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Chapter 2

Marking Boundaries

Between c.1050 and 1300 the Iberian Peninsula was subjected to a series of powerful political and cultural impulses. There was a dramatic shift in the military balance of power after the demise of the Umayyad Caliphate in 1031, which allowed the Christian realms of the North to undertake a spectacular—if spasmodic and largely uncoordinated—movement of territorial expansion into the southern half of the Peninsula at the expense of al-Andalus, as major cities such as Toledo (1085), Zaragoza (1118), Lisbon (1147), Córdoba (1236), Valencia (1238), and Seville (1248) fell in turn. The result was to be that, with the notable exception of the Nasrid emirate of Granada (founded in 1238), Muslim authority in Iberia was almost extinguished.¹ This expansionary process was accompanied by a significant ideological transformation that saw the Christians begin to reconfigure certain aspects of their relationship with the Islamic world, a process that was accelerated and sharpened by the preaching of the Crusade. Simultaneously, a profound cultural shift occurred that prompted the religious and secular authorities of the Latin West to attempt to erect barriers to prevent social assimilation and, above all, sexual mixing between Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

As a consequence of this convergence of political, religious, and cultural trends, the practice of interfaith marriage in the Peninsula was condemned to a swift decline. Muslim rulers in al-Andalus simply no longer enjoyed the same level of political and military dominance over the northern kings as had once enabled them to demand the hands of Christian princesses in marriage as the price of peace, although the recruitment of Christian slave women to the harems of Islamic potentates was to continue for centuries to come. For their Christian counterparts, meanwhile, having so often been in the position of supplicants to the Umayyad superpower to the south, interfaith marriage was to become politically unnecessary, as well as culturally and ideologically beyond the pale. At the same time, partly as a response to the incorporation of sizeable communities of Muslims and Jews under Christian rule in the wake of the territorial conquests carried out both in the Peninsula and in the Holy Land, canon lawyers began drawing up strict injunctions against those Christians who engaged in sexual contact with infidels, pronouncements that were soon to be amplified in numerous Iberian secular law codes. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the various policies that were enacted by the Christian secular and religious authorities from the twelfth century onward with a view to restricting interfaith sex, and the wider social and ideological significance that such measures entailed.

Regulating Intimacy

As we saw in the previous chapter, the religious authorities in the Christian Latin West—in common with their Jewish and Muslim counterparts—had traditionally expressed hostility toward the practice of interfaith sex, particularly when a woman of their own faith was involved. In an Iberian context, intermarriage between Muslim men and Christian women apparently became so widespread in the decades following the eighth-century Islamic conquest that Pope Hadrian I wrote to denounce the practice, while similar concerns were voiced by the assembled Christian clerics at the council of Córdoba in 839.² However, there is precious little evidence to suggest that such anxieties were widely shared in the nascent Christian states of the north of the Peninsula during the Early Middle Ages. For one thing, the readiness of various Christian rulers to sanction cross-border interfaith marriage alliances with Islamic potentates—be they Umayyad dynasts or regional powerbrokers like the lords of the Banū Qasī—seems to demonstrate the primacy of pragmatism over cultural scruples at a time when Muslim al-Andalus was by far the dominant political and military player in the region. For another, it is striking that none of the handful of lawcodes issued by the Christian authorities prior to the twelfth century in any of the northern realms went out of their way to outlaw sexual mixing. Thus, among the 48 precepts that made up the extensive fuero, or charter of obligations and exemptions, that was granted to the city of León by Alfonso V in 1017, there was no prohibition on interfaith sex or indeed any other edict regarding the rights and obligations of religious minorities, other than a ruling on the role to be played by Jews in establishing the value of property.³ It is similarly noteworthy that the secular and ecclesiastical magnates who attended the councils held at Coyanza near León in 1055, Santiago de Compostela in 1056, Jaca in Aragon c.1063, or Girona in Catalonia c.1068 did not consider it necessary to address the thorny subject of sexual mixing in their pronouncements; their priorities lay elsewhere.⁴ The same could be said of Alfonso VI of León, who in March 1091 issued detailed instructions on the judicial procedure to be followed in legal disputes between Christians and Jews in the territory of León, but again did not consider it essential to address the matter of transgressive sexuality.⁵

