Most national identities rest in part on a series of shared pseudo-historical myths. Christian Spain, that of Ferdinand and Isabella, Philip II or General Franco, defined itself in the context of the Recon-quest from the Moors (literally people from the old Roman province of Mauretania, i.e. Berbers from what are now coastal Morocco and Algeria), a process begun with the eighth-century Asturian resistance to the Muslim conquerors and finding its culmination in the capture of Granada in 1492. This construct gave shape to an otherwise messy political history; it explained and justified the elements of religious, even racial exclusivity in early modern and modern Spanish culture; it provided a link between late medieval Christian rule and its remote Visigothic predecessor; and it lent to Spanish history the aura of providential destiny. Holy war operated at the centre of the Reconquest myth. The leading patron saint of Spain, St James, became an archetype of holy warrior. In war as in peace, church marched in militant step with state. It was no coincidence that Spanish bula de la cruzada, papally sanctioned grants of spiritual privileges in return for cash payments to secular or ecclesiastical authorities, a direct legacy of medieval crusade instruments, resisted many attempts at their abolition from the sixteenth century onwards. Only with the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) were these crusading remnants finally laid to rest.5
However closely associated, the Reconquest and crusading were not synonyms. The conquest of Muslim Spain by Christian princes was a long political process; regarding it as a re-conquest, a state of mind. A crusade was an event, Spanish crusades punctuating the larger narrative of conquest and settlement. Crusaders conquered but if subsequently they settled in these newly acquired lands, they did so not as crusaders per se. Frontier settlements may have been established by warriors of the cross but they were not ‘crusading communities’, with the possible exception of those areas and castles controlled by the military orders. Some historians have designated certain regions in terms of the ideology of conquest, as in the thirteenth-century ‘Crusader Kingdom of Valencia’.6 This may appear something of a misnomer. The ideology of penitential warfare lent an edge to pre-existing reconquest mentalities, but it is notable that the development of communal and religious intolerance and the rise of a new biological racism that marked the persecution of Jews, Muslims and Muslim converts (moriscos) in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries post-dated the period when crusades were a regular feature of Iberian politics.
Early versions of the Reconquest myth emerged among propagandists associated with the royal court of the Asturias in the late ninth century. Their object lay in asserting a legitimate continuity for Asturian kingship from the Visigothic past, the purging of the former sins that had lost Spain to Christendom and the providential mission to restore Christian rule and liberty to the peninsula. Ninth-century concerns fashioned accounts of the creation of the Asturian kingdom by a King Pelayo, ostensibly of Visigothic royal blood, after a victory over the Moors in 722. In this triumph against the odds, so the myth insisted, the inevitable recovery of Christian Spain was born. Although such claims were fictive, this fashioning of perceptions established important and lasting traditions. Wars of defence and conquest against the Moors were projected as possessing a fundamental religious purpose, the salvation (salus) of Spain.7 Aggression, portrayed as recapturing territory lost by Visigothic predecessors, was intrinsically just. The struggle with Muslim neighbours became elevated into a sort of Manichaean contest of religions and cultures which bore very little actual relation to the nature of frontier competition and exchange, still less to the continuous internecine conflicts between the Christian lordlings of the north. As elsewhere in western Europe, the church, its bishops and its saints became intensely involved in promoting political identity. The permanent presence of the infidel aided the development of religious warfare, in ways parallel to contemporary war rhetoric in Alfredian Wessex or late Carolingian Francia. Religious symbolism and church liturgy had long been incorporated into the rituals of war. There was an elaborate liturgy blessing a departing warrior king in the Visigothic Liber ordinum, and it is possible that the tradition of bearing into battle a cross, or a relic of the True Cross, survived in the Christian kingdoms.8
However, warfare framed by religious language is hardly the same as a self-conscious religiously backed Reconquest or even religious war. Religious approval of war was a commonplace to inspire loyalty, establish united purpose, salve consciences and assuage doubts on both sides of the Iberian frontier. The great Cordoban vizier al- Mansur (i.e. ‘the Victorious’, 976–1002) attacked churches and monasteries during his devastating raids into Christian territory (985–1102), in which he plundered from Barcelona and Pamplona to Leon, the Duero valley and Coimbra. In 997, he carried off the bells of the basilica of St James at Compostela to adorn the mosque at Cordoba. Al-Mansur made a public virtue of his piety, allegedly carrying his own autograph fair copy of the Koran on campaigns, which he publicized as jihad. This did not prevent him from employing Christians as mercenaries and guides or being remembered by his own people as ‘our provider of slaves’.9 All Iberian rulers conducted aggressive warfare for profit. Although by 1000 much of this was conducted across the frontier region around the Duero valley stretching north-east towards the Upper Ebro and the foothills of the Pyrenees, there existed many petty frontiers in early eleventh-century Iberia, those caused by religion only the most obvious. The political authority and material resources of the Cordoban caliphate rather than its religious complexion made it a threat and a target for its Christian neighbours. Competition for resources and power pitted Christian against Christian and induced political alliances across religious divides. This was not how it looked to later observers and some foreign contemporaries, such as the Burgundian monk Ralph Glaber (c.980–1046), who wrote of resistance to al-Mansur in terms of faith and heavenly reward.10 However, recourse to the encouragement of religion in an idealized vision of a conflict of faiths ignored the realities of eleventh-century Spain.
