Download PDF | David A Wacks - Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World-University of Toronto Press (2019).
294 Pages
Acknowledgments
Many institutions, colleagues, and friends helped me to write this book. The University of Oregon Department of Romance Languages is my primary community of scholars and teachers, and I thank them for their collegiality and support. In particular I would like to thank the office staff, Budget Manager Linda Leon and Undergraduate Assistant Sarah Weiner for their assistance. Without the librarians at the Knight Library (and particularly the Interlibrary loan service), I would not have been able to complete this project.
A number of organizations and societies provided me with opportunities to present preliminary versions of the chapters as conference papers, including the Modern Language Association, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, the Medieval Academy of America, the Medieval Association of the Pacific, the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, the Pacific North West Renaissance Society, and the regular meetings of the Mediterranean Seminar directed by Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos. Invitations to speak at NYU Abu Dhabi, Yale Medieval Studies, the Centre for Medieval Literature (York University/Southern Denmark University), Universidad de Sevilla Departmento de Filologia Integrada, the Texas Tech University Study Abroad Center in Seville, the Department of Romance Languages of the University of Bonn, and the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota helped me to further develop my ideas.
I would also like to thank the members of the Andalusi Studies listserv, and in particular Antonio Giménez for his suggestions on the problem of the “tree of colors.” A 2017 Faculty Research Award from the Office of Vice Provost of Research and Innovation and a 2017 College fo Arts and Sciences Summer Humanities and Creative Arts Stipend provided funding and support to develop my ideas into more substantial chapters. The College of Arts and Sciences and the Provost's Office of the University of Oregon provided me with sabbatical and research leave during the academic year 2016-17, which I spent with my family in Seville. The staff of the Biblioteca Colombina and the University of Seville Humanities Library were very helpful in providing me with space and research materials during my stay in Andalusia.
I’d also like to thank my colleagues Emilio Gonzalez Ferrin (Universidad de Sevilla) and Alejandro Garcia-Sanjuadn (Universidad de Huelva) for their support during my time in Seville. As Ineared completion, several colleagues generously agreed to read drafts and provide suggestions for improvement: Cristina Gonzalez, Michael Harney, Mark Johnston, Remke Kruk, David Porcel Bueno, Pamela Beattie, Matthew Gabriele, and the two anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript for the University of Toronto Press. An Ernst Moll Faculty Research Fellowship in Literary Studies and a generous publication subvention grant from the Oregon Humanities Center (spring 2018) provided me with the time and funds necessary to complete the manuscript and bring it into print. Large portions of this book were researched and written while I listened to the channel “Drone Zone” on somafm.com, a nonprofit, listener-supported, commercial free internet radio station.
Preliminary versions of parts of some chapters have appeared in print. Parts of chapter 2 are in “Translation of Texts and of Relics as Symbolic Capital in Caballero Zifar” (La corénica 43.1: 115-40). Sections of chapter 4 are included in “Romance, Conversion, and Internal Orientalism in Cronica de Flores y Blancaflor (ca. 1290)” (Narrative Culture 2.2: 270-88). “Popular Andalusi Literature and Castilian Fiction: Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani, 101 Nights, and Caballero Zifar” (Revista de Poética Medieval 29: 311-35) contains material from chapters 2 and 3, and “Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani as Andalusi Muslim Crusade Literature” (The Study of al-Andalus: The Scholarship and Legacy of James T. Monroe, ed. Michelle M. Hamilton and David A. Wacks, Ilex Foundation, Boston, 2018, 211-28) contains material included in chapter 2.
Finally, Suzanne Rancourt of the University of Toronto Press was ever responsive, helpful, and professional in helping me through the publication process.
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. For transliterations of Arabic words I use a modified version of the system used by the Journal of Arabic Literature. In both languages the letter ayin is indicated by the character ‘-. In some cases I have opted for conventional transliterations of proper names and nouns that are more commonly known in English (i.e., Abbasid vs. ‘Abbasid or Abdallah vs. ‘Abd-Allah).
Introduction
Medieval Iberian Crusade Culture and the Mediterranean World
The studies in this book look at how Iberian authors reimagined the idea of crusade through the lens of Iberian Mediterranean geopolitics and social history. Why the Mediterranean framework? What does a Mediterranean studies approach add to the study of these materials? Mediterranean studies reframes the study of history and culture with an approach defined not by national histories and literatures, but rather by geography, and regional cultural practices and historical processes.
It focuses not on “roots,” as have national literatures and histories, but on routes, itineraries, crossings, exchanges, and the types of cultural production and interaction that Mediterranean trade, travel, and migration make possible. Brian Catlos has remarked that Mediterranean studies focuses on the “commonality of culture ... despite the region’s ethno-culturally fractured nature” (“Why the Mediterranean?” 5). Thinking about the interconnectedness of Mediterranean geography and cultural practice allows us to understand local histories and cultural practices as part of broader networks that span languages, religions, ethnic identities, and cultural practices.’ Under the influence of the nationalist ideologies of the nineteenth-century scholars who shaped the academic fields in which we work, we tend to perceive (and teach) these histories and cultures in large part as national traditions, or at best as part of a “Western” (meaning Latin Christian or western European) civilization.
However, the people whose lives and works we study understood their world in ways that do not resemble or coincide with the categories of inquiry developed by modern academic study. According to Catlos, deprivileging these categories allows “developments that seem anomalous, exceptional, or inexplicable when viewed through the narrow lens of one religio-cultural tradition, [to] suddenly make sense when viewed from the perspective of a broader interconnected and interdependent Mediterranean” (“Why the Mediterranean?” 14). As I hope the studies in this book demonstrate, this is the primary advantage of studying medieval Iberian literature in its Mediterranean context.
The story of Mediterranean studies begins with Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip IT), published in France, on the heels of the Second World War in 1949. Braudel’s chief innovation was to frame the Mediterranean as a category of historical study, and he divided this inquiry into three levels: the deep and slow-moving current of geographical time, the longue durée of social and economic history, and the superficial history of individual people and events. Braudel’s students and readers developed his ideas along different lines, focusing on physical geography and its effects on human history, and, to a lesser extent, cultural practice.
The work of S.D. Goitein, a historian of the Jewish Mediterranean, was likewise foundational in developing a consciousness of medieval Jewish culture as a Mediterranean phenomenon. His multivolume study of the documents found in the Cairo Geniza and archived by the team of scholars working under Solomon Schechter at Cambridge University has come to define the field, and his students and students’ students continue to study medieval Jewish Mediterranean as, to use S.D. Goitein’s words, a “Mediterranean Society.”*
The most important recent intervention has been Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (2000), an ambitious, interdisciplinary, and challenging study of Mediterranean geography and ecological history. Current scholars working in the emergent field of Mediterranean studies received the work variously as a call to arms, or provocation to study the region’s histories and cultures in ways that challenge national and other, more parochial approaches. Not surprisingly, scholars who are heavily invested in the established paradigms, may feel threatened, and instinctively push back against this new approach. Consequently, Horden and Purcell’s contribution attracted its fair share of criticism.® The work of David Abulafia (Emporium; Western; Great Sea) continues in Braudel’s line but focuses on how human history has shaped the Mediterranean world. In his own words his goal is “to bring to the fore the human experience of crossing the Mediterranean or of living in the port towns and islands that depended for their existence on the sea” (Great Sea 24). He thus opens the door to Mediterraneanfocused studies of human cultural production such as art history, religion, and literature.
The medieval cultures of the Mediterranean provide rich subject matter for this approach, with the questions of coexisting religions (many varieties of Islam, Judaism, Christianity), empires (Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Mameluk, Holy Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Genoese, Aragonese, Spanish, Ottoman), diasporas (Armenian, Jewish, Andalusi, Sephardic), classical languages (Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Syriac) and various vernaculars and koinés (too numerous to list) in constant and dynamic contact, whether through war and conquest, exploitation and slavery, trade and pilgrimage, migration and diplomacy, and other types of movement and contact that shape agricultural, economic, political, religious, literary, and artistic practices.
Mediterranean studies has been dominated by classicists (including archaeologists and anthropologists) and historians of the medieval and early modern periods. Ancient archaeology and anthropology were quicker to respond to Horden and Purcell’s challenge than literary scholarship, a field mostly organized into departments of national languages whose practitioners are trained to focus on a single language and national tradition (Akbari, “Persistence” 4-5). Literary scholars have come late to the party, and so Mediterranean Literature is only now emerging as a category, thanks to the efforts of Sharon Kinoshita, Karla Mallette, Suzanne Akbari, and others.* Nearly all of these scholars work in departments of national literatures, but build on the work of Horden and Purcell and others in order to privilege the Mediterranean context of the traditions they study and their connections to authors, works, and practices normally studied in connection to other, national literatures.° This approach is a natural fit for someone who works, for example, on medieval classical languages that were used throughout the region, or the literary practice of Mediterranean religious traditions.°
Part of the difficulty in mobilizing literary scholars to adopt a Mediterranean approach is overcoming not only the institutional cultures of departments of national languages and literatures, but also the sheer linguistic complexity of the region. Again, the legacy of national philology pushes anything that does not support a national linguistic narrative to the margins. The Mediterranean, a space of connectivity and contact across languages, religions, and ethnic cultures, produced literary and linguistic practices, such as aljamiado (Iberian Romance written in Arabic or Hebrew script) that are “puzzling curiosities to modern eyes but were in fact unexceptional in the multilingual, multi-confessional landscape of the medieval Mediterranean” (Kinoshita, “Mediterranean Literature” 315).
The resulting kaleidoscope of medieval Mediterranean literary and linguistic practice, though fascinating and ripe with literary critical possibility, is daunting: who can learn all those languages? Maria Rosa Menocal, writing about the Iberian question, tells us that translations are “vital” in studying Mediterranean literature.’ Her suggestion goes very much against the grain of national philologies’ role as guardian of linguistic boundaries: think of the work that goes into enforcing the distinction between “language” and “dialect.”
However, in many cases here the ideologies that guide national philologies do not bear close scrutiny. Take for example, Kinoshita’s observation that epic poems such as the Poem of the Cid or the Song of Roland, canonized in modernity as foundational national works, have a manuscript record that is very poor in comparison with that of works of wisdom literature in translation from Eastern traditions such as Kalila and Dimna or Sendebar. She writes: “versions of wisdom literature like the Seven Sages survive in the dozens, while the Poem of the Cid or the Song of Roland come down to us in a single exemplar” (“Negotiating” 35-6).