The silence of the sources in this regard can be explained in various ways. At a most basic level, one might conjecture that the population of Jews and Muslims living in proximity to Christian communities in the northern realms prior to the late eleventh century was so insignificant that interfaith sex was simply not deemed a sufficiently serious risk to warrant legislation. For example, Jewish enclaves are recorded in the environs of the city of León prior to the twelfth century, but not within the urban space itself, while the Muslim population, drawn largely from slaves, was probably very small indeed.⁶ We should also bear in mind that since religious minorities living under Christian rule were customarily allowed a good deal of judicial autonomy, there may have been no apparent need to incorporate these communities within Christian law, even in areas where substantial enclaves of non-Christians are known to have existed.⁷ Yet we should also take account of other realities. For one thing, it might simply have been the case that a heightened sense of ethnic and religious difference, which was shortly to become a striking feature of political and cultural discourse in most parts of the Latin West, had yet to make itself felt among the Christians of the Northern Iberian realms. For another, the drive toward cultural unity and orthodoxy, which was to be a central feature of papal policy from the mid-eleventh century, and which was to see Rome ready to ride roughshod over local traditions and practices if necessary, had not yet had an impact on the north of the Peninsula. We shall return to explore these realities later in this chapter.

The dramatic military expansion of the Christian states at the expense of al-Andalus from the second half of the eleventh century onward marked a watershed moment insofar as interfaith relations were concerned. As Christian armies began to push southward, into the valleys of the Tagus and the Ebro between the 1080s and the 1140s, and then much further south toward the Guadiana, the Guadalquivir, and the Júcar a century and more later, they paved the way for an extensive program of resettlement that was designed to reinforce their control over the newly conquered territories and peoples. Kings and other lords took steps to establish the legal framework by which these Christian-ruled settlements would be governed and, with manpower at a premium, offered a variety of eye-catching inducements—including grants of property, tax breaks, and immunity from prosecution for criminals on the run—in order to attract colonists to the exposed lands that lay along the southern frontier. A case in point was the charter that Alfonso VII of León-Castile (1126–57) granted to the settlers of Oreja near Toledo in 1139 “in order to prevent the Moors from retaking it.”⁸ Some of the documents—known in Castilian as fueros (Catalan furs) or cartas pueblas—that were issued as part of this program of colonization were relatively brief statements of the obligations and privileges that would apply to settlers in the town or village in question; others were substantial compilations of municipal law and custom.⁹

Among the most striking features of this large body of customary law that was set down in writing between c.1050 and 1300 was the fact that numerous charters deemed it prudent and necessary to set out in detail the legal rights and obligations of the Jewish and Muslim communities who lived in the vicinity. On one level, this legislative initiative may be interpreted as an entirely pragmatic response to the fact that significant enclaves of religious minorities had been allowed to remain in situ in the aftermath of the Christian conquest, with a particularly high density of population in parts of Navarre, Aragon, and Valencia. With manpower scarce, there was an evident desire on the part of many Christian lords to avoid an exodus of Muslim and Jewish workers by guaranteeing their rights. In many cases fueros stipulated the religious, legal, and economic privileges Muslims and Jews would enjoy in a particular municipality or region, any additional taxes they might be liable to, their right in some cases to elect their own officials, or the prohibition on their holding certain posts in the local administration. A good example was the fuero Alfonso I of Aragon (1104–34) granted to Calatayud, south of the Ebro, in 1131, some eleven years after its conquest, in which he catalogued the various economic freedoms and legal protections that Muslims and Jews in the town would henceforth enjoy.¹⁰

By the late twelfth century, as economic and social interaction between the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities increased, laws designed to regulate intercommunal relations grew ever more detailed. Among this plethora of legislation, the monumental collections of municipal law promulgated in the towns of Teruel and Cuenca particularly stand out. Teruel, located in the Eastern Iberian Cordillera, was conquered by Alfonso II of Aragon (1164–96) in 1171, and its substantial Latin fuero (the Forum Turoli) was promulgated five years later.¹¹ Cuenca, about 150 kilometers to the west, was captured by Alfonso VIII of Castile (1158–1214)—with the assistance of the Aragonese king—in 1177 and probably received its code (the Forum Conche) around 1190.¹² Scholars have debated at length the exact relationship between the Teruel and Cuenca codes, since there are numerous areas of convergence and similarity between the two. However, it is now considered improbable that the authorities in Cuenca directly modeled their code on the Teruel text; the likelihood, rather, is that both fueros drew on a common body of customary law—oral and written—then already in existence in the frontier lands under Castilian and Aragonese rule by the second half of the twelfth century.¹³ Unlike the relatively limited statements of rights and responsibilities that had characterized many charters of settlement hitherto, however, the Cuenca and Teruel fueros set out in exhaustive detail the legal procedure that was to be followed in these towns and the system of municipal government that was to operate. Furthermore, they addressed numerous other aspects of urban life, such as the organization of the local militias whose responsibility it was to defend these communities against attack or to undertake offensive operations, regulations regarding economic activity, labor rights, the role and status of women, and so on.¹⁴