Politics and cash, not religion, provided the impetus for the Reconquest. The collapse of the Cordoban caliphate through internecine feuding in the generation leading to its extinction in 1031 and its replacement by a patchwork of so-called taifa or ‘party’ kingdoms provided Christian rulers with a chance to intervene in affairs of the south, a reversal of the politics of al-Mansur’s time. Muslim Spain was transformed into competing principalities, many no stronger, some weaker than their Christian counterparts: Badajoz, Seville, Granada, Malaga, Toledo, Murcia, Valencia, Denia, Zaragoza, Lerida and the Balearic Islands. Strong Christian rulers, such as Ferdinand I of Leon-Castile, his son, Alfonso VI, and Ramon Berenguer I count of Barcelona (1035– 76), exploited these divisions by establishing a network of proprietorial protection rackets. Formal treaties were drawn up under which the Christian ruler would agree to defend his taifa client in return for vast quantities of the key commodity that fuelled these relationships, gold. Although the material weakness of taifa emirs allowed for territorial expansion, such as Ferdinand I’s annexation of Coimbra in 1064, intense competition revolved around taifa gold through annual tributes, or protection money, known as parias. Historically, the prosperous urban economy of al- Andalus had been rich in gold that came from the west African Gold Coast across the Sahara to the Mediterranean. Now the Christian kings managed to harness this wealth for themselves. By the 1060s, Ferdinand I, for example, enjoyed parias from Zaragoza, Toledo and Badajoz. Control over Zaragoza had been contested between Leon-Castile, Navarre and Barcelona. On Ferdinand’s death, it passed briefly to Sancho IV of Navarre. Al-Andalus became the milch-cow for Christian assertiveness. The wider circulation of large quantities of gold, in the rest of western Europe a very scarce commodity, funded the consolidation of royal power, the formation of stable states and the expansion of Christian frontiers. As well as enriching those in military, religious, civilian or commercial royal service, the influx of gold to the Christian realms attracted interest from beyond the Pyrenees, both military adventurers and diplomatic allies. In that indirect fashion, the parias system contributed to opening Spain to ideas of holy war increasingly fashionable north of the Pyrenees.11
Religion was no determinant in these arrangements. In his deal with the emir of Zaragoza for the year 1069, Sancho IV of Navarre explicitly agreed not to assist any ‘people from France or elsewhere’ crossing his kingdom to attack Zaragoza or ally with any Christians or Muslims against the emir, with whom the king would be bound ‘in one brotherhood’. For these promises, the emir agreed to pay 1,000 gold pieces a month.12 These deals rightly assumed an inherent instability that allowed entrepreneurial freebooters to sell their swords and armed following to the highest bidder or even to establish themselves as independent rulers. This occurred across the peninsula, making it, for the first time in centuries, a single, if chaotic political system. One Muslim political entrepreneur from the south, Ibn Ammar (1031–84), had won and lost control of Murcia. After years in exile at the court of Zaragoza, he was murdered by his former boss, the emir of Seville, using an axe given by Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile. The most famous example of a freelance taking advantage of this fluidity of preferment and power was the Castilian nobleman Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid (c.1045–99). A valued general and diplomat under Ferdinand I, after falling out with Alfonso VI, Rodrigo served the emir of Zaragoza (1081–6),
