A Plural Peninsula: Studies in Honour of Professor Simon Barton 9004425462, 9789004425460

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Simon Barton’s Scholarly Legacy: Challenging Historiographical Narratives in Medieval Mediterranean and Iberian Studies
Part 1 Emotional Narratives: Pragmatism, Symbolism and Performance
Chapter 1 The Restless Sea: Storm, Shipwreck and the Mediterranean, c.1000–1700
Chapter 2 A Peninsula in Flames: War and Emotions in the Cantigas de Santa María
Chapter 3 ‘Emotional Diplomacy’: Trust and Political Communication in Thirteenth-Century Iberia
Part 2 Reassessing Historical and Historiographical Narratives
Chapter 4 Adapting History to Modern Values? Re-evaluating Vellido Dolfos
Chapter 5 Praying for Conquest in Thirteenth-Century Castile: The Oratio in tempore belli adversus Saracenos
Chapter 6 Reframing ‘Reconquista’. Hernando de Baeza’s Take on the Conquest of Granada
Part 3 Exchanges, Tradition and Cross-Fertilisation: Change and Continuity
Chapter 7 The View from the Edge: Gallaecia and the Byzantine Mediterranean in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries
Chapter 8 A Forma Mesquite in Formam Ecclesiae: Toledo, Between Rodrigo and Ibn Hud
Chapter 9 A Christian Iberian Attack on Twelfth-Century Medina? Keys to Understanding an Unusual Story
Chapter 10 Jewish Officials at Royal Courts in al-Andalus and Castile (Tenth to Fourteenth Centuries): Continuities and Disjunctions
Part 4 Managing Conflict: Social, Physical and Imagined Boundaries
Chapter 11 Sex, Theft, and Violence: Conflict and Local Society in the Mountains of León around the Year 1000
Chapter 12 The Aristocracy against the King in the Twelfth Century: Rebellion as Opposition to Alfonso VII “Imperator Hispaniae”
Chapter 13 Advancing Dogs and Rushing Lions: Animals and the Imagery of Conflict in the Poem of Almería
Part 5 Authority, Leadership, Gender and Power Management
Chapter 14 Once and Future Queen: The Portrait Coinage of Urraca “Regina Hispaniae” (r. 1109–1126)
Chapter 15 Between Queen Regnant and Queen Consort: Berenguela of Castile, Beatrice of Swabia and the Nuances of Queenship
Chapter 16 Speaking Truth to Power: Authority, Social Status, and Gender in Thirteenth-Century Castilian Witness Testimony
Index

Citation preview

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A Plural Peninsula

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The Medieval Mediterranean peoples, economies and cultures, 400–1500

Managing Editor Frances Andrews (University of St. Andrews) Editors Corisande Fenwick (University College London) Paul Magdalino (University of St. Andrews) Maria G. Parani (University of Cyprus) Larry J. Simon (Western Michigan University) Daniel Lord Smail (Harvard University) Jo Van Steenbergen (Ghent University) Advisory Board David Abulafia (Cambridge) Benjamin Arbel (Tel Aviv) Hugh Kennedy (soas, London)

volume 138

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mmed

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Frontispiece

Professor Simon Barton. Stockholm 2016 Photo by Jerrilynn D. Dodds

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A Plural Peninsula Studies in Honour of Professor Simon Barton Edited by

Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover illustration: Mural painting in San Román, Toledo. Photo by Jerrilynn D. Dodds. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Scorpo, Antonella Liuzzo, editor, author. | Barton, Simon, 1962-2017, honouree. Title: A plural Peninsula : studies in honour of professor Simon Barton / edited by Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2023] | Series: Medieval mediterranean, 0928-5520 ; volume 138 |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023032716 (print) | LCCN 2023032717 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004425460 (hardback) |  ISBN 9789004683754 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Iberian Peninsula—Civilization. | Iberian Peninsula—History—To 1500. |  Iberian Peninsula—Historiography. Classification: LCC DP63.7.B36 P57 2023 (print) | LCC DP63.7.B36 (ebook) |  DDC 946.0009/02—dc23/eng/20230821 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032716 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032717

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0928-5520 isbn 978-90-04-42546-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-68375-4 (e-book) DOI 10.1163/9789004683754 Copyright 2024 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix List of Figures x Notes on Contributors xi



Introduction 1 Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo

Part 1 Emotional Narratives: Pragmatism, Symbolism and Performance 1

The Restless Sea: Storm, Shipwreck and the Mediterranean, c.1000–1700 15 Amy G. Remensnyder

2

A Peninsula in Flames: War and Emotions in the Cantigas de Santa María 70 Simon R. Doubleday

3

‘Emotional Diplomacy’: Trust and Political Communication in Thirteenth-Century Iberia 95 Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo

Part 2 Reassessing Historical and Historiographical Narratives 4

Adapting History to Modern Values? Re-evaluating Vellido Dolfos 125 Fernando Luis Corral

5

Praying for Conquest in Thirteenth-Century Castile: The Oratio in tempore belli adversus Saracenos 153 Teresa Witcombe

6

Reframing ‘Reconquista’. Hernando de Baeza’s Take on the Conquest of Granada 183 Teresa Tinsley

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vi

Contents

Part 3 Exchanges, Tradition and Cross-Fertilisation: Change and Continuity 7

The View from the Edge: Gallaecia and the Byzantine Mediterranean in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries 215 Jamie Wood

8

A Forma Mesquite in Formam Ecclesiae: Toledo, Between Rodrigo and Ibn Hud 239 Jerrilynn D. Dodds

9

A Christian Iberian Attack on Twelfth-Century Medina? Keys to Understanding an Unusual Story 275 Maribel Fierro

10

Jewish Officials at Royal Courts in al-Andalus and Castile (Tenth to Fourteenth Centuries): Continuities and Disjunctions 305 Maya Soifer Irish

Part 4 Managing Conflict: Social, Physical and Imagined Boundaries 11

Sex, Theft, and Violence: Conflict and Local Society in the Mountains of León around the Year 1000 331 Iñaki Martín Viso

12

The Aristocracy against the King in the Twelfth Century: Rebellion as Opposition to Alfonso VII “Imperator Hispaniae” 351 Sonia Vital Fernández

13

Advancing Dogs and Rushing Lions: Animals and the Imagery of Conflict in the Poem of Almería 378 Alun Williams

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Contents

Part 5 Authority, Leadership, Gender and Power Management 14

Once and Future Queen: The Portrait Coinage of Urraca “Regina Hispaniae” (r. 1109–1126) 403 Therese Martin

15

Between Queen Regnant and Queen Consort: Berenguela of Castile, Beatrice of Swabia and the Nuances of Queenship 435 Ana Echevarría Arsuaga

16

Speaking Truth to Power: Authority, Social Status, and Gender in Thirteenth-Century Castilian Witness Testimony 457 Janna Bianchini



Index 481

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Acknowledgements Deepest and heartfelt gratitude is to Professor Simon Barton, to whose memory this volume is dedicated. As an inspiring, engaging, patient, and kind mentor and supervisor, he guided me through the exciting, and sometimes daunting, academic journey that has led me where I am today. To Simon I owe the privilege of having met and collaborated with the contributors to this volume, who are some of the finest scholars and experts in Medieval Iberian and Mediterranean Studies, and who have proven to be—time after time—supportive colleagues and generous friends. To them, I wish to express my most sincere gratitude for having transformed an initially intimidating editorial experience into one of the most productive and pleasant collaborative projects in which I have been involved. I am very grateful to Simon Doubleday, Therese Martin, Teresa Witcombe, and Jamie Wood, who provided invaluable feedback and precious advice throughout all stages of this process. Simon Barton would have been proud of this volume, not only for its scholarly and intellectual worth, but for what it represents: a collective endeavour from which we all learned, and by which we were inspired, while it brought us a step further in our journey of discovery both individually and collectively. Among all the uncertainty and challenges posed by the global shocks of the past few years, mutual support, collegiality, and kindness have made a major difference. Thanks also to my patient husband, to all my colleagues, friends, and family who apply these valuable principles of care and solidarity every day, within and beyond academia.

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Figures 4.1

Zamora. Commemorative plaque installed at the entrance of the city wall gate following the approval of the municipal proposal to change the name in 2009 128 8.1 The Great Mosque of Córdoba, Prayer Hall of Abd al Rahman 1, 8th century 243 8.2 Toledo, Mosque of Ibn Hadidi (Bab al-Mardun), 999 243 8.3 Toledo, Santa Cruz (Apse and Crossing added to the Mosque of Ibn Hadidi) 244 8.4 Toledo Cathedral, Ambulatory Vaults, 13th century 261 8.5 Toledo, Doorway of Plazuela del Seco, No. 7 264 8.6 Toledo, San Román, interior 265 8.7 Toledo, San Román, choir window 265 11.1 Types of conflict in the documents 335 14.1a–b Coin of Alfonso VI +ANFVS REX on obverse, +LEO CIVITAS on reverse. MAN, no. 1995/95/2 410 14.2a–b VRRACA REGI on obverse, LEO CIVITAS on reverse. MAN 1994/50/66 411 14.3a–b +VRACA RE on obverse, +TOLETVO on reverse. MAN no. 1994/50/62 412 14.4a–b VRAC REGI /ANFVS RE, likely minted during the short-lived marriage of Urraca with Alfonso I of Aragon. MAN no. 2020/43/2 413 14.5 Alfonso VII, ANFUS R REX on obverse, SOCOVIA CIV on reverse. MOMECA cat. No. 7.1 415 14.6a–b VRRACA REXA on obverse, LEGIONENSIS on reverse. MAN no. 2020/43/3 415 14.7a–b Empress Matilda, ‘rex Matilda’ Cross Moline type, Malmesbury, moneyer Walter 416 14.8 REGINA on obverse, VRACA ISPA REX (?) on reverse. MOMECA cat. no. 4.6 418 14.9 Tumbo A, Archivo de la Catedral de Santiago de Compostela, 1129–1134 419 14.10a–b VRRACA REGII on obverse, LEO CIVITATIS on reverse 421 14.11 VRAC REGIN on obverse, +LEGIONENSIS on reverse 422 14.12 Seals of Alfonso VII 424 14.13 Seal of Empress Matilda, 1141–1143, +MATHILDIS DEI GRATIA ROMANORVM REGINA. SJP/19, Archive Centre, King’s College Cambridge 424 14.14 Statue of Queen Urraca by Juan Cuenca, León, 2019 427

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Notes on Contributors Janna Bianchini is Associate Professor of the European High Middle Ages at the University of Maryland. Her research interests include the history of power, women, and religious conflict, particularly in medieval Christian Iberia. She has held fellowships from the Fulbright Association, the Medieval Academy of America, the American Historical Association, the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain and United States Universities, and the Real Colegio Com­ plutense. She is the author of The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile, among other publications. She knew Simon Barton since she was a graduate student, when Simon generously offered his advice and encouragement for her project. Her research on prosopography and social networks among the western Iberian elite was profoundly influenced by Simon Barton’s seminal study, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile, and her interests in gender and power align with Barton’s work on similar themes in his last book, Conquerors, Brides and Concubines. Jerrilynn D. Dodds is Harlequin Adair Dammann Professor at Sarah Lawrence College (New York). Her work has centred on issues of artistic interchange—in particular, among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Iberia—and how groups form identities through art and architecture. She is the author of Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain and NY Masjid: The Mosques of New York and co-author of Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture, among other publications. She was a friend of Simon Barton, with whom she shared numerous research interests and academic experiences. Simon R. Doubleday is Professor of History at Hofstra University, and a specialist in the history of medieval Spain. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. His books include The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance, and The Lara Family: Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain. He has co-edited books including Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past, and Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers. He recently recorded a video lecture series entitled After the Plague. He was Founding Editor of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies,

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Notes on Contributors

an initiative that developed partly out of conversations with his friend Simon Barton, and has also served as president of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS). Ana Echevarría Arsuaga is Professor of Medieval History in the Department of Medieval History and Palaeography at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Spain. She works on queenship and relations between Muslims and Christians (especially interreligious polemics, Muslims living under Christian rule, conversion and crusade), in the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean. She also led the project “Christian Society under Muslim Rule: Canon Collections from Medieval Spain” funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Being the same generation as Simon Barton, both met at several conferences and pursued similar academic endeavours, and she reviewed some of his publications for academic journals in Spain and abroad. She is a member of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, through which she also collaborated with Simon Barton, who was the Society’s President between 2013 and 2017. Maribel Fierro is Research Professor at the Institute for the Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean—Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). She has published extensively on the political, religious and intellectual history of the pre-modern Islamic West (al-Andalus and North Africa). She shared with Simon Barton his interest on the social aspects of interfaith relations in the Iberian Peninsula. Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo is Associate Professor of Medieval History in the School of Humanities and Heritage at the University of Lincoln (UK). She specialises in medieval Iberian social and cultural history, with a particular focus on thirteenth-century Castile and Aragon. Her areas of research include the study of medieval friendship, social communication and cultural networks, trust and diplomacy, transcultural collaborations, and the History of Emotions. She is the author of the monograph Friendship in Medieval Iberia: Historical, Legal and Literary Perspectives, among other publications. She was Simon Barton’s first PhD student and was elected President of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean to succeed him in 2018. Fernando Luis Corral is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Salamanca. Focusing on social and political history, he specialises in the study of the - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

Notes on Contributors

xiii

exercise of power in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. His main lines of research include the study of the relationships involving the monarchy, the aristocracy and local societies, and how these dynamics affected territorial organisation and administration. He is also interested in the demystification of the medieval past. Between 2008 and 2010, he directed the research project “The exercise of power in the kingdoms of León and Castile in the Middle Ages” (SA085A08), collaborating with Simon Barton as a member of his research team. Through the Erasmus Programme, he was also involved in Teaching Staff mobility activities in the Department of History at the University of Exeter, under the supervision of Simon Barton. Therese Martin is Senior Researcher in Medieval Art History at the Instituto de Historia of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC, Madrid). Her research and extensive list of publications investigate the intersections of medieval Iberia’s multiple cultures; women as vectors of cross-cultural exchange in the central Middle Ages; the geographic resonances of treasured objects; and Romanesque construction and decoration. She first met Simon Barton in the 1990s when both were PhD students, and they quickly became friends and colleagues, collaborating both formally and informally through the succeeding years. Iñaki Martín Viso is Professor of Medieval History in the Department of Medieval, Early Modern and Modern History at the University of Salamanca. His research focuses on the study of rural societies and landscapes in the early Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula, using written and archaeological records. He is a member of the Research Group Antigüedad Tardía y Alta Edad Media en Hispania (ATAEMHIS) and he is the Principal Investigator of the Research Project ESMICRO (Los escenarios de las micropolíticas (siglos VI–XII): acción colectiva, sociedades locales, poderes englobantes) founded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. They met when Simon Barton visited the University of Salamanca, and since then they continued collaborating, sharing a common interest in medieval Iberian social history. Amy G. Remensnyder is Giancarlo Family Provost’s Professor of History at Brown University. In her first book, she focused on high medieval French monastic culture and collective memory. Her next book spanned the Atlantic, placing medieval Iberia in dialogue with colonial Mexico. A practitioner of engaged scholarship, she is the founder and director of the Brown History Education Prison Project. Her - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Notes on Contributors

current research interests focus on piracy, slavery, deserted islands, and maritime religion, which she is exploring by writing a longue durée micro-history of the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa between 1200 and 1700. She was lucky to have Simon Barton as a close colleague and good friend. Maya Soifer Irish is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program at Rice University. Her research focuses on religious violence and toleration, and explores the legal, social, and economic situation of religious minorities in Iberian Christian societies. She is the author of Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change. Her research continues to be inspired by Simon Barton’s work on interfaith relations in Iberia, and she has successfully used his books in the classroom. Soifer Irish has served as President of the Fourteenth Century Society, President of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain, and President of the Texas Medieval Association. Teresa Tinsley obtained her PhD in History from the University of Exeter in 2019 under the supervision of Simon Barton, building on a long career in languages research and education. Her research focuses on the conflicts, controversies and preoccupations which marked the transition from multi-faith Iberia to Catholic Spain. Her academic publications include Reconciliation and Resistance in Early Modern Spain and the co-authored Relación de Hernando de Baeza sobre el Reino de Granada. Sonia Vital Fernández was awarded her PhD in History with mention of “Doctor Europeus” from the University of Salamanca. Her research and publications focus on power relations in León and Castile in the twelfth century, and on the complex relationship between the lay aristocracy and King Alfonso VII in a social and political context of feudal organization. Currently, her research areas include the political role of the ‘infantas’ of León and Castile in the central Middle Ages, as well as diplomacy and warfare in the time of Queen Urraca I and King Alfonso VII. In 2007, she carried out part of her research at the University of Exeter, under the supervision of Professor Simon Barton, with whom she also collaborated as a member of the research project “The exercise of power in the kingdoms of León and Castile in the Middle Ages” (SA085A08).

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Notes on Contributors

xv

Alun Williams is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. He is the first scholar to hold the position of Research Fellow at the Society of the Medieval Mediterranean. He obtained his PhD under the supervision of Simon Barton and taught at the University of Exeter from 2007 until his retirement in 2021. His research covers Spanish chronicle writing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and he is especially interested in the use of biblical narrative in the texts that describe conflict between Christians and Muslims as well as between the competing Christian kingdoms in the north of Spain. He was secretary of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean from 2007 to 2019, and associate editor of the Society’s house journal, Al-Masāq, between 2007 and 2017. Teresa Witcombe is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. Prior to this, she held a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral scholarship in Madrid, where she was affiliated with the CSIC-CCHS, and was an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London. She works on the cultural and intellectual history of medieval Iberia, in particular, the Church and society of thirteenth-century Castile, the Arabic-Latin translation movement, and the exchange of ideas and people across borders. She has published widely on these themes, and co-edited a study of the reign of King Fernando III of Castile, published by Brill in 2020. She wrote her PhD thesis on the thirteenth-century prelate Bishop Maurice of Burgos, under the supervision of Simon Barton at the University of Exeter. Jamie Wood is Professor of Education and History in the School of Humanities and Heritage at the University of Lincoln (UK), where he has taught since 2013. He has published extensively on the historical writings of Isidore of Seville, bishops in Visigothic Hispania, and the social functions of violence in late antiquity. His current project explores political, economic, and religious connections between the Iberian Peninsula and the Byzantine world in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries. He has many fond memories of working alongside Simon Barton on the board of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean for several years.

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Introduction

Simon Barton’s Scholarly Legacy: Challenging Historiographical Narratives in Medieval Mediterranean and Iberian Studies Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo The feast-day wore a frown, the hail came hammering down: A glum exchange to see For smiles and jollity. I guess the eager feast Had come from further east To find you, but it failed And therefore wept and wailed. Ibn Rashid (d. 1064)1

∵ This volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor Simon F. Barton, whose scholarly contribution has left important intellectual legacies in the fields of Medieval Iberian History and Mediterranean Studies. An outstandingly talented scholar, Simon was also an incredibly supportive colleague, an inspiring mentor, and a kind friend.2 When I approached contributors for this volume, responses were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Aligning with Simon’s own working ethics and attitude, the contributors embraced this project eagerly. As editor of this volume, I am privileged and grateful to have seen this emotionally-charged project become an intellectually stimulating journey, thanks to colleagues whose original research will advance our knowledge, 1 Arthur J. Arberry, Moorish Poetry: A Translation of The Pennants, an Anthology Compiled in 1243 by the Andalusian (Cambridge, 1953, repr. New York, 2001), p. 166. 2 Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, “Professor Simon Fraser Barton (1962–2017),” Anuario De Estudios Medievales 48, no. 1 (2018): 421–426; Sonia Vital Fernández, “In Memoriam Simon Barton (1962–2017): Historiador, medievalista e hispanista,” Intus-Legere Historia 11, no. 2 (2017): 5–9.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004683754_002

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2

Liuzzo Scorpo

building on Simon Barton’s influential scholarship. Simon’s work variously examined the functioning of medieval Iberian social systems of power; the value, interpretations, and cultural legacy of interfaith exchanges, including sexual liaisons and marital practices; and the socio-political and cultural influence of multiple forms of contacts—and the narratives associated with them—on the multi-confessional context of the Iberian Peninsula. Simon’s research contributed to the reassessment and questioning of controversial historiographical paradigms, such as ‘Convivencia’ and ‘Reconquista’, which have often channelled approaches to the study of medieval Iberian history towards both politically and culturally framed trajectories.3 His work also advocated the need to critically assess paradigms distorted by modern periodization and by problematic concepts, such as that of Iberia’s ‘exceptionalism’, while promoting a more systematic cross-disciplinary engagement with inclusive and less Eurocentric perspectives. Conscious of the importance of such debates in Medieval Studies, within and beyond Mediterranean and Iberian contexts, the essays in this volume engage critically with, and are inspired by, some of the questions raised by Simon Barton’s research, while opening new avenues of enquiry. Eschewing rigid disciplinary boundaries and embodying Simon’s scholarly ethics and practice of collaboration and exchange beyond and across areas of specialisation, this volume brings together the expertise of scholars whose research focuses on diverse and interconnected areas within Iberia and the broadest Mediterranean to examine the diplomatic, political, and cultural connections between individuals and communities across time and space. Through a close examination of different types of textual, archaeological, visual and material evidence, this volume explores how the legacy of the past was strategically manipulated and adopted to promote and legitimise political, cultural and emotional frameworks across different chronological and geographical settings. The themes and questions at the core of this volume are relevant for the postmedieval period and for regions that encompass, and go beyond, the 3 Simon Barton† and Robert Portass, eds., Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085) (Leiden, 2020). Other useful studies: Hussein Fancy, “‘The New Convivencia,’” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 11, no. 3 (2019): 295–305; Alejandro García- Sanjuán, “Rejecting al-Andalus, Exalting the Reconquista: Historical Memory in Contemporary Spain,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10, no. 1 (2018): 127–145; Maya Soifer, “Beyond Convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): 19–35. In May 2022 some scholars signed a petition to revisit the definition of ‘Reconquista’ that appears in the Spanish Dictionary of the Real Academia Española (RAE). This received public attention on national media: https://www.eldiario.es/cultura/reconquista-definicion-reconquista_1_8985 597.html. Accessed May 13, 2022. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Iberian Peninsula. The medieval Mediterranean is one of them. As a complex and plural space of shifting political powers, ethnically and culturally diverse communities, multiple individual and collective identities, the Mediterranean has received intense scholarly attention, not least because the phenomena and dynamics which characterised such a heterogeneous and fluid reality speak with particular urgency to issues of concern in our contemporary world. Conceptualised, experienced, and represented as both a physical and imagined space, the medieval Mediterranean was defined by its permeable and interconnected boundaries which served as channels of cross-fertilisation. Problematising definitions and understandings of the Mediterranean as a category of historical research—from anthropological, sociological, historical and economic perspectives, among others—is essential to understand its widest historical, social and geopolitical context both in the past, and in the present.4 The increasing number of scholarly societies (including the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, of which Simon Barton was President), publications, academic journals, and book series dedicated to the study of the interconnectedness, boundary-crossing, intra- and inter-faith relations in the medieval Mediterranean, evidence the growing appetite for new and interdisciplinary research in this field.5 The extended chapter by Amy G. Remensnyder—spanning both the medieval and the early modern eras—responds to this burgeoning scholarly interest and provides a contextual framework for the entire volume. Within a chronology that goes from the seventh to the end of the fifteenth centuries (and in the 4 Luke B. Yarbrough, Clara Vidal Almagro, Jessica Tearney-Pearce, eds. Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean (Turnhout, 2021); Michelle M. Hamilton, Núria Silleras-Fernández, eds., In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies (Nashville, 2015); David Abulafia, “Mediterranean History as Global History,” History and Theory 50, no. 2 (2011): 220–228; Abulafia, The Great Sea. A Human History of the Mediterranean (London, 2011); William V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2005); Peregrine Horden, Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea—A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000). 5 The examples are numerous, to list some: Al-Masāq: The Journal of the Medieval Mediter­ ranean (published by the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, available at https://www .societymedievalmediterranean.com/. Accessed March 22, 2023); Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology; Journal of Mediterranean Studies: History, Culture and Society in the Mediter­ ranean World; Mediterranean Quarterly: A Journal of Global Issues; Mediterranean Studies (Journal of the Association for Mediterranean Studies, Massachusetts); Cahiers de la Méditerranée (published by the Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine, University of Nice); Mediterranea. Ricerche storiche (published by the University of Palermo); Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée (published biannually by the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme, Aix-en-Provence); Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée; Mediterranea. An International Journal for the Transfer of Knowledge (UCO Press); The Mediterranean Seminar, available at http://www.mediterraneanseminar.org/. Accessed March 22, 2023. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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case of Remensnyder’s contribution to the eighteenth century), the essays in this volume re-assess, challenge, and enhance existing scholarship on medieval Iberia by focusing on the wide-ranging and intertwined processes—at both local and transregional levels—which defined dynamics and phenomena that impacted the lived experiences and representations of individuals and communities. The history of the Iberian Peninsula embodies and reflects some of these entangled dynamics and experiences of intra- and interfaith contacts, and calls for critical re-assessment which engages with multidisciplinary and innovative perspectives. By scrutinizing diverse types of sources—including archaeological findings, art and architecture, material culture, and textual evidence—through a range of methodologies and approaches, and exploring the potential for new historiographical developments, this volume offers a fresh insight into themes and debates that were present in Simon Barton’s work, while sowing the seeds for new research pathways. All our chapters are in dialogue, as they address interconnected questions. One of the main objectives that contributors have pursued is the re-assessment of historical narratives by questioning paradigms informed by ‘traditional’, mostly Eurocentric, historiographical views. The chapters by Maya Soifer Irish and Jerrilynn D. Dodds—both of whom refer to the ‘colonial’ possessions of Castile in the south of the Peninsula—and by Fernando Luis Corral, who discusses the ‘distortion of History’ through the modern manipulation of historical evidence, offer valuable points of reflection. They reveal how certain narratives have been constructed and often informed by one-sided and arbitrary hierarchies of knowledge imposed by those who held privileged positions within ecclesiastical, legal, intellectual, and political circles. Emotional narratives are another crucial component of such historiographical constructions. In the approximation to a cultural history of the sea proposed by Amy G. Remensnyder, environmental history and the history of emotions are brought together to reveal how in multi-confessional contexts emotional narratives—often stimulated by, or responding to, environmental inputs—transcend rigid categorisations based on periodisation and genre. Remensnyder emphasises the commonality of physical and emotional experiences through the analysis of a chronologically broad range of textual sources. Yet, while shared emotions—such as fear—could generate a community of experience, and therefore promote solidarity and a shared sense of belonging, they could also lead to intra- and interfaith tensions. Such a plurality of experiences, often accompanied by idiosyncratic and ambiguous emotional reactions and responses, are also aspects at the core of Simon Doubleday’s study. With a focus on the thirteenth-century collection of

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miracle stories, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, produced under the patronage of King Alfonso X of Castile (r. 1252–1284), Doubleday examines the value of emotional narratives, and more specifically of norms of emotional restraint, to describe the conflicting attitudes towards war and violence. Contemporary sources often embodied a heterogeneous spectrum of reactions within the framework of culturally-recognised codes of behaviour associated with models of martial masculinity and chivalric heroism. Yet, this framework was not sufficient to repress shared anxieties and contradictory opinions regarding the experience and management of such threatening and unstable situations. Focusing also on the thirteenth-century Iberian context, my own chapter examines the instrumental adoption of emotions—with their related language, rhetoric, rituals and performances—in political and diplomatic communication. Through the analysis of James I of Aragon’s (r. 1213–1276) chronicle-autobiography, the Llibre dels fets (Book of Deeds), I explore contemporary meanings and interpretations of trust, of which emotions constituted an intrinsic part. In this study, I discuss how trust shaped ‘emotional diplomacy’, favouring, supporting, and in some instances threatening, the establishment of different types of social networks at both local and translocal levels. In line with Simon Barton’s approach to the study of cross-cultural contacts, my contribution considers religious affiliation, social status and gender as complementary and intertwined parameters that defined and influenced both political interactions and the ways in which they were performed and presented in writing. The broadest socio-cultural and intellectual dynamics that stimulated, supported and shaped cross-cultural interactions informed, and were often mirrored by, contemporary processes of history-writing, which survive in the historiographical legacies of such constructions. Fernando Luis Corral’s study exposes such dynamics effectively through the example of Vellido Dolfos, an eleventh-century knight whom some contemporary chronicles and subsequent historiography present as a regicide and a traitor. Not only does Luis Corral’s study re-assess the surviving evidence, cross-referencing narrative accounts and legal documents, including charters, but it also explains how in recent years, local political agendas (in this case, that of the city of Zamora, to which this ‘myth’ was linked) have affected the transparency and accuracy of historical research, while fabricating ad-hoc narratives for public dissemination. Focusing on liturgical texts, Teresa Witcombe follows similar lines of enquiry by discussing the process of remodelling ideological narratives to suit different audiences. Examining how the notion of ‘crusade’, already circulating widely across western Europe, was adapted to a thirteenth-century Iberian intellectual scenario, Witcombe’s analysis reveals how liturgy was used in time

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of war, accommodating ideas, customs and practices which were familiar and recognisable within the context of reception. The thirteenth-century prayer from Burgos Cathedral that Witcombe discovered—which is edited, translated and analysed in her chapter—contributes to challenging assumptions of ‘exceptionalism’ by offering fresh evidence that points to Iberian interconnectedness, which the circulation of people and ideas prompted and sustained. Witcombe’s study, among others in this volume, offers nuanced readings and understandings of (frequently over-simplified) narratives, including that of ‘Reconquest’. Teresa Tinsley adopts a similar approach when scrutinising the account of the demise of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada written in the early sixteenth century by Hernando de Baeza, a man who, as an Arabic-speaking judeoconverso (Christian of Jewish origin) himself, seems to embody the plurality of multi-faith Iberia. In Baeza’s narrative, Tinsley identifies a rejection of the polarisation which characterised ‘Reconquista’ ideology and the adoption of an integrated approach inclusive not only of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian perspectives, but also of their hybridity. Baeza presented the Christianization of Spain not as a triumph of victors over the vanquished, but as a natural coming together of neighbours and compatriots. These manifold interpretations of historical events and their related contexts should not be surprising when considering the multicultural and multi-confessional scenario of medieval Iberia. The movement and mobility of individuals, communities, goods and ideas favoured cross-cultural assimilation, adaptation and exchanges which were managed, manipulated and controlled by those involved, often leaving a physical and material imprint of such contacts. Jamie Wood’s chapter, focusing on the world of the late antiquity, explores and contextualises the entanglement of the north-western Iberian province of Gallaecia (north of the Duero River, including areas that corresponds to parts of modern-day Galicia, the Leonese mountains, northern Portugal and western Asturias) with the ‘Byzantine’ world, especially with North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. As suggested by the abundant textual and archaeological evidence from sixth-century Braga, in the post-Roman world some elite sites preserved and enhanced their connections. Significantly, those cultural, political, intellectual, and commercial links were not always determined by major political changes (such as those connected with the Visigothic monarchy), but rather by the decisions of local ecclesiastical elites who held economic power, along with theological and political influence. Investigating the interconnectedness of Iberia from cross-disciplinary perspectives and across a broad time frame helps demystify the misleading stereotype of a premodern world too often labelled as the ‘Dark Ages’, in

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which homogeneously defined ‘nations’ and ‘identities’ consolidated in isolation. These are incorrect and dangerous assumptions that have frequently (mis)informed the public use of the history and heritage of a much richer, more diverse, and intricate medieval world. This approach also leads to critically assess whose voices we can access, through what means they were mediated, and how the socio-political and cultural contexts within which they were created might explain distinct understandings of the same phenomena. This is a subject discussed by Jerrilynn D. Dodds, who examines the examples of Toledo’s Great Mosque turned into a transcultural cathedral, and the church of San Román with its collective identity to understand how architecture functioned as a locus of unresolved agendas. These complexities were mirrored by the work of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (c.1170–1247), one of Castile’s most renowned archbishops and historians. His masterpiece, the chronicle De rebus Hispaniae—an account of the history of the Iberian Peninsula from its origins to his own time—reveals his investment in the conversion of religious buildings in the thirteenth century and how he “felt keenly the competing agendas of the colonial world he sought to unite”. Maribel Fierro’s contribution interrogates the nature and structure of historical and historiographical narratives, focusing on those that describe the attempts at stealing the Prophet Muhammad’s body from his grave, and the Christian attacks on Muslim holy sites, which the earliest surviving source attributes to Iberian Christians. Fierro argues that such attribution should be examined in context, that is how Muslim groups who had to flee al-Andalus due to the Christian territorial expansion southward, attempted to gain support for their cause by influencing the policies of rulers in the Mashriq. The evidence under scrutiny reveals how and to what extent symbolic meanings were adapted to suit plural contexts. The acquisition of relics highly charged with symbolic capital to uphold the Fāṭimids’ lineage, for example, was meant to increase their legitimacy and to strengthen their claim to the inheritance of the Prophet Muḥammad’s authority. Fierro’s contribution offers an insight into the use and representation of holy sites, objects, rituals and religious practices as adaptable and transferrable symbols of power. The emphasis on multiple identities, experiences and practices within the same groups and communities, and on the ways in which individuals were able to draw upon different skills, tools, and connections to navigate and succeed (or at least survive) in these spheres, is prominent throughout this volume. These themes converge and are examined in Maya Soifer Irish’s study that focuses on how Jewish courtier culture changed and adapted according to the political agendas of those who ruled, as demonstrated by the analysis of the period that

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characterised the shifting military and political power structures from Muslim to Christian Iberia. Soifer-Irish argues that different courtly requests and expectations had an impact on the construction of Jewish identity. For example, while in al-Andalus, Jewish courtiers were admired and employed for their extensive knowledge, linguistic and academic skills, in late medieval Christian Iberia Jewish administrators were respected and could progress because of their wealth and connections—a development perhaps not surprising when considering the monarchs’ priorities and emphasis on financial matters. Identity creation, and its adaptation to different socio-cultural, historical and political contexts, is closely informed by the expression and management of authority and power, and by aspirations to social control, the main objective of both secular and religious regulations. Preoccupation with the maintenance of an established social structure became progressively more pervasive in situations of political and economic instability at local, regional, and transregional levels. These are significant aspects discussed by Iñaki Martín Viso, Sonia Vital Fernández and Alun Williams, who analyse descriptions and management of social conflict through legal, political, religious, and theological perspectives, considering examples that encompass an extremely wide social spectrum. Focusing on ninth- to eleventh-century documents from northern Iberia, Iñaki Martín Viso examines crime and its management in local societies, revealing common practices such as the inter-familial negotiation of settlements through payments of fines and lands, which was relatively common, unless an overlord was involved. Examining differences of social status, demographics, and gender, Viso’s study demonstrates the ways in which social control was enforced at a local level, and the key roles that individuals and communities played in such disputes. Martín Viso reminds us of the importance of assessing these sources in context, considering that legal records provide a mediated account of events and individual voices. These considerations are essential in revealing how “conflict was far more visible than consensus”, and that ways of dealing with tensions and disputes lay “at the heart of family and community relationships.” Inspired by Simon Barton’s influential work on the growing power of the aristocracy in twelfth-century León and Castile, Sonia Vital Fernández explores other conflictive social dynamics, discussing whether and how noble rebellions reflected changing power structures. Contemporary chronicles and documentary sources suggest that this was the case for Alfonso VII (r. 1126–1157), against whom Leonese, Castilian, Asturian and Galician nobles rebelled on several occasions and for different reasons. While pursuing individual and family interests, the evidence under scrutiny reveals that these rebellions were part of a common strategy of political affirmation by these aristocratic groups, which

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also included the establishment of different types of networks to strengthen their own social positions and political claims. One of the sources composed towards the end of the reign of Alfonso VII of León-Castile is the Hispano-Latin chronicle known as the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris (translated by Simon Barton into English), which Alun Williams analyses in his contribution. Williams shows how biblical imagery, derived from a wide exegetical and classical corpus, was embedded in the description of Alfonso’s military successes, framed through the language of conquest which characterised depictions of the Muslim enemies, and carefully shaped to suit specific authorial agendas and perceptions. Responding to Simon Barton’s last work, Conquerors, Brides and Concubines, a number of essays address the complexities of gender, sex and social identity, and how they interacted with, and often affected, structures and implementations of power and authority. Therese Martin, Ana Echevarría and Janna Bianchini reflect on the connections between gender, legal and institutional structures of power, and social control, using a broad range of evidence spanning from litigations to visual and material communication, including the use of some unique iconography on coins. Therese Martin discusses the effective and all-encompassing strategy of consolidation and management of royal power adopted by Urraca of León-Castile (r. 1109–1126) by focusing on the minting of five different coin types with her ‘portrait’ over the course of her seventeen-year reign. Some of these coins suggest that Urraca sought to present herself as both queen and king, more than a decade before this concept would be fully verbalised in the chronicle Historia Compostellana. Assessing visual and material evidence together with textual sources, Martin credits the queen with the ability to understand and exploit the extraordinary propagandistic potential of coins, which ‘spoke’ to people across the social spectrum. By adopting multiple legends and images that must have been recognised by all beholders, Urraca established a new standard of multiple portrayals of a ruler, highlighting her ambition and her distinctiveness as a woman who reigned in her own right. Ana Echevarría Arsuaga also focuses on female authority and how this translated into an active exercise of royal power by assessing the idea of a ‘corporate monarchy’, within which queens occupied a leading role. Using the thirteenth-century case study of the relationship between Berenguela of Castile, regnant queen mother, and her daughter-in-law Beatrice of Swabia, Echevarría Arsuaga explores how power and queenship were conceived by contemporaries. The author assesses how these queens’ social and political actions and interactions were strengthened by strategic donations and symbolic practices, such as name changes, and how their marital unions had an

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impact on international politics and crusading ideology, as they paved the way for the founding of a first house of the Knights of the Teutonic Order in the Iberian Peninsula. Female agency and authority, of course, also extended beyond the realm of royal and noble elites. Scrutinising a collection of witness testimonies from thirteenth-century Castile, Janna Bianchini’s analysis reveals how women and other individuals within local communities managed to assert authority through legal procedures that might hold ecclesiastical lords accountable to their own judicial systems. Significantly, as previously discussed by Martín Viso with reference to the early medieval period, the majority of such testimonies were heavily mediated by a learned elite of scribes who recorded (and/or constructed) some of these narratives. Witnesses’ honour, service and their sources of information were regarded as markers of reliability, alongside old age, which was considered a repository of collective memory. In all likelihood, this is one of the main reasons why the women involved in such legal disputes frequently referred to their advanced age, thus claiming a form of individual authority which was otherwise limited by their gender in both legal theory and practice. The sixteen chapters in this volume provide new directions and valuable insights into the study of interrelated local and translocal dynamics which shaped an entangled Plural Peninsula: one which played a key role within Mediterranean and European economic, diplomatic, and cultural networks. A number of these studies demonstrate how the creation of historical and historiographical narratives in written, material, and visual forms were based on individual, collective and historical memories which were themselves socially and culturally constructed. Even first-hand accounts that related what it meant to live, participate, lead, suffer or struggle in (as well as to write about) this plural society were still filtered through embedded cultural norms, and personal agendas. Simon Barton’s research had already raised some of these points, challenging historiographical assumptions and approaches—such as those based on mere religious and ethnic categories of analysis—which obscured what contemporary evidence suggests about multi-layered structures of knowledge and how they shaped the ways in which the past was presented in both contemporary and later views.6 6 Simon Barton, “From Mercenary to Crusader: The Career of Álvar Pérez de Castro (d. 1239) Reconsidered,” in Church, State, Vellum and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honour of John Williams, eds. Julie Harris, Therese Martin (Leiden, 2005), pp. 11–129; Barton, “Traitors to the Faith? Christian Mercenaries in Al-Andalus and the Maghreb, c. 1100–1300,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict and Coexistence. Studies in Honor of Angus MacKay, eds. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 23–45.

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The choice of the term Plural to describe medieval Iberia in the title of this volume aims to emphasise the richness and variety of its fabric, components and experiences, without proposing any rigid hierarchical interpretative paradigm. The study of medieval Iberia offers an excellent opportunity to de-centre and diversify frameworks of research, building towards an all-encompassing approach. We hope that this volume will promote deeper reflections upon the epistemic power of historical narratives and manipulations in the past as well as in the present, and the ways in which they inform processes of identity-making (regarding gender, sexuality, religious affiliation, place, race, and ethnicity) which in turn forged the social dynamics that shaped the lives and experiences of individuals across the Middle Ages. We dedicate our work to the memory of Simon Barton, certain that his research will continue to inspire new generations of scholars.

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Part 1 Emotional Narratives: Pragmatism, Symbolism and Performance

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Chapter 1

The Restless Sea: Storm, Shipwreck and the Mediterranean, c.1000–1700 Amy G. Remensnyder The ocean delights in its booty; and there is no shelter, nor anywhere to flee.

Yehuda Halevi, “On the Sea”

∵ “Know, oh reader, that sailing the sea has many principles … you should know all the coasts and … their various guides such as mud, or grass, animals or fish, sea-snakes, and winds. You should consider the tides, and the sea currents and the islands on every route,” wrote the fifteenth-century navigator Ahmad ibn Mājid al-Najdī in his manual of instruction for mariners.1 He piloted ships in the Red and Arabian Seas, but Muslim, Christian and Jewish seafarers in the medieval Mediterranean—including those Castilian and Portuguese mercenaries who, as Simon Barton demonstrated, crossed its waters to fight for North African rulers—would have agreed with his advice.2 They knew that they ignored the marine environment at their peril. After all, declared one of Ibn Mājid’s Christian contemporaries, “of all things the sea is the most unfaithful.”3 It was a particularly rough Mediterranean passage that compelled him to borrow these words from an ancient Greek philosopher. 1 Gerald R. Tibbets, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Coming of the Portuguese, being a Translation of Kitāb al-Fawāʾid uṣūl al-baḥr wa’l-qawāʾid of Ahmad b. Mājid al-Najdī (London, 1981), p. 77. 2 Simon Barton, “Traitors to the Faith? Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, c. 1100–1300,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence, eds. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 23–45. 3 Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno en Terre Sainte, ed. Jacques Heers and Georgette de Groer (Paris, 1978), p. 370.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004683754_003

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Medievalists studying Mediterranean maritime mobility mostly have yet to recognise the importance of the sea as a living marine environment—its currents, its winds, its storms, its rocks, its flora, and its fauna—for those people who ventured on its back.4 The major exception is the scholarship on nautical technology, which explores how vessels were built to work with and survive the sea’s physical demands.5 Medievalists are not alone in this neglect of the sea per se. Until recently, much of the research resulting from what is variously called the oceanic turn, the new maritime history, or thalassography confines salt water to a supporting role, reducing it to a surface across which ships move to connect terrestrial points.6 But what if rather than treating the sea as a featureless substance serving human movement, medievalists instead paid attention to its “natural conditions,” as Michael Borgolte and Nikolas Jaspert urge, or 4 For example, David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (New York, 2011); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000). 5 For example, Ruthy Gertwagen, “A Chapter on Maritime History: Shipping and Nautical Technology of Trade and Warfare in the Medieval Mediterranean, 11th–16th Centuries,” in Maritimes Mittelalter: Meere als Kommunikationsraüme, eds. Michael Borgholte and Nikolas Jaspert (Ostfildern, 2016), pp. 109–148; John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649–1571 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 12–101. 6 Such is the case with many foundational studies, including Michel Mollat, Europe and the Sea, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Cambridge MA, 1993); Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89 (1999): 215–224; Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea; Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001); Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, ed. Bernhard Klein and Gesa MacKenthun (New York, 2004); “Oceans of History: AHR Forum,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 717–780; Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, eds. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and Kären Wigen (Honolulu, 2007); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge MA, 2008); Abulafia, Great Sea; Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Era of Migrations, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley, 2011); John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London, 2013); The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography, ed. Peter N. Miller (Ann Arbor MI, 2013); Christophe Picard, La mer des caliphs: une histoire de la Méditerranée musulmane (VIIe–XIIe siècle) (Paris, 2015). For examples of the recent bluer turn in the history of the sea: W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge MA, 2012); Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge MA, 2013); Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (Oxford, 2013); Stuart Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (Princeton, 2015); Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea (Berkeley, 2016); Alison Bashford, “Terraquaeous Histories,” The Historical Journal 60 (2017): 253–272; Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York, 2019); Gelina Harlaftis, “Maritime History: A New Version of the Old Version and the True History of the Sea,” The International Journal of Maritime History 32 (2020): 383–402.

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incorporated insights from oceanography, as Ruthy Gertwagen proposes—or even heeded environmental historians’ call to dethrone humans as the sovereign historical subject?7 Environmental historians conceptualize humans and the non-human natural world as inextricably linked in a complex web of reciprocal influences that renders both participants in history.8 This perspective offers the potential to chart new waters in the history of human maritime mobility in the Mediterranean. What might it look like to understand the Mediterranean as “both geo-cultural frame and nautical actor” and to explore how its “winds, seasons, climates, and currents  … shaped political and economic pulses” as well as “dictate[d] who went where, when and how?” asks Julia Clancy-Smith.9 The questions I pose about the nexus between the Mediterranean and people on the move are often differently inflected, yet they too rest on the premise that the marine environment is a historical force to be reckoned with. My time period is capacious and has ill-defined boundaries, which I cross freely. “Compared with the stable conventions for marking eras on land, maritime periodization is remarkably fluid,” observes Kären Wigen.10 It starts in the eleventh century, when Latin Christian ships began to compete seriously with those of Islamic polities as well as with Byzantine vessels for space on this sea’s waves; it ends circa 1700 as Islamic marine power in the Mediterranean declined, European ships established hegemony, and this sea became a 7

Michael Borgolte and Nikolas Jaspert, “Maritimes Mittelalter—Zur Einführung,” in Mari­ times Mittelalter: Meere als Kommunikationsraüme, ed. Michael Borgholte and Nikolas Jaspert (Ostfildern, 2016), p. 28; Gertwagen, “A Chapter,” pp. 109–110. Gertwagen’s recent work on fishing in the premodern Mediterranean is explicit environmental history; see her “Towards a Maritime Eco-history of the Byzantine and Medieval Eastern Mediterranean,” in The Inland Seas: Towards an Ecohistory of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, eds. Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen and Ruthy Gertwagen (Stuttgart, 2016), pp. 341–368. Cf. Roxani Eleni Margariti, “The Rasūlids and the Bountiful Sea: Marine Resources, State Control, and Maritime Culture in the Southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (626/1229–854/1454)” Der Islam 98 (2021): 69–99. 8 Programmatic statements of environmental history’s principles include William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17 (1993): 1–22; Ted Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 798–820; Ellen Stroud, “Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History,” History and Theory 42 (2003): 75–81; Linda Nash, “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?” Environmental History 10 (2005): 67–69; Nash, “Furthering the Environmental Turn,” The Journal of American History 94 (2013): 131–135. 9 Julia Clancy-Smith, “The Mediterranean of the Barbary Coast: Gone Missing,” in The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South, ed. Judith E. Tucker (Oakland CA, 2019), pp. 37, 59. 10 Kären Wigen, “Introduction,” in Seascapes, p. 14.

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different sort of multi-confessional realm. I thus join the increasing numbers of Mediterraneanists who bridge the traditional gulf between medieval and early modern.11 I will often use the term “premodern” here, though by rights this word embraces many more centuries than I consider. This long period encompasses a diversity of shipboard experience conditioned by seafarers’ religious affiliation, cultural perspective, and social status, as well as by shifting politics and changing nautical technologies. Yet there were considerable continuities and commonalities in premodern voyagers’ relationship with the Mediterranean, as I show. The sea itself was not static during this half millennium. This was an era of climate change, as the relatively pacific Medieval Climate Anomaly yielded circa 1300 to the more turbulent Little Ice Age.12 Yet even before the Mediterranean became a more dangerous environment for ships, human maritime movement was often disrupted by the sea’s own multiple mobilities. It is on those moments that I focus here. Exploding into storm or shattering into shipwreck, they starkly expose the sea’s immense power over people. Storm and shipwreck demand that we take Ibn Mājid’s exhortation seriously and pay attention to the marine environment in all its complexity; these events inescapably confronted premodern seafarers with a convergence of other-than-human-natural forces. Many Mediterranean voyages passed without incident, even when climate change made the sea more unpredictable. Yet, as maritime insurance contracts recognised, storm and shipwreck were risks that seafarers consciously assumed whenever they embarked on any vessel.13 The “invisible ways fixed in memory”14 11

For example, Abulafia, Great Sea; Thomas E. Burman, Brian A. Catlos and Mark D. Meyerson, The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650–1650 (Berkeley, 2022); Andrew Devereux, The Other Side of Empire: Just War in the Mediterranean and the Rise of Early Modern Spain (Ithaca NY, 2020); A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200–1700, ed. Adnan A. Husain and K. E. Fleming (Oxford, 2007); Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea; Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War. 12 The date of the Little Ice Age’s onset probably varied by region; for the Mediterranean, see Jean-Michel Carozza, Benoît Devillers, Nick Marriner and Christophe Morhange, “Introduction,” in “Le petit âge de glace en Méditerranée,” eds. Jean-Michel Carozza, Benoît Devillers, Nick Marriner and Christophe Morhange, special issue, Méditerranée: Revue géographique des pays méditerranéens 122 (2014): 3–9. 13 Seafarers were among those communities who most actively managed natural hazard risk; Christopher M. Gerrard and David N. Petley, “A Risk Society? Environmental Hazards, Risk and Resilience in the Later Middle Ages in Europe,” Natural Hazards 69 (2013): 1051–1079, 1072. On maritime insurance, see Luisa Piccinno, “Genoa, 1340–1620: Early Development of Marine Insurance,” in Marine Insurance: Origins and Institutions, 1300–1850, ed. Adrian B. Leonard (New York, 2016), pp. 25–45. 14 Pinuccia I. Simbula, “La percezione del tempo nell’esperienza dei marinai e dei naviganti,” Studium Medievale 2 (2009): 157–182, 160.

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that shipmasters, pilots, and crews followed across the Mediterranean’s waves were in fact blazed with the seamarks of storm and shipwreck. Experienced sometimes as opportunity, but more often as emergency or even disaster, storm and shipwreck distill much about how seafarers related to and understood the Mediterranean. In the offing here are not the technical details of mariners’ nautical efforts to meet these challenges, but rather how the Mediterranean’s violence elicited from seafarers emotional and religious responses that bore the impress of the marine environment, the space of the ship, and the social divisions often apparent on board. Those moments when the Mediterranean most acutely asserted its dominion over the ship illuminate how mariners’ perceptions of the sea could diverge from those of passengers. They also reveal the ship as a site of potential religious tension. The seascape of risk laid bare by the history of storm and shipwreck could collide with the Mediterranean’s complicated religious geography; these junctures suggest the sea was an actor in—rather than just a stage for—this region’s multi-confessional politics. Yet if the socially constructed experience of storm and shipwreck could splinter along lines of labor, faith and other factors, the commonality of physical experience could transcend them. The sea was, as Stuart Schwartz has written of Caribbean hurricanes, “always indifferent to” human categories of difference, and its violence spared no one.15 Storm and shipwreck could transform shipmates into a collectivity held together by shared fear and trauma. As fragile and evanescent as sea foam, these disaster communities dissolved as rapidly as they formed, sometimes leaving traces on the shore. This exploration of storm and shipwreck in the premodern Mediterranean is experimental and partial. Yet all the currents that flow through it meet at one point: the restless sea’s ability to shape history. 1

An Environment in Motion

Premodern people experienced Mediterranean maritime mobility not as frictionless displacement between terrestrial points, but instead as prolonged interaction with an environment that manifested the overwhelming, ineluctable power of non-human natural forces: millions of tons of water in motion. Wind and wave, tempest and tide, the sway of fishes and the play of light, the pull of currents and the drift of seaweed—the sea is never still. Other aquatic 15 Schwartz, Sea of Storms, p. 50. My concept of disaster communities owes much to his analysis.

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environments, such as rivers and lakes, are also in motion, but the scale and potency of marine movement dwarfs theirs. Marine currents “are many thousand times more powerful than any river on land,” writes one oceanographer.16 Premodern seafarers recognised the sea’s exceptional restlessness. “The waters of the sea are more rude, sonorous, and wondrous in their elevations than other waters,” declared the fifteenth-century Dominican Felix Fabri, who spent long months aboard Mediterranean ships.17 A man who wanted never to set foot in a boat would have agreed with the friar: Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s biographer and contemporary, Ibn Shaddād. In an anecdote intended to glorify the sultan, he invoked the sea’s distinctively intense movement. Ibn Shaddād related how the sight of the Mediterranean’s “motion and billowing” on the coast near Akko terrified him, but it inspired in courageous Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn dreams of launching war fleets.18 Salt water could even dissolve the distinction between mobile and immobile. An eleventh-century Fatimid geographer described how on certain days, a mosque would appear on the shore at Sousse. After people prayed there, it would sink beneath the waves.19 Even those seafarers who didn’t believe the sea had the wondrous power to make the immobile mobile knew it as a living environment in ceaseless motion. Whether they were in a small boat used for coastal trips or a large ship plying deeper waters, and whether they were crew or passenger, they were enveloped in what has been called the “synesthetic experience of the sea” common to all pre-steam maritime voyages.20 So intense was this sensory perception of the sea’s encompassing presence that premodern seafarers perhaps shared the feeling of some contemporary Tunisian fishermen, who describe themselves as being not “at sea” but “in the sea.”21 Before steam power, a ship moved toward its port as a partner in a dance with the marine environment’s own motion. Vessels that primarily used sail were dependent on winds, but even galleys largely propelled by human muscle had to reckon with currents and winds. With their low freeboards, these 16 17 18 19 20 21

Dorrick Stow, Oceans: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2017), p. 58. Felix Fabri, Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem, ed. Conrad Hassler, 3 vols (Stuttgart, 1843–1849), 1: 52. Bahāʾ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, trans. D. S. Richards (Aldershot, 2001), p. 29. An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities, eds. and trans. Emilie Savage-Smith and Yossef Rapoport (Leiden, 2013), p. 516. Perhaps this was an example of the thermal inversions known as Fata morganas. Mack, The Sea, p. 103. Naor Ben-Yehoyada, The Mediterranean Incarnate: Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II (Chicago, 2017), p. 111.

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craft were easily swamped in seas greater than three feet.22 All ships had to fear maelstroms, whirlpools born where currents clash; their potent eddies could stop a vessel or drag it underwater.23 Hence the acute attention to natural signs that Ibn Mājid recommended to mariners.24 They needed to predict and respond to sea’s movements that determined those of the ship. And hence the obsessive detail about wave height and wind strength in accounts of Mediterranean voyages. Such seemingly tedious minutiae reveal how sensory awareness of the sea’s immense might permeated the premodern experience of maritime mobility. In favourable conditions, mariners had the exhilarating sensation of commanding the sea’s power. A sixteenth-century Moroccan reveled in a turn of speed put on by the Ottoman fleet with which he voyaged, comparing the plunging ships to a caravan of eager camels.25 A mid fourteenth-century Christian voyager chose a different metaphor and remembered with pleasure how it felt to fly before the wind off Tripoli, so fast “that a bird could not have caught up with us.”26 The eleventh-century Andalusi Jewish wazier and poet, Shmuel HaNagid, lyrically conjured such a moment: “We worked the oars and a wind came up/ as over a field of corn,/ and the sea like a slave, did as I asked/ like a maid, and the sky was sapphire.”27 The Mediterranean, however, was never actually a slave to even the most skilled mariner, for no one could control its waves and winds. This is true of all seas and oceans, but every body of salt water has its own personality created by seabed, currents and coastline—and the Mediterranean is famously mercurial. “It is a difficult and stormy sea,” declared a tenth-century Muslim traveller.28 The sixteenth-century Ottoman admiral Piri Reʾis was even more pointed, contrasting the reliable seasonal Indian Ocean winds with the Mediterranean ones: “No matter where the wind may be in the Mediterranean, it will be 22 Gertwagen, “A Chapter,” p. 115. 23 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 36. 24 Cf. P. C. Fenton, “The Navigator as Natural Historian,” The Mariner’s Mirror 79 (1993), 44–57; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 179. 25 Abou-l Hasan Ali ben Mohammed et-Tamgrouti (al Tamgrouti), En-Nafhat el-Miskiya fi-s-sifarat et-Tourkiya: Relation d’une ambassade maroccaine en Turquie 1589–1591, ed. and trans. Henry de Castries (Paris, 1929), p. 39. 26 Niccolò da Poggibonsi, Libro d’Oltramare, ed. Alberto Bacchi della Lega, 2 vols (Bologna, 1881), 2: 217. 27 Shmuel HaNagid, “Miracle at Sea,” in Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid, trans. Peter Cole (Princeton, 1996), p. 8. 28 Al-Muqaddisī, The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions (Aḥsan al-Taqāsīm fī Maʿrifat al-Aqālīm), trans. Basil Collins (Reading, 2001), p. 15.

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inconstant. Sometimes it will deviate and sometimes it will blow and take you on your way.”29 His modern successors still warn of this sea’s unruliness. “Wind behaviour appears unpredictable, and weather … often changes from benign to life-threatening in a matter of minutes,” cautions a recent sailing handbook for the Mediterranean.30 Premodern seafarers’ accounts confirm Piri Reʾis’s observation about the fickle Mediterranean’s power to disrupt human maritime mobility. Contrary winds could leave ships languishing in port for weeks or months at a time—or frustrate their ability to anchor.31 “Never were men so tantalised by the winds as we have been these last four days,” complained a seventeenth-century English diplomat of the breezes that defeated his ship’s efforts to enter Genoa’s harbor.32 At sea, favourable winds might suddenly shift, something sixteenth-century mariners setting out from Sardinia tried to avoid by embarking only after having consulted a small ivory ship that hung in the main port’s Marian shrine; its prow infallibly indicated wind direction on the open sea.33 But even this maritime charm could not predict those eerie moments when the wind died away, immobilizing a ship on glassy water for days on end or setting it adrift on currents that could carry it into hostile territory.34 No wonder it was on a becalmed vessel that the thirteenth-century Moroccan sufi al-Shādhilī supposedly composed the “Litany of the Sea.” Recited by Muslim voyagers by the 29 Piri Reʾis, Kitāb-i bahriye, ed. Ertuğrul Zekai Ötke, trans. Vahit Çabuk, Robert Bragner, Tülay Duran, 4 vols (Ankara, 1988), 1: 75. 30 Roberto Ritossa, Mediterranean Weather Handbook for Sailors, 2nd ed. (St. Ives, 2014), p. 1. Cf. Broodbank, Making of the Middle Sea, p. 74. 31 Hence the variable length of Mediterranean Sea voyages; Simbula, “La percezione del tempo,” esp. pp. 165–174. Some examples include Bernhard von Breydenbach, Peregrinatio in terram sanctam: Frühneuhochdeutscher Text und Übersetzung, ed. Isolde Mozer (Berlin, 2010), pp. 634–644; Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 3: 323–327; Nicola de Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis ad loca sancta,” in Louis Le Grand, “Relation du pèlerinage à Jérusalem de Nicolas de Martoni, notaire italien (1394–1395),” Revue de l’Orient Latin 3 (1895): 577–669, 646, and 663; the account by a fifteenth-century Nasrid ambassador to the Mamluks in Luis Seco de Lucena Paredes, “Viaje a Oriente: embajadores granadinos en el Cairo,” Miscelánea de studios árabes y hebraicos 4 (1955): 5–30, 12; Amar S. Baadj, “Travel by Sea and Land between the Maghrib and the Mamluk Empire,” in The Mamluk Sultanate from the Perspective of World History: Economic, Social and Cultural Development in an Era of Increasing International Interaction and Competition, eds. Reuven Amitai and Stephan Conermann (Bonn, 2019), pp. 286–287, 292. 32 Piracy and Diplomacy in Seventeenth-Century North Africa: The Journal of Thomas Baker, English Consul in Tripoli, 1677–1685, ed. C. R. Pennell (London, 1989), p. 101. 33 Felipe de Guimeran, Breve historia de la Orden de Nuestra Señora de la Merced de Redempción de cautivos Christianos … (Valencia, 1591), pp. 64–65. 34 For example, Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 44; Nompar de Caumont, Voyatge d’outremer en Jherusalem, ed. Peter S. Noble (Oxford, 1975), pp. 72–73.

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fourteenth century, this prayer implores God to “subject to us this sea … send us a gentle breeze … let it bear us along as if by miraculous intervention.”35 During an agonizingly long windless spell on a voyage between Tunis and Alexandria, thirty Muslim passengers spent the night reciting the Qurʾān in the hopes that God would stir the air.36 Becalmed Christians too beseeched God, along with an array of maritime saints, to dispel the sea’s lassitude, for they knew as well as Muslims did the dangers of the doldrums.37 On ships languishing in windless waters, food rotted, water putrefied, vermin proliferated and people died of disease, dehydration or starvation, as fifteenth-century Mediterranean voyagers remembered with a shudder.38 According to a ḥadīth that Muslim writers quoted by the late tenth century, the Mediterranean was not just a particularly fickle sea, but also a particularly murderous one. God says to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, “I have created thee and deigned thee as a carrier for some of my servants … how wilt thou act towards them?” The Indian Ocean replies, “I shall carry them,” but the Mediterranean answers, “I shall drown them.”39 To premodern people, it often seemed that this insubordinate sea did try to drown them, especially when it wielded the formidable weapon of tempest. 2 Storm The Mediterranean infrequently generates cyclonic storms of hurricane force, so-called Medicanes.40 But it was and is a sea of storms, to borrow a phrase 35

Marco di Branco, “Some Observations on the Ḥizb al-Baḥr (the “Litany of the Sea”),” in Ein Meer und seine Heiligen: Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum, eds. Nikolas Jaspert and Marco di Branco (Paderborn, 2018), pp. 265–273, 268; Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325–1354, trans. H. A. R. Gibb and C. F. Beckingham, 5 vols (London, 1958–2000), 1: 25–27. 36 Jorge Lirola Delgado, “Travesías náuticas en la Riḥla del almeriense Jālid al Balawī (siglo XIV),” in Actas del II Congreso de Historia de Andalucía (Córdoba, 1994), pp. 85–92, 88. 37 For example, William of Malmesbury, The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, eds. and trans. R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Woodbridge, 2015), p. 52; Nompar de Caumont, Voyatge, pp. 72–73. 38 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 116; Santo Brasca, Viaggio in terra santa, con l’itinerario di Gabriele Capodilista, ed. Anna Momigliano Lepschy (Milan, 1966), p. 120. 39 Al-Muqaddisī, Best Divisions, p. 15. For a later version, see Muḥammad b. Sa‌ʾīd al-Zammūrī al-Ṣanhājī, Kanz al-asrār wa lawāqiḥ al-afkār in Le trésor des secrets et des idées fécondes …, 2.15, trans. Belkacem Daouali (Saarbrücken, 2011), pp. 180–181. 40 María del Carmen Llasat, “Storms and Floods,” in The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean, ed. Jamie Woodward (Oxford, 2009), pp. 513–540, 534.

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Stuart Schwartz coined for the Caribbean.41 According to climate scientists, the Mediterranean has the “highest concentration of cyclogenesis in the world” (that is, of extra-tropical storm formation), as well as “the heaviest extra-tropical rainfall events and very strong local winds.”42 Contained by the mountainous terrain ringing most of its coastline, the Mediterranean possesses its own “specific … air mass and … distinctive … meteorology.”43 This sea is situated at the conjunction of “subtropical high pressure systems to the south, and westerly wind belts to the north,” which shift with the seasons.44 In the winter, the subtropical air moves southward and the westerly winds churn the water, though tempests can occur even when the warmer, drier air of summer is over the sea.45 As premodern mariners well knew, the topography of certain areas of the Mediterranean especially spawns storms. The Gulf of Antalya, for example, which ships travelling between Cyprus and Rhodes had to traverse, was notorious for its lethal combination of fierce tempests and underwater crags; a fifteenth-century shipmaster’s claim that a particularly harrowing passage through its waters had turned his hair white was probably more than an old salt’s yarn intended to impress passengers.46 “All ships” travelling through this gulf “are in danger of being destroyed and lost,” wrote one fifteenth-century seafarer.47 Christians facing its perils comforted themselves with the thought that, as one wrote, “in past times, it was much more dangerous than it is now, because out of three ships, usually two remained sunk there.”48 They credited Constantine’s mother Helena with the improvement, relating how she had weakened the gulf’s waves by making the sign of the cross or by casting

41 Schwartz, Sea of Storms. 42 Llasat, “Storms and Floods,” p. 515. Cf. Andrew Harding, Jean Palutikof, and Tom Holt, “The Climate System,” in The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean, ed. Jamie Woodward (Oxford, 2009), pp. 69–88, 74. 43 Llasat, “Storms and Floods,” p. 513. 44 Harding, Palutikof, and Holt, “Climate System,” p. 69. 45 Harding, Palutikof, and Holt, “Climate System,” Table 3.1, p. 75. 46 Le voyage de Pierre Barbatre à Jérusalem en 1480, eds. Noël Pinzutti and Pierre Tucco-Chala, in Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France (1972–1973), pp. 75–172, 126. Other descriptions of this gulf’s storms: Pantaleão de Aveiro, Itinerario da Terra Sancta, ed. António Baião (Coimbra, 1927), p. 47; Breydenbach, Peregrinatio, p. 108; Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis,” p. 638. For discussion, Michele Bacci, “A Holy Site for Sailors: Our Lady of the Cave in Famagusta,” in Famagusta Maritima: Mariners, Merchants, Pilgrims and Mercenaries, ed. Michael K. Walsh (Leiden, 2019), pp. 47–51. 47 Le voyage de Pierre Barbatre, p. 126. 48 Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, p. 356.

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overboard a relic of the Passion she was ferrying home to her son.49 But as these tales admit, even a legendary saint wielding some of the most potent talismans in Christendom couldn’t completely tame the natural forces that make the Gulf of Antalya so treacherous. The cold fronts that move south over the Anatolian Plateau and stir the water near Cyprus mean that this stretch of the Mediterranean still ranks among its stormiest.50 Just as ill-reputed was a vast bay at the other end of the Mediterranean: the Gulf of Lion, onto which Marseilles’ harbor opened. As one fourteenth-century voyager commented, this bay owed its name to its roaring tempests.51 These gales were precipitated by the configuration of what modern oceanographers deem the “most windy region of the entire Mediterranean Sea.”52 The Gulf of Lion, they explain, is particularly “open to onshore winds and extratropical storms moving along a southern track between the Middle Atlantic and the Mediterranean.”53 Mountain ranges punctuated by valleys hedge its coast, creating gaps that funnel cold fronts from the north-west onto the sea and thus regularly generate marine storms even in the Mediterranean’s most pacific season of summer.54 No wonder that a fourteenth-century Christian voyager declared that “a ship could cross the [rest of the] sea peacefully, [but] it could not cross [the Gulf of Lion] without great storms, danger and fear.”55 Barcelonan dignitaries on a ship bound from their city to Italy in June 1435 had the misfortune to experience the truth of this statement. As they entered the Gulf of Lion, a tempest suddenly attacked their galera, destroying one rudder, swallowing eighteen oars and almost wrecking the vessel amidst the islets and shallows off Sardinia.56 They were among the many seafarers in the fourteenth and 49 Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 46–47; Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, pp. 356 and 358; Santo Brasca, Viaggio, pp. 121 and 177; Le voyage de Pierre Barbatre, p. 153. Breydenbach (Peregrinatio, p. 650) situates this miracle in the Adriatic. 50 Llasat, “Storms and Floods,” pp. 515, 517 (Fig. 18.2); Harding, Palutikof, and Holt, “Climate System,” pp. 75 and 76 (Fig. 3.4a). 51 Ludolph von Suchem, De itinere terrae sanctae liber, ed. Ferdinand Deycks (Stuttgart, 1851), p. 18. 52 C. Millot, “Wind Induced Upwellings in the Gulf of Lions,” Oceanologica Acta 2 (1979): 261–274, 262. 53 Uwe Ulbrich et al., “Climate of the Mediterranean: Synoptic Patterns, Temperature, Precipitation, Winds, and Their Extremes,” in The Climate of the Mediterranean Region: From the Past to the Future, ed. Piero Lionello (London, 2012), pp. 301–346, 332. 54 Millot, “Wind Induced Upwellings,” p. 262. 55 Ludolph von Suchem, De itinere, p. 18. 56 Luís Camós Cabruja, “Historia dramática de una embajada barcelonesa en Italia en 1435,” Boletin de la real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 25 (1953): 11–53, 15–16. I thank Victòria A. Burguera i Puigserver for this reference.

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fifteenth centuries to feel the lion’s bite; paleotempestologists argue that as the Medieval Climate Anomaly gave way to the Little Ice Age during these centuries, storms increased in frequency and fury in this gulf.57 The effects of climate change then were as uneven as they are now. The arrival of the Little Ice Age rendered waters in the western and central Mediterranean more turbulent, but it perhaps did not exacerbate the extant difficulties of navigation in the eastern Mediterranean.58 Due to an “east-west climate see-saw,” the Little Ice Age seems to have brought more rain to the western stretches of the sea and greater aridity to its eastern half.59 It is worth asking whether the differing maritime impact of climate change was among the many complex reasons that in the late middle ages, western Mediterranean polities invested far more than did their eastern counterparts such as the Byzantines and the Mamluks in building the larger and more sea-worthy ships produced by new nautical technologies.60 Perhaps the emergence of these cochas, carracks, and great galleys was a response not just to economic, political and military factors but also to increasingly stormier waters in the west. But even before the Medieval Climate Anomaly yielded to the Little Ice Age, tempests regularly roiled the Mediterranean, especially when winter winds attained their full strength. Storms had more impact on ships’ movement than did this sea’s inconstant winds. In the fourteenth century, successive storms drove one ship headed from Cyprus to Venice first back to the coast of Turkey, then south to Tripoli, then west to the island of Sapienza.61 A three-hour sum57 L. Delizeau et al., “Intense Storm Activity during the Little Ice Age on the French Medi­ terranean Coast,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaecology 299 (2011): 289–297; Philippe Sabatier et al., “7000 Years of Paleostorm Activity in the NW Mediterranean Sea in Response to Holocene Climate Events,” Quaternary Research 77 (2012): 1–11; Philippe Degeai et al., “Major Storm Periods and Climate Forcing in the Western Mediterranean during the Late Holocene,” Quaternary Science Reviews 129 (2015): 37–56. 58 Increased storms in the western Mediterranean: Dario Camuffo et al., “Sea Storms in the Adriatic and the Western Mediterranean during the Last Millennium,” Climactic Change 46 (2000): 209–223. 59 Neil Roberts et al., “Palaelimnological Evidence for an East-West Climate See-Saw in the Mediterranean since AD 900,” Global and Planetary Change 84–85 (2012): 23–34; M.-L. S. Goudeau et al., “Seasonality Variability in the Central Mediterranean during Cli­ mate Change in the Late Holocene,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaecology 418 (2015): 304–318. 60 New ship types and their adoption in the west, including by the sultanate of Granada, but not in the east: Gertwagen, “A Chapter”; idem, “Characteristics of Mediterranean Sea Going Ships of 13th–15th Centuries,” in Splendour of the Medieval Mediterranean (13th–15th Centuries), ed. David Abulafia and Xavier Barral i Altet, et al. (Barcelona, 2004), pp. 543–561; Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War, pp. 39–57. 61 Poggibonsi, Libro, 2: 217–220.

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mer gale sent another ship scudding back forty miles to the Aegean island it had just left behind.62 Far less lucky was the ship on which the twelfth-century Jewish merchant Abū Sa‌ʾīd was travelling from Tunis to Sicily. A severe storm lengthened this voyage from its usual day or day and a half to a remarkable thirty-five; the gale forced Abū Sa‌ʾīd’s ship to anchor at a deserted island, where the crew and passengers cowered for weeks until the sea’s rage was spent.63 For two years running, storms foiled a Muslim pilgrim’s efforts to complete the Alexandria-to-Tunis leg of his journey home to al-Andalus. This man set out twice, but both times bad weather forced the ship on which he was travelling backwards.64 Premodern Mediterranean seafarers thus experienced maritime mobility not as a smooth linear progression, but instead as a series of unplanned and involuntary zigzags caused by tempests blowing the ship off course.65 Storms meant more to seafarers than thwarted and delayed movement—they meant danger as well. The contracts for maritime insurance that emerged in the late medieval Mediterranean often lumped tempests together with pirates in the list of the worst perils that might occasion payout.66 It is not clear whether ships succumbed more readily to the human hazard or to the natural one, but seafarers describe storms as enemies as dangerous as even the most ruthless of sea robbers.67 Towering waves, deafening thunder, blinding lightning, screaming wind, and churning water rampage through the abundant accounts of tempests in narratives of Mediterranean sea voyages, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian. Exaggeration surely eddied through seafarers’ memories of storms. Travellers liked to boast that the tempests they endured were deemed by the ship’s crew to be the worst that these men of the sea had ever confronted.68 Tales of suffering inflicted by tempests also belonged to the narrative repertoire of pilgrims’ 62 63 64 65

Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis,” pp. 580–581. S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, 1973), pp. 323–327. Lirola Delgado, “Travesías náuticas,” pp. 88–89. Although two modern maps that plot the effect of storms on Mediterranean ships employ continuous lines rather than zigzags; Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2 vols, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1966), 1: 229, 231. 66 Dominique Valérian, “La course et la piraterie en Méditerranée occidentale à la fin du Moyen Âge: entre activité économique et instrument politique,” in Les territoires de la Méditerranée, XIe–XVIe siècles, eds. Annaliese Nef, Damien Coulon, Christophe Picard, Dominique Valérian (Rennes, 2013), pp. 35–49, 38–39. 67 Valérian (“La course,” pp. 38–39) argues storms were the worse hazard, whereas Piccinno (“Genoa, 1340–1620,” p. 36) argues that pirates were. 68 For example, Meshullam da Volterra, Von der Toskana in den Orient: Ein RenaissanceKaufman auf Reisen, trans. Daniel Jütte (Göttingen, 2012), p. 95.

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pious travails. Writers could use storms to thrill readers, crafting them as climaxes in descriptions of otherwise dull weeks on the water. Imagery borrowed from scripture could heighten the drama; Muslims, for example, found the Qurʾānic phrase “waves like mountains” (11.42) apt for Mediterranean gales.69 Yet for all their literary shaping and creative license, these portrayals of an enraged marine environment unleashing vast incomprehensible force were not mere hyperbole. “The largest, most violent storms on earth are generated at sea … the energy released by a single tropical cyclone in one day would be enough to power the entire industrial production of the United States for one year,” writes one oceanographer.70 Mediterranean marine storms were smaller than these southerly monsters, but they still subjected premodern people to some of the most extreme and most terrifying weather events they would ever experience. These destructive demonstrations of the sea’s awesome power over humans made seafarers feel the Mediterranean as a willful presence—even an animate force—as some personifications of marine storm elements suggest. Christian mariners, for example, transformed the eerie electromagnetic phenomenon of blue flames that could ignite on ship masts or prows during storms into the saints’ comforting presence. They reassured alarmed passengers that these fires manifested the protection of Saint Elmo, Saint Nicholas, or the Virgin Mary and meant the storm would soon pass.71 Muslim mariners too believed that the appearance of such blinding lights atop the mast signalled the end of danger.72 Modern science confirms premodern sailors’ insight that such corona discharge often occurs near storm’s end.73 The fury of marine storms, however, usually evoked supernatural malevolence rather than benevolence. Authors of Christian hagiography do not seem to have imagined the sea as demonic even at its fiercest, but high medieval Christian artists could paint devils and sirens into marine storms and the Jewish-Christian Testament of Solomon featured a sea horse demon that

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Ibn Shaddād, Rare and Excellent History, p. 29; The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. Roland Broadhurst, (London 1952), pp. 331, 332. 70 Stow, Oceans, p. 81. 71 Examples, include Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 54; Nompar de Caumont, Voyatge, p. 61; Le voyage de Pierre Barbatre, p. 167; Santo Brasca, Viaggio, pp. 124–125. 72 Al-Masʿūdī, Les prairies d’or, eds. and trans. C. Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille, 9 vols (Paris, 1861–1877), 1: 344–345 (evidence from the Persian Gulf). 73 William Beatty, “What Causes the Strange Glow Known as St. Elmo’s Fire?” Scientific American (September 22, 1997). Available at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article /quotwhat-causes-the-stran/. Accessed January 27, 2023.

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boasts of becoming tempest waves.74 The “Devil’s mother,” asserts a twelfthor thirteenth-century Jewish fable, is often “present in the sea” during storms; when she cannot be there, she sends her deputies to whip the waters.75 A third-century rabbi claimed that mariners told tales of one monstrous ocean wave asking another whether anything was left for it to destroy.76 A fourteenth-century Christian seafarer described his ship’s traumatic meeting with “a cursed spirit that we call Macone,” probably a waterspout.77 Three centuries later, a French diplomat derided the Provençal sailors aboard his ship for their belief that “devils preside over storms”; he claimed that they blamed demons for falls from the shrouds during tempests and that one man even spun a yarn of a harrowing fight high in the rigging with a clawed devil sporting a blond wig.78 The men who knew the sea most intimately, that is mariners, could also believe that storms manifested the displeasure of the Mediterranean itself when asked by humans to do the intolerable: to bear a dead body. According to a fourteenth-century German chronicle, the crew of a twelfth-century ship departing Cyprus protested when a crusader’s bones were loaded on board, fearing them as a danger to the living. As the chronicler explained, “the sea’s insolence is so great … that with billowing dangers, it violently menaces ships carrying dead bodies.” Though mollified at first by the promise of money, the mariners renewed their outcry when a gale rocked the ship. The guardians of 74

Sea as not demonic in Christian hagiography: Jana Habig, “Die pericula maris in den Acta Sanctorum—das Meer als Unheilsbringer?” in Ein Meer und seine Heiligen: Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum, ed. Nikolas and Marco di Branco (Paderborn, 2018), pp. 247–249, 260. Sea-horse demon in the Testament of Solomon: Alexandra Cuffel, “The Sea as Magical Stage: Miracles and (Un)Holy Names in the Chronicle of Aḥimaʿaẓ,” in Ein Meer und seine Heiligen, p. 232. An example of demons in Christian paintings of marine storm is a Dalmatian altarpiece (c.1400) in the National Gallery, London. Available at https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/dalmatianvenetian-helsinus-saved-from -a-shipwreck-a-french-canon-drowned#painting-group-info. Accessed January 27, 2023. Sirens in storm paintings: Gentile da Fabriano’s 1425 predella with scenes from the life of St. Nicholas in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. Available at http://www.museivaticani.va/con tent/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/la-pinacoteca/sala-ii---secolo-xiii-xv/gentile -da-fabriano--storie-di-s--nicola-di-bari.html. Accessed January 27, 2023. I thank Jessica Tearney-Pearce for this reference. 75 Raphael Patai, The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times (Princeton, 1998), p. 72. 76 Patai, Children of Noah, p. 125. Sea waves also converse in another early rabbinic tale; ibid., p. 113. 77 Poggibonsi, Libro, pp. 226–227. 78 Mémoires du chevalier D’Arvieux, envoyé extraordinaire du Roy, à la Porte, Consul d’Alep, de Tripoli et autres Echelles du Levant …, ed. Jean Baptiste Labat, 6 vols (Paris, 1735), 4: 80.

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the bones tricked the sailors into silence by tossing a coffin filled with stones overboard, but paid the price for deception by arriving at their destination half drowned by rough seas.79 The chronicler concludes that the crew was right in wishing to deny the corpse passage, but he also suggests that passengers didn’t always share mariners’ belief that dead bodies aboard riled the sea. Some erudite pilgrims, including Felix Fabri and Bernhard Breydenbach, in fact told tales intended to sink this notion as a sailors’ superstition. Both related how during their joint 1483 return from the Levant, the body of a distinguished passenger who died en route was embalmed on an Aegean island, and then smuggled back on board without the mariners’ knowledge and hidden in the hold among spice sacks and ballast; the ship’s subsequent safe homecoming proved, declared Fabri and Breydenbach, that sailors’ belief in the sea’s violent refusal to carry a corpse was nothing more than a “lie.”80 But their scorn mattered little to the master of the Venetian ship on which they and their fellow pilgrims sailed to the Levant. When they stipulated in their contract negotiations with him that if any pilgrim died at sea, the body was to be kept on board until the vessel reached land, he replied that “he would gladly have a corpse on his galea, but that the sea would not suffer it and thus our voyage (navigatio) would be hindered.”81 Mariners animated the stormy sea to ventriloquize their own dread of corpses. There were practical reasons for their fear; in the tight quarters of a ship, the stench of decomposing bodies would spread rapidly, as would any diseases lurking in rotting human flesh. Yet an undercurrent of anxiety that dead things on board would spell the death of the voyage itself also welled up in mariners’ aversion to corpses. The sea recoiled so strongly from death, they believed, that it would stifle the winds or send contrary ones to punish ships that carried vials of a liquid they considered especially prone to putrefaction: water from the Jordan River. The presence of these little flasks on board could cause conflict between crew and passengers. Christian pilgrims prized Jordan water as a holy souvenir, but sailors feared it as a cause of refractory seas. When bad weather or lack of wind plagued a ship, its master might order a search of passengers’ luggage for the offending vials or even threaten to throw overboard

79 Chronica Reinhardsbrunnensis, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, SS 30.1: 546–547. 80 Breydenbach, Peregrinatio, pp. 630, 632; Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 3: 296–297. 81 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 91, 92. Christian burial practices at sea: Romedio Schmitz-Esser, Der Leichnam im Mittelalter: Einbalsamierung, Verbrennung und die kulturelle Konstruktion des toten Körpers (Ostfildern, 2014), pp. 38–41. Muslim burial at sea: Hassan S. Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law: An Introduction (Leiden, 1998), pp. 168–171.

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anyone who was found to have one.82 Felix Fabri explains why: “some say that Jordan water, although live water when it flows, dies and rots when put in a container. And because the sea can’t bear death and putrefaction, thus the ship’s progress is impeded”—a belief he hastens to dismiss even as he personifies the angry Mediterranean.83 It was perhaps logical for mariners to read tempests as the sea’s rebellion against humans and their desires. At their fiercest, storms smashed rudders and masts, tore sails, and left ships helpless. But even without such damage, storms often took control of ships, despite crews’ efforts. “We let the ship do and go where it would,” wrote a fourteenth-century Franciscan of a storm off Tripoli, recalling how people and cargo rolled across deck as the ship “lurched like a sick man, who wants to walk but can’t stay on his feet … the ship … first fell on one side and then on the other, and could not be controlled in any way.”84 Storms exposed the emotional costs, the dangerous hubris, and the contingency of maritime mobility, generating fear that was the emotional counterweight to the thrilling audacity of humans venturing onto the immense moving force that was the sea. Storms rudely reminded seafarers that even when aboard ships as big as “castles” (as one fifteenth-century voyager lauded Genoese vessels), they were little more than “worms clinging to a piece of wood,” a metaphor for maritime travel that originated with Muslim writers and was echoed by some Jewish ones.85 This stark imagery of human impotence gave one Muslim voyager the language in which to express his alarm at the Mediterranean’s agitation: “the sea under us [was] like the land, shaking its people, rocking its mountains and plains. We [were] sitting [like] a worm on … wood.”86 The pilgrim Ibn Jubayr combined this trope with scriptural language to capture his dread during November storms with “waves like mountains

82 Breydenbach, Peregrinatio, p. 644; Pietro Casola, Viaggio a Gerusalemme, ed. Anna Paoletti (Turin, 2001), p. 239. 83 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 2: 36, 41–44. 84 Poggibonsi, Libro, pp. 218–219. 85 Ships compared to castra: Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, pp. 48, 50. The much used “worm on wood” metaphor for sea travel originated in ninth-century Islamic texts; Yohanan Friedmann, “Minor Problems in al-Balādurī’s Account of the Conquest of Sind,” Rivista degli Studi Orientali 45 (1970): 253–260, 254–255; Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, p. 4, note 9. Other examples: Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1980), 2: 39; al-Tamgrouti, En-Nafhat, pp. 39, 84–85. Jewish writers in the Islamicate world used the image, including Shmuel HaNagid (see his Selected Poems, p. 10). 86 Quoted in Friedmann, “Minor Problems,” p. 254–255.

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(Sura 11.42) that struck the ship such blows that with all its size it tossed like a tender twig.”87 Tempests and their terrors transformed ships into temporary emotional communities of fear. In the wake of a storm, wrote a fourteenth-century Franciscan, “we all felt as if we had escaped the tomb, we were pale and jaundiced and all this was because of fear.”88 A century later, an Italian canon remembered how fright forged bonds between all on board; during a violent storm off the island of Zakynthos, “everyone fled under cover and no one needed to say ‘this is my place,’ but in that moment, ‘all was in common’ [because] death was hunting us.”89 As this cleric’s language suggests, the sea’s violence created a commonality of physical and emotional experience that could sweep away distinctions among those on board and unite them in the common enterprise of survival. A ship in a storm thus became what might be called a disaster community.90 Crews deployed their skills to keep the vessel afloat, sometimes receiving monetary rewards later from grateful passengers.91 Passengers could also pitch in, bailing out the water that poured over gunwales or leaked in through storm-strained seams.92 Individual interests were sacrificed for the collective good, as the age-old practice of jettison also suggests. “Fear of death moves merchants and others to throw their goods into the sea when there is a tempest, with the goal of lightening ships so that they can escape danger,” commented a thirteenth-century Castilian law code.93 An eleventh-century Jewish merchant from the Maghrib described how a storm off Tyre “drove us out into the middle of the sea, where we remained for 4 days … we threw part of the cargo overboard and I gave up all hope for my life and my goods.”94 Carefully regulated by maritime law, jettison expressed hierarchies of worth in which property was weighed against human lives and perhaps even human lives against each other.95 Islamic jurists, for example, agreed that heaviest 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Travels of Ibn Jubayr, pp. 331, 332. Poggibonsi, Libro, 1: 17–18. Cf. Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis,” pp. 663–664. Casola, Viaggio, p. 259. Disasters often dissolve “normal distinctions” and hierarchies, engendering cooperation in the interest of survival; Schwartz, Sea of Storms, p. 106. Poggibonsi, Libro, 2: 220. Some high medieval Italian law codes mandated such payments for mariners; Rose Melikan, “Shippers, Salvors, and Sovereigns: Competing Interests in the Medieval Law of Shipwreck,” The Journal of Legal History 11 (1990): 163–182, 167. Goitein, Letters, p. 41. Alfonso X, Las Siete Partidas … glosadas por el licenciado Gregorio Lopez, 5.9.7 (1555; 3 vol. repr. Madrid, 1985), 2: 864 (cf. 5.9.3, 2: 862). Goitein, Letters, p. 46. Olivia Remie Constable, “The Problem of Jettison in Medieval Mediterranean Law,” Journal of Medieval History 29 (1994): 207–220; Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, pp. 87–105; - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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goods should be jettisoned first, followed by lighter goods, then by animals, but they debated whether humans themselves could be jettisoned. Most said no, but some argued that to save Muslim lives, non-Muslim captives and slaves could be tossed into the sea. Other jurists proposed voluntary sacrifice, recommending that lots be drawn to see who would go overboard.96 Jonah’s fate (Book of Jonah, 1.15) notwithstanding, there is little evidence of humans actually casting other humans into the sea during a tempest. Yet a ship in a storm was a fragile collective in which fear of death suspended normal rules. The corpses of people swept overboard by storm might even float by you, macabre proof of the sea’s ability to dispense death, as a sixteenth-century Franciscan experienced off Crete.97 A grinning skeleton rides the bow of a tempest-tossed ship in a late fifteenth-century Venetian print.98 To exorcise the dark shadow of mortality conjured by storms, seafarers often turned to the only force with the power to still the enraged Mediterranean: its creator, God. Storms distilled the piety generated by maritime mobility. They were a reminder that to embark on the sea was to commit oneself to God’s hands.99 This belief shared by Muslims, Christians, and Jews was in tension with seafarers’ considerable practical efforts to meet maritime risks and their evident recognition of the Mediterranean’s power over ships. Yet providential and natural explanations of maritime storms and other environmental hazards co-existed.100 The shipboard community of disaster was awash with prayer. In their accounts of Mediterranean storms, members of all three faiths typically relate how cries to God rang out amidst the clamor of terror. As a proverb circulating in various Mediterranean vernaculars by the fifteenth century declared: “if you want to learn to pray, go to sea.”101

96 97 98 99

100 101

Emilia Matiax Ferrándiz, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Continuity and Change of the Lex Rhodia’s Jettison Principles in Roman and Medieval Mediterranean Rulings,” Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 29 (2017): 41–59. Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, pp. 96–97, 116–117; idem, “Human Jettison, Contribution for Lives, and Life Salvage in Byzantine and Early Islamic Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean,” Byzantion 75 (2005): 225–235, 225–229. Aveiro, Itinerario, p. 26. Aventuriers des mers VIIe–XVII siècles: de Sinbad à Marco Polo Méditerranée—Océan Indien (Paris, 2016), p. 46. Examples of the common trope of sea voyages as entrusting yourself to God: Mohamed Cherif, “La piraterie en Méditerranée d’après les sources hagiographiques maghrébines,” in Seeraub im Mittelmeerraum, eds. Nikolas Jaspert and Sebastian Kolditz (Leiden, 2019), pp. 83–103, 83; Yehuda Halevi, “On the Sea: A Sequence of Poems,” trans. Gabriel Levin, European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe 28 (1995): 87–90, 88–89. A point made throughout Schwartz’s Sea of Storms, and, for the late medieval period, by Gerrard and Petley, “A Risk Society?” pp. 1061–1062. Fifteenth-century evidence: Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana, Refranes que dizen las viejas tras el fuego, ed. Hugo Oscar Bizzarri (Kassel, 1995), p. 106. Instances of - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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In seeking deliverance from the divine anger that they believed could cause storms, Muslims and Christians vowed offerings to saints and pilgrimage to their shrines, sometimes throwing pieces of parchment or paper inscribed with their names into water.102 As this suggests, shipboard emergency devotional practices could be specific to the sea. Members of all three faiths wielded religious talismans to quell the water’s movement. Christians tied relics to ropes and hung them from the stern or dragged them through the angry waves, while Jews tossed pottery or parchment inscribed with God’s holy names into stormy waters.103 Muslims confronted tempests with amulets and cast into churning seas offerings of oil, candles, bread, or even dirt from the tomb of Sidi Muḥriz in Tunis, which sailors believed was particularly efficacious.104 Muslims also attached scraps of cloth with saints’ names high on the mast, reaching heavenward to gird this critical part of the ship with holy protection against wind and waves.105

this proverb from the sixteenth century and later: Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, Prologue to Book 50, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 5 vols (Madrid, 1846–), 5: 308; José Gella Iturriaga, “Quattrocento proverbi marina comuni agli italiani e agli spagnuoli,” in Congresso internazionale di etnografia e folklore del mare, Napoli 3–10 ottobre 1954: Cronaca dei lavori (Naples, 1957), pp. 367–392, 379, 380, and 384. 102 For examples. Gabriele Capodilista, “Itinerario,” in Santo Brasca, Viaggio, p. 171; Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Travels 2: 320; Amy G. Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Medi­ terranean: Ships, Shrines and Sailors,” in Ein Meer und seine Heiligen: Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum, ed. Nikolas Jaspert and Marco di Branco (Paderborn, 2018), pp. 299–325, 316. For a vivid example of storms as manifesting God’s anger, see Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 57–58. 103 Christian relics dragged through waves: Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean,” pp. 318–319. Jews and pottery and parchment with the names of God: Cuffel, “Sea as Magical Stage,” p. 233; S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols (Berkeley, 1967–1993), 1: 324. 104 Amulets: Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī, Maqāmāt, trans. W. J. Prendergast (London, 1973), no. 23, pp. 98–99. Bread: Piri Reʾis, Kitāb, 1: 309–311; F. W. Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, ed. Margaret M. Hasluck, 2 vols (Oxford, 1929), 1: 345–346. Candles and oil: Emanuel d’Aranda, Relation de la captivité et liberté du Sieur Emanuel d’Aranda, jadis Escalve à Algiers (Brussels, 1662), pp. 9–10; Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires … 2nd ed. (Paris, 1649), 3.6.3, pp. 322–324; Joseph Pitts, A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans … (Exeter, 1704), pp. 12–13. Dirt from Sidi Muḥriz’s tomb: Abū Ḥāmīd, al-Garnāṭī, Tuḥfat al-Albāb (El regalo de los espíritus), trans. Ana Ramos (Madrid, 1990), p. 95; ʿAli ibn Abī Bakr Harawī, A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide to Pilgrimage, trans. Joseph W. Meri (Princeton, 2004), p. 138. 105 Mohamed Cherif, “Quand les saints protègent les pèlerins en Méditerranée médiévale,” Arqueologia Medieval 9 (2005): 5–11, 8; Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, p. 80.

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A ship’s crew might participate with passengers in these rituals, but the men most familiar with the Mediterranean’s moods also had specialist ways of tackling tempests. The Babylonian Talmud depicts Jewish sailors shaking clubs inscribed with prayers at the enraged sea.106 In the seventeenth century, North African corsairs snared by storms would sacrifice a sheep that had been blessed for them in port by a marabout.107 In the same era, their Christian counterparts confronted tempests with practices aimed at quelling an animate marine cosmos. They tried to cut through bad weather and kill storm winds and waterspouts by brandishing a knife while reciting secret prayers, a practice that continued into the twentieth century among some Maltese and Italian fishermen.108 Fourteenth-century Muslim mariners in the Indian Ocean wielded a sword instead against malevolent winds.109 During maritime emergencies, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish rituals and prayers might mingle on the same ship, making this community of fear a multi-confessional one. A seventeenth-century Christian put it well in his account of his time as a captive in Algiers. He remembered how when a February storm threatened to sink the North African vessel on which he was voyaging toward the ransom waiting for him in Tetouan, its deck transformed into a “veritable last judgment,” as the Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants on board broke out in a cacophony of prayers, each confession in its own way.110 As this and other descriptions of marine disasters highlight, Mediterranean ships were potential agents of religious encounter not just because they ferried people across the sea to places where other religions held sway, but also because they brought people of different faiths together on the sea. 106 Cuffel, “Sea as Magical Stage,” p. 231. 107 Dan, Histoire, 3.6.2, p. 322; Aranda, Relation, pp. 82–83. 108 Bartolomeo Crescentio Romano, Nautica Mediterranea (Rome, 1607), pp. 401–402; Dan, Histoire, 1.8, pp. 52–53. Modern examples: Francesco Casaburi, “Il folklore marinaro di Cetara,” in Congresso internazionale di etnografia e folklore del mare, Napoli 3–10 ottobre 1954: Cronaca dei lavori (Naples, 1957), pp. 87–95, 92; Joseph Cassar-Pullicino, “Some Maltese Traditions About the Sea,” in L’homme méditerranéen et la mer: Actes du troisième congress international d’études des cultures de la Méditerranée occientale ( Jerba, avril 1981), eds. Micheline Galley and Leïla Ladjimi Sebai (Tunis, 1985), pp. 474–485, 443, 454–455; Luigi Lombardi Satriani and Mariano Meligrana, “Precarietà ed esorcizzazione del rischio nella cultura marinara tradizionale del sud d’Italia,” in L’homme méditerranéen, pp. 478–482; Saverio La Sorsa, “Pregiudizi e superstizioni dei marina,” in Congresso internazionale di etnografia e folklore del mare, Napoli 3–10 ottobre 1954: Cronaca dei lavori (Naples, 1957), pp. 435–448, 444–445. 109 Dionisius A. Agius, Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Leiden, 2008), p. 240. 110 Aranda, Relation, p. 84. Cf. Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, pp. 78 and 80.

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So many complex constellations of religious identities were possible onboard that they are hard to chart.111 Muslims, Jews, and Greek Christians could take passage on ships owned by Latin Christians (though Muslim jurists debated whether it was legitimate for Muslims to do so);112 Greek Christians could travel on Ottoman ships, where their fellow passengers might include not just Muslims but also Jews, who could voyage too on ships whose home ports lay in the Maghrib. Crews were if anything even more religiously and ethnically mixed than passengers. Whether Jews worked some ships as sailors is unclear, but one did command a sixteenth-century Algerian corsair ship.113 Latin-Christian owned ships were often crewed by Latin and Greek Christians, Muslims, and baptised Muslims. Crews of North African and Ottoman ships included Muslims, Christians, and Christian converts to Islam. By the late fifteenth century, many of the men whose muscle powered corsair galleys were slaves of a different faith from the vessel’s master.114 Laboring aboard ships could also be men of fluctuating or murky religious allegiance.115 111 Evidence for the multi-faith configurations mentioned in this paragraph includes Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 125–126; Travels of Ibn Jubayr, pp. 26, 325, 361–362; and discussions in Baadj, “Travel,” p. 286; Giancarlo Casale, “The Ethnic Composition of Ottoman Ship Crews and the ‘Rumi Challenge’ to Portuguese Identity,” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 122–147; Bernard Doumerc, “Cosmopolitanism on Board Venetian Ships (Fourteenth–Fifteenth Centuries),” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 78–95; Kathryn L. Reyerson, “Introduction: Cross-Cultural Encounters on the High Seas (Tenth–Sixteenth Centuries),” special issue, Medieval Encounters 13, no. 1 (2007): 1–3; Theresa M. Vann, “Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Mariners in the Port of Rhodes, 1453–1480,” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 158–173. 112 A. Gateau, “Quelques observations sur l’intérêt du voyage d’Ibn Jubayr pour l’histoire de la navigation en Méditerrané au XIIe siècle,” Hespéris 36 (1949): 293–294; Vincent Lagardère, Histoire et société en Occident musulman au moyen âge: Analyse du ʿMiyār d’al-Wansarīsī (Madrid, 1995), 1.86. 113 Jewish sailors: Goitein, Letters, p. 125, note 24; David Jacoby, “The Jews in the Byzantine Economy (Seventh to Mid-Fifteenth Century),” in The Jews in the Byzantine Economy (Seventh to Mid-Fifteenth Century), eds. Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Strousma and Rina Talgam (Leiden, 2012), pp. 219–255, 241. The sixteenth-century Jewish corsair ra‌ʾis: Orit Rotgaizer and Sa‌ʾar Nudel, “Piracy and the Jews (2nd century BCE–19th century CE),” in Pirates: The Skull and Crossbones, eds. Ruthi Gertwagen and Avshalom Zemer (Haifa, 2002), pp. 216–222, 219–220. 114 For an introduction to this subject, see Salvatore Bono, Schiavi: Una storia mediterranea (XVI–XIX secolo) (Bologna, 2016), pp. 191–219. Shift from free to enslaved rowers: Michel Fontenay, “L’esclave galérien dans la Méditerranée des temps modernes,” in Figures de l’esclave au Moyen Âge et dans le monde moderne, ed. Henri Bresc (Paris, 1996), pp. 115–143, 126–130. 115 Prime examples were the “renegades”: Bartolomé Bennassar and Lucile Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah: L’histoire extraordinaire des renégats XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1989); Giovanna Fiume, Schiavitù mediterrannee: Corsari, rinnegati, e santi di età moderna (Milan, 2009), pp. 70–86. Other mariners had fluid religious identities: Karoline P. Cook,

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The religious heterogeneity on high medieval and early modern Mediterra­ nean ships is now recognised. Almost unexplored, however, is how it combined with the material conditions of life on board to make ships sites of inescapable and intense religious encounter. Given the notoriously cramped quarters of Mediterranean ships, passengers and crews could hardly avoid witnessing the daily and emergency devotional practices of people of different faiths.116 On late medieval Catalan ships, each crew member had 0.787 square meters of space.117 Passengers didn’t enjoy much more. According to Felix Fabri, each passenger on Venetian ships was allotted a body length spot in which to “sleep, sit and eat.”118 The situation was similar on medieval Muslim ships, where the average passenger had just enough room in which to pray.119 The acute religiosity and fear generated by tempests might create the potential for shipboard religious entanglement; danger at sea could cause the observation of others’ devotional practices to shade into participation in them. This possibility was particularly pronounced among mariners. Not only were they used to working alongside men of different faiths and to encountering other ways in foreign ports, but their labor also gave them an acutely visceral understanding of how, when it came to survival at sea, everyone onboard was literally in the same boat. Hence in the hazardous waters off Cape Baba in Asia Minor, where “sudden squalls from the mountains” buffeted ships, some sixteenth-century Christian crew members joined their Muslim colleagues in tossing propitiatory offerings into the sea and invoking the marabout who had lived there.120 Perhaps they believed that they were engaging in a mariners’ rite rather than a Muslim one; it is likely that men of the sea evolved a shared set of ritual practices to confront maritime perils.

116 117 118 119 120

“Navigating Identities: The Case of a Morisco Slave in Seventeenth-Century New Spain,” The Americas 65 (2008): 63–79, 67–68, 73–75; Michael Kempe, “Piraterie, Sklaverei, Konversion: zur Frage nach der Relevanz von Religion im mediterranen Kaperkrieg (17.–18. Jahrhundert),” in Seeraub Im Mittelmeerraum: Piraterie, Korsarentum und maritime Gewalt von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit, eds. Nikolas Jaspert and Sebastian Kolditz (Paderborn, 2013), pp. 105–114, 113–114. Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 130; Travels of Ibn Jubayr, pp. 336–337; Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis,” p. 664. Arcadi García Sanz and Núria Coll i Julia, Galeres mercants catalanes dels segles XIV i XV (Barcelona 1994), p. 201. Cramped conditions on premodern ships in general: Mollat, Europe and the Sea, p. 157. Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 92 (cf. 1: 137–138). Hassan S. Khalilieh, “Women at Sea: Modesty, Privacy, and Sexual Misconduct of Passen­ gers and Sailors Aboard Islamic Ships,” Al-Qantara 27, no. 1 (2006): 137–153, 145, note 30. This Muslim practice: Piri Reʾis, Kitāb, 1: 309–311. Christian crew participating: Hasluck, Christianity and Islam, 1: 344–346.

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Maritime emergencies had the power to dissolve religious distance, replacing it with a sense of common fate and shared humanity that lasted until the risk abated. It was for this reason that the seventeenth-century Christian captive Emanuel d’Aranda made it alive on deck to see the “Last Judgment” scene of multi-confessional tempest prayer he described so vividly. He recounted how, when the storm set in, he and the other enslaved Christians incarcerated in the hold begged the “Turk” in charge of them to promise that if the vessel began to sink, he would open the hatch so that “each could escape and prolong his life as best he could, whether by swimming or in some other way.” The “Turk” kept his pledge. Aranda even remembers him shouting “Christians, come up! We should all die together!”—perhaps not this man’s exact words, but perhaps his sentiment as he threw open the hatch to free the Christians from certain drowning.121 Bad weather at sea and the fear it elicited could also exacerbate or even produce friction between members of different faiths crammed into the same ship. During his return voyage from Jerusalem in 1481, the Italian Jewish merchant Meshullam of Volterra wisely concealed his religious identity from the Christians onboard until he had won their friendship through flattery and favours.122 He sustained his subterfuge with the help of the ship’s master, Agostino Contarini, who remembered only too well a disturbing incident of the previous year. In 1480, as Contarini was departing Jaffa with a load of Christian pilgrims, he had added several well-paying Jews as last-minute passengers. When a windless spell plagued the vessel, some Christian pilgrims muttered that the Jews were at fault and should be thrown overboard. The crew, however, rejected such reflexive anti-Semitism and privileged their own less confessionally incendiary understanding of why wind might vanish; they insisted that the blame lay with pilgrims who had disobeyed the prohibition on keepsakes of Jordan River water, dangerous objects which they and the shipmaster demanded be jettisoned.123 In this episode, it was the difficult sea that drew inter- and intra-faith tensions to the surface. A moralizing fable from the Babylonian Talmud shows even more clearly how the existential angst of marine dangers could combine with the multi-confessional nature of Mediterranean maritime mobility to allow the sea to be drafted as a powerful player in religious polemics. This tale 121 Aranda, Relation, pp. 83–84. 122 Meshullam da Volterra, Von der Toskana in den Orient, pp. 85–86. 123 Three pilgrim eyewitnesses tell this story: Le voyage de Pierre Barbatre, p. 153; Le voyage de la Saincte Cyté de Hierusalem avec la description des lieux, portz, villes, citez et aultres passaiges fait l’an 1480, ed. Charles Schefer (Paris 1882), pp. 101–102; Santo Brasca, Viaggio, p. 121 (who omits any references to Jewish people).

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features a ship in a tempest. The pagan passengers desperately pray to their own idols, but the waves abate only when a Jewish child intercedes with God. Naturally, his shipmates admit his divinity’s superiority.124 Ballads sung many centuries later by Sephardic Jews in diaspora echoed this parable, depicting how people on a storm-tossed ship who pray to the Virgin Mary drown while those who invoke God are saved.125 Proclaiming Judaism the true faith, these ballads mocked Christians while perhaps also warning any Jew tempted to join them in invoking Mary during storms at sea. The violent sea could plunge less fictional people into anguish over their religious allegiances, according to a sixteenth-century Portuguese Franciscan. He was lucky enough to be safely in port in Cyprus when a huge gale blew through, but a Portuguese conversa whom he met later on shore had endured the storm’s terrors instead out at sea on a ship called the Quirina. She told the friar how, as “she was looking death in the eye,” she had repented of her earlier decision to renounce Christianity and live as a Jew. She had vowed to return to the Catholic fold and God miraculously had saved her from the sea’s wrath. To the friar’s disgust, however, when he encountered this woman some months later in a Syrian port town, she reinterpreted her rescue, now insisting that God had helped her survive because “she had always been a good Jew.”126 Vows made at sea indeed often went unfulfilled, as Christian and Muslim writers recognised.127 On shore, shipboard fears could fade into a distant memory. “Mariners’ vows last as long as the tempest,” declared proverbs circulating in Italian and Spanish by the sixteenth century.128 Yet Christian and Muslim literary works often summoned storms as devices to impel the protagonist’s romantic or heroic transformation129—and in Cyprus, the same Portuguese Franciscan met someone who proved to him that the restless sea did indeed have the power to spur permanent religious change: a Castilian Jewish youth, who had been travelling on the same ship as the conversa. According to the friar, when the Quirina began to sink in the storm, this boy begged a Jesuit 124 Cuffel, “Sea,” p. 230. 125 Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean,” pp. 320–321. 126 Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 54–55. 127 Piri Reʾis, Kitāb, 1: 71–73; Alonso de Espinosa, Del origen y Milagros de la santisima Imagen de Nuestra Señora de Candelaria que parecio en la isla de Tenerife, con la descripción desta Isla (Seville, 1594), folio 120r. 128 Gella Iturriaga, “Quattrocento proverbi,” p. 381. 129 Albrecht Classen, “Storms, Shipwrecks, and Life-Changing Experiences in Late Medieval German Literature: From Oswald von Wolkenstein to Emperor Maximilian,” Oxford German Studies 43 (2014): 212–228; idem, “Storms, Sea Crossings, and the Transformation of the Protagonist in Medieval and Renaissance Literature,” Neohelicon 30 (2003): 163–182; M. C. Lyons, The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Story-Telling, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1995), 1: 62.

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onboard for help. Told that the only lifeboat floated on baptismal waters, he pledged on a makeshift cross to accept Christianity. The youth later fulfilled his vow in the cathedral of Nicosia, with the Franciscan author as eyewitness. The friar styled this shipboard conversion as a triumph of the true faith that counterbalanced the conversa’s perfidy.130 But visible beneath this rhetorical gilding is a very real convergence of maritime and personal emergencies. Like his conversa shipmate, the Jewish boy was caught in the rip currents generated by the tortured religious politics of the post 1492 era, as Iberian Jews and conversos struggled to navigate the social and literal seas of exile (the Jesuit shipboard advisor was himself a convert from Judaism). As the Quirina began to founder, he was under pressure from all sides: his own drive to survive, the Jesuit converso’s sermonizing, and perhaps even threats from other Christians on board, who might have seen this Jew’s presence as the reason for the ship’s distress. In any case, side by side with the conversa who wrestled with her own religious choices aboard the tempest-driven Quirina, this youth would experience the ultimate power of the sea to disrupt maritime mobility and change lives: shipwreck. The storm rammed their ship onto rocks between Paphos and Limassol. There, large and powerfully built though this Venetian vessel was, it broke apart.131 3 Shipwreck In the absence of comprehensive studies of premodern Mediterranean shipwreck, it is difficult to offer statistics on the frequency with which this sea devoured ships.132 Shipwreck was common enough that it shadowed the lives of at least three late medieval intellectual luminaries: the Christian mystic and missionary, Ramon Llull, who survived when his ship sunk off Pisa, taking his books and his wardrobe with it;133 the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides,

130 Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 59–60. 131 Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 52–53. 132 Studies and databases of premodern Mediterranean shipwreck offer no statistics on the percentage of ships wrecked; e.g. A. J. Parker, Ancient Shipwrecks of the Mediterranean and the Roman Provinces (Oxford, 1992), who asserts that “to be wrecked was a relatively common occurrence in antiquity” (p. 3); Julia Strauss (2013). Shipwrecks Database. Version 1.0. Available at oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/shipwrecks_database/. Accessed February 5, 2020. For early modern shipwrecks http://shipwrecks.haifa.ac.il/. Accessed January 27, 2023. 133 Ramon Lull, “Vita Coetanea,” CCCM 34, pp. 300–301.

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whose brother perished in the Indian Ocean;134 and the Muslim polymath Ibn Khaldūn, who lost his wife, several children, and his library to the waves.135 Shoddy construction or a vessel’s aging frame might be at fault, but often the rigors of the Mediterranean’s marine environment combined with human error and incompetence to strain ships beyond their limits. Storms could submerge or rupture ships in open water. But frequently it was violent collision with the Mediterranean’s limestone that wrecked vessels. Hence during tempests, shipmasters reversed their usual practice of coasting and tried to steer far away from jagged shores. Even in good weather, mariners had to keep a sharp lookout for the many underwater hazards detailed by a fourteenth-century oceanographer avant la lettre: “in the sea there are mountains and rocks, grasses and vegetation  … In some places, the rocks and mountains are covered by hardly a hand or arm’s worth of water. Thus no one dares to sail in some places toward the south near Barbary, because many rocks and shoals are there.”136 Marine charts today still caution sailors to avoid stretches of the Maghrib’s shore, warning of “shoal patches … not always marked by breakers” and of currents “unpredictable in both rate and direction.”137 The red coral the fourteenth-century voyager describes being harvested along this coast as it was elsewhere in the Mediterranean too could rend an unwary ship’s hull. As the Little Ice Age sent more rain into the western Mediterranean, rising sea levels covered the rocks and shoals in a particularly treacherous area off Tunis with just enough water that they vanished from mariners’ collective knowledge, but remained dangerous to ships.138 Mariners scanning the sea’s surface to read its depths knew that creatures lived there who also might bring down a ship. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish seafarers described huge “fish” that wrecked ships by leaping on them or by biting chunks from hulls, sometimes leaving teeth embedded in the wood; others capsized vessels in their powerful wake.139 “Sea-monsters eye us at snack time 134 Goitein, Letters, pp. 207–28. 135 Allen James Fromherz, Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh, 2010), p. 101. 136 Ludolph von Suchem, De itinere, p. 11. 137 Imray Chart M35 “Mediterranean Sea: Sicilian Channel” (2014). 138 Clancy-Smith, “Mediterranean,” pp. 61–62, note 11. This area has been a shipwreck site since antiquity; Anne Marguerite McCann and John Peter Oleson, Deep-Water Shipwrecks off Skerki Bank: The 1997 Survey (Portsmouth RI, 2004). 139 Abū Ḥāmīd, Tuḥfat, pp. 63, 64–65; Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 117; Ludoph von Suchem, De itinere, pp. 12–14; Shmuel HaNagid, “Miracle at Sea,” in his Selected Poems, pp. 8–9. Sometimes the teeth of marine creatures that bit hulls were believed to have miraculously plugged holes and thus became relics; Angelo R. Mojetta et al., “Where Sharks meet Humans: The Mediterranean Sea, History and Myth of an Ancient Interaction between Two Dominant Species,” Regional Studies in Marine Science 21 (2018): 30–38, 36.

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and tunny-fish lance the ship’s hull,” wrote an Iberian Jewish poet in his versification of the fear he felt on the ship that took him to Alexandria in 1140.140 One Christian traveller claimed that mariners threw bread in the water to try to satiate such creatures’ hunger while Muslim authors reported men of the sea making loud noises to frighten them away.141 It is not always easy to fit the marine giants of these stories into modern taxonomies. What species exactly is the troya, a fish that supposedly could be deterred from damaging a ship by humans making angry faces at it? But these stories are more than tall fish tales about mythic monsters that embodied the sea’s power to sink ships. Evidence from the modern Mediterranean indicates that whales, swordfish, and sharks can respond to the intrusion of ships’ hulls into their own realm in just the ways described by these premodern seafarers.142 As recently as 2020, some of the orcas seasonally present in the Straits of Gibraltar were bumping hard against sailboats, whether in play (orcas often surf vessels’ wake) or in self-defense.143 Like storms, shipwreck had good narrative value. Yet it was more than a convenient device to underscore the bravery of travellers and to magnify their maritime sufferings. Shipwreck haunted premodern Mediterranean seafarers as a terrifying possibility and a physical reality. The remains of unlucky ships littered this sea, sometimes shockingly visible. In clear shallow water, mariners might spy the bones of ships on the sea bottom and, when passing capes or points, they might confront the rotting carcasses of vessels caught on the rocks. In one of his jottings about Cyprus, Leonardo da Vinci evoked the eerie seascape left by shipwreck: “How many vessels have broken upon these rocks! Here might be seen an innumerable host of ships: some broken in pieces and half buried in sand: here is visible the poop of one, and there a prow; here a keel and there a rib; and it seems like a day of judgment when there shall

140 Halevi, “On the Sea,” p. 88. 141 Bread to feed fish: Ludoph von Suchem, De itinere, p. 12. Noises to frighten fish away: Abū Ḥāmīd, Tuḥfat, pp. 64–65. The latter practice was also used by Muslim mariners in the Indian Ocean: Agius, Classic Ships of Islam, pp. 234–235. 142 Teresa Romeo et al., “Recent Records of Swordfish Attacks on Harpoon Vessels in the Sicilian Waters (Mediterranean Sea),” Acta Adriatica 58 (2017): 147–156; Hakan Kabasakal and Sait Özgür Gedikoğlu, “Shark Attacks Against Humans and Boats in Turkey’s Waters in the Twentieth Century,” Annales Ser. Hist. nat. 25 (2015): 115–122. 143 Elian Peltier, “Rough Play or Bad Intentions? Orca Encounters off Iberia Baffle Experts,” The New York Times, September 20, 2020. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20 /world/europe/orca-boat-spain.html?referringSource=articleShare. Accessed January 27, 2023.

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be a resurrection of dead ships, so great is the mass that covers the whole northern shore.”144 Leonardo probably never visited this coast himself, but his remarkable imagination did not invent nautical graveyards; they would have been disturbingly familiar to Mediterranean mariners. Perhaps mariners even plotted onto this sea’s shoals and deeps memory maps of recent or long past maritime disasters, like some modern fishermen do.145 In the aftermath of shipwreck, what is left of a vessel settles on the seabed, where it is colonised by marine life, changed by the sea’s chemistry, and thus slowly fuses with the physical environment with which mariners have to reckon.146 The anthropogenic change to the sea wrought by shipwreck could include pollution. Medieval and early modern ships didn’t sport the lead-sheathed hulls of Roman ships, but galley oars had large lead counterweights, which, along with the lead components of any fishing gear on board, would be deposited on the sea bottom during a wreck, where the toxic metal would slowly leach into the water.147 To modern archaeologists, shipwreck remains offer troves of data about trade routes, cargoes, nautical construction, and maritime material culture.148 But to premodern seafarers, such salt soaked debris exposed the fragility of the technology on which maritime mobility was based. The shattered corpses of vessels were maritime memento moris, warnings that, as Felix Fabri wrote, seafarers are never more than a four-finger width away from death, since that

144 Passage from the Windsor Folios translated in Edward McCurdy, The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci (1st publ. 1928; repr. Mineola NY, 2005), p. 247. 145 For a modern example, see Heidrun Friese, “Thalassographies of Departure, Disaster and Rescue: Fishermen and Undocumented Mobility,” Etnofoor 27 (2015): 13–36, 28–29, and 31. 146 Colin Martin, “Wreck-Site Formation Processes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archaeology, eds. Alexis Catsambis, Ben Ford, and Donny L. Hamilton (Oxford, 2011), pp. 47–67. 147 Lead counterweights: Federico Foerster Lares, “The Warships of the Kings of Aragón and Their Fighting Tactics during the 13th and 14th Centuries AD,” The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 16 (1987): 19–29, 19–20; René Burlet, Jean Carrière and André Zysberg, “Mais comment pouvait-on ramer sur les galères du Roi-Soleil?” Histoire et Mesure 1 (1986): 147–208, 158 (I thank Gillian Weiss for the latter reference). Roman ships and lead pollution: Baruch Rosen and Ehud Galili, “Lead Use on Roman Ships and Its Environmental Effects,” The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 36 (2007): 300–307. 148 Jonathan Adams, “Ships and Boats as Archaeological Source Material,” World Archaeol­ ogy 32 (2001), 292–310; David Gibbins and Jonathan Adams, “Shipwrecks and Maritime Archaeology,” World Archaeology 32 (2001): 272–291; Johann Rönnby, “The Archaeological Interpretation of Shipwrecks,” in Interpreting Shipwreck Remains: Maritime Archaeologi­ cal Approaches, eds. Jonathan Adams and Johann Rönnby (Southampton, 2013), pp. 9–24.

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is the thickness of a ship’s hull.149 Encounters with wrecked ships thus left mariners uneasy and anxious. A seventeenth-century Knight of Malta remembered how seeing shipwreck remains near a rocky cape in the Adriatic “made everyone [on board] afraid and we believed that at any instant we might suffer a similar terrible fate. We continuously beseeched heaven with a thousand prayers and a thousand vows.”150 Shipwreck detritus signalled dangerous waters; if one vessel had met its demise in this spot, another might easily too. Perhaps mariners also considered it bad luck to encounter the relics of a sea-swallowed vessel, fearing that the submerged ship might drag them down. According to a sixteenth-century Spanish captive in Algiers, corsairs from that city told tales of how during the winter, a magical bronze ship prowled beneath the Mediterranean’s stormy surface. Those mariners travelling in a more orthodox manner needed to sight the underwater ship before it saw them, for otherwise, their vessel would sink and all aboard drown.151 Whether or not this story accurately depicts Algerian corsairs’ beliefs about the perils of winter voyages, it suggests another reason why seeing a shipwreck was ill-omened: a vessel under water reversed the proper spatial relation between ships and the sea—and thus turned the world upside down. Whatever caused a ship to “crack asunder, as an egg would crack when a man presses it with his two hands,” as an eleventh-century Jewish merchant put it, shipwreck could represent the rupture not just of a vessel’s fabric, but also of order on many levels.152 Because shipwreck destroyed the technological artifact that allowed humans to survive in the inhospitable environment of the sea, it could symbolize the collapse of other technologies people create to insulate themselves from nature, such as the body politic, culture, or society.153 The heavy cargo of meanings that ships carried in literature, religion, and art amplified the rich potential of shipwreck as metaphor for Muslims, Christians and Jews. Shipwreck as trope could encompass empire, love, chivalric

149 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 53–54 (quoting an unidentified ancient philosopher). 150 Malta National Library, Archives of the Order of Malta, MS 1771, folios 104v–105r. 151 [Antonio de Sousa] Topographia, e historia general de Argel … (Valladolid, 1612), chapter 16, folio 17r. The attribution of this text to Diego de Haedo (listed as author by this edition) has been debunked. 152 Goitein, Letters, p. 41. 153 Josiah Blackmore, Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire (Minneapolis, 2002), pp. 52–54; Carl Thompson, “Introduction,” in Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Carl Thompson (New York, 2014), pp. 1–26, 7.

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adventure, and other secular domains.154 It could also convey religious messages: the fragility of human life, the inevitability of divine punishment of sinners, and the necessity to rely on God, spiritual guides, and holy people for salvation.155 By the sixteenth century, shipwreck had even expanded from a discrete motif into a subject commanding its own narrative genre, its rhetorical weight increasing alongside Europeans’ global maritime empires.156 The prevailing symbolic meanings of shipwreck seeped into seafarers’ memories of the actual event. Yet when the sea’s power and human error conspired to send vessels into the deeps or run them aground, the ruptures effected were very real. The element of the marine environment that often came to the fore during shipwreck and its aftermath—the shore—offers the space in which to explore these breaks as more than metaphor. Shipwreck rendered the threshold between sea and land a site of horror and of opportunity as wave, wind, and current brought to shore the material and human flotsam from the vessel’s broken body. Redistributing people and property, the sea could inflect religious politics and change survivors’ lives for the better or the worse. The violent ruptures of wreck extended the Mediterranean’s dominion over mobile people and their goods onto land, whether continental coast or island edge. Shipwrecks spilled cargos of textiles, spices, wood, comestibles, weapons, pottery, luxury objects and more into the Mediterranean, which the sea then carried to places they were not originally intended for. This might be God’s will, suggests Christian hagiography through the topos of images of the Virgin Mary such as Santa María del Mar of Almería or La Candelaria of Tenerife that felicitously arrive from the water; they float ashore to their new homes, their

154 Classen, “Storms, Shipwrecks”; Simone Pinet, “Where One Stands: Shipwreck, Perspective, and Chivalric Fiction,” eHumanista 16 (2010): 381–394; Nicholas M. Parmley, “Alfonso X’s Imagined Mediterranean Empire: Shipwrecks, Storms, and Pirates in the Cantigas de Santa María,” Hispanic Review 85 (2017): 199–221. 155 Islamic religious valences of shipwreck: Daniel G. König, Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2015), p. 234; Jürgen Paul, “Faire naufrage,” in Miracle et karāma: hagiographies médiévales comparées, ed. Denise Aigle (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 375–395. Jewish religious interpretations: Patai, Children of Noah, pp. 112–113; Sarah Arenson, “Medieval Jewish Seafaring between East and West,” Mediterranean Historical Review 15 (2000): 33–46, 42. Christian religious interpretations: Michel Bideaux, “Chroniques de l’infortune et naufrage organisés,” Cahiers d’études romanes 3 (1999): 91–103; Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, pp. 3–20; Classen, “Storms, Shipwrecks”; Steve Mentz, “God’s Storms: Shipwreck and the Meanings of the Ocean in Early Modern England and America,” in Shipwreck in Art and Literature, pp. 80–81. 156 Blackmore, Manifest Perdition; Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globaliza­ tion, 150–1719 (Minnesota, 2015).

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charisma intact despite their wave-damaged wood and paint.157 Jews too harbored the belief that divine providence might steer shipwreck bounty to the deserving faithful. A second-century Midrashic text asserts that all the “bundles of silver and of gold, and precious stones and pearls, and all the desirable vessels” from Mediterranean shipwrecks “are spewed out by the sea of Jaffa and hidden for the pious for the future.”158 But if in cultural imagination, shipwrecks could bring just rewards to holy men or sacred objects to a community in need of them, in reality they often brought to shore cargo that aroused less pious emotions and encouraged breeches of social and ethical norms.159 Accounts of Mediterranean shipwreck typically describe a storm of greed as coastal dwellers rushed to seize what seemed to them like gifts from the sea, but actually were someone else’s belongings.160 In 1340, news of a ship driven aground on the island of Lampedusa even lured a motley flotilla of boats to risk the winter seas and set out from Sicily, full of people eager to grab what they could from the wreckage.161 The complicated laws regulating seaside salvage articulated by Muslim and Christian polities were often ignored by scavengers intent on turning someone else’s tragedy into their own economic opportunity.162 They resisted, sometimes violently, any dazed survivor who tried to assert property rights.163 Such “cruel theft,” as one sixteenth-century eyewitness called it, edged the post-shipwreck shore with moral darkness.164

157 La Candelaria of Tenerife: Alonso de Espinosa, Del origen y Milagros, 2.4, folios 36r–v (whose protests that the image was not shipwreck flotsam suggests it was). Santa María del Mar of Almería: testimony of 1502 in Gabriel Pasqual y Orbaneja, Vida de San Indalecío y Almería ilustrada en su antiguedad, origen, y grandeza, (Almería 1699), p. 150; Amy G. Remensnyder, La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds (Oxford, 2014), pp. 130–131. Other examples of sea-borne holy images: Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean,” pp. 313–315. 158 Patai, Children of Noah, p. 116. 159 “A place of serendipitous bounty for shore-dwellers, the beach is also a place of theft and lies,” writes Andrew M. Richmond, “‘The Broken Schippus He Ther Fond:’ Shipwrecks and the Human Costs of Investment Capital in Middle English Romance,” Neophilologus 99, n. 2 (2015): 315–333, 321. 160 For a particularly vivid description, see Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 53–54. 161 Acta curie felicis urbis Panormi, 7, Registri di lettere (1340–1348), ed. Laura Sciascia (Palermo, 2007), no. 104, pp. 144–148. 162 Laws of salvage: Hassan S. Khalilieh, Admiralty and Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean Sea (ca. 800–1050): The Kitāb Akriyat Al-Sufun Vis-à-Vis the Nomos Rhodion Nautikos (Leiden, 2006), pp. 205–223; idem, Islamic Maritime Law, pp. 109–115; Melikan, “Shippers.” 163 Acta curie felicis urbis Panormi, no. 104, p. 145; Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 53–54. 164 Aveiro, Itinerario, p. 54.

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Snarled among the goods over which brutal wrangles might erupt was flotsam that no one contested: human corpses, often grotesquely swollen and sometimes disfigured from collisions with rocks or the appetites of sea creatures. The premodern Mediterranean would have merited the title of giant graveyard that this sea has earned in today’s era of mass migration across its treacherous waters.165 Shipwreck left same tragic trail of bodies washed ashore then as it does now, dragging the meeting place of land and sea into the history of death. Responses to water-logged human remains reveal the shore yet again as a site of potential ethical failure following shipwreck. Although Islamic law and Christian duty mandated that locals bury beached bodies, scavengers often robbed corpses first—or simply ignored them.166 A sixteenth-century Franciscan helped to bury the dead from a wreck on Cyprus, neatly segregating Jews, Muslims, and Christians, but a century earlier, a Dominican had no luck persuading galley rowers from his ship to inter a body they found on shore.167 Burying stranded corpses required labor, expense, potential exposure to contagious disease—and close encounter with the sea-dead, whose bloated anonymity aroused particularly deep dread.168 The stinking corpses strewn by shipwreck along the shore materialised the Mediterranean’s lethal force in a profoundly disturbing way. In the wake of shipwreck, the sea might also bring ashore living people: survivors, individuals, that is, cast up on a coast they did not choose. Hence in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature, shipwreck was a useful device with which to displace protagonists and launch them on new adventures.169 As a 165 The Mediterranean as mass cemetery today: Hakim Abderrezak, “The Mediterranean Sieve, Spring, and Seametery,” in Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, eds. Emma Cox et al. (Edinburgh, 2019), pp. 372–391. Responses to the bodies of migrants drowned at sea: Cristina Cattaneo, Naufraghi senza volto: Dare un nome alle vittime del Mediterraneo (Milan, 2018). 166 Islamic law: Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, p. 170. Scavengers robbing corpses: ClancySmith, “Mediterranean,” p. 52. Scavengers ignore bodies: Aveiro, Itinerario, p. 54. 167 Franciscan burying corpses: Aveiro, Itinerario, p. 56. Dominican and stranded body: Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1: 33. 168 Jürgen Hasse, “Und das meer gab die Toten heraus, die in ihm waren: Sepulkralkulturelle Sonderwege im Umgang mit Standleichen,” in Das Mittelmeer und der Tod: Mediterrane Mobilität und Sepulkralkultur, eds. Alexander Berner et al. (Paderborn, 2016), pp. 339–353. 169 In Islamic literature, Sinbad is the prime example, but he is not alone. Other examples include “Die Geschichte vom Kerkermeister-Kapitän: Ein türkischer Seeraüberroman aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” ed. and trans. Andreas Tietze, Acta Orientalia 19 (1942): 160–163; Lyons, Arabian Epic, 1: 63. Shipwreck serves this purpose in Christian literature ranging from medieval romance and epic to Shakespeare’s Tempest; for discussion, Pinet, “Where One Stands,” p. 389. A Jewish example: “The Tale of the Jerusalemite,” in Rabbinic

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literary motif, it also allowed for personal as well as physical re-orientation; the sufferings of shipwreck could test a hero’s virtues or even impel a confrontation with the self that led to positive transformation, spiritual rebirth or, in later texts, to self-fashioning and self-discovery.170 Thus in Ludovico Ariosto’s early sixteenth-century epic, Orlando Furioso, the violent sea propels the paladin Ruggiero toward baptism by sinking his ship and plunging him into the Straits of Sicily. While struggling against the waves to reach a rocky islet, he vows to convert.171 Here, literary imagination transmuted into interior change the possibilities of positive external ruptures with one’s previous life that actual shipwreck could proffer survivors—especially slaves and captives—who were cast up on the right shore. Slaves from ships wrecked on deserted islands could take advantage of their masters’ disarray and seek freedom by hiding in limestone caves or in dense macchia, as sixteenth-century Muslim galley slaves did on Lampedusa and Christian ones on Formentera.172 Events of 1606 on Jazīrat Zambrah suggest that when such marine disasters tossed slaves and captives onto shores patrolled by co-religionists, they could open the way for not only escape but also revenge. In April of that year, a fleet of the Knights of Malta prowling the waters around this craggy island just west of Cap Bon was surprised by a storm; heavy weather turned the tricky passage through this area into a lethal one. As the ships strove to claw off the coast toward which the west winds were driving them, three collided. The survivors who made it to Jazīrat Zambrah’s narrow beach included Muslim galley slaves. They turned the tables on their masters by smashing their chains and then building fires on the island’s summit to signal to mainland Muslims the presence of vulnerable Christian enemies. The next day, Tunisian war ships arrived and battle

Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature, eds. David Stern and Mark J. Mirsky (New Haven, 1990), pp. 123–142, 125. 170 Some scholars argue that the literary motif of survivors’ self-transformation is medieval: Jean-Marie Barbera, “La fonction narrative du naufrage dans Tirant lo Blanc,” Cahiers d’études romanes 3 (1999): 129–147; Classen, “Storms, Shipwrecks.” Others argue that it appears first in early modern literature: Pinet, “Where One Stands.” 171 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, secondo l’editio princeps del 1516, 37.19–22, 37.46–60, eds. Tina Matarrese and Marco Praloran, 2 vols (Turin, 2016), 2: 1228–1229, 1236–1240. 172 Lampedusa: Archivo General de Simancas, Estado Legajo 1119, no. 79. Formentera: Richard Hasleton, Strange and wonderfull things. Happened to Richard Hasleton, borne at Braintree in Essex, in his ten yeares trauailes in many forraine countries  … (London, 1595), n.p. (3rd page of main text).

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ensued.173 Shipwreck thus gave the sea yet another role in the complex religiously inflected politics of the Mediterranean. As the episode on Jazīrat Zambrah indicates, the Mediterranean’s religious geography did not always work in the favour of shipwreck survivors. If you washed up on the wrong shore, that is one controlled by your enemies, as happened to these Knights of Malta, then you were very vulnerable. Vulnerability was the hallmark of shipwreck experience, as high medieval Christian literature often suggested by depicting the shipwreck victim as female.174 Actual shipwreck survivors used the language of exposure instead. They claimed that the sea stripped them bare and reduced them to what one Muslim survivor called a “foul state of nakedness.”175 The garments they might improvise from flotsam, as this man did from “ruptured oil skins,” did not remedy their abjection. Perhaps the force of hitting the water had torn their clothes off, perhaps they had shed sodden garments to avoid drowning—or perhaps they invoked the imagery of nakedness to express how the sea ripped away their belongings and markers of status. “I came out of it without a dinar or even a dirhem and no garment to wear; I arrived naked in Tripoli,” wrote an eleventh-century Jewish merchant after current and wind ground his ship against shoals on the Libyan coast.176 Whether or not the sea literally stripped shipwreck survivors to their skin, it left them vulnerable to further hazard, whether human or other-than human. In response, an elemental, if evanescent, community of fellow sufferers might form as it did during a storm, though now the fate shipmates confronted together was far worse than the tossing of a tempest. Survivors could help each other in the sea, as a twelfth-century Italian Jewish merchant experienced on a 173 Bartolomeo dal Pozzo, Historia della Sacra Religione Militare di S. Giovanni Gerosolimitano detta di Malta, 2 vols (Verona and Venice, 1701–1715), 1: 507–514. For an earlier story of shipwreck freeing Muslim captives and creating Christian ones see ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Bādisī, El-Maqṣad (Vies des saints du Rif ), trans. G. S. Colin (Paris, 1926), pp. 83–85. 174 Richmond, “‘Broken Schippus,’” p. 329 (an example from Mediterranean literature is Boccaccio’s Alatiel, Decameron, II.7). Shipwrecked mariners were vulnerable in northern waters as well; Maryanne Kowaleski, “‘Alien’ Encounters in the Maritime World of Medieval England,” Medieval Encounters 13 (2017): 96–121, 116–117. 175 Kenneth Garden, “The Riḥla and the Self-Reinvention of Abū Bakr al ʿArabi,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 135 (2015): 1–17, 1; Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York, 2000), p. 559. Christian example: Ramon Llull, “Vita Coetanea,” CCCM 34, p. 301. 176 Goitein, Letters, no. 71, p. 317. On the weather conditions of this wreck, see Ruthy Gertwagen, “Geniza Letters: Maritime Difficulties along the Alexandria-Palermo Route,” in Communication in the Jewish Diaspora: The Pre-Modern World, ed. Sophia Menache (Leiden, 1996), pp. 73–91, 87.

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sinking ship. When he clung to its upper deck, rigid with terror and praying for divine aid, people already in the water beckoned and called out, “come down quickly … catch a piece of wood and ride upon it, perhaps God will grant you a rescue.”177 Solidarity among shipwreck survivors that transcended the hierarchies of status, power, and religious difference structuring shipboard experience might even reach the shore. The seventeenth-century captive Emanuel d’Aranda and the other enslaved Christians on an Algerian ship had planned to “kill all the Turks” onboard and seize control of the vessel. But when the winter storm that Aranda described in such detail wrecked them near Tetouan, his immediate thought on making it to land was to search among the crowd of survivors in the hopes that the “Turk … who had taken care of” the slaves (presumably the man who had opened the hatch to free them from the foundering ship) was still alive. Aranda found him in a “troop of Christian slaves, Turks, [and] Jews, who pressed up against each other, like sheep, to get warm.” At this point in his narrative, Aranda’s language shifts to the collective, asserting a community of shipwreck experience. Rather than reserving “we” for himself and his Christian companions as earlier, he extends it to embrace all seventy odd survivors, detailing how they organised themselves and spent the night huddled together around a bonfire of flotsam. After their rescue by the governor of Tetouan and their arrival in that city, the collectivity evaporated, normative social distinctions reasserted themselves, and Aranda returned to the terminology of Christian, “Turk” and Jew.178 Shipwreck survivors also had to be wary of one another. It is perhaps telling that among the math formulae offered by Michael of Rhodes in his famous late fifteenth-century compendium of Mediterranean navigational computations was how to count off to ensure that it would be a Jew who was jettisoned if it were necessary to throw someone overboard from a raft with fifteen Christians and fifteen Jews.179 According to medieval Islamic law, it was in fact legitimate for people floating on wreckage to fight off challengers to save their own life.180 The danger from former shipmates was no less on land, at least when slaves’ potential freedom was at stake. Shipwrecked slaves could summon violence to regain their liberty, as the 1606 episode on Jazīrat Zambrah revealed—and beached masters could reject disaster solidarity in favour of efforts to retain 177 Goitein, Letters, no. 3, p. 41. 178 Aranda, Relation, pp. 77–78, 85–90. On the transition from shipboard collectivities to the fragile ones of shipwreck survivors, see Blackmore, “Sunken Voices,” pp. 67–68. 179 The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript, eds. Pamela O. Long, David McGee and Alan M. Stahl, 3 vols (Cambridge MA, 2009), 2: 226. 180 Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, pp. 155–156.

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human property. The “Turks” who survived the wreck of an Algerian galley on Formentera “were unwilling to depart with us, thinking to finde some other galley of the company to take us aboard and carie us back to Argire,” wrote one of the Christian slaves with whom these Muslims had earlier crept under some “bushes and thickets” to recover from the ordeal at sea.181 Survivors especially had to fear people who lived along the shore. Religious charity, desire for a reward, or maritime solidarity with victims of the sea could motivate coastal dwellers to offer food, shelter and clothing.182 Yet the manifest vulnerability of the shipwrecked could incite theft not just of their possessions, but also of their liberty. The specter of captivity and enslavement haunted Mediterranean maritime voyages as powerfully as did the possibility of shipwreck. As a sixteenth-century Moroccan wrote of the days his ship spent fighting heavy winter seas between Tripoli and the Levant, “we were like a worm on wood, afflicted by the possibility of captivity or shipwreck.”183 Pirates and corsairs prowled this sea, hunting human booty on the water and along the coast—but shipwreck itself could also plunge people into unfreedom. On shore, shipwreck survivors could find themselves prey to equal opportunity slavers, as frequently happened in the seventeenth century to seafarers whose vessels succumbed to the clashing winds and waves that made the passage around craggy Cape Maleas in the Peloponnese so notorious (“Saint Michael stands on the tip of the promontory and his wing strikes the winds and pushes back those ships which do not show reverence to him,” wrote a fifteenth-century Christian voyager of the dangerous weather system generated by this cape).184 The nominally Christian inhabitants of this mountainous coast searched shipwreck flotsam not just for goods but also for survivors, all of whom they enslaved: “If [the survivors] were Christians, they sold them to the Turks and if they were Turks, they sold them to the Christians,” commented a seventeenth-century French diplomat.185 But the shipwrecked most often faced the loss of liberty when the sea beached them in hostile territory held by people not of their faith (or with whom their government did not have a treaty). Hence Barbary corsairs shipwrecked off the 181 Hasleton, Strange and wonderful things. 182 For example, Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis,” p. 665. Such charity as religious duty: Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, p. 161; Patai, Children of Noah, pp. 114–116. 183 Al Tamgrouti, En-Nafhat, p. 39. 184 Saint Michael’s wings: Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 3: 313. As he describes, this cape’s weather often caused ships lengthy delays (cf. Breydenbach, Peregrinatio, 634–644). Cape Maleas had been famous for its dangers ever since its winds scattered Odysseus’s fleet (Odyssey, 3.285–289). 185 Mémoires du chevalier D’Arvieux, 1: 33.