In common with numerous other charters of settlement of this period, the Teruel and Cuenca codes also addressed the question of interfaith relations. Muslims and Jews were welcome to settle in both towns—indeed a significant number probably remained in residence after the Christian conquest—and they shared many of the same rights and legal protections as their Christian counterparts. Yet this was no interfaith utopia. The municipal authorities in both towns were careful to draw clear lines of demarcation between the faiths in order to prevent excessive social interaction. The unvoiced fear was that social and cultural assimilation might prove a stepping-stone toward apostasy. With this in mind, Muslims and Jews at Teruel were warned not to frequent local bathhouses at the same times as Christians, with those who infringed the law facing a fine.¹⁵ At Cuenca, the same prohibition was laid on Jews, but there is no mention of Muslims, which might suggest that apart from slaves they no longer resided in large numbers in the town.¹⁶ Similar regulations regarding access to bathhouses were laid down in numerous other collections of frontier municipal law at this time, while the Church also added its voice to such injunctions: in 1280, at a synod in Lleida, the local bishop declared that any Christians who bathed with Muslims were to suffer excommunication.¹⁷

Perhaps more striking still, however, both the Teruel and the Cuenca codes contained a draconian prohibition on interfaith sex, at any rate as far as Christian women were concerned. The Teruel fuero has a section titled “Of the woman who sleeps with a Moor,” which baldly states: “If a Christian woman is discovered with a Moor or a Jew and they can be captured, they are to be burned together.”¹⁸ The Cuenca code was equally brief and to the point: “If a woman is surprised with a Moor or a Jew, both should be burned alive.”¹⁹ These are the earliest known legal enactments from any of the northern Christian realms to regulate interfaith intimacy in this way. Their prohibition on sexual mixing was to be echoed elsewhere in the succeeding decades, as the Cuenca legal corpus came to be adopted, either partially or wholly, by dozens of other municipalities across the center of the Peninsula, from Cáceres in the west, to Soria on the Duero in the north and Baeza and Iznatoraf near the Guadalquivir in the south.²⁰ A good example of the legal-cultural transformation that took place in the Castilian heartlands is provided by the town of Sepúlveda, situated just south of the Duero. It is striking that when Alfonso VI granted a short fuero to the settlers of Sepúlveda in 1076 he made no attempt to regulate interfaith relations, let alone to target sexual mixing.²¹ Yet two centuries later, when the civic authorities compiled an extensive fuero, which was also modeled to a large degree on the Cuenca archetype, the code included the stipulation that a Christian woman caught in flagrante delicto with a Muslim or Jewish man was to be burned at the stake, while her lover was to be hurled from the town’s cliffs.²² It further ruled that a Christian woman who lived among Jews and Muslims and bore a child by one of them, but was not caught in the act, was to be considered shameless, publicly flogged, and expelled from the town.²³

Various other collections of customary law, while not drawing directly on the Cuenca corpus, also subscribed to the view that sexual liaisons between Christian women and Muslim or Jewish men were dangerous acts that deserved to be punished with the utmost rigor.²⁴ According to the Costums that were granted to the community of Tortosa on the Ebro in the 1270s, for example, if a Jewish or Muslim man were to sleep with a Christian woman, the male was to be drawn and quartered and the woman burned at the stake.²⁵ The thirteenth-century Furs of Valencia pronounced that “if a Jew or a Saracen is found to lie with a Christian woman, let both him and her be burned.”²⁶ For its part, the Siete Partidas, the voluminous compendium of Roman, canon, and customary law that was compiled during the 1250s and 1260s at the behest of Alfonso X of Castile (1252–84), also promised that Jews found guilty of having intercourse with Christian women should suffer the capital penalty.²⁷ The penalties for Muslim male transgressors were similarly harsh and echo the punishments laid down in the various municipal fueros:

If a Moor has sexual intercourse with a Christian virgin, we order that he shall be stoned, and that she, for the first offence, shall lose half of her property, and that her father, mother, or grandfather, shall have it, and if she has no such relatives, that it shall belong to the king. For the second offence, she shall lose all her property, and the heirs aforesaid, if she has any, shall obtain it, and if she has none, the king shall be entitled to it, and she shall be put to death. We decree and order that the same rule shall apply to a widow who commits this crime. If a Moor has sexual intercourse with a Christian married woman, he shall be stoned to death, and she shall be placed in the power of her husband who may burn her to death, or release her, or do what he pleases with her. If a Moor has intercourse with a common woman who abandons herself to everyone, for the first offence, they shall be scourged together through the town, and for the second, they shall be put to death.²⁸

