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Chapter 1

Sex as Power

The circumstances surrounding the Islamic conquest of the Visigothic kingdom of Iberia between 711 and c.720 remain deeply obscure, for Muslim and Christian accounts of the invasion differ greatly in terms of chronology, detail, and emphasis. The two earliest Muslim accounts of the invasion—composed by the Maliki religious and legal scholars (‘ulamā) Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 853) and Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 871) fully 150 years after the events took place—are a notable case in point. In those texts, it has been argued, the authors’ primary concern appears to have been to demonstrate that the lands of the Peninsula had been conquered by force rather than by submission and, as a result, were to be regarded as the absolute property of the Muslim invaders.¹ In marked contrast, the chronicler Ibn al-Qūṭīya (d. 977), who claimed to be of Visigothic royal descent, was equally insistent that the Islamic takeover of the Peninsula had been more the fruit of a series of pacts with the Hispano-Gothic population than the consequence of a full-blown military conquest.² Be that as it may, there is broad consensus between the various accounts, Muslim and Christian alike, that the collapse of the Visigothic state owed as much to the invaders’ skill in exploiting existing political divisions within the Peninsula as to the speed and ruthlessness with which they were able to press home their military advantage. The death of King Roderic (710–11/12) in battle and that of much of his aristocratic entourage, together with the fall of the capital Toledo soon afterward, appears to have left what remained of the Visigothic ruling élite in a state of collective paralysis, unable to coordinate further resistance.³ In the ensuing power vacuum, some notables are said to have fled to the remote mountainous regions of the North;⁴ others abandoned the Peninsula altogether and sought refuge across the Pyrenees;⁵ yet others were carried off into captivity, or were even executed outright.⁶

Other Visigothic notables sought to preserve their wealth, status, and power by coming to terms with the invaders. One such was Theodemir (d. 744), lord of Orihuela, Alicante, and five other towns in the southeast of the Peninsula, who on 5 April 713 agreed on a treaty with the military commander ‘Abd al-Azīz b. Mūsā, the text of which has thankfully survived.⁷ Theodemir and his supporters pledged loyalty to the Muslim authorities and undertook not to succor any fugitives or enemies of the Muslim state. Furthermore, they agreed that they and the towns under Theodemir’s authority would pay an annual poll tax, in return for which they were guaranteed their safety and freedom of worship. In doing so, they and the other Christian and Jewish communities who made similar undertakings acquired the status of dhimmī (protected peoples) under Muslim rule. The treaty may be a chance survival, but it serves to reinforce the impression given by other sources that the Islamic conquest of the Peninsula was in part a gradual and negotiated takeover, involving the active collaboration of significant elements of the Hispano-Gothic aristocracy, rather than the smash-and-grab raid presented by some of the Arabic narrative accounts.⁸

Intermarriage with the indigenous Christian population of Iberia constituted another important mechanism by which the Muslim invaders consolidated their authority over the Peninsula. Indeed, “sexual mixing” between Muslim men and Christian women—be it through marriage or the taking of slave concubines—may be said to have represented a vital element in driving the process of social and cultural change in postconquest Iberia. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the social, cultural, and political significance of such interfaith sexual liaisons—be they consensual or forced—and the part they played within the construction of Islamic authority prior to the millennium.

Interfaith Marriage: Purposes and Consequences

According to the tenets of classical Islamic law, intermarriage between a Muslim man and a Christian or Jewish woman was entirely permissible, as long as any children born to the couple were also brought up as Muslims: “Lawful to you are the believing women and the free women from among those who were given the Scriptures before you, provided that you give them their dowries and live in honor with them, neither committing fornication nor taking them as mistresses.”⁹ As Jessica Coope has noted, “underlying this rule is the assumption that the husband, as head of the family, would be likely to convert his wife, whereas the wife, as the subordinate partner, would be unable to convert her husband to her religion.”¹⁰ By stark contrast, marriage or indeed any sexual relations between a Muslim woman and a Christian or Jewish man were strictly outlawed.¹¹ Thus, a ninth-century legal pronouncement from Córdoba ordered that any Christian found guilty of having sexual intercourse with a Muslim woman should receive corporal punishment and imprisonment; other legal authorities prescribed the death penalty for such transgressors.¹²

For its part, the Christian Church, like Judaism before it, had traditionally expressed hostility to those who engaged in sexual intercourse with people of other faiths. St. Paul had been forthright on the matter: “Do not unite yourselves with unbelievers; they are no fit mates for you. What has righteousness to do with wickedness? Can light consort with darkness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14). These prohibitions had been amplified in numerous pieces of conciliar and secular legislation promulgated during the period of the Later Roman Empire and beyond.¹³ In Iberia, for example, the synod of Elvira, held c. 300–309, along with a series of church councils celebrated in Toledo under the authority of the Visigothic monarchy during the sixth and seventh centuries, had outlawed intermarriage between Jewish men and Christian women.¹⁴ In the aftermath of the Muslim invasion and conquest of the Peninsula, however, such concerns in some quarters on the Christian side appear to have been temporarily laid to one side.

Our sources, Christian and Muslim alike, give the impression that the lead in this matter was taken by ‘Abd al-Azīz b. Mūsā, who succeeded to the governorship of al-Andalus in 714 once his father Mūsā b. Nuṣayr—the Arab governor of Ifrīqīya (North Africa) and architect of the invasion of the Peninsula—had been recalled to Damascus.¹⁵ It is widely reported that some time after taking up the reins of power ‘Abd al-Azīz married King Roderic’s widow (or his daughter according to some accounts), who is referred to in the Chronicle of 754 as Egilona and by Muslim writers as Aylū or Umm ‘Āṣim. The Chronicle of 754 gives this brief account:

After he [‘Abd al-Azīz] had taken all the riches and positions of honour in Seville, as well as the queen of Spain, whom he joined in marriage, and the daughters of kings and princes, whom he treated as concubines and then rashly repudiated, he was eventually killed on the advice of Ayyūb by a revolt of his own men while he was in prayer. After Ayyūb had held Spain for a full month, al-Hurr succeeded to the throne of Hesperia by order of the prince, who was informed about the death of ‘Abd al-Azīz in this way: that on the advice of Queen Egilona, wife of the late king Roderic, whom he had joined to himself, he tried to throw off the Arab yoke from his neck and retain the conquered kingdom of Iberia for himself.¹⁶

On the Muslim side, writing a century later, Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam describes these events in a far more dramatic fashion:

After his father departed, ‘Abd al-Azīz married a Christian princess, daughter of a king of al-Andalus. It is said she was the daughter of Roderic, king of al-Andalus, whom Tāriq killed. She brought him a great fortune in worldly things, such as cannot be described. When she came to him, she said, “Why do I not see the people of your kingdom glorifying you? They do not prostrate themselves before you as the people of my father’s kingdom glorified him and prostrated themselves before him.” He did not know what to say to her, so he commanded that the side of his palace be pierced with a small door. He used to give audience to the people, and for this purpose he would come to the inside of the door, so that someone entering to see him would have to lower his head on account of the smallness of the door. She was in a [hidden] spot watching the people, and when she saw this, she said to ‘Abd al-Azīz, “Now you are a great king!” The people heard, however, that he had constructed the door for this purpose, and some believed that she had made him a Christian.¹⁷

Alarmed by this behavior, a group of prominent Arab conspirators led by Ḥabīb b. Abī ‘Ubayda al-Fihrī, who was ‘Abd al-Azīz’s right-hand man, and Ziyad b. al-Nābigha al-Tamīmī, assassinated the governor while he was at prayer, perhaps with the connivance of the caliph Sulayman (715–17).¹⁸ Later authors, including the Andalusi chronicler Aḥmad al-Rāzī (d. 955), embellished this episode even farther, claiming that Roderic’s widow had encouraged ‘Abd al-Azīz to wear a crown studded with precious stones in order to further project his authority. It is also reported by some that the “royal couple” lived together in the church of Santa Rufina in Seville.¹⁹

