Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [43]
Pelayo’s contempt for the offer, his noble resistance, and his ultimate triumph led directly to the foundation of the Kingdom of the Asturias, and thence to the royal house of Castile. In this dreamworld of good and evil, Castile exemplified the true heritage of the “good” Visigoths. Roderick and Oppa shared the same blood, but they had lost their inherited virtue and honor through their depravity. They had become crypto-Moors. It was the kings of Castile who carried the honorable heritage of the Visigoths in their veins and it was invariably the Moors or Arabs who were the agency of evil. There were Muslims in these histories who behaved honorably, but these exceptions were used to throw Christian wickedness into a starker relief.
Often these connections between the mythic past and the domain of history are mere conjecture. But in the case of Bishop Oppa we know the popular resonance of the myth. Centuries after the conquest, in 1465, during a civil war in Castile, King Enrique IV was symbolically deposed at Avila by a group of dissident nobles. An effigy of the king was sat upon a chair. The act of deposition had been carried out by Archbishop Carrillo, who took the crown from the head of the king’s effigy; another noble took away the sword from its hand; and a third knocked the effigy headlong from the mock throne.16 The news of this event spread quickly throughout Castile. A few months later Enrique’s own soldiers were besieging the fortress of Simancas, and they put on a pageant to lampoon the events at Avila. But they did not give Carrillo his own name and title, but rather called him Oppa, eliding him with the archtraitor to Pelayo more than seven centuries before.17 By this analogy they made clear the depth of Carrillo’s treachery.
The running thread of evil in these narratives, sometimes on the surface but as often below, was the Moors. They were the trial and test set by God for his people, and they would be destroyed only by a virtuous and godly Christian king, a new Pelayo.18 Like the Jews, who were often seen as their surrogates and accessories, as they had been in the accounts of the fall of Jerusalem, the Muslims were evil incarnate. God used the Moors like a heavy flail to beat his people back to virtue.
WE NEED TO SET THE REALITY OF MUSLIM SPAIN AGAINST THIS ARTFULLY contrived Castilian propaganda. For almost 500 years—from roughly 720 to 1200—Muslims dominated most of the Iberian peninsula. They called it “Al-Andalus,” the land of the Vandals, and their numbers were reinforced at intervals by new waves of conquest from North Africa. But the Muslim conquerors were few in number—no more than 20,000 in the first waves—and thereafter provided only a thin veneer, rather like the Visigothic ruling class, set atop a large Catholic Christian population. But this Muslim layer was itself divided, between Berbers and Arabs. The Berbers were the native inhabitants of the mountain regions of North Africa, whose stubborn resistance had held up the Arab armies advancing from the east. The Berbers’ conversion to Islam was very recent, and many of their pre-Islamic customs were carried forward into their new faith. The Arabs, who traced their connections back to the ancient tribes of the Arabian peninsula, looked down upon the Berbers. It was no accident that the best land and the richest cities in Spain were allocated to Arabs, while the mountain zones and the poorest land were peopled by the Berber clans. This division, although obscured by the outward success of the Muslim governing institutions, was a constant and destabilizing force within the Islamic culture of Spain.
Islamic Spain appeared a strong and unified power, but this was only partly true. There were many fracture lines within