God's War: A New History of the Crusades (106 page)

19. The Spanish
Reconquista

This was no new phenomenon in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Christian rhetoric had surrounded the wars of Charlemagne against the then pagan Saxons in the eighth century and those against Vikings, Magyars and Saracens in the ninth and tenth centuries. In the eleventh century, certain frontier conflicts became suffused with doctrines of penitential warfare developed by the reformed papacy for
the spread (
dilatio
) as well as defence of Christendom. The dynamic image of an embattled faith challenging enemies on all sides excited the imagination of recruits on the First Crusade. Within half a century, the ideology and formulae of Pope Urban’s Jerusalem war found expression in the campaigns of Christian lords against their non-Christian neighbours throughout the Iberian peninsula and in the Baltic. Nonetheless, despite the obvious analogies, in one central aspect these frontier wars, to which popes applied or locals assumed the privileges of the war of the cross, differed from the eastern crusades. Political exchange along and across Christendom’s immediate frontiers was a constant, regardless of new-fangled ways of justifying violence. Competition for land and resources, conflicts of lordship, culture and religion were inescapable features of Christendom’s borderlands, long predating Urban II’s penitential war. In Spain and the Baltic political expansion and settlement drove the crusades, not, as in the Near East, vice versa. Western Christendom had no frontier with the Muslim Near East except in the collective imaginative empathy of a religious culture fed by endless repetition of Bible stories in preaching, the liturgy and art. No strategic or material interest compelled the presence of western knights in the Judean hills. Easier if not always richer pickings for settlers, colonists and conquerors lay along the contested marches in Spain, Sicily, Pomerania, Prussia, Livonia or even Greece and the Aegean. The presence of western warriors and settlers on these frontiers made some economic and political sense, whereas the western adventures to Palestine, Syria and Egypt are only satisfactorily explicable in terms of a religious mission, however material the means used to achieve and sustain it. German expansion in the Baltic or the integration of Denmark and Sweden into the polity of western Europe were not dependent on crusade ideology and practices, even if they received important support from them. In Spain, conflict between Muslims and Christian rulers long predated the arrival of crusade indulgences. As with the colonization wars in the Baltic, the so-called Reconquest (
reconquista
) of Spain by Christian powers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even where embracing the spiritual, legal and fiscal benefits of the
negotium crucis
, retained distinct characteristics unmediated by the idea of the crusade.
³

THE SPANISH RECONQUEST

The political history of early medieval Spain bore closer similarities with the experience of north Africa, the Levant and the Mediterranean islands than with western Europe north of the Pyrenees. Indeed, it has been argued that the application of crusading formulae to the wars in the peninsula provided a barometer of northern influences and the integration of Spanish society and culture within the norms of Latin Christendom. By the early eighth century, the former Roman province of Hispania was dominated by a Christian Visigothic kingdom based at Toledo, which had emerged two centuries earlier. This Visigothic kingdom was then destroyed by a power that owed nothing either to the Roman or Germanic inheritance. In 711 largely Berber armies led by Arab generals invaded the peninsula, defeating and killing the last Visi-gothic king, Rodrigo, at the battle of the Guadelete (711). Rapidly, the political structure of Spain was transformed. The Visigothic state imploded, to be replaced by a Muslim emirate (756–1031) with its capital at Cordoba, transformed in 929 into an autonomous caliphate, under the descendants of the earlier seventh- and eighth-century Um-mayyad caliphs of the whole Islamic empire. The new rulers asserted their political authority over almost all of the Iberian peninsula, with the exception of the far north beyond the Duero valley, in the Cantabrian mountains and the Basque country. There some enduring Christian lordships coalesced during the century and a half following the Arab invasion. More slowly, the Arab conquest led to the creation of an Islamicized and Arabized culture in the lands they occupied. Berber settlers assumed the orthodoxy of their Muslim Arab commanders and gradually, over many generations, significant numbers of the indigenous Romano-Hispanic population that had not emigrated adopted the customs, language, laws and religion of the conquerors. Although by 900 only about 25 per cent, in 1000, perhaps about 75 per cent of the population of Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, ‘the land of the West’, may have been Muslims.
⁴