Interfaith marriage brought with it two clear advantages for the Muslim élite that sought to consolidate its power in Iberia in the immediate aftermath of the conquest. First, it provided a means to legitimize the imposition of new lords over the Hispano-Gothic population, at a time when the pacification of the Peninsula was still precarious in the extreme and the number of Muslim settlers was relatively small. In this way, the Christian women of al-Andalus could be regarded as potential “peace-weavers” in the consolidation of Islamic rule, in the same way that intermarriage between Norman lords and local heiresses was later to provide a means to bind conquerors and conquered more closely together in the wake of the Norman conquest of England, Southern Italy, and Ireland.²⁰ In the case of ‘Abd al-Azīz, however, the Arab governor is reported to have gone even farther, using his marriage to a member of the Visigothic ruling class as a means to associate himself with indigenous traditions of government, including perhaps crown-wearing, as part of an ambitious if ultimately doomed attempt to create a personal monarchy for himself in Iberia that might command support from the local population.²¹ In short, ‘Abd al-Azīz’s downfall was brought about by his political ambitions, which sought to deny the caliph’s authority over al-Andalus, and not by his decision to take for himself a Christian bride, as some authors would later imply. After all, Ziyād ibn al-Nābigha al-Tamīmī, one of the chief conspirators against the governor, is also said to have married a Christian noblewoman.²²

The second advantage offered by marriage alliances between Muslim lords and Christian noblewomen was that they represented a means through which much of the landed wealth of the Visigothic magnate class could legitimately be channeled into Muslim ownership. Whereas property conquered by force of arms (‘anwatan) would have passed automatically into the hands of the invaders, there were large swathes of the country—like Theodemir’s power base in the southeast, for example—where Islamic authority had been recognized through a pact, and where the invaders had no such rights of ownership over these lands (called sulḥan).²³ Interfaith marriage offered a solution to that problem, in that the children born to such mixed faith alliances, who were to be raised as Muslims, stood to inherit the property of their Visigothic grandfathers, through their mothers, as well as the lands that their Muslim fathers might have won as the fruits of conquest.

An account of how such arrangements might have worked out in practice is provided by Ibn al-Qūṭīya. Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s proud boast was that he was descended from Sara, grand-daughter of King Wittiza (694–710), whose sons had reportedly conspired against King Roderic at the time of the invasion and offered their allegiance to the Muslims. In return for this support, they had been confirmed in possession of their father’s estates, totaling some 3,000 properties spread across the Peninsula, or so it was claimed.²⁴ Ibn al-Qūṭīya goes on to recount that when the eldest of Wittiza’s sons, Almund, later died, his lands in and around Seville were seized by his brother Artabas, prompting Almund’s daughter, Sara, and her younger brothers to travel to the court of the caliph Hishām I (724–43) in Damascus in search of restitution. The caliph ruled that Artabas’s usurpation of Almund’s legacy had been unlawful, and he also arranged for Sara to marry one of his clients, ‘Īsā b. Muzāḥim, who accompanied her back to the Peninsula and helped to recover her properties. It was from this marriage that Ibn al-Qūṭīya claimed to be descended. When later widowed in 755, Sara married again, this time to ‘Umayr ibn Sa‘īd al-Lakhmī, a member of one of the Syrian junds (military regiments) that had arrived in the Peninsula in 742 to help prop up Umayyad authority in the wake of a major Berber revolt. It was through this second marriage, which was said to have been arranged by the first independent emir of al-Andalus, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I, that the family of the Banū Ḥajjāj later came to enjoy extensive wealth and power in the region of Seville.²⁵

How trustworthy is Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s account? Given that his History comprises more a colorful collection of exemplary and fabulous anecdotes than a detailed account of his times, and that even his pupil Ibn al-Faraḍī is said to have disparaged him as a spinner of tales (akhbār) rather than as a purveyor of serious history (ta’rīkh), his reliability as a historian has frequently been called into question. His account of how Sara traveled to Damascus to raise her case with the caliph certainly raises all manner of doubts.²⁶ It has been pointed out, for example, that Wittiza’s sons could only have been young boys at the time of the conquest and that it is difficult to believe that they took the lead in offering to give support to the Muslims, as Ibn al-Qūṭīya alleges.²⁷ On the other hand, the Christian Chronicle of 754 does make mention of the support lent to the Muslims by Wittiza’s brother, Oppa, so the idea that some of Wittiza’s kin—including perhaps his widow, who had briefly held the regency before Roderic seized the throne—were instrumental in negotiating with the Muslims, and that his sons were later beneficiaries of the deal, should not be dismissed out of hand. Whether “Sara the Goth” and her brothers really did journey to the caliphal court in Damascus, as is claimed, is highly doubtful. Such stories served above all to explain to posterity the process of accommodation between conquerors and some of the vanquished that had taken place at the time of the eighth-century Islamic conquest. Yet even if embroidered, the general thrust of Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s story, which illustrates how an interfaith marriage alliance provided the means by which the property of King Wittiza passed into Muslim control, is eminently plausible. As it is, a similar process of property transmission can be glimpsed in the case of a daughter of Theodemir of Murcia, who is reported to have married ‘Abd al-Jabbār b. Khaṭṭāb b. Marwān b. Naḍīr, another member of the Syrian army that arrived in the Peninsula in 742. According to the chronicler al-‘Udhrī, Khaṭṭāb received two villages from his bride by way of dowry, at Tarsa near Elche and at Tall al-Khaṭṭāb near Orihuela.²⁸ It was thanks to this alliance that the family of ‘Abd al-Jabbār was able to establish itself as one of the wealthiest and most influential kin groups in the region, whose power was to endure for centuries.²⁹

Interfaith marriage alliances offered the Visigothic landed aristocracy a number of advantages. Most obviously, for those like the families of Wittiza and Theodemir, who sought and found an accommodation with the Islamic invaders, marriage pacts represented a means for certain kin groups to defend their interests in the localities where they had traditionally held sway and to keep their landed wealth intact. Thus, if we are to believe Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Wittiza’s son Artabas continued to be an influential power broker in the region of Córdoba even after the conquest.³⁰ Likewise, Theodemir’s presumed son Athanagild remained a prominent figure in the southeast of the Peninsula, at any rate until the arrival of the Syrian junds and the appointment of the governor Abū’l-Khaṭṭār during the 740s.³¹ The price to be paid for that security of tenure was to be the raising of future generations of the family as Muslims, although in the early days of the conquest, barely eighty years after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad, when the doctrines and customs of Islam were still somewhat hazily defined, the differences between the three monotheistic religions were by no means as clear to contemporaries as they would later become.³² In short, for the members of the old Visigothic élite who were willing to collaborate with the invaders, interfaith marriage represented an attractive means to guarantee security of tenure and avoid the traumatic upheaval and loss of wealth, status, and power that had undoubtedly affected their peers in many other parts of the Peninsula.

Yet, while interfaith marriage was an important mechanism with which to encourage assimilation between Muslims and Christians in the years immediately following the conquest, it also had the potential to cause friction between the two. That, at least, is what a later account of the rebellion against Muslim authority that was hatched in the northernmost region of Asturias by the Christian warlord Pelayo (Pelagius) would have us believe. As so often, the sources for these events are both sparse and problematic in equal measure.³³ According to the A Sebastianum version of the late ninth-century Christian text known to historians as the Chronicle of Alfonso III, Pelayo was a Visigothic notable of royal descent; the Roda version of the same text, which differs in emphasis and a number of details, has him as the swordbearer of kings Wittiza and Roderic.³⁴ The latter version relates that in the early stages of the Muslim conquest Islamic authority over Asturias was wielded by one of Tāriq b. Ziyād’s supporters, a Berber called Munnuza, whose center of power was the coastal settlement of Gijón.³⁵ During his governorship of the region:

A certain Pelayo, who was the swordbearer of kings Wittiza and Roderic, oppressed by the authority of the Ishmaelites, had come to Asturias with his sister. On account of his sister, the aforementioned Munnuza despatched Pelayo to Córdoba as his envoy; but before he returned, Munnuza married his sister through some ruse. When Pelayo returned he by no means approved of it and since he had already been thinking about the salvation of the Church, he hastened to bring this about with all of his courage. Then the evil Tāriq sent soldiers to Munnuza, who were to arrest Pelayo and lead him back to Córdoba, bound in chains.³⁶