What, then, does Mediterranean studies have to offer to literary criticism? As critics such as Suzanne Akbari, Sharon Kinoshita (“Medieval Mediterranean Literature”; “Mediterranean Literature”; “Negotiating”), Karla Mallette (Sicily; “Boustrophedon”; “Lingua Franca”), Michelle Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Fernandez have written, reading the literature of the Mediterranean region as Mediterranean Literature can be a corrective to the parochialism of national philologies. I have written elsewhere in favour of a multilingual and multiconfessional approach to medieval Iberian literature, arguing that it might help to get us closer to how medieval Iberians experienced the literary practice of their own time and place, rather than persist in some of the habits we have learned from national philology that make this less likely (Framing Iberia 11).
Kinoshita expands this argument for the corpus of Mediterranean literature as a whole. According to her, this approach “expands the limits of our textual world and provides us with a repertoire of different questions that bespeak the connectivity ... of the medieval Mediterranean, getting us (I would like to think) closer to the mentalities of the cultures and agents that produced the texts we read” (“Negotiating” 46). This is my goal in the studies that follow this introduction: to read Iberian literature as a Mediterranean cultural practice that is shaped by the geography and culture of the region (“of the Mediterranean”), and that demonstrates how Iberian writers and audiences imagined the Mediterranean world in which they lived.
This is certainly not the first effort to study medieval Iberian cultural production in the Mediterranean context. A number of studies and especially collections of essays have brought together scholars focusing on different aspects of Spain or the Iberian Peninsula in the Mediterranean context.® The cultures of the Iberian Peninsula are very much both in and of the Iberian. Antiquity connected Iberia with metropoles in Phoenicia, Rome, Byzantium, and Africa. Medieval Iberian monarchs ruled over territories across the Mediterranean: the Balaerics, Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and southern Italy, parts of the Maghrib, Ifriqiyya, and Greece had outposts in ports across the Islamic Mediterranean, and claimed (successfully, or not) authority over north Africa and the then-ephemeral kingdom of Jerusalem. Members of their court and aristocracy sojourned or settled permanently in many of these places. Trade, especially the ports of Barcelona, Palma, Valencia, and Malaga, but historically Almeria and Cartagena as well, connected Iberian populations and markets with all points of the Mediterranean.
There is a lot about medieval Iberian culture that fits with this approach: the coexistence of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, of Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Ibero-Romance vernaculars, of the routes of material culture, human migration, and ideas for which the Iberian ports were important sites, and for the various migrations and imperialisms (Phoenician, Celtic, Roman, Jewish, Carthaginian, Visigothic, Islamic, Andalusi, Sephardic, Castilian) that shaped medieval Iberian society and that Iberian kingdoms sought to shape (Africa, eastern Mediterranean). For this reason, Akbari has called Iberia “a Mediterranean in microcosm, a polity and a history unimaginable without the broader backdrop of Mediterranean history” (“Persistence” 10).
Recent work by scholars across a number of disciplines responds to this approach to Iberia in the Mediterranean context. Many such studies focus on the Crown of Aragon, whose historical footprint in the Mediterranean is vast and better documented in the Archives of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona than those of Granada, Castile, or the other medieval kingdoms of the Peninsula.’
Literary scholars have only recently begun to take up the challenge of theorizing a Mediterranean literature of Iberia. A number of those brought together in the pioneering 2015 volume edited by Michelle M. Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Fernandez, In and of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies are explicit in addressing Iberian literature as both in and of the Mediterranean region; others work independently on topics such as the representation of Byzantium by medieval Iberian travellers (Bravo Garcia), the Holy Land in the work of Catalan troubadours (Paterson), and descriptions of eastern cities by Iberian travellers (Rodilla Leén, “Laudibus Urbium”). By and large, as Akbari points out, scholars of Iberian literature “have not responded coherently, however, to the fundamental provocation of Mediterranean Studies to work beyond the category of the modern nation, to see local microhistories and the macrohistory of the sea in indissoluble and essential continuity” (Akbari, “Persistence” 10).
This broader Mediterranean context provides a more capacious context for Iberian crusade fiction, and especially for its relationship with the geopolitical historical processes of the region. Crusade is part of a larger and longer story of migration, trade, and conquest linking the Iberian Peninsula to broader Mediterranean, and the crusader imaginary (on which see below, note 10) draws on these historical connections, reaching back to biblical, Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic storyworlds, or other literary representations of the Mediterranean world. It produced a literary culture that is still poorly understood outside of the context of French national literature (Akbari, “Persistence” 6).
With this book then, I am hoping to continue the work of thinking about the literatures of Iberia in the Mediterranean context. As Michelle Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Fernandez state in the introduction to In and of the Mediterranean, “Spain is indeed part of Europe, but it is also part of the Mediterranean and seeing it as such provides us with an opportunity to appreciate the Peninsula’s connections, not only with Africa, but also with the Middle East” (xii), and we may include the eastern crusades as an important (but not the only) part of this engagement with the Levant. The idea of crusade, as a French idea that gave rise to Iberian, north African, and Levantine campaigns, was very much a Mediterranean phenomenon. This study aims to explore the ways in which Iberian authors imagined their role in the culture of crusade, both as participants in the realities of crusades both Iberian and in the Levant as well as Iberian interpreters of narrative traditions of the crusading world from north of the Pyrenees.
In the rest of this introduction, I will provide an overview of the crusade culture of Iberia, and how the idea of crusade was reflected and constructed by preachers of crusade, papal bulls, chronicles, and poetry. The chapters that follow discuss some case studies of texts written from the twelfth to the fifteenth century in a variety of Iberian languages: Arabic, Castilian, Catalan, and Valencian.
Chapter 1 is a study of the only known Arabic chivalric romance from the Iberian Peninsula, Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani (ca. 1234). In this text, the author adapts the conventions of the French chivalric romance to the Arabic literary imagination, and projects the literary ideologies of holy war found in French chansons de geste and romances onto an Islamic landscape in which the hero battles against pagan idolaters, converting them to Islam. Ziyad draws on literary traditions from the Arab world and Latin Christendom to address the problem of dynasty building and holy war against the infidel in a fictional world that combines elements of French romance and Arab popular epic.
In chapter 2, I show how the author of the Book of the Knight Zifar (Libro del cavallero Zifar) (ca. 1300), working from both Eastern (Arabic, etc.) and French models of knightly and saintly adventure, imagines a Christian East in ways that speak directly to the contemporary politics of Iberian conquest of al-Andalus and the appropriation of the Andalusi intellectual tradition. Zifar takes place in a semi-fictionalized East that recalls both Christian hagiography and Arab geography, and draws on Eastern wisdom literature while performing Arab learning in a gesture of Castilian proto-colonialism.
Chapter 3 is a study of Ramon Llull’s Blaquerna (late thirteenth century), the story of a Christian friar whose path to spiritual perfection takes the shape of a knightly romance. Just as the knight errant goes from one military challenge to the next, all the while gaining in power and prestige, the hero of Blaquerna ascends the spiritual ladder from monk to papacy, all the while pursuing his goal of converting the infidel. Llull’s canvas is the Mediterranean, and his novel is a fictional workshop for the author’s ideas of mass conversion of Muslims and Jews that distinguishes the Iberian conquest of al-Andalus from the crusades to the Holy Land.
Chapter 4 addresses the blurred boundaries between fiction and historical narrative in a study of The Chronicle of Flores and Blancaflor (Cronica de Flores y Blancaflor), a romance of conversion in which the Muslim king of Almeria (Spain) marries a Christian woman (whose mother is French) and converts his entire kingdom to Christianity. The text performs the twin functions of providing an alternate history in which al-Andalus is conquered by conversion rather than by military force, at the same time creating an Andalusi Christian ancestry for Charlemagne. The story of Flores and Blancaflor is very much both in and of the Mediterranean, as the action ranges from France to Iberia to the Levant and back again, and draws on the Byzantine novel for inspiration.
The fifth and final chapter deals with the novel Tirant the White Knight (Tirant lo Blanch) (1490), in which the author melds the world of the Arthurian romance with the history of Aragonese expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. I argue that Tirant projects contemporary anxieties over the loss of Aragonese territories to Ottoman expansion in the eastern Mediterranean, and imagines a fictional Christian “Reconquest” of the former Byzantine capital at a time when Latin Christendom feared Ottoman incursion into the West.
Taken together, these case studies show us how the literature of the times, through the power of fiction, reinforced and promoted the values of a society whose political identity in the Mediterranean region depended on military expansion, holy war, and the conversion and assimilation of religious minorities both at home and abroad.
The crusades transformed European history and inaugurated a complex history of engagement between western Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East whose legacy we still live today. Thousands of Latin Christians took the cross and spent years, sometimes entire lifetimes, establishing colonies in the eastern Mediterranean in the name of religious conquest. Narratives of crusade powerfully shaped European thinking about the East and continue to influence the representation of interaction between religious groups and states in the region.
Imaginative fiction reflected and fuelled the desire to conquer and convert the Muslim other. French and English authors wrote itineraries of the Holy Land, chronicles of the crusades, and fanciful accounts of Christian knights who championed the Latin church in the East. In the Iberian Peninsula, this fiction reflected a desire to recuperate the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim kings who had held large parts of the land since the eighth century.
These texts described and reacted to a reality quite different from that of their French counterparts. While for French knights, the crusades were a far-away adventure in the exotic East, Christian Iberian knights fighting on the border of Christian and Muslim Spain were waging war at home, against an enemy that was so culturally familiar it had become an essential part of their identity. In fact, Castile and Aragon were in a way the European testing ground for crusade: popes offered Western knights remission of their sins for fighting Iberian Muslims even before the First Crusade. These same popes discouraged Christian Iberian knights from fighting in the East, scolding them to instead fight the infidel at home.
These unique circumstances that shaped medieval Iberian history likewise shaped the fictional narratives of the Peninsula. The types of romances and tales of knightly conquest that French authors wrote about the conquests in the East took ona different meaning coming from authors working in the Iberian Peninsula, whose experience with holy war was often a domestic affair and (at least for the Christian authors) part of their cultural identity. This fictional world was an incubator for the culture of conquest that Spain exported to the Americas in the Age of Discovery. The exploits of fictional Christian knights were so real to the conquistadors that the very name “California” is taken directly from the pages of The Adventures of the Very Brave Knight Esplandian (Las sergas de Esplandian), published at the beginning of the sixteenth century (Putnam). This is the literary culture that Cervantes so famously parodied in Don Quijote de la Mancha.
