wider Christian attack on Islamic lands. Everywhere encouraged by Muslim disunity, the Franks had conquered Sicily and made extensive conquests in Spain, where they had ‘gained possession of town after town’, before descending on the Near East.1 Al-Sulami’s vision mirrored Urban II’s encouragement for certain Catalan counts to restore the town and church of Tarragona rather than depart for Jerusalem: ‘it is no virtue to rescue Christians from the Saracens in one place, only to expose them to the tyranny and oppression of the Saracens in another’.2 To both, the First Crusade formed part of a larger political struggle between the two religions in which control of territory and lordship stood as a vindication and imperative of faith. While the Muslim concept of umma, the universal community of the faithful, derived from the religion’s earliest days, its rough Christian equivalent, the idea of Christendom, Christianitas, inhabited by a homogeneous Christian people or race (gens), was markedly consolidated by the papal reforms of the eleventh century. This emphasized doctrinal and devotional uniformity. Where opponents were of different faiths, the material could be associated with the transcendent. Configuring frontier conflicts in terms of religious identity allowed the language and institutions of holy war to be applied to frontier wars against Muslim and pagan neighbours.
19. The Spanish Reconquista
This was no new phenomenon in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Christian rhetoric had surrounded the wars of Charlemagne against the then pagan Saxons in the eighth century and those against Vikings, Magyars and Saracens in the ninth and tenth centuries. In the eleventh century, certain frontier conflicts became suffused with doctrines of penitential warfare developed by the reformed papacy for the spread (dilatio) as well as defence of Christendom. The dynamic image of an embattled faith challenging enemies on all sides excited the imagination of recruits on the First Crusade. Within half a century, the ideology and formulae of Pope Urban’s Jerusalem war found expression in the campaigns of Christian lords against their non-Christian neighbours throughout the Iberian peninsula and in the Baltic. Nonetheless, despite the obvious analogies, in one central aspect these frontier wars, to which popes applied or locals assumed the privileges of the war of the cross, differed from the eastern crusades. Political exchange along and across Christendom’s immediate frontiers was a constant, regardless of new-fangled ways of justifying violence. Competition for land and resources, conflicts of lordship, culture and religion were inescapable features of Christendom’s borderlands, long predating Urban II’s penitential war. In Spain and the Baltic political expansion and settlement drove the crusades, not, as in the Near East, vice versa. Western Christendom had no frontier with the Muslim Near East except in the collective imaginative empathy of a religious culture fed by endless repetition of Bible stories in preaching, the liturgy and art. No strategic or material interest compelled the presence of western knights in the Judean hills. Easier if not always richer pickings for settlers, colonists and conquerors lay along the contested marches in Spain, Sicily, Pomerania, Prussia, Livonia or even Greece and the Aegean. The presence of western warriors and settlers on these frontiers made some economic and political sense, whereas the western adventures to Palestine, Syria and Egypt are only satisfactorily explicable in terms of a religious mission, however material the means used to achieve and sustain it. German expansion in the Baltic or the integration of Denmark and Sweden into the polity of western Europe were not dependent on crusade ideology and practices, even if they received important support from them. In Spain, conflict between Muslims and Christian rulers long predated the arrival of crusade indulgences. As with the colonization wars in the Baltic, the so-called Reconquest (reconquista) of Spain by Christian powers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even where embracing the spiritual, legal and fiscal benefits of the negotium crucis, retained distinct characteristics unmediated by the idea of the crusade.3
THE SPANISH RECONQUEST
