4.
Although it is undoubtedly true that medieval legal enactments all too often reflected the aspirations of lawmakers as much as the social reality “on the ground,” the prohibitions on interfaith sex which were inserted into the various Iberian collections of customary law that were drafted from the late twelfth century onward were by no means mere theoretical statements of ideal conduct. The rich documentary evidence from the realm of the Crown of Aragon, which has been interrogated skilfully by John Boswell, María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, David Nirenberg, and Brian Catlos, among others, has demonstrated the zeal with which the sexual boundaries between the faiths were sometimes policed and the thoroughness with which suspected crimes might be investigated.33 To give but one example, in January 1389 the Infante Martin of Aragon instructed the justice of the town of Arándiga, near Calatayud, to investigate whether it was true that the previous month, on Christmas Eve, a Muslim man, Lop “el fustero” (or carpenter), had had sex with a Christian prostitute at a local inn.34 The Infante urged the justice to undertake a thorough investigation of the case, since “we do not wish that such things should pass without due punishment,” and laid out the step-bystep procedure that was to be followed. First, the justice was to interrogate the prostitute in order to establish what day and time the Muslim had come to see her; what words had been exchanged between the couple; whether he had slept with her; whether any money had changed hands; or whether the Muslim had left the woman something as security. Then the Muslim was to be questioned in the same manner, before witness statements were taken from the innkeeper and others. If the judge proved satisfied of the Muslim’s guilt, he was “to do justice to him as should be done.” What that meant in practice is not stipulated. Although the majority of urban fueros specified the capital penalty for such cases, this was by no means consistently enforced, even when guilt was firmly established, and in the majority of cases transgressors escaped by paying a fine.35 The Aragonese Crown may have claimed jurisdiction over its subject Muslims, describing them as “Our Royal Treasure,” but its kings proved notably reluctant to execute such lawbreakers. In 1322, no fewer than eighteen Muslims from the Vall d’Uxó were convicted of having had sex with a Christian prostitute, but the death penalty initially laid down was later commuted for a hefty fine.36 When James I of Aragon issued a charter setting out his policy on interfaith relations in 1242, he allowed any Christian women then living with minority men up to two months to extricate themselves from their illegal relationships.37 Be that as it may, on some occasions the authorities did not flinch from imposing the capital penalty. Thus, in 1311 James II of Aragon (1291–1327) confirmed that a Muslim, Muḥammad, who had been accused of trying to have sex with a Christian prostitute, was to be burned at the stake, in order that it might serve as a warning to others of his faith.38 A similar fate befell the Navarrese Muslim Bursón, who in 1343 was found guilty of maintaining sexual relations with a Christian woman.39
In some cases local officials were painfully aware that they lacked the necessary legal apparatus to guide them in their investigation and sought guidance from the Crown. When, in 1300, the municipal council of Niebla near Huelva realized that their local fuero lacked a clause outlawing interfaith sex, they wrote to Ferdinand IV of Castile (1295–1312), who allowed them to borrow sections from the fuero of nearby Jerez de la Frontera for the purpose.40 The authorities of Murcia came up against a similar problem. That much is clear from the letter that the Infante Peter, son of Sancho IV of Castile (1284–95), dispatched to the alcaldes of that city from Burgos on 5 August 1315.41 The letter records that a local Muslim, Mahomat Abollexa, had been accused of having sex with a Christian woman called María Fernández, and that his Christian companion Juan de Dios (perhaps, given his name, a convert) had supposedly tricked the woman by telling her that Mahomat was a Christian. Whether María was a prostitute is not made clear, but the circumstances of her case, in particular the role of a Christian go-between who arranged the encounter with the Muslim, suggest that she may well have been. The officials duly launched an investigation into the matter and, once they had satisfied themselves of the two men’s guilt, contacted the Infante to request guidance on how to proceed, since the local fuero did not include provision for such cases. Having considered their report and discussed it with various learned officials of the king, the Infante ruled that both men should be burned at the stake, in the case of Juan de Dios because he had played a key role in arranging the interfaith liaison and was condemned as a “besmircher of our law” (ensuziador de nuestra ley). The Infante further commanded that, since it appeared that María Fernández had been ensnared by Juan de Dios and was unaware that Mahomat was not a Christian, she should be released from prison. Finally, he noted that in any similar cases in the future the local authorities should proceed in the same manner.
The majority of the Christian women who were cited in the cases of sexual mixing that came before the courts appear to have been prostitutes, as in the cases from Arándiga and Vall d’Uxó mentioned above. This is not in itself terribly surprising given the nature of their profession and the fact that such women, whether they worked independently or in licensed brothels, tended to frequent areas where the faiths intermingled. The Christian authorities were well aware that prostitutes ran a particular risk of engaging in sexual relations with men of other faiths, while Muslim community leaders also protested at their presence in their midst for fear that excessive contact between the faiths might in turn lead their coreligionists to apostatize.42 In 1304 James II of Aragon instructed his legal officials in Valencia to command the Christian prostitutes and their pimps who resided in the Muslim quarter of the city to leave, for fear they would incur “horrible sins.”43 In 1346 Peter IV of Aragon (1336–87) declared that it had come to his attention that Christian prostitutes and others had purchased houses in the Muslim quarter of the same city and warned of the danger this posed to Christians and Muslims alike; those who did so would be liable to a fine of 100 gold pieces.44 Yet the proclamation does not appear to have had the desired effect: in 1351 the king reiterated his command that Christians were not to buy or rent houses in the Muslim quarter; yet fully 33 years later he found it necessary to return to the same theme.45 It is striking, nonetheless, that during the final third of the fourteenth century only three cases of interfaith sex involving minority men and Christian prostitutes from licensed brothels are known to have come before the courts of Valencia. That suggests either that the harsh penalties prescribed by the law had the desired effect of dissuading Christians and Muslims from engaging in sexual mixing, or else that the authorities did not pursue malefactors with any particular sense of urgency. However, it is worthy of note that the converso Gil García was burned at the stake for having facilitated and covered up sexual encounters between Christian prostitutes and Muslim men, “out of great scorn for the Christian faith,” as the judicial sentence put it.46
The readiness of the authorities to punish interfaith sex between Christian prostitutes and minority men is writ large in the legal registers of the period. If a prostitute were arrested on charges of engaging in interfaith sex, her life might depend on her being able to convince the judges that she had been unaware that her client was not a Christian. The experience of the prostitute Alicsén de Tolba, which is recorded in a detailed judicial summary drawn up on 27 November 1304, is a notable case in point.47 Alicsén declared before the judge that when she and one of her companions had visited a shepherds’ camp near Xivert (Valencia) a Muslim called Aytola was persuaded by one of his fellow shepherds, Lorenç, to sleep with her, but was told to pretend that he was a Christian named John, to speak in the accent of the mountains, and to say that he came from the port. However, when the couple slept together and Alicsén saw that Aytola had been circumcised, she realised that he was not a Christian and promptly raised the alarm, denouncing both Aytola and Lorenç to the lieutenant of the Commander of the Temple in Xivert for deceiving her to “the dishonour of God and of the Catholic faith and of Christianity.” Fearing the consequences if he were brought to book, Aytola promptly skipped town; the Christian Lorenç, who had introduced his Muslim companion to Alicsén in the first place, was arrested, but later acquitted of the charge of abetting illegal interfaith sex.
To sum up thus far, the fact that Christian prostitutes were far more likely to come into sexual contact with men of another faith meant that