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Sicilian promontory of San Vito lo Capo in the sixteenth century were taken captive by local Christians just as Christian corsairs shipwrecked a century later on the Maghrib coast were by Muslims living there.186 An English Lutheran laboring as a rower on the Algerian galley that collided with Formentera’s coast managed to elude his Muslim masters, only to be incarcerated by Catholics on nearby Majorca when they learned of his Protestantism.187 The potential for shipwreck to fracture one’s freedom along the Mediterra­ nean’s religiously charged political fault lines explains Ibn Jubayr’s relief when William II of Sicily not only sent boats to rescue him and his fellow Muslim passengers from a shattered ship off Messina, but also demonstrated Sicilian exceptionalism by refraining from making them captives. If this had happened “on the mainland,” Ibn Jubayr wrote, “or even on one of the islands inhabited by the Rum … even if we had been saved, we should have been forever slaves.”188 Some three centuries later, a Nasrid diplomat remembered how close he had come to this dreaded consequence of shipwreck on his voyage to the Mamluk court. During his vessel’s dawn approach to Hospitaller-held Rhodes, it shuddered horribly as it grazed an enormous “shoal,” probably the sandy spit of shifting configurations that juts out immediately to the north of the island’s harbor; despite the pull of the strong current of which navigational manuals still warn, the ship escaped ruin. Had God willed it otherwise, wrote the Muslim ambassador, “we would have perished or been taken prisoner.”189 On coasts marked by military tensions between Muslims and Christians, shipwreck might also allot survivors an even more brutal change of fate; the death they had eluded at sea might await them there. Christians from Crete killed “Turks” shipwrecked on a deserted island in the Aegean, wrote Cristoforo Buondelmonti, the Florentine priest who turned his experiences of sailing that contested sea in the early fifteenth century into one of the first isolarios, or book 186 Pozzo, Historia, 2: 405; Antonio Cordici, “Istoria della chiesa di San Vito del Capo  …” edited in Angela Morabito, “Una seicentesca Istoria della Chiesa di San Vito del Capo con la vita e miracoli del Santo,” in Congresso internazionale di studi su San Vito ed il suo culto. Mazara del Vallo 18019 Luglio 2002, eds. Ferdinando Maurici, Renato Alongi, and Angela Morabito (Trapani, 2004), pp. 192–296, 199–200. Other examples of shipwrecked people being taken captive include Piracy and Diplomacy, pp. 154–155, 187; Salvatore Bono, I corsari barbareschi (Turin, 1964), p. 345; Enrica Lucchini, La merce umana: schiavitù e riscatto dei Liguri nel Seicento (Rome, 1990), pp. 161–162. 187 Hasleton, Strange and wonderful things. 188 Travels of Ibn Jubayr, p. 338. 189 Lucena Paredes, “Viaje a Oriente,” p. 9. The sandy spit: United States Hydrographic Office, Sailing Directions for the Mediterranean, 5 vols (Washington DC, 1945), 4: 186. The current: United States Hydrographic Office, Supplement to Hydrographic Office Publication no. 154, Mediterranean Pilot Vol. IV (Washington DC, 1941), p. 26.

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of islands.190 He also recounted how “Turks” shipwrecked on a deserted islet near Psara cobbled together a raft from the skins of the wild donkeys that lived there and set off for home, only to be killed at sea as they neared the coast.191 These stories served Buondelmonti’s agenda of depicting the Ottomans as pirates who unjustly possessed islands that were rightly Christian, but they also capture the very real risks faced by shipwreck survivors in a sea at war.192 Shipwreck survivors were equally vulnerable to the dangers posed by the natural environment where they came ashore, as Buondelmonti knew from his own maritime misfortunes. During his Aegean journey, he was shipwrecked in the desolate and deserted Fourni islands. There he and his shipmates survived for a week with only wild plants to eat and water that collected in rocky hollows to drink. He engraved his despair on the island, scratching these words with his sword point in a cave: “Here Cristoforo died from dire hunger.”193 The site of his sufferings was the same as that of many other shipwreck survivors, including the “Turks” of his stories: an island. Islands belonged to the marine environment that composed the geography of Mediterranean shipwreck. It has been said rightly that before the age of steam, shipwreck and islands were synonymous.194 The Mediterranean was thus a hazardous sea to navigate safely; due to millennia of changing sea levels and convergence between the African and the Eurasian continental plates, some 5000 islands and islets stud its waters.195 Each presented its own set of perils for a ship running blind before a storm or suddenly swung in the wrong 190 Buondelmonti’s text exists in many versions; for the episode here as told in two representative manuscripts, see Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Description of the Aegean and Other Islands …, ed. and trans. Evelyn Edson (New York, 2018), p. 29; Buondelmonti, Liber insularum archipelagi: Transkription des Exemplars Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf Ms. G. 13, ed. Karl Bayer (Wiesbaden, 2007), p. 15. 191 Buondelmonti, Description, p. 68; idem, Liber insularum, pp. 43–44. 192 Buondelmonti’s view of the Ottomans: Michel Balard, “Buondelmonti and the Holy War,” in Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of John Pryor, eds. Ruthy Gertwagen and Elizabeth Jeffreys (London, 2012), pp. 387–395. Christian sailors marooned on hostile Christian shores could also be deemed “enemies” and killed; Kowaleski, “Alien’ Encounters,” p. 116. 193 Buondelmonti, Description, p. 67; idem, Liber insularum, p. 43. 194 John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York, 2009), p. 108. 195 Broodbank, Making of the Middle Sea, pp. 78–79; Ian Stewart and Christophe Morhange, “Coastal Geomorphology and Sea-Level Change,” in The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean, ed. Jamie Woodward (Oxford, 2009), pp. 385–413, 401; Ioannis N. Vogiatzakis and G. H. Griffiths, “Island Biogeography and Landscape Ecology,” in Mediterranean Island Landscapes: Natural and Cultural Approaches, eds. Ioannis N. Vogiatzakis, Gloria Pungetti and Antoinette M. Mannion (Dordrecht, 2008), pp. 61–81, 63–64.

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direction by this sea’s unpredictable winds: sandbars, jagged cliffs, fringing rocks, and hidden shoals. Hence, in bad weather, ships steered well clear of islands, unless they were already anchored in a protected harbor there. As Buondelmonti’s anguished graffito suggests, the specter of shipwreck on deserted islands was particularly terrifying. There, people who had survived the rigors of the waves became nature’s prey again. After all, if the event of shipwreck “begins an irreversible process in which [the vessel] leaves the world of human artifice and reverts to nature,” as one maritime archaeologist has written,196 the same could be said of survivors’ beaching on an uninhabited island. Of the twenty days he and his shipmates spent on a deserted island between Tunis and Sicily “with no food other than nettles,” a twelfth-century Jewish Maghribi merchant recalled that “when we set out from there, we did not have the look of human beings anymore … after arrival in Sicily we were so exhausted from our sufferings at sea that we were unable to eat bread or understand what was said to us for a full month.”197 Personal experience of the sea’s power to reduce humans to a state of nature could induce lingering trauma. It is no wonder that in literature, deserted islands could serve as settings for a marooned hero to reinvent civilization, an imaginative possibility that the twelfth-century Andalusi writer Ibn Ṭufayl realised hundreds of years before Daniel Defoe.198 But men of the sea could have a more practical response to the potential nightmare of shipwreck on such islands. They recognised it as a risk that they could manage by seeking to mitigate its consequences. Treaties between France and the Regency of Tunis in 1665 and 1672 stipulated that if a vessel belonging to one signatory were to be wrecked on an uninhabited island, passing ships that sailed under the other signatory’s flag were required to rescue both people and cargo (and were expressly prohibited from selling either).199 Such foresight took a much more concrete form on what was perhaps the Mediterranean’s most remote uninhabited island: Lampedusa. There, by the sixteenth century, Muslim and Christian mariners maintained together a stockpile of food, clothes, and tools.200 These provisions kept in one of the 196 Martin, “Wreck-Site Formation Processes,” p. 48. 197 Goitein, Letters, pp. 325–326. 198 Abu Bakr Muhammad bin Tufail, The Journey of the Soul: The Story of Hai bin Yaqzan, trans. Riad Kocache (London, 1982); Samar Attar, “Serving God or Mammon? Echoes from Hayy Ibn Yazquan and Sinbad the Sailor in Robinson Crusoe,” in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimson (New York, 1996), pp. 78–97. 199 Traités de la France avec les pays de l’Afrique du Nord: Algérie, Tunisie, Tripolitaine, Maroc, ed. E. Rouard de Card (Paris, 1906), pp. 122–123, 136. 200 Lampedusa and its shrine: Amy G. Remensnyder, “Compassion, Fear, Fugitive Slaves, and a Pirates’ Shrine: Lampedusa, ca. 1550–1750,” in Mapping Medieval Sicily: Maritime

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island’s many limestone caves were intended for the use of any seafarer, whether Muslim or Christian, free person or escaped slave, who was marooned there. Holy figures presided over this potentially life-saving cache; tucked into the cave were the tomb of a Muslim marabout and an image of the Virgin Mary. These were good choices as saintly stewards for this non-confessional mariners’ shrine-cum-supply depot. Mary was a woman venerated by both Muslims and Christians, as well as one of the premier Christian maritime saints of the high medieval and early modern periods.201 If the marabout resembled his peers, he was an equally appropriate patron for this sea shrine. Muslim mariners—and even some Christian ones—believed that Muslim holy men controlled the sea’s winds and waves, powers they wielded in life and after death.202 But the true guardian ensuring the supplies would be there in Lampedusa’s cave for shipwrecked seafarers and others in need was the Mediterranean itself. According to sailors’ lore, the marine environment enforced the shrine’s protective taboos. Mariners believed that if you came to Lampedusa and made no offerings at the shrine or took something without leaving equivalent value, you would be unable to sail away, your ship immobilised by contrary winds or lashed by tempest. Tales circulated of Muslim and Christian mariners and Jewish passengers who tested the prohibition and were duly punished by wind and wave. These stories’ warning value was doubtless enhanced by mariners’ knowledge that Lampedusa, with its hidden shoals, strong currents, variable winds and sudden storms, had wrecked many ships. Lampedusa’s celebrated shrine is a fitting port in which to end this exploration of the restless sea. Guarded by the tempests that could break vessels on this deserted island’s shores but also offering succor to people marooned by the same sea’s violence, the cave shrine adds to the abundant evidence of storm and shipwreck as complex manifestations of the Mediterranean as an ‘other-than-human’ natural force in history. With its fickle winds, fierce storms, and frequent shipwreck, this sea could delay, re-orient, or thwart human maritime movement and thus change destinies. Just as significant are the more Violence, Cultural Exchange, and Imagination in the Medieval Mediterranean, eds. Kathryn Reyerson and Emily Sohmer Tai (New York, 2022), pp. 149–172. 201 Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean.” 202 Al-Bādisī, El-Maqṣad, pp. 23–24, 87; Piri Reʾis, Kitāb, 1: 181–183; The Diary of Henry Teonge, Chaplain on Board His Majesty’s Ships Assistance, Bristol and Royal Oak, Anno 1675 to 1679 (London, 1825), p. 141. For discussion, Amara Allaoua, “La mer et les milieux mystiques d’après la production hagiographique du maghreb occidental (XIIe–XVe siècle),” in La mer et le sacré en Islam médiéval, ed. Christophe Picard. Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, Série Histoire, 130 (2011–2012): 33–52, 39–41; Cherif, “La piraterie,” pp. 86, 88–90.

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unexpected analytic consequences that have emerged from this consideration, including how storm and shipwreck plunge the sea into the history of emotions and of disaster communities. Evanescent emotional communities of fear formed aboard ships confronting extreme weather and other marine emergencies; saltwater terror could even act as a social solvent, temporarily dissipating differences between people and uniting them in the collective enterprise of survival. Storm and shipwreck also highlight the marine environment as a hitherto unrecognised participant in the politics of religious difference so significant to the history of the Mediterranean in this half millennium. The sea could manifest as catalyst in these politics to people while they were on its waters. The fraught moments when vessels were unable to harness wind, wave, and current in their service, but were instead captive to these marine elements throw into stark relief the significance of the religious diversity that so often prevailed on Mediterranean ships. Maritime emergencies could precipitate interfaith tensions among people on board or cause crises leading to conversion. Shipwreck even sent waves to land that broke against the shore’s religious and political antagonisms and eddied through the geography of Mediterranean slavery. In shipwreck’s wake, some enslaved people surfaced to freedom, but more often survivors were exposed to captivity or even murder at the hands of religious or political enemies. At times, this essay about the sea has indeed drifted ashore. But it has done so in the service of exploring what storm and shipwreck reveal to be a seascape every bit as variegated and three-dimensional as the Mediterranean’s landscape of myriad micro-ecologies. The multiple contours of this seascape as experienced by premodern people on the move were more fluid than those of the surrounding landscape. “[M]ost sea features are volatile—the temporary function of wind, tide and current,” writes Robert MacFarlane.203 Product and evidence of the Mediterranean seascape’s mutability, storm and shipwreck could even transform coastlines and islands from familiar guides on the horizon into potentially lethal obstacles for ships and places of suffering for people cast ashore. But storm and shipwreck also became waymarks along the “sea roads,” those “dissolving paths, whose passage leaves no trace beyond a wake, a brief turbulence astern,” to borrow more of MacFarlane’s elegant prose.204 Premodern mariners knew the Mediterranean as a seascape of risk, where certain stretches of water anchored memories of past disasters and harbored

203 Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (New York, 2012), p. 124. 204 MacFarlane, Old Ways, p. 88.

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configurations of current, coast, wind, wave, and sea-bottom warning of dangers in the present. Mariners’ lives depended on their deep understanding of and profound respect for the dangerous, unpredictable force that was the sea. These men’s rituals of cutting tempest winds, their stories about bad weather tormenting ships that carried corpses, and their belief that storms protected the supplies in Lampedusa’s cave-shrine suggest how their labor gave them a distinctive, felt sense of the Mediterranean as a living presence. After all, mariners’ bodies sustained the tug of the wind against the sails and the pull of the water against the oars. “Human beings have historically known nature through work,” declares Richard White.205 Yet the Mediterranean’s power was palpable even to premodern passengers venturing on its back for the first time, for they too experienced those moments when the relationship between seafarers and the marine environment spun into human crisis. Much has been omitted from this experiment in using storm and shipwreck to write a bluer history of the Mediterranean. I have not, for example, considered how storms sculpted coastlines and altered harbors, nor have I asked whether ships wrecked more often as the Little Ice Age made subtle yet significant changes in the Mediterranean’s seascape. These and many other questions await answers. But it is my hope that this essay contributes to restoring to its rightful place in history a force that is literally reshaping the world today, as rising ocean waters and ever more ferocious marine storms shipwreck coastal communities and create migrants, millions of whom then entrust their lives to the same sea that commanded the fate of so many premodern mobile people. Bibliography

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Khalilieh, Hassan S. “Women at Sea: Modesty, Privacy, and Sexual Misconduct of Passengers and Sailors Aboard Islamic Ships.” Al-Qantara 27, no. 1 (2006): 137–153. Klein, Bernhard and Gesa MacKenthun, eds. Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. New York, 2004. König, Daniel G. Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe. Oxford, 2015. Kowaleski, Maryanne. “‘Alien’ Encounters in the Maritime World of Medieval England.” Medieval Encounters 13 (2017): 96–121. La Sorsa, Saverio. “Pregiudizi e superstizioni dei marina.” In Congresso internazionale di etnografia e folklore del mare, Napoli 3–10 ottobre 1954: Cronaca dei lavori, Naples, 1957, pp. 435–448. Lagardère, Vincent. Histoire et société en Occident musulman au moyen âge: Analyse du ʿMiyār d’al-Wansarīsī. Madrid, 1995. Lirola Delgado, Jorge. “Travesías náuticas en la Riḥla del almeriense Jālid al-Balawī (siglo XIV).” In Actas del II Congreso de Historia de Andalucía. Córdoba, 1994, pp. 85–92. Llasat, María del Carmen. “Storms and Floods.” In The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean, ed. Jamie Woodward. Oxford, 2009, pp. 513–540. Lucchini, Enrica. La merce umana: schiavitù e riscatto dei Liguri nel Seicento. Rome, 1990. Lucena Paredes, Luis Seco de. “Viaje a Oriente: embajadores granadinos en el Cairo.” Miscelánea de studios árabes y hebraicos 4 (1955): 5–30. Lyons, M. C. The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Story-Telling. 3 vols. Cambridge, 1995. MacFarlane, Robert. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. New York, 2012. Mack, John. The Sea: A Cultural History. London, 2013. Margariti, Roxani Eleni. “The Rasūlids and the Bountiful Sea: Marine Resources, State Control, and Maritime Culture in the Southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (626/1229–854/1454).” Der Islam 98 (2021): 69–99. Martin, Colin. “Wreck-Site Formation Processes.” In The Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archaeology, eds. Alexis Catsambis, Ben Ford, and Donny L. Hamilton. Oxford, 2011, pp. 47–67. Mathew, Johan. Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea. Berkeley, 2016. Matiax Ferrándiz, Emilia. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Continuity and Change of the Lex Rhodia’s Jettison Principles in Roman and Medieval Mediterranean Rulings.” Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 29 (2017): 41–59. McCann, Anne Marguerite and John Peter Oleson. Deep-Water Shipwrecks off Skerki Bank: The 1997 Survey. Portsmouth RI, 2004. McCurdy, Edward. The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci. 1st publ. 1928, repr. Mineola NY, 2005.

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Mentz, Steve. “God’s Storms: Shipwreck and the Meanings of the Ocean in Early Modern England and America.” In Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Carl Thompson. New York, 2014, pp. 77–91. Mentz, Steve. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 150–1719. Minnesota, 2015. Miller, Peter N., ed. The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography. Ann Arbor MI, 2013. Millot, C. “Wind Induced Upwellings in the Gulf of Lions.” Oceanologica Acta 2 (1979): 261–274. Mojetta, Angelo R. et al. “Where Sharks meet Humans: The Mediterranean Sea, History and Myth of an Ancient Interaction between Two Dominant Species.” Regional Studies in Marine Science 21 (2018): 30–38. Mollat, Michel. Europe and the Sea. Trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan. Cambridge MA, 1993. Nash, Linda. “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?” Environmental History 10 (2005): 67–69. Nash, Linda. “Furthering the Environmental Turn.” The Journal of American History 94 (2013): 131–135. “Oceans of History: AHR Forum.” Introduction by Kären Wigen. American Historical Review 111 (2006): 717–780. Parker, A. J. Ancient Shipwrecks of the Mediterranean and the Roman Provinces. Oxford, 1992. Parmley, Nicholas M. “Alfonso X’s Imagined Mediterranean Empire: Shipwrecks, Storms, and Pirates in the Cantigas de Santa María.” Hispanic Review 85 (2017): 199–221. Patai, Raphael. The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times. Princeton, 1998. Paul, Jürgen. “Faire naufrage.” In Miracle et karāma: hagiographies médiévales comparées, ed. Denise Aigle. Turnhout, 2000, pp. 375–395. Peltier, Elian. “Rough Play or Bad Intentions? Orca Encounters off Iberia Baffle Experts.” The New York Times, September 20, 2020. Picard, Christophe. La mer des caliphs: une histoire de la Méditerranée musulmane (VIIe–XIIe siècle). Paris, 2015. Piccinno, Luisa. “Genoa, 1340–1620: Early Development of Marine Insurance.” In Marine Insurance: Origins and Institutions, 1300–1850, ed. A. B. Leonard. New York, 2016, pp. 25–45. Pinet, Simone. “Where One Stands: Shipwreck, Perspective, and Chivalric Fiction.” eHumanista 16 (2010): 381–394. Pryor, John H. Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649–1571. Cambridge, 1988.

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Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge, 1987. Remensnyder, Amy G. “Compassion, Fear, Fugitive Slaves, and a Pirates’ Shrine: Lampedusa, ca. 1550–1750.” In Mapping Medieval Sicily: Maritime Violence, Cultural Exchange, and Imagination in the Medieval Mediterranean, eds. Kathryn Reyerson and Emily Sohmer Tai. New York, 2022, pp. 149–172. Remensnyder, Amy G. La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds. Oxford, 2014. Remensnyder, Amy G. “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean: Ships, Shrines and Sailors.” In Ein Meer und seine Heiligen: Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum, eds. Nikolas Jaspert and Marco di Branco. Paderborn, 2018, pp. 299–325. Reyerson, Kathryn L. “Introduction: Cross-Cultural Encounters on the High Seas (Tenth– Sixteenth Centuries).” Special issue, Medieval Encounters 13, no. 1 (2007): 1–3. Richmond, Andrew M. “‘The Broken Schippus He Ther Fond:’ Shipwrecks and the Human Costs of Investment Capital in Middle English Romance.” Neophilologus 99 (2015): 315–333. Ritossa, Roberto. Mediterranean Weather Handbook for Sailors, 2nd ed. St. Ives, 2014. Roberts, Neil et al. “Palaelimnological Evidence for an East-West Climate See-Saw in the Mediterranean since AD 900.” Global and Planetary Change 84–85 (2012): 23–34. Romeo, Teresa et al. “Recent Records of Swordfish Attacks on Harpoon Vessels in the Sicilian Waters (Mediterranean Sea).” Acta Adriatica 58 (2017): 147–156. Rönnby, Johann. “The Archaeological Interpretation of Shipwrecks.” In Interpreting Shipwreck Remains: Maritime Archaeological Approaches, eds. Jonathan Adams and Johann Rönnby. Southampton, 2013, pp. 9–24. Rose Melikan. “Shippers, Salvors, and Sovereigns: Competing Interests in the Medieval Law of Shipwreck.” The Journal of Legal History 11 (1990): 163–182. Rosen, Baruch and Ehud Galili. “Lead Use on Roman Ships and Its Environmental Effects.” The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 36 (2007): 300–307. Rotgaizer, Orit and Sa’ar Nudel. “Piracy and the Jews (2nd century BCE–19th century CE).” In Pirates: The Skull and Crossbones, eds. Ruthi Gertwagen and Avshalom Zemer. Haifa, 2002, pp. 216–222. Sabatier, Philippe et al. “7000 years of Paleostorm Activity in the NW Mediterranean Sea in Response to Holocene Climate Events.” Quaternary Research 77 (2012): 1–11. Satriani, Luigi Lombardi and Mariano Meligrana. “Precarietà ed esorcizzazione del rischio nella cultura marinara tradizionale del sud d’Italia.” In L’homme méditerranéen et la mer: actes du troisième congress international d’études des cultures de la Méditerranée occientale ( Jerba, avril 1981), eds. Micheline Galley and Leïla Ladjimi Sebai. Tunis, 1985, pp. 474–485.

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Schmitz-Esser, Romedio. Der Leichnam im Mittelalter: Einbalsamierung, Verbrennung und die kulturelle Konstruktion des toten Körpers. Ostfildern, 2014. Schwartz, Stuart. Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina. Princeton, 2015. Simbula, Pinuccia I. “La percezione del tempo nell’esperienza dei marina e dei naviganti.” Studium Medievale 2 (2009): 157–182. Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge MA, 2008. Steinberg, Philip E. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge, 2001. Steinberg, Ted. “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History.” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 798–820. Stewart, Ian and Christophe Morhange. “Coastal Geomorphology and Sea-Level Change.” In The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean, ed. Jamie Woodward. Oxford, 2009, pp. 385–413. Stow, Dorrick. Oceans: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, 2017. Stroud, Ellen. “Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History.” History and Theory 42 (2003): 75–81. Thompson, Carl. “Introduction.” In Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Carl Thompson. New York, 2014, pp. 1–26. Ulbrich, Uwe et al. “Climate of the Mediterranean: Synoptic Patterns, Temperature, Precipitation, Winds, and Their Extremes.” In The Climate of the Mediterranean Region: From the Past to the Future, ed. Piero Lionello. London, 2012, pp. 301–346. Valérian, Dominique. “La course et la piraterie en Méditerranée occidentale à la fin du Moyen Âge: entre activité économique et instrument politique.” In Les territoires de la Méditerranée, XIe–XVIe siècles, eds. Annaliese Nef, Damien Coulon, Christophe Picard, Dominique Valérian. Rennes, 2013, pp. 35–49. Vann, Theresa M. “Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Mariners in the Port of Rhodes, 1453–1480.” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 158–173. Vogiatzakis, Ioannis N. and G. H. Griffiths. “Island Biogeography and Landscape Ecology.” In Mediterranean Island Landscapes: Natural and Cultural Approaches, eds. Ioannis N. Vogiatzakis, Gloria Pungetti and Antoinette M. Mannion. Dordrecht, 2008, pp. 61–81. White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York, 1995.

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Chapter 2

A Peninsula in Flames: War and Emotions in the Cantigas de Santa María Simon R. Doubleday War occupied a paradoxical place in medieval Christian culture. This was a society whose theological principles advocated peace, as an ideal towards which all should strive, yet one in which military action was ubiquitous and widely celebrated, and in which organised violence was widely praised as a means of maintaining the ‘peace’ implied in social and political order.1 Theologians had developed the principles of just war since the age of St. Augustine, yet these principles—and the pursuit of war as an ennobling activity—sat uneasily with the realities of armed conflict. Medieval war narratives often oscillate correspondingly between two poles: on the one hand, a desire to convey the moral legitimacy, nobility, even sanctity, of military engagement; on the other, a need to acknowledge (however briefly) an often brutal lived experience that could not be wholly contained with the frame of traditional pieties. “In the medieval lexicon,” Joanna Bellis and Laura Slater observe, “both war and violence possessed a fundamental ambivalence, occupying simultaneous extremes on the moral spectrum: war could connote something glorious, epic, just or noble or something fallen, unchristian, hideous and brutalising”.2 Violence of all kinds provoked complex and ambivalent reactions;3 and the discomforting memory of violence and suffering as intrinsic facets of war necessarily inhabited even those narratives that sought to aggrandize military campaigns or to underscore the unfolding of divine favour. Wartime realities, embedded in human bodies,

1 Martín Alvira Cabrer, “Guerra y caballería: utopia y realidad,” in Medievo utópico: sueños, ideales y utopías en el imaginario medieval, eds. Alvira Cabrer and Jorge Díaz Ibáñez (Madrid, 2011), pp. 277–296; Sara Torres, “‘In Praise of Peace’ in Late Medieval Europe,” in Representing War and Violence, 1250–1600, eds. Joanna Bellis and Laura Slater (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 95–115. 2 Joanna Bellis and Laura Slater, “Introduction,” in Representing War and Violence, 1250–1600 (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 1–19, 3. 3 Hannah Skoda, Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270–1330 (Oxford, 2013), ix. “It is ambivalence,” Skoda observes, “which stands out as the salient feature of medieval understandings of violence more generally … This deeply rooted and eloquently expressed ambivalence constitutes an important corrective to teleological accounts of the history of violence,” p. 242.

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reshaped and destabilised emotional practices; war narration “is not simply about the historical and bodily emotional experience of war, but of it.”4 By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the ideological and emotional framework of chivalry offered a legitimation for elite violence, asserting the honourable nature of war and its value as a proving ground for martial masculinity, and ostensibly civilizing its physical, sometimes sexual, violence.5 The celebration of chivalric heroism served, broadly speaking, to suppress emotional ambivalences, and also to overwrite the human instinct for autonomous self-preservation, in pursuit of an ostensibly superior collective goal. Hegemonic forms of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century masculinity required the repression of fear, as well as grief and anger;6 an emphasis on emotional restraint characterised war literature throughout the late medieval and early modern periods.7 In the military sphere, the repression of fear was essential to ‘proper’ masculinity; martial manliness demanded the redirection of emotional allegiance away from family and towards loyal service of God.8 The clergy, after all, were actively involved in military affairs, offered ideological and material support for military campaigns, and not infrequently participated directly and personally in them, even if “clerical approval of warfare rested uneasily alongside the irenic tradition of church thought exemplified in the notion of love for one’s brother and turning the other cheek”.9 This delicate, uncomfortable, fusion of chivalry with religious belief, a process under constant debate and renegotiation, enabled the knightly elite to locate their particular place 4 Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O’Loughlin, eds., Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (Basingstoke, 2015), p. 4. 5 The scholarly literature on the nature of ‘chivalry’, a complex although commonly used term, is substantial. See, for instance, Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, 1984, repr. 2005) and David Crouch, The Chivalric Turn: Conduct and Hegemony in Europe before 1300 (Oxford, 2019). For the Iberian context, see Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, Order and Chivalry: Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile, trans. Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson (Philadelphia, 2010). 6 Kim Bergqvist, “Performing chivalric masculinity: morality, restraint, and emotional norms in the Libro del cavallero Zifar,” in Affective and Emotional Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Andreea Marculescu and Charles-Louis Morand Métivier (New York, 2018), pp. 227–246; and ““Era omne de grant coraçon”: Gendered grief, sorrow, and zeal in medieval Castilian history writing,” in Knowing Sorrow: Grief, Gender, and Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Lee Templeton (Leiden, forthcoming). 7 Downes et al, Emotions and War, p. 10. 8 Christoph Maier, “Propaganda and Masculinity: Gendering the Crusades in Thirteenth-Century Sermons,” in Crusading and Masculinities, eds. Natasha R. Hodgson, Katherine J. Lewis, and Matthew M. Mesley (London, 2019), pp. 21–35. 9 Radoslaw Kotecki, Jacek Maciejewski, and John S. Ott, Between Sword and Prayer: Warfare and Medieval Clergy in Cultural Perspective (Leiden, 2018), p. 3.

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within a divine plan; through their strenuous labor, suffering, and endurance they might overcome sin and spiritual scruple.10 This fusion reached its apogee in conceptions of holy war and crusade that circulated widely in Christian Iberia. The dynamics and chronology of this process, and the exact relationship between papal crusade and Iberian ideals of Reconquista, continue to be a matter of vigorous debate.11 For some historians, neither crusade nor Reconquista had been formative ideas before the early twelfth century; in this view, earlier power relations between the Christian and Islamic realms of the peninsula were pragmatic, the drive for expansion driven largely by territorial and financial ambitions. They suggest that it was only in the generation after the First Crusade (preached in 1095) that a crusading ethos had begun to seep across the Pyrenees.12 For others, ideals of sacralised war had already begun to circulate in parts of Christian Iberia during the second half of the eleventh century, preparing the ground for the specific formulation of these ideals as ‘crusade’ by the reforming papacy and perhaps even shaping them.13 What is beyond doubt is that by the reign of Alfonso VII (r. 1126–1157), crusading ideals had become deeply entrenched in Iberia. St. James became an icon of holy war; St. Mary herself was reenvisaged as patroness of crusade.14 In his seminal article “From Tyrants to Soldiers of Christ: the nobility of twelfth-century León-Castile and the struggle against Islam,” the late Simon Barton showed how the ethos of legitimate holy war came to serve 10 Richard Kaeuper, Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (Philadelphia, 2009); and Kaeuper, “Medieval Warfare—Representation Then and Now,” in Bellis and Slater, Representing War and Violence, pp. 20–38. 11 One helpful review of the historiography is José Manuel Rodríguez García, “Reconquista y cruzada. Un balance historiográfico doce años después (2000–2012),” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, serie III, Historia Medieval 26 (2013): 365–394. 12 The bibliography is substantial, but see for example William Purkis, “The Past as Precedent: Crusade, Reconquest and Twelfth-Century Memories of a Christian Iberia,” in The Making of memory in the Middle Ages, ed. Lucie Doležalová (Leiden, 2009), pp. 441–461; and, among Spanish scholars, José Luis Martin, “Reconquista y cruzada,” Studia Zamorensia 3 (1996): 215–241. 13 See, for instance, the work of Carlos de Ayala, including “On the origins of crusading in the peninsula: the reign of Alfonso VI (1065–1109),” Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum 7 (2013): 225–269. 14 Richard Fletcher, “Reconquest and Crusade in Spain, c. 1050–1150,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, vol. 37 (1987): 31–47; Carlos de Ayala Martínez, “The Episcopate and Reconquest in the Times of Alfonso VII of Castile and León,” in Between Sword and Prayer, eds. Kotecki et al., pp. 207–232; Amy G. Remensnyder, La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds (Oxford, 2014); Edward Lawrence Holt, “Cantigas de Santa María, Cantigas de Cruzada: Reflections of Crusading Spirituality in Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María,” Al Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 27 (2015): 207–224.

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as an integral component of power relations there, working to bind the nobility more closely to the crown. A social elite that had been portrayed in the Historia Compostellana (in the early twelfth century) as violent, rapacious, and domineering came to be portrayed as loyal, willing servants in the crusade against al-Andalus. Even beyond Iberia, Barton wrote, this crusade came to be seen as having a spiritual value equivalent to campaigns waged in the Holy Land; troubadours like Marcabru portrayed Spain as a lavador or cleansing-place in which knights might purge their sins.15 These powerful cultural constructs, harnessing penitential spirituality, chivalry, and crusade, were still dominant in the mid-thirteenth century. Yet the realities of war on the Andalusian frontier were often far from holy.16 Militarised violence against civilians—including raids aiming at the destruction of harvests, the cutting down or trees, the theft of cattle, and the imprisonment of people—was ubiquitous.17 Alfonso VI (r. 1072–1109) had set fire to Valencia in the face of an Almoravid surge, “selecting as targets the principal public buildings—the main mosque, the alcazar, and some houses”.18 Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo from 1209 until his death in 1247, recounted how in the 1190s, under archbishop Martín López de Pisuerga, “the Kingdom of Baetica was set to flames … The death made the prelate prosper. He thus proceeded setting fire to the castles and the towns in the land. Thus, he happily returned to his own land”.19 Muslim women, in particular, suffered acutely in the years after the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, the climactic

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Simon Barton, “From Tyrants to Soldiers of Christ: the nobility of twelfth-century LeónCastile and the struggle against Islam,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 44 (2000): 28–48. As Joseph O’Callaghan incisively observes, to speak of “holy war” is a travesty. “War, which by its very nature entails the destruction of life, the infliction of extreme harm on human beings, and the ruination of crops, homes, churches, and other structures, is not holy or sacred. The type of war of which we are speaking was not holy but rather religious”: O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 9–10. Francisco García Fitz, “Una frontera caliente. La guerra en las fronteras castellanomusulmanas (siglos XI–XIII),” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval (siglos XI–XIV). Seminario celebrado en la Casa de Velázquez y la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (14–15 de diciembre de 1998), eds. Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Pascal Buresi and Philipp Josserand (Madrid, 2001), pp. 159–179, 177–179; and “Las guerras de cada día. En la Castilla del siglo XIV,” Edad Media. Revista de Historia 8 (2007): 145–181. Robert I. Burns, Islam under the Crusaders, Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth-Century Kingdom of Valencia (Princeton, 1973), p. 416. Kyle C. Lincoln, “Beating Swords into Croziers: A Case Study of Warrior Bishops in the Kingdom of Castile, c. 1158–1214,” Journal of Medieval History 44, no. 1 (2017): 83–103, 92–93.

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confrontation in which Jiménez de Rada was actively involved.20 Thousands were taken captive during the ensuing actions against Úbeda and Baeza. One passage in the Estoria de España relates that the town of Baeza had been deserted, since “all the Moors had fled: seeing the danger their people faced, they had picked up and left for Úbeda. But some of them had not been able to flee so easily, and took refuge in their mosque; and the Christian forces arrived, and set fire to it, and burned them alive there”.21 Systematic violence against civilians continued into the reign of Alfonso X, el Sabio (r. León-Castile 1252–1284), for whom the African Crusade—and control of the Straits of Gibraltar—remained a powerful objective, although one that proved to be interrupted by the revolt of his Mudéjar subjects in 1264 and by the Marinid invasions that began in 1275.22 In 1260, during the pillaging of Salé on the coast of Morocco (which O’Callaghan describes as the only result of his fecho de Africa), Castilian forces set houses and markets on fire.23 The fourteenth-century Crónica de Alfonso X tells of a military expedition from Seville (ostensibly 1263, actually 1265) to Alcalá de Benzaide: the king himself—we read—“went into the land of the Moors, destroying them and burning them, and doing them great harm and much damage”.24 If we recognise that this kind of violence sits uneasily with the aspiration to heroism and spiritual purity, we should not imagine a priori that there is any absolute ethical gulf dividing us from medieval observers. As Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O’Loughlin point out, “it should not be assumed that [late medieval and early modern] war literature simply forces depictions of war’s emotions into the narrative matrices of male chivalric glory in the field”. Clerical and humanist writers alike, they write, were 20

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Miriam Shadis, “Women and Las Navas de Tolosa,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 4 (2012): 71–76, 74 (monographic issue of JMIS, co-edited by Simon R. Doubleday and Miguel Gómez, entitled “A Turning Point in Iberian History? The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212)”). Primera Crónica General, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 2 vols (Madrid, 1955), 2:768–69. Joseph O’Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade. Castile and the battle for the Strait (Philadelphia, 2011); for the ways in which this campaign—and resilient ideals of crusading— played into Alfonso’s broader foreign policies and imperial ambitions, see also José Manuel Rodríguez García, “Henry III, Alfonso X of Castile and the crusading plans of the thirteenth century,” in England and Europe in the Reign of Henry III, ed. Bjorn Weiler (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 99–120. Joseph O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, p. 210; O’Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade, pp. 26–27. Crónica de Alfonso X. Según el Ms. II/2777 de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real (Madrid), ed. Manuel González Jiménez (Murcia, 1998), ch. 12. There is diplomatic evidence that Alfonso had also been physically present at the siege of Niebla, in early 1262, but the chronicle— which is extremely impressionistic at this juncture—does not elaborate on his role there.

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concerned about the destructiveness of war, including a concern for the plight of non-combatants, and sometimes challenged dominant notions of medieval military masculinity; medieval war texts had “a capacity for critique of dominant chivalric discourse through their depiction and evocation of noncompliant emotions”.25 If chivalry was in part an attempt to overwrite a fundamental medieval ambivalence about the violence of war, the narrative display of empathy for its victims also reveals an underlying discomfort. Whereas the suffering of the knightly combatant might be easily contained within the structure of chivalry—a virtuous military martyrdom with many modern analogies—other forms of trauma and brutality in war resist full integration, haunting the chivalric observer. As a result, everywhere in the edifice of chivalric, martial culture, unexpected cracks and stresses appeared. This is the case even in narratives, such as the early thirteenth-century History of William Marshal, regarded as the earliest biography of a layman in the vernacular in western Europe, which seek to exalt the heroism of a chivalric protagonist. Lindsey Diggelmann illustrates the point through an examination of the poet’s description of events at Le Mans in 1189, in the closing days of the reign of Henry II, as the king declines into aggressive desperation: He [William Marshall] then rode forward with the King, / who, in a violent and excessive manner, To tell you the truth, had set fire to / the town outside the walls … They saw a woman wailing / and weeping bitter tears As she took her possessions out of her house / which was all in flames. William Marshall, a “tender-hearted man”—we are told—was saddened and took pity on her, dismounting from his horse to give her assistance. “He was most willing to repair the harm done, as was his wont”.26 This, Diggelmann notes, is one of the rare occasions when we see a glimpse of the emotional impact of war on those at the lower levels of society; we might add that it may offer an insight into the suppressed emotional responses of the poet, even perhaps of William Marshall himself. My goal in the pages that follow will be to explore the emotional ambivalences that unfold in the context of the ‘society organised for war’, in Elena

25 Downes et al., Emotions and War, p. 7. On the multiplicity of medieval masculinities in crusading theaters of war, see Hodgson et al., Crusading and Masculinities. 26 Lindsay Diggelmann, “Emotional Responses to Medieval Warfare in the History of William Marshal,” in Downes et al., Emotions and War, pp. 24–41, at 34.

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Lourie’s well-known phrase: thirteenth-century Castile and León.27 Here, as elsewhere, one significant facet of this social architecture was the construction of emotional foundations that could support constant military activity, including martial masculinity, a culture of chivalric heroism, and an emphasis on emotional restraint. Yet no more than in other parts of western Europe could this framework entirely restrain the full range of psychological responses to military violence and bloodshed. The analysis will focus on two of the Cantigas de Santa María [Songs to Holy Mary] produced under the aegis of Alfonso X el Sabio—Cantigas 205 and, in the first instance, 345—each describing military actions on the Andalusian frontier.28 In both cases, we encounter incidents in which a mother and child are threatened by the flames of war, and the fate of women and children becomes the emotional pivot. In the first instance (a nightmare narrative that unfolds in Cantiga 345), they are clearly identified as the Virgin Mary and her Son; in the second (Cantiga 205), Castilian troops are confronted with the terror of a Muslim woman and her own son, innocent ‘pagans’ caught up in the fire and the suffocating smoke. Across the lines, the soldiers are awestruck by the resemblance to Mary and her child Jesus. The Cantigas de Santa María were, to a significant degree, ideological texts aiming to advance King Alfonso’s vision for his kingdom, to catalyze conversion, and to consolidate the colonial occupation of Andalusia. But many of the songs are also rooted in social realities and reflect dominant emotional norms; some were indeed Castilian versions of miracle stories already circulating elsewhere in western Europe, and in this sense hold up a mirror to pervasive cultural trends. Jesús Rodríguez Velasco has rightly reminded us of the need that, in the context of this reign the name “Alfonso” contains multitudes: the many authors whose creative intellectual work has dissolved into a single name, a collective Alfonsine mens.29 In this sense, too, there are risks in addressing any of the cantigas as if they were an expression of his individual psychic processes, and it may be prudent to assert simply that—regardless of questions of direct authorship—the king endorsed its message as supervisor of the works produced by his scriptorium. To this extent, the emotional complexities they reveal may perhaps best be understood as a collective feature of elite secular culture. Having said this, the king appears to have been 27

Elena Lourie, “A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain,” Past and Present 35 (1966): 54–76. 28 Afonso X, o Sábio, Cantigas de Santa María, ed. Walter Mettman, 4 vols (Coimbra, 1959– 72); Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise: A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa María, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill (Tempe, 2000). 29 Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco, “Theorizing the Language of Law,” Diacritics 36.3–4, (Fall-Winter 2006): 64–86, 64 and 84.

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a fairly prolific songwriter: a new David, his Franciscan confessor wrote in a biographical sketch towards the end of his reign. Manuel Pedro Ferreira has suggested that the king was directly involved in the writing of at least 26 of these miracle-songs.30 Cantiga 345—to which we may turn first—is not among those Ferreira analyzes, but it does bear a distinctively and emphatically biographical imprint, and as we will see, it is likely that it also reflects Alfonso’s individual lived experiences. The opening line of Cantiga 345 tells us that the story we are about to hear will be a painful one: “un chanto mui doorido” (l. 1). It unfolds against the backdrop of violent instability on the frontier. Alfonso’s forces had captured Jerez in the late spring or early summer of 1261, soon after the annexation of Cádiz and the port of al-Qanatir (rechristened as El Puerto de Santa María). A Christian garrison had been planted there, but the local population remained predominantly Muslim, and the city’s fate had continued to hang in the balance. A strategic alliance with Muhammad I, king of Granada, always brittle, had been stretched to its breaking point by Castilian expansionism; early in 1264, amid bitter mutual recrimination, it had finally snapped. On 20 June, in a letter to Pedro Lorenzo, bishop of Cuenca, Alfonso had claimed that Muhammad I—had violated his trust “with the falseness and treachery that he has in his heart,” secretly conspiring to coordinate a rebellion by the king’s mudéjar subjects: “he attacked our lands, fought against our castles, and killed our vassals, and is now waging war as fully and aggressively as he can, with his own troops and those from across the sea”.31 The speed with which this uprising spread, in the summer of 1264, caught him unaware, and exacerbated deep-rooted political tensions within Castile. So it was that Alfonso found himself fighting—on behalf of the Queen of the Heavens, so the cantiga relates—against two sets of enemies, ‘Moors and bad Christians’: “da Reynna / dos ceos tenia bando / contra mouros e crischaõs / maos” (Cantiga 345, ll. 11–12). The Cantiga first spins a tale of military ‘cowardice’ and intimately personal betrayal. After the conquest of Jerez in 1261, the tenancy of the fortress had 30 “More quoque Davitico etiam, [ad] preconium Virginis gloriose multas et perpulchras composuit cantinelas, sonis convenientibus et proportionibus musicis modulates” [“Furthermore, in the manner of David, he also composed in praise of the glorious Virgin many beautiful songs, set to suitable sounds and appropriate music”] (Fidel Fita, “Biografías de San Fernando y de Alfonso el Sabio por Gil de Zamora,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia 5 (1885): 308–328, 321); Manuel Pedro Ferreira, “Alfonso X, compositor,” Alcanate, Revista de Estudios Alfonsíes 5 (2006–2007): 117–137. 31 Antonio Ballesteros-Beretta, Alfonso X el Sabio (Barcelona, 1963), 368; my translation. See also Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia, 1993), p. 183.

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been entrusted to a Castilian count. The count in question was Nuño González de Lara, Alfonso’s childhood friend and, a member of the aristocratic Lara family which his father—Fernando III (r. 1217–1252)—had once banished to the margins of courtly life.32 The cantiga alludes to Don Nuño’s rehabilitation under Alfonso: he had been well-honoured, “un ric-ome onrrado muito” (ll. 26– 27). The bond of friendship mattered deeply to Alfonso, as it did to many other thirteenth-century intellectuals.33 In his Siete Partidas, Alfonso emphasised its value for the collective well-being of the realm, and invoked the Aristotelian category of natural friendship, affection between people from the same territory.34 These principles underlie the king’s outrage at the events that then occurred in the summer of 1264. The ties of friendship had been undercut, so the Cantiga narrates, by Nuño González’s refusal to defend Jerez in the face of the mudéjar uprising. In the narrator’s view, his actions—or inactions—had violated law and statute (l. 44). Rather than putting up proper resistance, he had timidly called for the aid of the king, and ultimately abandoned the castle, leaving just a few men inside, for “he had no wish to die there” (“per nulla maneira / en el morrer non queria”, l. 53). Before the royal army itself—based in Seville—could reach Jerez, the castle had fallen to the enemy; the rebels seized the chapel, attempting unsuccessfully to set fire to a statue of “She who is our Protector” (“da que é noss’ anparança”, l. 62). The vilification of actions represented as being cowardly, in the Siete Partidas, like the implicit charge of cowardice in Cantiga 345, bears comparison with accusations against crusaders in other theaters of war. The knights who had lowered themselves by rope from the walls of newly-captured Antioch to escape the Turkish army, in 1098, had come to be known by the humiliating term ‘rope-dancers’; those who had fled the earlier siege, like Stephen of Blois—continued to be mocked a century later in French epics like the Chanson d’Antioche.35 The alleged cowardice of the infantes of Carrión, mocked as a fundamental moral defect in the most famous of Castilian epics—the Poema de mío 32 Simon R. Doubleday, The Lara Family: Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain (Cambridge MA, 2001), pp. 64–74. 33 Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, Friendship in Medieval Iberia: Historical, Legal and Literary Perspectives (Farnham, 2014; repr. New York, 2020). 34 Carlos Heusch, “Les fondements juridiques de l’amitié à travers les Partidas d’Alphonse X et le droit médiéval,” Cahiers de linguistique hispanique médiéval 18–19 (1993): 5–48. 35 Conor Kostick, “Courage and Cowardice on the First Crusade, 1096–1099,” War in History 20, no. 1 (2013): 32–49. On charges of effeminacy, see Natasha R. Hodgson, Women, Crusading and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 47.

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Cid—in order to ensure masculine/warrior group solidarity, has been widely commented upon.36 The most immediate comparison, however, is to be found in the satirical songs also produced in Alfonso’s court, the Cantigas de escarnho e de maldecir. Like the Cantigas de Santa María, these also served particular political purposes including the aggrandizement of the crown at the expense of an ostensibly “treacherous” nobility, perennially tempted—as Simon Barton showed in his article “Traitors to the Faith”—to seek employment in the courts and armies of Muslim potentates to the south.37 None of these lyric texts should be seen as uncomplicated, transparent windows onto emotional realities; they were also active agents, didactic tools reflecting contemporary power relations, and in particular the growing political gulf between the crown and the old aristocracy.38 Many of these values are paraded in another narrative of these events, chapter 10 of the Crónica de Alfonso X, in which we learn of the doomed attempts of a vassal of Nuño González, Garci Gómez Carrillo, to defend the fortress of Jerez.39 Garci Gómez is depicted in a way that serves as a foil to his superior’s self-interest. He defends the alcázar after the Muslims have attacked the tower and allows his flesh to be pulled away rather than be captured. This heroic tale may have been a fable written by the knight’s descendants;40 but its integration into the royal chronicle was surely designed to serve the interests of a monarchy anxious to control legitimate violence. Equally, we might understand Alfonso’s attack on the nobleman’s behavior in Cantiga 345 as an ideological move designed to shore up the walls of this society built for war, drawing on emotionally repressive norms of chivalric masculine bravery. The production of lyric was also a valuable tool in countering, and suppressing, an instinctive

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David Hook, “Some observations on the episode of the Cid’s Lion,” The Modern Language Review 71 (1976): 553–564; Thomas Montgomery, “The Rhetoric of Solidarity in the Poema del Cid,” MLN [Modern Language Notes] 102 (1987): 191–205. Simon Barton, “Traitors to the Faith: Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Maghreb,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict and Coexistence. Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay, eds. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 3–45. See also Simon R. Doubleday, “O que foi passar a serra: Frontier-crossing and the thirteenth-century Castilian nobility in the cantigas de escarnio e de maldizer,” in Le médiéviste et la monographie familiale: sources, méthodes et problematiques, ed. Martin Aurell (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 189–200; Benjamin Liu, Medieval Joke Poetry: The Cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer (Cambridge MA, 2004). Simon R. Doubleday, The Lara Family, ch. 4. Crónica de Alfonso X, pp. 29–32. Crónica de Alfonso X, p. 31 n. 53.

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horror of war and a disinclination to fight.41 This process is surely at work in Cantiga 345: Nuño González’s reluctance to die in the castle of Jerez might in principle be seen as a rational decision, but violated hegemonic norms of masculinity. It is within this historical, ideological, and emotional framework that the climactic scene unfolds: a nightmare, in which—as we will see—the burning of the Marian statue morphs into traumatised memory. As King Alfonso slept in the alcázar in Seville, we read, he dreamed about something astonishing (“maravilla viu en sonnos,” ll. 67–68): he imagined he saw the Virgin Mary, crying out in anguish in the castle chapel of Jerez, the city which his forces had conquered “two, or rather three, years earlier” (ll. 16–17). In her arms, Mary was carrying a small and beautiful child, and running desperately to the chapel door, for the chapel was on fire: “viia fog’ acender … Dentro e de grandes chamas / arder toda a capela” (ll. 74/76).42 Mary cries out in terror, “I would rather die a thousand times”—a line that may have given itself to theater; the Cantigas, after all, were designed for public performance. She calls frantically on Alfonso to save the child from the flames, and he runs towards them. But he cannot fulfill his conventionally masculine responsibility to rescue the mother and son, and his traumatic experience remains unresolved; “weeping and moaning, he awoke from this dream” (“chorand’ e gemendo despertou daqueste sonno”, l. 89–90). The king recounts his nightmare to his young Aragonese wife, Queen Yolant (Violante, in Castilian), who is lying in bed next to him. Yolant replies that she has had an identical experience, a parallelism that in fact also speaks to the reality of shared participation in political leadership: “Outro tal e eu sonnado” (l. 94).43 The royal couple immediately interpret the dream to mean that

41

Soldiers have always been afraid, in the face of battle, William Ian Miller reminds us; “the dominant passion in battle, the one each party expects its comrades and its opponents to be intimately involved with, is fear. We might see all heroic literature as a desperate attempt to keep it at bay”. William Ian Miller, “Weak Legs: Misbehavior before the Enemy,” Representations 70 (2000): 27–48. 42 Cantigas de Santa María, ed. Mettman, 3: 234–37. 43 On the agency of royal women in medieval León and Castile, see: Miriam Shadis, Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages (New York, 2009); Janna Bianchini, The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile (Philadelphia, 2012); and Lucy K. Pick, Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms (Ithaca NY, and London, 2017). On Queen Violante, Francisco J. Hernández, “La reina Violante de Aragón, Jofré de Loaysa, y la Crónica de Alfonso X. Un gran fragmento cronístico del siglo XIII reutilizado en el XIV,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 7 (2015): 87–111.

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the castle of Jerez has fallen to their Muslim enemies—an event which had indeed occurred on 31 May 1264.44 The nightmare-vision of Mary and Jesus, licked by the flames at Jerez, may certainly be interpreted on one level, in the way that we have seen, as a rhetorical instrument performing ideological work against alternative political agendas and potential threats to military discipline. We might further read it as an attempt to dehumanize the Other, an example of the narratives of atrocities committed by the enemy towards women and children, as well as men; in this case a divine Mother and Son. Narratives of this kind might serve to legitimize military conflicts that in fact had devastating effects on one’s own population (leading to the sacking of cities, or the destruction of the countryside by troops from either side).45 Muslim attacks on Christian images, or religious buildings, were a common trope in the medieval Christian imagination and surface in several other cantigas.46 One (Cantiga 99) relates how in an unnamed church, “Holy Mary thwarted a great band of Moors who entered a city of Christians and tried to destroy their holy statues.” Another (Cantiga 215) relates with more precision the way in which “Holy Mary protected Her statue from receiving harm from the many abuses the Moors inflicted upon it.” The context here is a Marinid attack on the campiña de Córdoba, either in 1275 or in 1277–1278. The Muslims seize a statue, and try unsuccessfully to slash it to pieces with their swords (attempting to cut off one of its arms, only for one of the attackers to suffer this very fate), to stone it, and to burn it: “They put it in a huge fire, and it lay there for two days, but He who protected Hananiah, the boy Mishael, and the third man, Azariah, in the furnace in Babylon saved this statue from the fire”.47 They then attempt to drown the statue in the river, but it will not sink; finally, they take it to the King of Granada (Muhammed II, 1273–1302), who “recognise[s] the event as a great miracle” and commands them to take it to the king of Castile and León. They find Alfonso in Segovia; he has the statue adorned in rich cloth and placed in his chapel. Yet so deeply is the nightmare narrative of Cantiga 345 embedded in exact historical and emotional detail, other cultural processes are also in play. 44 Joseph O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa María: A Poetic Biography (Leiden, 1998), p. 114. 45 Ana Rosa Rabazo Vinagre, “El miedo y su expresión en las fuentes medievales. Mentalidades y sociedad en el reino de Castilla,” unpublished PhD thesis (UNED, 2009), pp. 322–324. 46 Mateusz Wilk, “Les ‘attentats’ musulmans contre les images et les édifices religieux dans les Cantigas de Santa María,” Images re-vues 2 (2006). Available at http://imagesre vues.revues.org/306. Accessed March 22, 2023. 47 Songs of Holy Mary trans. Kulp-Hill, p. 258.

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This is more than a trope, and more than ideological rhetoric—it is tangibly grounded in actual lived experience.48 We may note that this is the only nightmare recounted in the more than four hundred Cantigas de Santa María. While there are more than ten other dreams, none of these is infused with this kind of fear; all are vehicles for good news or, at least, positive change. Indeed, one might read them as wish-fulfillment dreams. Among them are dream-narratives with origins beyond Iberia, such as the dream of St. Basil, in which Mary promises to avenge him against the Emperor Julian (Cantiga 15); or the tale—associated with the church of Soissons—of the shepherd boy with inflamed feet, who dreams that the Virgin intercedes with Christ for everyone to be cured of the inflammation (Cantiga 53). Among the Castilian dream narratives, Cantiga 325 recounts how a young Christian woman is held captive in Tangiers; having commended herself to the Virgin of Tudia, she refuses to convert to Islam despite offers of money, property, and a rich husband. Then, in a dream, Mary tells her that she will show her the road to freedom, and after waking, she is miraculously able to reach Silves, then making her way to Tudia, where her iron collar falls from her neck. Cantiga 348, set in the year 1280, is suffused with the bitter disillusion that characterizes the last decade of the reign.49 Nonetheless presents us with a striking moment of wish fulfillment: a certain king is short of money in his campaign against the Moors—the backdrop is the unsuccessful siege of Algeciras—but has a dream in which the Virgin promises to provide him with a vast treasure, buried by “people much worse than the Moors”. The first time the king looks for it, he finds nothing; the second, he discovers a horde of gold, precious stones, textiles, and other objects belonging to the Jews, and has it sent to Seville. The nightmare recounted in Cantiga 345 is thus qualitatively unique amongst these lyric texts. In place of wish fulfillment, we encounter unresolved trauma. Its denouement does not, as one would expect, involve a miraculous intervention by the Virgin Mary directly resulting in the recapture of the castle; and the loss of the castle causes the king and queen to “grieve deeply”: “se fillaron / daquesto muit’ a doer” (l. 104). Our cantiga ends, rather anticlimactically, with the bland statement that a few days later, God willed that this king might win Jerez, and settle it with Christians: “quiso Deus que gannada Xerez este Rei ouvesse / e de crischãos pobrada” (ll. 106–107). The statue of the 48 O’Callaghan suggests that the poet is likely to have heard the story from the king himself, or perhaps the queen (Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa María, p. 114). 49 Simon R. Doubleday, The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance (New York, 2015), chapters 8 and 9: a biography which aims to interweave an emotional biography of the king with a cultural history of his age. For an overview of the reign, see O’Callaghan, The Learned King.

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Virgin is replaced in the chapel of the alcázar, a narrative framing that is surely intended to create a sense of aesthetic symmetry and finality, but the real climax of the lyric remains the horrifying nightmare itself. In short, this speaks to an emotional (and probably biographical) reality, and to an unresolved cultural tension; the conscious and ideological attempt at narrative framing cannot suppress the horror. Freudian theory—and in particular a case recounted in chapter 7 of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—offers one potential angle for thinking about the nightmare. A father, whose son has recently died after a prolonged sickness, falls asleep and dreams that the child is once again alive, standing by his bed and calling out: ‘Father, don’t you see that I am burning?’. The father wakes in horror, to discover that a candle has set fire to his dead son’s shroud and has burned one arm of the corpse.50 Freud’s own analysis of the dream is sparse; its meaning, he observes, is “simple enough”, reflecting subconscious fulfillment of a wish that the child were still alive and perhaps embodying a reference—in the burning—to a fever that the child had experienced. Later generations of psychoanalysts have devoted a good deal of attention to the case, suggesting a richness that Freud glosses over and underscoring the importance of paternal failure and guilt. The father’s waking from the nightmare, seemingly useless from a practical point of view, is one compelling feature of the case, perhaps serving as a means of avoiding a direct confrontation, in sleep, with the deepest levels of trauma.51 What role might guilt, and trauma, play in Cantiga 345? To begin to approach this question, we may turn to its closest parallel, another emotive and historically detailed song recounting the fate of an innocent mother and child caught in the fires of war—one that may also bring to mind the woman-amid-the-flames incident recounted in the History of William Marshal. Cantiga 205 is set about a generation earlier, in the mid-1230s, during the campaigns of Fernando III in Andalusia; it tells of an incident involving Castilian troops led by the knights of the Military Orders of Uclés and Calatrava, and by Alfonso Téllez, who was operating near Écija and Carmona from a military base at Martos.52 The Castilians launch a brutal attack on a Muslim castle, causing its walls to collapse (ll. 27–28), and the inhabitants take refuge in a 50 51 52

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York, 1913), p. 403. I thank Prof. Bruno Bosteels for this helpful reference. Slavoj Zizek, “Freud Lives!” London Review of Books, 25 May 2006. Francisco Corti, “Cantiga 205 (e 205; f, fol. 5–7): las Órdenes de caballería de Santiago y Calatrava y un folio miniado perdido,” Alcanate. Revista de estudios alfonsíes 2 (2001–2): 251–261.

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strong tower (l. 30). The attackers then set fire to the base of the tower, and to escape being burned alive, many Muslim people leap to their death (l. 33). Con esta coita tan grande / do fogo que os cegava et d’outra parte do fogo / que os mui forte queimava hũa mora con seu fillo / que mui mais ca si amava, Sobiu-sse con el encima, / que lle non fos’ afogado [Desperate because of the smoke which was blinding them, and on the other hand because of the fire which was fiercely burning them, a Moorish woman with her son, whom she loved much more than herself, climbed to the top with him, so he would not be suffocated].53 E entre duas amẽas [= almenas] / se foi sentar a mesquỹa, con seu fillo pequenyo / que en seus braços tiia; e pero que mui gran fogo / de todas partes viynna, a moura no foi queimada, / nen su fillo chamuscado [Between two merlons, the poor woman went to sit With her little son, whom she held in her arms. And although a great fire came from every side, The Moorish woman was not burned, nor her son scorched by the flame]. So, in the midst of this horror, a miracle is unfolding. In the accompanying illuminations, Alfonso’s artists emphasise the parallel that the Christian soldiers begin to observe; moved by a strange likeness, their compassion begins to outstrip their religious enmity. E quando viron a torre / que era toda ca[v]ada e viron ontr’ as amẽas / aquela mour’ assentada, semellou-lles a omagen / de com’ esta fegurada a Virgen Santa Maria / que ten se Fill’ abraçado. [When they saw that the tower was completely undermined, and noticed the Moorish woman sitting between the merlons, 53 Here, I have slightly adapted the translation of Cantiga 205 in Songs of Holy Mary, trans. Kulp-Hill, pp. 246–247.

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she seemed to them exactly like the Holy Virgin Mary with her Son in her arms]. E ouveron piadade / eles e quantos crischãos a viron, e con gran doo / alçaron a Deus as mãos que os de morte guardasse, / pero que eran pagãos; a desto quis Deus que fosse / un gran miragre mostrado. [And they took pity, they and all the Christians who saw her, and in great anguish they raised their hands to God that he might save them from death, although they were pagans. So God wished that a great miracle be shown]. E daquela part’ a torre / u eles eran tan passo Se leixou viir a terra / sobr’ un gran chão devasso Que neuu deles morto / no foi, ferido nen lasso, Nena madre neon fillo; mas pousou-os en un prado … And that part of the tower where they were fell to the ground so slowly and gently on a great wide plain that neither of them was killed, injured, or weakened, neither mother nor child; the Virgin placed them in a meadow … Cantiga 205 (unlike 345) is included in the so-called Florentine codex of the Cantigas de Santa María, the companion volume to the Códice Rico in the Escorial.54 As Francisco Prado-Vilar argues, its miniatures strongly evoke the recognition of sameness across religious and ethnic lines. Each religious group gazed eye to eye, he writes, and was “obliged to continually revise not only its image of them, but even its own vision of itself, thus rendering contingent ideas that went unchallenged in the rest of Christian Europe.”55 Fundamentally, then, this is a song evoking empathy and compassion, quite specifically for those caught in the horrors of war. It is true that Cantiga 205 ends predictably, with the conversion of the mother and the baptism of the 54 O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa María, 8–10, offers a useful survey of the four extant manuscripts. 55 Francisco Prado-Vilar, “The Gothic anamorphic gaze: regarding the worth of others,” in Under the Influence. Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, eds. Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi (Leiden and Boston, 2005), pp. 67–100, 72.

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child: “a moura foi crischãa / e seu fillo batiçado” (l. 70); women are sometimes perceived—or at least, presented—as being more malleable and easier to convert than their male counterparts.56 But this denouement is conventional and, again, anticlimactic. Amy Remensnyder’s appraisal of the core story may well be correct: “When this cantiga’s poetic veneer is stripped away, the unmistakable lines of a war story emerge. Alfonso X might even have heard this anecdote from … Alfonso Téllez de Meneses, a regular at Fernando III’s court who had fought alongside Alfonso’s own knights at the siege of Seville”.57 An emotionally compelling tale engaging with the horrors of war had probably been circulating at the royal court in Alfonso X’s youth. The narrative power of the tale rests, in the end, on this emotional charge. Cantiga 205 reflects acute awareness of the fear and vulnerability of all those under attack, and the audience’s particular horror at the suffering of women and children in wartime—even the suffering of “pagans” (that is, non-Christians). We might note that, in the text, the mother and child are marked as “pagans” throughout their suffering, despite the resemblance to the Virgin and Her child which the illuminators emphasise. If we are indeed dealing with a tale that had gained traction at the royal court, we might think of this horror as a feature of the ‘emotional community’ of that court;58 it points once more to a deep ambivalence towards war. If literary narratives offer a way of engaging with complex emotions, the miracle genre may have offered a particularly privileged space for attempting to resolve psychological tensions, bridging the gap between cultural norms and restrained, repressed, emotions.59 Finally, it is worth asking to what extent, if any, Cantigas 205 and 345 may reflect the king’s own repressed horror of war, his individual lived trauma or guilt at the death of innocents? His Siete Partidas leave little doubt that he perceived the frontier with al-Andalus—the setting of both lyric songs examined here—as a particularly violent place: “La frontera de Espanna es de natura caliente e las cosas de nascen en ella son mas gruessas e de mas fuerte complision que las de la terra vieja” (2.22.7) [the frontier of Spain is hot by nature, 56

On women, conquest, and conversion, see Simon Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, 2015). 57 Remensnyder, La Conquistadora, p. 199. Alfonso’s brother Tello was a bishop of Palencia. 58 Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” The American Historical Review 107 (2002): 821–845; and Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca NY, 2006). 59 Belle S. Tuten, “Power and Trauma in the ‘Maid of Arras’, Cantigas de Santa María 105,” in Trauma in Medieval Society, eds. Wendy J. Turner and Christina Lee (Leiden, 2018), pp. 105–121, 121—focusing on female trauma—suggests: “Miracle stories in general  … often invite listeners and readers to sympathize with the suffering of people whose troubles are either brought on, or finally solved by supernatural agency.”

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and things that arise from there are more intense than in the old land]. As Francisco García Fitz suggests, the ‘heat’ of the southern frontier may be partly a matter of climate, but the sentence alludes primarily to the fact that frontier warfare was more violent and fierce here than it was in the hinterland.60 As Jonathan Riley-Smith suggests in his discussion of knights returning from the First Crusade, “it is hard to penetrate the minds” of those who had survived the brutalities of war.61 But it is not inconceivable that the king’s individual response to conflict, and its innocent victims, is being refracted in the cantigas. Two points are worth immediate consideration here. Firstly, by the time Alfonso came to the throne in 1252, he had already acquired considerable experience of war. As early as the age of ten, he had accompanied his father’s troops in a campaign against Ibn Hūd; the Estoria de Espanna recalls how “the shouts and the cries of the Moors, and the noise of their drums and trumpets, were so great that it seemed that heaven and earth alike were collapsing”.62 During the early 1240s, he had engaged in significant military campaigns in Murcia and Portugal, and was, of course, present at the siege of Seville. Alfonso, then, would have been in close proximity to the fires of war, although his military campaigns were ultimately more modest than those of other medieval Castilian kings. He was not a warrior-king relishing the battlefield in the model of his father, Fernando III, or his later namesake Alfonso XI. This ‘limitation’ may have cost him some political support, reducing the opportunities for booty and bounty that had existed in the first half of the century. Secondly, a significant number of cantigas revolve around the emotional pivot of compassion for children, suffering from fatal or near-fatal illness, or saved from sudden accidental death, and some of them are particularly close to Alfonso’s heart: in one explicitly autobiographical Cantiga (122), he recalls a moment from his own childhood in which his baby sister Berenguela had fallen so ill that she was thought to have died. The girl’s death “grieved her nursemaid so greatly all through the night that she thought she would kill herself from sorrow. She informed the child’s mother at once, and she became greatly afflicted / at the death of her child.”63 Other cantigas specifically address the painful loss of children in wartime: Cantiga 323 relates how, in 1275, the Marinid emir Abu Yusuf invaded “all the land of Seville”, and how village upon village was burned by the Moors. In the midst of this scourge, a father 60 Fitz, “Una frontera caliente,” pp. 159–62. The rendering in Las Siete Partidas, trans. Scott, 2: 437, is surely incorrect: “The frontier of Spain is naturally hot, and animals born there are larger and of stronger constitution than those which belong to the older country”. 61 Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 153. 62 Primera Crónica General de España, 2:1043, 726b. 63 CSM 122: Songs of Holy Mary, trans. Kulp-Hill, p. 150.

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loses his little son, “whom he loved as much as his own life,” from a fever. The man is forced to abandon the boy’s burial when his village was attacked; the miraculous intervention of a mysterious “lady” is mercifully able to revive the boy, and to reverse the most traumatic loss imaginable.64 Seen in this context, both sets of lyrics—the song recounting Alfonso’s nightmarish vision of the mother and child caught up in the flames at Jerez, and the cantiga recalling the anguish of the Christian soldiers witnessing the horrors of the attack on the Muslim castle—may speak to his responses to the suffering of civilians in war. Scorched earth tactics, a feature of internal conflict within the realm of Castile—as well as a facet of war against the kingdom of Granada of the Marinids—were certainly a concern for Alfonso. During the aristocratic rebellion of 1272, Alfonso charged that the rebels “stole many cattle and everything else that they found, and set fire to some unfortified places, and destroyed the churches”; Lope Díaz de Haro, in particular, had pillaged the land and ordered many places to be burned.65 The Siete Partidas attempted to limit the conflagration of the realm: Where persons unite to commit violence with arms, and kindle fire, or direct it to be kindled in order to burn the houses or other buildings, or the crops of other persons, and the party who commits such an act is of noble birth or a man of distinction, he shall be banished forever for this reason; and if he is a man of inferior importance or degraded, and was found in the neighborhood while the fire that he kindled is burning, he shall be thrown into it at once and burned to death.66 Prado-Vilar suggests that the whole Alfonsine cultural project “seems to have emerged from a necessity to dissipate the shadows of life”, after the king’s tragic encounter with pain and death in the 1260s and 1270s: his cancer, and the death of his eldest son and other family members, as well as the rupture with his friend Nuño González.67 We might in this context see a number of Alfonso’s cantigas—those narrating war, as well those narrating illness, and the serial betrayals of his friends and family—as an effort to alchemize his suffering, as well as that of others, into meaning and beauty, and to reconcile it with the cultural values to which he adhered. 64 65 66 67

CSM 323: Songs of Holy Mary, trans. Kulp-Hill, pp. 391–392. Crónica de Alfonso X, p. 94. Siete Partidas 7.10.9. Francisco Prado Vilar, “Sombras en el palacio de las horas: arte, magia, ciencia y la búsqueda de la felicidad”, in Alfonso X el Sabio. Sala San Esteban, Murcia, 27 octubre 2009–31 enero 2010 [exhibition catalog] (Murcia, 2009), pp. 448–455, 455.

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Yet whether or not we can detect the traces of individual experience in either of these cantigas, they speak to broader emotional ambivalences among the thirteenth-century secular elite; their narrative emphasis on the suffering of mothers and children reflect a complex response to the brutality of war. This ambivalent sensibility would find expression, in the later Middle Ages, in the more fully developed critiques of military conduct, and of the brutalization of civilian populations, that emerged during the exceptionally violent Hundred Years War.68 The acute concern with the suffering of women and children in the fires of war would be articulated powerfully by the Castilian soldier Gutierre Díaz de Games, in his biography of Pero Niño, the Victorial (1436)—a text which Jesús Rodríguez Velasco also reads as an attempt to shore up the chivalric foundations of the Castilian nobility.69 A ‘good war’ was possible, the biographer argued, if certain conditions were fulfilled; these included not killing an enemy combatant after he had fallen into one’s power (either being defeated or captured); defending churches and their possessions, and not harming anyone who took refuge in them; not seizing women, either married or single; and fourthly, “no quemar panes ni casas; porque aquel daño y mal alcanza a los inocentes y a los párvulos, que no hicieron por qué”: not burning grains nor houses; because that harm and evil affects innocent people and children, who have done nothing to deserve it.70 Without resorting to teleological views of the history of war, and violence, we may trace here the presence of the same horror that is already expressed in thirteenth-century texts. The evidence of the Cantigas de Santa María suggests that ambivalent responses to the suffering of innocent non-combatants in war might be repressed and overwritten, but never eliminated, by the culture of martial masculinity and chivalric heroism. Acknowledgements A very early version of this chapter was delivered as a keynote lecture at the “Historians of Medieval Iberia” conference, whose thematic focus was “Enemies 68

Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years’ War: England and France at War, c. 1300–c. 1450 (Cambridge, 1988). Allmand cites Honoré Bouvet’s L’arbre des batailles [Tree of Battles, c.1386] as an example of the vociferous criticism of a predatory soldiery, “deeply influenced by the many human tragedies caused by the war”, p. 51. 69 Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV: la tratadística caballeresca castellana en su marco europeo (Salamanca, 1996), pp. 293–294. 70 Gutierre Diez de Games, Crónica de don Pedro Niño, Conde de Buelna (Madrid, 1782), 112; see also Alvira Cabrer, “Guerra y caballería,” p. 282.

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and Friends”, held at the Centre for Medieval Studies at Stockholm University (Sweden) between March 4–6, 2016; Simon Barton was also a keynote lecturer. I extend my warm gratitude to the organizers of this conference—Kurt Villads Jensen, Anthony Lappin, and Kim Bergqvist—as well as to Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, Kyle Lincoln, Teresa Tinsley, and Fernando Luis Corral, for their constructive comments and critiques. Bibliography Afonso X. Cantigas de Santa María, ed. Walter Mettman. 4 vols. Coimbra, 1959–1972. Allmand, Christopher. The Hundred Years’ War: England and France at War, c. 1300– c. 1450. Cambridge, 1988. Alvira Cabrer, Martín. “Guerra y caballería: utopia y realidad.” In Medievo utópico: sueños, ideales y utopías en el imaginario medieval, eds. Alvira Cabrer and Jorge Díaz Ibáñez. Madrid, 2011, pp. 277–296. Ayala Martínez, Carlos de. “On the origins of crusading in the peninsula: the reign of Alfonso VI (1065–1109).” Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum 7 (2013): 225–269. Ayala Martínez, Carlos de. “The Episcopate and Reconquest in the times of Alfonso VII of Castile and León.” In Between Sword and Prayer, eds. Kotecki et al. Leiden, 2018, pp. 207–32. Barton, Simon. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia. Philadelphia, 2015. Ballesteros-Beretta, Antonio. Alfonso X el Sabio. Barcelona, 1963. Barton, Simon. “From Tyrants to Soldiers of Christ: the nobility of twelfth-century León-Castile and the struggle against Islam.” Nottingham Medieval Studies 44 (2000): 28–48. Barton, Simon. “Traitors to the Faith: Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Maghreb.” In Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict and Coexistence. Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay, eds. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman. Basingstoke, 2002, pp. 23–45. Bellis, Joanna, and Laura Slater. “Introduction.” In Representing War and Violence, 1250–1600, eds. J. Bellis and L. Slater. Cambridge, 2016, pp. 1–19. Bergqvist, Kim. ““Era omne de grant coraçon”: Gendered grief, sorrow, and zeal in medieval Castilian history writing.” In Knowing Sorrow: Grief, Gender, and Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Lee Templeton. Leiden, forthcoming. Bergqvist, Kim, “Performing chivalric masculinity: morality, restraint, and emotional norms in the Libro del cavallero Zifar.” In Affective and Emotional Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Andreea Marculescu and Charles-Louis Morand Métivier. New York, 2018, pp. 227–246.

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Bianchini, Janna. The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile. Philadelphia, 2012. Burns, Robert I. Islam under the Crusaders, Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth-Century Kingdom of Valencia. Princeton, 1973. Crónica de Alfonso X. Según el Ms. II/2777 de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real (Madrid), ed. Manuel González Jiménez. Murcia, 1998. Corti, Francisco. “Cantiga 205 (e 205; f, fol. 5–7): las Órdenes de caballería de Santiago y Calatrava y un folio miniado perdido.” Alcanate. Revista de estudios alfonsíes 2 (2001–2): 251–261. Crouch, David. The Chivalric Turn: Conduct and Hegemony in Europe before 1300. Oxford, 2019. Diez de Games, Gutierre. Crónica de don Pedro Niño, Conde de Buelna. Madrid, 1782. Diggelmann, Lindsay. “Emotional Responses to Medieval Warfare in the History of William Marshal.” In Emotions and War, eds. Downes et al., pp. 24–41. Doubleday, Simon R. “O que foi passar a serra: Frontier-crossing and the thirteenthcentury Castilian nobility in the cantigas de escarnio e de maldizer.” In Le médiéviste et la monographie familiale: sources, méthodes et problematiques, ed. Martin Aurell. Turnhout, 2004, pp. 189–200. Doubleday, Simon R. The Lara Family: Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain. Cambridge MA, 2001. Doubleday, Simon R. The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance. New York, 2015. Downes, Stephanie, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O’Loughlin, eds. Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature. Basingstoke, 2015. Ferreira, Manuel Pedro. “Alfonso X, compositor.” Alcanate, Revista de Estudios Alfonsíes 5 (2006–2007): 117–37. Fita, Fidel. “Biografías de San Fernando y de Alfonso el Sabio por Gil de Zamora.” Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia 5 (1885): 308–28. Fletcher, Richard. “Reconquest and Crusade in Spain, c. 1050–1150.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, vol. 37 (1987): 31–47. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York, 1913. García Fitz, Francisco. “Una frontera caliente. La guerra en las fronteras castellanomusulmanas (siglos XI–XIII).” In Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval (siglos XI–XIV). Seminario celebrado en la Casa de Velázquez y la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (14–15 de diciembre de 1998), eds. Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Pascal Buresi and Philipp Josserand. Madrid, 2001, pp. 159–79. García Fitz, Francisco. “Las guerras de cada día. En la Castilla del siglo XIV.” Edad Media. Revista de Historia 8 (2007): 145–181. Hernández, Francisco J. “La reina Violante de Aragón, Jofré de Loaysa, y la Crónica de Alfonso X. Un gran fragmento cronístico del siglo XIII reutilizado en el XIV.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 7 (2015): 87–111. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Heusch, Carlos. “Les fondements juridiques de l’amitié à travers les Partidas d’Alphonse X et le droit médiéval.” Cahiers de linguistique hispanique médiéval, 18–19 (1993): 5–48. Hodgson, Natasha R., Women, Crusading and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative. Woodbridge, 2007. Hodgson, Natasha R., Katherine J. Lewis, and Matthew M. Mesley, eds. Crusading and Masculinities. London, 2019. Holt, Edward Lawrence. “Cantigas de Santa María, Cantigas de Cruzada: Reflections of Crusading Spirituality in Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María.” Al Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 27 (2015): 207–224. Hook, David. “Some observations on the episode of the Cid’s Lion.” The Modern Language Review 71 (1976): 553–564. Kaeuper, Richard. Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry. Philadelphia, 2009. Kaeuper, Richard. “Medieval Warfare—Representation Then and Now.” In Representing War and Violence, 1250–1600, ed. J. Bellis and L. Slater. Cambridge, 2016, pp. 20–38. Keen, Maurice. Chivalry. New Haven and London, 1984, repr. 2005. Kostick, Conor. “Courage and Cowardice on the First Crusade, 1096–1099.” War in History, 20, no. 1 (2013): 32–49. Kotecki, Radoslaw, Jacek Maciejewski, and John S. Ott. Between Sword and Prayer: Warfare and Medieval Clergy in Cultural Perspective. Leiden, 2018. Lincoln, Kyle C. “Beating Swords into Croziers: A Case Study of Warrior Bishops in the Kingdom of Castile, c. 1158–1214.” Journal of Medieval History 44, no. 1 (2017): 83–103. Liu, Benjamin. Medieval Joke Poetry: The Cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer. Cambridge, MA, 2004. Liuzzo Scorpo, Antonella. Friendship in Medieval Iberia: Historical, Legal and Literary Perspectives. Farnham, 2014; repr. New York, 2020. Lourie, Elena. “A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain.” Past and Present 35 (1966): 54–76. Maier, Christoph. “Propaganda and Masculinity: Gendering the Crusades in ThirteenthCentury Sermons.” In Crusading and Masculinities, ed. Natasha R. Hodgson, Katherine J. Lewis, and Matthew M. Mesley. London, 2019, pp. 21–35. Martin, José Luis. “Reconquista y cruzada.” Studia Zamorensia 3 (1996): 215–241. Miller, William Ian. “Weak legs: Misbehavior before the enemy.” Representations 70 (2000): 27–48. Montgomery, Thomas. “The rhetoric of solidarity in the Poema del Cid.” MLN [Modern Language Notes] 102 (1987): 191–205. O’Callaghan, Joseph F. Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa María: A Poetic Biography. Leiden, 1998. O’Callaghan, Joseph F. The Gibraltar Crusade. Castile and the battle for the Strait. Philadelphia, 2011. O’Callaghan, Joseph F. The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile. Philadelphia, 1993. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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O’Callaghan, Joseph F. Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. Philadelphia, 2004. Pick, Lucy K. Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms. Ithaca NY, and London, 2017. Prado Vilar, Francisco. “The Gothic anamorphic gaze: regarding the worth of others.” In Under the Influence. Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, eds. Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi. Leiden, 2005, pp. 67–100. Prado Vilar, Francisco. “Sombras en el palacio de las horas: arte, magia, ciencia y la búsqueda de la felicidad.” In Alfonso X el Sabio. Sala San Esteban, Murcia, 27 octubre 2009–31 enero 2010 [exhibition catalog] (Murcia, 2009). Primera Crónica General, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal. 2 vols. Madrid, 1955. Purkis, William. “The past as precedent: crusade, reconquest and twelfth-century memories of a Christian Iberia.” In The Making of memory in the Middle Ages, ed. Lucie Doležalová. Leiden, 2009, pp. 44–461. Rabazo Vinagre, Ana Rosa. “El miedo y su expresión en las fuentes medievales. Mentalidades y sociedad en el reino de Castilla.” Unpublished PhD thesis. UNED, 2009. Remensnyder, Amy G. La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds. Oxford, 2014. Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The First Crusaders, 1095–1131. Cambridge, 1997. Rodríguez García, José Manuel. “Henry III, Alfonso X of Castile and the crusading plans of the thirteenth century.” In England and Europe in the Reign of Henry III, ed. Bjorn Weiler. Aldershot, 2002, pp. 99–120. Rodríguez García, José Manuel. “Reconquista y cruzada. Un balance historiográfico doce años después (2000–2012).” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, serie III. Historia Medieval 26 (2013): 365–394. Rodríguez Velasco, Jesús. El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV: la tratadística caballeresca castellana en su marco europeo. Salamanca, 1996. Rodríguez Velasco, Jesús. “Theorizing the Language of Law.” Diacritics 36.3–4, (Fall-Winter 2006): 64–86. Rodríguez Velasco, Jesús. Order and Chivalry: Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile, trans. Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson. Philadelphia, 2010. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca NY, 2006. Rosenwein, Barbara H. “Worrying about Emotions in History.” The American Historical Review 107 (2002): 821–845. Shadis, Miriam. Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages. New York, 2009. Shadis, Miriam. “Women and Las Navas de Tolosa.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 4 (2012): 71–76. Skoda, Hannah. Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270–1330. Oxford, 2013.

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Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise: A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa María, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill. Tempe, 2000. Torres, Sara. “‘In Praise of Peace’ in Late Medieval Europe.” In Representing War and Violence, 1250–1600, eds. J. Bellis and L. Slater. Cambridge, 2016, pp. 95–115. Tuten, Belle S. “Power and Trauma in the ‘Maid of Arras’, Cantigas de Santa María 105.” In Trauma in Medieval Society, eds. Wendy J. Turner and Christina Lee. Leiden, 2018, pp. 105–121. Wilk, Mateusz. “Les ‘attentats’ musulmans contre les images et les édifices religieux dans les Cantigas de Santa María.” Images re-vues 2 (2006) Available at http://images revues.revues.org/306. Accessed March 22, 2023. Zizek, Slavoj. “Freud Lives!” London Review of Books, 25 May 2006.

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Chapter 3

‘Emotional Diplomacy’: Trust and Political Communication in Thirteenth-Century Iberia Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo And while we were at Valencia, the alcaid of Xàtiva came to us, with a great company of Saracens, and with a good ten of the sheikhs of the town; and he entered very happily before us, and kissed our hand and asked us how it went with us. And we said that well, thanks be to God, but that what the evil al-Azraq had done to our castles greatly grieved us, and that we wondered how they had allowed it. And they said: “Lord, if anybody has done you evil, you must know that it greatly saddens and grieves us.” And we could see that they were very content and satisfied, and we had never seen them so content and satisfied.1

∵ This is how King James I of Aragon (r. 1213–1276)’s chronicle-autobiography, Llibre del Fets/Book of Deeds (henceforth LDF), describes the events that occurred in 1247 during the southern campaign to conquer the taifa (independent Muslim principality) of Valencia. The episode unambiguously refers to the dissonance between physically performed, verbally declared and 1 “E, nós estant en València, venc-nos l’alcaid de Xàtiva ab gran companya de sarraïns, e dels vells de la vila, ben deu; e entrà molt alegrement denant nós e besà’ns l mà e dix-nos con nos anava. E nós dixem que bé, la mercè de Déu, e que ens pesava molt lo mal que ens havia feit Alazrat en nostres castells e que ens meravellàvem con ho sofrien ells. E dixeren ells:—Senyor, si mal vos fa negú, sapiats que ens pesa molt e ens és greu. E nós veem-los molt alegres e pagats, que anc null temps no els havíem vists tan alegres ne tan pagats.” James I of Aragon, The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon: A Translation of the Medieval Catalan Llibre dels Fets, trans. Damian Smith and Helena Buffery (Farnham, 2003), chapter 362, p. 272. For a Catalan edition: Jordi Bruguera, M. Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, eds., Les quatre grans Cròniques. I. Llibre dels feits del rei En Jaume (Barcelona, 2007). Chapter numbers of the above Catalan edition and English translation coincide. Page numbers in footnotes refer to the English translation by Smith and Buffery.

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ostensibly felt emotions on the one hand, and perceived emotions on the other. The description of the alcaid (military leader)’s performance of grief contrasts with his self-evident delight and raises some of the key questions at the core of this study. First, what was the function of emotional language and performance in political and diplomatic communication? Second, to what extent did discourses and practices associated with human emotions contribute to shaping and facilitating cross-cultural political communication? A critical examination of these questions will require a broader understanding of whose emotions were emphasised or silenced depending on the types of evidence under scrutiny. Textual evidence might point to a hierarchy of emotions, but the extent to which they reflected the implementation of an ‘emotional regime’ (a set of emotional norms shaped by theological and legal views)2 or experiences that were widely shared across social groups is open to investigation. This study will explore the interplay between textual representations of gestures and performance (including rituals and ceremonies), their customary use and expected reception. At the core of this analysis are also the complex and multi-layered premodern meanings and experiences of trust. The latter included emotions and constituted one of the essential parameters for the establishment or breaking of individual and collective relationships in both local and translocal contexts, within and beyond cultural boundaries. Thirteenth-century Iberia—a multi-layered political reality, within which multiple agents from diverse cultural backgrounds converged, interacting with and sometimes confronting each other—provides a significant case study for examining the instrumental adoption of the language, rituals and performances of emotions in political and diplomatic communication. This study will also reveal important aspects of intersectionality, shaped by the multiple social categories (including gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and social status) that defined individual and collective actions and interactions. Simon Barton’s research contributed to enhancing and re-assessing the ways in which the study of cross-cultural contacts could be approached by considering the historicity of the complex dynamics that regulated social interactions.3 Challenging some of the most traditional historiographical narratives and perspectives applied to both Iberian and western Mediterranean 2 William Reddy, The Navigation of Feelings: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001). 3 Simon Barton, Conquerors, Brides and Concubines (Philadelphia, 2015); Simon Barton and Peter Linehan, eds., Cross, Crescent and Conversion: Studies on Medieval Spain and Christendom in Memory of Richard Fletcher (Leiden, 2008).

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contexts (such as that of rigid socio-cultural fragmentations dictated mostly by religious standard), Simon Barton’s work offered an enhanced framework of analysis that helps revising how we contextualise cross-cultural exchanges at different levels.4 1

Context, Sources and Methodology

To reflect upon the communicative function of emotions in political discourses and diplomatic exchanges, this study will focus on the Kingdom of Aragon during the reign of James I ‘the Conqueror’. In the thirteenth century, Aragon was a growing political, military and territorial power, expanding in the south-east of the Iberian Peninsula and in the Mediterranean at the expense of the Muslim polities that held control over areas that were strategically relevant for both trade and military defence, such as the Kingdom of Valencia and the Balearic Islands.5 On its south-western front, the relationship with the neighbouring Christian Kingdom of Castile had been tense since the time of Fernando III (King of Castile from 1217, and of Castile-León between 1230 and 1252), whose military advance south had threatened the relationship with Aragon, impinging on its borders. This relationship remained ambiguous, even after James I’s daughter, Yolant (Violante in Castilian), married the infant Alfonso of Castile in 1249. Periods of mutual support between Castile and Aragon alternated with phases of open threats and mistrust.6 This is not surprising considering on the one hand the imperial ambitions of Alfonso X of Castile (r. 1252–1284), which were to be frustrated;7 and on the other hand, James I’s attempts to counter 4 Simon Barton, “Traitors to the Faith? Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, c. 1100–1300,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict and Coexistence. Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay, eds. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 23–45. 5 For a historical overview: Carme Battle, L’expansió baixmedieval (segles XIII–XV). Historia de Catalunya, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1988); Flocel Sabaté, “Territory, Power and Institutions in the Crown of Aragon,” in The Crown of Aragon: A Singular Mediterranean Empire, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Leiden, 2017), pp. 172–200; Josep Torró, “The Eastern Regions of al-Andalus before the Conquest by Catalonia-Aragon: An Overview,” Catalan Historical Review 5 (2012): 11–27; David Abulafia, “The Rise of Aragon-Catalonia,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History: Vol 5 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 644–667. 6 Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, “‘El mellor amigo que nos avemos’: Friendship and Political Communication in Thirteenth-Century Iberia,” Cahiers d’Études Hispaniques Médiévales 42 (2019): 107–122; Joseph O’Callaghan, “Kings and Lords in Conflict in late Thirteenth-Century Castile and Aragon,” in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages, eds. Paul E. Chevedden, Donald J. Kagay and P. G. Padilla (Leiden, 1996), pp. 120–135. 7 H. Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, The Learned: A Biography (Leiden, 2010), pp. 189–212.

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Castilian power by consolidating his own Mediterranean influence through the marriage of his son, who will become Peter III of Aragon, to Constance of Sicily in 1262. This alliance was to be followed by an agreement that Peter later established with Portugal in 1281 by arranging the marriage of his eldest daughter, Elisabet, to Denis I. The position of the Kingdom of Navarre, fluctuating between the orbits of Castile and Aragon respectively, as well as the intervention and influence of the Church and its legates in Iberian internal and external affairs, further complicated the relationship between Castile and Aragon.8 The thirteenth century was a politically dynamic period across western Europe and the Mediterranean, and a particularly fruitful one for historians of emotions. Theories of emotions had already emerged from the eleventh century within monastic contexts and later developed within the rising universities from the twelfth century.9 In scholastic circles, concepts of emotions continued to be refined and conceived as part of human nature, rather than expressions of original sin. Theorising emotions became progressively more systematic, reflecting the convergence of different disciplinary perspectives, as physiological interpretations merged with theological and moral views. Greek and Arabic medical treatises (focusing on emotions as expressions of bodily imbalance), circulated widely across the Mediterranean and western Latin Europe, contributing to the growing intellectual debate on the subject.10 By the thirteenth century, passions, their management and treatment—matters that had already been addressed in medical treatises and philosophical debates—spread widely within Christian circles, often through the influence of the Mendicant Orders. The works by the Franciscan John of Rupella/La Rochelle (d. 1245) and Alexander of Hales (c.1185–1245), both Masters of Theology at the University of Paris, along with those attributed to the Dominican Albertus Magnus (c.1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) are some of the most illustrious examples. Aquinas’s writings embody some of 8

Maria J. Branco and Hermínia M. de Vasconcelos Alves Vilar, eds., Ecclesiastics and Political State Building in the Iberian Monarchies, 13th–15th centuries (Évora, 2016); Branco and de Vasconcelos, “Eclesiásticos na diplomacia, na administração e na legitimação das monarquias medievais: Portugal, Leão e Castela, França e Inglaterra: Apresentação do dossier temático,” Medievalista 28 (2020): 24–34. Available at https://books.openedition .org/cidehus/1539. Accessed November 17, 2021. 9 Damien Bouquet and Piroska Nagy, “Medieval Sciences of Emotions during the Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries: An Intellectual History,” Osiris: History of Science and Emotions 31 (2016): 21–45. Available at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/688041#. Accessed November 17, 2021. 10 Naama Cohen-Hanegbi, “A Moving Soul: Emotions in Late Medieval Medicine,” Osiris: History of Science and Emotions 31 (2016), 46–66; Cohen-Hanegbi, Caring for the Living Soul Emotions, Medicine and Penance in the Late Medieval Mediterranean (Leiden, 2017).

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the most renowned and extensive philosophical engagement with ideas and practices associated with emotional issues. For Aquinas, the senses are essential in order to acquire knowledge and to motivate individual action, although whether he attributed any cognitive element to felt bodily passions has been a matter of debate.11 Emotions, passions and affects (terminology that varies when considering different chronologies, languages and types of sources), along with their expressions and management, also appear in sources other than medical and theological writings, including narrative accounts, epistolary exchanges, hagiography, legal sources, and material culture.12 This plethora of sources provides an insight into individual and collective perceptions, uses and conceptualisations of an inner state that was reflected and represented in physical, verbal and material forms. The Llibre dels fets, a chronicle-autobiography originally composed in the vernacular Catalan and probably dictated by James I of Aragon, offers a thought-provoking insight into some of these processes of emotional management and political communication, while also being useful as evidence for processes of royal self-construction.13 It provides a narrative account of James I’s emotional outlook, from a first-person perspective, on a series of events, some of which can be cross-referenced with documentary evidence, including charters and letters. There are, however, some methodological challenges that need addressing. First, how were emotions defined and by whom in this source? On the one hand, this requires a critical analysis of what is understood as the subjectivity of the author (this includes considerations regarding the process of mediation from orality—the king’s memories dictated to a scribe—to written form), along with the individual and collective voices recorded in the written text. In this case, James I’s personal memories (including those connected with his emotional states) align with, and are enhanced by, historical narratives and cultural images that merged with his first-person perspective.14 On the other hand, those ‘written voices’ and the emotions attributed to them should be 11 Shawn D. Floyd, “Aquinas on Emotion: A Response to Some Recent Interpretations,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1998): 161–175; Diana Fritz Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry (Washington DC, 2009); Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae 1a2ae 22–48 (Cambridge, 2009). 12 Barbara Rosenwein, “Emotion Words,” in Le sujet de l’émotion au Moyen Âge, eds. Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy (Paris, 2008), pp. 93–106; Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context 1 (2010): 1–31. Available at https://www.pas sionsincontext.de/uploads/media/01_Rosenwein.pdf. Accessed October 20, 2021. 13 Robert Burns, “The Spiritual Life of James the Conqueror, King of Arago-Catalonia, 1208–1276. Portrait and Self-Portrait,” The Catholic Historical Review 62 (1976): 1–35. 14 Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, “Emotional Memory and Medieval Autobiography: King James I of Aragon (r. 1213–76)’s Llibre dels fets,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10 (2018): 1–25.

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understood as part of shared discursive traditions among socio-cultural, political and emotional communities.15 This last point departs from the views of biological and anthropological studies on cognitive associations, according to which some ‘emotional messages’ transcend specific cultural spheres. If one accepts this hypothesis, the inevitable question to follow is whether and to what extent some of these messages, loaded with emotional undertones, were in fact accessible to a wider audience beyond the remit of the political, intellectual, and social elites that shared the same cultural and emotional norms. The divergency of views between universalists (who see emotions as unchangeable phenomena linked to universal cognitive patterns) and socio-constructivists (for whom emotions are historically framed and determined by culturally changing settings) has shaped decades of scholarly debates around emotion research.16 Scholars such as Rosenwein, Reddy and Boddice have proposed more nuanced approaches that take into consideration the impact of multidisciplinary research, while emphasising the importance of historical and socio-cultural contexts to develop a more holistic understanding of the role of emotions in different communicative acts.17 While some emotions were constructed and defined to represent and identify a specific political community, they were also recognised and recognisable within broader cross-cultural contexts. Diplomacy, as the process of ‘negotiating contacts’, would necessarily imply that the parties involved were bound to recognise and adopt (whether not adapt) a commonly accepted or at least recognised register. Emotional performance, gesture, and language (the latter often filtered through translation) provided tools to move across geopolitical, religious, and linguistic borders.18

15 Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca NY, 2006). 16 Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2015); Rom Harré, “An Outline of the Social Constructionist Viewpoint,” in The Social Construction of Emotions, ed. Rom Harré (Oxford, 1986), pp. 2–14. 17 William Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38 (1997): 327–351; Reddy, The Navigation of Feelings; Barbara Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context 1 (2010): 1–32; Rosenwein, “Thinking Historically about Medieval Emotions,” History Compass 8, no. 8 (2010): 828–842; Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2017); Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester, 2018); Boddice, A History of Feelings (London, 2019). 18 Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion. Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction 1 (Cambridge, 1990); Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge, 1999); James M. Wilce, Language and Emotion. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language (Cambridge, 2009). - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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A second methodological consideration is how to define diplomacy in the premodern period. According to nineteenth-century views, diplomacy was a mere branch of political history, conceived within the grand narrative of the building of the modern nation-State. By the mid-twentieth century, scholars such as Mattingly defined diplomacy as a predominantly Renaissance phenomenon, datable with the emergence of permanent ambassadorial roles.19 Such rigid views have since been challenged and nuanced20 by historians who have explored the key role and function of written documents in the development of late medieval diplomatic practices.21 The definition of diplomacy adopted in this study includes all the negotiations undertaken directly and indirectly by members of different political communities (sometimes coexisting within the same geopolitical space and yet regarded as ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’) leading to the building of networks of solidarity, trust and friendship aimed at achieving mutually beneficial outcomes. A final methodological aspect to consider is how to approach the study of the cultural influence of the language and performance of emotions in medieval political and diplomatic communication, and how language (both oral and written) functioned as a tool to communicate and ‘generate’ emotions.22 While defining the borders of political communication is an open historiographical debate on its own, the relevance of language to navigate both its pragmatic and symbolic meanings is undeniable.23 19 Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Boston, 1955). 20 Donald E. Queller, The Office of Ambassador in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1967); Pierre Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice in the Middle Ages (London, 2003); Stéphane Péquignot, Au nom du roi: Pratique diplomatique et pouvoir durant le règne de Jacques II d’Aragon (1291–1327) (Madrid: 2009); Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict. Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520 (Oxford, 2015); Serena Ferente, “Diplomacy and Political Writing in Renaissance Italy: Macro and Micro,” in Il laboratorio del Rinascimento: studi di storia e cultura per Riccardo Fubini, ed. Lorenzo Tanzini (Firenze, 2015), pp. 71–88; Kim Bergqvist, Kurt Villads Jensen and Anthony John Lappin, eds., War, Diplomacy and Peacemaking in Medieval Iberia (Cambridge, 2021). 21 Néstor Vigil Montes, “Diplomacia y diplomática: un análisis de las fuentes documentales de la diplomacia bajomedieval,” in Comunicación política y diplomacia en la Baja Edad Media (Évora, 2019). Available at https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cidehus.6880. Accessed May 20, 2022. 22 Michael Bamberg, “Language, Concepts and Emotions: The Role of Language in the Construction of Emotions,” Language Sciences 19, no. 4 (1997): 309–340; Javier E. Díaz-Vera, “Embodied Emotions in Medieval English Language and Visual Arts,” in Sensuous Cognition: Explorations into Human Sentience: Imagination, (E)motion and Perception, eds. Rosario Caballero and Javier E. Díaz Vera (Berlin, 2013), pp. 195–220; Rita Copeland, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2021). 23 Jan Dumolyn, “Political Communication and Political Power in the Middle Ages: A Conceptual Journey,” Edad Media 13 (2012): 33–55; François Foronda, El espanto y el miedo: Golpismo, emociones políticas y constitucionalismo en la Edad Media (Madrid, 2013). - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Trust and Communication

In the Middle Ages, trust was one of the key parameters for regulating political and diplomatic negotiations. As one of the foundations of most social interactions, trust—whether personal or institutional—relied upon the synergy of established legal practices, expected actions based on habits and shared values, but also emotional impulses confirmed and strengthened by the written word.24 Trust, as a culturally determined attitude based on experience, was therefore subject to change and required a process of historicization and communication—oral, written and performed. The written word, in particular, had the potential to generate and confer trust, although there are further questions to be considered in the context of political communication and diplomatic exchanges.25 Did rituals (or ritualised performances) take place before, during or after the creation or handing over of written documents, and how were they meant to enhance the text’s trustworthiness? Could changes be observed in these communication strategies, and if so, when and why? The instrumental, performative, and transformative nature of emotions (and their related language) contributed to shaping these modes of communication in which trust appeared, either or simultaneously, as an emotional response, a rational calculation, and a way of negotiating the spaces of such interactions.26 The physical space of trust often constituted a determining factor of diplo­ matic negotiations, as suggested in the description of the 1238 advance of James I of Aragon’s army towards Valencia, which was still under the rule of Zayd Abū Zayd (c.1195–before 1268, Zaén in the chronicle), the last Almohad ruler of the city.27 The LDF offers an insight into the importance of secrecy and of keeping private spaces to facilitate political negotiations. That was the reason why James I, at the request of one of his noblemen, Fernando Díaz, who liaised with Abū Zayd about the potential surrender of the city, agreed to keep such negotiations secret: “ … we chose a part of the house where we slept, and 24

Susan Reynolds, The Middle Ages Without Feudalism: Essays in Criticism and Comparison on the Medieval West (London, 2012), XIII, pp. 1–15. 25 Petra Schulte, Marco Mostert and Irene van Renswoude, eds., Strategies of Writing: Studies on Text and Trust in the Middle Ages: Papers from “Trust in Writing in the Middle Ages” (Utrecht, 28–29 November 2002) (Turnhout, 2008); László Kontler, Mark Somos, eds., Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought (Leiden, 2018). 26 Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, “Women, Trust and The Politics of Space in Thirteenth-Century Iberia,” in In and Out of the City: Female Environments, Relations and Dynamics of Space (400–1500), eds. Mattia Chiriatti and Carmen Trillo (Leiden, forthcoming); Ian Forrest, “Trust in Long-Distance Relationships, 1000–1600,” Past and Present 238:13 (2018): 190–213. 27 LDF 242, pp. 209–210.

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he said that we had to keep the secret.”28 This is only one among the numerous examples narrated in the LDF that emphasise the importance of secrecy in diplomatic communication and, more specifically, the need for a confined space for negotiations, exclusively open to a few trustworthy members.29 Secrecy, as an essential requirement for military and political negotiations, is nothing new, but what is remarkable in the LDF is the emphasis on the relevance of these secret spheres to express emotions freely. The chronicle shows evident concern with defining both a physical and emotional space of trust, different to the public and ritualised display that might have instead accompanied formal agreements that would have normally followed such preliminary arrangements. We could argue for two stages of managing trust in political and diplomatic negotiations. First, private meetings and negotiations that might have involved a less ritualised expression of emotions, although these episodes are still included in the historical narrative attributed to James I. Significantly, the dissonance between apparent secrecy and the fact that these events were recorded in the chronicle, and therefore made public, raises questions about James I’s specific aims and agenda. The second stage was the signing of written agreements to consolidate the outcomes of those negotiations—as written legitimisation of personal trust—which were often accompanied by ritualised performances that included emotional language, framed through the parameters of a specific source register.30 On 3 June 1239 the citizens of Montpellier—birthplace of James I, of which he claimed natural lordship based on his maternal line—declared their love and vassalage to the King of Aragon through his bailiff Atbrand, although the latter had been himself struggling for power within the city due to the opposition of some members of its consulate.31 According to the LDF, James I interrupted his military campaign aimed at capturing Xàtiva in order to rescue a tense situation—and subsequently his own power—in Provence. He certainly needed the financial support of the city of Montpellier to complete his military campaigns in the south-east of the Iberian Peninsula.32 The LDF narrates 28

“… triam-nos a una part en una casa en què nós jaíem, e dix que tinguéssem secret.” LDF, 242, p. 209. 29 A similar example in LDF 350, p. 266. 30 Marco Mostert and Paul S. Barnwell, eds., Medieval Legal Process. Physical, Spoken and Written Performance in the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2011). 31 Damian Smith, Crusade, Heresy and Inquisition in the Lands of the Crown of Aragon, c. 1167–1276 (Leiden, 2010), p. 58. 32 Robert Burns and Paul Chevedden, Negotiating Cultures: Bilingual Surrender Treaties in Muslim-Crusader Spain under James the Conqueror, Medieval Mediterranean Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400–1453 (Leiden, 1999), pp. 79–82.

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that a great number of the inhabitants of Montpellier from different social groups paid homage to James I on his visit, or they did so through his bailiff. The description of these events from James I’s perspective focuses on the multisensory expression and experience of trust: “And we remained very happy and satisfied with the good words and good will that we had seen and heard”.33 James I acknowledged the reliability of the citizens of Montpellier’s claimed loyalty based on what he could both see and hear. The explicit mention of both these sensorial dimensions is significant, as sometimes the two expressions did not converge (as seen in the opening example of this chapter), revealing a dissonance between genuine intentions and overt performance. The need for multisensory proofs of trust is confirmed when James I remarks upon the following: we said to them that we had always thought that they loved us greatly, but that now we believed that completely, because we recognised the good will they had towards us. Because of what we could see in them.34 The multi-layered components of trust are clearly defined through these examples, providing a reminder of the ways in which it was articulated verbally, in written form (hence legally), in gestures and attitudes. In the medieval mindset, trust and the sensorial experience were closely connected, informing perceptions and representations of both spiritual and secular experiences.35 The evidence provided by the senses could confirm or challenge habit, tradition and in some cases even legal practices, determining emotional reactions that could strengthen trust or generate its opposite. These rational, sensorial, and emotional aspects often converged in political and diplomatic communication. In the negotiations between James I and the aforementioned Abū Zayd, along with the tension that characterised the process of decision-making in which James I engaged, the combined influence of rational thinking and emotional drive is described as prominent in his personal choices:

33 “E nós romanguem molt alegre e pagat de les bones paraules e de la bona volentat que havíem vista e oïda.” LDF 302, p. 241. 34 “… dixem-los que totavia era nostre pensament que ells nos havien molt amat, mays ara ho creíem de tot en tot, perquè coneixíem bé la bona voluntat que ells nos havien molt amat; e, per ço que nós veíem en ells … ” LDF 303, p. 241. 35 Emma J. Wells, “Overview: The Medieval Senses,” in The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain, eds. Christopher Gerrard and Alejandra Gutiérrez (Oxford, 2018), chapter 42.

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When we heard that proposal, we held it, in our heart, to be a good and a fine one, and that he was giving us a great thing, but we said that we would think about it. And we remained thinking for a long while, so long that one could have walked a mile of land in that time36 James’ first instinct to accept Abū Zayd’s offer was overturned after an extended period of reflection. His final decision was unexpected by his noble companion and advisor Fernando Díaz: He marvelled at this and crossed himself, saying he was very much surprised that we should refuse this offer; because if this offer and this deal had been made in the time of our father or our grandfather, they would have jumped and danced at having received such a great fortune.37 James I’s emotional instinct embodied what was ‘expected’ from him, as his decision would have aligned with diplomatic standards, with tradition and custom (hence the reference to his ancestors), and certainly with the expectations of some of his nobles. Yet, the chronicle offers a more nuanced view of the intertwined rational and emotional sides of a complex process of decision-making, which James I might have chosen to emphasise and embellish in his didactic account. The combined rational and emotional aspects that influenced political and diplomatic exchanges occupy a prominent space in James I’s autobiography. On the one hand, this is part of the process of memory recollection and history-writing in which personal and collective memories contributed to create narratives that were both shaping and shaped by emotions. On the other hand, the complexity of such rational and emotional interactions reminds us of the centrality of both individual and collective human actions and reactions as tools of historical agency, beyond established rituals, traditions, and procedures. There are several instances narrated in the LDF in which the emotional side of diplomacy contributed to challenging established procedures by delaying or stirring the expected outcomes of some negotiations. Analysing the breaking of textual standards is a particularly useful approach to examine documentary evidence that might otherwise appear sterile when looking for 36 “E nós, quan oïm la paraula, tinguem-la per bona en nostre cor e per bella e que era gran cosa ço que ens donava, mas dixem-li que ens hi pensaríem. E estiguem una peça pensant, que pogra hom a ver anat una milla de terra …” LDF 242, p. 210. 37 “E ell maravellà’s e senyà’s e dix que fort se meravellava quan aquesta cosa rebutjàvem, car, si aquesta cosa e aquest pleit fos vengut en temps de nostre pare ni de nostre avi, ells saltaren e ballaren de tan gran bona ventura con los seria esdevenguda.” LDF 242, p. 210.

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explicit references to emotional language.38 Moreover, as the LDF explicitly mentions, there were exchanges that were not even recorded in writing. An example is that of Alfonso X, who sent a messenger to James I, asking him to meet in person to discuss an urgent matter that pertained both king’s affairs. As a reply, James I sent his notary, Don Jaume Sarroca, who was also sacristan of Lleida, “Yet he [Alfonso X] sent word to us that he did not want that, rather he begged us in all manners that we should meet with him, as there were things that he would say to nobody in the world but us.”39 Alfonso X’s attitude was motivated by the fact that he was aware that some of James I’s nobles were conspiring against both of them with the support of some Castilian nobles and Muslim leaders from the south. This example is a reminder of the fact that relationships of trust (especially those with political and diplomatic connotations) were fluid and often precarious, as they were influenced by changing socio-political dynamics (including rebellion and conflict), and by the personal interests of those involved. 3

Generating Trust through Language, Rituals and Performance

The description of the surrender of Menorca in 1231 offers an insight into the interplay between gestures and language as signals of ‘trust’. The welcoming of the alcaid (military commander), almoixerif (governor, in charge of collecting taxes) and the sheikhs (leaders of tribes, groups or families) of the island that negotiated the surrender is described in the LDF as a ceremonial practice that mirrored formal embassies, although in this case everything was adapted to the context of a military siege in which such negotiations took place. The account describes how James I ordered his men to use what they had at their disposal to re-create a resemblance of formal procedures: wall decorations had to be improvised from bedcovers; dwellings were “adorned with much fennel, because we had no other type of reed”, while James I and his men prepared by wearing “the best clothes” they had.40 There is also a clear reference to the private space arranged for these negotiations:

38

Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, “Beyond Epistolary Standards? Political and Diplomatic Communication from Thirteenth-Century Iberia,” in How to Ask? Strategies of Entreating in Medieval Eurasia, ed. Petra Sijpesteijn (Amsterdam, forthcoming). 39 “E ell tramès-nos a dir que no ho volia, ans nos pregava que nós nos víssem ab ell en totes guises, car coses hi havia que no les diría a home del món, sinó a nós.” LDF 505, p. 350. 40 “E faem-la bé aguiar e enjoncar de fenoll, que no havíem altre jonc”; “vestim-nos los mellors vestirs que havíem nós e aquells qui ab nós eren.” LDF 122, p. 133.

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And so that those of the army should not disturb us or put pressure on the conversations that we had to have with them, we moved from there, so as better to be able to speak with them.41 Speaking, in this case, was likely happening through the linguistic mediation of “a Jew whom we had given them as an interpreter.”42 Similar procedures applied when Christian embassies were sent to, or summoned by, Muslim leaders, especially in a siege situation. An example is the description of how the king of Majorca received for the second time Don Nunó Sánchez, sent by James I under the request of the Muslim leader, who: ordered a tent to be prepared and seats so that he and Don Nunó could sit there … The entire army stopped fighting while those negotiations took place, and they did no evil to those inside nor did those inside attack those who were outside. And when they were close to one another, the king of Majorca and Don Nunó dismounted and they went straight into the tent. And only the king and two of his sheiks, Don Nunó and the alfaquim (teacher/master), who had gone to interpret, spoke.43 Not only was translation essential to communicate; it was central for promoting and generating trust. We also see this in a passage describing the arrangements for expedition to the island of Menorca aimed at negotiating its surrender: through our alfaquim of Saragossa, named Don Salomó, brother of Don Bahiel, we ordered letters of credence to be made, in Arabic, so that they would trust the three who gave the message in our name.44 Don Bahiel, like his brother Don Salomó, was a Jewish member of a distinguished family from Saragossa who knew Arabic and played a prominent role 41 “E, per tal que els de la host no ens faessen embarg ni presa en les paraules que nós hauríem ab ells, mudam-nos d’aquí, per tal que mills poguéssem parlar ab ells.” LDF 122, p. 133. 42 “… un jueu que nós los havíem lliurat per trujanmà.” LDF 119, p. 130. 43 “… e féu parar una tenda e sos sitis en què siguessen ell e Don Nuno … e tota la host cessava quan eren aquelles vistes, que no faïen als de dins mal, ni els de dins als de fora. E, quan se foren acostat, lo rei de Mallorques e Don Nuno davallaren en la tenda. E parlaren lo rei tan solamente ab dos de sos vells. E Don Nuno e l’alfaquim qui anava per trujanmà.” LDF 76, p. 99. 44 “E faem-los fer carta en algaravia, de creença, a un alfaquim nostre de Saragossa, per nom Don Salamó, germà de Don Bahiel, que creguessen a aquests tots tres de la missatgeria que els dirien per nós.” LDF 118, p. 130.

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in the negotiations undertaken on behalf of James I at Xàtiva, Murcia and Majorca. During the siege of the latter: the Saracens understood that they could not defend the city, and they sent a message to us saying that if we sent messengers to them, they were willing to speak to them; and they asked that these be persons whom we trusted. After consulting his bishop and nobles, James I decided to send some of his trustworthy men and among them “… to interpret, a Jew from Saragossa, who was called Don Bahiel, and knew Arabic.”45 Beyond the functional utility of translation, the role of the translator here was also that of a trustworthy man. This is a reminder that translation, as a complex act of linguistic and cultural transfer, required (even before aiming at generating) trust among different individuals at multiple levels, bringing sender, translator/mediator, and receiver of a message within a dynamic process of recognition, communication, adaptation and recreation; a process often monitored and filtered through the lens of customary and culturally expected reactions.46 The language of trust itself, as a conceptual framework, when examined in its historical, cultural and geographical contexts, reveals a multiplicity of meanings and values associated with its interpretations, uses and adaptations, that might vary when considering different social, economic and cultural structures.47 For instance, in ecclesiastical contexts the adaptable and powerful concepts of trust and faith were crucial in strengthening the position of the Church in western Europe between c.1200 and 1500.48 In mercantile and commercial settings, the language of trust helped generate social bonds, to respect obligations and to guarantee protection of individuals and their businesses. In Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz’s words “like the language of trust, the language of diplomacy makes diplomacy itself 45 “E sobre açò viren los sarraïns que no ho podien defendre e enviaren-nos missatge que volien parlar ab missatges que nós los enviàssem, e que fossen tals en qui nós nos fiàssem.” “… un jueu de Saragossa qui sabia algaravia, per trujanman, e havia nom Don Bahihel.” LDF 74, p. 98. 46 Roser Salicrú i Lluch, “Between Trust and Truth: Oral and Written Ephemeral Diplomatic Translations between the Crown of Aragon and Western Islam in the Late Middle Ages,” in Iberian Babel: Translation and Multilingualism in the Medieval and the Early Modern Mediterranean, eds. Michelle M. Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Fernandez (Leiden, 2022), pp. 124–146. 47 Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, “The Concept of Language of Trust and Trustworthiness: (Why) History Matters,” Journal of Trust Research 10 (2020): 91–107. 48 Ian Forrest, Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church (Princeton, 2018).

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more specific. Where it differs from the language of trust in my opinion is that it does not disclose personal or group values, but rather the political interests and concerns of an entity.”49 While this definition applies to a modern understanding of diplomacy, it is more nuanced for the medieval period, when personal and group values closely aligned with political interests, especially for systems of power centred around individuals and their dynastic networks, such as that of monarchy as a corporate identity.50 Trust was also based on acknowledged values, merits, and reliability, broadly recognised by individuals and communities; they might not have been directly experienced by everyone, but they were based on reputation, fame honour, and renown. In the description of the negotiations for the surrender of Menorca in 1231, alongside the performative diplomatic interaction mentioned above, there is also an open reference to James I’s perceived trustworthiness: “they had heard it said that we were a good lord to our people and they hoped we would also be so with them.”51 Not only was this a recurrent trope often attributed to medieval kings, but—especially when considering long-distance relationships—intellectually accomplished people were regarded as morally worthy and celebrated for their deeds and achievements, even if they were only known indirectly rather than through personal acquaintance. Undoubtedly, James I claimed such a moral stature, although posterity might challenge his view, especially when reading (in this same part of the LDF) what occurred to the Muslim population who refused to surrender and tried instead to escape, and who were subsequently enslaved.52 To judge from the LDF’s description of the conquest of Majorca, cross-cultural diplomatic exchanges encompassed several spheres and aspects. First, in some instances diplomatic procedures were broken, re-defining and challenging the expected terms according to which such interactions should have taken place. Second, the value of emotional language and performance had an impact on such exchanges. Finally, one should consider the cultural parameters that contributed to define and shape such negotiations, including trust, which was often determined by several factors, including gender, social status, and moral worth. The breaking of standard procedures might have served different purposes, including signalling meanings beyond established formulae and 49 Wubs-Mrozewicz, “The concept of language of trust,” p. 94. 50 Erin Jordan, “Corporate Monarchy in the Twelfth-Century Kingdom of Jerusalem,” Royal Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (2019): 1–15. 51 “… car havien oït dir que nós érem bon senyor a les gents nostres, e així havien esperança que seríem a ells.” LDF 121, p. 132. 52 LDF 124, p. 133. Antoni Ferrer, “Captives at the Conquest of Mallorca: September 1229– July 1232,” Imago Temporis: Medium Aevum 13 (2019): 151–176.

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re-framing communication through a new set of parameters. This is what Abū Yaḥyà, wālī (governor) of Majorca (r. 1208–1229), tried to do the first time he sent a message to James I, refusing to speak once the embassy arrived, expecting his interlocutors to start, hence reverting the formal procedure and perceived scale of fear and need between the negotiating parties. At the council later summoned by James I, this diplomatic misunderstanding—presented from the king’s perspective as a cunning attempt by the ruler of Majorca to revert the rules of the game—was reported by Don Nunó (sent to receive the message) “laughing”, perhaps to underplay the possible implications of such a diplomatic incident.53 As the chronicle points out, James I was only twenty-one when leading this military campaign, so his actions were informed—perhaps even more than at later stages—by the advice of his noblemen, but also by his own instinct and outbursts of emotions. What is particularly interesting is the reference to overt emotional gestures to justify, explain and even motivate the development of such negotiations. The King of Majorca—sending back a new call for messengers and this time speaking first, hence following procedures—claimed that he did not understand why James I was “so angry … that he should wish to take the kingdom” of Majorca.54 Whether this was the Muslim leader’s attempt to revert the expected communication dynamics, or a genuine lack of understanding of the ‘crusading’ ideology pushing James I in his territorial expansion is debatable. However, the former seems the most likely option considering the terms of a treaty suggested by the King of Majorca: that he would pay a sum of money to James I within five days and, if the Christians left the island peacefully, nobody would show them “… anything but good treatment and friendship.”55 James I reacted furiously. References to James I’s anger are not unusual in the LDF: not only was ira regia part of a recognised and recognisable ‘emotional regime’ for medieval rulers, but in this case it also played a significant role in defining the didactic value of this text.56 In the Majorcan negotiations, Abū Yaḥyà also reminded Don Nunó that he had enough weapons to defend the city and therefore the loss of the towers previously destroyed by the Christian army would not have had a major impact 53 54 55 56

LDF 74, p. 98. “… con tan fort s’enfelloneix contra mi, que em vol tolre mon regne …” LDF 76, p. 100. “… que neguna re no us faria hom sinó plaer e amor.” LDF 76, p. 100. Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, “Emotional Memory,” pp. 11–15; Gerd Althoff, “Ira Regis: Prolegomena to a History of Royal Anger,” in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara Rosenwein (Ithaca NY, 1998), pp. 59–74; Elena Carrera, “Anger and the Mind-Body Connection in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine,” in Emotions and Health, 1200–1700, ed. Elena Carrera (Leiden, 2013), pp. 95–146; Simon Doubleday, “Anger in the Crónica de Alfonso X,” Al-Masāq 27, no. 1 (2015): 61–76.

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on their defence. The negotiating strategy adopted by the Majorcan king was multi-layered, as it included first, an attempt to blame James I for his unjust attack and ‘angry’ reaction; second, a treaty offering money for the Christian army to leave; finally, an implicit threat of war (through a reminder of the Muslim military defence) if the Aragonese attack persisted. As the chronicle narrates, Don Nunó challenged most of these claims by reminding the King of Majorca that the reason why James I intervened against him was because the Muslim leader had previously attacked some Catalan ships. Moreover, when James I sent a messenger, the Majorcan ruler “replied with great insolence and harshness”, breaking diplomatic procedures by threatening the messenger with his own outburst of anger.57 In the end, an agreement was reached: Then, Don Nunó, hearing the words that the king had said, came to us very happy. And nobody knew about it except him and the alfaquim, and he whispered in my ear that he had good news. And we said that we would send for the bishops and for the nobles, so that they were present when he spoke those words, as for they would have to be made public, it was better than he spoke them in front of everybody.58 Secrecy, essential in the negotiation process, had to be reverted into public sharing of those outcomes in order to be valid. Nonetheless, the offer of surrender by the King of Majorca was rejected by some of James I’s barons and ecclesiastical supporters, who called for revenge instead.59 When they finally realised that this would not have been a wise move, having been summoned by James I—who was inclined to accept a treaty in the first place—they agreed that if another surrender treaty were to be proposed, they would accept it. However, James I could not propose one himself as this would have been interpreted as a sign of weakness.60 James I’s chronicle remarks upon the emotional and physiological impact that the developments of such events caused him, who remained sleepless for three days and nights.61 This is not the first time in the chronicle when we find references to the emotional and physiological impact 57 “… e vós responés-li molt bravament e dura …” LDF 77, pp. 100–101. 58 “Ab tant, Don Nuno, oïdes les paraules que el rei li hac dites, venc a nós molt alegre. No ho sabe null hom sinó ell e l’alfaquim, e dix-nos a l’orella que ens diría bones noves. E dixem nós que enviaríem per los bisbes e per los nobles, que hi fossen denant quan ell diria aquelles paraules, e, pus descubrir s’havien, que més valía que denant tots ho dixés.” LDF 78, p. 101. 59 LDF 79, p. 102. 60 LDF 80, pp. 103–104. 61 LDF 82, pp. 105–106.

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of military and political situations of high pressure: from lack of sleep, sweating and anxiety to anger and sadness.62 The events that occurred in 1247 offer another example. When a messenger arrived with a letter from queen Violant of Hungary (r. 1235–1251)—James I’s second wife and key actor in a number of mediations and diplomatic negotiations—reporting that the Muslim rebel al-Azraq had taken the castle of Penàguila (near Alicante), James I’s emotional reactions are openly described as “perturbed” and “perplexed”: On the one hand we were upset by the affront they had done us, and on the other hand it pleased us, since they gave us the motive and opportunity to avenge ourselves. And that night we could not sleep at all, but we sweated as much as if we were in a bath.63 Emotional memories are a key part of James I’s autobiographical account and historical narrative,64 but it is important to distinguish between references to the language and performance of emotions in diplomatic and political negotiations, and the use of emotional language in the chronicle to frame and decode those exchanges while constructing a historical narrative. The laugher of Don Nunó when reporting about the breaking of procedure by the king of Majorca—discussed above—is an example; why, one might ask, is this detail specifically mentioned in the chronicle? It may perhaps be seen as a rhetorical move emphasising Don Nunó’s attempt to play down the potential confrontational meaning of such encounter; or as a means of evoking his efforts to establish group solidarity and lessen general anxiety.65 Another relevant example, also discussed above, is that of anger, which in diplomatic negotiations could be used as a tool to revert hierarchies and expectations. The mismanagement of negotiations could itself cause suffering, generate fear and humiliation. In 1247, breaking an oath of vassalage sworn to James I’s son, Alfonso, to whom he had made homage for the castles of Alcalá and Perpunchent in 1244,66 the southern warlord al-Azraq led a revolt, capturing several castles, including Penàguila,

62 Some examples in LDF 232, 237 and 255. 63 “E d’una part nos pesava per l’honta que feita nos havia, e d’altra part nos plaïa, car nos daven raó e manera que ens en poguéssem venjar. E anc la nuit no poguem dormir, ans suàvem tan bé con si fóssem en un bany.” LDF 363, pp. 272–273. 64 Liuzzo Scorpo, “Emotional Memories”. 65 Albrecht Classen, ed., Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Epistemology of a Fundamental Human Behavior, its Meaning, and Consequences (Berlin, 2010). 66 Robert Burns, Islam Under the Crusaders: Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth-Century Kingdom of Valencia (Princeton, 1973), p. 325.

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which “saddened and angered” James I deeply.67 Summoning his nobles, bishops and some of the citizens of Valencia, James I called for revenge against al-Azraq, justified by the breaking of a previous agreement, and reminding his men of the need “to take a share in our grief; for just as you would have a share in our good, so you have to have a share in our misfortune and shame.”68 In this speech, James I went a step further, inciting them to feel the same shame that he experienced; an order proceeding from his lordship that reads like an attempt to impose ways of feeling (and acting accordingly) on his subjects. Emotional incitement was a common rhetorical strategy to pursue revenge, but also to promote and sustain military action. During the siege of Majorca—according to the LDF—seeing how frightened his men were at the prospect of fighting against James I’s forces, the alcaid of the island summoned his military forces as follows: And furthermore they talk of something even worse than captivity; that they will take our women and all that they can take there, and once we are in their power, they will be able to rape them and do what they want to them. And I, who have come here among you, would rather lose my head than accept something so cruel against our law … And all the people cried out with a single voice that they would rather die than suffer so great a shame as that would be.69 This is also a reminder of Simon Barton’s concern with “interfaith sexuality in medieval Iberia both as a social reality and as it was imagined and manipulated in the political and cultural discourse of the time.”70

67 “gran dolor e gran ira” LDF 364, p. 273. 68 “E del nostre pesar devets vós haver part, que així con hauríets part del nostre bé, així devets a ver part del nostre dan e de la nostra honta.” LDF 364, p. 273. See also Robert Burns, “The Crusade against al-Azraq: A Thirteenth-Century Mudejar Revolt in International Perspective,” in Warrior Neighbours: Crusader Valencia in its International Context, Collected Essays of Father Robert I. Burns, S.J., ed. Mary Elizabeth Perry (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 219–254. 69 “… e encara dien-nos major cosa, part la cativea: que ens guardaran nostres mullers e guardaran, si res ne traen, e, pus siam en llur poder, forçar-les han e fer n’han a llur guisa. E jo, qui só vengut aquí entre vós, que tan dura cosa soferís contra nostra llei, volria més haver perduda la testa … E cridà tot lo pobre a una vou, e dixeren que més volien morir que sofrir tan gran honta con aquesta seria.” LDF 79, p. 103. 70 Simon Barton, Conquerors, p. 5.

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Gender, Tears and ‘Emotional Diplomacy’

As active agents, queens and noblewomen often embodied a core part of political and diplomatic negotiations.71 An outstanding example of trustworthy counsellor and mediator on the side of James I, as recorded in both the LDF and archival evidence, was his second wife, Violant of Hungary.72 Violant features prominently as James I’s partner in power, whom the king fully trusted for advice, judgment, and mediation. In 1249, she acted as arbiter in the dispute between James I and Peter of Portugal (1187–1255), son of Sancho I of Portugal (r. 1185–1211) and Dulce of Aragon (1160–1198), who was the daughter of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona (from 1131, consort and ruler of Aragon 1137–1162) and his wife, Queen Petronila of Aragon (r. 1157–1164). The dispute followed James I’s expulsion of the Muslim population living in the territories north of Valencia after they rebelled against his authority in 1247. These areas included Morvedre, Almenara, Sogorb and Castelló de Borriana, which were under Peter’s vitalicio and who was therefore financially affected, as the Muslim inhabitants of those lands paid rents to him. As a charter signed on 24th February 1249 reveals, supported by the bishops of Tarragona and Valencia, along with other ‘wise men’, Violant managed to secure an agreement according to which James I would have garrisoned and protected Peter’s castles and their frontiers, while Peter confirmed his obligation to respect the repartimiento (distribution of conquered lands) previously made by James I.73 The LDF emphasises how Violant embodied the qualities of a model queen, acting as a mother and a wife, but also as the king’s chief advisor, loyal companion, and provider of moral support. Her position in the chronicle is in sharp contrast with that of James I’s first wife, Eleanor of Castile (r. 1221–1229), presented as lacking a shared vision of power.74 According to James I’s chronicleautobiography, in 1224/1225, while besieged by rebellious nobles, Eleanor 71 Louise Wilkinson and Sarah J. Wolfson, “Introduction: Premodern Queenship and Diplomacy,” Women’s History Review (2021): 1–10; Theresa Earenfight, ed., Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Abingdon, 2005). 72 Marta VanLandingham, “Royal Portraits: Representations of Queenship in the Thirteenth-Century Catalan Chronicles,” in Queenship and Political Power, pp. 109–119. 73 Archive of the Crown of Aragon, Cancelleria. Pergamins de Jaume I, nº 1146. Available at https://www.jaumeprimer.uji.es/cgi-bin/arxiu.php?noriginal=000941. Accessed Novem­ ber 18, 2022. See also Ambrosio Huici Miranda and María de los Desamparados Cabanes Pecourt, eds., Documentos de Jaime I de Aragón, 5 vols (Valencia, 1976); Josep Torró, “Guerra, repartiment i colonització al regne de València, 1248–1249,” in Repartiments a la Corona d’Aragó (segles XII–XIII), eds. Enric Guinot and Josep Torró (Valencia, 2007), pp. 201–276, 218. 74 Marta VanLandingham, p. 113.

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“broke down in tears”, refusing to follow a dangerous and mostly impractical plan to escape which was suggested by a very young James I. He was nearly seventeen years old when this occurred, even if the chronicle states that he was “no more than fifteen years old”, likely a conscious miscalculation to justify his inexperience and unwise choices.75 Significantly, while these emotional outbursts are described as signs of Eleanor’s weakness and fear, the emotional reactions attributed to Violant often had different meanings, serving as strategies to manage both familial and political negotiations. The fluctuating relationship between James I and his son-in-law, Alfonso X of Castile was frequently balanced, whether not rescued, by both Violant’s and her daughter Yolant’s interventions, in matters where the lines between familial, political, and diplomatic spheres were blurred. In those situations, emotional rhetoric and gestures (or we might want to think of them as political and diplomatic performance) played a significant role. In March 1244, Violant asked James I to allow her to attend his meeting with Alfonso, so that she could help to solve the dispute between them. Adopting negotiating procedures also helped, as “that day passed in joy and happiness, since it was not good that one should speak of any business on the first day.”76 However, the situation turned into an open crisis when Alfonso threatened to take Xàtiva. James I’s explosion of anger was appeased only through Violant’s own emotional intervention, as—the autobiography narrates—she wept to stop him from running away and abandoning these negotiations.77 Tears need to be examined within the widest theological, religious, medical and cultural contexts by which they were framed and understood. In a western Christian landscape, the rise of affective piety, with a strong emphasis on Christ’s suffering, made physical expressions of emotional states a key part of both theological debates and devotional practices.78 Yet, tears as expressions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ emotions had the potential to convey different messages, within and beyond a specific context. In the LDF, for example, tears are equally attributed to members of different cultural and religious communities, beyond gendered perspectives. What they represented and aimed to convey varied widely: from tears of spiritual and devotional performance (LDF 63); 75 LDF 21 and 22, pp. 36–40. 76 “E aquell dia passà’s en alegria e en solaç, perquè no era bé que parlàs hom de neguns feits en lo primer día.” LDF 344, p. 263. 77 LDF 348, p. 265. 78 Piroska Nagy, “Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West,” Social Analysis 48 (2004): 119–37; Elina Gertsman, ed., Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (Abingdon, 2012); Katherine Harvey, “Episcopal Emotions Tears in the Life of the Medieval Bishop,” Historical Research 87 (2014): 591–610.

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tears of joy and relief (LDF 282); sadness and loss (LDF 368); mourning and sorrow (LDF 66, 67, 68); supplication (LDF 109); fear (LDF 22); dishonour and empathy (LDF 168), to tears of compassion and reconciliation (LDF 520). For instance, when James I consulted one of his nobles, Don Jiméno Pérez de Tarazona, and the justiciar of Aragon to complain because the army was not ready to support him: we could not help crying, because of the great evil that we saw they would do us, because they preferred to have the goods of the king of Valencia than to guard our honour and faith that they owe us. And they, seeing us crying, took to crying with us.79 A similar example of empathy—or alignment of emotional display—is recorded in the chronicle when describing how James I decided to remain in El Puig, summoning his men in the church of Santa Maria to confirm that he would not leave before taking Valencia: “When they heard my words, there was nobody in the church who did not begin to weep, and we wept with them.”80 Defining emotional expressions through the lens of sex and gender might be therefore limiting. Emotional reactions of different sorts (including tears) should be studied as part of a distinctive category of analysis—that of ‘emotional diplomacy’—that encompassed a number of ‘emotional communities’, including those in which women, and especially queens and noblewomen, participated actively as political and diplomatic agents, along with their family roles associated with female identity.81 5 Conclusion The analysis of emotional language and gestures adopted by different actors within and across military, political, familial, and diplomatic contexts offers an 79 “E no ens poguem abstenir que no haguéssem a plorar per lo gran mal que veíem que ens percaçaven, que més querien haver del rei de València, que no guardar la nostra honra ni la fe que ens deuen portar. E ells, que ens veeren plorar, prengueren-se a plorar ab nós.” LDF 168, p. 165. 80 “E, quan ells oïren aquesta paraula, no hi hac negú en l´església que no es prengués a plorar, e nós ab ells.” LDF 238, p. 207. 81 Lisa R. Perfetti, ed., The Representation of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Gainesville, 2005); Sophie Harwood, Medieval Women and War: Female Roles in the Old French Tradition (London, 2020).

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overview of complex systems of power relationships in which the lines between ‘public’ and ‘private’, individual and collective, pragmatic and emotional, were extremely blurred and yet they defined and shaped spaces and modes of communication. Trust remained central, in both political and social contexts and it unfolded into a variety of communicative acts, including expressing and managing emotions. Recent philosophical, sociological, anthropological and psychological studies have defined trust as a meta-emotion, one that precedes and defines what we call first order emotions.82 Meta-emotions are conceived as the structure of emotional experiences in narratives, and the latter are essential to understand emotions, especially as we build them through language when referring to an emotional state. As noted by Karen Bauer: Emotions are a means of social communication, and as such they are related to language and structures of social power. The control of emotions can be as important as their expression, and can reveal hierarchies in society at both the macro- and the micro-level, as well as shedding light on the mores and norms of that society.83 The LDF emphasises the role of emotions (and of meta-emotions, such as trust) in the process of decision-making and political communication. Whether these aspects are explicitly mentioned in James I’s autobiography for didactic reasons, or weather instead they were used to legitimise choices which were breaking with tradition and customary practices is hard to establish with any certainty. Whatever the case might be, the study of emotional language, gestures, and performance enhances our understanding of the inextricable bonds between political contexts, communication and human behaviour. The complex social, ethnic and cultural landscape of the Crown of Aragon (and by extension of Iberia and the Mediterranean) provides a fascinating example for reflecting upon modes of diplomatic operation and shaping of political thinking, in which emotional discourses, language and performance were central to promoting, explaining and legitimising different types of connections and exchanges.

82 83

Simone Belli and Fernando Broncano, “Trust as a Meta-Emotion,” Metaphilosophy 48, no. 4 (2017), 430–448. Available at https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12255. Accessed November 20, 2022. Karen Bauer, “Emotions in the Quran: An Overview,” Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 19 no. 2 (2017): 1–31, 9.