The political history of early medieval Spain bore closer similarities with the experience of north Africa, the Levant and the Mediterranean islands than with western Europe north of the Pyrenees. Indeed, it has been argued that the application of crusading formulae to the wars in the peninsula provided a barometer of northern influences and the integration of Spanish society and culture within the norms of Latin Christendom. By the early eighth century, the former Roman province of Hispania was dominated by a Christian Visigothic kingdom based at Toledo, which had emerged two centuries earlier. This Visigothic kingdom was then destroyed by a power that owed nothing either to the Roman or Germanic inheritance. In 711 largely Berber armies led by Arab generals invaded the peninsula, defeating and killing the last Visi-gothic king, Rodrigo, at the battle of the Guadelete (711). Rapidly, the political structure of Spain was transformed. The Visigothic state imploded, to be replaced by a Muslim emirate (756–1031) with its capital at Cordoba, transformed in 929 into an autonomous caliphate, under the descendants of the earlier seventh- and eighth-century Um-mayyad caliphs of the whole Islamic empire. The new rulers asserted their political authority over almost all of the Iberian peninsula, with the exception of the far north beyond the Duero valley, in the Cantabrian mountains and the Basque country. There some enduring Christian lordships coalesced during the century and a half following the Arab invasion. More slowly, the Arab conquest led to the creation of an Islamicized and Arabized culture in the lands they occupied. Berber settlers assumed the orthodoxy of their Muslim Arab commanders and gradually, over many generations, significant numbers of the indigenous Romano-Hispanic population that had not emigrated adopted the customs, language, laws and religion of the conquerors. Although by 900 only about 25 per cent, in 1000, perhaps about 75 per cent of the population of Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, ‘the land of the West’, may have been Muslims.4
This produced neither cultural apartheid nor an Eden of multicultural harmony. As elsewhere under Islamic rulers, Jews and Christians were afforded subordinate status as people of the Book, liable to the habitual poll tax. They lived side by side with Muslim neighbours and adopted the customs and language of their masters, Arabic- speaking Christians being known as Mozarabs. Early medieval Spain under the Ummayyads of Cordoba was a land of diversity as well as convivencia (literally ‘living together’), but not always harmony. Central authority was often patchy, cultural identity frequently confused by conversion, intermarriage and ambition. Claiming Arab ancestry, even if ersatz, was almost a sine qua non for political success under the Cordoba caliphate. The peninsula was crossed by a series of political, social and cultural frontiers to match its intractably divisive physical geography. Such frontiers produced synthesis and contact alongside competition and hostility. The independence of the northern Christian enclaves centred initially around Orviedo in the Asturias largely depended on the early Muslim withdrawal from the region rather than any resilience of their own. Only by the early tenth century had this principality expanded southwards into the wide frontier zone south of the Cantabrian mountains to incorporate a new capital, Leon, as well as the county of Castile around Burgos and the headwaters of the Ebro. By this time another murkily identifiable lordship had coalesced around Pamplona in the western Pyrenees, later known as Navarre. South-east of Navarre, the valley of the river Aragon, a tributary of the Ebro, also became a focus of power that grew into a separate kingdom in the eleventh century. At the eastern end of the Pyrenees, Catalonia, a political and cultural link with the Christian shores of the Mediterranean and conduit for people and ideas from southern France, had been established by Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son, in the early years of the ninth century. Charlemagne’s own attempts to create a Frankish march further south around Zaragoza on the Ebro failed dismally in 778, a campaign made famous by the defeat of its rearguard at Roncevalles.
With the exception of Catalonia, whose counts remained in the orbit of trans-Pyrenean Frankish politics, these tiny Christian principalities remained insular, locked in a close dependency on rivalries between each other and raiding across the long and wide frontier with the caliphate of Cordoba, bandits and rustlers, not warriors of God. The transformation in the Song of Roland of the disastrous massacre of a Frankish regiment by Pyrenean Basques in 778 into an epic contest pitting Christian chivalry against the massed exotic malignity of Spanish and north African Islam owed everything to religious rhetoric, social values, cultural experiences and imaginative constructions north of the Pyrenees. The development of the Song of Roland, its earliest written version only surviving from the early twelfth century, after the First Crusade, in no way reflected Iberian realities. However, the idea of the immediate Iberian military frontier with Islam played its part in the formation of Urban II’s world-view. In the second half of the eleventh century, Spanish frontier wars attracted recruits from southern France and, possibly, even papal indulgences a generation before the Council of Clermont, signs, at the least, of greater interest from outside the region. When and how far these wars of survival, profit and conquest were regarded by those engaged in them as possessing any transcendent religious purpose or spiritual value remains both unclear and controversial.