Here we will trace the development of an Iberian culture of crusade, both in terms of papal crusades authorized for Iberian campaigns against Muslim forces as well as the development of ideas and images of crusade in medieval Iberian literature. This introduction will set the stage for our subsequent chapters that focus on fictional narratives by Iberian authors. In this section, I will first give an overview of the crusading movement in Latin Christendom before focusing on the Iberian context. Then I will discuss the reflection of the Iberian crusade imaginary in literature.'’ This will give the reader a sense of how Iberian Christians experienced crusade and how they gave voice to this experience in fiction.
Crusading is a spiritually inspired movement that transformed the shape of the known world during the late Middle Ages. Its aspirations were nothing short of cosmic. On the one hand, it was another series of massive military campaigns by which one group sought to deprive another of resources. But there was something different about the spiritual mission of crusade that set it apart from other campaigns fought in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Its origins in pilgrimage and original focus on securing the Christian holy sites gave it a sacred mission that went further than a simple military action carried out in the name of one god or another: its primary stated motivation was spiritual, not material. Though some crusaders (and certainly some of the war profiteers who sold them goods and services) enriched themselves, they were the exception rather than the norm. Crusading was ultimately not about money; it was a spiritual drama in which a mere human could take part, bearing arms."
For this reason, I believe the themes associated with crusade acquired a special relationship with fictional representation, one in which the spiritual foundation of crusading unlocked writers’ access to the mythic groundwater of medieval narrative practice. As in other forms of religious literature such as scripture, hagiography, and miracle tales, fictions of crusade, conquest, and conversion were in a sense religious literature, in that they gave shape to their authors’ desire to serve God, and to see divine will done on earth. Crusade as an institution is an example of what can happen when we link military action to spiritual conviction. Crusade fiction shows us what happens when we dream about what this linkage can achieve in an idealized world shaped by our imagination.
As we will see in the pages that follow, crusade ideology and action, and the fictions to which it responds, take on a decidedly different shape in Iberia than north of the Pyrenees. This is so for the simple reason that Iberian crusaders (and this term is problematic) did not fight to secure the holy sites in Jerusalem and its environs (and the various way stations between Western Latin Christendom and the Levant) but rather those in their own home territory. This simple reason draws complicated realities in its wake, and this book is dedicated to exploring these realities and their projections onto narrative fictions.
The crusade ideal is one of conquering and holding holy places. It was upheld by institutions through a variety of discourses and genres (homily, theology, hagiography, chronicle, chivalric fiction). Like all ideologies, it was born of and served other political and economic projects. The Western desire to take and hold the holy sites of Christianity in the Levant went hand in glove with economic and social pressures in Western Christendom, especially France, England, and Germany. For the kings who supported it, crusade was a way to ingratiate one’s self with the church, gain popular support, and leave behind an exalted legacy, or even achieve sainthood, as was the case with Louis IX of France and eventually Ferdinand III (canonized in the late seventeenth century) of Castile-Leon. New traditions of militarized sainthood of which the most important examples were the cults of Saints James and Isidore lent historical and traditional support to the emergent cults of crusader kings such as Louis and Ferdinand.
On the Peninsula, there is no holy place per se to be recovered, no Jerusalem. In order for military conflict against Muslim rulers to qualify as holy war (and therefore just war), the territories of al-Andalus would have to be sacralized in some way, with Toledo as a new Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela as a new Rome.” During the reign of Alfonso III of Asturias (r. 866-910), the staged “discoveries” of the sepulchre of St James in Galicia, along with the Holy Ark of Oviedo containing a major collection of relics of Jesus Christ helped to establish the Iberian Peninsula as sacred territory. As we will discuss below, the doctrine of iter per Hispaniam, or the Iberian route to Jerusalem, linked the Peninsula to Eastern crusade. The sacred economy of relics supported the ideology of crusade and created a new extraction economy by which Western knights removed relics from the East to strengthen the Latin church. The Western Pilgrimage to Santiago, established in part due to the decreased accessibility of Jerusalem once the Levant passed from Byzantine to Muslim control, became the most important pilgrimage route in the west after Rome, and a far more secure undertaking than making the hazardous trip to Muslim Palestine.’ Eastern relics, such as the cache “discovered” in Oviedo, and the very body of St James himself, provided the spiritual economic currency that made this western movement possible." In this sense, crusade was not only about securing the holy sites of the East, but just as much became about enriching the west with the relics “recuperated” from Byzantine schismatics or, in the Levant, safeguarding them from the reach of Islam.°
Crusade in Iberia: An Overview
This sacralization of the land legitimates the doctrine of holy war against al-Andalus, and the Iberian Peninsula becomes, by analogy, a new holy land. That is, Iberia did not become a new holy land because of the importance of the pilgrimage route to Santiago, and even if this were so there would have been no such justification possible for the conquest of the south of the Peninsula, once the northern territories, through which the road of St James passed, were secured. The sacralization of Iberia was the product of the extension of crusade ideology and papal bulls of crusade to include military conflict in Iberia (and later north Africa).'°
This culture of domestic crusade shaped ecclesiastic and royal discourses and in turn inspired courtly and other writers to map the Iberian crusade imaginary onto original works of fiction. Together with royal and church chroniclers, medieval Iberian writers shaped the way Christian Iberians understood their place in the world. This self-image in turn shaped political and ecclesiastic institutions and policy, and would eventually give rise to the creation of the Spanish Inquisition and the grand purification campaign of the Catholic Monarchs, their crucible of empire.
The dominant ideologies and narratives that shaped the Iberian crusade imaginary came from the north, from countries that were geographically and culturally distant from Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. While technically the doctrine of crusade actually obtained first in the Iberian conflicts with Islam and only later to the French project in the East, the culture of eastern crusade was essentially French. French nobles, and later the king himself, organized the crusades, and much of the religious leadership of the crusades was likewise French.'”
The institutions, practices, and representations developed by the French leadership of the crusades took on different forms in the Iberian Peninsula, where the frontier with Islam created historical conditions unique to Western Christendom (with the possible exception of Hungary). Ideology of crusade, preached throughout Western Christendom, took root in the Iberian Peninsula in the service of the local struggle with al-Andalus, a political struggle sometimes clothed in religious discourse, but in reality little different from the political conflicts between Christian kingdoms that obtained in parts of Western Christendom where Islam had not arrived."
Papal bulls of crusade fuelled this discourse, linking military service to remission of sins and adding institutional prestige to the economic and social benefits of (successful) military campaigns in the Iberian Peninsula against Muslim rulers. Popes promulgated the first bulls of crusade for campaigns against al-Andalus. This intervention coincided perfectly with the institutional invasion of Cluny, who brought the Roman rite, and stacked the Spanish church with high-level officials from France, who transformed Spanish ecclesiastic and religious culture at a formative time in Christian Iberian history."”
Despite the very clear crusading directives coming from Rome over the years, for the most part the royal and seigneurial chronicles are low-key in their anti-Muslim or crusading discourse. They tend to link crusading discourse with royal/noble power. Their authors were concerned with legitimizing the political power of the houses for whom they wrote. However, the more fictional or novelized the text, the more fanciful and intense the representations of crusading themes and the discourse in which they were couched. This is probably because the French models, written during the first flush of fiery crusade discourse, were less familiar with the culture they sought to dominate, and so were freer to fantasize and present more extreme versions of the conflict. Their Iberian imitators were even freer, as they were at a greater historical distance and a greater ideological remove from the French authors whose texts they adapted. Their heroes were further fictionalized, their settings even more removed from history, even when they were set in “Spain,” as they sometimes were. This intimacy did not breed contempt, but rather a measure of mutual respect, and above all, less extreme rhetoric, at least until the epoch of the Catholic Monarchs. Like the Roman rite, like the bulls of crusade that stoked the crusade imaginary with tax breaks and depositor’s insurance, the business of crusade was an import that Iberian authors deployed through their own experiential and interpretive lenses.
The Role of Conversion
Spanish imperial expansion both on the Peninsula, in the Mediterranean, and eventually in the New World rested upon a political and theological base predicated on the recuperation of holy sites for Western Christianity and on the Christian obligation to save the unconverted. By this logic, Muslim polities on Iberian (and African) soil threatened the shrine of St James in Santiago de Compostela and the relics in Seville and Toledo and were as such fair game for holy war. Schismatic Byzantines and pagan Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean likewise were targets. This crusading logic eventually extended to the indigenous populations of the New World, who did not threaten Christian holy sites but who required conversion for the good of their own souls, and whose leaders, hostile to the project of conversion, were likewise hostile to Christianity and therefore legitimate targets for holy war (Benito Rodriguez). However, the military conquest of al-Andalus was only one part of Christian expansion, which included, to varying extents, the conversion of the Jews and Muslims living in lands conquered by Christian Iberian kings.
While conversion of Muslims was never a significant part of the crusading project in the East, relatively early on in the Iberian campaigns Rome became interested in missionizing newly subject Iberian Muslims. In 1074 Pope Gregory VII and the abbot of Cluny sent a missionary friar to preach in Christian Iberia. Some fifteen years later, Pope Urban II advocated for the conversion of Iberian Muslims newly subjected to Christian rule.”” In the 1170s Cardinal Alberto Morra (the future Pope Gregory VIII) requested that the Order of Santiago emend its rule to include missionary work as part of their activities, thus emphasizing the clerical function of the crusading order (Kedar, Crusade 45-8, 60).
We usually understand the verb “to convert” as intransitive, as a something that one does for or to one’s own self. In the context of crusade I think it is more accurate to think of it as a transitive verb, as something done to another. When the political and economic conditions of the unconverted are far inferior to those of the converted, it is difficult to maintain that conversion is a choice made freely or a choice made exclusively for spiritual reasons. When one is subjected to constant pressure and harassment as a member of a minority religion, conversion is an instrument of control and dominance rather than a spiritual choice.
