interfaith sex from the thirteenth century onward; they have even been portrayed as the sentinels who policed the boundaries between the faiths.48 It was not that contemporaries were unconcerned about the sexual honor of other women, but the fact of the matter was that relationships between Christian women who were of good standing in the community and a minority male appear to have reached the courts only rarely.49 The social space such women inhabited was far more closely controlled, with the result that the danger that interfaith sexual liaisons might occur was correspondingly diminished. In 1366, King Peter I of Portugal (1357–67) declared that since he had heard that some Christian women, deceived by the Devil, had maintained sexual relations with “men of another law,” he commanded that henceforth, on pain of death, a Christian woman should only enter the Muslim and Jewish quarters of Lisbon if accompanied by a Christian man if she were a spinster or widow, or two if she were married. What is more, the king prescribed two itineraries such women were to follow.50
Moreover, when such cases did come before authorities, a cuckolded husband may sometimes have preferred not to press charges, for fear he would be dishonored if he did so. In 1344, a Muslim blacksmith from Lleida in Catalonia, Çalema Abinhumen, who had been accused of conducting an affair with the Christian woman, Arnaldona, was acquitted when her husband Ramon d’Aguilar flatly denied that any such relationship had taken place.51 It is conceivable that Ramon did so to avoid public shame, although it is equally possible that in this, as in numerous other cases, the accusation of illegal sexual mixing had been brandished against a minority male not because such a relationship had actually occurred, but because it was viewed as an effective mechanism for ensuring that the accused would feel the full weight of the law.52 Such false accusations could have devastating consequences for those implicated. In 1304, the same year as Alicsén de Tolba brought her case against the Muslim Aytola, a young Christian woman of the Aragonese town of Daroca, Prima Garsón, was accused of having pursued an affair with a local Muslim, Ali de Matero, and given birth to a child. Prima fled the town before her accusers could have her arrested, but the hapless Ali was seized and burned at the stake in her absence. When Prima was later captured and delivered into the hands of the authorities, a medical examination demonstrated that she was still a virgin and therefore innocent of the charges that had been laid against her.53 The case demonstrates most powerfully that a determination to prevent interfaith sex was by no means the abstract preoccupation of lawgivers; it could give rise to fierce passions at the grass-roots level too.
Double Standards
If we turn our attention back to the legal prohibitions placed on sexual mixing, it is apparent that it was the conduct of Christian women and minority men that was consistently targeted. Did the same rules apply to Christian men who had sexual relations with Muslim or Jewish women? In the crusading kingdoms of the Near East, where similar multicultural realities prevailed, royal and ecclesiastical authorities took a firm line against such liaisons. The Council of Nablus of 1120, apparently inspired by Byzantine legal precedent, ruled that a Latin or Muslim man found guilty of having sex with a female of the other religion—be it voluntary or forced—should be castrated, while the woman’s nose was to be cut off; Latin women who had relations with Muslim men were condemned as adulteresses.54 Furthermore, the mid-thirteenth-century laws of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem warned all colonists not to marry “heretics,” by which they meant non-Christians.55 Be that as it may, numerous chroniclers of the Crusades lamented the sexual licentiousness of the participants and the frequency with which they had recourse to prostitutes or engaged in extramarital affairs with local women. The likelihood is that sexual encounters between Christian men and Muslim prostitutes or slaves occurred with some frequency, whatever the jurists of the kingdom had to say on the matter.56
In the Christian-dominated regions of the Iberian Peninsula the legal position regarding such sexual liaisons was notably less clear-cut. While there is ample evidence from legal and other sources to demonstrate that the authorities deplored interfaith sex where Christian women were involved, intercourse between Christian men and Muslim or Jewish women was only rarely singled out in the secular legislation of the age. According to the laws of Valencia, if a Christian man was caught sleeping with a Jewess both parties were to be burned at the stake, but in the case of a Christian man who slept with a Muslim woman, the couple would be compelled to run naked through the streets. However, whether this law was consistently implemented is doubtful, and John Boswell has observed that it “was clearly a dead letter by the midfourteenth century.”57 In 1276, the Infante Peter of Aragon commanded the justices of the Kingdom of Valencia that they should not allow Muslims and Christians to cohabit, on the grounds that it was “neither honest nor just.”58 The following year, Peter, now King Peter III of Aragon (1276–85), undertook before the Jews of Calatayud that any Christian man caught in flagrante delicto with a Jewish woman would be fined to the tune of 300 maravedís.59 For his part, Sancho IV of Castile warned the Christian men of his kingdom not to commit sin with Jewish or Muslim women, “for they are women of another law and another faith.”60 He was particularly critical of his ancestor, Alfonso VIII, whose sinful seven-year relationship with a Jewess of Toledo supposedly led to his defeat at Almohad hands at Alarcos in 1195.61 Aragonese records demonstrate that it was not unknown for prosecutions against men to be brought on such charges, and that the women in question were liable to confiscation of property and enslavement.62 Those who denounced a Muslim woman who had engaged in interfaith sex stood to earn half her value if she were subsequently enslaved and sold. In one notorious case, in 1356, Peter IV of Aragon granted to the monks of the abbey of Rueda the right to profit from the sale of any Muslim women within its domains who had been enslaved for sleeping with Christian men, only to revoke it in September of the following year when it became known to him that it had been the monks themselves who had been engaging in sexual relations with the women in question.63 What is abundantly clear is that legal opinion on such matters was far from consistent. In 1294, a Muslim woman of Ablitas in Navarre who was found guilty of having slept with a Christian man was merely fined the sum of thirty solidi.64
It is also worth emphasizing that the Muslim and Jewish communities of the Peninsula were equally horrified by the phantom of sexual mixing, and patrolled the social boundaries between the faiths zealously in order to protect their own women from pollution by men of another religion. The perennial fear was that if such interfaith sexual intimacy went unchecked, it would not only bring shame upon the women’s families, but would also be a prelude to apostasy among their coreligionists. The late thirteenth-century Toledan rabbi Asher b. Yeḥiel decried Jewish men who carried out “harlotry with the daughter of a foreign God,” and declared that those who did so were to be denounced before Jewish courts.65 In the popular song of the beautiful Jewess Marisaltos, which is preserved among the Cantigas de Santa María, the young woman is thrown from a cliff by her own coreligionists, probably because she had conducted extramarital relations with a Christian man, only to be saved by the miraculous intervention of the Virgin.66 For their part, Islamic judges regularly sentenced women found guilty of having interfaith sex or engaging in other sexual misdemeanors, such as fornication or adultery, to flogging or stoning to death, but they were not permitted to do so without the permission of the king, and such penalties were normally commuted to slavery to the Crown. Take the case of the Muslim woman Axia, who had been condemned to be stoned to death for adultery with Christians and Muslims by the qadi of Valencia, only to be enslaved instead by command of James II of Aragon and granted to one of his nobles.67 Even so, in 1347, in response to lobbying by the Muslim officials in Valencia, King Peter IV of Aragon ruled that any Muslim woman convicted of pursuing an adulterous relationship with a Christian or Jew was to suffer the death penalty rather than pay a fine.68 But such pronouncements were rare. For the most part, the execution of Muslim adulteresses remained the exception rather than the rule.
By the same token, it is apparent that on the Christian side social attitudes and legal procedures on such matters could vary substantially from region to region. Canon lawyers might have denounced the practice, but the reality was that the taking of minority women—the majority of them slaves—as concubines (barraganas) was