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Foronda, François. El espanto y el miedo: Golpismo, emociones políticas y constitucionalismo en la Edad Media. Madrid, 2013. Forrest, Ian. “Trust in Long-Distance Relationships, 1000–1600.” Past and Present 238, no. 13 (2018): 190–213. Forrest, Ian. Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church. Princeton, 2018. Fritz Cates, Diana. Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry. Washington DC, 2009. Gertsman, Elina, ed., Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History. Abingdon, 2012. Harré, Rom. “An Outline of the Social Constructionist Viewpoint.” In The Social Construction of Emotions, ed. Rom Harré. Oxford, 1986, pp. 2–14. Harvey, Katherine. “Episcopal Emotions Tears in the Life of the Medieval Bishop.” Historical Research 87 (2014): 591–610. Harwood, Sophie. Medieval Women and War: Female Roles in the Old French Tradition. London, 2020. Huici Miranda, Ambrosio and María de los Desamparados Cabanes Pecourt, eds. Documentos de Jaime I de Aragón. 5 vols. Valencia, 1976. James I of Aragon. The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon: A Translation of the Medieval Catalan Llibre dels Fets, trans. Damian Smith and Helena Buffery. Farnham, 2003. Jordan, Erin, “Corporate Monarchy in the Twelfth-Century Kingdom of Jerusalem.” Royal Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (2019): 1–15. Kontler, László and Mark Somos, eds. Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought. Leiden, 2018. Lazzarini, Isabella. Communication and Conflict. Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520. Oxford, 2015. Liuzzo Scorpo, Antonella. “Beyond Epistolary Standards? Political and Diplomatic Communication from Thirteenth-Century Iberia.” In How to Ask? Strategies of Entreating in Medieval Eurasia, ed. Petra Sijpesteijn. Amsterdam, forthcoming. Liuzzo Scorpo, Antonella. “‘El mellor amoigo que nos avemos’: Friendship and Political Communication in Thirteenth-Century Iberia.” Cahiers d’Études Hispaniques Médiévales 42 (2019): 107–122. Liuzzo Scorpo, Antonella. “Emotional Memory and Medieval Autobiography: King James I of Aragon (r. 1213–76)’s Llibre dels fets.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10 (2018): 1–25. Liuzzo Scorpo, Antonella. “Women, Trust and The Politics of Space in ThirteenthCentury Iberia.” In In and Out of the City: Female Environments, Relations and Dynamics of Space (400–1500), eds. Mattia Chiriatti and Carmen Trillo. Leiden, forthcoming. Lutz, Catherine and Lila Abu Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion. Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction 1. Cambridge, 1990.

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Mattingly, Garrett. Renaissance Diplomacy. Boston, 1955. Miner, Robert. Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae 1a2ae 22–48. Cambridge, 2009. Mostert, Marco and Paul S. Barnwell, eds., Medieval Legal Process. Physical, Spoken and Written Performance in the Middle Ages. Turnhout, 2011. Nagy, Piroska. “Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West.” Social Analysis 48 (2004): 119–37. O’Callaghan, Joseph. “Kings and Lords in Conflict in late Thirteenth-Century Castile and Aragon.” In Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages, eds. Paul E. Chevedden, Donald J. Kagay and P. G. Padilla. Leiden, 1996, pp. 120–135. Péquignot, Stéphane. Au nom du roi: Pratique diplomatique et pouvoir durant le règne de Jacques II d’Aragon (1291–1327). Madrid, 2009. Perfetti, Lisa R., ed., The Representation of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Gainesville, 2005. Plamper, Jan. The History of Emotions: An Introduction. Oxford, 2015. Queller, Donald E. The Office of Ambassador in the Middle Ages. Princeton, 1967. Reddy, William. “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions.” Current Anthropology 38 (1997): 327–351. Reddy, William. The Navigation of Feelings: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge, 2001. Reynolds, Susan. The Middle Ages Without Feudalism: Essays in Criticism and Comparison on the Medieval West. London, 2012. Rosenwein, Barbara. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca NY, 2006. Rosenwein, Barbara. “Emotion Words.” In Le sujet de l’émotion au Moyen Âge, ed. Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy. Paris, 2008, pp. 93–106. Rosenwein, Barbara. “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions.” Passions in Context 1 (2010): 1–31. Available at https://www.passionsincontext.de/uploads /media/01_Rosenwein.pdf. Accessed October 20, 2021. Rosenwein, Barbara. “Thinking Historically about Medieval Emotions.” History Compass 8, no. 8 (2010): 828–842. Rosenwein, Barbara and Riccardo Cristiani. What is the History of Emotions. Cambridge, 2017. Sabaté, Flocel. “Territory, Power and Institutions in the Crown of Aragon.” In The Crown of Aragon: A Singular Mediterranean Empire, ed. Flocel Sabaté. Leiden, 2017, pp. 172–200. Roser Salicrú i Lluch. “Between Trust and Truth: Oral and Written Ephemeral Diplomatic Translations between the Crown of Aragon and Western Islam in the Late Middle Ages.” In Iberian Babel: Translation and Multilingualism in the Medieval and the Early Modern Mediterranean, eds. Michelle M. Hamilton and Nuria SillerasFernandez. Leiden, 2022, pp. 124–146.

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Salvador Martínez, H. Alfonso X, The Learned: A Biography. Leiden, 2010. Schulte, Petra, Marco Mostert and Irene van Renswoude, eds. Strategies of Writing: Studies on Text and Trust in the Middle Ages: Papers from “Trust in Writing in the Middle Ages” (Utrecht, 28–29 November 2002). Turnhout, 2008. Smith, Damian. Crusade, Heresy and Inquisition in the Lands of the Crown of Aragon, c. 1167–1276. Leiden, 2010. Torró, Josep. “Guerra, repartiment i colonització al regne de València, 1248–1249.” In Repartiments a la Corona d’Aragó (segles XII–XIII), eds. Enric Guinot and Josep Torró. Valencia, 2007, pp. 201–276. Torró, Josep. “The Eastern Regions of al-Andalus before the Conquest by CataloniaAragon: An Overview.” Catalan Historical Review 5 (2012): 11–27. VanLandingham, Marta. “Royal Portraits: Representations of Queenship in the Thirteenth-Century Catalan Chronicles.” In Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. Earenfight, Theresa. Abingdon, 2005, pp. 109–119. Vigil Montes, Néstor. “Diplomacia y diplomática: un análisis de las fuentes documentales de la diplomacia bajomedieval.” In Comunicación política y diplomacia en la Baja Edad Media (Évora, 2019). Published online: 19 May, 2021. Available at https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cidehus.6880. Accessed March 20, 2022. Wells, Emma J. “Overview: The Medieval Senses.” In The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain, eds. Christopher Gerrard and Alejandra Gutiérrez. Oxford, 2018. Wierzbicka, Anna. Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals. Cambridge, 1999. Wilce, James M. Language and Emotion. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language. Cambridge, 2009. Wilkinson, Louise and Sarah J. Wolfson. “Introduction: Premodern Queenship and Diplomacy.” Women’s History Review (2021): 1–10. Wubs-Mrozewicz, Justyna. “The Concept of Language of Trust and Trustworthiness: (Why) History Matters.” Journal of Trust Research 10 (2020): 91–107.

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Part 2 Reassessing Historical and Historiographical Narratives

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Chapter 4

Adapting History to Modern Values? Re-evaluating Vellido Dolfos Fernando Luis Corral 1 Introduction At the end of January 2008, Simon Barton and I visited the archaeological dig and restoration works at the castle of Zamora on the invitation of Francisco Somoza, the architect responsible for the project. Simon was at the Universidad de Salamanca at the beginning of that year to take part in a research project that I was directing on the exercise of power in the kingdoms of León and Castile in the Early Middle Ages. After a tour of the castle, we talked about the blockade of the city by Sancho II of Castile in 1072 and the legends associated with it, and the various versions that have come down to us. One such legend would soon resurface in the political life of the city, inviting the following reflection on the uses and misuses of history. On 24 June 2009, the City Council of Zamora held an ordinary session whose agenda addressed a question related to the city’s medieval history. It was decided that the name of the gate hitherto known as ‘Puerta de la traición’ (the Gate of Betrayal) should be changed to ‘Puerta de la lealtad’ (the Gate of Loyalty).1 This decision of the municipal government might seem trivial when compared to other problems concerning the survival of this city in what is known today as ‘empty Spain’, including its depopulation, a lack of economic investment to support industrial development, and its ageing population.2 Yet, this decision taken by the Council has significant implications for the historical memory of Zamora. Although the instrumentalisation of the past for political ends is nothing new, it is a cause for growing concern among historians, given the repeated use of history to legitimize political views that adapt historical narratives to suit political agendas, often without any academic rigour.3 This issue is significant 1 Annex 1. 2 Sergio del Molino, La España vacía: viaje por un país que nunca fue (Madrid, 2016). 3 On distorting the past see, Alejandro García Sanjuán, La conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado (Madrid, 2013), pp. 21–22.

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because it emphasises the need to offer historical accounts that are both rigorous and attractive. As historians, we must strive to engage the widest possible audience in a more effective way, allowing the public, and not just specialists, to cast aside myths and distortions of history. This necessity for a more accurate and reliable dissemination of history, and of medieval history in particular, is a response to the growing fascination with historical themes in contemporary society, which has prompted historians to engage with the debate of how to disseminate accurate historical information.4 To the difficulties of an accurate dissemination of history through different media one must add the challenges posed by social networks. Historical content is present in the constantly changing digital world, produced with or without expertise, often sharing generic opinions on historical events and processes. This inaccurate dissemination of ‘historical knowledge’ led historians to seriously consider the need to participate more actively in such online debates. In the case of medieval history, the circulation of clichés and falsehoods that are constantly repeated and thus end up attaining a semblance of authenticity and authority among keen, but uneducated, consumers of history have pushed historians to publish work in which they re-establish the value of accessible scholarly research.5 In this study, I will focus on some of the main arguments of the political groups represented in Zamora’s municipal council as recorded in the minutes of the aforementioned meeting, since they are examples of revisionist rewriting of the city’s history and, more broadly, of the history of the Christian kingdoms of the north of the Iberian Peninsula in the last quarter of the eleventh century.6 2

Zamora and the Nationalist Demand for the Recognition of the Kingdom of León

It is impossible to understand the aforementioned 2009 proposal by a local political group to change the name of the Gate of Betrayal to Gate of Loyalty 4 Peter Mandler, “La responsabilidad del historiador,” Alcores 1 (2006): 47–61, 49; José Mª. Mínguez, La historia y el historiador ante la sociedad: lección inaugural del curso académico de la USAL 2010–2011 (Salamanca, 2010), p. 8. 5 In Spain, debates have arisen over the use of terms such as ‘Reconquista’ and ‘Muslim invasion’ by political parties. The press echoes this, see https://elpais.com/elpais/2021/04/17 /hechos/1618673719_346140.html and https://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2019-04-12 /vox-reconquista-andalus-historia-desproposito_1938810/. Both accessed June 10, 2021. 6 See Annexes 1 and 2.

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without considering the geopolitical context of the city. Zamora is part of the autonomous region of Castile and León, a political and administrative construct forged in the reorganization of Spanish territory following the establishment of democracy after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco.7 This autonomous region is the result of the fusion of what were two historical territories in the Middle Ages: the Kingdoms of León and Castile. Despite this administrative union, the idea of the differentiation of the Kingdom of León has been kept alive by minority political groups that gradually became regionalist forces promoting the idea that the western part of the autonomous region of Castile and León, which corresponds to the ancient Leonese kingdom, is discriminated against as a peripheral space. They also argued that since the 1980s the economic development of the area had been monopolised by Valladolid, the Castilian city that is home to the majority of the region’s administrative bodies, and the seat of legislative and executive power in the Autonomy.8 The proposal to change the gate’s name was accepted by all the political formations present at the council and a commemorative plaque was placed beside it.9 The name change was not opposed because the measure lacked economic, social, and political consequences for the municipality, or because it was related to a distant historical event. The proposal, as we shall see, was cloaked 7 The decentralisation of the state had already been addressed in previous historical moments, but it was during the period known as the ‘Transition’ when this process of territorial reorganisation of Spain was reactivated, leading to what is known as the ‘State of the Autonomies’, see Lucrecio Rebollo Delgado, España y su organización territorial: antecedentes, surgimiento, evolución, problemas y propuestas (Madrid, 2018). This territorial reorganisation, in terms of the configuration of the autonomous region of Castilla y León, was not without its problems and was highly complex, see José M. Sánchez Estévez, “Transición y configuración de la autonomía de Castilla y León (1978–1983),” in Regionalismo y autonomía en Castilla y León, ed. Juan A. Blanco Rodríguez (Valladolid, 2004), pp. 137–198. Julio Valdeón argued that the creation of autonomy for Castilla y León was ultimately the result of a political decision that went beyond the “historical tradition of unity in Castilla y León”, see Julio Valdeón, “Castilla y León,” in España, tomo V. Autonomías, ed. Juan P. Fusi (Madrid, 1989), p. 294. José Mª. Monsalvo argues that the current administrative geography of Spain is based on the Middle Ages, although it is a mythified medieval territorialisation, see Edad Media y medievalismo (Madrid, 2020), pp. 80–81. 8 Juan A. Blanco points out that from 1975 onwards, new parties appeared that were not very influential and that emphasised Castilian and Leonese regionalist propaganda, see “La formación de la identidad regional en Castilla y León,” in Regionalismo y autonomía en Castilla y León, ed. Juan A. Blanco Rodríguez (Valladolid, 2004), p. 28. The problems that arose with the creation of the autonomy of Castilla y León with this Leonese tendency have been pointed out in ibid., pp. 30–31. 9 Annex 1.

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Figure 4.1 Zamora. Commemorative plaque installed at the entrance of the city wall gate following the approval of the municipal proposal to change the name in 2009 photo: author

in historical considerations of the importance of looking again at the city’s past in pursuit of ‘historical justice’,10 but in reality had to do with the regionalist demands which continued to be made by minority parties seeking visibility on the local political scene by posing a confrontation between lo leonés and lo castellano.11 The group that filed the motion at the council was the Agrupación de Electores Independientes Zamoranos (ADEIZA, Association of Independent Zamoran Voters), also known as the Unión del Pueblo Zamorano (UPZ, Zamoran People’s Union). The statutes of this party, founded in 1999, established among its programmatic bases the “strengthening and consolidating the signs of Zamoran identity” and “strengthening the characteristics of the 10 Annex 2. 11 The use of the expressions lo leonés (Leonese) and lo castellano (Castilian) refers to the signs of regional identity of the inhabitants of these two historical territories that these regionalist parties try to make visible. The evolution in votes of the regionalist parties in Carlos J. Salgado, La evolución de la identidad regional en los territorios del antiguo Reino de León (Salamanca, Zamora, León) (Salamanca, 2016), pp. 393–400.

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area (características comarcales), taking into account its distinct geographical, social, economic and cultural features.”12 This demand for lo zamorano (the Zamoran identity) defended by UPZADEIZA was a localist manifestation of certain regionalist principles that other parties, such as the Partido Regionalista del País Leonés (PREPAL, Regionalist Party of Leonese Country) and the Unión del Pueblo Leonés (UPL, Leonese People’s Union), both founded in the 1980s, had formulated more broadly, demanding recognition of the País Leonés as heir to the historical Kingdom of León, which would integrate the provinces of León, Zamora and Salamanca, justifying the creation of a Leonese region that could break away from Castile.13 The coincidence of the interests of UPZ-ADEIZA with some of these regionalist parties, like the UPL, led them into electoral pacts during the municipal elections of 2011.14 This regionalist-nationalist leonesista ideology had an implicit influence on the proposal to change the name of Zamora’s castle gate. ADEIZA’s political manoeuvre to present its demand as a proposal, did not seek to highlight the historical truth of whether that particular gate in the walled precinct of Zamora was the actual place by which a historical Vellido Dolfos entered the city to take refuge after killing the Castilian king, or the greater or lesser importance of Vellido within the broader political process that was being settled with the siege of the enclave. ADEIZA used this proposal to present the action of Vellido, whom it described as a Galician-Zamoran knight, as a victory of the Leonese against the Castilians. In the search for cohesive signs of identity that could link Zamora to the País Leonés, UPZ-ADEIZA turned to a figure coming from a bygone era, the Middle Ages, which as on so many other occasions has been transformed into a useful resource for legitimizing nationalist (here very local and regional) demands of the present.15 12

This is recorded in the founding act of the political party, which was substantiated before the notary of Zamora, Juan Luis Hernández Gil Mancha, on 4 March 1999. The statutes of the political parties are available at https://sede.mir.gob.es/opencms/export/sites /default/es/procedimientos-y-servicios/partidos-politicos/. Accessed August 8, 2021. 13 Salgado, La evolución, p. 389. The statutes of UPL and PREPAL available at https:// www.upl.es/estatutos-de-upl/, http://www.prepal.eu/p/organizacion.html. Both accessed August 8, 2021. 14 The local press echoed this, see https://www.laopiniondezamora.es/benavente/2010/11/16 /upl-adeiza-iran-coalicion-municipales-1456474.html. Accessed August 8, 2021. The similarity between UPZ-ADEIZA and UPL is highlighted by Salgado, La evolución, pp. 396–397. 15 The use of the Middle Ages by nineteenth-century nationalism in Monsalvo, Edad Media, pp. 28–29. This tendency to search for identity references in the Middle Ages has transcended the construction of nineteenth-century nationalism and is perpetuated in the emergence of contemporary regionalisms. Thus, this specific case in Zamora could be

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This study does not aim to delegitimize this demand for rights and resources by the Autonomy of Castile and León, where Zamora is located, which have been claimed for decades. Nor is it intended to judge whether the creation of an exclusively Leonese geographical and administrative territory, that could be traced onto the frontiers of the former Kingdom of León, is a plausible project. Every political demand made within legal channels is legitimate and worthy of respect, but it is a very different matter to misuse history to legitimize modern political positions. Under the pretext of adapting the traditional historical ideas about an event related to the city’s medieval period to modern times,16 UPZ-ADEIZA turned to a crude revisionism, lacking any scientific-historical methodology, to undo the image of Vellido Dolfos as a Castilian traitor and cloak him in the aura of a Zamoran—and by extension, Leonese—liberator, and to turn him into the executing hand of justice against the Castilian king, Sancho II, whom UPZ-ADEIZA described as a tyrant.17 The document presented by the UPZ-ADEIZA representative Miguel Á. Mateos at the plenary session of the city council was based on a premise that—from a historical perspective—fatally undermines the rest of its discourse. According to the proposal, both the chronicles closest in time to the events, which are not contemporary, and those written later reflect accurately what happened in the siege of Zamora. At no point there is mention of the possible literary and/or legendary nature of those details, whose account derives from the lost Cantar de gesta of Sancho II, a work adapted by one of the chronicles referenced by the ADEIZA proposal.18 The attribution of ‘truth’ to all the details narrated by these chronicles based on a lost cantar means that there is no doubt about the existence of Vellido Dolfos as presented in the different accounts, despite part of a larger-scale phenomenon on the European continent, Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe. A Cultural History (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 239–241. 16 On ‘presentism’ in Historical analysis, see Alberto Montaner, “Acusar y defender en la Edad Media: una aproximación conceptual,” in Historia de la abogacía española, 1, ed. Santiago Muñoz (Pamplona: Aranzadi Thomson Reuters, 2015), p. 239. Historians link this ‘presentism’ to anachronism, see Alejandro Quiroga, “La trampa de la equidistancia. Sobre la historiografía neoconservadora en España,” in El pasado en construcción, ed. Carlos Forcadell, Ignacio Peiró and Mercedes Yusta (Saragossa, 2015), p. 361. 17 See paragraphs 5, 6 and 7 of Annex 1. In Annex 2 we see very striking political assessments of the reinterpretation of history and “historical justice”. In the local press, see https:// www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2010/12/22/castillayleon/1293034786.html. Accessed June 4, 2021. 18 This Cantar of Sancho II in different versions seems to be the main source for the account of the Siege of Zamora in chronicles such as the Najerense, the Estoria de Espanna by Alfonso X and the De Preconiis Hispaniae by Fray Juan Gil, see Charles T. Fraker, “Sancho II: Epic and Chronicle,” Romania 95, no. 380 (1974): 467–507, 476.

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the fact that the traits attributed to this figure could also have been literary inventions of Sancho’s Cantar intended to render more vivid the account of the Castilian king’s assassination before the besieged city’s walls.19 At first glance, it does not look like there had been any prior study of the historical documentation on the subject that would permit a critique of the sources and consideration of the elements mentioned before drawing up the proposal presented at the council session. I say ‘at first glance’ because I very much doubt that such was the case, given that the person who made the proposal on behalf of ADEIZA, Miguel Á. Mateos, had a background in history, even if he was not a medievalist.20 In drafting the proposal to rename the rampart gate, priority was given to the aforementioned political demand—even if this was not explicitly stated—where romantic regionalist imagery outweighed historical evidence, and Vellido Dolfos was a necessary element to carry this argument that seeks an identitarian confrontation between lo leonés and lo castellano. The proposal lacks any historical methodology and there are several problems, including a lack of distinction between different types of sources and their chronology. For example, the proposal equates Alfonso X’s Estoria de Espanna with later histories and even with romances and poems, hence assuming that the details contained in all these accounts of the siege of Zamora and the king’s assassination are historically accurate. There is no reference to any historical source—apart from those mentioned above—that would help identity Vellido Dolfos, and those gathered in Zamora during the siege. The proposal invokes research into what it calls ‘current historiography’ to interpret what happened during the siege in the light of new approaches, without naming any scholarly research on this subject, despite the claim that academic support for its arguments exists. There is also anachronism in presenting the belligerence of Sancho of Castile as tyranny, and Vellido’s action against him as just, relying on treatises of moral philosophy from the seventeenth century and even later. These elements, among others, reflect the will to mould history to fit the political demand that underlies this proposal and has driven ADEIZA, along with other political groups, to present Vellido Dolfos over the last few

19 Salustiano Moreta presents Vellido as a “purely imaginary character” who, once he had fulfilled his role in the tragedy, was of no interest either to minstrels or chroniclers, see Mío Çid el Campeador (Zamora, 2000), p. 182. 20 Miguel Á. Mateos obtained his Phd. in history in 1987 and has been a history teacher for years in one of the secondary schools in the city of Zamora, see https://dialnet.uniri oja.es/servlet/tesis?codigo=168136. Accessed June 4, 2021.

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years as the city’s liberator, a Zamoran hero and, by extension, a hero of the Leonese against the Castilians.21 3

Who Was Vellido Dolfos and What Have We Been Told about His Identity?

Answering the first part of this question should be relatively simple for anyone familiar with the medieval history and literature of the Iberian Peninsula. Yet, the answer is complex. The figure of Vellido Dolfos is linked to historical events that occurred during the fratricidal war involving the kings Sancho II of Castile, Alfonso VI of León and García of Galicia following the death of their father Fernando I of Castile and León in 1065.22 Our understanding of this period of conflict after Fernando’s death is relatively confused as few diplomas have survived from the royal chanceries and ecclesiastic institutions to shed enough light on these events. The majority of the information that has come down to us has done so through chronicles that were mostly written significantly later than the events recounted.23 As historians, we must be cautious in evaluating the information that narrative sources offer about specific events, as they might have also incorporated literary, epic, and poetic elements to 21

This view of Vellido Dolfos by the different Leonese political parties has been conveyed to society through the press over the years: https://www.laopiniondezamora.es /zamora/2004/10/02/reivindican-figura-vellido-dolfos-centros-1973614.html; https://www .abc.es/espana/castilla-leon/abci-bellido-dolfos-villano-heroe-200310200300-215248 _noticia.html; https://www.zamoranews.com/articulo/zamora/la-no-colocacion-ban dera-leonesa-en-el-ayuntamiento-en-el-947-aniversario-del-fin-del-cerco-de-zamora -lleva-a-los-leonistas-a-la-protesta-en-la-plaza-mayor/20191012183342108716.html. All accessed June 24, 2021. 22 Reig’s reflection on the questions that exist about Vellido Dolfos is interesting because since she presented her work, little progress has been made in this regard, see El Cantar de Sancho II y el Cerco de Zamora (Madrid, 1947), pp. 21–24. 23 Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VI 1065–1109 (Princeton, 1988), pp. 62–63; Andrés Gambra, Alfonso VI: cancillería, curia e imperio. Estudio I (León, 1997), p. 78. The struggle for power of the sons of Fernando I in José Mª. Mínguez, Alfonso VI. Poder, expansión y reorganización interior (Hondarribia, 2000), pp. 39–48; Fernando Luis Corral, “Leoneses y castellanos en el cerco de Zamora,” in Fundamentos medievales de los particularismos hispánicos, IX Congreso de Estudios Medievales 2003 (Ávila, 2005), pp. 391–410; “La infanta Urraca Fernández, prolis imperatoris Fredenandi et soror regis”, in La Península en la Edad Media: treinta años después, eds. José Mª. Mínguez and Gregorio del Ser (Salamanca, 2006), pp. 201–218; “‘Y sometió a su autoridad todo el reino de los leoneses’: formas de ejercicio del poder en la Historia Silense o cómo Alfonso VI llegó al trono,” E-Spania: Revue électronique d’études hispaniques médiévales 14 (2012). Available at https://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/21696. Accessed July 26, 2021.

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embellish the story. Faced with the dearth of quality information on this period, the problem we face is that the figure of Vellido is only identified through these chronicles. David Porrinas argues that no contemporary sources record what happened, and what we have is a “literary panorama of the events” preserved through the much later chroniclers’ prose rendering of the troubadours’ views composed after the events.24 Similarly, as Salustiano Moreta wrote in his peculiar monograph on the historical and epic figure of El Cid: “were it not for the Cantar of Sancho II and the related romances, no one today would remember the treacherous end of the King of Castile, Sancho II, or its tragic circumstances … The decisive scene of the drama concerns the death by treachery of King Sancho [attacked] from behind, attributed by legend to a sinister knight by the name of Bellido Dolfos.”25 According to Alberto Montaner y Francisco Bautista, this lost epic song, mentioned by Moreta, was the basis of the account of the twelfth-century Chronica Naierensis and the episode of the siege of Zamora in Alfonso X’s Estoria de Espanna. The latter, written in the 13th century, is the chronicle that offers the most detail about Vellido Dolfos and his actions during the siege, which was later copied into other chronicles and accounts.26 Bernard F. Reilly argued that the Castilian king’s assassination “was bound to capture the literary imagination and one can catch echoes of what had been done with it already by the time of the composition of the Crónica Najerense in the last quarter of the twelfth century. The full tide of that literary effort is reflected in the thirteenth-century historians.”27 Not all the chronicles that record Sancho II’s assassination during the Castilian siege of Zamora treat the event with the same attention and detail. It is thus notable that while most of these sources narrate the King’s murder, not all of them mention Vellido Dolfos or name him as regicide.28 The chronicles 24 David Porrinas, El Cid. Historia y mito de un señor de la guerra (Madrid, 2019), p. 62. 25 Moreta, Mío Çid, p. 179. 26 Alberto Montaner, “La huida de Vellido, ¿por las puertas o el postigo? (O de la Chronica Naierensis y las fuentes alfonsíes),” in Actes del X Congrés Internacional de l’Associació Hispànica de Literatura Medieval: Alicante, 16–20 de septiembre de 2003, vol. 3, eds. Josep Lluís Martos, Josep Miquel Manzanaro and Rafael Alemany (Alicante, 2005), pp. 1179–1180. Montaner stresses the oral transmission of the facts relating to the siege as a source used in the construction of the version of the Alphonsine workshop, see ibid., pp. 1188–1189. Francisco Bautista, “El episodio épico de la división de los reinos por Fernando I y el Cantar de Sancho II,” Studia Zamorensia 15 (2016): 57–64, 57. A key study of the Cantar of Sancho II and the siege of Zamora is the one authored by Reig. 27 Reilly, Kingdom, p. 66. 28 An interesting compilation of sources on Sancho II in Miguel C. Vivancos, Reinado y diplomas de Sancho II de Castilla y León (Madrid, 2014), pp. 41–43 and pp. 219–251. Vivancos

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offer a picture of uncertainty as far as the identification of the miles (knight) who killed Sancho II concerns. Among the chronicles that do not name the regicide, we could highlight the Historia Legionense (formerly Silense, composed in the first third of the 12th century) and the Chronicon Compostellanum (composed after 1126). Both mention the siege of Zamora by Sancho and his troops and signal that it was a miles who ended the monarch’s life by means of subterfuge (dolo). The Legionense qualifies the anonymous miles as “courageous”; in the Chronicon this miles is sent out of the city by the Zamorans with the aim of assassinating the king.29 One of the first chronicles to introduce the name of the regicide is the Chronicon Regum Legionensium composed around the year 1120 by Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo.30 It would not be the only one to do so and as time passed, the description of the siege of Zamora in the chronicles gained in detail and literary richness, as did the action of the miles who killed the king, who acquired a name, feelings, ambitions and a larger, more defined role in the denouement of the siege.31 Thus, in the Chronica Naierensis, at the end of the twelfth century, more details are already being introduced about the events surrounding the blockade of Zamora and about Vellido Dolfos, who is given the epithet filius perditionis (son of doom) to mark him as a malevolent figure who murdered Sancho II by deceitful means.32 However, there is no doubt that the

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mentions two Muslim authors—Ibn al-Khatib and Ibn Idari—who report the news of the death of the Castilian king, but he only reproduces the text of Ibn al-Khatib. Ibn Idari mentions that Urraca managed to convince one of Sancho’s men to kill him. Later, Alfonso VI ordered this traitor to be killed, Ambrosio Huici, Ibn Idari: Al-Bayan al-Mugrib. Nuevos fragmentos almorávides y almohades (Valencia, 1963), pp. 120–121. Chronica hispana saeculi XII. Pars III, Historia Silensis, ed. Juan A. Estévez Sola (Turnhout, 2018), ch. 8; Emma Falque, “Chronicon Compostellanum,” Habis 14 (1983): 73–84, 80. “Milite nomine Velliti Ayulphi per proditionem”, “Chronicon Regum Legionensium, Pelagii oventensis episcopi,” in Las crónicas latinas de la Reconquista, ed. Ambrosio Huici, vol. 1 (Valencia, 1913), p. 325. On Vellido’s feelings about Urraca Fernández, see José Luis Martín Rodríguez, “Vellido Dolfos ¿Traidor o héroe enamorado?” Anuario Brasileño de Estudios Hispánicos 4 (1994): 311–318; Alan Deyermond, “La sexualidad en la épica medieval española,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 36, no. 2 (1988): 778–779. Chronica Hispana saeculi XII. Pars II, Chronica Nairensis, ed. Juan Antonio Estévez Sola (Turnhout, 1995), Book III, ch. 16, Lines 15–33. On the use of this epithet, see Ariel Guiance, “Ir contra el fecho de Dios: Regicidios y regicidas en la cronística castellana medieval,” História: Questões & Debates 41 (2004): 85–105, 101. This connection with the evil associated with the Devil is repeated in the Crónica latina de los Reyes de Castilla where Vellido is described as “satellite Sathane”, “Chronica latina regum Castellae,” in Chronica Hispana saeculi XIII, ed. Luis Charlo (Turnhout, 1997), p. 36.

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details of the Zamoran siege and the death of Sancho attain their most brilliant expression in the Estoria de Espanna. This is a very important work because it has been preserved in two different versions and in later chronicles and other accounts.33 The Estoria is the first text to offer a fuller portrait of Vellido Dolfos, incorporating information from earlier chronicles—such as those of Lucas of Tuy and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada—and various songs and romances.34 The incorporation of all these elements into the Estoria by Alfonso X’s scriptorium, which includes historical information and elements originating from the oral troubadour tradition, made it possible to give a more vivid and literary tone to the account of the siege, giving the narrative greater complexity, moving away from the cold, laconic record of the Castilian king’s death in 1072 at the hands of an anonymous miles.35 The search for traces of Vellido Dolfos in the diplomas of the documentary archives that we know today is less fruitful than in the chronicles. Bernard F. Reilly summarises the situation in his study of the reign of Alfonso VI, stating that he was unaware of the existence of any contemporary charter that bore the name of Vellido Dolfos or Arias Gonzalo, even though they appear repeatedly in the chronicles.36 Assuming the absence of documentary evidence for Vellido Dolfos, José María Mínguez asserted that “there are many members of the second and third ranks of the nobility of whom we 33

Inés Fernández-Ordoñez, “La transmisión textual de la « Estoria de España » y de las principales « Crónicas » de ella derivadas,” in Alfonso X el Sabio y las crónicas de España, ed. Inés Fernández-Ordóñez (Valladolid, 2000), pp. 219–260. 34 Manuel González highlights this variety of sources used in the composition of the Alphonsine work, Alfonso X el Sabio (Barcelona, 2004), pp. 428–429. Alberto Montaner, “Lo épico y lo historiográfico en el relato alfonsí del Cerco de Zamora,” Studia Zamorensia 15 (2016): 65–89. 35 Alfonso X, el Sabio, Primera Crónica General de España, II, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, (Madrid, 1977), ch. 830–839. A more accurate version of the Estoria de Espanna by Alfonso X is available at https://blog.bham.ac.uk/estoriadigital/. Accessed August 02, 2021. The Siege of Zamora from ch. 842 (Trans. E2, p. 149V) to 850 (Trans. E2, p. 154v.). The insertion of epic matter in the account of the Siege of Zamora in the Estoria de Espanna, as well as giving prominence to other characters beyond Sancho II or the Cid Campeador in Patricia Rochwert-Zuili, “El Cerco de Zamora en la historiografía alfonsí y neoalfonsí: el hijo rebelde, el caballero y la reina,” Studia Zamorensia 15 (2016): 91–102. 36 Reilly, Kingdom, p. 67. According to the chronicles, Arias Gonzalo was in charge of the upbringing of the infanta Urraca Fernández. During the siege of the city, he was her most faithful advisor and in charge of the military defence of the city. His sons confronted the Castilian Diego Ordóñez in single combat after he challenged the city, accusing the people of Zamora of being traitors for conspiring with Vellido Dolfos to assassinate King Sancho II, see Alfonso X, el Sabio, Primera Crónica General de España, II, ch. 828, 831, 834 and 839; and also Estoria de Espanna at https://blog.bham.ac.uk/estoriadigital/. Accessed January 12, 2022, ch. 840, 843, 846 and 851.

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have no documentary record”37 so this documentary absence should not necessarily prevent us from accepting that this miles mentioned in the chronicle really existed and killed the Castilian king, but left no mark in the diplomas because he was otherwise of little interest to the scribes of the time. In recent years, some researchers have granted Vellido Dolfos historical status, accepting his identification with the figure of the siege. Margarita Torres argues that he was a Zamoran knight whose “earliest appearances in the documentation placed him in the aristocratic circle closest to King Fernando I and Queen Sancha in the second half of the eleventh century”. Moreover, she states that this Vellido Dolfos of the siege of Zamora whom she finds in the charters did not die by execution or disappear without further ado after the Castilian king’s assassination in 1072.38 These claims are based on various documents from the monastery of Sahagún. The first refers to January 1057 and recounts a dispute brought before King Fernando I in Castrofroila in which the monastery of Sahagún clashed with a Gutier Vélaz and his heirs.39 It is worth noting that among these heirs, there was a certain “Uellite Adulfizi”. The information in this document allows us to draw a few conclusions. First, one of Gutier Vélaz’s heirs was a man named Vellido Adolfez; second, we note a homonymy with the figure of the siege of Zamora; and, third, the explicit reference to these heirs might lead us to think that—possibly—this Vellido and the others named in the charter were part of the local elite of Villada, like Gutier Vélaz, even if there is no reference to any aristocratic title for him or any of the other heirs mentioned. It is impossible, without further information, to argue with certainty that these heirs’ appearance in a diploma with the Leonese king links them to him in some special way or that they belong to his closest circle, all the more so when the document itself says nothing explicit about their relationship. Fernando I appears in the document only because the monastery of Sahagún was one of the parties in the dispute: the monastery had a special connection to the Leonese monarchy and tended, whenever possible, to settle 37 Mínguez, Alfonso VI, p. 46. 38 Margarita Torres Sevilla. “Voz Vellido Dolfos”. Available at http://dbe.rah.es/biografias /6055/vellido-bellido-dolfos. Accessed July 26, 2021. 39 Marta Herrero de la Fuente, Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (857–1230), II (1000–1073) (León, 1988), doc. 588. In addition to Torres, Montaner and Escobar also use this chart to identify Vellido, although they state that there is “a certain distance in time”—15 years—between the diploma on which the presumed Vellido appears documented and the time of the Siege. In our opinion, this fact generates a methodologically unsound position to consider the identification as 100% certain, based only, as we shall see, on homonymy, see Alberto Montaner y Ángel Escobar, Carmen Campidoctoris o poema latino del Campeador (Madrid, 2001), p. 238; Montaner, “La huida,” footnote 2, p. 1179 and Margarita Torres, “Voz Vellido Dolfos,” available at http://dbe.rah.es/biografias /6055/vellido-bellido-dolfos. Accessed July 26, 2021. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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its lawsuits before the king, who in this case used Castrofroila, a prominent place, to represent his royal power.40 On the basis of this charter from 1057, it is difficult to claim that Uelliti Adulfizi was part of “the aristocratic circle closest to King Fernando I and Queen Sancha in the second half of the eleventh century”, as Torres asserts.41 Regardless of whether this Uellite from 1057 is or is not the Vellido linked to the siege, the charter itself does not permit us to say anything beyond the coincidence of their names. Besides this document from 1057, Torres used two others, dated 1074 and 1078.42 They are legal acts recording a sale and a donation, respectively, by a certain Armentario Vélaz, an aristocrat linked in some way to Alfonso VI.43 In February 1074 he and his wife Flamla sold a plot of land in Valdespino to a certain “Uelite Ariolfiz, cognomento Eudesindo”.44 Four years later, Armentario made a donation to the monastery of Sahagún in which, by order of Alfonso VI, he ceded the village of Otero, near Valdespino, and half of the village of Juarilla. Regarding the donation of the village of Otero, the document specifies that four plots were not part of the transaction and mentions their owners, one of whom was a certain “Uillidi Ariulfiz”.45 These documents offer some certainties: first, it can be asserted that the “Uelite Ariolfiz, cognomento Eudesindo” of February 1074 is the same person as the “Uillidi Ariulfiz” of January 1078. A Uellite or Vellido had at least an economic link to Armentario Vélaz, from whom he bought a plot of land that was later exempted from the donation that Armentario made to the monastery of Sahagún. Second, the “Uellite Adulfizi” of 1057 and the “Uillidi Ariulfiz” of 1074 and 1078 almost correspond in name and in being figures of a certain economic status in the local communities of Villada and Valdespino, respectively. Do these three documents allow us to say that “Uellite Adulfizi” (1057) and “Uillidi Ariulfiz” (1074/1078) were the same person? We have seen that they align on certain points: they have very similar names, economic standing and 40

On the relevance of Castrofroila as a place of representation of the power of the Leonese monarchy, see María Pérez Rodríguez, “Castrofroila: la representación del poder central en la ribera del Cea (siglos X–XII),” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 33 (2015): 173–199. In 1091, Alfonso VI resolved another dispute in Castrofroila in which the monastery of Sahagún defended its rights against the inhabitants of Villavicencio, see Fernando Luis Corral, Villavicencio en la Edad Media: propiedad y jurisdicción en los valles del Cea y del Valderaduey (Valladolid, 2003), pp. 170–179. 41 See Margarita Torres, “Voz Vellido Dolfos”. 42 Marta Herrero, Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (857–1230), III (1073–1109) (León, 1988), doc. 732 and 762. 43 Armentario Vélaz also appears in other charters, Herrero, Sahagún II, doc. 707 and 719. 44 The place is Valdespino Vaca, near Gordaliza del Pino (province of León), see Mª. Fátima Carrera, El valle del Cea a través de la toponimia documental (Madrid, 2010), pp. 188–191. 45 Herrero, Sahagún III, doc. 762. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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social importance derived from their place among the local aristocracy of an area connected to the monastery of Sahagún. The places where these two Vellidos had interests were only 18 km apart, located in the area of the Cea and Valderaduey rivers. Yet, beyond these coincidences, and even assuming that they could be the same person with multiple interests in this interfluvial zone between 1057 and 1078, these documents do not permit us to say whether this was the same Vellido Dolfos of the chronicles, songs and romances. Beyond the coincidence of the name, none of the charters identify this Uelite, Uellite or Uillidi as the same figure from the legend of the siege of Zamora. The first charter predates the siege of 1072 by 15 years, and as Mínguez claims, many members of the local aristocracy left no documentary trace.46 What is striking is that in the charters of 1074 and 1078 the scribe made no reference to this Uillidi as a regicide. We know that, on other occasions, scribes noted information relating to historical events that they deemed worthy of memory—events such as the coronation of a king, his death or the conquest of a place.47 However, we must also appreciate that it is not so strange that there be no trace of Vellido Dolfos in the documents after the regicide, since he also disappears from the chronicles as soon as he has accomplished his mission, leaving us none the wiser as to his fate.48 46

Simon Barton raised the difficulty of studying the lay aristocracy in the kingdoms of León and Castile before 1300 due to the disappearance of the archives of the aristocratic families before that date. Furthermore, he argued that the surviving documents were “desperately laconic”, see Simon Barton, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile (Cambridge, 1997), p. 2 and p. 6. The data in the diplomas on the aristocracy are fragmentary or generic and many of them have been lost. Sonia Vital confirms this in her study of Count Gonzalo Peláez in the reign of Alfonso VII, and by Fernando Luis Corral in the case of the boni homines as local aristocracy, see Sonia Vital, Alfonso VII de León y Castilla (1126–1157). Las relaciones de poder en el centro de la acción política y social del Imperator Hispanieae (Gijón, 2019), p. 39; and Fernando Luis Corral, “Lugares de reunión, boni homines y presbíteros en Valdevimbre y Ardón en la Alta Edad Media,” Medievalista 18 (2015), available at https://doi.org/10.4000/medievalista.1093. Accessed September 09, 2021. 47 Historical memory and the ‘micro-narratives’ in Amaia Arizaleta, “Topografías de la memoria palatina: los discursos cancillerescos sobre la realeza (Castilla, siglos XII y XIII),” in Memoria e Historia. Utilización política en la Corona de Castilla al final de la Edad Media, ed. Jon Andoni Fernández and José R. Díaz de Durana (Madrid, 2010), pp. 51–53. The act in which Alfonso IX of León was knighted by Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1188 is documented in the dating of a document of the same year and in an enquiry of 1220, see Julio González, El reino de Castilla en la época de Alfonso VIII (Madrid, 1960), doc. 505 y Julio A. Pérez Celada, Documentación del monasterio de San Zoilo de Carrión (Burgos, 1986), doc. 84. 48 Salustiano Moreta points out that we will never know what happened to this character who, for him, is “purely imaginary”. He points to several versions of his tragic end, see Moreta, Mío Cid, pp. 182–183.

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As for the Zamoran origins that Torres claims for Vellido Dolfos, and which ADEIZA’s proposal also referred to,49 they depend on the parental connection that Torres suggests between Vellido Dolfos and Pelayo Vellitiz, and which is highly unlikely for it is not indicated in any diploma or chronicle of the time.50 Pelayo had property in Zamora, as we know from a document of 1093 in which Alfonso VI granted him a privilege of exemption for a property he and his wife owned in the area of Villalpando.51 Torres suggested that if the man she affirms to be a descendent of Vellido—due to the use of Vellitiz in his name—held property in the Zamora area it is because his family had roots in that area, and from this she infers that Vellido was a Zamoran knight. The document of 1093 makes no mention of Pelayo’s filial connection to Vellido Dolfos and no reference to his birthplace has been found in any other diploma. As medievalists, we are conscious of the dangers of homonymy in historical documents and we should not lose sight of the fact that Vellido was a very common name at the time, as evident from a significant number of eleventh and twelfth century diplomas.52 The filiation that Torres claims to establish 49 The “Galician-Zamoran” origin of Vellido Dolfos is raised in Annex 1. Although the entry of the voice “Vellido Dolfos” in the Electronic Biographical Dictionary of the RAH (available at https://dbe.rah.es/db~e. Accessed September 21, 2021) dates from 2018, already in 2006, in cultural circles dedicated to the dissemination of the history of the kingdom of León, the link that Margarita Torres makes between Vellido and Pelayo Vellítiz was mentioned, see https://corazonleon.blogspot.com/2006/02/bellido-dolfos-hroe-de-zamora-iii.html. Accessed September 21, 2021. 50 Pelayo Vellítiz frequented the circles of power at the court of Alfonso VI at least between 1075 and 1094. Gambra identifies Pelayo Vellítiz in 30 charters, but none of them mentions his affiliation, other than he occupied the position of steward of Alfonso VI at least between the spring of 1079 and 1085, see Andrés Gambra, Alfonso VI: Estudio, p. 573, and Colección Diplomática II (León, 1998), docs. 32, 62, 63, 65, 68, 71, 72, 74, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 91, 100, 105, 107, 114, 119, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131. 51 Gambra, Alfonso VI: Colección, doc. 125. 52 The development of genealogical and anthroponymic studies, which already have a strong tradition among medievalists, has led researchers to confront the problems of homonymy, sometimes making it difficult to identify individuals, see Ignacio Álvarez Borge, “La nobleza castellana en la Edad Media: familia, patrimonio y poder,” in La familia en la Edad Media: XI Semana de Estudios Medievales, ed. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte (Logroño, 2001), p. 7. A glance at the indexes of names in different documentary collections shows that the name Vellido, in its different variants, is very common, see José Mª. Fernández Catón, Index verborum de la documentación medieval leonesa, vol. IV, Archivo Catedral de León (775–1300) (León, 2002), p. 726 and 800; Gregoria Cavero and María E. Martín, Colección documental de la Catedral de Astorga (646–1126) 1 (León, 1999), p. 482; José A. Fernández Flórez and Marta Herrero, Colección documental del monasterio de Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas, II (1109–1300) e Índices (León, 1999), pp. 803–804; José Mª. Fernández Catón, José A. Fernández Flórez and Marta Herrero, Colección diplomática del Monasterio de Sahagún VI Índices (León, 1999), p. 268.

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between Vellido Dolfos and Pelayo Vellitiz, based purely on homonymy, is thus difficult to support and so too, consequently, are the supposed Zamoran origins of Vellido.53 Despite the difficulty of identifying Vellido Dolfos in the documentation, the proposal that inspired this essay presents the regicide as a historical figure and declares him a local son, describing him as a “gallego-zamorano” knight. The chronicles upon which ADEIZA based its proposal shed no light on this particular point. Even those chronicles closest to the events chronologically, as mentioned above, state only that a miles left the city to kill the Castilian king. They say nothing about his birthplace. The Estoria de Espanna says that Vellido went to Zamora to serve Urraca, a representative of her brother Alfonso’s interests, but does not specify where he came from: “Sennora, yo uin a Çamora con xxx caualleros todos mios uassallos e serui a uos con ellos grand tiempo a muy bien (My lady, I came to Zamora with 30 of my knights, all my vassals, and I served you well with them for a long time).”54 The birthplace and fate of the miles who killed Sancho II are unknown. Mínguez goes as far as to assert that this soldier was perhaps a member of the low aristocracy and was attached to Alfonso VI, and this is why he was in the besieged city.55 Neither the diplomas nor the chronicles allow us to say anything certain about his provenance. 4

Conclusion: A Reinterpretation of History and a Re-evaluation of Vellido Dolfos

This study has addressed two main points: the current political intentionality in the historical revision of the figure of Vellido Dolfos and his role in the regicide during the Siege of Zamora in 1072; and the existence of traces in the medieval documentation that could prove that Vellido existed as a historical 53 The patronymic “Uelliti” is also very common in Medieval diplomas, see “Hannadie Uellitiz”, “Granza Vellitiz” and “Menendo Vellitiz” in Cavero, Astorga I, docs. 327, 470 and 473; “Bellite Uellitiz”, “Uellit Uellitiz”, “Tello Uellitiz”, “Fernando Uellitiz”, Herrero, Sahagún II, docs. 430, 563, 586, 659 and “Ouecco Bellitiz”, “Columba Bellitiz”, “Marię Uellitiz”, Herrero, Sahagún III, docs. 760, 1022, 1057. If we accept the filiation that Margarita Torres makes about Pelayo Vellitiz without any other proof than the patronymic, since no charter records the link between this character and the Vellido Dolfos of the chronicles of the Siege of Zamora, then we should conclude that other Uelliti recorded in medieval charters would also be related to him and this, methodologically, does not hold up. 54 Estoria de Espanna, available at https://blog.bham.ac.uk/estoriadigital/, ch. 847 (Trans. E2, p. 153R). Accessed September 21, 2021. 55 Mínguez, Alfonso VI, p. 46.

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figure beyond the troubadour songs’ character who later appears in the chronicles with suspiciously well-defined features. The arguments of the 2009 ADEIZA proposal for renaming the Gate of Betrayal as the Gate of Loyalty and rehabilitating Vellido from traitor to Zamoran hero, revolve around the opposition of leonés and castellano identities and the need to reinterpret the history of the siege and its protagonists to suit the political purposes of the moment. As shown in Annex 2, this process was based on uncorroborated and ambiguous details, along with assertions that slip into anachronism.56 Historians have a social responsibility to search for historical accuracy based on evidence, be it textual, archaeological or material culture. A story recounted in a medieval chronicle does not have the same value for the dating of a village as, for example, the results of a palynological analysis of plant remains. One must be able to judge the value of each analytical approach, type of source, and its peculiarities. This is only possible with the appropriate academic training in historical methodology, and it is not something that should be subject only to the ‘world of opinion’ that is generally the preserve of television talk shows or political declarations devoid of scientific rigour. On the basis of these methodological premises, what we know of the siege of Zamora is that it happened in 1072 and the most palpable outcome was the death of the King of Castile, Sancho II, at the hands of a miles who set out from the city. This led to Alfonso VI’s ascension to the throne of Castile and the Galician territory: until then he had been King of León, but now he assumed power in the territories that Fernando I had ceded to Alfonso’s brothers. This provides an overview of the exercise of power in the last quarter of the eleventh century, even if their account has little literary merit. From these facts that we have pointed out about the siege of Zamora, the medieval troubadours and poets were able to construct an epic story about the fratricidal struggle that drove Alfonso to unite the kingdoms of León and Castile at the cost of his brother’s life. Thomas Carlyle argued that the history of the world is the history of its heroes.57 The history of great men and women, and their deeds has progressively lost its appeal and is no longer considered a viable lens to understand society. Moreover, if societies need heroes, they also need villains. Stories about the siege of Zamora have provided an ‘anti-hero’: the miles who killed the Castilian monarch, a man who was later baptised with the name 56 57

These elements, although valuable for a more in-depth analysis, have been left out of the scope of this paper so as not to go into too much detail, although some of them have been commented on very briefly. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (New York, 1842), p. 1.

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of Vellido Dolfos, a figure whose traits are more typical of an epic hero than of a historical figure.58 What was done from the political perspective of the municipal group, which presented the motion to change the name of the wall gate and vindicated the heroism of Vellido in the face of his treacherous act, was to appeal to historical justice to revise the specific role of a figure—Vellido Dolfos—in the chronicle accounts of the siege of 1072. The reassessment of historical processes is a task carried out by historians regularly. Every new generation of historians has approached the problems of the past with new questions that have allowed researchers to adopt new standpoints to different historical processes following a specific methodology.59 In the ADEIZA proposal, however, as we have seen in the specific analysis of the figure of Vellido, the certainties of historical evidence are ignored in order to exploit the epic character—the literary Vellido of the Song of Sancho II—contained in the late chronicles as presented as historical ‘truth’. The ADEIZA proposal presented Vellido as a symbol of a victorious León over a tyrannical Castile, embodied by Sancho II.60 The historical reference to the siege was intended to legitimize the present-day struggle of leonesista regionalism against the Castilian-dominated centralization of the autonomous region represented by Valladolid. Although the political position is legitimate, the means to achieve its goal are problematic, as they led to a distorted historical narrative presented as an academic reinterpretation of the events, which in this case were based on chroniclers’ accounts produced far removed in time from the siege, supported by a cantar de gesta that offers a highly literary vision of both the events and their protagonists. Sancho II was assassinated by a miles in an isolated operation we believe to have been directed by those who really wielded power in the city, the Infanta Urraca and her advisors and, from a distance, Alfonso VI. Vellido Dolfos, if that is the real name of this capable miles, executed a plan very likely conceived by Urraca Fernández and endorsed by Alfonso VI. An effective manoeuvre that allowed the latter to retake control of León and, in addition, reign in Castile. Why did the Zamoran politicians who proposed to rename the Gate of Betrayal present Vellido Dolfos as the liberator of Zamora rather than attributing this 58 Mínguez, Alfonso VI, p. 46. 59 Henri I. Marrou argues that historical elaboration has been informed by the predominant currents of thought at any given time and, in this sense, the way in which it has been written will be in line with the assumptions of these dominant historiographical trends, see Marrou, “Qu’est-ce que l’histoire?” in L’Histoire et ses méthodes, ed. Charles Samaran (1961; repr. París: Gallimard, 1973), p. 29, available at https://www.cairn.info/l-histoire-et -ses-methodes--9782070104093-page-1.htm. Accessed April 21, 2021. 60 See Annex 1.

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role to the Infanta Urraca (for surely it was she who devised the strategy to kill her brother Sancho II)? This question opens new avenues of enquiry to try to delve even deeper into the interests that move some political parties to use certain historical discourses to legitimise their own political positions and win voters, regardless of the distortion of history in which they habitually engage and which historians are obliged to denounce.

Annex 1

Sesión Ordinaria del Excelentísimo Ayuntamiento Pleno de Zamora (24/06/ 2009), Acta Núm. 10/09. Mociones, Punto Octavo. CAMBIO DE DENOMINACIÓN DE LA PUERTA DE LA TRAICIÓN POR PORTILLO DE LA LEALTAD: Por el Sr. Concejal del grupo de ADEIZA, D. Miguel Ángel Mateos Rodríguez, se presenta una moción relativa al cambio de denominación de la “Puerta de la Traición” por “Portillo de la Lealtad”. El contenido de la moción es el siguiente: “Desde la Crónica General del Rey Sabio y los cronicones medievales, hasta los romances protocastellanistas, el poema cidiano y la literatura del siglo XV, se estigmatizó la figura del caballero gallego-zamorano Bellido Dolfos, calificado de traidor al asesinar mediante engaños y añagazas al rey don Sancho II el Fuerte, primogénito de don Fernando III (sic) de Castilla y doña Sancha de León. Parece ser que mostraba al Rey de Castilla las disidencias de los zamoranos respecto a entregar o retener la plaza sitiada, a la vez que le indicaba la puerta por donde deberían introducirse las huestes de don Sancho que asediaban Zamora desde hacía siete meses y cuya fortaleza permanecía inexpugnable. Fue asesinado el Rey el 7 de octubre de 1072, junto a las puertas de Zamora en el campamento regio. Precisamente en la ciudad se habían dado cita el sindicato de agraviados contra el Rey don Sancho (leoneses, gallegos, toresanos y zamoranos). Bellido Dolfos cumplió el pacto tratado y tramado por la fortaleza y la ciudad de Zamora con total lealtad a la palabra dada. Léase el romance “tiempo era ya doña Urraca de cumplir lo prometido”. Con posterioridad se acusó a Bellido de Traidor desde las fuentes castellanistas del derecho castellano contrario a la opinión jurídico-visigótica asturiana y leonesa que se guiaba por el Liber Iudiciorum o Fuero Juzgo que desde San Isidoro de Sevilla se consideraba a Sancho tirano por quebrar la tradición leonesa del hecho testamental jurado por todos sus hijos herederos ante sus padres—Fernando y Sancha—y la presencia del testimonial del Cid. La posterior recuperación de la monarquía autoritaria con los Reyes Católicos y su divinización absolutista en los siglos XVII y XVIII consideró intocable la

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versión que de los hechos hicieron los cronistas castellanos y por eso la condena de Bellido Dolfos. La historiografía actual entiende los acontecimientos del cerco de Zamora de forma más ajustada a los hechos temporales del propio siglo XI. De ahí que hubiera que aceptar la concepción patrimonial del Rey Fernando I y aceptar también la versión de los conspiradores zamoranos para defender su tradición, el poder y el orden establecido, y la defensa que hacen del territorio y la sacralización de la tierra. En este sentido Bellido Dolfos se comportó como un libertador de la ciudad, ejerció la lealtad con sus señores legítimos, cumplió el testamento de Fernando I y defendió los derechos jurisdiccionales de doña Urraca sobre Zamora. Por el contrario, Sancho se comportó como un tirano al romper la legitimidad testamentaria y, en aplicación al derecho visigodo y la defensa isidoriana, Bellido Dolfos dio muerte justa al tirano, aplicando luego la filosofía de San Isidoro, del padre Mariana del S XVII y la escuela filosófico política de la Escuela de Salamanca, internacionalizada por los expertos Soto, Laínez, Mariana, Báñez, Molina, Cano, Padre Vitoria y otros”. Acto seguido, se somete a votación la declaración de urgencia de la presente moción, siendo aprobada la misma, por unanimidad. Votos a favor: veinticuatro (24) (PP) Votos en contra: ninguno Abstenciones: ninguna. Y el Pleno del Excmo. Ayuntamiento, por unanimidad de los miembros presentes que reviste mayoría absoluta de su composición legal, adoptó el siguiente ACUERDO: PRIMERO Y ÚNICO.—Cambiar la denominación de la llamada “Puerta de la Traición” por “Portillo de la Lealtad”. Ordinary Session of the right honourable City Council of Zamora (24/06/2009), Minutes no. 10/09. Motions, Item Eight. RENAMING OF THE GATE OF BETRAYAL TO GATE OF LOYALTY: The Councillor of the ADEIZA group, Mr Miguel Ángel Mateos Rodríguez, presents a motion concerning the renaming of the ‘Gate of Betrayal’ to ‘Gate of Loyalty’. The motion reads as follows: “From the Crónica General of the Wise King and the medieval chronicles to the proto-Castilian romances, the Poem of the Cid and the literature of the fifteenth century, the figure of the caballero gallego-zamorano Bellido Dolfos was stigmatised, described as a traitor for killing by trickery and deceit the king Sancho II the Strong, firstborn son of Fernando III (sic) of Castile and Sancha of León. It appears that he revealed to the King of Castile the disagreement among the Zamorans as to whether they should surrender or to hold on to the - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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besieged stronghold, while at the same time indicating the gate through which Don Sancho’s troops should enter, who had been blockading Zamora’s impregnable fortress for seven months. The king was assassinated on 7 October 1072 in the royal camp near the gates of Zamora. It was precisely in this city that the injured parties met against King Sancho (Leonese, Galicians, the people of Toro, Zamorans). Bellido Dolfos fulfilled the agreement negotiated and elaborated by the fortress and city of Zamora with total fidelity to his word. The romance reads, ‘it was time for doña Urraca to accomplish what was promised’. Bellido was later condemned as a Traitor by the castellanista sources of Castilian law, contrary to Visigothic, Asturian and Leonese judicial opinion, which had been guided by the Liber Iudiciorum or Fuero Juzgo since Isidore of Seville and held Sancho to be a tyrant because he broke the tradition of the testamentary act sworn by all heirs before their parents—Fernando and Sancha—and in the presence of the Cid. With the subsequent return of authoritarian monarchy under the Catholic Monarchs and their absolutist divinization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the version of events recorded by the chroniclers was considered sacred, and thus the condemnation of Bellido Dolfos. The current historiography understands the events of the siege of Zamora in a way more in line with the actual events of the eleventh century. We should therefore accept King Fernando’s conception of inheritance, but we should also accept the version of the Zamoran conspirators, that they acted in order to defend their tradition, established power and order, to defend their territory and the sanctity of their land. In this sense, Bellido Dolfos behaved like a liberator of the city, acted out of loyalty to its legitimate lords, fulfilled the will of Fernando I and defended the jurisdictional rights of doña Urraca over Zamora. In contrast, Sancho behaved like a tyrant in breaking the testament, while in applying the Visigothic law and Isidorean defence, Bellido Dolfos justly killed the tyrant, applying the philosophy of Isidore, of father Mariana of the seventeenth century and the political-philosophical school of Salamanca, rendered international by the experts Soto, Laínez, Mariana, Báñez, Molina, Cano, father Vitoria and others”. The fast-track declaration of the present motion was then immediately put to the vote, and was approved unanimously. Votes in favour: twenty-four (24) (Partido Popular) Votes against: none Abstentions: none. And the Plenary of the right honourable City Council, by unanimous vote of its members present, which represents an absolute majority of its legal composition, adopted the following AGREEMENT: FIRST AND ONLY—To change the name ‘Gate of Betrayal’ to ‘Gate of Loyalty’. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Annex 2

Sesión Ordinaria del Excelentísimo Ayuntamiento Pleno de Zamora (24/09/ 2013), Acta Núm. 04/13. Mociones, Punto Tercero. MOCIÓN PRESENTADA POR EL GRUPO MUNICIPAL DE ADEIZA, RELATIVO AL CAMBIO DE PANEL INFORMATIVO DEL MONOLITO COLOCADO JUNTO A LA “PUERTA DE LA LEALTAD”: El portavoz del grupo municipal de ADEIZA, Sr. Mateos Rodríguez, presenta a la Corporación la siguiente moción: ADEIZA exige a la señora alcaldesa que dé la orden de cambiar el panel informativo del monolito colocado junto a la Puerta de la Lealtad. Tras un acuerdo plenario, apoyado por la unanimidad de todos los grupos políticos, se decidió cambiar el cambio del nombre de la Puerta de la Traición por Puerta de la Lealtad. Y el 22 diciembre de 2010, se colocó la placa con su nuevo rótulo, donado por el escultor zamorano Ricardo Flecha. En el acto en que la placa fue presentada la Alcaldesa dijo: “No se trata de reinterpretar la historia, sino de adecuarla a los valores actuales”. Los argumentos que nuestro grupo expuso para solicitar el cambio de nombre fueron motivados por considerar que era y es una decisión de justicia histórica que conocen la mayoría de los historiadores especialistas en el medievo con base en argumentos jurídicos, históricos y sociológicos. Cuando en 2012 se colocaron casi un centenar de monolitos que costaron 73.237,80 euros, y cuyas placas duraron más bien poco, ADEIZA comunicó en varias ocasiones que esta placa debía ser retirada para modificar su texto. No se puede consentir que se utilicen las señalizaciones turísticas para especular con la realidad y la veracidad de la historia. La señalización turística monumental de la ciudad, ubicada junto a los principales templos románicos y edificios de carácter histórico ha de ser aséptica, fiel a la historia y no incluir opiniones personales de sus autores. El texto que ahora aparece reflejado en el monolito ubicado junto a la Puerta de la Lealtad dice textualmente: “Abierto muy cerca de la iglesia de San Isidoro, el Portillo de la Traición (o de Arena), simple arco de medio punto, forma parte del primer recinto amurallado de la ciudad de Zamora y está vinculado con la leyenda del regicidio de Sancho II de Castilla a cargo de Bellido Dolfos, noble leonés del siglo XI que aprovechó un vulgar apretón del monarca para lanzarle un dardo mortífero y fue después perseguido por el Cid. Pero no existe constancia real de semejante hecho alevoso, parecen ser glosas del romancero, perfectamente transmitidas por vía de la oralidad, pero muy reelaboradas en época romántica. Cosas de la modernidad y el oportunismo, el 22 de diciembre de 2010 a instancias

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municipales y como acto de desagravio con la figura de Bellido Dolfos, el Portillo de la Traición cambió su nombre por el Portillo de la Lealtad”. No han sido cuestiones de la modernidad ni del oportunismo, sino un acto de justicia y de reconocimiento a la figura de Bellido Dolfos, quien se jugó su vida por librar a la ciudad de Zamora del asedio de un tirano. Por ello exigimos que este panel informativo sea modificado desapareciendo del mismo cualquier referencia subjetiva, y que además se elimine del título la referencia “o de la Traición”. Porque su nombre es Puerta de la Lealtad, sin opciones a llamarla de dos maneras distintas. El Ayuntamiento de Zamora mediante la presente moción se compromete a mandar cambiar el texto del monolito ubicado en la puerta de la Lealtad, haciendo desaparecer del mismo cualquier referencia subjetiva y quitar del título “o de la Traición”, pudiendo aparecer en el texto que anteriormente este era el nombre de la puerta. Asimismo, solicitamos se remita un escrito al patronato de turismo de la Diputación, y a las empresas zamoranas de guías turísticas para comunicarles que en sus exposiciones deberían nombrar a esta edificación como Puerta de la Lealtad y no de la Traición. Así el paso del tiempo podrá hacer que la figura de Bellido Dolfos sea reconocida como lo que fue, un héroe y no un traidor. A continuación, se somete a votación la declaración de urgencia de la moción transcrita anteriormente, siendo desestimada al no contar con mayoría absoluta para su aprobación (votos a favor, 11, PSOE, IU, ADEIZA; votos en contra, ninguno; abstenciones, 13, PP). La Ilma. Sra. Alcaldesa dice que, aunque no sea aprobada la declaración de urgencia de la moción, se revisará lo que ha apuntado el portavoz del grupo municipal de ADEIZA, porque entiende que el acuerdo plenario es claro en este sentido. Ordinary Session of the right honourable City Council of Zamora (24/09/2013), Minutes no. 04/13. Motions, Item Three. MOTION PRESENTED BY THE MUNICIPAL GROUP OF ADEIZA, RELATIVE TO THE CHANGE OF INFORMATION PANEL OF THE MONOLITH PLACED BESIDE THE ‘GATE OF LOYALTY’: The spokesperson of the municipal group of ADEIZA, Mr Mateos Rodríguez, presents to the Board the following motion: ADEIZA demands that the mayoress gives the order to change the information panel of the monolith placed beside the Gate of Loyalty. Following a plenary agreement supported by the unanimous assent of all political groups, it was decided to change the name of the Gate of Betrayal to Gate of Loyalty. And on 22 December 2010 the plaque was placed with its new sign,

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donated by the Zamoran sculptor Ricardo Flecha. At the plaque’s presentation the mayoress said: ‘It is not a question of reinterpreting history but of adapting it to modern values’. The arguments that our group presented to request the change of name were motivated by the consideration that it was, and is, a decision of historical justice, as most historians specializing in the Middle Ages know, based on legal, historical and sociological arguments. When in 2012 around one hundred monoliths were placed at a cost of 73,237.80 Euros, whose plaques did not last very long, ADEIZA communicated on several occasions that this plaque should be removed and the text modified. We cannot allow tourist signs to be used to speculate on the reality and truth of history. The city’s monumental touristic signs, located beside the main Romanesque temples and buildings of historical significance must be objective, faithful to history and not include the personal opinions of their authors. The text that now appears on the monolith placed by the Gate of Loyalty reads: “Open very close to the church of San Isidoro, the Gate of Betrayal (or of the Arena), a simple half-point arch, is part of the first walled enclosure of the city of Zamora and is linked to the legend of the assassination of Sancho II of Castile by Bellido Dolfos, a Leonese noble of the eleventh century who took advantage of a vulgar handshake to throw a deadly dart at him and was pursued by the Cid. But there is no real evidence of such a treacherous act. It seems to be the gloss of a balladeer, perfectly transmitted by oral tradition and highly reworked in the Romantic era. In an affair of trendiness and opportunism, on 22 December 2010, the Gate of Betrayal was renamed the Gate of Loyalty at the request of the municipality, as an act of reparation to the figure of Bellido Dolfos”. It was not a question of trendiness or opportunism, but an act of justice and recognition of the figure of Bellido Dolfos, who risked his life to liberate the city of Zamora from the tyrant’s siege. We therefore demand that this information panel be modified to remove any subjective comments, and that ‘of Betrayal’ be removed from the name. Its name is the Gate of Loyalty; it should not be given two distinct names. The City Council of Zamora by the present motion undertakes to have changed the text of the monolith located at the Gate of Loyalty, removing from it any subjective reference and the phrase ‘of Betrayal’ from the name, as the text indicates that this was the former name of the gate. Likewise, we request that a letter be sent to the Council Tourist Board and to local tour guide companies to inform them that they should name this edifice the Gate of Loyalty, and not that ‘of Betrayal’. In this way, with the passage

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of time, Bellido Dolfos will be recognised for what he was—a hero and not a traitor. Next, the fast-track declaration of the motion transcribed above was put to the vote, and was rejected as there was no absolute majority for its adoption (votes in favour, 11, Partido Socialista Obrero Español, Izquierda Unida, ADEIZA; votes against, none; abstentions, 13, Partido Popular). The honourable Ms Mayoress says that, although the fast-track declaration of the motion was not approved, the statement made by the spokesperson of the municipal group of ADEIZA would be reviewed because she understood that the plenary agreement was clear in this regard. Acknowledgements The first part of the title of this chapter is an adaptation of a phrase used by Rosa Valdeón, mayoress of Zamora, regarding Vellido Dolfos. See Annex 2 and https://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2010/12/22/castillayleon/1293034786.html. Accessed January 16, 2023. This study was produced as part of the work of the Grupo de Investigación Reconocido Antigüedad Tardía y Alta Edad Media en Hispania (ATAEMHIS, Recognised Research Group: Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in Spain) and the project Los escenarios de las micropolíticas: acción colectiva, sociedades locales, poderes englobantes (siglos VI–XII) (Micropolitical scenarios: collective action, local societies, broad powers, sixth to twelfth century), ref.: PID2020-112506GB-C42. I would like to thank Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, María Pérez Rodríguez, Covadonga Valdaliso and Sonia Vital for their suggestions that have contributed to improve this work, as well as the translation assistance of Alwyn Harrison. Bibliography Alfonso X, el Sabio. Primera Crónica General de España, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal. Madrid, 1977. Álvarez Borge, Ignacio. “La nobleza castellana en la Edad Media: familia, patrimonio y poder.” In La familia en la Edad Media: XI Semana de Estudios Medievales, ed. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte. Logroño, 2001, pp. 221–252. Arizaleta, Amaia. “Topografías de la memoria palatina: los discursos cancillerescos sobre la realeza (Castilla, siglos XII y XIII).” In Memoria e Historia. Utilización política en la Corona de Castilla al final de la Edad Media, eds. Jon Andoni Fernández de Larrea and José R. Díaz de Durana. Madrid, 2010, pp. 43–58.

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Montaner, Alberto. “Acusar y defender en la Edad Media: una aproximación conceptual.” In Historia de la abogacía española, ed. Santiago Muñoz, vol. 1. Pamplona, 2015, pp. 245–296. Montaner, Alberto. “Lo épico y lo historiográfico en el relato alfonsí del Cerco de Zamora.” Studia Zamorensia 15 (2016): 65–89. Montaner, Alberto and Ángel Escobar. Carmen Campidoctoris o poema latino del Campeador. Madrid, 2001. Moreta Velayos, Salustiano. Mío Çid el Campeador. Zamora, 2000. Pérez Celada, Julio A. Documentación del monasterio de San Zoilo de Carrión. Fuentes medievales castellano-leonesas, 100. Burgos, 1986. Pérez Rodríguez, María. “Castrofroila: la representación del poder central en la ribera del Cea (siglos X–XII).” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 33 (2015): 173–199. Porrinas, David. El Cid. Historia y mito de un señor de la guerra. Madrid, 2019. Quiroga, Alejandro. “La trampa de la equidistancia. Sobre la historiografía neoconservadora en España.” In El pasado en construcción, eds. Carlos Forcadell, Ignacio Peiró and Mercedes Yusta, 339–362. Saragossa, 2015. Rebollo Delgado, Lucrecio. España y su organización territorial: antecedentes, surgimiento, evolución, problemas y propuestas. Madrid, 2018. Reig, Carola. El Cantar de Sancho II y el Cerco de Zamora. Madrid, 1947. Reilly, Bernard F. The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VI 1065–1109. Princeton, 1988. Rochwert-Zuili, Patricia. “El Cerco de Zamora en la historiografía alfonsí y neoalfonsí: el hijo rebelde, el caballero y la reina.” Studia Zamorensia 15 (2016): 91–102. Salgado Fuentes, Carlos J. La evolución de la identidad regional en los territorios del antiguo Reino de León (Salamanca, Zamora, León). Salamanca, 2016. Sánchez Estévez, José M. “Transición y configuración de la autonomía de Castilla y León (1978–1983).” In Regionalismo y autonomía en Castilla y León, ed. Juan A. Blanco Rodríguez. Valladolid, 2004, pp. 138–198. Torres, Margarita. “Voz Vellido Dolfos”. Available at http://dbe.rah.es/biografias/6055 /vellido-bellido-dolfos. Accessed July 26, 2021. Valdeón, Julio. “Castilla y León.” In España, tomo V. Autonomías, ed. Juan P. Fusi. Madrid, 1989, pp. 267–298. Vital Fernández, Sonia. Alfonso VII de León y Castilla (1126–1157). Las relaciones de poder en el centro de la acción política y social del Imperator Hispaniae. Gijón, 2019. Vivancos, Miguel C. Reinado y diplomas de Sancho II de Castilla y León. Madrid, 2014.

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Chapter 5

Praying for Conquest in Thirteenth-Century Castile: The Oratio in tempore belli adversus Saracenos Teresa Witcombe Relations between Christians and Muslims in medieval Iberia, from the most cosmic and ideological to the most intimate and personal, were a consistent theme in the work of Simon Barton. It was a field to which he contributed an enormous amount. Alongside his own supervisor, Richard Fletcher, he was one of a vanguard of historians to overturn and move beyond long-held conceptions of ‘Reconquista’, demonstrating in a variety of ways the pragmatism that often underpinned relations between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula and the permeability of religious and cultural borders in both war and peace.1 He also wrote about what he described as “the new-fangled crusading ideology” that came increasingly to influence the rhetoric of interreligious conflict by the late twelfth century, and he identified a “forgotten crusade” at Jaén.2 This study concerns the most ethereal of these interactions: the ways in which Christians prayed about their Muslim neighbours, and the creeping into these prayers of the ‘new-fangled’ ideology of crusade over the first half of the thirteenth century. The geopolitical map of the Iberian Peninsula was redrawn during this period, as almost all of Islamic al-Andalus, the northern-most lands of the Almohad Empire, was brought under the control of King Fernando III of Castile (r. 1217–1252), culminating in the conquest of Córdoba in 1236 and of Seville in 1248. These were events in which the Castilian Church and clergy were deeply involved, both on and off the battlefield. The interest and involvement of the rest of Latin Christendom, especially that of the papacy, and the extent 1 See the Introduction of this volume for an overview of Simon’s work. Specifically on the question of ‘Reconquista’, see his most recent co-edited volume, published posthumously: Simon Barton† and Robert Portass, eds., Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085) (Leiden, 2020). 2 Simon Barton, “Islam and the West: A view from twelfth-century León,” in Cross, Crescent and Conversion: Studies on Medieval Spain and Christendom in memory of Richard Fletcher, eds. Simon Barton and Peter Linehan (Leiden, 2008), p. 174; and idem, “A forgotten crusade: Alfonso VII of León-Castile and the campaign for Jaen (1148),” Historical Research Oxford 73, no. 182 (2000): 312–320. © Teresa Witcombe, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004683754_007 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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to which these endeavours could be considered part of the wider ‘crusading’ effort are topics that have been richly debated.3 Largely absent from this, however, has been the question of the liturgy itself, that is, the prayers and rites chanted in Castilian churches and cathedrals in support of and preparation for these wars. Thirteenth-century liturgical books are quite plentiful in Castilian archives, but few have received detailed attention or critical edition, and liturgical material relating specifically to military action against al-Andalus is hard to find. In what follows, I shall discuss one such prayer, a ‘Prayer in time of war against the Saracens’ (Oratio in tempore belli adversus Saracenos), found at the front of a thirteenth-century sacramentary currently in the archive of Burgos cathedral.4 The Oratio consists of a short antiphon and psalm, a sequence of seven versicles, and a principal prayer (or ‘collect’).5 The whole is bound together thematically as an appeal for divine protection against the Saracens, calling on God to “powerfully conquer the Muslim people” and to ensure that, “the barbaric ferocity having been trampled underfoot”, the armies of the king may return safely to their homes. This prayer does not, to the best my knowledge, appear in any other liturgical source in the Peninsula, and is one of very few liturgical texts from thirteenth-century Castile to explicitly refer to the context of warfare with the Islamic south. Despite its importance, there is very little scholarship dedicated to the Oratio, and nowhere has it been comprehensively analysed. The few scholars who have mentioned it have relied entirely upon an early modern transcription of the text, and the accompanying antiquarian assumption that this prayer must belong to a much older liturgical tradition, the Old Hispanic Rite. And yet, as we shall see, close study of the Oratio reveals a complex set of textual and liturgical influences and sources that place this prayer clearly within the cultural landscape of the thirteenth century, bringing to light important parallels with the sorts of liturgical rites associated with crusade across the rest of Latin Europe.

3 For an overview: Carlos de Ayala Martínez and Martín Ríos Saloma, eds., Fernando III: Tiempo de Cruzada (Madrid, 2012); Francisco García Fitz, Relaciones políticas y guerra: la experiencia castellano-leonesa frente al Islam, siglos XI–XIII (Seville, 2002); Barton, “Islam and the West”; William Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia c.1095–c.1187 (Woodbridge, 2008); Damian Smith, “The Papacy, the Spanish Kingdoms and Las Navas de Tolosa,” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 20 (2011): 157–178; and Daniel Baloup and Philippe Josserand, Regards croisés sur la guerre sainte: Guerre, idéologie et religion dans l’espace méditerranéen latin (XIe–XIIIe siècle) (Toulouse, 2006). 4 Archivo de la catedral de Burgos [ACB], Cod. 23, f. 2. 5 For a full transcription and translation, see the Appendix at the end of this chapter.

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The Manuscript, the Antigüidades de España, and the Old Hispanic Rite

Before turning to the text of the Oratio, let us first consider the manuscript in which it is found. The prayer is on the second folio of a liturgical book described by the codicologist José Janini as a Liber Sacramentorum, that is, a codex containing the parts of the liturgy to be said by the celebrant of the mass.6 Both Janini and, before him, Demetrio Mansilla, have dated this sacramentary to the thirteenth century.7 The codex contains text for the temporale (the ordinary calendar of the liturgical year) from the first Sunday of Advent to the 25th Sunday after Pentecost, and the sanctorale (the calendar of feasts, here from St Silvester on 31st December to St Thomas of Canterbury on 29th December), as well as a variety of miscellaneous liturgical forms, including some later additions. It is written using a neat early Gothic minuscule in a number of hands, and contains illuminated letters in red and blue ink, as well as widespread rubrication in red. As is so often the case with liturgical sources, the precise date and provenance of the Liber Sacramentorum are difficult to ascertain with any certainty. That it has been associated from an early date with the Benedictine monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, which lies in the diocese of Burgos, is evident. Marginal notes identifying it as property of the monastery can be found on folios 79v and 11r, in a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century hand. There are also two insertions from the same period that reveal the further influence of the monks: a mass for St Benedict has been added on folios 78–78, and on folio 2, within a mass for All Saints, the name of Benedict has been added to those of Peter and Paul as the principal saints to be invoked—a clear indication that the text was in the hands of Benedictine monks. Yet, by dint of these early clues pointing towards the adaptation of the codex for the monks of Cardeña, it is clear that the sacramentary was not produced there. And yet its provenance was nonetheless apparently local; in addition to the Roman calendar of saints, it also includes the feasts of a great many Hispanic saints.8 At the front of the codex and adjacent to our Oratio lies a mass in honour of San Millán, which 6 José Janini, Manuscrítos litúrgicos de las bibliotecas de España, vol 1 (Burgos, 1980), pp. 53–54. 7 Demetrio Mansilla Reoyo ed., Catálogo de los códices de la catedral de Burgos (Madrid, 1952), pp. 99–100. This is one of many liturgical books that would greatly benefit from detailed codicological and palaeographical study. 8 See Janini, Manuscrítos litúrgicos, p. 54; including Sts Domingo of Silos, Ildefonsus, Torquatus and friends, Pelagius, Fructosus, Augurius and Eulogius, Eulalia, Isidore, Justus and Rufina, Emilianus, Aslicus and Victorius, the feast of the Virgin on 18th December, the translation of St Isidore, and many more.

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posits the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, also in Burgos, as a possible place of origin, but this is hardly conclusive, and raises the same issues regarding the insertion of St Benedict (as San Millán was a Benedictine house). There are contextual grounds for considering Burgos cathedral to be a possible place of origin, as we shall see later, and many codicological similarities with documents produced in the cathedral in the 1230s, but again, this is hardly conclusive and the provenance of the codex remains unresolved.9 The Liber Sacramentorum itself is arranged rather peculiarly. The first folio of the sacramentary is a guard sheet, a much earlier and incomplete mass for St Stephen’s day, apparently from the twelfth century. Folio 2 contains the Oratio, as well as a mass for All Saints, and on the verso, a mass for San Millán. Following this, several pages have been cut out of the sacramentary—at what date this was done is unknown. However, reference is made to these early folios further on. Where the feast of San Millán falls within the sanctorale, the text directs the reader to the front of the book to find the mass.10 The same is the case for the feasts of Saints Ildefonsus, Bricius, Acisclus and Victoria, each of which are accompanied by the rubric: “require in principio libri” (consult the front of the book), evidently referring to the missing folios.11 This curious arrangement seems to suggest that the scribe of the sanctorale already had in his possession these folios that he intended to reuse at the front of the sacramentary. This may well have been for reasons no more profound than simply cost-efficient parchment usage. But it does complicate our attempts to securely date the Oratio from the perspective of manuscript evidence alone, as it appears to predate, if perhaps by not much, the rest of the sacramentary. However, the codex evidently existed as a whole before it was transferred to the monastery of Cardeña, since we find additions pertinent to that monastery on folio 2 as well as throughout the rest of the manuscript. In short, it is to textual analysis that we must now turn in order to achieve a better understanding of the date and context within which the Oratio is likely to have been produced. On this front too, however, the Oratio has a complicated past. It came to the attention of the eighteenth-century Spanish antiquarian and monk at the monastery of Cardeña, Francisco Berganza, who transcribed the text in his vast compilation entitled Antigüidades de España, published in 1721.12 Berganza provided no contextual information about the Oratio, nor any analysis of it, noting 9

Especially the Kalendario Antiguo (ACB cod.27); see Sonia Serna Serna, Los Obituarios de Burgos (León, 2008), pp. 86–87. 10 Folio 98v. 11 Janini, Manuscrítos litúrgicos, p. 54. 12 Francisco de Berganza y Arce, Antigüedades de España, 2 vols (Madrid, 1719–1721), vol. II, p. 685.

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only that: “we have also added into this section some other things, which we have taken out of the Ceremonial Antiguo of Cardeña, which was written in the thirteenth century”.13 This clearly matches our Liber Sacramentorum currently in Burgos (like many other medieval codices from Cardeña).14 However, perplexingly, Berganza included the Oratio within a collection of much earlier prayers, most of which were taken from the tenth-century Liber Ordinum Episcopal from the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, and which pertain to the Old Hispanic Rite (that is, the rite widely celebrated in the Peninsula before the imposition of the Roman liturgy in 1080).15 His reasons for so doing remain elusive. There are of course prayers within the Old Hispanic Rite that are intended to be said in times of war—although none that explicitly mention war with Muslims—but none of these bear any structural, linguistic, or textual similarities to the Oratio, nor is there any evidence of any influence or common source.16 As already discussed, and as acknowledged by Berganza himself, the only manuscript evidence for this text comes from the thirteenth century. Roger Collins has commented on the widespread assumption by many premodern scholars that medieval liturgical texts were necessarily copies of a much older, Visigothic, liturgy, and this seems to have been the case with regard to the Oratio.17 It is, however, an assumption that has continued to overshadow scholarly approaches to the Oratio. Berganza’s Antigüidades has been the sole means by which the text of the prayer has become known to later scholars, and the existence of the manuscript itself has remained entirely unknown.18 Perhaps 13 Ibid., p. 624. 14 Gonzalo Martínez Díez, Colección documental del monasterio de San Pedro de Cardeña (Burgos, 1998); see also Martínez Díez, “Códices no Visigóticos de San Pedro de Cardeña,” Boletín de la Institución Fernán González 78, no. 219 (1999): 255–276. 15 Berganza refers to this as the ‘Ritual Antiguo de Silos’. For a modern scholarly edition and analysis, see José Janini, Liber Ordinum Episcopal (Burgos, 1991), and Roger Collins, “Continuity and Loss in Medieval Spanish Culture: The Evidence of MS Silos, Archivo Monástico 4,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence, eds. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 1–22. On the adoption of the Roman liturgy, see Rose Walker, Views of Transition: Liturgy and Illumination in Medieval Spain (London, 1998). 16 See Janini, Liber Ordinum Episcopal, XLVIII ‘Incipit ordo quando rex cum exercitu ad prelium egreditur’, and XLVIIII ‘Orationes de regressu regis,’ pp. 146–149, are the two that refer to the king going to war and thus are the closest parallels in term of theme, although neither make any reference to a Muslim enemy. There are also various masses ‘de tribulatis’ (pp. 259–267). 17 Collins, “Continuity and loss,” p. 8. 18 Notably, Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal, “El labaro primitivo de la reconquista. Cruces asturianas y cruces visigodas,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 136 (1955): 8–28, 14;

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as a consequence, the categorisation of the Oratio as ‘Old Hispanic’ has gone unquestioned, as in the recent publication on Holy War in the early medieval Iberian Peninsula by Alexander Bronisch.19 Others have speculated that the liturgical text referred to by Berganza must simply be lost.20 Another result of this exclusive reliance on Berganza has been the impossibility, for modern scholars, of distinguishing his additions and interpretations from the original text. Berganza entitled his transcription the ‘so-called mass of the Cross’, a title not found in the manuscript and yet one by which this prayer is generally referred to in modern scholarship. He also expanded the psalms and the antiphon, which, as is the norm, are in their shortest possible form in the manuscript; yet in doing so, he did not make clear which parts of the text were his own insertions, which, as we shall see below, has led to some confusion in the case of the antiphon. In what follows, I shall examine the Oratio on its own terms, and within the context of the original manuscript. As we shall see, close analysis reveals significant parallels with the liturgical and textual sources of the thirteenth century, aligning this prayer for war against the Saracens with the ongoing conflicts between Castile and al-Andalus in this century, and revealing important influences from the wider cultural and theological landscape of thirteenth-century Europe. 2

A Clamour against the Saracens

The antiphon of the Oratio opens with a text that would have been instantly recognisable to medieval clerics as an appeal to God in times of tribulation: Deus qui conteris bella ab initio, or “Lord God, you who destroy wars from the beginning  …” It is a passage from the Book of Judith 9: 10–11, and one used widely in medieval liturgies—and indeed other sources too—in the context of war.21 These opening words appear very commonly in the liturgies In tempore belli, or the various derivatives pro invasiones or contra paganos in the Joseph O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade (Philadelphia, 2003), pp. 186–7; and Alexander Bronisch, Reconquista y guerra santa: la concepción de la guerra en la España cristiana desde los visigodos hasta comienzos del siglo XII (Granada, 2006). 19 Bronisch, Reconquista y guerra santa, pp. 218–220. 20 Patrick Henriet, “L’idéologie de guerre sainte dans le haut Moyen-Âge hispanique,” Francia 29, no. 1 (2002): 171–220, 182–183. 21 Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca NY, 2017), pp. 29–64. Judith is one of the books widely drawn on to provide military imagery in the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris; see Simon Barton and Richard Fletcher, eds. and trans., The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest (Manchester, 2001).

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Gregorian Sacramentary, and thus are found in early medieval sacramentaries across Latin Europe from the Carolingian period onwards.22 We also find the passage in the Gregorian Missa pro rege, specifically in defence of the king and his people against “visible and invisible enemies”, in Franco-Roman liturgical tradition from at least the ninth century.23 The remainder of the antiphon glosses the Judith text, calling on God to “crush” the power of the enemy, that is, “those who wish evil on your servants”. As is very often the case, the liturgist did not write out his text in full, but rather supplied the minimum necessary to the celebrant, for whom the intended expansion would have been clear. Berganza suggested inserting the phrase ‘let your right hand shatter the enemies’, but, although it fits the general tenor of this prayer, his suggestion is not one for which there is any liturgical precedent, nor indeed any textual similarity in either the Old Hispanic Rite or any other early medieval liturgy that I have found.24 A more ready solution can be found by comparing our text to other antiphons widely used in twelfthand thirteenth-century Europe. The variant that we see here can be found frequently in Matins of the daily office, drawn from the common ‘De Judith’ used in September, and part of the liturgical period known as the Summer Histories.25 This appears most frequently in French and German antiphonals from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in a slightly expanded form, as below:26 22 Le sacramentaire grégorien: Ses principales formes d’après les plus anciens manuscrits, 3 vol ed. Jean Deshusses (Fribourg, 1971–1982), vol. II, 154 (p. 161), ‘Missa in tempore belli’, and idem 155 (p. 162). It also can be found in the Gelasian rite at the start of collects ‘in tempore belli’; see Amnon Linder, Raising Arms: Liturgy in the Struggle to Liberate Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2003), p. 175 and 199. 23 Le sacramentaire gregorien II, 52 (p. 75); Deus qui conteris bella, et impugnatores in te sperantium potentia tuae defensionis expugnas, auxiliare quaesumus famulo tuo regi nostro, coniugi, et proli populoque sibi subiecto, pro quibus suppliciter misericordiam tuam imploramus, ut te parcente remissionem peccatorum percipiant, et cuncta sibi adversantia te adiuvante superare valeant. For more on the Misa pro rege in Castile, see Holt, “Laudes regiae: Liturgy and royal power in thirteenth-century Castile-León,” in The Sword and the Cross: Castile-León in the era of Fernando III, eds. E. Holt and T. Witcombe (Leiden, 2020), pp. 140–164. 24 Berganza’s suggestion reads ‘Allide vir[tutem] eor[um] et dextera tua confringat inimicos’. 25 R. Hesbert, Corpus antiphonalium officii (Roma, 1963–1979), no. 6492. On the Summer Histories, see Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 41–43 and 113. 26 Eg, Marseille, Antiphonarium Massiliense (1190–1200), BNF, Département des Manuscrits. Latin 1090 f. 103v; Early twelfth-century St. Maur-des-Fossés, BNF, Département des Manuscrits. Latin 12044 f. 134r; Twelfth-century antiphoner, Klosterneuburg, AugustinerChorherrenstift—Bibliothek, 1012, f. 136.v; Antiphoner from Cambrai Cathedral c.1230 (Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale, 38 (olim 40), fol 170v); Twelfth-century antiphoner from Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ms. 406 (3 J 7), f. 175r; Worcester Cathedral, c.1230,

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Antiphon from Matins of De Judith:

Antiphon of the Oratio [my suggested expansions]:

Domine deus qui conteris bella ab initio eleva bracchium tuum super gentes quae cogitant servis tuis mala et dextera tua glorificetur in nobis. Allide virtutem eorum in virtute tua cadat virtus eorum in iracundia tua.

Domine deus qui conteris bella ab inicio [eleva bracchium tuum super gentes quae cogitant servis tuis mala.]27 Allide vir[tutem] eor[um] et dextera tua [glorificetur in nobis]

Significantly, this antiphon is also to be found in three Iberian manuscripts, two of which are direct contemporaries to the Liber Sacramentorum. The earliest of these is associated with the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, in the diocese of Burgos (and just fifty kilometres from Cardeña), written in the late eleventh century.28 The same antiphon appears in another text from Silos, an antiphonal dated to the thirteenth century, and thus contemporary to the writing of our Oratio.29 It appears again in a thirteenth-century breviary from the Aragonese see of Huesca.30 The identification of this antiphon within the tradition of Gregorian in tempore belli masses, and as being widespread in the liturgical texts of Latin Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, thus clearly points us away from the antiquarian understanding of this text as representing a much older Hispanic rite, and towards the initial indication Worcester Cathedral Music Library F.160 (olim 1247) (facs), f. 178; Franciscan codex c.1260, Fribourg, Bibliothèque des Cordeliers, 2, f. 148v; Late twelfth-century Zwiefalten, Badische Landesbibliothek—Musikabteilung, Aug. LX, f. 201v; Twelfth-century antiphoner from St. Gall; Stiftsbibliothek, 388, (Cod. Sang. 388 f. 404); Tenth-century Hartker Antiphonary from St. Gall (Cod. Sang. 391 f. 216.) For more, consult the Cantus Index (cantusindex.org). 27 I suggest the integration of the whole of this passage, as the ‘eorum’ of the response requires a subject. 28 British Library Add MS 30850; see the MusicaHispanica entry by Raquel Rojo Carrillo. Available at musicahispanica.eu/source/20199. Accessed March 3, 2023; Vivancos, “Antiphonary”, p. 278, who dates it to the eleventh century and comments that: “it follows the Roman monastic cursus which corresponds to the time when the Spanish liturgy had been replaced by the Franco-Roman”. 29 Silos Biblioteca del monasterio, ms. 9, f. 126r; see the MusicaHispanica entry by Javier Santiago Ruiz and Pablo Cantalapiedra. Available at musicahispanica.eu/source/19722. Accessed March 3, 2023; Janini, Manuscríto litúrgicos, p. 254 and W. Whitehill and J. Pérez de Urbel, “Los manuscritos del Real Monasterio de Santo Domingo de Silos,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 95 (1929): 570–573. 30 Archivo de la catedral de Huesca, ms. 8, f. 120v; Available at musicahispanica.eu/source /20426?page=8. Accessed March 3, 2023.

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that the Oratio may belong to a context more closely aligned with the period in which the manuscript was produced. Berganza described this text as the ‘so-called Mass of the Cross’ (missa dicitur de crucis). Yet the manuscript does not designate our prayer as a mass at all; the rubric provided is simply Oratio in tempore belli adversus Saracenos. By way of contrast, there is a mass setting on the lower half of this same folio, namely for All Saints, which is rubricated as Missa de omnibus sanctis.31 The Oratio, however, is evidently not a mass setting, but a shorter sequence designed to be said in the course of a mass or office as needed. In this sense, it can more accurately be described as a ‘clamour’, that is, an urgent liturgical appeal to God at a time of crisis that could be said within any mass, and a form that was coming to be increasingly popular by the thirteenth century for use in times of war against Muslims in the context of crusade. The direct confrontation with Islam that was precipitated by the crusading movement resulted in a dynamic period of adaptation and expansion of the ways in which the Church prayed about military engagement with Muslims across the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. From the time of the First Crusade in 1095, liturgy relating to war with non-Christians would undergo an important shift, focused on the theological imperative to conquer (and, after 1187, to reconquer) Jerusalem. Rituals also developed around taking the Cross and becoming crucesignatus, that is, vowing to go on crusade.32 Most important for our purposes, however, was the emergence of a liturgical ‘clamour’ for the Holy Land as a key weapon in the arsenal of medieval lay and clerical society. Although originally a jurisdictional term, monks were deploying the term ‘clamour’ in a liturgical sense by the eleventh century, signifying a prayer sequence associated with the doing of penance in the face of tribulation.33 By the late twelfth century, however, the practice of clamour had taken on quite a far more bellicose nature, and became inextricably linked to the call for triumph in war against Muslims and the deliverance of the Holy Land from the Islamic powers to which it had fallen. For both Cecilia Gaposchkin and Amnon 31

The three prayers provided for the mass for All Saints are the three standard prayers of the ‘proper’ that one would expect to see in a medieval sacramentary. The proper constitutes the collect (the principal prayer before the readings), the secret (an offertory prayer), and the postcommunion (the prayer said following communion); see C. Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, trans. W. Storey and N. Rasmussen (Washington DC, 1986). 32 Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, pp. 65–93. 33 Lester Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca NY, 1993), pp. 17–26.

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Linder, the defeat of the crusaders at Hattin and the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 was a turning point, after which popes and leaders of crusade began exhorting the faithful to insert a Holy Land clamour into their daily prayers as an increasingly regular, and regularised, forms of liturgical entreaty for the recovery of Jerusalem.34 Linder has identified these clamours as having a broadly tripartite structure: opening with an antiphon or psalm, followed by a series of versicles, and finally a collect, which was the most original part of the sequence.35 They were prayers to be said daily, within the mass or office, and were to be said before the public as well as privately by clergy and religious. The English chronicler Roger of Hoveden described the new intercessory prayers stipulated in 1188 by Pope Clement III (1187–1191) as consisting of an antiphon, a psalm, several versicles, and a collect, with the latter calling on God to aid Christians at war with Muslims:36 “Almighty and everlasting God (Omnipotens sempiterne deus), in whose hands are the power and rule of all kingdoms, in your mercy look upon the Christian armies, that the heathen who put trust in their own ferocity may be vanquished by the power of your right hand”.37 By the turn of the thirteenth century, clamours with rubrics such as Oratio pro terra iherosolimitana, Contra paganorum incursiones, and Pro terra sancta, were appearing in sacramentaries across the Latin West. Clamours for the Holy Land were not wholly absent from the northern Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, where, of course, the Andalusi south provided another, much more immediate, Islamic threat.38 However, I know of no examples of this liturgical form from Castile, where the closest thing we have to such a text is our Oratio. There are many immediate points of similarity. The structure of the Oratio matches exactly that of the 1188 clamour, and more broadly, the tripartite nature that characterises the liturgical clamour. Like clamours to the Holy Land, the Oratio is a short, focused prayer sequence, and one that could be inserted into the mass easily. The majority of the Holy Land clamours analysed by Linder were inserted either into the 34 See Linder, Raising Arms, pp. 1–63 and Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, pp. 192–226. 35 Linder, Raising Arms, p. 3. 36 The antiphon was ‘Tua est potencia’, taken from the Summer Histories liturgy ‘De Machabaeis’. See Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, pp. 198–200. 37 “Omnipotens sempiterne deus, in cuius manu sunt omnium potestates et omnia iura regnorum, respice ad Chrsitianorum benignus auxiliam [ad Christianum benigne exercitum], ut gentes quae in sua feritate confidunt potentiae tuae dextera comprimantur. Per Christum Dominum nostrum …” See idem, p. 198 and Linder, Raising Arms, p. 11. 38 Gaposchkin has identified an Aragonese manuscript containing a clamour ‘Pro adversitate terre ierosolimam’; see Invisible Weapons, p. 291. There are also masses for Jerusalem from Catalonia.

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front or the margins of medieval sacramentaries, reflecting the intended daily use of these prayers, and, in the cases where they were written into margins, encapsulating the moment when the exhortation to say such prayers reached the liturgist. As we have already discussed, the codicology of the Burgos Liber Sacramentorum is complicated, but nonetheless, we see the Oratio at the very front of the codex, in line with Linder’s observations. These comparisons become more convincing when we consider the textual development of the Holy Land clamour in relation to the Oratio. The exhortation of Pope Clement III to all Christians to raise a clamour to God in 1188, in response to the loss of Jerusalem, was expanded upon by his successors. By the mid-1190s, Cistercian liturgical books had started stipulating the recital of an Oratio pro terra Ierosolimitana, which consisted of Psalm 78, lamenting the defilement of Jerusalem, followed by the versicles Exurgat Deus (‘Let God rise up’) and Salvum fac populum (‘Save O Lord your people’), and a collect.39 Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) invigorated and universalised the clamour for the Holy Land. In 1202, he issued a universal call to prayer for the deliverance of Jerusalem, although the key text in this regard was not issued until somewhat later; namely Innocent’s bull Quia Maior of 1213, an encyclical calling for the Fifth Crusade that stressed the importance of spiritual weapons—prayers and processions—in support of crusade and specified the clamour that should be raised to God within the mass every day.40 Innocent’s clamour revolved around Psalm 78, followed by the versicle, Exurgat Deus once again, and adding a collect of his own, which focused explicitly on the Holy Land.41 The call for crusade, and very likely the clamour itself, was reiterated at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Innocent also directed his liturgical fervour towards the wars with Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. As the Castilian king prepared for war with the Almohads in 1212, Innocent ordered major processions throughout Rome, at which the relics of the Passion were revealed, with huge crowds gathering to pray that the enemy might be vanquished.42 39 Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, pp. 198–200 and 291; Linder, Raising Arms, pp. 8–11. 40 Thomas Smith, “How to craft a crusade call: Pope Innocent III and Quia maior (1213),” Historical research 92, no. 255 (2019): 2–23; Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, pp. 201–209; Linder, Raising Arms, pp. 37–41. 41 “God, You who arranges all with astonishing providence, we suppliantly beg You to restore to Christian worship that land, which Your own begotten son consecrated with His own blood, snatching it from the hands of the enemies of the cross, by mercifully directing the vows of the faithful pressing hard for its liberation, into the way of eternal salvation”; Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, p. 207. 42 This was the Omnipotens sempiterne deus prayer. See ibid., p 205 and Damian Smith, “The Papacy, the Spanish Kingdoms and Las Navas”.

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Clamour remained central to the crusading endeavour throughout the thirteenth century, and calls for clamour were repeated by Honorius III in 1217, who referred to the “invisible weapons” of the liturgy in advance of the Fifth Crusade, and again by Pope Innocent IV in 1245, in advance of King Louis IX’s crusade in 1248.43 It was a form that allowed for flexibility and for expansion depending on circumstance. Psalm 78 remained the most common opening text, and one of the hallmarks of this genre, an explicit cry of lament at the sullying of Jerusalem: “they have entered your holy city, they have turned it into a place to sell fruit!”, although Linder has also identified others, such as Psalm 66, the call to the Lord to have mercy.44 The collects used also varied, and were adapted to need. From the pontificate of Innocent III, the versicle Exurgat Deus had been associated with the Holy Land clamour, but more could be, and were, added. As we have seen, the Cistercian sacramentaries regularly inserted the Salvum fac populum versicle too in the 1190s. By the 1240s, an increasingly consistent selection of some six or seven versicles were most commonly recycled between Holy Land clamours.45 In her comprehensive study of crusade liturgy, Cecilia Gaposchkin has traced the development of the Holy Land clamour from the 1180s until the end of the thirteenth century, and it is here that we find the clearest evidence of a connection with the Oratio in tempore belli adversus Saracenos: The development of the Holy Land Clamour, c.1225–4546

The Oratio

Antiphon/Psalm (usually Ps 78)

Antiphon Psalm 66: Deus misereatur Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. Pater noster. Et ne nos …

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. Pater Noster. Et ne nos …

43 44 45 46

Linder, Raising Arms, pp. 41–52; Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, pp. 219–222. Linder, Raising Arms, pp. 54–56, 58–60, 62, 63 and 67. Linder, Raising Arms, p. 49. As identified by Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, Appendix 2 ‘Comparative Development of the Clamor’, columns 5, 7, 8 and 9. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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The Oratio

Versicles: 1. Exurgat deus et dissipentur inimici eius, et fugiant qui oderunt eum a facie eius (Ps. 67:2)47

1. Exurgat deus et dissipentur inimici eius. Et fugiant qui oderunt eum (Ps. 67.2)

2. Domine salvum fac regem et exaudi nos in die qua invocaverimus te (Ps. 19:10)

2. Domine salvum fac regem R. Et exaudi nos in die qua invocaverimus te (Ps. 19:9)

3. Salvum fac populum tuum domine, et benedic hereditati tuae. (cf. Ps. 27:9)

3. Salvum fac populum tuum Domine. R Et benedic haereditati tuae (cf. Ps. 27: 9)

4. Oremus pro afflictis et captivis et peregrinis christianis. Libera eos deus israhel. (cf: Ps. 24:22)

4. Esto eis, Domine, turris fortitudinis a facie inimici in eis. (Ps. 60:4)

5. Mitte eis domine auxilium de sancto et de syon tuere eos. (cf. Ps. 19:3)

5. Mite eis auxilium de Sancto domine R. Et de Syon tuere eos (cf. Ps. 19:3)

6. Esto eis domine turris fortitudinis a facie inimici. (cf. Ps. 60:4)

6. Domine exaudi orationem meam, et clamor meus ad te veniet. (Ps. 101:2)

7. Domine exaudi orationem meam. Et clamour meus ad te, veniet. (Ps. 101:2)

7. Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo

8. Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. Collect 47 Following the Exurgat Deus, Gaposchkin has noted that a manuscript from Chartres c.1225 inserts the verse: “Non nobis domine non nobis, sed nomini tuo” Ps. 113:9 (See Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, Appendix 2, column 5). - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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It is clear from this comparison that, in the Oratio, we find a Castilian prayer that echoes many of the features of the clamour for the Holy Land, the liturgical form that had become ubiquitous as a support for the crusading endeavour by the thirteenth century. And yet it is not a clamour to Jerusalem, but for conquest against the Muslims of al-Andalus. It is notable that the only versicle commonly employed in the Holy Land clamour to be missed out of the Oratio was the verse that beseeched God to protect the captive and the pilgrim; the latter being a common theme in crusading theology from its earliest stirrings. This was, naturally, a prayer that had far less resonance in a Castilian context, since no pilgrims headed to al-Andalus. It is also noteworthy that the Oratio includes the ‘royal variant’, the insertion of the Salvum fac regem verse, an exhortation that God should protect the king. Both Linder and Gaposchkin have noted this addition into the clamours being said in preparation for the Seventh Crusade, led by Louis IX of France, and it was common in French manuscripts from the 1240s.48 Through these prayers, the earthly struggles of the congregation became bound up within an eschatological framework, and their enemies became God’s own enemies, to be scattered and defeated by God, the ‘tower of strength’. To us, they also make clear the place of the Oratio within the wider tradition of clamouring for the Holy Land, and the influence in Castile of the liturgical innovations associated with crusade, and used by prelates and liturgists across France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the rest of the Latin West. The Oratio reveals a repurposing of this liturgical form, directed towards the south of the Iberian Peninsula rather than Jerusalem. It is important, at this juncture, to point out a further clue in the manuscript, indicating that these prayers belong in a thirteenth-century context. Adjacent to the Oratio, on the same folio, is a Mass for All Saints that takes up the second half of the page. This consists of the three standard mass prayers: a collect (A cunctis nos),49 a secret (Exaudi nos),50 and a postcommunion (Mundet et muniat).51 This mass text is widely known, and has long 48 Linder, Raising Arms, p. 44; Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, pp. 219–222. 49 “A cunctis nos, quaesumus, Domine, mentis et corporis deffende periculis, et intercedente gloriosa virgine Dei genetrice Maria: cum beatis apostolis tuis Pet[ro] Paulo [atque Benedicto] et omnibus sanctis, salutem nobis tribue benignus et pacem, ut destructuris adversitatibus et erroribus universis, Ecclesia tua secura tibi serviat libertate”. [My transcription] 50 “Exaudi nos, domine deus noster, ut per huius sacramenti virtutem a cunctis nos mentis et corporis hostibus tuearis, gratiam tribuens in praesenti, et gloriam in futuro”. [My transcription] 51 “Mundet et muniat quaesumus domine, d … t sac … nos ut intercedente beata virgine Dei genetrice Maria, cum apostolis tuis Petro et Paulo, [atque Benedicto] et omnibus

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been associated with Pope Innocent III.52 Although the attribution of liturgical texts to a cause célèbre like Innocent must be treated with caution, there is substantial evidence to suggest that this mass sequence did in fact emerge in the early thirteenth century, and that it found its way into sacramentaries across Europe in the following decades. It has been identified by Stephen van Dijk as appearing within papal liturgical registers for the first time under the papacy of Innocent III, and from here, entering the early Franciscan liturgical tradition; the text is attributed to Innocent III in four thirteenth-century Franciscan missals.53 Most importantly for our purposes, it also appears to have been inserted into two sacramentaries from Catalonia, from Santa Maria de Vilabertran and Sant Cugat, in the early- and mid-thirteenth century.54 We see it elsewhere too, including in three liturgical texts connected to the Knights Templar from mid-thirteenth-century Acre.55 The reoccurrence of this mass in the Liber Sacramentorum, and indeed, alongside the Oratio, thus lends further support to the notion that liturgical ideas propagated by the papacy and developing within the wider liturgical tradition in the thirteenth century were filtering into local practices in Castile, where the context of war with the Muslims to the south necessitated their redeployment in a new direction.

sanctis (a cunctis nos reddas et perversit) atibus expiatos, et adversitatibus expeditos”. [My transcription] 52 This mass setting continues to have a place in the liturgy of the Catholic Church today. Migne calls these prayers “three prayers on All Saints for the defence and tranquillity of the Church”, Patriologia Latina 217, p. 918; Janini, Manuscrítos Litúrgicos, p. 53. 53 Van Dijk, The Ordinal of the Papal Court from Innocent III to Boniface VIII and Related Documents (Fribourg, 1975), p. xxix (note 8), also pp. 152, 353, 183, 491, and 558. See also A. Welch, Liturgy, Books and Franciscan Identity in Medieval Umbria (Leiden, 2016), pp. 55–66. 54 For San Cugat: Joan Bellavista, “El santoral en el sacramentari de Sant Cugat del Valles Barcelona”, RCatT XXI71 (1996): 117–200, 188; this sacramentary is dated to the late twelfth century with the addition of these prayers, rubricated “lnnocentius papa terci composuit tempore concilii eiusdem”. For Vilabertran: Miquel Gros I Pujol, “El sacramentari de Santa Maria de Vilabertran (París, BnF, lat. 1102),” Miscellània litúrgica catalana 19 (2011): 47–202, 49, 154 (supplement 1, written 1250–1275), and 163 (supplement 3, 15th century). 55 See Cristina Dondi, “The Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem (XII–XVI century): With Special Reference to the Practice of the Orders of the Temple and St John of Jerusalem,” unpublished PhD Thesis (King’s College London University, 2000), p. 280 (pre-dates 1228), p. 300 (a sacramentary from the late 1220s) and p. 326 (a missal from the 1260s). She also identifies the same mass sequence in a thirteenth-century Templar sacramentary from Modena (p. 348).

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The ‘gens Maurorum’

Let us now turn to the final part of the Oratio, the collect. This calls for the protection of the king and his armies and the total destruction of the Muslim enemy: Lord Jesus Christ son of the living God, you who are both true God and man, look kindly on your servant our king and on his army, and accompany them always in protection. And grant that, by virtue of your name and of your most victorious Cross, they should powerfully conquer the Muslim people, who always disparage you. And concede that, the barbaric ferocity having been trampled underfoot, they may return to their homes with honour and joy.56 As we have seen, the collect was generally the most original part of the clamour sequence, written with a particular context in mind. This appears to be the case here, and I have not been able to identify any direct textual models for this prayer. In invoking God’s power to bless the king’s armies in the face of the ‘ferocity’ ( feritate) of the Muslims (referred to as a gens), it echoes thematically the Omnipotens sempiterne deus, the collect that accompanied the first clamours for the Holy Land in the 1180s and that was called upon by Innocent III in the preparations for war in Spain in 1212. This language was not new; one of the principal collects for the Gregorian Sacramentary masses in tempore belli likewise refer to ‘crushing’ (compressa or depressa compared to the Oratio’s calcata) the ‘ferocious peoples’ (gentium feritate).57 However, such broad parallels are of little assistance in pinpointing our Oratio any further. Notably, the Muslim peoples are described as ‘detracting from’ or ‘disparaging’ God (tibi … detrahit), a term originally taken from Psalm 108, where this same verb is used repeatedly with regard to those who, having disparaged God, will in turn be shamed by him.58 Medieval theological tradition built on this term, associating it consistently with the Jewish people, who ‘detracted from’ God by denying the divinity of Christ, an interpretation presented in the 56 For the original text, see the Appendix. 57 Le sacramentaire grégorien II, 2537 and 2545, and Corpus orationum II, 1501: “Deus qui conteris bella et impugnatores in te sperantium potentia tuae defensionis expugnas, auxiliare famulis tuis, / [famulo tuo illi rege nostro] implorantibus misericordiam tuam, ut omnium gentium feritate compressa/[depressa], indefessa te gratiarum actione laudemus”. [MS variant as recorded by Bruylants, Oraisons du Missel Romain, 317]. See also Hesbert, Corpus antiphonalium Officii, no. 2338. 58 Ps 108:4, 108:20, 108:29.

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works of Augustine.59 From here, it can be found widely in subsequent medieval exegetical tradition, such as the works of the twelfth-century theologian Peter Lombard, and the thirteenth-century Franciscan chronicler Salimbene, where, again, the Psalm and the terminology of ‘detrahere Christi’ was explicitly bound up with Judaism and the denial of Christ’s role in the Godhead.60 It is significant, therefore, though perhaps not surprising, that we should see the same term re-used here in the Oratio, as an accusation against Muslims, since the defence of Christ’s divinity was precisely at the core of much of the anti-Islamic polemic written in the Peninsula during these centuries.61 Indeed, the closest textual parallel to this collect comes not from another liturgical source, but from a narrative one, the Chronica latina regum Castellae, written in the late 1230s, and attributed to Juan bishop of Osma, chancellor of the Castilian court and bishop of Burgos from 1240.62 When describing the battle with the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, the chronicler narrates how the king of Castile was avenged against the Muslims of al-Andalus “by the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the most victorious Cross, which the aforesaid king of Morocco had blasphemed with polluted mouth” (per uirtutem Domini nostri Iesu Christi et uictoriosissime Crucis, in quam blasfemauerat ore poluto rex supradictus Marroquitanus).63 The sentiment and language are both echoed very closely in the exhortation of our collect from the Oratio: “Lord Jesus Christ … grant that, by the power of your name and of your most victorious Cross, they should powerfully conquer the Muslim people, who always detract from you” (Domine Jesu Christe … presta ut per virtutem nominis tui et victoriosissime crucis tue gentem maurorum que tibi semper detrahit potenter expugnent.) We see this rhetoric repeated further on, where the chronicler describes the conquest of Córdoba in 1236, and the consecration of the city’s 59 Augustine, Sermones ad populum, 43; idem, Enarrationes in psalmos, 40. 60 Peter Lombard, Commentarium in pslamos, 108:19; Salimbene, Cronica, p. 71. 61 See Thomas Burman, Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050–1200 (Leiden, 1994). 62 Henceforth Chronica Latina. The Latin edition used here is: Crónica latina de los reyes de Castilla, ed. Luís Charlo Brea (Cádiz, 1984). On the identification of Juan as its author, see Derek Lomax, “The authorship of the Chronique latine des rois de Castille,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 40 (1963): 205–211; Peter Linehan, “Don Juan de Soria, Unas apostilles,” in Fernando III y su tiempo (1201–1252): VIII Congreso de Estudios Medievales (Avila, 2003), pp. 375–394; and Bernard F. Reilly, “The Chronica Latina Regum Castellae: Historical Composition at the Court of Fernando III of Castile, 1217–1252,” Viator 41, no. 1 (2010): 141–154. 63 Chronica Latina: ch. 23; “si quid labis uel opprobii contraxerat rex gloriosus et regnum eius in bello de Alarcos, purgandum erat per uirtutem Domini nostri Iesu Christi et uictoriosissime Crucis, in quam blasfemauerat ore poluto rex supradictus Marroquitanus”.

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mosque as a cathedral. Once again, the blasphemy of Islam and the “filthiness of Muhammadan superstition” is crushed “by the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and his most Victorious Cross” (per uirtutem Domini nostri Iesu Christi et uictoriosissime Crucis).64 It is by turning to narrative sources that we can also gain some insight into another eye-catching element of the collect; the term used to refer to the object of this prayer, the gens Maurorum or ‘Muslim peoples’ themselves. Nowhere in the crusading liturgies do we find any parallel to this language.65 The clamours for the Holy Land describe the Muslim enemy as gentes (‘peoples’ or ‘nations’, sometimes translated as ‘heathens’),66 gentes incredulitates (‘unbelieving peoples’), pagani (‘pagans’), infidelis (‘the unfaithful’), and most straightforwardly, from an eschatological perspective, inimici crucis (‘enemies of the Cross’). There are many masses ‘Against Pagans’, but as Gaposchkin has pointed out, the ‘pagan’ could be more or less any enemy; Carolingian sacramentaries used the term against the Saxon invaders, whereas early English liturgies referred to the Danes by the same.67 Similar can be said for the Old Hispanic Rite: the liturgy for the king going to war asks God to defend him simply against ‘enemies’ (hostes and inimici).68 None of these terms, mostly drawn from the language of the Old Testament, specify that the enemy is a Muslim. ‘Saracen’ is a more specific term, and one that was very widely used in medieval discourse, where it is generally recognised as referring more clearly to Muslims.69 This too is a term found commonly in the crusading liturgies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a way of referring to the Muslim enemy, including by Innocent III, who, in 1212, referred to “the so-called Saracens” in the Iberian Peninsula.70 The gens Maurorum, the Muslim nation or people, on the other hand, is a term entirely unprecedented in a liturgical context, and one that does not 64

65

66 67 68 69 70

Ibid., ch. 50: “Archiepiscopus uero Toletanus et episcopus Palentinus et alii uiri religiosi, qui cum episcopis erant, mezquitam Maurorum omni spurcicia mahometice susperstitionis per uirtutem Domini nostri Iesu Christi et uictoriosissime Crucis eius purgatam dedicauerunt ecclesiam Domino Iesu Christo”. Patrick Henriet has noted this too; idem, “La guerra contra el Islam: ¿Una guerra santa, pero según qué criterios?” in El mundo de los conquistadores, ed. Martín F. Ríos Saloma (Mexico City, 2015), pp. 287–306, 324. Much later, in the sixteenth century, we find clamours against Turks: ‘Turcer … Machometi secte vane’ (Linder, Raising Arms, p. 196). Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, p. 197. Ibid., pp. 48–49. Janini, Liber Ordinum Episcopal, no. 48. On this important term, see John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York, 2002). ‘Sarracenos dicitur’; Demetrio Mansilla, La documentación pontificia hasta Inocencio III (965–1216) (Rome, 1955), p. 503.

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have its roots in the language of the Old Testament. It should, perhaps, come as no surprise that a liturgist writing in thirteenth-century Iberia, where Christian and Muslim polities had lived in immediate proximity for some six centuries, should choose this term. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christian chroniclers were showing more interest in and awareness of the identities of their Andalusi neighbours than before. Simon Barton revealed a surprisingly detailed understanding of Almoravid government and policy in the mid-twelfth century Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, and by the thirteenth century, a greater diversity of terms was being used to depict political and ethnic differences among Andalusi Muslims.71 Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada of Toledo took this to its furthest extent in the 1240s, when he wrote his Historia Arabum, which was to be the first history of peninsular Islam written by a non-Muslim. In the Chronicle of 754, an eighth-century Christian text written in the Peninsula under Muslim rule, references to the gens Maurorum had a specific ethnographical significance, differentiating between two Muslim groups to identify the Berbers in contrast with the ruling Arabs.72 By the twelfth century, however, the term maurus can be found very widely, and appears to have lost its original, ethnic, significance. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada’s De Rebus Hispanie, for example, routinely refers to the inhabitants of al-Andalus as mauri, indicating Muslims of all backgrounds, as do the authors of the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, the Chronica Latina, and the Primera Crónica General, written at the end of the thirteenth century.73 Yet, widespread though the term is, its coupling with the noun gens, a recognition of the existence of a ‘people’ or ‘nation’ of the Muslims, is more unusual.74 I have found the term in just one of these sources; that is, once again, in the Chronica Latina, and more specifically, in the same chapter cited above, the description of the conquest of Córdoba in 1236. Here, it is used in explicit contrast to the people of Christ: “after the sudden evacuation of the Muslim people (gens Maurorum), [Córdoba] had to be 71 Barton, “Islam and the West”. See Hélène Sirantoine, “What’s in a Word? Naming ‘Muslims’ in Medieval Christian Iberia”, in Making the Medieval Relevant: How Medieval Studies Contribute to Improving Our Understanding of the Present, eds. Chris Jones et al. (Boston, 2019), pp. 225–238; and Teresa Witcombe, “The Qur’an and the ‘Laws of Muhammad’ in medieval Christian eyes”, in The Iberian Qurʾan: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times, eds. M. García-Arenal and G. Wiegers (Berlin, Boston, 2022), pp. 49–67. 72 Hélène Sirantoine, “What’s in a Word?”, p. 230. For the Chronicle of 754, see the study and translation of Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, 2nd ed. (Liverpool, 2011). 73 Sirantoine, “What’s in a Word?”. 74 On ‘gens’, see Bartlett, Robert, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 39–56.

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populated by new inhabitants, followers of Christ (novis habitatoribus, Christi cultoribus)”.75 The chronicler also refers to the “land of the Muslims”, such as his description of the elderly Alfonso VIII setting out to besiege Baeza and hoping to die “in time of war in the land of the Muslims”.76 There are other similarities too between the collect of the Oratio and the language of the Chronica Latina. At least three times, the chronicler mentions the Muslims being “forcefully expelled” (potenter … expugnantes), and the king’s armies “returning to their homes with honour”.77 However, I do not wish to overemphasise the significance of these concurrences. There may be a direct link between the chronicler and the writing of the Oratio; Juan of Osma was present at several of the conquests he describes, and was the prelate who consecrated the mosque of Córdoba after the city’s conquest. He also owned land in these conquered territories, referred to in his will as the “frontier” ( frontaria).78 But perhaps more important is the fact that these two texts appear to be products of the same cultural milieu. If prayers such as the Oratio were being said routinely in support of the wars of Fernando III, it would be wholly expected to find the same rhetoric in the descriptions of these events by those who were there, and who would themselves have been raising the “invisible weapons” of the liturgy on behalf of these conquests. Rather than allowing us to identify a precise provenance for the Oratio, the language of the collect more securely points us, once again, towards the cultural and linguistic context of the thirteenth century, and the ways in which the Castilian Church under Fernando III perceived of and wrote about the Muslims of al-Andalus. 4

Conclusions: Praying for Conquest in Castile

As I hope has been made clear in the course of this chapter, the Oratio in tempore belli adversus Saracenos should be considered to be a thirteen-century prayer, and one that reflects the sorts of liturgy performed by the Castilian clergy during the turbulent years of conflict with the Islamic south of the Peninsula during this period. The Oratio is very clearly a ‘clamour’, and one that was influenced, structurally and textually, by the liturgies associated with 75 Chronica Latina, ch. 74. 76 Chronica Latina, ch. 26; habens propositum firmissimum finire uitam suam in terra Maurorum tempore guerre. 77 For example, see ch. 25: reuersi sunt ad propria cum uictoria et honore. 78 In his will of 1246, Bishop Juan leaves “possessiones meas quas habeo in Frontaria, scilicet, in Corduba et in terminis suis, in Ubeda et Baecia et in terminis suis, et in Campo de Alarcos.” ACB, Vol 25, f. 351.

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crusade, and specifically the clamours for the Holy Land, that were said across the rest of Latin Europe in the thirteenth century. Yet here, the liturgical rhetoric was re-purposed and re-directed for use within the context of Castilian conquest of al-Andalus. That this should be so comes as little surprise when we consider the nature of the Castilian Church in the thirteenth century, and particularly, the sorts of prelates that staffed it—and that would have been responsible for commissioning new liturgical texts. Although the bishops of Fernando III have a reputation for eschewing all instructions from the papal curia, this is not always justified, and there is no doubt that an unprecedently large proportion of Iberian prelates, 27 in total, attended the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It was at this council that Pope Innocent III called for crusade, almost certainly accompanied by a clamour.79 From Castile, the prelates of Toledo, Burgos, Ávila, Cuenca, Osma, and Segovia attended, each with clerical entourages.80 The papal call was repeated in 1228, on the visit of the papal legate John of Abbeville, to Castile.81 It is highly likely, as such, that the majority of the bishops serving in Castile in the aftermath of both of these events had themselves heard the papal exhortation to clamour. Indeed, two of these prelates, Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo and Bishop Maurice of Burgos, were themselves designated crucesignatus in 1225, in a bull from Pope Honorius III that explicitly bestowed the spiritual benefits accrued by crusaders to Jerusalem upon those fighting the Almohads in the Iberian Peninsula.82 In letters dated to September of that year, the pope exhorted Rodrigo and Maurice to preach the “business” of crusade throughout Castile,

79 Antonio Garcia y Garcia, “Legislación de los concilios y sínodos del Reino Leonés,” in El reino de León en la alta edad media, II: Ordenamiento jurídico del reino (León, 1992), pp. 105–114, 97. 80 S. Kuttner and A. Garcia y Garcia, “A New Eyewitness Account of the Fourth Lateran Council,” Traditio 20 (1964): 115–178. It is likely that the bishops of Palencia and Plasencia were also present, or at least represented. 81 See Peter Linehan, “A papal legation and its aftermath,” in Peter Linehan, Historical Memory and Clerical Activity in Medieval Spain and Portugal (Farnham, 2012), pp. 236–256; and Garcia y Garcia, “Legislación de los concilios,” 105–114. 82 Demetrio Mansilla Reoyo, ed., La documentación pontificia de Honorio III (1216–1227) (Rome, 1965), doc. 575: “unde universis per Ispanias constitutes, qui crucis assumpto signaculo cause huiusmodi duxerint, insistendum, eamdem concedimus indulgentiam, que crucesignatis terre sancte subsidio insistenibus in generali concilio est concessa, quorum etiam personas cum omnibus bonis suis post crucem assumptam, sub protectione recipimus apostolice sedis et nostra … crucesignatus regni Castille vos proprios deputavimus protectores”.

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and called on King Fernando III to support them in this endeavour.83 The two prelates appear to have cooperated, and to have spread this call to crusade at least as far as Ávila.84 Unfortunately, Honorius’s letters make no reference to any particular liturgy that should accompany this preaching campaign, and there is no way of knowing whether any sort of clamour was intended to support this endeavour—although, as we have seen, calls for crusading activity were routinely associated with liturgical clamours elsewhere. Moreover, we do not have to see papal commands as the only vectors for the movement of liturgical ideas into Castile. The higher clergy of Castile were cosmopolitan men, well-travelled and often well-connected with the wider European Church. The ways in which his French and German peers prayed for crusade cannot have gone unnoticed by Bishop Maurice of Burgos, who passed through France twice in 1219, at the height of the Fifth Crusade (1217–1221), on his mission to collect Beatrice Hohenstaufen, future Queen of Castile. In almost every cathedral and church he passed as he journeyed between the Pyrenees and the imperial court in Suabia, Maurice would undoubtedly have heard the clamour for the Holy Land being prayed daily, and so would his clerical travelling companions, namely, the abbot of San Pedro de Arlanza, the abbot of Ríoseco, the prior of the Hospital of Burgos, and the master of the military order of Santiago.85 Whether these prelates brought this liturgical practice back with them to Castile must of course remain no more than speculation, although it is not irrelevant to point out that they did return with new ideas about French Gothic architecture, as seen in the founding of the Gothic cathedral of Burgos two years later, the earliest such building in Castile, constructed by masons recruited from France.86 There are many more examples of such opportunities for the movement of liturgical ideas during the first half of the thirteenth century. One was the arrival in Castile of John of Brienne, the displaced king of Jerusalem, in 1224, in 83 Mansilla Reoyo, La documentación Pontificia, doc 576; “Venerabiles fratres nostros Toletanum archiepiscopum et Burgensem episcopum deputavimus protectores, quibus etiam per litteras nostras iniunximus, ut indulgentiam huiusmodi, qua fideles ad promotionem eiusdem negotii animentur, publice debeant nuntiare”. 84 Teresa Witcombe, “Between Paris and Al-Andalus: Bishop Maurice of Burgos c.1208–1238 and his world,” unpublished PhD thesis (University of Exeter, 2019), ch. 2. 85 De Rebus Hispaniae, IX.10, ed., Juan Fernández Valverde (Turnhout, 1987). The Chronica Latina, ch. 40, adds ‘Garsiam Gonzalui, quondam magistrum ordinis Vclensis, hoc est, milicie Sancti Iacobi’. 86 Specifically, the masons who built the earliest parts of Burgos cathedral in the 1220s and 1230s appear to have been from Bourges. See T. Witcombe, “Building Heaven on Earth: Bishop Maurice and the novam fabricam of Burgos cathedral,” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (2017): 46–60, 49–50.

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the aftermath of the failure of the Fifth Crusade. He married Berenguela, sister of Fernando III, in May 1224, in a ceremony at Burgos cathedral performed by Archbishop Rodrigo. Any relationship between the presence in Castile of “the king of the earthly Jerusalem”, as he was referred to in a charter recording the event, and Fernando III’s declaration of war on the Almohads just a few months later, has yet to be established, but in any case, it seems beyond doubt that John would have his own clerics travelling with him.87 His appearance in Burgos in these critical months would surely have been an occasion on which the clamour to the Holy Land may have become known to Castilian liturgists. Another such opportunity, towards the end of Fernando’s reign, was the appointment of Juan de Medina de Pomar, former archdeacon at Burgos and student at the University of Paris, as archbishop of Toledo in 1248—the year in which Seville was conquered by the Castilians. This was also the year in which Louis IX of France embarked on the Seventh Crusade, with the backing of Pope Innocent IV, who, as we have seen, reiterated a call for clamour to the Holy Land for the occasion. Archbishop Juan was well-known to both the French king and the pope, with the latter describing him as “our chaplain” (capellanus noster).88 On the occasion of Juan’s promotion to the archiepiscopate, Louis IX despatched to him a selection of relics from the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, including a fragment of the Holy Cross and one of the spines of the Crown of Thorns, both crusading relics par excellence.89 Even though, once again, we have no explicit mention of the liturgy, there is little doubt that the entourage of French clerics that must have accompanied these relics would have been familiar with the Holy Land clamour, and would most likely have been performing it daily themselves in preparation for the Seventh Crusade led by their king. However the clamour for the Holy Land reached the ears of the liturgist who drew up the Oratio in tempore belli adversus Saracenos, there can be little doubt that it did so, and that this prayer represents a recycling within a Castilian context of a liturgical form that was in far wider use in thirteenth-century Europe. Whether they knew it or not, those who prayed the Oratio were echoing congregants across the rest of Europe who prayed for divine assistance in crusade—although in the case of the Oratio, the goal was not the retaking of Jerusalem but the crushing of the “Muslim people” in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. Whether this was a prayer written in anticipation of the reopening of war with the Almohads in the 1220s, or later on, around the time of the 87 ACB v. 35, f. 34; “Johanem Regem terrestris Iherosolimitane”. 88 R. Gonzálvez Ruiz, Hombres y libros de Toledo 1080–1300 (Madrid, 1997), p. 207. 89 Ibid., pp. 207–208.

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conquest of Seville in 1248, or indeed, even after this event (since Fernando’s son, Alfonso X, nurtured his own, unsuccessful ambitions to conquer Muslim lands), must remain an open question for now.90 Detailed inspection of the Liber Sacramentorum may go further in clarifying this point, as will a wider identification of the prayers contained in the many other unstudied liturgical codices from this period. Nonetheless, once understood within its thirteenth-century context, the Oratio provides us with an important insight into the liturgy of the Castilian Church in this turbulent period, and the ways in which its members prayed for war against the Muslims of al-Andalus. Appendix Oratio in tempore belli adverssus91 Sarracenos (ACB cod. 23 f.2r). Domine deus qui conteris bella ab inicio [eleva bracchium tuum super gentes quae cogitant servis tuis mala] A. Allide vir[tutem] eor[um] et dextera tua [glorificetur in nobis]

Lord God, you who destroy wars from the beginning, raise your arm against the peoples who wish evil on your servants; crush their force and let your right hand be glorified in us.

Ps. Deus misereatur nostris.

Ps. God have mercy on us.

Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison Pater noster. Et ne nos …

Kyrie Eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie Eleison Our Father.

Exurgat deus et disipentur inimici eius. Et fugiant qui oderunt eum (Ps. 67:2)

Let God rise up, and may His enemies be scattered; and let those that hate Him flee

90 For Alfonso’s crusading ambitions, see Peter Linehan, “Quedam de quibus dubitans: On Preaching the Crusade in Alfonso X’s Castile,” Historia Instituciones Documentos 27 (2000): 129–154. 91 There is some controversy about the transcription of this word. To me, ‘adverssus’ is very clear. Janini thought ‘ad usum’ correct, whilst Mansilla rather inexplicably made this word out to be ‘contra’, as did Berganza.

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Domine salvum fac regem R. Et exaudi nos in die qua invocaverimus te. (Ps. 19:9)

Lord, save the king; and hear us on the day that we shall call to thee

Salvum fac populum tuum Domine. R Et benedic haereditati tuae (cf. Ps. 27: 9)

Save, O Lord, thy people; and bless thy inheritance

Esto eis, Domine, turris fortitudinis a facie inimici in eis. (Ps. 60:4)

Be unto them, Lord, a tower of strength; against the face of the enemy

Mite eis auxilium de Sancto domine R. Et de Syon tuere eos (cf. Ps. 19:3)

Send them help from the holy place Lord; and defend them out of Zion

Domine exaudi orationem meam, et clamor meus ad te veniat. (Ps. 101.2)

Lord, hear my prayer and let my cry come to thee

Dominus vobiscum R. et cum spiritu tuo.

The Lord be with you; and with your spirit.

Domine Jesu Christe fili dei vivi qui vere deus es et homo. Respice propicius super famulum tuum regem nostrum, et super exercitum eius et eos perpetuo comitare presidio. Et presta ut per virtutem nominis tui et victoriosissime crucis tue gentem maurorum que tibi92 semper detrahit potenter expugnent. Et concede ut feritate barbarica calcata cum honore et gaudio ad propria revertantur. Qui vivis et regnas cum domine pater. In …

Lord Jesus Christ son of the living God, you who are both true God and man, look kindly on your servant our king and on his army, and accompany them always in protection. And grant that, by the power of your name and of your most victorious Cross, they should powerfully conquer the Muslim people, who always disparage you. And concede that, the barbaric ferocity having been trampled underfoot, they may return to their homes with honour and joy. Who lives and reigns with the Lord Father …

92

This word is partially obscured. To me, it looks most like ‘tibi’. Berganza thought it to be ‘ubique’, whereas Janini suggests ‘vim’.

