Even the early thirteenth-century epic on Rodrigo Diaz, the Poema de Mio Cid (The Poem of the Cid) admits to the hero’s friendship with Muslims and catalogues the deficiencies of Rodrigo’s Christian associates as much as those of the Moors. As with the Historia Roderici of a century before, this is hardly ‘crusading’ literature.24 Despite the trickle of papal bulls from the early decades of the twelfth century, holy war was grafted on to the Spanish conflicts only gradually and, from an Iberian perspective, incompletely. Not all subsequent wars against Muslims were crusades. Crusading did not, as often in the eastern Mediterranean, set the military and political agenda but followed it, shaping mentalities, not strategy. The association of holiness to defence and conquest paid practical dividends, in the use of military orders in front-line settlements as well on campaign, or in the access to ecclesiastical and lay taxation. However, Iberian Muslims rarely attracted from Iberian Christians the consistent demonization concocted by western rhetoric far from the crusade frontier. Spanish convivencia, while never the Edenic state of multicultural harmony some have imagined, precluded the worst excesses of religious hatred in the contest for supremacy that rumbled and spat for a century and half after the First Crusade. The tainted legacy of entrenched intolerance and the racist persecution and expulsion of non-Catholic Spaniards belonged more to the period after the effective completion of the Reconquest, Granada excepted, in the mid-thirteenth century than to the previous period of active crusading.25 Nonetheless, crusade stereotypes did influence the creation of Spanish Catholic exceptionalism in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, providing a justification for internal discrimination with an abiding external incentive, the recovery of Jerusalem. The self-image of warriors of Christ, specially favoured and specially commissioned, that permeated Spanish official culture by 1500 was thus an indirect product of the historical Reconquest crusade experience.26
HOLY WAR
By analogy, the First Crusade lent definition to the application of holy war to the Spanish Reconquest. While remissions of sins were attached to various Spanish campaigns by Paschal II, the full panoply including cross-giving was applied to the ephemerally successful Pisan-Catalan-southern French assault on the Balearic Islands in 1113– 14, and possibly to the unrealized attack on Tortosa planned in 1115. The successful siege of Zaragoza by Alfonso I of Aragon in 1118 drew a papal indulgence for those who died or, in the tradition of Urban II’s Tarragona appeal of 1089, contributed to the establishment of the city’s new church and clergy. The consistent papal line was that the Spanish war against Islam was as useful and therefore as meritorious as the wars for the Holy Land, even in the absence of equivalent symbols and privileges. The First Lateran Council of 1123, summoned by Calixtus II, a former papal legate to Spain, confirmed the equation by lumping together those who had taken the cross for Jerusalem and Spain (Canon XI).27 At the same time, Calixtus granted to crucesignati in Spain ‘the same remission of sins that we conceded to the defenders of the eastern church’ for an expedition planned in Catalonia under the legates of the archbishop of Tarragona.28 On the other side of the peninsula, in 1125, Archbishop Diego Gelmirez of Santiago took up the linguistic and theological association in a grandiose scheme apparently aimed at reaching Jerusalem via north Africa: ‘let us become soldiers of Christ… taking up arms… for the remission of sins’.29 However, as with the papal plan for a general crusade in Spain in 1123, the archbishop’s ambition proved stillborn. In general, crusading apparatus was most effective when it fitted existing plans rather than of itself stimulating action in the manner of many eastern Mediterranean campaigns. It is notable how regularly papal crusade grants came in response to requests from local Iberian rulers. Perhaps of greater significance than the operation of the formal paraphernalia of the Jerusalem holy war in Spain was its influence on aspirations. Increasingly, wars in Spain were regarded by their promoters in terms of the wider conflict defined by the Jerusalem war. This redefinition was neither universal nor constant. Yet its penetration was evident in Leonese and Castilian chronicles and, most startlingly, in the 1131 testamentary arrangements of Alfonso I of Aragon-Navarre (d. 1134), who left his kingdom jointly to the Templars, Hospitallers and the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre. Ten years before his death Alfonso had attempted to found a militia Christi, modelled on the Templars, entrusted with the task of fighting all Muslims and, in the fashion of Archbishop Gelmirez, cutting a new path to Jerusalem.30
The experience of the late 1140s emphasized how Iberian holy war was influenced by local demands coinciding with grander crusading designs, in this case the Second Crusade. In 1146, the Genoese had attacked the port of Almeria on the southern coast of Granada, an expedition described by contemporaries in wholly secular terms. The following year, in alliance with Alfonso VII of Castile, a renewed Genoese attack had been elevated into a holy war, complete with remission of sins. Alfonso attracted allies to join the venture with promises of ‘redemption of souls’ before he obtained from Eugenius III retrospective confirmation of the status of the new attack on Almeria in the bull Divina dispensatione (April 1147).31 Almeria fell to the Christians in October 1147. In conception and execution, the Almeria campaign had no direct connection with the larger eastern expedition beyond the availability of crusade privileges. In 1148, a further papal grant of crusader indulgences ‘which Pope Urban established for all those going for the liberation of the eastern church’ was applied to the Catalan-Genoese attack on Tortosa at the mouth of the Ebro, which fell after a five-month siege in December 1148.32 Among others, the Tortosa campaign recruited veterans from Almeria and the successful siege of Lisbon (July–October 1147). However, it is notable that, unlike the Aragonese and Catalan ventures of 1147–8, the Lisbon enterprise seems not to have elicited an explicit, separate papal crusade bull, the Portuguese invitation to the Holy Land crusaders, however long contemplated, appearing by comparison rather more opportunist.