This was supposedly the spark that detonated a Christian revolt in Asturias. The chronicle goes on to narrate Pelayo’s flight from the Muslims, his election as dux (lord) of the region, and his subsequent victory at Covadonga at the foot of the Picos de Europa Mountains in 718, or possibly 722, depending on which version of events we follow. “From then on,” the late ninth-century Chronicle of Albelda declared, “freedom was restored to the Christian people … and by divine providence the kingdom of Asturias was born.”³⁷ How much of this we can take at face value is a moot point. It may be the case that claims that Pelayo enjoyed connections to the Visigothic royal house, either by blood or by service, were so much wishful thinking by later chroniclers keen to portray the Asturian realm as the legitimate successor to the Visigothic kingdom. Alternatively, it is plausible that Pelayo—like Theodemir before him—was a local noble, who had decided to come to terms with the invaders in the wake of the collapse of the Visigothic monarchy, only to repudiate those terms at a later date.³⁸ The motivation ascribed to Pelayo’s revolt, namely his desire to avenge the dishonor brought about by his sister’s marriage to Munnuza, might be construed simply as an easily understandable justification for his revolt after the event, in an age when the defense of family honor was considered essential. That said, it is by no means impossible that Pelayo’s inital pact of surrender with the Muslims had been sealed by a marriage alliance between his sister and Munnuza, just as Theodemir’s presumed son, Athanagild, may have engineered the marriage of his sister to Khaṭṭāb at the time of his agreement with the Syrians, when they settled in the southeast of the Peninsula.

To sum up thus far, the various strands of evidence that have survived—scattered, exiguous, and problematic though they may be—all seem to point in the same direction. They suggest that interfaith marriage between Muslim men and Christian women became a significant tool in the process of pacification and colonization that took place in the period immediately following the Islamic conquest and in the aftermath of the arrival of the Syrian junds in 742. Furthermore, even though only a handful of examples have come down to us, recorded by later historians because the élite protagonists were deemed particularly “newsworthy,” it is safe to assume that marriage alliances of this sort occurred with frequency at other levels of society too. So commonplace indeed had the practice evidently become by the end of the eighth century, that in a letter he composed sometime between 781 and 785 Pope Hadrian I expressed dismay that so many daughters of Catholic parents in the Peninsula had been given in marriage to Muslims or Jews.³⁹ Hadrian’s letter was a response to missives dispatched to him by the Frankish clergyman Egila, who had been consecrated bishop by Archbishop Wilcharius of Sens c.780 and sent to the Peninsula to preach.⁴⁰ Such anxieties were voiced anew at an ecclesiastical council held in Córdoba in 839, when the assembled Christian clerics denounced “the impious marriage of various faithful with the infidel, sowing crimes among our morals.”⁴¹ It is worth noting in passing that mixed marriages between Muslims and Jews are far less well documented.⁴²

Other sources reinforce the impression that interfaith marriage between Muslims and Christians had become relatively frequent at lower levels of society by the middle of the ninth century. The evidence in question is provided by a clutch of Latin texts that were produced in response to the Christian “martyrdom movement” that briefly convulsed Córdoba during the 850s. The movement, which erupted in 851, appears to have been a response to the quickening pace of conversion of Andalusi Christians to Islam by the middle of the ninth century and the ongoing Arabicization of society that threatened to obliterate the traditional Latin literary heritage of the Christian Church in the Peninsula, or so some thought.⁴³ According to the accounts of the movement penned by the priest Eulogius of Córdoba and his disciple Paul Albar, at least forty-eight Christians deliberately courted “martyrdom” at the hands of the Islamic authorities by publicly denouncing Islam or by encouraging muwallads (converts to Islam) to apostatize, both of which actions carried the capital penalty under Islamic law.⁴⁴

How much credence should be attached to these accounts is difficult to assess. The texts present—yet again!—numerous methodological problems for the historian, not least because several of the cases reported by the movement’s leading light, Eulogius, appear to have been literary inventions “lifted” from various non-Hispanic martyrologies.⁴⁵ Be that as it may, it is striking that at least twelve of those Christians who were executed by command of the Umayyad authorities during this period were said to have come from religiously mixed families.⁴⁶ Not only that, the accounts also suggest that in some cases—in clear contravention of Islamic law—the children born to those couples had not been raised as Muslims. It was for this reason that the Islamic authorities regarded such voluntary martyrs as apostates.⁴⁷ Jessica Coope has gone so far as to declare that “hatred between relatives in mixed families was one of the engines that powered the martyrs’ movement.”⁴⁸ It is apparent that Eulogius viewed such sexual mixing as a root cause of the troubles then assailing the embattled Christian community in al-Andalus. He condemned one such mixed marriage as a “wolfish union”; elsewhere he continued the vulpine motif when he compared another interfaith marriage alliance to a wolf invading his flock.⁴⁹ In a similar vein, Paul Albar, referring to the martyr Leocritia’s mixed background, declared vituperatively that she was “begotten of Gentile dregs and born from wolf’s flesh.”⁵⁰ Be that as it may, Eulogius and Paul Albar did not subject the women who had married Muslims to direct criticism, doubtless conscious that it was thanks to their influence that their children had embraced Christianity and later become martyrs.⁵¹

It seems unlikely that these mixed marriages were mere literary devices conjured up by Eulogius or Paul Albar. This impression is confirmed by the fatwa, or legal ruling, attributed to the jurisprudent Abū Ibrāhīm Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm of Córdoba (d. 965), which refers to another such marriage alliance that came to the attention of the authorities. In this case, a woman had been born to a Muslim father and a Christian mother, who had brought her up as Christian after his death. The woman had subsequently married a Christian with whom she had a child. Questioned by the judge, she claimed that her father had converted to Islam while serving elsewhere in the mercenary guard. The judge pronounced that in order that she should not be punished as an apostate, she would need to provide reliable testimony that her father’s conversion had indeed occurred away from the family home.⁵²

In short, the evidence outlined thus far suggests that intermarriage between Muslim men and Christian women had become relatively commonplace at lower levels of society by the mid-ninth century, that in some cases—in clear contravention of Islamic law—the children born to those couples were not raised as Muslims, and that the conversion of some but not all family members to Islam could cause considerable tensions within kin groups.⁵³ This might explain why the assembled clerics at the Council of Córdoba in 839, echoing Pope Hadrian’s disquiet a few decades previously, considered sexual mixing of this sort sufficiently widespread to warrant explicit condemnation. In modern times the Spanish Arabist Julián Ribera went so far as to claim that the degree of interfaith sexual mixing was so extensive in Iberia during the early medieval period that the proportion of Arab blood running through the veins of the tenth-century Umayyad caliphs of al-Andalus was in fact infinitesimal.⁵⁴ According to this analysis, Andalusi society was ethnically and culturally hybrid to its very core.

There remains the possibility, however, that among the Muslim élite, at least, inter-faith marriage pacts of the kind outlined above might have been simply a short-term phenomenon born of political and economic expediency: once the Muslim conquest of the Peninsula had been consolidated the practice may have passed into desuetude. Indeed, in his pioneering work on Islamic society in the Peninsula, published in 1976, Pierre Guichard argued forcefully that, far from mixing extensively with the Hispano-Gothic population, the majority of the Arab and Berber families who had undertaken the conquest were so anxious to preserve their “pure” breeding and lineage that they went out of their way to avoid intermarriage with the local population, be they Christians, Jews, or even muwallads.⁵⁵ They did this, Guichard posited, by maintaining “Eastern” patterns of kinship, according to which patrilineal descent and endogamous marriage, that is, within the kin group, remained the norm. His theory seemed to be corroborated, as far as the Arabs were concerned, at least, by writers such as the Andalusi polymath Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064), whose Kitāb Jamharat ansāb al-‘Arab, a genealogical account of the Arab tribes who had settled in al-Andalus after the Islamic conquest, consistently privileged the agnatic, that is to say, the male lineages of these families over the female ones.⁵⁶ It is worth noting in passing that Ibn Ḥazm also provided a number of examples of what he considered “unequal marriages” between Arab men and women of lesser social rank in his Naqṭ al-‘arūs. The names of those who “married down” in this way included the vizier to the emir Muḥammad I (852–86), Tammām b. ‘Amir al-Thaqafī, who reportedly married a daughter of the Christian Khalaf b. Rūmān.⁵⁷

