Download PDF | Elena Lourie, Harvey J. Hames - Jews, Muslims, and Christians in and Around the Crown of Aragon_ Essays in Honour of Profesor Elena Lourie (Medieval Mediterranean)-Brill Academic Publishers (2004).
375 Pages
CRUSADE, COLONISATION AND DANCING RABBIS:
IN AND AROUND THE WORK OF E. LOURIE
Harvey J. Hames
On entering a bookshop almost anywhere in the Iberian peninsula, but particularly in the areas that constituted the medieval Crown of Aragon and its environs, one is continually surprised by the amount of material on the shelves dealing with the local history. Historians delve into the archives in order to write very detailed studies of the immediate locale from a variety of perspectives. This phenomena, no doubt connected to the broader geo-political context and changes particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, has uncovered material that helps elucidate documents found in the central archives of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona.
And while the local historians tend to focus on their own immediate environment, often over-emphasising the significance of their findings for the greater picture, it is left to others to examine these local histories in the broader context of the Crown of Aragon both in the study of the parts which makes up the whole, and in its relations with the world outside. Elena Lourie is one of those “others” whose various studies take into account the local, the larger parts, the whole medieval Crown of Aragon and the interaction between the Crown and its neighbours both within the Iberian peninsula and further afield.
Combining exacting archival work and an eye for detail, with broad learning and analytical prowess, Elena Lourie’s works reconstruct many of the aspects of daily life in the multicultural society of the Crown, the relations between the different segments of the population both vertically and horizontally, the complexities of charters and law codes both in their compilation and application, and the mentality of rulers in their dealings with their subjects.
Minorities, or the medieval “others”, are also a major focus in her articles, as different types of interaction between Christians, Muslims and Jews come under the microscope, and gender issues are teased out of the sources. And from broader issues to case studies: the archival material reveals what happens when a corpse is discovered in the Jewish quarter,’ the presence of a Jewish mercenary in the employ of King Alfonso HI,* Jewish mafiosi and criminals in partnership with Christians, a dancing Rabbi at a Christian vigil and Jewish filocapti,’ Jewish bullfighters,° and the consequences of the report of a unit of female archers fighting in the Muslim army at Valencia.’
Many of Elena Lourie’s seminal studies were collected together and published as Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medial Aragon.® In this volume, many of the essays deal with the convoluted relations between the different faiths examined from the perspective of the Christian majority trying to implement its rule over large minorities, as well as from the point of view of the minorities in their relations with each other and the dominant faith. In an area with continually changing and expanding frontiers, these studies show how the different faiths and cultures adjusted to mutable circumstances, how religious prohibitions were often ignored or extended, and how the boundaries between the faiths were either utilised or discarded according to the fluctuations of time and space. Geopolitics, war and peace, crusade, colonisation, demography, ideology, economic pressures, jurisprudence, borders and boundaries, conflict and co-operation, provide the backdrop for her integrative approach as the basis for examining and understanding the complexities of the Iberian peninsula, and particularly the Crown of Aragon, in the Middle Ages.
Central to the aforementioned volume is an original study dealing with Christian attitudes towards the mudejars which, since its publication, has been highly praised as central for all future study of Mudejar communities in the Crown of Aragon, and indeed can be viewed as germane for a number of the authors in this volume.°® Coining the term ‘ambivalence’ to describe the general attitude of the Christians towards the Mudejar communities, Elena Lourie shows that it is not useful to define this interaction only from the point of view of functionality or utility of the Muslim minority for the Christian majority. Within both cultural communities there are sub-groups and categories where attitudes are determined according to specific circumstances, activities, social status and economic variables. Indeed, each community viewed itself in complex ways which were partly linked with its relationship to the other. The Jews appear in the study as a way of demonstrating the complexity of the nature of Christian attitudes towards the mudejars. While increased persecution and fiscal pressure are the mudejar’s lot towards the end of the thirteenth century and the fourteenth, unlike the steadily worsening situation of the Jews, the former’s status remained dependant on fluctuating notions of Christian ambivalence.
