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(“follower of the Nazarene,” Jesus of Nazareth), was neutral by comparison. Rumi, which technically meant a Byzantine but was haphazardly applied to Spanish Christians, fell somewhere between the two, but was less often used. Kafir, or “infidel,” was also used less frequently. So even in the context of Spain, with its ever-advancing war front in the north, sometimes Christians were spoken of as hated enemies, but on other occasions they were described in terms that contained no strong sense of hostility. Muslim Arabic speakers gradually created an expanding repertoire of terms to describe Christians and Jews. Frenk, Frenj, Ferinj, applied to Christians in Spain and the Holy Land, literally meant Frank or Frenchman. In the East, however, only Western Christians were described in this way. Local Orthodox or Syriac Christians were Nasrani, never Frenj.36

Gutiérrez has discovered the presence of a changing, adaptive syntax to encompass the increasingly dominant Christians. All save two of the terms were traditional, derived from the Holy Qu’ran, composed in the seventh century. But Muslims needed a new framework of language to describe the experience of Christian power. When Muslims wanted to extend their repertoire of insult they more and more departed from this hallowed traditional lexicon. Non-Muslims were increasingly called ily, “uncivilized.”37 It was, suggests Gutiérrez, “the most complex of all the terms used in the Arabic-Muslim chronicles to define the Christians.” It had the sense of someone bloated and crude, but also with the wildness and sexual proclivities of a wild ass.38

Using this vocabulary, Muslims could present Western Christians as inherently morally defective, condemned by their environment and the corrupting effects of their culture. The Franks’ misfortune was to come from bitter northern climes. Writer after writer stressed that this had determined their character: “Excessive cold … ruined their manners and hardened their hearts … Their colour is, of course, white and they, like beasts, care only for war, combat and hunting.”39 Even their manner of writing was against nature, being from left to right and thus “away from the heart and not towards it.” Christians came to be described in zoomorphic terms: as dogs (especially despised in Islam) or, worse still, as pigs. This then brought the terms of condemnation back within the Qur’anic system of what was permitted and what forbidden.

Infidels were unclean, in the same way that semen, urine, menstrual blood, and feces were filthy and contaminating.40 If Muslims wanted to make the taint of being infidel even stronger, they then associated it with other ritually and fundamentally unclean objects. Terms like “wild beast,” “dog,” or “pig” referred to inalienable characteristics.41 A pig was always a pig.42 To bestialize any human being, to give them the character of a despised animal, carried a huge metaphoric potential, and their animal qualities by exchange emphasized the speaker’s humanity and Muslim cleanliness. But the curse of infidelity would be lifted at the moment that the infidel made the profession of faith and began to lead a truly Islamic life.

The everyday Christian perceptions of the Moor were correspondingly fearful. The border ballads romanticized the Moorish warriors of the frontiers with Granada, but they were still figures of fear and danger. Christians rarely made a direct equation between Muslims and the other (and more prosperous) minority, the Jews, but distaste for one group also seemed to spill over onto the other, and Jews and Moors were linked together in the minds of many Christians. Rulers and popular opinion alike regarded them as enemies, existing only by the benevolence of the Christian community. The Jews suffered attacks more regularly and more severely than the Moors. An outburst of popular rage, which led to savage massacres of Jews, began in Seville in June 1391 but soon spread to many parts of Spain. It was the product of many different causes, mostly purely local. But running as a common thread through all the killings,