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Acknowledgements This research was carried out whilst I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by a Study Abroad Studentship from the Leverhulme Trust. I would like to thank Jenny Sheppard, Sonia Serna Serna, Edward Sutcliffe, Ainoa Castro Correa, Emma Hornby, and Damian Smith for their advice with various aspects of this paper. My deepest thanks also go to Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo for her support and encouragement. At a conference in Madrid in October 2017, I mentioned to Simon Barton, then my PhD supervisor, that I had recently come across some unknown prayers for war with the Saracens in a thirteenth-century sacramentary in Burgos. He gave me some perennial advice; “quick, write something about them!” Just a few weeks later, Simon’s wholly unexpected death was announced, and the scholarly community lost one of its finest members. His scholarship is known by many, but he was also a supervisor whose wisdom and perspicacity were matched only by his generosity, enthusiasm, and kindness. My contribution is offered here in Simon’s memory, with gratitude. Bibliography

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Chapter 6

Reframing ‘Reconquista’. Hernando de Baeza’s Take on the Conquest of Granada Teresa Tinsley The idea of a medieval history of Iberia as the progressive ‘reconquering’ of land unjustly occupied by Islamic invaders has been a surprisingly tenacious paradigm, although it is only since the beginning of the nineteenth century that the word ‘Reconquista’ began to be used and only since the twenty-first century that historians, acknowledging its inherent bias, have tended to avoid the term except in inverted commas.1 It is generally accepted that the ideas we have come to call ‘Reconquista’ had their roots in early Asturian and Leonese chronicles which were taken up and developed by successive Castilian monarchs and their supporters.2 Recent discussion of the concept has taken one of two main directions. On the one hand, medievalists have discussed the extent to which the idea of ‘Reconquista’ was ‘real’ at the time, in the sense of a shared and constant ideology driving forward military action against al-Andalus.3 On a different but related tack, scholars have critiqued the development and (mis)use of the term in nationalist historiography and discussed the distortions it has engendered.4 1 Martín Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista. Una construcción historiográfica (siglos XVI–XIV) (Madrid, 2011). Ríos Saloma gives 1796 as the first dating of the word to refer to the conflict between Christian and Islamic societies on the Iberian Peninsula and noted that historians had then been using inverted commas for a decade (pp. 31, 37). However, in 2002 Eloy Benito Ruano put up a last-ditch defence of the word as a historical category as well as a historiographic device: “La Reconquista. Una categoría histórica e historiográfica,” Medievalismo 12 (2002): 91–98. 2 J. N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, vol. II, 1410–1516 (Oxford, 1978), 198–200; Brian Tate, Ensayos sobre la historiografía peninsular del siglo XV (Madrid, 1970), chapter “La historiografía de la España del s.XV,” pp. 280–296 and “The re-writing of the historical past,” in Historical literature in Medieval Iberia, ed. Alan Deyermond (London, 1996), pp. 85–103. 3 Manuel González Jiménez, “Sobre la ideología de la Reconquista: realidades y tópicos,” in Memoria, mito y realidad en la historia medieval, eds. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte and José Luis Martín Rodríguez (Nájera, 2003), pp. 151–170; Francisco García Fitz, La Reconquista (Granada, 2010). 4 Joseph Torro, “Pour en finir avec la Reconquête. L’occupation chrétienne d’al-Andalous, la soumission et la disparition des populations musulmanes (XIIe–XIIIe siècles),” Cahiers d’histoire 78 (2000): 79–97; John Tolan “Using the Middle Ages to Construct Spanish Identity: 19th and

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Prominent among the medievalists, Francisco García Fitz describes it as a “mito motor”—a galvanising ideological construction. He attributes its longevity and success during the medieval period to the interpretative framework it provided for understanding the past, present, and future.5 Focussing on the origin of the concept in latter-day historiography, Martín Ríos Saloma provides a detailed deconstruction of its development from the mid sixteenth to the nineteenth century.6 In common with these two authors, and notwithstanding those who advocate avoiding the term altogether, I use the word as a shorthand—generally without the definite article or as an adjective—to describe a constellation of values, beliefs, and biases which have been re-purposed, re-used, embellished, and re-discovered in different contexts over more than a thousand years.7 My interest is in what we might call the hinge moment in the development of the ‘Reconquista’ imaginary—the conquest of Granada in 1492—the moment when, as an ideology, it stopped framing immediate lived reality and functioning as a call to arms, and was reduced to providing a particular identity-defining understanding of the past. How the conquest of Granada was conceptualised and exploited in the creation of the new, soon-to-be exclusively Christian, society would impact on questions of religious toleration, national identity, and human rights that are still with us today. Simon Barton himself, in his posthumous publication with Robert Portass, urges us to look “Beyond the Reconquista”.8 In response to this recommendation, I offer an example of an author who did just that. Hernando de Baeza’s account of the decline and fall of Nasrid Granada, provides an idealistic glimpse of how the conceptual framework we have come to recognise as the ‘Reconquista’ narrative might have been reset.9 Composed by an Andalusian

5 6 7 8 9

20th-Century Spanish Historiography of Reconquest,” in Historiographical Approaches to Medieval Colonisation of East Central Europe, ed. J. Piskorski (Boulder, 2002), pp. 329–347; Adam Kosto, “Reconquest, Renaissance and the Histories of Iberia, ca. 1000–1200,” in European Transformations. The Long Twelfth Century, eds. Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen (Notre Dame, 2012), pp. 93–116; Alejandro García Sanjuan, La conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado (Madrid, 2013); Alejandro García Sanjuan, “Rejecting al-Andalus, Exalting the Reconquista: Historical Memory in Contemporary Spain,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10, no. 1 (2018): 127–145. García Fitz, La Reconquista, p. 71. Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista. Torro, “Pour en finir”. Simon Barton† and Robert Portass, eds., Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085) (Leiden, 2020). Hernando de Baeza, La Relación de Hernando de Baeza sobre el Reino de Granada, eds. Juan Pablo Rodríguez Argente del Castillo, Teresa Tinsley, and José Rodríguez Molina, (Alcalá la Real, 2018). - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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frontiersman, a converso and an Arabic speaker, around 1510, it not only avoids the key elements of ‘Reconquista’ ideology—the ‘othering’ of Muslims as enemies of the faith, concepts of recovery and redemption, and the special role of the monarchs in completing a divinely-ordained mission—but seems actively to contradict them, telling a story, not of diametrically opposed victors and vanquished, but of the natural coming together of near neighbours. 1

The Gap in Historiographical Production

Ríos Saloma starts his analysis of the development of the concept of ‘Reconquista’ in historiography with the five Crónicas Generales de España published between 1553 and 1615, linking them to the construction of Spanish identity in the context of a Hapsburg monarchy looking outwards to parade its credentials within the Christian world, to unify soldiers and bureaucrats in far-flung dominions, and to define itself in opposition to Protestant monarchies.10 But, before that, in the first half of the sixteenth century and the last years of the fifteenth, despite plentiful propaganda, there is a gap in official historiography. This hiatus is surprising given the efforts of the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel of Castile (r. 1474–1504) and Fernando of Aragon (r. 1479–1516), to commission chroniclers to record their triumphs, and the enormous level of interest in the victory over Granada reflected in literary and artistic sources.11 Alonso de Santa Cruz (1505–1567) whose Crónica de los Reyes Católicos dates from the 1540s, lamented the lack of historians which had left more than twenty-five years of history unwritten “from the year 1490 to the death of the most serene King Don Fernando the Catholic which happened at the beginning of the year 1516”.12 He said that he had scoured the length and breadth of the country looking for “books and reports and any sort of writing on the things that happened in those times.”13 So, why the gap? The conquest of Granada was celebrated throughout the Christian world as a major historical breakthrough, though its repercussions 10

Those of Florián de Ocampo, Ambrosio de Morales, Prudencio de Sandoval, Esteban de Garibay, and Juan de Mariana. Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista, pp. 41–76. 11 Richard Kagan, Clio and the Crown. The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore, 2009), pp. 53–56; Nicasio Salvador Miguel, “La glorificación literaria de Fernando el Católico. El caso de la guerra de Granada,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia CCXIV (2017): 279–328; Fabrizio Cruciani, Teatro nel Rinascimento, Roma 1450–1550 (Rome, 1983), chapter “Feste per la conquista di Granata,” pp. 228–240. 12 Alonso de Santa Cruz, Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo (Seville, 1951). Quotes are referenced from an on-line manuscript: Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) m/s 1620, f. 6r. 13 Ibid. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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were by no means certain at the time, nor could they have felt clear to those whose task would be to convert the extraordinary amount of news and propaganda surrounding the event into a matter of historical record.14 Was it the end of all wars—as Hernando de Talavera, appointed by the monarchs as the first Archbishop of Granada, claimed in his commemorative mass to celebrate the conquest—or the beginning of a new era of military expansion?15 In the two decades that followed, events moved very swiftly—the expulsion of the Jews, the discovery of the New World, war with France in Italy and the Pyrenees, the death of the monarchs’ heir, Prince Juan, the rebellion and forced baptism of Granadan Muslims, followed by the death of Queen Isabel, the intensification of Inquisition activity, and its use for blatantly political purposes.16 Those at the heart of these rapidly-unfolding events must have struggled to attach a settled meaning—particularly one which would be acceptable to the dual crown—to the conquest of Granada and the process of Christianisation which followed it. One might have expected a reassessment, once Granada fell, of a centuries-old historical narrative based on pride in a Gothic heritage whose purpose, heavily biased towards Castile, was to legitimate and drive forward a mission which the Catholic Monarchs themselves trumpeted as having been completed. It is clear that there was a tension between claims that the conquest of Granada was the culmination of a divine mission which had taken eight hundred years, and the need to re-elaborate the ‘Reconquista’ narrative to energise a unifying mission for the future. Andrew Devereux has described the efforts of Fernando’s adherents to put forward arguments for continuing military expansion in North Africa and the New World. Whilst some repeated the conceit that Visigothic territory had included parts of North Africa, others justified war to ‘recover’ all lands believed to have been formerly Christian, with Fernando’s messianic mission being to go on to conquer Africa, defeat the Turks, destroy Islam, and recover Jerusalem.17 Latter-day nationalist 14 Salvador Miguel, “La glorificación literaria”. This author suggests that lack of public demand for published historiography as compared to more popular genres may have been a reason for this gap, p. 327. 15 María Julieta Vega García-Ferrer, Fray Hernando de Talavera y Granada (Granada, 2007), p. 276: “con la conquista de Granada, [Dios] ha puesto fin a las guerras. Ha dado, pues, una paz completa a los pueblos de España”. 16 John Edwards, “Trial of an Inquisitor: the dismissal of Diego Rodríguez Lucero, Inquisitor of Cordoba in 1508,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37, no. 2, (1986): 240–257; Ana Cristina Cuadro García, “Acción inquisitorial contra los judaízantes en Córdoba y crisis eclesiástica (1482–1508),” Revista de Historia Moderna. Anales de la Universidad de Alicante 21 (2003): 11–28. 17 Andrew Devereux, The Other Side of Empire. Just War in the Mediterranean (Ithaca NY, 2020).

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historiography has clearly overstated the idea of ‘Reconquista’ as restoring the integrity of Visigothic Hispania as mapped on to contemporary borders. The sense of having been cut loose from former certainties once the divine mission, as explained in Gothic accounts of Castilian history, had been completed must have represented a challenge for those seeking to account for the events of the monarchs’ reign in the quarter century after 1490. While, as Helen Nader noted, the conquest of Granada was used to confirm the righteousness of the monarchs’ enterprise and divine favour in seeing it accomplished, it also deprived those responsible for the writing of history of a lens through which to read the world and understand events.18 The chroniclers of the early part of the monarchs’ reign, Diego de Valera, Alonso de Palencia, and Fernando del Pulgar, all display a hefty dose of ‘Reconquista’ zeal in urging forward the monarchs’ enterprise, but their works all terminate before the final victory, so do not have to address the ‘end of history’ problem.19 In 1509, Doctor Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal, a jurist and member of the Royal Council, was appointed by King Fernando to head up what has been called a “historiography workshop” to sift through all the various sources and write a history of the monarchs’ reign.20 Galíndez’s Anales, in common with another chronicler appointed by the monarchs, the Sicilian Lucio Marineo Sículo (1460–1533), and Alonso de Santa Cruz, name a number of authors as sources, none of whose work has survived.21 Marineo Sículo said explicitly that he was disinclined to write about Granada, and only did so in his later work well after both monarchs were dead.22 Santa Cruz explained that Gonzalo de Ayora had been appointed to pick up where Pulgar left off and write about the conquest of Granada, but he could not track down anything he had written. Hinting at possible censorship, he attributed the disappearance of Ayora’s manuscript to his part in the Comunero rebellion of 1520.

18 Helen Nader, The Mendoza family in the Spanish Renaissance (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 19–34. 19 Hernando del Pulgar, Crónica de los Señores Reyes Católicos (Valencia, 1780); Diego de Valera, “Memorial de diversas hazañas: crónica de Enrique IV,” in Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla (Madrid, 1878), pp. 1–95; Alonso de Palencia, Guerra de Granada, ed. Rafael Peinado Santaella (Granada, 1998). 20 Kagan, Clio and the Crown, pp. 53–54. 21 “Anales breves … que dejo manuscritos el Dr. D. Lorenzo Galíndez Carvajal”, CODOIN 18 (Madrid, 1851), pp. 227–536; Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla (Madrid, 1878), pp. 533–565. It contains brief notes on major events, organised chronologically by year from 1468 to Fernando’s death in 1516; Lucio Marineo Sículo, Vida y hechos de los Reyes Católicos (Madrid, 1943), p. 93. 22 Caro Lynn, A College Professor of the Renaissance. Lucio Marineo Sículo (Chicago, 1937), p. 200.

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The narrative which has been handed down to us from those early years of the sixteenth century was written not by an official chronicler, but by a man positioned at one extreme of an ideological divide in the upheavals which followed the death of Queen Isabel (1504).23 Andrés Bernáldez was chaplain to the controversial Inquisitor General and Archbishop of Seville, Diego Deza. He claimed to be writing for the “common people” and drew strongly on ‘Reconquista’ ideology to vaunt the Christianisation of the peninsula.24 The conquest of Granada was, for him, a miraculous confirmation of a political theology that blurred the distinction between secular and divine authority, attributed a messianic role to the Spanish monarchs, and not only justified, but welcomed violence in pursuit of their aims. Bernáldez presents the reign of Fernando and Isabel as fulfilling a prophecy to rid the country of evil—defined as “bad Christians”, “heretics” and “Moors”—and depicts the conquest of Granada, the work of the Inquisition, and the 1492 Edict of Expulsion as all part of the same programme of action.25 But not everyone shared the prejudices of Bernáldez. The turn of the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries was a period of creativity and transformation, an age of discoveries, new thinking, and new possibilities. Those who banded together to decry the excesses of the Inquisitor Lucero—and succeeded in having him tried and condemned in 1508—who lobbied the young monarchs Felipe and Juana I to have the work of the Inquisition suspended, and who opposed “the King of Aragon” as governor of Castile, displayed a very different conception of the society which emerged post 1492.26 It was in this window, 23 Antonio Álvarez-Ossorio, “Razón de linaje y lesa majestad. El Gran Capitán, Venecia y la Corte de Fernando el Católico (1507–1509),” in De la unión de las coronas al Imperio de Carlos, ed. Ernest Berlenguer, vol. 3 (Madrid, 2001), pp. 385–451; Álvaro Fernández de Córdova Miralles, “La emergencia de Fernando el Católico en la Curia papal: identidad y propaganda de un príncipe aragonés en el espacio italiano (1462–1492),” in La imagen de Fernando el Católico en la Historia, la Literatura y el Arte, eds. Aurora Egido Martínez and José Enrique Laplana (Saragossa, 2014), pp. 28–91; José Szmolka Clares, “Nobleza y autoritarismo en Andalucía. La contribución de Granada a la sumisión del estamento nobiliario andaluz, 1504–1510,” Cuadernos de Estudios Medievales 6–7 (1981): 277–296, 293; Stefania Pastore, Una herejía española: conversos, alumbrados e Inquisición (1449–1559) (Madrid, 2010), pp. 113–124. 24 Andrés Bernáldez, Historia de los Reyes Católicos (Granada, 1856), p. 30. 25 José Enrique López de Coca, “El otro en la crónica de Andrés Bernáldez,” in Estudios en homenaje a Emilio Cabrera Muñoz, eds. Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave et al. (Córdoba, 2015), pp. 293–306; E. Michael Gerli, “Social crisis and conversion. Apostacy and Inquisition in the chronicles of Fernando del Pulgar and Andrés Bernáldez,” Hispanic Review 70 (2002): 147–167. 26 There is much more to say here which I discuss in my book on Baeza’s political agency during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, which includes the first English translation of

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before the standard narrative of the conquest of Granada became embedded in historiography, that Hernando de Baeza’s work emerged. 2

The Author and His Context

Baeza was a man of the frontier, literate, somewhat cultured, au fait with court protocol and caballero etiquette and clearly linked to the Andalusian nobility and frontier commanders. He stresses his Christian credentials, making explicit his affinity with the Jeronymite Order and implicitly with a current of thought which had emerged within that Order during the mid-fifteenth century arguing strongly for the integration of people of Jewish heritage within the Christian community. This view also rejected the principle of limpieza de sangre which, by the time Baeza was writing, was becoming part of the dominant ideology.27 My research has established that Baeza was a member of a wealthy and influential family from Córdoba who had converted from Judaism, very probably at the end of the fourteenth century, following the pogroms of 1391, and had been living as Christians for several generations. Under the protection of the House of Aguilar—a branch of the aristocratic Fernández de Córdoba family—they came to occupy influential positions in Córdoba. Baeza’s father was an alderman (veinticuatro), his uncle the Town Clerk (escribano mayor). Another uncle held the Customs House, collecting tax on incoming goods. Educated, financially very capable, entrepreneurial—they were targeted in the well-documented anti-converso riots of 1473–4 which led to the establishment of the Inquisition. Later, the older generation of Baezas were some of the first to succumb to the Cordoban Tribunal. However, under the protection of the Fernández de Córdobas, Hernando and his brothers were able to rebuild their lives as devout Christians.28

his work: Teresa Tinsley, Reconciliation and Resistance in Early Modern Spain. Hernando de Baeza and the Catholic Monarchs (London, 2022). See also Teresa Tinsley, “Granada como Espejo de Castilla en la ‘Relación’ de Hernando de Baeza,” in Estudios de Frontera 11, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos (Alcalá la Real, 2020), pp. 467–474. See also Teresa Tinsley, “Esbozo biográfico,” in La Relación de Hernando de Baeza sobre el Reino de Granada, ed. Juan Pablo Rodríguez Argente del Castillo, Teresa Tinsley and José Rodríguez Molina (Alcalá la Real, 2018), pp. 31–40. 27 Bruce Rosenstock, New Men: ‘Conversos’, Christian Theology and Society in Fifteenth-Century Spain (London, 2002). 28 Tinsley, Reconciliation and Resistance, pp. 9–22.

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After the surrender of Granada, Hernando went with Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba—the second son of the family—as his secretary to Italy. Here he witnessed his master take the kingdom of Naples for the Aragonese from the French, the downfall of the Borgias, the election of Pope Julius II, and the arrival of King Fernando in Naples to take the throne for himself. In recognition of his military brilliance, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba was given the title of Gran Capitán, two dukedoms, and the position of Fernando’s Viceroy in Naples. Hernando de Baeza acted as his representative in Rome, where he encountered a wide variety of views on contemporary politics which challenged the assumptions of the Castilian mainstream, rubbing shoulders with Machiavelli, among others. Meanwhile, back in Córdoba, the infamous Inquisitor Diego Rodríguez Lucero was running amok arresting so many people—including members of Baeza’s own family—that the Marquis of Priego, head of the House of Aguilar, was forced to intervene. This pitted the Marquis against Fernando and led to his downfall and the destruction of the Fernández de Córdoba’s castle in Montilla, where Hernando had grown up. My book describes all this in detail, and in particular the importance of the relationship that Baeza had with his noble masters, based on letters he wrote to them while he was in Naples.29 A key feature of the Lucero affair—a convulsion which has been seen as a prelude to the Comunero rebellion of 1520—was the way that the discriminatory and politicised way in which the Inquisition was operating brought together the anti-authoritarian protests of conversos, intellectuals and townspeople, and the political philosophy of a nobility whose caballero values and traditional consultative role were being squeezed by the absolutizing monarch.30 On returning from Naples in 1507, the Gran Capitán, whose political and religious philosophy as far as we can gather closely mirrors that evident in Baeza’s text, found himself out of favour with Fernando, who, amid the turmoil following the death of Felipe I, returned as governor of Castile.31 The Gran Capitán surrounded himself with an ‘academy’ of followers—soldiers, former captains under his command, and noble relatives—who shared a sense of injustice at the side-lining of their hero and the destruction of his family seat. It has been argued that this group became a virtual political party opposed to

29 Ibid., pp. 47–98. 30 Edwards, “Trial of an Inquisitor”; Álvaro Fernández de Córdova Miralles, “Una Inquisición sin inquisidores: los procesos de Córdoba y la crisis del Tribunal entre Roma y la Península Ibérica (1506–1507),” Hispania Sacra LXXIII (2021): 361–371. 31 José Enrique Ruiz Domènec, El Gran Capitán. Retrato de una época (Barcelona, 2002).

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Fernando.32 They would have formed a core audience for Baeza’s text, which presents Gonzalo in a very favourable light. However, Baeza is not writing a polemic; his dissidence is discreet. He takes care to build his own credibility as an eyewitness and a devout Christian, and wraps his message up in an appealing story which has subsequently inspired many creative representations of the sighing ‘last Moor’, Boabdil.33 Although elements of his story found their way into later ‘official’ chronicles—including a whole section in Alonso de Santa Cruz’s Crónica de los Reyes Católicos—later writers used what suited their agendas, discarding or reframing the aspects of Baeza’s work which challenged the ‘Reconquista’ narrative. I contend therefore that Baeza was an arms-length contributor to the official historiography being coordinated by Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal and that Gonzalo de Ayora, the chronicler later disgraced for participating in the Comunero rebellion, was the most likely conduit. Ayora too was from Córdoba and represented the town in its campaign against Lucero.34 Another reason which might have emboldened Baeza to write in a way which departed from the emerging post-conquest reworking of ‘Reconquista’ is the fact that he was no longer based in Spain, but in Italy. Here he enjoyed a certain protection from high level contacts in the Vatican where his son was a scriptor and later protonotary.35 According to the limpieza de sangre file of his great grandson, Licenciado Alonso Álvarez de Córdoba, Baeza died in Rome where he was buried in a stone tomb in the church of Saint Jerome (San Girolamo della Carità).36 3

Hernando de Baeza’s History of Granada

Baeza’s short account emerged after the death of Queen Isabel, while Fernando was acting as governor of Castile on behalf of his incapacitated daughter, Juana I. It recounts the final years of the Nasrid regime on the basis of notes 32 Álvarez-Ossorio, ‘Razón de linaje’, lists names on p. 401. 33 These were promoted in the English-speaking worked by Washington Irving in his Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (Teddington, 2007), first drafted 1828–1829. 34 Tinsley, Reconciliation and Resistance, p. 108. On Ayora: Rafael Ramírez de Arrellano, “Estudios biográficos (Gonzalo de Ayora),” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 41 (1902): 293–324. 35 Thomas Frenz, Die Kanzlei der Päpste der Hochrenaissance (1471–1527) (Tübingen, 1986), p. 363. Both Hernando and his son Juan Rodríguez de Baeza are very closely linked to Bernardino López de Carvajal, Cardinal of Santa Cruz. 36 Adolfo de Salazar Mir, Los Expedientes de Sangre de la Catedral de Sevilla, 1 (Madrid, 1995), p. 251.

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taken as an eyewitness and from oral testimony collected in Granada during the years leading up to 1492. It appears that the work enjoyed a fair amount of circulation in the sixteenth century, with various authors citing it explicitly while others—including Alonso de Santa Cruz, who used whole chunks verbatim—drew on the work without crediting its author.37 Until recently, only two manuscripts were known to exist, one from the second half of the sixteenth century and the other an eighteenth-century copy of the first. These are incomplete, with the text breaking off in the middle of a dramatic scene, and they were ‘rediscovered’ in the nineteenth century when two editions were published.38 However, in the last decade, three new manuscripts have emerged which include an end section previously lacking.39 My research on the author’s identity provides a way of getting to grips with the deeper meanings of the text. By his own account, Baeza acted as an intermediary between Boabdil (Mohammed XI), the last emir of Granada, and the Catholic Monarchs in the run up to the surrender of the city.40 Various sixteenth-century authors who cite him as a source indicate that he acted as interpreter between the two sides.41 From his own testimony he says that he was invited to work for Boabdil but at the same time he was receiving instructions from the Catholic Monarchs—it appears therefore that he was aware of the perspectives of both sides. Until now, Baeza’s work has been received, 37

Francisco de Medina y Mendoza, “Vida del Cardenal D. Pedro González de Mendoça,” in Memorial Histórico Español, 6 (Madrid, 1853), pp. 153–310; Pedro Barrantes Maldonado, “Ilustraciones de la Casa de Niebla,” II, Memorial Histórico Español 10 (Madrid, 1857), p. 397; Gonzalo Argote de Molina, Nobleza de Andalucía (Jaén, 1866), p. 52; María del Carmen Pescador del Hoyo, “Cómo fue de verdad la toma de Granada, a la luz de un documento inédito,” Al-Ándalus 20, no. 2 (1955): 283–344; Juan de Mata Carriazo, “Continuación inédita de la ‘Relación’ de Hernando de Baeza,” Al-Ándalus 13, no. 2 (1948): 431–442. 38 El Escorial, Biblioteca del Real Monasterio de El Escorial, Y-111-6; Madrid, BNE, MSS/11267/21; Marc J Müller, Die letzten Zeiten von Granada, (Munich, 1863), pp. 57–95; Hernando de Baeza, “Las cosas que pasaron,” in Relaciones de algunos sucesos de los últimos tiempos del Reino de Granada, ed. Emilio Lafuente y Alcántara (Madrid, 1868), pp. 1–45. 39 Madrid, Real Biblioteca (RBME), Y-111-6. f. 12v; Yale, Beinecke MS 633. The final manuscript is not publicly available but has been discussed by Mercedes Delgado Pérez, “A newly-discovered manuscript of the Historia de los Reyes Moros de Granada by Hernando de Baeza,” Manuscript Studies 2, no. 2 (2017): 540–567. 40 Baeza, Relación, p. 94. I am aware of the potential bias in using the Castilianised version of the last emir’s name, particularly in the way that this deprives him of his kingly title. However, “Mohammed XI” is no less westernised and potentially confusing as there has recently been a renumbering of Granadan emirs. I therefore follow Baeza, who gives his name as “Muley Baudeli”, from which the name Boabdil is derived. 41 Fernando del Pulgar, “Tratado de los Reyes de Granada y su origen” in Semanario erudito, 11–12, ed. Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor (Madrid, 1788), pp. 59–60; Medina y Mendoza, “Vida,” p. 305.

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quite rightly, as an authentic source, but also as an unproblematic and straightforward account of the events it describes. However, in the context of the ideologically-charged contemporary accounts that were shaping the narrative of the Catholic Monarchs’ historic achievement—and with an understanding of Baeza’s biography—the work appears much less ‘innocent’ and much more original than the many historians who have drawn on his work have hitherto assumed.42 In the remainder of this article I will discuss key features of the Catholic Monarchs’ ‘Reconquista’ narrative which Baeza appears deliberately to rebut. 4 Timescale The conquest of Granada was immediately promulgated throughout the Christian world as a struggle against the Muslims which had gone on for eight centuries.43 On the very day that he took possession of Granada, Fernando of Aragon wrote to the Pope saying: After so much work, expense, death, and bloodshed on the part of our subjects, our Lord has given your Holiness this Kingdom of Granada which for 780 years was occupied by unbelievers.44 In his commemorative mass, written to be celebrated annually, Archbishop Talavera set out the “diptych” of the ‘Reconquista’: the fall of the Visigothic kingdom of Hispania when “the Lord struck all of Spain as a result of King Rodrigo’s sin”, and its redemption by the virtuous Catholic Monarchs.45 It is an interpretation which casts aside the many intervening centuries of medieval history and represents the Muslim presence throughout that time as an evil aberration: 42

See discussion and references in Teresa Tinsley, “Un autor elusivo y poco entendido,” in Relación, pp. 27–30. 43 María Dolores Rincón González, “La divulgación de la toma de Granada: objetivos, mecanismos y agentes,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 40, no. 2 (2010): 603–615; Raúl González Arévalo, “Ecos de la toma de Granada,” in Homenaje al profesor Eloy Benito Ruano, ed. Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales, vol. 1 (Murcia, 2010), pp. 343–353. 44 Quoted in Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, La Guerra de Granada (1482–1491) (Granada, 2007), p. 125. 45 Vega García-Ferrer, Fray Hernando, p. 284. The description of the fall and redemption of Spain as a diptych is from Alan Deyermond, “The Death and Rebirth of Visigothic Spain in the Estoria De España,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 9, no. 3 (1985): 345–367.

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Today we commemorate the day on which this mighty city was rescued from a black hand most cruel and given to princes of upright faith who honour our Holy Trinity. After so many years of Spain being held to ransom by the fierce cruelty of the Arabs, finally it is the Lord’s will that this madness should lose its power for ever, and that the Catholic faith should shine out, and pious Christian people should worship the Lord our God in the place where, for so long and so powerfully, there ruled a diabolical deception.46 Baeza uses a very different timeframe. He does not mention eight hundred years of Muslim presence and avoids words like “victory” or “conquest” to describe the taking of Granada.47 He starts his account with the Battle of La Higueruela (1431), a decisive victory for Juan II (r. 1406–1454) which opened up the possibility of taking Granada, though it was not followed up. Baeza primes his audience to expect a ‘Reconquista’ narrative by describing the “glorious King Juan II” leading the attack, but then takes the reader into unfamiliar territory, switching his focus to the Granadan side. They were under siege and had shortages, so they pulled together an army and came out of the city to fight, but Juan II made an unexpected move crossing a watercourse and scattered them in disarray. Baeza states that “some say” that more than five thousand foot-soldiers were killed and “many are of the opinion” that no Christian died in the fighting.48 These informants, he clearly implies, were on the Muslim side. He then focusses back on the Christians, saying that “they” call it “the battle of La Higueruela” because there was a large fig tree growing beside the battleground. And he carries on: “and the Moors call it by the same name, which in Arabic is acijara quibira.”49 From the very beginning of his account, therefore, he reframes the ‘Reconquista’ as an integrated narrative of shared history including perspectives from both sides and showing that, behind superficial differences of language, there is an essential similarity and shared understanding of the world. 46 Vega García-Ferrer, Fray Hernando, p. 278: “Hoy se conmemora el día en que esta ciudad fortísima es rescatada de una mano negra, crudelísima, y se entregó a unos príncipes de fe rectísima que honran al Dios Trino. Después de tanto tiempo como ha estado España secuestrada por la feroz crueldad de los árabes quiere, por fin, el Señor que esta locura pierda su virulencia para siempre. Y brille allí (en Granada) la fe católica; y celebre a Dios el pueblo apostólico allí donde con tanto ímpetu y por tan largo tiempo reinó el engaño diabólico.” 47 The eight-hundred-year time scale was later used in defence of the moriscos to justify their “Spanishness”. 48 Baeza, Relación, p. 60. 49 Ibid.

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It has been more than a century since Mariano Gaspar y Remiro noted that Baeza “does not do general history, or a rigorous chronology of events” and I agree this is not his objective.50 As far as I have been able to ascertain, his purpose in writing was to contribute to a larger body of work being compiled at the time on the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. However, I disregard the idea that Baeza avoids mention of the Islamic ‘invasion’ because he is only writing about recent events. Alonso de Palencia, who also wrote about events that happened in what was recent history for him, and with a similarly modest timescale, drew strongly on the idea of the ‘illegality’ of the Muslim occupation of Spain, as can be seen in the quote in the next section. Baeza is not interested in who had ‘first rights’ to the territory and deliberately avoids the fall and redemption narrative. 5

The “Moro Enemigo”

The recourse to ‘Reconquista’ ideology during the Granada war involved ratcheting up the righteousness index in relation to describing the iniquity and tyranny of the Muslims.51 Palencia links the illegality of their original invasion with the subsequent brutality of their rule to provide a double justification for war which, with spurious objectivity, he puts in the mouth of King Fernando: [he said that] the Mohammedans were notorious for violence and treachery with which they had occupied the Spains [sic] and many other provinces of the world which belonged to Christians by right of inheritance. That, during the course of time, the kings of Spain, following the bravery of the first defender, Pelayo, had restored to the Catholic faith the other regions of the peninsula, all except Granada … that the innate perfidy of their race had led them to break every truce and treaty; they had raged against the Christians with the cruelty of wild beasts, so that, even if they had been occupying their lands legitimately, it would have been necessary to wage war against them. But when a people had violently usurped 50

51

Mariano Gaspar y Remiro, “Documentos árabes de la Corte Nazarí de Granada, o primeros tratos y correspondencia íntima entre los Reyes Católicos y Boabdil sobre la entrega de Granada,” Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos (RABM), 21 (1909): 330–339 and 531–535, 427. Rafael Peinado Santaella, “‘Cristo pelea por sus castellanos’. El imaginario cristiano de la guerra de Granada,” in Las Tomas: Antropología histórica de la ocupación territorial del Reino de Granada, ed. Manuel Barrios Aguilera and José Antonio González Alcantud (Granada, 2000), pp. 453–524.

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a territory, how much more justified was it therefore to inflict as much damage as possible and expel them from it?52 In his sermon to mark the conquest of Malaga (1487), where Fernando’s “pious cruelty” had been particularly fierce, the Catalan intellectual Pere Boscà described the kingdom as having been “subjected to the sect of Mohammed under the ferocious hand of the Moors” who had been exercising their “tyranny” since the time of the contemptible Count Julian—one of the characters of Visigothic Hispania who was held responsible for the invasion of 711.53 As exemplified earlier, even Archbishop Hernando de Talavera thought it appropriate to describe the supposed savagery and brutality of the “Arabs”—a word which draws attention to their foreign origin.54 Although Andrés Bernáldez describes the cruelty of the Moors towards Christians, he rails less against Muslims than against Jews. Like Boscà, he justifies the hard line taken towards them after the conquest of Malaga—there was no surrender agreement and its whole population was evicted and sold into slavery—as Christian vengeance for the centuries of brutality the Muslims had inflicted on Christians.55 Perhaps prefiguring the stance of later writers who sought to “nationalise” the Muslim heritage, Bernáldez’s account reflects a certain grudging respect for the enemy with the admission that those defending Malaga conducted themselves “like people from Spain” and he describes a Moor who “behaved virtuously, like an hidalgo”.56 Hernando de Baeza’s view of the Christianisation of the peninsula is notable because it resists the demonization of the “Other”. While Bernáldez interprets any virtue displayed by the Moors as “Spanish” values, Baeza insists on the virtues and honourability of Muslims who are his “great friends”: I knew Abrahén de Mora and considered him a friend and he was a good man and a clever strategist in war57 a mizwar of his called Alhaje, a very great friend of mine58 52 Palencia, Guerra de Granada, pp. 397–398. 53 José María Ruiz Povedano, “Exaltación y propaganda de la nueva monarquía hispánica con motivo de la conquista de Málaga (1487),” Andalucía Medieval: Actas del III Congreso de Historia de Andalucía 6 (Córdoba, 2003), pp. 473–496, 493. 54 Vega García, Fray Hernando de Talavera, pp. 284–285. 55 Bernáldez, Historia, p. 191. 56 López de Coca, “El otro,” pp. 297–298. On the nationalisation of “Muslim Spain”, see Tolan, “Using the Middle Ages,” pp. 344. 57 Baeza, Relación, p. 78. 58 Baeza hints that this man is a black African: Relación, p. 94.

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a very honourable merchant named Abrahen Alcaici, who was a very great friend of mine.59 The use of the word “amigo” as Baeza introduces these Muslim characters into his narrative seems deliberately chosen to disrupt the hackneyed “moro enemigo” repeated in so many official documents of the time, and indeed one that he himself issued.60 Baeza takes this one step further in declaring that Boabdil, had he become a Christian, “would have been one of the best that ever lived”.61 However, Baeza is in no way making a general or essentialist observation about all Granadans or all Muslims. He depicts the visir Abū al-Qāsim “El Muleh” as deeply untrustworthy and delivers trenchant criticism of the cruelty and despotism shown by the emir Abū al-Ḥasan in his later years: And this king went so far in his cruelty that there was no-one left in his kingdom who could be called a man, whether warrior or advisor, and he had almost as a watchword, “kill him, because dead people never did any harm to anyone” and he had the whole kingdom in such subjection to him that almost everyone trembled when they heard his command.62 Baeza writes about Abū al-Ḥasan’s “vices”—abandoning his wife of royal blood in favour of a young Christian enslaved girl—summoning up stereotypical images of Muslims in Christian chronicles as sexual predators, but in Baeza’s account they are directly linked to the putsch which removed him from power.63 He never resorts to essentialist bigotry towards Muslims—but rather stresses individual agency and human potential for vice and virtue. In fact, he never describes them as Muslims (Mohammedans) or Arabs, preferring the word “moro”, which in this context I take to be less derogatory.64 While Baeza shows “moros” and “cristianos” as opposed in war, he also presents them as partners. He stresses the history of alliances between Granada 59 Baeza, Relación, p. 99. 60 Toledo, Archivo Ducal de Medinaceli (ADM), AH. 277.1 and 2. For earlier examples of expressions of interfaith friendship in Iberia, see Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo “‘El mellor amigo que nos avemos’: Friendship and Political Communication in thirteenth-century Iberia,” Cahiers d’études hispaniques médiévales 42 (2019): 119–121. 61 Baeza, Relación, p. 95. 62 Baeza, Relación, p. 71. 63 Ron Barkai, Cristianos y musulmanes en la España medieval (El enemigo en el espejo), (Madrid, 1984), p. 287; Simon Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, 2015). 64 I discuss this in further detail in Reconciliation and Resistance, pp. 117–118.

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and Castile, the pleasure Juan II and the future Enrique IV (1454–1474) took in hosting Abū al-Ḥasan and his followers in Arévalo and their admiration for their skills on horseback: And the king enjoyed his company and seeing him and his men ride a la gineta [i.e., in the Moorish style with short stirrups] because they were very good horsemen, very skilled in the saddle jousting with canes as well as doing other things.65 In depicting Granadans and Castilians taking part in tournaments together and exchanging embassies and gifts, he shows that both sides shared elements of chivalric culture—María Soledad Carrasco has used this as an example of the “moral proximity” of Moors and Christians—not only on the frontier, but in the Castilian heartland.66 Both Moors and Christians can be described as caballeros and honourable people: Prince Abū al-Ḥasan, with his caballeros and many other people who accompanied him, both Christians and Moors, went to the town of Olmedo.67 Baeza needs the language of “Moors” and “Christians” to describe the battles and cross-border politics which feature in his narrative, but he pulls towards using the words as a complementary pair rather than antithetical categories: more like king/queen than good/evil. 6 Monarchy ‘Reconquista’ ideology is associated with the Castilian monarchy and the special role of the kings of Castile as rightful heirs to Visigothic Hispania and descendants of the Asturian king Pelayo, whose legendary victory at Covadonga (c.720) was regarded as the beginning of the fight back against the Muslims. In the mid-fifteenth century, the idea of the Gothic heritage was revived by the court poet Juan de Mena whose Laberinto de Fortuna urged Juan II to follow up the battle of La Higueruela (1431) and press forward to conquer 65 Baeza, Relación, p. 62. 66 María Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, El moro de Granada en la literatura (del siglo XV al XX) (Madrid, 1956), p. 26. 67 Baeza, Relación, p. 61.

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Granada. Mena cites a glorious line of “Alfonsos”, “Fernandos” and “Enriques” and has “Fortune” prophesying that Juan II will take Granada, and be hailed as “king of kings, king of lords, surpassing and outclassing all the deeds of the Gothic kings”.68 With its first publication in 1481, just before the start of the Granada war and various editions thereafter, Mena’s work achieved significant circulation and raised expectations about the glory to be achieved by the monarchs who could fulfil Fortune’s prophecy. The stage was set for the Catholic Monarchs to receive the acclamation that Isabel’s father, Juan II, failed to achieve. There is a growing literature on the ways in which she and Fernando were exalted and glorified through public spectacles, dramatic reconstructions, sermons, orations, poetry, and courtly literature, all closely allied to their role in the conquest of Granada and drawing heavily on ‘Reconquista’ themes.69 With each Christian victory, the liberation of Christian captives from the chains of Islam was enacted as a set-piece public spectacle in which the monarchs were cast in the role of redeemers of Christian Spain, and prisoners’ fetters were displayed on church walls. Archbishop Talavera’s mass presents the monarchs with the power and glory of biblical heroes and celebrates the mystic destiny of Isabel, and the idea that all Muslims will be converted by the End of Days. In Rome, Spanish ambassadors and clerics portrayed them as glorious crusading leaders of Christendom with a divine mission to overcome the enemies of the faith—a political project which would culminate in the election of the Valencian Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI in August 1492 and continued throughout his papacy and beyond.70 At the instigation of Cardinal Bernardino López de Carvajal, the monarchs’ chief propagandist in Rome, Annio da Viterbo 68 Cristina Moya García, “El Laberinto de Fortuna y la frontera de Granada,” in Estudios de Frontera, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos, vol. 9 (Alcalá la Real, 2014), pp. 491–498. Mena’s work was first published just before the start of the Granada war, in 1481 with two further editions during the war itself and a new suitably glossed edition by Hernán Núñez published in 1499 and again in 1505. 69 Peinado Santaella, “Cristo pelea”; Ruiz Povedano, “Exaltación”, also “Roma y los sermones de la Guerra de Granada (1486–1492): de la propaganda a la política de imagen de los Reyes Católicos”, in El valor del documento. Estudios en homenaje al profesor José Rodríguez Molina, ed. Javier García Benítez (Almería, 2018), pp. 225–283; Salvador Miguel, “La glorificación literaria”. 70 Carlos de Miguel Mora, Bernardino de Carvajal, La conquista de Baza (Granada, 1995); Álvaro Fernández de Córdova Miralles, Alejandro VI y los Reyes Católicos: relaciones político-eclesiásticas, 1492–1503 (Rome, 2005); Nicasio Salvador Miguel, “La conquista de Málaga (1487). Repercusiones festivas y literarias en Roma,” in La Guerra de Granada en su contexto internacional, eds. Daniel Baloup and Raúl González Arévalo (Toulouse, 2017), pp. 161–282.

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published a history of Spain using forged and invented sources to trace what purported to be a lineage of twenty-four ancient kings of Spain going back to Noah’s grandson Tubal.71 Whilst medieval monarchs had long derived their legitimacy and reinforced their power through representations of themselves as divinely ordained, the appeal to religion reached unprecedented levels with Fernando and Isabel who were identified as “superhuman beings”, “fallen from the sky” to bring God’s kingdom to the earth.72 The monarchs and their propagandists built on a widespread expectation of prophetic fulfilment as the Christian world approached the half millennium.73 Messianism grew—and was promoted—around the figure of Fernando who was proclaimed as the “Hidden One” (the Encubierto) who would triumph definitively over evil.74 Pere Boscà proposed in his sermon on the conquest of Malaga that it was only the Spanish monarchs whose destiny it was to deliver universal Christianity to the world, while Bernardino López de Carvajal’s sermon on Baza, entitled “the victory which conquers the world is our faith”, claimed that God had intervened on behalf of Castile because of the Spanish monarchs’ piety and devotion.75 The Christian camp, he said, had more in common with a religious institution than a military detachment.76 The idea that the monarchs’ interests were mapped so closely on to religious ones legitimated their further military expansion and imbued 71 The Antiquitates (Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium) appeared in 1498, prefaced by a panegyric to the Spanish monarchs. Although Annio’s key sources were debunked as fake in the mid sixteenth century, his construction of the twenty-four kings found its way into a number of historiographical works: José Antonio Caballero López, “Annio de Viterbo y la historiografía española del siglo XVI,” in Humanismo y tradición clásica en España y América: VI Reunión Científica sobre Humanistas Españoles, mayo, 2001, León y San Pedro de Dueñas, España (León, 2002). See also: Brian Tate, “Mitología en la historiografía española de la Edad Media y del Renacimiento,” Ensayos, pp. 13–32. 72 Peinado Santaella, “Cristo pelea,” p. 504. The quotations are from the letters of Pedro Mártir de Anglería, but the sentiment is also reflected in the poetry of Juan Barba and elsewhere in a less extreme form. 73 Marjorie Reeves, ed., Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period (Oxford, 1992). 74 The hyperbole must be understood in an international context of intense competition both with other monarchs for papal favours—particularly Charles VIII of France who also took to surrounding himself with a messianic aura—and with the papacy itself for power over church taxes, appointments and the Inquisition. See Alain Milhou, Pouvoir royal et absolutisme dans l’Espagne du XVIième siècle (Toulouse, 1999), pp. 33–35; Fernández de Córdova Miralles, Alejandro VI, pp. 144–167; Devereux, The Other Side of Empire, pp. 155–168. 75 Mora, La conquista de Baza; Peinado Santaella, “Cristo pelea,” pp. 467–472; Ruiz Povedano, “Exaltación y propaganda,” p. 495; Fernández de Córdova Miralles, Alejandro VI, p. 156. 76 Ibid.

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them with divine authority to do so.77 It is in this overheated context that we must read Baeza’s treatment of the Catholic Monarchs, which amounts to cold disinterest. He refers to them infrequently and dispassionately and even expresses subtle disapprobation for Fernando, describing the failure of what he regards as an underhand plan to storm the city of Granada by trickery.78 It is the emir Boabdil rather than Fernando whom he paints as an upholder of chivalric values, so angered by the plot that he “agreed with his caballeros to go out and give battle with as many people as they could, and for them all to die rather than to suffer the affront of such a great city being taken in this way”.79 7 Providence From its inception in early Asturian chronicles, the ‘Reconquista’ imaginary always contained prophetic elements and the belief in the destiny of righteous monarchs to struggle and prevail against Islam.80 However, the term “providentialism” has been used rather uncritically in relation to accounts of the Catholic Monarchs’ triumph over Granada.81 Pulgar in particular has been identified as an exponent of a messianic providentialism—attributed to his Jewish background—although with very little analysis and evidence mainly drawn from his early letters.82 While Pulgar attributed events such as the fortuitous destruction of the Granadans’ gunpowder store at Moclín (1486) to divine intervention, so did Alonso de Palencia—perhaps regarded as one of the least “providentialist” authors.83 But although Palencia saw the struggle against Granada as a “divine war”, he said that the Almighty’s designs were inscrutable, and the Catholic Monarchs, like others in history, had experienced both God’s favour and His disfavour.84 It is Bernáldez’s account which is steeped in the 77 See section entitled “El máximo religioso” in Luis Suárez Fernández, Claves históricas en el reinado de Fernando e Isabel (Madrid, 1998), pp. 261–291; José Manuel Nieto Soria, Propaganda y opinión pública en la historia (Valladolid, 2007), pp. 11–47. 78 Baeza, Relación, p. 100. 79 Ibid. 80 Benito Ruano quotes from a nineth century chronicle which cited the prophet Ezekial to claim that the Sarracens would be defeated on 11 November 883: “La Reconquista,” p. 94. See also González Jiménez, “Sobre la ideología,” p. 158. 81 José Cepeda Adán, “El providencialismo en las cronistas de los Reyes Católicos,” Arbor 17 (1950): 177–190. 82 Ibid. 83 Pulgar, Crónica, p. 280; Palencia, Guerra, p. 248. 84 Ibid., pp. 430–431. See also Rafael Peinado Santaella, Rafael, “Estudio preliminar,” in Alonso de Palencia, Guerra de Granada (Granada, 1998), pp. LXIII–LXXIV; Brian Tate, “Poles Apart.

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most exaggerated form of providentialism, in which a vengeful all-powerful God punishes evil and rewards the good. He describes the two sides in the Battle of Lucena (1483) as “los buenos” and “los malos” and attributes setbacks in the Christian campaign, such as the debacle of La Axarquia, earlier the same year, as God’s punishment for the troops being motivated mainly by a desire for plunder.85 It has been claimed that Baeza is unusual among historiographers of his time in largely avoiding a providentialist vision.86 His is certainly not the extreme ideological providentialism of Bernáldez. But although his belief in a divine plan is less strident, his memoir contains a number of episodes which are explicitly attributed to Providence, for example, a raid on Cañete by Abū al-Ḥasan which failed through lack of water, which might be read as the antithesis of the biblical story of the Israelites receiving manna in the desert.87 Most notably, in recounting the battle of Lucena, Baeza attributes a tactical error made by the Granadans to divine intervention: As Our Lord had already determined that the Moors should be lost, and that they and their king should be captured, he put in their hearts that they should cross the stream.88 In his depiction of the battle of Lucena, Baeza draws on the ‘Reconquista’ imaginary, describing how the “saintly” Count of Cabra ordered mass to be said before rallying his troops with a rousing speech and leading the charge on the Granadans calling on Santiago to come to their aid. He even includes a quote from Juan de Mena, in which Santiago is described as “the son of good Zebedee”.89 However, as in his description of the battle of La Higueruela, he then cuts to the Granadan side, who are terrified by the cries of “Santiago” and believe that all of Andalusia has gathered to attack them. Once again, he tells both sides of the story, whilst making clear that his own belief in the advance of Christianity does not require an erasure of the Muslim experience and Two official historians of the Catholic Monarchs: Alfonso de Palencia and Fernando del Pulgar,” in Pensamiento medieval hispano: homenaje a Horacio Santiago-Otero, ed. Soto José María Rábanos, vol. 1 (Madrid, 1998), pp. 439–463. 85 Bernáldez, “Historia,” p. 610; López de Coca, El ‘otro’. 86 Mercedes Delgado Pérez, La ‘Historia de los Reyes Moros de Granada,’ de Hernando de Baeza. Edición y Estudio, unpublished PhD thesis (Universidad de Sevilla, 2013), p. 41. I am grateful to the author for allowing me access to a short section which deals with Hernando de Baeza’s identity. 87 Baeza, Relación, p. 73. 88 Ibid., p. 83. 89 Ibid., p. 82.

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identity. He contrasts the disarray and disagreement in the Muslim camp with the Christians entering into spiritual communion with each other at the sight of the consecrated host and ends the sequence with the “agony and anguish” of Boabdil stuck on his horse in the muddy river as his veteran commander Alatar throws himself on his dagger rather than be captured. The way that Baeza sees God’s will being done is not through semi-divine monarchs implementing an ineluctable destiny, but through “saintly” individuals like the Count of Cabra, using their intelligence and their moral capacity in His service. It is no accident that, in portraying the Count of Cabra as “the most excellent member of the laity there has been in Castile in our time”, he is drawing attention to a family well-known for its protection of conversos and activism on behalf of the victims of the Inquisitor Lucero, and proclaiming his support for a local aristocracy opposed to Fernando’s centralising and absolutizing practices.90 His focus on a member of the lay nobility rather than the sovereigns as a channel for God’s purpose was something that drew the attention of the compiler of the manuscript now in the Escorial library, dating from around 1562. A marginal note expresses disapprobation of the way in which Baeza highlights the role of the Count, clearly implying that Baeza’s approach was discrepant, since other annotations to the manuscript are descriptive rather than evaluative.91 Baeza’s point is that individuals such as the Count of Cabra had the power to influence events through their devotion to God, their moral choices, their bravery, and their intelligence. Despite his belief in the guiding hand of the Almighty, Baeza writes very vividly about “the world” and is keen to express causality, both explicitly and as demonstrated through sequencing. He shows how the Granadan emirs’ tyranny and misuse of power led to division and ultimately their downfall. Both he and Bernáldez describe an extreme weather event, but they interpret it in very different ways. Bernáldez ominously positions his account of the excessive rain and flooding, which he says affected Seville in 1481, at the end of his section on the Jews and conversos, as a sign of an impending apocalyptic resolution.92 In a similar way, but one step removed, Baeza frames his own description of the serious flooding in Granada, which heralded the end of Abū al-Ḥasan’s rule, by saying that the Moors thought that the Day of Judgement was coming. However, Baeza’s analysis is related to its economic impact: “the damage was so great that it carried away and destroyed the whole market area”. He explains that this was what created the conditions for a successful coup d’état: “The 90 Baeza, Relación, p. 83. 91 RBME. Y-111-6.F.474r. 92 Gerli, “Social crisis and conversión,” p. 154.

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whole city was in upheaval because of this, both because of the destruction and losses and because of the property that the king had appropriated”.93 8 Identity As the mass conversion of Jews around the turn of the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries had shown, the othering of non-Christians shifted into genealogical prejudice once they converted to Christianity.94 Their ambiguous status, especially if their conversion was forced, gave rise to resentment and suspicion which found expression in the doctrine of limpieza de sangre.95 In Granada in the years after the conquest, it was the elches—captives taken to Granada, often as children, who had become Islamicised—who excited most controversy. Although this group had received some protection in the terms for the surrender of the city, by the end of the century they were already being targeted by the Inquisition as apostates because they had been baptised as Christians. Baeza shows such sympathy for these people who, he says, “departed from the Christian faith” but “wanted to be Christians if they could”, that his work has even been dubbed “the elche version of the conquest of Granada”.96 However, the work makes a wider point about complex identity and interconnectedness beyond the particular sympathy shown for the elches. It is strewn with characters whose experience—as political dissidents, envoys, captives, converts, and merchants—spans the frontier between Islamic and Christian Iberia. These include Abū al-Ḥasan, then Crown Prince, residing in the Moorish quarter of Arévalo before the Granada war, and the dissident Abencerraje family, originally from North Africa, who were given exile in Castile by the noble families of Aguilar and Medina Sidonia.97 He describes how, after years of marriage, Abū al-Ḥasan rejected his queen to marry a Christian captive who the Granadans called La Romia, which he says was a common nickname for women “who had been subject to Roman rule” and how she later reverted to Christianity with her sons.98 Among Boabdil’s supporters there was “a mudéjar from the town of 93 Baeza, Relación, p. 77. 94 David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (2002): 1–39. 95 Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII (Newark, 2010) (first published in French in 1960). 96 José Enrique López de Coca, “La conquista de Granada. El testimonio de los vencidos,” Norba 18 (2005): 33–50. 97 Baeza, Relación, pp. 61 and 68. 98 Ibid., p. 67.

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Mora [in Castile] who at that time was living in Granada” and “a Moorish mudéjar caballero originally from Toledo who was called Santa Cruz”.99 The complexity of this last character is particularly interesting, with his Christianised name, a mudéjar (a Muslim subject of Christian monarchs) but also a caballero, and a moro—the use of the word here tends to pull towards the political rather than the religious meaning, fighting on the side of the Granadans. Since the discovery of the end section of Baeza’s tale in which he describes his role in the negotiations for the surrender of Granada, his own stance has been made clear. He says there were two sticking points preventing the agreement between Boabdil and the Catholic Monarchs—one of which was to do with preserving Boabdil’s honour in handing over the keys to the city and the other was concerning the elches and whether they should be forced to return to Christianity against their will (and implicitly thereby become targets for the Inquisition). Baeza says that, in his opinion, this “should not rightfully be done”.100 For him, universal Christianity, must be achieved through free will, not through notions of ethnic or doctrinal purity. 9 Conclusions From its roots in medieval chronicles to its use in twenty first-century politics, the ‘Reconquista’ narrative has proved to be immensely powerful and longlasting. So much so that it can appear that the idea of an exclusive Christianity triumphing against Islam and repressing Jewish elements in its heritage was uncontested and inevitable. Yet as Simon Barton pointed out, the conquest of Muslim territory was not always predominant in medieval Christian strategic thinking, relations between the faith groups were not consistently hostile, and political alliances were commonplace. This continued to be the case several centuries on from the core period of Simon Barton’s research. Baeza’s text does not fit the binary ‘Moors versus Christians’ scheme of ‘Reconquista’, although those who have commented on his work have often made the mistake of assuming that it must represent one side or the other.101 One by one, Baeza discards each of the main elements of ‘Reconquista’ ideology. His account is integrationist, idealistically looking towards the sort of society which might be created once the kingdom of Granada came under Christian rule. Painfully aware of ‘the Jewish precedent’, he was able to see that 99 Ibid., pp. 78 and 85. 100 Baeza, Relación, p. 104. 101 Tinsley, “Un autor elusivo”.

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narratives of the conquest of the city, which were couched in the discourses of the past, which divided the population into victors and vanquished, would hinder, not help, reconciliation and social harmony.102 Baeza writes from the perspective of the frontier, that ‘third space’ where the rhetoric of Holy War sat uneasily with twin realities of cross-border friendship and enmity.103 Emerging during a pause in official historiography, his account offers a glimpse of an emerging new historical consciousness, albeit one which failed to gain traction but was overwhelmed, once official historiographical accounts started to appear, in favour of a rehash of the medieval narratives of loss and redemption.104 Bibliography Álvarez-Ossorio, Antonio. “Razón de linaje y lesa majestad. El Gran Capitán, Venecia y la Corte de Fernando el Católico (1507–1509).” In De la unión de las coronas al Imperio de Carlos, ed. Ernest Berlenguer, vol. 3. Madrid, 2001, pp. 385–451. Argote de Molina, Gonzalo. Nobleza de Andalucía. Jaén, 1866. Baeza, Hernando de. “Las cosas que pasaron.” In Relaciones de algunos sucesos de los últimos tiempos del Reino de Granada, ed. Emilio Lafuente y Alcántara. Madrid, 1868, pp. 1–45. Baeza, Hernando de. La Relación de Hernando de Baeza sobre el Reino de Granada, eds. Juan Pablo Rodríguez Argente del Castillo, Teresa Tinsley, and José Rodríguez Molina. Alcalá la Real, 2018. Barkai, Ron. Cristianos y musulmanes en la España medieval (El enemigo en el espejo). Madrid, 1984. Barrantes Maldonado, Pedro. Ilustraciones de la Casa de Niebla, Memorial Histórico Español. 2 vols., tomo IX and X. Madrid, 1857. Barton, Simon. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia. Philadelphia, 2015. Barton, Simon† and Portass, Robert, eds. Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085). Leiden, 2020. Benito Ruano, Eloy. “La Reconquista. Una categoría histórica e historiográfica,” Medievalismo 12 (2002): 91–98. Bernáldez, Andrés. Historia de los Reyes Católicos. Granada, 1856. 102 Isabelle Poutrin, “The Jewish precedent in the Spanish Politics of Conversion of Muslims and Moriscos,” Journal of Levantine Studies 6 (2016): 71–87. 103 A recent addition to the vast literature on Iberia’s frontier culture: Thomas Devaney, Enemies in the Plaza. Urban Spectacle and the End of Spanish Frontier Culture, 1460–1492 (Philadelphia, 2015). 104 Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista, pp. 45–46. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Caballero López, José Antonio. “Annio de Viterbo y la historiografía española del siglo XVI.” In Humanismo y tradición clásica en España y América: VI Reunión Científica sobre Humanistas Españoles, mayo, 2001, León y San Pedro de Dueñas, España. León, 2002. Carrasco Urgoiti, María Soledad. El moro de Granada en la literatura (del siglo XV al XX). Madrid, 1956. Carriazo, Juan de Mata. “Continuación inédita de la ‘Relación’ de Hernando de Baeza.” Al-Andalus 13, no. 2 (1948): 431–442. Cepeda Adán, José. “El providencialismo en las cronistas de los Reyes Católicos.” Arbor 17 (1950): 177–190. Cruciani, Fabrizio. Teatro nel Rinascimento, Roma 1450–1550. Rome, 1983. Cuadro García, Ana Cristina. “Acción inquisitorial contra los judaizantes en Córdoba y crisis eclesiástica (1482–1508).” Revista de Historia Moderna. Anales de la Universidad de Alicante 21 (2003): 11–28. Delgado Pérez, Mercedes. La ‘Historia de los Reyes Moros de Granada’, de Hernando de Baeza. Edición y Estudio. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Seville, 2013. Delgado Pérez, Mercedes. “A Newly-Discovered Manuscript of the Historia de los Reyes Moros de Granada by Hernando de Baeza.” Manuscript Studies 2, no. 2 (2017): 540–567. Devaney, Thomas. Enemies in the Plaza. Urban Spectacle and the End of Spanish Frontier Culture, 1460–1492. Philadelphia, 2015. Devereux, Andrew. The Other Side of Empire. Just War in the Mediterranean. Ithaca NY, 2020. Deyermond, Alan. “The Death and Rebirth of Visigothic Spain in the Estoria De España.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 9, no. 3 (1985): 345–367. Edwards, John. “Trial of an Inquisitor: the dismissal of Diego Rodríguez Lucero, Inquisitor of Cordoba in 1508.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37, no. 2 (1986): 240–257. Fernández de Córdova Miralles, Álvaro. Alejandro VI y los Reyes Católicos: relaciones político-eclesiásticas, 1492–1503. Rome, 2005. Fernández de Córdova Miralles, Álvaro. “La emergencia de Fernando el Católico en la Curia papal: identidad y propaganda de un príncipe aragonés en el espacio italiano (1462–1492).” In La imagen de Fernando el Católico en la Historia, la Literatura y el Arte, eds. Aurora Egido Martínez and José Enrique Laplana. Saragossa, 2014, pp. 28–91. Fernández de Córdova Miralles, Álvaro. “Una Inquisición sin inquisidores: los procesos de Córdoba y la crisis del Tribunal entre Roma y la Península Ibérica (1506–1507).” Hispania Sacra LXXIII (2021): 361–371. Galíndez Carvajal, Lorenzo. “Anales breves … que dejo manuscritos el Dr. D. Lorenzo Galíndez Carvajal.” CODOIN 18. Madrid, 1851, pp. 227–536; also in Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla. Madrid, 1878, pp. 533–565. García Fitz, Francisco. La Reconquista. Granada, 2010. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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García Sanjuan, Alejandro. La conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado. Madrid, 2013. García Sanjuan, Alejandro. “Rejecting al-Andalus, Exalting the Reconquista: Historical Memory in Contemporary Spain.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10, no. 1 (2018): 127–145. Gaspar y Remiro, Mariano. “Documentos árabes de la Corte Nazarí de Granada, o primeros tratos y correspondencia íntima entre los Reyes Católicos y Boabdil sobre la entrega de Granada.” Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos (RABM) 21 (1909): 330–339 and 531–535. Gerli, E. Michael. “Social crisis and conversion. Apostacy and Inquisition in the chronicles of Fernando del Pulgar and Andrés Bernáldez.” Hispanic Review 70 (2002): 147–167. González Arévalo, Raúl. “Ecos de la toma de Granada.” Homenaje al profesor Eloy Benito Ruano, ed. Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales, vol. 1. Murcia, 2010, pp. 343–353. González Jiménez, Manuel. “Sobre la ideología de la Reconquista: realidades y tópicos.” In Memoria, mito y realidad en la historia medieval, eds. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte and José Luis Martín Rodríguez. Nájera, 2003, pp. 151–170. Hillgarth, J. N. “Spanish Historiography and Iberian Reality.” History 24, no. 1 (1985): 23–43. Hillgarth, J. N. The Spanish Kingdoms, 1410–1516, vol. II. Oxford, 1978. Kagan, Richard. Clio and the Crown. The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Baltimore, 2009. Kosto, Adam. “Reconquest, Renaissance and the Histories of Iberia, ca. 1000–1200.” In European Transformations. The Long Twelfth Century, eds. Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen. Notre Dame, 2012, pp. 93–116. Ladero Quesada, Miguel Ángel. La Guerra de Granada (1482–1491). Granada, 2007. Liuzzo Scorpo, Antonella. “‘El mellor amigo que nos avemos’: Friendship and Political Communication in Thirteenth-Century Iberia.” Cahiers d’études hispaniques médiévales 42 (2019): 107–122. López de Coca, José Enrique. “La conquista de Granada. El testimonio de los vencidos.” Norba 18 (2005): 33–50. López de Coca, José Enrique. “El otro en la crónica de Andrés Bernáldez.” In Estudios en homenaje a Emilio Cabrera Muñoz, eds. Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave et al. Córdoba, 2015, pp. 293–306. Lynn, Caro. A College Professor of the Renaissance. Lucio Marineo Sículo. Chicago, 1937. Marineo Sículo, Lucio. Vida y hechos de los Reyes Católicos. Madrid, 1943. Medina y Mendoza, Francisco de. “Vida del Cardenal D. Pedro González de Mendoça.” In Memorial Histórico Español 6. Madrid, 1853, pp. 153–310.

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Miguel Mora, Carlos de. Bernardino de Carvajal, La conquista de Baza. Granada, 1995. Milhou, Alain. Pouvoir royal et absolutisme dans l’Espagne du XVIième siècle. Toulouse, 1999. Moya García, Cristina. “El Laberinto de Fortuna y la frontera de Granada.” In Estudios de Frontera, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos, vol. 9. Alcalá la Real, 2014, pp. 491–498. Müller, Marc J. Die letzten Zeiten von Granada. Munich, 1863. Nader, Helen. The Mendoza family in the Spanish Renaissance. Berkeley, 1972. Nieto Soria, José Manuel. Propaganda y opinión pública en la historia. Valladolid, 2007. Nirenberg, David. “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain.” Past and Present 174 (2002): 1–39. Palencia, Alonso de. Guerra de Granada, ed. Rafael Peinado Santaella. Granada, 1998. Pastore, Stefania. Una herejía española: conversos, alumbrados e Inquisición (1449–1559). Madrid, 2010. Peinado Santaella, Rafael. “‘Cristo pelea por sus castellanos’. El imaginario cristiano de la guerra de Granada.” In Las Tomas: Antropología histórica de la ocupación territorial del Reino de Granada, eds. Manuel Barrios Aguilera and José Antonio González Alcantud. Granada, 2000, pp. 453–524. Peinado Santaella, Rafael. “Estudio preliminar.” In Alonso de Palencia, Guerra de Granada. Granada, 1998, pp. XI–CVI. Pescador del Hoyo, María del Carmen. “Cómo fue de verdad la toma de Granada, a la luz de un documento inédito.” Al-Andalus 20, no. 2 (1955): 283–344. Poutrin, Isabelle. “The Jewish precedent in the Spanish Politics of Conversion of Muslims and Moriscos.” Journal of Levantine Studies 6 (2016): 71–87. Pulgar, Hernando del. Crónica de los Señores Reyes Católicos. Valencia, 1780. Pulgar, Fernando del. “Tratado de los Reyes de Granada y su origen.” In Semanario erudito, 11–12, ed. Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor. Madrid, 1788, pp. 57–144. Ramírez de Arrellano, Rafael. “Estudios biográficos (Gonzalo de Ayora).” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 41 (1902): 293–324. Reeves, Marjorie, ed. Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period. Oxford, 1992. Rincón González, María Dolores. “La divulgación de la toma de Granada: objetivos, mecanismos y agentes.” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 40, no. 2 (2010): 603–615. Ríos Saloma, Martín. La Reconquista. Una construcción historiográfica (siglos XVI–XIV). Madrid, 2011. Rodríguez Argente del Castillo, Juan Pablo, Teresa Tinsley, and José Rodríguez Molina, eds. La Relación de Hernando de Baeza sobre el Reino de Granada. Alcalá la Real, 2018. Rosenstock, Bruce. New Men: ‘Conversos’, Christian Theology and Society in FifteenthCentury Spain. London, 2002. Ruiz Domènec, José Enrique. El Gran Capitán. Retrato de una época. Barcelona, 2002.

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Ruiz Povedano, José María. “Exaltación y propaganda de la nueva monarquía hispánica con motivo de la conquista de Málaga (1487)” Andalucía Medieval: Actas del III Congreso de Historia de Andalucía 6. Córdoba, 2003, pp. 473–496. Ruiz Povedano, José María. “Roma y los sermones de la Guerra de Granada (1486–1492): de la propaganda a la política de imagen de los Reyes Católicos.” In El valor del documento. Estudios en homenaje al profesor José Rodríguez Molina, ed. Javier García Benítez. Almería, 2018, pp. 225–283. Salvador Miguel, Nicasio. “La conquista de Málaga (1487). Repercusiones festivas y literarias en Roma.” In La Guerra de Granada en su contexto internacional, eds. Daniel Baloup and Raúl González Arévalo. Toulouse, 2017, pp. 161–282. Salvador Miguel, Nicasio. “La glorificación literaria de Fernando el Católico. El caso de la guerra de Granada.” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia CCXIV (2017): 279–328. Santa Cruz, Alonso de. Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo. Seville, 1951. Sicroff, Albert. Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII. Newark, 2010. Suárez Fernández, Luis. Claves históricas en el reinado de Fernando e Isabel. Madrid, 1998. Szmolka Clares, José. “Nobleza y autoritarismo en Andalucía. La contribución de Granada a la sumisión del estamento nobiliario andaluz, 1504–1510.” Cuadernos de Estudios Medievales 6–7 (1981): 277–296. Tate, Brian. Ensayos sobre la historiografía peninsular del siglo XV. Madrid, 1970. Tate, Brian. “The re-writing of the historical past.” In Historical literature in Medieval Iberia, ed. Alan Deyermond. London, 1996, pp. 85–103. Tate, Brian. “Poles Apart. Two official historians of the Catholic Monarchs: Alfonso de Palencia and Fernando del Pulgar.” In Pensamiento medieval hispano: homenaje a Horacio Santiago-Otero, ed. José María Soto Rábanos, vol. 1. Madrid, 1998, pp. 439–463. Tinsley, Teresa. Reconciliation and Resistance in Early Modern Spain. Hernando de Baeza and the Catholic Monarchs. London, 2022. Tinsley, Teresa. “Un autor elusivo y poco entendido”, “Esbozo biográfico” and “Contexto histórico e historiográfico de la obra.” In La Relación de Hernando de Baeza sobre el Reino de Granada, eds. Juan Pablo Rodríguez Argente del Castillo, Teresa Tinsley, and José Rodríguez Molina. Alcalá la Real, 2018, pp. 27–44. Tinsley, Teresa. “Granada como Espejo de Castilla en la ‘Relación’ de Hernando de Baeza.” In Estudios de Frontera 11, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos. Alcalá la Real, 2020, pp. 467–474. Tolan, John. “Using the Middle Ages to Construct Spanish Identity: 19th and 20thCentury Spanish Historiography of Reconquest.” In Historiographical Approaches

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to Medieval Colonisation of East Central Europe, ed. J. Piskorski. Boulder, 2002, pp. 329–347. Torro, Joseph. “Pour en finir avec la Reconquête. L’occupation chrétienne d’al-Andalous, la soumission et la disparition des populations musulmanes (XIIe–XIIIe siècles).” Cahiers d’histoire 78 (2000): 79–97. Valera, Diego de. “Memorial de diversas hazañas: crónica de Enrique IV.” In Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla. Madrid, 1878, pp. 1–95. Vega García-Ferrer, María Julieta. Fray Hernando de Talavera y Granada. Granada, 2007.

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Part 3 Exchanges, Tradition and Cross-Fertilisation: Change and Continuity

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Chapter 7

The View from the Edge: Gallaecia and the Byzantine Mediterranean in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries Jamie Wood In recent years, the persistence of post-Roman trade routes along the Atlantic has been of increasing interest to archaeologists.1 Some scholars have argued that the Byzantine state must have been behind efforts to distribute Mediterranean-produced goods as far as Britain and Ireland—such initiatives reflecting the imperial ambitions of Justinian, for instance.2 It is becoming increasingly clear that while access to imported goods was no longer as widespread as in the fourth century and earlier, some sites maintained intense ongoing economic interactions with the Mediterranean world well into the post-Roman period, in some cases into the mid-seventh century. For example, the large volumes of eastern Mediterranean and African pottery excavated from sixth- and seventh-century contexts at Vigo, in north-western Spain, have led to the city being identified as “a major late antique port with intense longdistance trade” with the Mediterranean (Africa and the Byzantine Near East) and Gaul.3 In stark contrast to its plentiful archaeological record, Vigo is unattested in the written sources for the period. This chapter seeks to contextualise 1 For an example of the aforementioned interest in this subject from an archaeological perspective: Maria Duggan, Links to Late Antiquity: Ceramic Exchange and Contacts on the Atlantic Seaboard in the 5th to 7th Centuries AD (Oxford, 2018). 2 As suggested by Ewan Campbell and Christopher Bowles, “Byzantine trade to the edge of the world: Mediterranean pottery imports to Atlantic Britain in the sixth century,” in Byzantine Trade, 4th–12th Centuries. The Archaeology of Local, Regional, and International Exchange, ed. Marlia Mundell Mango (Farnham, 2009), pp. 297–313. Paul Reynolds, Hispania and the Roman Mediterranean, AD 100–700: Ceramics and Trade (London, 2010) also sees the Byzantine state as a driver for connectivity. 3 Sánchez Pardo, José Carlos, “Power and Rural Landscapes in Early Medieval Galicia (400– 900 AD): Towards a Re-Incorporation of the Archaeology into the Historical Narrative,” Early Medieval Europe 21 (2013): 150. Particularly important in disseminating these findings have been the publications of Adolfo Fernández Fernández, especially El comercio tardoantiguo (ss. IV–VII) en el noroeste peninsular a través del registro cerámico de la Ría de Vigo (Oxford, 2014) and O comercio tardoantigo no noroeste peninsular (Noia, 2013).

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‘Byzantine’ connections to Vigo through comparison with Braga, the key political and ecclesiastical centre in the north-western province of Gallaecia.4 The plentiful written evidence for Braga in the sixth century, alongside a well-developed archaeological repertoire, reveals that economic interactions were part of the broader entanglement of the province with the Byzantine world, especially with North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.5 Although the scale of long-distance connectivity may have fallen in the post-Roman period and its scope contracted geographically, at some elite sites cultural, theological and political connectivity occurred alongside the trading of goods, as people, objects, institutions and ideas traversed not just the shores of the Mediterranean, but also Iberia’s Atlantic coast.6 I argue that the evidence from Braga and Vigo sheds an important light on the considerable ‘reach’ of Byzantine trade networks in the post-Roman period, as well as their connection to a range of other cultural and material linkages between the Mediterranean and the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula. In addition, I suggest that the impetus for such connectivity is likely to have lain as much in the agency of local elites, including churchmen, as it did in the activities of the Byzantine state or the kingdoms of sixth- and seventh-century Hispania. 1

Approaching Connectivity in Post-Roman Gallaecia

Ceramic evidence is a particularly useful index of economic vibrancy in the post-Roman period, its continued presence or absence from a site also functioning as a marker of long-distance trade and thus of connectivity.7 Other material evidence such as coinage and architecture can also indicate exchange and, in the case of stylistic changes, possible influences.8 Scattered textual 4 When considering the ceramic record, Manuela Delgado, Adolfo Fernández Fernández, José Carlos Quaresma and Rui Morais, “Una aproximación a la terra sigillata africana de Bracara Augusta (Braga, Portugal),” Rei Cretariæ. Romanæ Favtorvm Acta 43 (2014): 671–680 make the point that Vigo is the best ‘local’ comparison to Braga. 5 Sánchez Pardo, “Power and Rural Landscapes,” p. 166 notes the “close relationship” between Suevic Gallaecia and Byzantium. 6 Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton, 2016), p. 5. 7 Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), p. 693. 8 Numismatic evidence also points towards some degree of connection between the Byzantine world and the west of the Iberian Peninsula in the sixth and seventh centuries, Carlos Fabião, “O Ocidente da Península Ibérica no século VI: sobre um pentanummium de Justiniano I encontrado na unidade de produção de preparados de peixe da Casa do Governador da Torre de Belém,” Apontamentos de Arqueologia e Património 4 (2009): 25–50.

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references demonstrate that pilgrims, ecclesiastics and diplomats travelled freely between Gallaecia, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, while the archaeological record points towards the movement of traders. Institutional and intellectual influences can be charted through the transmission of texts and ideas, especially from Africa, while the imitation of late Roman pottery in Gallaecia further demonstrates that the pull of the Byzantine world was strong even in the north-western corner of Hispania. Some historiography focuses on the role of the Byzantine state in driving forward continued connectivity in the post-Roman period. For example, the annona, the system that supplied imperial officials and the military, underlay the continued integration of ports such as Cartagena, the capital of the Byzantine province in the south-east of the Peninsula, into long-distance exchange networks.9 In a much-cited article on the colonies of eastern merchants in the Peninsula in Late Antiquity, Luis A. García Moreno similarly suggested that at least some traders acted as imperial agents, while more recently it has been argued that the Byzantine state activity underpinned the continuation of connections between parts of south-western Britain and the eastern Mediterranean up to the first half of the sixth century.10 While there is little doubt that the imperial state was a key driver of economic connectivity, especially in the case of Cartagena, this focus on the state tends to obscure the agency of local and regional elites. Indeed, Paul Reynolds suggested that it is time to take more seriously the potential role of the church in directing local, regional and perhaps longer-distance economic activity—rather than viewing it solely as a consumer of traded goods.11 Even if the Byzantine state was the inspiration for efforts to continue trade relations with ports along the Atlantic fringe such as Vigo, it was necessary for merchants from imperial territory to connect with local actors in order to identify markets and engage in commerce. Excessive focus on the imperial inspiration for trade potentially obscures the agency of local populations, especially their leaders, and of merchants. Channelling contact with outsiders, controlling access to and distribution of prestige imported goods, and engaging in conspicuous consumption and display of such items were all important methods for the articulation of elite status in the post-Roman period. Recent 9 Reynolds, Hispania and the Roman Mediterranean, pp. 120–123 and n. 435–459 (pp. 297–304). 10 L. A. García Moreno, “Colonias de comerciantes orientales en la Península Ibérica. S. V–VII,” Habis 3 (1972): 127–154; Campbell and Bowles, “Byzantine trade to the edge of the world.” 11 Paul Reynolds, “Material Culture and the Economy in the Age of Saint Isidore of Seville (6th and 7th centuries),” Antiquité Tardive 23 (2015): 205–208.

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historical studies of the political makeup of post-Roman Gallaecia have pointed towards the vibrancy of such elites, while archaeologists have shown how a general shift to upland sites was connected to the efforts of elites to control and exploit local populations and resources.12 It is highly likely, therefore, that long-distance trade in Gallaecia was controlled by regional and local leaders, including the Suevic ruling elite, bishops and other high-status ecclesiastics.13 As Simon Barton’s work has shown, local aristocracies—including ecclesiastical leaders—were motors of social, political, and economic activity throughout the Iberian Middle Ages, a point that is underlined by this chapter’s focus on the elites of Gallaecia in the immediate post-Roman period.14 Case studies of Vigo and Braga outline the scope and scale of connectivity to the Byzantine world (the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa) in the sixth and seventh centuries and suggest that such linkages reflected the social and economic power of aristocracies. Damián Fernández has demonstrated that aristocratic life and forms of government did not wither in western Iberia as soon as the Roman government ended, but continued in many places.15 Michael Kulikowski and Leonard Curchin have shown something similar for civic government across the Peninsula, while Pablo Díaz and Luis R. Menéndez-Bueyes have underlined the strength of local powers in post-Roman Gallaecia and the agency that they exercised during negotiations with the Suevic monarchy.16 Ecclesiastical elites in Gallaecia, as elsewhere in Hispania, played important roles as political brokers embedded in local and regional society, including as

12 Pablo Díaz and Luis R. Menéndez-Bueyes, “Gallaecia in Late Antiquity: The Suevic Kingdom and the Rise of Local Powers,” in Culture and Society in Medieval Galicia: A Cultural Crossroads at the Edge of Europe, ed. James D’Emilio (Leiden, 2015), pp. 146–175. See also: Carlos Tejerizo-García and Jorge Canosa-Betés, “Power, Control and Social Agency in Post-Roman Northern Iberia: An Archaeological Analysis of Hillfort Occupations,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10 (2018): 295–323. 13 Sánchez Pardo, “Power and Rural Landscapes,” p. 156. 14 E.g. Simon Barton, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile (Cambridge, 1997); “The Count, the Bishop and the Abbot: Armengol VI of Urgel and the Abbey of Valladolid,” English Historical Review 111 (1996): 85–103. 15 Damián Fernández, Aristocrats and Statehood in Western Iberia, 300–600 CE (Philadelphia, 2017), pp. 123–227. 16 Michael Kulikowski, Late Roman Spain and its Cities (Baltimore, 2004), pp. 197–214 and 256–285; Leonard A. Curchin, “Senators or Curials? Some Debatable Nobiles in Late Antique Hispania,” Hispania Antiqua 37–38 (2013–14): 129–135; Leonard A. Curchin, “The role of civic leaders in late antique Hispania,” Studia historica, Historia antigua 32 (2014): 281–304; Díaz and Menéndez-Bueyes, “Gallaecia in Late Antiquity.”

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significant consumers of goods that had been imported from Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.17 2

The Port: Vigo’s Commercial Connections to the East

The lack of contemporary written evidence for Vigo means that without recent archaeological discoveries the city’s importance as a bulk trading centre would be entirely obscured. The material record indicates that large-scale long-distance trade peaked in the mid-sixth century and continued well into the seventh.18 The scale of ‘Byzantine’ trade with Vigo is underlined by the fact that it is “the site with the greatest proportion of eastern Mediterranean pottery … in all of western Europe.”19 Vigo’s “very important commercial relations” with Africa and the Byzantine Near East in Late Antiquity led to the importation of huge quantities of finewares and amphorae, which reflect the port’s integration into a long-distance trading network that stretched from the eastern Mediterranean along the Atlantic fringe to western Gaul, Britain and Ireland.20 At Vigo, importation of Terra Sigillata Africana (African Red Slip) and Phocaean fineware was significant, although with revealing chronological variations.21 African imports were dominant during the fifth and early sixth century, with products from the eastern Mediterranean taking over from the mid-sixth to the mid-seventh century.22 Analysis of late Roman amphorae

17 Sánchez Pardo, “Power and Rural Landscapes,” pp. 149–150; José Carlos Sánchez Pardo, “Sobre las bases económicas de las aristocracias en la Gallaecia suevo-visigoda (ca. 530–650 d. C.): Comercio, minería y articulación fiscal,” Anuario de estudios medievales 44 (2014): 1009–1014. 18 Pilar Diarte-Blasco, Late Antique and Early Medieval Hispania: Landscapes without Strategy (Oxford, 2018), p. 137. 19 Sánchez Pardo, “Power and Rural Landscapes,” p. 157. 20 José Carlos Sánchez Pardo, “Late Antique Atlantic contacts: the case of Galicia,” in Ceramics and Atlantic Connections: Late Roman and Early Medieval Imported Pottery on the Atlantic Seaboard, ed. Maria Duggan, Sam Turner and Mark Jackson (Oxford, 2020), p. 94. 21 Sánchez Pardo, “Late Antique Atlantic contacts,” p. 94. 22 Fernández Fernández, El comercio tardoantiguo (ss. IV–VII), pp. 431–450. Delgado, Fernández Fernández, Quaresma and Morais, “Una aproximación,” p. 676: of the African fineware, forms Hayes 99B and C, 91D, 104C, 105, 107 and 109A are found, together with late forms from Sidi Khalifa (C/D of Bonifay 2004); Phocaean tableware outnumbers that from Tunisia, with the form Hayes 10A prominent.

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reveals a similar pattern, with imported eastern products taking over in the late sixth century and enduring well into the seventh.23 Vigo was by no means typical of other locations in Gallaecia. While imports to other coastal sites in the province had ceased by the mid-sixth century, high volumes were brought to Vigo into the first half of seventh century.24 Although there are some similarities between the deposits at Vigo and Braga, the latter has a markedly more “African” profile. This suggests that Vigo did not play a role as a redistribution centre within the region, for example as a point of unloading for goods destined for the capital at Braga. Its long-distance connections were of a different type and scale to its regional interactions, as is suggested by evidence for the movement of Braga-produced ceramics to Vigo at the same time as the large-scale importations began to focus almost exclusively on the latter city in the late sixth century.25 The ceramic record suggests that Vigo’s trading relations with Africa and the eastern Mediterranean were similar to those of Mediterranean ports, such as Marseille, Cartagena, Tarragona, Carthage and Naples.26 It is likely that in the late-sixth and seventh century some of its trade was carried out directly with the eastern Mediterranean because Phocaean wares predominate after the mid-sixth century and the profile of ceramic deposits is not at all similar to that of sites such as Cartagena, which was within the Byzantine province in Hispania and very well-connected to North Africa. There are no particularly strong similarities to African sites such as Carthage either.27 The longevity and scale of Vigo’s connections to sites in the Byzantine Mediterranean, which endured into the middle decades of the seventh century, distinguish it from other sites on the Atlantic fringe, especially in Britain, where imports ceased at some point in the mid-sixth century.28 It has been suggested that Gallaecia may have replaced south-west Britain as the main source of minerals such as tin for Byzantine traders after around 550.29 Vigo probably functioned as an entrepôt within trade networks that linked Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, western Gaul (especially Bordeaux), and the 23 Fernández Fernández, O comercio tardoantigo no noroeste peninsular, pp. 182–88. 24 Sánchez Pardo, “Power and Rural Landscapes,” p. 157. 25 Fernández Fernández, O comercio tardoantigo no noroeste peninsular, pp. 179–202; p. 197 for Braga-produced ceramics in Vigo. 26 Delgado, Fernandez, Quaresma and Morais, “Una aproximación,” p. 680. 27 Reynolds, Hispania and the Roman Mediterranean, p. 111. 28 Sánchez Pardo, “Power and Rural Landscapes,” p. 160. On British connections, see Ewan Campbell, Continental and Mediterranean Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland, AD 400–800 (York, 2007); Duggan, Links to Late Antiquity. 29 Sánchez Pardo, “Power and Rural Landscapes,” p. 151.

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western seaboard of the British Isles, including Tintagel.30 It has been argued that wine imports were important within the trading networks that linked the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and may have played a particularly significant role at Vigo.31 Wine and luxury products were likely traded with merchants from Byzantine territories in exchange for tin and gold from Gallaecia, the extraction of which appears to have continued into the seventh century, albeit at much-reduced levels compared to the early imperial period.32 Wood and leather may also have been exported from Gallaecia, while, alongside wine, imported Byzantine goods likely included olive oil, alum, small luxury items and fine pottery.33 Oil and wine were important for the liturgy, with the former vital for church lighting, and there is evidence for the importation of other liturgical kit from Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.34 The consumption of wine and the use of fine tablewares were important elements of elite social status in the post-Roman West, where feasting ‘was central to the establishment and maintenance of the client base with which rulers sought to control territory and resources.’35 Wine and other imported prestige goods therefore played an essential role in the practical and symbolic articulation of elite identities, whether ecclesiastical or secular, and whether operating at a local or a regional level. The material evidence from Vigo thus provides us with a vivid, if partial, insight into the continuity of high-volume long-distance trade with the Mediterranean world in the post-Roman period and its control by local elites.

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For a thorough summary of relevant literature on this topic, see Maria Duggan, “Ceramic Imports to Britain and the Atlantic Seaboard in the Fifth Century and Beyond,” Internet Archaeology 41 (2016). Available at https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue41/3/index.html. Accessed December 14, 2022. Sánchez Pardo, “Power and Rural Landscapes,” pp. 150 and 157 notes that wine was one of the main goods imported to Vigo. On the wine trade to Hispania more generally, see Michael Decker, “Export wine trade in West and East,” in Byzantine Trade, 4th–12th Centuries: The Archaeology of Local, Regional and International Exchange. Papers of the Thirty-Eighth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, St John’s College, University of Oxford, March 2004, ed. Marlia Mundell Mango (Farnham, 2009), pp. 241–245 and 251–252. José Carlos Quaresma and Rui Morais, “Eastern Late Roman fine ware imports in Bracara Augusta (Portugal),” Rei Cretariæ. Romanæ Favtorvm Acta 42 (2012): 380. Sánchez Pardo, “Power and Rural Landscapes,” p. 157; Diarte-Blasco, Late Antique and Early Medieval Hispania, p. 137. Sánchez Pardo, “Power and Rural Landscapes,” p. 150. Sánchez Pardo, “Late Antique Atlantic contacts,” p. 95. Andrew Seaman, “Dinas Powys in Context: Settlement and Society in Post-Roman Wales,” Studia Celtica 47 (2013): 8.

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The Capital: Braga’s Economic, Ecclesiastical and Political Connections

The rich textual record for Braga can help to further understand the changing nature of connections between the Byzantine world and Gallaecia, and especially the role of elites in the management of such contacts. The city had long-established linkages to broader political, economic and religious networks. Founded during the era of Augustus, Braga became capital of the new province of Gallaecia during the reign of Diocletian (284–305), at approximately the same time as a city wall was built, as occurred at other urban sites in the north west of Hispania, like Lugo, Astorga, and León.36 The city remained important throughout Late Antiquity and during the fourth century it became the seat of a bishopric. The topography of the city was transformed with the establishment of a Christian episcopal complex and the reconfiguration of elements of the intramural space. Its administrative importance and episcopal status contributed to the construction of new public buildings and the gradual Christianisation of the cityscape, as happened elsewhere in the Peninsula.37 Although the fifth-century chronicler Hydatius suggests that the inhabitants of Gallaecia suffered at the hands of the Sueves, his reports do not suggest that Braga itself was particularly hard-hit.38 This may have been because by the late fifth century, the city had become the capital of the Suevic kingdom, a status that helped to ensure its continued vitality.39 During the fifth and sixth centuries, there was building activity inside and outside the city walls, while Roman public buildings were adapted to new uses.40 For instance, new structures were constructed in what had previously been main streets, meaning that residential areas had to be reorganised and 36 Raquel Martínez Peñín, Manuela Martins and Luís Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory through its Material Culture (5th–15th Centuries),” in Medieval Territories, ed. Flocel Sabaté Curull and Jesús Brufal Sucarrat (Newcastle, 2018), pp. 71–73. 37 Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” p. 75. For an overview of debates on the christianisation of cities of late antique Hispania, understood within overall urban transformations, see Javier Martínez Jiménez, Isaac Sastre de Diego and Carlos Tejerizo García, The Iberian Peninsula between 300 and 850: An Archaeological Perspective (Amsterdam, 2018), pp. 125–138, 153–191. 38 Hydatius, Chronicle, 66 (74): men of the vicarius Maurocellus were killed while escaping from Braga; 167 (174): the city was sacked by the Goths; 172 (179): bandits pillaged part of the conventus of Braga. 39 Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” p. 75. 40 Manuela Martins, Jorge Ribeiro, Fernanda Magalhães and Raquel Martínez Peñín, “Urban Changes in Braga in Late Antiquity: The Area of the Roman Theater,” in Braga and its

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were increasingly composed of smaller-scale housing units.41 The city’s theatre, built in the second century, was abandoned in the fourth century and subsequently reoccupied and used as an area for craft production, a phenomenon that has been observed at other Iberian urban sites in this period, such as Lisbon and Cartagena.42 A new centre developed in the north-eastern part of the city, around the original Christian basilica where the cathedral was established. While some parts of the Roman city became ruralised,43 in the sixth and seventh centuries much of the space within the city walls was still inhabited.44 Extensive building on the hill of Falperra has been interpreted as the construction of a palace attached to the Suevic court.45 Basilicas and churches were constructed near to Roman roads around the city. Some were associated with martyr cults that were constructed at necropoleis around the city, while others seem to have started out as villas and later became part of monasteries.46 Shortly after the arrival of the ecclesiastical leader Martin of Braga in Gallaecia (likely in the early 550s), the Suevic king Charraric permitted the establishment of a monastery at Dume, near Braga, possibly on land that he owned. A basilica dedicated to St. Martin of Tours was constructed at the site and Dume was soon granted episcopal status.47 The cult of Martin of Tours

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Territory between the Fifth and the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Raquel Martínez Peñin (Lleida, 2015), pp. 11–28. Maria do Carmo Ribeiro and Luís Fontes, “The Urban Morphology of Braga between Late Antiquity and the Fourteenth-Fifteenth Centuries,” in Braga and its Territory, pp. 29–45. Martins, Ribeiro, Magalhães, and Peñín, “Urban Changes in Braga in Late Antiquity”; Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” p. 76; Martínez Jiménez, Sastre de Diego and Tejerizo García, The Iberian Peninsula, pp. 181–182 (Cartagena); Rodrigo Banha da Silva and Adriaan De Man, “Palácio dos Condes de Penafiel: A Significant Late Antique Context from Lisbon,” A Cerâmica Medieval no Mediterrâneo: Actas do Silves X Congresso Internacional (Silves, 2015), pp. 455–460 (Lisbon). Martins, Ribeiro, Magalhães, and Peñín, “Urban Changes in Braga in Late Antiquity,” pp. 13–16 note that while the north-western area of the forum became more peripheral, it housed more residential and productive structures. Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” p. 76. Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” p. 75, with additional references. Rebecca Devlin, “Separating the Secular from the Spiritual: Wives, Sons and Clients of the Clergy in Late Antique Hispania,” Sacris Erudiri 58 (2019): 344. Roger Collins, Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, 400–1000 (Basingstoke, 1983), p. 44; Luís Fontes, “Powers, Territories and Architecture in North-West Portugal: An Approach to the Christian Landscape of Braga between the fifth and eleventh Centuries,” in Churches and Social Power in Early Medieval Europe: Integrating Archaeological and Historical Approaches, eds. José Sánchez Pardo and Michael G. Shapland (Turnhout, 2015), pp. 402–404; Pablo C. Díaz, El reino Suevo (411–585) (Madrid, 2011), p. 232; Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” p. 76.

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seems to have been particularly strong in the Suevic kingdom, underlining the fact that the region’s connections extended north- and eastwards to Gaul as well as to the Byzantine Mediterranean.48 The ecclesiastical complex at Dume occupied a privileged position: it was less than two miles from Braga, located in fertile agricultural territory, near to a Roman road and built over an existing Roman villa that had been adapted into a church.49 Although comparable to churches built elsewhere in north-western Iberia from the fifth to the eighth centuries, its architectural models were from the eastern Mediterranean.50 The monastery had access to imports from North Africa and elsewhere in Hispania, underlining the point that economic connectivity was not limited to secular elites.51 By the mid-seventh century, the basilicas on the outskirts of Braga had been incorporated into the city’s ecclesiastical structures52 and around 660, the monastery of São Salvador de Montélios was built by Bishop Fructuosus of Braga, whose mausoleum was apparently modelled on Byzantine exemplars.53 The Byzantine commercial and architectural influences enjoyed by the two most prominent monasteries in Braga’s hinterland help to contextualise broader connections between the city’s churchmen and their eastern and African counterparts, to be explored later in this chapter. The sixth and seventh centuries thus did not witness the city’s collapse, but rather the culmination of its transformation into a new kind of urban space that was increasingly Christian in character, supported by activities of the Suevic kings and then the Visigothic government.54 The absorption of the Suevic kingdom into that of the Visigoths at the hands of Leovigild in 585 does not seem to have had a particularly negative impact on the city—Braga continued as the head of the ecclesiastical province of Gallaecia and its mint remained in operation until the end of the Visigothic kingdom.55 Indeed, Sánchez Pardo 48 49 50 51 52 53

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Alberto Ferreiro, “Martinian Veneration in Gaul and Iberia: Martin of Tours and Martin of Braga,” Studia Monastica 51 (2009): 1–32. Fontes, “Powers, Territories and Architecture,” pp. 397, 402–404; Devlin, “Separating the Secular from the Spiritual,” p. 356. Fontes, “Powers, Territories and Architecture in North-West Portugal,” pp. 402–404 and 409. Devlin, “Separating the Secular from the Spiritual,” p. 356. Devlin, “Separating the Secular from the Spiritual,” p. 344. Fontes, “Powers, Territories and Architecture,” pp. 396 and 405 (where the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna is mentioned as a potential model). Ribeiro and Fontes, “The Urban Morphology of Braga;” Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory through its Material Culture,” p. 75. Martins, Ribeiro, Magalhães, and Peñín, “Urban Changes in Braga in Late Antiquity.” On Braga’s mint, see Ruth Pliego, La moneda visigoda, 1 (Seville, 2009), pp. 129–132; on the city’s ecclesiastical status, see E. A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain (Oxford, 1969), p. 275.

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has described the period from 560 to 640 as witnessing the socio-economic “flowering of Gallaecia”.56 Points of change in the political record, such as the end of the Suevic kingdom, do not seem to have affected the ability of central and local powers—including ecclesiastical elites—to form working relationships and maintain their access to long-distance trade networks. Braga’s economic vitality and political prominence are reflected in the international profile of the city’s archaeological record.57 The evidence of imported ceramics suggests that Braga remained integrated into Atlantic and Mediterranean trade circuits well into the sixth century,58 highlighting “the intense trade flows that existed in this period between Braga and various extra-peninsular territories”, including Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and western Gaul.59 There are indications that such connections continued, albeit on a much-reduced scale, into the seventh century. It is also possible to trace shifts in the geographical origins of the ceramics which were being traded with Braga. African Red Slip (ARS) wares most frequently found in excavations in the city and its territory have chronologies ranging from the mid-third century to the late-sixth century, while the next most frequent imports are Terra Sigillata Hispánica Tardía (TSHT) forms dating between the fourth and the sixth centuries.60 The period from the mid-fourth century to the first quarter of the fifth century saw the highest levels of importation of ARS and TSHT.61 While eastern Mediterranean ceramics are found less frequently, a mid-fifth-century reduction in products from Africa and elsewhere in Hispania was accompanied by an increase in Phocaean Ware (Late Roman C), especially form Hayes 3, which dates between the fifth and sixth centuries.62

56 Sánchez Pardo, “Power and rural landscape,” p. 156. 57 Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” p. 84. 58 Martins, Ribeiro, Magalhães and Peñín, “Urban Changes in Braga in Late Antiquity”; Reynolds, Hispania and the Roman Mediterranean, pp. 23, 98, 110–111, 289 (n. 363), 292 (n. 392). Raquel Martínez Peñin and Manuela Martins, “Characterization of Late Antique and Early Medieval Pottery Production of the City of Braga and its Territory,” in Arqueologia Medieval VIII. Hàbitats Medievals, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Lleida, 2016), pp. 53–56, 60. 59 Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” p. 84. 60 Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” pp. 68–86: ARS forms Hayes 44, 58A, 59A, 59B, 61A, 61B, 73, 76, 91, 97, 104 are prominent, while TSHT forms Palol 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9/11 and Drag. 37T stand out. 61 Delgado, Fernandez, Quaresma and Morais, “Una aproximación,” pp. 672–673. 62 Delgado, Fernandez, Quaresma and Morais, “Una aproximación,” pp. 672–673; Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory.”

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After dropping in the second half of the fifth century, the late fifth and early sixth century witnessed the resurgence of African imports.63 Despite the overall reduction in African imports to Braga in the second half of the fifth century, excavations have revealed more than 70 sixth-century ARS vessels in deposits at Braga. Conversely, there is very little evidence for Tunisian amphorae in the same contexts, suggesting that while fineware imports continued, albeit on a reduced scale, the consumable products carried in amphorae were not reaching Braga at this time.64 There was a further reduction in ceramic evidence for eastern and African ceramics coming into Braga dating to the second half of the sixth century, suggesting severely diminished contact.65 The remaining fragments suggest that by this point in time the supply was exclusively African,66 although few can be dated later than the mid-sixth century and there is only one possible exemplar of a seventh-century form.67 The material evidence thus points towards the continued—although small-scale—integration of Braga into trading networks into the mid-sixth century, maintaining long-distance connections that it had enjoyed throughout the Roman period. Thereafter, there is sporadic evidence for later exchanges. The importation of eastern Mediterranean ceramics into Vigo continued into the seventh century, whereas at Braga there is minimal ceramic evidence—exclusively African—for connectivity after the second half of the sixth century.68 However, reduced flows of imported ceramics do not reflect the city’s economic decline because, as we have seen, there was significant investment in the urban fabric in the middle decades of the sixth century. Furthermore, plentiful non-archaeological evidence from Braga survives, underlining the city’s importance as a political and ecclesiastical centre. Braga’s status as capital of the Suevic kingdom in the sixth century encouraged political and socio-economic linkages beyond the confines of Gallaecia and generated demand for imported goods. The city was also a significant ecclesiastical centre, with long-established connections to the Byzantine world. Egeria, Orosius and Hydatius—pilgrims to the Holy Land in the late fourth and fifth century—all probably came from Gallaecia and Orosius met up with a churchman from Braga called Avitus when he was in Palestine,

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Delgado, Fernandez, Quaresma and Morais, “Una aproximación,” pp. 672–673, 680. Reynolds, Hispania and the Roman Mediterranean, p. 105. Delgado, Fernandez, Quaresma and Morais, “Una aproximación,” pp. 672–673. Quaresma and Morais, “Eastern Late Roman fine ware imports in Bracara Augusta.” Delgado, Fernandez, Quaresma and Morais, “Una aproximación,” p. 672. Delgado, Fernandez, Quaresma and Morais, “Una aproximación,” p. 679.

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agreeing to carry back relics of St. Stephen to their homeland.69 Later instances of travel by ecclesiastics between the Mediterranean world and Hispania are recorded in Isidore of Seville’s De viris illustribus, a series of potted biographies of mostly Iberian bishops put together in the early seventh century. Martin of Braga, for instance, is said to have been from Pannonia and sailed ex Orientis partibus (“from Eastern regions”) to Gallaecia before setting up a monastery, Dumium, and playing a leading role in the conversion of the Sueves to the Nicene faith.70 Bishop Fructuosus of Braga, the most prolific monastic founder of seventh-century Hispania, is also reported by his hagiographer as wanting to make a pilgrimage to the East, but was foiled by some unfaithful companions who reported him to the king. Fructuosus was arrested because the king did not want “such a light” to abandon Spain and his plans were thus thwarted.71 In addition to these examples of successful and not-so-successful travel between Gallaecia and the Mediterranean world, the textual sources indicate that religious texts and ideas were moving between East and West. Much of Italy, including Rome, was under imperial control in the second half of the sixth century and Alberto Ferreiro has recently demonstrated how ecclesiastics from Suevic Gallaecia maintained regular contact with the papacy during this period, received guidance and recognised its primacy in resolving disputes.72 For example, in a treatise on baptism, De trina mersione, probably written sometime between 556 and 561 to a bishop Boniface (bishopric unknown), Martin of Braga sought to answer his addressee’s questions about reported irregularities in baptismal practices in Gallaecia.73 Martin told Boniface that the previous metropolitan bishop of Braga, Profuturus, had asked Pope Vigilius for guidance on the proper baptismal procedure and received a reply dated 29th June 538.74 Martin based much of his argument about the orthodoxy of baptismal practices in Gallaecia on papal authority.75 More importantly for the purposes of this chapter, Martin noted that triple immersion was the custom of the Eastern Roman Empire, being “also held by the prelate of Constantinople, who had been observed performing the Easter festival by present delegates 69 Maribel Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins and Pilgrims (University Park PA, 2005), pp. 43–64. 70 Isidore, De viris illustribus 22. 71 Vita Fructuosi, 17. 72 Alberto Ferreiro, Epistolae Plenae: The Correspondence of the Bishops of Hispania with the Bishops of Rome (Third through Seventh Centuries) (Leiden, 2020), pp. 257–304. 73 For the most thorough recent treatment of the text and its context, see Ferreiro, Epistolae Plenae, pp. 292–304, esp. pp. 292–295. 74 Martin of Braga, De trina mersione 2. 75 Ferreiro, Epistolae Plenae, pp. 296–304.

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who had been sent from this kingdom to the imperial court.”76 Apparently, ambassadors from the Suevic court to Byzantium observed the baptismal liturgy in the imperial capital and reported back to ecclesiastics in Gallaecia. Liturgical knowledge thus moved from East to West even when it was not carried in the minds or texts of churchmen. It has been suggested that Martin of Braga’s journey westwards was an act of Byzantine religious diplomacy. Roger Collins argued that “possible openness to Byzantine political influence inevitably made the Suevic kingdom an object of suspicion to reviving Visigothic power” under king Leovigild in the 570s and early 580s and led, ultimately, to the kingdom’s destruction.77 Scholars have long speculated about possible Byzantine involvement in the rebellion of Hermenegild against his father Leovigild in the early 580s.78 In this context, the attempt of the Suevic king Miro to relieve Leovigild’s siege of Hermenegild’s forces in Seville in 582 is suggestive.79 The Byzantine government engaged in frequent diplomatic negotiations with the Visigoths.80 It would not be surprising if similar overtures were made to the Suevic kings as part of efforts to undermine Leovigild.81 Another example is the translation of the Apopthegmata of the Greek and Egyptian fathers from Greek into Latin by Martin of Braga and his pupil Paschasius of Dumium, who Martin had taught to read Greek. When he came to Gallaecia, Martin likely brought with him “a manuscript in Greek containing a collection of the anecdotes of the ascetic monks of Egypt. It was a very extensive collection and apparently arranged by subject matter into books and chapters”.82 Tentatively dated by Barlow to 555–6,83 these sayings indicate that the thought world of the Gallaecian church faced eastwards. This predilection 76 Martin of Braga, De trina mersione 3. 77 Collins, Early Medieval Spain, p. 44. 78 Goffart, Walter, “Byzantine Policy in the West under Tiberius II and Maurice. The Pretenders Hermenegild and Gundovald (579–585)”, Traditio 13 (1957): 73–118; more recently, see Wolfram Drews, “Hermenegild’s Rebellion and Conversion: Merovingian and Byzantine Connections,” in East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective, ed. Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen and Laury Sarti (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 74–86. 79 John of Biclarum, Chronicle 65, s. a. 582. 80 For an overview, see Jamie Wood, “Defending Byzantine Spain: Frontiers and Diplomacy,” Early Medieval Europe 18 (2010): 292–319. 81 Díaz, El reino suevo, pp. 133, 148, 150. Gregory of Tours, Libri Historiarum X 6.43 notes that Hermenegild had to rely on support from the emperor and Miro. 82 Claude W. Barlow, Iberian Fathers, volume 1: Martin of Braga, Paschasius of Dumium, Leander of Seville (Washington DC, 1969), p. 5. 83 Barlow, Iberian Fathers, volume 1, pp. 6, 113.

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must have been reinforced if the texts were used as precepts by the early monastic community at Dumium in the absence of a monastic rule.84 Indeed, in the preface to his translation, Paschasius asked that the memory of the fathers should act as an inspiration for the works of the monks: “These are the responses of the wise and spiritual fathers. May their worthy memory also come to us, that we may reveal in our works this narration of the holy life, that we may become without reproach, perfect and blameless, and may please our Savior”.85 Later in the preface, Paschasius noted that there were many books of these eloquent men with which he had become familiar under Martin’s tuition.86 This suggests that there were more texts about the sayings and deeds of the fathers available at Dumium than the surviving works of Martin and Paschasius. Barlow, the editor and translator of Martin’s works, posited that the shorter collection long attributed to Paschasius “represents but a small part, probably less than one-fifth, of his original”.87 Clearly the surviving texts are but one element of a broader engagement with the thought world of eastern monasticism. Paschasius went on to say that he translated the writings exactly as they were in the original, possibly Greek, manuscript that had been given to him, although he doubted that he had done so accurately and suggested that Martin might correct his work.88 Earlier in the preface, he described the “Lives of the Greek Fathers” as “carefully and eloquently composed, like many other works of the Greeks”, stressing his lack of ability and confidence. By name-checking the “very wise” Socrates, Paschasius suggested that he was perfectly well educated, despite his skilled deployment of the humility topos.89 Shortly after 556, Martin made another translation of 109 very brief selections from the Greek original, in what has been described as a “colloquial type of Latin”.90 These were intended, like Paschasius’s work, to provide moral guidance, although, unlike the earlier text, this was not stated 84 Barlow, Iberian Fathers, volume 1, p. 6; cf. Claudia Rapp, “The Origins of Hagiography and the Literature of Early Monasticism: Purpose and Genre between Tradition and Innovation,” in Unclassical Traditions. Volume I: Alternatives to the Classical Past in Late Antiquity, ed. Christopher Kelly, Richard Flower and Michael Stuart Williams (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 119–130, who argues convincingly that sayings collections in Egypt served a similar purpose in the early stages of the development of monasticism. 85 Paschasius, Questions and answers of the Greek Fathers, 44 (12). 86 Paschasius, Questions and answers of the Greek Fathers, preface. 87 Barlow, Iberian Fathers, volume 1, p. 114, notes the survival of two versions of Pashchasius’ translation: a long version that is more common in the manuscripts, and a shorter one. 88 Paschasius, Questions and answers of the Greek Fathers, preface. 89 Paschasius, Questions and answers of the Greek Fathers, preface. 90 Barlow, Iberian Fathers, volume 1, p. 6.

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explicitly. Twenty-two of the chapters were also included in Paschasius’s version. Although it is possible that Martin used Paschasius’s text when making his own translation, there is sufficient difference to indicate that his was an independent translation.91 Whatever the level of intertextual dependence, the combined efforts of Paschasius and Martin further underline the active interest of the community at Dumium in the eastern monastic tradition. Other written sources demonstrate that engagement with ecclesiastical writings from the Byzantine world extended beyond the monastery of Dumium and later than the 550s. Due to the efforts of Martin, the bishops of Gallaecia also had access to eastern canon collections. Several of the canons of the Second Council of Braga, held in June 572, over which Martin presided as metropolitan bishop of the provinces of Braga and Lugo were adapted from eastern collections and a special collection of eastern canons, mostly translated from Greek and now known as the Capitula Martini, was also included in the council’s records.92 In addition to the eastern Mediterranean and Italy, the ecclesiastics of Gallaecia engaged actively with the writings of late antique Africa. Augustine of Hippo exerted a formative influence on the intellectual culture of sixth- and seventh-century Hispania more generally, including Gallaecia.93 It has been said that both the form and contents of Martin of Braga’s De correctione rusticorum, a model sermon on how to deal with superstitious beliefs and practices written in response to a request from Bishop Polemius of Astorga, were largely conditioned by Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus, a treatise on catechetical preaching written sometime between 399 and 405 in response to a request for instruction from Deogratias, a deacon from Carthage.94 Augustine also

91 Barlow, Iberian Fathers, volume 1, p. 6. 92 Barlow, Iberian Fathers, vol. 1, p. 4. For more on the canon collection, see Molly Lester, “Making Rite Choices: Roman and Eastern Liturgies in Early Medieval Iberia,” in Rome and Byzantium in the Visigothic Kingdom: Beyond Imitatio Imperii, ed. Damián Fernández, Molly Lester and Jamie Wood (Amsterdam, 2023), pp. 179–203. 93 L. Rubio, “Presencia de San Agustin en los escritos de la España romana y visigoda,” La Ciudad de Dios 200 (1987): 477–506; Collins, Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, pp. 60–61. 94 Barlow, Iberian Fathers, vol. 1, pp. 10–11; Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 447–461. The Confessions and the City of God were also used: J.-C. Martín, “La biblioteca cristiana de los padres hispanovisigodos siglos VI–VII,” Veleia 30 (2013): 260–261. While other sources have been detected, including the sermons of Caesarius of Arles and (possibly) Hilary of Poitiers’ De Trinitate, Augustine was clearly the main inspiration for the De correctione rusticorum, Martín, “La biblioteca,” pp. 266, 269.

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influenced Martin’s broader project to organize the church in Gallaecia and to ensure that that appropriate pastoral care was available across the province.95 While the ceramic evidence indicates that eastern and African imports were beginning to flatline in the late sixth century, there was no definitive caesura between Braga and the Byzantine world. Ecclesiastics travelled to the East from the Suevic kingdom, consuming, engaging with and reconfiguring texts produced in imperial territories, from Africa and Rome to the eastern Mediterranean. This included translating texts from the original Greek for use in the monastic communities of Gallaecia, some of which continued to consume goods imported from the Byzantine world.96 The adaptation of textual sources originating in the Mediterranean world can be paralleled in the material record. The ceramic industry of late antique Braga engaged in a similar process of creative adaptation of imported models. Peñin and Martins have highlighted the presence of a considerable number of ceramics copied from imported types.97 These copies were mostly made of wares from Africa and elsewhere in Hispania, but imitations were also made of limited numbers of Gallic and eastern Mediterranean exemplars. The late grey wares from Braga “mimic … containers whose original productions are made between the final moments of the fourth century and the sixth century.”98 For instance, imitations were made of African Red Slip (ARS) ware types such as Hayes 97 (produced between 490 and 550) and the feet of Hayes 170 cups, which are not common in Hispania (produced between the second half of the fifth century and the sixth century).99 Local red and grey wares imitated a range of ARS tablewares dating from the late fourth century to the sixth century and late Roman C (Phocaean Ware) dating between the fifth and the late sixth century.100 Imitation and imported types have been found at sites across the city and outside it, for example at the monastic site of São Martinho de Dume.101 95 Collins, Early Medieval Spain, p. 84; M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe: A.D. 500 to 900, 2nd ed. (Ithaca NY, 1957), p. 118. 96 Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” p. 78. 97 E.g. Peñin and Martins, “Characterization,” p. 58: copies of ARS with chronologies ranging from the final moments of the fourth century to the late sixth century are found often in excavations in Braga and the surrounding area. 98 Peñin and Martins, “Characterization,” p. 59. 99 Peñin and Martins, “Characterization,” p. 62. 100 Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” pp. 78–80. 101 Peñín, Martins and Fontes, “The City of Braga and its Territory,” p. 78: sites within the city at which such discoveries have been made include the Theatre, Ex Albergue Distrital, Alfonso Henriques 20/26, Alfonso Henriques 42/56, Escole da Sé Velha.

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It has been argued that the proliferation of imitation wares was “a consequence of the inability of foreign productions to meet local demand”.102 Social and economic difficulties contributed to the retraction of trade flows, which meant that the pottery producers of Braga could provide imitation products for the local market. While this phenomenon does suggest a strong demand in the city, it may also imply that there was a demand for more affordable versions of imported ceramics. However, that this was not simply a matter of access is demonstrated by the fact that some members of the elite of Braga could access “authentic” imported ceramics, while the imitation types have also been found in Vigo, which continued to have access to Mediterranean imports after Braga had largely been cut off from them.103 Furthermore, ceramic chronologies indicate that the imitative process could have continued for up to two centuries, while imitation and original ceramics circulated alongside one another, suggesting that the emergence of imitative wares was not simply the result of short-term fluctuations in demand. The ceramic record thus indicates ongoing connectivity to the Byzantine world (the eastern Mediterranean and Africa), with imitation wares circulating alongside originals. A similar shift to imitation pottery occurred elsewhere in post-Roman Iberia, while at Braga copies were also being made of late wares from elsewhere in Hispania and Gaul.104 Ceramic imports to Braga and local imitations suggest continued demand among the elites of the city and its hinterland, perhaps related to Braga’s status as a political and ecclesiastical centre. While it is impossible to determine whether the imitation wares were valued specifically for their likeness of imported wares (as opposed to their status as finewares more generally), the fact that imitative processes in the ceramic record parallel those in the textual record further indicates the varied nature of contacts between the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula and the Byzantine economic and cultural world in the post-Roman period. 4 Conclusion This chapter has tracked patterns of mobility and exchange across the political boundaries and long distances that separated the north-western part of postRoman Iberia from the economic heartlands of the Byzantine-Mediterranean 102 Peñin and Martins, “Characterization,” p. 66. 103 Fernández Fernández, O comercio tardoantigo no noroeste peninsular, pp. 179–202. 104 Peñin and Martins, “Characterization,” pp. 59–60, 66.

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world. Many sites on the western fringe of the Iberian Peninsula were integrated into a range of long-distance exchange networks with the Mediterranean, especially with North Africa and parts of the eastern Mediterranean, well into the middle of the sixth century and, in some cases, into the seventh. In general, the scale of such connectivity was much reduced compared to previous centuries and some sites which had previously received extensive imports from Africa and the East no longer did so or did so on a much-reduced scale. There is, in general, much less evidence for imports at sites that are further from the coast, although scattered finds, including Byzantine coins and weights, demonstrate that parts of the interior were not completely cut off.105 Some sites clearly functioned as redistribution hubs, for example for the movement of goods inland via road networks and/or for secondary distribution. In the case of Vigo, the port was linked to longer-distance and larger-scale networks along the Atlantic fringe than many other sites, including those that are much better represented in the written record, such as Braga. In addition to the importation of prestige goods such as sarcophagi, jewellery and liturgical items to Gallaecia, scholars have noted ‘Byzantine’ elements within the contemporary architectural repertoire and the growing popularity of eastern and African saints.106 Alongside textual references to the movement of ecclesiastics such as Martin of Braga and their awareness of contemporary theological developments in Rome and the East, this points towards the extensive integration of the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula into long-distance trading and communication networks. Analysis of the written evidence, coupled with a review of the material record suggests that local elites, especially ecclesiastical leaders, played a vital role in articulating and managing connections to the Mediterranean world. Bishops and monastic founders—sometimes these were the same people—seem to have been important in cultivating connections, but not just in relation to purely ecclesiastical or intellectual matters. Imported goods and ‘Byzantine-style’ material culture are disproportionately present at monastic and episcopal sites, suggesting that, as Reynolds argued, the economic work of the church is worthy of further investigation. While there are some broad correlations between political changes and shifts in the material and textual record, the activities of the imperial state and the Visigothic and Suevic monarchies cannot be mapped neatly against shifting patterns of connectivity. This suggests that it is much more likely that the driving forces behind

105 Fabião, “O Ocidente da Península Ibérica no século VI,” pp. 38–39. 106 Sánchez Pardo, “Late Antique Atlantic contacts,” p. 95.

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western Iberia’s continued connections with the Byzantine world were local and regional elites, including religious leaders. Acknowledgements This paper was first presented at the general seminar of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman, and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham in January 2020. Feedback from Chris Wickham, Leslie Brubaker and Daniel Reynolds was especially useful in developing it for publication. Bibliography

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Chapter 8

A Forma Mesquite in Formam Ecclesiae: Toledo, Between Rodrigo and Ibn Hud Jerrilynn D. Dodds Two prominent monuments, each a rich palimpsest of histories, have recently become the material manifestation of contemporary struggles for confessional and political possession: the Great Mosque of Córdoba—first a mosque, then a cathedral, and subsequently a functioning cathedral and museum; and the church of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul—converted to a mosque, then a secular museum, and then to the Great Mosque of Ayasophia. Each has been instrumentalised in support of an array of political, social and economic considerations harbored beneath the cloak of a search for religious purity—or of a secular ideal that claims similarly transcendent and universal values.1 The result is that these struggles reveal fissures in a fictively smooth cultural discourse, contemporary contradictions “between the rhetoric and realities of secular modernity.”2 We would be very mistaken to suppose that such contradictions, such tangled discourses, were limited to our own time. And there would be few Medieval protagonists more likely to wrangle these discursive knots than Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (c. 1170–1247), Castile’s indefatigable archbishop, historian and mentor of kings. He is known as the ardent promoter of the Crusade of Las Navas de Tolosa, and yet, among his many political goals was the construction of a vision for his rapidly expanding colonial society that—by necessity—included Muslims and Jews submitted to his Christian king.3 “His 1 Jaime Jover and Brian Rosa, “Contexted Urban Heritage: Discourses of Meaning and Owner­ ship of the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, Spain,” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 4, no. 1–2 (2017): 127–153; D. Fairchild Ruggles, “The stratigraphy of Forgetting: The Great Mosque of Cordoba and its contested legacy,” in Contested Cultural Heritaghe: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure and Exclusion in a Global World, ed. H. Silvermann (New York, 2011), 51–67; Ipek Kocaömer Yosmaoglu, “Aghia Sophioa and a Reckoning with History,” Platform 27 July. Available at https://www.platformspace.net/home/aghia-sophia-and-a-reckoning-with -history. Accessed November 24, 2020. 2 Finbar Barry Flood, “Inciting Modernity? Images, Alternities and the Contexts of ‘Cartoon Wars,’” in Images that Move, ed. Patricia Spyer and Mary Margaret Steedly (Santa Fe, 2013), pp. 41–72, 63. 3 Lucy Pick, Conflict and Coexistance. Archbisop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain (Ann Arbor, 2004), recognised Rodrigo’s evolution towards an inclusive world beneath © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004683754_010

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theological challenge,” Lucy Pick has shown, “was to make this palatable to a Christendom that increasingly demanded uniformity of worship and practice from all those living within it.”4 His investment in the conversion of religious buildings in the thirteenth century is revealed in his De rebus Hispaniae, a masterful history of the Iberian Peninsula from its origins to his own time. In this sweeping narrative, he includes a subtle and stratified account of the long-storied transformation of the Great Mosque of Toledo into the city’s gothic cathedral.5 For Rodrigo, whose great passion was the establishment of Toledo as the peninsula’s Primatial see, the site of the Great Mosque of Toledo, and its history, were deeply fetishised. Rodrigo was thus eager to document his intimate relation with its rebuilding. Sometime in the 1230s, he described how, in 1226, after King Fernando III returned from the conquest of Capilla, in Extremadura, the king and the archbishop Rodrigo placed the first stone of the Cathe­ dral of Toledo, that still conserved the form of a mosque since the time of the Arabs, and which building rises by the day with formidable work, to the enormous admiration of the people.6 The church, he explained further, in a cartulary of 1238: “once noble and famous, had been prisoner under the tyranny of the Saracens for a long time” and it would now be “transformed from the form of a mosque to a church.”7 The more complete history as we can piece it together is worth rehearsing, as is Rodrigo’s deft manipulation of it. His account, for instance, is not without subtle inference that this laying of a stone constituted a kind of conversion of the mosque to a church, but he scrupulously writes “the form of a mosque” because, (as he will subsequently explain) for over 130 years Toledo’s cathedral had occupied the same building that had previously been Toledo’s Great Mosque. Such conversions of mosque buildings into churches had been common and these buildings became, on the simplest level, trophies of

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the church. See also Lucy Pick, “Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and the Jews: Pragmatism and Patronage in Thirteenth-Century Toledo,” Viator 28 (1997): 203–22; Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford, 1993), pp. 322–323 and 344–5. Lucy Pick, “What Did Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada Know about Islam?” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 20 (2011): 221–235, 235. Rodrigo’s part in the construction of the Gothic cathedral is elucidated by Tom Nickson in Toledo Cathedral. Building Histories in Medieval Castile (University Park PA, 2015). Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie sive Historía Gótica, ed. Juan Fernández Valverde (Turnhout, 1987), 9.13 (6–10). “A forma mesquite in formam ecclesiae,” in Los cartularios de Toledo, ed. Francisco Hernández (Madrid, 1985), n. 449, translated in L. Pick, “Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and the Jews,” p. 219.

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conquest—of an essentialised Christianity over Islam, and of a ruler whose victory thereby garnered a kind of sacred entitlement. The changing of the orientation of the building: the destruction of the qibla8 and the creation in many of a divergent and more axialised orientation common to a Christian church constitutes, in Buresi’s words “a framing of conquered territory” and also a stage set for the emergence of new social and political powers within the new economy of conquest.9 But as those diverse actors emerged, the very act of conversion fragmented and complicated the discourse that strove towards a morality constructed around two simple, unequivocal poles. 1

Between Mosque and Cathedral

The Great Mosque of Toledo—the building that would become the city’s cathedral—was a significant structure at the center of Tulaytula (Toledo), reconstructed today as a t-type hypostyle mosque of eleven naves with a wider

8 The wall facing Mecca. 9 Pascal Buresi, “Les conversions d’églises et de mosqués en Espagene aux XIe–XIIIe siècles,” in Villes et religion. Mélanges offerts à Jean-Louis Biget, eds. Patrick Boucheron and Jacques Chiffoleau (Paris, 2000), pp. 333–350, 341. There exists, in addition, a rich bibliography surrounding the conversion of mosques to churches, which includes: Susana Calvo Capilla, “De mezquita a iglesia: el proceso de cristianización de los lugares de culto de al-Andalus” in Transformació, destrucció i restauració dels espais medieval, eds., Pilar Giráldez, Màrius Vendrel (Barcelona, 2016), pp. 129–148; “La mezquita de Bab al-Mardum y el proceso de consagración de pequeñas mezquitas en Toledo (s. XII–XIII),” Al-Qantara 20, no. 2 (1999): 299–330; “‘Et las mezquitas que habien deben seer del rey.’ La cristianización de Murcia tras la conquista de Alfonso X,” in Alfonso X el Sabio, ed. Isidro Bango (Murcia, 2010), pp. 688–694; Ana Echevarría, “La transformacíon del espacio islámico (siglos XI–XIII),” Annexes des Cahiers de linguistique et de civilisation hispaniques médiévales 15 (2003): 53–77; Heather Ecker, “How to administer a Conquered City in Al-Andalus: Mosque, Parish Churches and Parishes,” in Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, ed. Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi (Leiden, 2005), pp. 45–65; Julie Harris, “Mosque to Church Conversion in the Spanish Reconquest,” Medieval Encounters 3, no. 2 (1997): 158–172; Francisco Hernández, “La catédral, instrument d’assimilation,” in Tolède, XIIème–XIIIème: Musulmanes, chrétiens et juives: le savoir et le tolérance, ed. Louis Cardaillac (Paris, 1991), pp. 75–91; José Orlandis, “Un problema eclesiástico de la Reconquista española: La conversión de mezquitas en iglesias cristianas,” in Mélanges offerts à Jean Duvilliers (Toulouse, 1979), pp. 595–604. Parts of the argument pursued in this essay appeared in a previous publication: Jerrilynn Dodds, “Rodrigo, Alfonso y la conversión de edificios,” in Alfonso X el Sabio, ed. Isidro Bango Torviso (Murcia, 2010), pp. 740–775.

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central nave, and a sahn, or courtyard, surrounded by porticos.10 The date of its original construction is unknown, but it was presumably founded in the period of the Emirate, for already in 871 a petition was made to rebuild its minaret, which had collapsed, and to opportunistically appropriate the land on which a contiguous church stood for the mosque’s expansion.11 Surviving sculpture surveyed from the Caliphal period (929–1031) in all Toledo reveals an elegant corpus of drilled Corinthian capitals in marble of great delicacy and quality, suggesting that after the consolidation of Tulaytula under Abd al-Rahman III, the city might have received an architectural branding in keeping with the Caliphate that could well have marked the principle mosque.12 And the modest echo of Córdoba in the Caliphal forms of the compact neighborhood mosque of Ibn Hadidi: interlacing arches fashioned of brick and polylobed banded arches of stone and brick, suggest that in Toledo’s principle mosque, such forms also might have prevailed as well.13 (Figs. 8.1–8.3) Over 130 years before the ceremony described by Rodrigo, Toledo, with its mosque at its center, had become a colonial possession of Castile, an occupation that marked a reversal from the habitual Castilian strategy of demanding parias—tribute payments—and feudal duties from taifa kings. After a protracted siege, Alfonso VI took possession of his client’s city state and its territories on 25 May 1085, with a capitulation treaty that included the possession of around 80 associated towns with their own principle mosques and their 10 Susana Calvo Capilla, Las mezquitas de al-Andalus (Almeria, 2014), pp. 117–119; Clara Delgado Valero, Toledo Islamico. Ciudad, arte e historia (Toledo, 1987), pp. 266–274. See also: Martín Almagro Gorbea et al., Excavaciones en el claustro de la cathedral de Toledo (Madrid, 2011); Guido Conrad Von Conradsheim, “Exploration géophysique des soubassements de la cathédrale de Tolède,” Annales d’Histoies de l’Art et d’Arquéologie Bruxelles 2 (1980): 95–99. Delgado sees the marble columns incorporated into the choir enclosure in the Gothic building as spolia from the mosque, possibly echoing smaller columns from the additions of al Hakam II in the Great Mosque of Córdoba (Toledo Islamico, 273–274). However, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza dismisses this possibility because of the small size of the columns (240). Tom Nickson reconstructs these as part of a plan of compound piers, suggesting they might have been the inspiration for the 13th century piers at the church of San Román in Toledo, a typology for which precedents are lacking in earlier or contemporary Iberian prayer halls. It is fair to say, however that San Román retains decorative schemes that reflect Toledo’s transcultural styles (Toledo Cathedral. 35 and Fig. 19). 11 Susana Calvo Capilla, Las mezquitas de al-Andalus, p. 118; Delgado Valero, Toledo Islamico, pp. 268–274. 12 Patrice Cressier, “Los capiteles islámicos de Toledo,” in Actas del congreso internacional: entre el Califato y la Taifa: mil años del Cristo de la Luz (Toledo, 2000), pp. 169–196, 180 and 184–185. 13 Calvo, “La mezquita de Bab al-Mardum,” and Christian Ewert, “Die Moschee am Bab al-Mardum in Toledo: Eine ‘Kopie’ der Ehemaligen Moschee von Córdoba,” Madridrer Mitteilungen 18 (1977): 287–354.

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figure 8.1 The Great Mosque of Córdoba, prayer hall of Abd al Rahman 1, 8th century Photo: Author

figure 8.2 Toledo, Mosque of Ibn Hadidi (Bab al-Mardun), 999 Photo: Author

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figure 8.3 Toledo, Santa Cruz (apse and crossing added to the Mosque of Ibn Hadidi) Photo: Jl FilpoC, Creative Commons. Available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mezquita _de_Bab_al-Mardum_%28Toledo%29.jpg. Accessed May 9, 2023

charitable endowments or waqfs.14 Toledo’s ruler, al-Qadir—the grandson of al-Ma‌ʾmun, who had been Alfonso’s host during his exile there some 13 years before, was provided with an alternate rule, the Kingdom of Valencia, formerly a possession of the Kingdom of Tulaytula. The pact was of a sort generally inspired by the dhimma, in which the Muslim citizens of Toledo accepted a kind of minority status similar to that given to Christians and Jews in Muslim majority states. The Taifa’s status as Alfonso’s client, and his intimacy with it nurtured during his nine month exile there in 1072, must have played a part in these negotiations, though to Alfonso, the pacts must have seemed more like a fuero15 for the city’s Muslims, whom he apparently intended to rule.16 The terms, as they are reported within this framework, were fairly conventional: Muslims and their families were to be respected, and to be allowed the practice of their faith; those who wished to leave the city could do so in safety, with their possessions, and they retained the right to return without prejudice should they wish. Alfonso VI was to receive al-Qadir’s possessions and buildings in the

14 Orlandis, “Un problema eclesiástico,” p. 599. 15 A municipal law code. 16 Concerning Alfonso’s exile at the court of al-Ma‌ʾmun: Evariste Levi Provencal, “Alfonse VI et la prise de Tolede,” Hespéris 12 (1931): 33–49, 38; Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of LéonCastilla under King Alfonso VI 1065–1109 (Princeton, 1988), pp. 64–68.

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realm, and he could dispose of its mosques as he wished, with the significant exception, sources suggest, of Toledo’s principal mosque.17 And yet, by October of 1086, that mosque was appropriated and consecrated as the city’s cathedral. There are no Latin sources addressing this change before Rodrigo’s account in the thirteenth century, but Ibn Bassam, a contemporary of the seizure of the mosque, recounts that Alfonso defied the advice of his advisor, Sisnando Davidez, who counseled tolerance, and blinded by pride, did not heed him, and rather only listened to the voice of his madness and his idiocy. The day … of Rabiʾ I of the year 478, he gave orders to defile the Great Mosque. A witness who was there recounted having seen his minions approaching the mosque this day, the bitterness of which blinds eyes and the mind. In the sanctuary there was no one but the Shakh Ustadh al-Maghami … The Master had with him one of his students, who was reading, and when the Christians said to him “finish quickly” he made signs to his disciple to continue. Finally, he raised himself, without showing signs of haste or fear, made his prostrations and devotions, and then cried and sobbed a long time, while the Christians watched him with reverence and respect.18 Buresi, in an interesting reading of Ibn Bassam, sees his account of a pious Muslim’s prayer, completed just before the mosque was profaned, as a purification ritual in reverse.19 Defilement and the separation of dhimmi and Muslims were central legal concerns in al-Andalus, issues that became more imperative in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Aillet notes that in the Kitāb al-muḥallā bi-l-āṯār, a commentary on Islamic law and jurisprudence of Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), there were over sixty questions regarding dhimmi that treated “with a maniacal precision 17

See the excellent review of the sources and analysis in Heather Ecker, From Masjid to Casa-Mezquita. Neighbourhood Mosques in Seville after the Castilian Conquest (1248–1634), unpublished PhD thesis (University of Oxford, 2000), pp. 18–53; Levi Provencal, “Alfonse VI et la prise de Tolède,” p. 47; Julio González, Repoblacíon de castila la nueva, vol. 1 (Madrid, 1976), pp. 111–113; Susana Calvo Capilla, “La mezquita de Bab al-Mardum,” pp. 308–309. 18 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, “El conde mozárabe Sisnando Davídiz y la política de Alfonso VI con los Taifas,” Al-Andalus 12, no. 1 (1947): 27–42, 31–33. For additional and valuable analysis of the account of ibn Bassam regarding Alfonso’s early administration in Toledo: Heather Ecker, “Administradores Mozárabes en Sevilla después de la Conquista,” in Congreso Internacional Conmemorativo del 750 Aniversario de la Conquista de la Ciudad de Sevilla por Fernando III, Rey de Castilla y León, ed. Manuel González Jiménez (Seville, 2000), pp. 821–838, 822–825. 19 Buresi, “Les conversions d’églises,” p. 344.

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the possibilities of contamination through contact,” including legal questions regarding places of worship.20 These concerns augment after Alfonso VI’s conquest of Toledo.21 In accounts of both Muslims and Christians, defilement or contamination in particular occur because erasing the contamination of the divergent confession constitutes an important part of rites of mosque and church conversions, and also because mosques and churches constitute the only collective spaces of confessional purity in plural cities. They are the unique sites for the experience of exclusive confessional identity.22 Alfonso had been no stranger to the conversion of mosques; his father, Fernando I, had converted the mosque of Coimbra to a church after the city’s conquest in 1064.23 However, though both cities capitulated following a protracted siege, Coimbra was a military conquest of a different hue from the partially complicit if divisive handover of Toledo by its ruler and that faction of the populace of Tulaytula who warily accepted the rule of their Castilian ally. And Alfonso’s original intentions seemed to tend towards the assumption that he intended to rule submitted Muslims. Letters in an exchange between Alfonso and al-Muʾtamid of Seville attest to Alfonso’s early adoption of the title: “ad-inbiratur du l-millatayn”: “the emperor, lord of [the adherents of] the two faiths,”24 which aligns with a Latin title found by Menendez Pidal in late eleventh-century documents from Sahagun that describes Alfonso in Toledo as “imperante christianorum quam et paganorum omnia Hispanie regna” (ruler of Christians and pagans in the whole kingdom of Spain), in which context pagan references Muslims.25 The title does not, of course, question the king’s agency in the conversion of the principal mosque, nor his desire to see it come

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Cyrille Aillet, “La construction des frontiers interconfessionnelles: le cas des chrétiens d’alandalus dans les sources juridiques (iie/viiie–vie/xiie siècle),” in The Legal Status of Dimmi-s in the Islamic West, ed. Maribel Fierro and John Tolan (Madrid, 2013), pp. 167–198, 174. 21 Aillet, “La construction des frontiers interconfessionnelles,” p. 175. Aillet notes that some of the language of the Muslim juridical documents was assimilated into the canons of the church in al-Andalus in the mid-11th century, at 174. 22 Concerning conversion rituals see: Susana Calvo Capilla, “De mezquita a iglesia,” pp. 133; Julie Harris, “Mosque to Church Conversion,” pp. 160–169. 23 Gerhard Graf et al., Portugal Roman (Ste. Marie de la Pierre qui Vire, 1986), p. 139. 24 Angus MacKay and M’hammad Benaboud, “Alfonso VI of León and Castile al-Inbratur du l-Milatayn,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LVI (1979): 95–102, 100–101; Angus MacKay et al., “Yet again Alfonso VI ‘the Emperor, Lord of the (the Adherents of) the Two Faiths, the Most Excellent Ruler’: A Rejoinder to Normal Roth,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXI (1984): 171–181. 25 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid (Madrid, 1956), vol. 2, pp. 730–731.

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to pass, but it does suggest, as Maribel Fierro points out, that his initial intention was to rule a city inhabited by both Christians and Muslims.26 This presumed reversal of 1086 reveals a political program balanced precariously between an intent to rule Toledo’s diverse population seamlessly, without interruption, and a desire to construct an image of conquest that might be seen as the kind of sacred preemptive victory a mosque conversion would commemorate. Alfonso’s flirtation with a multi-confessional rule may have been a strategic colonial policy, but his ultimate shift towards the seizure of the mosque seems not to have been part of a preconceived plan, as was, for example, the pact Alfonso I of Aragon offered conquered Muslims in the early 12th century.27 In Toledo, at least two mosques were still left to the remaining Muslim population after the seizure of the city’s principle mosque: the mosque converted in 1159 to the church of San Salvador, and the tiny eleventh-century mosque of “Tornerías” or “Solarejo,” which continued in use through the fifteenth century.28 But the Aragonese policy anticipated from the beginning the ultimate evacuation of all Muslims from the city center: the Muslims of Saragossa, for instance, were ordered by pact to leave the city center within a year after capitulating in 1118, abandoning their homes and their mosques, which would, according to plan, fall into the hands of the church.29 Alfonso VI, instead, seems to have begun his conquest of Toledo with a different, more inclusive protocol in mind, and the perplexing nature of the narrative with which surviving texts have left us is born, perhaps, of the fact that he was obliged to abandon that original plan soon after taking Toledo.30 There is evidence that Alfonso VI was working hard to repopulate a city that had lost population during the end of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth centuries.31 If Alfonso was initially seeking social and economic continuity in Toledo, he must have known the devastating effect the loss of its principal 26 Maribel Fierro, “Mitos y realidades del Toledo Islámico,” Tulaytula 12 (2005): 29–61, 57; MacKay and Benaboud, “Alfonso VI of León and Castile al-Inbratur du l-Milatayn”; Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of Léon-Castilla, pp. 181–183. 27 Clay Stalls, “The Relationship between Conquest and Settlement on the Aragonese Frontier of Alfonso I,” in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of Robert I. Burns, S.J., ed. Larry Simon (Leiden, 1995), vol. 1, pp. 216–231. 28 Calvo, Las Mezquitas, pp. 676–679, and 682–685. 29 Orlandis, “Un problema eclesiástico,” p. 601. 30 A small Muslim community did subsist in Toledo through the 14th century. Jean Pierre Molénat, “Quartiers et Communautés à Tolède (XIIe–XVe Siècles),” La España Medieval 12 (1989): 163–190. 31 Susana Calvo notes the process of property grants (“La mezquita de Bab al-Mardum”), a process studied in detail by Heather Ecker, From Masjid to Casa-Mezquita, pp. 18–53. Consulted with the kind permission of the author.

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mosque would have on the stability of the city’s Muslim community, a factor in his retention of the former Taifa capital. Abandoning his strategy to rule a Toledo with a robust Muslim population less than a year and a half after taking the city likely reflects, first, the drastic transformation in his military landscape during those months. The occupation of Toledo by the Castilians—who had formerly only extorted tribute from the Taifa kingdom—had proved a catalyst for the alliance of alarmed Taifa rulers from Seville, Granada, Malaga and Badajoz with Almoravid ruler Yusuf ibn Tashfin, one that culminated in October 1086 in the battle of Sagrajas.32 Only a year and a half after his entry into Toledo, Alfonso’s army was crushed by this Almoravid alliance, suffering enormous losses. Though the Almoravid army was also crippled, the entire Castilian vision of a Toledan capital was by necessity transformed, as the encroaching presence of the Almoravids changed the status of an ancient Visigothic capital, resonant with implications of the renewal of a mythic Visigothic monarchy, into an ephemeral frontier outpost that was neither consolidated nor secure. By 1086, Alfonso could likely see that attempts to retain a large proportion of the Muslim population of Toledo had failed, perhaps—as Reilly supposes—in expectation of an Almoravid victory and a hope of return to Muslim rule.33 And yet, there were other reasons as well: even a diminishing indigenous population might not have provided incentive for this conversion so soon, were it not for additional players in this far from binary drama. When, in December 1086, the building of the Great Mosque of Toledo was officially consecrated, it became, not only a church, but the city’s cathedral, in an act that greatly empowered Frankish and Papal interests in Toledo’s conquest. During much of the decade preceding his entry into Toledo, Alfonso very likely considered the reformed papacy and its legates to be more challenging adversaries than his taifa clients. Pope Gregory VII had seen in the existence of lands that had been newly wrested from Muslim hands an opening to territorial expansion for the papacy, one intensified by the apocalyptic presence of Islam, an other to the dominion of Christ, in whose interests the reformed papacy staked its own terrestrial claims. Hugh, Abbot of Cluny and for much of this period a papal legate and agent, famously mediated between the pope 32 Also called the battle of Zalaca or Zallaqa. 33 Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla, pp. 182–183; Delgado, Toledo Islamico, p. 267. Regarding Muslim population abandoning Toledo see: Jean-Pierre Molenat, Campagnes et monts de Tolède du XIIe au XVe siècle (Madrid, 1997), pp. 31–36. See also: Echevarria, “La transformacíon del espacio islámico” and Molénat “Mudéjars, captifs et affranchise,” in Tolède XIIe–XIIIe. Musulmans, chrétiens et juifs: le savoir et la tolérance (Paris, 1991), p. 62, who asks if after Sagradas the pact might have been broken in anticipation of possible Toledan Muslim support of invading Almoravids.

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and Alfonso, who finally accepted devoted obedience to the Pope as regarded Roman liturgical reform while feigning oblivion to the issue of Iberia’s mythical feudal indenture to Rome.34 Thus, Rome was a third party at the table in Toledo’s post-conquest diplomacy, in a powerful and symbolic new jurisdiction emerging at the height of the reformed papacy. Gregory’s successor, Urban II, no longer supposed, as Gregory had originally, that he could supersede Iberian kings in their territorial expansion, but he still was invested in both the material and emblematic sovereignty of such a conquest. Alfonso thus demonstrated his continued commitment to liturgical reform and provided for Cluniac and papal possessions and authority in new territorial acquisitions, at the expense of, not just conquered Muslims, but indigenous Christians as well. In Toledo he chose the abbot of the royal monastery of Sahagún: Bernard of Sédirac—a Cluniac, an ardent reformer and intimate of the papacy—to be archbishop in 1086.35 The appointment was confirmed in 1088 by a papal bull—“Cunctis sanctorum,” literally “All the holy places”—which gave Bernard authority over all the newly conquered territories, as well as all of the bishoprics that had survived under the jurisdiction of Mozarabs, the indigenous Christian community that had continued to occupy Toledo under Muslim rule. Thus Toledo saw four remarkable changes occur in quick succession between the Battle of Zalaca in October 1086 and the end of that year: the appropriation of the city’s principle mosque from Toledo’s Muslim community; its conversion and consecration as a cathedral; the consecration of a French Cluniac, Bernard de Sédirac, as archbishop of the city; and the donation of the vast wealth and holdings of the mosque’s waqf to the cathedral’s nascent endowment, together with enormous peninsular ecclesiastical authority. Bernard’s ascension would see the spoils of the city divided in such a way as to demonstrate the strong arm of Cluny and the Roman church in the affairs of the new Castilian city. The conversion of the mosque was an act intended to project onto its transformation a cosmic polarity between Muslim and Christian that the city’s initial possession had not immediately suggested. But this gesture also deftly 34 Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christiandom Face Heresy, Judaism and Islam (1000–1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca NY, 2002), p. 60. Gonzalvez explains that for Pope Gregory the abolition of the ‘Mozarabic’ liturgy would become “nothing more than a means for the … submission of the Spanish church to Rome.” Ramón Gonzálvez, “The Persistence of the Mozarabic Liturgy in Toledo after 1080,” in Santiago, Saint-Denis and Saint Peter, ed. Bernard F. Reilly, Santiago, Saint-Denis and Saint Peter. The Reception of the Roman Liturgy in León-Castile in 1080 (New York, 1985), pp. 157–185, 161. 35 His primacy would not be confirmed by Urban II until 1088, see Linehan, History and the Historians, p. 214.

