Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [216]
12. Historia Silense, written in Leon in about 1115.
13. In the case of the Wahabis of Arabia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they desecrated even Muslim sites, proclaiming them idolatrous.
14. This was against the law and practice of Islam.
15. E. Lévi-Provençal, “Les mémoires de Abd Allah,” Al-Andalus 4 (1936), pp. 35–6.
16. Their name is a version in Spanish of Al-Murabitun, meaning those who came from the ribat. These were closed encampments where the chosen warriors of Islam could lead pure lives. The first military towns of the Arab armies, such as Kufa or Cairouan, had served much the same function, as did the Wahabi settlements in Arabia in more modern times.
17. Like their modern descendants, the Tuareg.
18. See Chejne, Muslim Spain, pp. 69–72.
19. Ibn Idhari, Al Bayan al Mughrib, cited in Chejne, Muslim Spain, p. 72.
20. Few terms are more confused or misused than jihad. Not all wars fought by Muslim armies were holy wars, nor was the term applied only to warfare, for the “struggle” could be interior and moral as well as military. Similarly, the Christian conflict of “crusade” was replete with ambiguities: there were crusades against secular enemies of the papacy or the church hierarchy, against heretics, as well as against Muslims. But the concept of jihad could be invoked by a ruler, and once this was done the nature of any conflict altered. There is a large literature on this topic, but for a broad perspective see Johnson and Kelsay, Just War.
21. María Jesús Rubiera Mata has pointed out that the “tolerance” of Toledo is a misnomer, being much more an accommodation between Muslims and Christians. Against that should be set regular attacks on the Jews of the city. See “Les premiers Mores convertis ou les prémices de la tolérance,” in Cardaillac, Tolède, pp. 102–11.
22. The Poem of the Cid (anonymous), trans. Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, p. 55.
23. Ibid., p. 71. (Corneille produced his own version of the heroic deeds of Rodrigo in his play Le Cid of 1637.)
24. Ibid., p. 98.
25. For this transition see Fletcher, Quest, pp. 193–205. Plainly, at this distance in time, the boundary between the history and legend is blurred and subject to interpretation. But the desire to construct an ideal type of Hispanity, through the Cid or even Don Quixote, who has also been made to serve a similar typological purpose, is a persistent characteristic of the Spanish past.
26. See Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “The Creation of a Mediaeval Frontier: Islam and Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, Eighth to Eleventh Centuries,” in Power and Standen, Frontiers, p. 52.
27. Cited in O’Callaghan, History, pp. 344–5.
28. Many Muslims had lived in Old and New Castile and the Kingdom of Aragon for several generations, and though in a minority, were a settled part of the population. They were very different from the newly conquered communities in the south. See Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 51–2.
29. Cited ibid., p. 66.
30. See Smith, Christians and Moors, vol. 2, p. 94 (my translation).
31. In 1408, Queen Catalina, regent for the young Juan II, ordered that Moors should wear a blue moon on their clothes and, four years later, that no one should address a Moor with the courtesy title Don. She even decreed that all Moors and Jews should live within their own communities and should not work for Christians. But the decrees were not effective, and in 1418, the status quo ante was restored; see Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, vol. 2, p. 129.
32. This story is told in Nirenberg, Communities, pp. 146–8.
33. From the Siete Partidas. The Muslim and Jewish communities were even more anxious to preserve the separation of the communities.
34. This is the point that Gabriel Martinez-Gros raises against Pierre Guichard’s Structures sociales orientales et