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Moorish prisoners carried the great bells back to Compostela, where in the church rebuilt after Al-Mansur’s assault a space had been left for them. Once they were rehung, the deep voice of the bells sounded again to announce that St. James had again triumphed over the enemies of Christ.

THAT MOMENT MARKED THE BEGINNING OF A NEW PHASE IN THE HISTORY of the peninsula. As we have seen, for most of the period from 711 until the late eleventh century Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together mostly under Muslim rule. There were then few Muslims in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain. But by the early thirteenth century, the bulk of Muslims and Jews were living predominantly under Christian dominion; this situation persisted until this second period of convivencia ended with the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, and the conversion by decree of the Muslims eight years later. The concept of living together characterizes both eras, but it unfolded under very different terms. By the mid–thirteenth century, Ferdinand III of Castile had occupied Seville and the whole valley of the Guadalquivir, and James I of Aragon had conquered the Balearic Islands, Valencia, and the little kingdoms to the south. Only the Kingdom of Granada remained a solid and coherent bloc of territory in Muslim hands.

The majority of Muslims now lived under Christian rule, a situation that the laws and practices of Islam had never envisaged.28 For the purist, good Muslims could fulfill their duty to God only within a Muslim-ruled community. Yet from the thirteenth century Muslims lived permanently in all the five Christian Spanish kingdoms. Each state had its own approach to its Muslim and Jewish subjects, and each kingdom, and every local community within each kingdom, had its own framework of regulations and customs governing the relationship. The theoretical position advanced by Alfonso X of Castile in his ideal law codes, the Siete Partidas, encompassed the double nature of the Christian attitudes to the Muslims:

Moors are the sort of people who believe that Mahomet was the prophet or messenger of God. Because the works or actions he performed do not demonstrate any great holiness on his part, such as might justify according to him such a holy status, their law is like an insult to God … And so we say that the Moors should live among the Christians in the same manner as … the Jews, observing their own law and causing no offence to ours. But in the Christian towns the Moors may not have mosques, nor may they make public sacrifices before men, and the mosques which were formerly theirs must belong to the king, who may grant them to anybody he wishes. And even though the Moors do not have a good law, nevertheless, as long as they live among the Christians under their protection, they ought not to have their property stolen from them by force.29

Under Islam, Jews and Christians had also been “protected,” as the “People of the Book,” since they venerated Abraham and the other precursors to the Prophet Mohammed. In practice, this had not prevented them coming under extreme pressure from the Almorávides and the Almohades. In the Christian kingdoms, the idea of the Moors as a necessary evil gained strength. The Infante Don Juan Manuel of Castile in his Libro de los Estados (“The Book of the Estates”) expressed a view common throughout Christian Spain:

Long after Jesus Christ was crucified, there arose a false man named Muhammad. He preached in Arabia, convincing certain ignorant people that he was a prophet sent by God. As part of his teaching he offered them wholesale indulgences in order that they could gratify their whims with excessive lust and to an unreasonable extent … They had seized lands belonging to Christians. That is why there is war between Christians and Moors [moros], and there will be until the Christians have recovered the lands that the Moors took from them by force; but there is no other reason either because of their faith or the [false] sect [secta] they belong