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diverted attention from a more awkward problem: the existence of a quite adequate pre-existing cathedral—one that was not a former mosque—in Toledo. For in fashioning a cathedral from the converted mosque, Toledo’s new ecclesiastical hierarchy disenfranchised the cathedral of Santa Maria de Alficín, which had served as cathedral for Toledo’s Mozarabic Christians for over three centuries—surviving several Muslim hegemonies—and had very probably functioned as Toledo’s cathedral continuously since Visigothic times.36 Thus the new ecclesiastical hierarchy of Toledo relinquished a quite neat symbol of the survival and continuity of the church beneath Muslim rule, for one of erasure and resurrection. The creation of this new cathedral was, in fact, the coup de grace in the toppling of the city’s existing Mozarabic ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the triumph of the Roman church over the city’s substantial and erudite indigenous Christian community, and its traditional Hispanic liturgy, now replaced in the cathedral and most of the realm by the Roman rite.37 We might well see Alfonso’s decision to shift his position regarding the mosque as a strategic one: there was, following the advent of the Almoravids, little to be gained in continuing his vision of Toledo as a capital where he would rule a plural city as Taifa rulers had. Instead, he might regroup, and bargain this powerful marker of divine conquest, sealing the introduction of the Roman liturgy within his new lands, and greatly enriching its Roman institutions. In 1099 Santa Maria de Alficín—the church that had served as the Mozarabs’ cathedral, and was believed by them (and likely also by both Bernard and Alfonso) to be the cathedral in which legendary Visigothic kings had been anointed—was donated to the monastery of San Servando, which had itself been given to the papacy in 1088.38 The history of the Mozarabic cathedral was now officially contained and obscured, and the fiction of a mosque building restored to a cathedral by the new Archbishop of Toledo, complete. The consecration of the new cathedral of St. Mary was recognised by Alfonso VI with an opulent privilege including a grand endowment, part of which was drawn from the Mosque’s waqf.39 To lend material substance to the 36 F. J. Hernández, “La catedral, instrument d’assimilation,” in Tolède, XIIème–XIIIème: Musulmanes, chrétiens et juives: le savoir et le tolérance, ed. L. Cardaillac (Paris, 1991), pp. 75–91; Linehan, History and the Historians, pp. 218–224. 37 Hernández, “La catedral, instrument d’assimilation,” p. 82; Gonzálvez, “The Persistance of the Mozarabic Liturgy,” pp. 175–179 points out that, likely in the interests of stabilizing an unhappy Mozarabic clergy, a limited “continuing liturgical practice of the Mozarabic community” was purposefully overlooked in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. 38 Hernández, “La catedral, instrument d’assimilation,” pp. 82–91. 39 J. F. Ribera, ed., Privilegios reales y viejos documentos de Toledo (Madrid, 1963), vol. 1, p. 18. Refers to December 1086. This act was followed a year later with a grant to the cathedral of all of the congregationals mosques in the kingdom along with their waqfs, buildings

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erasure, and also to sacralize this act, Alfonso and his chancery crafted the inference that the mosque he had appropriated had been originally constructed on the site of Toledo’s ancient Visigothic cathedral. Here was a fiction that must have been bitter for the city’s Mozarabic church, their long experience dismissed in the interest of a myth of triumphant Christian restoration that paralleled Alfonso’s hoped for political regeneration of Visigothic hegemony.40 This required that Alfonso’s personal experience of Toledo be reconceived in more polarised terms. “The city,” he says, “… was possessed for three hundred sixty six years by the Moors, a society that blasphemed the name of Christ … Considering it a disgrace that … in the places where our sainted fathers worshipped God with intense faith, the name of the cursed Muhammed was invoked, I engaged in war against this barbarous people …”41 Hernandez reveals how the king suggests a long held desire to restore the celebrated church of St. Mary, appropriating the history of the Mozarabic cathedral of Santa Maria to insinuate a fictive pedigree for the site of the converted mosque.42 He then tells how he chose Bernard to consecrate the mosque to the Virgin and calls the mosque “a building wrenched from the devil (domus erepta diabolo).”43 The change of policy is so striking that it has contributed to suspicions that the original document was tampered with, or that it reflects Bernard’s position rather than that of Alfonso.44 Alfonso had, thus, lithely pivoted—or been made to pivot—to the second of his wrestling identities, from aspiring “emperor of the adherents of the two faiths,” to champion of Christian restoration. The seizing the Great Mosque of Toledo had now become the restitution of a mythic Visigothic cathedral. Alfonso—like the city’s Mozarabs—knew well, from his personal experience of Toledo, that the mosque had not been founded on the ruins of a destroyed cathedral, but this fiction was ideologically convenient and quite palatable for the Castilians and Franks who now flooded the city. Indeed, the material presence of a cathedral arrayed as a mosque; or rather of the mosque bereft of its qibla; worship in its hypostyle hall now wrenched towards the east that, since they were the central places of worship in small towns, were by now parish churches. Susana Calvo Capilla, “La mezquita de Bab al-Mardum,” p. 309. 40 Hernández, “La catedral, instrument d’assimilation,” p. 81. Francisco Hernández charts this developing identity of the cathedral for Alfonso in a reading of Alfonso’s declaration of 18 December 1086. 41 Ribera, ed., Privilegios, vol. 1, 18 December 1086. 42 Hernández, “La catedral, instrument d’assimilation,” p. 81 and footnote 8; Ribera, ed., Privilegios, vol. 1, 18 December 1086. 43 Ibid. 44 Richard Fletcher, “Reconquest and Crusade in Spain c. 1050–1150,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 37 (1987): 31–47, 38–39.

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with a growing line of chapels carved from its qibla wall, was a seductively configured, agonistic image, a powerful stage set for the performance of Alfonso’s and Bernard’s ecclesiastical victory. Its new altars were endowed with relics by the Pope and Alfonso himself, part of a movement that Henreit sees as the “recentering of Christian space in important cities.”45 But in articulating these political realities we sometimes miss them also, or even first as manifestations of deep devotion conceived agonistically, “of love or religion in contrast to reconquest as an investment opportunity” in Linehan’s words.46 There is little as moving in this regard as the powerful personal memory of Jaime I of Aragon who, just after the submission of Murcia in the thirteenth century, recalled mounting an altar to the Virgin erected in the principle mosque: “Embracing the altar,” the formidable Conqueror wrote in his Book of Deeds, “we wept so strongly and so heartily, that for the time it takes to go a mile, we could not stop crying, nor leave the altar.”47 Perhaps for this very reason, the body of the mosque thus preserved and used also became powerfully polysemous. Its hypostyle forest of columns— perhaps with banded arches and interlacing forms as at the mosque of ibn Hadidi and its model, the Great Mosque of Córdoba—would become a principal site of worship for Toledo’s Christian community for over 130 years (Figs. 8.1–8.3). Prominent families buried their dead in its sahn; the altars that masked its qibla now housed relics that were indexical to holy bodies, fervently revered material sites of intersection with the divine.48 Through them, the mosque building became the physical locus of divine agency in Toledo, the visual environment for a phenomenological transformation of community experience—of confessional materiality and Christian visual identity within 45

Patrick Henriet, “L’espace et le temps hispaniques vus et construits par les clercs (IXe–XIIIe siècle),” in Annexes des Cahiers de linguistique et de civilisation hispaniques médiévales 15 (2003): 81–127, 120–121. On the early transformations of the cathedral see: Nickson, Toledo Cathedral, 37–8; Francisco Hernández, “La hora de Don Rodrigo,” Cahiers de Linguistique et de Civilisation Hispaniques Médiévales 26 (2003): 16–71, 68–69. My thanks to Tom Nickson for guidance here. 46 Peter Linehan, Spain, 1157–1300. A Partible Inheritance (Oxford, 2011), p. 156. 47 “E nós, abraçats ab l’altar, ploram tan fort e tan de cor, que per anadura d’una gran milla no ens poguem partir d’aquell plorar ni de l’altar.” Jordi Bruguera, M. Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, eds., Les quatre grans Cròniques. I. Llibre dels feits del rei En Jaume (Barcelona, 2007), ch. 451, p. 320. Cited in Linehan, A Partible Inheritance, p. 156. 48 Hernández, “La cathedral,” p. 86; Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Animation and Agency of Holy Food: Bread and Wine as Material Divine in the Middle Ages,” in The Materiality of Divine Agency, ed. Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik (Berlin, 2015), p. 71. See also: Henriet, “L’espace et le temps hispaniques,” pp. 118–122.

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the city—that flowed above and around the simple imposition of a narrative of Christian victory.49 With time, it would become increasingly difficult for religious alterity to be defined architecturally in Toledo. It is possible that this gradual, century-long process of the sacralization of a mosque building in Toledo laid a collective subconscious groundwork for later more overt Christian conceptions of style and form. I am thinking here of the extraordinary eruption of “Neo-Caliphal” styles brought to light by Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza who saw, after the conquest of Córdoba and conversion of its mosque in 1236, that the Great Mosque of Córdoba became something more than a triumphalist symbol: it became a powerful model for “the representation of the highest level of sanctity” throughout Castile in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.50 We can hear the license with which writers like Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada praise the mosque as reflecting the ease with which its form is dislodged from Islam as a referent even before it has been purified and shuffled into the Castilian fold. He recounts how Bishop Juan de Osma and other clerics “entered the mosque of Córdoba, that surpassed in size and luxury all of the mosques of the Arabs.”51 Only subsequently is the “filth of Muhammed erased and the water of purification scattered,” converting the mosque into a church.52 No such appreciation of the Great Mosque of Toledo exists during its long Christian apprenticeship, apart from a complaint that it was becoming dilapidated.53 Its absorption into the Toledan subconscious was silent and incremental.

49

Developing colonial practices multiplied this effect. Consider Heather Ecker’s compelling studies of the administrative protocol for occupied cities, in which organization centred on parishes in selected converted neighbouring mosques, working from an existing urban structure (a process that developed, and proceeded slowly in Toledo). Heather Ecker, “How to Administer a Conquered City in Al-Andalus,” in Under the Influence, p. 47, and From Masjid to Casa-Mezquita, pp. 18–53. In this and subsequent publications, Ecker develops the use of Arabic speaking minorities—Mozarabs and Jews—as part of the colonial process and explores the impact of surveying and adopting “pre-existing spatial constructs,” p. 47. My thanks to Heather Ecker for access to this work. 50 “Representación de la máxima sacralidad.” See: Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza, “Toledo entre Europa y al‐Andalus en el siglo XIII. Revolución, tradición y asimilación de las formas artísticas en la Corona de Castilla,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 233–271, 242–243. 51 Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 9.17 (1–17). 52 Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 6.24 (26–56). 53 Cited by Juan Carlos Ruiz, “Toledo entre Europa y al‐Andalus,” p. 246.

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Rodrigo’s Narrative

If we return to Rodrigo’s story of Toledo, also written in the heady moments following the conquest of Córdoba, we find that the dismembered history of the Mozarabic cathedral of Santa Maria de Alficín is now entirely erased. Instead, we read the residue of Alfonso VI’s hastily assembled narrative of over a century earlier, but with significant additions. This is how Rodrigo would explain the events surrounding the eleventh-century appropriation of the mosque for Christian worship, in a chapter of his De rebus entitled: “How the mosque of the Muslims was converted into a Christian church”:54 Taking advantage of a trip made by the King to the area around León, (Archbishop Bernard) entered the main mosque of Toledo at night, at the insistence of Queen Constance, bringing with him some Christian knights; and after erasing the vestiges of Mohammedan filth, he raised an altar to the Christian cult and installed bells in the main tower to call the faithful.55 Rodrigo sees Bernard, under cover of night, performing the two parts of a ritual of restitution: purification (“erasing the vestiges of Muhammaden filth”) followed by the consecration of the altar, and the installation of bells, a ritual taken from the Liber Pontificale of the reformed papacy.56 Harris has shown that the term used in Rodrigo’s descriptions of the purification of mosques: “spurcicia,” was widely used, and appears in the Vulgate in reference to the contamination of dead bodies. Modified by “Mahometi” it is often translated as “filth of Muhammed.”57 The ceremony was the means by which a space was purified of all contamination with another faith. This would have had particular poignancy in a city that was now demographically diverse, one in which 54 Chapter 24: “Quod Mezquita Maurorum facta est Ecclesia Christianorum,” Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 6.24 (1). 55 Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 6.24 (26–32). 56 Harris, “Mosque to Church Conversions,” pp. 158–172. Harris speaks of its Old Testament metaphors as opening the way to the acceptance of the appropriated building. The ceremony deriving from the Pontificals of Gregory VII and Urban II also appears in the Partidas. 57 Harris, “Mosque to Church Conversion,” p. 162; points out that this terminology is common to Crusader chronicles and other polemic texts of the 12th century; Penny Cole, “Oh God the Heathen Have Come into your Inheritance (Ps. 78.1): The Theme of Religious Pollution in Crusade Documents, 1095–1188,” in Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria, ed. Maya Shatzmiller (Leiden, 1993), pp. 84–111, 102.

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such a sense of religious exclusivity was not possible to achieve outside of one’s place of worship. What follows in Rodrigo’s account is how he sees this fitting into his preferred historical narrative: When this was heard by the king, he was profoundly irritated and incited by the pain, since he had made a pact with the Saracens concerning the mosque, (so that he) arrived in Toledo from Sahagun in three days, determined to have the elect Bernard and Queen Constance burned. When the Arabs of Toledo heard of the king’s angry outburst, it is said that they came out to the meeting place of these people in all states with their wives and little children to a village that today is called Magan. When the king arrived before this multitude, believing that they came to protest, he said to them: ‘This was not an affront to you, but to me since my word had until this day never been broken; but from now on, I can no longer take pride in this; it is of great importance to me, not only to make amends to you but also to severely punish the guilty.’ The Arabs, on their part, because they were prudent, begged him with cries, on their knees and with pleas that he would listen to them. The king, slowing his horse, lingered a moment and the Arabs began to speak in this manner: ‘We understand perfectly well that the archbishop is the visible head of your law, and if we were the cause of his death, the Christians would kill us in only one day, carried away by their passion for their faith, and if the Queen died on our account, we would be forever hated by her descendants, and they would avenge themselves on us as soon as you died. For these reasons, we ask that you not punish them, we for our part free you from the obligation of your oath.’ When he heard these words, the anger of the king was exchanged for joy, for he could have the mosque without breaking his word, and entering into the city, he put all things to order without recourse to violence.58 Ibn Bassam, recounting the seizure of the mosque in far closer chronological proximity to the action than Rodrigo, was apparently not made privy to the extraordinary magnanimity of Toledo’s submitted Muslims, nor to the treachery of Archbishop Bernard and Constance. Rodrigo found it far more convenient to sacrifice a French wife and cleric to history—especially considering that at least the cleric’s zeal for conversion could be forgiven.59 But why, in 58 Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 9.23 (1–56). 59 Linehan, History and the Historians, pp. 220–224.

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Rodrigo’s eyes, did Alfonso require such exalted scapegoats; why did he need an excuse at all for converting a mosque to a church? The heart of the matter was that Alfonso “had made a pact with the Saracens concerning the mosque” and his “word had until this day never been broken …” Alfonso’s obligation to punish the wrong doers, “to make amends” to Toledo’s Muslims lies in his need, in Rodrigo’s eyes, to be a trustworthy negotiator with submitted populations: a reliable colonial ruler. Encased in this mythologised past for Toledo is Rodrigo’s vision of a multi-confessional society submitted to a Christian king.60 In execution it faced complications that I do not believe Alfonso VI had completely thought through in 1085, but with which Rodrigo was increasingly familiar: should a mosque in a submitted city be a material manifestation of the rule of an “emperor of the two faiths” or the marker at the city’s heart of sacred conquest? Rodrigo understood Alfonso’s dilemma, and probably his presumed act of betrayal, but he was not prepared to countenance ambivalent images of Alfonso as colonial ruler in his narrative of eleventh-century Toledo, as his beloved city began its new chapter of Christian history.61 To resolve this dilemma, he instrumentalised Toledo’s Muslims to act as model subalterns, bridging the gap between religious plurality and utopian religious agendas.62 And in writing about Toledo’s past, he offered an alternative model for the rapid conquest of Andalucia, which was taking place as he wrote.63 Rodrigo’s long tenure as Archbishop of Toledo saw a transformation in the status of the Christian Kingdoms of Spain, changes in which he was an ardent participant.64 These culminated in 1228, when a crisis in Almohad succession 60 Pick, Conflict and Coexistence, pp. 71–126; “What Did Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada Know about Islam?” p. 235. 61 “It was unthinkable,” Linehan suggested, “that the rite of passage should be delayed by doubts raised by Arabic historians at the very approach to the Visagra Gate.” Linehan, History and the Historians, p. 223. 62 For the scholarly dialogue concerning the veracity of Rodrigo’s account, see: Linehan, History and the Historians, p. 216; B. F. Reilly, The Kingdom of Léon-Castilla, pp. 181–182; Hernández, “La catedral, instrument d’assimilation,” pp. 75–91. 63 This part of the De rebus was likely written between 1236–1238 and 1242–1243. Juan Fernández Valverde, “Introduction,” in Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Historia de los Hechos de España, trans. and ed. Juan Fernández Valverde (Madrid, 1989), pp. 49–50; Linehan, History and the Historians, pp. 350–351. 64 Only three years after his election in 1209 he became a driving force behind the Crusade of Las Navas de Tolosa, which he personally framed as a cosmic battle, riding into combat himself, preceded by a mounted canon bearing a monumental cross. See: Pick, Conflict and Coexistence, pp. 34–44.

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had left much of al-Andalus undefended, an opportunity seized by a young King Fernando III and an alliance of Christians kings. During the next twenty years, the greatest cities of al-Andalus would fall to these kings and their heirs, the great majority to Fernando. And at once, the problem shifted from how to conquer Islamic cities to how to rule them.65 In a literary sense, Rodrigo was balancing the same irreconcilable burdens as his protagonist, Alfonso VI. The expulsion of Muslims from conquered cities made the holding of territories and cities and the essential exploitation of lands difficult; and resettlement by Christians was not as successful, or as rapid as was desired (or advertised).66 Christian kings resorted to diverse political and economic entanglements with local Muslim populations and rulers to secure these vast new territories, balancing the division of properties, the difficulties of repopulation and the consequent need to retain a local Muslim population in attempts to assure the continuity of agriculture and local economy. Rodrigo wrote a history for Alfonso VI that echoed his contemporaries’ dilemma. On one hand, Christian colonials conquered in the name of a church that offered no possible ideological structure for the construction of a multi confessional society. On the other hand, there was an urgent practical need to build alliances and to keep pacts with Muslims who could make the holding of territories and cities and the exploitation of lands possible, a dilemma Rodrigo meant the reader to link in his account of Alfonso and Toledo (“When he heard these words, the anger of the king was exchanged for joy, for he could have the mosque without breaking his word”).67 To thread a discourse about the conversion of mosques into his history was to try to reconcile the messy complexities of colonial settlement at its very heart—within sacred spaces—while still insisting on the firm foundation of the church’s ultimate cosmic authority. His account concretizes this anxiety within a safe discursive space, exploring the difficulties of reconciling contingent ideas concerning the place of submitted Muslims in a Christian cosmos through a past his pen controlled.

65 As Pick points out, this suited Rodrigo: “Rodrigo’s goal was one Spain, united under Christian rule.” He “favored permanent conquest and settlement over defensive attacks and booty raids.” Pick, Conflict and Coexistence, p. 21. 66 “(W)ithout a workforce to secure the area and keep it economically viable,” queried Linehan, “what price all that exertion?” A Partible Inheritance, p. 70. 67 Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 9.23 (55–56).

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In Puerto de Santa María

A pacified colonial state was Rodrigo’s dream, his imagining of a fragmented, postlapsarian world slowly unifying in Castile, where Christians and Mus­ lims might haltingly approach an ideal unified kingdom beneath Christian authority.68 And those wise and self-abnegating Muslims he had invented in the interests of that design would find their ways into the mythologised histories of the last king he would mentor, a generation after Rodrigo’s death. In the thirteenth-century cycle of twenty four Cantigas that constructs a miraculous account of Alfonso X’s colonization of “Santa María del Puerto” is found one of that king’s most remarkable first-person accounts, an idealised refashioning of his own colonial process from the ultimate manuscript of the Cantigas, one inflected by his desire to extend his rule to North Africa.69 Echevarria noted parallels between the first of these—Cantiga 328—and Rodrigo’s account of the cession of Toledo’s Great Mosque.70 Here, a powerful Muslim aguacil, a local official, complained that Christians were calling the town Alcanate (Al-Qanatir) by the name Puerto de Santa Maria. Like Alfonso VI, the Alfonso X of the Cantiga goes to great lengths to uphold his pact, violently punishing Christians who transgressed.71 But in the end—under the persuasive influence of the Virgin—the aguacil yields both the city and its name “to secure peace in the land.”72 Rodrigo’s impact on Alfonso’s X’s political and cultural programs was significant, so we are not surprised to hear that the motive for the aguacil’s capitulation—a plea for peace—sounds very much like that of the Toledan Muslims in Rodrigo’s account of Alfonso VI, and we can hear, in this refrain, an echo of Rodrigo’s voice. Like Alfonso VI in Rodrigo’s history, Alfonso X has a happy afterthought to his unexpected possession of Al-Qanatir in Cantiga 328: The king “was very pleased about it, for he realised that Cádiz would be more quickly colonised.”73 68 Pick, Conflict and Coexistence, pp. 71–126; “What Did Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada Know about Islam?” p. 235. 69 Joseph Snow, “A Chapter in Alfonso X’s Personal Narrative: The Puerto de Santa Maria Poems in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” La Corónica 8 (1979): 10–21. See in particular Connie L. Scarborough, A Holy Alliance: Alfonso X’s Political Use of Marian Poetry (Newark, 2009), pp. 55–80. 70 Echevarría, “La transformación del espacio islámico,” pp. 53–77. 71 Alfonso’s troops were bilited in Alcanate, possibly in violation of his agreement regarding the autonomy of the citizens of Jerez. Manuel González Jiménez, En torno a los origins de Andalucía. La repoblacíon del siglo XIII (Seville, 1980), pp. 21–22. 72 Translation Kathleen Kulp Hill, Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise. A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa María (Tempe, 2000), pp. 398–399. 73 Kulp Hill, trans., Songs of Holy Mary, p. 399.

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O’Callaghan points out that the historical tension from which this account grows was likely Alfonso X’s occupation of Cádiz and Al-Qanatir—and their repopulation by him—in violation of the pact with the Muslims of Jerez.74 As this series of Cantigas also functions as a kind of final legacy for Alfonso X, the content here, which insists on his upholding his obligations, is significant. Alfonso’s colonial policy had been marred by the transgression of the treaty of Alcaraz, which in turn contributed to the uprising of the Mudejares in 1264.75 Perhaps for this reason, in the famous Cantiga 169 about the Virgin of Arrixaca, he attempts to rebuild his reputation as a just colonial ruler whose word of honour is so immutable that he is on the verge of dismantling a church dedicated to the Virgin, when a Muslim leader intervenes to save it in Mary’s name.76 The Muslims in each of its miniatures kneel in orderly submission, a picture of Alfonso’s—and Rodrigo’s—ideal colonial state, inhabited by docile and wise Muslims who yield rights and transgress their own boundaries in the name of peace. The sanctified forensic history depicted in the cycle of Santa María del Puerto is also intimately intertwined with miracles surrounding the creation of its church, which appears in three of its Cantigas.77 Mary helps a mason, Master Ali, find a cache of stone when materials are needed; she creates a flood that brings wood to the very construction site, and saves workers from the perils of a falling tower during construction.78 But the famous cycle in no place states what archaeology has taught us: that this church was built into a converted mosque. Encased in a fortress-like carapace constructed under Alfonso X, a qibla wall marked by a mihrab is masked, in which a modest ribbed dome like those of the mosque of Ibn Hadidi in Toledo still survives, while the church

74 Joseph O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa María, A Poetic Biography (Leiden, 1998), p. 105. 75 Juan Torres Fontes, Incorporacíon de Murcia a la Corona de Castilla (Murcia, 1973), pp. 36–48; H. Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned: A Biography (Boston, 2010), p. 166; Linehan, A Partible Inheritance, pp. 71–4 and 149–156. 76 Jerrilynn D. Dodds, “The Virgin as Colonial Agent in 13th Century Castile,” in Ordering Imperial Worlds: From Late Medieval Spain to the Modern Middle East, ed. Susan Slyomovics (Edinburgh, forthcoming); “Rodrigo, Alfonso y la conversión de edificios,” in Alfonso X el Sabio, ed. Isidro Bango Torviso (Murcia, 2010), pp. 740–775. 77 Kulp Hill, trans., Songs of Holy Mary, pp. 398–399; 435 and 437 (Cantigas 358, 356 and 364). Ana Echevarría notes that “Alfonso deseaba sin duda pasar a la historia como creador de un espacio religioso en la Andalucía suroccidental.” Echevarría, “La transformación del espacio islámico,” p. 75. 78 Kulp Hill, trans., Songs of Holy Mary, p. 437, 435, and 443 (Cantigas 358, 356 and 364).

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arcades reuse spolia appropriated from the mosque’s prayer hall arcades.79 The Cantigas of Puerto de Santa Maria are mute regarding the conversion, but they betray substantial slippage as regards the connection of the church to the mosque that, in reality, came before: more than one author has supposed that the falling tower “resting on loose earth” of Cantiga 364 must have been the minaret of the mosque;80 and the mason Master Ali, with the prescience common to many Muslims in the Cantigas, “realised that the Virgin had kept those stones like a treasure … although he was a Moor.”81 And the stones themselves, “found like that under the earth, good sized and neatly squared” hover like the spectre of a preexisting building willfully transmuted into a miracle, details that haunt the construction of the church of the Virgin with the ghost of the secreted mosque. Alfonso X is not interested, in this late literary fashioning his legacy, in being known for converting mosque buildings into churches; he wished to be known for making this church anew. In both literary accounts—a history by an archbishop, and poetic songs written with the intervention of a king—the device of docile subalterns makes the presence of competing colonial agendas possible, Muslims who are complicit in the erasure of their material and confessional presence in the transforming urban landscape of colonial Castile. Alfonso, who effaces the mosque from his church and from his account, was part of this material process, while Rodrigo straddled two worlds: that of appropriation, and that of erasure. 4

Between Romanesque and Gothic

If we return to the archbishop’s account of the construction of the Gothic Cathedral begun in his own lifetime, we find that he seeks both to appropriate the project as something new, and to accentuate its connection with the conversion of the mosque 140 years before.82 There is a striking ambivalence present between this desire to represent a church free of the material vestiges of 79 Calvo, Las mezquitas de al-Andalus, pp. 551–555; Leopoldo Torres Balbas, “La mezquita de al-Qanatir y el sanctuario de Alfonso el Sabio en el Puerto de Santa María,” in Obra Dispersa. Al Andalus. Crónica de la España Musulmana, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1982), pp. 149–171. 80 O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa María, p. 181. 81 Kulp Hill, trans., Songs of Holy Mary, p. 437 (Cantiga 358). 82 Linehan points out that Rodrigo claims in a letter to Pope Honorius III in 1222 that his predecessor had pulled down vestiges of the old mosque, though he is contradicted in more than one source, particularly his own subsequent account. Linehan, History and the Historians, p. 338. For a chronology of Rodrigo’s design see Nickson, Toledo Cathedral, pp. 59–75.

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figure 8.4 Toledo Cathedral, ambulatory vaults, 13th century Photo: Miguel Hermoso Cuesta, Creative Commons. Available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki /File:Catedral_de_Toledo_girola_02.JPG. Accessed May 9, 2023

Islam, and the desire to retain the powerful metaphor of conversion that a surviving mosque would evoke. Bernard’s supposed occult nocturnal purification of the appropriated mosque was echoed in Rodrigo’s laying of the first stone as a step in the physical conversion of the building into a Gothic cathedral (Fig. 8.4). Buresi sees the adoption of the Gothic style in a number of second conversions of Iberian mosque buildings as a way it was possible for clergy to militate in northern cities like Toledo that were, by now, far from the frontier.83 By the thirteenth century the Gothic style had become a signifier for the Christian possession of an urban or town center, so that James I famously attempted to 83 Buresi, “Les conversions d’églises,” pp. 348–349. This needs to be complicated, however, with the more specific documentation of Rodrigo’s personal experience in Paris. Nickson, Toledo Cathedral, pp. 43–58.

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motivate the See of Huesca in Aragon to replace its mosque building with an “honest” cathedral in a “Christian” style (modum ecclesiarum more christiano constructa).84 Gothic was indeed recognisable: a whole imported style as a sign, a monumental system in which the architectural enterprise generated and governed its own organic articulation. Though it certainly yielded to direct reference, its novelty must, at first, have dominated its reception. The painted walls of Romanesque buildings, local versions of which were still being built in Toledo in the thirteenth century, were the more customary canvas for the expression of specific meanings and local visual identities. So Gothic, more than Romanesque, must have appeared more unmediated and ideologically explicit, at first unambiguously alien to the transcultural settings in which consecrated mosques were found, environments in which, not just churches, but also homes and palaces were palimpsests of urban memory within the webs of their architectural and decorative forms.85 Toledo in the thirteenth century teemed with churches and domestic buildings constructed in brick based local styles that marked forms originally developed under Umayyad rule, but that were now transcultural expressions of post conquest Toledo. These included not only the mosque of Ibn al-Hadidi, but the apse added to it to create the church of Santa Cruz, the apse of the church of San Román, bell towers that took the form of minarets, and domestic buildings (Figs. 8.2, 8.3, 8.5–8.7), to name only a few examples.86 The mosque turned cathedral reflected back, with time, these architectural traditions within a secular urban fabric that was stylistically ambivalent, and not coded for 84 R. I. Burns, “The Parish as Frontier Institution in Thirteenth-Century Valencia,” Speculum 37 (April 1962), 244–251, at 250 and note 35; Eduardo Carrero Santamaría, “De mezquita a cathedral. La seo de Huesca y sus alrededores entre los siglos XI y XV,” in Eduardo Carrero Santamaría and Daniel Rico Camps, eds., Catedral y ciudad medieval en la Península Ibérica, (Murcia, 2005), pp. 35–75, at 38–44. 85 Dodds, “Rodrigo, Reconquest and Assimilation at San Román,” in Spanish Medieval Art. Recent Studies, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2007), pp. 213–244. 86 For instance, the houses at Plaza del Seco 5; Calle de las Bulas 21; or Calle de la Soledad, 2, houses dating from the Taifa period and from continuations of these architectural and ornamental strategies through the 14th century. Jose Manuel Rojas Rodríguez-Malo, and José Ramón Villa González, “Las Casas Islámicas Toledanas,” in Actas del Congreso Internacional: Entre el Califato y la Taifa: Mil Años del Cristo de la Luz (Toledo, 2000), pp. 197–242. See also: Arturo Ruiz Taboada, “La Perduración de Arquitecturas de Tradición Islámica,” in al-Andalus País de Ciudades. Actas del Congreso celebrado en Orpesa (Toledo) del 12 al 14 de Mayo de 2005 (Toledo, 2008), pp. 317–332; Jacobo Fernández del Cerro, “Abandono, Reocupación y Reforma de una Casa Hispanomusulmana entre los Siglos XI y XIV. Los Graffiti de Calle Locum, 15 Toledo,” in La Ciudad Medieval de Toledo: Historia, Arqueología y Rehabilitación de la Casa, eds. Jean Passini and Ricardo Izquierdo Benito (Madrid, 2007), pp. 113–138.

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confession. Toledo’s mosque had become part of that local visual discourse, and its conversion to cathedral had served to bring Toledan Christians into intimate and proprietary contact with its language of expression, making it one not only sacralised, but with which Toledans must increasingly have identified over time. This palimpsest of shifting meanings thus informed the collective experience, not only of Mozarabs, but of Franks and Castilians, for whom the use of the mosque and the city fabric conceived dynamic and unstable visual identities, so that what had begun as conversion had slipped into something like translation: appropriation and incorporation into a body of, in this case, visual experience. The rise of Gothic might be seen at first as witness to anxiety regarding this widespread visual ambivalence, the impossibility of a visual, material definition of alterity in the urban landscape until the conquest of Córdoba opened up a discursive space for the incorporation of Islamicate forms in a triumphalist way, as Juan Carlos Ruiz has shown.87 And so the search for a visual language that could offer clear polarities found its banner in the Gothic style, which, for its divergence, created a visual language of transformation. Still, the attempt to draw a sharp line that would define alterity in Toledo Cathedral is subtly subverted by echoes of a dynamic, augmenting cosmopolitanism in its own language of forms as both Ruiz Souza and Nickson have revealed.88 But the ambivalent identities still had their uses, and the sprouting of an enormous Gothic cathedral in the city’s center did not constitute the erasure of the city’s more ambivalent secular and ecclesiastical styles, even for its clerical establishment. If the meaning of the adoption of a foreign style like Gothic was conscious, there was also clearly an intentional assessment of the meanings that might be advantageously attached to a brick based Romanesque church with Arabic inscriptions and banded horseshoe arches like San Román in Toledo (Figs. 8.6–8.7).89 Gothic addressed the wider world and enhanced Toledo’s prestige, while a church like San Román addressed local interests. 87 88

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Ruiz Souza, “Toledo entre Europa y al-Andalus.” In Toledo, interlacing arches in the triforium of the choir break Gothic’s logical web to remind us of Cordoba. Juan Carlos Ruiz, “Toledo entre europa y al-Andalus,” p. 243 and Fig. 9.5. Nickson relates these Cordoban references in particular to the presence of the Holy Cross Chapel, crusade ideology and the relics received from Louis IX in 1248 (340), and develops an argument for the transmission of a cosmopolitan, transcultural vocabulary in Toledo’s Gothic cathedral. Tom Nickson, “Copying Cordoba: Toledo and Beyond,” The Medieval History Journal 15, no. 2 (2012): 317–351. For San Román see: Concepción Abad Castro, La iglesia de San Román de Toledo (Madrid, 2004); J. Dodds, “Rodrigo, Reconquest and Assimilation at San Román,” pp. 213–244; J. Dodds, Maria Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Balbale, Abigail The Arts of Intimacy. Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (New Haven, 2008), pp. 163–189.

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figure 8.5 Toledo, doorway of Plazuela del Seco, No. 7 Photo: Author

Here, the wall paintings of a church Rodrigo consecrated only five years before the laying of the first stone for the Gothic cathedral pointedly includes Spanish fathers identified with the Mozarabic church, though it was not itself one of the “Mozarabic” parishes. Its monumental portrait of Leander—according to Rodrigo, an author of the suppressed indigenous Hispanic liturgy—is particularly arresting, as the saint stands in equal company with the contemporary reformer, Bernard of Clairvaux, who had been canonised in 1174.90 The 90 Dodds, “Rodrigo, Reconquest and Assimilation at San Román,” pp. 235–236. Rodrigo calls the Hispanic liturgy “the office of the mass instituted by Leander and Isidore,” in - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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figure 8.6 Toledo, San Román, interior Photo: Author

figure 8.7 Toledo, San Román, choir window Photo: Author

Marian hymns of its Latin inscriptions intensify San Román’s connection to the Mozarabic church, and yet they express, at the same time, a triumphalist discourse performed in the church’s dynamic apocalyptic paintings.91 The

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Historia de rebus Hispanie, 6.24 (1–5). Despite this peace offering, there is no indication that the Hispanic liturgy was performed at San Román (Dodds, “Rodrigo, Reconquest and Assimilation at San Román,” p. 220). For the Latin inscriptions and their interpretation see: Miguel Gómez, “The Crusades and Church Art in the Era of Las Navas de Tolosa,” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 20 (2011): 237–260, who discusses them with regard to their Marian and triumphalist meanings. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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church of San Román addresses in part a still restive Mozarabic clergy, and so, in contrast to the new Gothic cathedral, spoke to the incorporation of local demographies and politics, its artistic language of expression bearing material witness to internal obstacles to the external expression of a unified cultural ideal.92 Pointedly, these complications were posed, not by Muslims, but by Christians; in particular indigenous Mozarabs, and Mozarabic immigrants for whom this indigenous visual lexicon was endemic. Rodrigo was both skilled at—and invested in—bridging these multiple agendas. 5

Between Rodrigo and Ibn Hud

Indeed, even the story Rodrigo tells of laying the first stone of the Gothic cathedral in De rebus is mitigated in its implicit polarities by the account that immediately follows it. Rodrigo introduces “a certain Abenhut … in the lands of Murcia” who “began to confront the Almohads, who oppressed the Arabs of the peninsula with such a severe yoke that they supported Abenhut without difficulty.”93 Abenhut is the celebrated Murcian leader Ibn Hud (1228–1238), who successfully rebelled against the Almohads in 1228, setting himself up as a liberator of Spanish Muslims. He took the approach of claiming to represent the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad as a means of bolstering his legitimacy, justifying the killing of Almohads as heretics. The first years of his campaign were extremely successful, but when Fernando III took Córdoba, Ibn Hud was forced to pay tribute and reluctantly became a vassal of the Kingdom of Castile and León. The loss of Córdoba harmed his reputation, and by 1238 he had been assassinated. By the time this part of De rebus had been written, his family member Mutawakil ibn Hud al-Dawla had surrendered the city of Murcia to Castile, making him a Castilian client in an arrangement sealed by the Treaty of Alcaraz. Thus only a few years after Ibn Hud’s death, Rodrigo carefully laid the literary foundation for remembering him as a man who “cuts off the heads of all the Almohads” he can find, framing Ibn Hud’s character as the unassailable He identifies the hymns as: Speciosa Facta Est, Alma Mater Redemptoris, Ave Maris Stella, Ave Virgo Sanctissima, and Santa Maria Virgo Piissima as well as excerpts from the Song of Songs (247–252). The connection of the paintings to the Crusades of Las Navas de Tolosa, proposed by Dodds “Rodrigo, Reconquest and Assimilation at San Román,” pp. 237–260 was subsequently discussed by Gómez in light of their connection to the Latin inscriptions. 92 Hernández, “La catedral, instrument d’assimilation,” pp. 89–90; Dodds, “Rodrigo, Reconquest and Assimilation at San Román,” pp. 215–224. 93 Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 9. 13 (10–20).

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enemy of his enemy; a useful Muslim ally in a plural colonial state. Ibn Hud appears here as part of a fragmented Islamic world, the bipolar opposition between Christians and Muslims splintered by interactions of groups within groups, making Rodrigo’s vision of a plural Castile more palatable. One of Rodrigo’s sources for Ibn Hud was the Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile (c. 1236), though in this case he employed meticulous triage to construct his more austere narrative in De rebus, excising accounts of Ibn Hud’s cruelty and some of the more contentious interactions with the Castilians.94 Instead, Toledo’s archbishop dedicates an interesting amount of time to describing a single act of Ibn Hud in the Murcia he had seized from the Almohads: “… considering that all of the mosques were infected by the presence of the Almohads, he had his priests purify them, sprinkling water, and painted over their coats of arms … ”95 For Rodrigo and his readers, this was a very familiar scene of purification and conversion. Ibn Hud is seen here as performing a Muslim ablution ceremony, identified as tahhara, in its essence very similar to the purification rites celebrated in Christian “restitutions” of churches.96 Ibn Hud’s claim that the Almohads were heretics, a concept that translated into Rodrigo’s world quite well, gave the archbishop license to develop an analogy with Christian practice that would not have been possible had Ibn Hud purified a church for conversion to a mosque. So, though the Almohads, for whom issues of contamination were particularly critical, practiced purification of the churches of cities they had conquered—including the painting over of ornament, which Rodrigo includes in his account of Ibn Hud’s ritual—he does not make reference to them.97 The spectre of Almohad caliph Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb al-Manṣūr ordering that a mosque which had been converted into a church by Christians at Calatrava, be “purified” before prayer after his victory at Alarcos, was not one the archbishop was eager to resurrect.98 Instead, he builds a parallel that he hopes the reader will bridge. Unlike his sparse appropriations from the Latin Chronicle’s narrative of Ibn Hud’s career, Rodrigo adopted, and then embroidered upon, its account of Ibn Hud’s ceremony of purification. The Latin Chronicle remarks simply that “For this reason he (Ibn Hud) said that the mosques must be purified of Almohad superstition as 94 95 96 97

Crónica Latina de los Reyes de Castilla, ed. and trans. Luis Charlo Brea (Madrid, 1999), p. 84. Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 9.13 (10–20). Calvo, “De mezquita a iglesia,” p. 133. M. Fierro, “Las Practicas Religiosas,” in El Retroceso Territorial de al-Andalus: Almoravides Y Almohades, Siglos XI al XIII, ed. Carlos Seco Serrano (Madrid, 1997), pp. 437–549, 515. 98 Buresi, “Les conversions d’églises,” p. 342; M. Fierro, “Las Practicas Religiosas,” p. 515.

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if they were polluted.”99 Rodrigo’s addition, in the De rebus, of “he had his priests purify them, sprinkling water” was meant to echo a trope—seeded throughout his accounts of Castilian colonial triumphs—of Christian ceremonies of purification and consecration of former mosques. In his account in De rebus of over a century and a half earlier, Rodrigo has Bernard of Sédirac perform the furtive nocturnal rite of purification (“erasing the vestiges of Muhammedan filth”) in Toledo,100 and in his triumphant account of the almost contemporary conversion of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, he declares “Once the filth of Muhammad had been removed, and it was sprinkled with Holy Water of purification, (Bishop Juan de Osma) converted it into a church …”101 Rodrigo surely also used this scene to draw his own—architectural—conversion of Toledo’s mosque building into the fold of those purifications, as if the new style constituted a kind of purgation of the old cathedral’s plural material history, the conscious memory of which his narrative had resurrected with perhaps too uncomfortable a lucidity. Speaking of an earlier time, Lucy Pick showed that “(h)istories did not so much provide answers, as they … outlined patterns of thought and behavior, and suggested avenues of comparison between past, present and future …”102 Connecting these passages regarding Toledo, Córdoba and Murcia, Rodrigo made a place for this mythologised Ibn Hud—a Muslim who was a Castilian ally—in his utopian vision of a Christian ruled world. Though purification is the first and most essential component of a conversion ritual, suggesting the possibility of separate identities, a converted mosque also bears continuous material witness to its impossibility in a plural polity. This is perhaps the struggle Rodrigo attempts to reconcile in his accounts of the conversion of the Great Mosque of Toledo, both in the reign of Alfonso VI and in his own time. But his trope of purification linking Alfonso VI and Ibn Hud offers only a fragile thread of commonality, for its subject—purification, and its mirror image, contamination—also reveals the anxiety of that frontier breached, the tenuousness of such a web of order drawn over the unstable and chaotic colonization of al Andalus.

99 Crónica Latina, p. 84. 100 Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 6.24 (29–31). 101 Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 9.17 (8–12). 102 Lucy Pick, “Islam Concealed and Revealed: The Chronicle of 754 and Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary of the Apocalypse,” in Beyond the Reconquista. New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085) in Honour of Simon Barton, eds. Simon Barton† and Robert Portass (Leiden, 2020), pp. 257–282, 259.

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Rodrigo felt keenly the competing agendas of the colonial world he sought to unite, agendas echoed in the impossible contradictions faced by Alfonso VI and Alfonso X. Architecture functions here as a locus of these unresolved agendas: Toledo’s Great Mosque turned transcultural cathedral; the church of San Román, with its collective identity both triumphant and plural; and the city’s Gothic Cathedral, a building that functioned simultaneously as a sign of a fictive pure identity, and also as the vestigial marker of anxiety about shared languages of expression. Purification is a concept that stridently defends boundaries, against contamination, against miscegenation, but in his literary gambol from Toledo’s Gothic cathedral headlong to Ibn Hud’s Murcia, Rodrigo entangles the reader in the Gordion knot of Christian colonialism, the fissure between its rhetoric and reality, the endless recognition that what separates us also binds us. It addresses anxiety both about physical and spiritual entanglement within a complicit transcultural world, and also about the impossibility of its erasure. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo for her patient and enlightened editing of this article through all phases of publication. And I am indebted to Lucy Pick for reading the text, and, as ever, for her wisdom. Simon Barton and his work were so deeply inspirational, especially as one embarked on studies that explored permeable frontiers between Christians and Muslims in Medieval Iberia. His chapter “Traitors to the Faith? Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, c.1100–1300,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict and Coexistence. Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 23–45 was enormously influential to my thinking in this work. He will be so profoundly missed. Bibliography Abad Castro, Concepción. La iglesia de San Román de Toledo. Madrid, 2004. Aillet, Cyrille. “La construction des frontiers interconfessionnelles: le cas des chrétiens d’al-andalus dans les sources juridiques (iie/viiie–vie/xiie siècle).” In The Legal Status of Dimmi-s in the Islamic West, eds. Maribel Fierro and John Tolan. Madrid, 2013, pp. 167–198.

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González Jiménez, Manuel. En torno a los origins de Andalucía. La repoblacíon del siglo XIII. Seville, 1980. Gonzálvez, Ramón. “The Persistence of the Mozarabic Liturgy in Toledo after 1080.” In Santiago, Saint-Denis and Saint Peter. The Reception of the Roman Liturgy in LeónCastile in 1080, ed. Bernard F. Reilly. New York, 1985, pp. 157–185. Graf, Gerhard et al. Portugal Roman. Ste. Marie de la Pierre qui Vire, 1986. Harris, Julie. “Mosque to Church Conversion in the Spanish Reconquest.” Medieval Encounters 3, no. 2 (1997): 158–172. Henriet, Patrick. “L’espace et le temps hispaniques vus et construits par les clercs (IXe–XIIIe siècle).” Annexes des Cahiers de linguistique et de civilisation hispaniques médiévales 15 (2003): 81–127. Hernández, Francisco. “La catédral, instrument d’assimilation.” In Tolède, XIIème–XIIIème: Musulmanes, chrétiens et juives: le savoir et le tolérance, ed. Louis Cardaillac. Paris, 1991, pp. 75–91. Hernández, Francisco. “La hora de Don Rodrigo.” Cahiers de Linguistique et de Civilisation Hispaniques Médiévales 26 (2003): 16–71. Iogna-Prat, Dominique. Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christiandom Face Heresy, Judaism and Islam (1000–1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards. Ithaca NY, 2002. Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo. Historia de rebus Hispanie sive Historía Gótica, ed. Juan Fernández Valverde. Turnhout, 1987. Jover, Jaime and Brian Rosa. “Contexted Urban Heritage: Discourses of Meaning and Ownership of the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, Spain.” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 4, no. 1–2 (2017): 127–153. Kocaömer Yosmaoglu, Ipek. “Aghia Sophioa and a Reckoning with History.” Platform 27 July. Available at https://www.platformspace.net/home/aghia-sophia-and-a-reckon ing-with-history. Accessed November 24, 2020. Levi Provencal, Evariste. “Alfonse VI et la prise de Tolede.” Hespéris 12 (1931): 33–49. Linehan, Peter. History and the Historians of Medieval Spain. Oxford, 1993. Linehan, Peter. Spain, 1157–1300. A Partible Inheritance. Oxford, 2011. Los cartularios de Toledo, ed. Francisco Hernández. Madrid, 1985. MacKay, Angus and M’hammad Benaboud. “Alfonso VI of León and Castile al-Inbratur du l-Milatayn.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LVI (1979): 95–1021. MacKay, Angus and M’hammad Benaboud. “Yet again Alfonso VI ‘the Emperor, Lord of the (the Adherents of) the Two Faiths, the Most Excellent Ruler’: A Rejoinder to Normal Roth.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXI (1984): 171–181. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. “El conde mozárabe Sisnando Davídiz y la política de Alfonso VI con los Taifas.” Al-Andalus 12, no. 1 (1947): 27–42. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. La España del Cid. Madrid, 1956. Molénat, Jean-Pierre. Campagnes et monts de Tolède du XIIe au XVe siècle. Madrid, 1997.

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Molénat, Jean-Pierre. “Mudéjars, captifs et affranchise.” In Tolède XIIe–XIIIe. Musulmans, chrétiens et juifs: le savoir et la tolérance, ed. Louis Cardaillac. Paris, 1991, pp. 112–124. Molénat, Jean-Pierre. “Quartiers et Communautés à Tolède (XIIe–XVe Siècles).” La España Medieval 12 (1989): 163–90. Nickson, Tom. “Copying Cordoba: Toledo and Beyond.” The Medieval History Journal 15, no. 2 (2012): 317–351. Nickson, Tom. Toledo Cathedral. Building Histories in Medieval Castile. University Park PA, 2015. O’Callaghan, Joseph. Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa María: A Poetic Biography. Leiden, 1998. Orlandis, José. “Un problema eclesiástico de la Reconquista española: La conversión de mezquitas en iglesias cristianas.” In Mélanges offerts à Jean Duvilliers (Toulouse, 1979), pp. 595–604. Pick, Lucy, Conflict and Coexistence. Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain. Ann Arbor, 2004. Pick, Lucy. “Islam Concealed and Revealed: The Chronicle of 754 and Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary of the Apocalypse.” In Beyond the Reconquista. New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085) in Honour of Simon Barton, eds. Simon Barton† and Robert Portass. Leiden, 2020, pp. 257–282. Pick, Lucy. “Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and the Jews: Pragmatism and Patronage in Thirteenth-Century Toledo.” Viator 28 (1997): 203–22. Pick, Lucy. “What Did Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada Know about Islam?” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 20 (2011): 221–235. Reilly, Bernard F. The Kingdom of Léon-Castilla under King Alfonso VI 1065–1109. Princeton, 1988. Ribera, J. F., ed., Privilegios reales y viejos documentos de Toledo. Vol. 1. Madrid, 1963. Rojas Rodríguez-Malo, Jose Manuel, and José Ramón Villa González, “Las Casas Islámicas Toledanas.” In Actas del Congreso Internacional: Entre el Califato y la Taifa: Mil Años del Cristo de la Luz. Toledo, 2000, pp. 197–242. Ruiz Souza, Juan Carlos. “Toledo entre Europa y al‐Andalus en el siglo XIII. Revolución, tradición y asimilación de las formas artísticas en la Corona de Castilla.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 233–271. Ruiz Taboada, Arturo. “La Perduración de Arquitecturas de Tradición Islámica.” In al-Andalus País de Ciudades, Actas del Congreso celebrado en Orpesa (Toledo) del 12 al 14 de Mayo de 2005. Toledo, 2008, pp. 317–332. Scarborough, Connie L. A Holy Alliance: Alfonso X’s Political Use of Marian Poetry. Newark, 2009. Salvador Martínez, H. Alfonso X, the Learned: A Biography. Leiden, 2010. Snow, Joseph. “A Chapter in Alfonso X’s Personal Narrative: The Puerto de Santa Maria Poems in the Cantigas de Santa Maria.” La Corónica 8 (1979): 10–21.

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Stalls, Clay. “The Relationship between Conquest and Settlement on the Aragonese Frontier of Alfonso I.” In Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of Robert I. Burns, S.J., ed. Larry Simon. Vol. 1. Leiden, 1995, pp. 216–31. Torres Balbas, Leopoldo. “La mezquita de al-Qanatir y el sanctuario de Alfonso el Sabio en el Puerto de Santa María.” In Obra Dispersa. Al Andalus. Crónica de la España Musulmana. Vol. 2. Madrid, 1982, pp. 149–171. Torres Fontes, Juan. Incorporacíon de Murcia a la Corona de Castilla. Murcia, 1973. Von Conradsheim, Guido Conrad. “Exploration géophysique des soubassements de la cathédrale de Tolède.” Annales d’Histoies de l’Art et d’Arquéologie (Bruxelles) 2 (1980): 95–99. Walker Bynum, Caroline. “The Animation and Agency of Holy Food: Bread and Wine as Material Divine in the Middle Ages.” In The Materiality of Divine Agency, eds. Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik. Berlin, 2015, pp. 70–89.

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Chapter 9

A Christian Iberian Attack on Twelfth-Century Medina? Keys to Understanding an Unusual Story Maribel Fierro According to the Muslim sources that report the story, in 557/1162 two Christians from al-Andalus (here taken to mean the Iberian Peninsula as they are said to have been sent by their kings), attempted to steal the remains of the Prophet Muḥammad from his grave in Medina. Their plot was foiled by the Sunni ruler of the Levant, Nūr al-Dīn Maḥmūd b. Zankī (d. 565/1174), the predecessor of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, the Saladin of the Christian sources (d. 589/1193). The story is first attested in a history of Medina written in the first half of the 8th/14th century, almost two centuries after the event was supposed to have taken place. It continued to be quoted in later histories about the city of the Prophet, with one author expressing doubts as to its historicity. It was also mentioned in an 8th/14th-century Egyptian polemical tract against Christians, and later in a general historical work written in Egypt between the 9th/15th–10th/16th centuries, in which the culprit was said to have been a Shīʿī. The story is not unknown to western scholars, as we shall see: it was first quoted (to my knowledge) by Eldon Rutter (1894–ca. 1956) in his Holy Cities of Arabia, and later by scholars dealing with Mamlūk anti-Christian polemics (Moshe Perlmann, Barbara Längner), the history of the Prophet’s grave in Medina (Emel Esin, Shaun Marmon), and Fāṭimid history (Yūsuf Rāġib, Paul E. Walker). It is not mentioned in the most extensive study on the reign of Nūr al-Dīn (Nikita Eliséeff).1 While the contributions of these scholars are extremely valuable to understand specific aspects of the story, there is still room for inquiry into its genesis, and especially into its connection with al-Andalus. The questions that this paper aims to answer are: how the story came into being, how it relates to other stories dealing with attempts at stealing the Prophet’s body and Christian attacks on Muslim holy sites, and why in the earliest extant source the protagonists are Iberian Christians. It forms part of a broader interest in the shape of relations between Muslims and Christians in Medieval sources, and also in how al-Andalus and the Maghrib (North Africa, west of Egypt) and its people were represented in the central regions of Islam 1 The references are given below. © Maribel Fierro, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004683754_011 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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(the Mashriq or Islamic East). With this paper I wish to honour Simon Barton, a generous colleague and an inquisitive scholar who left us much too soon, and whose interest in the Medieval history of the Iberian Peninsula included the different ways in which Jews, Christians and Muslims viewed themselves and reacted to each other. 1

The Dream of Nūr al-Dīn Maḥmūd b. Zankī (d. 565/1174): Al-Maṭarī’s (d. 741/1340) Text

The Zengid emir al-ʿĀdil Nūr al-Dīn Maḥmūd b. Zankī (d. 565/1174) achieved notoriety for his fight against both the Christian enemies, the Crusaders and the Byzantines, and the Fāṭimids, considered heretics as Ismaʿīlī Shīʿīs. He is the man who sent Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (Saladin) to Egypt, where the latter eventually put an end to the Fāṭimid caliphate in the year 567/1171.2 Ten years earlier, in 557/1162, Nūr al-Dīn is said to have travelled to Medina.3 His journey was motivated by a vision he had in his sleep wherein the Prophet asked for his help to fend off two fair-haired men, who were also present in the dream.4 This story was first recorded by the Ḥanafī scholar of Egyptian origin Jamāl al-Dīn Abū ʿ⁠Abd Allāh Muḥammad b. Abī Jaʿfar Aḥmad b. Khalaf al-Khazrajī

2 Nikita Elisséeff, “Nūr al-Dīn Maḥmūd b. Zankī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_5988. Accessed April 29, 2020; Elisséeff, Nūr al-dīn, un grand prince musulman de Syrie au temps des Croisades 511–569 H./1118–1174, 3 vols (Damascus, 1967). On Nūr al-Dīn’s performance of jihad see Yaacov Lev, “The Jihad of Sultan Nur al-Din of Syria (1146–1174). History and Discourse,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 35 (2008): 227–284; Yehoshua Frenkel, “Muslim responses to the Frankish dominion in the Near East, 1098–1291,” in The Crusades at the Near East. Cultural Histories, ed. Conor Kostick (London-New York, 2011), pp. 27–54; Javier Albarrán, “‘He was a Muslim knight who fought for religion, not for the world’. War and religiosity in Islam: A comparative study between the Islamic east and west (12th century),” Al-Masaq: Journal of the Medieval Mediter­ ranean 27, no. 3 (2015): 191–206. 3 In Arabic, Medina is short for Madīnat al-nabī, ‘the City of the Prophet’. Originally called Yathrib, it was given the name Madīnat al-nabī since the Prophet settled there after fleeing his birthplace, Mecca, and because it was there that he acted not only as a prophet but also as a statesman. 4 Nūr al-Dīn is known to have performed the pilgrimage in the year 556/1161: according to Elisséeff, “Nūr al-Dīn Maḥmūd b. Zankī”, he restored the defences of Medina, ordering the construction of a second perimeter wall with towers to protect its inhabitants from the Bedouins’ raids. See also Nikita Élisséeff, “Les monuments de Nūr al-Dīn: inventaire, notes archéologiques et bibliographiques,” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 13 (1949–1951): 5–43, 34.

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al-Anṣārī al-Saʿdī al-ʿIbādī al-Maṭarī al-Madanī (d. 741/1340).5 Al-Maṭarī was the descendant of one of the Sunni muezzins sent by the Mamlūk Sultan Baybars (r. 658/1260–676/1277) to Medina to counter the influence of the families of Shīʿī religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ)—the so-called Sharīfī emirs—who had controlled both Medina and Mecca since the late fourth/tenth century, and who had initially pledged obedience to the Fāṭimid caliphs in Egypt.6 Al-Maṭarī, who became the chief of the muezzins in Medina, wrote a history of the city of the Prophet entitled al-Taʿrīf bimā ansat al-hijra min maʿālim dār al-hijra (‘Information on the landmarks of the Abode of Emigration—i.e. Medina—that have fallen into oblivion because of neglect’), in which he included the story of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream,7 specifically in discussing when and why the city walls were erected. The authority that al-Maṭarī cites is Shams al-Dīn Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282), a famous Shāfiʿī jurist and judge of Damascus, author of the biographical dictionary Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān (‘Obituaries of celebrities and news about the [author’s] contemporaries’) which is the only preserved work of the many he is said to have written.8 But although Ibn Khallikān’s Wafayāt does include a biography of Nūr al-Dīn, its account does not include the story of the dream. Al-Maṭarī indicates that Ibn Khallikān, or perhaps he himself (text is unclear), heard the story from the jurist ʿ⁠Alam al-Dīn Yaʿqūb b. Abī Bakr, whose father had died when the mosque of Medina caught fire.9 Yaʿqūb b. Abī Bakr had in turn heard the story of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream from 5 The Maghribi traveller Ibn Baṭṭūta (d. 770/1368 or 779/1377) met al-Maṭarī during his stay in Medina and records that he was then the chief of the muezzins. On him, see Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur + Supplementband, 2 vols + 3 vols (Leiden, 1943–1949), II, 171, SII, 220; ʿUmar R. Kaḥḥāla, Muʿjam al-muʾallifīn, 4 vols (Beirut, 1414/1993), III, 62. 6 On the control of Mecca and Medina by Shīʿī rulers see Esther Peskes, “Western Arabia and Yemen (Fifth/Eleventh Century to the Ottoman Conquest),” in The Western Islamic World, Eleventh-Eighteenth Centuries, vol. 2 of The New Cambridge History of Islam, ed. Maribel Fierro, gen. ed. M. Cook (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 285–98; Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Societies (New York, 1995), p. 138, note 159. 7 The Kitāb al-taʿrīf has been edited by Sulaymān al-Raḥīlī (al-Riyāḍ, 1426 H). The story is found on pp. 208–209 and referred to on p. 104. I first encountered it in the ms. of Kitāb al-taʿrīf, Lala Ismail Efendi, 62, preserved in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, fs. 75a–75b. Al-Raḥīlī’s edition is based on four mss. that do not include Ms. Lala Ismail Efendi, where I initially encountered the story. 8 Gerhard Wedel, “Ibn Khallikān,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, eds. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Available at https://referenceworks .brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/ibn-khallikan-COM_30945. Accessed April 29, 2020. 9 The father of Yaʿqūb b. Abī Bakr, called Abū Bakr b. Awḥad al-Farrāsh, worked at the mosque of Medina, and himself accidentally started the fire in 654/1256 (al-Maṭarī, Kitāb al-taʿrīf,

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someone who reported to have heard it recounted by prominent men from the emir’s entourage ( jamāʿa min akābir al-khidam).10 Given that Nūr al-Dīn died in 565/1174 and Yaʿqūb b. Abī Bakr’s father in 654/1256, Yaʿqūb b. Abī Bakr must have lived between the first and the second half of the 7th/13th century, that is, more than fifty years after the reported event took place. This makes it more likely that he was the source of Ibn Khallikān and not of al-Maṭarī himself. But if so, Ibn Khallikān’s original text has not been preserved independently. As mentioned above, al-Maṭarī records the story of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream in a section devoted to the construction of the walls of Medina. He quotes Ibn Khallikān to explain that the oldest wall was built during the reign of the ʿ⁠Abbasid caliph al-Ṭāʾiʿ (r. 363/974–372/983). When it fell into disrepair, it was restored by Nūr al-Dīn’s vizier Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿ⁠Alī b. Abī Manṣūr al-Iṣfahānī,11 at which point the number of inhabitants living outside the city walls began to grow. At this point, the focus of al-Maṭarī’s narrative shifts to Nūr al-Dīn himself. Nūr al-Dīn saw the Prophet three times in the same night. Each time, the Prophet told him: “Oh, Maḥmūd! Save me from these two people,” meaning two fair-haired men (ashqarayn) who faced him. Nūr al-Dīn summoned his vizier before daybreak and informed him of his dream. The vizier told him: “This is a matter related to Medina that only you can solve.” Nūr al-Dīn got ready and departed quickly with one thousand caravan camels (rāḥila) and their retinues of horses and so on. He arrived in Medina without its inhabitants having been alerted of his arrival. The vizier went with him. Nūr al-Dīn visited the Prophet’s tomb (wa-zāra)12 and then sat in the mosque without knowing what to do. The vizier asked him: “Would you recognise the two people if you saw them?” Nūr al-Dīn answered that he would. The vizier then summoned all the people of Medina and distributed among them great quantities of gold and silver. The vizier said: “Everybody in Medina is obliged to make p. 82). In that same year there was an earthquake in the vicinity of Medina that caused much destruction. 10 Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Societies, p. 132, note 93 (quoting another version) remarks that this chain of transmission is “atypically vague.” 11 This construction, according to al-Maṭarī, was begun around 540/1146. Cf. note 4. 12 The verb indicates that he performed ziyāra, that is, the pious visitation or pilgrimage to a holy place, tomb or shrine: J. W. Meri, Ende, W., Doorn-Harder, Nelly van, Touati, Houari, Sachedina, Abdulaziz, Th. Zarcone, M. Gaborieau, Nelly van Doorn-Harder, R. Seesemann and S. Reese, “Ziyāra,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Available at https://ref erenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/*-COM_1390. Accessed April 29, 2020; Harry Munt, The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 123–147. In the case of Medina, the most important sacred place was the grave of the Prophet Muḥammad.

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himself present.” Everybody did, except two men who had taken up residence in Medina (mujāwarāni)13 and who were from the people of al-Andalus.14 They lived in the area adjacent to the south-eastern (qibla)15 wall of the Prophet’s tomb (ḥujra),16 outside the Mosque, near the residence (dār) of the family of ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, known today as dār al-ʿašara (the House of the Ten). They were convened to receive the alms (ṣadaqa) [that were being distributed], but they refused saying: “We are well served (naḥnu ʿalā kifāya), we are not in need of any help.” But the vizier insisted on convening them and they were brought [before Nūr al-Dīn and the vizier]. When Nūr al-Dīn saw them, he told the vizier: “These are the ones.” They were asked about their circumstances and what had brought them to Medina, to which they answered: “To live near the Prophet (li-mujāwarat al-nabī)”. Nūr al-Dīn retorted: “You must tell the truth!” They were subjected to intense interrogation (wa-takarrara al-suʾāl),17 which revealed that they were guilty and deserved punishment. They confessed that they were Christians and that they had travelled [to Medina] to steal the body of the one who was buried in that ‘holy tomb’ (al-ḥujra al-muqaddasa) [i.e. the Prophet] with the agreement of their [Christian] kings.18 They were found to have excavated an underground tunnel that went beneath the south-eastern wall of the mosque in the direction of the ‘noble tomb’ (al-ḥujra al-sharīfa). 13

The term jiwār refers to pilgrims who settle in a holy place in order to lead a life of asceticism and religious contemplation, and to receive the baraka of that place: W. Ende, “Mud̲ jā̲ wir,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10 .1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_5307. Accessed May 1, 2020. 14 The term al-Andalus refers to the whole of the Iberian Peninsula and not only to the territory under Muslim rule: Alejandro García Sanjuán, “El significado geográfico del topónimo al-Andalus en las fuentes árabes,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 33, no. 1 (2003): 3–36. Thus, it encompasses both those regions under Muslim rule and those under Christian rule. 15 The qibla is the direction towards which Muslims pray, i.e. facing Mecca. 16 The term al-ḥujra refers to the room, or dwelling, of ʿĀʾisha, Muḥammad’s favourite wife, and daughter of his Companion and first caliph Abū Bakr. It was adjacent to the mosque of Medina. Both the Prophet and ʿĀʾisha were buried within the confines of that dwelling, and later Abū Bakr and the second caliph, ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, were buried in their vicinity. When the mosque of Medina was enlarged during the reign of the Umayyad caliph al-Walīd (r. 86/705–96/715), the Prophet’s grave was included within the new perimeter. Leor Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York, 2004), pp. 188–189, 192–196; Munt, The Holy City of Medina, pp. 107–110, 116–117. 17 There is no explicit indication in al-Maṭarī’s text that they were tortured, a specification that appears in al-Asnawī’s and al-Samhūdī’s works, to be dealt with below. 18 The term is mulūkihim (their kings in plural, not dual) instead of mulūkihimā (the kings of the two men), thus a reference not to the two men but to al-naṣārā (Christians) generally. It means that the attempt resulted from a combined effort of the Christian rulers.

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They had disposed of the soil in a well19 that was inside the house where they were staying. This is what Yaʿqūb b. Abī Bakr told me from those who told him. The two men were decapitated near the lattice screen (al-shubbāk), that is, on the eastern side of the tomb of the Prophet (ḥujrat al-nabī) outside the mosque. Afterwards, they were burnt in a fire towards the end of the day. Nūr al-Dīn left in the direction of Syria and, as he was leaving, the people who lived outside the walls of Medina cried out for help, beseeching him to build a wall that would protect their children and their livelihood. Nūr al-Dīn ordered the building of the wall that can be seen today. It was built in the year 558/1163. He had his name written on the gate of al-Baqīʿ,20 which is still standing at the time of writing this book. God knows best! One element in al-Maṭarī’s narrative that may come as a surprise is that the Christian kings would have chosen two fair-haired men for the mission. The Maghribī geographer al-Ḥimyarī (d. after 726/1325) said of the ifranj (i.e. those inhabiting the area now corresponding to Catalonia and France) that “the majority are white and blonde (shuqr), although sometimes there are those who are brown-skinned and with black hair.”21 Why, then, did they not choose swarthier conspirators, who would therefore be less conspicuous? However, in the Iberian context, it was not just Christian northerners who had fair hair. Indeed, it is said even the Cordoban Umayyads inherited fair hair through their mothers, slave-concubines who came from the northern regions of the Peninsula, as well as from Slavic countries.22 The outcome of these mixed

19 The houses of Medina are known to have had wells for the domestic supply of water: W. Montgomery Watt and Winder, R. B., “al-Madīna,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. Second Edition. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0603. Accessed May 1, 2020. 20 The area where the cemetery stood, with the graves of the Prophet’s wives, his daughters, his son Ibrāhīm, many of his descendants, and also the graves of his Companions and Successors. Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/795), the Medinese jurist considered to be the founder of the Maliki legal school that prevailed in the Maghrib and al-Andalus, was also buried in this cemetery. The graves were destroyed by the Wahhābīs in modern times: A. J. Wensinck and Bazmee Ansari, A. S., “Baḳīʿ al-G̲ h̲ arḳad,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. Second Edition. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_1101. Accessed May 1, 2020. 21 Al-Ḥimyarī, al-Rawḍ al-miʿṭār fī khabar al-aqṭār, partial edition and French translation by E. Lévi Provençal, La péninsule ibérique au Moyen-Age, d’après le Kitāb ar-rawḍ al-miʿṭār fī ḫabar al-akṭār d’Ibn ʿ⁠Abd al-Munʿim al-Ḥimyarī (Leiden, 1938), s.v. Ṭurṭūsha. 22 Gabriel Martinez-Gros, Identité andalouse (Paris: Sindbad, 1997), p. 70; D. Fairchild Ruggles, “Mothers of a Hybrid Dynasty: Race, Genealogy and Acculturation in al-Andalus,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 65–94; Simon Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, 2015).

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marriages may have given rise to the idea that Andalusīs in general—and not just ifranj from the Christian north, were fair-complexioned. Another interesting element is that there is no indication of what the Christians intended to do once they had reached the grave of the Prophet. If their aim was to steal the body, where did they intend to take it? And how? Or was their intention simply to destroy it? No clues are given regarding their ultimate aim. 2 Nūr al-Dīn’s Dream in al-Asnawī’s (d. 772/1370) Expanded Version An expanded version of this same story was subsequently recorded by the Egyptian Shāfiʿī Jamāl al-Dīn Abū Muḥammad ʿ⁠Abd al-Raḥīm b. al-Ḥasan al-Umawī al-Qurashī al-Asnawī (d. 772/1370),23 in his work al-Kalimāt almuhimma fī mubāsharāt ahl al-dhimma (‘Important words about the treatment of the People of Protection,’ i.e. Jews and Christians), written after 750/ 1349, and possibly between 755/1354 and 761/1359.24 This is one of many tracts dealing with anti-Christian polemics written in Mamlūk Egypt during the 7th/13th and 8th/14th centuries.25 Al-Asnawī attacked the Copts who worked in the Mamlūk administration, accusing them of making illicit profits from the Egyptian treasury and thus enriching their churches and monasteries, as well as amassing personal wealth. They aimed, al-Asnawī said, at taking revenge on the Muslims, who they claimed had stolen Egypt from the Christians. Al-Asnawī also suspected the Copts of co-operating with foreign non-Muslim powers against their Muslim rulers. While they bought Muslim Turkish slaves from Muslims in order to convert them to Christianity, they objected to Christians converting to Islam and also to the building of mosques. However, not content with this, he alleges that their hatred of Muslims even induced them to acts of arson aimed at destroying Muslim holy sites. 23 On al-Asnawī see Alex Mallett, “Jamāl al-Dīn al-Asnawī,” in David Thomas et al., ChristianMuslim Relations 600–1500: A Bibliographical History, 5 vols (Leiden, 2009–2013). Available at https://brill.com/display/serial/HCMR1BP. Accessed April 28, 2020. 24 It was edited by Moshe Perlmann, “Asnawī’s Tract Against Christian Officials,” in Ignace Goldziher memorial, ed. S. Löwinger, A. Scheiber and J. Somogyi (Jerusalem, 1958), vol. II, pp. 172–208. 25 On these writings from Mamlūk times, including al-Asnawī’s work, see Moshe Perlmann, “Notes on Anti-Christian Propaganda in the Mamlūk Empire,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies X (1942): 843–861; Luke Yarbrough, Friends of the Emir: NonMuslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 250–253. See also Barbara Längner, Untersuchungen zur historischen Volkskunde Ägyptens nach mamlukischen Quellen (Berlin, 1983), pp. 70–71.

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Al-Asnawī’s text in fact contains a section dealing with different episodes of Christian-sponsored anti-Muslim arson, in particular mosque burning. Al-Asnawī mostly concentrates on those that took place during his lifetime, and which caused anti-Christian rioting. He starts by mentioning that in the year 700/1301 an “ambassador from the Maghrib was an amazed witness of a Christian official’s insolence. He asked himself: ‘How can Muslims win a war if at home they have in their midst the infidels at the head of the state?’ This was the origin of the outburst”.26 Although some scholars refrained from stirring up the passions of the populace, others did the opposite, insisting on the Christians’ mischief, treachery and moral depravity. In 721/1321 there was another anti-Christian riot, when, in the wake of several fires, a group of monks were accused of having organised a plot, and were subsequently tortured. The authorities who tried to defend the Christians were also stoned. The Mamlūk sultan, unwilling to antagonize the masses, decided to leave the Christians at the mercy of their persecutors. In 740/1339, when the Christians of Damascus were accused of having set the Umayyad mosque on fire, one Christian confessed under torture, telling “of a secret meeting of several Christians of the administrations, headed by two monks who were expert incendiarists, and who came from Byzantium a little while before. A plan of campaign was drawn up. The monks set about carrying it out. They prepared seven bombs (kaʿkāt) filled with barūda, naphtha, and coaldust, etc. These they ‘planted’, and a series of fires broke out. Messages were sent, bribes distributed, communication with officials of other towns maintained.”27 In 749/1348, the year of the Black Death, there was another case of arson. Christians were caught and confessed, but eventually managed to escape, and instead a noble sharīf (descendant of the Prophet) was charged and tortured. Later incidents in 755/1354 and 759/1358 are not mentioned by al-Asnawī, nor another fact that enraged some jurists: that the Frankish merchants in Egypt enjoyed special status exempting them 26 Perlmann, “Notes on Anti-Christian Propaganda in the Mamlūk Empire,” pp. 852–853. See also Donald P. Little, “Coptic conversion to Islam under the Baḥrī Mamlūks, 692–755/ 1293–1354,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies XXXIX, no. 3 (1976): 552–569 and “Coptic converts to Islam during the Baḥrī Mamlūk Period,” in Indigenous Christian communities in Islamic lands eighth to eighteenth centuries, ed. M. Gervers and R. J. Bikhazi (Toronto, 1990), pp. 263–288; Linda S. Northrup, “Muslim-Christian Relations during the reign of the Mamluk Sultan al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn (A.D. 1278–1290),” in Indigenous Christian communities in Islamic lands, ed. Gervers and Bikhazi, pp. 253–62; Tahar Mansouri, “Les dhimmis dans les documents de chancellerie de l’époque mamelouke,” in La cohabitation religieuse dans les villes Européennes, Xe–XVe siècles. Religious cohabitation in European towns (10th–15th centuries), ed. John V. Tolan and Sphéna Boissellier (Turnhout, 2014), pp. 55–62. 27 Perlmann, “Notes on Anti-Christian Propaganda in the Mamlūk Empire,” p. 854.

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from the limitations imposed on the native Christian community.28 He likewise does not mention older episodes. For example, in ca. 634/1236, under Ayyubid rule, a college (madrasa) with a brick minaret was attached to the Cairene shrine housing al-Ḥusayn’s head,29 and a few years later, in 640/1242–3, fire (in this case rumoured to have been set by Jews) nearly consumed the building. It was saved by the emir Jamāl al-Dīn b. Yaghmūr, deputy of al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ in Cairo, who was said to have extinguished the fire with his own hands. It is in connection with these accusations of arson against Christians that al-Asnawī reports Nūr al-Dīn’s dream about the Christian plot against Muḥammad’s tomb in Medina: During the reign of al-Malik al-ʿĀdil Nūr al-Dīn al-Shahīd,30 the Christians had devised a major plot that they thought would turn out perfectly, but God insisted on “perfecting His light, though the unbelievers be averse.”31 What happened was that this sultan used to spend the night performing voluntary prayers (tahajjud) and reciting the corresponding sections of the Qurʾan (awrād). When he finished, he went to sleep. He saw the Prophet during his sleep pointing to two fair-haired people and saying: “Rescue me from these two men!” Nūr al-Dīn woke up alarmed, made the ablutions, prayed and went back to sleep. He saw the same dream before his eyes, woke up, made the ablutions, prayed and went back to sleep. He saw the same dream for a third time. He woke up and said: “I cannot go back to sleep”. He had a vizier who was a pious man called Jamāl al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī.32 He had him called in during the night, and told 28 Perlmann, “Notes on Anti-Christian Propaganda in the Mamlūk Empire,” pp. 852–856. 29 Al-Ḥusayn b. ʿ⁠Alī, the grandson of the Prophet, was killed by the Umayyads in the year 61/680. Najam I. Haider, “al-Ḥusayn b. ʿ⁠Alī b. Abī Ṭālib,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_30572. Accessed May 2, 2020. The Fāṭimids brought the remains of his severed head from Hebron to Cairo: Daniella Talmon-Heller, Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Religious Culture of the Medieval Islamic Middle East (Edinburgh, 2020). This was part of the movement of relics that characterised the Fāṭimids’ practices of self-legitimization: see below, note 69. 30 Nūr al-Dīn died of fever, which entitled him to be considered having died as a martyr (shahīd). Etan Kohlberg, “Medieval Muslim views of Martyrdom,” Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Mededelingen van de Afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, 60, no. 17 (1997): 281–307. 31 It is a reference to Qurʾan 61:8: “They desire to extinguish with their mouths, the light of God; but God will perfect His light, though the unbelievers be averse” (translation by A. J. Arberry). 32 Previously mentioned as Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿ⁠Alī b. Abī Manṣūr al-Iṣfahānī. As noted by Perlmann in the notes to his edition, this vizier died in prison in 559/1164. He had ordered restorations in Medina (where he was buried) and Mecca. Ibn Khallikān

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him all that had happened to him. The vizier told Nūr al-Dīn: “What are you doing sitting here? Leave now for the City of the Prophet, but keep what you have seen a secret.” The sultan spent the rest of the night getting ready, and left with agile female riding camels and twenty men. The abovementioned vizier went with him, bringing along great amounts of money. They arrived in Medina in sixteen days. The sultan performed the major ritual ablution (ghusl) outside the town and then entered, praying in the rawḍa.33 Then he made the visit to the Prophet’s grave (wa-zāra) and those of his two Companions [i.e. Abu Bakr and ʿUmar] who are confined with him forever, and afterwards sat down, not knowing what to do. The vizier said, having gathered the people of Medina34 in the mosque: “The sultan came to visit the Prophet’s grave (ziyārat al-nabī) and brought with him money to give as voluntary alms (ṣadaqa). Write down who is in your houses.” The people of Medina did as they were told, and the sultan ordered that everybody be brought before him. Each one who came before the sultan was looked over attentively to check if he responded to the image that the Prophet had shown to the sultan. If he was not found to match up with the image, he was given his alms and ordered to leave, until everybody had been checked. The sultan then asked: “Is anybody left who did not take any alms?” They said: “No.” He insisted: “Think about it and think it over.” They answered: “Nobody is left except two Maghribī men who do not partake of anything with anybody. They are two pious rich men who give abundantly in alms to those who are in need.” The sultan rejoiced and said: “Bring them to me.” When they were brought before him, he saw that they were the two men the Prophet had signalled to him saying: “Rescue me from these two!” He asked them: “Where are you from?” They answered: “From the country of the Maghrib. We came as pilgrims and decided to perform mujāwara near the Prophet this year.” The sultan said: “Tell me the truth!” But they persisted in their story. The sultan asked: “Where are their lodgings?” He was informed that they were in a lodge (ribāṭ) near the ‘noble tomb’ (al-ḥujra al-sharīfa). They were detained and brought to their residence. There they saw a great

33 34

devoted an entry to him in his Wafayāt al-aʿyān: Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Societies, p. 131, note 89. Perlmann explains in his annotation that it is “a pillared area over the prayer place of the Prophet in a palm grove later turned into a mosque,” this location being the starting point of the ritual visitation (ziyāra) performed in Medina. In Arabic, ahl al-Madīna. It seems to refer to specifically to the heads of households.

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amount of money, two copies of the Qurʾan and books on raqāʾiq.35 They did not find anything else in their dwelling. The people of Medina praised them for the many good works they had done, saying: “They fasted during the day, attended the prayers in the noble rawḍa, visited the Prophet’s tomb and [the cemetery of] al-Baqīʿ every day, and visited Qubāʾ every Saturday.36 They never rejected anyone who asked for help in any matters that might solve the needs of the Medinese in this year of drought.” The sultan said: “God be praised!” He could not find anything of what he had seen in his dream. The sultan stayed in the house wandering about on his own. He lifted a carpet and saw below it a plank made of wood or something of that sort. He lifted it and saw an excavated underground passageway (sirdāb) that led in the direction of the ‘noble tomb.’ The people were alarmed by this, and the sultan told [the two men] as a result of what he had found: “You must tell me the truth about yourselves!” The two men were beaten severely until they confessed that they were Christians sent by the Christians under the guise of Maghribī pilgrims. They had been given great amounts of money, and were ordered to travel there to carry out the terrible plan they had devised, but had deluded themselves into thinking that they were empowered by God to do such a thing, this being to reach the noble lordship (al-jināb al-sharīf ) and do with it what Iblīs [Satan] had made them believe they could do: to steal it, and what would follow.37 They had settled in the ribāṭ that was nearest to the Prophet’s tomb, showing themselves to be religiously observant and generous in their alms and so on. During the night they started excavating. Each of them had a leather bag (miḥfaẓa) of the sort the Maghribīs usually wear, and in it they deposited the soil they excavated. Then, whenever they left with the excuse of visiting al-Baqīʿ cemetery, they threw it among the graves when they were alone. They did this for a long period. But when they got near the ‘noble tomb’, the sky thundered, lighting appeared, and the earth shook so hard it seemed as if mountains were going to be

35 Literally, ‘subtleties,’ meaning morally inspiring anecdotes and other written pieces intended to soften the hearts from a religious point of view, leading to intense emotional reactions such as weeping. Perlmann, in his “Notes on Anti-Christian Propaganda in the Mamlūk Empire,” pp. 856–857 was unsure about the meaning and suggested the possibility that it could indicate ‘explosives,’ a reading he substituted later for ‘parchment, vellum,’ also incorrect. 36 Qubāʾ is a shrine outside Medina, the place where Muḥammad prayed before entering Medina during his emigration (hijra) from Mecca. 37 Perhaps to destroy the Prophet’s remains?

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uprooted. The sultan arrived the morning after that night, and it was then that their capture and confession took place. Once they had confessed and acknowledged their true intentions in front of him, the sultan thanked God for having bestowed upon him the merit of solving the issue, started weeping intensely, and ordered the two men to be beheaded. They were executed below the lattice screen (shubbāk) that is adjacent to the ‘noble tomb’ on the side of al-Baqīʿ cemetery. He then ordered to bring in great quantities of lead and to excavate a ditch—deep enough to reach water—around the noble tomb in its entirety. The lead was melted and used to fill up the ditch. In this way walls of lead surrounded the noble tomb from the level of the water table.38 The sultan then returned to his reign, and ordered the power of the Christians to be diminished and prohibit them from having any say [in the matters of his kingdom]. He then forbade the employment of infidels in state service, and also put an end to illicit taxes (mukūs), writing about it to Syria, Egypt, and Diyarbakir. This situation lasted until his death.39 While in the case of al-Maṭarī the reason for recounting the tale of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream was to explain how the second wall of Medina was built (with no mention of the lead ‘belt’ around the Prophet’s tomb), al-Asnawī is not interested in Medina’s urban planning, but in depicting Christians in the worst possible light, including general charges of arson. The case of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream is just one (albeit a very important one) of the long list of Christian attempts at destroying Muslim holy sites. Al-Asnawī’s narrative does not contradict al-Maṭarī’s text, but enriches it with details that make the story more thrilling and entertaining. A noteworthy difference is that the two men in al-Asnawī’s narrative are said to come from the Maghrib and not from al-Andalus. In al-Maṭarī’s text it is possible to read ʿ⁠al-Andalus’ as a geographical term and thus as a reference to the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula. As regards the Maghrib, during Nūr al-Dīn’s time the Almohad caliphs (r. 524/1130–668/1269) were busy consolidating an empire that spanned North Africa (except Egypt) and part of the Iberian Peninsula. All these territories integrated into the Almohad empire were referred to as the Maghrib.40 However, al-Asnawī—who is writing 38

As noted above (note 19), the water supply in the houses of Medina consisted of wells that reached down to the underground deposits of water. 39 Perlmann, “Asnawī’s tract against Christian officials,” pp. 14–18 (Arabic text); Perlmann, “Notes on Anti-Christian Propaganda in the Mamlūk Empire,” pp. 856–857. 40 As highlighted by Víctor de Castro, “Historiography and geography” and Luis Molina, “The integration of al-Andalus in Islamic historiography: The view from the Maghrib and the

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specifically against the dhimmīs, non-Muslims living in territories ruled by Muslims—is not interested in Christians living outside Islamic territories. His narrative conveys the impression that the two men were Christians living in the Maghrib under Muslim rule and, thus, there is no mention of any Christian king. This difference with al-Maṭarī’s version served al-Asnawī’s agenda, shifting the story’s focus from Christians living outside the Islamic world to Christians living within Islamic societies. What al-Asnawī seems not to realize is that the Almohads had in fact eliminated the dhimma system throughout their empire: Jews and Christians were obliged to convert to Islam, and in particular to the Almohads’ peculiar understanding of Islam.41 That the Almohad period had seen the disappearance of dhimmī communities in the Maghrib42 was known in Egypt,43 so that al-Asnawī’s rendition of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream would probably have been read as a reference to crypto-Christians. To sum up, al-Maṭarī’s text was the source for al-Asnawī’s narrative, which he expanded and adapted to better serve his specific needs. 3

Later Versions of Nūr al-Dīn’s Dream in the Histories of Medina

After al-Asnawī, the story was quoted by two authors of works having to do with the Holy Places of Islam. One of them was a student of al-Asnawī, the Egyptian Shāfiʿī Abū Bakr b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿUmar al-Marāghī (727/1327–816/1414), who settled in Medina44 and wrote Taḥqīq al-nuṣra fī faḍl Makka al-muḥarrama wa-l-Madīna al-munawwara (‘The most proficient assistant on the merit of

Mashriq,” in The Routledge Handbook of Muslim Iberia, ed. Maribel Fierro (London, 2020). 41 Maribel Fierro, “A Muslim land without Jews or Christians: Almohad policies regarding the ‘protected people,’” in Christlicher Norden—Muslimischer Süden. Ansprüche und Wirklichkeiten von Christen, Juden und Muslimen auf der Iberischen Halbinsel im Hochund Spätmittelalter, eds. Matthias M. Tischler and Alexander Fidora (Münster, 2011), pp. 231–247 and the studies by Maribel Fierro, David Wasserstein and Alain Verskin in Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam: Coercion and Faith in Premodern Iberia and Beyond, eds. M. García-Arenal and Jonathan Glazer-Eytan (Leiden, 2019), respectively pp. 111–132, 133–154, 155–172. 42 While the Christian communities never re-emerged, strong Jewish communities did, lasting into modern times. 43 See above, note 26 about the Maghribī ambassador who visited Egypt in post-Almohad times and complained about the existence there of dhimmī communities. 44 Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, II, 172, SII, 221; Kaḥḥāla, Muʿjam al-muʾallifīn, I, 437.

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Sacred Mecca and Luminous Medina’).45 Al-Marāghī’s text closely follows al-Maṭarī’s, adding the name of Nūr al-Dīn’s vizier who went with him to Medina (Khālid b. Muḥammad b. Naṣr al-Qaysarānī al-Shāʿir)46 and a sentence not found in his source (underlined in the following translation): They confessed that they were Christians. They were found to have excavated an underground tunnel that went below the south-eastern wall of the mosque in the direction of the ‘noble tomb’ (al-ḥujra al-sharīfa), with the agreement of their [Christian] kings, as these kings had conceived the absurd idea of initiating something that God would stop.47 The other author is Nūr al-Dīn Abū l-Ḥasan ʿ⁠Alī b. ʿ⁠Afīf al-Dīn ʿ⁠Abd Allāh alSamhūdī (844/1466–911/1533), also an Egyptian Shāfiʿī who settled in Medina, where he wrote a tract that called for the rebuilding of the Prophet’s mosque, which had for the second time been badly damaged by fire.48 He also wrote an extensive history of Medina that was lost in this same fire. A shorter version completed in 886/1481 survived, with the title Wafāʾ al-wafā bi-akhbār dār al-Muṣṭafā (‘The Fulfilment of faithfulness regarding the reports about the House of the Chosen One’). In it, al-Samhūdī quoted the story of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream.49 His source was al-Asnawī, whose tract he mentions under the title of al-Intiṣārāt al-islāmiyya (‘The Islamic Victories’): 45

I first encountered the story preserved in this work when consulting the Ms. Reisülkuttab 121, fs. 64b–65a. The work has been edited by ʿ⁠Abd Allāh ibn ʿ⁠Abd al-Raḥīm ʿUsalyān (Riyadh, 1422/2002). Available at https://backend.ketabonline.com/uploads /2020/04/447512858183464424.pdf. Accessed March 20, 2023. 46 On him see Khayr al-Dīn al-Ziriklī, al-Aʿlām, II, 240. Elsewhere al-Maṭarī mentions Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿ⁠Alī b. Abī Manṣūr al-Iṣfahānī as Nūr al-Dīn’s vizier who had started building a new wall around the Mosque of the Prophet around 540/1146. However, he does not name the vizier in the story of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream. Al-Asnawī does identify him as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī (who corresponds to the vizier mentioned by al-Maṭarī in relation to the walls), but he was not vizier to Nūr al-Dīn in Damascus, but rather to his father and brother in Mosul. Later, al-Samhūdī noted this problem, concluding that Jamāl al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī al-Mawṣilī must also have served Nūr al-Dīn. 47 Al-Marāghī, Taḥqīq al-nuṣra, p. 240. In al-Marāghī’s text we find mulūkihimā instead of mulūkihim (cf. above note 18). 48 C. E. Bosworth, “al-Samhūdī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. Second Edition. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_6578. Accessed April 28, 2020. See also Ḥāmid al-Jāsir, “Manuscripts in the history of Makkah and Madīnah,” in The significance of Islamic Manuscripts. Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation 1991, ed. J. Cooper (London, 1992), pp. 107–113. 49 Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā bi-akhbār dār al-Muṣṭafā, ed. Qāsim al-Sāmarrāʾī, 5 vols (Muʾassasat al-Furqān li-l-turāth al-islāmī, 1422/2001), II, 431–6. Eldon Rutter, in his

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Know that I found an Epistle written by the scholar Jamāl al-Dīn al-Asnawī prohibiting the employment of Christians in administrative positions entitled by some al-Intiṣārāt al-islāmiyya. But I have seen in a copy of this work, written by the hand of his student and teacher of my teachers, Zayn al-Dīn al-Marāghī, the following title: Naṣīḥat ūlà al-albāb fī manʿ istikhdām al-naṣārā kuttāb. Our teacher … did not give it any title, but I gave it this one in his presence and he confirmed it.50 Al-Samhūdī was also familiar with al-Maṭarī’s text, which he mistakenly thought was an abridged version of al-Asnawī’s story,51 whereas, as explained above, my view of the relationship between the two texts is the opposite. Al-Samhūdī’s text differs very little from that of al-Asnawī. But al-Samhūdī, contrary to al-Asnawī, expresses doubts as to the story’s authenticity, since he has never seen it mentioned by Nūr al-Dīn’s biographers: I find it strange that I have not found this story in the texts of the biographies of Nūr al-Dīn, despite its significance. For this story serves as witness to what al-Imām al-Yāfiʿī says in his biography of Nūr al-Dīn, that Nūr al-Dīn … was one of the forty saints and that Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn was his deputy among the three hundred saints.52 This critical view was not shared by the famous Mamlūk historian al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442), whose Imtāʿ al-asmāʿ,53 on certain aspects of the biography of the Prophet, quotes al-Maṭarī’s text verbatim, without any critical comment about its historicity. 4

The Shīʿī Link: Ibn Iyās’s (d. ca. 930/1524) Version

A contemporary of al-Samhūdī, the Egyptian historian Abū l-Barakāt Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Nāṣirī al-Jarkasī al-Ḥanafī, known as Ibn Iyās

50 51 52 53

The Holy Cities of Arabia (London-New York, 1928), II, 201–3, partially translated alSamhūdī’s text. Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, II, 431 and 435. Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, II, 434. Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Societies, p. 37. The Arabic text is al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, II, p. 436. This remark was already noticed by Perlmann, “Notes on Anti-Christian Propaganda in the Mamlūk Empire,” p. 857. Ed. Maḥmūd Shākir (Cairo, 1941), p. 627.

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(d. ca. 930/1524),54 included the story of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream in his multi-volume chronicle of Egypt entitled Badāʾiʿ al-zuhūr fī waqāʾiʿ al-duhūr (‘Wonderful flowers in the events of the ages’). His version is as follows: It was said that Nūr al-Dīn saw the Prophet while sleeping. The Prophet told him: “Oh, Nūr al-Dīn, come to my rescue! A member of the Rāfiḍa55 intends to steal my corpse.” Nūr al-Dīn showed him the appearance [of the Rāfiḍī man] in his dream. When Nūr al-Dīn woke up the next morning, he set out for noble Medina, although it was not the usual time for the pilgrimage. When he arrived in Medina, he summoned its inhabitants and made them believe that he was going to distribute money among them. When they were in front of him, he asked: “Is someone missing?” They answered: “The one missing is a pious man who lives in retirement devoted to God and does not mix with anybody.” Nūr al-Dīn ordered that he be brought before him. When that man was in front of him, he was the same one that the Prophet had shown him in his dream. When Nūr al-Dīn saw him, he ordered him to be crucified, and this was done. Then he raided his house, which was nearby, not far from the ‘noble tomb’ (al-ḥujra al-sharīfa), and found that he had excavated an underground tunnel that had come close to the grave of the Prophet. Nūr al-Dīn al-Shahīd (the Martyr) had a ditch excavated around the ‘noble tomb’ and filled it up with huge stones, interlocking them with lead. This is a well-known story about Nūr al-Dīn.56 The culprit in this version, instead of two fair-haired men, is a person with no salient physical features but who, similarly to the two men in the variants of the other version, had a reputation in Medina as pious and well-regarded. Instead of being discovered to be a Christian, he turns out to be a Shīʿī; he is crucified (in al-Maṭarī’s story the two men were decapitated and then burnt). There is reason to suspect this in fact might be the original version of the story, especially if the Shīʿī belong to the Ismaʿīlī sect, which during this period was associated with violent attacks against both individuals and buildings with 54 W. M. Brinner, “Ibn Iyās,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. Second Edition. Available at: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_3225. Accessed April 29, 2020. 55 This term refers to the Shīʿīs in general, and may target any of its sects; it can also refer exclusively to the proto-Imāmiyya and, subsequently, the Twelver Shīʿa: E. Kohlberg, “al-Rāfiḍa,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. Second Edition. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10 .1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_6185. Accessed May 2, 2020. 56 Ibn Iyās, Badāʾiʿ al-zuhūr fī waqāʾiʿ al-duhūr, ed. Muḥammad Muṣṭafá (Wiesbaden, 1960– 1975), I/1, p. 241. I wish to thank Anne-Marie Eddé for this reference.

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symbolic importance. For example, in January 317/930, Mecca was sacked by the Carmathians (considered by some to be a branch of the Ismaʿīlīs) who took away the Black Stone, causing a great scandal and much sorrow among other Muslims. It was nearly a decade later, in 327/939, when the Carmathians finally allowed a pilgrims’ caravan to enter Mecca again, eventually returning the Black Stone.57 Later, a branch of the Ismaʿīlīs, the Nizārīs, became closely linked to murderous violence against their enemies, to the extent that they constitute the origin of the European term ‘assassin.’58 There are many legendary aspects in the image of the Nizārīs constructed in medieval and later sources. For example, it was said that in Isfahān, an underground chamber was discovered in the house of a blind man who lured young men into it by asking them for help, only to torture and kill them. The blind man was said to have been an Ismaʿīlī, and those in the city who were accused of being Ismaʿīlīs were killed along with him.59 While many such tales are the stuff of legend, there was nonetheless also some historical truth to this reputation.60 The Nizārīs had at their origins the teachings of the Ismaʿīlī missionary Ḥasan-i-ṣabbāḥ (d. 518/1124). They expanded into Syria, Persia, Central Asia and India, having as their main fortress Alamūt, in the mountainous south-western region of the Caspian Sea, until it was destroyed by the Mongols in 654/1257.61 Especially during the 6th/12th century, the Nizārīs used murder as a means to achieve their political-religious aims. They were especially feared because the ‘assassins’ charged with carrying out the killings of the group’s political-religious opponents were considered to be unafraid of death. These men, the fidāʾīs, offered themselves up for missions that were generally suicidal, as their targets were often armed and surrounded by armed guards, and the murderers did not try to safeguard themselves. Thus, their fanatical devotion indicates a high degree of personal motivation and an intense group sentiment.62 The conspiratorial secrecy attributed to the Nizārīs included arousing suspicion that certain Sunnīs were actually Ismāʿīlīs, creating a climate of 57 58 59 60 61 62

Heinz Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fāṭimids (Leiden, 1996), pp. 255–257, 381–382. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizârî Ismâʿîlîs Against the Islamic World (The Hague, 1955); Bernard Lewis, The Assassins (London, 1967). Hodgson, The Order of Assassins, pp. 77–8. Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismaʿilis (London-New York, 1994) and cf. its review by J.-P. Guillaume and A. Chraibi in Arabica 43 (1996): 369–375. Farhad Daftary, “Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_30361. Accessed May 3, 2020 and idem, The Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 301–402. V. Ivanow, “An Ismaili Ode in Praise of Fidawis,” Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, new series, XIV (1938): 63–72.

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confusion, fear and tension. For all these reasons, the Nizārīs were feared and detested as few other ‘heretics’ have been. The Seljuqs were one of the foremost targets of the Nizārīs’ attacks. After the Seljuq ruler ordered an attack against Alamūt, the vizier Niẓām al-Mulk was stabbed to death in 485/1092. His murderer—who had disguised himself as a Sufi and was immediately killed—was thought to have been an emissary of Ḥasan-i-ṣabbāḥ, although it was most probably an ‘internal’ affair of the Seljuq empire.63 The list of victims of the Nizārīs (real or alleged) grew to include important members of the political and religious elites (military commanders, judges and scholars). There were even two failed attempts against Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn himself, after which he is said to have slept in a wooden tower especially designed for him, and would no longer allow any stranger to approach him. The Nizārīs also targeted the Crusaders from their base in the mountainous regions of Syria, their most famous murder being that of Conrad of Montferrat, king of Jerusalem, killed in Tyre in 1192 by two assassins disguised as monks (as in the case of Niẓām al-Mulk, other possible culprits have been proposed).64 Ultimately, it did not really matter who had actually carried out these murders, because the Nizārīs were always suspect, and this widespread fear gave them power. Their targets were not only men but also buildings: the fire that burned down the mosque of Aleppo in the year 564/1169 was attributed to the Nizārīs.65 That the Nizārīs carried out selective murders of their enemies made sense in societies in which political and social power was held by “a host of essentially equal and autonomous military and religious leaders, on a personal basis.” In Hodgson’s words: Already the Sunnī society had become accustomed to seeing upstart individuals, robbers or rich rebels, appropriate whole areas and force the paramount power to recognise them as ‘loyal’ but independent vassals. The policy suitable for conquering such a society was to take it over piece by piece, winning or destroying it stronghold by stronghold, leader by leader.66 63 H. Bowen and C. E. Bosworth, “Niẓām al-Mulk,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. Second Edition. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_5942. Accessed May 3, 2020; Carole Hillenbrand, “1092: A Murderous Year,” in Proceedings of the 14th Congress of the Union Européene des Arabisants et Islamisants (Budapest, 1995), pp. 281–296. 64 Patrick A. Williams, “The Assassination of Conrad of Montferrat: Another Suspect?”, Traditio XXVI (1970): 381–389. 65 Élisséeff, “Les monuments de Nūr al-Dīn,” p. 14. 66 Hodgson, The order of Assassins, p. 81.

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But what could have been the aim for a Shīʿī—be he Ismaʿīlī or Ismaʿīlī/Nizārī—to steal the remains of the Prophet Muḥammad from his grave in Medina, the city where he died and which had become one of the Holy Places of Islam? As strange as it may seem, two Ismaʿīlī/Fāṭimid imam-caliphs had indeed espoused this very idea. The first was al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh (r. 386/996–411/1021).67 Among the many bizarre acts attributed to this intriguing Fāṭimid imam-caliph was the attempt to steal the body of his ancestor, the Prophet, in order to bring it to Cairo. This story was first recorded by the Andalusī geographer al-Bakrī (432/1040–487/1094),68 who alleged that al-Ḥākim sent agents to secretly tunnel under the grave of the Prophet, as well as the adjacent graves of the first two caliphs, Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, in order to steal their remains and transfer them to Cairo. His intention was to build for each of them a sanctuary (mashhad) along the road between Fusṭāṭ and Cairo.69 The historicity of this accusation has been brought into question by historians such as P. Walker, who has identified two particularly dubious elements in the account. Firstly, despite the Fāṭimids’ well-known interest in turning Cairo into a centre of worship, they do not seem to have envisioned doing away with the pilgrimage to the Ḥijāz, as shown by their efforts to control the Sharīfī emir who ruled over Mecca and Medina. The second is that Abū Bakr and ʿUmar were hated by the Shīʿīs, who considered them “Great Satans.” Walker asks: “Of what use could their remains be in this situation?”70 To the first argument, it can be objected that the pilgrimage may have continued even after the transfer of the Prophet’s body to Cairo: after all, Medina’s sacred topography has no lack of places for veneration and visitation, and of course Mecca would have not been affected. To the second, the Fāṭimids are well known for the inventiveness and ingenuity of their ceremonies, and they may have thought of a special type of ritual for such mashāhid to reflect their rejection of the first two caliphs. For the Fāṭimids, the veneration for their imams was paralleled by their hatred of their enemies, whose punishment involved a striking public display of their 67

The most recent study on him is Paul E. Walker, Caliph of Cairo: Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, 996–1021 (Cairo, 2010). 68 Al-Bakrī, Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, 2 vols (Beirut, 1992), II, 609–610. He does not mention his source. 69 Yūsuf Rāġib, “Un episode obscur d’histoire Fāṭimide,” Studia Islamica 48 (1978): 125–132; Paul E. Walker, “Purloined Symbols of the Past: The Theft of Souvenirs and Sacred Relics in the Rivalry between the Abbasids and Fatimids,” in Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam: Essays in Honour of Wilferd Madelung, eds. F. Daftary and J. Meri (London, 2003; reprinted in Fatimid History and Ismaili Doctrine, Farnham, 2008), pp. 364–387, 368–369. 70 Walker, “Purloined Symbols of the Past,” p. 369.

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bodies.71 In any case, importantly for our study, al-Bakrī’s narrative includes key parallels with the story of the Andalusīs/Maghribīs: the excavation of a tunnel, the punishment of the culprits and the use of lead to seal the grave off from similar attacks in the future. Writing a century-and-a-half later, Mamlūk historian al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/ 1333) recounts a similar plan, here attributed to Fāṭimid imam-caliph al-Ḥāfiẓ (r. 526/1132–544/1149). Upset by the Abbasids’ and Seljuqs’ control of the Holy Places of Islam, al-Ḥāfiẓ sent forty men to Medina to dig a tunnel to the Prophet’s grave. They started at some distance to avoid detection, but the tunnel collapsed while they were working in it, killing all those involved.72 These stories cannot be completely dismissed. They add to the welldocumented Fāṭimid obsession with acquiring relics associated with their claimed ancestors, the Prophet and his cousin and son-in-law ʿ⁠Alī b. Abī Ṭālib.73 After conquering Egypt in 358/969, the Fāṭimids moved their capital from Ifrīqiya to the newly founded city of Cairo, during which process the reigning imam-caliph al-Muʿizz (r. 341/953–365/975) took the remains of the first three imam-caliphs with him to be buried in their new capital. Cairo became the centre of the complex ceremonies and ritual practices developed by the Fāṭimids,74 and also the place where an increasing number of relics were located, including, as mentioned above, al-Ḥusayn’s head.75 The acquisition, through different means, of relics highly charged with symbolic meaning to uphold the Fāṭimids’ lineage was meant to increase their legitimacy and to strengthen their claim to the inheritance of the Prophet Muḥammad’s authority. Al-Ḥāfiẓ’s attempt would have taken place in the 6th/12th century, as Fāṭimid power waned, but also as powers of intercession

71

On the punishment of the Berber rebel Abū Yazīd, discredited as the Dajjāl (Antichrist) by the Fāṭimids, see Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi, pp. 318–325. His case was not unique. 72 Walker, “Purloined Symbols of the Past,” pp. 369–370, quoting al-Nuwayrī, Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, ed. Muḥammad Muḥammad Amīn and Muḥammad Ḥilmī Muḥammad Aḥmad (Cairo, 1992), p. 308. 73 Al-Ḥākim had sent one of his agents to open the house of the imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq in Medina and bring its contents to Cairo, an episode reported by both Ismaʿīlī and Sunnī sources. These contents were brought by Fāṭimid agents accompanied by a delegation of Medinese Ḥusaynid and Ḥasanid notables. Only part was given back, as al-Ḥākim considered himself the rightful heir of his ancestor’s belongings. He had known exactly which objects were to be found in Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq’s house and where they stood, a memory that proved his claim to the imamate: Walker, “Purloined Symbols of the Past,” pp. 368–9. On how the Fāṭimids acquired the sword of ʿ⁠Alī see ibid., pp. 364–7. 74 Paula Sanders, Ritual, Politics, and the City in Fatimid Cairo (New York, 1994). 75 See above, note 29.

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were increasingly attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad,76 and the visitation of graves became increasingly popular. The new importance of graves and bodies was such that the Seljuq vizier Niẓām al-Mulk—the one supposedly murdered by a Nizārī agent—allegedly led an attempt at transferring the body of al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820), the founder of the Shāfiʿī legal school favoured by the Seljuqs, from Cairo to Baghdad in order to rescue it from Fāṭimid control.77 5

Why Were Christians from the Islamic West Made the Protagonists in al-Maṭarī’s Version?

The first author to quote the story of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream, al-Maṭarī, was a fervent anti-Shīʿī, and thus one might expect him to have attributed the alleged attempt against the Prophet’s grave to Shīʿī agents. After all, the story of Fāṭimid imam-caliph al-Hakim’s attempted theft of the Prophet’s body had been in circulation since the 5th/11th century. However, by al-Maṭarī’s times the Fāṭimids had disappeared from the political scene, ever since Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn had deposed the last imam-caliph in Cairo and restored Sunnism in the former Fāṭimid territories. The Nizārīs’ attacks had also stopped. Moreover, al-Maṭarī lived in Medina at a moment in which those in power were Shīʿīs, the aforementioned Sharīfī emirs.78 But even though a Shīʿī plot would therefore have been unconvincing and politically inappropriate in al-Maṭarī’s times, the same is not true for the times the alleged attack took place. Both Nūr al-Dīn and his successor Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn were apparently indifferent to Shīʿī control of religious offices in Medina, something that later Mamlūk authors found disturbing, as they seem to have thought that such rulers should have taken care to ‘Sunnify’ Medina.79 Outside the particular context of the Ḥijāz, however, Nūr al-Dīn was concerned about the Fāṭimids and fought against them. It was the Fāṭimids’ ominous 358/969 conquest of Egypt that prompted the Buwayhid ruler ʿ⁠Aḍud al-Dawla to build a wall around Medina’s city centre in 364/974. This wall was later restored in 540/1145 under Zangid rule,80 and less than two decades later, in 557/1162, Nūr al-Dīn built a second, longer wall equipped with towers and gateways.81 Nūr al-Dīn is also one of the 76 77 78 79 80 81

Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries, pp. 34–35. Walker, “Purloined Symbols of the Past,” p. 368. See above, note 6. Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries, p. 139, note 169. See above, note 11. Montgomery Watt and Winder, “al-Madīna,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam; Élisséeff, “Les monuments de Nūr al-Dīn,” p. 34.

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rulers credited with establishing the guard of eunuchs who acted as custodians of the Prophet’s grave,82 and, as we have seen, he is said to have surrounded the tomb with a protective belt of stones and lead. It can therefore be concluded that Nūr al-Dīn was concerned about the safety of Medina, be it from attacks from the Bedouins or the Fāṭimids. But again, the fact that Medina was ruled by Shīʿīs—the Sharīfī emirs—may have made it inconvenient for al-Maṭarī’s to accuse the Shīʿīs of any possible attack against the Prophet’s grave. Another possibility would have been to accuse the Crusaders: after all, in 1182–3 Reynald of Châtillon had managed to sail into the Red Sea to launch a raid on Mecca and Medina, before being defeated by the Ayyubids of Egypt.83 According to the Andalusi Ibn Jubayr (d. 614/1217) who performed his pilgrimage in 578/1183, the aim of the Crusaders was to enter Medina and remove the Prophet’s body from his grave.84 Here we have a Christian connection. However, this attempted raid took place in 578/1182, after Nūr al-Dīn’s death, and therefore could not have been linked with the construction of the new wall and the sealing of the grave.85 Al-Maṭarī, our earliest source on the Christian attempt against the Prophet’s grave during Nūr al-Dīn’s reign, had a strong connection with a family of Maghribī origin, the Banū Farḥūn.86 The founder of the line, Muḥammad b. Farḥūn, had left al-Andalus to settle in Medina, obeying what he thought had been a divine command. One of his descendants was the Maliki scholar Badr al-Dīn Ibn Farḥūn (d. 799/1397), author of a famous biographical dictionary of Maliki scholars, who said about al-Maṭarī: “After our father, we found no one like him in kindness to us and compassion for us. He took charge of our 82 Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries, p. 129, note 79. In one of the stories about the Shīʿī attempt to desecrate the Prophet’s grave, the chief eunuch plays a major role, witnessing how the earth miraculously opens and swallows up the Shīʿī agents: Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries, p. 38. 83 Gary Leiser, “The Crusader Raid in the Red Sea in 578/1182–3,” The Journal of the American Research Center in Cairo 14 (1977): 87–100; A. Mallett, “A Trip Down the Red Sea with Reynald of Châtillon,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 18, no. 2 (2008): 141–153. 84 Ibn Jubayr, Riḥla, trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr (London, 2020, first ed. 1952), pp. 72–73. 85 As pointed by Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries, note 95, it was only in nineteenthand twentieth-century sources that the Christian threat—whether the “fair-haired men” of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream or an expedition by the Crusader Reynaud de Châtillon against Medina—was linked to the founding of the eunuch guard at the Prophet’s tomb, referring to Emel Esin, Mecca the Blessed, Madina the Radiant (New York, 1963), p. 158. 86 M. Aragón Huerta, “Ibn Farḥūn, Burhān al-dīn,” in Biblioteca de al-Andalus, ed. Jorge Lirola Delgado and José Miguel Puerta Vílchez (Almería, 2004), vol. 3, pp. 141–149, no. 461. As noted above (note 5), the Maghribi traveller Ibn Baṭṭūta (d. 770/1368 or 779/1377) met al-Maṭarī during his stay in Medina. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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upbringing and our education and concern for our welfare like our father”.87 In the 6th/12th–7th/13th centuries increasing numbers of Andalusī and Maghribī scholars were emigrating to Egypt and the central lands of Islam. Behind this phenomenon there was both a ‘pull’ factor (the Sunnitization of the former Fāṭimid territories that required, especially in Egypt, the presence of Sunni scholars) and a ‘push’ factor (the initial Almohad persecution of Mālikīs in al-Andalus and the Maghrib, and the Christians’ territorial gains in the Iberian Peninsula). In the writings of some of these emigrants—especially those from al-Andalus, where territories had been lost to the Christians since the fall of Toledo in 478/1085—there is a noticeable desire to arouse an interest in the plight of their homeland. The Andalusī al-Yasaʿ b. Ḥazm (d. 575/1179) settled in Egypt and wrote for Saladin a historical work entitled al-Mughrib fī akhbār maḥāsin ahl al-Maghrib that was full of inventions and distorted materials.88 Al-Yasaʿ b. Ḥazm, for example, sought in his writings to highlight the Iberian Christians’ wickedness in hopes of inspiring Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn to intervene militarily in order to save al-Andalus from the Christian invasion. Later, in the 7th/13th century, after the main cities of al-Andalus had already fallen, including Córdoba, horrific stories were told about the Christians’ treatment of such a venerated place. The king of Castile Alfonso VI (r. 1072–1109), the conqueror of Toledo, wanted his wife Constance to give birth in the mosque of Córdoba, on the advice of his priests and bishops who reminded him that in the western part of the mosque a church had stood before, and he sent a Jewish ambassador with the proposal to the king of Seville al-Muʿtamid (r. 461/1069–484/1091), who controlled Cordoba at the time. This story is presented as justifying al-Muʿtamid’s decision to kill the ambassador.89 6

Conclusion: The History of a Story

In the mid-fifth/eleventh century, the possibility of an attack against the grave of the Prophet Muḥammad in Medina had been recorded by the Andalusī geographer al-Bakrī. The culprit was the Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim bi-Amr 87 Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries, pp. 138–139, notes 161 and 162. 88 Maribel Fierro, “La falsificación de la historia: Al-Yasaʿ b. Ḥazm y su Kitāb al-mugrib,” Al-Qanṭara XVI (1995): 15–38. 89 Al-Ḥimyarī, al-Rawḍ al-miʿṭār, ed. and trans. E. Lévi-Provençal, p. 84 (Arabic text), 104–5 (French translation); ed. I.  ʿ⁠Abbas (Beirut, 1975), p. 288; Maribel Fierro, “Christian success and Muslim fear in Andalusi writings during the Almoravid and Almohad periods,” Israel Oriental Studies XVII (1997): 155–178; reprint in F. Micheau, ed., Les relations des pays d’Islam avec le monde latin du milieu du Xe siècle au milieu du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 2000), pp. 218–249. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Allāh, accused of attempting to steal the body of his ancestor, the Prophet, in order to bring it to Cairo. The Fāṭimids were known for their interest in gathering the remains of their ancestors in the city they had built in Egypt where they developed complex rituals to bolster their legitimacy and strengthen the belief in the truth of their doctrines and their right to rule. In the 6th/12th century, the Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥāfiẓ would have carried out another failed attempt, as did the Crusaders according to the Andalusī Ibn Jubayr. It was in that same century that an alleged attack against the Prophet’s grave was halted by the Zengid Nūr al-Dīn. More than two centuries later, the Egyptian historian Ibn Iyās included in his chronicle of Egypt how a Shīʿī who passed as a pious man in Medina was found to be the same about whom the Prophet, in a dream, had warned Nūr al-Dīn that he wanted to steal his corpse. Uncovered, that Shīʿī man was crucified. The Fāṭimid precedent may have been behind the protagonism given in this narrative to a Shīʿī who would have been most probably associated with an Ismaʿīlī and more specifically with a member of the Nizārī branch of Ismaʿīlism. Nūr al-Dīn had reached during his own life great renown for his fight against both the Christian enemies, the Crusaders and the Byzantines, and the Fāṭimids. Other versions of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream were in circulation before Ibn Iyās. As recorded earlier by al-Maṭarī and al-Asnawī, the culprits were not Shīʿīs but Christians either from al-Andalus or from the Maghrib. It is unclear which may have been the earlier version, although the precedence of the Fāṭimids’ attempts suggests that Nūr al-Dīn’s dream was probably initially associated with Shīʿī culprits. In any case, the earliest sources at our disposal about Nūr al-Dīn’s dream record the protagonism of Christians. In the case of al-Asnawī’s version, by accusing Christians from the Maghrib—to be understood as crypto-Christians as under the Almohads Jews and Christians had been forced to convert—the intention seems to have been to undermine the position of dhimmis in Egypt. Moshe Perlmann has, in fact, read in al-Asnawī’s version of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream a similarity with “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the early-20th-century anti-Semitic forgery depicting the Jews as the masterminds of a worldwide conspiracy to seize power, in order to justify anti-Jewish violence on the ground.90 The similarity does not hold in terms of the tangible global impact of the “Protocols”91 compared with the very limited reach of the 90 A. Berlin and M. Grossman, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (Oxford, 2011), s.v. 91 Esther Webman, ed., The Global Impact of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’: A Century-old Myth (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon-New York, 2011).

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story of the alleged Christian attack against Medina, at least in premodern times.92 For Perlmann, the story of Nūr al-Dīn’s dream was directed against the Christians as a way to legitimize the restrictions and persecutions against them implemented in Egypt, which al-Asnawī supported and wanted to see extended and intensified. But al-Asnawī, as we have seen, was preceded by al-Maṭarī, for whom al-Asnawī’s agenda would not have made any sense, since only Muslims were allowed to live in the Ḥijāz, meaning dhimmīs were a non-issue there.93 Al-Maṭarī’s version fits the context of the times with the fight against the Crusaders but also with the influx of emigrants and exiles from al-Andalus who had a vested interest in rallying Muslim opinion in favour of the plight of the Muslims. By accusing Christians coming from the Iberian Peninsula of trying to attack the Prophet’s grave, the intention may have been to create an atmosphere favourable to a military intervention in support of the Muslims of al-Andalus. Thus, in al-Maṭarī’s work, the story, with its Christian agents on the order of Christian Iberian kings, is better understood in the context of how Andalusīs tried—unsuccessfully—to influence the policies of rulers in the Mashriq to save their homeland from Christian conquest. Acknowledgements This study has been carried out within the research projects AMOI and AMOI-II co-directed with Mayte Penelas (FFI2016-78878-R AEI/FEDER and 92

Writing in the 17th century, the Ottoman scholar Evliya Çelebi recorded the story of Nūr al-Dīn, but in his version the protagonist on the Christian side is the Pope who wanted to get hold of the Prophet’s body by sending to Medina twenty monks who could speak different languages and who pretended to be Muslims. What those men did in Medina follows al-Maṭarī’s narrative in general terms. In this rendition of the story the Pope’s initiative was motivated by the desire to take revenge for the Arab conquests and to force the Muslims to return to the Christians the territories they had lost; another version is that the intention was to divert the pilgrimage from the Arabian Peninsula to the Iberian Peninsula in order to profit from the taxes that the pilgrims would have to pay. See Evliya Çelebi in Medina; the relevant sections of the Seyāhatnāme, ed. Nurettin Gemici, trans. Robert Dankoff (Leiden, 2012), pp. 59–73. 93 Seth Ward, “A fragment from an unknown work by al-Ṭabarī on the tradition ‘Expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula (and the lands of Islam),’” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies LIII (1990): 407–420; Harry Munt, “‘No two religions’: Non-Muslims in the early Islamic Ḥijāz,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78 (2015): 249–269.

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PID2020-116680GB-I00). I started collecting materials on the topic of this paper in 1987, during a summer spent in Istanbul consulting manuscripts of Andalusī works preserved in different libraries there, as reflected in my article “Manuscritos de obras andalusíes en las bibliotecas de Estambul,” Al-Qanṭara IX (1988): 199–207. I wish to thank Luis Molina and Luke Yarbrough for their invaluable help during the difficult circumstances of the confinement period in the spring of 2020 when I finished this paper. The English has been revised by Nicholas Callaway. Bibliography

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Chapter 10

Jewish Officials at Royal Courts in al-Andalus and Castile (Tenth to Fourteenth Centuries): Continuities and Disjunctions Maya Soifer Irish In 1325, the fourteen-year-old king of Castile, Alfonso XI (r. 1312–1350), reached majority and decided that he was ready to break free from the control of his regents and to rule on his own. One of the first decisions the young monarch made was picking a chief royal treasurer, or almojarife, whose primary function would be to manage the kingdom’s financial affairs and provide loans to the king and the royal family on demand. The Castilian royal chronicler explains that the king made his choice based on the recommendation of one of his uncles: And because it had long been a custom in the houses of the kings of Castile for them to have Jews as almojarifes, and also because of the request of his uncle, Infante Felipe, the king took as an almojarife a Jew named don Yuçaf de Écija, who occupied a high position in the house of the king and had great power in the kingdom due to the favor that the king has shown him. On the face of it, Alfonso’s willingness to heed a former regent’s counsel and take one of Infante Felipe’s own men into his service belied the young king’s desire to assert his independence.1 But in all likelihood that is not how the young king viewed his decision. To him, it was a bold assertion of power. Alfonso must have known that his subjects broadly disapproved of such appointments. During his minority, in 1313, representatives of towns gathered at the cortes (parliament) beseeched Alfonso’s tutors not to allow Jews to occupy positions of power at 1 “E por que de luengos tienpos era acostunbrado en las casas de los rreyes de Castilla que avia almoxarifes judios, el rrey por esto, e por rruego del ynfante don Felippe su tio, tomo por almoxarife a vn judio que dezian don Juçafe de Eçija, que ovo gran lugar en la casa del rrey e gran poder en el rreyno con la merçed que el rrey le fiziera.” Gran Cronica de Alfonso XI, ed. Diego Catalan, vol. 1 (Madrid, 1977), p. 376. Yuçaf found favor with Infante Felipe in part by lending him money. See Antonio Ballesteros, “Don Juçaf de Ecija,” Sefarad 2 (1946): 243–287, 256.

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the royal court. The rumblings against Jewish officials at the Castilian representative assembly would continue after his coming of age.2 In the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon, facing the ire of the nobility, king Peter III (r. 1276–1285) had already dismissed most Jewish officials from the royal service in 1283.3 Church legislation, including the recent edicts of the ecumenical Council of Vienne (1311–1312) and the provincial Council of Zamora (1312–1313), prohibited the holding of public offices by Jews.4 In northern Europe, not since the time of the Carolingians had any Jews been appointed to governmental positions.5 In short, Alfonso’s act was seemingly out of sync with the contemporary political realities in most of western Christendom. Yet the chronicler was right in saying that by appointing a Jewish almojarife Alfonso was adhering to a long-standing royal Castilian custom. By naming Yuçaf Halevi ben Ephraim ben Isaac ibn Shabat as his almojarife mayor, Alfonso was not only asserting his customary prerogative, but reaching even deeper into the peninsular past, specifically, to the Andalusi Islamic tradition of employing bureaucrats from marginal ethno-religious groups, a tradition that itself had antecedents in the administrative practices at the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphal courts.6 Castilian monarchs began to emulate such Islamic court practices in the eleventh century, when León-Castile emerged from relative obscurity to make a bid for hegemony over other Iberian Christian kingdoms.7 Not only did they mimic a sophisticated royal culture with roots in the Mediterranean imperial traditions, but they also reaped the benefits of having capable and loyal servants who were completely dependent on their will. This paper will argue for the existence of significant continuities in the types of Jewish officials who served the rulers of Islamic al-Andalus and Christian Castile between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries. However, 2 Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla, ed. La Real Academia de la Historia, vol. 1 (Madrid, 1861), pp. 230 and 241. 3 Yom Tov Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213–1327 (London and Portland, 1997), pp. 13–16. 4 Maya Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change (Washington DC, 2016), p. 87. 5 Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 2nd ed. (Malden MA, 2007), p. 76. 6 Norman Stillman, “Court Jews,” in Stillman, ed., Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, Vol. I (Leiden, 2010), pp. 681–685; Luke Yarbrough, Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Pre-Modern Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 32–33, 48–87; Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 2008), pp. 65–66. I would like to thank Dr. Yarbrough for graciously sharing the proofs of two chapters of his book when I was working on an early draft of this article. 7 Simon Barton, “Spain in the Eleventh Century,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, eds. David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith, vol. IV, part 2, (Cambridge, 2004), p. 169.

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instead of viewing these continuities through the lens of the court Jews’ selfimage—predicated on fluency in Judeo-Arabic high culture, the supposed nobility of their lineage, and commitment to rabbinic orthodoxy—as much of the scholarship on this topic has done, I examine the identities of Jewish officials from the point of view of their royal employers.8 On closer inspection, it turns out that expertise in fiscal administration was the most ubiquitous skill required of Jews in the service of Muslim and Christian rulers, with medicine, diplomacy, and other competencies following closely behind. While the adherence to the intellectual values of adab (Andalusi court culture) remained a marker of elite identity within the Jewish communities throughout the period, kings were far more interested in the Jewish officials’ effectiveness as treasurers and tax collectors. I suggest that this disjunction between their self-perception and the actual demands of courtly service was a constant in the experiences of Jewish officials in medieval Iberia. The exercise of fiscal power on behalf of the state formed the material foundation upon which Jewish officials-cum-intellectuals could build and develop their refined cultural sensibilities. They were able to do so because both Muslim and Christian rulers preferred religious outsiders, of whom they demanded complete loyalty, to handle the delicate business of overseeing royal finances. 1

Jewish Officials in al-Andalus (Tenth and Eleventh Centuries)

In the words of Norman Stillman, the Jewish elite employed at caliphal and later taifa courts in Islamic al-Andalus developed “a conscious sense of its own collective identity and a well-defined group ethos.”9 Integral to this identity was the ideology of exceptionalism, rooted in the Sefardi elite’s claims to genealogical nobility and cultural superiority.10 A consummate Andalusi court Jew was someone whose position of authority within the state bureaucracy was predicated on personal and intellectual qualities. With his refined aesthetic sensibilities, courtly manners, and knowledge of secular arts and sciences, as well as Jewish law, this archetypical Jewish official would feel equally at home in the company of Muslim intellectuals steeped in adab, and rabbinic scholars immersed in the study of the Torah and the Talmud.11 He would also be lauded 8

For example, Norman Stillman, “The Emergence, Development and Historical Continuity of The Sephardi Courtier Class,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, series 3, vol. 6 (1993): 17–30. 9 Stillman, “Sephardi Courtier Class,” 18. 10 Ross Brann, Iberian Moorings: Al-Andalus, Sefarad, and the Tropes of Exceptionalism (Philadelphia, 2021), pp. 58–73. 11 Brann, Iberian Moorings, p. 8.

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for his public service, and ideally accorded an honorific title of nasi (“prince”) or nagid (“ruler”) in recognition of his purportedly noble descent and his political leadership within the Jewish community.12 Few Andalusi Jewish writers contributed more to the construction of this idealized image of a court Jew than the Córdoba-born scholar Abraham ibn Daud (c.1110–1180), who settled in Christian Toledo after fleeing al-Andalus because of the Almohad persecutions. Having received a brilliant education in the best traditions of the Judeo-Arabic adab, Ibn Daud had profound knowledge of both the Aristotelian philosophy and the Talmud.13 Therefore, he belonged to the same privileged class of Andalusi intellectuals as his model Jewish courtier, Samuel ibn Naghrela ha-Nagid, who had served as a kātib (scribe) and a wazīr (government minister) under the Zirids of Granada in the first half of the eleventh century. In Ibn Daud’s Sefer ha-Qabbalah (The Book of Tradition), written in Toledo around 1160, Samuel ha-Nagid is portrayed as a paragon of courtly virtues.14 Even though it is clear from Ibn Daud’s account that ha-Nagid’s scholarly achievements were made possible by his family’s wealth, Ibn Daud de-emphasises Samuel’s economic privilege, noting that “he maintained himself in very modest circumstances as a spice-merchant” despite the fact that he “was highly versed in Arabic literature and style and was, indeed, competent to serve in the king’s palace.”15 Once his talents were discovered, as Ibn Daud narrates, ha-Nagid was finally able to fulfil his destiny as a loyal servant to the amir, the head of Granada’s Jewish community (he was given the title “Nagid” in 1027), an expert religious scholar, a brilliant Hebrew poet, and a generous benefactor of Torah studies throughout the Jewish-Islamic world.16 According to Ibn Daud, ha-Nagid “died at a ripe old age after having earned four crowns: the crown of Torah, the crown of power, the crown of a Levite, and towering over them all, by dint of good deeds in each of these domains, the crown of a good name.”17 García-Sanjuán has recently questioned some long-held assumptions about the scope of ha-Nagid’s power in the taifa of Granada. Specifically, he points out that no Arabic sources corroborate Samuel’s claim, expressed in a number of his Hebrew poems, that the amir Bādīs ibn Ḥabbūs (r. 1038–1073) appointed 12 Brann, Iberian Moorings, pp. 59, 115. 13 José Fernández López, “Historia, escatología y teología política en el Sefer ha-Qabbalah,” Cuadernos Medievales 31 (2021): 50–51. 14 Stillman, “Sephardi Courtier Class,” 23. 15 Abraham ibn Daud, The Book of Tradition (Sefer ha-Qabbalah), ed. and trans. Gerson D. Cohen (Philadelphia, 1967), pp. 71–72. 16 Brann, Iberian Moorings, pp. 113–117. 17 Ibn Daud, The Book of Tradition, pp. 74–75.

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him a military commander and allowed him, a dhimmi, to lead Muslim troops into battle against Granada’s enemies.18 While there is no reason to doubt ha-Nagid’s scholarly achievements or his exceptionally high, for a Jew, political status in the kingdom—both of which are confirmed by Andalusi Muslim writers—Bādīs’s grandson,ʿ⁠Abd Allāh ibn Buluggīn (r. 1073–1090), offers a starkly different explanation of ha-Hagid’s path to power.19 In contrast to Ibn Daud, who attributes ha-Nagid’s meteoric rise to his intellectual merits and proficiency in the Arabic letters, Ibn Buluggīn claims that Samuel was a singularly talented politician who ingratiated himself first to Ḥabbūs ibn Māksan (r. 1019–1038) and then to Bādīs by proving his ability to collect large revenues and put them at the disposal of his masters. In his memoirs, the Tibyān, Ibn Buluggīn credits ha-Nagid’s loyalty to the amir and his financial acumen with securing him a place of honour among the wazīrs: Bādīs … employed Abū Ibrāhīm [i.e. Samuel] because of his utter lack of confidence in anyone else and the hostility of his kinsmen. Moreover, Abū Ibrāhīm was a Jewish dhimmi who would not lust after power. Nor was he an Andalusian against whom he needed to be on his guard lest he scheme with non-Berber Princes. Bādīs also needed money with which to placate his kinsmen and to maintain his royal position. He therefore simply had to have someone like Abū Ibrāhīm to secure for him the money which he needed to realise his ambitions.20 Neither Ibn Daud nor Ibn Buluggīn is a disinterested chronicler of ha-Nagid’s career: while the former extolls Samuel as an embodiment of the Andalusi Jewish elite’s exceptional virtues, the latter aims to shield his grandfather against the accusation of violating religious law by casting Bādīs’s placement of a dhimmi official in charge of the state finances as a purely pragmatic one: “… most of the subjects (raʿāyā) in Granada as well as the tax-collectors (ʿummāl) were only Jews.”21 The first half of Ibn Buluggīn’s claim—that Jews constituted a majority of Granada’s population—is likely an exaggeration, but his comment on the ethno-religious identity of tax-collectors merits further

18 Alejandro García-Sanjuán, “Jews in Government Functions in al-Andalus over the Ta‌ʾifa Period,” in Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean, eds. Clara Almagro Vidal, Jessica Tearney-Pearce, and Luke Yarbrough (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 251–253. 19 García-Sanjuán, “Jews in Government Functions,” pp. 249–250. 20 ʿ⁠Abd Allāh ibn Buluggīn, The Tibyān: Memoirs of ʿ⁠Abd Allāh ibn Buluggīn, Last Zirid Amīr of Granada, trans. Amin T. Tibi (Leiden, 1986), pp. 55–56. 21 The Tibyān, p. 56.

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examination.22 García-Sanjuán believes that “both of the Naghrelas, Samuel and his son Joseph, initially achieved political influence by being successful tax collectors.”23 In fact, it is conceivable that by the time the illustrious Naghrelas entered government service, the management of state finances had been a well-trodden path to power for several generations of Andalusi Jewish notables. Some evidence suggests as much. The first Jewish official who is known to have attained a prominent position in the Umayyad administration was Ḥasdai ibn Shaprūt, who served the caliphs ʿ⁠Abd al-Raḥmān III (r. 912–961) and al-Ḥakam II (r. 961–976). It is usually assumed that Ḥasdai first gained access to the caliphal court thanks to his redoubtable skills as a scholar and physician, but the reality may be more complicated. Ḥasdai was from a prosperous family and therefore an ideal candidate for a position in the management of royal revenues, where he would be expected to provide loans to the caliph in the event of any budget shortfall. It appears that he was first appointed to manage the department of customs, which was responsible for collecting customs duties from all the ships arriving in al-Andalus.24 It was this lucrative position that probably laid the groundwork for Ḥasdai’s better known accomplishments as a physician-courtier, diplomat, counselor to the caliph, patron of poets, and the political head (nasi) of the Andalusi Jewish community. Yet, Ḥasdai’s quotidian service to the caliphate is usually glossed over in scholarship, even as he is credited with single-handedly creating the ethos of Jewish elite culture that was to flourish in medieval al-Andalus and later, in Christian Spain.25 Not all Andalusi court Jews easily fit in the typology of cultured Jewish aristocrats. In Sefer ha-Qabbalah, Ibn Daud provides a detailed portrait of Jacob ibn Jau, who became a high-ranking official at the court of caliph Hishām II (976–1009) and his all-powerful hajib al-Manṣūr. Nowhere does Ibn Daud allude to Ibn Jau’s singular knowledge of secular sciences, Arabic letters, Jewish law, or courtly etiquette. Rather, he contends that Ibn Jau and his brother were able to get into the good graces of Hishām and al-Manṣūr thanks to their serendipitous discovery at the palace of two thousand gold pieces, which they promptly turned over to the caliph. Consequently, their silk business flourished under the royal patronage, and they augmented their success by showering the caliph and the hajib with gifts. As a result, al-Manṣūr gave Ibn Jau jurisdiction over “all the Jewish communities from Sijilmasa to the river Duero,” and empowered him to “exact from them any tax or payment to which they might be subject.” 22 The Tibyān, p. 206, no. 158. Jews were quite numerous in the taifa of Granada. See Brian Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (New York, 2018), p. 216. 23 García-Sanjuán, “Jews in Government Functions,” p. 251. 24 Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 162, p. 419, n. 13; Brann, Iberian Moorings, p. 59. 25 Stillman, “Sephardi Courtier Class,” 19. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Soon after the Jews of Córdoba certified his position as their nasi, Ibn Jau lost the hajib’s favour, having failed to squeeze as much revenue from the Jewish communities as al-Manṣūr had expected.26 It is likely that Ibn Jau was a more typical representative of the Andalusi courtly Jewish elite than the multi-talented intellectuals like Ibn Shaprūt and Samuel ibn Naghrela, who were exceptional figures even among their peers. The carefully constructed self-image of the cultural, linguistic, and genealogical superiority hid the prosaic reality of the upper-class Jews in al-Andalus serving at the mercy of Muslim rulers, whose primary goal in employing them was to raise revenues by way of religious outsiders with no pretensions to independent political power. That said, the Jewish officials’ mastery of adab, and their deep integration into the courtly society of al-Andalus undoubtedly helped their advancement to the highest positions available to them as dhimmis. The cultural prestige associated with these norms and traditions could also serve as a marker of an elite identity that legitimized the authority of prominent Jewish families within their communities. Their commitment to cultivating these courtly values did not diminish even after many of these officials, along with their families, left al-Andalus to escape persecutions or to pursue new opportunities in the Christian north, finding employment at the royal courts of León-Castile. 2

Jewish Officials at Castilian Royal Courts (Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries)

The earliest historical evidence of Jews serving the rulers of León-Castile comes from the reign of Alfonso VI (King of León from 1065, and Castile from 1072– 1109). One cannot know with any degree of certainty how Alfonso arrived at the idea of employing religious outsiders at his court. Certainly, there were no contemporary or recent precedents from Latin Europe for Alfonso to follow. The notion of appointing Jews to official state positions would go against a voluminous body of Christian prescriptive texts, which included statements by the Church Fathers, late imperial Roman legislation, and the decision of church councils.27 In 1081, pope Gregory VII specifically warned Alfonso 26 Ibn Daud, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, pp. 68–70. 27 Amnon Linder, “The Legal Status of the Jews in the Roman Empire,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, ed. Steven T. Katz, vol. 4 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 160–161; Steven Bowman, “Jews in Byzantium,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4, p. 1042; Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, 1999), pp. 29–30, 361. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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against appointing Jews to positions of authority over Christians, to no avail.28 Therefore, it is very likely that Alfonso was emulating the power structure of Andalusi royal courts, such as that of Toledo’s ruler al-Ma‌ʾmun, whose hospitality he was forced to accept during his brief exile from León in 1072. One of Alfonso’s right-hand men was Count Sisnando Davídiz, a Mozarab, who had previously served as a counsellor to king al-Muʿtaḍid of Seville, and who after switching sides was sent by Alfonso on frequent diplomatic missions to the taifas.29 Other evidence indicates that the employment of Jewish officials was part of Alfonso VI’s broader political program of building a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state modelled, in part, after the political systems in Islamic al-Andalus and the wider Mediterranean. Already in 1077, Alfonso began calling himself “emperor of all Spain” (imperator totius Hispaniae), and after the conquest of Toledo in 1085, his chancery sent letters, written in Arabic, to king al-Muʿtamid of Seville, referring to Alfonso as the “emperor of the two religions” (ʿal-imbraṭūr ḏhū-l-Millataynʾ), thereby claiming for him a dominion over all Muslims and Christians in Hispania.30 As Simon Barton has remarked, “[m]edieval Iberia was always a region of multiple frontiers,” that were “regularly criss-crossed by merchants, diplomats, transhumant shepherds, political exiles, and mercenaries  …”31 Upper-class Jewish immigrants were one such group of frontier-crossers, which became a conduit for the transmission of the Andalusi cultural and political traditions to the Christian north. Jewish officials attracted to the court of León-Castile by Alfonso’s rising political fortunes found themselves stepping into many of the same roles they had been accustomed to play in Islamic Spain. Unfortunately, not much extant information is available about the Jewish physicians, 28

Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 50; Fritz (Yitzhak) Baer, ed. Die Juden im christlichen Spanien. Erster Teil: Urkunden und Regesten, vol. 2: Kastilien, Inquisitionsakten (Berlin, 1936), p. 5. 29 Angus MacKay and Muhammad Benaboud, “Alfonso VI of León and Castile, ‘al-Imbraṭūr dhū-l-Millatayn’,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 59 (1979): 95–102, 100. 30 Andrés Gambra, Alfonso VI: Cancillería, curia e imperio, vol. 1: Estudio (León, 1997), pp. 672–675; MacKay and Benaboud, “Alfonso VI,” 97; MacKay and Benaboud, “Yet again Alfonso VI, ‘the Emperor, Lord of [the Adherents of ] the Two Faiths, the Most Excellent Ruler’,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1984): 171–181, 171 and 177; Barton, “Spain in the Eleventh Century,” pp. 168–172; Manuel González Jiménez, “La idea de imperio antes y después de Alfonso VI,” in Alfonso VI: Imperator Totius Orbis Hispanie, ed. Fernando Suárez and Andrés Gambra (Madrid, 2010), pp. 15–18; Wolfram Drews, “Imperial Rule in Medieval Spain: Christian and Islamic Contexts,” The Medieval History Journal 20, no. 2 (2017): 297–299. 31 Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, 2015), pp. 11–12.