It is striking that none of these codes went out of their way to prohibit sexual relations between Christian men and Muslim or Jewish women; we will consider the significance of that omission shortly. Even so, it should be emphasized that clauses of this sort were by no means universal, since legal cultures across the Peninsula were far from uniform, and legal approaches toward religious minorities tended to reflect local conditions and priorities. A prohibition on interfaith sex was absent, for example, from major law codes such as the Fuero General of Navarre (1237) or the Fori aragonum (1247). And while numerous collections of municipal law thought it necessary to address the rights, obligations, and protections of Muslims and Jews in the economic sphere, by no means all addressed the issue of intercommunal sexuality.

Since sexual relations between Christian women and minority men were widely considered to be among the most heinous crimes that could be committed in the frontier towns under Christian control, and because of the potential gravity of the consequences for those accused and convicted on such charges, some law codes emphasized that due legal process had to be scrupulously followed. At Castelo Bom and Castelo Melhor in Portugal, as at Coria, Cáceres, and Usagre across the border in León, the local fueros stated that magistrates who apprehended a Jew with a Christian woman were to settle the case with two Christians and one Jew as witnesses, or two Jews and one Christian.²⁹ An identical procedure was followed at Sepúlveda, while in cases where a Muslim man was accused of sleeping with a Christian woman the case could be proved with two Christians and one Muslim as witnesses.³⁰ At Tortosa, a woman charged with conducting sexual relations with a Muslim or Jew would be pardoned if it could be established that she had been forced, or tricked because the man in question had been dressed as a Christian.³¹ As we shall see, this was a defense that more than one Christian woman would have recourse to when arrested on charges of engaging in interfaith sex.

The importance that was attached to correct judicial procedure was also emphasized in the song Quen na Virgen santa muito fiará, one of the large collection of over 400 hymns composed in praise of the Virgin, known collectively as the Cantigas de Santa María, which was compiled under the patronage of Alfonso X of Castile. The song in question tells of a Christian woman whose hatred of her daughter-in-law is such that she orders one of her Muslim servants to get into bed with the woman as she sleeps, in order to make it appear that they had engaged in illicit sex. The calculating mother-in-law prevents the traumatized husband, her son, from killing the couple on the spot and instead encourages him to summon the local magistrate and others, knowing that eyewitness testimony of the crime would seal the supposed lovers’ fate. The couple are duly sentenced to be burned at the stake, only for the young woman to be miraculously saved from the flames by the intervention of the Virgin; for the blameless Muslim there was to be no such deliverance, however.³² We will return to consider the ideological significance of this episode in Chapter 4.

Although it is undoubtedly true that medieval legal enactments all too often reflected the aspirations of lawmakers as much as the social reality “on the ground,” the prohibitions on interfaith sex which were inserted into the various Iberian collections of customary law that were drafted from the late twelfth century onward were by no means mere theoretical statements of ideal conduct. The rich documentary evidence from the realm of the Crown of Aragon, which has been interrogated skilfully by John Boswell, María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, David Nirenberg, and Brian Catlos, among others, has demonstrated the zeal with which the sexual boundaries between the faiths were sometimes policed and the thoroughness with which suspected crimes might be investigated.³³ To give but one example, in January 1389 the Infante Martin of Aragon instructed the justice of the town of Arándiga, near Calatayud, to investigate whether it was true that the previous month, on Christmas Eve, a Muslim man, Lop “el fustero” (or carpenter), had had sex with a Christian prostitute at a local inn.³⁴ The Infante urged the justice to undertake a thorough investigation of the case, since “we do not wish that such things should pass without due punishment,” and laid out the step-bystep procedure that was to be followed. First, the justice was to interrogate the prostitute in order to establish what day and time the Muslim had come to see her; what words had been exchanged between the couple; whether he had slept with her; whether any money had changed hands; or whether the Muslim had left the woman something as security. Then the Muslim was to be questioned in the same manner, before witness statements were taken from the innkeeper and others. If the judge proved satisfied of the Muslim’s guilt, he was “to do justice to him as should be done.” What that meant in practice is not stipulated. Although the majority of urban fueros specified the capital penalty for such cases, this was by no means consistently enforced, even when guilt was firmly established, and in the majority of cases transgressors escaped by paying a fine.³⁵ The Aragonese Crown may have claimed jurisdiction over its subject Muslims, describing them as “Our Royal Treasure,” but its kings proved notably reluctant to execute such lawbreakers. In 1322, no fewer than eighteen Muslims from the Vall d’Uxó were convicted of having had sex with a Christian prostitute, but the death penalty initially laid down was later commuted for a hefty fine.³⁶ When James I of Aragon issued a charter setting out his policy on interfaith relations in 1242, he allowed any Christian women then living with minority men up to two months to extricate themselves from their illegal relationships.³⁷ Be that as it may, on some occasions the authorities did not flinch from imposing the capital penalty. Thus, in 1311 James II of Aragon (1291–1327) confirmed that a Muslim, Muḥammad, who had been accused of trying to have sex with a Christian prostitute, was to be burned at the stake, in order that it might serve as a warning to others of his faith.³⁸ A similar fate befell the Navarrese Muslim Bursón, who in 1343 was found guilty of maintaining sexual relations with a Christian woman.³⁹

