in Damascus. The Christian chronicler expressed unbridled satisfaction at Munnuza’s demise, which he saw as retribution for having “made himself drunk on the blood of Christians,” and in particular for his complicity in the murder of the local bishop of Urgel. However, he passed no judgment on Munnuza’s decision to take for himself a Christian bride.68
Even more striking was the case of the Banū Qasī family, which dominated the area of the Upper Ebro valley from at least the late eighth century to the early tenth.69 The Banū Qasī were muwallads, supposedly descended from a Visigothic count named Casius, who is said to have reached an accommodation with the Muslim authorities at the time of the eighth-century conquest, made his way to Damascus to pledge allegiance to the Umayyad caliph, al-Walīd I, and subsequently converted to Islam.70 How much credence should be accorded to this account of the family’s origins is debatable. Roger Collins has speculated that it may belong to “the spurious antiquarianism that became fashionable in the later Umayyad period,” and these doubts have been echoed more recently by Jesús Lorenzo Jiménez and Maribel Fierro.71 Even so, it is far from inconceivable that a Visigothic lord in the Upper Ebro might have brokered a pact with the Muslim invaders—just as Theodemir of Murcia is known to have done in 713—and that he or his successors later converted to Islam. The fact that some members of the Banū Qasī are later said to have renounced Islam and embraced Christianity serves to reinforce the impression that this was a muwallad family whose Islamic ties remained in some cases fragile.72
Whether or not the power of the Banū Qasī in the Ebro region predated the Muslim conquest, the family only comes sharply into focus in 788, when one member of the clan, Mūsā b. Fortun, briefly seized Zaragoza. From their power base at Tudela, the family came to enjoy a substantial degree of autonomy over the neighboring districts of Zaragoza and Huesca, and even—toward the end of the ninth century—as far west as Toledo. The power of one of the most prominent members of the dynasty, Mūsā b. Mūsā (d. 862), was such that he reputedly styled himself “the third king of Spain.”73 In the pursuit of greater autonomy, members of the Banū Qasī wove a complex web of diplomatic contacts with neighboring states, most notably with the Basque Arista family of the embryonic Christian kingdom of Pamplona-Navarre, with whom they forged numerous marriage alliances.74 For example, we are told by the late tenth-century Christian Roda Codex that in 872 Mūsā b. Mūsā married Assona, daughter of Íñigo Arista, founder of the Pamplonan royal dynasty75; meanwhile, the chronicler al-‘Udhrī records that Mūsā b. Mūsā’s son, Muṭarrif b. Mūsā, married Velazquita, a daughter of one Sancho, “lord of Pamplona” (d. 873).76 A few years later, in 918, another such marriage pact prompted Furtūn b. Muḥammad to ally himself with King Sancho Garcés I of Pamplona (905–25) against the then Umayyad emir ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III (912–61).77
A similar matrimonial strategy was pursued by another muwallad kin group, the Banū Shabrīṭ and its close relatives the Banū Amrūs, whose center of power lay in the Central Pyrenees around Huesca.78 Thus, it is recorded that one of the family members, Muḥammad al-Ṭawīl, married Sancha, daughter of Count Aznar Galíndez II of Aragon.79 The porosity of the frontier between Christian and Muslim zones of influence at this time is further demonstrated by the fact that after the death of Muḥammad al-Ṭawīl in 913, his widow Sancha left Huesca and returned to Pamplona, where she married King García Sánchez I (931–70).80
For their part, the Umayyad rulers of al-Andalus may have been keen to emphasize their pure Arab descent along the male line from the family of the Prophet Muḥammad, but they too are known to have sought Christian brides of high rank from across the frontier.81 Thus, the Roda Codex records that the Umayyad emir ‘Abd Allāh (888–912) married Onneca (Íñiga)—known to Muslim writers as Durr—who was the widow of Aznar Sánchez of the Arista family82; their son Muḥammad, who also later took a Christian slave as his concubine—called Muznah in the Arabic sources—was the father of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, the self-styled caliph of al-Andalus.83 The example of the Umayyads was later followed by the all-powerful ḥājib (chief minister) Muḥammad b. Abī ‘Āmir (d. 1002), better known by his honorific al-Manṣūr, who demanded the hand in marriage of a daughter of Sancho Garcés II of Navarre (970–94) as part of a peace deal brokered with the king, probably in 983.84