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diplomats, and tribute collectors who are known to have served Alfonso VI.32 As in the case of the Christian Sisnando Davídiz, their knowledge of Arabic and the taifa courts must have made them a natural fit for diplomatic missions to al-Andalus, which in some instances were combined with the collection of annual parias (tributes from taifa states). Thus, around 1082, a Jewish emissary named Ibn Shālīb led a delegation of Christian knights to collect a yearly tribute from al-Muʿtamid of Seville. The Muslim king sent him the money, but Ibn Shālīb purportedly refused to accept it, demanding that his lord Alfonso be paid that year’s tribute “in pure gold,” and the following year be given “the whole wealth of the country.” Incensed, al-Muʿtamid allegedly had the Jew dragged out of his tent, brought to Seville, and crucified.33 Another prominent Jewish official at king Alfonso’s court was Joseph ibn Ferruziel (or Ferrizuel), also called Cidellus (Cidiello) in the Christian sources. The full scope of his responsibilities at the Castilian court is not known, although they clearly extended beyond his primary role, which was that of a physician.34 According to the thirteenth-century De Rebus Hispaniae by Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the Archbishop of Toledo, around 1108 Cidellus led unsuccessful negotiations between the nobles and the king regarding the marriage of Alfonso’s daughter, Urraca, to a powerful Castilian magnate.35 Two years later, on June 26, 1110, Cidellus was listed as one of the signatories on a charter of immunities given by the then-queen Urraca to Diego López.36 Cidellus seems to have enjoyed Alfonso’s confidence until the king’s death, and was rewarded for his loyal service with a house in the parish of St. Thomas in Toledo, as well as a vineyard near the same city.37 Ibn Daud briefly mentions Cidellus, but says nothing about the courtier’s intellectual accomplishments. Instead, he praises Ibn 32 Baer, A History of the Jews, vol. 1, pp. 50–51; Haim Beinart, “The Jews in Castile,” in Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim Beinart, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 21–22. 33 Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Maqqarī, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, trans. Pascual de Gayangos, vol. 2 (London, 1843), pp. 252–253. This seventeenth-century account is based on an eleventh-century Arabic source. See also Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla Under King Alfonso VI, 1065–1109 (Princeton, 1988), p. 163; Norman Roth, “Again Alfonso VI, ʿImbarātūr dhu’l-Millataynʾ, and Some New Data,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1984): 165–169, 166. 34 Baer, A History of the Jews, vol. 1, pp. 50–51. 35 Reilly, Alfonso VI, p. 356. 36 Luciano Serrano, Cartulario de San Millán de la Cogolla (Madrid, 1930), p. 298, no. 296; Baer, A History of the Jews, vol. 1, p. 387, no. 20. 37 In 1145, king Alfonso VII granted some properties to the Cathedral Chapter of Toledo, including “hereditates domus que fuerunt Cidelli, iudei regis Adefonsi, avi mei, et sunt in collatione sancti Thome in Toleto inter domum Vitalis iudei et domum Avi Beniamin. … Dono etiam vobis vineas que fuerunt predicti iudei Cidelli. …” Baer, Die Juden 2, p. 14., no. 29.

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Ferruziel for using his position as a nasi—probably confirmed by the king—to persecute the Karaites and drive them “out of all the strongholds of Castile except for one, which he granted them, since he did not want to put them to death …”38 Much like the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus before them, Alfonso VI and his successors viewed Jewish court officials as pliable instruments of royal power who could be entrusted with delicate tasks that required discretion and absolute loyalty to the monarch. Overseeing royal finances was therefore a job for which court Jews were especially well-suited, particularly if they possessed sufficient personal wealth to help underwrite the monarchy’s massive military spendings. The fiscal aspect of the upper-class Jews’ service to the Crown came to the fore during the reign of Alfonso VI’s grandson, Alfonso VII (r. 1126–1157), who had himself crowned as emperor in 1135 at the Cathedral of Santa María in the royal city of León.39 Alfonso VII was apparently the first king of Castile to name a Jewish official, Judah ibn Ezra, as the royal treasurer, or almojarife.40 Consequently, it became a deeply entrenched tradition, “a custom in the houses of the kings of Castile for them to have Jews as almojarifes,” according to the fourteenth-century chronicle quoted at the beginning of this chapter.41 Alfonso may have also initiated the tradition of rewarding royal almojarifes for their service to the monarchy with hereditary estates, or donadíos, as they were known in Castilian documentation. This particular estate, located in the village of Azaña near Ibn Ezra’s hometown of Toledo, was given to the almojarife, his children, and his descendants “in perpetuity,” with a stipulation that they could dispose of the property in any way they wished, not having to do any service for it to anyone.42 Such royal grants were normally reserved for the high nobility and important ecclesiastical institutions.43 38 39

Ibn Daud, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, p. 95. Maurilio Pérez González, ed., Crónica del Emperador Alfonso VII: Introducción, tradución, notas e índices (León, 1997), pp. 84–87; Manuel Recuero Astray, Alfonso VII, Emperador: el imperio Hispanico en el siglo XII (León, 1979), pp. 72–73; B. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla Under King Alfonso VII, 1126–1157 (Philadelphia, 1998), p. 138. 40 The appointment is documented in Christian sources: a charter of king Sancho III of Castile (1157–1158) grants to “almuxarif Boniuda nomine et filiis vestris et omni generationi vestre de quinque iugadis de terra” in the village of Azaña near Toledo, in exchange for another property given to the Order of Calatrava. Baer, Die Juden 2, pp. 16–17. 41 Gran Cronica de Alfonso XI, p. 376. 42 The estate in the village of Azaña is granted to Ibn Ezra, “ut habeatis eas et possideatis pro hereditate deinceps in perpetuum. Ita inquam dono et concedo eas vobis et filiis vestris et omni successioni vestre, ut faciatis de eis quidquid volueritis, vendendo, donando vel concambiando cuicumque vobis placuerit libere ac quiete … nec proinde aliquot servicium alicui faciatis.” Baer, Die Juden 2, pp. 16–17. 43 For the definition of a donadío, see Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, Historia de Sevilla II: La ciudad medieval (1248–1492), 3rd ed. (Seville, 1989), p. 22. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Ibn Ezra occupies a place of honour in Ibn Daud’s Sefer ha-Qabbalah, where he is described as “our master and rabbi.” Like Ibn Daud himself, the Ibn Ezras were exiles from al-Andalus who had found a new home in Christian Toledo. Judah ibn Ezra belonged to an elite Jewish family that had lived in Muslim Granada for generations: his uncle, Moses ibn Ezra, was one of the most celebrated Andalusi poets, who along with his three brothers fled the Almoravid persecutions in the late eleventh century.44 Ibn Daud must have known Judah Ibn Ezra personally, but the figure that appears on the pages of Sefer ha-Qabbalah is devoid of any individual characteristics. Instead, for Ibn Daud, Ibn Ezra is yet another personification of the type of a powerful Jewish court official whose political legitimacy is confirmed by an unbroken chain of inherited authority that stretches from ancient Israel through Granada to Christian Toledo: [R. Judah the Nasi b. Ezra’s] forefathers had been among the leaders of Granada, holders of high office and men of influence in every generation [as far back as] the reign of Badis b. Ḥabbus, the king of the Berbers, and that of the latter’s father, King Ḥabbus. There is a tradition current among the members of the community of Granada that they are descended from the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the holy city, from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, not from [the inhabitants of] the villages or the unwalled towns.45 Just like his predecessors who had served gentile rulers, Ibn Daud maintains, Judah Ibn Ezra commanded great respect among the nobility (he “lorded it over a company of spearmen”), and used his sway over the king to help his coreligionists (“he supervised the passage of [Jewish] refugees” from al-Andalus to Toledo) and to suppress “heretics,” that is, Karaites. Only one of Ibn Daud’s rather clichéd claims about Ibn Ezra’s great powers finds corroboration in Christian sources: the assertion that the king appointed Ibn Ezra as almojarife. According to Sefer ha-Qabbalah, Alfonso VII made the Jewish administrator “lord of all his household and ruler over all his possessions,” a description that is consistent with the duties of an almojarife. However, Ibn Daud’s ambiguously-worded report that Ibn Ezra “was appointed over Calatrava,” a frontier castle captured by Alfonso VII from the Almoravids in 1147, must not be taken to mean that the king put the Jewish official in charge of the fortress’s military defences. Rather,

44 45

On Moses Ibn Ezra, see Brann, Iberian Moorings, pp. 132–138; Ángeles Navarro Piero, “Mosé ibn ʿEzrá: El poema de los dos exilios,” Sefarad 61, no. 2 (2001): 381–393. Ibn Daud, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, p. 97. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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as Baer has argued, Ibn Ezra’s role was probably limited to supplying provisions to Christian troops fighting against Muslims on the frontier.46 By the end of the twelfth century, therefore, the Castilian monarchy established several practices that would continue shaping the social and political status of court Jews for the next century and a half, all of them ultimately stemming from the Castilian Crown’s urgent need for reliable sources of revenue. The Jews ascending to the highest levels of power at court would be employed as treasurers and tax collectors (almojarifes), and granted large estates to enable the accumulation of intergenerational wealth in a select number of Jewish families that functioned as a kind of royal “banks” and were expected to provide the king with money—both through tax farming and direct loans to members of the royal family. The case in point is Joseph ben Meir ibn Shoshan, also known as Yusuf Abenxuxen or Avomar (Abu Omar) Avenfussen, the chief almojarife of king Alfonso VIII (r. 1158–1214), who founded a whole dynasty of Toledo-based tax collectors that would remain active in the management of royal finances through the end of the thirteenth century.47 The foundations for the family’s long-term success were laid in 1186, when Alfonso VIII granted his “beloved and faithful” (dilecto et fideli) almojarife, Ibn Shoshan, and his “sons and daughters” and their heirs, in perpetuity, a hereditary estate in the village of Magán (near Toledo), adding a vineyard the following year.48 If the language of the charter hints at a close personal relationship between the king and his almojarife, it also suggests that Alfonso expected a great deal from his chief tax farmer. The Castilian king spent his entire reign fighting against the Almohads, and his military expenditures were significant.49 With the taxes from the kingdom’s Jewish communities by this time constituting one of the Castilian Crown’s most important sources of revenue, it is not surprising that 46

Ibn Daud, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, pp. 97–99; Baer, Die Juden 2, p. 17, and A History of the Jews, vol. 1, p. 77. Calatrava was initially defended by the Knights Templar, but in 1158 it was ceded to Ramón, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Fitiero, and to his successors. The Order of Calatrava was formally recognised by the papacy in 1164. See O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca NY, 1975), p. 238. 47 José Manuel Nieto Soria, “Los judíos de Toledo en sus relaciones financieras con la monarquia y la iglesia (1252–1312),” Part 1, Sefarad 41 (1981): 305–307. 48 “Dono itaque vobis et concedo hereditatem in Magan, quantam tria iuga bovum ad anni vicem suficienter possint colere et arare, cum domibus, ingresibus et egresibus, prabus, pascuis et cum omnibus directuris et pertinenciis suis iure hereditario vobis habendam et inrevocabiliter posidendam ad faciendum de ea quidquid vobis placuit, dando, vendendo, concanbiando, inpignorando vel quidlibet aliud faciendo, et habeatis eam libere et absoluere, ut nullam decimam seu forum nec servicium nec facendam per predicta hereditate faciatis.” Baer, Die Juden 2, pp. 19–21. 49 O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain, p. 278.

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Alfonso VIII sought to formalize the arrangement by stating, in the fuero given to the newly-conquered town of Cuenca (1190s), that “the Jews are servi of the king and they are entrusted to his treasury ( fisco).”50 Ibn Shoshan, along with the rest of the Castilian Jewry, now officially belonged to the royal fisc, and the king could all the more easily press him into providing the Crown with large loans whenever the circumstances required it. At the time Alfonso VIII dictated his will, in 1204, he owed Ibn Shoshan 12,000 maravedís—out of the original loan of 18,000 maravedís that the almojarife had given the king in excess of the amount that he collected in the royal rents of Toledo.51 Even as the emphasis on the fiscal functions of court Jews became more pronounced in Castile, upper-class Jews in Toledo persevered in their commitment to the intellectual values of adab. The connection to the Islamic Andalusi culture enhanced their elite status and heightened a sense of exceptionalism that had first emerged among the courtly Jews of al-Andalus and was inherited by many of their descendants in Christian Castile.52 The study of rationalistic philosophy and the sciences flourished in the elite Jewish circles, despite the fact that Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah met a cool reception among the spiritual leaders of the Toledan community.53 Arabic continued to be a spoken language among the Jews of Toledo and, starting in the thirteenth century, of Andalusia for generations after these territories fell under Christian rule.54 Yet, one should not assume that the majority of Jewish administrators serving the Castilian court lived up to the idealized image of a courtier-intellectual that Ibn Daud had created earlier in the century. Joseph ibn Shoshan may have 50 “In calumpnia iudei, iudeus nullam habet partem, tota enim regis est. Nam iudei serui sunt regis et fisco deputati.” D. Rafael de Ureña y Smenjaud, ed., El fuero de Cuenca: formas primitiva y sistemática: texto Latino, texto Castellano y adaptación del fuero de Iznatoraf. Facsimile reproduction of the first edition (1936) (Cuenca, 2003), pp. 633–634. Translated by James Powers as The Code of Cuenca: Municipal Law on the Twelfth-Century Castilian Frontier (Philadelphia, 2000), p. 165. 51 “Sciendum est etiam, quod ego tenebar persolvere Avomar, almoxarife meo, ultra illud quod de certis redditibus meis quos de me tenebat michi dare tenebatur, decem et octo milia morabetinorum quos michi dedit, et ex quibus meam cartam bullatam penes se habet; sed quoniam sex milia morabetinorum iam ei persolvi, mando quod regina uxor mea, meusque filius dominus F. sine aliqua contradictione duodecum milia morabetinorum de redditibus Toleti sibi persolvant, unoquoque anno sibi tribuendo in eisdem redditibus Toleti tria milia morabetinorum.” Baer, Die Juden 2, p. 21. 52 See Esperanza Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes: Al-Andalus from the Tenth to Twelfth Century (London, 2008); Brann, Iberian Moorings. 53 Bernard Septimus, Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: The Career and Controversies of Ramah (Cambridge, MA., 1982), pp. 48, 62. 54 Assis, “The Judeo-Arabic Tradition in Christian Spain,” in The Jews of Medieval Islam, ed. David Frank (Leiden, 1995), pp. 111–124, 116.

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sponsored the construction of the Almohad-style “Santa María la Blanca” congregational synagogue in Toledo, and Hebrew poems praised him for supporting his coreligionists’ welfare, but there is no extant evidence of his intellectual accomplishments and values.55 It was another of Alfonso VIII’s almojarifes, Abraham ibn al-Fakhar, who was remembered in the Arabic sources for his profound knowledge of Islamic culture. Sent by Alfonso on diplomatic missions to Marrakech because of his outstanding linguistic skills, Ibn al-Fakhar impressed his hosts at the Almohad court by composing witty verses in Arabic that evoked the Qurʾan.56 Even if Ibn Shoshan was no match for Ibn al-Fakhar in this regard, it is important to note that both men’s skills were of great value to the Castilian Crown, and both served the king as tax collectors. 3

Jewish Officials at the Courts of Alfonso X and Alfonso XI (Thirteenth to Early Fourteenth Centuries)

As the Castilian territorial expansion slowed down after the conquests of Córdoba and Seville by king Fernando III (r. 1217–1252), and the kingdom was beset by recurring political and economic crises, the monetization of the Jewish officials’ talents by the Castilian Crown became even more pronounced, while the kings placed an ever-growing emphasis on the personal loyalty of their almojarifes. The reign of Alfonso X el Sabio (r. 1252–1284) exposed the tension between the Wise King’s personal intellectual interests and his political goals, with the church and his Christian subjects at the cortes now exerting a steady pressure on the monarchy to dismiss Jewish administrators from royal service. On the one hand, Arabic-speaking Jewish intellectuals educated in the sciences were instrumental in Alfonso’s project of turning his court in Toledo into a centre of a cultural Renaissance.57 He famously employed a group of Jewish scholars to produce translations of scientific treatises from Arabic into Castilian and Latin.58 One of his court Jews, the poet Todros ben Judah Halevi 55 Jerrilynn D. Dodds, “Mudejar Tradition and the Synagogues of Medieval Spain: Cultural Identity and Cultural Hegemony,” in Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, eds. Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds (New York, 1992), pp. 116–117. 56 Jonathan Decter, “Before Caliphs and Kings: Jewish Courtiers in Medieval Iberia,” in The Jew in Medieval Iberia, 1100–1500, ed. Jonathan Ray (Boston, 2012), pp. 12–19. 57 H. Salvador Martínez, La Convivencia en la España del siglo XIII: Perspectivas alfonsíes (Madrid, 2006), pp. 15–16; Simon Doubleday, The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance (New York, 2015). 58 Thomas F. Glick, “Science in Medieval Spain: The Jewish Contribution in the Context of Convivencia,” in Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, eds. Vivian

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Abulafia, whose main job, it is worth noting, was that of a tax collector, wrote at least two panegyrics in Hebrew for the Castilian ruler. One of the poems, following a form common in Arabic panegyrics, celebrated service to the king, and drew a parallel between appearing at Alfonso’s court and going on a religious pilgrimage.59 Alfonso also continued the practice of endowing Jewish tax-farming families with landed estates to ensure their continued prosperity. As a result of Fernando III’s conquests, numerous new estates in Andalusia came into the possession of the Castilian Crown. The Repartimiento (land register) of Seville lists numerous Jewish royal officials, many of them from Toledo, who were the beneficiaries of land grants in Seville’s fertile agricultural district.60 For example, Çulema ibn Sadoq, who had served Fernando III and Alfonso X as an almojarife mayor and an ambassador, received 20 aranzadas (about 20 acres) of vineyard land and a sizable estate of 10 yugadas (about 800 acres).61 A comparable grant was given to Juçaf Barchilon, who became the owner of 200 aranzadas (about 200 acres) and 6 yugadas (about 480 acres) of land, along with “the smallest” barrio. Were it not for their religious identity, the size of their properties would have been enough to place these two court Jews in the social class of titled nobles.62 On the other hand, his continuing reliance on Jewish officialdom clashed with Alfonso’s most cherished goal: enforcing his claim to the title of the Holy Roman emperor, and, by extension, inheriting the mantle of the ancient Roman emperors. It was for the purpose of replacing Castile’s diverse legal norms with a single code of law suitable for an empire, that Alfonso employed lawyers trained in Canon and Roman Law to help him write Las Siete Partidas, in a deliberate imitation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis compiled in the sixth century by Mann, Thomas Glick, and Jerrilynn Dodds (New York, 1992), pp. 90–91, 102; Robert I. Burns, “Stupor Mundi: Alfonso X of Castile, the Learned,” in Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance, ed. Burns (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 1–13, 8–9. 59 Decter, Dominion Built on Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy Among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean (Philadelphia, 2018), pp. 267–270. 60 On repartimientos see Thomas F. Glick, “Reading the Repartimientos: Modeling Settlement in the Wake of Conquest,” in Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Interaction and Cultural Change, eds. Mark D. Meyerson and Edward D. English (Notre Dame, 2000), pp. 20–39. 61 Due to variations in measurements throughout medieval Iberia, these are very rough estimates. 62 Julio González, Repartimiento de Sevilla: studio y edición preparada, vols. 1 and 2 (Madrid, 1951), 1: pp. 279–281; 2: pp. 71, 118, 233. Josefa María Mendoza Abreu, “Aproximación al estudio de la onomástica de los judíos de Sevilla en la Baja Edad Media,” in Hommage à Haïm Vidal Sephiha, eds. Winfried Busse and Maria-Christine Varol-Bornes (Bern, 1996), pp. 175–193, 178.

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the jurists of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I.63 As mentioned above, the late Roman legal tradition strictly prohibited appointing Jews to public offices, and numerous medieval church councils reiterated the ban, including Lateran IV (1215), of which one edict stated that doing so created a “pretext” for Jews “to vent their wrath against the Christians.”64 When the writers of the Partidas included a similarly-worded ban on Jewish officials, they explicitly linked it to the example set by Alfonso X’s Roman imperial predecessors: The emperors, who in former times were lords of all the world, considered it fitting and right that, on account of the treason which [Jews] committed in killing their lord, they should lose all said honors and privileges, so that no Jew could ever afterwards hold an honorable position, or a public office by means of which he might, in any way, oppress a Christian.65 Once Alfonso X’s fortunes declined and his imperial dreams were quashed by the election of Rudolf of Habsburg in 1273, his political opponents eagerly seized on the king’s supposed favouritism of Jews to argue for his removal from power. In 1279, a group of Castilian and Leonese prelates who were supporting Alfonso’s rebellious son, Sancho, complained to Pope Nicholas III that among other things, the king was placing Jews in positions of authority over Christians.66 The subsequent execution of the royal tax collector, Çag de la Maleha (Isaac ibn Sadoq—Çulema ibn Sadoq’s son) for misappropriating the money intended for the siege of Algeciras, and the holding of the kingdom’s Jews for ransom until they agreed to pay 12,000 maravedís a day for a year, may have been intended to send a message that Alfonso was not beholden to his Jewish officials and financiers.67 63 See Antonio García y García, “En torno al derecho Romano en la España medieval,” in Estudios en homenaje a don Claudio Sanchez Albornoz en sus 90 años, vol. 3 (Buenos Aires, 1985), pp. 59–71; O’Callaghan, Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age: Law and Justice in Thirteenth-Century Castile (Ithaca NY, and London, 2019), pp. 1–4. 64 Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century (New York, 1966), p. 311. 65 Siete Partidas 7.24.3 in Las Siete Partidas, ed. Robert I. Burns, trans. Samuel Parson Scott, vol. 5 (Philadelphia, 2001), p. 1434. 66 Peter Linehan, “The Spanish Church Revisited: The Episcopal Gravamina of 1279,” in Authority and Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government Presented to Walter Ullman on His Seventieth Birthday, eds. Brian Tierney and Peter Linehan (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 135–136, 146. 67 Manuel González Jiménez and Isabel Montes Romero-Camacho, “Financieros judíos en la primera época de la repoblación del reino de Sevilla: La crisis del realengo en el Concejo de Niebla (1262–1368),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 29 (1999): 367–407, 397; Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians, pp. 163, 193.

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Despite the ever-present possibility that keeping Jews in their service would fuel anti-royal sentiments and even inspire revolt, Castilian kings continued to insist on their right to appoint Jewish officials. They seemed to have made a political calculation that to buckle under the pressure from the nobility and the townsmen would mean giving up an important royal prerogative that constituted one of the most stable bases of their power. In justifying their policy, they often evoked the ancient customs and traditions followed by their royal predecessors. Alfonso X’s great-grandson, Alfonso XI, whose appointment of Yuçaf de Écija as his almojarife opens this chapter, is a perfect example of a strong Castilian monarch who had to walk a thin line between guarding his prerogatives and alienating his supporters among the nobility and urban elites.68 While Alfonso XI was not averse to anti-Jewish measures, as evidenced by his condemnation of the “very grave sin” of usury at the cortes in Alcalá de Henares in 1348, he depended on Jewish almojarifes and tax collectors to help finance his military campaigns against the Marinid rulers of Morocco and their Granadan allies, rewarding their services with privileges and promising “to support and protect [the Jews], like the kings our predecessors had done.”69 As we have seen, Yuçaf arrived at the royal court as a result of personal patronage, having first earned the trust of Infante Felipe, the king’s uncle. He was a member of the Seville-based Ibn Shabat (Abenxabat) clan, for which tax farming was a family occupation: his relative, Judah Abenxabat, served as an almojarife of Seville.70 By that point Yuçaf must have possessed extensive properties in the Seville region, for otherwise he would not have been able to farm taxes and lend money to the king and the royal family. Thanks to a fortuitous survival of a notarial document from 1332, written in Hebrew and translated into Castilian by a converso in 1393, we get a glimpse of Yuçaf’s possessions in Écija. The document mentions an unspecified number of houses and an orchard with two large houses (palacios) and a warehouse (almasen). It refers to Yuçaf as a “rabbi,” and reveals that he built a synagogue in Seville and created an endowment to maintain a yeshiva in Écija.71 However, unlike his rival

68

Carlos Estepa, “The Strengthening of Royal Power in Castile Under Alfonso XI,” in Building Legitimacy: Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimacy in Medieval Societies, eds. Isabel Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy, and Julio Escalona (Leiden, 2004), pp. 211–213. 69 Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians, pp. 170, 245; González Jiménez and Montes RomeroCamacho, “Financieros judíos,” 395–397. 70 Archivo Catedral de Sevilla, Fondo Capitular, leg. 101, #8/3–4 and #8/1–2; Documentos y notarios de Sevilla en el siglo XIV (1301–1350), eds. Pilar Ostos and María Luisa Pardo (Seville, 2003), pp. 212–216. 71 Baer, Die Juden 2, pp. 153–154.

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at Alfonso XI’s court, Samuel ibn Wakar, who was a physician and astronomer, Yuçaf is not known to have been a scholar himself.72 When Yuçaf was first named royal almojarife, he became one of the king’s most trusted courtiers, farming royal taxes and serving on the king’s privy council alongside two Christian advisors. He accompanied the king’s sister, Leonor, to Valladolid in 1328, and even organized the musical entertainment at her wedding to king Alfonso IV of Aragon, which took place in 1329 in Tarazona.73 But Yuçaf entered royal service during a trying time for Jewish notables who rose to positions of great influence in Castile. The kings’ growing reliance on trusted counsellors (privados) to administer the kingdom drew accusations of corruption and immorality.74 Jewish administrators like Yuçaf were openly accused of being particularly unscrupulous and greedy. At the cortes of 1329 in Madrid, town representatives renewed their demands that no Jews or Muslims be allowed to hold positions of power at the royal court.75 According to the Great Chronicle, upon hearing numerous complaints at the cortes about Yuçaf’s handling of the kingdom’s financial affairs and after conducting an investigation, king Alfonso XI “took away from him the office of the almojarifazgo, and henceforward he was no longer on his Council; and the king ordered that from that point and on Christians and not Jews would collect his taxes, and that [these officials] would be called treasurers, not almojarifes.”76 Around 1336, Yuçaf lost the king’s favour, was dismissed from service, and died in prison. The historical work Shevet Yehudah (The Scepter of Judah), written in the early sixteenth century by an exile from Spain, Solomon ibn Verga, claims that a Christian courtier, Gonzalo Martínez de Oviedo, hatched a plan to add 8 million maravedís to the royal income by seizing the money and possessions of the

72

Ibn Wakar belonged to one of the most influential Castilian Jewish dynasties. Circa 1320, Yehudah Ibn Waqar was a physician and confidant of Juan Manuel, as well as a courtappointed rabbi. See Ray, The Sephardic Frontier, pp. 120–123; Baer, A History of the Jews, vol. 1, p. 322. 73 Gran Crónica, vol. 1, pp. 417, 441; Baer, A History of the Jews, vol. 1, pp. 325–326; Ballesteros, “Don Juçaf de Ecija,” 258. 74 David Nirenberg, “Deviant politics and Jewish love: Alfonso VIII and the Jewess of Toledo,” Jewish History 21 (2007): 15–41, 27–31. 75 Cortes, vol. 1, pp. 415–416. 76 “E por esto el rrey tirole el ofiçio del almoxarifazgo, e de alli a/delante non fue en el su Consejo; e desde entonçes / mando el rrey que rrecaudasen christianos las sus rrentas e non judios, e estos que no vuiesen nonbres almoxarifes, mas que les dixesen tesoreros.” Gran Crónica, vol. 1, pp. 472–473. Antonio Ballesteros believes that Yuçaf’s downfall did not happen until later. It is indisputable that the Jewish courtier was still mentioned in the chancery’s documents as an almojarife in 1330. Ballesteros, “Don Juçaf de Ecija,” 274; Baer, A History of the Jews, vol. 1, pp. 326–327. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Castilian Jews and expelling them from the kingdom.77 Only the courtier’s own downfall, supposedly engineered by his archenemy, the king’s mistress Leonor de Guzmán, led Alfonso to revoke his decree on the Jews’ expulsion. The king honoured Yuçaf posthumously and released his family from all claims.78 Ibn Verga’s account is not very reliable, but there is a real possibility that the notion of expelling the Jews was discussed at the Castilian court. Alfonso XI seems to have alluded to these discussions when at the cortes of Alcalá de Henares in 1348 he declared that the Jews would be allowed to stay in his kingdom until the prophecies were fulfilled and the Jews converted to the true faith.79 The Jews’ sojourn in Castile would turn out to be much shorter, ending only a century and a half later with the Edict of Expulsion. But until then, Jewish officials would continue collecting taxes and managing royal finances, carrying on the tradition that by that time had persisted in Iberia for over five hundred years. Despite the vehement protests from the towns and the nobility, their loyal service was not something that the Castilian monarchy was ready to relinquish during the late Middle Ages, when the kingdom lurched from one political crisis to another. One of the last court Jews to serve the Catholic monarchs was Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), a descendant of a tax-farming Sevillian family that rose to prominence in the early fourteenth century.80 Born in Portugal, Abravanel was an intellectual and a grandee whom Ibn Daud would surely have recognised as an embodiment of virtues typical of Andalusi Jewish elites.81 Yet it was Abravanel’s wealth and financial expertise that cushioned his fall when the king of Portugal accused him of treason, and he had to flee the kingdom and seek protection at the Castilian court. Once there, he found favour with the Catholic monarchs by farming taxes and helping finance their campaign against Granada.82 Just as their predecessors had done for half a millennium, the rulers welcomed this affluent Jewish administrator because he could help raise revenues and boost the state’s financial health—except that in 1492 these considerations were not enough to save Abravanel from joining 77 78 79 80

81 82

On the historicity of Shevet Yehudah, see Jeremy Cohen, A Historian in Exile: Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, and the Jewish-Christian Encounter (Philadelphia, 2017), pp. 1–9. Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, ch. 10. I use Francisco Cantera Burgos’s Spanish translation: Chébet Jehuda (La Vara de Judá) (Granada, 1927), pp. 101–107; Baer, A History of the Jews, vol. 1, pp. 355–356. Cortes, vol. 1, p. 533; Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians, p. 245. Judah Abravanel served king Fernando IV as the almojarife of Seville, lent money to Infante Pedro (Alfonso XI’s uncle), then underwrote loans to finance Alfonso XI’s siege of Algeciras. Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, vol. 1, p. 309; González Jiménez and Montes Romero-Camacho, “Financieros judíos,” 380. Decter, “Before Caliphs and Kings,” pp. 22–23. Decter, “Before Caliphs and Kings,” p. 25. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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thousands of other Jewish exiles forced to leave Sefarad and seek refuge in foreign lands. Acknowledgements Some of the research and writing for this article was done while I was a Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where a group of scholars gathered during the 2018–2019 academic year to conduct research around the theme “Sephardic Identities, Medieval and Early Modern.” I would like to thank the Institute’s staff for their hospitality and generosity, and the Fellows for their companionship, wisdom, and valuable feedback on my writing. Bibliography

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Alfonso X. Las Siete Partidas, trans. Samuel Parsons Scott, ed. Robert I. Burns, vol. 5. Philadelphia, 2001. Baer, Fritz (Yitzhak). Die Juden im christlichen Spanien. Erster Teil: Urkunden und Regesten. Vol. 2: Kastilien, Inquisitionsakten. Berlin, 1936. Cartulario de San Millán de la Cogolla, ed. Luciano Serrano. Madrid, 1930. Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla, ed. La Real Academia de la Historia, Vol. 1. Madrid, 1861. Crónica del Emperador Alfonso VII: Introducción, tradución, notas e índices, ed. Maurialio Pérez González. León, 1997. El fuero de Cuenca: formas primitiva y sistemática: texto Latino, texto Castellano y adaptación del fuero de Iznatoraf, ed. D. Rafael de Ureña y Smenjaud. Facsimile reproduction of the first edition, 1936. Cuenca, 2003. González, Julio. Repartimiento de Sevilla: studio y edición preparada. Vols. 1 and 2. Madrid, 1951. Gran Crónica de Alfonso XI, ed. Diego Catalán. Vol. 1. Madrid, 1977. Grayzel, Solomon. The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century. New York, 1966. Ibn Buluggīn. ʿAbd Allāh, The Tibyān: Memoirs of ʿAbd Allāh ibn Buluggīn, Last Zirid Amīr of Granada, trans. Amin T. Tibi. Leiden, 1986. Ibn Daud, Abraham. The Book of Tradition (Sefer ha-Qabbalah), ed. and trans. Gerson D. Cohen. Philadelphia, 1967. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Ibn Muḥammad al-Maqqarī, Aḥmad. The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, trans. Pascual de Gayangos. Vol. 2. London, 1843. Ibn Verga, Solomon. Chébet Jehuda (La Vara de Judá), trans. Francisco Cantera Burgos. Granada, 1927. Ostos, Pilar and María Luisa Pardo, eds. Documentos y notarios de Sevilla en el siglo XIV (1301–1350). Seville, 2003. The Code of Cuenca: Municipal Law on the Twelfth-Century Castilian Frontier, trans. James Powers. Philadelphia, 2000.



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Alfonso, Esperanza. Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes: Al-Andalus From the Tenth to Twelfth Century. London, 2008. Ashtor, Eliyahu. The Jews of Moslem Spain. Vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1992. Assis, Yom Tov. The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213–1327. London and Portland, 1997. Assis, Yom Tov. “The Judeo-Arabic Tradition in Christian Spain.” In The Jews of Medieval Islam, ed. David Frank. Leiden, 1995, pp. 111–124. Baer, Yitzhak. A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. Vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1992. Ballesteros, Antonio. “Don Juçaf de Ecija.” Sefarad 2 (1946): 243–287. Barton, Simon. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia. Philadelphia, 2015. Barton, Simon. “Spain in the Eleventh Century.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, ed. David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith. Vol. IV, part 2. Cambridge, 2004, pp. 154–190. Beinart, Haim. “The Jews in Castile.” In Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim Beinart. Vol. 1. Jerusalem, 1992, pp. 11–43. Bowman, Steven. “Jews in Byzantium.” In The Cambridge History of Judaism, ed. Steven T. Katz. Vol. 4. Cambridge, 2006, pp. 1035–1052. Brann, Ross. Iberian Moorings: Al-Andalus, Sefarad, and the Tropes of Exceptionalism. Philadelphia, 2021. Burns, Robert I. “Stupor Mundi: Alfonso X of Castile, the Learned.” In Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance, ed. Burns. Philadelphia, 1990, pp. 1–13. Catlos, Brian. Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain. New York, 2018. Cohen, Jeremy. A Historian in Exile: Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, and the Jewish-Christian Encounter. Philadelphia, 2017. Cohen, Jeremy. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity. Berkeley, 1999. Cohen, Mark R. Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton, 2008. Decter, Jonathan. “Before Caliphs and Kings: Jewish Courtiers in Medieval Iberia.” In The Jew in Medieval Iberia, 1100–1500, ed. Jonathan Ray. Boston, 2012, pp. 1–32. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Decter, Jonathan. Dominion Built on Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy Among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean. Philadelphia, 2018. Doubleday, Simon. The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance. New York, 2015. Drews, Wolfram. “Imperial Rule in Medieval Spain: Christian and Islamic Contexts.” The Medieval History Journal 20, no. 2 (2017): 288–318. Estepa, Carlos. “The Strengthening of Royal Power in Castile Under Alfonso XI.” In Building Legitimacy: Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimacy in Medieval Societies, eds. Isabel Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy, and Julio Escalona. Leiden, 2004, pp. 179–222. Fernández López, José. “Historia, escatología y teología política en el Sefer haQabbalah.” Cuadernos Medievales 31 (2021): 49–73. Gambra, Andrés. Alfonso VI: Cancillería, curia e imperio. Vol. 1. León, 1997. García y García, Antonio. “En torno al derecho Romano en la España medieval.” Estudios en homenaje a don Claudio Sanchez Albornoz en sus 90 años. Vol. 3. Buenos Aires, 1985, pp. 59–72. García-Sanjuán, Alejandro. “Jews in Government Functions in al-Andalus over the Ta‌ʾifa Period.” In Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean, eds. Clara Almagro Vidal, Jessica Tearney-Pearce, and Luke Yarbrough. Turnhout, 2020, pp. 249–268. Glick, Thomas F. “Reading the Repartimientos: Modeling Settlement in the Wake of Conquest.” In Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Interaction and Cultural Change, eds. Mark D. Meyerson and Edward D. English. Notre Dame, 2000, pp. 20–39. Glick, Thomas F. “Science in Medieval Spain: The Jewish Contribution in the Context of Convivencia.” In Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, eds. Vivian Mann, Thomas Glick, and Jerrilynn Dodds. New York, 1992, pp. 83–111. González Jiménez, Manuel. “La idea de imperio antes y después de Alfonso VI.” In Alfonso VI: Imperator Totius Orbis Hispanie, eds. Fernando Suárez and Andrés Gambra. Madrid, 2010, pp. 11–29. González Jiménez, Manuel, and Isabel Montes Romero-Camacho. “Financieros judíos en la primera época de la repoblación del reino de Sevilla: La crisis del realengo en el Concejo de Niebla (1262–1368).” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 29 (1999): 367–407. Ladero Quesada, Miguel Ángel. Historia de Sevilla II: La ciudad medieval (1248–1492), 3rd ed. Seville, 1989. Linder, Amnon. “The Legal Status of the Jews in the Roman Empire.” In The Cambridge History of Judaism, ed. Steven T. Katz. Vol. 4. Cambridge, 2006, pp. 128–173. Linehan, Peter. “The Spanish Church Revisited: The Episcopal Gravamina of 1279.” In Authority and Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government Presented to Walter Ullman on His Seventieth Birthday, eds. Brian Tierney and Peter Linehan. Cambridge, 1980, pp. 127–147.

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MacKay, Angus and Muhammad Benaboud. “Alfonso VI of León and Castile, ‘ʿalImbraṭūr dhū-l-Millatayn’.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 59 (1979): 95–102. MacKay, Angus and Muhammad Benaboud. “Yet again Alfonso VI, ‘the Emperor, Lord of [the Adherents of] the Two Faiths, the Most Excellent Ruler.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1984): 171–181. Martínez, Salvador H. La Convivencia en la España del siglo XIII: Perspectivas alfonsíes. Madrid, 2006. Mendoza Abreu, Josefa María. “Aproximación al estudio de la onomástica de los judíos de Sevilla en la Baja Edad Media.” In Hommage à Haïm Vidal Sephiha, eds. Winfried Busse and Maria-Christine Varol-Bornes. Bern, 1996, pp. 175–193. Moore, R. I. The Formation of a Persecuting Society. 2nd ed. Malden MA, 2007. Navarro Piero, Ángeles. “Mosé ibn ʿEzrá: El poema de los dos exilios.” Sefarad 61, no. 2 (2001): 381–393. Nieto Soria, José Manuel. “Los judíos de Toledo en sus relaciones financieras con la monarquia y la iglesia (1252–1312).” Part I, Sefarad 41 (1981): 301–319. Nirenberg, David. “Deviant politics and Jewish love: Alfonso VIII and the Jewess of Toledo.” Jewish History 21 (2007): 15–41. O’Callaghan, Joseph. A History of Medieval Spain. Ithaca, 1975. O’Callaghan, Joseph. Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age: Law and Justice in ThirteenthCentury Castile. Ithaca NY, and London, 2019. Ray, Jonathan, The Sephardic Frontier: ‘The Reconquista’ and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia. Ithaca NY, 2006. Recuero Astray, Manuel. Alfonso VII, Emperador: el imperio Hispanico en el siglo XII. León, 1979. Reilly, Bernard F. The Kingdom of León-Castilla Under King Alfonso VI, 1065–1109. Princeton, 1988. Reilly, Bernard F. The Kingdom of León-Castilla Under King Alfonso VII, 1126–1157. Philadelphia, 1998. Roth, Norman, “Again Alfonso VI, ʿImbarātūr dhu’l-Millataynʾ, and Some New Data,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1984): 165–169. Septimus, Bernard, Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: The Career and Controversies of Ramah. Cambridge, MA., 1982. Soifer Irish, Maya, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change. Washington DC, 2016. Stillman, Norman, “Court Jews,” in Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, Vol. I, eds. Stillman et al. Leiden, 2010, pp. 681–686. Stillman, Norman, “The Emergence, Development and Historical Continuity of the Sephardi Courtier Class,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Series 3. Historia medieval, vol. 6 (1993): 17–30. Yarbrough, Luke, Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Pre-Modern Islamic Thought. Cambridge, 2019. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Part 4 Managing Conflict: Social, Physical and Imagined Boundaries

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Chapter 11

Sex, Theft, and Violence: Conflict and Local Society in the Mountains of León around the Year 1000 Iñaki Martín Viso 1

Conflict and Local Society

The monastery of Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas was placed in the north-eastern part of the current Spanish province of León, on Duero’s plateau near the Cantabrian Mountains. A charter from its archive dated 1024 reports on Algastre, son of Serbodei, giving Fruela Muñoz and his wife Amuna a plot of land in the Viñayo Valley, in a place called La Vega, in the Mountains of León, in the upper Luna River Valley. This was a payment associated with a fine, as Algastre had acted violently against María, Diego’s wife, seriously insulting her, possibly pushing her to the floor and locking her up in his house. Algastre was taken before Judge Gaudinas, the saione Permiro, an official linked to the administration of justice, and Sarracino, a representative of Diego, who also accused his mother-in-law, Emilo. Algastre, María, and Diego were part of a local society, perhaps smallholding peasants or maybe members of a local elite. The damage (livores) caused to María was assessed before an assembly (concilio), and Algastre was sentenced to pay 30 solidos (silver coins), 15 in cash in the form of silver and 15 through the land he was now delivering.1 There is no indication of the cause of the conflict, although the fact that the victim was a woman and that she was subjected to physical mistreatment—it is not clear that there was sexual abuse—is yet another example of the patterns of behaviour ingrained in a deeply gender-divided society, an issue that Simon Barton studied in his last book.2 The victim’s husband led the accusation, perhaps because he was the target of Algastre’s action, or because he was the one whose honour had been damaged by his wife. We also have knowledge of certain aspects regarding how the dispute was settled through the intervention of a local judge and a saione at a public hearing, as the presence of the concilio, 1 José Antonio Fernández Flórez and Marta Herrero de la Fuente, eds., Colección documental del monasterio de Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas, I (854–1108) (León, 1999) = Otero 163. 2 Simon Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, 2015).

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at least in the assessment of the damage, is mentioned.3 While the payment of the fine compensated for the damage, it also revealed that agreements were essential to prevent other acts of violence.4 Part of the fine, referred to in other texts as iudicatio, was received by an aristocrat, Fruela Muñoz, the ultimate guarantor of justice. This individual was a powerful Asturian nobleman who held control over this area.5 This text is one of numerous examples that appear among the thousands of ninth-to-eleventh-century documents that are preserved in different archives from northern Iberia.6 Different from the usual formulae that permeate most diplomas, these texts provided a window to understanding local society in the Early Middle Ages.7 Disputes sometimes involved collective action against the interests of lords or other groups,8 while in other cases, they arose from internal tensions and reflected everyday life and cultural values. Thus, 21st-century historians are allowed a glimpse into life 1000 years ago. However, it is necessary to keep in mind that these texts were legal documents, and as such, they did not record the voices of the parties involved directly, but they were mediated through scribes whose cultural and social referents might have altered the text. Some charters are less formal, but this does not mean that they lacked their own narrative formulae to codify events into textual frameworks that would be recognisable by any scribe at the time.9 3 Julio Escalona, “Community Meetings in Early Medieval Castile”, in Power and Place in Europe in the Early Middle Ages, eds. Jayne Carroll, Andrew Reynolds and Barbara Yorke (Oxford, 2019), pp. 216–237. 4 Regardless, it is advisable to steer clear of the dichotomy between law and commitment (feudal), as mediation seems to be a constant aspect, and there is evidence of feudal disputes that resulted in the defeat of one of the parties involved. Chris Wickham, Legge, pratiche e conflitti. Tribunali e visualizazione delle dispute nella Toscana del XII secolo (Roma, 2000), pp. 30–31. 5 On this individual, see Alfonso García Leal, “Los condes Fruela Muñoz y Pedro Flaínez. La formación de un patrimonio señorial,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 31, no. 1 (2006): 1–110. 6 There is an online database of texts that include references to early medieval judicial procedures in northern Iberia, among which are examples similar to the one addressed here. Procesos Judiciales en las Sociedades Medievales del Norte Peninsular (siglos IX–XI). Available at prj.csic.es. Accessed March 31, 2023. 7 Wendy Davies, Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia, 800–1000 (London, 2016). 8 Álvaro Carvajal Castro, “Collective Action and Local Leaderships in Early Medieval North-Western Iberia, Ninth-Eleventh Centuries,” in Social Inequality in Early Medieval Europe. Local Societies and Beyond, ed. Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 281–299; Iñaki Martín Viso, “Orta fuit intentio. Communities and disputes in Northern Iberia (9th–11th centuries)” (forthcoming). 9 See the useful considerations of Isabel Alfonso, “El formato de la información judicial en la Alta Edad Media peninsular,” in Chartes et cartulaires comme instruments de pouvoir. Espagne et Occident chrétien (VIIIe–XIIe siècles), eds. Julio Escalona and Hélène Sirantoine (Toulouse, 2013), pp. 191–218. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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The fact that lawsuits are one of the best instruments to analyse local societies entails the risk of overrepresenting conflict in such societies. Disputes are undoubtedly an inherent part of daily life. However, conflict was far more visible than consensus, or accepted and standard practices. Therefore, tensions and disputes should be neither overstated nor overlooked, as they were at the heart of family and community relationships. In recent years, access to a wealth of excellent scholarship has allowed considerable progress in the study of how legal machinery worked and how it was used by kings and magnates to accumulate power.10 This study complements and enhances such knowledge by analysing local societies through lawsuits that reveal where clusters of conflict laid, what values they represented, and what aspects converged into the construction of authority on a local scale. This study offers an insight into such matters through the case study of the monastery of Otero de Dueñas, in the Mountains of León. A surviving collection of 43 documents dated between 998 and 1039 records legal disputes between individuals and families in the area of Valdoré, Lorma, and Viñayo.11 This documentary wealth is the product of the 10

11

For more on the Iberian Northwest, without attempting to be exhaustive: Agustín Prieto Morera, “El proceso en el reino de León a la luz de los diplomas,” in El reino de León en la Alta Edad Media. II. El ordenamiento jurídico del reino (León, 1992), pp. 381–518; José M.ª Mínguez, “Justicia y poder en el marco de la feudalización de la sociedad leonesa,” in La giustizia nell’alto Medioevo (secoli IX–XI) (Spoleto, 1997), vol. I, pp. 491–546; Isabel Alfonso, “Judicial Rhetoric and Political Legitimation in Medieval León-Castile,” in Building legitimacy. Political discourses and forms of legitimation in medieval societies, eds. Isabel Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy and Julio Escalona (Leiden, 2004), pp. 51–88; Pascual Martínez Sopena, “La justicia en la época asturleonesa: entre el Liber y los mediadores sociales,” in El lugar del campesino. En torno a la obra de Reyna Pastor, ed. Ana Rodríguez (Valencia, 2007), pp. 239–260; Wendy Davies, “Judges and Judging. Truth and Justice in Northern Iberia on the Eve of the Millennium,” Journal of Medieval History 36, no. 3 (2010): 193–203; W. Davies, Windows on Justice; José Miguel Andrade Cernadas, “Baños, claustros y piedras: una aproximación a los escenarios de las asambleas judiciales en la Galicia altomedieval,” Studia Histórica. Historia Medieval 36:1 (2018), 13–30; Iñaki Martín Viso, “Authority and Justice in the Formation of the Kingdom of Asturias-León,” Al-Masaq. Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 29, no. 2 (2017): 114–132; Igor Santos Salazar, “Ruling Through Court: The Political Meanings of the Settlement of Disputes in Castile and Álava (ca. 900–1038),” Al-Masaq. Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 17, no. 2 (2017): 133–150; Fernando Luis Corral and María Pérez Rodríguez, “Negotiating Fines in the Early Middle Ages. Local Communities, Mediators and the Instrumentalization of Justice in the Kingdom of León,” Al-Masaq. Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 17, no. 2 (2017): 172–185; Álvaro Carvajal Castro, “Resistencias campesinas en el Noroeste ibérico altomedieval: confrontando la tragedia,” Cuadernos Jerónimo de Zurita 95 (2019): 13–33. Certain texts that refer to Sobarriba (Mellanzos, Villarratel) and the area of Astorga, that are examples of how the presence of these aristocratic groups’ asset-related interests reached far beyond the valleys of the Mountains of León, have not been taken into account. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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preservation of a large part of the archives owned by Pedro Flaínez for Valdoré and Lorma, in the upper Porma Valley, and by Pedro Muñoz for Viñayo.12 2

Sources of Conflict

The first aspect that should be considered is what types of litigation appear in legal documents (Fig. 11.1). The focus on individuals and family units, rather than on collective action, facilitates understanding of how those social actors worked on a local scale. One of the most frequently quoted matters in these disputes is that of sexual offences. The evidence is eloquent regarding the existence of adulterous relationships that were punished. An example is provided by the case of Flaíno, who, accused by Elias and acting on behalf of Count Flaíno Muñoz, admitted before several judges to having committed adultery with the wife and daughter of an unknown man.13 There are also several examples of rape that were equally punishable, such as the case of Argimiro, who assaulted Licinia, a third-degree relative.14 There is also information on kidnapping that was, in reality, a cover for sexual relations that were considered illicit. The representative of Count Fruela Muñoz accused Eneco, as well as his brother and mother, of kidnapping Midona, one of the count’s household servants. The action was discovered by others who, crying out ‘Kidnapping!’ caught the accused.15 Within three days, Eneco admitted that this was true. Nevertheless, another document sheds further light on the circumstances of the case. Eneco and Midona promised to respect the pact they had made with Diego, the local representative (uigario) of Fruela Muñoz, and thus entered into the count’s service, becoming his servants. Only upon the death of the count and his wife would they recover their freedom.16 On the one hand, the 12

13 14 15 16

Alfonso García Leal, El archivo de los condes Fruela Muñoz y Pedro Flaínez. La formación de un patrimonio nobiliario en la montaña asturleonesa (854–1048) (León, 2010). The texts will be quoted in the edition mentioned in footnote 1. These individuals have been the object of analysis in studies such as: Carlos Estepa Díez, “Poder y propiedad feudales en el periodo astur: las mandaciones de los Flaínez en la montaña leonesa,” in Miscel·lània en homenatge al P. Agustí Altisent (Tarragona, 1991), pp. 285–327; García Leal, “Los condes”; Pascual Martínez Sopena, “Prolis Flainiz. Las relaciones familiares en la nobleza de León (siglos X–XII),” Studia Zamorensia XVII (2018): 69–102. Otero 38 (21 April 995) y 39 ([22] April 995). For other cases of adultery, see Otero 71 (26 August 1006), 99 (22 November 1014), 166 (15 May 1024), 168 (18 July 1024), 177 (18 June 1027), 187 (1028). Otero 33 (13 November 992). Otero 150 (21 February 1022). Otero 151 (23 February 1022).

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figure 11.1 Types of conflict in the documents

source of the problem seems to be Midora’s servant status, which means that the count, her lord, could control whom she could marry. On the other hand, Eneco seems to be a free individual who chose to stage a kidnapping, likely plotted with the alleged victim to achieve his goal without falling into servitude. Unfortunately, their plan failed and they were both punished. A relevant aspect that emerges from the surviving evidence is that sexual disputes had a family-related component. This is the case when the parents of the accused were obliged to undertake the payment of a fine, sometimes stipulated in the form of land, as for the case of Argemiro’s parents.17 Another example is that of Fronilde and García Osóriz, who handed over a plot of land (corte) at Tapia de la Ribera, in the territory of Ordás, to Fruela Muñoz and his wife Amuna because their son Vimara had committed adultery with Vida Meráciciz’s daughter, leaving her pregnant. The adulterous individuals were led before Count Fruela, and a transfer of land was decreed to make amends for the offence against the barones of Tapia.18 This type of offence, when committed by women, also gained public visibility in the form of physical punishment. Auria, who became pregnant after fornicating with her first cousin, Algastre, was led before Count Fruela Muñoz, who ordered her whipping. However, her brother, Munio, and her mother, Paterna, agreed to pay a fine in exchange for

17 Otero 33 (13 November 992). 18 Otero 166 (15 May 1024).

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Auria’s pardon.19 By contrast, men who were accused of adultery were generally subjected to public exposure and the payment of fines, but there is no evidence of physical punishment for them. Therefore, sexual relationships framed as illicit or criminal were one of the main axes around which conflict in these local societies revolved. They involved neighbours and relatives, with possible tensions within the core of family structures. Another source of conflict was theft as property crime. Generally, small-scale theft involved clothing and animals. Mater was forced to give Flaíno Muñoz and his wife Justa half of the property she owned at Villar, where her grand­ father had lived, as a penalty for having stolen clothing from one Cisla.20 Belito and his wife Egilo were punished because Belito had taken and eaten two sheep.21 Quintela had to deliver a plot of land in Sariego as payment for a fine imposed for stealing hides, likely some type of wineskin made with animal hide.22 Argivado and Aíta Gontínez stole a cow, but they were caught with its flesh.23 As can be easily inferred, these were minor thefts involving objects and animals that were easy transport. There is scarce information regarding causality, but there is unquestionable evidence of a society in which part of the population lived on the edge of subsistence. In all of these cases, the dispute was judicially settled with the delivery of land or vineyards by the guilty parties, indicating that the involved household units did not lack their own property, but especially difficult times may have driven these people to perpetrate thefts to eat, or clothe themselves. The victims seem to have been other peasants and sometimes Count Fruela Muñoz. The documents provide no evidence as to whether there was friction between the thieves and the victims. What is reasonable to assume is that desperate needs, personal quarrels, and hatred might have been behind these thefts. Such quarrels were also rooted in land disputes. It should be kept in mind that agrarian plots were the economic backbone of medieval peasantry and were associated with family work, and the existence of the household unit.24 There are fewer instances of this type of land issue beyond those involving sexual offence and theft. In one instance, Velito and Calendo were forced to return a plot of land that they had inadvertently ploughed in a busto (an 19 20 21 22 23 24

Otero 177 (18 June 1027). Otero 34 (25 January 993). Otero 49 (24 July 1000). Otero 132 (4 June 1021). Otero 142 (18 October 1022). Laurent Feller, “Enrichessement, accumulation et circulation des biens. Quelques problèmes liés au marché de la terre,” in Le marché de la terre au Moyen Àge, ed. Laurent Feller and Chris Wickham (Rome, 2005), pp. 3–28.

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agricultural area created through burning) called Gogiti, which had previously been donated to the monastery of Santa Marina by Adriano and Leocadia.25 The matter at stake concerned the ploughing of a plot of land that was in the hands of a monastery. Nevertheless, this could also signal the intervention of the monastery as a new local actor in the management of a space, such as the busto, which may have had collective connotations: an area that had been cleared by a social group.26 This hypothesis would explain the alleged ‘ignorance’ of Velito and Calendo, who continued to see the busto as a collective resource that they could use. Collective use of land was one of the most common sources of tension that affected the early medieval societies of northern Iberia. However, there are few such known cases, which may lead to the assumption that either disputes among relatives over land were not numerous at the time (perhaps because of the locals’ strong knowledge of who owned each plot of land)27 or these conflicts may not have been registered in the documents, as they could have been settled elsewhere unless a lord intervened.28 Significantly, debt directly related to agrarian husbandry was probably present among conflicts to a greater extent than the texts reveal. In 995, Domnabona and her son Citi handed a third of a corte and an orchard, as well as a flax field in San Felices, over to Fruela Vimáraz and his wife Adosinda for a renovo that had been entrusted to her and her husband Cresconio, from which they had lost a significant amount of wine and cereal. Fruela and his wife 25 Otero 43 (1 June 997). On bustos, see Carlos Manuel Reglero de la Fuente, Espacio y poder en la Castilla medieval. Los Montes de Torozos (siglos X–XIV) (Valladolid, 1994), p. 159. In the area of the Mountains of León, it could be related to the creation of pastures, as is also the case in Asturias; see Francisco Javier Fernández Conde, “Ganadería en Asturias en la primera Edad Media. Algunas características de la economía castreña y romana,” in Los rebaños de Gerión. Pastores y trashumancia en Iberia antigua y medieval, ed. Joaquín Gómez-Pantoja (Madrid, 2001), p. 149; Juan José Sánchez Badiola, La configuración de un sistema de poblamiento y organización del espacio: el territorio de León (siglos IX–XI) (León, 2002), pp. 181–183. 26 On such a possibly collective nature, see Iñaki Martín Viso, “Las propiedades regias y la formación del reino asturleonés (850–950),” in Biens publics, biens du roi. Les bases économiques des pouvoirs royaux dans le haut Moyen Âge, eds. François Bougard and Vito Loré (Turnhout, 2019), pp. 193–195. 27 Julio Escalona, “Dense Local Knowledge: Grounding Local to Supralocal in Tenth-Century Castile,” in Polity and Neighbourhood in Early Medieval Europe, eds. Julio Escalona, Orri Vésteinsson and Stuart Brookes (Turnhout, 2019), pp. 351–379. 28 By contrast, land disputes seem to have been largely related to collectively used spaces rather than family property in tenth-and eleventh-century north-western Iberian documents. Reyna Pastor, Resistencias y luchas campesinas en la época del crecimiento y consolidación de la formación feudal. Castilla, siglos X–XIII (Madrid, 1980); Carvajal Castro, “Resistencias campesinas”.

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allowed them to maintain eight measures of wine worth 16 solidos.29 A renovo was loaned capital, often in kind. It was a way of accessing credit in rural settings, and its use could create ties of subordination among different families.30 Although emphasis has been placed on the role that some monasteries could have played within these credit circuits that took advantage of the difficulties weighing on peasant families, this specific case referred to a layman, namely Fruela Muñoz’s father.31 A situation of need entailed debt and, with it, a possible handing over of land, although, in a display of generosity, Fruela Vimáraz allowed Domnabona to keep part of the capital in the form of wine and cereal, perhaps as a calculated act so that he would not appear overly greedy. It was not in vain that the plot of land delivered was located next to that of Fruela, a neighbour who seemed excessively powerful. Debt must have been quite frequent in these local societies, although it is not always explicitly mentioned in texts where such a reality is disguised as made of free transactions. Adevero and his wife Caradomna sold Pedro Flaínez a vineyard in Villarratel for ten solidos. Nevertheless, this purchase and sale stemmed from debt, as the couple had not returned the wine that Pedro had loaned them, which was worth exactly ten solidos; thus, they had to transfer the vineyard.32 This is another example of capital delivered as an allocation of receivables, which, as it could not be repaid, resulted in the transfer of a plot of land. In this case, the transfer took the fictitious form of a purchase and sale agreement.33 This friction sometimes triggered acts of physical violence, as recorded in the sources under examination. In some instances, it is difficult to establish their exact causes, for example when Algastre hit Diego’s wife, María, and locked her away.34 Another example is provided by the wounds inflicted by Ermegildo on Padre, estimated at a value of ten solidos. As compensation, Ermegildo’s parents had to trasfter two plots of land and half of nine apple trees to Flaíno Muñoz and his wife Justa Pepici.35 A final example is the case of Enego and his wife Arbidio, who gave Fruela Muñoz and his wife Gontrodo half of a vineyard 29 Otero 41. 30 Luis García de Valdeavellano, “El renovo. Notas y documentos sobre los préstamos usurarios en el reino astur-leonés,” Cuadernos de Historia de España 57–58 (1973): 408–448. 31 Robert Portass, “Rethinking the small worlds in tenth-century Galicia,” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 31 (2013): 83–103, 96–99. On Fruela Vimáraz, see García Leal, “Los condes,” pp. 17–20. 32 Otero 95 (22 February 1014). 33 Alfonso, “El formato”, pp. 199–200. On the existence of these sales as part of the payment of fines, Davies, Windows on Justice, pp. 40–41. 34 Otero 163. 35 Otero 31 (15 July 991).

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in Cerconeto as a fine for the quarrel between their son Quilmondo, Flagino and Marino, who received several bruises from the former.36 It is not clear what triggered this violence. Disputes that could arise from the day-to-day interactions and close relationships that characterise these local societies are by no means a far-fetched assumption. It is also interesting to note the relevant role that young men played. Although the records do not mention age, violent acts were likely committed by young men, something that might be inferred from the fact that their parents took charge of the fines resulting from their passionate behaviour, which was often associated with both their gender and age. However, they were not the group that perpetrated homicides, which are mentioned in a couple of cases and are always associated with theft.37 This brief review outlines how conflict was often driven by sex, small-scale theft, land disputes (possibly involving common usage of spaces), debt, and violence among young people.38 The examples examined in this study highlight the internal tension that existed within local societies, characterised by personal disputes and face-to-face relationships that added bitterness to such conflicts. Three aspects should be noted. First, the vulnerability of women in relation to men. Second, the threats that external circumstances and powerful social actors could pose to the survival of household units, which often led to theft and debt. Finally, the centrality of family ties, as parents and children were jointly responsible for the ‘righting’ of offences, especially when committed by the youngest family members. 3

Conflict Resolution

Recent studies have focused on forms of conflict resolution in the early medieval world, drawing attention to the transactional nature of justice, regardless of the statements that appear in law enforcement rulings.39 North-western Iberia reflects these characteristics. Judges were not legal experts but, rather, locally prominent individuals who were immersed in social and power networks, and had some notion of law. They often appeared as part of a small group made up of two or three judges who collectively made decisions. Their 36 37 38 39

Otero 193 (31 May 1030). Otero 93 (5 March 1013) and 114 (1018). Martínez Sopena, “La justicia,” p. 253. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre, eds., Settlement and Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986); Jeffrey A. Bowman, Shifting Landmarks. Property, Proof and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000 (Ithaca NY, 2004); Wickham, Legge; Stephen D. White, Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France (Aldershot, 2005).

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helpers were the saiones who were in charge of guarding the accused and enforcing sentences.40 The Otero de las Dueñas dossier follows this pattern of judges acting by consensus, and saiones. A good example is the previously mentioned case of the alleged kidnapping of Midona by Eneco, which was settled before the judges Pelayo, Martino, and Diego, and the saione Quintila.41 There is also evidence of the existence of judges who acted individually rather than collectively. This was the case in Viñayo, where Gaudinas is mentioned as the judge in several texts dated between 1022 and 1024.42 Gaudinas always appears as an external actor who is not subject to the control of Fruela Muñoz, so he must have been an individual of considerable standing, beyond the magnate’s authority. It is equally significant that the same saione, Fermiro or Permiro, appears in at least two cases, being the only one mentioned more than once.43 It is likely that these judicial functions were a part-time occupation and were perhaps performed only during a portion of these individuals’ lives. Nonetheless, being regarded as a judge was a marker of high local standing, while the office of saione offered the opportunity to carve out a position within the local power structure. There are also examples in which conflicts were settled before an assembly or concilio, that is, a public event in which all inhabitants of a community would take part. The concilio is only mentioned on three occasions, two of them being cases of adultery and one being an assessment of the injuries caused to a woman.44 It is interesting to note that the participation of the concilio is limited to these cases, as these were perceived as offences affecting the community as a whole. As they concerned sexual issues, it seems that such cases had a clear public dimension in these local societies. These cases resulted in damage to the reputation of those affected; therefore, sexual morality—especially concerning adultery—was regarded as a community issue. This offence affected families who lived in the same community and were often bound by kinship ties, which is why it was necessary to involve the community as a whole and to make the offence visible to the public. However, not all cases of adultery were addressed in the same manner, as some did not involve the intervention of the concilio. The reasons behind these alternatives are unclear, but they imply a diversity of proceedings. 40 41 42 43 44

Davies, “Judges and Judging” and Windows on Justice, pp. 162–168. Otero 150 (21 June 1022). Otero 147 (13 January 1022), 156 (17 April 1022), 163 (24 January 1024) and 168 (18 July 1024). Otero 156 and 163. Otero 38 (21 April 995) and 39 (22 April 995; these are the same dispute), 168 (18 July 1024) and 163 (21 January 1024). This case might have a sex-related context.

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Settlements of disputes were heterogeneous. References to such ordeals are scarce; there are only three examples, and they are all related to the hot water ordeal.45 It is remarkable that in two such cases the ordeal was not enforced because Count Fruela Muñoz allowed the accused to avoid it. One might think that ordeals worked as a means to enforce an agreement through the terror they instilled. This function could also appeal to the Lex, meaning Visigothic law. References to the Lex are equally scarce, as they only appear in four documents. In one case, the fine imposed is based on Law VIII, I, 6 (although it is mistakenly quoted as V in the text), concerning the theft and pillaging of property, for which whoever perpetrated it was to compensate the victim 11 times what had been stolen. In fact, the accused handed over a vineyard masked as a purchase and sale transaction to cover the payment of such a fine.46 On another occasion, the Lex is quoted in association with an alleged kidnapping, which would carry a penalty of flogging. The case was settled through an agreement where the accused—in what, as previously mentioned, could have been an attempt to circumvent Count Fruela Muñoz’s control over the marriage of a servant—recognised his position as servant of the Count.47 The Lex is also mentioned in connection with the justification of the payment of the iudicatio (judicial fine) to Fruela Muñoz, after which he authorised the condemned party to pay part of a 30-solidos fine in the form of half a vineyard.48 Finally, Armentero and his wife Marcela had stolen 30 solidos; thus, according to the Lex, they had to pay 50 solidos; however, Count Fruela Muñoz spared them 20 solidos and agreed that the payment could be accomplished through the transfer, formalised as a sale transaction, of a plot of land in Otero de las Dueñas.49 The Lex appears in all four cases as a mechanism that justifies specific agreements.50 Another feature is the central role played by Fruela Muñoz and Pedro Flaínez in all of these events, as they appealed to such knowledge of the Lex. Within the broad array of judicial mechanisms, this strategy was specific to such individuals, even if they did not always use it. The evidence from 45 Otero 31 (15 July 991), 123 (19 April 1019) and 158 (25 December 1022). 46 Otero 113 (30 January 1018). El libro de los juicios (Liber Iudiciorum), ed. Pedro Ramís Serra and Rafael Ramís Barceló (Madrid, 2015), VIII, I, 6. These mistakes are frequent, as noted by Amancio Isla Frez, “La pervivencia de la tradición legal visigótica en el reino asturleonés,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 41, no. 2 (2011): 75–86. 47 Otero 150 y 151. Liber, III, III, 2. 48 Otero 193 (31 May 1030). About the iudicatio, see Martínez Sopena, “La justicia,” pp. 239–240. 49 Otero 195 (1030–1035). 50 A situation that involves an instrumental use of the Lex, as noted by Isla Frez, “La pervivencia”. See also Martínez Sopena, “La justicia,” p. 244.

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Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas does not mention other actors involved in the lawsuits appealing to the Lex, perhaps because it was a tool used by magnates, whose representatives had access to copies of the Lex, which circulated in the rural world but were not available to all social groups. Most conflicts were settled through the payment of fines. However, these had to be defined through some type of valuation, as there were no fixed amounts. Once the amount had been agreed in monetary terms (solidos), it had to be enforced in societies characterised by a lack of cash. Hence, the transfer of land and vineyards was sometimes disguised as donations, purchase and sale transactions, which were actually the payment of such fines.51 The development of these judicial arrangements involved the participation of the omines bonos, a term that likely refers to local elite, the same group to which judges likely belonged.52 For example, they participated in the case of Braulio, who had caused considerable damage to Pedro Flaínez, for which he appeared before the omines bonos who resolved that he should deliver a plot of land in Valdoré as iudicato.53 In the dispute that brought Dono and his son Leovigildo, as well as other individuals named Maxito and Vermudo, up against Pedro Flaínez for clearing forest land, the accused were condemned to pay 300 solidos, an extraordinarily high figure. However, they asked for the intervention of the concilio de omines bonos and the fine was settled through the delivery of a series of properties in Noantica.54 In both cases, the presence of the omines bonos was elicited on the initiative of the accused, who were to face payments demanded by the magnates that were beyond their creditworthiness. Those implicated requested atiba, namely, reaching an agreement.55 The purpose of this mediating task was to strengthen the social status of those who were recognised as omines bonos, a category associated with prestige rather than legal

51 Martínez Sopena, in “La justicia,” p. 252, points out that the fact that on several occasions, the lands delivered bordered with others belonging to counts Fruela Muñoz or Pedro Flaínez, which could be evidence that specific comital interests were involved in the negotiations. 52 Martínez Sopena, “La justicia,” p. 255; Davies, Windows on Justice, pp. 169–170; Fernando Luis Corral, “Lugares de reunión, boni homines y presbíteros en Valdevimbre y Ardón en la Alta Edad Media,” Medievalista online 18 (2015). Available at https://medievalista .fcsh.unl.pt/MEDIEVALISTA18/corral1805.html. Accessed March 31, 2023. 53 Otero 121 (20 March 1019): Et deuinit inde atiua, gum omnibus bonis, et dedit in iudicatu ipsa terra qui super taxatum est ad uobis Petru Flainizi et ad uxor uestra Bronildi … 54 Otero 149 (28 May 1022): Et pro tale facta, in concilio de omines bonos et cum rogatores, recesamus iuditium et fecimus atiba. Et in atiba dedimus ipsa ereditate, qui in oc iscripto resona, ad uobis Petru Flainizi et ad domna Iusta … 55 Martínez Sopena, “La justicia,” p. 256.

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status. Agreements were not necessarily generous acts, but they consolidated the social position of those who exercised mediation. 4

Cheating the Count

The settings of the local societies of the Mountains of León were not completely isolated from other actors who operated at a higher scale, such as Fruela Muñoz and Pedro Flaínez. Research has focused on them, highlighting their capacity to act on groups of residents through control over mandacione—a type of power wielding that included control over peasants together with a certain degree of judicial capacity56—and the building of a significant estate.57 This is unquestionably one of the channels of social interaction used by higher aristocrats, albeit not the only one. Another was participation in judicial activity and taking over some of its functions. Numerous groups of judges held such a rank due to their personal prestige rather than by being appointed by an authority.58 In addition, the intervention of counts can be observed in such spheres. Some documents provide evidence of the presence of comital judges and saiones in disputes. This is the case of Flaíno Muñoz, the father of Pedro Flaínez, who operated in the area of Valdoré, and of Fruela Muñoz in Viñayo.59 The collection of judicial fines (calumnias and iudicatos) also reflects comital judicial capacity.60 For this purpose, they relied on agents such as the priest Cidi, who took part by representing Pedro Flaínez in the accusation against Dono, his son Leovigildo, and Maxito and Vermudo for the felling of trees in a forested area.61 In the case of Fruela Muñoz, there is one Diego who is listed as his representative for the prosecution in certain lawsuits and who is labelled as 56 Estepa Díez, “Poder y propiedad feudales”; Mariel Pérez, “La configuración del espacio político en el Reino de León: los marcos territoriales del poder feudal en el ámbito leonés,” Sociedades Precapitalistas 1, no. 2 (2012). Available at https://www.sociedade sprecapitalistas.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/article/view/SPv2n1a04/pdf. Accessed March 31, 2023; Álvaro Carvajal Castro, Bajo la máscara del “regnum”. La monarquía asturleonesa en León (854–1037) (Madrid, 2017), pp. 155–161. 57 Estepa Díez, “Poder y propiedad feudales”; García Leal, “Los condes”. 58 Estepa Díez, in “Poder y propiedad feudales” p. 305, regarded them as small village community chiefs or agents who gradually acquired a relevant role. 59 Flaíno Muñoz in Otero 43 (1 June 997); Fruela Muñoz in Otero 177 (18 June 1027). 60 See the case of Flaíno Muñoz in Otero 31 (15 June 991), 33 (13 November 992), 34 (25 January 993), and 44 (25 January 998); Pedro Flaínez in Otero 71 (26 August 1006) and 73 (15 May 1007); and Fruela Muñoz in Otero 109 (18 May 1017). Additionally, there are more cases. 61 Otero 149 (28 May 1022).

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his uigario (representative).62 This judicial power was the consequence of control over mandaciones that Pedro Flaínez, and likely Fruela Muñoz, had been granted by the king. This is revealed in a document stating that Juan Matérniz and Gracilo pledged before the sagione Jimeno that they would donate some properties in Quintanilla the day that Pedro Flaínez appeared in his mandaciones of Lorma as a fine for the offence committed by their daughter.63 This power came from the king, who had given the mandacione of Lorma (Valdellorma) to Pedro Flaínez.64 Therefore, it is likely that comital justice stemmed from a royal prerogative, but at the same time it was a consequence of the increase of comital power in local society. The status of count was not an official position, but worked as a label used for those who held considerable social authority at regional level, which was not unlike that held by kings.65 The justice delivered by the counts coexisted with the presence of judges beyond their control, as when, on behalf of Fruela Muñoz, the previously mentioned Diego stood before a series of judges to report the attempted kidnapping of Midona, one of the count’s servants.66 There is no evidence suggesting that disputes within the comital area and those resolved by other judges followed different procedures. It is likely that those who had to appeal to the counts’ justice would do so because they were under their authority, as this would be the case with people belonging to the mandacione. However, it could also have stemmed from the interests of some members of a local elite who acknowledged comital power and, in doing so, they became part of their networks of patronage.67 Such networks were also powered by the counts’ actions as enablers in judicial resolutions, reaching agreements, defending the accused, 62 Otero 151 (22 June 1022): uigario de Froila Amunizi et de Amuna. See also 150 (21 June 1022). He could have been the same Diego mentioned in the document that is used to introduce our contribution, the husband of María, the woman who was hit by Algastre. 63 Otero 99 (22 November 1014). 64 This is revealed in Otero 116: comodo sic teniente Pedro Faliniz mandacione de dado de reie domno Adefonso, ic in Lorma … 65 Robert Portass, “The Contours and Contexts of Public Power in the Tenth-Century Liébana,” Journal of Medieval History 38, no. 4 (2012): 389–407; Igor Santos Salazar, “Competition in the Frontiers of the Asturian Kingdom: The Comites of Castile, Lantarón and Álava (860–940),” in Coopetition. Rivaliser, coopérer dans les sociétés du Haut Moyen Âge (500–1100), eds. Régine Le Jan, Geneviève Bührer-Thierry and Stefano Gasparri (Turnhout, 2018), pp. 231–257; Wendy Davies, “Counts in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Iberia,” in Beyond the Reconquista. New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085), eds. Simon Barton † and Robert Portass (Leiden, 2020), pp. 143–168. 66 Otero 150. 67 This is rightly noted by Carvajal Castro, “Sociedad y territorio en el norte de León: los Flaínez y el entorno del alto Esla (siglos IX–XI)”, Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 31 (2013), 127–128.

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and even ruling out the practice of ordeals.68 Similarly, comital agents were part of the networks that had an impact on local societies. Nonetheless, such alliances were problematic, as they could give rise to a specific type of dispute: cheating the count. In 1021, Fernando Braóliz and his wife Tregidia, who were entrusted by Pedro Flaínez with the collection of duties, iudicatos included, in his mandaciones of Curueño, Lorma, and Ferreras, confessed to having stopped delivering oxen, cows, silver, and linen worth 300 solidos to the aforementioned Pedro. At the request of the omines bonos, who played the role of mediators, they agreed to return all such goods and an additional horse, four oxen, and two beles (probably sheep).69 Fernando Braóliz appears as one of the sureties of Juan Matérniz and Gracilo before Pedro Flaínez in 1014.70 He was a prominent member of this local society. His role seems to be associated with a collection of judicial fees, as the person who effectively obtained and managed them (to his own advantage). This is not the only case in which local actors breached the count’s trust. In 1025, Cidi Fredínez and his wife Cete gave Pedro Flaínez and his wife Bronilde two plots of land and some apple trees in Valdoré because Cidi and his wife had not been loyal to the count in the surety and defence of some lands and the iudicatos assigned to them by Pedro Flaínez. After being brought to trial, they requested the mediation of the omines bonos, ultimately reaching an agreement to pay for the lands involved, which bordered those of Pedro Flaínez.71 These two cases are proof of the complex relationship between the count and his local servants. The management of land, and especially the collection of fines, were in the hands of members of the local societies, for whom such a link was perceived as an opportunity to increase their status. They undoubtedly could become wealthier by removing part of the income and rights due to the count. Perhaps in the eyes of Fernando Braóliz and Cidi Fredínez this was a fair payment for conducting an activity that must have earned them significant enmities. We do not know whether their actions lead to a loss of trust. If this were the case, the count had to turn to locals so that their power could be exercised within these societies. Nonetheless, the relationships that tied the count to local societies were subject to potential conflict. 68 Otero 158 (25 December 1022), 168 (18 July 1024), 178 (21 August 1028) and 192 (10 March 1030), all of them concerning Fruela Muñoz. 69 Otero 136. Bele would mean “head of sheep”, according to Maurilio Pérez, ed., Lexicon Latinitatis Medii Aevi Regni Legionis (s. VIII-1230). Imperfectum (Turnhout, 2010), vol. I, p. 97. 70 Otero 99. 71 Otero 174. Perhaps this is the same priest Cidi who appears in 1022 as Pedro Flaínez’s agent (Otero 149). This identification is not clear.

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Conclusion: Perspectives on Local Societies

Conflict was a recurrent phenomenon in local societies, whose coexistence was complex. There were fault lines that affected the relationships established within such communities that, at times, could lead to tension, which was often aggravated by daily contact and family ties. These fissures primarily materialised as the theft of personal property—land does not seem to be such a strong source of controversy72—extramarital sex, and violence; such issues may have been the result of tension stemming from a variety of reasons, and they frequently involved young men. These fissures speak of different values ingrained in these local societies, marked by gender, property, and violence. Such situations were common in societies in which coexistence was rife in tension. Appealing to justice was a means to settle conflicts through agreements, a transactional pattern in which procedures seemed to run quite smoothly and to be adapted on an ad hoc basis. Participation offered prestigious local individuals such as judges, saiones, and omines bonos the opportunity to increase their status. Thus, conflict would become an arena to represent and renegotiate local influence in a less formal, but presumably very effective manner. Rural elites used this strategy to consolidate their prestige. Therefore, the search for balance and consensus was a platform to solidify the power of local elites. A higher authority could intervene here. This is what happened in Valdoré, where there was an increase in lordship (the Flaínez) since the end of the 10th century that contrasted the centrality of local authorities in conflict resolution in the first half of the century. Pedro Flaínez became an important actor within this local society, and obtaining the mandacione contributed to it. In the case of Fruela, it is not clear whether this was the result of such a shift, although there is a charter that seems to indicate that he held this type of power over the region of Omañas.73 Regardless of whether it was the result of a link to royal power, the exercise of judicial power embodied in the receipt of the iudicato could only materialise through the collaboration of local individuals. For them, this was an excellent opportunity to increase their influence. Nevertheless, 72

Both the geographical area and timeline should be increased for a more systematic analysis. However, it seems that land-related problems affected the payment of dues, meaning that they were focused on the relationship with the lords of both families and communities. They did not cross into the internal field of local societies. 73 Otero 180 (28 October 1027), where Fruela rules that one Paterno, having left, must return to live in Regos (Villaviciosa de la Ribera), which was a mandamento of King Alfonso V. The text can be understood as meaning that he was responsible for the safekeeping of the mandamento, although the place remained in the king’s hands until, four years later, Bermudo III donated it to Fruela Muñoz (Otero 196).

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cheating the counts seems to have been commonplace; it was made easier by their absence and possibly by a different view of the fair allocation of the lands and goods that fell into the hands of the count because of the iudicatos.74 The result was that the aristocratic authority was much more limited. Conflict provides a window into local societies. However, the countless occasions on which daily life was steered along agreed and consensual paths cannot be neglected. The question is not whether there were high levels of tension and disputes in these societies, but whether such disputes allow us to see those societies in a different light, exploring their practices, values, and internal differences. They were active players in building their own future rather than passive agents, subject to forces above their narrow horizons. Acknowledgements This study was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación through the Research Project PID2020-112506GB-C42. Bibliography Alfonso, Isabel. “Judicial Rethoric and Political Legitimation in Medieval León-Castile.” In Building Legitimacy. Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimation in Medieval Societies, eds. Isabel Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy and Julio Escalona. Leiden, 2004, pp. 51–88. Alfonso, Isabel. “El formato de la información judicial en la Alta Edad Media peninsular.” In Chartes et cartulaires comme instruments de pouvoir. Espagne et Occident chrétien (VIIIe–XIIe siècles), eds. Julio Escalona and Hélène Sirantoine. Toulouse, 2013, pp. 191–218. Andrade Cernadas, José Miguel. “Baños, claustros y piedras: una aproximación a los escenarios de las asambleas judiciales en la Galicia altomedieval.” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 36, no. 1 (2018): 13–30. Barton, Simon. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia. Philadelphia, 2015. Bowman, Jeffrey A. Shifting Landmarks. Property, Proof and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000. Ithaca NY, 2004. 74 On the absence of Count Pedro Flaínez, there is an eloquent testimony in a text where Juan and Gracilo committed themselves to deliver a uilla on the first day that Count Pedro arrived at the mandacione of Lorma. Otero 99 (22 November 1014).

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Carvajal Castro, Álvaro. Bajo la máscara del “regnum”. La monarquía asturleonesa en León (854–1037). Madrid, 2017. Carvajal Castro, Álvaro. “Collective Action and Local Leaderships in Early Medieval North-Western Iberia, ninth-eleventh centuries.” In Social Inequality in Early Medieval Europe. Local Societies and Beyond, ed. Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo. Turnhout, 2020, pp. 281–299. Carvajal Castro, Álvaro. “Resistencias campesinas en el Noroeste ibérico altomedieval: confrontando la tragedia.” Cuadernos Jerónimo de Zurita 95 (2019): 13–33. Carvajal Castro, Álvaro. “Sociedad y territorio en el norte de León: los Flaínez y el entorno del alto Esla (siglos IX–XI).” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 31 (2013): 105–131. Davies, Wendy. “Counts in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Iberia.” In Beyond the Reconquista. New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085), eds. Simon Barton† and Robert Portass. Leiden, 2020, pp. 143–168. Davies, Wendy. “Judges and Judging. Truth and Justice in Northern Iberia on the Eve of the Millenium.” Journal of Medieval History 36, no. 3 (2010): 193–203. Davies, Wendy. Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia, 800–1000. London, 2016. Davies, Wendy and Fouracre, Paul, eds. Settlement and Disputes in Early Medieval Europe. Cambridge, 1986. El libro de los juicios (Liber Iudiciorum), eds. Pedro Ramís Serra and Rafael Ramís Barceló Pedro Ramís Serra and Rafael Ramís Barceló. Madrid, 2015. Escalona, Julio. “Community Meetings in Early Medieval Castile.” In Power and Place in Europe in the Early Middle Ages, eds. Jayne Carroll, Andrew Reynolds and Barbara Yorke. Oxford, 2019, pp. 216–237. Escalona, Julio. “Dense Local Knowledge: Grounding Local to Supralocal in TenthCentury Castile.” In Polity and Neighbourhood in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Julio Escalona, Orri Vésteinsson and Stuart Brookes. Turnhout, 2019, pp. 351–379. Estepa Díez, Carlos. “Poder y propiedad feudales en el periodo astur: las mandaciones de los Flaínez en la montaña leonesa.” In Miscel·lània en homenatge al P. Agustí Altisent. Tarragona, 1991, pp. 285–327. Feller, Laurent. “Enrichessement, accumulation et circulation des biens. Quelques problèmes liés au marché de la terre.” In Le marché de la terre au Moyen Àge, eds. Laurent Feller and Chris Wickham. Rome, 2005, pp. 3–28. Fernández Conde, Francisco Javier. “Ganadería en Asturias en la primera Edad Media. Algunas características de la economía castreña y romana.” In Los rebaños de Gerión. Pastores y trashumancia en Iberia antigua y medieval, ed. Joaquín Gómez-Pantoja. Madrid, 2001, pp. 139–158. Fernández Flórez, José Antonio and Herrero de la Fuente, Marta, eds. Colección documental del monasterio de Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas, I (854–1108). León, 1999.

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García de Valdeavellano, Luis. “El renovo. Notas y documentos sobre los préstamos usurarios en el reino astur-leonés.” Cuadernos de Historia de España 57–58 (1973): 408–448. García Leal, Alfonso. “Los condes Fruela Muñoz y Pedro Flaínez. La formación de un patrimonio señorial.” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 31, no. 1 (2006): 1–110. García Leal, Alfonso. El archivo de los condes Fruela Muñoz y Pedro Flaínez. La formación de un patrimonio nobiliario en la montaña asturleonesa (854–1048). León, 2010. Isla Frez, Amancio. “La pervivencia de la tradición legal visigótica en el reino asturleonés.” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 41, no. 2 (2011): 75–86. Luis Corral, Fernando. “Lugares de reunión, boni homines y presbíteros en Valdevimbre y Ardón en la Alta Edad Media.” Medievalista online 18 (2015). Available at https://medievalista.fcsh.unl.pt/MEDIEVALISTA18/corral1805.html. Accessed March 31, 2023. Luis Corral, Fernando and Pérez Rodríguez, María. “Negotiating Fines in the Early Middle Ages. Local Communities, Mediators and the Instrumentalization of Justice in the Kingdom of León.” Al-Masaq. Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 17, no. 2 (2017): 172–185. Martín Viso, Iñaki. “Authority and Justice in the Formation of the Kingdom of Asturias-León.” Al-Masaq. Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 29, no. 2 (2017): 114–132. Martín Viso, Iñaki. “Las propiedades regias y la formación del reino asturleonés (850–950).” In Biens publics, biens du roi. Les bases économiques des pouvoirs royaux dans le haut Moyen Âge, eds. François Bougard and Vito Loré. Turnhout, 2019, pp. 179–212. Martín Viso, Iñaki. “Orta fuit intentio. Communities and disputes in Northern Iberia (9th–11th centuries).” (Forthcoming). Martínez Sopena, Pascual. “La justicia en la época asturleonesa: entre el Liber y los mediadores sociales.” In El lugar del campesino. En torno a la obra de Reyna Pastor, ed. Ana Rodríguez. Valencia, 2007, pp. 239–260. Martínez Sopena, Pascual. “Prolis Flainiz. Las relaciones familiares en la nobleza de León (siglos X–XII).” Studia Zamorensia XVII (2018): 69–102. Mínguez, José Mª. “Justicia y poder en el marco de la feudalización de la sociedad leonesa.” In La giustizia nell’alto Medioevo (secoli IX–XI). Spoleto, 1997, vol. I, pp. 491–546. Pastor, Reyna. Resistencias y luchas campesinas en la época del crecimiento y consolidación de la formación feudal. Castilla, siglos X–XIII. Madrid, 1980. Pérez, Mariel. “La configuración del espacio político en el Reino de León: los marcos territoriales del poder feudal en el ámbito leonés.” Sociedades Precapitalistas 1, no. 2 (2012). Available at https://www.sociedadesprecapitalistas.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/article /view/SPv2n1a04/pdf. Accessed March 31, 2023.

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Pérez, Maurilio, ed., Lexicon Latinitatis Medii Aevi Regni Legionis (s. VIII-1230). Imperfectum. Turnhout, 2010. Portass, Robert. “The Contours and Contexts of Public Power in the Tenth-Century Liébana.” Journal of Medieval History 38 no. 4 (2012): 389–407. Portass, Robert. “Rethinking the small worlds in tenth-century Galicia.” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 31 (2013): 83–103. Prieto Morera, Agustín. “El proceso en el reino de León a la luz de los diplomas.” In El reino de León en la Alta Edad Media. II. El ordenamiento jurídico del reino. León, 1992, pp. 381–518. Reglero de la Fuente, Carlos Manuel. Espacio y poder en la Castilla medieval. Los Montes de Torozos (siglos X–XIV). Valladolid, 1994. Sánchez Badiola, Juan José. La configuración de un sistema de poblamiento y organización del espacio: el territorio de León (siglos IX–XI). León, 2002. Santos Salazar, Igor. “Ruling Through Court: The Political Meanings of the Settlement of Disputes in Castile and Álava (ca. 900–1038).” Al-Masaq. Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 17, no. 2 (2017): 133–150. Santos Salazar, Igor. “Competition in the Frontiers of the Asturian Kingdom: the Comites of Castile, Lantarón and Álava (860–940).” In Coopetition. Rivaliser, coopérer dans les sociétés du Haut Moyen Âge (500–1100), eds. Régine Le Jan, Geneviève Bührer-Thierry and Stefano Gasparri. Turnhout, 2018, pp. 231–257. White, Stephen D. Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France. Aldershot, 2005. Wickham, Chris. Legge, pratiche e conflitti. Tribunali e visualizazione delle dispute nella Toscana del XII secolo. Roma, 2000.

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Chapter 12

The Aristocracy against the King in the Twelfth Century: Rebellion as Opposition to Alfonso VII “Imperator Hispaniae” Sonia Vital Fernández Simon Barton’s monograph, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile, was the first study on the subject to overcame the regional approaches that had characterised Iberian historiography since the mid-1970s.1 Building on the extensive research that had already focused on the medieval aristocracies of different Iberian territories, Simon Barton took on the necessary challenge of analysing the aristocratic groups that acted in both León and Castile during the twelfth century. While previous scholarship had identified the origins and settlement areas of these aristocratic groups, along with their social networks, structures, and relationship with royal power, Simon Barton’s work broadened this framework of analysis by integrating other features that characterised the aristocracy, such as their mobility and relationship with other aristocratic groups from the same territory and from other areas in northern Iberia. Barton’s subsequent research mainly focused on the participation of the aristocracy in military campaigns in al-Andalus, and the study of the female aristocracy, acknowledging the fundamental role of women in power relationships.2 Drawing on Simon Barton’s research, this study will examine the rebellions that arose under King Alfonso VII (r. 1126–1157) and the complexity of the aristocratic groups that interacted with the king. This analysis reveals the immense power accumulated by the aristocracy, capable of confronting 1 Simon Barton, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile (Cambridge, 1997). For an overview of historiography on the Iberian medieval aristocracy see: Pascual Martínez Sopena, “La nobleza de León y Castilla en los siglos XI y XII. Un estado de la cuestión,” Hispania LIII, no. 185 (1993): 801–822; idem, “La aristocracia hispánica. Castilla y León (siglos X–XIII),” Bulletin du Centre d’Études Médiévales d’Auxerre 2 (2008). Available at https://journals.openedition.org/cem/10052. Accessed January 21, 2020; Mariel Pérez, “La aristocracia medieval: legados historiográficos y tendencias de investigación,” Medievalista 15 (2014). Available at https://journals.openedition.org/medievalista/263?lang=en. Accessed January 2, 2020; and Inés Calderón Medina, “La extensión de las redes de parentesco de la nobleza ibérica plenomedieval. Presentación del dossier,” Studia Zamorensia XVII (2018): 11–17. 2 For a list of his work see: Antonella Liuzzo-Scorpo, “Professor Simon Fraser Barton (1962– 2017),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 48, no. 1 (2018): 421–426, 424–425.

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the king, while also shedding light on the diplomatic, political, administrative, legal and propagandistic mechanisms adopted by the monarch to strengthen his power, especially when power dynamics and forms of feudal organization played against royal authority. 1

Negotiation: Alfonso VII’s Inner Circle of ‘fideles’

Spring of 1126 marked the demise of Queen Urraca (r. 1109–1126), leaving her heir and successor, Alfonso VII, with a kingdom at war and a deep crisis of royal authority. León was still experiencing a civil war against Alfonso I of Aragon and Pamplona (r. 1104–1134), the queen’s former husband and usurper of some of her territories. The Infanta Teresa, stepsister of Urraca and holder of the county of Portugal—which was then part of the kingdom of León—had invaded Galicia several times with the aim of expanding her territorial power. Moreover, the Almoravids, who had arrived in the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the reign of Alfonso VI (r. 1065–1109), were posing a serious threat to the stability of the Christian frontier which, in spite of everything, held out during Urraca’s reign. Amidst all such difficulties, a powerful aristocracy also hindered the consolidation of power of the new king. Alfonso VII’s first actions were aimed at regaining the Castilian lands usurped by Alfonso I and strengthening his position in those territories; to that end, it was essential to attract the favour of the high aristocracy. He also signed an agreement with his aunt Teresa in Ricovado, which led to his recognition as King of León by the highest authority in Portugal;3 though this did not placate Teresa’s desire of increasing her power. As King of León, around 1133, Alfonso VII promoted several military campaigns against the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus. All his political and military actions were possible thanks to the consolidation of a support network among his inner circle of fideles. The accession of a new king to the throne was a significant political and diplomatic moment, as feudal relationships of vassalage had to be renewed along with the bond of fealty between the monarch and the aristocracy of his kingdom. These relationships, of both private and personal nature, lost their validity when the king died, and 3 Probably, these peace settlements re-established the vassalage that since the time of Alfonso VI linked the holder of the county of Portugal to the King of León. Sonia Vital Fernández, Alfonso VII de León y Castilla (1126–1157). Las relaciones de poder en el centro de la acción política y social del Imperator Hispaniae (Gijón, 2019), pp. 198–199. Hereafter cited as Vital Fernández.

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their renewal was convenient for both parties: on the one hand, the new king needed support for his royal consolidation, and energetic collaborators to rule the kingdom; on the other hand, the aristocracy needed to place itself in the orbit of an authority that had the power to confirm grants iure hereditario4 (hereditary property rights) and support its political and social progress. The first pages of the twelfth-century Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris5 (henceforward CAI) detail a procession of aristocratic retinues that came to pay homage to the new king. But there were also opposing sectors, which the chronicle is equally quick to point out, as we shall see. This source is of great value for understanding this period: contemporary to the events it narrates, its anonymous author must have been someone very close to the royal sphere of power, as suggested by its detailed writing.6 Nonetheless, there is an undeniable degree of intentionality in this historical narrative, an aspect that should be kept in mind when integrating the events narrated in the chronicle into historical analysis. This chronicle was an exercise in ideological praise of both the figure and politics of Alfonso VII, becoming one more element of royal propaganda that supported his imperial project.7 That said, the CAI is fundamental

4 Pascual Martínez Sopena, “Reyes y nobles de León (ca. 860–1160),” in Monarquía y sociedad en el reino de León. De Alfonso III a Alfonso VII, 1 (León, 2007), pp. 149–200, 200. 5 Barton translated this chronicle into English: Simon Barton and Richard Fletcher, eds. and trans., The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest (Manchester, 2000), pp. 162–263. 6 For questions of chronology and possible authorship, this article remains fundamental: Antonio Ubieto Arteta: “Sugerencias sobre la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris,” Cuadernos de Historia de España 25–26 (1957): 317–326. See also: Augusto Quintana Prieto, “Sampiro, Alón y Arnaldo. Tres obispos de Astorga, cronistas del reino de León,” in León medieval: Doce estudios. Ponencias y comunicaciones presentadas al Coloquio “El Reino de León en la Edad Media” (León, 1978), pp. 57–68; José María Canal Sánchez-Pagín, “Elías, canónigo rotense, posible autor de la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 30, no. 2 (2000): 735–755; Maurilio Pérez González: “Arnaldo, Obispo de Astorga, probable autor de la crónica del emperador Alfonso VII,” Argutorio: revista de la Asociación Cultural “Monte Irago” 22 (2009): 47–50. Also of interest is issue 15 (June 2013) of e-Spania: “La Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris y la Historia Roderici: dos crónicas particulares del siglo XII”. Available at https://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/22140. Accessed October 25, 2021. Without entering the historiographical debate still open on these questions, I support the most widely held thesis that it was written between the campaign of Almería (1147) and probably a few years before the death of Alfonso VII (1157) by someone in his inner circle or very close to him. 7 Hèléne Sirantoine, Imperator Hispaniae. Les idéologies impériales dans le royaume de León (IXe–XIIe siècles) (Madrid, 2012), pp. 309–373; Andrés Gambra Gutiérrez, “El imperio medieval hispánico y la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris,” e-Spania 15 (2013). Available at http://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/25151. Accessed March 10, 2022.

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to understand the support that the king had at any given moment,8 and what opposing sectors acted against him, while also giving an insight into how the rebellion was faced, how the conflict was resolved and, ultimately, what was the overall impact of the power relationships between the aristocracy and the king. These details, completed with the information that appear in the lists of witnesses and in the dating of the available documentation9—in both royal and private diplomas—allow us to understand why certain magnates rebelled and what strategies they and the king adopted to reinforce their political position in the feudal scenario of León and Castile in the twelfth century. The aristocracy of this period, with its fickle and always renegotiable loyalty,10 forced Alfonso VII to engage in continuous negotiations, which provide evidence of the huge power it wielded, as they could undermine the king, while being essential for the establishment and maintenance of royal authority. This is why Alfonso VII had to reassess his complex relationship with this group, integrating it into his political project, while controlling its power, and redirecting its political functions. The strengthening of royal authority was at stake, and therefore he set about attracting this powerful aristocracy to his cause through negotiations. The objective was to establish a feudal pact that would bind the aristocracy in a private and personal relationship with the king, with mutual obligations of fealty and protection. However, this aristocracy was 8 9

10

Barton referred to this when studying the magnates who participated in the conquest of Almería in 1147: “The ‘Discovery of Aristocracy’ in Twelfth-Century Spain: Portraits of the Secular Élite in the ‘Poem of Almería’,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 83 (2006): 453–468. The dangers of replicating the perspective of the monarchy are discussed, e.g., in Simon R. Doubleday, The Lara Family. Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain (Cambridge, 2001); Julio Escalona Monge, “Misericordia regia, es decir, negociemos. Alfonso VII y los Lara en la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris,” in Lucha política. Condena y legitimación en la España medieval. Annexes des Cahiers de Linguistique et de Civilisation Hispaniques Médiévales 16 (2004): 101–152; and Álvaro Carvajal Castro, “The Monarchy and the Elites in Early Medieval León (Ninth-Eleventh Centuries),” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 7, no. 2 (2015): 232–248; among others. On the characteristics of the documentation available for the study of the aristocracy of this period: Miguel Calleja Puerta, “Archivos dispersos, fuentes reencontradas. Notas metodológicas al estudio de las elites del reino de León en los siglos centrales de la Edad Media,” Medievalismo: Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales 12 (2002): 9–36; idem, “Conservación y recepción de archivos familiares en cartularios medievales del noroeste ibérico,” in Les archives familiales dans l’Occident médiéval et moderne: Trésor, arsenal, mémorial (Madrid, 2021). Available at https://books.openedition.org/cvz/25705?lang=es. Accessed December 1, 2022; and Mariel Pérez, “Posibilidades y límites de los archivos eclesiásticos para el estudio de la nobleza leonesa (siglos X y XI),” in Actas y Comunicaciones del Instituto de Historia Antigua y Medieval 9 (2013). Available at http://revistascientifi cas.filo.uba.ar/index.php/AcHAM/article/view/2084/1837. Accessed December 1, 2022. Vital Fernández, especially p. 56 ff. and p. 233 ff.

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far from submissive and did not yield easily to the authority of the monarch: for decades, it had been developing strategies in its internal structures that allowed it to reach the highest circles of power, thanks to the extension of family networks and alliances. This aristocracy did not hesitate to change loyalty and negotiate with other authorities that would support its cause, and even to rebel if necessary. It was in extreme cases, where no agreement was reached and the magnates persisted in their rebellion, that the king took up arms, although even in these cases he often resorted to negotiation in an attempt to re-establish the feudal pact and vassallatic alliance. Overall, the aristocracy—a complex social group—was capable of creating instability in power relationships with the king: it could disrupt the government of the realm and destabilize it, and it was in a position to force negotiation, and demand in exchange for its loyalty, which was the key element underpinning an entire social and political system. 2

Opposition: Negotiating with Rebels

Alfonso VII’s complex relationship with the high aristocracy marked his entire reign: it hindered the consolidation of royal authority in his early years, and continued to be a problematic point thereafter. In these circumstances, the king could only try to attract the mighty to his cause by promising them powerful positions. The CAI and the documentation of the period show some aspects of these negotiations, especially regarding the benefits that the magnates received by entering into bonds of vassalage with the king. The tenencia (delegated government of a stronghold or a specific territorial demarcation)11 became the main attraction for the aristocracy to negotiate and reach agreements with the king. Alfonso VII used it to attract them to his cause,12 11 Simon Doubleday, The Lara Family; Julia Montenegro Valentín, “Merinos y tenentes en el ‘territorium Legionense’: Una aportación al estudio de la organización territorial de los reinos occidentales,” Anales de la Universidad de Alicante. Historia Medieval 12 (1999): 153–169; Carlos Estepa Díez, “Frontera, nobleza y señoríos en Castilla: el señorío de Molina (siglos XII–XIII),” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 24 (2006): 15–86; and more recently Janna Bianchini, “The Distribution of Tenancies in León, c. 1200–1250: Charter Evidence for a History of Power,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 5, no. 1 (2013): 33–46; Sonia Vital Fernández, p. 92 ff. and idem, “Una riflessione sulla tenencia, elemento chiave nel rapporto politico tra Alfonso VII di León e Castiglia (1126–1157) e i suoi magnati,” I quaderni del m.ae.s—Journal of Mediæ Ætatis Sodalicium 18 (2020): 158–178. 12 See Sonia Vital Fernández, “‘Tenencias’ y tenentes en Galicia a través de los documentos de la cancillería de Alfonso VII (1126–1157). Algunas reflexiones,” in Actas de las VIII Jornadas de Cultura Grecolatina del Sur & III Jornadas de Estudios Clásicos y Medievales

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in an attempt to keep them in his circle and incorporate them in royal service. However, the promotion of the tenencia—a temporary and revocable jurisdictional concession—by Alfonso VII involved considerable royal intervention in the organisational and internal structure of the kingdom, which is, the palpable manifestation of the strengthening of royal authority.13 This action by the king clashed with the seigniorial power of the aristocracy and with its jurisdictional autonomy. For this reason, the negotiations that were to regulate the position and power of the aristocracy in his reign were not easy, and pockets of rebellion emerged throughout the kingdom. 3

First Difficulty in León: The Rebellion in the Torres (Towers)

The CAI refers to the first problems that Alfonso VII encountered in the city of León when he went there to be proclaimed king. This initial opposition must be understood as arising from a wary and powerful aristocracy that saw its political and social position unstable in the new reign. Above all, this was because Alfonso VII’s political project meant more competition among the aristocracy for access to significant positions, and greater difficulty for them in successfully joining the king’s circle of magnates, since there were too few positions at court to satisfy all sectors of the kingdom’s high aristocracy. In the previous reign, the magnates had occupied several positions in the service of the queen, her son, the infant Alfonso Raimúndez—now king—and Alfonso I of Aragon, who kept important places in Castile under his power despite the break-up of his marriage with Queen Urraca. Alfonso VII’s political project now required these magnates to place themselves under his direct authority. The CAI suggests that the initial problems in León forced the king to head to Zamora, seeking the support of the Galician aristocracy that had come out to pay him homage.14 The early support of this sector of the aristocracy can «Palimpsestos», eds. Lidia Gambón and Ana Clara Sisul (Bahía Blanca, 2018), pp. 227–238, 232. Available at http://repositoriodigital.uns.edu.ar/bitstream/123456789/4239/1/palimp sestos.%20VIII%20Jorn.%20Cult.%20Grecol.pdf. Accessed January 20, 2020; Vital Fernández, p. 29 ff., and idem, “Una riflessione sulla tenencia.” 13 This intervention by the king and the strengthening of his authority are the consequences of the social transformations and changes in the political structure of the kingdom of León that had been taking place since the end of the tenth century. See José María Mínguez, “Pacto privado feudal y estructura pública en la organización del poder político en la alta Edad Media,” Res publica. Revista de Filosofía Política 17 (2007): 59–80, 78–80. 14 Cf. Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, ed. Antonio Maya Sánchez in Chronica Hispana saeculi XII, eds. Emma Falque, Juan Gil and Antonio Maya, (Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Medieualis) LXXI (Turnhout, 1990), pp. 109–248, I-2. Hereafter cited as CAI.

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be explained by Alfonso VII’s past in Galician territory, where he had grown up under the protection of the mightiest magnates, who had taken a stand in his cause by defending his rights to the throne of León since the demise of his father (1117), the Count of Galicia Raymond of Burgundy.15 Galician royal supporters were joined by exponents of the Asturian high aristocracy, along with some Castilians, and by Alfonso Jordán, Count of Toulouse and cousin of the king. It was also at this time that the king met his aunt, the Infanta Teresa of Portugal, with whom he reached a temporary agreement (while awaiting a better negotiation, according to the CAI) to avoid a major conflict at a crucial moment of his consolidation.16 Supported by these allies, the king returned to León to face the rebellion of the tenente (holder of a tenencia over which he exercised administrative, judicial and military functions) of the torres and those who assisted him. Unfortunately, the CAI does not give their names, but according to the anonymous chronicler, the tenente and his supporters rejected Alfonso VII as king because they had moved closer to the Castilian nobles Pedro and Rodrigo González de Lara, who defended the cause of the King of Aragon. There were several attempts at negotiation in which the king promised the rebels to consolidate their position in his realm if they handed over the torres peacefully.17 But none succeeded. The king could not tolerate an uprising in the torres, as they represented the stronghold of his military power over the city, which was also the capital of the kingdom. The control of the city strengthened and symbolised royal authority over the entire kingdom. Having exhausted the diplomatic route, and with sufficient support, Alfonso VII recovered the torres by force: he captured the rebels and, after reaching an agreement, released them.18 As narrated in the CAI, in several occasions concerning the resolution of this type of conflict, the king freed the rebels after confiscating their assets, leaving them empty-handed and without honores. I will return to this point later, but I would now like to focus on an aspect that reveals Alfonso VII’s political conception and his intervention in the political and administrative structure of the kingdom to reinforce royal authority. The king understood that it was up to him to delegate the government of the torres of León following negotiation and 15

Ermelindo Portela Silva, “Diego Gelmírez y el trono de Hispania. La coronación real del año 1111,” in O século de Xelmírez, eds. Fernando López Alsina et al. (Santiago de Compostela, 2013), pp. 45–74; and idem, El báculo y la ballesta. Diego Gelmírez (c. 1065–1140) (Madrid, 2016), p. 163. 16 CAI, I-5. 17 CAI, I-3. 18 CAI, I-4.

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the establishment of a feudal pact. Significantly and innovatively, this was not a concession iure hereditario, but a temporary and revocable concession that depended on the king. Likewise, this concession responded to the logic of the feudal pact that dominated social and political structures of the time, so it also depended on commitments based on personal ties. In this feudal framework, the king ensured that matters affecting the political organisation and governance of the kingdom were the remit of his fideles, but at the same time, the temporary and revocable nature of his concession allowed him to maintain strict and direct control over the areas within which they exercised delegated functions of government. Therefore, the permanence of these magnates in post was mainly due to the demands associated with the governing of the kingdom. According to this conception, the tenente of the torres remained in office without legitimacy because, with the death of Queen Urraca, the pact that she had established with him was no longer valid, unless the new king confirmed it. At this point and despite some attempts at negotiation, Alfonso VII had not succeeded in the establishment of a vassallatic compromise with the tenente. The tenente’s refusal to hand over the stronghold, and his rebellion in the torres of León reveal his significant power and that of his supporters, as they were capable of maintaining a position of strength against the king. It was precisely this position that forced Alfonso VII, who had recently acceded to the throne, to negotiate with the tenente. The king only recurred to force when he was unable to reach an agreement with the rebel. However, the CAI silences this aspect and takes pains to show a king who imposes himself by force on those who challenge his authority. What is more, the chronicle emphasises that those who did not agree with the king were deprived of the royal favour necessary for their social and political progress. Unfortunately, in this specific case, we do not know the name of the main rebel, the tenente of the torres,19 19

The last document of Queen Urraca in which the tenente of the torres appears is from 1118 and refers to Pedro Díaz (see Irene Ruiz Albi, La reina doña Urraca (1109–1126). Cancillería y Colección diplomática (León, 2003), doc. 92). We know that in 1123 Pedro Bráoliz was at the head of the tenencia (see José Antonio Fernández Flórez ed., Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (857–1300), IV (1110–1199) (León, 1991), doc. 1213, in Vital Fernández, p. 270) and in 1129, in the reign of Alfonso VII, it was Rodrigo Martínez who held the tenencia (see: José María Fernández Catón, Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), V (1109–1187) (León, 1990), doc. 1387 in Vital Fernández, p. 270). But this information is not sufficient to know who was in charge of the torres in 1126, when Alfonso VII acceded to the throne. Although it is certain that it was not Pedro Bráoliz because the chronicle itself says that he immediately paid obeisance to the king (see: CAI, I-2). Perhaps, as the CAI suggests, we should think of someone close to Pedro González de Lara, who until then had enjoyed great influence at court due to his love affair with Queen Urraca. Possibly this may be the key to the chronicle’s silence on the identity of

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or that of the individuals who supported him, so we cannot verify through the surviving documentation the developments of their subsequent personal and political careers. What is certain is that the king must have tried to attract the high aristocracy to his close circle by offering them prominent positions of power. It is possible to make some considerations about the initial negotiations between the king and the aristocracy from the following information provided by the chronicle. According to the CAI, after the recovery of the torres, several members of the Leonese aristocracy and the Asturian Gonzalo Peláez made a pact with the king.20 Probably they had not previously negotiated with the king, and their position was unclear as Alfonso VII inherited a kingdom that had not yet been pacified. The chronicle offers an insight into these negotiations when it states that the king subsequently granted Rodrigo Martínez, his brother Osorio and Ramiro Fróilaz the title of comes, and that of consul to Gonzalo Peláez, who already held the title of count.21 These titles were not granted immediately—Rodrigo Martínez at the end of 1128,22 Osorio and Ramiro Fróilaz in 113823—but the prospect of political and social progress must have been decisive in attracting them to the king’s cause. These titles, along with the devolved government of the tenencias, formed part of the benefits that magnates obtained from their pact with the king. 4

Rebellions in Castile

Within the context of the war in Castile, the CAI devotes particular attention to the rebellion of the Lara brothers, the predominant group among the Castilian aristocracy of the time. Earlier, Pedro and Rodrigo González de Lara the tenente because, if he was someone close to the Lara family and, above all, to the branch headed by Pedro González, his revelation could hinder the subsequent discourse of the chronicler, who, writing from 1147 onwards, had to adjust his narrative in accordance with the political developments of this family without abandoning the image of a king who imposed his authority. Certainly, by 1147 the influence of Manrique Pérez de Lara, son of the rebel Pedro González, was a fact. On the rise of the Lara family in the reign of Alfonso VII and their accommodation to the discourse of the CAI see Julio Escalona Monge, “Misericordia regia”. 20 CAI, I-4. 21 An analysis of the application of the term consul at this time has allowed me to establish that it was only granted to individuals who had previously obtained the dignity of count, see Vital Fernández, pp. 99–105. 22 Simon Barton, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile, 1st paperback ed. (Cambridge, 2002), p. 294, note 4. Hereafter cited as Barton. 23 Ibid., p. 271 and 288, respectively.

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and Jimeno Íñiguez, tenente of Coyanza, made a pact with the king of León, although without much loyalty and with a hesitant attitude.24 Alfonso VII knew how to play his negotiation cards deftly and brokered a feudal pact capable of attracting them to his cause at a time when he had the support of other powerful magnates—Galicians, Asturians and Leonese—who were potential competitors for relevant positions of power. With the death of Queen Urraca, the privileged position that Pedro González and his family held at court (guaranteed by the intimate relationship that Pedro maintained with the queen during the last years of her life) was put on hold. The Lara family had to make a pact with another authority in order to maintain their prominent position. In such uncertain circumstances, Pedro and Rodrigo made a pact with Alfonso VII (whose offer must have been attractive), waiting to see what turn the conflict between the King of León and Alfonso I of Aragon would take. However, they soon rebelled to support instead the Aragonese King. This is perhaps not surprising, as the authority of the Lara family in Castile25 extended over territories bordering the domains of the King of Aragon, which facilitated a relationship of mutual collaboration. Through their alliance with Aragon, they could aspire to very important benefits in the area, especially considering that Alfonso I had displaced the Castro—the Lara’s long-term rivals—from the Castilian lands that he controlled. The conflict in Castile did not prevent other Castilian nobles, less influential than the Lara family, from making pacts with the King of León. The promise of a privileged position at court and in the administration of the kingdom must have attracted them to join Alfonso VII’s cause. This is what the CAI suggests when stating that among them were Rodrigo Gómez, whom the king later named consul, and Lope Díaz, to whom he granted the title of comes and an honor.26 The documentation confirms that the former received the title of count in 113127 and the latter in May 1135.28 The ambiguity of the Lara pact manifested itself very early, in the summer of 1127, with their rebellion. The occasion was provided by Alfonso I’s fortification of Nájera, Castrojeriz and other castles in the surrounding area as a check on the expansion of Alfonso VII in Castile, who was recovering 24 CAI, I-6. 25 See also Antonio Sánchez de Mora, Los Lara: un linaje castellano de la plena Edad Media (Burgos, 2007). 26 CAI, I-7. 27 Barton, p. 291. 28 Ibid., p. 263 and José María Canal Sánchez-Pagín, “La casa de Haro en León y Castilla durante el siglo XII. Nuevas conclusiones,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 25 (1995): 3–38, 18.

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important fortresses and had conquered Burgos. Both kings clashed in the valley of Támara. According to the CAI, Pedro González de Lara, who was a frontline member of the Leonese troops, refused to fight against the King of Aragon, with whom he had been in contact,29 breaking his vassalic oath to Alfonso VII. Yet, they must have renegotiated because, two years later, a similar situation took place in Atienza and Pedro was once again in the ranks of the King of León. On this new occasion, Alfonso I had assembled a large army with which he attacked the castles and towns bordering Medinaceli and Morón. Alfonso VII went there after receiving a request for help from the inhabitants of those places. However, the Lara refused to provide auxilium30 (military service) to the king, and this openly translated into a new act of rebellion. Once again, the CAI presents Alfonso VII crashing the rebels by arresting Count Pedro González and his son-in-law, Count Beltrán de Risnel, transferring and imprisoning them in León. He did not release them until the prisoners had handed all (uniuersos) their castles and cities over to him.31 The chronicle’s assertion seems excessive. But perhaps the rebels had lost, in principle, their struggle against the king, who had imprisoned them. The negotiations to regain their freedom must have resulted in losses for the rebels, as the king could confiscate their properties,32 which were their main source of power, together with the complex clientele networks that they had established, and which allowed them to maintain a position of strength against the king. The rebels’ handing of their honores to the king was the clearest expression of their breaking of vassalage, and the way in which the king could punish them.33 However, the Lara family—the hegemonic group among the Castilian 29 30 31 32 33

CAI, I-9. CAI, I-14. CAI, I-18. “Members of the nobility who fell from favour in this way faced the humiliating prospect of being stripped of the fiefs that they held from the crown and frequently of having their private property confiscated too, before being cast into exile”, Barton, p. 115. In the twelfth century, the disagreement of an aristocrat with the king was not understood as a crime of lèse-majesté, but as the breaking of the vassallatic bond established between them, which in turn implied the loss of the benefits agreed upon. José María Mínguez has noted how, from the end of the tenth century, the punishment for crimes against the king adapted to the profound social and political transformation that crystallised in the forms of feudal organisation. Thus, the crime of treason as defined by the Liber Iudiciorum, that is, the public crime of lesa maiestate or lesa patria, which Roman and Visigothic laws could punish with capital punishment, in addition to the confiscation of property, was understood, from that time onwards, as a simple breach of a personal pact of loyalty that was punished only with the loss of honores that could be recovered or improved when the pact of loyalty was re-established. José María Mínguez, “Pacto privado feudal,” 68–71 and idem, “Pervivencia y transformaciones de la concepción y práctica del poder en el Reino

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aristocracy—had woven a solid network of inter-aristocratic relationships around them, so that, whatever the extent of the king’s confiscation of property, Pedro’s support in Castile was too significant to be challenged, and the king’s pressure was an exercise in force that was difficult to sustain, despite the steady advance of Alfonso VII in Castile. Undoubtedly, what the king was seeking was to negotiate with the Lara family in order to re-establish their loyalty and reintegrate them into his political project. In the narration of this conflict, the chronicle continues by describing Pedro González de Lara rebelling again against the King of León, and appealing to the protection of Alfonso I (who was besieging Bayonne) to surrender Castile by force.34 There, according to the CAI, Pedro met his death at the hands of the Count of Toulouse, Alfonso Jordán, cousin of Alfonso VII. The chronicle then focuses on the other Lara, Rodrigo, who had rebelled in the region of Asturias de Santillana after hearing of his brother’s imprisonment. According to the chronicle, the king met him with fierce repression and there was an attempt at negotiation, but Rodrigo set specific conditions for the king.35 Rodrigo was certainly not prepared to give in, and this first attempt at negotiation failed. The CAI presents a, by now, very familiar pattern: Rodrigo was imprisoned and taken to León; he was not released until he handed over all his castles and honores to the king; subsequently, the king released him.36 There were no more attempts at rebellion: the chronicle reports that, a few days later, Rodrigo presented himself before Alfonso VII and made a pact with him after admitting his guilt.37 In this way, the CAI resorts to the image of a compassionate king who pardons and rehabilitates the repentant rebel, and does so by granting the magnate a significant place, such as Toledo, and other domains on the frontier and in Castile. Furthermore, Rodrigo recovered the area of Asturias de Santillana despite this being the focus of his rebellion. This image of a merciful Alfonso VII, of clear clerical inspiration, was used by the author of the chronicle to justify the political reintegration of certain magnates. In reality, any rehabilitation depended on the negotiations that both the king and the rebels could sustain. But negotiation could overshadow the

34 35 36 37

de León (siglos X y XI),” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 25 (2007): 15–65, 31. On the evolution of the law punishing rebellion, see also: José Manuel Ruiz Asencio, “Rebeliones leonesas contra Vermudo II,” Archivos Leoneses 45–46 (1969): 215–241; and Mariel Pérez, “Rebelles, infideles, traditores. Insumisión política y poder aristocrático en el reino de León,” Historia Instituciones Documentos 38 (2011): 361–382. CAI, I-18. CAI, I-22. CAI, I-23. CAI, I-23.

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image of a victorious king imposing himself by force on the opposing factions. The chronicler presents negotiation as mercy,38 which contributed to aggrandising the figure of the king. However, the situation must have been more complicated than this narrative suggests. Both Rodrigo’s reincorporation into the king’s circle of fideles and the royal concessions that he received can be explained by the establishment of a pact that satisfied both parties, which was reached through lengthy negotiations through which both the king and the magnate tried to make demands and take advantage. Rodrigo was now protected by the complex clientele networks that sustained the Lara family and that had regrouped around him. In these conditions, the king and Rodrigo had to negotiate on a very similar level, practically on an equal footing. Rodrigo’s subsequent career allows us to deduce what benefits his new agreement with Alfonso VII brought him: the leadership of the Lara family; a position at court; the government of tenencias; and his participation in the king’s military campaigns. I am not going to discuss the political and military arguments that justify the granting of such an important seat as Toledo, threatened by the Almoravids, to someone like Rodrigo, who was after all an ex-rebel.39 But it is worth noting that Rodrigo had already held the tenencia of Toledo during the reign of Urraca,40 so the new granting of this seat could mean the restitution of a previous position, now linked to his service to the King of León. This was a restitution that Rodrigo may well have demanded when he made his pact with the king. However, something of which we have no direct information must have happened because, in 1137, Rodrigo handed over his honores to the monarch and left the kingdom to go to the Holy Land.41 In 1139 he was again in the Peninsula, but in the courts of Barcelona, Navarre and Valencia, never in the kingdom of León. He then returned to Jerusalem, where he saw the end of his days.42 What was the reason for his departure? The CAI only suggests that Rodrigo handed over Toledo, along with the cities and fortresses he held as tenencias43 38 Julio Escalona Monge, “Misericordia regia,” pp. 149–150. 39 Vital Fernández, p. 36. 40 Simon R. Doubleday, The Lara Family, p. 29; Julio Escalona Monge, “Misericordia regia,” p. 130, note 72. 41 He confirms a last document in León on 1 April 1137, cf. Santiago Domínguez Sánchez, Colección documental medieval de los monasterios de San Claudio de León, monasterio de Vega y San Pedro de las Dueñas (León, 2001), doc. 17. 42 CAI, I-48. 43 Rodrigo handed over the tenencias to the king, but retained his lordships, cf. Escalona Monge, “Misericordia regia,” p. 137, note 98.

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to the king when he incurred the king’s wrath, and that the king granted them to Rodrigo Fernández de Castro, whom he named alcaide (military commander, tenente of stronghold) of Toledo.44 The progressive reassertion of Rodrigo’s political position, thanks to a personal strategy based on advantageous marriages, must have alerted the king, who would have tried to curb the rise of the ex-rebel and his family branch by reducing his political power, which could easily have provoked his discontent. In fact, the king had begun to favour Rodrigo’s rival, Rodrigo Fernández de Castro, and also his young nephew, Manrique Pérez de Lara (the next leader of the Lara family), which was leading to the definitive eclipse of Count Rodrigo and his family branch. In this context and deprived of royal favour, Rodrigo would have opted to develop other strategies outside the kingdom, first by setting out for the Holy Land and then by seeking support from other authorities, as evidenced by his presence at the courts of Barcelona, Navarre and Valencia. He was unsuccessful, hence his final pilgrimage to the Holy Land. 5

New Difficulties in León

Around the year 1130, Pedro Díaz and his relative Pelayo Fróilaz rebelled in the fortress of Valle45 with a considerable group of knights and peons. The monarch sent two of his most trusted men against them: Rodrigo and Osorio Martínez of León.46 However, the resistance of the rebels forced the king to take part in the siege. Finally, the rebels agreed to talk to the king. In the words of the CAI, Alfonso VII, once again moved by mercy, freed them.47 This new conflict in León, which took advantage of a moment of weakness of royal authority over relevant sectors of the aristocracy, had its own raison d’être: Pedro Díaz, who had begun his cursus honorum with Alfonso VI and had also served Queen Urraca, was the mayordomo (chief officer of the royal household) of Alfonso VII from 9 March to 18 July 1126.48 His short tenure of office, the fact that he did not obtain any other honours, and that his political prerogatives were diminished in comparison with the roles and power that he had previously 44 CAI, I-47. The documentation of the royal chancellery places him as alcaide of Toledo from 1139. José-Luis Martín Rodríguez, Orígenes de la Orden Militar de Santiago (1170–1195) (Barcelona, 1974), doc. 8, in Vital Fernández, p. 318. 45 Valle de Mansilla, on the river Esla, see: Margarita Torres Sevilla, Linajes nobiliarios en León y Castilla (Siglos IX–XIII) (Salamanca, 1999), p. 381, note 2019. 46 CAI, I-19. 47 CAI, I-20. 48 For these references see: Vital Fernández, p. 83.

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held, must have led to his rebellion, which included some of his family members. Once he was released and, according to the CAI, despite admitting his guilt,49 Pedro must not have reached any agreement with the king, as he no longer took part in the politics of the kingdom, as his disappearance from the documentation confirms.50 He was probably less powerful than other rebels, and this would explain his lesser capacity to maintain the confrontation with the king, and even to make demands. Could Pedro Díaz have had hopes for the success of the Lara’s uprising, which had now collapsed in the face of Pedro’s defeat and Rodrigo’s pact with the king? 6

Rebellion in Asturias

According to the CAI, around the same time, in 1132, the king had gathered his army in Atienza and there he learned that the Asturian count Gonzalo Peláez was conspiring with his relative, Rodrigo Gómez, to rebel. It was then that the king captured Rodrigo and confiscated his domains before setting him free.51 Gonzalo, seeing himself defeated in the first phase, fled to Asturias and made himself strong in the castle of Tudela, where the king followed him to lay siege to the fortress. Taking with him all the rebel knights he had captured in Atienza,52 the king managed to occupy Tudela and open negotiations. Alfonso VII recovered Tudela and other castles, while the count obtained Proaza, Buanga and Alba de Quirós. In addition, they established a truce of a full year.53 Judging by the version offered by the anonymous chronicler, this last aspect is, to say the least, striking because Gonzalo is practically alone, as the king had captured his most trusted knights. However, the terms of the negotiation are equal, which is evidence of the great power Gonzalo wielded in Asturias. Significantly, the king was obliged to reach an agreement at a time when political difficulties plagued him on all fronts in the kingdom. Through 49 CAI, I-20. 50 The CAI’s version emphasises the harm that it meant for a magnate not to reach an agreement with the king. Thus, Pedro Díaz would have gone from one place to another without king or protector, would have become seriously ill and would have died poor and unfortunate. Cf. CAI, I-20. Through this same discourse, the chronicle describes the tragic fate of those who, by rebelling and breaking their relationship with the King of León, had opted for a change of allegiance by seeking the favour of another authority. Cf. the deaths of the counts Pedro González de Lara and Gonzalo Peláez outside their homeland. Cf. CAI, I-18 and I-46 respectively. 51 CAI, I-30. 52 CAI, I-30. 53 CAI, I-31.

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this agreement, the rebel managed to return to the king’s circle of magnates and maintain a position of power in Asturias. However, the pact must not have been completely satisfactory54 because Gonzalo broke the agreement soon after, rebelling from the places he had acquired.55 The king was forced to return to Asturias with more support. The count’s refusal to hand the strongholds to the king, and their armed conflict in Proaza—in which Gonzalo killed the king’s horse—provoked a new siege that was entrusted to the Asturian Suero Vermúdez and Pedro Alfonso.56 This siege was prolonged over time—another sign of Gonzalo’s strength and that of the aristocratic networks that supported him—but finally culminated in the surrender of the count who, according to the CAI, admitted his guilt and handed the castles to the king.57 Further negotiations led to another pact: Gonzalo returned to royal service in the spring of 1135 and received the fortress of Luna, in the Montaña Leonesa,58 although the documentation does not confirm this. It would not be unreasonable to think that, in these negotiations, the count had demanded this place from the king in order to maintain his pre-eminence in Asturias, as Luna was precisely one of the important places under the control of his rival, Count Suero Vermúdez.59 The competition for power and the continuous changes in political positions in Asturias could explain the absence of this information in the documents. In other words, Gonzalo could have governed Luna for a very short period of time, so that there is no record of it, or the few documents that contained such information may have been lost. What is certain is that Count Suero appears in Luna after the last rebellion of Gonzalo Peláez.60 The CAI suggests that before granting Luna to the rebel who demanded the place, the king requested the consilium (counsel) of his

54 Calleja Puerta points out that the income obtained by the three castles was of lesser importance than that obtained in Tudela. Miguel Calleja Puerta, El conde Suero Vermúdez, su parentela y su entorno social. La aristocracia astur-leonesa en los siglos XI y XII (Oviedo, 2001), p. 596. 55 CAI, I-31. A private document dated 1 May 1134 describes Gonzalo in rebellion in the castle of Buanga. Luciano Serrano, Cartulario de San Vicente de Oviedo (781–1200) (Madrid, 1929), doc. 181. 56 CAI, I-43. 57 CAI, I-45. 58 CAI, I-45. 59 A private document dated 17 June 1126 places Count Suero in Luna and minores Asturias. Santiago Domínguez Sánchez, Colección documental medieval de los monasterios, doc. 11, in Vital Fernández, p. 280. 60 He appears in two documents dated 11 April 1136. María Luisa Guadalupe Beraza et al., Colección documental de la catedral de Salamanca (León, 2010), docs. 7 and 11.

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advisors, including his sister Sancha and his wife Berenguela.61 Evidently, the king needed to put down the rebellion in Asturias once and for all, and to integrate the count’s power into the royal office. Hence the ongoing negotiations. Despite the agreements and Gonzalo’s return to court, he soon disappeared from the documentation, suggesting a new rupture with the monarch. In fact, the count tried to recover Buanga, but was finally captured. This time his properties were ceded to the king’s fideles Rodrigo Martínez and his wife Urraca Fernández, and Rodrigo González de Lara and his wife Estefanía Ermengol.62 After another brief period at court, at the end of 1137, the last of Gonzalo’s rebellions took place. On this occasion, Pedro Alfonso, at the head of the king’s knights, seized the rebel and took him to the castle of Aguilar from where he only left for exile.63 He then fled to Portugal, where he made a pact with Afonso Henriques,64 who took him into his court.65 With this action, Gonzalo was probably looking for the support of a benefactor who would allow him to gain power and, perhaps, become stronger against Alfonso VII. But Gonzalo died soon after.66 Why did Gonzalo persist in his rebellion? An analysis of his cursus honorum confirms a progressive reduction of his political prerogatives, which would have led to his continued discontent. During the reign of Queen Urraca, Gonzalo had distinguished himself by collaborating with the queen in her confrontation with Alfonso I of Aragon, for which he was rewarded with the tenencia of the Asturias de Oviedo. However, at an unknown date, Gonzalo

61 CAI, I-45. 62 This is confirmed by the donation of Alfonso VII in July 1135: Manuel Mañueco Villalobos and José Zurita Nieto, eds., Documentos de la iglesia colegial de Santa María la Mayor (hoy Metropolitana) de Valladolid: siglos XI y XII (Valladolid, 1917), doc. 30. The diploma explicitly states that the king granted the two aristocratic couples the inheritance of Zisner and all that they could get in his kingdom that belonged to Gonzalo Peláez. 63 CAI, I-46. 64 He was the son of Henrique of Burgundy, son-in-law of Alfonso VI and Count of Portugal, and of the Infanta Teresa, illegitimate daughter of Alfonso VI, and therefore cousin of Alfonso VII. His political position in Portugal is justified by the fact that he considered himself heir to his parents, whom he replaced at the head of the county. 65 Portugal was at that time seen as a place of welcome for the magnates opposed to Alfonso VII. On this see: Sonia Vital Fernández, “La aristocracia contra el rey. La corte portuguesa de Afonso Henriques como opción política para los magnates descontentos con la política de Alfonso VII de León y Castilla (1126–1157),” in Actas de las XVI Jornadas Internacionales de Estudios Medievales y XXVI Curso de Actualización en Historia Medieval (Buenos Aires, 2019), pp. 264–276. Available at http://saemed.org/publicacio nes/actas/pdf/Actas_XVI_Jornadas.pdf. Accessed December 1, 2022. 66 CAI, I-46.

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rebelled against the queen67 and appeared for the last time at the head of this tenencia in September 1125.68 Shortly afterwards, in May 1126, during the reign of Alfonso VII, Count Suero Vermúdez took over the tenencia.69 These changes in the government of the Asturias de Oviedo reveal the rivalry within the high aristocracy. Gonzalo’s rebellion against Queen Urraca could well be explained by his radical rejection of the weakening of his political prerogatives. At the beginning of the reign of Alfonso VII, Suero Vermúdez immediately paid homage to the king, while Gonzalo Peláez, according to the CAI, did so later, after the king had taken the torres of León. In these circumstances, Alfonso VII would have rewarded the alacrity and loyalty of Count Suero by confirming his position in the Asturias de Oviedo. However, Alfonso VII’s need to pacify the kingdom would explain why Gonzalo soon appeared with the title of count associated with the Asturian territory and why, in 1129, he was chosen by the monarch, together with Count Suero, as a delegate in the truces of Almazán, agreed with the King of Aragon. These prerogatives were intended to attract him to the king’s circle of magnates. Subsequently, in 1131 and 1132, Gonzalo held the post of royal alférez (standard bearer and commander of the king’s military household).70 From 1132, he appears in the royal documentation only with the title of count, with no geographical association. Therefore, from that moment onwards, his political prerogatives were diminishing, probably to the benefit of the family of Suero Vermúdez. The king’s intervention in this aristocratic struggle for power confirms that Alfonso VII was preventing the consolidation of a strong aristocratic power.71 This explains why magnates from rival families were in charge of the Asturias de Oviedo for short periods of time.72 This is yet another example of the 67 CAI, I-45. 68 It is recorded in the private document: Luciano Serrano, Cartulario de San Vicente de Oviedo, doc. 165, in Vital Fernández, p. 280. 69 It is recorded in the private document: José Antonio Fernández Flórez, ed., Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (857–1300), IV (1110–1199) (León, 1991), doc. 1224, in Vital Fernández, p. 280. 70 He held it until March 1132, when he was replaced by the Leonese Count Ramiro Fróilaz. Vital Fernández, p. 73. 71 In this sense, the creation of an infantazgo in Asturias by Alfonso VII, in the hands of his illegitimate daughter, Urraca, is also revealing. On this subject see: Vital Fernández, pp. 136–137 and idem, “Más que Deo votae: Reflexiones sobre el papel político de las infantas, señoras del Infantazgo, en León y Castilla en el siglo XII,” in Estudios sobre cristianismos tardoantiguos y medievales (Mar del Plata and Bahía Blanca, 2021), pp. 117–141, 138–139. Available at https://giemmardelplata.org/archivos/librosyactas/. Accessed 2022 December 4, 2022. 72 Vital Fernández, pp. 280–281.

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assertion of royal power that tried to overcome the limitations of feudal structures to impose itself on the jurisdictional autonomy of the aristocracy. 7

Rebellion in Galicia

Later in Alfonso VII’s reign, rebellion arose in Galicia.73 The CAI provides fewer details about this rebellion because of the greater importance the author gives to the king’s actions in Castile. It does, however, report on the invasion of Galicia by Afonso Henriques in 1137. As his mother had done before, the Portuguese ruler sought to extend his dominions and, on this occasion, he was seconded by Gómez Núñez and his brother-in-law Rodrigo Pérez de Traba, nicknamed el Velloso.74 Both controlled territories close to the border with Portugal: Rodrigo held numerous castles in the territory of Limia, while Gómez Núñez held Tuy and numerous castles in the territory of Toroño. Both must have negotiated with Afonso Henriques their exchange of loyalty and the benefits they would obtain from it. As vassals of Afonso Henriques, they placed their domains at the service of the Portuguese ruler,75 committing treason against Alfonso VII, who had entrusted them with these places by virtue of their relationship of vassalage. This action also positioned them on the Portuguese side in the war that Afonso Henriques was waging against his cousin, the King of León.76 Afonso Henriques fortified the places that the traitors had handed over to him—a true act of sovereignty—and headed back to Portugal.77 On his return to Galicia, he was met with the reaction of the king’s fideles.78 War was on the cards. Finally, in Valdevez, an exchange of castles that one side had taken from 73

Sonia Vital Fernández, “La participación política de la nobleza gallega en el reinado de Alfonso VII (1126–1157). Entre la rebelión y la lealtad al rey,” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 29 (2011): 99–120; idem, “La alta aristocracia gallega y sus estrategias en el poder ante los cambios políticos y sociales en época de Alfonso VII,” Minius 24 (2016): 43–75; and Inés Calderón Medina, “Reyes, nobles y frontera. Entre la violencia y el parentesco en el espacio fronterizo galaico portugués (siglos XII–XIII),” Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos 130 (2017): 91–117, 98–106. 74 It was precisely Barton who definitively identified this Traba as el Velloso who appears in the documentation at: “Sobre el conde Rodrigo Pérez ‘el Velloso’,” Estudios Mindonienses 5 (1989): 653–661. 75 CAI, I-74. 76 See Vital Fernández, “La alta aristocracia gallega,” p. 61 and idem, “La aristocracia contra el rey,” p. 270. 77 CAI, I-77. 78 CAI, I-78.