The failure of the Second Crusade in the east dampened papal and probably popular enthusiasm for crusading holy war. However, local conditions, in Spain as in the Baltic, encouraged continued identification of secular conflict with religious war. This was lent added force by a new threat to Christian gains from the Almohads, al-Muwahhidun, the ‘Upholders of the Divine Unity’. These fundamentalist unitarians, originating like the Almoravids in southern Morocco, sought to purge the increasingly corrupt Almoravid regime and restore to the Maghrib and al-Andalus the spiritual purity and intensity of early Islam. The Almoravids had emphasized legalistic rules and operated a very loose theocratic regime even before they declined from their initial austerity. The Almohads, under their founder Muhammed Ibn Tumart (declared the mahdi by his followers in 1121, d. 1130) and his successor ‘Abd al-Mu ‘min (1130–63) destroyed Almoravid power in the Mahgrib and, from 1146, began to infiltrate across the Straits into Spain. (They founded a town at Gibraltar in 1159.) While initially a threat chiefly to the emirs, who had regained a measure of autonomy as the authority of the Almoravids had decayed from the 1120s, soon the Christian rulers felt the force of this new power. By 1173, mainland al-Andalus had been annexed by the Almohads under Yusuf I (1163–84). In the next quarter of a century, the Almohads reversed many of the Christian advances of the previous generations. In 1195 they defeated Alfonso VIII of Castile at Alarcos on the river Guadiana and proceeded to raid into the Tagus valley. Yet, even here, the complexity of Spanish politics overlay any religious conflict. At least one disaffected Castilian noble fought for the Almohads at Alarcos and in 1196 led a Muslim regiment in the army of Alfonso IX of Leon which invaded Castile.33 The Almohad advance served only to add another potential ally for the warring Christian kings. In an attempt to impose Christian unity, in 1197 the nonagenarian pope, Celestine III, was even induced to authorize the full eastern crusading privileges for those who fought against the renegade Alfonso IX.34 Only in gilded memory was the Spanish crusade a simple religious war.
Celestine III’s use of the crusade against the Christian Alfonso IX, although eliciting little obvious response, demonstrated how far the mechanics of the Jerusalem war had come to dominate church-sanctioned violence. In 1166, a church council at Segovia had proposed Jerusalem indulgences for those who defended Castile from invasion. By the early thirteenth century, crusade privileges became a regular, accepted element in church warfare. However, Celestine had a more personal concern with Iberian politics. As Cardinal Hyacinth he had twice been on legatine missions to the peninsula, in 1154–5 and 1172–3. On each occasion he had promoted the Reconquest as a crusade, an association he revived during his pontificate, when he sent his nephew, Gregory of Sant’ Angelo, as legate to Spain.35 While Celestine’s commitment exposed the contrast between the rhetoric of holy war and the reality of secular politics, his long career witnessed the consolidation of a crusading tradition which, although reflecting both the general absence of crusading between 1149 and 1187 and its revival and extension thereafter, presented distinctive features.
Most obvious was the use of international and local military orders to garrison the frontier regions from southern Aragon to Portugal.36 As recipients of alms, estates, villages and castles, the military orders played a central role in the politics as well as campaigning of the Reconquest, a position reflected in
