Spain: A Unique History (10 page)

Whereas the Visigothic state, with its broad territorial domain, crumbled, the new kingdom of Asturias proved remarkably tough, resilient, and ultimately successful in almost every respect. It repeatedly fought off a much larger, more powerful, and sophisticated Muslim foe and even added new territory at the expense of the latter. Rather than wilting under the contest, it gained population, partly thanks to immigration and an astute repopulation policy. It created a new church structure, reaffirmed its relations with the broader Latin Christian culture, produced at least one religious writer read widely in other lands, and created an original style in art and architecture — the "Asturian Pre-Romanesque" — without precedent in the western Europe of that era.
¹⁷
Its society developed increasing cohesiveness and integration despite internal political conflicts, to which might be applied as working hypothesis the influence of fuller Christianization in breaking down the remnants of clan and tribal structures, and encouraging the role of the exogamic family. Later, as the Andalusi state weakened in the great
fitna
(internal conflict) of the late ninth century, a portion of the Asturian elite espoused the goal of complete reconquest, something that could hardly have been imagined a generation or two earlier. Rather than finding the first crystallization of such an ambition artificial and pretentious, as was sometimes the tendency in twentieth-century historiography, the revisionist interpretation finds this a natural consequence of Asturian culture and institutions, and of the circumstances of that time.
¹⁸

Whether the field of "climate history" is of any use here is difficult to determine. It has rather frequently been observed that Late Antiquity experienced a harsh climate in much of the Mediterranean, with prolonged droughts and other problems. What seems clear is that the rise of Asturias (and later of Castile) coincided with the five centuries of warmer and more benign climate in western Europe and the north Atlantic between approximately 800 and 1300. This may have made the northern mountainous regions of the peninsula more productive and capable of sustaining a larger population.

The Spanish Grand Narrative tended to reify and exaggerate, as presumably all grand narratives do. While recent research suggests somewhat greater precedent within the kingdom of the Visigoths than had often thought, the Grand Narrative's emphasis, in its classic form, on Catholic mission, a chosen people, and implacable reconquest has always gone beyond what the historical evidence yields. Though one may find roots of what might be termed a "Spanish ideology" in San Isidoro, concepts of ideology and mission evolved only slowly and intermittently among the elite of Asturias and León. Asturias was made the target of an official "jihadi" assault under the Emir Hisham I in the final years of the eighth century, but no official concept of "crusade" as "counter-jihad" developed. The struggle against Al-Andalus was apparently viewed in the first generations as a sort of territorial war, first a struggle for survival and then a conflict against a usurper who should be dispossessed of whatever was possible. Nearly two centuries were required, so far as we know, to generate the goal of total reconquest, at least as the official goal of the Asturian leadership, and then because of the internal weakening of the Andalusi state. Nor could such a doctrine be sustained after the revival of Andalusi power a generation later. While Al-Andalus practiced jihad according to pristine Islamic concepts (which, unlike some twenty-first-century variants, included certain rules of war), the wars of Asturias and León could be called "religious wars" only in the sense of military conflict by a Christian state against an Islamic one. These were not a crusade in the later sense of a war officially blessed with special spiritual endorsement and spiritual rewards directly by the Church itself. They were, however, campaigns increasingly fought with a claim to "legitimacy," to the recovery of lands usurped by foreigners, based on an identity whose roots were rather deeper than some twentieth-century historians have thought.

During the late twentieth century, Western multiculturalists began to imagine utopias of cultural and ethnic "diversity," as they liked to put it, in which distinct cultures and civilizations would coexist harmoniously.
¹
This ideal became a prominent feature of cultural and educational institutions in western Europe and, especially, North America.