Also prominent in the aforementioned collection of articles is Elena Lourie’s side in an interesting debate on how to interpret the will of Alfonso I of Aragon, “el Batallador”, who bequeathed his kingdoms to the military orders. Her article published in Speculum in 1975, reopened a issue on which there had been fairly universal consensus; that Alfonso I had been very sincere when he made the will and had intended it to be carried out, but since it disregarded laws of family inheritance and succession to the throne, it was ignored. Lourie claimed that if previous analysis of the will had focused on the king’s psychological state, it was far less arbitrary and speculative to try and offer a political explanation which accorded with the way Alfonso had reigned during his thirty odd years on the throne. In her opinion, the will was a shrewd attempt to buy time to allow Ramiro, Alfonso’s brother to marry and produce a heir, which in the event worked, as neither the papacy or Alfonso VI, king of Leon-Castile who had designs on the kingdom succeeded in furthering their claims.'°
This reading of the events surrounding the writing and ratification of the will was criticised a few years later by Alan Forey, who propounded a counter-thesis which negated Lourie’s arguments.'’ He suggested that Alfonso [s will shows no inconsistency because he had already demonstrated a lack of political acumen earlier in his career, and in addition, one should not expect a man close to death (the will was ratified a week before Alfonso died) to act in a manner consistent with earlier behaviour. Alfonso intended that his will be upheld in order to help further Christian advances in the Holy Land. In a very detailed rejoinder, Elena Lourie showed how Forey’s thesis was even less plausible than traditional explanations of the will, and again demonstrated how her own thesis, though also hypothetical, makes more sense of the available evidence.
A remarkable example of the painstaking detective work needed to fit pieces of evidence together is Elena Lourie’s examination of the trial of the Order of Montesa which reflects her ongoing interest in the military orders in Spain.” In a much earlier study, the ribat, an Islamic religious and military institution set up to protect the frontiers, was suggested as a possible source for the Belchite confraternity founded in 1122 and which disappeared ca. 1136. It did not survive because the Islamic model of the ribat did not fit the legal and religious constraints of the Christian world, particularly the notion of a temporary vocation, and the Belchite confraternity was acculturated into the emerging models of the Christian military orders.'* In dealing with Peter IV’s attempt to abolish the Order of Montesa, Lourie uncovered a tale of intrigue and disinformation which shows the king as devious, trying to increase his income and renege on debts by transferring the lands and property of the Order into his hands. This was not righteous indignance at the relaxation of the monastic rule, or perhaps the fear that the Order was no longer able to defend the Valencian frontier from Muslim invasion (an almost non-existent threat in the mid-fourteenth century), but a strategy designed to blackmail the Master of the Order and make him compliant. However, the Master proved to be resilient and politically competent, and in the aftermath, the King was forced to abandon his plans for the Order.
These few examples are indicative of the refreshing and iluminating approach to the primary and secondary sources adopted by Elena Lourie, and her bringing together of local conditions and motivations along with broader historical contexts and concerns. In the main, this is also the approach taken by the authors of the studies in this volume. Almost all the papers in this collection refer in one way or another to Elena Lourie’s articles, or deal with topics close to her heart. One of the main guidelines to the authors was that the studies focus on the Crown of Aragon and its environs from different perspectives and cover the medieval period, while also building on and expanding arguments made in her many studies. The reader may be the judge of whether this has been achieved; some of the articles have used her writing extensively, and others re-evaluate, compliment and look anew at topics she has illuminated. In addition, as her works have done, this collection bridges between different cultures living and interacting with each other, and examines a dynamic society with expanding borders and fluctuating boundaries.
The first section focuses on legal, economic and political issues, and by extension, also on the use of force. The raising of money for military campaigns, the political adroitness needed, the cost of keeping a army in the field and the legal status of the Jews, often a major source for both royal administrators and financial gain are the focus of these studies. In the opening article, Jocelyn Hillgarth looks at the fiscal system of the Crown of Aragon. Close examination of the extensive archival material available offers the possibility to follow the major changes in administration and the paying of taxes that occurred during the thirteenth century. The development of the post of Maestre Racional and the increased importance of the Treasurer at the end of the century was a necessary response to the need for greater financial efficiency in the face of external adversity. However, as, Hillgarth shows, the kings ability to generate income decreased steadily during the fourteenth century as the power of the Corts grew, due to concessions made by the rulers in order to raise funds for military campaigns.
