or broke down boundaries between religious groups in medieval Iberia, Zorgati concludes that such boundaries were by no means static and that interfaith relationships—expressions of cultural contact and hybridity, as she puts it—might take place across them.18
My own investigation of interfaith sexual mixing is situated on a broader canvas, in that it explores the social, political, and cultural significance of the phenomenon from the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century down to the eve of the fall of the last redoubt of independent Muslim rule, Nasrid Granada, in 1492. This study is concerned with interfaith sexuality in medieval Iberia both as a social reality and as it was imagined and manipulated in the political and cultural discourse of the time. My primary concern is less to portray interfaith sex as an expression of hybridity and cultural contact—although I do not deny that it could sometimes be such—than to highlight the numerous ways in which sexuality and politics intertwined in the medieval Peninsula. Above all, I will investigate the extent to which sexual relationships between Muslims and Christians impinged on interfaith power relations and how they might be perceived, tolerated, or feared, depending on the precise political and social contexts in which they occurred. Just as the social anthropologist Fredrik Barth has highlighted the importance of “the social processes of exclusion and incorporation” in multiethnic societies in maintaining group identity, so this work will argue that in medieval Iberia the sexual boundaries that were raised between the faiths came to perform a similar vital function.19
Chapter 1 examines the practice of sexual mixing between Muslim lords and Christian women in early medieval Iberia. It first considers the diverse political, social, and economic functions that marriage alliances with Visigothic heiresses or widows were designed to fulfill in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim conquest of the Peninsula. Attention is also paid to the various cross-border interfaith sexual liaisons that helped to shape Andalusi diplomatic relations with the nascent Christian realms of the North thereafter. It will be argued that, for the ruling Umayyad dynasty and for the chief ministers of the Caliphate who seized the reins of power at the end of the tenth century, as well for other élite groups, sexual relations with Christian women—be they freeborn wives or slave concubines—might serve not merely as a tool of diplomacy, but as a potent propaganda weapon and even as an instrument of psychological warfare.
Chapter 2 examines the political, religious, and cultural reasons for the decline of interfaith marriage after c.1050 and considers the wider significance of the various policies that were enacted by the Christian authorities in order to prevent interfaith sexual mixing thereafter. It questions why the matter of interfaith sex came to assume such significance for the secular and ecclesiastical lawgivers of the states of Christian Iberia from the twelfth century on, and why intercourse between Christian women and Muslim or Jewish men generated by far the greatest anxiety. Finally, it discusses whether the hardening attitudes toward social assimilation—and above all sexual interaction between Christian women and Muslim and Jewish men—can be related to the wider hostility being articulated across the Latin West at this time toward others considered to be “outsiders” at the margins of society, such as heretics, homosexuals, prostitutes, and lepers.
Chapter 3 highlights the extent to which the thorny subject of interfaith sex impinged on Christian political and cultural discourse from the twelfth century on. Christians feared for the well-being of their women who were carried off into captivity in al-Andalus or even to North Africa and voiced concern that sexual contact with Muslims would both damage their honor and pave the way to apostasy. The image of the Christian damsel in distress was repeatedly deployed by chroniclers, hagiographers, and other literary exponents in order to foster solidarity among their intended audiences. To a society that attached such importance to personal honor, literary narratives in which Christian identity and power were intimately linked to the sexual purity and honor of its women were to prove spectacularly effective and remarkably long-lasting.
Chapter 4 approaches Christian attitudes toward interfaith sex from a very different angle. In some of the texts analyzed, Christian women are portrayed not as passive victims of Muslim lasciviousness, but as wanton instigators themselves, who seek out Muslim sexual partners, with often perilous consequences. In other texts, by contrast, an alternative narrative is presented, as Muslim women surrender their bodies to Christian men and renounce Islam. At a symbolic level, this act of submission is presented as analogous to that of military surrender. Even if most of these accounts are pure fiction, their purpose was to remind their audiences that sex, power, and cultural identity were at all times closely interrelated.
This book adopts an interdisciplinary methodology that is grounded on the close reading of a wide range of source materials, including not only laws, but also charters and letters, historical narratives of various kinds, works of polemic, and hagiography, as well as literary texts in a variety of other genres. By engaging with such a broad source-base, it is possible to track Muslim and Christian attitudes toward interfaith sex across time and provide a more nuanced reading of the phenomenon, which helps to complement what could be seen as the more aspirational and normative perspectives provided by legal texts alone.20 Among the most notable absentees from the dramatis personae of the book are the Iberian Jews, whose relationship with their Muslim and Christian neighbors has already been the object of significant scholarly study.21 Be that is it may, this work is designed to connect with some of the most recent and lively debates in medieval Iberian studies—for example, about Christian-Muslim interaction (in peace as well as in war); and about identity formation and the reinvention of the past—and to offer some novel perspectives on the Peninsula’s rich and distinctive medieval history. Furthermore, it is my hope that this study of the encounter between Islamic and Christian cultures, which continues to impinge forcefully on the consciousness of contemporary commentators and politicians both in the Muslim world and in the West, will in some way contribute to our understanding of the issues that have shaped the rich, complex, yet sometimes volatile relationship between the two.
Christianity and Islam in Iberia: From Reconquista to Convivencia and Beyond
During the course of the past century, scholarly approaches to the relationship between Christian and Islamic societies in the medieval Peninsula have undergone a number of marked shifts of emphasis.22 Until only a few decades ago, the study of Spain and Portugal’s development during this period was dominated by the concept of Reconquista. First coined in a Peninsular context in the nineteenth century, the term was used to denote the gradual process of territorial expansion by which, between c.720 and 1492, the Christian-dominated territories of the Peninsula—Portugal, Asturias-León, Castile, Navarre, Aragon, and the Catalan counties—wrested control of the region from Islamic authority.23 However, it was a concept that was politically and ideologically highly charged. For many Spaniards, particularly those who espoused the idea of the “historical unity” of la España eterna (Eternal Spain), the Reconquista represented nothing less than a divinely guided patriotic and religious movement, through which Christian Spain had defended not just the Peninsula, but Christian civilization as a whole, against a rising tide of Islamic expansionism, and whose ultimate outcome was to be the creation of the modern Spanish state. It was a narrative of fall and redemption, which shaped Spanish culture, institutions, and social attitudes and helped to fulfil Spain’s very own “Manifest Destiny.”24 Such ideas were articulated most forcefully and influentially by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, whose bestselling Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880–82) trumpeted the view that it had been the unidad de creencia (unity of belief) that had sustained Spain during the dark years of Islamic occupation, and that it was thanks to the Catholic faith that “we became a nation, a great nation, rather than a crowd of assorted peoples.”25 This triumphalist, patriotic interpretation was later to be amplified by Menéndez y Pelayo’s pupil, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the doyen of twentieth-century Hispanic