It was difficult, not to say impossible, to find an historical precedent for such a utopia, since all known civilizations have insisted on the primacy of their own culture, but some commentators have thought to identify such a unique society in medieval Spain. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, historians and writers evoked a mythical paradise in medieval Al-Andalus, which was declared to have achieved a culture of genuine tolerance, compared with which all the rest of Spanish history might be seen as a decline. A century later Américo Castro gave this a new spin from his American exile, in the several successive versions of his magnum opus imagining a unique situation of what he termed "convivencia." Most recently such an image of tolerance and cultural cross-fertilization has been eloquently evoked in a work by the Harvard literature professor María Rosa Menocal,
The Ornament of the World
(2002).
²
The title is taken from a comment by an eleventh century German nun, and the product is a sort of novel, written with considerable charm, consisting of a series of pen portraits of leading cultural personalities.

In this idyll, Christians and Muslims quarrel more among themselves than they do with each other, while cooperating with Jews in creating a unique multicultural paradise. There is, of course, always a serpent in the Garden of Eden, and in Menocal's case it takes the form of the fanatical Islamists of the two successive Moroccan empires that invaded the Iberian Peninsula in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The intolerant domination of this hostile and unenlightened Other is perceived as beginning to put an end to the Andalusi utopia, though it is presented as considerately oppressing enlightened Muslims more than anyone else. Menocal's novel, presented as cultural history, exerted a strong appeal in the contemporary academy, with its pretensions to the multicultural. This is all the more the case since she never mentions the centuries of bloody conflict between Christians and Muslims, and the word "conquest" or "reconquest" never appears.

Menocal's book is but one of the most concerted expressions of the "myth of Al-Andalus" that has been propagated for a century and a half, acquiring renewed force in recent years. The Muslim invaders of 711 are portrayed as variously entering, incorporating, or colonizing the Iberian Peninsula (as if no one lived there), replacing a decadent and dreary band of elitist Visigoths — presumably all "dead white males" — who failed to achieve multiculturalism and deserve no respect. The reexamination of Visigothic history that has been carried on during the past two generations is conveniently ignored because it might complicate the introduction of this dream world.

The Muslim eruption into the Iberian Peninsula took place near the end of the first century of massive Islamic empire-building. Subsequent phases under other Muslim empires elsewhere would continue for a full millennium, into the seventeenth century.
³
In extent the only equal in world history would be the conquests of the Mongols six hundred years later, while the duration was without parallel. Unlike the Mongols, the Arabs would soon construct a major new civilization, which would impose itself permanently on each of the many lands conquered, Islamized and in most cases Arabized, with the sole exception of Spain. Only in the Iberian Peninsula was a large territory both conquered and for the most part culturally and religiously Islamized, only to be reconquered and de-Islamized by a portion of its pre-Muslim inhabitants. This fact alone would have made Spain absolutely unique in world history, if the Spanish had never accomplished anything else .
⁴

The rapidity of the Muslim conquest of 711-18, despite the limited numbers of the invaders, was due to the internal division of the Visigoths and their inability to mount a central or organized resistance, once the monarchy had been decapitated at the outset. By 718 politico-military control had been extended, albeit very tenuously, over the entire peninsula. From there the seemingly inexhaustible Muslim tide poured into France, establishing a limited control over its southwestern part, until a major defeat in 732. Even so, new raiding parties continued to cross into France during the next few years, these attacks coming to an end only because of the overextension and exhaustion of the invaders.

Military expansion has been a common feature of many different states and societies in human history. Islamic civilization was not the first to operate under a religious imperative for military conquest. What is unique, however, is that Islam is the only major world religion that categorically requires continuing military action against unbelievers, and its followers have been remarkable for the long persistence and, for centuries, the relative success, of their military conquests. In the West, North African Muslims would later conquer Sicily in the ninth century and continue assaults on western Europe into the fourteenth century. In the form of large-scale piracy and slave raiding, attacks would continue for half a millennium more, into the early nineteenth century. The assaults on eastern Europe began early in the eighth century (at approximately the time of the conquest of Spain) and would be continued by the Ottomans throughout the latter Middle Ages and beyond that until the end of the seventeenth century, becoming a major factor in east European underdevelopment.
⁵

