Spain: A Unique History (12 page)

Spanish Christian rulers also had to quell numerous rebellions, but this was due above all to elite dissidence, not to ethnic segmentation. Their principalities were much more successful in building polities over the long run, with evolving structures of law, social rights, and a certain degree of broader participation and representation.

Slavery was a major feature of tolerant, "conviviente" Andalusi society, which maintained major international slave markets in Córdoba and other large cities. Mohammed declared that Muslims could not be held as slaves but otherwise explicitly approved slavery as an institution in Islamic society, the slave population to be made up of the many prisoners captured in Islamic military conquest and others purchased on the international market. The frequent "aceifas" launched against the Spanish principalities were designed to a considerable extent as slave raids.

Slavery in the Islamic world was multiracial, as in ancient Rome, non-Muslims from any ethnic or racial group being possible victims. A major new feature of Islamic slavery, however, was development of a large-scale black African slave trade. Black slaves had been found in Rome, but their numbers were very few, whereas the Arabs were the first to make the acquisition of sizable numbers of African slaves a major activity. The Muslims were also the first to categorize blacks as uniquely racially inferior and hence more naturally and appropriately enslaved. Arabs were thus not inhibited in seizing slaves from black Muslim tribes, as well.
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Whereas slavery largely died out in western Europe outside Italy, the influence of the Islamic slave-raiding border helped to sustain the presence of slavery in the Spanish Christian principalities, which imbibed the Muslim attitude toward black slavery and, by the close of the fifteenth century, would position themselves to surpass the Muslims in the African slave trade.
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Conversely, the most positive aspect of Islamic slavery was the encouragement of regular emancipation or the purchasing of freedom after conversion (even though this was not always observed in practice), so that multigenerational slave castes generally did not develop, even though slave markets thrived in the Middle East and Africa well into the twentieth century.
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Despite the persistence of military violence for eight centuries, relations between Spaniards and Andalusis were extremely complex. The entire period was punctuated by numerous official truces, though none lasted for more than a few years. For centuries, Islamic orthodoxy held that there could be no regular peace between the "House of Islam" and the "House of War," that is, the entire non-Islamic world, which was to remain under assault until it had been forced to submit to Islam (the word Islam itself means "submission"). It was soon deemed appropriate, however, to desist from military operations if an adjoining non-Islamic power was willing to pay some form of tribute. In the Iberian Peninsula, whenever practical reasons moved the ruler of the Islamic state (Umayyad, Almoravid, or Almohad) to a temporary truce with one or more of the Christian kingdoms, the customary bearing of minor gifts that accompanied any embassy was interpreted by means of a legal fiction as payment of "tribute," hence rendering the truce legitimate under Islamic doctrine.

The frontier between the two civilizations was hostile and violent, but also highly permeable.
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Spanish Christians developed a kind of familiarity of both military and political relations with the Muslims unknown beyond the Pyrenees. Rules of war often thus obtained surprised, even shocked, European Christians. When the latter helped the Aragonese to seize Barbastro in 1063, they proposed to subject the Muslim inhabitants to violent extortion, rape, slavery, or even death, but were restrained by the Aragonese, who told them that was simply not the way things were done. Roughly speaking, Spanish Christians seemed to have accepted Koranic rules of warfare, which allowed for such practices only if a city refused to agree to terms.

In times of truce both Christian and Muslim rulers, as well as opposition factions on both sides, did not hesitate to enter political deals and even cross-cultural alliances. On occasion, Christian rulers sought and obtained Muslim military assistance against either internal rebels or rival princes in other kingdoms, as did dynastic or aristocratic factions who rebelled against them. Andalusi rulers employed Christian mercenaries in their semiprofessional armed forces and also made use of Christian rebels against the northern kingdoms. By the eleventh century, as the Córdoba caliphate weakened, Muslim rulers or rebel factions sought and obtained Christian military intervention on their own behalf. Although cross-cultural political and military alliance was not the norm, neither was it infrequent, but simply one feature of a long and complex relationship that was always ultimately adversarial, but part of the time was peaceful and occasionally might even be complementary, rarely even intimate.