The alleged reluctance of some Muslims to intermarry with other faiths may have been reinforced by fears—articulated most powerfully by followers of the Maliki school of religious jurisprudence—of “corruption” by Christians or Jews, because it was believed that by her customs and morals the wife and mother might ultimately undermine the faith of her offspring, particularly if she lived within what was termed the dār al-ḥarb (the “Abode of War”), that is, the territories not under Islamic rule.⁵⁸ In his Kitāb al-bida‘, or “The Treatise Against Innovations,” Muḥammad ibn Waḍḍaḥ (d. 900) had sternly warned his coreligionists: “It is said that temptations will come with the companions of the Book, and they will be because of them.”⁵⁹ Meanwhile, the religious authorities zealously patrolled the boundaries between the faiths with regard to such matters as ritual purity, food taboos, festival celebrations, or burials, in order to define and strengthen the legal and social limits between Muslims and dhimmīs.⁶⁰ This climate of opinion helps to explain why in their accounts of the Muslim conquest Maliki scholars such as Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam chose to give such prominent coverage to the doomed marriage of ‘Abd al-Azīz b. Mūsā and his Christian wife, and even to echo the claim that ‘Abd al-Azīz b. Mūsā had converted to Christianity. Such accounts stood not merely as a stark warning of the danger that such overmighty subjects posed to the constituted authority in the Islamic world, but also as a reminder to fellow Muslims of the serious consequences that marriage outside the Islamic umma, or community, might bring in its wake.⁶¹

However, a warning note should be sounded. In recent years several elements of the Guichard thesis have been called into question. It has been pointed out, for example, that the French scholar’s research was based upon an extremely small sample of texts, drawn from only a handful of Andalusi writers active during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and that he did not take into account the ideological concerns that underpinned those writings.⁶² The endogamous “Eastern” tribal structures that Guichard claimed to see across the ages may have been no more than a reflection of the political discourse of the age, which sought to emphasize the “Arabness” of the leading Peninsular families, not least that of the Umayyad caliphs of al-Andalus. The reality was that not only were many leading families ethnically hybrid, but also that most of the genealogies that were compiled during the tenth and eleventh centuries were replete with errors and imaginative inventions. As Ann Christys has observed, “many of the genealogies were more illustrious in their reconstructions than in actuality and the subject of ethnicity in al-Andalus became hopelessly confused.”⁶³ A case in point was the Banū Khaṭṭāb family of Murcia mentioned earlier, which while proudly trumpeting its Arab ancestry did not preserve any genealogical memory of its maternal Visigothic forebears.⁶⁴ In short, the ethnic “purity” that Guichard claimed to detect among the leading Muslim kin groups of al-Andalus may be no more than a mirage.⁶⁵

Marriage Across Frontiers

However, even if it were true that many Muslims at the level of the political and social élite later chose to eschew marriage with dhimmī, it is striking that a number of influential families went out of their way to seek brides who were not Muslims, and that in some cases they did so by arranging marriage alliances with the emerging Christian-ruled realms that lay to the north of the Peninsula, or even further afield.⁶⁶ The earliest recorded example of an interfaith marriage pact of this sort was that arranged by the Berber warlord known as Munnuza, the leading military figure in the northeast of the Peninsula, who rebelled against the Umayyad governor ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Ghāfiqī in around 731, reportedly in protest at the treatment of his countrymen by Islamic administrators in Libya.⁶⁷ The Chronicle of 754 reports that after Munnuza had raised the flag of rebellion, he sought to bolster his position in the northeast by marrying the daughter of the Frankish Duke Eudo of Aquitaine. The latter, having already suffered several attacks by Muslim forces, presumably saw the marriage as a means to forestall further aggression. Yet little good did the alliance do either of them. Munnuza was shortly tracked down by the emir’s forces to Cerdanya in the eastern Pyrenees, where he was besieged and then forced to flee to the mountains, finally throwing himself to his death from a high crag. His unfortunate bride—who is referred to in later sources by the name of Lampégie—was subsequently sent to the caliph’s court 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 recorded by other sources, and that it was the memory of that marriage agreement that reached Bishop Pelayo at the beginning of the twelfth century and was transformed into legend.⁹⁶

However, other scenarios suggest themselves. Teresa’s brother, Alfonso V, was but five years old when he succeeded to the throne of León in 999; as a result, power was initially entrusted to a regency council. During this period, the young king faced a number of challenges to his authority, including a series of aristocratic revolts, a wave of attacks on the Galician coastline by Viking marauders, and two major offensives by the forces of ‘Abd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar, in 1002 and 1005 respectively, as a result of which the Christians were forced to seek peace.⁹⁷ Is it not conceivable that it was after the second of these campaigns, by which time Princess Teresa could still have been no more than thirteen years old, that she was betrothed to al-Muẓaffar, only returning to León after his untimely death late in 1008?

An alternative—and equally intriguing—possibility is that the bridegroom in question was al-Muẓaffar’s brother and successor as ḥājib, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, nicknamed Shanjūl (Sanchuelo). Ibn Idhārī al-Marrākushī relates that shortly after assuming power on his brother’s death on 20 October 1008 ‘Abd al-Raḥmān dispatched a letter to an unnamed “infidel king”’—in all likelihood Alfonso V of León, in the light of subsequent events—“in the same way that his brother had written to him previously.”⁹⁸ This letter is likely to have sought to renew the “pact of submission” with the Leonese that had been agreed at the start of al-Muẓaffar’s term in office as ḥājib six years earlier, and it was probably accompanied by a demand for contingents of Christian troops to supplement the caliphal army, in the same way as Leonese and Castilian forces had been required to assist al-Muẓaffar on his raiding expedition to Catalonia in 1003.⁹⁹ In January 1009, despite rumblings of discontent among some of the Umayyad aristocracy, who were affronted by both his recent nomination as successor to the caliphate and his increasing reliance on the Berber military, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān proclaimed a jihād and led an army of Berber mercenaries and a few volunteers from Córdoba to Toledo, from where he planned to invade the Leonese kingdom. Accompanying the expeditionary force was a group of Christians led by the Leonese Count Sancho Gómez, as well as a reported 70 members of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s extensive harem.¹⁰⁰

However, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s plans soon unraveled. Shortly after he reached Toledo he was forced to abort the expedition when bad news reached him from Córdoba: the city had been taken over by a group of Umayyad conspirators on 15 February 1009; the caliph Hishām II (976–1013) had been deposed and replaced by the leader of the rebels, Muḥammad b. ‘Abd al-Jabbār al-Mahdī; and the palace at Madinat al-Zāhira, which had been built by al-Manṣūr, had been sacked. Given these multiple setbacks, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān opted to return south, but support for his cause soon began to crumble, and he was deserted by his Berber mercenaries. Leaving the women of his harem at his palace at Armilāṭ (Guadalmellato), to the north of Córdoba, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān fled with Count Sancho and a force of only 50 horsemen, with the intention of escaping north. However, he was tracked down by supporters of the new caliph Muḥammad and killed, along with the count, at a nearby Christian monastery on 5 March 1009. The women of his harem were sent back to Córdoba.¹⁰¹

It seems clear enough that, like his father and brother before him, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān had sought an early military success against the Christians as a means to win personal prestige and thereby shore up his political authority at home. Whether he further attempted to emphasize his dominance over the Christians by engineering a marriage alliance with a Leonese princess, in this case Teresa Vermúdez, in the same way his father al-Manṣūr had done when he had sought the hand in marriage of Sancho Garcés II’s daughter—‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s mother—is unknown but by no means implausible. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s own status as heir to the caliphate and his Christian background on his mother’s side might also have helped to seal a peace deal. According to Ibn ‘Idhārī al-Marrākushī, one of the arguments that had been employed by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān when he persuaded Hishām II to appoint him his heir was to remind him that they were both born to Navarrese mothers.¹⁰² This might explain why it was later claimed by Christian writers, such as Lucas of Tuy (d. 1249), that the Muslim king had “pretended to be a Christian” and had sworn to provide military support to Alfonso V.¹⁰³ Conversely, one of the accusations flung at ‘Abd al-Raḥmān by his enemies within al-Andalus was that he was not a proper Muslim at all.¹⁰⁴ It is also noteworthy that Toledo was ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s main base of operations during the campaign against the Christians in 1009 and that after the Umayyad palace coup, faced by large-scale opposition to his authority, he apparently intended to make the city his power base from which to launch a counterattack against the rebels in Córdoba. The importance that he attached to the city can be seen from the fact that, once he had been forced to suspend the campaign and return south toward Córdoba, he sent a letter to the citizens of Toledo urging them to show loyalty to the caliph Hishām II. Subsequently, Count Sancho is said to have advised ‘Abd al-Raḥmān to escape north and ally himself with Wāḍiḥ, the governor of the Middle March, whose chief city was Toledo.¹⁰⁵ All this might explain the otherwise opaque comment by Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez (d. 1247) in his De rebus Hispanie that the “king of Toledo” sought a political alliance with León against Córdoba.¹⁰⁶

