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one writer as paradise.23 The Christian writers also praised their own lands as paradise, but with much less reason, for they possessed little of the superabundance of the Muslim south. Where nature required assistance, the southerners created elaborate systems of irrigation, much like those found in Syria or Egypt. Sun and flowing water made southern Spain one of the best agricultural areas of the known world. The focus of this wealth was the capital city, Cordoba, although all the urban centers, from Saragossa in the north, through Toledo in the heart of the peninsula, to the cities of the east and south, were filled with new buildings and rich possessions.

Much of this “Moorish,” or Islamic, building was created by Christians living under Muslim rule who were known as Mozarabes, meaning “Arabized.” In the first century of the conquest they formed a large majority in the Muslim cities, and in some parts of the countryside. Thus the population of Al-Andalus in the ninth century had four main elements: the Muslim conquerors, Arab or Berber; the Christian Mozarabes; and the Jews. The Mozarabes were descendants of the inhabitants of Roman Spain and the Visigoth invaders who had crossed the Pyrenees in the fifth century. When the Jews first came to Spain is shrouded in mystery. Some claimed that they first arrived at the time of Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C., others that they had migrated west after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The first physical evidence of their presence is a Jewish woman’s tomb at Adra from the third century. The Jewish population suffered severe persecution under the Visigothic kings, so the Muslim conquest represented a release from oppression.

For the most part, apart from the occasional outburst of mutual antagonism, all managed to live side by side. Over the first three centuries of Islamic rule, many Christians converted to Islam and the cultures acquired characteristics in common, while still maintaining their distinct and separate identities.24 As in the Levant, where the Arab Christians became outwardly indistinguishable from the larger Muslim population, so too in Al-Andalus the superficial differences between the different groups diminished. Mozarabes and Jews often adopted Arabic, while the Berbers also abandoned their native dialects for it (apparently, though, retaining a Berber accent).25 Yet the communities remained distinct: they preserved their customs and observed their own laws.26 This was the unique and paradoxical Spanish accommodation to which Américo Castro later gave the name convivencia, “living together.”

Many of the varying interrelationships between Islam and Christendom (as well as Judaism) that played out later elsewhere first appeared in Spain. Yet because of the peninsula’s isolation below the Pyrenees, much of this experience has gone largely unnoticed. However, if we read the experience of Spain against the experience of the Balkans or the Levant, connections, parallels, and analogies begin to surface. Throughout the long history of Al-Andalus, there was a consistent quality that Ron Barkai has called the “enemy in the mirror.”27 For more than 300 years Andalusi Muslims lived with Christians and Jews in their midst.28 Then, during the Moroccan reconquest of Spain under the militantly Islamic Almorávides and Almohades tribesmen, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Christian and Jewish elements in Muslim Spain diminished rapidly. Andalusi Christians either converted to Islam or were forced to migrate north to the Christian lands.29 During those early centuries the model for living together worked well, except for those who wished to accentuate religious differences. But by the thirteenth century, when the principal Christian kingdom, Castile, pushed south to Cordoba, conquering the bulk of the once-Muslim states, convivencia was already moribund, or in many areas of Andalusia had ceased altogether. When the Christians returned to the south, they came as rulers, as the dominant rather than subordinate group. Granada to the east became