There was nothing uniquely Spanish about all this, for such practices have existed at times in every region in which Christian and Muslim states lived in conditions of at least relative equilibrium. Even Crusader states in Syria and Palestine sometimes formed such alliances, as much later did European governments with the Ottoman empire. None of that meant that either the Crusaders or the European states ever modified their primary identity, or were involved in any marked "cultural hybridiry."

To the extent that the medieval Spanish experienced any genuine convivencia, this did not take place in Al-Andalus, where Christians completely disappeared, but in the Reconquest Christian kingdoms from the late eleventh century on. The era from the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries has been called the "Mudéjar century," for by then the incorporation of Muslim minorities had reached its height, and a certain amount of cultural diffusion took place. In the conquered southern cities, Spanish architecture introduced its distinctive style of impressive facades but retained the existing Muslim configuration of narrow, winding streets with little public space. Christian architecture was considerably superior and had little to learn from that of the Muslims, but Andalusi or Mudéjar architectural decoration generally won favor and became a common Spanish motif during this era. The public baths that existed in medieval Spain were probably not so much a matter of Islamic influence as of the Roman tradition, for at that time they sometimes existed beyond the Pyrenees as well, being eliminated throughout Europe by the sixteenth century.

The general trend of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries was a slow but increasing assimilation to Spanish Christian culture, though much more on the part of the Jewish, than the Muslim, minority. The Jewish elite began to aspire to something equivalent to aristocratic status, while even in independent Granada, the last Muslim state, the upper class sometimes donned Christian-style clothing. Conversely, Castilian elites often found it modish to adopt bright-colored Muslim garb.

Ultimately, what took place between Christians and Muslims was a form of coexistence not equivalent to Américo Castro's convivencia. There were individual conversions, primarily of Jews and Muslims to Christianity, and also a certain number of mixed marriages (commonly of a Christian man with a Muslim woman), but the kind of cultural assimilation found among much of the Jewish population did not generally extend to Muslims. Technical borrowing in esthetics, economic production, and technology took place on both sides, but the Mudéjar minority showed no signs of general assimilation, even though it seems to have had a kind of hybrid culture, Islamic in its fundamentals of religion and thought, marriage and family, food and dress, though partially assimilated in its economic life. Bernard Vincent has judged that "Morisco and Christian culture clashed in nearly every respect. Their two styles of life were diametrically opposed. The inner organization of Morisco homes and the way houses were grouped in neighborhoods in no way resembled the way in which Christians did such things."
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Christians were offended by the sounds of Muslim music and ceremonies, the scent of the perfume Muslims used, and the bright color of their clothing, whose style and tone were so different from the more austere Spanish manner. They found equally offensive such basic domestic practices as sitting on the floor to eat without tables, chairs, or benches, and sleeping on the floor in standard oriental style on mats rather than in beds. With the Moriscos, at least, the segmented culture of Al-Andalus continued into the seventeenth century.

Beginning in the fifteenth century, and even more in the years that followed, enemies of the Spanish kingdoms denounced Spanish society as racially and culturally bastardized, a mixture of Moors and Jews, hence inherently inferior to the strictly Christian societies of other parts of western Europe. By the nineteenth century, as denunciation and propaganda began to give way to more serious observation, there arose the only slightly more empirical notion of "oriental Spain," the only part of the West that was somehow also part of the East, because of the supposedly profound influence of the "Moors." (The common use of the latter term, by Spaniards and foreigners alike, would presumably have surprised and offended the Andalusis themselves. It probably reflected the fact that most foreign Muslims who entered the peninsula were Moroccan and other Berbers, not Arabs, and also stemmed from the continued massive Moroccan invasions between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.)

This raises the question — how much and what kind of influence did the Muslims have on Spanish culture, society, and institutions? The influence is often considered to have been profound, but was it really? The issue was at the crux of the quarrel between Castro and Sánchez Albornoz, probably the most famous two-man controversy in all Spanish historiography.

To begin with, there are approximately four thousand words in Castilian and other peninsular languages that are derived from Arabic (with rather fewer in Catalan), having to do specifically with such areas as geography, economic practices, basic technology, and administration. They are almost all words for things, rather than for sentiments (although there are a few for the latter, as well), and entered the vocabulary primarily between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the Spanish occupied nearly all of Al-Andalus and incorporated a sizable Muslim minority.
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The vocabulary of Castilian is, however, quite large, and such words — though among those frequently used — amount to a very small percentage of the total. Grammar and syntax remained totally unaffected. Obviously Arabic had some influence, but whether this could be considered a profound influence is more doubtful.

Spanish culture, on the one hand, and the country's institutional theory and practice, on the other, are all of the west European type. There is some Islamic influence in Spanish literature, but again the degree is quite limited, having to do with certain medieval poetic forms and plotlines. No influence may be found in religious culture, theology, or church organization and administration, or in philosophical thought, high culture, or political philosophy and practice. The fact that an occasional term of Arab origin may appear in the roster of administration positions is a technicality, not an oriental model. Even Spanish diet reveals only modest traces of Andalusi or Mudejar influence, rejecting the semivegetarian Andalusi cuisine and most of its favorite foods, such as couscous, which has no place in Spanish diet, which conversely always featured pork, like that of other Europeans.

Popular songs and music have no Arab meter, and in fact Spanish music, even of the earlier period, could not be played on the typically Muslim instruments. The oldest of the well-known Spanish, mainly Andalusian, dances originated no earlier than the sixteenth century. Similarly the origins of flamenco and cante jondo, the "lerele" style, are modern Andalusian, and traditional gypsy, a style that first began to emerge in the Jerez-Cádiz triangle toward the end of the eighteenth century, achieved its full form in Seville and some of the larger Andalusian cities soon after the middle of the nineteenth century, from where it soon spread to Madrid. It does have certain oriental roots, but the orient from which part of flamenco stems is the musical culture that the gypsies brought from India, not the Arab Middle East.

In the late Middle Ages, the principal influence or expression of Muslim culture in Spanish lay in certain areas of esthetics, most especially in the decorative style generally called Mudéjar. This lasted for approximately two centuries as architectural and other kinds of decoration for buildings whose plan and character, however, were not those of Muslim Granada but of Christian Spain. "Mudejar style" remained a Spanish form that was revived early in the twentieth century.

Proponents of "romantic Spain" would nonetheless argue that Spanish "psychology" reveals considerable oriental influence. To what precisely would such an observation refer? Its proponents usually point to such qualities as rhetoric, emotionality, spontaneity, frequent dissidence, and lack of cooperation, or any one of a number of other things. Richard Ford, in his famous
Handbook for Travellers in Spain
(1845), tried to be more precise than most, pointing to such qualities as hospitality, gratitude, fear of contamination or of the "evil eye," of women sitting on the floor of churches, and of the "resignation" of the Spanish. Occasional individual traits might be noticed, such as a greater tendency of Spanish women to cover their faces, or a special flourish, such as the contraction "q.s.p.b." (standing for "que sus pies besa" — who kisses your feet — a rhetorical gesture not common in other Western discourse). When totaled up, however, it is rather thin stuff, since many of these characteristics might be found in other European countries in varying degrees. On the other hand, Spanish essentialists, beginning to some extent in the sixteenth century, have held that Spanish psychology is in fact a kind of racial constant since pre-Roman times. Is either contention — the "orientalist" or the "essentialist" — correct? Is either verifiable or an empirical hypothesis capable of falsification? This would seem doubtful, since each rests on vague but sweeping generalizations that cannot be empirically verified. Many of the things that seemed so "different" about the Spanish during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries were the consequence not of orientalism but of the relative traditionalism of Spanish society, slower to undergo the changes experienced by the rest of western Europe. This is not to deny that Spanish society has its idiosyncrasies, as do all others, but those customs or attitudes that can be determined to have stemmed directly from the Muslims are quite limited.