We cannot prove categorically that ‘Abd al-Raḥmān “Sanchuelo” was indeed the “pagan king” to whom Teresa Vermúdez was betrothed. Other plausible candidates present themselves, such as the Umayyad pretender Muḥammad b. ‘Abd al-Jabbār al-Mahdī, who, when ousted from Córdoba by Sulaymān b. al-Ḥakam b. Sulaymān in 1010, briefly took refuge in Toledo, or even one of the various notables who sought to establish themselves as independent dynasts in Toledo in the years immediately after the fall of the caliphate.¹⁰⁷ What is entirely conceivable, however, is that at some point during the first decade of the eleventh century—at a time when the entire edifice of the Umayyad state was beginning to totter and when the Leonese monarchy’s own grip on power was uncertain—Alfonso V, or the nobles who wielded power on his behalf, might have sought to broker a marriage alliance with a Muslim potentate, just as other hard-pressed Christian kings had done in the past. Equally, one can quite imagine why a leading Muslim with designs on the caliphal throne, like ‘Abd al-Raḥmān “Sanchuelo,” keen to reinforce his own power and prestige, might have embraced such an alliance. Even if Bishop Pelayo’s account clearly contains some fantastical elements, it is unlikely to be a complete fiction.

Be that as it may, one is bound to question why the Christian royal dynasties chose to enter into such interfaith marriage alliances, when the Church had traditionally preached against sexual mixing of this kind. We have seen that at the ecclesiastical council of Córdoba in 839 the assembled clerics had been at pains to denounce interfaith marriage, but if similar edicts were issued at church councils held in the Christian-dominated territories to the north of the Peninsula no record of them has survived.¹⁰⁸ It is entirely possible that the Muslim conquest had so utterly disrupted the apparatus of church government in the North that pastoral guidance for the laity, of the kind that had earlier been provided at regular church councils under the Visigoths, was in notably short supply. It was equally the case that prior to the eleventh century papal contacts with the bishops and churches of the Peninsula, as in most of the Latin West at this time, remained limited in the extreme. There is little evidence that any of the popes took an interest in the spiritual welfare of their Iberian flock, let alone that they voiced any concerns about the practice of interfaith marriage.¹⁰⁹ As Bishop Arnulf of Orléans pithily declared at the synod of Rheims in 991, “Spain knows nothing of papal decisions.”¹¹⁰

Probably even more important than this, the decidedly weak political and military position in which the Christian monarchs found themselves for much of the tenth century, during which time the North was subjected to a series of devastating raids by Umayyad armies, probably meant that at times they had little room for maneuver when Muslim rulers demanded Christian brides as the price of peace.¹¹¹ In the circumstances, interfaith marriage alliances may have represented an indispensable means to achieve both peace and dynastic survival. Besides, Christian monarchs were not slow to recognize that kinship ties with the Umayyad dynasty could bring their own advantages. Thus, when Sancho I of León (956–66) was deposed from the throne in or around 958, reputedly because he was too obese to mount a horse and lead his nobles to war, he sought assistance from his grandmother Queen Toda Aznárez of Navarre. The queen promptly led a delegation to Córdoba to the court of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, to whom she was related through her mother Onneca’s second marriage to the Umayyad emir ‘Abd Allāh. As a result of her intervention, the caliph undertook to provide Sancho with the military reinforcements he desperately needed in order to regain his throne, as well as the services of the caliph’s Jewish physician Ḥasdāi b. Shaprūṭ to help him shed his excess weight.¹¹²

By marked contrast, it is notable that very few Muslim women are known to have crossed the frontier in the opposite direction and taken Christian husbands. True, a number of the female members of the Banū Qasī are recorded to have married prominent Christians, such as Urraca, daughter of ‘Abd Allāh b. Muḥammad (d. 915–16), who was married off to King Fruela II of León (924–25).¹¹³ But in this the family may have constituted something of a special case, in that it was only relatively recently Islamized—which may have prompted the clan to play fast and loose with the strictures of Islamic law regarding mixed marriages. Moreover, the family’s peculiar geopolitical position, sandwiched between several competing powers, apparently led it to be far more pragmatic in its marriage policy than was the case in other regions of al-Andalus. For the most part, however, it appears that cross-border marriages between Muslim women and Christian men occurred only in exceptional circumstances. Thus, when Maḥmūd b. ‘Abd al-Jabbār of Mérida (d. c.845), a longstanding rebel against Umayyad authority, who had found political asylum in the kingdom of Alfonso II of Asturias (791–842), was killed in the course of a skirmish with the king’s forces, the Christian nobles of the region competed to marry his surviving sister Jamīla “on account of her ancestry, beauty and valor,” according to Ibn Ḥayyān. In the end, the nobles reportedly drew lots to win her hand, whereupon she converted to Christianity and married.¹¹⁴ Another Muslim woman who crossed the frontier in this manner was the princess known in Christian sources as “Zaida,” who after the death of her husband al-Fatḥ al-Ma’mūn during the Almoravid attack on Córdoba on 26 March 1091, and the subsequent deposition of her father-in-law, al-Mu‘tamid b. Abbād, ruler of the kingdom of Seville, fled to the Christian North and became the concubine of Alfonso VI of León-Castile (1065–1109), whom she may later have married.¹¹⁵ We shall have much more to say about this interfaith liaison in Chapter 4.

Women Enslaved

Our focus thus far has been on intermarriage between Muslims and Christians. None the less, it is important to recognize that the vast majority of the Christian women who were taken as sexual partners by the Umayyad rulers and other Islamic potentates in al-Andalus were not legitimate wives at all. They were, rather, jawārī (singular jariya), slaves of Iberian or other origin, who had been taken as concubines (sarārī; singular surrīya) on account of their beauty, or their abilities as singers, dancers, or reciters of poetry. The institution of concubinage was recognized by the Qur’an and came to enjoy popularity in all parts of the Islamic world, with the acquisition of jawārī widely regarded as an important status symbol.¹¹⁶ Islamic legal schools regulated the relationship between a man and his concubine and defined her rights closely. A concubine who bore a child to her Muslim master assumed the status of umm walad (mother of a child), which meant that she could not be sold, would enjoy permanent residence in her master’s household, and would be manumitted on his death, if not sooner; their child would be regarded as a free, legitimate heir, whose legal and social status was equal to that of any siblings born to their father’s free wives.

We know the names of a few of those Christian women who were taken as slave concubines in this way.¹¹⁷ One was Qalam, a woman of Navarrese origin, who had been enslaved at a relatively young age and joined the harem of the emir ‘Abd al-Raḥmān II (822–52), where she won renown as a skilled singer and dancer, as well as an outstanding calligrapher and storyteller.¹¹⁸ Another was Ailo, who bore Muḥammad I his son and succcessor al-Mundhir (886–88).¹¹⁹ By far the best known of the jawārī, however, was the Christian Navarrese woman known as Subḥ (d. 998).¹²⁰ We have no idea of the precise circumstances that led to Subḥ’s enslavement, but given her reputed expertise as a singer and poetess in Arabic the likelihood is that she had been taken to al-Andalus at a relatively young age and received her education there.¹²¹ This impression is reinforced by the fact that her brother, known as Fā’iq or Rā’iq in the sources, came to hold a series of influential posts in the caliphal administration between at least 972 and 974/5.¹²² Recruited to the harem of al-Ḥakam II (961–76), Subḥ bore the caliph two sons, and it was reputedly through her influence that one of them later succeeded his father to the throne as Hishām II. Such was her sway over the caliph, one source claimed, that he never opposed her will.¹²³ After Hishām II’s accession to the throne, Subḥ retained an influential role within the machinery of royal government in Córdoba, effectively acting as regent on account of her son’s young age, with control over the state bureaucracy and treasury. In 996, however, she was sidelined from power by the caliph’s ḥājib, al-Manṣūr, whose own career Subḥ had earlier helped to further and with whom she was reported to have had a passionate love affair.¹²⁴

The capture and onward sale of Christian women in the slave markets of al-Andalus is well enough documented to suggest that there was a considerable demand for such human merchandise.¹²⁵ Attractive slave girls could command high prices at market, particularly those who were accomplished singers.¹²⁶ In the vast majority of cases, such women had been taken into captivity in the aftermath of one of the many military expeditions that were launched from al-Andalus against the Christian states of the North. Whether the Christian rulers ever surrendered women to the Umayyads in payment of tribute, in accordance with the terms of a peace treaty, as Christian tradition would later claim, is unknown, but it is not entirely inconceivable. After all, the payment of tribute in the form of slaves is recorded from other regions bordering the Islamic world.¹²⁷ In other cases, the slave traffickers might have been Jews or even Christians. Thus, one source refers to the sale of a number of Christian women by Jewish merchants in ninth-century Mérida.¹²⁸ Meanwhile, a charter preserved in the cartulary of the Portuguese monastery of São Mamede de Lorvâo relates how, at the time of the capture of Coimbra by al-Manṣūr in 987, a local Christian, one Ezerag de Condeixa “went to Farfon iben Abdella and became a Moor,” which could either mean that he converted to Islam, or that he pledged support to the Muslim authorities.¹²⁹ Having been granted command over thirty Muslim horsemen, Ezerag is reported to have captured the Christian inhabitants of the villages in the vicinity by trickery and sold them into slavery at Santarém for six pieces of silver, in exchange for which he was later granted some property near Coimbra by al-Manṣūr.

In many cases, prisoners would have been taken in relatively small numbers, as Muslim raiding parties rampaged far and wide across Christian lands in search of easy pickings. In others, the numbers involved were clearly more substantial: when Barcelona was sacked by al-Manṣūr in 985, it was reported that all of those Christians who had taken refuge in the city at the command of Count Borrell II “for the purpose of guarding it and defending it” were either killed or taken prisoner.¹³⁰ We can get a clearer idea of how the division of such human plunder was carried out from Ibn Idhārī al-Marrākushī’s relatively detailed account of the winter campaign waged by Abd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar in late 1007, when he besieged the castle of San Martín.¹³¹ We are told that when, after several days of fierce fighting, the exhausted Christian defenders finally surrendered, they filed out of the castle, placing themselves and their property under the ḥājib’s authority. Once all had done so, al-Muẓaffar commanded that the Christians be separated into two groups: on one side the warriors and other men; on the other the women and children. The ḥājib then approached the prisoners on horseback, accompanied by his retinue, and was greeted by great cheers and shouts of praise from his troops. On al-Muẓaffar’s command, the Christian men were then put to the sword; the women and children were shared out among the various volunteers and other troops who had taken part in the campaign, “as was the custom.”¹³² Doubtless some prisoners were also carried back to Córdoba with the army. A charter of Vermudo II of León reports that after the Muslim attack on Simancas in 983 those Christians who had not been executed outright were led off to Córdoba in chains.¹³³ For those of high social status there was always the hope that they might be ransomed.¹³⁴ But for the majority of Christian captives there was the prospect of a lifetime of servitude, either in al-Andalus or in other regions of the Islamic world. Ibn Ḥawqal, writing in the 970s, listed male and female slaves among the most important exports of al-Andalus.¹³⁵ Of course, this was not a one-way street: Muslims too were regularly enslaved in the course of Christian cross-border raids.¹³⁶

The tenth century marked the apogee of the cross-border slave trade, as the Umayyad caliphate and the ḥājibs who wielded power on its behalf exerted ever greater military pressure on the Christian states of the North. According to the North African historian ‘Abd al-Wāḥid al-Marrākushī (b. 1185), the fifty or so campaigns waged by al-Manṣūr from the 980s down to his death in 1002 produced such a glut of Christian slave women in the markets of Córdoba that prices collapsed, and the number of men deciding to take a free Muslim wife, as opposed to a slave concubine, slumped dramatically. The beautiful daughter of one Christian notable was said to have fetched only 20 dinars.¹³⁷ For its part, the anonymous fourteenth-century Dhikr Bilād al-Andalus, which preserves a catalogue of al-Manṣūr’s numerous military campaigns, places particular emphasis on the large numbers of women and children captured by the ḥājib.¹³⁸ He claims, for example, that when Barcelona was sacked in 985 some 70,000 women and children were taken into captivity; at Zamora (981) the figure given is 40,000 women; at Pamplona (999) 18,000. These figures are doubtless so much hyperbole, but the chronicler’s repeated emphasis on the numbers of prisoners taken demonstrates that the capture of Christian slaves, and in particular females and their offspring, was regarded as a specially significant and praiseworthy act. This impression is reinforced by the fact that when ‘Abd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar returned from a largely fruitless campaign to Sobrarbe and Ribagorza in 1006 he was widely criticized in Córdoba for not having brought back young captives as his father had regularly done, supposedly prompting the sardonic comment from one slave trader that “the slave importer is dead.”¹³⁹

Two precious eleventh-century documents enable us to put names to a handful of those Christian women who were captured in such Muslim military operations. The first charter, probably drawn up on 4 May 1005, records the grant that was made by the layman Iaquinti and his wife Tornaánimas to the monastery of Saints Justo and Pastor in León of half of their property in Campo de Villavidel, including “in that estate the shares of our daughters named Gaudiosa and Speciosa who are captive.”¹⁴⁰ The document says nothing about the circumstances that had led to their captivity, but one is drawn to speculate that the daughters had been carried off to al-Andalus during the course of an earlier Muslim raid into the region. This impression is reinforced by another Leonese charter, drawn up on 28 December 1023.¹⁴¹ The document is remarkable for the extensive historical narratio inserted at the beginning, in which the nun Flora explained the background to her decision to grant all her property to the monastery of Santiago de León. She related that her grandfather Arias and her father Baldredo had earlier built the monastery of Santa Cristina within the city of León and placed the house under the control of her aunts, Justa, María, Domna Infante, and Granda, as well as her sister Honorífica and Flora herself. There then follows a vivid portrait of the devastating campaign that al-Manṣūr launched against León in 988:

On account of the sins of the Christians, the Saracen people, the seed of the Ishmaelites, invaded all the province of the West in order to devour the earth, and to strike all with the sword, to carry off captives; thus our ambusher the most ancient serpent gave them victory. And they cast down the cities, destroyed walls and trampled us underfoot; they razed cities to the ground, they beheaded men and there was not a town, a village or castle that survived that devastation.

In the course of the raid, the nuns of Santa Cristina were carried off captive by the Muslims, with the exception of Flora’s mother, the wife of Baldredo, and their son Arias. Then, Flora relates, after a long time, God took mercy on them and they left that “evil captivity,” with the exception of two of them who remained in chains. Finding their monastery in León in ruins, the women chose to set up a new religious house at nearby Villar de Mazarife. In later life, after the death of her other family members, Flora recovered the remains of Arias, Baldredo, and Justa, who had been buried in the ruined monastery of Santa Cristina, and reinterred them in that of Santiago de León, whose community Flora herself joined and generously endowed. Flora’s account does not tell us what became of those who were carried off to al-Andalus. Some might have been made to work in agriculture or domestic service, but it is equally possible that one or more of them had ended up in the personal harem of al-Manṣūr or in that of another Andalusi notable.

The Leonese charter of 1023 is important to us not only because it sheds some light on the precise circumstances that led to the enslavement of Christian women, but also because it demonstrates the traumatic psychological effects that the campaigns launched by al-Manṣūr had upon the Christian communities of the North. And what happened in León was replicated in Santiago de Compostela, Astorga, Zamora, Pamplona, Barcelona, and all the other major population centers that were overrun by al-Manṣūr’s forces during the final two decades of the tenth century.¹⁴²

Our sources tell us precious little about the lives of those Christian women who were taken as wives or concubines by Muslim lords. This is hardly surprising, given that, by and large, women registered but rarely on the consciousness of Andalusi writers, and those who did tended to belong to the upper classes, in particular the mothers, wives, and daughters of sovereigns. Members of the harem were not expected to meddle in political activity, and those who did—like Queen Egilona in the eighth century or Subḥ in the tenth—were invariably portrayed as ambitious schemers, who used their feminine wiles to feather their own nests or those of their kin.¹⁴³ Although none of these women would have been obliged to renounce their faith, they would have been required to abide by Islamic social practices such as those concerning ritual purity and dietary laws, and their children would have been brought up as Muslims. The social pressures to convert to Islam may have been considerable, and it is likely that many women—legitimate wives and concubines alike—did so, particularly those who had borne children to their masters.¹⁴⁴ One woman who is known to have converted in this way was al-Manṣūr’s Navarrese royal bride, known as ‘Abda, of whom it was later said by the historian Ibn al-Khaṭīb that “she became a good Muslim; she was of all al-Manṣūr’s wives the staunchest in faith and of most gentle birth.”¹⁴⁵ She bore the ḥājib a son, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān—nicknamed Shanjūl/Sanchuelo after his paternal grandfather—who, as we have seen, came to play a key role in the events that led to the fall of the Umayyad caliphate in the early eleventh century.

Although severe restrictions were imposed on their mobility and social interaction, the brides and jawārī who entered the harem of the caliph or some other Muslim lord might live in some comfort. Ibn Ḥayyān, for one, mentions the fine clothes, jewels, and perfumes enjoyed by one of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s slave concubines, Marjān.¹⁴⁶ Moreover, some concubines might enjoy special status, particularly those who held the status of umm walad; Marjān, who bore the caliph five children, including his son and heir al-Ḥakam II, was even awarded the title of “great lady” (al-sayyida al-kubrā).¹⁴⁷ Al-Ḥakam II esteemed his own concubine Subḥ so highly that in 964 he granted her an exquisite ivory container, which may now be viewed in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid.¹⁴⁸ Other concubines were not so fortunate, however, and suffered victimization or even violence at the hands of their masters. According to Ibn Ḥayyān, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III had a particularly violent streak toward the women of his harem, subjecting one unfortunate concubine who rejected his advances at his palace at Madīnat al-Zahrā’ to cruel abuse, by having his eunuchs hold her while he burned her face with a candle.¹⁴⁹ Al-Manṣūr is reported to have had two of his slave girls executed for having recited some verses that he deemed inappropriate; while such was the ill treatment suffered by the slave concubines of Abū Marwān al-Tubnī (d. 1065) that they conspired to murder him.¹⁵⁰ The vulnerability of jawārī was magnified at times of political turmoil. For example, when Córdoba descended into the fitna (civil war) on the death of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān “Sanchuelo” in 1009, the members of the harems of several leading Muslims were violated.¹⁵¹ Concubines might sometimes live in the lap of luxury, but for many, clearly, the experience must have been a deeply traumatic one.

The Rationale for Sexual Mixing

How are we to explain the readiness of the Umayyad rulers and other élite Muslim families of al-Andalus to enter into cross-border interfaith marriage alliances or to take Christian slave concubines? In the case of powerful kin groups such as the Banū Qasī and the Banū Shabrīṭ, marriage ties with Christian lords were clearly designed to bolster their autonomy and security vis-à-vis other regional powers, be they the Umayyad emirs to the south or the Christian Franks and Asturians to the east and west respectively, all of whom, at one time or another, had sought to impose their authority over the region of the Upper Ebro. For the Umayyads, meanwhile, as well as for the ḥājib al-Manṣūr, exogamous marriages acted partly as a tool of diplomacy, which could help stabilize relations with the sometimes fractious Christian states to the north. This is very much what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had in mind when he declared that “a continuous transition exists from war to exchange, and from exchange to intermarriage, and the exchange of brides is merely the conclusion to an uninterrupted process of reciprocal gifts, which effects the transition from hostility to alliance, from anxiety to confidence, and from fear to friendship.”¹⁵²

Yet peacemaking was only part of the equation. From another perspective, Umayyad policy in this regard provides a classic example of an “aggressive” marriage strategy that seems to have been a characteristic feature of many premodern Mediterranean societies.¹⁵³ In the words of Julian Pitt-Rivers,

Marriage strategy can be either conciliatory, defensive or aggressive. To give women in exchange for political protection and/or economic advantage involves accepting domination and profiting from its counterpart…. A more defensive strategy attempts to reserve its women within the group and avoid outside involvement. But the aggressive strategy aims both to deny its women to outsiders and take in their women…. Competition for women, however it may be conceptualised by the people themselves, is competition for power.¹⁵⁴

Ruth Mazo Karras puts it more baldly: “Penetration symbolizes power. For men of one group to have sex with women of another is an assertion of power over the entire group.”¹⁵⁵ Muslim societies were by no means unique in this respect, but it was undoubtedly the case that in early Islamic and even pre-Islamic culture it had been considered honorable for a man to acquire a wife from another kin group through force or persuasion, by conquest or alliance, and women were regarded as particularly valuable prizes of conquest.¹⁵⁶ Echoes of such attitudes could be found in al-Andalus too. The sexual dominance of a Muslim ruler over a Christian woman—be it a freeborn princess or a slave concubine—was portrayed by some as symbolic of Islamic political and military hegemony, as well as a humiliating reminder to the Christians themselves of their subordinate status.¹⁵⁷

The prolific poetic output of the panegyrist and man of letters Ibn Darrāj al-Qasṭallī (d. 1030) provides a useful perspective on these matters.¹⁵⁸ Hailing from the Algarve in southern Portugal, Ibn Darrāj rose to prominence at the court of al-Manṣūr in 992, and it was in honor of the latter and of his son, ‘Abd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar, that he composed a large number of panegyrics. Especially revealing for our purposes are the poems he composed for al-Manṣūr to celebrate the ḥājib’s military successes over the Christian armies during the final decade of the tenth century. In these works Ibn Darrāj is quick to praise the nobility, valor, piety, and generosity of his patron, but equally eye-catching is the emphasis that he places upon the capture of Christian women by Muslim armies. One such poem, which is dedicated to al-Muẓaffar, and which refers to a campaign led by al-Manṣūr against Navarre and against the territory of Miró count of Pallars, perhaps in 999, claims that the ḥājib had stolen the Christians’ lives, “possessing the slavery of their women and dominating their souls”; he further adds that their marriage contracts had been “written with spears,” a clear indication that their forcible recruitment to Muslim harems was anticipated.¹⁵⁹ Equally explicit is the poem written to extol al-Manṣūr’s campaign to Navarre and the Rioja in 1000, which had culminated in a victory over a coalition of Christian forces. Here again Ibn Darrāj mentions the capture of Christian women, who are described as “herds of fat gazelles.” Although they are chaste, the poet declares, “they would accept your offer if you wanted to marry them.”¹⁶⁰ In another poem he wrote to celebrate the winter campaign waged against León in 995, Ibn Darrāj makes extravagant play of the vulnerability of those Christian women whose husbands had been put to the sword.¹⁶¹ Furthermore, when King Sancho Garcés II of Navarre came to Córdoba at the head of a diplomatic mission in September 992, and had the opportunity to meet his grandson ‘Abd al-Raḥmān “Sanchuelo,” Ibn Darrāj praised the nobility of the Christian king, but left his audience in no doubt that his visit and pledge of obedience to his son-in-law, al-Manṣūr, marked a considerable humiliation for him.¹⁶²

Since a woman’s very reputation and status rested upon her honor and chastity, the sexual use of Christian female captives or even freeborn wives was designed in part to destroy solidarity among Christian families and communities, inflicting shame not only on the women themselves, but also on their male coreligionists—like King Sancho Garcés of Navarre—who had failed to protect them.¹⁶³ Simultaneously, the forcible deracination of Christian women and children to al-Andalus, and their conversion to Islam in many cases, was seemingly designed to encourage a process of assimilation which would hinder procreation among the Christians of the North and ensure a shift in cultural and ethnic loyalties in the future.¹⁶⁴ Sex was, perhaps, the ultimate colonizing gesture. Of course, this was by no means an exclusively medieval Iberian phenomenon. Organized sexual violence against women, with the intention of reinforcing a sense of failure and humiliation among the vanquished, has been an integral aspect of military conduct throughout the ages.¹⁶⁵ In a modern context, one need only recall the forcible recruitment of many thousands of “comfort women” to Japanese-run brothels during the Second World War, or the mass rapes carried out by Soviet forces in Germany in 1945 and by the participants of the Balkan and Rwandan conflicts of the 1990s, to list only some of the most shocking examples.¹⁶⁶ In all such cases, sexual violence acts as a political metaphor, an emblem of military hegemony, with women’s bodies being used to stage the conflict.¹⁶⁷ “In war zones,” Ruth Seifert has observed, “women apparently always find themselves on the front line.”¹⁶⁸

The taking of Christian prisoners—male and female alike—was regarded as a significant propaganda opportunity for the Umayyad caliphs and for the ḥājibs who later supplanted them. By the time of the reigns of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III and al-Ḥakam II, the military expeditions that were regularly dispatched from Córdoba against the Christians and other enemies of the caliphate had developed into complex ceremonial occasions designed to project the caliph’s power and legitimacy, as well as his commitment to the defense of the faith. Thus, we know from the detailed descriptions provided by al-Rāzī that before an army departed on jihād during the reign of al-Ḥakam II, its banners were customarily blessed and fixed on lances; muezzins recited verses from the Qu’rān and blessed those who would wage war on God’s behalf; and the general and his army paraded through the streets of Córdoba, stopping off at the Bāb al-Sudda, one of the ceremonial gates to the royal palace, where the caliph would appear to impart his own blessing on the departing troops.¹⁶⁹ And the return of the army some months later was equally carefully choreographed. A report on the campaign and its achievements would be read out before the faithful in the great mosque of Córdoba; there were further parades, and the heads of some of the enemy dead, as well as prisoners of war, were conveyed in solemn procession back to the Bāb al-Sudda, along with other battle trophies such as banners, crosses, and bells.¹⁷⁰ The poems of Ibn Darrāj demonstrate that the many campaigns led against the Christian realms by al-Manṣūr, the victories that he won, and the plunder and captives he brought back to Córdoba were likewise regarded as opportunities for the ḥājib to project his own power among the populace. Significantly, the Bāb al-Sudda was the location chosen by al-Manṣūr for the mass execution of some fifty Navarrese notables by way of retaliation for an earlier Christian attack on Calatayud; indeed, we are told that the ḥājib’s son, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, by then no more than fourteen, personally killed one of the nobles to whom he was related through his mother.¹⁷¹ By the end of the tenth century, it is apparent that jihād against the infidel and the large-scale enslavement of Christians that accompanied it had become significant instruments of political authority, a means to achieve social cohesion, and doubtless a significant stimulus to the local economy.¹⁷² At the same time, the expectation was that Muslim leaders would offer protection to the women of their own community: those who failed to do so were heavily criticized. When the Muslim general Wāḍiḥ refused to rescue a Muslim girl who had been taken by a Christian soldier who had entered Córdoba in support of the would-be caliph al-Mahdi in 1010, and the girl’s father was subsequently killed by the Christian despite paying a ransom, it was regarded as a particularly shameful act.¹⁷³

We should also be aware that there were other political imperatives at play here. For the Umayyads, the taking of slave concubines or intermarriage with Christian princesses appears to have served as an important dynastic defense mechanism. Marrying a freeborn Muslim woman necessitated the paying of a dowry and even the providing of favors to her family, while divorce might lead to a costly property settlement.¹⁷⁴ More dangerous yet, marriage ran the risk that a Muslim wife’s own kin group might at some time in the future entertain its own competing dynastic claims. Marrying a Christian princess or, even more preferable, procreating with jawārī, forestalled that danger. In the case of the Umayyads, D. Fairchild Ruggles has argued that “a deliberative procreative program was in effect whereby wives were denied the sexual services of their royal husbands at least until a successor (or two) had been born to a slave concubine.”¹⁷⁵ This impression is strongly reinforced by the fact that all of the Umayyad males who came to assume the rank of emir or caliph in al-Andalus between the eighth and the tenth centuries were born to slave consorts, many of them Christian, rather than to married mothers. In his celebrated love treatise The Dove’s Neckring Ibn Ḥazm went so far as to assert that with only one exception the Umayyad caliphs were

disposed by nature to prefer blondes…. Every one of them has been fair haired, taking after their mothers, so that this has become a hereditary trait with them…. I know not whether this was due to a predilection innate in them all, or whether it was in consequence of a family tradition handed down from their ancestors, and which they followed in their turn.¹⁷⁶

It is striking, for example, that even though ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III fathered a son from his marriage to a woman of the prestigious Quraysh tribe, the caliph chose his son born of the concubine Marjān—that is, the future al-Ḥakam II—as heir to the caliphal throne.¹⁷⁷ A similar pattern of reproductive politics can be glimpsed in other regions of the Islamic world, where royal dynasties—such as the ‘Abbasid caliphs or later the Ottoman sultans—went out of their way to choose slave concubines to bear their children.¹⁷⁸ The matrimonial policy that was adopted by the ḥājib al-Manṣūr is also instructive in this regard. Early in his career, as he sought to consolidate and further his political influence, he entered into advantageous marriage alliances with other powerful Muslim aristocratic families. Once he held the reins of power in al-Andalus, however, it is striking that he preferred to distance himself from the local Muslim aristocracy and underline his peninsular hegemony, in his case by marrying the daughter of Sancho Garcés II of Navarre.¹⁷⁹ Some writers were also of the opinion that marriage to “foreign women” (banāt al-‘ajam) could bring benefits in terms of the physical and mental attributes of any offspring. Besides, most clove to the view that whether or not men married wives of pure Arab blood, the latter were mere “recipients” of their husband’s seed: the lineage of their children was purely determined by their male ancestry.¹⁸⁰ As Coope has observed, “their mothers’ background … in no way compromised their identity as Umayyads and as Arabs.”¹⁸¹ Even so, during the civil wars of the ninth century, there would be some who would seek to undermine the Umayyads’ claim to sovereignty by asserting that their descent from non-Arab women meant that they could no longer be considered Arabs in their own right.¹⁸²

It is time to draw the diverse threads of this chapter together. From the surviving evidence, it is clear enough that sexual mixing between Muslim lords and Christian women—be they freeborn brides or slave concubines—was commonplace in Early Medieval Iberia. In many cases, such unions were manifestly “instruments of domination,” to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase.¹⁸³ Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim invasion in the eighth century, marriage alliances with Christian heiresses or widows served as a means to pacify the Peninsula, legitimize the conquest, and channel the landed wealth of the Visigothic aristocracy into Muslim ownership. As far as Andalusi relations with the nascent Christian realms of the North were concerned, meanwhile, cross-border interfaith sexual liaisons served other functions. For influential muwallad kin groups like the Banū Qasī and the Banū Shabrīṭ, marriage pacts with their Christian neighbors were designed to bolster their local autonomy against other competing regional powers, Muslim and Christian alike. For the ruling Umayyad dynasty and for the ḥājibs who seized the reins of power at the end of the tenth century, meanwhile, sexual liaisons outside the umma served a variety of functions: as a mechanism to keep potential rivals for power within al-Andalus at arm’s length; as a tool of diplomacy, with which to maintain relations with the Christian states on an even keel; as a means to reward followers who had distinguished themselves in war; and as a potent propaganda weapon—for internal and external purposes—designed to underline the dominance of the Islamic state in its dealings with the infidels of the North. Last but not least, the systematic enslavement en masse of Christian women and the recruitment of some of them as concubines to the harems of the caliphs, emirs, and other notables of al-Andalus constituted a major tool of psychological warfare, designed to sow terror among the population and sap its will to resist. As we shall see, the trauma inflicted by this policy was to endure in the Christian consciousness for generations to come.