In some cases local officials were painfully aware that they lacked the necessary legal apparatus to guide them in their investigation and sought guidance from the Crown. When, in 1300, the municipal council of Niebla near Huelva realized that their local fuero lacked a clause outlawing interfaith sex, they wrote to Ferdinand IV of Castile (1295–1312), who allowed them to borrow sections from the fuero of nearby Jerez de la Frontera for the purpose.⁴⁰ The authorities of Murcia came up against a similar problem. That much is clear from the letter that the Infante Peter, son of Sancho IV of Castile (1284–95), dispatched to the alcaldes of that city from Burgos on 5 August 1315.⁴¹ The letter records that a local Muslim, Mahomat Abollexa, had been accused of having sex with a Christian woman called María Fernández, and that his Christian companion Juan de Dios (perhaps, given his name, a convert) had supposedly tricked the woman by telling her that Mahomat was a Christian. Whether María was a prostitute is not made clear, but the circumstances of her case, in particular the role of a Christian go-between who arranged the encounter with the Muslim, suggest that she may well have been. The officials duly launched an investigation into the matter and, once they had satisfied themselves of the two men’s guilt, contacted the Infante to request guidance on how to proceed, since the local fuero did not include provision for such cases. Having considered their report and discussed it with various learned officials of the king, the Infante ruled that both men should be burned at the stake, in the case of Juan de Dios because he had played a key role in arranging the interfaith liaison and was condemned as a “besmircher of our law” (ensuziador de nuestra ley). The Infante further commanded that, since it appeared that María Fernández had been ensnared by Juan de Dios and was unaware that Mahomat was not a Christian, she should be released from prison. Finally, he noted that in any similar cases in the future the local authorities should proceed in the same manner.

The majority of the Christian women who were cited in the cases of sexual mixing that came before the courts appear to have been prostitutes, as in the cases from Arándiga and Vall d’Uxó mentioned above. This is not in itself terribly surprising given the nature of their profession and the fact that such women, whether they worked independently or in licensed brothels, tended to frequent areas where the faiths intermingled. The Christian authorities were well aware that prostitutes ran a particular risk of engaging in sexual relations with men of other faiths, while Muslim community leaders also protested at their presence in their midst for fear that excessive contact between the faiths might in turn lead their coreligionists to apostatize.⁴² In 1304 James II of Aragon instructed his legal officials in Valencia to command the Christian prostitutes and their pimps who resided in the Muslim quarter of the city to leave, for fear they would incur “horrible sins.”⁴³ In 1346 Peter IV of Aragon (1336–87) declared that it had come to his attention that Christian prostitutes and others had purchased houses in the Muslim quarter of the same city and warned of the danger this posed to Christians and Muslims alike; those who did so would be liable to a fine of 100 gold pieces.⁴⁴ Yet the proclamation does not appear to have had the desired effect: in 1351 the king reiterated his command that Christians were not to buy or rent houses in the Muslim quarter; yet fully 33 years later he found it necessary to return to the same theme.⁴⁵ It is striking, nonetheless, that during the final third of the fourteenth century only three cases of interfaith sex involving minority men and Christian prostitutes from licensed brothels are known to have come before the courts of Valencia. That suggests either that the harsh penalties prescribed by the law had the desired effect of dissuading Christians and Muslims from engaging in sexual mixing, or else that the authorities did not pursue malefactors with any particular sense of urgency. However, it is worthy of note that the converso Gil García was burned at the stake for having facilitated and covered up sexual encounters between Christian prostitutes and Muslim men, “out of great scorn for the Christian faith,” as the judicial sentence put it.⁴⁶