The obligation to "exertion" in jihad as military conquest of unbelievers was thus a constant feature of Islamic culture and practice for more than a thousand years, declining in modern times only as Muslim societies became categorically inferior in military terms. During the twentieth century the major Muslim power, Turkey, then turned to genocide against its Christian minorities. The numerous references in the Koran to the obligation to fight militarily and to kill on behalf of the faith constitute one of the most striking differences between Christianity and Islam. Mohammed also referred to personal spiritual struggle as the "greater jihad," and in modern times this spiritual interpretation has come more to the fore, but the military jihad was at no time forgotten and was always periodically revived by activists or political leaders, even though the great majority of ordinary Muslims have never participated in it.
⁶

The new rulers of Al-Andalus would face militarily in three directions — to the north against Christian Europe (after the mid-eighth century meaning primarily the small, weak, new Spanish principalities), internally against all manner of domestic rebels, and later south and east toward the expansion of their power in North Africa and the west Mediterranean. Concern for the internal and southern fronts often provided a military respite to the new Spanish states, which they took advantage of for internal consolidation and the expansion of their own borders. When conditions permitted, the jihad was persistently invoked against these remaining Christian territories in the peninsula, though trans-Pyrenean assaults were eventually renounced as impractical. When Andalusi arms were successful, heads of slain Christians were regularly displayed on the walls of Córdoba, not the symbol of an especially tolerant society. On the other hand, after the 720s the Andalusi rulers made little effort to conquer completely the Christian resistance in the north, instead occupying new frontier positions or posting frontier garrisons. The goal of the frequent raids against the north, what was called the
sa'ifa
(Sp. "aceifa"), was rather to weaken the Christian enemy and to bring back slaves and booty.

The initial terms of the Muslims for subject populations tended to be relatively generous, a policy indeed virtually required by the limited numbers of the Muslims themselves at the beginning of their conquests. Aristocrats and other landholders who accepted Muslim domination without resistance were generally confirmed in the control of their properties. Freedom of religion was recognized for Christians and Jews, and initially the latter enjoyed greater opportunities than under the Visigoths, who had persecuted them severely. It has been suggested — though historians do not really know — that the obligations of the peasantry were no greater, and possibly even lighter, than under the Visigoths. Serfs, for example, were often transformed into sharecroppers, which may have eased their lot. These factors made it easier to accept the initial Islamic domination; the Visigothic allies of the invaders soon had to accept complete subordination, even though most continued to hold their original lands, so long as they obeyed.
⁷

During the course of the eighth century, however, as the Islamic system was consolidated, its full features were introduced into the new realm known as "Al-Andalus." 
⁸
The taxes paid by non-Muslims were regularized as a land tax and a separate poll tax, and religious activities were restricted. No new churches were allowed to be built, some of the existing churches were converted into mosques, and bell-ringing and any form of Christian religious activity outside of churches prohibited. The proselytizing of Muslims was punishable by death, and any Muslim who converted was liable to the same penalty. By the middle of the ninth century, as the Muslim population increased, Jews and Christians had to wear special clothing to indicate their religion. They could not marry Muslim women, could ride only on donkeys, had to give up their seats whenever a Muslim wanted to sit, and were denied equality in judicial procedures. The terms of this kind of "discriminatory toleration" slowly grew more oppressive with each passing generation.

Given the restrictions on and discrimination against Jews and Christians, did any real "convivencia" take place in Al-Andalus, beyond mere physical juxtaposition? Two kinds of convivencia of a sort might be found. One was cooperation at the elite level between individual Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who to some extent worked with each other and exchanged information regarding learned texts and scholarly interests. In addition, the Andalusi state frequently employed Christians in various capacities, just as the late medieval Spanish kingdoms employed Jews. There was also considerable economic contact, trade, and also the hiring of labor. None of this, however, in any way blurred the basic caste lines.