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the other in both Galicia and Portugal was agreed. Afonso Henriques expelled the rebels from their lands. Both Counts negotiated with Alfonso VII, but were treated differently. Although Rodrigo remained out of power for years, the king pardoned him and readmitted him to his court, most probably under pressure from his family, the influential Traba.79 Gómez Núñez, instead, did not receive a positive response from the king, and they did not reach an agreement, despite having admitted his guilt, as he did not return to the service of Alfonso VII.80 Why did these counts rebel? Rodrigo Pérez de Traba, son of Pedro Fróilaz, the tutor of Alfonso VII, had paid homage to the king in Zamora in 1126 and the king rewarded him with his appointment as count the following year.81 But his political rise soon came to a halt because, beyond obtaining the countly dignity and the government of the tenencia of Limia, he made no further progress in Leonese politics, being confined to the exercise of local power in Galicia. The reorganisation of power carried out by Alfonso VII on his accession to the throne was particularly damaging for the Galicians, who disappeared from positions of political administration in León. As a result, some magnates were forced to look to the Portuguese court to fulfil their aspirations.82 In these circumstances, Rodrigo valued the possibilities that Portugal could offer him, but he did not entirely neglect his relationship with Alfonso VII, with whom he maintained sufficient ties for the latter to grant him the government of Limia. Meanwhile, from 1128, he became a regular visitor to the court of Afonso Henriques, who rewarded him for his service with the donation of Burral and the lordship of Oporto between 1132 and 1135,83 and with the post of mayordomo, which he held at least from November 1140 to 1 February 1141,84 dates which would coincide with his betrayal. As for Gómez Núñez, he was the son of Count Nuño de Celanova, cousin of the last Count of Portugal who was assassinated in 1071. His brother, Sancho Núñez, had married a sister of Afonso Henriques, while he married a Traba, 79 80 81 82

83 84

See Vital Fernández, pp. 47–48 and 140; idem, “La participación política,” p. 111 and idem, “La alta aristocracia gallega,” p. 62. CAI, I-87. He was made Count on 2 April 1127, as recorded in a document of the king of that date: José Antonio Fernández Flórez ed., Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún, doc. 1230. Ermelindo Portela Silva, “La articulación de la sociedad feudal en Galicia,” in En torno al feudalismo hispánico. I Congreso de Estudios Medievales (Ávila, 1989), pp. 331–339, 339; Vital Fernández, pp. 43 ff.; idem, “La participación política,” p. 112 ff.; and idem, “‘Tenencias’ y tenentes,” pp. 228–229. Barton, pp. 297–298. José Luis López Sangil, A nobreza altomediebal galega. A familia Froilaz-Traba (Noia, 2005), p. 107.

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Elvira Pérez. Furthermore, his own daughter, Châmoa Gomes, was a concubine of Afonso Henriques himself.85 This family policy was at the core of his political participation in Portugal and León: he was governor of São Cristóvão in 1110 and 111186 and mayordomo of Count Henrique of Burgundy, from whom he had obtained the dignity of count. When Count Henrique died, Gómez Núñez remained in the service of the Infanta Teresa87 and later, also of Queen Urraca88 and Alfonso VII, from whom he received the tenencias of Toroño and Tuy. Similarly, the limited prospects of promotion under the service of the king led him to take a firmer step to the side of Afonso Henriques. Controlling areas on the border with Portugal must have been the key to his power of negotiation with the Portuguese ruler. 8 Conclusion The aristocratic rebellions of this period reveal the lack of authority of the monarchy inherited by Alfonso VII and, at the same time, the complexity of the internal structures of an aristocracy that had grown in power. An aristocracy with which the king had no choice but to negotiate and make pacts. Indeed, he needed to weave a vast network of support that would allow him to face the challenge of governing in a difficult context and to respond to the aristocratic challenge to royal authority. The king’s actions are indicative of his political strategy: he tried to exhaust all avenues to reach a compromise with the aristocracy before using force. He did so by putting into play a series of political and administrative mechanisms with the intention of reinforcing his position by controlling the power exercised by the magnates. The latter did not make it easy for him. Aware of the power they wielded, they put pressure on him, demanding and forcing negotiations. Although not immediately evident, this emerges clearly from a thorough analysis of the surviving sources. The historical narrative of the CAI, along with the aspects it conceals, are revealing of such dynamics of power, which can be glimpsed in spite of the dominant authorial agenda of promoting Alfonso VII’s royal strength and his imperial project. The strength of these magnates is also evident from the content of the negotiations in which they were involved, and the analysis of their political 85 Calderón Medina: “Reyes, nobles y frontera,” pp. 100–101, note 31. 86 José Mattoso, D. Afonso Henriques (Lisboa, 2007), p. 97. 87 António Brandão, Crónicas do conde D. Henrique, D. Teresa e infante D. Afonso (Oporto, 1944), pp. 253–256. 88 Inés Calderón Medina, Los Soverosa: Una parentela nobiliaria entre tres reinos. Poder y parentesco en la Edad Media Hispana (ss. XI–XIII) (Valladolid, 2018), pp. 70, 232–233.

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and military trajectory, which can be studied through the surviving documentation. Unlike the CAI’s narrative, which insists on placing the king in a position of victory and strength vis-à-vis the aristocracy, the combined analysis of different sources offers a more pragmatic image of the king, who needed to negotiate with the aristocracy in order to integrate it into the political order, and who was sometimes obliged to accommodate their requests and ‘give in’. However, while acknowledging the overly apologetic descriptions given in the CAI, we should not ignore the actions that Alfonso VII took, with firm steps, to strengthen his power and authority. Ultimately, these rebellions were extreme manifestations of the aristocratic defence of their social and political position, which they believed to be harmed by the king’s intervention in the political and administrative structures of the kingdom, especially in contexts of competition for the exercise of power between and among aristocratic families, and between them and the king. Sometimes rebellions were the response to the diminution of individuals’ political prerogatives, often visible in the revocation of offices in favour of other magnates. At other times, rebellions could be a reaction to a lack of expectations that led to changing allegiances, placing those rebels at the service of another authority under which they believed they could achieve greater benefits. But at the root of any act of rebellion there was always the magnates’ disagreement with royal policy and, in the end, with the way in which the king distributed offices and tenencias. This intervention of the king in the political and administrative structure of the kingdom is, therefore, a clear manifestation of the strengthening of royal authority. Alfonso VII sought to assert his power over that of the aristocracy, overcoming the limits imposed by the feudal structures, which tended to fragment sovereignty.89 He did so by granting temporary and revocable positions and tenencias, which modified the administrative and organisational structure of the kingdom, affecting the very bases of power of the aristocracy, which saw how their political functions were redirected and became increasingly dependent on monarchical power. In this context, both the aristocracy and the king needed each other to assert their own power. An agreement was reached through negotiation, but neither was willing to give in at any price. This issue appears in the CAI, which describes a powerful aristocracy in arms against the king, and a king who tried to impose himself and reduce the opposing sectors, according to a strategy that is repeated in each rebellion: capture, confiscation of honores and final release of the rebels, deprived of everything they had previously gained and owned. This is the king’s forceful response to such an aristocratic challenge. However, 89

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the strategy outlined by the CAI cannot hide the need for negotiation on both sides. The king had the strength to imprison the rebels, but not to forcefully reduce their power, which was sustained by the wide networks of alliances that supported them and their direct confrontation with the king. In this sense, the confiscation of property to which the rebels were subjected could damage, to some extent, their individual power bases, but not those of the entire aristocratic group. However, confiscation also brought with it the loss of royal favour, as vassallatic bonds were broken. And this is where the CAI comes in, presenting us with the liberation of the rebels deprived of royal favour, hence emphasising that the magnates needed to regain their amicitia with the king, the only one who could grant them the exercise of power and a prominent position above other members of the aristocracy. In these circumstances, the aristocracy was forced to renew their pact of loyalty with the king, as this was the only way of reintegration into the king’s circle of fideles. These aristocratic rebellions and the strategies implemented for their resolution offer an insight into the strengthening of royal power, and how this initiated the development of a feudal monarchy. Bibliography

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Chapter 13

Advancing Dogs and Rushing Lions: Animals and the Imagery of Conflict in the Poem of Almería Alun Williams 1

Introduction: The Chronicle and Its Authorship

The Hispano-Latin chronicle known as the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris (henceforward CAI) was completed in the last decade of the reign of Alfonso VII of León-Castile (r. 1126–1157), known as ‘the emperor’, especially following his coronation in León in 1135.1 It comprises three books: two prose sections and a truncated poem known as the Poem of Almería (henceforward PA).2 The poem, written in Latin and consisting of 385  ½  lines of rhythmic hexameters, is a key text, though not the exclusive focus of this study. It is a polemical and a celebratory epic that records the success of the Castilian Christians and their Aragonese, Pisan and Genoese allies in wresting the port city of Almería from Muslim hands in October 1147. The PA has characteristics of the cantar de gesta, and begins with a peroration to the emperor-king, Alfonso VII, pious, faithful and courageous, whose deeds in battle are described as glorious. This preface precedes a rousing inventory of Leonese and Castilian military, ecclesiastical and aristocratic leadership, as well as the bravery of the men-at-arms from Galicia, Extremadura and the Asturias, as well as from the cities of León-Castile. Their proud and ancient legacy ripples through the account. The language as well as references within the PA are reminiscent of an Old Testament narrative, and this poetic drama draws almost all its faunal references from biblical sources. There are also allusions to Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni3 and the author briefly uses Charlemagne as a military model and one whose courage 1 Alfonso VII was crowned Imperator totius Hispaniae at León, and, even though this title was sometimes seen as a pretension, it was increasingly used throughout his realms; Damian Smith, “The Men Who Would Be Kings: Innocent II and Spain”, in Pope Innocent II (1130–43): The World vs the City, eds. John Doran and Damian Smith (Abingdon, 2016), pp. 181–205, 194. 2 Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris and Prefatio de Almaria, in Chronica Hispana saeculi XII, eds. Emma Falque, Juan Gil and Antonio Maya Sánchez, Part 1, CCCM 71 (Turnhout, 1990), pp. 109–248 (ed. Maya) and 249–67 (ed. Gill). 3 See Paul Magdalino, The Perception of the Past in Twelfth Century Europe (London, 1992), p. 217.

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and moral probity precedes and is a model for that of Alfonso VII with whom there is a brief but striking comparison.4 The author also uses classical models, most notably images drawn from the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Simon Barton published a gripping translation of the complete chronicle5 and the text is of central importance to the themes of power and conflict in twelfth-century León-Castile, which he studied extensively. The text is anonymous, though elements within the narrative suggest a single strand of authorship and give clues to the author’s identity.6 The entire chronicle is written in praise of Alfonso’s military successes against competing Christian kingdoms in Iberia and the emperor’s own campaigns against Muslims in the evolving entity of al-Andalus. A striking feature of the author’s construction of history is his incorporation of biblical imagery and narrative into the language of conquest and in his depictions of the protagonists. This is evident from the author’s use of animal-based imagery, and the examples indicate a derivation from a wide exegetical and classical corpus. The poem incorporates a variety of examples, including horses, cattle, lions, wolves, dogs, sheep, deer, birds, locusts, and there is even an unattractive reference to a female donkey (asellam), that is used as a metaphor for Castile.7 The idea of employing faunal imagery to suggest a diminished early Hebrew kingdom (i.e., Judah) is used by the author of the PA to suggest a Hispanic kingdom (i.e., Castile), subservient to the Leonese giant, embodied by Alfonso himself: “Alone he has subdued Castile like a little she-ass.”8 Small or immature animals, notwithstanding their potential strength, can provide images of submission and dependence. Because the donkey is often portrayed as a beast of burden and humility in biblical texts,9 this may be a reference to the relative superiority of León over Castile and, perhaps allude to the author’s non-Castilian origins.10 We will consider this body of metaphor, particularly from within the PA, in relation to 4 5 6

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PA, p. 256. Simon Barton and Richard Fletcher, eds. and trans., The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest (Manchester, 2000), pp. 162–263. Peter Linehan questions whether the poem may have been the work of a separate author from the writer of the prose books of the CAI, but refrains from making this assertion: Peter Linehan, Review of Chronica Hispana Saeculi XII. Part 1, in Journal of Theological Studies 43 (1992): 731–37, 734. PA, p. 260. Ibid. Jesus’ riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday is an obvious example (Matt. 21). Other examples include Gen. 44.13, Ex. 22.4, Prov. 26.3 and a particularly unedifying reference in Jer. 48.6. In Hos. 8.9, the writer compares the donkey with Assyria, the ancient enemy of Israel. Barton and Fletcher, El Cid, p. 255, n. 27.

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purpose and implication, as well as style and context. Furthermore, this study will argue that the particular use of faunal narrative was used in an increasingly unusual and refined manner to paint a picture not just of the Muslim enemy within Castile, but also in elaborating the way in which campaigns were waged and understood. Although the identity of the writer (or possibly writers) of the CAI is not the principal focus of this study, any discussion of its contents should consider authorship because such inferences offer clues as to where the author’s raw knowledge and exegetical material may have been derived. Furthermore, a consideration of the author’s possible provenance and background can shed light on the ecclesiastical, political, and literary influences that shaped his narrative. Indeed, elements within his chronicle have, according to philologists, suggested several possible origins. Perhaps the most likely author of the chronicle is Bishop Arnaldo of Astorga (d. 1152), who makes an appearance in the third person in the closing lines of the poem as well as in chapter 108 of the prose section in Book II.11 In the seventeenth century, Francisco de Sota, a religious chronicler working for Carlos II,12 suggested the long-serving Archbishop of Toledo, Jiménez de Rada (c.1170–1247) as a possible author;13 the difficulties of authorship were further discussed by the eighteenth-century historian, Manuel Risco.14 In the last century, Ferrari suggested Peter of Poitiers (c.1130–c.1215) as the possible author,15 and his is by no means the most fanciful suggestion.16 More recently, José María Canal Sánchez-Pagin advances the case for Don Elías, canon of the church of Roda de Isábena, Huesca (1126–1143), who may have written the Vita beati Raimundi, bishop of Roda (d. 1095).17 11 CAI, p. 247; PA, p. 267. 12 The Benedictine monk, Francisco de Sota, had been appointed cronista ad honorem by the mother of the king, Mariana of Austria (1634–96) who was acting as regent during her son’s minority (1665–1675). 13 Francisco de Sota, Chronica de los Principes de Asturias y Cantabria (Madrid, 1681), p. 559. 14 Manuel Risco, Historia de Alfonso VII el Emperador (León, 1792), pp. 9–10. 15 Angel Ferrari, “El Cluniacense Pedro de Poitiers la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris y Poema de Almería,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia CXXII (1963): 154–93. Peter served as secretary to Peter the Venerable and is thought to have visited Spain in 1142 and was part of a team that was responsible for the first translation of the Qurʾan into Latin. 16 Maya Sánchez refers to the entirely farcical suggestion of the author being an invention of the seventeenth-century Jesuit and Spanish pseudo-historian, Jerónimo Román de la Higuera (see discussion in introduction to CAI, p. 114). 17 J. M. Canal Sánchez-Pagin, “Elías, canónigo rotense, posible autor de la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 30, no. 2 (2000): 735–755. This argument rests on the similarity of the vita with the CAI. Not only would the emperor have trusted the writer of the vita, but the author would also have been favoured by his Queen, Berenguela of Barcelona (1116–1149), pp. 742–743.

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Nevertheless, although some consensus has gathered around Bishop Arnaldo (r. 1144–1152), his authorship is not universally accepted.18 Even though the details of the author of the CAI are hedged with uncertainty, it is possible to infer, from his encomium to the emperor, knowledge of a rich biblical culture and interpretation of contemporary literature.19 This is demonstrated by a facility to incorporate biblical precedent and narrative into the myth of conquest and in his depictions of the infidel, as well as of Alfonso’s Christian adversaries from the north of Spain. His use of animal-derived imagery from biblical texts demonstrates breadth and complexity that determine and inform his choice of subject, and the way in which his range of sources might be applied to the description of events. This will be considered within the context and use of faunal imagery in other parts of the medieval Latin west, along with Iberia, while also considering the long-standing and comparable use of such imagery in the medieval Mediterranean and beyond.20 The author of the CAI was therefore appealing to a well-established corpus of material made familiar to a wide public through sermons and art. The Israeli theologian and archaeologist Tova Forti, who has written extensively about faunal imagery as well as aesthetic principles within supporting narrative, believes that the use of such imagery in medieval literature, serving a variety of purposes, is likely to have been biblically derived.21 This arcane and ancient derivation is further explored by the philologist David Wacks, who makes the link between medieval and earlier tradition as well as on the commonality of faunal imagery.22 Principally, this rich vein of sources seems to be derived from biblical accounts—which in turn represent and interpret imagery that was familiar

18 Linehan, Review of Chronica Hispana saeculi, pp. 731–737. 19 Barton, “Islam and the West: A View from Twelfth-Century León,” in Cross, Crescent and Conversion, Studies on Medieval Spain and Christendom in Memory of Richard Fletcher, eds. Simon Barton and Peter Linehan (Leiden, 2008), pp. 153–174, 166. In addition, Purkis suggests that the Poem used ideas derived from two contemporary texts, the Historia Turpini and the Liber Sancti Jacobi; William Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c.1095–c.1187 (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 175–176. For a discussion of other sources that the author is likely to have consulted see Ubieto Arteta, “Sugerencias sobre la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris,” Cuadernos de Historia de España 25, no. 6 (1957): 317–326, 320. 20 Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic. Notre Dame, 2007, p. 199. 21 Tova Forti, Animal Imagery in the Book of Proverbs (Leiden, 2008), especially pp. 52–53, 57–67. 22 David Wacks, Framing Iberia: Māqamāt and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain (Leiden, 2007), p. 123.

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in the Latin west23—and served a purpose well-suited to medieval ideology and culture as well as to the written narrative.24 This imagery, as we shall see, was well established in Iberia and elsewhere. Some Christian writers from the early period of Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula used their biblically-derived imagery to provide material with which they might verbally abuse their Muslim enemy.25 Certainly, the author of CAI uses this technique, but he also shows himself to be particularly adept at deploying the imagery to enhance and emphasise other events and assertions in his chronicle. 2

Possible Sources and Exegesis

Uncertainty around the authorship constrains our knowledge of the sources that the writer had at his disposal. Even by the thirteenth century, there were few complete copies of the Bible to which chroniclers and exegetes had access.26 Jerome (c.347–420) supervised Spanish scribes to copy his Vulgate translation and, though no version from this early period survives, parts of what was copied were brought into the Roman province of Baetica in the early-fifth century. This suggests that the Bible had an “… early and healthy life in the Peninsula …”27 Furthermore, Visigothic Spain became a route by which the Latin literature of North Africa, classical and religious, made its way to northern Europe.28

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Benjamin Foreman explores a range of examples of the powerful and varied application of metaphor and trope in the Old Testament. An example is his comparison of the imagery used to describe the characteristics and behaviour of shepherds and flocks in five different OT books; Benjamin A. Foreman, Animal Metaphors and the People of Israel in the Book of Jeremiah (Göttingen, 2011), p. 50. 24 Simona Cohen believes that this imagery is linked to medieval guilt culture and its gloomy view of the human condition: “… animal images, in general, and those on water receptacles, in particular, were essential in conveying this perception.” Simona Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Leiden, 2008), p. 202. 25 For example, the writings of Paul Alvarus (see below). 26 Luke Timothy Johnson and William S. Kurz S. J., The Future of Catholic Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation (Cambridge, 2002), p. 43. The first printing press in Spain appears to have operated in Valencia by Lambert Palmart between 1474 and 1494, over three hundred years after the author of the CAI had completed his history; E. Gordon Duff, Early Printed Books (Cambridge, 1893), p. 113. 27 John Williams, “The Bible in Spain,” in John Williams, ed., Imaging the Early Medieval Bible (University Park PA, 1999), pp. 179–218, 180, 185. 28 Leighton Durham Reynolds, Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), pp. xv–xvii.

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Leonese-Castilian chroniclers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries would have consulted early versions of the Bible, be they complete or fragmentary, though much of their material was from liturgical sources, which would facilitate the recall of holy text and its emphasis through the repetition of worship.29 Two early examples of what may have been available are the extant, though mutilated, seventh-century version of the Bible known as the León Cathedral Palimpsest, and the illuminated and three-columned mid-ninth century La Cava Bible, both produced in Spain, and possibly in the Asturias. John Williams also cites two Andalusian Bibles, now lost, that King Alfonso III (r. 866–910) bequeathed to the cathedral of Oviedo. One was known as the Sevillian Bible because it was rumoured to have been written by Isidore, though we do not know whether these Bibles were written in Jerome’s Vulgate or in a pre-Vulgate version of the Vetus Latina.30 There is a further Bible that was also produced in the north of Spain with which there are some interesting similarities. The so-called 920 Bible (Cod. 6), produced in a monastery to the west of León,31 also has Visigothic minuscule and is loosely described as “Mozarabic”,32 and contains illustrations derived from a variety of Iberian sources.33 Only the second half of this pandect survives and it is now held at the Monastery of San Isidoro in León.34 It is likely, therefore, to have remained in the proximity of León for most of its existence and was conceivably available to later chroniclers such as Lucas de Tuy and the author of the CAI.35 Further texts that may have been available to twelfth-century northern chroniclers include a Bible known as the San Isidoro or León Bible (Codex Goticus Legionensis) of 960, which was a model for future copies, including one made for the Real Colegiata 29

John Sullivan, “Reading Habits, Scripture and the University,” in The Bible and the University, eds. David Lyle Jeffrey and C. Stephen Evans (Milton Keynes, 2007), pp. 216–232, 224. 30 Williams, “The Bible in Spain,” p. 181. 31 The precise provenance of the Bible is obscure because the Bible’s colophon is indecipherable; Williams, “The Bible in Spain,” p. 181. 32 Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Daíbhí Ó. Cróinín and David Ganz (Cambridge, 1990), p. 96. 33 Mikal de Epalza, “An Emblematic Christian Minority in Islamic al-Andalus,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayussi (Leiden, 1992), pp. 149–70, 149 ff. 34 There is a further Bible from the tenth century known as the Codex Toletanus (or Biblia Hispalense), produced under the direction of the bishop of Écija nd Baza before 988 and was then given to the Cathedral of St. Mary in Seville. I do not include this as part of the present study because of its remoteness from León-Castile suggesting that it was unlikely to have been accessible to twelfth-century chroniclers writing in the north of the Peninsula. 35 Lucas de Tuy (d. 1249), author of Chronicon Mundi (c.1238), was a canon of San Isidoro between 1221 and up 1239, before he was elevated to the bishopric of Túy, where he remained until his death.

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de San Isidoro in 1162, and the thirteenth-century Romanesque Bible from San Millán de la Cogolla in La Rioja.36 An early exegete is Beatus of Liébana (c.730–800), a central figure linking the early church fathers with later exegetes from the Carolingian monasteries who gradually infiltrated the north of the Iberian Peninsula from the end of the eighth century and whose commentaries were used in preaching, meditation and teaching.37 Beatus’ most important exegetical work, Commentaria in Apocalypsin, whose lavish illustrations are integral to the copies that survive,38 was heavily dependent on the exegesis of earlier church fathers, including Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Isidore and Fulgentius of Ruspe.39 There is uncertainty as to whether the Beatus commentary predated or was a response to the heresy of Adoptionism,40 and no manuscripts survive from his own lifetime, the earliest being the Nájera Fragment dating from the ninth century.41 Significant dissemination seems to have been evident from the tenth century onwards42 and evidence of the influence of the commentary is suggested by a later manuscript that was copied and lavishly illustrated by monks at the Silos Monastery near Burgos between 1091 and 1109. This, the so-called Silos Apocalypse (London BL, Add MS 11695) survives in near perfect condition and is likely to have been an important exegetical source for chroniclers from the twelfth century onwards. Nevertheless, motifs illustrating different codices of the Beatus manuscripts seem to have encouraged the

36 Williams, “The Bible in Spain,” pp. 186–187. 37 Kevin Poole, “Beatus of Liébana: Medieval Spain and the Othering of Islam,” in End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity, eds. Karolyn Kinane and Michael A. Ryan (Jefferson NC, 2009), pp. 47–66, 47. 38 John Williams, “Purpose and Imagery in the Apocalypse Commentary of Beatus of Liébana,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (New York, 1993), pp. 217–33, 217. 39 For a more expansive list of exegetical sources, see Williams, “Purpose and Imagery,” p. 218. 40 Adoptionism, known as haeresis feliciana after its founder, Bishop Felix, Bishops Urgel (783–99), argued that Jesus’ human form was not divine and that he was the adopted son of the Father in the physical sense; Poole, “Beatus of Liébana,” pp. 49–52. 41 Williams, “Purpose and Imagery,” p. 217. 42 Heather H. Coffey, “Contesting the Eschaton in Medieval Iberia: The Polemical Inter­ section of Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse and the Prophet’s Miʿrānjāma,” in The Prophet’s Ascension: Cross-Cultural Encounters with the Islamic Miʿrāj Tales, eds. Christine Gruber and Frederick Colby (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2010), pp. 97–140, 98.

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perception of anti-Islamic inferences by later chroniclers of the conflict in al-Andalus—whether they were intended by the author or not.43 The author of the CAI drew on a knowledge of written and visual material derived from the repetition of biblical and liturgical texts transmitted in a monastic setting. The scriptural narrative and its imagery formed an indispensable element in his understanding of the world. He did not seek to re-interpret the books of the Bible as much as recognise that its chronology of events was part of a precursor to his own people’s history and a means by which it could be understood; biblical narrative provided models and examples to those who had commissioned their histories as well as dogma, instruction and solace for their cloistered audience.44 Although his range of references is wide, the author of the CAI shows a preference to select specific passages from the Old Testament (henceforward OT), especially those that describe the struggle of the Hebrew people, and from apocalyptic writing (especially from the Book of Daniel). These choices often accentuate the warlike tone of the chronicle, though the author also uses other passages—where allusions can be traced from the gospels or from more reflective extracts in the Psalms or Proverbs45—at least in part, as literary devices. This purposeful, though often subliminal, treatment of text reflects stylistic confidence and the author’s familiarity with biblical narrative and can be contrasted with his use of more powerfully evocative passages. For example, the more restrained use of the Vulgate is particularly evident in Book I of the CAI, where the author is chiefly concerned with Alfonso’s attempts to shore up his own position vis-à-vis the aristocracy of León-Castile and with his neighbouring Christian kingdoms; often here, the references are reminiscences rather than the more combative use of biblical passages which are a feature of Book II and the PA. This is evident in the early chapters of Book I where allusions to Susanna 35 (Daniel 13) and I Chronicles 19 are evident; it can also be seen in the evocation of the familiar and benign biblical trope, “Because 43 Otto Werckmeister discusses one such marginal illustration from the so-called Girona Manuscript (which also contains Jerome’s Commentary on the Book of Daniel), in O. K. Werckmeister, “The Islamic Rider in the Beatus of Girona,” Gesta 36, no. 2, Visual Culture of Medieval Iberia (1997): 101–106. See also Richard K. Emmerson, “Medieval Illustrated Apocalyptic Manuscripts,” in A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse, ed. Michael A. Ryan (Leiden, 2015), pp. 21–66, 30–33. 44 Marcia L. Colish, Studies in Scholasticism (Aldershot, 2006), p. 81. 45 The Book of Proverbs is a particularly rich source: “… Proverbs mentions many members of the animal kingdom. These include birds (sparrow, eagle/vulture, brook-raven), insects (ant, locust), reptiles (serpent/viper), wild animals (bear, lion, pig, dog, deer, rock-cony), domesticated animals (ox, goat, donkey, horse) and animals whose identification is problematic …”; Forti, Animal Imagery in the Book of Proverbs, p. 11.

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his mercy endureth for ever”, derived from a number of texts, not all of which are listed in the Index Locorum S. Scriptvrae in CCCM 71.46 Such references are often gracious echoes of biblical authority and narrative rather than declarations of religious dominance or assertions of military or aristocratic legitimacy, though more polemical use of scripture is a more common characteristic of the author’s interpretation of events.47 But this is by no means all; the author’s use and embellishment of references from the Psalms is sometimes deployed to contribute to the deep-seated sense of grievance and injustice felt by the Christians whose ancestral homeland had been seized by, among others, those believed to be the ancestors of those Muslims with whom they were now in conflict.48 3

Dogs and Polemic

This combination of linguistic ornamentation and invention appears to be in keeping with the power with which animal imagery is used in the Psalms and is emulated and practised by the author of the CAI himself. Commenting on Psalm 22, J. Kenneth Kuntz notes that in order to portray ‘rancorous enemies’, the psalmist uses a stratum of faunal imagery49 to augment the sense of anguish and lament.50 The author of the CAI also recognises the ways in which the familiar may be enhanced by an enriched metaphor and does not shrink from using a range of references to provide more potent imagery. For example, his allusion to Psalm 42 (43).1: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God”, contains the doctored (or possibly mis-remembered) line: A canibus cervus velut in sylvis agitates51 (“[Just] as the deer pursued by dogs in the woods”). The use of the term “by dogs” (canibus) does not occur in the psalm itself and the author may have inserted this because it was a recognisably insulting reference to the Muslim enemy. This omission of canibus from the biblical text may account for the fact 46 This is a compilation of biblical references from the CAI (Books I and II) and the PA (CCCM 71, pp. 271–77). The Index Locorum also includes biblical references within the early twelfth-century history, Historia Roderici, though that is not part of this study. 47 Barton and Fletcher, El Cid, p. 153. 48 CAI, pp. 205, 212. 49 Worms, bulls, lions, dogs and unicorns are all invoked to create a collective metaphor for the psalmist’s enemies. 50 J. Kenneth Kuntz, “Growling Dogs and Thirsty Deer: Uses of Animal Imagery in Psalmic Rhetoric,” in My Words are Lovely: Studies in the Rhetoric of the Psalms, eds. Robert L. Foster and David M. Howard (New York and London, 2008), pp. 46–62, 55. 51 PA, p. 256.

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that the editors of Chronica Hispana saeculi XII did not note the allusion to Psalm 42, though the psalmic derivation is recognised in Barton’s translation (… caruus [l. 49] … Desiderat fonts … [l. 50] / “The hart panteth after the water brooks”).52 Although Psalm 42 is in part a meditation and perhaps also a melancholy search, it has an underlying optimism which emerges in the last verse (“Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.”).53 The writer of the PA uses the psalmist’s personal quest to provide a thinly veiled battle cry and a call for vengeance on the part of the Christians. Effectively, the purpose and intrinsic mood of the psalm have been hijacked by the author of the PA for his own purposes. Whilst there is a reference in the psalm to “mine enemies who reproach me” (exprobraverunt mihi hostes mei),54 the context in which this appears entirely lacks the combination of a militaristic call to arms and sense of profound injustice that can be found in the PA, and there is no intention within the Psalm to cast a slur on specific or named enemies. Rather the psalmist seems to be referring to forces that oppress him—what we might call his personal demons. What Karen Jolly refers to as the psalmist’s “afflicted state” is also an observable phenomenon in other psalms.55 In the context of the battle narrative within the PA, it is plausible that the author’s use of the term canibus reminded his hearers and readers of the distinction to be made between victorious Christians and vanquished Muslims. There is an echo of the way Jesus himself used the term to contrast children (God’s chosen people) and dogs when approached by a Syrophoenician gentile woman whose daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit: “But (Jesus) said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread and to cast it unto the dogs.”56 Both “children” and “dogs” are metaphors that distinguish chosen people from those who are to be shunned (or perhaps who are to be regarded with less favour). The routine manner in which the term turns up in the gospel account may cast doubt on whether the earliest Christians used the term “dogs” as a piece of intentional abuse or as a generic way to refer to those whose way of life and religion they came to despise. 52 53

Barton and Fletcher, El Cid, p. 251, n. 8. “Quare incurvaris anima mea et conturbas me expecta Dominum quoniam adhuc confitebor ei salutibus vultus mei et Deo meo” (Psalm 42.11). 54 Psalm 42.10. 55 Karen Louise Jolly, “Elves in the Psalms? The Experience of Evil from a Cosmic Perspective,” in The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell, ed. Alberto Ferreiro (Leiden, 1998), pp. 19–44, 37. 56 Mark 7.27.

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Moreover, the woman’s reply suggests partial acceptance of this term.57 By the time it was being applied by Christians and Muslims to each other in the Iberian conflict, it had become much more potent, though the greater offence was felt by Muslims since the term is always abusive, unless used in reference to working dogs.58 The American literary scholar John Block Friedman recognises that this link between biblical and contemporary enemies had a widespread application and deeply embedded origins. He notes that the link between Saracens and Cynocephali was frequently used by Christians as a trope,59 so the enemies of the children of Israel became identified with the later enemies of Christians in medieval Iberia. Although the image of dogs was only one of the terms intentionally and pejoratively applied to Muslims, it was the most enduring and persistent insult and could be traced in an Iberian context directly to depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.60 Yet its use in prose sections of the CAI and the poem are consistent and emphatic. The link between the Muslim cry in the CAI II 71. 6 and 7 (when the uncorroborated Muslim governor of Seville, Avenceta, refers to the Castilians as insensati Christiani, filii canum / “foolish—or irrational—Christians, sons of dogs”)61 and the biblical image of the hart being pursued by dogs in PA 4962 may prompt unintended inferences. However, the recourse to canine imagery is commonly used by the author to show how Muslims and Christians described each other, and its recurrent feature in both the prose section and the poem strengthens the argument for a single strand of authorship between the main body of the CAI and the poem. Since Muslim scholars trained in Islamic law had traditionally regarded dogs as ritually unclean, the term would have been a particularly potent slur and one which would offend Muslim sensibilities, a point that emerges in certain Arabic sources. A variant twelfth-century hadith states: “Angels do not

57 Mark 7.28: “at illa respondit et dicit ei utique Domine nam et catelli sub mensa comedunt de micis puerorum” / (And she answered and said unto him, Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs.) It is interesting how the woman responds with the term catelli (literally “small dogs” or “puppies”) which has the effect of turning a slur into a term of endearment. 58 Jamilia Hussein, Islam: Its Law and Society (Sydney, 1999), p. 118. 59 John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (New York, 1981), p. 67. 60 Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003), explores the range of deployment of this term and suggests that it may have been used descriptively as much as being a deliberate insult (pp. 159–160). 61 CAI, pp. 228, 229. 62 PA, p. 256.

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enter a house in which there is a dog or an idol”.63 Yet as a slur it seems to have been used only rarely and is completely absent from the eleventh- and earlier twelfth-century chronicles of León-Castile. The omission of such invective may seem curious, since its potency was well attested. Alberto Ferreiro notes that the “… polemical weapons that Christianity had aimed against Judaism were now [i.e., from time of the Muslim occupation of Iberia] put into action to combat Islam. In view of the overwhelmingly negative view of dogs in Judaism and Islam, it is hardly surprising that Christians utilized them metaphorically to belittle both faiths.”64 Perhaps Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo and the anonymous author of the so-called Historia Silense, both writing in the early twelfth century but using earlier sources and living in the relative remoteness from Muslim society in the Christian north of Iberia, had other concerns and simply did not comprehend Muslim sensibilities or appreciate the significance of such a slur. Nevertheless, Ferreiro cites La Chanson de Roland and the ninth-century Istoria de Mahomet (described by Wolf as “a short and singularly unsympathetic life of Muhammad”),65 as containing particularly virulent anti-Islamic invective based on canine imagery. Unsurprisingly perhaps, such imagery also occurs more frequently in the ninth-century writings of Paul Alvarus, the chronicler of the Córdoban martyrs; in his Epistulae, Alvarus makes an almost gratuitous reference to the prophet’s death, and although it is without accompanying commentary or embellishment, its very pithiness constitutes an effective slur: “He [i.e. his body] was discovered and gulped down by dogs.”66 However, Alvarus’s most gruesome invective against Muhammad and the events surrounding the death of the prophet are found in Liber Apologeticus Martyrum: “The dogs advanced towards his stench and gorged on his flanks … and it was indeed fitting that so great a prophet (tantus ac talis propheta) should fill the stomachs of dogs.”67 The term tantus ac talis propheta may simply mean ‘such

63 64

65 66 67

Muhammad Ali Maulana, A Manual of Hadith: The Traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, 2nd ed. (London, 1978), p. 367, no. 2. “The polemical weapons that Christianity had aimed against Judaism were now [i.e. from the Muslim invasion of Iberia] put into action to combat Islam. In view of the overwhelmingly negative view of dogs in Judaism and Islam, it is hardly surprising that Christians utilized them metaphorically to belittle both faiths.” Alberto Ferreiro, “Simon Magus, Dogs, and Simon Peter,” in The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft, pp. 45–91, 64. Kenneth B. Wolf, “Christian Views of Islam in Early Medieval Spain,” in Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, ed. John V. Tolan (London, 1996), pp. 85–108, 93. Alvarus, Epistulae. VI.9.10–11, Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum I, p. 201. Liber Apologeticus Martyrum 16.53–4  … 57–8, Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum 2, pp. 485–486.

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a prophet’; if ‘great’ is implied, there is the suggestion of irony.68 In his references to dogs, we cannot be sure whether Alvarus was drawing on current or earlier traditions of anti-Islamic rhetoric and abuse, though there is a further example of the insult in the anonymous tenth-century Andalusian hagiography known as the Vita Argenteae in its reference to the capture and arrest of the Frank, Vulfura: “… captured by heathens as if by starved dogs, mad with fury, he [i.e. Vulfura] was dragged before a certain governor.”69 There may be a mild verbal reminiscence between this source and Alvarus’s Liber Apologeticus Martyrum, but there is a marked lack of direct evidence linking the writers of the two texts and, furthermore, according to Ann Christys, the cult surrounding the Córdoban martyrs became neglected over time, and an awareness of Alvarus’ work is likely to have waned.70 Indeed, we may infer that the geographical remoteness from al-Andalus and political distinctiveness of events in León-Castile ensured that knowledge of the Córdoban martyr movement had withered in the northern kingdom. The context in which the author of Vita Argenteae refers to dogs is less specifically vituperative than in the earlier references within Alvarus’s Epistulae and the Liber Apologeticus Martyrum; suggestions that such phrases were lifted by the anonymous author of the vita from Alvarus’ works seem extremely tenuous, even fanciful. 4

The Variety and Use of Leonine Imagery

Metaphors with animals and the way that these were used to create the tapestry of conflict are deployed sparingly and memorably in the PA, and the author varies the way they are applied, even within the same passage. Dogs, wolves, lions and sheep, may be used as insulting references, but also as significant and different images of military assault or as a means of providing detail in the backdrop of the author’s historical narrative. Certainly, the author’s use of leonine imagery is both varied and unpredictable. In the account following the fulsome description of the arrival of the knights of León at the beginning of the struggle for Almería, we have a scene in which the city of León and its valiant men, as well as the scene of conflict itself, are described through a series 68 Talis really means ‘of such a sort’, and often, according to context, ‘so exceptional’, sometimes ‘so bad’ (i.e., not just ‘so great’); so perhaps translate ‘… that such a great and exceptional prophet should …’ Tantus ac talis would therefore suggest an ironic application. 69 Fabrega Grau, Pasionario hispanico, ll. 385. 70 Ann Christys, “Cordoba in the Vita Vel Passio Argenteae,” in Topographies of power in the Early Middle Ages, eds. Frans Theuws, Mayke De Jong and Carine van Rhiju (Leiden, 2001), pp. 119–136, 126.

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of complex metaphors involving lions, wolves, sheep and the forces of nature. The author uses these examples, not in a recognisably consistent pattern to reinforce his anti-Muslim rhetoric, but to create a kind of military fable. The wolf, instead of being represented as an evil force, is used almost en passant to suggest the Christian harrying the Muslim “sheep”: “Just as the wolf follows hard on the heels of the sheep and the sea overwhelms the lion’s heels …”71 Instead of relating these images immediately to the conflict, the author creates the picture of a deluge that owes its derivation to Ovid, where the wolf, the tiger and the lion—as well as the sheep—are passive creatures, powerless to resist the natural elements: nat lupus inter oves, fulvos vehit unda leones, unda vehit tigres72 (“the wolf swims with the sheep, the waves bear away tawny lions and tigers”). This seems to be an untypical reference and suggests the author’s expansive use of imagery and metaphor, even if his examples are almost exclusively from biblical and classical sources. Lions, for example, may be feared or admired and are a metaphor for God’s people as well as for the one who scatters them, but the reference to “sea” (maris) also reminds us that all creatures, even a beast with the might and nobility of a lion, are subject to enduring, eternal forces. By comparing lions with Muslim forces and the waves of the sea (maris, unda) with an all-powerful light (lux, proterit), the author alludes to a mighty Christian enemy, mightier even than the lion itself. He therefore paints a picture of an enemy that will ultimately be overwhelmed by more powerful and eternal forces,73 even if no physical force could crush those who fought alongside the emperor.74 From a medieval Christian perspective, the reference to Ovid is therefore underpinned with the more authoritative and recognisable allusion to the biblical flood.75 The author uses the image of the lion to refer to a place as well as to a specific people: the city of León, which is praised for its integrity and scrupulous attention to aristocratic privilege,76 provides an obvious allusion. Its young men are not praised merely for their valour, but are also directly compared 71 Ibid., p. 258. 72 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I, ll. 304, 305 in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant (Oxford, 2004). p. 12. 73 PA, p. 258. 74 This is a reference to the Asturian contingent and their constant piety (Irruit interea non ultimos impiger Astur), but it may also allude to San Salvador of Oviedo whose aid the Asturians seek; Ibid., p. 259. 75 Genesis 6–9. For a discussion of the resemblance between Ovid’s account of the Flood and the biblical narrative, see Caroline Jameson, “Ovid in the Sixteenth Century,” in Ovid, ed. J. W. Binns (Abingdon, 1973), pp. 210–242, 210 ff. 76 PA, p. 257.

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with lions as they sweep into battle.77 The author’s interpretation of animal imagery is unique, though by the thirteenth century, the lion had become a common symbol in Castilian literature and an image that served a variety of purposes, as we shall see in relation to Alfonso VII himself.78 Although the Bible typically depicts sheep as docile and benign, biblical texts abound with images of fickle creatures that have gone astray. Such images may imply a certain wilfulness (“All we like sheep have gone astray”),79 or a tendency to scatter in the absence of proper guidance (“And he said, I saw all Israel scattered upon the hills, as sheep that have not a shepherd”).80 This seems to be the sense in which the term is used in the PA, as the author’s flexible use of this imagery is compounded in a passage in which the weakness of the Muslims and their leadership is contrasted with the strength of the men of the city of León. Because of the sound judgement of the monarch and the courage of his men-at-arms, the city holds a preeminent position within Iberia: “it holds/represents the whole of the Spanish kingdom.”81 Yet the references to León and the imagery surrounding the context in which the city is described, because they are so emphatic, deserve further exploration. In the PA, the creatures representing the different military factions are energetic agents and are not merely caught up in the current of history.82 Although the picture that emerges is of a vigorous Christian assault, the inconsistent use of images suggests that such visual references can be used for a flexible range of purposes. It is also worth observing that the absence of lurid adjectives renders wolves and lions as fit instruments for God’s purposes as the author neutralizes their more malevolent aspects. In terms of its name, the city of León is derived from Legio (i.e., the city of the Legion); nevertheless, it is suggested that the rampant lion became a symbol of the city during the reign of Alfonso VII. It can be found on certain

77 Ibid. 78 Wacks cites works such as Cantar de Mio Cid, Poema de Fernán González, Libro de Alexandre and Calila (translated from Arabic into Castilian in the mid-twelfth century) as well as the use of the constellation Leo in Judizios de las estrellas, so the complex literary imagination associated with the lion (and possibly other animals too) may have been a source with which the author of the CAI had some familiarity; Wacks, Framing Iberia, p. 121. 79 Isaiah 53.6. 80 I Kings 22.17. 81 PA, p. 257. 82 In addition to the comparisons with pursuing wolves and rushing lions, there are references to the activity of other creatures (PA, pp. 257 and 263).

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coins of this period83 and is also intimated by the author himself.84 The PA suggests that the author was well aware of this lexicographical reminiscence, even if it was based on a false etymology: the Leonese knights are compared with lions as they surge forward (prorumpit more leonis)85 and the image is then embellished by the author’s comparison of the quality, or possibly the character, of the lion with that of other animals (Vt leo devincit animalia vique decore) and the way in which León exceeds other cities in honour (sic cunctas urbes haec vincit prorsus honore).86 Since the two lines are sequential and part of the same verse, it is scarcely surprising that decore and honore should have been chosen in part to fit the rhyming scheme; decore is, nevertheless, an intriguing term to use. It could mean “reputation” which is the word Barton uses in his translation,87 but it might equally well be translated as “grace”, “beauty”, “splendour”, “dignity”, “virtue” or, indeed, as a synonym for honour itself. This complex representation of the lion is in keeping with the biblical narrative. For example, the patriarch Jacob, in a passage which has echoes of the land of Judah being described as a “lion’s whelp” (catulus leonis),88 is shown as a lion blest by God: “He crouched, he lay down as a lion, and as a great lion: who shall stir him up? Blessed is he that blesseth thee, and cursed is he that curseth thee.”89 The author of the PA creates in León a city and faithful community that is more than a match for the Ishmaelites who shun the light and are crushed by it: “This light crushes underfoot the crushed (or fleeing) Ishmaelites.”90 So here the lion itself becomes a symbol of solitary and remote strength, a faithful and brave remnant. This is a familiar image used as an inspirational OT picture: “And the remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles in the midst of many people as a lion among the beasts of the forest, as a young lion among the flocks of sheep”.91 This biblical identification with God’s people would have been tempting for an author who was well acquainted with the Leonese court and who had a ready-made metaphor to hand.

83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Martín de Riquer, Manual de Heráldica Española (Barcelona, 1942). PA, p. 258. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 258. Barton and Fletcher, El Cid, p. 252. Genesis 49.9. Numbers 24.9. The translation in the Authorised Version of leaena is odd; it should be emended to “lioness” or “lesser lion” and is so translated in other versions. 90 PA, p. 258. 91 Micah 5.8.

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Yet if the lion could be seen in a particular context as the embodiment of God’s people, it could also be famously depicted as man’s enemy (David is described as having killed both a lion and a bear in defence of his flock),92 and as the representation of forces much to be feared: facta est mihi hereditas mea quasi leo in silva dedit contra me vocem / “Mine heritage is unto me as a lion in the forest: it crieth out against me.”93 This fearsome force is alluded to by the author of the PA further on: Legio fera bella requirit. This could be translated as “León searches for the fiercest battles” or, possibly, “wild León seeks battles”.94 León itself is a noble beast, but also one that thrives on the spoils of war. The use of the adjective fera might suggest more than fierceness; it also conveys a sense of biblical terror and wildness, of untamed vengeance, which is one of the themes of the chronicle. And if the ferocity of a lion can be a metaphor for the power of God over his people (leo rugiet quis non timebit Dominus Deus locutus est quis non prophetabi / “The lion hath roared, who will not fear? The Lord hath spoken, who can but prophesy?”95) how much more powerfully will the lion serve as a weapon to be used against God’s enemies? The author recognises the potential creative complexity of this image and is dextrous in using its biblical provenance and variety of usage in the interpretation of his own history. Nevertheless, the apocalyptic writing of St. John’s vision demonstrates the full authority of the lion and we may compare the most spectacular interpretation of the metaphor in the PA with the picture created in the Book of Revelation. For though the lion is a metaphor for God’s people—the remnant of Judah and the flower of Leonese manhood—it is also something more. In John’s vision the lion has become Christ himself: “And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David (radix David), hath prevailed to open the book, and loose the seven seals thereof”.96 We deduce the link because of the reference to radix David.97 And in the PA the relationship between the lion and the Incarnation may also be inferred. For in his description of a certain Count Ramiro (Radimirus)—a Leonese magnate, statesman and military leader, loyal to Alfonso VII,98 we 92 93 94 95 96 97

I Samuel 17.36. Jeremiah 12.8. PA, p. 259. Amos 3.8. Revelation 5.5. Isaiah 11 contains prophecies which describe the Messiah as “a rod from the stem of Jesse” (et egredietur virga de radice Iesse …) and “a root of Jesse” (radix Iesse), Jesse being the father of David. 98 PA, p. 258.

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have a complex conflation of salvation, lineage, and a eulogy to the count with unmistakable references to Christ himself. Count Ramiro is described as “precious to Christ” (est Christo carus)99 and he is represented at the end of the author’s description as a kind of arm of God’s strength.100 Ramiro is the servant of Christ, of the Emperor (In cunctis horis iussum tenet imperatoris)101 and of the city of León. The fusing of royal power, the royal city and Christ himself is a consummate but visceral attempt to confer (or perhaps confirm) God’s blessing on the Leonese mission.102 It is as if the author is stirred by his own rhetoric. But collaboration of image, interpretation and idealism seems to represent an idea that was to gain traction as the Christian military campaign to wrest Almería from Muslim hands gathered pace. For right at the beginning of the chronicle there is a reference to a promise sent down from on high, a gift of God to the newly faithful in Jerusalem in a verse at the end of St. Luke’s gospel (Luke 24.49). And here in the chronicle, the verse is used to allude to an implied link between Jerusalem and the city of León. But the metaphor of the fighting, divinely empowered, noble lions that makes such a powerful linguistic association with León was to emerge only in the poem. 5 Conclusion This study has contended that within the CAI, and particularly within the PA, the author uses a range of faunal imagery to enrich his narrative of the struggle for supremacy between Christian and Muslim forces within Iberia in the mid-twelfth century, as well as seeking to promote the dominance of Alfonso VII and the men of León within the coalition of Christian forces. Yet the poem, which, in its completed form would have been a fitting apotheosis to the entire chronicle, represents a denouement, a coming together, not only of the author’s own thinking but as a way of demonstrating how his use of imagery evolves into a complementary, though complex, narrative. His promotion of biblical and classical faunal imagery was used to create a myth of military assertiveness and glory, predicated, according to the author, on a kind of crafted piety and spiritual teaching.103 He compounds this biblically-derived narrative 99 100 101 102

Ibid. Ibid., p. 259. Ibid., p. 258. Giles Constable, Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century (Farnham and Burlington, 2008), p. 245; Barton and Fletcher, The World of El Cid, p. 253, no. 16. 103 One of those charged with spiritual guidance was Bishop Arnaldo himself, who may indeed have been the author of the CAI; PA, p. 267.

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by comparing the leaders of the campaign at Almería with those from biblical and classical texts. Alfonso himself is directly compared with Charlemagne104 and the idea of a continuous divinely-driven narrative is perpetuated. If beasts from the Bible and classical texts supply a range of characteristics that define the protagonists (valour, cowardice, strength and weakness), so the Christian leaders are presented as exemplars of godly determination and vision. The author largely avoids a conventional package of vituperation and the kind of crude fiction derived from early post-conquest sources (such as we saw in the writings of Paul Alvarus and in the Vita Argenteae) from al-Andalus when anti-Jewish polemic was thenceforward largely directed towards the unfamiliar and more menacing threat from Umayyad North Africa. Neither was the author of the CAI dependent on contemporary sources such as the writings of Bishop Pelayo or the Historia Silense. Indeed, we cannot be sure that he was even acquainted with these works. Yet, there is an acknowledgement in his preface to the chronicle that he is aware of the importance of historical writing to inform posterity, incite memory and serve what might be described as painting a new and lively picture to stir the imagination.105 But such models justify and inspire his vision of conquest. As we have seen, they offer the author a penetrating discernment of divine purpose, and the imagery becomes essential in his presentation of ideology. Barton describes the author as “clearly a learned man”106 with an unusual gift for recognising the imaginative potential of the familiar and he goes directly to the sources themselves. Because he is intensely aware of how biblical precedent might be used and shaped to suit his own history, the power of suggestion and allusion are his abiding and flexible tools. Bibliography

Primary Sources

Alvarus, Epistulae. In Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum I, ed. J. Gill. Madrid, 1973. Barton, Simon and Richard Fletcher, eds. and trans. The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest. Manchester, 2000. Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris and Prefatio de Almaria. In Chronica Hispana saeculi XII, eds. Emma Falque, Juan Gil and Antonio Maya Sánchez, Part I, CCCM 71. Turnhout, 1990, pp. 109–248 (ed. Maya) and 249–67 (ed. Gill). 104 Ibid., p. 256. 105 CAI, p. 149. 106 Barton and Fletcher, El Cid, p. 151.

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de Sota, Francisco. Chronica de los Principes de Asturias y Cantabria. Madrid, 1681. Liber Apologeticus Martyrum. In Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum 2, ed. J. Gill. Madrid, 1973. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I, ll. 304, 305. In R. J. Tarrant, ed. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Oxford, 2004.



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Ferrari, Angel. “El Cluniacense Pedro de Poitiers la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris y Poema de Almería.” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia CXXII (1963): 154–193. Ferreiro, Alberto. “Simon Magus, Dogs, and Simon Peter.” In The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell, ed. Alberto Ferreiro. Leiden, 1998, 45–91. Foreman, Benjamin A. Animal Metaphors and the People of Israel in the Book of Jeremiah. Göttingen, 2011. Forti, Tova. Animal Imagery in the Book of Proverbs. Leiden, 2008. Friedman, John Block. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. New York, 1981. Herrin, Judith, The Formation of Christendom. Princeton, 1987. Hussein, Jamilia, Islam: Its Law and Society. Sydney, 1999. Jameson, Caroline, “Ovid in the Sixteenth Century.” In Ovid, ed. J. W. Binns. Abingdon, 1973, pp. 210–242. Johnson, Luke Timothy and William S. Kurz S. J. The Future of Catholic Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation. Cambridge, 2002. Jolly, Karen Louise. “Elves in the Psalms? The Experience of Evil from a Cosmic Perspective.” In The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell, ed. Alberto Ferreiro. Leiden, 1998, pp. 19–44. Kuntz, J. Kenneth. “Growling Dogs and Thirsty Deer: Uses of Animal Imagery in Psalmic Rhetoric.” In My Words are Lovely: Studies in the Rhetoric of the Psalms, eds. Robert L. Foster and David M. Howard. New York and London, 2008, pp. 46–62. Linehan, Peter. Review of Chronica Hispana Saeculi XII. Part I. In Journal of Theological Studies 43 (1992): 731–737. Loewe, E. A., ed. Codices and Latini Antiquiores, Part XI. Oxford, 1966. Maloy, Rebecca. Inside the Offertory: Chronology and Transmission. Oxford, 2010. Marías, Julián. Understanding Spain, trans. Frances M. López-Morillas. Ann Arbor, 1991. Maulana, Muhammad Ali. A Manual of Hadith: The Traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, 2nd ed. London, 1978. Poole, Kevin. “Beatus of Liébana: Medieval Spain and the Othering of Islam.” In End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity, eds. Karolyn Kinane and Michael A. Ryan. Jefferson, 2009, pp. 47–66. Reynolds, Leighton Durham. Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics. Oxford, 1983. Risco, Manuel. Historia de Alfonso VII el Emperador. León, 1792. Strickland, Debra Higgs. Saracens, Demons and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art. Princeton, 2003. Sullivan, John. “Reading Habits, Scripture and the University.” In The Bible and the University, eds. David Lyle Jeffrey and C. Stephen Evans. Milton Keynes, 2007, pp. 216–232.

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Ubieto Arteta, Antonio. “Sugerencias sobre la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris.” Cuadernos de Historia de España 25, no. 6 (1957): 317–326. Wacks, David A. Framing Iberia: Māqamāt and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain. Leiden, 2007. Werckmeister, Otto K. “The Islamic Rider in the Beatus of Girona.” Gesta 36, no. 2, Visual Culture of Medieval Iberia (1997): 101–106. Williams, John. “The Bible in Spain.” In Imaging the Early Medieval Bible, ed. John Williams. University Park PA, 1999, pp. 179–218. Williams, John. Early Spanish Manuscript Illumination. New York, 1977. Williams, John. “Purpose and Imagery in the Apocalypse Commentary of Beatus of Liébana.” In The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn. New York, 1993, pp. 217–233. Wolf, Kenneth B. “Christian Views of Islam in Early Medieval Spain.” In Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, ed. John V. Tolan. London, 1996, pp. 85–108.

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Part 5 Authority, Leadership, Gender and Power Management

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Chapter 14

Once and Future Queen: The Portrait Coinage of Urraca “Regina Hispaniae” (r. 1109–1126) Therese Martin Nine long centuries have passed since Urraca of León-Castile came to the throne in 1109. During these many years, the stories told about the queen, first-born of the legendary King Alfonso VI (r. 1065/72–1109) and mother of the Emperor Alfonso VII (r. 1126–1157), have ranged from a straightforward acknowledgement of her role as ruler, to praise for her generosity to churches, to scorn for her womanly weakness and wanton nature, to frequent characterisations as a despoiler of churches, and finally to recent revindications of her role as reigning queen. In this study, I take a renewed look at Urraca as ruler through the medium of her coinage.1 The problematics of dating coins mean that this material evidence is not always taken into account in historical studies, and indeed we must use caution when attempting to attach specific minting or coin types to concrete political circumstances. Still, the unexpected range of Urraca’s ‘portrait’ coins—as I will refer to her figural imagery—along with the recent appearance of new types, make this ruler’s coinage ripe for art historical analysis. Themes of gender and power evident in the coins and deeply relevant to Urraca’s reign were central to the research of Simon Barton, as typified by his superb article “Marriage across Frontiers: Sexual Mixing, Power, and Identity in Medieval Iberia,” published in 2011 in the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, which was expanded four years later in his monograph Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines.2 Simon and I first met in the 1990s when he was finishing his 1 The present study got its start in a session in memory of Simon Barton at the conference “Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean (6th–15th Centuries)” of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, which was held at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans—Institució Milà i Fontanals, Barcelona in July 2019. I wish to express my thanks to Roser Salicrú and Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo for inviting me to participate. Some of my thoughts on Urraca’s coinage were first presented in May 2021 in the UNED lecture series, Microscopías: detalles elocuentes en la historia del arte, at the invitation of Antonia Martínez Ruiperez. 2 Simon Barton, “Marriage across Frontiers: Sexual Mixing, Power, and Identity in Medieval Iberia,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 3, no. 1 (2011): 1–25; Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, 2015). © Therese Martin, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004683754_016 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

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PhD and I was starting out on mine. Later, I invited him to participate in the 2002 sessions at Kalamazoo organised in honor of John Williams (1928–2015), after which Simon contributed an excellent chapter to the resulting volume of studies.3 These publications and many others will long serve as inspiration for generations of scholars to come. My continuing work on Queen Urraca will be the poorer for not being able to sound out ideas with Simon, yet as a topic close to my heart it is the most appropriate one to offer to his memory. I first began to study Urraca almost by accident during the course of my doctoral research on the Romanesque church of San Isidoro in León. One of the most surprising results of that research was the discovery that the ‘despoiler of churches’ had, in fact, been a major patron of San Isidoro, her family’s dynastic site at the heart of the kingdom. In 2005 I published an article about Urraca’s successful strategies of rulership, including the patronage of architecture. My monograph, Queen as King, which centred on her family’s involvement with the monumental complex of San Isidoro, came out in 2006,4 the same year María del Carmen Pallares and Ermelindo Portela published their book, La reina Urraca.5 It was gratifying to see the close imbrications between their historical study and my own conclusions, drawn from material, visual, and written evidence. Both our studies, for example, found that 1117 had marked a watershed moment in her reign. If the early years, especially around 1112, had been decidedly turbulent, the second half of Urraca’s rule was little different from that of any other twelfth-century ruler, which is to say, it was a balancing act between supporters and opponents, including bishops like Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela, who shifted from one category to the other. Her gender was likely to have been a limitation in the context of the deeply patriarchal society 3 Simon Barton, “From Mercenary to Crusader: The Career of Álvar Pérez de Castro (d. 1239) Re-examined,” in Church, State, Vellum, and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honor of John Williams, eds. Therese Martin and Julie A. Harris (Leiden, 2005), pp. 111–129. 4 Therese Martin, “The Art of a Reigning Queen as Dynastic Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain,” Speculum 80, no. 4 (2005): 1134–1171; Martin, Queen as King: Politics and Architectural Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain (Leiden, 2006). 5 María del Carmen Pallares and Ermelindo Portela, La reina Urraca (San Sebastián, 2006). See also María del Carmen Pallares, “Urraca de León y su familia. La parentela como obstáculo político,” in Mujeres, familia y linaje en la Edad Media, ed. María del Carmen Trillo San José (Granada, 2004), pp. 69–104. This important article has not received the attention it deserves, especially outside Hispanophone scholarship. Pallares’s goal for the study of Urraca is admirable: “conocer su acción propia y directa y no la que puede considerarse realizada por intermediación de su padre, sus maridos, sus amantes o su hijo” (knowing her own direct action, rather than what might be considered actions carried out through the mediation of her father, husbands, lovers or son.) My contention, as stated in the abstract of this paper, is that Urraca’s portrait coins help us to do just that—recognise Urraca’s direct actions—in a way that an examination of the textual sources alone has not yet achieved fully.

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in which she lived,6 yet Urraca’s evident capacity for rulership allowed her to keep her place on the throne until she died in 1126 at around age forty-five.7 All who work on Urraca owe a debt of gratitude to Bernard Reilly (1926–2021), whose pioneering 1982 monograph was decades ahead of the rest in taking her reign seriously.8 Later, with the publication of her royal charters in 1996 by Cristina Monterde Albiac,9 and again in 2003 with Irene Ruiz Albi’s in-depth study of the queen’s chancellery,10 the floodgates began to open. In 2018 Ángel 6

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See Esther Pascua Echegaray, “Urraca imaginada: representaciones de una reina medieval,” Arenal 21, no. 1 (2014): 121–152; Ana Rodríguez, “De olvido y memoria. Cómo recordar a las mujeres poderosas en Castilla y León en los siglos XII y XIII,” Arenal 25, no. 2 (2018): 271–294; Janna Bianchini, “A Mirror for a Queen? Constructions of Queenship in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century León-Castile,” Journal of Medieval History 45, no. 4 (2019): 432–456. On page 446 Bianchini notes, in reference to the twelfth-century chronicles, that “except for portions of the Historia Compostellana, they rarely blame her faults on her gender.” The Chronicon Compostellanum is the sole textual source to indicate that her death was in childbirth; the Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris, for example, reports only: “It is to be noted that the aforesaid Queen Urraca died on [8] March, era 1164 [1126 AD], after she had reigned sixteen years, eight months and seven days, and was buried honourably in a royal tomb with her forebears in the city of León” (Notandum est quod predicta Vrraca regina in era CLXIV post milesimam, postquam regnauit annis XVI, mensibus VIII, diebus VII, [VIII] idus martii mortua est et sepulta Legionis ciuitate cum patribus suis honorifice in sepulchris regum). See Emma Falque Rey, ed., “Chronicon Compostellanum,” Habis 14 (1983): 73–83, 82; Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris, ed. Antonio Maya Sánchez, in Chronica Hispana saeculi XII, eds. Emma Falque, Juan Gil, and Antonio Maya Sánchez, CCCM 71 (Turnhout, 1990), pp. 149–150. Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca 1109–1126 (Princeton, 1982). More typical was the treatment evident in works like Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, La reconquista y el proceso de diferenciación política (1035–1217), Historia de España Menéndez Pidal, vol. 9 (Madrid, 1998), in which the chapter headings are eloquent: that concerning Urraca’s father is entitled ‘La España del Alfonso VI,’ and the one dealing with her son’s rule is ‘El imperio de Alfonso VII,’ yet the chapter considering Urraca’s seventeen-year reign bears the heading, ‘De Alfonso VI a Alfonso VII.’ Even if the scholarship appears sound, such chapter titles make one hesitant to trust that the author has put equal effort into investigating the three monarchs. Cristina Monterde Albiac, ed., Diplomatario de la reina Urraca de Castilla y León (1109–1126) (Saragossa, 1996). Irene Ruiz Albi, ed., La reina doña Urraca (1109–1126). Cancillería y colección diplomática. Fuentes y estudios de historia leonesa, no. 102 (León, 2003). See also Ruiz Albi, “Cancillería y documentos de Raimundo de Borgoña y la infanta Urraca,” in Alfonso VI, Imperator totius orbis Hispanie, eds. Fernando Suárez and Andrés Gambra (Madrid, 2010), pp. 205–241. Supplementing these gatherings of her royal charters is the collection of all her documents from Galicia, starting in 1095 when Urraca, as infanta, ruled the region together with Count Raimundo of Burgundy. See Manuel Recuero Astray, Marta González Vázquez, and Paz Romero Portilla, eds., Documentos medievales del Reino de Galicia: Doña Urraca (1095–1126) (Santa Comba, La Coruña, 2002). On Urraca’s first husband, see

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Gordo Molina and Diego Melo Carrasco co-authored another monograph on Urraca11 and in recent years a plethora of articles, chapters in edited volumes, and theses from BA through PhD have appeared, not to mention novels, newspaper articles, blog posts, and self-published books.12 Interest in Urraca has shifted away from the tired reiterations of her wicked nature,13 seeking instead to understand how Urraca managed to keep a firm hold on the Leonese throne for seventeen years, despite being, in her day, Christendom’s only female monarch. Matilda of England and Melisende of Jerusalem, her closest parallels, are nearly a generation later.14 In the present study, I look closely at the role played Bernard F. Reilly, “Count Raimundo of Burgundy and French Influence in León-Castilla (1087–1107),” in Church, State, Vellum, and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honor of John Williams, eds. Therese Martin and Julie A. Harris (Leiden, 2005), pp. 85–110; Andrés Barón Faraldo, Raimundo de Borgoña, conde de Galicia. Política y relaciones de poder en el occidente peninsular (1093–1107) (Valladolid, 2017). 11 Ángel G. Gordo Molina and Diego Melo Carrasco, La reina Urraca I (1109–1126). La práctica del concepto de imperium legionense en la primera mitad del siglo XII (Gijón, 2018). It is unfortunate that the drawn signum of a different Urraca (of Portugal, d. 1211, wife of Fernando II of León, r. 1165–1175) appears as the cover image of this book. Such a choice reflects a regrettable dismissal of imagery as evidence in the investigation of medieval history. On this other Urraca’s signum, see Jitske Jasperse, “Of Seals and Siblings: Teresa/Matilda (d. 1218), Queen of Portugal and Countess of Flanders,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 12, no. 3 (2020): 317–343, 333–334. Open access, https://doi.org/10.1080/175 46559.2020.1805120. Accessed January 26, 2023. 12 Over the past decade, a growing number of Master’s students and other emerging scholars have centered their research on Queen Urraca through the lens of written sources, including María Resurreción Chamoso Ramos, “La creación de un modelo de mujer: Urraca I en las crónicas medievales,” MA thesis (Universidad de Salamanca, 2013); Carmen Grijalba Peña, “Urraca I: La imagen de una reina según las crónicas de su tiempo y los documentos regios,” MA thesis (Universidad de Cantabria, 2017); Luísa Tollendal Prudente, “Urraca I (1109–1126), gênero e monarquia: um estado da questão,” Veredas da História 10, no. 1 (2017): 213–242; Alejandro Colinas González, “La reina Urraca a través de las fuentes históricas: El nacimiento de un estigma real,” MA thesis (UNED-Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2019). 13 Yet even in 2022 we can still read such judgements as “no era doña Urraca persona que supiera moderar sus pasiones, como tal vez hubiera convenido a una reina en sus especiales circunstancias,” by Jaime de Salazar y Acha, “La reina doña Urraca (†1126) y su descendencia extramatrimonial,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia CCXIX, no. II (May–August 2022): 177–199, 182. 14 Urraca was born around 1080, Matilda in 1101, and Melisende in 1105. In Martin, Queen as King, I addressed this comparison in depth, see Chapter 7, “Queen as King: Urraca of León-Castilla (d. 1126), Matilda of England (d. 1167), and Melisende of Jerusalem (d. 1161),” pp. 177–207. Recent theses that bring these and other ruling women together for comparison include Ana de Fátima Durão Correia, “The Power of the Genitrix—Gender, Legitimacy and Lineage: Emma of Normandy, Urraca of León-Castile and Teresa of Portugal,” MA thesis (Universidade de Lisboa, 2015); Lisa Joseph, “Dynastic Marriage in England, Castile and

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by her remarkable coinage in creating the image of Urraca as a successful ruler in the first quarter of the twelfth century.15 The boom in Urraca publications over the past decade has seen a parallel explosion in examples of her coinage16 appearing on the market, brought to scholarly attention especially by numismatists, including Manuel Mozo Aragon, 11th–16th Centuries,” MPhil. thesis (The University of Adelaide, 2015); Alexandra Locking, “‘A New Senate of Women’: Ecclesiastical Reform and the Reimagining of Female Secular Lordship, c. 1050–1125 CE”, Unpublished PhD thesis (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2017); Jessica Lynn Koch, “A Comparative Study of Urraca of León-Castilla (d. 1126), Melisende of Jerusalem (d. 1161), and Empress Matilda of England (d. 1167) as Royal Heiresses,” unpublished PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 2018). Although the consideration of Iberian material in Anglo-centered comparative studies marks a step forward, such works have not yet added anything new about Urraca to the bibliography. It is to be hoped that the research project currently underway by Anaïs Waag, ‘Female Royal Rulership in Theory and Practice: Queens Regnant, 1109–1328’ (Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship), will break new ground on Iberian rulers like Urraca, beyond adding them to the mix. For Waag’s first assay, see “Rulership, Authority, and Power.” 15 For a wide-ranging coinage study along these lines, see recently Sebastian Steinbach, “Monetäre Herrschaftszeichen. Insignien königlicher Macht auf europäischen Münzen des Hochmittelalters (ca. 1050–1250),” in Macht und Herrschaft im Siegel- und Münzbild, ed. Andrea Stieldorf (Göttingen, 2021), pp. 67–99. Two of Urraca’s figural coins are mentioned on p. 87 in comparison with the coinage of Staufen queens, but a more appropriate comparison might be with the issues of her contemporary kings or with other reigning queens, rather than with queen consorts. In the same volume, see also Andrea Stieldorf, “Urraca, Mathilda, Konstanze und Co. Königinnen des 12. und beginnenden 13. Jahrhunderts im Münzbild,” pp. 11–38, in which Empress Constance is brought in for comparison; she had her own coins albeit without figural imagery. A useful introduction to medieval coinage studies can be found in Rory Naismith, ed., Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages, (Leiden, 2018), esp. pp. 1–18. 16 The basic starting point for Iberian coinage is Aloïss Heiss, Descripción general de las monedas hispano-cristianas desde la invastión de los Árabes, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1865–1869), for Urraca see esp. vol. 1, pp. 5–6, plate 1. For more recent comprehensive catalogues and studies, see Mercedes Rueda Sabater, Primeras acuñaciones de Castilla y León (Salamanca, 1991); James J. Todesca, “What Touches All: Coinage and Monetary Policy in Leon-Castile to 1230,” unpublished PhD thesis (Fordham University, 1996), esp. pp. 219–226; Fernando Álvarez Burgos, Catálogo de la moneda medieval castellano-leonesa. Siglos XI al XV (Catálogo general de las monedas españolas III) (Madrid, 1998); Antonio Roma Valdés, Emisiones monetarias leonesas y castellanas de la Edad Media. Organización, economía, tipos y fuentes (Madrid, 2010); Miquel Crusafont, Anna M. Balaguer, and Philip Grierson, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Vol. 6, The Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 225–234; Bautista Martínez Martínez, Catálogo de la moneda medieval castellano-leonesa, siglos XI al XV (Madrid, 2017), esp. pp. 5–7; Manuel Mozo Monroy, Enciclopedia de la moneda medieval románica en los reinos de León y Castilla, ss. VII–XIV (Madrid, 2017), vol. 1, esp. pp. 131–217; Antonio Roma Valdés, with Erea Castro Alfonso, Pablo Rueda Rodríguez-Vila, and Raúl Sánchez Rincón, Las monedas leonesas y castellanas del siglo XII (Madrid, 2019). See also the useful

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Monroy17 and Antonio Roma Valdés.18 This trend began in 2012 when the Hispanic Society of America decided to sell off its collection of 37,895 Iberian and Hispanic coins.19 With the goal of maintaining the collection intact, the Hispanic Society first approached the Spanish government and then other institutions, before turning to private buyers when the estimated $25 million purchase price could not be raised. In 2012 Sotheby’s sold the collection to the Madrid coin dealer Jesús Vico, who began immediately to hold a series of auctions, selling off the collection piecemeal; with that, a stunning selection of medieval Iberian coins began to enter the market, sparking further sales and encouraging collectors to bring their own coins to public attention. While my analysis depends in part on the work of numismatists, our aims, methods, and theoretical frameworks differ. As an art historian, I assess the visual and material evidence together with textual sources to understand the reasons behind the minting by Urraca of multiple portrait-type coins. In doing so, she both broke with the past and established a pattern that would be followed by her successors. Urraca’s coinage marks a significant shift from that of her father, Alfonso VI, the first ruler of León-Castile to mint his own coins. His parents, Fernando I (r. 1037–1065) and Sancha (d. 1067), had continued the tradition of their forebears in making use of the abundant Andalusi coins circulating in the Iberian Peninsula.20 Alfonso himself had carried on with the practice of using Andalusi coins during the first decades of his reign: in León from the death of his father in 1065, and in Castile from the death of his brother Sancho in 1072. It was not until 1085, to mark Alfonso VI’s conquest of Toledo, that he began to mint his own coins, and even then he first used Andalusi types with legends in Arabic before settling on a variety of cross types that became one of his standards for the rest of his reign. The coinage of Alfonso VI does not appear to have included any figural representations of the online catalogue created in 2020 by Antonio Roma Valdés. Available at https://mone damedieval.es/. Accessed January 26, 2023. 17 A prolific author, Manuel Mozo Monroy’s most relevant publication for Urraca, beyond the Enciclopedia de la moneda medieval, is “Las más raras labras de Doña Urraca: Acuñaciones de correinado (1117–1126),” Gaceta Numismática 191 (2016): 63–80. 18 Author of a great many numismatic studies, among the most useful on Urraca by Antonio Roma Valdés is “Notas sobre las acuñaciones medievales leonesas: primeros escritos conocidos y las emisiones de doña Urraca,” Revista Omni 10 (2016): 56–73. 19 Antonio Roma Valdés, “Los tipos monetarios medievales leoneses y castellanos conocidos tras la publicación de la colección de la Hispanic Society,” Numisma 257, año LXIII (2013): 95–112. 20 Crusafont et al., The Iberian Peninsula, pp. 209–211, summarize arguments to the contrary, leaving open the hypothesis that coinage may have been issued by Fernando I; however, no examples survive, and most scholars accept that Alfonso VI was the first ruler to mint coins in León-Castile. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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king, with the debatable exception of a stylised frontal bust bearing the legend ANFVS R on the obverse and TOLETA around a tiny, equal-armed cross on the reverse. León Hernández-Canut stated that this unusual coin, which recalls Visigothic models, was minted by Alfonso VI in the scant year or so between his initial Andalusi coinage and the almost immediate commencement of his cross types, but the identification of the ruler remains a matter of scholarly disagreement.21 Whether or not that single portrait type can be associated with Alfonso VI, rather than with one of the eponymous twelfth-century rulers who also minted coins in Toledo, it is clear that Urraca’s father did not produce any portrait coins during the rest of his reign, preferring the non-figural star-annulet type or variations on the theme of cross and chrismon (Christogram based on the Greek letters chi rho), as in an example minted in León (Fig. 14.1a–b).22 The legend +ANFVS REX encircles a cross on the obverse, with +LEO CIVITAS around a chrismon on the reverse.23 Elsewhere in western Christendom during the late eleventh century, coins with the ruler’s portrait were already circulating, including in Aragonese territories during the reign of Sancho Ramírez (r. 1063–1094).24 He was the father of Urraca’s second husband, Alfonso I of Aragon (r. 1104–1134), and Aragonese examples may have been an inspiration for one of Urraca’s coin types, a point to which I will return below. It is important to note, however, that the earlier Aragonese coins frequently show the 21 León Hernández-Canut, “El primer retrato regio en la moneda castellana,” in Actas del XIII Congreso Internacional de Numismática, Madrid, septiembre 2003 (Madrid, 2005), pp. 1199–1205. If the author is correct in observing that the schematic bust recalls Visigothic precedents, he does not address the question of why Alfonso VI would have abandoned the practice of portrait coinage after this initial foray, nor does he explain why neither Alfonso VII nor Alfonso I el Batallador should be identified as the ANFVS on this odd coin. I incline toward Alfonso VII, in part because he had so many differing coin types based on figural imagery, among which this coin would not be out of place. Antonio Roma Valdés also attributes this coin to Alfonso VII, see Momeca cat. 8.7. Available at https://moneda medieval.es/portfolio-items/momeca-8-7-alfonso-vii-series-anteriores-a-1140. Accessed January 26, 2023. 22 See James J. Todesca, “The Crown Renewed: The Administration of Coinage in LeónCastile c. 1085–1200,” in The Emergence of León-Castile c.1065–1500: Essays Presented to J. F. O’Callaghan, ed. James J. Todesca (Farnham, 2015), pp. 9–31; Todesca, “Selling Castile: Coinage, Propaganda and Mediterranean Trade in the Age of Alfonso VIII,” in King Alfonso VIII of Castile: Government, Family and War, eds. Miguel Gómez, Kyle C. Lincoln, and Damian Smith (New York, 2019), pp. 30–58. 23 Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid (hereafter MAN), 1994/50/2. 24 Miguel Ibañez Artica, “Consideraciones sobre las primitivas monedas del reino de Pamplona-Navarra,” Numisma 43, no. 232 (1993): 109–145. For Saxon and English precedents for the profile bust coin, as well as a less convincing Catalan frontal bust, see Marta Serrano Coll, “Imagen y propaganda en las primeras amonedaciones del rey de Aragón,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 45, no. 2 (2015): 915–953, esp. 922–924. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Figure 14.1a–b

Coin of Alfonso VI +ANFVS REX on obverse, +LEO CIVITAS on reverse. MAN, no. 1995/95/2. Photos: Therese Martin.

kings bare-headed, and only on some of those coined by Alfonso I during his marriage to Urraca does he wear a crown. By contrast, she herself is invariably depicted with either diadem or crown. Thus, inspiration did not result in simple copying; rather, the evident changes show the decisions behind modifications made to the different models.25 Urraca would closely follow her father’s cross examples on several of her own coins,26 but she went further than any Iberian ruler of her day in producing multiple different portrait types, four that are well attested and a fifth that has recently been published by Francisco Javier García Montes.27 Some of Urraca’s early emissions depended on the immediately recognisable symbol of the cross or chrismon, nonfigural designs closely patterned on one of her father’s standard coin types.28 Until the end of her reign, she would continue with this coinage which emphasised, as Alfonso’s had, the Christian nature of their rule;29 one example from León gives a good sense both of the larger nonfigural group and of the strong link forged between 25

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On the presence of coins from other lands in León, see Eduardo Fuentes Ganzo, “La circulación monetaria foránea en el Reino de León medieval (siglos XI–XV). Primeras aproximaciones 1,” in Actas del X Congreso Nacional de Numismática. Albacete (Madrid, 1998), pp. 559–568. This article draws in for comparison some of Urraca’s nonfigural coins and their legends, but an in-depth analysis of her complete coinage is beyond its scope. Francisco Javier García Montes, “El bello rostro de Urraca I,” ProMonumenta 16 (Dec. 2019): 48–59. As James Todesca pointed out in personal correspondence, there are no hoards of Urraca’s coins, which makes dating the different types extremely difficult. See José María de Francisco Olmos, “La tipología de la moneda castellano-leonesa en el reinado de doña Urraca (1109–1126). Un documento político,” in Monarquía y Sociedad en - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Figure 14.2a–b VRRACA REGI on obverse, LEO CIVITAS on reverse. MAN 1994/50/66

father and daughter by the iconography and inscriptions chosen for her coins (Figs. 14.2a–b).30 With a cross on the obverse and a chrismon on the reverse, the respective legends read VRRACA REGI and LEO CIVITAS. The city of León was a sort of capital for the peripatetic rulers of León-Castile, and its venerable Roman origins are here evoked through the use of civitas. Other coins minted in León bear the adjectival LEGIONENSE, referencing rule over the Leonese territory and its populace. Paired with the monarch’s name, the Christological signs are the visual equivalent of the written declaration in Urraca’s charters that she ruled by the grace of God, as in a donation of 1120 to the monastery of San Zoilo de Carrión de los Condes, in which the intitulation includes the phrase “Urraka, Dei gracia Ispanie regina”.31 On her nonfigural coins, rulership is thus evoked in multiple ways: through the symbol of Christ, the visual memory of Alfonso VI’s coinage, the legend with Urraca’s name and title, and the place in her domain where each was struck. 1 +VRACA RE / +TOLETVO Although the variety in her nonfigural coinage over the course of Urraca’s seventeen-year reign would also make for a fascinating comparison, the focus of this study is the pattern that has only recently emerged for her portrait el Reino de León. De Alfonso III a Alfonso VII, ed. José María Fernández Catón, vol. 2 (León, 2007), pp. 457–472. 30 MAN 1994/50/66. 31 Ruiz Albi, La reina doña Urraca, pp. 532–533. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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coins. The earliest and most common depiction of the queen has long been identified as dating from the commencement of her reign in 1109, and it may have been minted continuously throughout.32 Presented frontally, her simply sketched head is outlined by a triple veil, which is set off by a delicate pearled diadem across her forehead (Figs. 14.3a–b). The start of the legend on each side is marked by an equal-armed cross: +VRACA RE on the obverse with her bust, and +TOLETVO on the reverse, which centres on a slender cross.33 In 2005, I suggested that the telling detail of the (deliberately?) ambiguous abbreviation of the title could equally be completed either REGINA or REX.34 This coin is the first indication that Urraca sought to present herself as both queen and king, a concept that would later be fully verbalised in a charter of Urraca’s copied into the Historia Compostellana. In 1121, together with sixty of her barons and knights (barones et milites regine domine V), she swore fidelity to Archbishop Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela, declaring that she would be to him ‘a faithful lady and friend, as a good king (bonus rex) to his good archbishop, for my whole life.’35 As further evidence for understanding the meaning of RE on her coins, it is important to take into account that the same abbreviation was used around the same years on one of her nonfigural coins, jointly issued with

Figure 14.3a–b +VRACA RE on obverse, +TOLETVO on reverse. MAN no. 1994/50/62. Photos: Therese Martin. 32

Manuel Mozo Monroy, “Acuñación toledana de Urraca, reina de León y Toledo (1109–1126),” Parva Urbs 1 (2010): 14–16. 33 MAN 1994/50/62. 34 Martin, “The Art of a Reigning Queen,” p. 1161; Martin, Queen as King, pp. 177–178. 35 Published in Monterde Albiac, Diplomatario de la reina Urraca, p. 247; Ruiz Albi, La reina doña Urraca, 552–553: ‘sim vobis fidelis domina et amica, sicut bonus rex suo bono archiepiscopo in tota vita mea.’

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Figure 14.4a–b VRAC REGI on obverse / ANFVS RE on reverse. MAN no. 2020/43/2. AB.17. Photos: Therese Martin.

Alfonso I and most likely minted during their short-lived marriage.36 The legends read VRAC REGI and ANFVS RE (Figs. 14.4a–b).37 I wonder now if I might have been overly cautious in my initial ambiguous reading of RE on Urraca’s Toledo bust coin. Like ANFVS RE, could URACA RE actually have been a more direct statement about Urraca’s ‘kingship’ in her day than it appears to the modern eye? In the legends on her later coins, as we shall see, she would opt for a range of feminine endings paired with representations that make rulership even more explicit than the diademed bust. To be clear, my reading of the details on her coinage credits the queen with the ability to select and approve 36

The ways in which scholars identify the different sides of this coin reflect—and affect— our interpretations of the two rulers’ preeminence: I see Urraca’s place on the obverse and Alfonso’s on the reverse because of the cross, which would thus be in its standard position on the reverse of her figural coins. Mozo Monroy, Enciclopedia de la moneda medieval, pp. 229–252, however, holds the opposite, seeing the cross with Alfonso’s name as the obverse of this particular coin type; see also Mozo Monroy, “Nuevos descubrimientos en la numismática medieval española: sobre dos piezas inéditas y notables de Urraca I y de Alfonso X, de Castilla y León,” in Homenaje a Josep Pellicer i Bru, eds. José María de Francisco Olmos and Felix Retamero Serralvo (Barcelona, 2020), pp. 109–121. On this marital union, see José Ángel Lema Pueyo, Alfonso I el Batallador, rey de Aragón y Pamplona (1104–1134) (Gijón, 2008); Ángel Gordo, “‘Vos me teneatis ad honorem sicuti bonus vir debet tenere suam bonam uxorem.’ Urraca I de León y Castilla (1109–1126) y Alfonso I de Aragón y Pamplona (1104–1134). Pacto matrimonial, violencia, abandono y legitimidad de reina heredera y propietaria,” Intus-Legere 11, no. 1 (2017): 5–20. Finally, it is possible that the Alfonso of this coin type was Urraca’s son rather than her husband; see Luis Domingo Figuerola, “Una moneda de Urraca y Alfonso,” Numisma 32 (1982): 293–299; Balaguer, and Grierson, The Iberian Peninsula, p. 226. 37 MAN 2020/43/2 AB.17.

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these designs, as well as the capacity to understand and exploit the extraordinary communicative potential of multiple different legends and images.38 According to numismatists, the diademed portrait bust struck in Toledo throughout her reign is the most common of Urraca’s coins. Great numbers must have been produced in order for so many to have come down to us today. While there are minor variations across the multiple strikings, such as the absence or presence of a pair of dots on the shoulders that have been taken to represent earrings, in general the dinero presents a straightforward image of a female ruler, easily recognisable through her veiled headcovering. Yet the very existence of this representation, as well as the extensive minting that has guaranteed the survival of the coin type across many collections worldwide, should surprise us. In number, it is not typical of the rest of Urraca’s coinage, for which limited examples survive, but even more for its unprecedented use of female figural imagery on the Iberian Peninsula.39 In fact, a coin with any image of a ruler, male or female, was a radical break from tradition in León-Castile. Urraca’s coins would establish the new standard of multiple portrayals of the ruler; her son Alfonso VII later issued coins with a plethora of representations: in bust, profile, long-haired, bald, bearded, full body, mounted, enthroned, and more.40 2

VRRACA REXA / LEGIONENSIS

A second, less common portrait type for Urraca—and the only one in profile— may have taken inspiration from the Aragonese coins of her husband’s family. 38

In this I agree with Jitske Jasperse, “Manly Minds in Female Bodies: Three Women and Their Power through Coins and Seals,” Arenal 25, no. 2 (2018): 295–321, esp. 297, who argues for working from ‘the premise that coins and seals were the direct and explicit result of women’s power, instead of merely passive display of their status. It was women’s involvement in the conception and production that made these artefacts the embodiment of their rule.’ On the larger ‘role of coins as tokens of identity,’ see Lucia Travaini, “Coins and Identity: From Mint to Paradise,” in Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages, ed. Rory Naismith (Leiden, 2018), pp. 321–349. 39 Alan M. Stahl, “Coinage in the Name of Medieval Women,” in Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal (Athens, GA and London, 1990), pp. 321–341. 40 See, for example, Manuel Mozo Monroy and Francisco Javier Garciá Montes, “Alfonso VII, el rey entronizado,” Gaceta Numismática 185 (2013): 57–79; Manuel Mozo Monroy, “Conjeturas sobre doce monedas medievales hispano-cristianas del siglo XII,” Revista Numismática Hécate 1 (2014): 115–163. I am grateful to James Todesca for sharing with me a study he has underway examining coins and textual sources as evidence of joint rulership (“‘One with My Son’: Urraca, Alfonso Raimúndez and the Kingdom of Spain, 1109–26”). For a study of the co-rule of Urraca and her son centred on Galicia, see Xosé Antonio López Teixeira, Rex et Reina. Urraca, Afonso Raimúndez e a monarquía galega (Noia, A Coruña, 2013). - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Indeed, I would suggest that this coin type must have used a male ruler’s die as a model, given the uncovered hair that flows from the back of her head, which commonly appears on the coinage of kings. Nearly identical in crown and loose hair on the obverse as well as the cross-in-quadrants pattern on the reverse is a coin minted in Segovia, which has been attributed to Urraca’s son Alfonso VII (Fig. 14.5).41 Facing left toward a star, the queen wears a prominent crown topped by small circular forms, as though gems (Figs. 14.6a–b).42 Most extraordinary is the legend of this regal coin type, which makes use of a significant, if short-lived, neologism: VRRACA REXA appears on the figural obverse, naming her a female king. This term seems not to have been terribly successful, as it was not repeated on any of her other coins nor was it used in documentary

Figure 14.5 Alfonso VII, ANFUS R REX on obverse, SOCOVIA CIV on reverse. MOMECA cat. No. 7.1. Photo: Jesús Vico.

Figure 14.6a–b VRRACA REXA on obverse, LEGIONENSIS on reverse. MAN no. 2020/43/3. Photos: Therese Martin.

41

Two Segovian coin types that have been identified with Alfonso I of Aragón and Alfonso VII of León-Castile make use of a nearly identical image of the ruler: profile facing left, gemmed crown, flowing hair, with the legends ANFUS S REX SUCOVIA CIA (for Alfonso I Sanchez), and ANFUS R REX SOCOVIA CIV (for Alfonso VII Raimundi). 42 MAN 2020/43/3. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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sources.43 On the coin’s reverse, the word LEGIONENSIS, around a central cross with tiny crosses in the quarters, suggests rule over the kingdom of León rather than the city. A suggestive parallel for Urraca’s REXA coin has recently been studied by Johanne Porter for certain coins associated with Queen Matilda of England (d. 1167), which Porter names the ‘rex Matilda Cross Moline’ type (Figs. 14.7a–b).44 Building on the work of Marion Archibald, who read the abbreviated legend I M  REX:  AN as Imperatrix Matilda REX Anglorum,45 Porter argues that ‘these pennies copied the first type issued by King Stephen’ as Matilda’s ‘political statement and declaration of her legitimacy as the rightful ruler of England.’46 The profile bust with pearled collar faces right, and the slender sceptre is topped by a fleur-de-lis, as is the ruler’s bejeweled crown

Figure 14.7a–b Empress Matilda, ‘rex Matilda’ Cross Moline type, Malmesbury, moneyer Walter. British Museum no. 1932,0401.4. REX:AN on obverse, REV. +W[-] [LTE] RI:DE:MAL[ME] on reverse. © The Trustees of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. 43

An alternate interpretation has REXA referring to one of the kings named Alfonso—father, husband, or son—with whom she was associated, but I find this explanation unlikely. All of Urraca’s coinage includes some form of title, and if here the REX is understood as being attached to the abbreviated name of a king, on this coin alone there would be no title for the queen. 44 Johanne Porter, “A New Coin Type of the Empress Matilda? The ‘Rex Matilda’ Cross Moline Type,” British Numismatic Journal 89 (2019): 109–117. For a useful contextualisation of the English and Leonese systems, see Todesca, “The Crown Renewed,” pp. 9–31. 45 Marion Archibald, “The Lion Coinage of Robert Earl of Gloucester and William Earl of Gloucester,” British Numismatic Journal 71 (2001): 71–86, at 71; Archibald, “Early Medieval Coinage, 1066–1279,” British Numismatic Journal 73 (2003): 76–88, esp. 80. 46 Porter, “A New Coin Type of the Empress Matilda?” 109. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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from which three parallel curves sweep back to indicate hair. Although the British Museum catalogues this coin as pertaining to the future Henry II during King Stephen’s reign, I find Porter’s arguments convincing that we should instead recognise it as Matilda’s, a local variant struck c.1141 in Malmesbury in response to regional issues. According to Porter, this was a declaration by Matilda’s followers that she, not Stephen, was king of the English. Like VRRACA REXA, these were not, it seems, the most successful of the respective ruler’s coin types, yet they signal the conceptual viability of male-inspired imagery and legends on the coinage of powerful female rulers. Two other portrait types struck for Urraca are known from a single example each, and I have not had the opportunity to examine either of them in person. My readings are therefore dependent on the images and descriptions by other scholars, here bringing the two coins into comparison with those I have been able to study and photograph firsthand. 3

REGINA / VRACA ISPA—REX

This frontal bust, rather than being centred on the coin like Urraca’s first diademed image, extends the length of the coin from tall crown to lower torso, dividing the legend REG INA onto the two sides of the figure on the obverse (Fig. 14.8).47 No hair is visible under the wimple, whose folds ending at her neck meet the elaborate drapery indicative of a multi-layered tunic and mantle ensemble. This type of formal dress echoes her colorful costume as painted in the Tumbo A, the cartulary of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela which began to be compiled 1129–1134, shortly after Urraca’s death (Fig. 14.9).48 The carefully detailed miniature of Urraca preceding the first column of her donation text includes a white wimple veiling her head and shoulders over a pink mantle lined with a pattern recalling vair. Urraca’s deep blue dress is spotted with gold, and gilding also appears at its hem and in the diamond-patterned borders of her fashionably long sleeve openings; from these peep out the pale blue tight sleeves of her inner tunic, whose flowing length ends at her 47 48

Sold by Áureo on 3 March 2004, this poorly photographed coin is known only from this single example. For a facsimile and studies of this cartulary, see Tumbo A. Índice de los privilegios reales, que contiene este libro intitulado de la letra A (Madrid, 2008), especially Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras, “Sobre las modalidades y funciones de las imágenes en el Tumbo A,” pp. 143–216. See also Shannon L. Wearing, “Holy Donors, Mighty Queens: Imaging Women in the Spanish Cathedral Cartularies of the Long Twelfth Century,” in ‘Me fecit’. Making Medieval Art (History), ed. Therese Martin, special issue, Journal of Medieval History 42, no. 1 (2016): 76–106. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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REGINA on obverse, VRACA ISPA REX (?) on reverse. MOMECA cat. no. 4.6 Photo: Áureo.

white slippers.49 Seated on a golden cushion atop a crimson-draped throne, the painted ruler portrait shows her with a sceptre in her left hand while with her right she holds out an unfurled document that reads URAKA REGINA ADEFONSI FILIA CONFIRMAT. In the Compostelan cartulary, which displays representations of the Cathedral’s most important donors next to copies of their charters, Urraca is portrayed as a ruler: she is enthroned, crowned, and bearing a sceptre, just like the kings. None of the other elite ranks, whether queen consorts, infantas, or counts, are given these insignia of authority in the Tumbo A. Urraca’s representation should thus be read as a female king.50 Such a display of richness, in both color and the contrasting textures of silks and furs, is meant to be evoked on the REGINA VRACA ISPA-REX coin through the abbreviated drapery folds, summarising for the viewer the exquisite materials worn by the queen during her public appearances. As for the reverse of this 49

For the significance and prestige of textiles in this period, see María Judith Feliciano, “Muslim Shrouds for Christian Kings? A Reassessment of Andalusi Textiles in Thirteenth-Century Castilian Life and Ritual,” in Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, eds. Cynthia Robinson and Leila Rouhi (Leiden, 2005), pp. 100–131; Ana Cabrera Lafuente, “Textiles from the Museum of San Isidoro (León): New Evidence for Re-Evaluating Their Chronology and Provenance,” in The Medieval Iberian Treasury in the Context of Cultural Interchange, Expanded Edition, ed. Therese Martin (Leiden, 2020), pp. 81–117. Open access, https://brill.com/view/title/57009. Accessed January 26, 2023; Laura Rodríguez Peinado and Francisco de Asís García García, eds., Arte y producción textil en el Mediterráneo medieval (Madrid, 2019). 50 Martin, “The Art of a Reigning Queen,” pp. 1145–1149. See also Erin L. Jordan, “Swords, Seals and Coins. Rulers and the Instruments of Authority in Thirteenth-Century Flanders and Hainaut,” in Medieval Coins and Seals: Constructing Identity, Signifying Power, ed. Susan Solway (Turnhout, 2015), pp. 229–246.

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Figure 14.9

Tumbo A, Archivo de la Catedral de Santiago de Compostela, 1129–1134 Photo: ACSC.

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singular coin, the central cross with split terminals is fully ringed by a legend whose reading is a matter of disagreement by numismatists. I follow the transcription of Miquel Crusafont et al. and Antonio Roma, VRACA ISPA—REX.51 Crusafont and his colleagues make the important observation that this is the first appearance on a coin of Hispania, a term that would later reappear in certain issues of Urraca’s son Alfonso VII and that of her grandson Fernando II, perhaps to mark key moments in their reigns. I thus interpret the complete phrase on the two sides of the coin as ‘Queen Urraca, ruler of Hispania,’ following the intitulation used most frequently in her charters: these refer more often to rule over Hispania than to any other land, as Irene Ruiz Albi has pointed out.52 However, until more examples of this coin type are known or better photographs published, the complicated legend will continue to be up for debate. 4

VRRACA REGII / LEO CIVITATIS

In 2019, another lone specimen was published by Francisco Javier García Montes, bringing it into comparison with the previously known portrait types (Fig. 14.10).53 In this depiction, the frontal bust seems more simply portrayed 51 Crusafont, Balaguer, and Grierson, The Iberian Peninsula, pp. 229–230, prefer the reading: VRACA ISPA—REX. I do not, however, subscribe to their suggestion that the A of ISPA could be understood as an abbreviation for Alfonso. The spacing, with a sort of dash or bar between ISPA and REX suggests to me that the A is an integral part of the word Hispania. See Roma Valdés, Emisiones monetarias, no. 11, p. 158. Upon seeing a slightly better reproduction, Mozo Monroy, “Las más raras labras,” 79–80, changed his reading of the legend from REGINA / REX VRACA ISPA to REGINA / VRACA REGINATRIX. I find the logic of the initial reading, without the duplication of regina, more convincing, and to my eye the horizontal S of ISPA fits the pattern seen on other coins. See also García Montes, “Nuevas emisiones de Urraca,” 38, who suggests VRACA IMPATRIX. 52 Ruiz Albi, La reina doña Urraca, p. 292: ‘Detrás del nombre de Urraca y de su condición de reina suele aparecer la expresión del dominio, en la que predomina con 45 ejemplos la expresión “Hispanie,” escrita de diferentes formas (Hispanie, Ispanie, Yspanie, Spanie). Le sigue muy de cerca “totius Hispanie,” que aparece 36 veces, pudiéndose observar que su uso es muy intensivo hasta el año 1117 para ir luego decreciendo paulatinamente.’ On the different titles used by Urraca, see also Ángel Gordo, “Las intitulaciones y expresiones de la potestas de la reina Urraca I de León. Trasfondo y significado de los vocativos Regina e Imperatrix en la primera mitad del siglo XII,” Intus-Legere 9, no. 1 (2006): 77–92; Francisco Javier Fernández Conde, José María Mínguez, and Ermelindo Portela, El reino de Hispania (siglos VIII–XII). Teoría y prácticas del poder (Madrid, 2019), esp. “La reina Urraca y Alfonso el Batallador: una compleja continuidad en la política leonesa-castellana y en el plano ideológico del poder,” pp. 131–140. 53 García Montes, “El bello rostro de Urraca I,” esp. pp. 54–56, includes examples of diadems and crowns with pendants on coins and in mosaics, from late the Roman period through the central Middle Ages. The author stated that this coin belongs to a private collection in France, whose owner asked that no further identifying information be published. See - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Figure 14.10a–b VRRACA REGII on obverse, LEO CIVITATIS on reverse Source: Francisco Javier García Montes, “El bello rostro de Urraca I,” ProMonumenta 16 (Dec 2019): 58.

than in the previous example, with parallel curved lines suggesting the folds of a coif and a richly draped mantle. The minimally drawn torso extends to the lower edge of the coin; as such, the placement of the ruler portrait is framed similarly to that of the VRACA ISPA—REX composition. The headdress, however, is quite distinct from those typical of Iberian representations, an elongated crown with undulating pendants. The crown as a marker of authority is emphasised by a triple horizontal division that gives extra prominence to its height, together with the pearled elements that dangle to the viewer’s right, which add dynamism to the figure’s heiratic pose. Perhaps the swaying gemmed or pearled decorations are meant to evoke those of Visigothic votive crowns that would have hung above altars. From some of them—like that of Recceswinth—the letters of the ruler’s name were suspended, picked out in enamel and precious stones.54 On this coin, the legend is a familiar VRRACA REGII (or perhaps REGN? In either case, an abbreviation of REGINA) on the obverse and LEO CIVITATIS around an equal-armed cross with flanged terminals on the reverse. Much work remains to be done on this coin type; it is to be hoped that further examples will come to light. also Francisco Javier García Montes, “Nuevas emisiones de Urraca I de León y Castilla,” ProMonumenta 14 (2017): 32–47. 54 On the Byzantine models for such usage of crowns, see José Antonio Molina Gómez, “Las coronas de donación regia del tesoro de Guarrazar: La religiosidad en la monarquía visigoda y el uso de modelos bizantinos,” Antigüedad y Cristianismo 21 (2004): 459–472. The most in-depth analysis of the Visigothic crowns and the rest of treasure with which they were discovered can be found in Alicia Perea, ed., El tesoro visigodo de Guarrazar (Madrid, 2001). - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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VRAC REGIN / +LEGIONENSI

Finally, the most complete iconography of rulership can be found on Urraca’s enthroned portrait type (Fig. 14.11).55 On the reverse, the central cross with flanged terminals is repeated in miniature at the start of the legend +LEGIONENSI. The obverse depicts the queen in a full-body, frontal representation seated on a throne, much like the Tumbo A miniature (see Fig. 14.9). Her crowned head, shod feet, and trilobed sceptre break through the inner of two circles of pearls that frame the legend VRAC REGIN. Pearls also appear outlining her flat-topped crown, which is decorated by a pair of semicircles that may represent embroidered or jeweled ornamentation. Below the crown, a double veil frames her face and a mantle outlines her shoulders. Paired circular motifs decorate the upper part of her tunic, while the lower part is represented schematically through half-moon drapery folds to suggest a rounded torso and a dress draped over knees, emphasising the straight lines of her lower legs, complete with shod feet resting on the outer frame. Her left hand firmly grasps a sceptre that terminates in three leaves or petals, but the gesture of the right hand is not clear. Roma thinks that she’s holding a “diploma extendido,”56 whereas Mozo has reconstructed the hand with a pointing finger.57 Or might

Figure 14.11

55

56 57

VRAC REGIN on obverse, +LEGIONENSIS on reverse Photos: Therese Martin.

I am grateful to Tauler & Fau for allowing me to examine and photograph their example in May 2019 before it was sold later that month (lot 280). This type had initially been known only from a nineteenth-century description; however, between 2015 and 2019, five examples came to light, according to García Montes, “El bello rostro,” p. 52. Roma Valdés, “Notas sobre las acuñaciones,” p. 68. Mozo Monroy, “Las más raras labras,” p. 66.

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she proffer a tiny orb, as seen on her son’s seals, discussed below? In any case, the gesture of her right hand is one of authority, commensurate with the other insignia of authority on this most complete portrait coin. The imagery is immediately clear: crown, sceptre, and throne unequivocally convey her status as ruler, while dress identifies her nature as female. 6

Urraca’s Lost Seal?

Like Urraca’s portrait coins, seals with personalised imagery as statements of authority began in the twelfth century to enter into more common usage in western Christendom, with carefully constructed representations that gave visual and material form to the ruler’s words on parchment.58 We must therefore raise the question of whether a ruler like Urraca, who was so clearly conscious of the impact of her representation on coinage, might not also have had a seal of her own. Although no royal seal survives for León-Castile before the reign of her son Alfonso VII, during my doctoral research, long ago, a reference to Urraca’s sigillum in the Historia Compostellana led me to wonder what a seal made for this queen might have looked like, if indeed one ever existed.59 From a textual perspective, Ruiz Albi argued in 2003 that a document of 1120 along with two more from 1124 provide strong evidence that Urraca did have a seal in the final decade of her reign.60 The phrasing in these three charters distinguishes between a drawn signum—common in Urraca’s diplomas as it had been in those of her father and grandfather—and the first references to a material sigillum: “facio cartulam donationis, firmissima stipulatione subnixam, regali manu insignitam, necnon et imperiali sigillo decoratam, in qua hȩc edicta omnibus operiuntur.” The phrase imperiali sigillo may indicate an

58 For a useful introduction to seals, see the studies in Susan Solway, ed., Medieval Coins and Seals: Constructing Identity, Signifying Power (Turnhout, 2015). The groundbreaking studies by Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak on seals of female rulers include “Women, Seals and Power in Medieval France, 1150–1350,” in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, eds. M. Erler and M. Kowaleski (Athens, GA, 1988), pp. 61–82; Bedos-Rezak, “Medieval Women in Sigillographic Sources,” in Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. Joel Rosenthal (Athens, GA, 1993), 1–36. 59 Emma Falque Rey, ed., Historia Compostellana, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 70 (Turnhout, 1988), II, cap. LIX, p. 337. Attention was first drawn to this 1123 reference by Pascual Galindo Romeo, La diplomática en la ‘Historia Compostelana’ (siglo XII) (Madrid, 1945), pp. 20–21. 60 Ruiz Albi, La reina doña Urraca, pp. 328–331, 529–532, 577–580. The documents in question are nos. 109, 139, and 140.

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Figure 14.12 Seals of Alfonso VII Source: Faustino Menéndez Pidal, Los sellos en nuestra historia (Madrid, 2018), p. 169.

Figure 14.13 Seal of Empress Matilda, 1141–1143, +MATHILDIS DEI GRATIA ROMANORVM REGINA. SJP/19, Archive Centre, King’s College Cambridge.

image of an enthroned ruler, like those that would be made a generation later for Urraca’s son in the 1140s and 1150s (Fig. 14.12).61 These earliest surviving wax seals of Alfonso VII, much like the contemporaneous seal of Queen Matilda of England (Fig. 14.13), echo the iconography of the VRAC REGIN +LEGIONENSI coin type (see Fig. 14.11).62 I agree with the suggestion by Faustino Menéndez Pidal that the enthroned depiction on Urraca’s coin likely served as a precedent for the seal of Alfonso VII; indeed, I would go a step further to propose that it may have been the model for the queen’s lost seal.63 In her coinage, Urraca demonstrated that she could take inspiration 61

Faustino Menéndez Pidal, Los sellos en nuestra historia (Madrid, 2018), p. 152, traces the model of seals with a ruler in majesty (enthroned, crowned, holding sceptre and orb) to Otto III (r. 983–1002) in 998. On pp. 161 and 169, Menéndez Pidal notes that there are six surviving wax seals for Alfonso VII, made from two successive and slightly different matrices. 62 Jasperse, “Manly Minds,” pp. 303–310, discusses Matilda’s coins and this seal, pointing out that the majestic iconography and round shape were copied from masculine models, especially that of her first husband Henry V. 63 Menéndez Pidal, Los sellos, p. 170. By contrast with Ruiz Albi, La reina doña Urraca, pp. 328–331, Menéndez Pidal (p. 164) does not think that Urraca had a seal, interpreting the textual references to her sigillum as a drawn signum rather than a wax seal. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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from portrait types made beyond the borders of her kingdom, using this medium to spread her own message of sovereignty, and it seems quite possible that she would also have done so with the medium of seals then current outside León-Castile.64 I do not mean to suggest that Urraca’s seal would have been directly modeled on any specific extra-Pyrenean example, but that she is likely to have been aware of how other ruling men and women of her day made use of seals to impress their authority. Both the phrasing in Urraca’s late charters and the imagery on her VRAC REGIN +LEGIONENSI coin type give reason to argue that her ‘imperial seal’ did, in fact, exist and that we have a good idea of how she was portrayed on it. Urraca would thus have been among the earliest elite women in western Europe to employ a seal and the first ruler of any gender on the Iberian Peninsula to do so,65 befitting her groundbreaking role as female king. 7 Conclusions Whereas seals were designed mainly for the eyes of the elite, coins would speak to the literate as well as the unlettered, to anyone whose involvement with trade put these miniature markers of authority into their holding. Even today, 64

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Other female rulers with seals in the first half of the twelfth century include Bertrade of Montfort (d. 1119), of which only a drawing survives; Adelaide of Maurienne (d. 1154), known through a drawing, see Kathleen Nolan, Queens in Stone and Silver: The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France (New York, 2009); Matilda of Scotland (d. 1111), see Susan M. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester, 2003). The Germanic empresses seem to have been even earlier: Theophanu (who also referred to herself as imperator augusta in a charter); Empress Agnes (charter of 1059), and Empress/Queen Matilda, whose seal is known from 1117/1118 onwards, see Andrea Stieldorf, “Urraca, Mathilda, Konstanze und Co. Königinnen des 12. und beginnenden 13. Jahrhunderts im Münzbild,” in Macht und Herrschaft im Siegel- und Münzbild, ed. Andrea Stieldorf (Göttingen, 2021), pp. 11–38. On the matter overall, see the studies by Bedos-Rezak cited above, n. 58; Andrea Stieldorf, “Die Siegel der Herrscherinnen. Siegelführung und Siegelbilder der deutschen Kaiserinnen und Königinnen,” Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 64 (2000): 1–44; Marta Serrano Coll, “Iconografía de género. Los sellos de las reinas de Aragón en la Edad Media (siglos XII–XVI),” Emblemata 12 (2006): 15–52; Marie-Adélaïde Nielen, Corpus des sceaux français du Moyen Âge 3, vol. III, Les sceaux des reines et des enfants de France (Paris, 2011); Barbara Klössel-Luckhardt, “Et sigillo illustris uxoris nostre—Weibliche Repräsentation in frühen Frauensiegeln des Welfenhauses,” in Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, Neue Folge, Band 2, eds. Katja Lembke, Jochen Luckhardt, and Rainer Stamm (Petersberg, 2017), pp. 27–52. I am grateful to Jitske Jasperse and James Todesca for comments on the seal question. Simon Barton, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 60–62, discussed the use of seals among Iberian elites from the second half of the twelfth century. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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their diminutive scale obliges the viewer to look closely, rewarding a physical interaction with the object with an intimacy that can only be achieved through touch.66 The necessarily summary image reduces the complexities of authority to its most basic and instantly comprehensible expression. In the case of Alfonso VI, for example, the reiterative use of cross and chrismon, after his initial Andalusi-type coin, must have been understood by all beholders as staking a claim for Christian rulership in the Iberian Peninsula.67 Likewise, Urraca’s nearly identical issues made use of the immediately recognisable symbol of the cross to insist on the Christian faith of her kingdom while simultaneously linking her reign to that of her father. Yet, her figural coinage broke new ground by circulating a range of images that stressed her extraordinary role as a woman who reigned. Borrowing from beyond León-Castile the strategy of coinage stamped with a ruler’s portrait, Urraca was able to put her ‘likeness’ as REGINA/REXA/RE into the hands of her subjects. On dineros of varying percentages of silver, Urraca’s face looked out at merchants and customers, cityfolk and the elite, making the ruler visible to a swath of her people in a way that the sole painted representation in a cathedral cartulary could not do. What is more, the legends on these portrait coins declared her sovereignty over Toledo, the ancient Visigothic capital of the Peninsula, then a powerful Islamic taifa (independent kingdom) that was conquered by her father and inherited by Urraca; over León, both ancient Roman city and modern kingdom; and even over Hispania, the land she aspired to rule. If this ambition went unfulfilled, her charters make clear through the most frequently used intitulations that Urraca sought to project an image of herself as regina Hispaniae. It seems likely to me that Urraca understood the need to stress her physical presence, and that this gave rise to her changing representations across the different coin types. Significantly, none of her portrait coins is jointly issued with her husband or son, giving full visual prominence to the person of Urraca.68 66

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On the question of coins and seals as works of material culture with great significance as primary documentation for women’s history, see recently Jitske Jasperse, Medieval Women, Material Culture, and Power: Matilda Plantagenet and Her Sisters (Leeds, 2020). Open access, https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/37333. Accessed January 26, 2023. On coinage prior to Urraca, see Mercedes Rueda-Sabater, “Moneda y ponderales del Reino de León (s. X–XIII),” Boletín del Museo Arqueológico Nacional (Madrid) 11 (1993): 107–114; Jose María de Francisco Olmos, “El nacimiento de la moneda en Castilla. De la moneda prestada a la moneda propia,” in I Jornadas sobre Documentación jurídico-administrativa, económico-financiera y judicial del reino castellano-leonés (siglos X–XIII) (Madrid, 2002), pp. 303–348; Eduardo Manzano Moreno and Alberto Canto, “The Value of Wealth: Coins and Coinage in Iberian Early Medieval Documents,” in Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085). In Honour of Simon Barton, edited by Simon Barton† and Robert Portass (Leiden, 2020), pp. 169–196. There is a coin with two facing helmed male busts that is sometimes taken to represent Urraca with her husband or son, but I find the suggestion unconvincing. Based on hoard - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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A contemporary of Urraca, Countess Matilda of Canossa (r. 1076–1115), has been studied among others by Christine Verzar, who analyzed the many surviving written and visual depictions of this powerful ruler of Tuscany. Verzar observed that “the historian and art historian have often come up with rather different interpretations as a result of their respective verbal or visual sources.” My art historical investigation of Urraca’s coins is an attempt to weigh the textual and visual evidence together, in the firm belief that each helps us to understand the other more completely. As Verzar explained for Matilda, the representations “create a portrait of who she was rather than what she looked like; these representations stress presence rather than likeness.”69 If the Leonese queen has not yet, like her Tuscan counterpart, reached such modern

Figure 14.14 Statue of Queen Urraca by Juan Cuenca, León, 2019 Photo: Therese Martin. evidence, Todesca, “What Touches All,” pp. 355–357 and 504, argued that this coin was issued late in the reign of Alfonso VII and may represent him with his son Sancho. 69 Christine B. Verzar, “Picturing Matilda of Canossa: Medieval Strategies of Representation,” in Representing History, 900–1300: Art, Music, History, ed. Robert A. Maxwell (University Park PA, 2010), pp. 73–90, esp. 73 and 76. The author does not address the matter of Matilda’s seals, which were the subject of an unpublished paper by Alison Creber, “Making an Impression: Imperial Iconography and the Seals of Beatrice of Tuscany (c. 1020–1076) and Matilda of Tuscany (1046–1115),” presented at “Gender, Identity, Iconography,” a joint conference of the Gender in Medieval Studies Group and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, held at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, 9 January 2018. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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popularity as to have ‘cyclist routes … named after her,’ a monumental bust in Urraca’s honor was finally erected in 2019 on the main street into the old city of León (Fig. 14.14). Made by the sculptor Juan Cuenca of reconstituted stone (rather than of bronze like the other full-body monuments of medieval Leonese kings and infantas which dot the city centre), this statue reflects our shifting perceptions of Urraca. The coins of her day showed multiple hieratic views of female rulership, which by the Early Modern period had been reimagined as a rapacious virago. Nearly nine centuries after her death, Urraca is now portrayed as a concerned queen, in a statue looking out over her city. One can only wonder what the continuing appearance of heretofore unknown coins may add to our image of Urraca regina Hispaniae. Acknowledgements This research forms part of the project I directed 2019–2022, The Medieval Iberian Treasury in Context: Collections, Connections, and Representations on the Peninsula and Beyond (RTI2018-098615-B-I00, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER “Una manera de hacer Europa”). Heartfelt thanks are owed to team member Jitske Jasperse for her inspiring work on coinage overall and her comments on this article in particular. I am also grateful to James Todesca for his helpful critiques and deeply so to Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo for editing this volume. Bibliography Álvarez Burgos, Fernando. Catálogo de la moneda medieval castellano-leonesa. Siglos XI al XV. Catálogo general de las monedas españolas III. Madrid, 1998. Archibald, Marion. “Early Medieval Coinage, 1066–1279.” British Numismatic Journal 73 (2003): 76–88. Archibald, Marion. “The Lion Coinage of Robert Earl of Gloucester and William Earl of Gloucester.” British Numismatic Journal 71 (2001): 71–86. Barón Faraldo, Andrés. Raimundo de Borgoña, conde de Galicia. Política y relaciones de poder en el occidente peninsular (1093–1107). Valladolid, 2017. Barton, Simon. The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile. Cambridge, 1997. Barton, Simon. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia. Philadelphia, 2015. For illustrations and brief discussion, see Elke Goez, Matilde di Canossa. Die Urkunden und Briefe der Markgräfin Mathilde von Tuszien (Hannover, 1998), pp. 13–14 and figs. 15–17. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Perea, Alicia, ed. El tesoro visigodo de Guarrazar. Madrid, 2001. Porter, Johanne. “A New Coin Type of the Empress Matilda? The ‘Rex Matilda’ Cross Moline Type.” British Numismatic Journal 89 (2019): 109–117. Recuero Astray, Manuel, Marta González Vázquez, and Paz Romero Portilla, eds. Documentos medievales del Reino de Galicia: Doña Urraca (1095–1126). Santa Comba, La Coruña, 2002. Reilly, Bernard F. “Count Raimundo of Burgundy and French Influence in León-Castilla (1087–1107).” In Church, State, Vellum, and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honor of John Williams, eds. Therese Martin and Julie A. Harris. Leiden, 2005, pp. 85–110. Reilly, Bernard F. The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca 1109–1126. Princeton, 1982. Rodríguez, Ana. “De olvido y memoria. Cómo recordar a las mujeres poderosas en Castilla y León en los siglos XII y XIII.” Arenal 25, no. 2 (2018): 271–294. Rodríguez Peinado, Laura, and Francisco de Asís García García, eds. Arte y producción textil en el Mediterráneo medieval. Madrid, 2019. Roma Valdés, Antonio. Emisiones monetarias leonesas y castellanas de la Edad Media. Organización, economía, tipos y fuentes. Madrid, 2010. Roma Valdés, Antonio. “Los tipos monetarios medievales leoneses y castellanos conocidos tras la publicación de la colección de la Hispanic Society.” Numisma 257, año LXIII (2013): 95–112. Roma Valdés, Antonio. “Notas sobre las acuñaciones medievales leonesas: primeros escritos conocidos y las emisiones de doña Urraca.” Revista Omni 10 (2016): 56–73. Roma Valdés, Antonio, with Erea Castro Alfonso, Pablo Rueda Rodríguez-Vila, and Raúl Sánchez Rincón. Las monedas leonesas y castellanas del siglo XII. Madrid, 2019. Rueda-Sabater, Mercedes. “Moneda y ponderales del Reino de León (s. X–XIII).” Boletín del Museo Arqueológico Nacional (Madrid) 11 (1993): 107–114. Rueda Sabater, Mercedes. Primeras acuñaciones de Castilla y León. Salamanca, 1991. Ruiz Albi, Irene. “Cancillería y documentos de Raimundo de Borgoña y la infanta Urraca.” In Alfonso VI, Imperator totius orbis Hispanie, eds. Fernando Suárez and Andrés Gambra. Madrid, 2010, pp. 205–241. Ruiz Albi, Irene, ed. La reina doña Urraca (1109–1126). Cancillería y colección diplomática. Fuentes y estudios de historia leonesa, no. 102. León, 2003. Salazar y Acha, Jaime de. “La reina doña Urraca (†1126) y su descendencia extramatri­ monial.” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 219, no. 2 (May–August 2022): 177–200. Sánchez Ameijeiras, Rocío. “Sobre las modalidades y funciones de las imágenes en el Tumbo A.” In Tumbo A. Índice de los privilegios reales, que contiene este libro intitulado de la letra A. Madrid, 2008, pp. 143–216. Serrano Coll, Marta. “Iconografía de género. Los sellos de las reinas de Aragón en la Edad Media (siglos XII–XVI).” Emblemata 12 (2006): 15–52.

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Serrano Coll, Marta. “Imagen y propaganda en las primeras amonedaciones del rey de Aragón.” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 45, no. 2 (2015): 915–953. Solway, Susan, ed. Medieval Coins and Seals: Constructing Identity, Signifying Power. Turnhout, 2015. Stahl, Alan M. “Coinage in the Name of Medieval Women.” In Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal. Athens GA, and London, 1990, pp. 321–341. Steinbach, Sebastian. “Monetäre Herrschaftszeichen. Insignien königlicher Macht auf europäischen Münzen des Hochmittelalters (ca. 1050–1250).” In Macht und Herrschaft im Siegel- und Münzbild, ed. Andrea Stieldorf. Göttingen, 2021, pp. 67–99. Stieldorf, Andrea. “Die Siegel der Herrscherinnen. Siegelführung und Siegelbilder der deutschen Kaiserinnen und Königinnen.” Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 64 (2000): 1–44. Stieldorf, Andrea. “Urraca, Mathilda, Konstanze und Co. Königinnen des 12. und beginnenden 13. Jahrhunderts im Münzbild.” In Macht und Herrschaft im Siegel- und Münzbild, ed. Andrea Stieldorf. Göttingen, 2021, pp. 11–38. Suárez, Fernando, and Andrés Gambra, eds. Alfonso VI, Imperator totius orbis Hispanie. Madrid, 2010. Todesca, James J. “The Crown Renewed: The Administration of Coinage in León-Castile c. 1085–1200.” In The Emergence of León-Castile c.1065–1500: Essays Presented to J. F. O’Callaghan, ed. James J. Todesca. Farnham, 2015, pp. 9–31. Todesca, James J. “Selling Castile: Coinage, Propaganda and Mediterranean Trade in the Age of Alfonso VIII.” In King Alfonso VIII of Castile: Government, Family and War, eds. Miguel Gómez, Kyle C. Lincoln, and Damian Smith. New York, 2019, pp. 30–58. Todesca, James J. “What Touches All: Coinage and Monetary Policy in León-Castile to 1230.” Unpublished PhD thesis. Fordham University, 1996. Tollendal Prudente, Luísa. “Urraca I (1109–1126), gênero e monarquia: um estado da questão.” Veredas da História 10, no. 1 (2017): 213–242. Travaini, Lucia. “Coins and Identity: From Mint to Paradise.” In Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages, ed. Rory Naismith. Leiden, 2018, pp. 321–349. Tumbo A. Índice de los privilegios reales, que contiene este libro intitulado de la letra A. Madrid, 2008. Verzar, Christine B. “Picturing Matilda of Canossa: Medieval Strategies of Representation.” In Representing History, 900–1300: Art, Music, History, ed. Robert A. Maxwell. University Park PA, 2010, p. 73–90. Waag, Anaïs. “Rulership, Authority, and Power in the Middle Ages: The Proprietary Queen as Head of Dynasty.” Anglo-Norman Studies XLIV, Proceedings of the Battle Conference (2022): 71–104. Wearing, Shannon L. “Holy Donors, Mighty Queens: Imaging Women in the Spanish Cathedral Cartularies of the Long Twelfth Century.” In ‘Me fecit’. Making Medieval Art (History), ed. Therese Martin, special issue, Journal of Medieval History 42, no. 1 (2016): 76–106. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

Chapter 15

Between Queen Regnant and Queen Consort: Berenguela of Castile, Beatrice of Swabia and the Nuances of Queenship Ana Echevarría Arsuaga Building on Simon Barton’s “Las mujeres nobles y el poder en los reinos de León y Castilla en el siglo XII: Un estudio preliminar”,1 this article will examine the way in which two powerful queens, Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and her daughter-in-law Beatrice of Swabia (1205–1235), wielded power in the kingdom of Castile during the reign of Fernando III (r. 1217–1252). Obscured by Berenguela, queen in her own right, Beatrice has often been forgotten other than to justify her son, Alfonso X (r. 1252–1284)’s claims to the Holy Roman Empire. Her role, and that of her role in the kingdom, and that of her entourage need to be studied in more depth to examine whether and how the functions of a regnant queen mother and those of a queen consort coincided, and what were the characteristics of Castilian queenship in this specific period. Given that it was Berenguela herself who negotiated Fernando and Beatrice’s marriage, as a continuation of a diplomatic scheme that started with her own engagement to Conrad, son of Emperor Frederick I, the choice of a German princess and the arrival of the Teutonic Knights on her trail must have had a far-reaching effect on the politics of the kingdom, and in the royal household. 1

An Imperial Marriage

The origins of Beatrice of Swabia and the circumstances surrounding her marriage are the aspects of her life that have been most thoroughly studied both by German and Spanish historians thanks to their repercussion on the “fecho del Imperio”—as Alfonso X’s quest for the imperial throne was known at the time.2 1 Barton, Simon, “Las mujeres nobles y el poder en los reinos de León y Castilla en el siglo XII: Un estudio preliminar,” Studia Historica. Historia medieval 29 (2011): 51–71. 2 Recent contributions on Germanic marriage and its impact on Castilian international politics in Odilo Engels, Die Staufer (Stuttgart, 1998), pp. 127–130, 140–145, with certain imprecisions, such as the fact that Philip of Swabia had three daughters named Beatrice; Armin Wolf, “Derecho electivo y sucesion hereditaria en los reinos y en el imperio de Alfonso el Sabio,”

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Beatrice, christened with the name of Elizabeth, was born in 1205, the fourth daughter of Philip duke of Swabia, elected King of the Romans on 6 March 1198 and his wife Irene Angelos—renamed Maria when she married—daughter of Isaac II Angelos, emperor of Constantinople. The four sisters were orphaned in the summer of 1208, when Philip was assassinated on 21 June. Irene/Maria died two months later, possibly while giving birth. Otto IV of Brunswick, candidate for the royal election once Philip of Swabia died, made peace with the rest of the members and followers of the house of Staufer, becoming engaged to the eldest daughter of Philip of Swabia, Beatrice (1198–1212).3 Elizabeth probably went along with her sister and, at Beatriz’s death in the summer of 1212, it is possible that she was still hostage under Otto’s sway in the court of the new empress, Maria of Brabant. This is Winkelmann’s hypothesis, also accepted by Diago, who attribute the delay in the youth’s trip to Castile to this circumstance.4 It is likely that Elizabeth was present at the imperial court in Brunswick, where Otto’s brother had succeeded him, when the Castilian ambassadors arrived. Henry of Brunswick was reconciled to Frederick II, and in España y Europa, un pasado jurídico común, ed. Antonio Peréz Martín (Murcia 1986), pp. 223–257, and by the same author, “El proyecto imperial de Alfonso X,” in Alfonso X y su época: el siglo del rey sabio, ed. Manuel Rodriguez Llopis (Barcelona, 2001), pp. 153–173, and “Die Frauen Friedrichs II und ihre Nachkommenschaft,” in Frauen der Staufer, eds. Karl-Heinz Rueß and Amalie Fößel (Göppingen, 2006), pp. 113–150; Máximo Diago, “La monarquía castellana y los Staufer. Contactos políticos y diplomáticos en los siglos XII y XIII,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie III-Historia Medieval 8 (1995): 51–83, 62–69; Ana Rodríguez López, “El reino de Castilla y el Imperio Germánico en la primera mitad del siglo XIII. Fernando III y Federico II,” in Historia social, pensamiento historiográfico y Edad Media. Homenaje al Prof. Abilio Barbero de Aguilera, ed. María Isabel Loring García (Madrid, 1997), pp. 613–630; Bruno Berthold Meyer, Kastilien, die Staufer und das Imperium ein Jahrhundert politischer Kontakte im Zeichen des Kaisertums (Husum, 2002), pp. 72–112; Miriam Shadis, Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages (New York, 2009), pp. 108, 116–120; Daniel Colmenero López, “La boda entre Fernando III el Santo y Beatriz de Suabia: motivos y perspectivas de una alianza matrimonial entre la Corona de Castilla y los Staufer,” Miscelánea Medieval Murciana 34 (2010): 9–22; Janna Bianchini, The Queen’s Hand. Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile (Philadelphia, 2012), pp. 145–148; Georges Martin, “Négociation et diplomatie dans la vie de Bérengère de Castille (1214–1246). La part du facteur générique,” e-Spania 4 (December 2007). Avaliable at http://journals.openedi tion.org/e-spania/562. Accessed October 27, 2020; Carlos Estepa, “El reino de Castilla y el Imperio: de Alfonso VII a Fernando III,” in La Península Ibérica en el tiempo de Las Navas de Tolosa, eds. Carlos Estepa Díez and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz (Madrid, 2014), pp. 237–264. 3 Recent bibliography on the life and career of Philip of Swabia: Peter Csendes, Philipp von Schwaben: ein Staufer im Kampf um die Macht (Darmstadt, 2003); Andrea Rzihacek, ed., Philipp von Schwaben: Beiträge der internationalen Tagung anlässlich seines 800. Todestages, Wien, 29. bis 30. Mai 2008 (Vienna, 2010). 4 Eduard Winkelmann, Philipp von Schwaben und Otto IV. von Braunschweig ( Jahrbücher der Deutschen Geschichte) (Vol. 1–2) (Leipzig, 1873), I, pp. 537–539; Diago, “Monarquía,” pp. 64–66.

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on 24 June 1219 he handed him the imperial insignia at the Goslar Reichstag. It is highly possible that he returned his cousin at this moment so that she could marry the Castilian king, Fernando III. This is what can be inferred from the Annales Spirensis: “The daughter of King Philip was given as wife to the king of Hispania and sent [there]”.5 Nevertheless, other historians have preferred the hypothesis that the child Elizabeth was returned to her family before this date and was raised at Frederick II’s court until the moment of her departure to the Iberian Peninsula.6 The marriage of Fernando and Elizabeth, who adopted her sister Beatrice’s name was not the first negotiation between the Holy Roman Empire and Castile. Berenguela herself had been engaged to Conrad by the Treaty of Selingenstadt (April 1188) at the request of Frederick I, who was expanding his influence in Europe and was impressed by the accomplishments of Alfonso VIII (r. 1158–1214).7 Berenguela’s demotion to the second place in succession rendered the treaty void. This time, as opposed to what happened in the case of Selingenstadt, the negotiations to marry an imperial princess were Queen Berenguela’s initiative. She sent an embassy to Frederick II, who in turn chose which of his siblings should marry the king of Castile.8 Matrimonial negotiations involving her children were for Berenguela a means to strengthen alliances, secure her legacy and prevent other kings, such as her husband Alfonso IX (r. 1188–1230), from taking advantage of alliances that could jeopardize her. The idea that as a mother she was especially interested in bridling the sexuality of the young heir, using marriage as a means to remedy the promiscuity of youth as mentioned in treatises on the education of princes in vogue at the time, may have been a mere fabrication of ecclesiastical chroniclers. John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, written in 1156, advises the king not to have sexual relations with many women, not to commit adultery, and to be united exclusively to one woman in his lifetime.9 This was the most observed treatise on the education of a prince until Vincent de Beauvais’s De eruditione filiorum nobilium (1247). The thirteenth-century theologian and Bishop Lucas de Tuy 5 “Filia regis Philippi tradita fuit nuptui regi Hyspanie et traducta.” Annales Spirenses, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores XVII, eds. Georg H. Pertz and Georg Waitz, vol. XVII (Hannover, 1861), p. 84. 6 Manuel González Jiménez, Fernando III el Santo (Barcelona, 2006), pp. 62–64; Estepa, “Reino de Castilla,” pp. 253–255. 7 For the text of the treaty, see Peter Rassow, Der Prinzgemahl, ein Pactum matrimoniale aus dem Jahre 1188 (Weimar, 1950); Meyer, Kastilien, die Staufer, pp. 62–65; Estepa, “Reino de Castilla,” pp. 242–244. 8 Diago, “Monarquía,” pp. 60, 65; Estepa, “Reino de Castilla,” p. 257. 9 Shadis, Berenguela, pp. 104, 108–109; John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Libro IV.5, in Opera omnia, ed. J. A. Giles (Oxford, 1848), PL 199, cols. 520–521.

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refers explicitly to this marriage as the reason for peace in the kingdom; while his contemporary Jiménez de Rada believed that the Queen’s efforts to inspire chastity in her son were the clue to Fernando’s steady married life with his two subsequent wives.10 The choice of a good candidate would contribute to honour the Castilian royal lineage, one which also descended from the Plantagenet family.11 Fol­ lowing the marriage arrangements that her parents had devised for her—and which she respected even during her marriage to Alfonso IX—Berenguela once again turned to the Holy Roman Empire and to a daughter of an imperial family on both paternal and maternal bloodlines.12 On the one hand, the Queen was not obliged to seek Iberian candidates to settle border issues as had been the case with her own marriage. On the other hand, the choice of a princess from a prestigious foreign family could strengthen the legitimacy of her son’s proclamation against external threats. The insistence of a double bond with the imperial houses of the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantium suggests an attempt to return to the concept of regnum-imperium favoured by Alfonso VII (r. 1126–1157) before the disintegration of León and Castile (c.1135), a situation which Berenguela could foresee once again when her son would inherit both thrones. Beatrice’s paternal line (Philip, king of Romans) is incessantly repeated in the records, as we will see, while references to her mother’s Byzantine lineage only appear among the chroniclers. Additionally, this marriage alliance also receives a good deal of attention in the annals and chronicles of various German cities, such as Braunschweig and Speyer.13 This event offered chroniclers the opportunity to associate the spouses with the crusading venture: the narration of the Second Crusade in the Chronica latina regum Castellae, written between 1223 and 1237, refers to Byzantine Emperor Alexios as son of Isaac II, who at the same time “was grandfather of our lady and queen Beatrice, that is, father of her mother.”14 10 Lucas de Tuy, Chronicon mundi, ed. Emma Falque (Turnhout, 2003), p. 333; Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Historia de los hechos de España (Madrid, 1989), pp. 341–342, 352. Salvador Martínez, Berenguela, pp. 561–564. 11 Crónica latina de los reyes de Castilla, (hereafter, CLRC), trans. L. Charlo Brea (Madrid, 1999), p. 72: various expressions are used such as “… whose complete concern and utmost desire was to seek in every way possible his son’s honour …” or “… he who in noble bloodline seemed to surpass all the rest within Christendom …” 12 Peter Rassow, Der Prinzgemahl, ein Pactum matrimoniale aus dem Jahre 1188 (Weimar, 1950); Miriam Shadis, Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages (New York, 2009), pp. 27–38, 52–61, 105; Diago, “Monarquía,” pp. 65–66; Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, pp. 24–27. 13 Estepa, “Reino de Castilla,” pp. 253–254, 258–259. 14 CLRC, p. 62. Considering where the statement is placed, it may possibly be a later addition.

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Shadis defined Beatrice as “an exotic trophy” for both Berenguela and her son; yet, the value of their union was vital to legitimise and reinforce their claims to the Castilian throne. After Pope Innocent III declared the marriage between Berenguela and Alfonso IX of León incestuous, Fernando’s position could be undermined by accusations of incest and illegitimacy. While Berenguela openly confronted Rome and asked for the acknowledgment of her son as legitimate king in order to keep her power, Alfonso IX favoured one or another son as heir to the throne of León at his whim.15 Thus, the acquisition of legitimacy through Fernando’s marriage with Beatrice favoured both mother and son, and set the Holy Roman Empire on their side. Given the emperor’s request for a solemn embassy to escort the chosen princess, a delegation was created, presided over by the Bishop of Burgos, don Mauricio, along with the abbot of San Pedro de Arlanza;16 Juan, prior of San Zoilo of Carrión, one of the towns ceded to her in Berenguela’s charter of arras (a prenuptial agreement where the dower is stipulated);17 Pedro Ovario, Hospitaller prior; the Templar commander of Carrión de los Condes; and García Gonzalo, master of the Order of Santiago. The four-month sojourn at the German court in 1219 has been explained in various ways, whether it be the emperor’s need to consult his princes, a reason that would justify their following the emperor wherever he went—in April they went to Alsace, in May to Ulm, Augsburg and Halberstadt; in June, they were at the Imperial Diet in Nuremburg, then to Worms and Hagenau before returning to Nuremberg— or the previously mentioned absence of Elizabeth from the court. On their

15 Shadis, Berenguela, p. 106; González Jiménez, Fernando III, pp. 75–76. 16 He is endowed with the villages of Valdemoros and Quintanilla, in the alfoz or territorial district of Castrojeriz belonging to Queen Beatrice, as well as San Mamés in Panizares belonging to the king: “Hanc autem donationem et concessionem facio uolens remunerare labores multiplices venerabilis patris predicti Mauricii, nunc Burgensis episcopi, quos sustinuit in eundo in Alemaniam et redeundo de mandato meo et dulcissime matris mee pro karissima uxore mea regina domina Beatrice, Phylippi quondam regis Alemanie filia.” Julio González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, vol. II (Córdoba, 1980), pp. 163–164, doc. 136. 17 It is difficult to find an English term for “arras”, a characteristically Iberian contract, which leads Shadis to use the formula “charter of arras”. Bianchini uses the term “dower”, taken from common law, which technically refers to the inheritance received by a woman only in case her husband died. Another possibility would be the anthropological term “bride price”. In this article, I will use Shadis’s formula “charter of arras”, or “arras” with the meaning of “prenuptial agreement”. “Iohannes, prior Carrionensis et Hyspanie camerarius, eundo in Alamanniam pro karissima uxore mea regin Beatrice, filia Philippi, quondam regis Romanorum, nobis exhibuistis diligenter”. González, Reinado, II, pp. 123–124, doc. 100.

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journey back, they passed through Paris and paid a visit to Philip Augustus (r. 1180–1223), reaching Guipúzcoa in mid-November.18 Elizabeth’s dowry is unknown, as it is not reflected in any of the extant documents. As an example, her sister Beatrice of Swabia’s dowry, which Winkelmann calculated in some 350 castles of the duchy along with their rights, must have been appropriated by Otto upon their marriage, later reverting back to the empire. At the end of 1216 or early 1217, Frederick II named Henry, his firstborn, duke of Swabia, a title which was later inherited by his brother Conrad. In this way, all the daughters of Philip of Swabia were cut off from the duchy, including Beatrice, one of the youngest, and hence no Castilian prince was in the line of succession. Among the other sisters, Maria of Brabant was granted the church of Esslingen in 1215, and in 1235 the king of Bohemia, who was married to Kunigunde, was rewarded with 10,000 marks in exchange for her dowry.19 Elizabeth/Beatrice’s charter of arras—also known as donationes propter nuptias—consisted of various Castilian towns along with their rents: Carrión, Logroño, Belorado, Peñafiel, Castrojeriz, Pancorbo, Fuentepudia, Montealegre, Palenzuela, Astudillo, Villafranca and Roa.20 These early holdings of the queen coincide in general terms with those granted to Leonor Plantagenet in her own prenuptial agreement, as well as other territories that she added throughout the reign of her spouse, and were also considered part of Berenguela’s dowry in Seligenstadt.21 Berenguela’s marriage with the sovereign of León transformed many of these properties into controversial borders between Castile and León, such as Peñafiel and other territories whose ownership was stipulated in the

18 CLRC, p. 72; Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Historia de los hechos de España, (Madrid, 1989), p. 342; Jaime Ferreiro Alemparte, “Asentamiento y extinción de la Orden Teutónica en España: La encomienda de Santa Maria de Castellanos de la Mota de Toro (1222–1556),” Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia 168 (1971), 228–274 at 232–233. 19 Diago, “Monarquía,” pp. 68–69. 20 Fernando III confirms the fueros (local legal charters) of Palenzuela and Astudillo in 1221, both part of the queen’s arras. González, Reinado, II, pp. 156, 158, docs. 127 and 131. 21 The queen’s holdings are listed in a confirmation diploma issued by Honorius III on 23 August 1222. Mansilla, Documentación de Honorio III, p. 304, nº 411; Rodríguez López, “Reino”, pp. 615–616; González Jiménez, Fernando III, p. 65; Shadis, Berenguela, pp. 28–29; José Manuel Cerda, “Matrimonio y patrimonio. Las arras de Leonor Plantagenet, reina consorte de Castilla,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 46, no. 1 (2016): 63–96, 73–76, 78, 86–90. In this case, it is impossible to distinguish between the charter of arras (donationes propter nuptias) and a pre-nuptial gift promised by her future husband prior to the marriage (sponsalicia larguitas or donatio ante nupcias), as it can be differentiated in the case of Eleanor. Considering the early action of the queen in the case of Montealegre, it is likely this castle was granted as a sponsalicia larguitas.