The readiness of the authorities to punish interfaith sex between Christian prostitutes and minority men is writ large in the legal registers of the period. If a prostitute were arrested on charges of engaging in interfaith sex, her life might depend on her being able to convince the judges that she had been unaware that her client was not a Christian. The experience of the prostitute Alicsén de Tolba, which is recorded in a detailed judicial summary drawn up on 27 November 1304, is a notable case in point.⁴⁷ Alicsén declared before the judge that when she and one of her companions had visited a shepherds’ camp near Xivert (Valencia) a Muslim called Aytola was persuaded by one of his fellow shepherds, Lorenç, to sleep with her, but was told to pretend that he was a Christian named John, to speak in the accent of the mountains, and to say that he came from the port. However, when the couple slept together and Alicsén saw that Aytola had been circumcised, she realised that he was not a Christian and promptly raised the alarm, denouncing both Aytola and Lorenç to the lieutenant of the Commander of the Temple in Xivert for deceiving her to “the dishonour of God and of the Catholic faith and of Christianity.” Fearing the consequences if he were brought to book, Aytola promptly skipped town; the Christian Lorenç, who had introduced his Muslim companion to Alicsén in the first place, was arrested, but later acquitted of the charge of abetting illegal interfaith sex.

To sum up thus far, the fact that Christian prostitutes were far more likely to come into sexual contact with men of another faith meant that they became a locus for collective anxiety about interfaith sex from the thirteenth century onward; they have even been portrayed as the sentinels who policed the boundaries between the faiths.⁴⁸ It was not that contemporaries were unconcerned about the sexual honor of other women, but the fact of the matter was that relationships between Christian women who were of good standing in the community and a minority male appear to have reached the courts only rarely.⁴⁹ The social space such women inhabited was far more closely controlled, with the result that the danger that interfaith sexual liaisons might occur was correspondingly diminished. In 1366, King Peter I of Portugal (1357–67) declared that since he had heard that some Christian women, deceived by the Devil, had maintained sexual relations with “men of another law,” he commanded that henceforth, on pain of death, a Christian woman should only enter the Muslim and Jewish quarters of Lisbon if accompanied by a Christian man if she were a spinster or widow, or two if she were married. What is more, the king prescribed two itineraries such women were to follow.⁵⁰

Moreover, when such cases did come before authorities, a cuckolded husband may sometimes have preferred not to press charges, for fear he would be dishonored if he did so. In 1344, a Muslim blacksmith from Lleida in Catalonia, Çalema Abinhumen, who had been accused of conducting an affair with the Christian woman, Arnaldona, was acquitted when her husband Ramon d’Aguilar flatly denied that any such relationship had taken place.⁵¹ It is conceivable that Ramon did so to avoid public shame, although it is equally possible that in this, as in numerous other cases, the accusation of illegal sexual mixing had been brandished against a minority male not because such a relationship had actually occurred, but because it was viewed as an effective mechanism for ensuring that the accused would feel the full weight of the law.⁵² Such false accusations could have devastating consequences for those implicated. In 1304, the same year as Alicsén de Tolba brought her case against the Muslim Aytola, a young Christian woman of the Aragonese town of Daroca, Prima Garsón, was accused of having pursued an affair with a local Muslim, Ali de Matero, and given birth to a child. Prima fled the town before her accusers could have her arrested, but the hapless Ali was seized and burned at the stake in her absence. When Prima was later captured and delivered into the hands of the authorities, a medical examination demonstrated that she was still a virgin and therefore innocent of the charges that had been laid against her.⁵³ The case demonstrates most powerfully that a determination to prevent interfaith sex was by no means the abstract preoccupation of lawgivers; it could give rise to fierce passions at the grass-roots level too.

Double Standards

If we turn our attention back to the legal prohibitions placed on sexual mixing, it is apparent that it was the conduct of Christian women and minority men that was consistently targeted. Did the same rules apply to Christian men who had sexual relations with Muslim or Jewish women? In the crusading kingdoms of the Near East, where similar multicultural realities prevailed, royal and ecclesiastical authorities took a firm line against such liaisons. The Council of Nablus of 1120, apparently inspired by Byzantine legal precedent, ruled that a Latin or Muslim man found guilty of having sex with a female of the other religion—be it voluntary or forced—should be castrated, while the woman’s nose was to be cut off; Latin women who had relations with Muslim men were condemned as adulteresses.⁵⁴ Furthermore, the mid-thirteenth-century laws of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem warned all colonists not to marry “heretics,” by which they meant non-Christians.⁵⁵ Be that as it may, numerous chroniclers of the Crusades lamented the sexual licentiousness of the participants and the frequency with which they had recourse to prostitutes or engaged in extramarital affairs with local women. The likelihood is that sexual encounters between Christian men and Muslim prostitutes or slaves occurred with some frequency, whatever the jurists of the kingdom had to say on the matter.⁵⁶