This produced neither cultural apartheid nor an Eden of multicultural harmony. As elsewhere under Islamic rulers, Jews and Christians were afforded subordinate status as people of the Book, liable to the habitual poll tax. They lived side by side with Muslim neighbours and adopted
the customs and language of their masters, Arabic-speaking Christians being known as Mozarabs. Early medieval Spain under the Ummayyads of Cordoba was a land of diversity as well as
convivencia
(literally ‘living together’), but not always harmony. Central authority was often patchy, cultural identity frequently confused by conversion, intermarriage and ambition. Claiming Arab ancestry, even if ersatz, was almost a
sine qua non
for political success under the Cordoba caliphate. The peninsula was crossed by a series of political, social and cultural frontiers to match its intractably divisive physical geography. Such frontiers produced synthesis and contact alongside competition and hostility. The independence of the northern Christian enclaves centred initially around Orviedo in the Asturias largely depended on the early Muslim withdrawal from the region rather than any resilience of their own. Only by the early tenth century had this principality expanded southwards into the wide frontier zone south of the Cantabrian mountains to incorporate a new capital, León, as well as the county of Castile around Burgos and the headwaters of the Ebro. By this time another murkily identifiable lordship had coalesced around Pamplona in the western Pyrenees, later known as Navarre. South-east of Navarre, the valley of the river Aragon, a tributary of the Ebro, also became a focus of power that grew into a separate kingdom in the eleventh century. At the eastern end of the Pyrenees, Catalonia, a political and cultural link with the Christian shores of the Mediterranean and conduit for people and ideas from southern France, had been established by Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son, in the early years of the ninth century. Charlemagne’s own attempts to create a Frankish march further south around Zaragoza on the Ebro failed dismally in 778, a campaign made famous by the defeat of its rearguard at Roncevalles.

With the exception of Catalonia, whose counts remained in the orbit of trans-Pyrenean Frankish politics, these tiny Christian principalities remained insular, locked in a close dependency on rivalries between each other and raiding across the long and wide frontier with the caliphate of Cordoba, bandits and rustlers, not warriors of God. The transformation in the
Song of Roland
of the disastrous massacre of a Frankish regiment by Pyrenean Basques in 778 into an epic contest pitting Christian chivalry against the massed exotic malignity of Spanish and north African Islam owed everything to religious rhetoric, social values, cultural experiences and imaginative constructions north of the Pyrenees. The
development of the
Song of Roland
, its earliest written version only surviving from the early twelfth century, after the First Crusade, in no way reflected Iberian realities. However, the idea of the immediate Iberian military frontier with Islam played its part in the formation of Urban II’s world-view. In the second half of the eleventh century, Spanish frontier wars attracted recruits from southern France and, possibly, even papal indulgences a generation before the Council of Clermont, signs, at the least, of greater interest from outside the region. When and how far these wars of survival, profit and conquest were regarded by those engaged in them as possessing any transcendent religious purpose or spiritual value remains both unclear and controversial.

Most national identities rest in part on a series of shared pseudo-historical myths. Christian Spain, that of Ferdinand and Isabella, Philip II or General Franco, defined itself in the context of the Recon-quest from the Moors (literally people from the old Roman province of Mauretania, i.e. Berbers from what are now coastal Morocco and Algeria), a process begun with the eighth-century Asturian resistance to the Muslim conquerors and finding its culmination in the capture of Granada in 1492. This construct gave shape to an otherwise messy political history; it explained and justified the elements of religious, even racial exclusivity in early modern and modern Spanish culture; it provided a link between late medieval Christian rule and its remote Visigothic predecessor; and it lent to Spanish history the aura of providential destiny. Holy war operated at the centre of the Reconquest myth. The leading patron saint of Spain, St James, became an archetype of holy warrior. In war as in peace, church marched in militant step with state. It was no coincidence that Spanish
bula de la cruzada
, papally sanctioned grants of spiritual privileges in return for cash payments to secular or ecclesiastical authorities, a direct legacy of medieval crusade instruments, resisted many attempts at their abolition from the sixteenth century onwards. Only with the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) were these crusading remnants finally laid to rest.
⁵