Christian Iberia was long preoccupied with the conversion of its Jews and Muslims. Even the policies most favourable (or least prejudicial) toward Jews and Muslims allowed for and encouraged their proselytization.” In the later Middle Ages it was common for Christian kings to enforce mandatory attendance of Jews and/or Muslims to proselytic sermons. Other policies supported the proselytic activities of preaching friars in Christian kingdoms and abroad. Long before Columbus set sail, Iberia, partly owing to its multiconfessional population, was a laboratory of militant proselytism. It is no accident that one of the most renowned saints of the late Middle Ages in Iberia was St Vincent Ferrer, a brilliant firebrand Dominican friar who is credited with the conversion of thousands of Jews and Muslims and who was indirectly responsible for a series of violent episodes in which his preaching whipped the crowd into an antisemitic frenzy. His motto: “baptism or death” (Daileader 107).
From the twelfth to fifteenth centuries a number of clerics formulated theories, practical manuals, and personal narratives of conversion, all with the ultimate end of bringing together all Iberians (and African residents of greater Iberia) under the cross. A small industry of Islamic and Judaic studies emerged, and Catholic priests laboured to learn Arabic and Hebrew, and develop what understanding they could manage of Islam and Judaism, in order to convert Muslims and Jews (Chazan, Daggers and Barcelona; Hames; Tolan, Saracens 171-274; Daileader 102-36). Indeed, one of the reasons that Spain led Europe in Hebrew and Arabic studies was to train its clerics to speak and read the languages of potential converts, who in theory would be more inclined to listen to sermons (albeit at swordpoint) that referred to their own holy books and traditions, even disparagingly so.
Neither were the proselytic ambitions of Iberian preaching friars limited to the Peninsula itself. The culture of conversion that served Castilian and Aragonese expansion on the Peninsula by preaching to Jews and Muslims who lived in those lands conquered from al-Andalus developed ambitions beyond the Peninsula. Once the balance of power on the Peninsula had tipped decisively in favour of the Christian kindgoms, Castilian and Aragonese monarchs set their sights farther abroad, to Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. While these new territories promised greater political, military, and commercial reach for Christian Iberian kings, the Muslims and Jews who populated them were all potential new Christians. King Alfonso X of Castile-Leon (r. 1252-84) launched a series of sorties to the north African coast in the late thirteenth century. Jaume II of Aragon (r. 1291-1327) likewise had designs on north Africa, and in 1291 negotiated a treaty with Alfonso X to equitably divide the north African coast between the two Christian kingdoms.”
The Ideology and Discourse of Crusade
The eleventh century witnessed a series of reforms in the religious life of Western Latinity (Logan 105-30). This movement began with the religious orders, who were exhorted to take up stricter interpretations and practice of the Rule of St Benedict, and also by the establishment of hundreds of new churches and monasteries throughout the empire. The French monastery of Cluny spearheaded the movement and provided it with leadership and a steady supply of monks to populate the new Cluniac communities that sprouted up across the empire, seemingly overnight (at least in medieval terms). Pope Gregory VII (1072-82) was tireless in his efforts to reform the church during this period, and invited to the papal court the talented and energetic Cluniac monk Odo of Lagery, who would later become Pope Urban II in 1088 (Claster 27-33). Urban unveiled his campaign to preach what would become known as the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont (1095), where he first communicated a simple idea that would change the course of history: fighting for the church can earn you remission of sins.” Innocent III would later expand this call to arms to include not just knights and clergy, but all Christians regardless of station.”
William Purkis stresses that the “individual religious experience” is key in understanding the reality of broader religious reform outside the cloister (Crusading 1). His approach is especially important for the study of fiction, produced largely outside the cloister and at a remove (in many cases) from religious life. D.A. Trotter points out in his study of crusade literature that many of the authors of crusade narratives were either themselves crusaders or close relations of those who took the cross (111).
Purkis argues that Templars were far more influenced by eleventh-century religious reformers, principally by Bernard of Clairvaux, than is commonly reflected in modern scholarship. In particular, crusader ideology, together with the discourse of pilgrimage to Jerusalem from which it grew, is really more about Bernard’s thought on imitatio Christi than about just war (Crusading 1-4). At the end of the eleventh century, the perception that Benedictine monasticism had become corrupt spurred church reformers to expand the definition of the life religious to include different forms of practice, including crusading. One theological innovation that came from this atmosphere was the idea that certain types of violence could bring salvation to the faithful. This simple idea signalled the transfer of pilgrimage rhetoric to the enterprise of crusade, attracting both lay and religious to the cause of holy war (Purkis, Crusading 11-21). Pope Urban II, in his now famous speech to the Council of Clermont, is credited with the distillation of this rhetoric into the emblematic badge of the cross worn by crusaders and pilgrims alike. According to Robert of Rheims, Urban encouraged whomever wished to go on crusade to “display the sign of the cross of the Lord on his front or on his chest. When, truly, he wishes to return from there having fulfilled his vow, let him place the cross between his shoulders.”” The faithful eagerly obeyed, and eyewitness accounts of the First Crusade provide ample testimony to the various ways in which pilgrims and crusaders put Urban’s symbol, and the associated ritual, into practice. Those crusaders regarded as especially pious by chroniclers or by their peers often displayed stigmata in the form of the cross, sometimes located in the same place on the body where the badge was worn.”
Churchmen and crusaders likewise transferred other rhetorical and visual features of imitatio Christi onto their understanding of and accounts of the crusading experience. Ecclesiastical writers focused on the material sacrifices crusaders made in preparation for expedition, comparing it to that required by Jesus of his followers.” In some cases the crusades were framed as a via apostolica, imagining the crusaders as followers of Christ who left everything behind to back his spiritual mission. Other tropes drawn from traditional descriptions of the primitive church made their way into crusading discourse. Writers often described the crusaders’ unity of purpose, comparing it to that of the Apostles acting unanimiter (with one will).** By extension, Pope Urban II leveraged this idea to demonstrate support for those crusaders not willing to take full vows, pointing out in an influential letter that crusading was even more similar to the practice of the earliest Christians than that of fully professed members of monastic orders.”
The liberation of Jerusalem in the First Crusade (1099) brought about a number of significant effects. The first of these was a marked increase in pilgrimage, which was often taken under the rubric of the cross as Urban II had established. The crusaders, then, had a profound influence on the culture of pilgrimage, not only in securing the pilgrimage sites and making the journey far easier than it had been when Jerusalem was in Muslim hands, but also in establishing a visual and ideological framework for the act of pilgrimage. The liberation of Jerusalem and the activity of the crusaders in the East also created an active market for relics, both by affording many more Western Latins direct contact with relics in the Holy Land and by creating a demand for souvenir relics for churches back in the West. The ideology of the sanctification of the Holy Land itself, which essentially rendered the Holy Land a relic in its own right, was therefore applied to Western Latin Christendom through the medium of relics, as the holiness of the Holy Land was mapped onto or overlaid upon the Latin West.
What advantage did increased pilgrimage serve for the Christian West? In both the First and Second Crusades, including the intermediary expeditions between them, the imitatio Christi fuelling the mission extends to martyrdom for those who die on crusade (Purkis, Crusading 81). In Iberia we see Don Juan Manuel echo this idea in the mid-fourteenth century.”
However, when Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) preaches the Second Crusade, he breaks with this trend. In his letters, he does not speak of the crusade as a pilgrimage or an imitatio Christi as pointedly as his predecessors who preached the First and intermediary expeditions of 1095-1114. For Bernard, crusaders were coming to the aid of a besieged Jerusalem, and by association with the relics of Christ housed both there and in Byzantium, to the aid of Christ himself. He tempered this image by framing the enterprise as an opportunity to earn God’s mercy, lest the would-be crusader imagine himself as coming to the aid of an all-powerful God, an idea that flirted with blasphemy.”!
As opposed to Urban’s emphasis on the cross as symbol of signum mortificationis, for Bernard the cross was “symbolic of the crusade indulgence, the unique gift that God was offering to those who responded to the perilous situation he had contrived to bring about in the East” (Purkis, Crusading 92). This is a further step in the development of the political economy of crusade, by which military service, modelled even as it was on pilgrimage, is exchanged for institutional, not simply personal, spiritual credit. This commodification of crusade activity was achieved by de-coupling it from the pilgrimage to Jerusalem undertaken in the spiritu of imitatio Christi. The need to re-allocate crusading fighters to other theatres (Iberia, the Baltics) led Pope Eugenius III to assure those knights taking up arms in Iberia and the Baltics that they would enjoy the same spiritual benefits as those who took up the cross to Jerusalem. Bernard followed suit, preaching holy war against the enemies of Christendom, no matter where in the world they should happen to appear.”
Bernard’s crusading rhetoric de-emphasized (in most aspects) the idea of crusade as imitatio Christi so prevalent in Urban’s rhetoric in preaching the First Crusade. Rather, Bernard reserved this concept for fully professed religious who had committed their entire lives to the church, while he saw the crusaders’ commitment as merely temporary (Purkis, Crusading 117). Bernard did, however, make one important contribution to the theology of crusade: the idea that crusaders who died in battle were Christian martyrs who died a mors sacra.’
Urban Preaching the First Crusade
While it is a fact that the First Crusade was a response to the Byzantine call for aid against the Seljuk Turks, received in the form of a letter in 1095, other factors were at least as important in Urban’s approach to preaching the First Crusade.™ Since the pacification of Hungary and to a lesser extent the Balkans, Latin pilgrimage to Jerusalem was on the rise. Christian reformers in the eleventh century were “obsessed” by Jerusalem, and images of the Holy City as the site of man’s redemption and eventual doomsday venue reinforced its importance for every Christian and the urgency for Latins to rush to its defence (Riley-Smith, First Crusade 21). Already by 1095 the discourse of just war against Islam was old hat for Urban, who had described numerous campaigns in Spain, Italy, and the Balkans in these terms. The concept of holy war against Islam was hardly bespoke for the eastern campaign and had a long history of development in Christian thought.” Urban had been quite clear in framing Christian Iberia’s struggle with Andalusi and Almoravid Muslim states in terms of the defence of Christianity, and the current mania for pilgrimage made it easy to expand this concept eastward. In fact, Urban was already more sophisticated in his theological and rhetorical approach of the concept of holy war than his predecessors, benefitting from the theoretical studies of his fellow reformers on the subject. He combined this intellectual approach with aggressive infrastructure building in newly conquered al-Andalus, establishing bishoprics and privileges in a concerted effort to colonize and stabilize the Iberian lands newly annexed to Christendom.*°
It is important, however, to remember that the sources dating from after the liberation of Jerusalem in 1099 are far more strident and triumphalist than were Urban’s actual words in 1095-6 when he travelled through France preaching the First Crusade. Jonathan Riley-Smith points out that historians’ reliance on these after-the-fact accounts has distorted somewhat our understanding of Urban’s preaching, but for a student of fictionality these distortions are simply grist for the mill.