In the Christian-dominated regions of the Iberian Peninsula the legal position regarding such sexual liaisons was notably less clear-cut. While there is ample evidence from legal and other sources to demonstrate that the authorities deplored interfaith sex where Christian women were involved, intercourse between Christian men and Muslim or Jewish women was only rarely singled out in the secular legislation of the age. According to the laws of Valencia, if a Christian man was caught sleeping with a Jewess both parties were to be burned at the stake, but in the case of a Christian man who slept with a Muslim woman, the couple would be compelled to run naked through the streets. However, whether this law was consistently implemented is doubtful, and John Boswell has observed that it “was clearly a dead letter by the midfourteenth century.”⁵⁷ In 1276, the Infante Peter of Aragon commanded the justices of the Kingdom of Valencia that they should not allow Muslims and Christians to cohabit, on the grounds that it was “neither honest nor just.”⁵⁸ The following year, Peter, now King Peter III of Aragon (1276–85), undertook before the Jews of Calatayud that any Christian man caught in flagrante delicto with a Jewish woman would be fined to the tune of 300 maravedís.⁵⁹ For his part, Sancho IV of Castile warned the Christian men of his kingdom not to commit sin with Jewish or Muslim women, “for they are women of another law and another faith.”⁶⁰ He was particularly critical of his ancestor, Alfonso VIII, whose sinful seven-year relationship with a Jewess of Toledo supposedly led to his defeat at Almohad hands at Alarcos in 1195.⁶¹ Aragonese records demonstrate that it was not unknown for prosecutions against men to be brought on such charges, and that the women in question were liable to confiscation of property and enslavement.⁶² Those who denounced a Muslim woman who had engaged in interfaith sex stood to earn half her value if she were subsequently enslaved and sold. In one notorious case, in 1356, Peter IV of Aragon granted to the monks of the abbey of Rueda the right to profit from the sale of any Muslim women within its domains who had been enslaved for sleeping with Christian men, only to revoke it in September of the following year when it became known to him that it had been the monks themselves who had been engaging in sexual relations with the women in question.⁶³ What is abundantly clear is that legal opinion on such matters was far from consistent. In 1294, a Muslim woman of Ablitas in Navarre who was found guilty of having slept with a Christian man was merely fined the sum of thirty solidi.⁶⁴

It is also worth emphasizing that the Muslim and Jewish communities of the Peninsula were equally horrified by the phantom of sexual mixing, and patrolled the social boundaries between the faiths zealously in order to protect their own women from pollution by men of another religion. The perennial fear was that if such interfaith sexual intimacy went unchecked, it would not only bring shame upon the women’s families, but would also be a prelude to apostasy among their coreligionists. The late thirteenth-century Toledan rabbi Asher b. Yeḥiel decried Jewish men who carried out “harlotry with the daughter of a foreign God,” and declared that those who did so were to be denounced before Jewish courts.⁶⁵ In the popular song of the beautiful Jewess Marisaltos, which is preserved among the Cantigas de Santa María, the young woman is thrown from a cliff by her own coreligionists, probably because she had conducted extramarital relations with a Christian man, only to be saved by the miraculous intervention of the Virgin.⁶⁶ For their part, Islamic judges regularly sentenced women found guilty of having interfaith sex or engaging in other sexual misdemeanors, such as fornication or adultery, to flogging or stoning to death, but they were not permitted to do so without the permission of the king, and such penalties were normally commuted to slavery to the Crown. Take the case of the Muslim woman Axia, who had been condemned to be stoned to death for adultery with Christians and Muslims by the qadi of Valencia, only to be enslaved instead by command of James II of Aragon and granted to one of his nobles.⁶⁷ Even so, in 1347, in response to lobbying by the Muslim officials in Valencia, King Peter IV of Aragon ruled that any Muslim woman convicted of pursuing an adulterous relationship with a Christian or Jew was to suffer the death penalty rather than pay a fine.⁶⁸ But such pronouncements were rare. For the most part, the execution of Muslim adulteresses remained the exception rather than the rule.