However closely associated, the Reconquest and crusading were not synonyms. The conquest of Muslim Spain by Christian princes was a long political process; regarding it as a
re
-conquest, a state of mind. A crusade was an event, Spanish crusades punctuating the larger narrative of conquest and settlement. Crusaders conquered but if subsequently they settled in these newly acquired lands, they did so not as crusaders
per se
. Frontier settlements may have been established by warriors of the cross but they were not ‘crusading communities’, with the possible exception of those areas and castles controlled by the military orders. Some historians have designated certain regions in terms of the ideology of conquest, as in the thirteenth-century ‘Crusader Kingdom of Valencia’.
⁶
This may appear something of a misnomer. The ideology of penitential warfare lent an edge to pre-existing reconquest mentalities, but it is notable that the development of communal and religious intolerance and the rise of a new biological racism that marked the persecution of Jews, Muslims and Muslim converts (
moriscos
) in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries post-dated the period when crusades were a regular feature of Iberian politics.

Early versions of the Reconquest myth emerged among propagandists associated with the royal court of the Asturias in the late ninth century. Their object lay in asserting a legitimate continuity for Asturian kingship from the Visigothic past, the purging of the former sins that had lost Spain to Christendom and the providential mission to restore Christian rule and liberty to the peninsula. Ninth-century concerns fashioned accounts of the creation of the Asturian kingdom by a King Pelayo, ostensibly of Visigothic royal blood, after a victory over the Moors in 722. In this triumph against the odds, so the myth insisted, the inevitable recovery of Christian Spain was born. Although such claims were fictive, this fashioning of perceptions established important and lasting traditions. Wars of defence and conquest against the Moors were projected as possessing a fundamental religious purpose, the salvation (
salus
) of Spain.
⁷
Aggression, portrayed as recapturing territory lost by Visigothic predecessors, was intrinsically just. The struggle with Muslim neighbours became elevated into a sort of Manichaean contest of religions and cultures which bore very little actual relation to the nature of frontier competition and exchange, still less to the continuous internecine conflicts between the Christian lordlings of the north. As elsewhere in western Europe, the church, its bishops and its saints became intensely involved in promoting political identity. The permanent presence of the infidel aided the development of religious warfare, in ways parallel to contemporary war rhetoric in Alfredian Wessex or late Carolingian Francia. Religious symbolism and church liturgy had long been incorporated into the rituals of war. There was an elaborate liturgy blessing a departing warrior king in the Visigothic
Liber ordinum
, and it is possible
that the tradition of bearing into battle a cross, or a relic of the True Cross, survived in the Christian kingdoms.
⁸

However, warfare framed by religious language is hardly the same as a self-conscious religiously backed Reconquest or even religious war. Religious approval of war was a commonplace to inspire loyalty, establish united purpose, salve consciences and assuage doubts on both sides of the Iberian frontier. The great Cordoban vizier al-Mansur (i.e. ‘the Victorious’, 976–1002) attacked churches and monasteries during his devastating raids into Christian territory (985–1102), in which he plundered from Barcelona and Pamplona to León, the Duero valley and Coimbra. In 997, he carried off the bells of the basilica of St James at Compostela to adorn the mosque at Cordoba. Al-Mansur made a public virtue of his piety, allegedly carrying his own autograph fair copy of the Koran on campaigns, which he publicized as
jihad
. This did not prevent him from employing Christians as mercenaries and guides or being remembered by his own people as ‘our provider of slaves’.
⁹
All Iberian rulers conducted aggressive warfare for profit. Although by 1000 much of this was conducted across the frontier region around the Duero valley stretching north-east towards the Upper Ebro and the foothills of the Pyrenees, there existed many petty frontiers in early eleventh-century Iberia, those caused by religion only the most obvious. The political authority and material resources of the Cordoban caliphate rather than its religious complexion made it a threat and a target for its Christian neighbours. Competition for resources and power pitted Christian against Christian and induced political alliances across religious divides. This was not how it looked to later observers and some foreign contemporaries, such as the Burgundian monk Ralph Glaber (
c.
980–1046), who wrote of resistance to al-Mansur in terms of faith and heavenly reward.
¹⁰
However, recourse to the encouragement of religion in an idealized vision of a conflict of faiths ignored the realities of eleventh-century Spain.