Urban’s greatest innovation, aside from the badge of the cross, was to extend church protection to the property and families of the crusaders and simultaneously to extend the control of the church over the crusaders themselves. This safeguarded the estates of those who went east, and combined with the full remission of sins guaranteed for undertaking the journey, served as a powerful motivator for knights to literally drop everything and embark on a very risky, unpleasant journey for the sake of a religious ideal. In particular, the fact that crusaders were treated as pilgrims and made to take a vow — which technically made them temporary ecclesiastics — brought them under the authority of the church, with the result that the authority of the papacy now extended directly not only to the souls, but also to the persons and estates of all those who took the cross (Riley-Smith, First Crusade 23). These conditions had the secondary effect of promoting stability and peace in the home territories of those who went to Jerusalem. Many knights, as part of their penance, dropped conflictive claims on lands and privileges that had long promoted local violence in return for cash to fund their journey eastward. This served the dual function of fundraising and increasing the penitential function of crusade to promote peace at home (Riley-Smith, First Crusade 37).
For the crusaders, at least according to the chronicles of the First Crusade, an air of holiness and epic mode infused the project of the First Crusade. The land itself, after all, was holy both by canon law as having once been ruled by Byzantine Christian kings, but more importantly on the affective plane by virtue of Christ’s presence and the presence of his relics that remained in the Holy Land. A series of visitations, particularly of saints associated with the East and miraculous discoveries of relics punctuated the Latins’ stay in the Holy Land, reinforcing their claims that their entire enterprise was blessed (Riley-Smith, First Crusade 105). In this atmosphere, they began to experience the mundane and the coincidental as miraculous. To them, “the enterprise was as miraculous as any Old Testament epic” (Riley-Smith, First Crusade 99). This sense of the biblical proportions of their role in history was, in the retelling, conflated with epic accounts of the deeds of Charlemagne, a direct ancestor of a number among the crusade leadership. The biographer of Tancred wrote that Baldwin, a descendent of Charlemagne, sat on the very throne of David as king of Jerusalem, and in describing the battle of Dorylaeum, proclaimed that “Roland and Oliver, the heroes of the song of Roland, were reborn.”
The exceptional nature of the project in its historical, political, and spiritual dimensions produced an unprecedented outpouring of historical writing. The first wave of narratives was written by eyewitnesses, many of them knights, who wrote shortly after the liberation of Jerusalem. Then a second wave of monastic writers took it in hand to produce more learned, theologically inclined versions of events, basing themselves on the earlier eyewitness reports but bringing the version of record more in line with monastic spirituality, theology, and proper Latin.** These historians refined the popular theology of crusade forged by the lay and religious participants in the expedition, grounding the miraculous and the spiritual in authorities and in established doctrinal traditions. They developed the eyewitness’s sense of participating in providential history with authoritative hermeneutics and intertextuality, equating with full documentation the exploits of the crusaders with that of the invading armies of the Hebrews in biblical times. Guibert of Nogent placed the crusade above even “the divinely authorized wars of the Israelites described in the Old Testament” (Riley-Smith, First Crusade 141). Robert of Flanders placed the Mosaic victory hymn sung by the Israelites after the destruction of the Egyptian armies in the Red Sea into the mouths of the victorious crusaders after the Battle of Dorylaeum.”
This narrative consciousness involved the actions of nobles and royals, who were very much preoccupied with the legacy they would leave. Public orations, heraldry, and writings all contributed to this effort. This tendency is hilariously parodied in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, in which Sir Robin is accompanied by a bard who narrates his (cowardly) exploits in real time. However, it is one of the engines of the crusade imaginary — linked, to some extent, to that of churchmen and royal historians.
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the culture of Latin Christendom was deeply involved with the eastern crusades. The success of the First Crusade was never matched, leaving the Latins in a perpetual state of hope and frustration. The cycles of epic poems (gestes) celebrating the eastern campaigns were propaganda meant to generate support for subsequent campaigns. This corpus, like the matiéres of Rome, France, and Britain so rubricated by literary scholars, could stand alone as a fourth matiére d’Outremer.”°
The fusion of mythological and historical material in accounts of the First Crusade lent them a cosmic tone. English historians such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bede, and Nenio pioneered this fusion of the historical and the mythical. All of these writers synthesized local mythology with biblical, classical, and historical material, as José Manuel Querol Sanz writes, “elevating them to the category of Historia.”*'
Historical texts that blend myth, folklore, and historical events are showing us a process of change from one type of discourse to another: from mythic to logical, from oral to literary; they provide a substrate to history that, again in the words of Querol Sanz, “may appear to distort events but enriches our understanding of the world from which we spring.”“’ Once mythic material has passed through a process of Christianization, he adds, it can enter into historical consciousness (Cruzadas y literatura 21-2). This was particularly true in the examples of mythic material inserted into crusade chronicles.
The Culture of Crusade in Iberia
How did conditions differ on the Iberian Peninsula and what is distinctive about Iberian discourses of crusade? The most obvious difference is that Christian Iberian kingdoms shared a border with Islam and as such might be considered sites of holy war. However, the more important difference for local discourses of crusade was that Christian Iberian kingdoms were home to significant populations of Muslims and Jews. The struggle to convert Iberia’s Muslims and Jews was what distinguished local discourses of crusade from those elsewhere in Latin Christendom.”
Due to the fact that the Iberian Peninsula was and continued to be part of the Islamic world, Iberian Christianity was very much steeped in crusade tradition. The patron saint of Spain, James, is nicknamed Santiago Matamoros (St James the Moor-killer). In Iberia, the whole idea of being a Christian was predicated on struggle with Islam, far more so than elsewhere in Western Latinity.“* Christian Iberian kings took the cross in public ceremonies that no doubt were culturally influential. Joseph O'Callaghan writes that a series of kings took the cross before embarking on campaigns: they include Alfonso IX (1220) Ferdinand III (1224), Jaume I before his Majorcan campaign, Infante Alfonso de Molina, brother of Ferdinand III (1275 and 1267), and Alfonso X before embarking on his African campaign (1254) (O’Callaghan, Reconquest 122).
Symbols and heraldry were also important indicators of crusade culture and of the blending of spiritual and martial efforts. Chroniclers of the times such as Gil de Zamora express the divine investment in crusade, describing apparitions of the Virgin Mary, Santiago, and Isidore on the battlefield.” Crusader kings such as Ferdinand III carried the cross into battle and incorporated crusading mottoes and war cries into their martial practice.*° Crusaders enacted their intentions by a series of ritual preparations for battle, including prayer, confession, listening to sermons, adoring the cross, and other para-liturgical practices prescribed by theologians of crusade (Rodriguez Garcia 171-2).
Christian Conquest of al-Andalus and Crusade
Though the term “Reconquista” is a product of nineteenth-century historiography, the idea it represents is attested in Christian sources as early as the ninth century. It is not until the late eleventh century, or well into the twelfth century, according to Richard Fletcher (Catapult 296), and at the dawn of the First Crusade, that sources explicitly associate it with holy war.’ A number of social and political factors brought about this transformation, most of them emanations of foreign institutions. They included the presence of foreign military orders in Iberia, the need to protect the pilgrimage route to Santiago, the increasing influence of French religious orders such as Cluny and Cister, and the intermarriage of Iberian royals with their counterparts across the Pyrenees. Theologically, however, it was the papal imprimatur that made holy war possible in Iberia. First Pope Alexander II (1062-73) established the Christian campaigns in al-Andalus as crusades on a par with (although, it is worth pointing out, predating) those in the Levant, earning participants remission of sins and relief from penance. By 1089 Urban II declared Iberia a second front on the war against Islam, in which military service earned one the same spiritual benefits as the war in Jerusalem (O’Callaghan, Reconquest 24-6, 31)."°
By the second half of the thirteenth century, Muslim states were no longer a serious military threat, and the Muslim kings of Granada, Niebla, and Murcia had all accepted their status as tributary states of Castile-Leon, now the only Christian kingdom to maintain a frontier with Islam. However, north Africa was still a threat and an object of colonial speculation, and Castile’s campaigns in coastal al-Andalus had more to do with protecting the Peninsula from African invasion than with the elimination of political Islam. These campaigns also conveniently served the additional purpose of providing Ferdinand ITI with a beachhead in north Africa from which to stage an eastern crusade along the “southern route” that had been used to justify military action against Islam in the Peninsula since at least the mid-twelfth century. Ferdinand proposed to “take up the cross” and achieve what Louis IX had failed to do in his ill-fated 1250 crusade to Egypt (O’Callaghan, Gibraltar 6-7).
Ferdinand’s son Alfonso X continued these designs on north Africa in a series of campaigns during his reign (1252-84) that were undercut by domestic conflict and Alfonso’s aspirations to the Holy Roman Imperial throne (O’Callaghan, Gibraltar 11). In fact, the ideology of reconquest that justified the Christian conquest of al-Andalus included, in some formulations, all of Africa as well. Joseph O’Callaghan writes that “in his last will [Alfonso X] emphasized that, in ancient time, God intended that all of Africa and all of Spain should belong to his Christian ancestors, but they lost it on account of their sins. His clear intention was to take possession once again.”””
For Latin Christians from north of the Pyrenees whose ancestors had fought in the eastern crusades, after the fall of Acre in 1291, the Iberian frontier was the only crusade left connected to the eastern campaigns. This was a boon to Christian Iberian kings, in that there was no longer any competition for foreign crusaders. For the foreigners, this was no cynical spiritual justification of a local conflict but a “real” crusade, at least on paper. All throughout the fourteenth century we see foreign knights pledging their support to fight “the enemies of the Cross” in Iberia (O’Callaghan, Gibraltar 154-6, 198-201). As had been the case since the mid-eleventh century, papal bulls provided a legal framework, along with spiritual (remission of sins) material (tithes, protection of property), and propagandistic (preaching) support for the campaigns. In some cases these benefits extended beyond the fighters and those who donated to the cause, to include bankers and traders who left off their (illicit) business deals with Muslims and joined the crusade effort (O’Callaghan, Gibraltar 248-9).
