superpower to the south, interfaith marriage was to become politically unnecessary, as well as culturally and ideologically beyond the pale. At the same time, partly as a response to the incorporation of sizeable communities of Muslims and Jews under Christian rule in the wake of the territorial conquests carried out both in the Peninsula and in the Holy Land, canon lawyers began drawing up strict injunctions against those Christians who engaged in sexual contact with infidels, pronouncements that were soon to be amplified in numerous Iberian secular law codes. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the various policies that were enacted by the Christian secular and religious authorities from the twelfth century onward with a view to restricting interfaith sex, and the wider social and ideological significance that such measures entailed.
Regulating Intimacy
As we saw in the previous chapter, the religious authorities in the Christian Latin West—in common with their Jewish and Muslim counterparts—had traditionally expressed hostility toward the practice of interfaith sex, particularly when a woman of their own faith was involved. In an Iberian context, intermarriage between Muslim men and Christian women apparently became so widespread in the decades following the eighth-century Islamic conquest that Pope Hadrian I wrote to denounce the practice, while similar concerns were voiced by the assembled Christian clerics at the council of Córdoba in 839.2 However, there is precious little evidence to suggest that such anxieties were widely shared in the nascent Christian states of the north of the Peninsula during the Early Middle Ages. For one thing, the readiness of various Christian rulers to sanction cross-border interfaith marriage alliances with Islamic potentates—be they Umayyad dynasts or regional powerbrokers like the lords of the Banū Qasī—seems to demonstrate the primacy of pragmatism over cultural scruples at a time when Muslim al-Andalus was by far the dominant political and military player in the region. For another, it is striking that none of the handful of lawcodes issued by the Christian authorities prior to the twelfth century in any of the northern realms went out of their way to outlaw sexual mixing. Thus, among the 48 precepts that made up the extensive fuero, or charter of obligations and exemptions, that was granted to the city of León by Alfonso V in 1017, there was no prohibition on interfaith sex or indeed any other edict regarding the rights and obligations of religious minorities, other than a ruling on the role to be played by Jews in establishing the value of property.3 It is similarly noteworthy that the secular and ecclesiastical magnates who attended the councils held at Coyanza near León in 1055, Santiago de Compostela in 1056, Jaca in Aragon c.1063, or Girona in Catalonia c.1068 did not consider it necessary to address the thorny subject of sexual mixing in their pronouncements; their priorities lay elsewhere.4 The same could be said of Alfonso VI of León, who in March 1091 issued detailed instructions on the judicial procedure to be followed in legal disputes between Christians and Jews in the territory of León, but again did not consider it essential to address the matter of transgressive sexuality.5
The silence of the sources in this regard can be explained in various ways. At a most basic level, one might conjecture that the population of Jews and Muslims living in proximity to Christian communities in the northern realms prior to the late eleventh century was so insignificant that interfaith sex was simply not deemed a sufficiently serious risk to warrant legislation. For example, Jewish enclaves are recorded in the environs of the city of León prior to the twelfth century, but not within the urban space itself, while the Muslim population, drawn largely from slaves, was probably very small indeed.6 We should also bear in mind that since religious minorities living under Christian rule were customarily allowed a good deal of judicial autonomy, there may have been no apparent need to incorporate these communities within Christian law, even in areas where substantial enclaves of non-Christians are known to have existed.7 Yet we should also take account of other realities. For one thing, it might simply have been the case that a heightened sense of ethnic and religious difference, which was shortly to become a striking feature of political and cultural discourse in most parts of the Latin West, had yet to make itself felt among the Christians of the Northern Iberian realms. For another, the drive toward cultural unity and orthodoxy, which was to be a central feature of papal policy from the mid-eleventh century, and which was to see Rome ready to ride roughshod over local traditions and practices if necessary, had not yet had an impact on the north of the Peninsula. We shall return to explore these realities later in this chapter.
The dramatic military expansion of the Christian states at the expense of al-Andalus from the second half of the eleventh century onward marked a watershed moment insofar as interfaith relations were concerned. As Christian armies began to push southward, into the valleys of the Tagus and the Ebro between the 1080s and the 1140s, and then much further south toward the Guadiana, the Guadalquivir, and the Júcar a century and more later, they paved the way for an extensive program of resettlement that was designed to reinforce their control over the newly conquered territories and peoples. Kings and other lords took steps to establish the legal framework by which these Christian-ruled settlements would be governed and, with manpower at a premium, offered a variety of eye-catching inducements—including grants of property, tax breaks, and immunity from prosecution for criminals on the run—in order to attract colonists to the exposed lands that lay along the southern frontier. A case in point was the charter that Alfonso VII of León-Castile (1126–57) granted to the settlers of Oreja near Toledo in 1139 “in order to prevent the Moors from retaking it.”8 Some of the documents—known in Castilian as fueros (Catalan furs) or cartas pueblas—that were issued as part of this program of colonization were relatively brief statements of the obligations and privileges that would apply to settlers in the town or village in question; others were substantial compilations of municipal law and custom.9
Among the most striking features of this large body of customary law that was set down in writing between c.1050 and 1300 was the fact that numerous charters deemed it prudent and necessary to set out in detail the legal rights and obligations of the Jewish and Muslim communities who lived in the vicinity. On one level, this legislative initiative may be interpreted as an entirely pragmatic response to the fact that significant enclaves of religious minorities had been allowed to remain in situ in the aftermath of the Christian conquest, with a particularly high density of population in parts of Navarre, Aragon, and Valencia. With manpower scarce, there was an evident desire on the part of many Christian lords to avoid an exodus of Muslim and Jewish workers by guaranteeing their rights. In many cases fueros stipulated the religious, legal, and economic privileges Muslims and Jews would enjoy in a particular municipality or region, any additional taxes they might be liable to, their right in some cases to elect their own officials, or the prohibition on their holding certain posts in the local administration. A good example was the fuero Alfonso I of Aragon (1104–34) granted to Calatayud, south of the Ebro, in 1131, some eleven years after its conquest, in which he catalogued the various economic freedoms and legal protections that Muslims and Jews in the town would henceforth enjoy.10
By the late twelfth century, as economic and social interaction between the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities increased, laws designed to regulate intercommunal relations grew ever more detailed. Among this plethora of legislation, the monumental collections of municipal law promulgated in the towns of Teruel and Cuenca particularly stand out. Teruel, located in the Eastern Iberian Cordillera, was conquered by Alfonso II of Aragon (1164–96) in 1171, and its substantial Latin fuero (the Forum Turoli) was promulgated five years later.11 Cuenca, about 150 kilometers to the west, was captured by Alfonso VIII of Castile (1158–1214)—with the assistance of the Aragonese king—in 1177 and probably received its code (the Forum Conche) around 1190.12 Scholars have debated at length the exact relationship between the Teruel and Cuenca codes, since there are numerous areas of convergence and similarity between the two. However, it is now considered improbable that the authorities in Cuenca directly modeled their code on the Teruel text; the likelihood, rather, is that both fueros drew on a common body of customary law—oral and written—then already in existence in the frontier lands under Castilian and Aragonese rule by the second half of the twelfth century.13 Unlike the relatively limited statements of rights and responsibilities that had characterized many charters of settlement hitherto,