By the same token, it is apparent that on the Christian side social attitudes and legal procedures on such matters could vary substantially from region to region. Canon lawyers might have denounced the practice, but the reality was that the taking of minority women—the majority of them slaves—as concubines (barraganas) was widespread.⁶⁹ The Siete Partidas allowed a man to take a free woman or a slave as a concubine, with the proviso that he was not already married and she was not a virgin, or under twelve years of age, “or a widow who lives honourably and has a good reputation.”⁷⁰ There is no indication in the code that the taking of a Jewish or Muslim woman as a barragana was outlawed. Similarly, no objection was raised by the lawgivers of Sepúlveda if a Christian man had a child by a minority woman; however, we have seen that a Christian woman who bore a child to a minority man was to be considered a woman of ill repute, whipped, and driven out of town.⁷¹ The Costums of Tortosa contain numerous sections on the rights of minority concubines and their offspring, ruling that if the father were the owner of a slave concubine any child born to them would be considered free; if he were not the owner, the child would also become a slave, but could not subsequently be sold to a Muslim or Jew.⁷² For its part, the fuero of Cuenca also gives the impression that such interfaith liaisons were commonplace:

If someone has a child with another’s Moorish woman, this child should be the servant of the señor of the Moorish woman, until his father redeems him. Also, we say that such a child should not divide with his siblings that which corresponds to the patrimony of their father, while he remains in servitude. Later should he become free, he should take a share of the goods of his father.⁷³

What especially concerned some lawgivers was that any child born to a minority barragana should be brought up as a Christian: the laws of Soria were a case in point.⁷⁴ Similarly, the Fuero Real issued by Alfonso X of Castile in 1256 required a Christian man who fathered a child by a Muslim or Jewish woman to take responsibility for its upbringing and maintenance.⁷⁵ However, such children did not enjoy the same protection under the law as those of Christian barraganas, and if a mixed couple separated the woman might lose custody of her offspring.⁷⁶ From the fourteenth century, moreover, there is evidence to suggest that that the legal rights of such concubines and their offspring were gradually eroded.⁷⁷

Christian men also frequented Muslim prostitutes. In Aragon the sex industry was subject to strict regulation by the Crown, which issued licenses and gleaned substantial tax revenues as a result.⁷⁸ Religious institutions, such as the Military Orders, also had a significant economic interest in Muslim prostitution, such as the Templars of Tortosa, who levied taxes on local Muslim prostitutes.⁷⁹ Municipal authorities subjected brothels to careful supervision, with premises often being walled in to prevent women from plying their trade in the public highway and to protect them from being kidnapped.⁸⁰ According to Mark Meyerson,

Prostitution … was more than tolerated; it was encouraged. For why should a Christian king concern himself with the morality of Muslim women, who were, in any event, irredeemable on account of their profession of Islam? Since, according to the contemporary Catholic theological position, all Muslims were damned, the Christian authorities had no qualms about treating Muslim women as essentially soulless and exploitable objects.⁸¹

Many of these Muslim prostitutes were slaves, some of whom had fallen into servitude after having been condemned by local Islamic courts for sexual impropriety, or by royal or seigneurial officials for exercising prostitution without a license.⁸² Others had gravitated toward prostitution after having separated from unhappy marriages or abusive husbands.⁸³ Social outcasts, disowned by their families and communities, vulnerable to sexual violence, for such women prostitution was one of the few economic avenues open to them if they were to survive. The experience of the Muslim woman Mariem, who left her husband in the village of Alasquer and moved to the city of Valencia in the company of another Muslim man, Cutaydal, some time prior to 1491, and was later tricked into working in the brothel of the morería (Muslim quarter) of Valencia, was probably not untypical.⁸⁴

In reality, however, the boundaries between prostitution and concubinage were by no means clear-cut, and in the later medieval period there is evidence of former prostitutes entering into what have euphemistically been described as “domestic service contracts” with Christian men. The Christian Sancha Bolea, a resident of Daroca, who in her own words “became by chance a wayward woman, because a man there, in Zaragoza, took my maidenhood and dishonoured me, and I was on the verge of going to the brothels,” entered into such a contract with another Christian, Juan de Madrid, in 1460. Sancha’s predicament and motivation were clearly laid bare as she declared:

In order to have some goods and not end up in the brothels, I have decided to come and live with you and serve you of my own free will. And [thus] I begged and asked you to take me into your house as housekeeper or servant, to stay with you and sleep with you, and to do with my body as you wish.⁸⁵

In return for this undertaking, Juan de Madrid agreed to pay Sancha the sum of 200 sueldos. It is likely that for numerous marginalized, impoverished Muslim women similar arrangements such as these offered them a welcome, if often temporary, sense of security.⁸⁶