If the church wanted every local war against a Muslim state to be a crusade, they would have to pay for it. Many bulls of crusade written for Christian Iberian kings directed the local church to pay the tercia (technically one third of the funds collected by churches) to cover maintenance costs. In other cases, the bull provided the décima, a tenth of total local church income to be diverted to the crusade effort (O’Callaghan, Gibraltar 243-4). This sponsorship, along with the legal framework provided by the bulls, encouraged kings to use the discourse of crusade in conflicts that otherwise had the look of local political struggle, of business as usual.
Military Orders
The Iberian context of crusade and frontier war gave rise to institutions that responded specifically to this context, such as military and religious orders. We have already seen how the Iberian military orders differed in mission and constitution from the Templars and Hospitallers; this specificity also shaped new religious orders. By the thirteenth century there were Iberian religious orders, the Mercedarians and the Trinitarians dedicated to the ransoming and care of captive Christians (Rodriguez Garcia 55). While these functions were once the province of the Templars and Hospitallers who had developed health care and redemptive practices in the East, as with their function as a fighting force in Iberia, their low numbers and decreasing international profile during the waning of the eastern crusades opened the door for local institutions to take over, just as the Order of Calatrava was born out of the Templars’ abandonment of the fortress of that name.
The role of the military orders was quite different on the Peninsula than it was in the rest of Latin Christendom. In most countries, they administered their estates and sent funds to their leadership in the Levant; in Iberia (at first), they defended the home front of a war they were losing despite the help of foreign crusaders (Lomax, Santiago 2). Pious brotherhoods existed in the Peninsula before the founding of the military orders and were the template for their organization. They were responsible for the maintenance of churches, bridges, and urban fortifications. Some cities, like Toledo, had local militias that incorporated religious elements in their practice, which by the middle of the twelfth-century, under influence from foreign military orders, included a creeping sacralization of their military duties (Lomax, Santiago 4).
A final activity of the military orders, and one that might surprise given the crusading ethos they espoused, was diplomacy. The increasing prestige that the orders enjoyed over the course of the thirteenth century made their masters important courtiers and valued advisors and diplomats of the king. Alfonso X, for example, sent the master of Calatrava to negotiate with Granada, just as Pope Honorius IT had sent his predecessor to parlay with the Almohad caliph in 1219 (Rodriguez Garcia 56-7).
Alfonso X struggled to bring the Iberian orders under royal control. He was able to do so in part because of the increasingly aristocratic profile of their leadership, but took anumber of administrative measures to make it so, including moving their leadership closer to the frontier (and further from their ancestral lands), intervening directly in suits involving lands held by the orders that were granted by the crown, and other measures meant to bring the orders and their various activities under royal control. In addition, he limited their mobility, forbidding them from campaigning in the Holy Land, a measure similarly taken by the crown in Aragon and England. The international orders proved more difficult to control, since their members were not closely enmeshed in local networks of political power and their leadership was typically far away north of the Pyrenees (Rodriguez Garcia 59).
The Hospitallers began to establish communities in the Iberian Peninsula in the first quarter of the twelfth century. By the midfourteenth century they had developed significant holdings and political influence in Catalonia, Aragon, Castile, Navarre, and Galicia, and were coming under increasing royal control (Barquero Goni 14-19, 95-6). They waged war on the Peninsula against enemies both Christian and Muslim, cared for the sick and wounded, and provided material support for the crusades in the East, particularly to their cohorts in Rhodes (Barquero Goni 155-76).
The order of Calatrava began as a replacement squad for a band of Templars who had abandoned their post in the fortress some sixty miles south of Toledo. Calatrava was an important stronghold, both strategically (it protected the royal city of Toledo) and symbolically (it protected the historic capital city of the Visigoths only recently reclaimed for the Christians from the Muslim ruler al-Mu‘min). Alfonso VII had appointed a group of Templars to defend the fortress, but these soon realized their numbers were not sufficient to man the post effectively, and they decamped. Sensing an opportunity, Abbott Raymond of the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria de Fitero in Navarre gathered together a group of knights and followers to defend the fortress. In the fashion of the crusading orders, he granted them remission of their sins for defending Calatrava against the Muslims. Eventually, this group adopted a modified form of the rule of Citeaux and became the Order of Calatrava, Iberia’s first indigenous crusading order.’ Calatrava worked hard to establish official affiliation with the Cistercian order, mostly to maintain their tax-exempt status that Citeaux had negotiated with the Vatican (O’Callaghan, Calatrava 6: 71).
Citeaux’s influence in the Peninsula, manifested in their interest in the Order of Calatrava, was not the only such example. Both individuals and institutions from north of the Pyrenees had long been attracted to the spiritual and material possibilities to be had along the southern frontier. While holy war may well have been successful in channelling military aggression eastward and southward, it did not eliminate competition for resources among Christian factions. As is often the case, such competition inspired ethnic tensions. The Mozarab elite of Toledo felt displaced by the foreign Cluniacs invited by Alfonso VI to reform the Spanish church. Resentment of French interference in local affairs continued, and in 1234 Ferdinand III complained to the pope that the French prior of Calatrava’s ignorance of local custom had thrown the Order into “a turmoil” (O’Callaghan, Calatrava 6: 74).
One of the chief differences between Iberian and eastern crusade was that Iberian crusaders were not protecting a pilgrimage site. While St James was most certainly a powerful symbol of Iberian crusade, crusaders were not charged with recuperating his shrine from Islam; neither were there any significant shrines or Christian holy sites under Muslim control in al-Andalus (Conedera 33). The Iberian crusaders were not going to protect a site and a route to a site; they were going to fight Islamic political power in their own country.
French influence was more formative of Iberian crusade ideology than were local politics or religion (Conedera 33). The fact that Iberian knights responded so enthusiastically to Pope Urban II's call to crusade in the East demonstrates that they did not yet have any sense of an urgent crusading mission at home. It was Rome, in fact, that planted this idea in the Iberian imagination, by granting the same indulgences and remission of sins to Iberian knights who fought along the frontier with al-Andalus as to those who took up the cross in the East. The projection of papal priorities and French ideals onto the very different political and cultural landscape of Iberia is what gives us the so-called Iberian crusades, which were not crusades at all, in the sense that they were not wars waged to secure a pilgrimage site; neither could it be argued in any credible way that they were, like the crusades, a form of imitatio Christi. For a time, the conquest of Iberia and north Africa was framed as the pacification of a southern route to Jerusalem. This strategy became obsolete once the discourse of the Christian Iberian campaigns against al-Andalus began to adopt the discourse of crusade more consistently, around the time of the Second Crusade (Conedera 33).
In the meantime, that argument was likely a formality meant to justify the lucrative business of securing southern Mediterranean ports for strategic and trade purposes.
Preaching and Indulgences
Preaching the crusades was originally a recruiting effort but soon morphed into fundraising and proselytic campaigns. Proselytizing was a multifaceted effort, as the church in Iberia was dealing with a number of different populations both Christian and non-Christian. Preaching the crusade, while not unrelated to the task of conversion, tended to be done in sermons and letters, while the most important genre for the work of conversion was the disputation (Rodriguez Garcia 118). Literary works of various genres reinforced the crusading message, including chronicles and epic poems of crusading feats which we will discuss below, such as the Gran Conquista de Ultramar, Cancion de la cruzada albigense, Poema de la conquista de Almeria, and the Poema de Alfonso XI, as well as crusading episodes in more general historiographical works (Crénica latina de los reyes de Castilla) and narrative poems (Poema de Fernin Gondlez) (Rodriguez Garcia 119). To this we might add the several crusading exempla in Don Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor (1335) and in the Recull d’exemples ordenat per alfabet (1450).”!
Interestingly, there is no extant evidence of crusader preaching in Iberia in the thirteenth century. This is not to say that crusade was not promoted, as there is a wealth of other types of evidence that witness the crusade effort, including papal bulls, royal orders, and letters. There are also a number of fourteenth-century manuscripts of crusader sermons dealing with the East that may well have been recycled in the context of the Andalusi frontier (Rodriguez Garcia 138).
Reuse of French propaganda material was common across a number of genres. We have already seen how Iberian preachers and churchmen made liberal use of Latin sermons, exempla, and other texts in promoting crusade in Iberia. Likewise, we see historical examples of crusade, or of other campaigns reimagined as crusades, such as the campaigns of Charlemagne in Spain in the Latin Pseudo-Turpin (Book IV of the Codex Calixtinus), that also circulated in Iberia. Charlemagne’s activity in Iberia is also featured as an example of a crusading king in the 1266 Liber de predicatione sancte Crucis of Humbert of Romans (Rodriguez Garcia 156-7).
While it is true that popes offered indulgences and remission of sins for those knights fighting Islam in Iberia in the late eleventh century, the key concepts of crusade discourse employed by Urban II, Bernard of Clairvaux, and other churchmen preaching crusade in the same period are nearly absent in the Iberian documentation. The ideas of peregrinatio, imitatio Christi, via apostolica, and mors sacra scarcely appear in reference to the Iberian context at this time. The equivalencies drawn between fighting the Turks in Asia and fighting the “Saracens” in Iberia are few and may have rung hollow to French and Iberian knights, who were likely not convinced by papal assurances that their service in Iberia would earn them the same spiritual privileges as those who fought in the east (Purkis, Crusading 123-5; Falque Rey 271).
A letter sent from the patriarch of Jerusalem to first archbishop of Santiago de Compostela Diego Gelmirez (ca. 1069 — ca. 1140) in 1120 only threw this discrepancy into sharper relief. The patriarch begged Gelmirez to send Iberian knights to the aid of besieged Jerusalem: “we implore you with bended knees and with floods of tears to come to help us!” (Purkis, Crusading 130). This new urgency in the East and gathering unpopularity of the theology of Iberian crusade forced a new solution. The conquest of Zaragoza in 1120 by Alfonso I “The Battler” of Aragon (r. 1104-34) and the subsequent expansion into the Ebro valley was the setting from which it emerged and through which service on the Iberian frontier came to be described as a crusade per se. The concept that facilitated this change was associative rather than analogous. Instead of relying on the Iberian frontier as an analogue or equivalent of fighting in Jerusalem, the rhetoric described the Iberian frontier as part of fighting in Jerusalem, arguing that by defeating Islam in Iberian and north Africa, Christian knights were securing an alternative, less dangerous and less demanding route to Jerusalem itself: iter per Hispaniam. This solved the twin problems of diverting resources from the Iberian frontier to the liberation of Jerusalem, as well as the spurious claim that military service in Iberia was somehow equivalent to the pilgrimage-based crusading concept of literally following the footsteps of Jesus.