Unfortunately, however, our sources have practically nothing to tell us about the circumstances that gave rise to such cross-border marriage alliances. It is probably safe to assume that for the most part freeborn Christian brides were not party to the negotiations that preceded such matrimonial pacts and that their consent was rarely sought, although that did not necessarily mean that all female members of the family were completely excluded from such deliberations.85 No marriage contracts survive, more is the pity, nor are we left with even a description of how, in the case of freeborn Christian women, the undoubtedly delicate negotiations that preceded the marriage might have been conducted between the two parties. However, a glimpse of such matters is provided by the brief and idiosyncratic Chronicle of the Kings of León, which was composed by Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo sometime between 1121 and 1132.86 In his unremittingly hostile account of the reign of Vermudo II of León (982–99), the bishop makes fleeting reference to the marriage alliance that was subsequently arranged “for the sake of peace” between the king’s daughter, Teresa Vermúdez, and a certain pagan (i.e., Muslim) king of Toledo by her brother Alfonso V (999–1032). According to Pelayo, the princess proved an unwilling participant in the marriage, and when the king mocked her protests and subsequently raped her, he was struck down by a vengeful angel. On his deathbed, the king ordered that Teresa be allowed to return to her Leonese homeland. It was there that she took a nun’s habit and later died in Oviedo, where she was buried in the monastery of San Pelayo.87
We shall return to the ideological significance of this episode in a later chapter. For now, it is the historicity of Pelayo’s account that concerns us.88 Documentary sources confirm that there was indeed a Princess Teresa born to Vermudo II and his second wife Elvira García of Castile. She can first be traced in the records on 18 August 1017, when she confirmed a grant made by her mother, Queen Elvira, to the bishop and chapter of Santiago de Compostela; on 17 December of that same year, with her sister Sancha Vermúdez, she engaged in a lawsuit with one Osorio Froilaz over the monastery of Santa Eulalia de Fingoy.89 On 1 March 1028, Teresa granted some property of her own in the city of León to the church of Santiago; and on 27 January 1030, again with her sister Sancha, she gave an estate at Serantes to the same see.90 These Compostelan documents were later copied into the twelfth-century cartulary known today as Tumbo A, and a painting of the two sisters was added.91 In both donations Teresa was styled Christi ancilla, which demonstrates that by 1028 she had joined a religious community, in all probability that of San Pelayo de Oviedo, as Bishop Pelayo tells us, which is where she died on Wednesday 25 April 1039, according to her epitaph.92 However, no documentary record of Teresa’s supposed marriage to a Muslim king has survived.
The identity of the “pagan king” to whom Teresa was reportedly betrothed has provoked lively but inconclusive debate among historians. The nineteenth-century Dutch Arabist Reinhardt Dozy ventured that the ruler in question was none other than the redoubtable al-Manṣūr, who was reported by the North African historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) to have married a daughter of Vermudo II in 993.93 Dozy further speculated that it must have been in 1003—the year after the death of al-Manṣūr, when his son and successor as ḥājib, Abd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar, made peace with Alfonso V—that Teresa must have returned to León.94 Not all scholars have been convinced, however. Given that Vermudo II had only married his second wife Elvira of Castile in 992, their daughter Teresa could have been only a babe in arms at the time of her supposed betrothal, if indeed she had been born at all.95 Emilio Cotarelo and Hilda Grassotti have both argued, rather, that the princess who married al-Manṣūr was the daughter of Sancho Garcés II of Navarre mentioned earlier, whose betrothal to the ḥājib c. 983 was