Father Burns also draws on archival material, chronicles and other sources to put together a detailed picture of the actual provisioning of a crusader army in the field. He looks at James the Conquerors’ campaign to Murcia from 1264-1267, and describes the military successes in relation to the cost and victuals needed to keep the army in the field. ‘These include anything from the outfitting of ships and galleys, basic staples for man and beast, wages, to the construction of fortifications and weapons. ‘This massive outlay required the loaning of large sums which in turn had to be repaid by regular and special taxation from minorities and clerical incomes (it was after all a crusade), the granting of privileges, and other additional measures which could include foraging and hunting.
John Edwards article starts from a premise put forward by Elena Lourie in 1966 about the nature of Spanish society as one organised for war.'* Her study looked at, what she considered the backbone of medieval Spanish society, the militarised non-noble freeholders, or ‘commoner-knights’, of Castile and Leon, and their upward mobility due to their functions in the vast frontier areas. Edwards takes Cordoba as his case study, and looks at the various kinds of nobility and the changes in status due to lineage and economic considerations. He shows that while the ideology of nobility as something achieved by merit might still be around in fifteenth and sixteenth century Spain, in reality, the status of nobility was acquired in a variety of different ways. The conflicts between the lower and higher nobility indicates the dominance of a social over an economic, an inbred over a meritocratic, definition of nobility.
David Abulafia looks at the origin of the idea of the servitude of the Jews to the king as it appears in the fueros of Teruel (1176-7), and which predates its supposedly earliest formulation by Frederick II by some sixty years. By looking at the meaning of the traditional formulation servus camere nostre first used by the latter and tracing the previous history of the separate elements of this definition, the implications are that within it one can find a convergence of both legal and theological concepts regarding the status of the Jew. However, the different formulation in the /ueros of Teruel, when seen in the particular context of the frontier suggests that, during the twelfth century, the Jew combined the functions of citizen with ‘servitude’, or dependency on the royal fisc.
Following on from the previous article, the second part of the book focuses on the interaction between the Jewish and Muslim minorities, and between each of the minorities and the Christian majority. Love relations between Jews and Muslims, or at least what the sources reveal about them, are the subject of David Nirenberg’s contribution. In the aftermath of the Christian reconquest, relations between Jews and Muslims, very often mediated by a silent (and sometimes not so silent) Christian partner, depended on financial, political and social status. Nirenberg examines the legal status, nature, and various types of sexual relations over a period of some two centuries, illuminating the significant differences which were a function of changing theological concerns in the role the two minority communities held in the Christian world before and after 1400. The presence of growing number of conversos was both gratifying and worrying, either as a harbinger of the apocalypse or as undermining the Christian faith from within, and in the case of love relations, this was a cause for a significant shift in balance in favour of the Muslims.
Interfaith scholarly interaction is the focus of ‘Thomas Glick’s study. He suggests that judging the nature of relations between medieval scholars of the different faiths on the basis of polemic and disputation is misleading because it suggests that religious ideology is always the context for interaction. Utilising theory of social interaction, Glick suggests that most interaction which occurred on a regular basis was ideologically neutral, in other words, religious ideology was suspended in order to create an atmosphere where scholarly interaction could take place for the benefit of all involved. This allowed all types of relations between members of the three faiths where the scholar belonging to the minority faith could be the magister, where Jew, Christian and Muslim could work together on translations, or study philosophical texts together.
Ana Echevarria deals with the phenomenon of members of the Mudejar minority trying to succeed in the world of the Christian majority. Hers is a tale of fluid boundaries, and how the people who crossed them had to construct an identity, which, sometimes, was able to bridge between two cultures and religions. While it has been suggested that conversion was not so much a matter of changing faith as bringing about a change in social circumstances, here it 1s shown that this was not necessarily the case. ‘Two fifteenth-century Castilian families provide interesting examples of acculturation and assimilation. The Belvis who enjoyed a privileged position in the Castilian aljamas, just as the Aragonese branch of the family did in Aragon, yet remained Muslim, in contrast with the Al-Barramonis, who were established either in Granada or in Valencia, and who found their way to the Castilian court, where they converted to Christianity.
Charles Lohr shows how ideas and concepts move between religions and cultures and are adapted and used by the borrower. In this particular case he shows how the famous thirteenth-century Catalan missionary, philosopher and mystic, Ramon Lull, borrows central concepts for his Art from his western Muslim predecessors and contemporaries. Lohr demonstrates how Lull’s dignitates or principles are not only found in the list of the Islamic names of God, but how their meaning and function in the Art are comparable to how they are understood and explained in the teachings of figures such as al-Ghazalr and Ibn al-‘Arabi.
Eleazar Gutwirth examines musical tendencies among the Jews of fifteenth-century Spain, and shows how the Hebrew texts, when read in the broader Christian context, exhibit evidence of contacts, appropriations and relations between sacred and profane music and between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish musical practices. This evidence is also substantiated by inquisitorial records which show that after the events of 1391, far from being isolationist, the Jewish community, at least in the case of music, was open to current practices among their Christian neighbours and interacted with them on joyous and formal occasions where music and dance were called for.
In the final study in this section, Ram ben Shalom focuses on an aspect of Jewish acculturation to their Christian surroundings seen in their use of mythical stories in a manner similar to the way they were used by their Christian contemporaries. The myths of the conquest of ‘Troy and the labours of Hercules were used by fifteenth century figures such as Abravanel and Abraham Zacut to substantiate Jewish claims of genealogy (being descendants of King David) and the antiquity of the Spanish diaspora. Similarly, their Christian contemporaries also used these stories as foundation myths in order to show their superiority over the other kingdoms of Christendom. The Jewish the use of these myths was in part to define the relationship between minority and majority in Spain, and also as a response to negative propaganda being levelled against the Jews.
The final section of the book focuses on specific minority figures and their interaction with both the Christian majority and their coreligionists. Brian Catlos gathers the available evidence for the career of a Muslim mercenary, Mahomet Abenadalill, in the service of the Crown of Aragon, and shows that the supposed ecumenical divide and religious ideology of reconquista is more a matter of terminology by which policies are articulated and justified, than representative of any actuality. Mercenaries of the stature of Mahomet Abenadalill worked both sides of the religious divide and were often part of the court and sometimes even became vassals of their Christian employers. They were protected by the monarchy and received privileges dealing with spoils of war, slaves, wages and armaments, and their motivation was for personal gain. The existing evidence, as already shown by Elena Lourie in the case of a Jewish mercenary,’ supports the supposition that these mercenaries were not the exception that proves the rule, but were part and parcel of the cross-cultural and inter-religious contacts that were a basic staple of life in the Iberian peninsula.
Mark Meyerson examines the issue of malshinut—informing to the Christian authorities, looking again at a study by Elena Lourie published in 1988, where she examined records of an investigation that the bailiff general of the kingdom of Valencia conducted in January 1327 into the alleged criminal activities of some Jews of Morvedre.'® Due to the discovery of more archival material dealing with the community in Morvedre, he concludes that the whole affair had more to do with a power struggle within the ajama, mainly over taxation policies and the governance of the oligarchy. Though, perhaps, not directly connected with those involved in the “wax affair”, this example indicates the extent of Jewish-Christian co-operation, the attempt of the lower classes to break the monopoly of the oligarchies and have more say in the running of the ajama, and shows the potential of malshinut for furthering one’s aims.
The career of Shlomo Anaegni, a Jewish perpenturo (a type of medieval interior designer), is the focus of Asuncion Blasco’s paper. A very highly regarded craftsman at the royal court of the Crown of Aragon in the second half of the fourteenth-century, he was rewarded with the position of deputy merino in Saragossa in charge of the Jewish community. A difficult position to fill given the need to collaborate with Christian officials. Not being considered part of the Jewish elite, and notwithstanding his royal protectors, Shlomo Anagni found it very difficult to maintain his status and fulfil his role, and was the target of intrigue within and beyond the boundaries of the Jewish quarter.
What better way to conclude this volume in honour of a historian who spends much of her time with source material in the archives, than with an unpublished archival text. Carlos Carrete Parrondo’s brief but informative study presents documentary evidence of an inquisitorial process against a barber Juan del Escuela, an inhabitant of Cuenca, in 1492 accused of Judaizing. He considers these inquisitorial documents important in showing the lack of cohesiveness and coherence of the converso community as a social group, and their lack of knowledge of central tenets of Judaism.
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