The cult of St James was the lynchpin of the symbolic program of crusade in Iberia, and the literature of this cult was key in promoting the image of St James as a holy warrior against Islam on the Peninsula. In this way, the same militarization of the Jerusalem pilgrimage that supported the crusades in the East applies to the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The “way of St James” was since its inception meant to shore up Christian populations and stimulate the demographic and economic growth of areas controlled by Christian kings, but only in the twelfth century does James himself come to be represented as a knight in the service of God. Such representations are not unique to Iberia. In fact, chronicles of the First Crusade such as the Gesta Francorum (ca. 1100) represent other patron saints of French religious houses as soldiers of Christ already at the beginning of the twelfth century (Purkis, “Rewriting” 149). However, the cult of St James, already well established by this time, took a decidedly militarizing turn with the popularity of the Liber sancti Jacobi (LSJ, also known as the Codex Calixtinus), a sort of manual for the veneration of St James and pilgrimage to his shrine in Compostela, likely authored by Diego Gelmirez (but attributed spuriously to Pope Callistus II).
The collection of miracles attributed to St James in the LSJ is populated by a majority of knights and men-at-arms, and several of the miracles relate tales of military victory or liberation from captivity by Muslim enemies. James appears in these miracles dressed and armed as a knight, most notably in that of the liberation of Coimbra by Ferdinand of Castile in 1064, in which he appears to St Stephen in military kit, explaining: “I am appearing to you in this way so that you no longer doubt that I am able to fight for God as his champion, that I go before the Christians in the fight against the Saracens, and that I arise as the victor for them” (Purkis, Crusading 147; Whitehill and Prado 175). The same book also linked the militarization of the cult of St James as avatar for Iberian crusade to the quasi-historical precedent of Charlemagne’s Iberian campaigns narrated by Pseudo-Turpin, the earliest and most complete copy of which is included in the LSJ.
Pseudo-Turpin went to great lengths to link Charlemagne’s Iberian campaigns to the First Crusade, and did so by employing the tropes and language of the historians and preachers of the First Crusade in his description of Charlemagne’s campaigns against Iberian Muslims. He writes of Charlemagne’s mission to free the “terra” of St James from “Moabite” oppression, terms very similar to those used by Urban II in preaching the First Cruade. He even shrewdly makes martyrs of Roland and his men who died at Roncesvalles, a scene familiar to Pseudo-Turpin’s readers from the many narrative traditions of Roland’s exploits then circulating in the region (Purkis, Crusading 155-7). In his version, Charlemagne sees the red-cross-shaped crusader stigmata appear on the armour of his men who are destined to die in Roncesvalles, and Pseudo-Turpin borrows language from the account of the First Crusade of Fulcher de Chartres to describe the battle between Charlemagne and the pagans (Purkis, Crusading 159-60). He even goes so far as to attribute the building of the road to Compostela to Charlemagne, explaining that the first Iberian station of prayer on the pilgrimage was the place where Charlemagne stopped and prayed where he had completed his new road to Galicia, and that modern pilgrims of the twelfth century would likewise stop at this place in imitation of Charlemagne (Shaver-Crandell et al. 2: 26-7; Purkis, Crusading 164).
During the period of the Second Crusade, preachers and chroniclers described Iberian campaigns against domestic, Muslim enemies in terms of crusade. However, at this point such campaigns no longer needed to be linked to the Jerusalem pilgrimage in order to be viable as penitential wars. The conquest of the Balearic Islands, fought by joint Pisan-Catalan forces, was essentially a trade war, fought to eliminate the pirate bases in the Balearics that were harassing Pisan trade routes in the western Mediterranean. William Purkis notes that accounts of the campaigns “loosely and inconsistently ... [used] terminology that was related to, or inspired by, crusading” (Crusading 169). Nowhere, however, do these accounts attempt to link the conquest of the Balearics with the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, however, not even via the already-established iter per Hispaniam doctrine that made Iberian crusading part of the Jerusalem pilgrimage/crusade. By the mid-twelfth century Iberian penitential war was already robust enough to stand on its own legs without leaning on the Jerusalem pilgrimage for support (Purkis, Crusading 178).
Chroniclers of the siege of Lisbon, however, undertaken some thirty years later, do attempt to stress the spiritual equivalency of fighting in Iberia with fighting in Jerusalem. Preachers and chroniclers likewise described the siege of Lisbon in terms of crusade, probably as a way of justifying the campaign to crusaders from northern Europe who made the side trip to Lisbon en route to the Holy Land (Purkis, Crusading 171). In the same year, and on the Mediterranean coast of the Peninsula, preachers emphasized the great wealth to be gained in conquest of Almeria, and the lavish equipment of the forces mustering before the expedition. This contrasts sharply with statements of Eugenius III and Bernard of Clairvaux on poverty and humility as essential rules for crusaders (Purkis, Crusading 173-4).
Crusade or Conversion?
Thirteenth-century authors dealt with the question of which route to salvation was more important and what was to be the relationship between the two. The prevailing approach was that of Ramon Llull, who opined that crusade was the necessary preparation for the conversion of Muslims. This question was particularly pressing in the Iberian Peninsula, where large populations of Muslims were brought under Christian rule in the Christian conquests of al-Andalus (Rodriguez Garcia 176; Goni Gaztambide 249; Echevarria Arsuaga, Fortress 197-205; Tolan, Saracens 256-74). Actual royal policies favoured conversion by preaching, and specifically interdicted conversion by force or coercion.
In most cases Alfonso XI allowed his Muslim subjects to practise Islam and maintain their religious institutions, except in communities that were taken in a military campaign or that engaged in armed rebellion against the Crown (Rodriguez Garcia 177-80).
The religious policy of the Castilian kings around the time of Alfonso was, according to José Rodriguez Garcia, “basically defensive,” geared to avoid apostasies in situations where Christians and Muslims mixed freely, in a society with large Muslim populations. The Vatican formulated the laws promulgated in the councils in order to regulate the situation in the crusader states, but Iberian kings sometimes applied them selectively and with little force. Even after the Mudéjar rebellion of 1264 moved Alfonso X to think more concretely about the conversion of his Muslim subjects, his position remained essentially defensive.”
Popes took a much more aggressive stance toward conversion of Muslims in Iberia and north Africa. In 1240, Gregory IX asked Pedro de Portugal, conqueror of Majorca, and all the Templars and Hospitallers who had participated in the island’s conquest, to prevent Muslims from settling there. He had already asked the king of Menorca (while it was still under Muslim control) to allow the proselytization of the island’s Muslims, and the year prior had directed all religious living in Muslim lands to dedicate themselves to the conversion of Muslims.”
Castilian sources on conversion from the time are defensive and relatively tolerant. The tendency was to penalize interference with the conversion of Muslims and Jews to Christianity, but nowhere do Christian kings authorize coercive proselytization. In fact, both Alfonso X and Jaume I reproduced terms specified in the 1086 surrender tready of Toledo allowing Jewish and Muslim residents of conquered territories to retain their property if they converted to Christianity.”° In contrast, the accounts of the crusades in the Baltics place conversion of the pagans at the centre of their program (Rodriguez Garcia 194). Despite the fact that both Alfonso X and Jaume I postured in personal letters, poems, and other documents towards massive expulsions of their Muslim subjects in Mallorcia, Valencia, Murcia, and Andalusia (and particularly in papal correspondence), neither ever took this step in reality, though they did from time to time order smaller-scale displacements, such as those following the Mudéjar rebellion of 1264 (Rodriguez Garcia 195).
In Iberia, as elsewhere, there is no clear dichotomy in the sources between those favouring crusade and those favouring conversion. Neither is there any significant rupture in the way crusade was preached in Iberia as compared to abroad. Alfonso X follows this trend, and for him (at least rhetorically) the two enterprises are complementary, the idea being that it would be easier to convert Muslims and Jews once they had become subjects of Christian kings (Rodriguez Garcia 196-7).
Iberian Literature of Crusade
As military conflict became increasingly framed in terms of holy war, Iberian authors (and those writing for Iberian audiences) worked to reinforce this idea, and found ways to link current Christian /Muslim conflicts both with those of the past as well as with the contemporary eastern crusades. The LSJ went a long way to link the pilgrimage to Santiago and crusade ideology. The section known as the chronicle of the Pseudo-Turpin (whose narrator purports to be Turpin, Charlemagne’s companion and archbishop of Reims), relates a version of Charlemagne’s campaigns in the Peninsula against the Umayyads in terms of a crusade, using the type of rhetoric common in twelfth-century sources. Saint James himself appears to Charlemagne in a dream, exhorting him to drive the Muslims from the Peninsula:
I am very much surprised that you have not liberated my land from the Saracens, you who have conquered so many cities and lands! Therefore, I will have you know that just as the Lord made you the most powerful king in the Land, He has also chosen you from among all to prepare the way for me and liberate my land from the hands of the Muslims, for which you will obtain a crown of everlasting glory. The road of stars that you have seen in the sky means that from these lands to Galicia you must go with a great army to fight the perfidious pagan peoples, and to liberate my Camino and my land, and visit my Basilica and my tomb ...
In this way the Holy Apostle (James) appeared to Charlemagne three times. Then, having heard this, believing in the Saint’s promise, and after having mustered a great army, Charlemagne entered into Spain to fight the Infidels.”
For the author of the LSJ, as well as for many writers of the twelfth century, Charlemagne was a model crusader avant la lettre. The LSJ follows this bit of historical fiction with another, contemporary fiction: a bull of crusade calling for war against al-Andalus attributed to Pope Callistus II (but, in fact, an invention of the author). He appeals to the audience to follow the example of Charlemagne in cleansing the Peninsula of Islam:
You have often heard, o Beloved, how many ills, calamities and how much suffering the Saracens have brought upon our Christian brothers in Spain. There is no one who can tell how many churches, castles, and lands they have devastated, and how many Christians, monks, priests, or lay people they have killed or sold as slaves in barbarous and distant lands, or clapped in irons or afflicted by torture ...