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treaties with King Alfonso IX of León.22 Other towns (Castrojeriz, Pancorbo, Villafranca and Belorado) had been recovered by Fernando III thanks to the Laras, one of the most prominent noble families in the realm.23 Fernando and Beatrice’s betrothal took place through powers of representation in Germany before undertaking the trip towards Castile—hence the emperor’s interest in a solemn embassy—and even if Queen Berenguela went to Vitoria to receive the young lady, she must have reached Burgos by September, as the first documents where she figures in the intitulatio, or nominal inscription, appears at least a couple of months prior to the official wedding ceremony.24 On 27 November 1219, Fernando was knighted in the church of the royal abbey of Las Huelgas, burial place of his grandparents, Alfonso VIII and Eleanor Plantagenet, confirming his coming of age and his public role when he turned eighteen. His father had been knighted previously at least on two occasions, one in León and the other as a vassal of Alfonso VIII. However, Fernando could not be dubbed in León as in such a case he would have had to swear vassalage to his father. Consequently, he resorted to self-investiture, taking the sword himself from the altar. The role of ‘godfather’ was taken up by his mother, who unbuckled the sword from the baldric (or sword belt). According to Shadis, the queen went beyond the established limits of her gender by taking a masculine role in the ceremony, although it must be noted that often courtly women were allowed to participate in the dubbing of knights by presenting 22

The series of three treaties signed between 1216 and 1218 are crucial to understand the evolution of the queen’s properties on the frontier, as we will see. Colección documental del archivo de la Catedral de León, vol. 6, 1188–1230, ed. J. M. Fernández Catón (León, 1991), pp. 337–342, 349, docs. 1867–1868, 1874; Julio González, Alfonso IX (Madrid, 1944), II, pp. 460–462, 479, docs. 352 and 366. 23 The tenancies of many of them were divided among siblings: Montealegre was given to the Meneses; Carrión to the Giróns; and Logroño to the lords of los Cameros. Ana Rodríguez López, La consolidación territorial de la monarquía feudal castellana (Madrid, 1994), pp. 156–158. 24 “Finally, they fulfilled their duty and lead the very noble and fair youth safe and sound, despite the many dangers on such a long journey, to Queen Berenguela who went to greet her and her ambassadors outside the town of Vitoria with an escort of noble clerics and nuns. Henceforth, they travelled to Burgos where they found the king with the elite and many other noblemen and patricians of the cities and towns of the kingdom, at which point the youth and the ambassadors were welcomed with great honour and joy by the king himself.” CLRC, p. 72. On 6 September 1219, a document issued in Burgos included for the first time a clause following the name of the king: “ex asensu et voluntate domine Berengarie regine genitricis mee, una cum uxore mea Beatrice et cum fratre meo domino Alfonso”. This clause would appear systematically thereafter. González, Reinado y diplomas, II, pp. 113–114, doc. 91; Diago, “Monarquía,” pp. 65–66; Rodríguez López, “Reino,” p. 617; Salvador Martínez, Berenguela, pp. 564–572.

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them with the stirrups, for instance.25 Cooperation between mother and son would not change, and Berenguela’s role in bestowing her rights of succession upon Fernando III was unequivocal. Immediately after this ceremony, he married Beatrice of Swabia in Burgos cathedral and he celebrated the most lavish parliamentary assembly at which were present “aside from Queen Berenguela, all of the most noble ladies, both religious and secular that existed in the Kingdom of Castile. Not since ancient times had such an assembly been seen in the city of Burgos.”26 The relevance of ceremonies and the union with the imperial family is mentioned in the topical and chronological data of a document she sent to the abbess and nuns of Las Huelgas a few days after her wedding ceremony.27 This is one of the first instances in which her name appears as Beatrice, always linked to her condition as queen, and opposed to the use of her birth name, Elizabeth. The death of her eldest sister may have affected her to the point of adopting the same name when she married the king of Castile years later. The name change for the sake of the coronation was a very common practice among German queens, namely the foreign ones, but it was also common among the daughters of the elite. It has often been attributed to a change in status that took place in the coronation ritual, as this mirrored the consecration of an abbess or monk whose name changed to adopt a new identity, acquired by entering a given order with a characteristic set of rules and attitudes.28 Some of the earliest cases in western Europe, such as that of Emma, who adopted the Anglo-Saxon name of Aelfgifu—the name of many Anglo-Saxon queens, including the first wife of her husband, Aethelred (1002)—is limited to contemporary Anglo-Saxon records, while continental documents mention her by her original name without specifying either when she changed it, or for what reason.29 In the context of the Holy Roman Empire 25 Shadis, Berenguela, p. 105. 26 CLRC, p. 72; Jiménez de Rada, Historia, p. 342; Shadis, Berenguela, p. 106. 27 “Facta carta apud Burgis … Hiis uidelicet diebus quibus ego idem rex F. in dicto monasterio Sancte Marie Regalis manu propria in nouum militem me accinxi, et sequenti die tertia illustrem Beatricem reginam, regis Romanorum filiam, in cathedrali ecclesia Burgensi duxi solempniter in uxorem.” This formula would be reiterated with minor changes in all diplomas issued by the royal chancery throughout the following year. Many of them were privileges for the abbey of Las Huelgas. González, Reinado, II, pp. 115–118, 120–127, 130–153, docs. 93–95, 98–103, 106–122. Salvador Martínez, Berenguela, p. 573. 28 Pauline A. Stafford, “Royal Women and Transitions. Emma and Aelfgifu in 1035–1042/1043,” in Patterns of Episcopal Power. Bishops in Tenth and Eleventh Century Western Europe, eds. Ludger Körntgen and Dominik Waßenhoven (Berlin, 2011), pp. 127–144. 29 Julie Ann Smith, Queen-Making and Queenship in Early Medieval England and Francia, Unpublished PhD thesis (University of York, 1993), p. 172.

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the name change took place at the moment of the wedding celebration and the coronation of a queen. The Annals of Hildesheim of 1036 mention that the name Gunhild was replaced by the more Germanic Gertrude at the time of her coronation along with Henry III; the second spouse of Henry IV substituted Eupraxia or Praxedis for Adelheid (1089); Henry IV’s sister, Judith, was rebaptized Sophia when she married Solomon of Hungary (1058);30 Teresa of Portugal came to be known as Matilda or Mahaut upon her marriage to Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders (1184); and even Beatrice’s mother changed her name from Irene to Maria after marrying Philip of Swabia. This custom persisted until the last coronation of a Queen of the Romans, Eleanor of Portugal, spouse of Frederick III, who in 1452 changed her name to that of Helena in memory of Emperor Constantine’s mother.31 Elizabeth’s name change to Beatrice could not have taken place for linguistic reasons exclusively, as the variants for Elizabeth/Isabel in western Europe were well-known. It is possible that coronation rituals, along with those of royal weddings, and a possible consecration and blessing of the queen could shed some light on this practice, but unfortunately we have no evidence of them in relation to Fernando and Beatrice. It is also possible that the tradition of name changing was followed to please the bride or to bestow a quasi-imperial solemnity on the ceremony. It was indeed considered a foreign practice, as evidenced in the Chronica latina regum Castellae where there is no single reference to her baptismal name, Elizabeth, after the ceremony took place.32 Thereafter, she is referred to exclusively as Queen Beatrice, meaning she attains a new status and becomes a ‘new person’ upon becoming queen, by means of the king’s authority. In any case, the symbolism of the name change would never be replicated again among royalty in Castile.

30 Gertrud Thoma, Namensänderungen in Herrscherfamilien des mittelalterlichen Europa (Munich, 1985), pp. 194–196, 207, 306; Claudia Zey, “Frauen und Töchter der salischen Herrscher,” in Die Salier, das Reich und der Niederrhein, ed. Tilman Struve (Colonia/Vienna, 2008), pp. 47–98 at pp. 57, 69–70, 77–79; Martina Hartmann, Die Königin im frühen Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 2009), pp. 179–194. 31 Thoma, Namensänderungen, p. 209; Amalie Fößel, Die Königin im mittelalterlichen Reich: Herrschaftsausübung, Herrschaftsrechte, Handlungsspielräume (Stuttgart, 2000), p. 41. 32 “In Germany there lived at that time a very noble and fair youth of honourable manners, and very honest for her age: She was daughter of Philip, king of Germany, emperor-elect of the Romans, son of Frederick the Great, emperor of the Romans. The mother of this youth was the daughter of the emperor of Constantinople, Isaac, and she was thus the granddaughter of the two emperors deemed to be the greatest and most illustrious in the universal world.” CLRC, p. 72. It is worth noting the indirect style used at all times in this passage. CLRC, p. 72.

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Levels of Female Royal Authority

The role of Queen Beatrice in Alfonso X’s claim to the imperial throne is a product of the chroniclers’ rewriting of the memory of her imperial lineage after the queen’s death, invoking the maternal succession (materna sucessio) which, according to Wolf, was insinuated in the election of previous emperors.33 On the one hand, none of this is mentioned in the information regarding her marriage: it is likely that the participants were more than cognizant of her secondary position in the family line to lead directly to the election of an emperor. On the other hand, her role as the future mother of the heirs of Castile was crucial and urgently necessary since Berenguela had no intention of either marrying again, or having any more progeny, and the Castilian throne depended only on Fernando and his brother Alfonso de Molina (1202–1272). It was impossible for Fernando to begin his military campaigns before his new wife became pregnant. Since Beatrice was only fourteen at the time of her wedding, her pregnancy must have taken place as soon as she was mature for it, giving birth only two years later. While Beatrice was alive, the Andalusi campaigns were possibly only aceifas—minor military raids. During this period, the king was frequently found in the northern part of the kingdom—away from the Muslim frontier—and in the cities belonging to the queen, a sign which suggests that the entire royal family was present. At the outset of their marriage between 1217 and 1224, truces with the Almohads had been signed at first by Alfonso IX and later in 1221 by Berenguela herself who, in spite of this, did not prevent her subjects from participating in Leonese campaigns.34 This gave the young spouses time to sire two sons who were immediately cited in royal diplomas, substituting their uncle Alfonso de Molina, who would never again appear in them. The German princess’s young age may well explain the close connection that existed between her and Berenguela, who acted as her political mentor and was in charge of Beatrice’s education in the Castilian court. Between 1219 and 1224, Fernando’s sister, also called infanta Berenguela,35 must have been Beatrice’s companion at the queen’s household. As of February 1220, Beatrice’s name precedes the confirmation given by Queen Berenguela in royal privileges. This is a sign that the marriage may have been consummated and the consort had achieved a relevant position at court, while the king’s mother took on a

33 Wolf, “El proyecto imperial,” pp. 162–163. 34 Shadis, Berenguela, pp. 133–134. 35 Infante or infanta being the title given to the king’s children.

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secondary role without abandoning her political endeavours.36 The simultaneous presence of two queens at court was common and their roles often appear complementary, especially in this first period when the young German queen was still in the process of adapting to her role in a new kingdom. Beatrice and Berenguela were positioned to each side of the king in courtly ceremonies, such as during the visit of John of Brienne, the widower king of Jerusalem. This meeting took place on John’s return from his pilgrimage to Santiago in 1224, when Fernando III’s sister, Berenguela, was married to him after the cortes celebrated in Burgos, hence preventing their half-sisters by the King of León from taking this role: “The king and queen, her mother, and her wife accompanied the king of Jerusalem and her spouse to Logroño where they showered them with many gifts and entrusted them to the grace of God.”37 One of Beatrice’s first projects, encouraged by Berenguela, had to do with patronage in the kingdom: she began the construction of a large church and a Cistercian monastery for monks in Matallana (Villalba de los Alcores, Valladolid) which had been founded between 1173 and 1175, but had so far only occupied a provisional structure.38 Berenguela had participated in this endeavour in 1217, but it was not until the decade of the 1220s that the monastery was placed under the protection of Fernando III. Its proximity to the castle of Montealegre de Campos, Beatrice’s property according to her arras (dowry), explains the queen’s patronage as lord of these lands. The abbey of Las Huelgas was used as a model for the new monastery, which was most likely completed between 1224 and 1234. With respect to the queens’ households, Berenguela’s is well-known compared to that of her daughter-in-law’s, and was possibly larger as she often stood in for her son as governess of the realm in his absence. Beatrice’s household had two majordomos (head stewards). Pedro López only attested royal records occasionally, such as the agreement that ended the conflict between Alfonso Téllez de Meneses, one of Berenguela’s staunchest supporters among the higher nobility, and the archbishop of Toledo, which he signed along 36 González, Reinado y diplomas, II, p. 131, doc. 108. Horacio Salvador Martínez, Berenguela la Grande y su época (1180–1246) (Madrid, 2012), p. 522, points out that Beatrice’s name precedes that of Berenguela, unlike that of Jeanne de Ponthieu, the king’s second wife. 37 CLRC, pp. 73–74. 38 Luis Fernández Martín, “Colección diplomática del monasterio de Santa María de Matallana,” Hispania Sacra 25, no. 50 (1972): 391–435, 404–409, and 410; Shadis, Berenguela, p. 162; Julio González, Reinado, II, pp. 151–153, 210–211, docs. 122–123, and 171. Villalba de los Alcores was located very close to Valladolid and both were connected by a path to Montealegre. It would later be held by the Meneses, during the reign of Sancho IV, who would turn it into a family pantheon, in clear imitation of the royal abbey of Las Huelgas.

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with Berenguela’s majordomo.39 In 1232 Pedro López, his wife Inés and their children were awarded for their services a series of houses with an oven in the town of Baeza, as well as land between the tower of Malpedaço and the town itself, which the family would later donate to the monastery of La Vid.40 Furthermore, they were granted the town of Tudela de Duero, except for its monasteries, its servants and the properties of the see of Burgos and the monastery of San Millán.41 The other individual who held the title of majordomo was Gonzalo Gutiérrez, who confirmed a document for the abbey of Las Huelgas in 1231.42 The difference between Beatrice’s two majordomos and Berenguela’s may be found in the nature of the latter’s right to exercise power as queen regnant, or perhaps in the fact that Beatrice always accompanied her husband, not needing to act independently through a chancery of her own and giving way to a scaled-down queen’s household. The two queens appear acting jointly in various lawsuits in the area around the city of Burgos as seen in co-issued documents where we usually find the presence of a royal trio formed by King Fernando, his mother Queen Berenguela, and his wife Queen Beatrice, at times together with other individuals. According to Bianchini, these formulae where they appeared together with the king, underscore the juridical agency of the queens.43 The inclusion of the seals of the two queens in these diplomas follows the pattern of a tradition initiated by Eleanor of Aquitaine and continued by Eleanor Plantagenet and her successors in the Iberian Peninsula.44 The seals would not have been used if the presence of the king had deemed them unnecessary. Moreover, the use of the words “with agreement and approval” (consensus et beneplacitum) of the queens bestowed onto them a special role, including Beatrice as consort in a domain which had previously only been Berenguela’s as queen regnant, 39 “Petri Lupi, maiordomi domne regine Beatricis.” 7 October 1226. González, Reinado, II, pp. 264–265, doc. 219. 40 24 December 1232, Toledo. González, Reinado y diplomas, II, pp. 569–571, doc. 494. 41 González, Reinado, III, pp. 136–140, docs. 609–610. 42 “Mayordomo de la reyna donna Beatriz,” Documentación del monasterio de Las Huelgas de Burgos (1231–1262), ed. J. M. Lizoain Garrido (Burgos, 1985), pp. 16–17, doc. 265; Janna Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, pp. 149 and 301. 43 21 August 1221. Las Huelgas. Documentación del monasterio de San Juan de Burgos, ed. Peña Pérez (Burgos, 1983), pp. 94–95, doc. 66; Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, pp. 162–163, 305; Adam J. Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order and the Written Word, 1000–1200 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 105–106. 44 In the donation parchment of 1179 of the Archivo de la Catedral de Toledo, A-2-G-1-5, we find the queen’s wax seal. José Manuel Cerda Costabal, Leonor de Inglaterra: la reina Plantagenet de Castilla (Oviedo, 2021), pp. 109–110.

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on a level of virtual equality. It is undeniable that Berenguela’s authority was qualitatively distinct to that of the queen consort, but this does not imply that Beatrice lacked power, as is shown by her progressive integration into the political life of the kingdom after the birth of her first sons, Alfonso and Fadrique.45 Beatrice became increasingly involved in the governance of the realm as she grew older. At the death of Alfonso IX of León in September 1230, Fernando III was en route to Toledo to meet his mother and wife after the failed siege of Jaén.46 Counselled by his mother, the Archbishop and the elite of the kingdom, the king quickly left towards León through the lands belonging to his mother where he was warmly welcomed. However, in León he had problems securing the towers of the city, as the merino mayor (the chief regional military official) refused to give himself in. The king received news of Queen Teresa and his half-sisters, doña Sancha and doña Dulce, who requested a meeting with Queen Berenguela, although no mention is made of Beatrice at this point. These talks resulted in an agreement known as the Concordia de Benavente (1230) which secured the throne of León for Fernando.47 Even if Berenguela was the main negotiator of its clauses—her seal appearing next to that of the king’s in the main document—Beatrice also participated in the discussion of certain ancillary measures. Firstly, the queen consort was to swear on the Gospel that she would comply with all that was outlined in the treaty, just as the king and his sons would do. Later, the queen presented the infantas with a legal charter of her acceptance and ratification of the agreement. It was imperative for the queen—who was not present among the signatories—to sign an independent diploma to validate the agreement. In fact, the queen consort was never able to make it to the meeting at Benavente, perhaps because at that time she was giving birth to Infante Felipe, who was born that same year.48 A privilege granted to the palatine church of Saint Isidore, the first document issued in León in which the entire royal family appear, includes the formula of king and two queens in the Leonese context, one which had already been successfully introduced in Castile.49 In April 1231, the queen appears as guarantor in a document in which Fernando committed to defend his 45

On the power of Berenguela as queen regnant compared to the powers of a queen consort, see Shadis, Berenguela, pp. 115–121; Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, pp. 177–179. 46 Lucas de Tuy, Chronicon mundi, BNM Ms. 10442, f. 190v–191r does not even mention the transition of the kingdom into the hands of Fernando, nor the negotiations surrounding it. He leaps from one frontier military episode to another, relating the death of doña Beatrice between one and another. 47 CLRC, pp. 90–91; González, Reinado, II, pp. 309, 311–317, doc. 268, 270, and 272. 48 González, Reinado, II, p. 311–314, doc. 270; Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, pp. 204 and 314. 49 González, Reinado, II, p. 309, doc. 268, Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, p. 202.

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stepmother, Queen Teresa, surrendering the castle of Santo Estêvão to the king of Portugal in exchange for safeguarding Teresa’s Portuguese properties: “And if anything happens to me, my mother queen doña Berenguela and my wife queen doña Beatrice, my son who will reign after me, shall be obliged to fulfil this likewise.”50 After that, Beatrice would become tenant of León (1231–1232). Her direct engagement in state affairs in the kingdom of León becomes evident by the change in the wording of the document confirming Archbishop Bernardo of Santiago de Compostela as chancellor and chaplain of the kingdom of León. This document, validated “in the presence and with the approval of their Serene Highnesses Queen Berenguela, my mother, and my wife, Lady Beatrice” ensured that his authority would not be undermined by that of the Archbishop of Toledo.51 With the validation of this privilege, Beatrice began to exercise authority in such a manner that was not recognised before. The queens’ arbitration also aided the reconciliation of the king with Álvar Pérez de Castro, who had married Mancía López—daughter of Lope Díaz de Haro, the king’s niece and member of Queen Beatrice’s household—without informing the king. As they were close relatives, their marriage was considered incestuous. The king took over Álvar Pérez’s lands and threatened to besiege them, at which time “Álvar Núñez, motivated by sound advice, submitted to the will and inclination of the queens doña Berenguela and doña Beatrice. For their part, the queens sought the counsel of prudent men and instructed Álvar Núñez to disarm and leave the town of Paredes, to depart from the kingdom and go live in the lands of the Saracens or in any other place until he and his followers could recover the king’s favour.”52 Later, Álvar returned to Andalucía as caudillo mayor de la frontera (head military captain on the frontier) and his marital union endured, according to several records, even if the chronicle is silent on this issue. This episode has been interpreted as a means to reinforce the image of the monarch as a just king, whose wrath would have been buffered by the queens’ mediation, presented as

50 “Et si de me aliquid humanum contigerit, mater mea regina domina Berengaria et uxor mea regina domina Beatrice, et filius meus qui regnauerit pro me, teneantur ad istud idem complendum.” González, Reinado, II, pp. 367–368, doc. 319, Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, pp. 212–214. 51 “Presentibus et approbantibus serenissimis reginis matre mea domina Berengaria et uxore mea domina Beatrice.” González, Reinado, II, p. 346, doc. 299; Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, pp. 221–222. 52 CLRC, pp. 93–95; González Jiménez, Fernando III, p. 95; Shadis, Berenguela, pp. 120–121; Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, pp. 223–224, and 319.

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charitable and merciful women, and undeniably cloaked in a religious aura.53 Furthermore, this passage reveals the effect that the consort’s intervention had on the ladies who had become part of Beatrice’s household. Additionally, since his youth, Lope Díaz de Haro had been tenant in name of Berenguela, and henceforth he would remain faithful to her until his death. 3

Beatrice of Swabia’s Personal Actions

The arrival of the German princess in Castile marked another interesting milestone for international politics and crusading in the kingdom of Castile, as it paved the way for the founding of a first house of the Knights of the Teutonic Order in the Iberian Peninsula. No Teutonic knights are known to be among the retinue that escorted Queen Beatrice to Castile, although the fact that many representatives from different orders in the kingdom were included in the Castilian embassy that negotiated her betrothal to Fernando III leads one to suspect that they may have been also part of the German party in these talks.54 Following this logic, it is possible that a commitment may have been made for the Teutonic Order to receive certain endowments in Castilian lands (as happened in 1235 when Elizabeth of England married Frederick II) in view of a future expansion of their enterprise in an area well-known for its crusading front.55 One of the advantages of this type of deal was the promise of integrating one more master of an international military order in the royal court. The construction of what was most likely a modest monastery for the Teutonic Order with the name of Santa María de Castellanos, took place before 1222 in a remote site on the Castilian-Leonese border located between the castles of La Mota and Toro, bounded by a small spring on one side and the settlement of Santibáñez on the other.56 This was the queen’s personal initiative 53 Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, p. 226. 54 CLRC, p. 72. 55 Nikolas Jaspert, “Der Deutsche Orden in Spanien,” in España y el Sacro Imperio. Procesos de cambio, influencias y acciones recíprocas en la época de la “europeización” siglos XI–XIII, eds. Klaus Herbers, Karl Rudolf, Julio Valdeón Baruque (Valladolid, 2002), pp. 273–298 at 280; idem, “L’Ordine Teutonico nella penisola iberica: limiti e possibilità di una provincia periférica,” in L’Ordine Teutonico nel Mediterraneo, ed. Hubert Houben (Galatina, 2004), pp. 109–132, 115. 56 Ferreiro Alemparte, “Asentamiento,” pp. 248–249. More recently, José Manuel Rodríguez García, “La Orden Teutónica en España,” in Ordens militares, identidade e mudança, VIII Encontro sobre Ordens Militares, ed. Isabel Cristina F. Fernandes, vol. 2 (Palmela, 2022), pp. 597–609. I would like to thank Dr Rodríguez García for allowing me to read his article before publication.

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“which she built and established devoutly in memory of the aforementioned Order in Prussia, so that such remembrance shall live on perpetually in our kingdoms, and they be obliged to pray God for our lives and our health and that of the aforesaid queen our lady, and for the souls of the kings from where we come.”57 Clearly the location of the Teutonic hospital did not respond to crusading needs, otherwise it would have been founded in the south, along the frontier. Its position so far north in the kingdom of Castile could only be explained by another purpose of the Order, namely the care of the sick, as it was the case for the Hospitallers.58 The queen’s involvement in the foundation of hospitals could help promote a Jacobean pilgrimage route in the interior of Castile that would link the western part of the kingdom with towns such as Sahagún, the city of León and Astorga. Queen Beatrice’s endowment, located in a conflict-ridden area between Castile and León, could also be understood in the context of the complex negotiations between Alfonso IX, Berenguela and Fernando III in the Castilian-Leonese border, and as a way to secure disputed territories between the dioceses of Zamora and Palencia. This would connect the arrival of the Teutonic Order to the area in which the towns of Queen Beatrice’s arras were found, but were still awaiting confirmation by Pope Honorius III, who had already supported the young Fernando III in the settlement of the armed conflict against his father in 1218. The border between León and Castile was an imprecise line where both territories criss-crossed each other and which was made more complicated by the numerous treaties signed between Alfonso IX, Berenguela and Fernando.59 Furthermore, the defeat of the Laras following their uprising, and the elimination of their tenancies increased the availability 57 Luis Díez Hermosino, Descripción y mapa de Mota del Marqués (Valladolid) y sus alre­ dedores, 1796. BNE, Ms. 7310, pp. 146–150, published in part by Jaime Ferreiro Alemparte, “Acercamiento mutuo entre España y Alemania con Fernando III y Alfonso X el sabio,” in España y Europa, un pasado juridico común, ed. A. Perez Martin (Murcia, 1986), pp. 179–222, nº 15. 58 The link between the Teutonic Knights and the Camino de Santiago is shown by the popular name given to the first house of the order in Frankfurt, der Kompostellhof, founded in 1219 with the aim of providing shelter for the poor and sick, and containing a chapel dedicated to Santiago, or St. James according to Ferreiro Alemparte, “Asentamiento,” pp. 238 and 250. Other authors, such as Jaspert, are more doubtful about this connection. 59 Rodríguez López, Consolidación, pp. 161–171; Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, pp. 80–95, 154–156; Antonio Sánchez de Mora, “Proyección espacial de los conflictos políticos durante el reinado de Enrique I de Castilla: posibilidades metodológicas de los Sistemas de Información Geográfica,” in Los espacios del rey: poder y territorio en las monarquías hispánicas (siglos XII–XIV), eds. Fernando Arias Guillén, Pascual Martínez Sopena (Bilbao, 2018) pp. 327–354, 340–352.

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of land for the Castilians. The castles belonging to Berenguela and Fernando within the Kingdom of León created a north-south line along the Leonese border, and this was reinforced by another parallel line with lands held by the military orders, convenient for the establishment of the Teutonic Knights. The Leonese, however, claimed these lands. The castle of San Juan de La Mota in the Santibáñez district, next to Santa María de Castellanos, was momentarily in the hands of Sancho Fernández, Alfonso IX’s half-brother, who by 1220 had died in battle. The need to offset the position of this castle could have decided the location of the Teutonic commandery on the other side of the road that led northward, allowing them to defend the pilgrimage route towards Sahagún, as the commandery’s properties stretched towards the northeast, instead of around the area dominated by the castle of La Mota. Another important property-holder in the area was Teresa Gil de Soverosa—a favourite of Alfonso IX—thanks to the inheritance of her aunt, Alda Velasco. It consisted of arable lands in Grecos (today Griegos, a deserted town in the district of Tiedra), Campo de Pilela (Villela/Pilella), Tiedra, San Juan de la Mota and perhaps Benafarces, which in 1228 she donated to the Templars.60 Teresa Gil was part of the circle of Queen Teresa’s—Alfonso IX’s first spouse—since she had been raised in Soverosa, a castle that Queen Teresa received in her charter of arras, as was the case with other strongholds in the Montes Torozos region which were later handed down to her daughters Sancha and Dulce (1217).61 Judging by their shared name, it is plausible that the queen may have been the godmother of Alfonso IX’s future lover. This later relationship may have helped reinforce ties between the king and the noble cohorts of Portuguese origin that were present by his side, as well as place Teresa and her brothers at the centre of the Leonese court.62 At the death of Alfonso IX, Teresa Gil took refuge in her Galician properties and joined in the faction that supported the succession of the infantas. It is likely that the purpose of this endowment in the lands of Tierra de Campos may have been to safeguard her Leonese properties in this area with the use of the Knights Templars, or at least to hamper them 60 Archivo Histórico Nacional, Órdenes Militares, Templarios, carp. 567. 1228, July, 15. González, Reinado, I, p. 193; Gonzalo Martínez Díez, Los templarios en Castilla y León, pp. 64, 112, 115; Reglero, Señorío, pp. 140–141, 184, only mentions Griegos and Pilella. 61 Inés Calderón Medina, “Las arras de Doña Teresa. El tratado entre Alfonso IX de León y Sancho I de Portugal de 1194,” in Castilla y el mundo feudal. Homenaje a Julio Valdeón, eds. Ma Isabel del Val, Pascual Martínez Sopena (Valladolid, 2009), vol. II, pp. 443–456, 448–450. 62 Inés Calderón Medina, “El concubinato regio en la definición de la frontera galaicoportuguesa (ss. XII–XIII),” in Los espacios del rey. Poder y territorio en las monarquías hispánicas (ss. XII–XIV), eds. F. Arias Guillén, P. Martínez Sopena (Bilbao, 2018), pp. 275–304.

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from passing to the Castilian sovereign—who was based at Tiedra castle since the treaty of Cabreros (1206)—on the condition of returning the property to Berenguela in case the tenants did not hold it.63 German and Spanish historians disagree on whether the Teutonic Grand Master Hemann de Salza travelled in 1231 for the purpose of a pilgrimage to Santiago, or to visit the properties of his order in the Kingdom of Castile.64 When Fernando III bestowed on the Teutonic Order the lordship of Higares in 1231—this time granted exclusively by the king and not by the queen—the document reveals that there were brethren of the order already living in the kingdom.65 At the same time, while they reorganized León, Queen Beatrice took under her custody a pilgrim’s hospice next to the Camino de Santiago, owned by the abbot of Sahagún, hence reinforcing her patronage of this pilgrimage route.66 These diplomas concerning her patronage of hospices are at this stage the only extant ones which specifically include the queen’s name and titles (intitulatio). 4 Conclusion The status attributed to Beatrice by her genealogy grew during the last years of her reign, when she reached political maturity under the aegis of the queen mother, and continued growing after her death in 1235 to reach her children. Her successor, Jeanne of Ponthieu, of inferior rank according to the parameters of the times, never received the same treatment in the kingdom. Fernando never returned to the north of the kingdom—as he had often done—after the 63

An important number of castles received by Castile in Cabrero are linked to the dispute in this area, among which was Peñafiel—one of the castles belonging to Beatrice’s arras. Ana Rodríguez López, “Dotes y arras en la política territorial de la monarquía feudal castellana: siglos XII–XIII,” Arenal: Revista de historia de mujeres 2, no. 2 (1995): 271–293; Bianchini, Queen’s Hand, pp. 84, 286. 64 Some historians, including Ferreiro Alemparte, “Asentamiento,” p. 245, mention two sojourns instead of one. 65 “Facium cartam donationis, concessionis, confirmationis et stabilitatis deo et hospitali Sancte Marie Teuthonicorum in Iherusalem vobisque domno Hermando eiusdem instanti magistro et vestris sucessoribus totique eiusdem hospitalis conventui fratrum Deo serviencium specialiter fratribus eiusdem hospitalis in regno meo commorantibus, presentibus et futuris, perpetuo et irrevocabiliter valituram. Dono itaque vobis et concedo totam illam hereditatem meam que dicitur Figares …” Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart, Duque de Alba, “Documentos sobre propiedades de la orden de los caballeros teutónicos en España,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia 122 (1948): 17–21, 20–21; González, Reinado y diplomas, II, pp. 405–407, doc. 352. Ferreiro Alemparte, “Asentamiento,” p. 249; Jaspert, “Der Deutsche Orden,” p. 281 and “L’Ordine,” p. 116; Rodríguez García, “Orden Teutónica.” 66 22 November 1231. Ferreiro Alemparte, “Acercamiento,” p. 199. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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death of Beatrice. The weeping for her passing did her full justice. Beatrice of Swabia was commemorated by her son Alfonso X in several texts, including the collection of miracle stories Cantigas de Santa María. Although she was starting to build up her networks in the kingdom, her death lost the political effects of her actions, and we remain wondering what her accomplishments would have been as a ruler and mediator once her mother-in-law disappeared. The detailed study of Beatrice of Swabia’s biography in parallel with that of the queen mother, Berenguela, shows the need to consider the royal family as a common enterprise in which all the members contributed to the exercise of royal power, as would be discussed in the thirteenth-century legal code of the Siete Partidas. The nuances of the practice of queenship do not diminish the category and the duties of either of these two women: one of them ruled in her own right, and the other descended from one of the most powerful families in Christendom, the imperial lineages of both the East and the West. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Gonzalo Carrasco for his translation, funded by the Depart­ ment of Medieval History and Palaeography at UNED. I also thank José Manuel Rodríguez, Nikolas Jaspert and Clara Almagro for their help and encouragement. Bibliography Annales Spirenses. In Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores XVII, eds. Georg H. Pertz and Georg Waitz. Hannover, 1861. Barton, Simon. “Las mujeres nobles y el poder en los reinos de León y Castilla en el siglo XII: Un estudio preliminar.” Studia Historica. Historia medieval 29 (2011): 51–71. Bianchini, Janna. The Queen’s Hand. Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile. Philadelphia, 2012. Calderón Medina, Inés. “El concubinato regio en la definición de la frontera galaicoportuguesa (ss. XII–XIII).” In Los espacios del rey. Poder y territorio en las monarquías hispánicas (ss. XII–XIV), eds. F. Arias Guillén; P. Martínez Sopena. Bilbao, 2018, pp. 275–304. Calderón Medina, Inés. “Las arras de Doña Teresa. El tratado entre Alfonso IX de León y Sancho I de Portugal de 1194.” In Castilla y el mundo feudal. Homenaje a Julio Valdeón, eds. Ma Isabel del Val, Pascual Martínez Sopena. Vol. II. Valladolid, 2009, pp. 443–456.

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Cerda Costabal, José Manuel. Leonor de Inglaterra: la reina Plantagenet de Castilla. Oviedo, 2021. Cerda Costabal, José Manuel. “Matrimonio y patrimonio. Las arras de Leonor Plantagenet, reina consorte de Castilla.” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 46, no. 1 (2016): 63–96. Colmenero López, Daniel. “La boda entre Fernando III el Santo y Beatriz de Suabia: motivos y perspectivas de una alianza matrimonial entre la Corona de Castilla y los Staufer.” Miscelánea Medieval Murciana 34 (2010): 9–22. Crónica latina de los reyes de Castilla, trans. L. Charlo Brea. Madrid, 1999. Csendes, Peter. Philipp von Schwaben: ein Staufer im Kampf um die Macht. Darmstadt, 2003. Diago, Máximo. “La monarquía castellana y los Staufer. Contactos políticos y diplomáticos en los siglos XII y XIII.” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie III-Historia Medieval 8 (1995): 51–83. Engels, Odilo. Die Staufer. Stuttgart, 1998. Estepa Díez, Carlos. “El reino de Castilla y el Imperio: de Alfonso VII a Fernando III.” In La Península Ibérica en el tiempo de Las Navas de Tolosa, eds. Carlos Estepa Díez and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz. Madrid, 2014, pp. 237–264. Fernández Catón, José M., ed., Colección documental del archivo de la Catedral de León, vol. 6, 1188–1230. León, 1991. Fernández Martín, Luis. “Colección diplomática del monasterio de Santa María de Matallana.” Hispania Sacra 25, no. 50 (1972): 391–435. Ferreiro Alemparte, Jaime. “Asentamiento y extinción de la Orden Teutónica en España: La encomienda de Santa Maria de Castellanos de la Mota de Toro (1222–1556).” Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia 168 (1971): 228–274. Ferreiro Alemparte, Jaime. “Acercamiento mutuo entre España y Alemania con Fernando III y Alfonso X el sabio.” In España y Europa, un pasado juridico común, ed. A. Perez Martin. Murcia, 1986, pp. 179–222. Fitz-James Stuart, Jacobo. “Documentos sobre propiedades de la orden de los caballeros teutónicos en España.” Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia 122 (1948): 17–21. Fößel, Amalie. Die Königin im mittelalterlichen Reich: Herrschaftsausübung, Herrschaftsrechte, Handlungsspielräume. Stuttgart, 2000. González y González, Julio. Alfonso IX. Madrid, 1944. González y González, Julio. Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III. Córdoba, 1980. González Jiménez, Manuel. Fernando III el Santo. Barcelona, 2006. Hartmann, Martina. Die Königin im frühen Mittelalter. Stuttgart, 2009. Jaspert, Nikolas. “Der Deutsche Orden in Spanien.” In España y el Sacro Imperio. Procesos de cambio, influencias y acciones recíprocas en la época de la “europeización” siglos XI–XIII, eds. Klaus Herbers, Karl Rudolf, Julio Valdeón Baruque. Valladolid, 2002, pp. 273–298.

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Jaspert, Nikolas. “L’Ordine Teutonico nella penisola iberica: limiti e possibilità di una provincia periférica.” In L’Ordine Teutonico nel Mediterraneo, ed. Hubert Houben. Galatina, 2004, pp. 109–132. Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo. Historia de los hechos de España. Madrid, 1989. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Libro IV.5. In Opera omnia, ed. J. A. Giles. Oxford, 1848. Kosto, Adam J. Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order and the Written Word, 1000–1200. Cambridge, 2001. Lizoain Garrido, José M., ed. Documentación del monasterio de Las Huelgas de Burgos (1231–1262). Burgos, 1985. Lucas de Tuy, Chronicon mundi, ed. Emma Falque. Turnhout, 2003. Martin, Georges. “Négociation et diplomatie dans la vie de Bérengère de Castille (1214– 1246). La part du facteur générique.” e-Spania 4 (December 2007). Available at http://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/562. Accessed October 27, 2020. Meyer, Bruno Berthold. Kastilien, die Staufer und das Imperium ein Jahrhundert politischer Kontakte im Zeichen des Kaisertums. Husum, 2002. Peña Pérez, ed. Documentación del monasterio de San Juan de Burgos. Burgos, 1983. Rassow, Peter. Der Prinzgemahl, ein Pactum matrimoniale aus dem Jahre 1188. Weimar, 1950. Rzihacek, Andrea, ed. Philipp von Schwaben: Beiträge der internationalen Tagung anlässlich seines 800. Todestages, Wien, 29. bis 30. Mai 2008. Vienna, 2010. Rodríguez García, José Manuel. “La Orden Teutónica en España,” in Ordens militares, identidade e mudança, VIII Encontro sobre Ordens Militares, ed. Isabel Cristina F. Fernandes. Vol 2, Palmela, 2022, pp. 597–609. Rodríguez López, Ana. “Dotes y arras en la política territorial de la monarquía feudal castellana: siglos XII–XIII.” Arenal: Revista de historia de mujeres 2, no. 2 (1995): 271–293. Rodríguez López, Ana. “El reino de Castilla y el Imperio Germánico en la primera mitad del siglo XIII. Fernando III y Federico II.” In Historia social, pensamiento historiográfico y Edad Media. Homenaje al Prof. Abilio Barbero de Aguilera, ed. María Isabel Loring García. Madrid, 1997, pp. 613–630. Rodríguez López, Ana. La consolidación territorial de la monarquía feudal castellana. Madrid, 1994. Salvador Martínez, Horacio. Berenguela la Grande y su época (1180–1246). Madrid, 2012. Sánchez de Mora, Antonio. “Proyección espacial de los conflictos políticos durante el reinado de Enrique I de Castilla: posibilidades metodológicas de los Sistemas de Información Geográfica.” In Los espacios del rey: poder y territorio en las monarquías hispánicas (siglos XII–XIV), eds. Fernando Arias Guillén and Pascual Martínez Sopena. Bilbao, 2018, pp. 327–354. Shadis, Miriam. Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Age. New York, 2009.

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Stafford, Pauline A. “Royal Women and Transitions. Emma and Aelfgifu in 1035– 1042/1043.” In Patterns of Episcopal Power. Bishops in Tenth and Eleventh Century Western Europe, eds. Ludger Körntgen and Dominik Waßenhoven. Berlin, 2011, pp. 127–144. Smith, Julie Ann. Queen-Making and Queenship in Early Medieval England and Francia. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of York, 1993. Thoma, Gertrud. Namensänderungen in Herrscherfamilien des mittelalterlichen Europa. Munich, 1985. Winkelmann, Eduard. Philipp von Schwaben und Otto IV. von Braunschweig ( Jahrbücher der Deutschen Geschichte) (Vol. 1–2). Leipzig, 1873. Wolf, Armin. “Derecho electivo y sucesion hereditaria en los reinos y en el imperio de Alfonso el Sabio.” In España y Europa, un pasado jurídico común, ed. Antonio Peréz Martín. Murcia, 1986, pp. 223–257. Wolf, Armin. “Die Frauen Friedrichs II und ihre Nachkommenschaft.” In Frauen der Staufer, eds. Karl-Heinz Rueß and Amalie Fößel. Göppingen, 2006, pp. 113–150. Wolf, Armin. “El proyecto imperial de Alfonso X.” In Alfonso X y su época: el siglo del rey sabio, ed. Manuel Rodriguez Llopis. Barcelona, 2001, pp. 153–173. Zey, Claudia. “Frauen und Töchter der salischen Herrscher.” In Die Salier, das Reich und der Niederrhein, ed. Tilman Struve. Colonia/Vienna, 2008, pp. 47–98.

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Chapter 16

Speaking Truth to Power: Authority, Social Status, and Gender in Thirteenth-Century Castilian Witness Testimony Janna Bianchini In 1220 Pedro González, a monk of the monastery of San Zoilo de Carrión, in the kingdom of Castile, oversaw the collection of witness testimony to establish San Zoilo’s rights in certain churches in the diocese of Palencia. He or his agents spoke with at least 153 men and 12 women, and recorded the information they gave as support for his monastery’s claims.1 In their testimony, the witnesses reported what they knew about the local privileges of two great ecclesiastical lords, the monastery of San Zoilo and the bishop of Palencia. In doing so, they also asserted their own authority as individuals and as a community. Their participation in this legal process offered the witnesses a rare chance to air their knowledge and opinions in a context where such knowledge and opinions mattered a great deal to their episcopal or monastic overlords. The act of testifying, therefore, offered townspeople access to forms of power that were normally not available to them. In the face of this opportunity, they employed various strategies to advance their own interests, whether it was to declare their status within their communities, constrain the actions of their lords, or even to protect themselves from potential reprisal. It is difficult to know what results these strategies may have produced at the community level, but the authority claimed by witnesses was inevitably circumscribed by the much greater power of the ecclesiastical lords whose disputes demanded their testimony. Witness testimony has served as the basis of a wide range of studies over the last several decades. Research has focused on testimony from civil trials,2 1 Julio A. Pérez Celada, ed., Documentación del monasterio de San Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), Fuentes medievales castellano-leonesas, 100 (Burgos, 1986), #84, pp. 143–66. The extant document is original, but incomplete, breaking off at the beginning of testimony regarding the tercia of the chaplaincy of Villagonzalo. 2 Susan Alice McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community in Late Medieval Marseille (New York, 2013); Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Ithaca NY, 2000); Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Ithaca NY, 2003); Carol Lansing,

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from ecclesiastical trials,3 and from inquisitions of heresy.4 However, most of these studies deal with material from a later period, when the process of inquisitio, or inquest, had been more fully adopted from Roman law into secular and ecclesiastical legal practice, and when courts documented and archived their proceedings more thoroughly.5 For Castile, trial records of any kind are quite rare in the thirteenth century; documents like San Zoilo’s are frequently the only examples in which witness testimony is preserved, and even those documents are far from abundant.6 The testimony recorded in this document, then, is an early and uncommon survival. It offers a rare glimpse of the experiences of non-elite Castilians in the early thirteenth century, and some insight into the norms of power that governed their communities. The monastery of San Zoilo de Carrión lies between the cities of Burgos and León in what is now northern Spain. Founded in the mid-eleventh century, San Zoilo was an important monastic center and a dependent of Cluny. But when the kingdoms of León and Castile separated in 1157, San Zoilo found itself in the hotly contested borderland between the two kingdoms. It was the object of competition not only between the crowns of León and Castile, but also between two of those kingdoms’ most influential prelates: the bishop of the city of León, to its west, and the bishop of Palencia, to its south. Each diocese sought to assert its episcopal rights in the churches and towns where

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“Concubines, Lovers, Prostitutes: Infamy and Female Identity in Medieval Bologna,” in Beyond Florence: The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy, eds. Paula Findlen, Michelle Fontaine, and Duane J. Osheim (Stanford, 2002), pp. 85–100. Sara M. Butler, The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England, Later Medieval Europe, vol. 2 (Leiden, 2007); Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia, 2006); Charles Donahue, Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments about Marriage in Five Courts (Cambridge, 2007); Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya (Ithaca NY, 2017). The literature on this topic is too extensive to cite comprehensively. Some foundational texts are James Buchanan Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca NY, 1997); Carol Lansing, Power & Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy (New York, 1998); John Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, 2001). Maria João Violante Branco, “Memory and Truth: The Strange Case of the Witness Enquiries of 1216 in the Braga-Toledo Dispute,” Historical Research 79 (2006): 1–20. A couple of similar documents, both also produced in the context of disputes between ecclesiastical institutions, have been the subjects of excellent studies: María Isabel Alfonso Antón and Cristina Jular Pérez-Alfaro, “Oña contra Frías o el pleito de los cien testigos: Una pesquisa en la Castilla del siglo XIII,” Edad Media: Revista de Historia 3 (2000): 61–88; Branco, “Memory and Truth,” pp. 1–20.

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San Zoilo also had interests.7 In the inquest conducted in 1220, however, it was Palencia that contested the monastery’s rights. The bishop of Palencia, Tello Téllez de Meneses (r. 1208–46), belonged to a family of highly placed magnates whose power base lay in Palencia’s environs. His brothers Alfonso and Suero Téllez—like their father, Tello Pérez—belonged to the Castilian monarchs’ inner circle. While Tello Téllez’s noble origins were not exceptional among Castilian bishops, many of his colleagues—including Alderico, his predecessor in the see of Palencia—came from burgher families. Alderico, in fact, seems to have garnered some local reputation for sanctity.8 Tello Téllez, by contrast, acquired a reputation for rapacity. Early in his prelacy, Bishop Tello had worked with Alfonso VIII of Castile to nourish the fledgling university in Palencia, the kingdom’s first. But, in addition to the university’s existing expenses, Bishop Tello had to contend with a famine after 1212 and the aftermath of the small civil war that was fought upon the accession of Fernando III of Castile in 1217. Much of that war had been fought in and around the diocese of Palencia, with harsh economic consequences.9 In the war’s aftermath, therefore, it would have been difficult for Bishop Tello to collect even monies that were customarily owed to him, much less income that was not obviously his. Nevertheless, as Salcedo Tapia describes it, after 1217 “don Tello put all his effort into endowing the University with new life. … He proposed to save the University by recovering, for its benefit, properties belonging to the diocese of Palencia that were practically lost.”10 Those properties included ecclesiastical rents, which Bishop Tello vigorously pursued despite the challenge of “depriving lords of properties of which they had freely made use since time immemorial, 7 8

Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), p. lvi. Simon Barton, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 86, 193–94, 199–200; Pascual Martínez Sopena, La Tierra de Campos Occidental: poblamiento, poder y comunidad del siglo X al XIII (Valladolid, 1985), pp. 393–94; Janna Bianchini, The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile (Philadelphia, 2012), pp. 121–22, 168. For Alderico, see Kyle C. Lincoln, A Constellation of Authority: Castilian Bishops and the Secular Church during the Reign of Alfonso VIII (University Park PA, 2023), pp. 51–68. 9 María Luisa Palacio Sánchez-Izquierdo, Colección diplomática del Monasterio de San Zoil de Carrión (siglos XI al XV), Unpublished PhD Thesis (Madrid, 1988), pp. 275–276; Modesto Salcedo Tapia, “Vida de don Tello Téllez de Meneses, Obispo de Palencia,” Publicaciones de la Institución Tello Téllez de Meneses 53 (1985): 79–266, 173. 10 “don Tello puso todo su empeño en dotar a la Universidad de nueva vida. … Se trataba de salvar a la Universidad rescatando, en su beneficio, bienes de la diócesis palentina que estaban prácticamente perdidos.” Salcedo Tapia, “Vida de don Tello Téllez de Meneses,” pp. 188–189.

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considering them fully their own by right.”11 It appears that San Zoilo’s inquest was one product of his pursuit. The surviving document records inquests into the status of nine churches in the diocese of Palencia. The inquests center on ecclesiastical rights in these churches, especially on the question of how their income was divided. Each church’s tithes, or décimas, were split into thirds, called tercias. The tercias were then apportioned among various authorities, which might include the church’s own clergy, the monastery, the diocese, and even the governing council (concejo) of the town where the church was located. The witnesses questioned by San Zoilo’s investigators were often asked how these monies were distributed, as well as whether the monastery or the bishop had the right to appoint clergy in the various churches. The questions posed by San Zoilo’s investigators were tailored to the disputes about each individual church or its income. For example, in the case of the church of San Román de Fuentes, witnesses were asked to whom the church belonged, whether they had ever heard or seen that the bishop of Palencia had rights in the church or to its tithes, whether the bishop had ever objected to not having these rights, and so on. Most of these questions were phrased to elicit simple answers: yes or no, or an identification of the person who held the rights under dispute. But in every inquest, the witnesses were also asked more open-ended questions, such as how old they were, how far back they could remember, and how they knew the information they had given. These questions were important because direct personal observation—seeing and hearing—was considered the most reliable kind of testimony.12 In order to demonstrate their trustworthiness, witnesses had to explain how they were able to observe these facts firsthand. And, of course, the further back they could remember, the more authority their observations had.13 It was vital for San Zoilo to prove that its rights were longstanding custom, not novel encroachments on Palencia’s lordship. This paper is therefore organized around these more open-ended questions, which offered the witnesses greater latitude to express their own perspectives.

11 “los señores se privasen de unos bienes de los que hacían uso libremente desde tiempo inmemorial, considerándolos como de su pleno derecho.” Salcedo Tapia, “Vida de don Tello Téllez de Meneses,” p. 190. 12 Branco, “Memory and Truth,” p. 12; McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community, p. 41. 13 Judith Everard, “Sworn Testimony and Memory of the Past in Brittany, c. 1100–1250,” in Medieval Memories: Men, Women, and the Past, 700–1300, ed. Elisabeth van Houts (Harlow, 2001), p. 77.

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The high value that the investigators placed on recording firsthand testimony makes documents like this both appealing and treacherous to the modern historian. Their appeal stems from the fact that they purport to represent the lived experience and personal knowledge of non-elites—people whose perspectives are rarely captured in medieval records. The danger is that, for all their claims to accuracy, records of witness testimony are heavily mediated by the elites who wrote them down. First, most of the people questioned by San Zoilo’s unnamed investigators would have heard the questions and spoken their answers in Castilian, but the scribe(s) who produced this document wrote their replies in Latin—a “double translation,” in Susan McDonough’s words, from oral to written and from the non-elite vernacular language to an elite language reserved for the educated.14 Second—with a few exceptions, which will be addressed below—the scribes also turned the witnesses’ first-person replies (I saw, I heard) into third-person descriptions (he said he saw, he said he heard). Third, the scribes made no pretense of capturing a verbatim record of the testimony; they summarized the witnesses’ words as much as possible, even to the extent of recording only that one witness “said the same as” another.15 What the modern reader finds in this document, then, is an edited and abbreviated version of the witnesses’ testimony, which was converted into a language that most of the witnesses themselves did not understand—a document that met medieval standards of authenticity, but falls far short of modern ones. Still, these heavily mediated versions of witnesses’ words are the closest we can get to the worldviews of medieval non-elites, and historians have proposed approaches that can both make use of the evidence they offer and avoid the risks of accepting them at face value. Here, I have relied on McDonough’s paradigm of testimony as an expression of power: To bear witness was to be in an inherently powerful position. Even when one’s words were translated and circumscribed by law, the act of witnessing gave access to power across the social and economic spectrum. Litigants depended on witnesses to make their case, and the judges scrutinized their words to formulate their judgments.16

14 McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community, p. 45. 15 Robert N. Swanson, “‘… Et examinatus dicit …’: Oral and Personal History in the Records of English Ecclesiastical Courts,” in Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, ed. Michael Goodich (New York, 2006), p. 206. 16 McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community, p. 47.

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Through their testimony, witnesses could therefore influence not only the outcome of a case, but also the opinions of their audience—opinions about both the facts of the case, and community norms and standards. In the civil cases that McDonough studied, such influence might extend from the neighbors who heard the testimony spoken in court to the judges who relied on it to decide the case. San Zoilo’s witnesses may indeed have testified in a public venue or in front of other witnesses, or both, a situation likely to impact their words in ways that we cannot fully appreciate.17 Regardless of whether their community could overhear them, however, the witnesses might reasonably expect the written version of their testimony to reach the monks and perhaps the prior of San Zoilo itself, as well as the canons and perhaps the bishop of Palencia. These were audiences that most of them could not otherwise hope to address. Testifying for San Zoilo’s procurators, then, gave the witnesses at least the prospect of affecting events and institutions far beyond their typical sphere of influence.18 Judging from the record of their testimony, that prospect was not lost on them. 1

How Old Are You?

Some witnesses used their testimony to assert their own status in their community. Having been asked to testify was itself a mark of status, since the investigators tended to select witnesses of good reputation as a means of indicating their trustworthiness.19 But some witnesses had, or wanted to be seen to have, more status than others, and testifying gave them opportunities to claim that status. One way to do this was by asserting seniority. Each witness was asked to state their age. Few cited a specific number; it was not common in the Middle Ages to know one’s exact birth date,20 and indeed 19 of the witnesses said they did not know how old they were at all. But most witnesses provided at least an estimate. Because of the value that investigators placed on interviewing elders who could remember long-ago events,21 questions about age had the potential to elicit outlandish claims of longevity. In the 1216 case studied by 17 Alfonso Antón and Jular Pérez-Alfaro, “Oña contra Frías,” p. 70. 18 McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community, p. 4. In his contribution in this volume, Iñaki Martín Viso also explores ways in which individuals used their participation in formal conflict resolution to enhance their local status. 19 Everard, “Sworn Testimony,” p. 77. 20 McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community, p. 53. 21 Everard, “Sworn Testimony,” p. 77.

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Branco, 53 out of a group of 89 witnesses testified that they could remember back 80 or even 90 years, implying a thriving community of nonagenarians and centenarians in full command of their memory.22 San Zoilo’s witnesses were considerably more sober. By far the largest group, 60 people, reported being in their sixties, with another 19 saying they were in their fifties—answers that are demographically unremarkable. But a few witnesses did claim to be of impressively advanced age. Dominga, the widow of Juan Abad, said that she was 120 years old; and a layman named Muño reported that although other people said he was in his sixties, he believed himself to be 100 or more.23 Both Dominga and Muño claimed they could attest to San Zoilo’s rights in their local churches during their entire lives, which perhaps casts a shadow on their reliability; most witnesses were unwilling to swear that they could remember events from their childhood, or even from their adolescence. Interestingly, the reported ages of the female witnesses skew higher than that of the men. Twelve women’s testimony was recorded in this inquest, along with the testimony of at least 153 men. Three of those women—a full 25 per cent of all female witnesses—claimed to be at least 100. Dominga, the 120-year-old, was joined by Elvira Rodríguez and Solevida, both of Frómista, who both said they were 100 years old but would only swear to remembering 50 of those years. Since most witnesses’ recollections only stretched back 50 or 60 years, there was no obvious reason for the women to lie about their age. (It is, just barely, possible that Elvira and Solevida were telling the truth; Dominga was obviously exaggerating.) Perhaps 100 years or so was merely a conceptual stand-in for ‘very old.’24 But it is notable that of all the witnesses, only four claimed to be centenarians: these three women and one man (two men if we include Muño, the 60-something-year-old who believed he was 100). Could it be that the women stretched the truth as a means of bolstering their authority in the eyes of the monastic investigators? Both canon and Roman law set restrictions on women’s legal ability to testify. The Espéculo, a thirteenth-century legal code composed under the aegis of Alfonso X of Castile, asserted outright that men should be preferred as witnesses because of their superior understanding.25 In practice, however, 22 Branco, “Memory and truth,” pp. 14–15. 23 “dixit quod homines habent illum sexagenarium, set ipse credit se esse centenarium”: Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, pp. 156 [Dominga], 165 [Muño]. 24 Branco, “Memory and Truth,” p. 15. Branco observes that this is an incomplete explanation. 25 Elisabeth van Houts, “Gender and Authority of Oral Witnesses in Europe (800–1300),” The Royal Historical Society 6th series (1999): 202–203; Marta Madero, “Savoirs féminins et construction de la vérité: les femmes dans la preuve testimoniale en Castille au XIIIe siècle,” Crime, Histoire et Sociétés 3 (1999): 5–21, p. 13.

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laywomen’s testimony was both sought and accepted in a wide variety of legal disputes—that is, not only on subjects for which Roman and canon jurists had reluctantly accepted that women’s knowledge might be essential, like marriage and childbirth.26 So the inclusion of 12 women among San Zoilo’s witnesses in 1220 is not extraordinary. Yet Castilian women’s ability to testify would be increasingly circumscribed from the late thirteenth century.27 Perhaps these women were aware that their gender might reduce their reliability in the opinion of an ecclesiastical or judicial audience, and sought instead to assert the authority of old age. Indeed, one of them, Urraca de Frómista, claimed the prestige of both age and gender. She was over 70 years old, she said, and while she herself had always observed that the church of San Martín de Frómista had belonged to San Zoilo, she had also heard her father say the same thing.28 Her memory of her father’s words not only invoked a man’s knowledge of the case to bolster her own, but also attested San Zoilo’s rights in a period considerably beyond living memory—a significant boon for the monastery. Of the nine churches where the monastery’s rights were in dispute, women testified in regard to five. Four women spoke about the parish church of San Martín de Frómista; four about the church of San Facundo de Arconada; two about the church in the town of Villamez; and one each about the churches in the towns of San Mamés and San Felices. Eight of the women who testified were identified as widows; a ninth mentioned having a husband but not whether he was still alive.29 The relational status of the other three, all of whom testified about the church of San Martín de Frómista, was not mentioned. The fourth woman questioned about Frómista, however, was identified as a widow. While we cannot infer anything about her fellow-witnesses’ marital condition based on these omissions, it is perhaps notable that the scribes found it acceptable to omit the three women’s relational status from the record, suggesting that their own names and testimony in this case mattered more than the identities of their husbands, fathers, or other male relatives. San Zoilo’s investigators generally took few pains to establish male witnesses’ social status (such 26 Van Houts, “Gender and Authority,” pp. 203, 210–12, 220; McDonough, Witnesses, Neigh­ bors, and Community, pp. 33–39; Marie A. Kelleher, The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon (Philadelphia, 2010); Lansing, “Concubines, Lovers, Prostitutes”; Daniel Lord Smail, “Witness Programs in Medieval Marseille,” in Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, ed. Michael Goodich (New York, 2006), p. 240. Nuns and abbesses generally did not testify, even in cases concerning their own monasteries: Everard, “Sworn Testimony,” p. 81. 27 Madero, “Savoirs féminins,” p. 20. 28 Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 145. 29 Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, pp. 147, 152–53, 155–56, 165.

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as occupations and offices) beyond whether they were clerics or laymen; that disinterest suggests that social status was not considered especially important in determining the value of a person’s testimony.30 But relational status was evidently thought to matter for most female witnesses, albeit not for all of them.31 The investigators’ comparative disinterest in female witnesses (only 12 of them were questioned, versus some 153 men), combined with official judicial mistrust of their testimony, might have motivated some women to exaggerate their age as a means of asserting their authority. 2

How Do You Know?

The investigators sought to establish their witnesses’ credibility by asking them how they knew the information to which they had testified. Firsthand, sensory knowledge—information gained directly through one’s own sight or hearing—made the most valuable kind of testimony.32 The Siete Partidas, a law code composed at the behest of Alfonso X of Castile in the second half of the thirteenth century, went so far as to advise that testimony should be discounted if the witness could not explain how they knew it was true.33 This question offered many witnesses straightforward ways to declare their authority and status. The layman don Andrés, for example, testified that he had lived his entire life in the town of Carrión “and that was how he knew,” et ideo sciebat. Twenty-one subsequent witnesses, including several monks from San Zoilo, were recorded as having said the same as don Andrés.34 Or witnesses might remind the investigators (and any other potential audience) that their knowledge was due to their official responsibilities. In San Mamés, four of the ten witnesses testified that they had previously served as the terciarius, the official in charge of dividing up the very tercias whose apportionment was now disputed between the bishop and San Zoilo.35 One female witness was also able to assert her authority by virtue of her official responsibilities, even though women were not ordinarily appointed to positions like terciarius. When questioned about the church of San Facundo 30 Branco, “Memory and Truth,” p. 13. The witness testimony in Branco’s study did not include any women. 31 Contemporary law codes and juridical texts, on the other hand, did argue that witnesses’ social status affected the credibility of their testimony. Madero, “Savoirs féminins,” p. 10. 32 Madero, “Savoirs féminins,” p. 10. 33 Madero, “Savoirs féminins,” p. 16. 34 Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, pp. 149–51. 35 Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, pp. 155–56.

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de Arconada, María Yáñez attested that for forty-six years she had seen that the camarero [i.e., the chamberlain of San Zoilo] had held the church of San Facundo in peace, and she herself, with her husband, had held that church in the camarero’s name for forty-five years.36 María Yáñez’s longstanding role as co-tenant of San Facundo gave her a claim to authority that was not available to the other female witnesses, one that she made sure to highlight. The document does not indicate whether her unnamed husband was still alive, which implies that his corroboration was not necessary to validate María Yáñez’s authority as co-tenant, either to her or to the investigators. The other female witnesses, however—like most of the men—could appeal only to their own experience. Yet many of them called on another source of authority to confirm their testimony or to assert their status, or both: the authority of public opinion, or fama.37 The monastery’s investigators often asked witnesses about fama as part of their standard questions: had they ever heard it said that the disputed properties or rights belonged to the bishop, rather than the monastery? This is a typical example, from the testimony of the priest Fernando, chaplain of the church of Santa María de Frómista: Asked whether he had heard from people, from anyone, that the church of Palencia had suffered harm or force on account of this church [Santa María], or that it ought to belong to Palencia, he said he had never heard that from anyone.38 As in this case, the investigators’ questions about fama were usually framed to expect a negative reply. That is, witnesses were not asked whether they had heard that the monastery held the rights it claimed to have, but whether there was any public support for the bishop’s assertions that the rights were his. In most cases, the answer was either the anticipated ‘no’ or the more politic ‘I don’t know,’ and those answers were then summarized in subsequent witnesses’ testimony (e.g., “In regard to everything else, he said the same about 36 “quod per XLVI annos uiderat quod camerarius tenuerat ecclesiam Sancti Facundi in pace, et ipsa, cum marito, tenuit illam ecclesiam nomine camerarii per XLV annos.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 152. María Yáñez reported that she was in her fifties. If her numbers were accurate, she would have been no more than fourteen at the time she was married and came into the co-tenancy of San Facundo. 37 On fama, see Thelma S. Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, eds., Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca NY, 2003). 38 “Interrogatus utrum audiuerat a populo ab aliquo quod ecclesia palentina iniuriam sustinebat aut uim de illa ecclesia uel quod sua deberet esse, dixit quod nunquam audiuerat ab aliquo.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 144. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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everything as the chaplain, Fernando”).39 In such contexts, fama could only passively support the information that the witnesses had given. But occasionally, witnesses invoked fama for purposes of their own. In the inquiry at San Facundo de Arconada, where four women were interviewed, their recorded testimony takes an unusual turn. In reporting three of the female witnesses’ replies to the question of how they knew the information they had given, the scribe switches abruptly from third to first person, as if he were copying the witness’s exact words. For example, in the case of a second María Yáñez (not to be confused with the María Yáñez who had held the tenancy of San Facundo with her husband), when she was asked how she knew the information she testified, she said, “Because I know, and all of us in this town know, that the church of San Facundo always belonged to the sacristan of San Zoilo, and the bishop had his share.”40 The testimony of María’s fellow-resident Velida also turns to direct speech: Because I remember, and I’m telling you what I remember. García had it [the church] in his lifetime from the hand of don Alderico of San Zoilo, and after his death, as you can see, it is now fallen into the power of the camarero of Carrión.41 Here, Velida asserts her own authority as a firsthand observer: “I remember, and I’m telling you what I remember.” Yet she also appeals to the investigators’ own observational powers, reminding them that they could see for themselves who controlled San Facundo. María Yáñez likewise does not shy from declaring her own knowledge, but she bolsters her testimony with fama: “I know, and all of us in this town know.” Neither of these two statements offers much support for San Zoilo’s case; the monastery’s argument was that the bishop had no rights to San Facundo’s income at all.42 But a third woman, Dominga, Miguel’s widow, whose testimony also switches into direct speech, hewed to the party 39 “In omnibus aliis, dixit idem per omnia quod Fernandus, capellanus”: Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, pp. 144–45. 40 “dixit: quod ego scio omnes sciumus [sic] qui sumus in uilla, quod ecclesia Sancti Facundi semper fuit sacriste Sancti Zoyli et episcopus habebat partem suam.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 152. 41 “quod ego recolo et ex quo recolo uobis dico. Garsias, enim, in uita sua de manu domni habuit Alderici Sancti Zoyli, et, post mortem suam, sicut uidetis, nunc cecidus in potestatem camerarii carrionensis.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 153. There is an error here on the part of the witness, the scribe, or the modern copyist; Alderico, the previous bishop of Palencia, had no formal affiliation with San Zoilo de Carrión. 42 It was not unusual for records of witness testimony to include information that ran counter to the litigant’s argument. See Alfonso Antón and Jular Pérez-Alfaro, “Oña contra Frías,” p. 69; Madero, “Savoirs féminins,” p. 18. - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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line: “she said, ‘It’s always been the way it is now, because I remember that for 45 years it [the church] has belonged to the camarero.’”43 In other words, direct speech was not reserved for those who disagreed with San Zoilo’s investigators. It is difficult to guess why these three women’s words were recorded as direct speech, when nearly all the other witnesses in the document are referred to in the third person.44 They are the last three people on the witness list for San Facundo de Arconada, so their entries may simply have been the work of a different scribe, who either learned the standard third-person format later or did not take part in other testimony for this case. We therefore cannot read too deeply into the fact that the only ‘voices’ so directly recorded for Arconada belonged to women. But the possibilities are intriguing. Was the scribe perhaps trying to create additional mental distance between himself and the words of these women? Framing the women’s testimony as a direct quotation instead of a paraphrase implies that these were the women’s ‘own words,’ ostensibly removing the scribe from his usual role as a summarizer and condenser of testimony. His (or their) pretense of simply transcribing the witnesses’ speech thus obscures and imaginatively reduces his participation in creating the record. Perhaps a scribe with some working legal knowledge, aware of the ambiguous status of women’s testimony in Roman and canon law, hesitated to integrate himself too deeply into the process of recording their statements. It should nevertheless be noted that San Zoilo’s scribes rarely took similar pains to distance themselves from men’s testimony—even when, as we will see, they might have had good reason to do so. The scribe’s turn to direct speech is a valuable reminder that, however the various witnesses might have used their testimony to claim authority, San Zoilo’s agents ultimately determined how their words were presented. María Yáñez might have sought to reinforce the value of her personal knowledge by corroborating it with public opinion; Velida likewise might have wanted to remind the investigators that her testimony agreed with what they themselves knew.45 Were their efforts to enhance their credibility undercut by 43 “dixit: sicut erat semper sicuti nunc est, quia recolo a XLV annis fuisse camerarii.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 153. 44 The scribes also recorded direct speech, or something like it, for two men from Villalumbroso and one from Villabaruz. Two, the laymen Pelayo Futor de Villalumbroso and Compañero de Villabaruz, when asked a question, reportedly “said: ‘I don’t know’” (dixit: nescio): Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, pp. 160, 163. These are much less substantial ‘quotations’ than the ones ascribed to the women at Arconada. The other man quoted at Villalumbroso, Pedro the Butcher, is discussed below. 45 Official qualms about women’s value as witnesses may explain why María and Velida invoked outside sources for confirmation, much as other women who acted as witnesses in these inquests invoked seniority.

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the distancing effect of direct speech? Whatever direct speech might have signaled to a contemporary audience, the scribes’ decision to use it here and not elsewhere represents an intervention—an application of the monastery’s ability to edit, abridge, and interpret what its non-elite witnesses said. Not all witnesses used fama to support their versions of events. Indeed, some seem to use it as a means of distancing themselves from the implications of their own testimony. On the subject of the tercias of San Pedro de Villasirga, the layman Juan Herberoth said that he didn’t know how the tithes were divided, but he had always heard that the church belonged to the camarero. … Asked about the reason for his knowledge, he said that he had heard it.46 Juan appears to have ascribed his knowledge entirely to fama—what he had heard from others—rather than claiming the authority, and the responsibility, of firsthand experience. After all, what he had heard from others might be wrong, or adjudged to be wrong by the powerful ecclesiastical lords involved in the dispute—but in that case, Juan himself would bear no responsibility. He had not said that he personally knew his testimony to be true, only that others believed it to be true. Like the replies of “he doesn’t know” or “he knows nothing” often recorded by the investigators, Juan’s answers might have been strictly accurate. But they might also reflect the witness’s reluctance to be pulled into the middle of a dispute between San Zoilo and Palencia. Witnesses who declared that they had firsthand knowledge of the bishop’s or monastery’s rights might have been relating what they saw as facts, but in doing so they had effectively chosen sides.47 Knowing that their testimony would be written down, savvy witnesses might prefer not to cast their lot too obviously with either San Zoilo or Palencia. In the same vein, the layman Mateo de Villasirga testified: that the church of San Pedro [de Villasirga] belonged to the camarero [of San Zoilo], and that the church of San Pedro had been populated thirty years ago. Asked how he knew, he said that he had heard it. Asked how old he was, he said that he was in his fifties and remembered 25 years.48 46 “dixit quod nescit quomodo diuidantur decime, set semper audiui quod illa ecclesia erat camerarii. … De causa scientie interrogatus, dixit quod audiuerat.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 159. 47 McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community, p. 31. 48 “dixit quod ecclesia Sancti Petri erat camerarii et quod ecclesia Sancti Petri populata fuerat a XXX annis citra. Interrogatus quomodo sciebat, dixit quod audiuit. Interrogatus

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Mateo’s report of his age places him well within the typical range for witnesses in this document; the fifties were the second-largest age cohort, with 19 witnesses who claimed to be in this range.49 But his claim to remember only 25 years is very unusual; only three witnesses in the entire document reported a shorter memory, and none of them would swear to knowing their age.50 Deliberately or not, Mateo’s abbreviated memory allowed him to disavow any direct knowledge about San Pedro’s establishment, saying only that he had heard about it. Likewise, the layman Domingo Pascález of San Felices, when “[a]sked about the bishop’s rights and the other things, said that he had heard [about them], but didn’t know.” Domingo Pascález had already said that the church he was testifying about, San Miguel de San Felices, had belonged to the camarero of San Zoilo as far back as he could remember.51 But with regard to tithes and other monies that the bishop of Palencia claimed in San Miguel, Domingo was even more reticent than Juan or Mateo: the record makes no mention of what he claimed to have heard, although such fama would have been entirely acceptable evidence to the investigators. Domingo was apparently not willing to commit himself even to the point of repeating others’ information, saying only that he did not know whether what he’d heard was true. So far from claiming authority in a dispute between the powerful, as the self-described centenarians and the women who invoked fama had done, these witnesses renounced it. This may have been a means of protecting themselves from reprisal, but it was, as McDonough points out, also a way to assert their own power—the power not to speak.52 3

What Do You Think Should Be Done?

A notable feature of this inquest is that some witnesses were asked their opinion of the case. What did they think ought to be done to resolve the dispute? de etate, dixit quod erat quinquagenarius et recolebat a XXV annis.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 159. 49 The largest cohort of all was people in their sixties: 60 witnesses reported being this age. The third-largest was people who said they were in their eighties, with nine members altogether. 50 Two of them said they could remember 20 years, and one would only swear to remembering ten: Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, pp. 151, 154, 157. Another witness in his forties said he could remember 26 years, and Velida, the widow discussed above, did not say how old she was but could remember 26 years: ibid., pp. 151, 153. 51 “De foro episcopali et de aliis, dixit quod audiuerat, set nesciebat.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 166. 52 McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community, p. 57.

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And although most witnesses dodged the question with a politic “I don’t know,”53 others were surprisingly frank about their views—using the opportunity to declare their expectations for or criticisms of those who held power over them. It is difficult to judge whether all witnesses were asked for their opinion. In most cases, the question is mentioned in the testimony of the first witness, which then implies that it was broached to subsequent witnesses. For example, in the case of the pontifical tercia of Villamez, the first witness, the layman Martín Grandínez, was asked “what he thought should by right be done.” He replied that he knew nothing (dixit se nihil scire).54 Most of the subsequent witnesses were recorded as having said the same as Martín Grandínez, implying that they also declined to have an opinion. The exceptions were noted as having been asked “about their belief,” de credulitate, following which their own answer was recorded. Witnesses about the tercias of San Mamés, the church of San Román de Fuentes de don Vermudo, the church of San Martín de Villabaruz, and the church of San Miguel de San Felices were similarly asked de credulitate. But none of the testimony about the parish tercia of San Zoilo mentions credulitas. And in still other cases, such as the church of San Martín de Frómista, the tercia of San Pedro de Villasirga, and the half tercia of the chaplaincy of San Salvador de Villalumbroso, some witnesses are noted as having been asked de credulitate (or as having said the same as another witness who was asked), but others are not. There is no obvious indication of why credulitas was noted for some witnesses but not others, and its absence in some cases may simply be scribal oversight. Certainly, not all of the witnesses who expressed an opinion supported San Zoilo’s claims. Two of them, interviewed about the church of Villamez, stated that they thought the bishop of Palencia had as much or more right to the disputed funds than the monastery did.55 One Pedro the Butcher, questioned about the church of San Martín de Villabaruz, “responded: ‘The bishop himself would know; he knows better than all of us’”—a remark that not only tacitly supported the bishop’s claims, but also dismissed the usefulness of the inquest itself.56 As with the women at Arconada, Pedro’s implicit disregard for the inquest may be why the scribe turned to direct speech here, to emphasise that the witness’s opinions were entirely his own. 53 54 55 56

See, e.g., Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 153. “quid crederet de iure faciendo”: Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 153. Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, pp. 153–54. “respondit: ipse episcopus sciat qui melius scit quam omnes nos.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 161.

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The only place where most of the witnesses are recorded as giving independent opinions (rather than just ‘saying the same as’ their predecessors) was the town of Villalumbroso. The inquest here concerned the church of San Salvador, and how its tithes were distributed among the monastery, the bishop, and the church’s clergy. The testimony of 21 witnesses was recorded; 17 gave an opinion that was explicitly recorded.57 One, a layman named Martín, made some effort to dodge the question; he said he thought the church should belong to the person it had always belonged to. By the implication of his testimony, this was the camarero of San Zoilo, but Martín stopped short of saying so.58 Other witnesses had fewer qualms. The first witness asked for his views was another layman, Pelayo, from the town of Villalumbroso. The scribe records: When asked about his opinion on whether that church ought to belong to the bishop, he said that it would upset you if someone threw you out of your house, and, although he hated the camarero [of San Zoilo, who currently held the church], he said, nevertheless, that the bishop of Palencia was acting arrogantly in this matter.59 One wonders if Pelayo’s personal animus against the camarero, whatever it was, had been a reason that San Zoilo’s investigators sought him out as a witness. It makes his testimony in the camarero’s favor sound more credible. But his remark about the bishop’s arrogance also strikes a tone unexpected in a legal record. A layman, of whatever local stature, might criticize a bishop freely enough in ordinary conversation. But Pelayo would have known that his opinion was being written down, and that it might eventually come before the eyes of the very bishop he was impugning. Was this, for him, a rare opportunity to make his voice heard by an ecclesiastical prince he would never otherwise meet? Intriguingly, a few other witnesses also used metaphors of homeownership in their opinions. Compañero was a layman in his sixties who had lived 57

The scribe did not mention this question being posed to the first witness, a layman named Juan de Villalumbroso. Three other witnesses were subsequently recorded as having said the same as Juan, with no further mention of credulitas. Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, pp. 161–63. 58 The next witness, Martín Estebánez, reportedly said the same thing: Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 162. 59 “Interrogatus de credulitate, si crederet illam ecclesiam episcopi debere esse, dixit quod pigeret uos si aliquis uos eieceret de domo uestra et, licet odio habeat camerarium, dicebat, tamen, quod episcopus palentinus superbe mouebatur in hoc.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 162.

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in Villabaruz all his life except for three years, and for six years in the past he had been in charge of dividing up the tercias of San Martín de Villabaruz, the church now in dispute between Palencia and San Zoilo. “Asked about his opinion regarding who he thought had the right to that church, he said he didn’t know, but he thought that no one would want to be thrown out of their own house.”60 And Muño, a layman in his fifties, said when asked about rights in the church of San Miguel de San Felices “that he thought it should belong to the camarero more than to the bishop, because it was in the camarero’s possession, and indeed it was the camarero’s castle, as he said.”61 In short, three separate witnesses turned to the language of homeownership when describing ecclesiastical rights to three separate churches. Their equation of the bishop’s efforts to displace the camarero with the act of evicting someone from their house relies on an easily relatable metaphor—one that strongly implies that the bishop’s actions were immoral, an undue exercise of power against a dispossessed victim. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—the metaphor’s vividness, San Zoilo’s scribes seem to have taken some care to emphasise that these witnesses spoke for themselves. In Pelayo’s case, the use of quasi-direct speech (“he said that it would upset you”) creates a sense of distance between the scribe and the testimony; in Pedro’s case, the scribe’s addition of prout dixit (“exactly as he said”) after Pedro likened San Miguel to the camarero’s castle has the same effect. Perhaps the investigators or the scribes, or both, found the metaphor as striking as the modern reader does, and sought to highlight it while also making clear that it was not San Zoilo’s invention. Pelayo de Villalumbroso’s remark that the bishop was acting “arrogantly” found echoes elsewhere as well. Martín, a priest of the church of San Miguel de Villalumbroso, “said that he thought the bishop was acting very arrogantly and committing great excess.”62 The nine witnesses whose testimony was recorded 60 “Interrogatus de credulitate iuris cuius crederet illam ecclesiam esse, dixit se nescire, set credebat quod nemo uellet eici de domo sua.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 160. 61 “quod credebat quod magis debebat esse camerarii quam episcopi, quia sita erat in possessione camerarii, et etiam castrum est camerarii, prout dixit”: Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 165. 62 “dixit quod credebat quod episcopus faciebat grandem superbiam et grande demais”: Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 163. I am translating demais here as a Latinization of demás, which originates from the Latin de magis: Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, s.v. demás, https://dle.rae.es/demás. This translation is supported by the testimony of the layman Domingo Pérez, who, when asked his age, dixit quod habebat IIIIor demais quam LX (“said that he was four more than 60,” i.e., 64): Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 164. Thanks to Kyle C. Lincoln, Simon Doubleday, Miriam Shadis, and Lucy Pick for their assistance with this passage.

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after his, when asked for their opinions, reportedly “said the same as Martín, the priest of San Miguel.”63 This was a common form of abbreviation, of course. But did nine other witnesses really say “that they thought the bishop was acting very arrogantly and committing great excess”? Evidently, this was a theme that San Zoilo’s investigators wanted to underscore, and the scribes specified that each witness had been asked for an opinion. If they did indeed all speak of the bishop’s arrogance, then there was evidently some strong feeling toward the bishop in the town of Villalumbroso. But accusations of arrogance were by no means the only disparagement that residents of Villalumbroso were willing to aim at the bishop. Don Durando, another priest in the church of San Miguel, when asked if the bishop should have the church, “said that he [the bishop] could get it by force; but if the camarero [of San Zoilo] lost that church, it would be the same as if the bishop of Palencia lost his episcopate.”64 The church of San Miguel de Villalumbroso and the diocese of Palencia were hardly coequal, by most measures. But for don Durando, who served in San Miguel, the stakes might indeed be as high as his comparison implied. The church’s transfer to diocesan lordship might not be a disaster for the camarero, but it could cost don Durando his job. However, none of the witnesses in Villalumbroso—indeed, none of the witnesses in the entire surviving document—were as outspoken as one Martín Bernárdez, a layman in his late seventies. Asked for his views on the case, Martín Bernárdez “said that his soul told him that all the laypeople ought to apostatize, because that bishop of Palencia was transgressing boundaries that had been set by Augustine and other Holy Fathers.”65 Martín Bernárdez was, perhaps not coincidentally, the last witness in Villalumbroso whose testimony was recorded. It isn’t clear what Martín Bernárdez meant by apostatizing, and one also has to wonder how he came by his great familiarity with patristic texts. But, in an era when crowns and cathedrals across Iberia (and indeed across Latin Europe) were deeply anxious about heresy, these were—maybe literally—fiery words. However, determined San Zoilo’s investigators might have been to paint the bishop of Palencia in an unflattering light, and however much they might

63 Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, pp. 163–64. 64 “dixit quod uim posset inferre; perinde erat si camerarius perderet illam ecclesiam ac si episcopus palentinus episcopatum.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 162. 65 “dixit quod anima sua dictabat ei quod omnes laici deberent apostatare eo quod iste episcopus palentinus transgrediebatur terminos quos posuerat Augustinus et alii Sancti Patres.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 164.

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relish the chance to accuse him of arrogance via their witnesses’ testimony, it is enormously unlikely that they would invent a statement like this. Martín Bernárdez’s testimony underscores the potential of a record like this to provide at least an oblique insight into witnesses’ perspectives.66 The witnesses who spoke of the bishop’s arrogance and excess, or compared his behavior to ousting people from their homes, were arguing for a set of community norms that they believed had been violated.67 Gervasio de Villalumbroso told the investigators that “everyone thought the bishop of Palencia was committing excess,”68 underscoring a communal consensus that the bishop was acting inappropriately and deserved censure.69 Through their sworn testimony, the witnesses could provide that censure. Their testimony might even influence the outcome of the dispute, so that the bishop’s ‘arrogant’ designs would ultimately fail. San Zoilo’s investigators therefore offered their witnesses a very rare opportunity to hold a high ecclesiastical lord accountable to their own standards of justice. The fact that the opportunity was rare is reflected in the language that the witnesses used. Those who complained about the bishop did so in terms that expressed resentment precisely about his lack of accountability. They described the bishop’s actions as arrogant or haughty (superbus), and as ‘excessive’ ( facere demas)—that is, as the actions of a man who believed himself superior, and who did not expect to be held to the standards of legality and community expectation that constrained others. Yet the witnesses—except for Martín Bernárdez—also exercised a certain restraint in speaking about the bishop, who wielded spiritual as well as temporal power over them. No doubt this was partly due to the formal legal context of their testimony and the presence of San Zoilo’s agents, men they may not have known well. But it was probably also due to the knowledge, or hope, that their testimony might be read by people highly placed in Palencia’s cathedral, perhaps even the bishop himself. In that case, it would not do to be too plain-spoken about their displeasure. Compañero de Villabaruz’s testimony reflects this hesitation: he observed that no one would want to be thrown out of their own house, yet professed not to

66 Swanson, “‘… Et examinatus dicit …,’” p. 206. 67 McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community, p. 151. 68 “dixit quod omnes gentes credebant episcopum palentinum facere demas”: Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 162. Italics mine. 69 The fact that these opinions correlated so well with what San Zoilo’s investigators wanted to hear no doubt made them more likely to be written down. However, the fact remains that the investigators were able to find quite a number of people who espoused the opinions that they wanted to represent.

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know who actually had rights to the church of San Martín.70 His reluctance to commit himself echoes that of witnesses like Juan Herberoth and Domingo Pascález, who insisted that their only knowledge came from public opinion. The same restraint, and resentment, found different expression in the testimony of Señoret de Villamez, a layman who was at least in his fifties: [Asked] about his belief, whether the bishop should rightfully have [half of the pontifical tercia of Villamez], he said he would rather have it for himself than for the bishop or the camarero.71 Señoret’s words betray the frustration of a burgher asked to help settle a dispute about income between two powerful lords. With or without Villamez’s tercia, the bishop and San Zoilo had far more wealth than Señoret himself did. Bishop Tello, in particular, enjoyed not only the income and property of his see but also the backing of his prominent family. Señoret’s reply to the investigators was a joke that was not quite a joke, something that townsmen might casually say to each other—like Pelayo de Villalumbroso’s remark about the bishop’s arrogance, or even Martín Bernárdez’s insistence that the bishop was defying patristic precepts. But like Pelayo and Martín, Señoret was not speaking casually to a friend: he was testifying to monastic investigators, and he chose to say this (or something very like it) in that much more formal context. As the scribes recorded it, this was his entire answer to the question of what he thought about the dispute, not an aside appended to some more direct response. It was, in effect, how Señoret wanted to be heard by the more powerful figures who might ultimately judge this case. Of course those judges would never take his testimony literally; Señoret would not have actually expected to get the half tercia himself. But he could at least use this opportunity to register his sense of injustice, while also—not incidentally—refusing to further the case of either the bishop or the camarero. The investigators had asked for his opinion on whether the bishop ought to have the half tercia, and that was what he gave them. Having already testified that the bishop and the camarero had always divided the tercia evenly between them, Señoret declined to argue any further on San Zoilo’s behalf.

70 Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 160. 71 “De credulitate utrum de iure deberet habere episcopus, dixit quod libencius uellet pro se quam pro episcopo uel camerario.” Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #84, p. 154.

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Causes and Consequences

What exactly had the bishop of Palencia done to merit such dislike from townspeople in his diocese? As I mentioned earlier, San Zoilo had been fending off lordly encroachment on its towns and churches, by the cathedrals of both Palencia and León, for decades. But the episcopacy of Tello Téllez de Meneses had introduced new demands, spurred both by the economic devastation of the recent civil war and by Bishop Tello’s efforts to support and expand the University of Palencia. So shortly after the resolution of that war, however, it could have been quite difficult for ordinary people in the towns of Tello’s diocese—people like Martín Bernárdez, or Señoret de Villamez, or Pelayo de Villalumbroso—to come up with the funds to meet their obligations to their ecclesiastical lords. The witnesses for San Zoilo testified overwhelmingly that the monastery had indeed made use of the disputed rights and income “since time immemorial” (or at least within living memory and perhaps a generation further back), and that San Zoilo’s title to them was beyond question. These were the concerns to which the monastery wanted its witnesses to speak. For the witnesses, however, their testimony offered a rare opportunity to air their grievances against one of the most powerful figures in their ambit, the bishop of Palencia. While the monastery of San Zoilo was a mighty lord in its own right, the witnesses in this record were largely chosen because they would side with the monks, against what they saw as even more intrusive claims from their bishop. The inquest thus became a political opportunity in the broadest sense, a means for people of comparatively low status to criticize one of the kingdom’s elites, and to have their voices amplified by San Zoilo’s own complaints. Some seized this chance to assert their own authority, whether by virtue of age or experience, and their beliefs about how ecclesiastical lordship should properly be exercised. Others hesitated to commit themselves too openly to one side or the other, either by saying they knew nothing at all or ascribing the knowledge they did have to public opinion rather than their own experience. Their hesitation, nevertheless, suggests that they were aware of the power offered by testifying, as well as by refusing to testify. Professing not to know or have an opinion about the facts under contention not only avoided the potential consequences of affronting the much more powerful lords engaged in these disputes; it also denied those lords the witness’s support in their pursuit of rights and riches. Perhaps the witnesses who sided with San Zoilo did so because they feared that the bishop, in his pursuit of funds for the university and the diocese,

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would exert more fiscal pressure on them than the monks did. Perhaps they simply believed that the monastery was in the right. Ultimately, though, their objections had little effect. In 1228 the monastery of San Zoilo, in company with those of San Isidoro de Dueñas and San Román de Peñas, reached an agreement with the cathedral of Palencia that stipulated rights in each of the churches for which the monk Pedro González had gathered testimony eight years earlier. San Zoilo retained its rights in the parish churches of San Zoilo and San Martín de Frómista largely intact, though the bishop insisted on his right to install chaplains there. For Villamez and San Mamés, the pontifical tercias were to remain evenly divided between the bishop and the monastery, as San Zoilo had argued that they should be. At San Facundo de Arconada, San Román de Fuentes de don Vermudo, and San Pedro de Villasirga, where the witnesses generally agreed that San Zoilo should have a full tercia of the parish tithes, the monastery’s share was reduced to a third of that tercia—a ninth of the total tithes. At San Martín de Villabaruz, the two tercias that the monastery’s witnesses had said it should have were reduced to one. At San Salvador de Villalumbroso, San Zoilo’s share of the church’s tercias was again reduced to one-ninth, compared to the two-thirds its witnesses had claimed it deserved. At San Miguel de San Felices, where witnesses had said that San Zoilo should have half the tithes, it now received only a third.72 San Zoilo was hardly deprived of its rights in these churches, but in general Palencia gained far more than it lost.73 The monastery’s witnesses, however pleased they may have been to speak their truth to power, ultimately found their authority unequal to the challenge of constraining their great lords. Acknowledgements I am profoundly grateful to Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Roisin Cossar, Theresa Earenfight, Judith Evans, Alexandra Guerson, Emily Hutchison, Marie Kelleher, Amy Livingstone, Susan McDonough, Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, Miriam Shadis, Nuria Silleras-Fernández, and Dana Wessell-Lightfoot for their attention to and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. Mistakes are, of course, solely mine.

72 Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), #93, pp. 175–79 (February 1228). 73 Pérez Celada, S. Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), p. lvii.

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Bibliography Alfonso Antón, María Isabel, and Cristina Jular Pérez-Alfaro. “Oña contra Frías o el pleito de los cien testigos: una pesquisa en la Castilla del siglo XIII.” Edad Media: revista de historia (2000): 61–88. Armstrong-Partida, Michelle. Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya. Ithaca NY, 2017. Arnold, John. Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc. Philadelphia, 2001. Barton, Simon. The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile. Cambridge, 1997. Bianchini, Janna. The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile. Philadelphia, 2012. Branco, Maria João Violante. “Memory and Truth: The Strange Case of the Witness Enquiries of 1216 in the Braga-Toledo Dispute.” Historical Research 79 (2006): 1–20. Butler, Sara M. “I Will Never Consent to Be Wedded with You! Coerced Marriage in the Courts of Medieval England.” Canadian Journal of History 39 (2004): 247–70. Butler, Sara M. The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England. Leiden, 2007. Donahue, Charles. Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments about Marriage in Five Courts. Cambridge, 2007. Everard, Judith. “Sworn Testimony and Memory of the Past in Brittany, c. 1100–1250.” In Medieval Memories: Men, Women, and the Past, 700–1300, ed. Elisabeth van Houts. Harlow, 2001, pp. 72–91. Fenster, Thelma S., and Daniel Lord Smail, eds. Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe. Ithaca NY, 2003. Given, James Buchanan. Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca NY, 1997. Houts, Elisabeth van. “Gender and Authority of Oral Witnesses in Europe (800–1300).” The Royal Historical Society 6th series (1999): 201–220. Kelleher, Marie A. The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon. Philadelphia, 2010. Lansing, Carol. “Concubines, Lovers, Prostitutes: Infamy and Female Identity in Medieval Bologna.” In Beyond Florence: The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy, eds. Paula Findlen, Michelle Fontaine, and Duane J. Osheim. Stanford, 2002, pp. 85–100. Lansing, Carol. Power & Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy. New York, 1998. Lincoln, Kyle C. A Constellation of Authority: Castilian Bishops and the Secular Church during the Reign of Alfonso VIII. University Park PA, 2023. Madero, Marta. “Savoirs féminins et construction de la vérité: les femmes dans la preuve testimoniale en Castille au XIIIe siècle.” Crime, Histoire et Sociétés 3 (1999): 5–21.

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Martínez Sopena, Pascual. La Tierra de Campos Occidental: poblamiento, poder y comunidad del siglo X al XIII. Valladolid, 1985. McDonough, Susan Alice. Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community in Late Medieval Marseille. New York, 2013. McSheffrey, Shannon. Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London. Philadelphia, 2006. Palacio Sánchez-Izquierdo, María Luisa, ed. Colección diplomática del Monasterio de San Zoil de Carrión (siglos XI al XV). Unpublished PhD Thesis. Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 1987. Pérez Celada, Julio A., ed. Documentación del monasterio de San Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300). Fuentes medievales castellano-leonesas, 100. Burgos, 1986. Salcedo Tapia, Modesto. “Vida de don Tello Téllez de Meneses, Obispo de Palencia.” Publicaciones de la Institución Tello Téllez de Meneses 53 (1985): 79–266. Smail, Daniel Lord. Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille. Ithaca NY, 2000. Smail, Daniel Lord. “Witness Programs in Medieval Marseille.” In Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, ed. Michael Goodich. New York, 2006, pp. 227–50. Swanson, Robert N. “‘… Et examinatus dicit …’: Oral and Personal History in the Records of English Ecclesiastical Courts.” In Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, ed. Michael Goodich. New York, 2006, pp. 203–225.

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Index Please note that personal names beginning with ‘al-’ in Arabic are indexed under the letter of the following word. Personal names that include a toponym are listed under the first name. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, caliph (r. 912–961) 242, 310 ʿAbd Allāh ibn Buluggīn, amir of Granada (r. 1073–1090) 309 Abencerraje, family 204 Abenhut. See Ibn Hud Abenxabat, Judah 321 Abravanel, Isaac 323 Abū al-Ḥasan, sultan of Granada (r. 1464– 1482, 1483–1495) 197–198, 202, 204 Abū al-Qāsim “El Muleh” 197 Abū Bakr 284, 293 Abū Bakr b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿUmar al-Marāghī = al-Marāghī 287–288 Abū l-Barakāt Muḥammad b. Aḥmad alNāṣirī al-Jarkasī al-Ḥanafī = Ibn Iyās 289 Abū Saʾīd 27 Abū Yaḥyà, wālī of Majorca (r. 1208–1229)  110–111 Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb al-Manṣūr, Almohad caliph (r. 1184–1199) 267 Abulafia, Todros ben Judah Halevi 318–319 adab 307, 311, 317 ADEIZA (Association of Independent Zamoran Voters) 128–131, 139, 140–143, 146 Adelheid (r. 1089–1105). See Eupraxia al-ʿĀdil Nūr al-dīn Maḥmūd b. Zankī. See Nūr al-dīn Maḥmūd b. Zankī adoptionism 384 ʿAḍud al-Dawla 295 Africa 215, 217, 219–220, 225, 230, 233 African Red Slip (ARS) wares 219, 225, 231 age 39, 462–465 Aegean 30 Aethelred 442 aguacil 258 Aguilar, house of 189, 204 al-Andalus 27, 73, 86, 153–154, 166, 172–173, 176, 183, 245, 257, 268, 275, 279, 286, 294, 296–297, 299, 306, 308, 310–313, 315, 317, 352, 379, 385, 390, 396

ʿAlam al-dīn Yaʿqūb b. Abī Bakr 277 Alamūt 291–292 Alarcos 267 Alba de Quirós 365 Albertus Magnus 98 Alcalá, castle 112 Alcalá de Benzaide 74 Alcalá de Henares, cortes of (1348) 321, 323 Alcanate (Al-Qanatir) 258–259 Alcaraz 259, 266 Aleppo 292 Alexander of Hales 98 Alexander VI, pope 199 Alexandria 23, 27, 42 Alexios III Angelos, emperor of Byzantium (r. 1195–1203) 438 Alfonso I, king of Aragon and Pamplona (r. 1104–1134) 247, 352, 356, 360–362, 367, 409 Alfonso III, king of Asturias (r. 866–910)  383 Alfonso IV, king of Aragon (r. 1299–1336)  322 Alfonso VI, king of León (from 1065) and Castile (r. 1072–1109) 73, 132, 140–141, 242, 244, 246–249, 251–252, 256–257, 268, 297, 311–314, 352, 364, 403, 408–411, 426 Alfonso VII, king of Castile-León (r. 1126–1157) 72, 314–315, 351–358, 360, 362–364, 367–372, 378–379, 392, 394–395, 403, 415, 420, 423–424, 438 Alfonso VIII, king of Castile (r. 1158–1214)  172, 316–318, 437, 441, 459 Alfonso IX, king of León (r. 1188–1230)  437–439, 441, 444, 447, 450–451 Alfonso X, king of Castile and León (r. 1252–1284) 74, 76, 81, 97, 106, 135, 176, 258–260, 268, 318–321, 435, 444, 453, 463, 465 Alfonso XI, king of Castile and León (r. 1312–1350) 305–306, 321–323

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482 Alfonso de Molina 444 Alfonso Henriques, king of Portugal (r. 1139–1185) 367, 369–371 Alfonso Jordán, count of Toulouse 357, 362 Alfonso Raimúndez, infant (later Alfonso VII of León and Castile) 356 Algeciras 82, 320 Algiers 35, 44 ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib 294 Almazán 368 Almanzor. See al-Manṣūr Almenara 114 Almería 45, 378, 390, 395 Almohads 153, 163, 169, 173, 175, 266–267, 286, 297, 308, 316, 444 almojarife 305–306, 314, 316, 318, 321–322 Almoravids 248, 250, 315, 352, 363 Alonso de Palencia 187, 195, 201 Alonso de Santa Cruz 185, 187, 191–192 Alsace 439 Álvar Núñez 448 Álvarez de Córdoba, Licenciado Alonso 191 Ambrose, saint 384 Anatolian Plateau 25 Annals of Hildesheim 443 Annio da Viterbo 199 annona 217 Antioch 78 anti-Semitism 38, 298 apocalypse 384–385, 394 Aquinas, Thomas 98–99 Arabic language 107, 108, 194, 310, 312–313, 318 Aragon, kingdom 95–98, 103, 111, 114, 116–117, 185, 190, 193, 306, 322, 409–410, 414 Arconada 471 Arévalo 198, 204 Arias Gonzalo 135 Ariosto, Ludovico 48 Arnaldo of Astorga, bishop 380–381 Arrixaca 259 al-Asnawī 281–282, 286–289, 298–299 Astorga 222, 450 Astudillo 440 Asturias 357, 365–367, 378, 383 Asturias de Oviedo 367–368 Asturias de Santillana 362

INDEX Atbrand, King James I of Aragon’s bailiff 103 atiba 342 Atienza 361, 365 Atlantic 216–217, 219, 225, 233 Augsburg 439 Augustine of Hippo, saint 70, 169, 230, 384, 474 Augustus, emperor (63 BC–14 AD) 222 Avenceta 388 Ávila 173, 174 Avitus of Braga 226 Axarquia, La 202 Ayyubids 283, 296 al-Azraq 95, 112–113 Badāʾiʿ al-zuhūr fī waqāʾiʿ al-duhūr 290 Badajoz 248 Badr al-dīn Ibn Farḥūn 296 Baetica, kingdom of 73, 382 Baeza 74, 172, 446 Baghdad 266, 295 al-Bakrī 293–294, 297 Balearic Islands 97. See also Majorca and Menorca Banū Farḥūn 296 al-Baqīʿ 280, 285–286 Barcelona 363–364 Barchilon, Yuçef 319 Barton, Simon 72–73, 79, 96, 113, 125, 153, 171, 184, 205, 218, 276, 312, 351, 379, 387, 393, 396, 403–404, 435 Baybars, Mamlūk sultan (r. 1260–1277) 277, 282 Bayonne 362 Baza 200 Beatrice/Elizabeth Hohenstaufen/of Swabia (1205–1235) 174, 435–437, 439–450, 452–453 Beatus of Liébana 384 Bedouins 296 Bellido Dolfos. See Vellido Dolfos Belorado 440–441 Beltrán de Risnel, count 361 Benavente 447 Berenguela/Berengaria of Barcelona (1116–1149) 367 Berenguela of Castile (c.1180–1246) 87, 435, 437–442, 444–453

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INDEX Berenguela of León (1204–1237), Alfonso IX of León and Berenguela of Castile’s daughter 175 Berganza, Francisco 156–159, 161 Bernáldez, Andrés 188, 196, 203 Bernard of Clairvaux, saint 264 Bernard of Sédirac, archbishop of Toledo  249, 251–252, 254–255, 261, 268 Bernardo, archbishop of Santiago de Compostela 448 Bible Cod. 6 (920 Bible) 383 La Cava 383 León 383 Seville Bible 383 Black Death 282 Black Stone 291 Boabdil (Mohammed XI), amir of Granada (d. 1454) 191–192, 197, 201, 203–204 Boniface, bishop from Gallaecia 227 Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon. See Llibre dels fets Bordeaux 220 Borgias 190, 199 Boscà, Pere 196, 200 Braga 216, 218, 220, 222–233 Breydenbach, Bernhard 30 Britain 215, 217, 219, 221 Buanga 365, 367 Buondelmonti, Cristoforo 52–54 Burgos 155, 160, 173, 361, 384, 441–442, 445–446, 458 cathedral 154, 156, 157, 174–175, 442 Burral 370 Byzantines/Byzantium 26, 215–217, 219–220, 224, 226, 228, 230–234, 276, 282, 298, 438 Cabra, count of 202–203 Cabreros, treaty of 452 Cádiz 77, 259 Cairo 283, 293, 295, 298 Calatrava, Military Order of 83 Campo de Pilela 451 Canon Law 464, 468 Cantar de gesta (of Sancho II) 130–131 Cantigas de Santa María 76, 258–260, 453 Cap Bon 48

483 Cape Baba 37 Cape Maleas 51 Capilla 240 Carmathians 291 Carrión 440, 465, 467 infantes de 78 Carrión de los Condes. See San Zoilo de Carrión Cartagena 217, 220, 223 Carthage 220, 230 Castelló de Borriana 114 Castile (Castile and León from 1230), kingdom of 76–77, 81, 88, 97, 127, 162, 173–175, 186, 253, 258, 260, 266–267, 435–438, 440–444, 447, 449–450, 452 Castro, family 360 Castrofroila 137 Castrojeriz 360, 440–441 Catholic Monarchs (Fernando of Aragon and Isabel of Castile) 185–188, 191–193, 195, 199–201, 205 Cea, river 138 Central Asia 291 ceramics 216, 219–220, 226, 231–232 Châmoa Gomes 371 Chanson d’Antioche 78 Chanson de Roland 389 Charlemagne (747–814) 378, 396 Charraric, Suevic king of Galicia (r. c.550–558/559) 223 children 80 chivalry 71–72, 75 Chrismon 409–411, 426 Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris (CAI) 171, 353, 355–369, 371–373, 378, 380–382, 385–386, 388, 395–396 Chronica latina regum Castellae 169, 171–172, 267, 438, 443 Chronica Naierensis 133–134 Chronicle of 754 171 Chronicon regum Legionensium 134 Cid Campeador. See Díaz de Vivar, Rodrigo clamour 161–164, 166, 170, 172 Clement III, pope 162–163 climate anomaly 18 Coimbra 246 coin, coinage 216, 233, 408, 410–417, 418, 420–426

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484 Commentaria in Apocalypsin 384 Comunero rebellion (1520) 187, 190–191 Concilio (local assembly) 340, 342 Conrad II, duke of Swabia 436–437, 440 Conrad of Montferrat, king of Jerusalem (r. 1190–1192) 292 Constance of Burgundy (d.1093), second wife of Alfonso VI 254–255, 297 Constance of Sicily (d. 1198) 98 Constantinople 227. See also Byzantium Contarini, Agostino 38 converso/a 39, 40, 185, 189, 203, 321 Copts 281 Córdoba 81, 153, 169, 172, 189–190, 242, 254, 263, 266, 268, 297, 308, 311, 318 Great Mosque of 239, 243, 252–253, 268 Martyr Movement of 390 Corpus Iuris Civilis 319 corsairs 27, 35–36, 44, 51–53 Cortes 305, 322, 445 Council of Vienne (1311–1312) 306 Council of Zamora (1312–1313) 306 Covadonga 198 Coyanza 360 credit 338, 342 Crete 33, 52 Crónica de Alfonso X 74 cross 409–418, 421–422, 426 crown 412, 415–417, 419, 421–423 Crusades 164, 166, 175 First crusade 72, 161 Crusaders 173, 174, 276, 296, 298–299 Cuenca 173 fuero of 317 Cunctis sanctorum 249 Cyprus 24–26, 29, 39, 42, 47 Çag de la Maleha (Isaac ibn Sadoq) 319–320 Daniel 385 dār al-ʿašara (the House of the Ten) 279 Davídiz, Sisnando, count 245, 312 debt 337–339 demon. See Satan Denis I, king of Portugal (r. 1279–1325) 98 De Rebus Hispanie 171, 240, 254, 266–268, 313 De Sota, Francisco 380

INDEX devil. See Satan Deza, Diego de 188 dhimma/dhimmīs 244–245, 287, 309, 311 diadem 410, 412–414, 417 Díaz, Fernando 103, 105 Díaz, Pedro 364–365 Díaz de Games, Gutierre 89 Díaz de Haro, Lope 87, 448–449 Díaz de Vivar, Rodrigo (El Cid Campeador)  133, 146 Diocletian, emperor (r. 284–305) 222 Dulce of Aragon, queen consort of Portugal (r. 1185–1198) 114 Dulce of León (c.1194/5–1248), infanta  447, 451 Dume/ Dumium, monastery 223, 229–231 Edict of Expulsion (of the Jews from Spain, 1492) 188, 323 Égija 321 Egypt 228, 275–276, 281–282, 286–287, 290, 294–299 Einhard 378 elches 204–205 Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204), queen of France and England 446 Eleanor of Castile, queen consort of Aragon (r. 1221–1229) 114–115 Eleanor of Castile, Alfonso XI’s sister and queen consort of Aragon (r. 1329–1336). See Leonor of Castile  Eleanor Plantagenet, queen of Castile and Toledo (r. 1170–1214) 441, 446 Eleanor/Helena of Portugal, Frederick III’s wife (r. 1452–1467) 443 Elisabet/Isabel of Aragon, queen consort of Portugal (r. 1282–1325) 98 El Puig 116 Emanuel d’Aranda 38, 50 Emma/Aelfgifu 442 emotions 19, 95–106, 109–117, 203  emotional community 32, 47 masculinity and 71 Enrique/Henry IV, king of Castile and León (r. 1454–1474) 198 Epistulae 389 Ermengol, Estefanía 367

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485

INDEX Espéculo 463 estate. See property Estoria de España/Espanna. See Primera Crónica General Eudesindo. See Vellido Dolfos Eupraxia/Praxedis/Adelheid, Holy Roman Empress consort (r. 1089–1105) 443 Extremadura 378 Fabri, Felix 20, 30–31, 37, 43 Falperra 223 fama 466–467, 469–470 Fāṭimids 276–277, 293, 295, 297–298 faunal imagery 379–396 Felipe/Philip I, king of Castile (r. 1506)  188, 190 Felipe/Philip, infante of Castile (1292–1327), son of Sancho IV and María de Molina  305, 321 Felipe/Philip of Castile (c.1231–1274), son of Fernando III and Beatrice of Swabia 447 Fernández de Castro, Rodrigo 364 Fernández de Córdoba 189–190 Gonzálo, Gran Capitán 190–191 Pedro, Marquis of Priego 190 Fernando I, king of Castile and León (r. 1037–1065) 132, 136–137, 143, 246, 408 Fernando II, king of León (r. 1157–1188) 420 Fernando III, king of Castile (r. 1217–1252) and León (r. 1230–1252) 78, 83, 86–87, 97, 153, 172–175, 240, 257, 266, 318–319, 435, 437, 439, 441–442, 444–452, 459 Fernando del Pulgar 187, 201 Fernando/Ferdinand II of Aragón (r. 1479–1516). See Catholic Monarchs fine 331–332, 335–336, 339, 341–345 First Crusade. See Crusade Flaínez, Pedro 334, 342–346 Formentera 48, 51 Fourni Islands 53 Fourth Lateran Council (1215) 163, 173, 320 Frederick I, emperor (r. 1155–1190) 435, 437 Frederick II, emperor (r. 1220–1250) 436– 437, 440, 449 Fróilaz, Pelayo 364 Fróilaz, Ramiro 359

Fróilaz de Traba, Pedro 370 Frómista 463–464, 466, 471, 478 Fructuosus of Braga, archbishop 227 Fruela Muñoz, count 331–332, 335–336, 340–341, 343–344, 346 Fuentepudia 440 Fuentes de don Vermudo Fuero Juzgo. See Liber Iudiciorum Fulgentius of Ruspe, bishop 384 Fusṭāṭ 293 Gallaecia, Roman province of 216–218, 220–222, 226–228, 230–231, 233 Galicia 357, 369–370, 378 Galíndez de Carvajal, Lorenzo de 187, 191 García II, king of Galicia (r. 1065–1071) 132 García Gonzalo, Master of the Order of Santiago 439 Gate of Betrayal (Puerta de la Traición, Zamora) 125–126, 141–144, 146–147 Gate of Loyalty (Puerta de la Lealtad, Zamora) 125, 126, 141–144, 146–147 Gaul 215, 220, 224–225, 232 Gelmírez, Diego, bishop and archbishop of Santiago de Compostela 404, 412 Genoa 22 Gertrude, wife of Henry III. See Gunhild Gibraltar, Straits of 42, 74 Gómez Carrillo, Garci 79 Gómez, Rodrigo 360 González de Lara, Nuño 78–80, 88 González de Lara, Pedro 357, 361, 363 González de Lara, Rodrigo 357, 359, 362–363, 367 González, Pedro, monk of San Zoilo 457 Gonzalo de Ayora 187, 191 Gothic, style 260–263 Gran Capitán. See Fernández de Córdoba, Gonzalo Granada 192, 204, 248, 308–309, 315 conquest of (1492) 184, 185, 187–189, 193–195, 199, 201, 205, 323 Grecos 451 Greek, language 228–231 Gregorian Sacramentary 159, 168 Gregory VII, pope 248–249, 311 Gregory the Great, pope 384

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486 Guipúzcoa 440 Gulf of Antalya 24, 25 Gulf of Lion 25 Gunhild/Gertrude of Denmark, queen consort of Germany (r. 1036–1038) 443 Gutiérrez, Gonzalo, queen Beatrice of Swabia’s steward 446 Guzmán, Leonor de 323 ḥadīth 23, 389 al-Ḥāfiẓ, imam-caliph (r. 1132–1149)  294, 298 Hagia Sophia (Istanbul) 239 hajib 310–311 al-Ḥakam II, caliph (r. 961–976) 310 al-Ḥākim bi-amr Allāh 293, 297–298 HaNagid, Shmuel 21 Ḥasan-i-ṣabbāḥ 291–292 Helena, emperor Constantine’s mother  24, 443 Henrique/Henry of Burgundy, count of Portugal 371 Henry II, king of England (r. 1154–1189) 416 Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1046–1056) 443 Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1084–1105) 443 Henry IV of Castile. See Enrique IV, king of Castile Henry VII (1211–1242), Frederick II’s son  440 Henry of Brunswick 436 Hermann de Salza, Teutonic Grand Master  452 Hermenegild 228 Hernando de Baeza 183–211, esp. 189–191 Hernando de Talavera 186 Higares, lordship of the Teutonic Order 452 La Higueruela, Battle of (1431) 194, 198 Ḥijāz 293, 295, 299 al-Ḥimyarī 280 Hishām II, caliph (r. 976–1009) 310 Historia Arabum 171 Historia Compostellana 73, 412, 423 Historia Silense 134, 389, 396 History of William Marshal 75, 83 Holy Land 161–164, 166, 168, 170, 173–174, 363 Holy Roman Empire 166, 435, 437–439, 442–443 Honorius III, pope 164, 173, 450

INDEX Hospitallers 450 House of the Ten. See dār al-ʿašara Huesca 160, 262, 380 Hugh, Abbot of Cluny 248 ḥujra, al-ḥujra al-muqaddasa. See the Prophet’s tomb Hundred Years War 89 al-Ḥusayn 283, 294 Hydatius 222, 226 Iblīs. See Satan Ibn al-Fakhar, Abraham 318 Ibn Bassam 245, 255 Ibn Daud, Abraham 308–310, 313, 315, 317 Ibn Ezra, Judah 314–315 Ibn Ezra, Moses 315 Ibn Ferruziel, Joseph (Cidellus) 313–314 Ibn Ḥabbūs, Bādīs, amir of Granada (r. 1038–1073) 308 Ibn Hazm 245 Ibn Hud, ruler of Murcia (r. 1228–1238)  266–267, 269 Ibn Iyās 298 Ibn Jau, Jacob 310–311 Ibn Jubayr 31, 296, 298 Ibn Khaldūn 41 Ibn Mājid al-Najdī, Ahmad 15, 18, 21 Ibn Māksan, Ḥabbūs, amir of Granada (r. 1019–1038) 309 Ibn Naghrela, Joseph Ibn Naghrela, Samuel (ha-Nagid) 308–310 Ibn Sadoq, Çulema 319–320 Ibn Sadoq, Isaac. See Çag de la Maleha Ibn Shālīb 313 Ibn Shaddād 20 Ibn Shaprūt, Ḥasdai 310–311 Ibn Shoshan, Joseph ben Mair (Yuçuf Abenxuxen) 316–317 Ibn Ṭufayl 54 Ibn Verga, Solomon 323 Ibn Wakar, Samuel 322 ifranj 280–281 Imtāʿ al-asmāʿ 289 India 291 Innocent III, pope 163, 167, 173, 439 Innocent IV, pope 164, 175 Inquisition 186, 188, 205 insurance, maritime 18, 27 al-Intiṣārāt al-islāmiyya 289 Íñiguez, Jimeno 360 - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

INDEX ira regia (royal anger) 110 Ireland 215, 219 Irene/Maria Angelos (c.1181–1208), queen consort of Sicily and Germany 436 Isaac II Angelos, emperor of Byzantium (r. 1185–1195) 436, 438 Isabel/Isabella I, queen of Castile (r. 1474–1504). See Catholic Monarchs Isfahān 291 Isidore of Seville/Isidoro de Sevilla 227 Ismaʿīlī Shīʿīs 276, 290–291 Istoria de Mahomet 389 Italy 25, 186, 227, 230 Iudicatio, judicial fine 331–332, 341, 346–347 Jaén 153, 447 Jamāl al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. Abī Jaʿfar Aḥmad b. Khalaf al-Khazrajī al-Anṣārī Jamāl al-Dīn Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. al-Ḥasan al-Umawī alQurashī al-Asnawī. See al-Asnawī Jamāl al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī 283 Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Abī Manṣūr al-Iṣfahānī 278 Jamāl al-Dīn b. Yaghmūr 283 James, saint. See Santiago de Compostela James I, king of Aragon (r. 1213–1276) 95– 97, 99, 102–116, 252 Jazīrat Zambrah 48–50 Jeanne de Ponthieu/Joan of Ponthieu (c.1220–1279), queen consort of Castile and León 452 Jerez 77, 79–81, 88, 259 Jerome, saint 382–384 Jeronymite Order 189 Jerusalem 161, 162, 166, 173, 363, 395 jettison 32–33, 38 Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo 73, 135, 171, 173, 175, 239–240, 242, 245, 253–258, 260, 267–268, 313, 438 Joarilla de las Matas. See Juarilla John of Abbeville 173 John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem (r. 1210–1225) 174–175, 445 John of Rupella/La Rochelle 98 John of Salisbury 437 Jonah 33 Jordan, river 30, 38

487 Juan II, king of Castile (r. 1406–1454) 194, 198–199 Juan/John, prince of Asturias and Girona (1478–1497) 186 Juan, prior of San Zoilo of Carrión 439 Juan de Medina de Pomar 175 Juan de Mena 198 Juan de Soria, bishop of Osma 169, 172, 253, 268 Juana/Joanna I, queen of Castile (r. 1504–1555), queen of Aragon (r. 1516–1555) 188 Juarilla (Joarilla de las Matas) 137 Judith/Sophia of Swabia (1054–c.1105), queen consort of Hungary, and Poland 443 Julius II, pope 190 Justinian I, Eastern Roman Emperor 215, 320 al-Kalimāt al-muhimma fī mubāsharāt ahl al-dhimma 281 Karaites 314–315 kātib (scribe) 308 Khālid b. Muḥammad b. Naṣr al-Qaysarānī al-Shāʿir 288 kidnapping 334, 340, 344 Kitāb al-muḥallā bi-l-āṯār 245 Knights of Malta 44, 48–49 La Romia 204 La Vega 331 La Vid, monastery 446 Lampedusa 46, 48, 54–55, 57 Lara, family 360–365, 450 Las Huelgas, abbey 441–442, 445–446 Las Navas de Tolosa, battle (1212) 73, 169, 239 Lateran IV, church council. See Fourth Lateran Council Latin, language 229, 378, 461 Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile. See Chronica latina regum Castellae Legio (city of the Legion) 392 León 222, 314, 331, 356, 378, 383, 390–393, 395, 404, 406, 408–411, 415, 427, 441, 447, 450, 458, 477 Cathedral Palimpsest 383 kingdom of 130, 142, 357, 364, 370–371, 439, 448, 451–452 Torres of 357–359, 368 - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

488 León-Castile, kingdom 72, 74, 97, 126, 306, 311–312, 352, 354, 378–379, 389–390, 408, 411, 414, 423, 425–426, 438, 450 Leonardo da Vinci 42 Leonor/Eleanor of Castile, queen consort of Aragon (r. 1329–1336) 322 Leonor Plantagenet (1160–1214) 440 Leovigild, Visigothic king (r. 569–586) 224, 228 Lex, Visigothic law 341–342 Liber Apologeticus Martyrum 389–390 Liber Iudiciorum 143 Liber Ordinum Episcopal 157 Liber Pontificale 254 Liber Sacramentorum 155–157, 160, 163, 167, 176, Limassol 40 Limia 369–370 Limpieza de sangre 189, 191, 204 Lisbon 223 Little Ice Age 26, 41, 57 Lleida 106 Llibre dels fets of King James I of Aragon 95, 99–100, 102–117, 252 Llull, Ramon 40 local elite 138, 232, 331–332, 342, 344 Logroño 440 López, Pedro, queen Beatrice of Swabia’s steward 446 López de Carvajal, Bernardino 199–200 López de Pisuerga, Martín, archbishop of Toledo 73 Lorma 333–334, 344–345 Lucas, bishop of Tuy 135, 383, 437–438 Lucena, Battle of (1483) 202 Lucero, Diego Rodríguez de 188, 190–191 Lugo 222, 230 Louis IX, king of France (r. 1226–1270) 164, 166, 175 Luke 395 Luna 366 Machiavelli, Nicolò 190 madrasa 283 Maghrib 32, 36, 52, 275, 282, 284–287, 294, 296–298 Maimonides, Moses 40, 317 Malaga 196, 200, 248 al-Malik al-ʿĀdil Nūr al-dīn al-Shahīd. See Nūr al-dīn Maḥmūd b. Zankī

INDEX al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ 283 Malmesbury 416 Malpedaço 446 Majorca 52, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113 Mamlūks 26, 52 al-Maʾmun, amir of Toledo (r. 1043–1075) 312 mandaciones 343–346 al-Manṣūr, hajib (d. 1102) 310–311 al-Maqrīzī 289 al-Marāghī 287–289 Marcabru 73 Maria of Brabant, queen consort of France (r. 1274–1285) 436, 440 Marineo Sículo, Lucio 187 Marinids 81, 88, 321 Marquis of Priego. See Fernández de Córdoba, Pedro Marseille 25, 220 Marshall, William, first earl of Pembroke (d. 1219) 75 Martin of Braga, archbishop 223, 227–230, 233 Martin of Tours, bishop 223–224 Martínez, Osorio 359, 364 Martínez, Rodrigo 359, 364, 367 Martínez de Oviedo, Gonzalo 322 Mary, saint. See Virgin Mary masculinity 71, 75 Matallana, monastery 445 al-Maṭarī (al-Saʿdī al-ʿIbādī al-Maṭarī alMadanī) 277–278, 280, 286–287, 290, 295–296, 299 Matilda of Canossa, countess 426–427 Matilda/Maud of England (c.1102–1167)  406, 416, 423 Mauricio/Maurice, bishop of Burgos 173– 174, 439 Mecca 277, 288, 291, 293, 296 Medina 275–279, 283–288, 290, 293–299 Medina Sidonia, House of 204 Medinaceli 361 Mediterranean, sea 15–57, 97–98, 215–221, 224–227, 230–233 Melisende, queen of Jerusalem (r. 1131–1153)  406 Mendicant Orders 98 Menorca 106, 109 mercenaries 15 merchants 217, 221, 282, 308, 312 - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

INDEX Meshullam of Volterra 38 Messina 52 Metamorphoses 379 Michael of Rhodes 50 Miro, king of the Suevi (r. 570–583) 228 Moclín 201 Mohammed XI of Granada. See Boadbil Mongols 291 Montaña Leonesa. See Mountains of León Montealegre 440, 445 Montes Torozos 451 Montilla 190 Montpellier 103–104 Morocco 318, 321 Morvedre 114 Mota del Marqués (La Mota) 449 Mountains of León 331, 333, 343, 366 Mozarabs/Mozarabic 249–251, 254, 263–266, 383 Mudéjar/Mudéjares Mudéjar revolt (1264) 77, 78, 204–20 Muḥammad (the Prophet) 251, 253–254, 268, 275–276, 278, 283, 289, 293–295, 297–298, 388 Muḥammad’s tomb 275, 279–281, 283–286, 293–294, 296, 299 Muḥammad b. Farḥūn 296 Muhammad I, king of Granada (r. 1238–1273)  77 Muhammed II, king of Granada (r. 1273–1302)  81 al-Muʿizz, imam-caliph (r. 953–975) 294 Muñoz, Flaíno, count 334 Muñoz, Pedro 334 Murcia 87, 108, 266–267, 268–269 al-Muʿtamid, amir of Seville (r. c.1069–1091)  246, 297, 313 Mutawakil ibn Hud al-Dawla 266 nagid (ruler) 308 Nájera 360 fragment 384 Naples 190, 220 nasi (political head/prince) 308, 310, 314 Naṣīḥat ūlà al-albāb fī manʿ istikhdām alnaṣārā kuttāb 289 nautical technology 16, 18–19, 26, 43–44 Navarre 363–364 kingdom of 98 neighbours 171, 185, 338

489 New World 186 Nicholas III, pope 320 Nicosia 40 Niẓām al-Mulk 292, 294–295 Nizārīs 291–292, 295  North Africa 216–217, 224, 233, 258, 275, 382, 396 numismatics 407–410, 414, 419 Núñez, Gómez 369–371 Núñez, Sancho 370–371 Nuño de Celanova, count 370 Nūr al-dīn Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. ʿAfīf al-dīn ʿAbd Allāh al-Samhūdī = al-Samhūdī 288–289 Nūr al-dīn Maḥmūd b. Zankī 275, 276–279, 283–284, 286, 288, 290, 295–296, 298–299 Nuremberg 439 al-Nuwayrī 294 Old Hispanic Rite 154, 157–159, 170, 250 Omañas 346 omines bonos (wise men) 114, 342, 345–346 Oporto 370 Orosius 226 Osma 173 Otero 137 Otto IV of Brunswick 436, 440 Ottomans 21, 36, 53 Ovario, Pedro, prior of the Hospitallers 439 Ovid 379 Oviedo 383 parias 242, 313 Palencia 450 diocese of 457–460, 462, 466, 469, 471, 473–478 university of 98, 175 Palenzuela 440 Pancorbo 440–441 Paphos 40 Paredes 448 Paris 440 University of 98, 175 Sainte Chapelle 175 Paschasius of Dumium 229–230 patronage 310, 321, 404, 445, 452 Patronila, queen of Aragon (r. 1157–1164) 114 Paul Alvarus 389–390, 396 Pedro Alfonso 366–367 Pedro Lorenzo, bishop of Cuenca 77 - 978-90-04-68375-4 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/01/2024 06:33:10PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

490 Peláez, Gonzalo, count 359, 365, 368 Pelayo/Pelagius, king of Asturias (r. 718–737)  195, 198 Pelayo, bishop of Oviedo (d. 1153) 389, 396 Peñafiel 440 Penàguila, castle 112 Pérez, Elvira 371 Pérez de Castro, Álvar 448 Pérez de Lara, Manrique 364 Pérez de Tarazona, Jiméno 116 Pérez de Traba, Rodrigo 369–370 Perpunchent, castle 112 Persia 291 Peter III ‘the Great’, king of Aragon (r. 1276–1285) 98, 306 Peter Lombard 169 Peter of Poitiers 380 Peter of Portugal (1187–1255), son of Sancho I of Portugal 114 Philip Augustus (r. 1180–1223) 440 Philip duke of Swabia, king of the Romans (c.1180–1208) 436, 440 Phocaea/ Phocaean wares 219–220, 225, 231 Pilella. See Campo de Pilela pilgrimage/ pilgrims 27, 31, 38, 166, 227, 285, 293, 319, 364, 445, 450–452 piracy/pirates. See corsairs Piri Reʾis 21, 22 Poema de Almería 378–379, 387, 390, 392–394 Poema de mio Cid (Poem of El Cid) 78–79 Polemius of Astorga, bishop 230 Portugal 87, 323, 352, 367, 369–371 pottery 215, 217 Praxedis. See Eupraxia Primera Crónica General 74, 87, 131, 135, 140, 171 Proaza 365–366 Profuturus of Braga, bishop 227 property 32, 45–46, 51, 82, 139, 155, 204, 314, 336, 341, 343, 346, 353, 362, 373, 445, 451–452, 476  Prophet Muḥammad. See Muḥammad the Prophet’s tomb (ḥujra, al-ḥujra al-muqaddasa). See Muhammad Protocols of the Elders of Zion 298 providence/providentialism 201–204 Prussia 450

INDEX Psalms 163, 164, 168, 169, 385–387 Puerta de la Lealtad. See Gate of Loyalty Puerta de la Traición. See Gate of Betrayal Puerto de Santa María 77, 258–260 purchase. See sale al-Qadir, king of Toledo (r. 1075–1085) and of Valencia (r. 1086–1092) 244 quarrel 336, 339 Qubāʾ 285 queenship 114–115, 425–427, 435–453 Quia maior, papal bull (1213) 163 Rāfiḍa 290 Ramiro, Leonese magnate 395 Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Barcelona (from 1131), consort and ruler of Aragon (r. 1137–1162) 114 rape. See sexual dispute/violence rawḍa 285 Raymond of Burgundy, count of Galicia 357 Reconquista/‘Reconquest’ 72, 153, 183–211 Red Sea 15, 296 renovo (loan) 337–338 Repartimiento of Seville 319 Repartimiento by James I 114 Revelation (Book of Apocalypse) 394 Reynald of Châtillon 296 Rhodes 24, 52 Ricovado 352 Risco, Manuel 380 Roa 440 Roger of Hoveden 162, Roman law 458, 463–464, 468 Rome 163, 199, 249, 439 Rudolf of Hapsburg (r. 1273–1291) 320 rural elite 346. See also local elite al-Saʿdī al-ʿIbādī al-Maṭarī al-Madanī = al-Maṭarī. See al-Maṭarī sagione. See saione Sagrajas, Battle of (1086) 248 Sahagún, monastery 136–137, 246, 249, 450–452 Sainte Chapelle. See Paris Saint Elmo 28 Saint Isidore of León. See San Isidoro Saint Nicholas 28

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INDEX Saione/sagione 331, 340, 343–344, 346 Ṣalāḥ al-dīn = Saladin 20, 275–276, 292, 295, 297 sale 338, 341–342  Salé 74 Salimbene di Adam (of Parma) 169 al-Samhūdī 288–289 San Facundo de Arconada 464–468, 478 San Felices 337, 464, 471, 473, 478 San Isidoro, monastery/ Real Colegiata de  383–384, 404 San Juan de la Mota, castle 451 San Mamés 464–465, 478 San Martín de Frómista 464, 474, 476, 478 San Miguel, church 471, 473–474 San Millán de Cogolla, monastery 384, 446 San Pedro de Arlanza 439 San Pedro de Cardeña, monastery 155–156 San Román de Fuentes 460, 471, 478 San Servando, monastery 250 San Vito lo Capo 52 San Zoilo de Carrión, monastery 411, 439, 457–478 Sancha (c.1191– before 1243), queen of León, Alfonso IX and Teresa of Portugal’s daughter 447, 451 Sancha (c.1018–1067), infanta and queen of León, married to Fernando I 136, 137, 143, 408 Sancha Raimúndez (c.1095/1102–1159), infanta of León, sister of Alfonso VII  367 Sánchez/Sanxes, Nunó/Nuño (d. 1242), son of count Sancho of Provence 107, 110–112 Sancho I, king of Portugal (r. 1185–1211) 114 Sancho II, king of Castile (r. 1065–1072) 125, 134, 140–144, 408 Sancho IV, king of Castile (r. 1284–1295) 320 Sancho Fernández, Alfonso IX’s half-brother  451 Sancho Ramírez of Aragón (r. 1063–1094)  409 Sant Cugat, monastery 167 Santa María de Castellanos, house of the Teutonic Order 449 Santa María de Frómista, church 466, 471 Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas, monastery 331, 333, 341

491 Santiago de Compostela (Saint James) 72, 202, 417, 419, 445, 452 Santo Domingo de Silos, monastery 157, 160, 384 Santo Estêvão, castle 448 São Cristóvão 371 São Salvador de Montélios 224 Saragossa 247 Sardinia 22, 25 Sarroca, Jaume 106 Satan 285, 293 sceptre 416, 418, 422 seal 414 n.38, 423–425 Segovia 81, 173, 415 Selingenstadt 440 Treaty of 437 Seljuqs 292, 294–295 servants 23, 73, 159, 168, 176–177, 306, 308, 334–335, 341, 344–345, 395, 446 Seville 74, 80, 87, 153, 175–176, 203, 228, 246, 248, 312–313, 318, 321 sexual disputes/morality/violence 339–340, 346 al-Shādhilī 22 al-Shāfiʿī 294–295 Shakh Ustadh al-Magham 245 Shams al-dīn Ibn Khallikān (d. 1282) 277–278 sharīf (descendant of the Prophet) 282–283 Sharīfī emirs 277, 295–296 Shīʿī 275–277, 289–290, 293, 295–298 ships (Byzantine; Catalan; Latin Christian; North African; Ottoman; Venetian; Algerian) 17, 20, 26, 23, 31, 36, 37, 39–40, 43, 48, 50, 51 shipwreck 18, 40–57 Sicily 46, 48, 52, 54 Sidi Muḥriz 34 Siete Partidas 78, 86, 87, 319–320, 453, 465 Silos Apocalypse 384 monastery. See Santo Domingo de Silos Silves 82 slaves 35, 48, 51, 281 Socrates 229 Sogorb 114 solidos (silver coins) 331, 338, 341–342, 345 Sousse 20 Soverosa, castle 451

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492 Stephen, saint 227 Stephen of Blois 78 Stephen, king of England (r. 1135–1154) 416 storm, maritime 18, 23–40 Sueves/ Suevic kingdom/monarchy 218, 222, 224–228, 231, 233 Susanna (continuation of Book of Daniel)  385 Syria 280, 286, 291 tahhara 267 Taḥqīq al-nuṣra fī faḍl Makka al-muḥarrama wa-l-Madīna al-munawwara 287 al-Ṭāʾi (r. 974–983), Abbasid caliph 278 taifa/taifas 95, 242, 244, 248, 250, 307–308, 312–313, 426 Talavera, Hernando de, archbishop of Granada 193, 199 Talmud, Babylonian 35, 38 Tangiers 82 al-Taʿrīf bimā ansat al-hijra min maʿālim dār al-hijra 277 Tarazona 322 Tarragona 220 tears 75, 114 Téllez de Meneses, Alfonso 459 Téllez de Meneses, Suero 459 Téllez de Meneses, Tello, bishop of Palencia  86, 445, 459, 476–477 Templars 451 tenencia 355–359, 363–364, 367, 370–372 Teresa Gil de Soverosa, favourite of Alfonso IX 451 Teresa/Theresa, countess of Portugal, stepsister of Urraca of León 352, 357, 371 Teresa/Mathilda/Mahaut of Portugal (d. 1218), known as Matilda after she married count Philip of Flanders 443 Teresa, queen consort of León (r. 1191–1195), wife of Alfonso IX 447–448, 451 Terra Sigillata Africana 219, 225 Terra Sigillata Hispánica Tardía (TSHT) 225 Testament of Solomon 28 Teutonic Knights/Order 435, 449–452 theft 46 Tiedra, castle 451–452 Tierra de Campos 451 Tintagel 221 Toledo 173, 241–242, 246–249, 252–253, 255–256, 261, 268, 297, 308, 312–313,

INDEX 315–318, 363–364, 408–409, 413–414, 426, 446–447 Cathedral 240, 251, 263, 269 Church of Santa Cruz 244 Church of San Román 263–264, 266, 269 Church of San Salvador 247 Great Mosque 240–242, 245, 248, 251, 253, 258, 268–269 Mosque of Ibn al-Hadidi 262 Mosque of “Tornerías” or “Solarejo” 247 Santa María de Alficín 250, 254 Toro 449 Toroño 369, 371 Traba, family 369–370 trade/traders 43, 215–221, 225, 232 Tripoli 21, 26, 31, 51 trust 102, 104, 106, 345 Tudela 365 Tudela de Duero 446 Tudia 82 Tumbo A, cartulary of Santiago Cathedral 417, 419, 422 Tulaytula. See Toledo Tunis 23, 27, 54 Tuy 369 Tyre 292 Úbeda 74 Uclés, Milirary Order of 83 Uelite Ariolfiz. See Vellido Dolfos Uellite Adulfizi. See Vellido Dolfos Uellit Uellitiz. See Vellido Dolfos Uigario, local representative of a lord 334, 344 Uillidi Ariulfiz. See Vellido Dolfos ʿUmar. See ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb 279, 284 Umayyads 280, 282, 306, 310 University of Paris. See Paris UPZ (Unión del Pueblo Zamorano/Zamoran People’s Union) 128 Urban II, pope 249 Urraca, queen of León and Castile (r. 1109–1126) 313, 352, 356, 358, 360, 363–364, 367–368, 371, 403–407, 409–410, 412, 414–428 Urraca Fernández (d. 1101), infanta of León and Castile 140, 142–144

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493

INDEX Valderaduey, river 138 Valdespino 137 Valdevez 369 Valdoré 333–334, 342, 345–346 Valencia 363–364 kingdom of 97, 114, 244 taifa 95, 102 Valera, Diego de 187 Valladolid 127, 142, 322 Valle 364 Valley of Támara 361 Vélaz, Armentario 137 Vélaz, Gutier 136 Vellido Adolfez. See Vellido Dolfos Vellido Dolfos 125–152 Venice 26 Vermúdez, Suero, count 366, 368 Vetus Latina 383 Victorial (1436) 89 Vigilius, pope 227 Vigo 215–221, 226, 232–233 Villabaruz 471, 473, 475, 478 Villada 137 Villafranca 440–441 Villalpando 139 Villalumbroso 471–474, 476–477 Villamez 464, 471, 476–478 Villasirga 469, 471, 478 Villela. See Campo de Pilela Vincent de Beauvais 437 Viñayo 331, 333–334, 340, 343 Violant/Violante of Hungary (d. 1251), queen consort of Aragon 112, 114–115 Violante (Yolant) of Aragon (d. 1301), queen consort of Castile and León 80, 97, 115 Virgin Mary 28, 39, 45, 55, 72, 76, 80–88, 251, 259–260 Visigothic  Miniscule 383 Monarchy/kingdom/Hispania 186–187, 193, 196, 198, 224, 233, 248, 250–251, 409, 421

Vita Argenteae 390, 396 Vita Karoli Magni 378 vitalicio 114 Vitoria 441 Vulfura 390 Wafāʾ al-wafā bi-akhbār dār al-Muṣṭafā 288 Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān  277 waqf 250 wazīr (government minister) 308–309 William II, king of Sicily (r. 1166–1189) 52 wise men. See omines bonos Worms 438 Xàtiva 108, 115 al-Yāfiʿī 289 al-Yasaʿ b. Ḥazm 297 Yaʿqūb b. Abī Bakr 277–278, 280 Yolant/Violante of Aragon, queen consort of Castile. See Violante of Aragon Yuçaf de Écija 305, 321, 323 Yusuf ibn Tashfin, Almoravid ruler 248 Zaén. See Zayd Abū Zayd Zakynthos, island 32 Zalaca, Battle of (1086) 249 Zamora 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 146, 356, 370, 450 Zangid 295 Zaragoza. See Saragossa Zayd Abū Zayd/Zaén, Almohad ruler of Valencia (c. 1195–before 1268) 102, 104, 105 Zayn al-dīn al-Marāghī 289 Zirids 308 ziyārat al-nabī 284

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