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a fight against trained and hardened infantry. When they abandoned the town to the Spaniards, they hanged their Christian hostages from the church tower. But even in Valor, the mythmaking of Moros y Cristianos successfully obscured the historical fact, as it did throughout Spain. This celebration of unity eventually lost its original purpose and became a folkloric memory during the eighteenth century, a little more than a century after the departure of the last “Moors.” During the nineteenth century the events became formalized, and by the beginning of this century these local events had been transmuted into a mass international tourist attraction.

However, Moros y Cristianos and the language of the Reconquest also appeared in the Spanish colonial territories of the Americas and the Far East.52 There they did not lose their original roots of conflict. The fiestas spread rapidly through Mexico and Guatemala, where no “Moors” had ever been seen. But the indigenous inhabitants took to them. They identified with the Moros, and carried traditional Aztec festivals and mock battles into the fiestas. While the Spanish colonists saw in the fiestas a message of pacification and Christian forgiveness, the local people found in Moros y Cristianos a means of preserving memories of Aztec power and even hopes of an eventual expulsion of the Spaniards.53 Nor were the language and attitudes of the Reconquest restricted to the Atlantic dimension. Later in the sixteenth century, far to the east in the Philippines, the Spaniards found powerful and combative Muslim communities in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago. Instinctively, they called them Moros. They termed the many groups they managed to convert to Christianity collectively Indios, after the pacified peoples of the Americas. It was the intransigents who were generically called Moros. The Muslims of the southern Philippines were never successfully controlled by the Spaniards nor, indeed, by any subsequent government. Thus, the association of “Islam” with wildness persisted as Spaniards took their culture into the wider world.

In this way Spain carried its long conflict with “Islam” beyond the peninsula. I have suggested that the how and why of words and concepts becoming fixed to Aztecs or Malay tribesmen were circumstantial. But the inner intimations of danger and savagery were disseminated with the words themselves. All Spaniards knew what a Moro could and would do. This attitude persisted even in more tranquil contexts. In the Renaissance courts of Europe, there was a frenetic and uncontrolled dance that came to be called the Moresque, or “Moorish” dance. A German poet visiting Nuremberg in 1491 saw a display where the participants moved in a circle, throwing out their arms and legs in jerky spasms, their necks stretched back and wild grimaces on their faces. Sometimes they were called “Madmen” or “Savages,” but most often they were known as “Moors.” You can still see them, for there is a fine set of small gilded wooden figures, the Moriskentänzer, by Erasmus Grasser, in the Stadt-museum of Munich. These little Moors have dark faces, sinewy legs and arms, strong hands, unsmiling faces. They convey an air of power, mystery, and menace.54

Part Three

CHAPTER SEVEN

To the Holy Land

THE IBERIAN PENINSULA HAS LOOMED LARGE IN THIS BOOK, BUT there is no simple and neutral way to refer to it. Each of its names—Iberia, Hispania, Al-Andalus, Spain—proclaims a different heritage, a particular view of its history and origin, although it notionally describes the same territory. For a long time those who wrote about “Spain” did so mainly from Christian sources, and those who chronicled “Al-Andalus” worked principally from Muslim materials. Thus the history of the same past, in the same landscape, had a double aspect. It included both what was written about and what was ignored, what was visible on the surface and what Meron Benvenisti calls “buried history.”1 Buried history is not some archaeological material that can be excavated, but rather a terrain full of ghosts and memories.