Therefore I beseech you, my children, that you understand how important it is to go to Spain to fight with the Saracens and which what grace you will be rewarded if you go there voluntarily to do so. We already know that Charlemagne, king of the Franks, the most famous of all kings, established the crusade in Spain, fighting fiercely against the infidels, and that his blessed companion Turpin, archbishop of Reims, city of the Franks, granted full remission of sins to those who then went and those who later went to fight the infidel in Spain, to increase Christianity, free the Christian captives, and there suffer martyrdom for the love of God.
... all those who go forth as we have said, with the sign of the cross of the Lord on his shoulders, to fight the infidel in Spain or the Holy Land will be absolved of all their sins for which they have repented and confessed to their priests, and will be blessed by God and the holy Saints Peter, Paul, and James, as well as all the other saints, and with our apostolic blessing; and will be worthy of being crowned in the heavenly realm, together with the Holy Martyrs who have received the Palm of Martyrdom since the beginning of Christianity until the end of time.
... Whomsoever brings this written letter from one place to another, or from one church to another, and preaches it publicly to all, will also be rewarded with eternal glory. All those who preach it here, and go forth to Spain (or to the Holy Land), will have eternal peace, honour, and happiness, victory, strength, long life, health, and glory. May Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose kingdom and empire remain eternally, so ordain. Amen. May his will be done. May his will be done. May his will be done.*
The language of the Codex is unequivocally the language of crusade, both in its call for Christian continuity in fighting Islam on the Peninsula, and in granting to Iberian crusaders the same material and spiritual benefits earned by crusaders in the East.
Writing some years after the Codex Calixtinus in the beginning of the thirteenth century, chronicler Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada likewise took pains to link Iberian crusade both to past Iberian Christian/Muslim conflicts and to eastern crusade. Jiménez de Rada links Alfonso VI (conqueror of Muslim Toledo in 1085, and liege lord of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, aka The Cid) to the great crusading families of the eastern campaigns. This says much about how Castilian royal authority was constructed vis-a-vis the larger European political scene (Rodriguez Garcia 220-1). A monarch who had, before the First Crusade, reclaimed the historical capital city of Christian Hispania (Toledo) some twenty years before Pope Urban II began preaching the First Crusade must still present his bona fides as a (French) crusader in order to be considered a truly great monarch.
By the period of Alfonso X the purpose of later historical works such as the Gran conquista de Ultramar (GCU) and Poema de Alfonso XI was to attract nobles to the frontier “crusade” against al-Andalus and north Africa in the service of the king. However, the “crusading spirit” was often against the interests of the king, who might have Muslim allies or wish to bring other Muslims under his protection for one reason or another, and who had a good deal of Muslim subjects whose interests he also represented (Rodriguez Garcia 49). Alfonso advocated crusades and had political and family ties to many important crusaders. He was clear (at least in his rhetoric) about his designs on the Holy Land, following the iter per Hispaniam. In his last will and testament he ordered that his heart be buried in Jerusalem.”
The GCU (probably begun during the reign of Alfonso X and finished under Sancho IV) served the twin purpose of reinforcing the will to fight against Iberian Islam and projecting Alfonso’s desire to participate in the eastern crusade. While this inclination toward Jerusalem would appear to contradict the historical papal interdictions to stay home and fight the domestic infidel, in Alfonso’s role as aspiring Holy Roman Emperor it made perfect sense: the Holy Land was key to leading the Latin West (Rodriguez Garcia 225).
One of the key tasks of the GCU was to provide an explanation for the massive slaughter of Christian innocents committed by some crusaders. The work does this by distinguishing between “false” and “true” crusaders (Gonzalez, Ultramar 49). Another is the exaltation of crusade as a divinely guided and approved project. The description of battlefield miracles and the celebration of crusaders’ martyrdom at the hands of the Muslim enemy muddies the distinction between chronicle and hagiography. These miracles differ from hagiographic miracles in that they serve to resolve the moral contradictions in holy war rather than attract pilgrims to a shrine or inspire piety (Gonzalez, Ultramar 50). There is a certain process of narrative analogizing at work here by which the miraculous examples of hagiography are reverse engineered for crusade. The crusade’s objective is holy, but not miraculous. Saints have miracles associated with them, but not crusades (at least not until the thirteenth century, when Louis IX is canonized). However, the compilers are here borrowing a bit of the hagiographical sanctity by suggesting, particularly in their account of Christian martyrdom so common in hagiographical narratives, that the same apply to the crusader narrative at hand While the GCU is largely cobbled together from French chronicles, there are Iberian flourishes in the translation, some of which foreshadow the texts that form the body of this study, as we will see. For example, in the GCU version of the “Knight of the Swan” segments of the text that explain the genealogy of Godfrey of Bouillon (1060-1100), the hero of the First Crusade, the villain is made into a Muslim, who burns churches. The hero Godfrey defeats and decapitates him.°' The GCU promotes the theme of Latin unity, linking the lineage of Alfonso X to that of Louis IX, while at the same time contrasting the crusading defeats suffered by Louis with Alfonso’s victories.”
In 1291, the fall of Acre, the last crusader stronghold in the East, stimulated renewed interest in crusade in the West. Although the various projects inspired by this loss did not result in any new conquests in the East, the narratives it generated shaped political agendas (and, I will argue, the imaginative fiction) of the times. While most eastern crusades ended in failure, Iberian campaigns were more often than not successful, a fact which may explain why Alfonso X and other Christian kings supported the translation into Castilian of narratives of pilgrimage and crusade such as the Fazienda de Ultramar (ca. 1210), the Anales de Tierra Santa, la Gran Conquista de Ultramar (ca. 1285), and the Historia Orientalis of Jacques de Vitry.°
While the Poema de Fernan Gonzalez does not describe any crusades per se, it is wrapped in the ideology and “mentality” of crusade, making numerous references to the Castilians as a “pueblo cruzado” (crusading people), and demonizing the Muslim enemy as sorcerers and devil worshippers in contrast to Christian troops who confess, take communion, and pray before doing battle, for which they earn remission of their sins (Rodriguez Garcia 232-3). Similarly, the Marian poetry of the times makes frequent reference both to specific crusade campaigns as well as to the ideology of crusade, in reference both to Iberia and the East.“ Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria contains a number of portrayals of Christian battles against Muslim forces, most of which do not give voice to ideologies of crusade, but view Andalusis simply as a military threat.” However, in cantiga 360 Alfonso makes a straightforward plea to the Virgin to help him rid the Peninsula of Islam:
I beg you, Holy Crowned Virgin,
since you are God’s daughter and Mother and our Advocate, that I may have this favour granted me by God for your sake: that I may expel the sect of Mohammed from Spain.”
This was no mere rhetorical flourish; Alfonso’s crusading ambitions extended to north Africa, and after attending to the administration of recently colonized Seville (1248), Alfonso secured in the first years of his reign a series of bulls of crusade for his planned campaigns in north Africa.” Thus, images of the Virgin Mary as warrior and missionary in the Cantigas reinforced royal crusading policies and aspirations under Alfonso X (Holt).
The historiography of the times propagandizes for crusade, if only in a pro-forma manner. Mostly these comments are limited to reinforcing the idea that war against the Muslims (of al-Andalus) is a form of holy service, and that in so doing one may earn remission of sins and reduce one’s time spent in purgatory. But the lion’s share of references to crusade in Alfonsine chronicles are perfunctory and do not enter into the details of crusading theology (Rodriguez Garcia 205-7). One notable exception is the portrayal of Fernan Gonzalez in the Primera cronica general before the battle of Hacinas against the Hajjib (Regent) al-Mansur (Almanzor in Spanish sources).°° Pelayo, the mythologized hero of the first Christian victory against the Umayyads, appears to Gonzalez in a dream, announcing that both he and Santiago will appear on the battlefield to ensure that the Christians rout the Muslim forces:
Are you sleeping, Fernan Gonzalez? Wake up and go to your men, for God has granted everything you have asked. Know that you will defeat Almanzor and all his troops, but you will lose many of your men in so doing. And Our Lord says this to you as well: because you are his vassal, he will send you Santiago and myself, and with us many helper angels, and we will all appear on the battlefield with swords, and each of us will have a cross on his pennant, and when the Moors see us, they will be defeated, and will leave the battlefield despite their best efforts.”
The account of the conquest of Cordova in 1236 by Ferdinand III in the Primera cronica general (ca. 1289) is rich with crusading imagery and ritual, such as the rededication of the mosque, the prayers and battle cries, and the description of the king carrying the cross into battle, among others.”” Other chronicles of the times likewise noted the religious nature of wars against Muslim armies, and record the pre-battle speeches, prayers, and other ceremonial trappings of crusade, such as the religious banners and relics brought into battle (O’Callaghan, Gibraltar 251-3).
Alfonso X’s nephew Don Juan Manuel, an important author in his own right, also paid literary homage to the idea of crusade, emphasizing the idea of Christians’ divinely ordained right to occupy the whole of the Peninsula, and the martyrdom reserved for any who might die in campaigns against Muslim forces:
So many people believed [in Muhammad] that [the Muslims] took control of many lands, and conquered many — and still have them today — that used to belong to the Christians who were converted by the Apostles to the faith of Jesus Christ. And because of this there is war between Christians and Muslims, and there will be until the Christians have taken back the lands that the Muslims took from them ... and the good Christians understand that God granted that because of all the ill done to them by the Muslims, the Christians are justified in waging holy war against them, and that all who so die, having fulfilled the commandments of the Holy Church, will be martyrs, and through their martyrdom their souls will be cleansed of any sin they have committed.”!
One of Don Juan Manuel’s contemporaries, the poet Rodrigo Yanez, celebrated the campaigns against Andalusi Muslims as crusades in his Poema de Alfonso XI (1348). The poem recounts Pope John XXII’s authorization of a crusade against Granada: he tells King Pedro III: “Go and conquer Granada / in the name of God the Father, for it is fitting / that I grant you the crusade as well as the décimas.””* In fact, Pope John XXII granted Pedro III a third of the décimas of Castile as well as the bull of crusade against Granada, offering all who served a full year in the campaign the same indulgence as those who served in the eastern crusades (O’Callaghan, Gibraltar 140).
From these remarks we can see that the ideology and literature of crusade emanating from Rome and France took root in Iberia and inspired a specifically Iberian crusade culture, emphasizing Christian Iberia’s local frontier with Islam and the conversion of subject Jews and Muslims. The literature of Iberian crusade, from its origins in historiography and poetry, would then flourish in the fictional texts written in the various languages of the peninsula over the course of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, as we will learn in the following chapters.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق