Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [212]
12. Ibid.
13. Américo Castro recognized the significance of these stories: “Because Castile for centuries bore the brunt of the struggle against a people judged to be lascivious, a people that spoke of love and orgies in their literature, she imagined that violation of a maiden and the polygamy of the clergy were the determinants of a triumphant Saracen invasion.” See Castro, Structure, p. 328.
14. This image of Muslim lust became paradigmatic. Thus Juan Manuel in the Libro de los estados noted, “Long after Christ was crucified there arose a certain false man named Muhammad … As part of his teaching he offered them wholesale indulgences in order that they could gratify their whims lustfully and to an altogether unreasonable extent.” Cited in Smith, Christians, vol. 2, pp. 94–5.
15. Cited ibid., vol. I, pp. 26–9.
16. See Angus MacKay, “Ritual and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” Past and Present 107 (May 1985), pp. 3–43.
17. Ana Echevarria rightly observes that fifteenth-century Castilians showed a special identification with their ancestors, and evidently a knowledge of the epics that portrayed them. See Echevarria, Fortress of Faith, p. 121. The events at Simancas are outlined in W. D. Phillips, Enrique IV and the Crisis of Fifteenth-Century Castile, Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1978.
18. See also the explanation for the instrumentality of the Muslims offered by Juan Manuel in the Libro de los estados; Smith, Christians, vol. 2, pp. 94–5. This same theme emerged in the letter written by Alfonso VIII to Innocent III lamenting that so few Christians had died in the triumph over the Muslims at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212: “There is one cause for regret here: that so few in such a vast army went to Christ as martyrs”; ibid., p. 23.
19. The periods of central Muslim authority in Al-Andalus were as follows: Governors of Al-Andalus: 711–55
Umayyad Emirate: 756–912
Umayyad Caliphate: 912–1031
Almoravid Caliphate: 1086–1145
Almohad Caliphate: 1145–1224
I have followed the periodization given in Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal.
20. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 5, p. 479.
21. It was also known as the battle of Poitiers.
22. Isidore of Beja, Chronicle, cited in William Stearns Davis (ed.), Readings in Ancient History, Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1912–13, vol. 2, pp. 362–4.
23. See Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, citing Elías Téres, “Textos poéticos Arabes sobre Valencia,” Al-Andalus 30 (1965), pp. 292–5.
24. The number of converts is still a matter of controversy. The best calculation, by Richard Bulliet, has been questioned but not overturned. But it is clear that the immigrants from North Africa, even allowing a high rate of natural growth, still could have formed only a minority of the Muslim population. See Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain.
25. The language issue is even more hotly disputed than the issue of conversion. The degree to which Berber remained a language of the hearth cannot conclusively be established. Whether Romance as spoken by the Mozarabes became a lingua franca is also in dispute. Popular oral practice is harder to establish than written textual practice, but even the latter is uncertain. But there is some evidence: by 1085, for example, when the Christians captured Toledo, the large Mozarabic population in the city all spoke Arabic. On trade languages and lingua franca, like Sabir, see J. E. Wansbrough, Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean, Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996.
26. See Chejne, Muslim Spain, pp. 110–20.
27. See Barkai, Cristianos y Musulmanes.
28. See Ross Brann, Power in the Portrayal: Representation of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
29. See Guichard, Al-Andalus, pp. 171–2.
30. The Jews were expelled in 1492 from Castile and Aragon, and from Portugal and Navarre in the sixteenth century. Muslims were converted by decree in 1499, and those who adhered