Читать книгу Enemies in the Plaza - Thomas Devaney - Страница 10

Introduction

Magical swords can be useful things. While preparing an invasion of Muslim-ruled Granada in 1407, the Castilian prince and regent Fernando “de Antequera” made his headquarters in the city of Seville. During his stay, he visited the cathedral of Santa María la Mayor and gazed on the funeral effigy of King Fernando III, a hero of the “reconquest” who had captured the city as well as much of the rest of Castilian Andalucía from the Muslims in the thirteenth century. A fourteenth-century description of this effigy noted that “in the right hand is a sword, said to be of great virtue, with which [Fernando III] conquered Seville…. And whoever desires protection from evil, let him place a kiss on the sword and he will be sheltered thereafter.”¹ It was perhaps with this in mind that the later Fernando took the sword from the effigy’s hand in a solemn ceremony viewed by many of his retainers. After private prayer before an image of the Virgin Mary, Fernando bore the sword in a mounted procession through Seville before taking it with him into battle. Over the next few years, he “borrowed” the sword several more times. Only after his campaigns culminated in the conquest of Antequera in 1410 did he finally return the sword to the cathedral once and for all.

According to the contemporary chronicler Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, none of this was Fernando’s idea. Seville’s concejo, or municipal council, had originally offered him the sword, and he decided to parade it about the city only after one of his nobles convinced him to do so.² Pérez de Guzmán’s reasons for telling the story in this way are straightforward enough: he hoped to portray Fernando not as a grandstander who went about appropriating sacred weapons but as a pious man whose merit was recognized by others. It seems unlikely, however, that Fernando needed any prompting. He was aware of the symbolic import of the sword and knew full well that taking it would encourage his soldiers and embellish his reputation.

To an extent, Fernando’s audience consisted of the “knights, counts, and rich men” who joined him in the cathedral and on the procession.³ They, like the regent, had been raised and educated in a chivalric culture that lionized fallen heroes; to truly excel and win fame, a knight must prove himself worthy of the past and of his lineage.⁴ As warrior, king, and saint, Fernando III was a particularly powerful exemplar. His significance for fifteenth-century Castilian knights is perhaps best expressed in a chronicle written a few decades later and dedicated to another proponent of holy war, Rodrigo Ponce de León:

Oh, what relief it would be to be counted among the most holy and illustrious kings of glorious memory and the very noble and virtuous knights, who shine before the order of God, having defended and held up the holy Catholic faith against the Muslims and infidels, enemies of the faith of Jesus Christ! Just as the magnificent king don Fernando, who took Seville on the day of San Clemente. On the evening before that feast day, Our Lady the Virgin Mary appeared to him and placed the keys to the city in his hand and took him inside [the walls of Seville]. And that holy king, having there knelt before her image with devoted prayers, forgot his sword upon his departure. The next morning, the Muslim king sent it to him, asking that he spare their lives by the mercy of Her Highness, because Her Highness had vowed to put them all to the sword.⁵

For Ponce de León, as for Fernando and his followers, the sword of the saintly king was more than a protective object; it encapsulated their personal and collective aspirations. By publicly but reverently co-opting this history, Fernando inspired his knights in a manner that engaged deeply held beliefs about themselves and their society. There is no reason to assume that his motives were cynical. Fernando’s devotion to the Virgin Mary was lifelong and his crusading credentials were already established. A few years earlier, for instance, he had founded the chivalric Order of the Jar and the Griffin, dedicated to Mary’s purity and the ultimate defeat of Granada.⁶

His own knights were not Fernando’s only audience, however, and much of the population of Seville had little interest in chivalrous ambitions or the swords of dead kings. His plans for a campaign against Granada had earned a lukewarm response from the local nobility and populace. Despite rhetoric about unending hostilities between Christians and Muslims, war with Granada was hardly constant, and Seville’s residents made effective use of a nearly uninterrupted series of truces from 1350 to 1450 to establish lucrative trading partnerships with their putative religious enemies across the border. The proximity to Granada that permitted this commerce, however, also meant that any renewal of fighting put the city and its environs in danger. Fernando’s campaign was a response to a series of raids in central Andalucía, especially near Jaén and Baeza. Seville was not threatened, but that could change if its role as base for the regent’s army made the city a target for Granadan reprisals. As happened often on the frontier, therefore, many people were disinclined to take decisive action. Sevillanos did not openly object to Fernando’s plans. Many sincerely supported his plan for an invasion of Granada, in theory at least. But concerns about the practical and near-term implications of his ambitions meant that they did not actively or eagerly support him.

By taking up the sword, Fernando claimed its protective qualities and declared that he enjoyed the special attentions of the Virgin. By bearing it in procession through Seville, he extended that protection to encompass all those who lived there, thus relieving their anxiety about potential Granadan retaliation. Fernando’s decision to take up the sword thus was a response to practical political concerns as much as anything, one meant to act in concert with other efforts to win over the people of Seville, such as the prominent role Fernando accorded to the banners of Seville and Saint Isidore in the vanguard of his army. Fernando’s approach was not particularly innovative—rulers had long used pageantry and symbolic objects to their benefit and his great-grandfather Alfonso XI had employed Fernando III’s memory in 1327—but it was fruitful.⁷ He managed to bring a sustained campaign against Granada to a successful conclusion, a feat that had not been achieved for more than a century and would not be again until the 1480s. To do so, he had needed to appeal simultaneously to multiple constituencies. His claiming of Fernando III’s sword, although not the sole reason for his victory, indicates his sensitivity to the Sevillan perspective and an understanding of the power of symbols.

Fernando’s campaign illustrates several key aspects of politics in late medieval Castile. Leaders who hoped to wage war against Granada had to win a broad base of support. It was especially vital for them to ensure that noncombatants living near the frontier supported these military endeavors. Frontier dwellers bore the majority of the costs of holy war as well as the risks of retaliation. Frontier attitudes regarding putative religious enemies, moreover, were often more complex than those held by people who had little direct or regular contact with members of other religious groups. To effectively wage war against Muslims, elites had to adjust their public personae and messages in order to fit local sentiments. This was not only a question of Christian ideas about Islam; rather, the borderlands were marked by often contradictory sentiments about a range of religious communities, including Christians, Muslims, Jews, and recent converts. Ultimately, many Christians in Castile disagreed on the fundamental nature of their society: was it or should it be an exclusively Christian community? Or should non-Christians and converts play full and equal roles in a hybrid society? Such questions, combined with a constant sense of physical insecurity, caused a great deal of anxiety, one result of which was a turn to extreme and seemingly contradictory behaviors. These included unrestrained violence toward non-Christians as well as rejections of fixed religious identities; conversions to Islam, to give one example, were numerous. Such responses were often incomprehensible to those who lived away from the frontier, in places where they were free to consider issues of religion and identity in absolute terms and without the troubling presence of non-Christians.

In 1391, a few years before Fernando’s sojourn in Seville, for instance, the city was the epicenter of a series of brutal assaults that decimated one of the most populous Jewish communities in Iberia. Several decades later, in 1449, plague broke out in Seville and local church authorities responded with penitential processions. Soon thereafter, or perhaps at the same time, Seville’s Jews conducted their own procession, which apparently imitated a number of features of the Christian version. In place of the Bible, however, they bore the Torah aloft as they walked. The Jews did this with the permission of García Enriquez Osorio, archbishop of Seville, and their action occasioned little comment among the people and clergy of Seville. A notable exception was Antonio Ferrari, a cathedral canon, who remonstrated violently that Jews should not be allowed to emulate Christian practice and was excommunicated as a troublemaker. When he sought reinstatement from Rome, he was imprisoned. Word of these events soon reached the ear of Pope Nicholas V, who ordered an investigation into Ferrari’s allegations of persecution. The pope contended that the canon had been correct to oppose the Jewish procession, presenting it as an attack on Christianity because it insinuated that God would prefer the pleas of Jews over those of Christians. Ferrari had attempted to prevent the Jews from acting “as if God did not hear the prayers of the faithful” and so should be completely indemnified, while those who excommunicated and imprisoned him should be punished for abuse of their powers.⁸

But convergences in religious practice, as Sevillan church authorities well knew, had long been common among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Andalucía.⁹ Their tolerance in this and several other cases stands in stark contrast to the brutality of 1391 and the more institutionalized persecution Seville’s Jews would face later in the century. In order to further their own agendas or simply to keep order, leaders in frontier cities found it necessary to constantly address questions of religious conflict and coexistence. Public spectacle was one of their most effective tools, for spectacles are, by their nature, ambiguous. They can mean, to a degree, whatever a viewer wants them to mean. For this same reason, however, they can be subversive. Rulers cannot exert full control over their interpretation. Fernando’s task was easy in one sense: as a sojourner on the frontier, he could focus on the short term and the attainment of clear, limited goals. Those who remained had to find ways to negotiate the physical insecurity and contradictory attitudes that conditioned frontier life.

Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo was a prominent nobleman exiled from the royal court in the 1460s. Arriving in the frontier bastion of Jaén, he sought—like Fernando—to lead glorious campaigns into Granada. To do so, he too had to inspire a local population that was just as happy to trade with the Muslims as fight them. In response, Miguel Lucas spent the next decade conducting a dazzling and seemingly endless succession of elaborate tournaments, festivals, processions, and banquets. Oftentimes, these displays seem contradictory as the aspiring holy warrior dressed in Morisco attire, praised Islamic culture, or treated the issue of religious war in a jocular manner at odds with his serious purposes. Modern scholars have interpreted these events in any number of ways: as a cynical appropriation of popular motifs meant to solidify his rule, as “frontier fantasy” or “confirmatory magic,” as military training exercises. In all these instances, historians have assumed that Miguel Lucas controlled the meaning of his spectacles, that he was able to impose a “frontier ideology” on the people.¹⁰

In fact, as we shall see, both the content and the interpretation of Miguel Lucas’s spectacles were conditioned by the expectations of an audience that depended on predictable, if not wholly peaceable, relations with Granada. Confronted with the ambivalence that his new subjects evinced toward their Muslim neighbors, he sought to reassure them that he would not seek an unrestrained war against Granada that might threaten their livelihoods and expel their trading partners. In effect, Miguel Lucas aimed to lower the stakes of holy war by suggesting that victory over Islam required the conversion of Muslims but not the destruction of Granadan culture and society. Through pageantry, therefore, Miguel Lucas attempted not to indoctrinate the people but to make his aggressive policies broadly palatable.

Only a few decades later, however, the conditions that required such a response had faded. There was a general hardening of attitudes toward religious minorities as influential groups in Castile sought to define their society as exclusively and ardently Christian. This transition can be seen through royal policies such as the Edict of Expulsion or the establishment of the Inquisition. But it is especially visible in civic pageants of the 1470s and 1480s that now presented Muslims, Jews, and recent converts either as imminent threats to society who must be neutralized or as unwelcome guests, irrelevant but still the focus of much attention. Like those of Miguel Lucas, these later performances have been described in dismissive or uncertain terms by both contemporary observers and modern scholars. And so a Marian procession that incited violence against converts in Córdoba was but a “chance act” and the particular roles accorded to Jews and Muslims in Murcia’s presentation of Corpus Christi is a “puzzling mix of ecumenism and bigotry.”¹¹

Here again, close attention to the frontier and urban contexts of public performances can explain both their purpose and their significance. Spectacles reflected shifts in public sentiments toward religious minorities; in doing so, they accelerated the process. Like Fernando de Antequera and Miguel Lucas, most noble sponsors of spectacles had clear goals in mind. But, although they had a great deal of influence over the interpretation of performances, spectators did not mindlessly follow their lead. Indeed, the opposite seems to have been true. Elites constantly tried to “catch up” to what they perceived as popular sentiment. The perception of a growing popular intolerance for outsiders within “Christian” society encouraged rulers to craft performances that emphasized the foreignness of Muslims, Jews, and recent converts. The Christian populace, assured by these spectacles that religious minorities were no longer under the protection of the nobility, were then emboldened to act against them. The result was a semantic narrowing, as urban pageants that had previously been used to express a range of attitudes toward Jews, Muslims, and converts were now limited in practice to the rejection of those groups. By confirming and validating popular opinion, this shift fostered open intolerance across the social spectrum.

Immediate physical contexts played a significant role in this process. Sponsors understood that environments influenced how performances were experienced and received and made use of the connotations associated with particular urban locations in order to best present their own messages. These locations, of course, meant different things to different people, and so the connections between performance and context permitted multiple readings of the same display. Many spectacles were, therefore, deliberate efforts to transform those meanings by creating new cognitive or emotional connotations, to endow a prominent location with a significance understood by all and controlled by elites. Such moments are of particular interest in that they reveal contemporary understandings of how public memoria and social change were related.

Pageantry had long served as a means of negotiating and articulating the boundaries between religious communities. It was due to this tradition that Castilian elites, during a period in which traditional interfaith relations seemed to be less relevant, employed spectacle as a means of altering them. It also meant that these elites encountered receptive audiences familiar with the ability of performance to present social messages. By consistently turning to the theme of interfaith relations, they highlighted the importance of those relations and helped to transform the ambivalent attitudes about others that had characterized the borderlands. In the period with which this book is concerned, the result was an increasingly negative depiction of religious minorities. By the early 1490s, such festivities proclaimed a vision of a Castile that was triumphant and unabashedly Christian, a society in which Jews, Muslims, and recent converts might have a place, but only a tenuous one.

A great deal has been written about the so-called breakdown in religious tolerance in fifteenth-century Iberia. This is often presented as the transition from a golden age of convivencia, or peaceful coexistence, that was especially prominent in Muslim-ruled al-Andalus but also held, to varying degrees, through the initial period of Christian dominance from the thirteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries. The traditional account of what happened next has often been called the “Black Legend.”¹² It depicts late medieval and early modern Spain as defined by a narrow religious bigotry in which the Inquisition, Edict of Expulsion, and conquistadors loom large. The Black Legend has now been thoroughly refuted by any number of scholars. In recent years, perhaps the most influential work has been that of David Nirenberg, who argues that medieval religious violence was not perpetrated by irrational masses who blindly adopted inherited ideologies and prejudices but by self-aware groups that carefully adapted discourses about others to serve a host of diverse needs.¹³ In showing how religious violence could shape interfaith relations in often-constructive ways, moreover, Nirenberg suggests that we need to leave behind strict dichotomies like “tolerance” and “intolerance” when examining the medieval past. Other scholars, including Mark Meyerson, Barbara Fuchs, and Stuart Schwartz, have undermined the idea that conditions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were wholly negative for members of religious minority groups.¹⁴ In essence, the new view is that there was no dramatic break, that conditions in the earlier period were not as idyllic as had been imagined and they were not so dire in later centuries.

In revising what was indeed a flawed view of Spain’s past, however, these authors may have gone too far in the other direction. They do not deny the significance of the Inquisition, the conquest of Granada, the expulsion of Jews and later Muslims from Iberia, or, in the New World, the harsh treatment of Native Americans. But they do contend that these innovations fail to reflect a broad social consensus about the place of non-Christians in Spanish society. Instead they cast them as imperfectly accepted policies whose impetus came from above. To some degree this is accurate. If there was a broad shift from a cultural paradigm of convivencia to one of a homogeneous Christian society, its progress was slow and uneven. Undoubtedly, many embraced the new emphasis on conformity and exclusion. It is equally certain, however, that others did not entirely or quickly reject their former neighbors, business partners, and friends. Ultimately, the crown cast out the Jews and later the Muslims, negating the potentially disruptive influence of religious minorities without the need to rely on the divided minds of its subjects.

During the period examined in this book, however, such sweeping and absolute solutions were not an option. The reigns of Juan II (1405–1454) and Enrique IV (1454–1474) were characterized by weak royal authority and unprecedented influence and power for the most prominent of the nobility. In frontier regions, local magnates such as Miguel Lucas in Jaén or Pedro Fajardo in Murcia acted with almost full autonomy, employing spectacles to build local consensus. Factional struggles among the nobility raised the stakes of these endeavors, leading to a golden age of sorts for public pageantry. After a decade-long period of civil war that led to Enrique’s deposition, the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel I and Fernando II, had to deal with lingering challenges to their authority even while embroiled in wars with Portugal and then Granada. This meant that they required broad public support for their policies, especially those policies that threatened to destroy traditional modes of life on the frontier. Their efforts at centralization drastically reduced the independence of individual nobles but could not establish complete royal control. Municipal councils retained a good bit of power but had to wield it under the eyes of representatives of the central government. They too used spectacles to enhance their positions. Politics, thus, were always local but never divorced from broader trends.

By viewing the transition from late medieval to early modern Castilian understandings of Christian society through the twin lenses of frontier and urban spectacle, this book shows how the conditions that prevailed in cities close to the Granadan border fostered a dissonant outlook toward religious minorities, which I describe as an “amiable enmity.” The resulting social anxieties left the populace vulnerable to attempts by elites to either deflect or exacerbate existing confessional tensions through public spectacle. Political transformation in the last decades of the fifteenth century—including the civil wars of Enrique’s reign, the final war with Granada, and Fernando and Isabel’s efforts to reestablish royal authority—brought frontier traditions and accommodations into dialogue with the rest of the realm and incited a broader reaction against religious minorities. But shifts in attitudes toward religious minorities were neither “top-down” nor “bottom-up.” Instead I show how they evolved through public spectacles whose content reflected the interplay of noble and common perspectives about Muslims, Jews, and converts.

The concept of “frontier,” so central to this book, deserves some explanation. For many modern Americans, the term conjures a variety of images. We speak of the frontiers of science and medicine, of new or unexpected frontiers in the farthest reaches of the globe, of space as the “final frontier.” The word itself implies action: frontiers are to be crossed, conquered, pushed back, and made civilized. To be on the frontier is to be forward thinking, a pioneer at the forefront of a great and progressive endeavor; by implication, the alternative is stagnation, decline, complacency. These frontiers of our popular imagination are not so much physical locations as they are processes by which the unknown is made known and wilderness tamed, an understanding that owes much to the work of Frederick Jackson Turner and his influential 1893 paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”¹⁵ Turner never offered a precise definition of “frontier,” which he claimed was an “elastic” term. Rather, as the “outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” it was a set of conditions that challenged settlers, forcing them to leave behind European norms and establish a distinctly American way of life.

For medieval Castilians, frontier, or frontera, meant something quite different. There was never an encounter between civilization and wilderness. Rather, frontiers were arenas for interaction, both peaceful and hostile, between different cultures. Contact between Christianity and Islam in Iberia dates to at least 711, when Muslim armies from North Africa crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and swiftly conquered much of the peninsula. A Christian enclave survived in the northwest, however, forming the nucleus of what would become the kingdom of Asturias. Although there was no grand strategy of “reconquest” at this time, Muslim power in that region was weak and the Christians expanded slowly and unevenly for the next several centuries as Asturias was succeeded by the kingdoms of Castile-León, Navarre, and Aragón across northern Iberia.¹⁶ Internal divisions and civil war, meanwhile, led to the breakup of the Caliphate of Córdoba and establishment of a number of small city-states or taifa kingdoms. Despite a number of setbacks, Christian rulers conquered nearly all these states between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

This process seemed to culminate in 1238, when Fernando III of Castile (the original owner of the famous sword) signed a treaty that made the Emirate of Granada, the last independent Muslim state, into a vassal. Fernando likely envisioned that the Christian reconquest of Iberia would soon be complete. In the preceding decades, after all, the Christians had won great victories and gained vast swaths of territory. The speedy dissolution of Granada was not to be, however. It instead remained independent for another 250 years and, as Map 1 shows, Christians coming to settle the newly conquered regions around Jaén, Córdoba, Murcia, and Seville found themselves in close proximity to Muslims, often trading together and sharing pastureland even while intermittent frontier warfare continued.

From the beginning, boundaries between the various Christian and Muslim states were porous; there were never effective barriers to contact. Even clearly delineated borderlines were vanishingly rare and it would be more accurate to speak of zones in which authorities held varying degrees of control. People dwelling near the Granadan frontier—on both sides—encountered challenges and opportunities that differed markedly from those in more central regions. They lived in constant fear of physical attack and developed protective strategies ranging from militia forces to extensive fortification to frontier “institutions” meant to curtail private violence and mitigate the effects of general hostilities.¹⁷ They were subject to influences from both their home culture and that of their neighbors. The dual dynamics of war and cultural exchange meant that the frontier was a place apart and was seen as such by contemporaries.

MAP 1. Fifteenth-century Iberia.

Although his arguments have been alternately adopted, adapted, and debunked in the century since they were first published, Turner’s central contention—that frontiers matter—has remained tenaciously relevant. Historians have devoted much effort to understanding both the nature and the significance of frontier communities, seeing them both as windows into myriad aspects of past societies and as engines of historical change. The Granadan frontier has been a particularly popular subject for inquiry. It has been seen, at one time or another, as a region of free land, an arena for the expansion of Latin Christendom, a militarized border zone, or a site for cultural contact and exchange.¹⁸

Early generations of historians hewed closely to Turner’s original argument, contending that the freedoms and risks of the Granadan frontier spurred the development of a particular set of Iberian cultural values quite different from those of the rest of western Europe, even romanticizing it as a “miniature wild west.”¹⁹ Later medievalists, while retaining an emphasis on frontier-driven cultural change, linked the transformation to cultural contact and exchange, noting the ways in which populations on either side of the frontier intermingled to the point where they bore more similarities with each other than their nominal home cultures. Acculturation, however, was not an all-or-nothing proposition that led either to cultural immersion or strictly controlled interactions. People living in contact with other societies were able to adapt, borrow, or reject particular aspects of those societies as they saw fit, leading to highly localized modes of cultural exchange.²⁰ More recent scholarship has focused on the frontier as a “borderland,” drawing on theoretical work such as that of Homi Bhabha, who defines borderlands as a “third space,” or realm of negotiation, translation, and remaking. The third space, for Bhabha, is not simply an amalgam of its two constituent cultural groups but is instead a true hybrid, a new society that has the potential for fresh understandings of each of its predecessors. From this perspective, frontiers were arenas for mostly friendly competition, with acculturation triumphing over conflict.²¹

But the Granadan frontier does not fit easily into any broad definition. It was a region that provided freedoms not readily available elsewhere, but which exacted a heavy price in terms of taxes and military service. It was the site of Christian settlement. But newcomers arrived in a land of long-standing patterns of habitation into which they had to fit, at least initially. It was a fortified boundary between two civilizations, but a boundary that was neither defined nor linear. Nor, despite its many fortifications, was it closed; the movement of people and ideas never ceased and even the religious identities that defined it were not fixed. It was indeed a cultural melting pot, but one over which religious intolerance proved ultimately dominant.

In this book, I understand the Granadan frontier as a borderland region in which multiple religious, linguistic, and cultural groups maintained close contacts.²² It was not, however, simply a composite society. It was defined by insecurities, which stemmed both from the constant threat of physical attack and an awareness that there was a significant gap between ideologies of Christian dominance and the reality of acculturation. These anxieties effectively prevented the creation of what Bhabha calls a third space. A long-standing pattern of semibelligerency in which leaders had been unwilling to take decisive action regarding Granada, for either peace or war, created an equilibrium in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews could interact daily with each other but without true cultural hybridity. Many Christians living on the medieval frontier were caught between a sincere ideology of holy war against Islam and Christian dominance but also held an equally sincere respect and understanding not only for individual Muslims but also for many aspects of Islamic culture. This esteem went far beyond what Américo Castro called the “chance symbiosis of beliefs” and resulted in a conflicted attitude that we may best describe as an “amiable enmity.”²³

How could people reconcile ideas as contradictory as holy war and peaceful cooperation? Peter Linehan has offered one solution, pointing out that an either/or understanding of the frontier supposes a social homogeneity that we would not expect in our own times. As he puts it, “In theory, the very idea of frontier convivencia is inconceivable. Crusade and co-existence comprise a confessional oxymoron if ever there was one. But in fact people aren’t like that.”²⁴ Linehan goes on to suggest that this contradiction is unworthy of further discussion, as it was no more than a predictable outcome of human nature. But how did people cope with these all-too-human inconsistencies? For if, as the evidence suggests, there is no reason to suspect that medieval Castilians were unaware of the incongruities that lay at the core of their understanding of the world, the resulting tensions and general mood of uncertainty they created hold the key to understanding the medieval Granadan frontier.

Many of the songs and poems in the Cantigas de Santa María, a thirteenth-century collection gathered by or at the direction of Alfonso X, directly engaged such issues. Cantiga 185, for instance, described the great friendship between the Christian alcaide, or garrison commander, of Chincoya, a fortress near Jaén, and his Muslim counterpart in Bélmez.²⁵ The Muslim capitalized on their association by enticing his friend to leave the castle’s safety. The ruse worked and he seized the hapless Christian, forcing him to reveal Chincoya’s weaknesses. With this information in hand, a Muslim army soon attacked the castle. Fearing for their lives, Chincoya’s defenders “took the statue of the Mother of the Savior which was in the chapel and put it … on the battlements, saying, ‘If you are the Mother of God, defend this castle and us, who are your servants, and protect your chapel so that the infidel Moors will not capture it and burn your statue.’ They left it there, saying: ‘ We shall see what you will do.’ ”²⁶

The Muslims at once retreated, and three attackers who had managed to enter Chincoya were tossed from the walls, leading the king of Granada to confess that “I would consider myself foolish to go against Mary, who defends Her own.”²⁷ This was no metaphorical protection; the illumination that accompanied this cantiga depicts Mary’s image as physically mounted atop the castle and fitting neatly into the scheme of the battlements, almost as it were a natural extension of the stone walls.

The political content of this story is quite explicit. The whole sorry situation could have easily been avoided if only the alcaide of Chincoya had realized that true peace and friendship with Muslims was not possible, that the enemy saw such overtures merely as flaws to be exploited. As the alcaide’s squires warned, “the Moors are treacherous.”²⁸ But Chincoya’s commander trusted his Muslim counterpart anyway. Here we see the ideology of conquest confronting the realities of the frontier: fraternizing with the enemy was an unavoidable aspect of life. Yet the episode did not end in tragedy and this too is central to the political message. The Virgin Mary’s defense of Chincoya left no doubt that this was a religious boundary, and that those on the other side were the enemies of God. Those tasked with defending the frontier must be always wary.

In reality, frontier Christians often found themselves in the alcaide’s shoes. They were told again and again that their religious duty was to view all Muslims and Jews with suspicion and to reject non-Christian religious practices. But these obligations were theoretical and could fade when confronted with living, breathing individuals, people whom they came to know and respect, even love. They found themselves unable to define clear boundaries between members of different religious groups and unable to take decisive action to alter the situation by abandoning either the goal of expelling infidels from Iberia or their regard for non-Christian acquaintances and culture. Nor did they want to be perceived as having “gone native” by their counterparts in more central areas. The interaction of competing social realities—physical insecurity, ideological dissonance, and a sense of being on the periphery—defined late medieval frontier society in Iberia. There was always, despite real tolerance for other groups, a curb on how far frontier Christians were willing to adapt.

FIGURE 2. Image of the Virgin defends the tower of Chincoya. Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María: Edición facsímil del Códice T.I.1 de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, fol. 247r. In this detail from the illustration for cantiga 185, Granadan soldiers are retreating while the defenders of Chincoya Castle pray in the direction of the statue of the Virgin Mary, which appears almost as if it has become a part of the fortification.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the uneasy balance between acculturation and fear had reached a point of crisis. The victories of legendary kings like Fernando III were deep in the past and there had been very few sustained campaigns against Granada for two centuries. Long periods of truce (between 1350 and 1460, for instance, there were eighty-five years of truce and only twenty-five of declared war) and various forms of peaceful contact meant, in the words of one scholar, that “at times it would almost seem as if the frontier had in some ways ceased to exist.” But for many frontier nobles, the ideal of expansion remained as strong as ever and they defined this ambition in religious terms. Despite centuries of close contact with Islam, they saw war against Muslims as a sacred duty. Truces with the enemy were ignoble devices that merely delayed the inevitable. Raised in a culture that cherished the mythology of holy war, these nobles sought to live up to the ideal of their ancestors and the great heroes of the past, especially Fernán González and the Cid.²⁹ To do so required that they insert themselves into the grand epic of Iberia’s recovery from the Muslims.

Such aspirations were particularly appealing in a Castile whose political landscape was a morass of faction fighting and competing ambitions in which there was no strong ruler able to unite all in a holy purpose. And so the constable of Castile, Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, wrote to Pope Sixtus IV (1471–1484)on 15 October 1471 with both despair and hope: “Most blessed Father, to whom except your Holiness can we Christians, your most faithful children, appeal? To whom shall we go when my lord the king cannot come because of his labors and duties and when his knights are even less willing, with some of them more hostile to us than to the very enemies of Christ? No longer will Charlemagne, who used to [fight the Muslims], come, nor Godfrey de Bouillon who dared to, nor our most holy kings who won this land, for they are held by death.”³⁰ The constable directed his appeal to the pope because, as he put it earlier in the letter, the fight against Islam was a holy exercise (santo exerçiçio), which required papal authority for success. Although Miguel Lucas and his followers were willing to offer “all our possessions, our wives, our children, our freedom, our homeland, and in the end, our lives,” only a pope could offer the plenary indulgences that might inspire other Christians to join their struggle or at least make a small contribution (un poco dinero)to the cause.³¹

Rodrigo Ponce de León, marquis of Cáediz, petitioned a yet higher power, the Virgin Mary. In 1462, as a young man burning to prove himself in battle with Muslims, he prayed before an image of the Virgin each day until “Our Lady the Virgin Mary appeared visibly before him, and said to him, ‘Oh good knight, my devout follower, know for certain that my beloved son Jesus Christ and I have received your prayers and, as they have been so constant and expressed such a pure and heartfelt desire, we promise that you will be victorious in any battles against the Moors in which you find yourself’.”³²

With talk of crusade indulgences and miraculous visitations, Miguel Lucas and Ponce de León evoked an imagined ethos of the past in which uncompromising faith had led to great victories. They brought to battle with Muslims a brutality born of righteousness. About a year before the constable’s letter to the pope, for instance, a troop of his soldiers patrolling near Jaén came upon a smaller group of almogávares (Muslim raiders). After a brief scuffle in which two of the Muslims were killed and two captured, the Christian band returned to Jaén with their captives and the severed heads of the slain. They sent a report of the encounter, along with the heads, to Miguel Lucas, who was in the nearby town of Andújar. “And when he saw [the heads] and heard the tidings, he was pleased and ordered that each of them be impaled on a raised lance, and so they were borne into Andújar. There all the children of the town dragged them through the streets, and then they left them for the dogs to eat.”³³

Ponce de León showed similar disdain for the enemy in 1487. After defeating a Muslim force near Málaga, killing 320 enemies, his deputies executed all the wounded, about eighty in number, “because Don Diego [Rodrigo’s brother] and Don Alonso [his cousin] had vowed that, should God grant them a victory, they would take no one alive.” All four hundred bodies were then decapitated and the heads borne on lances for a triumphal entry into the royal camp where all “greatly enjoyed the sight.”³⁴ Such mutilations were common, though rarely on so large a scale. Raiding parties would often return with severed heads or ears as grisly souvenirs of their successes. Indeed, the practice was even institutionalized at times. In the mid-1430s, for example, the concejo (or town council) of Murcia paid bounties of 100 mrs. each for the heads of Muslim raiders in the hope of inspiring vigilance against incursions.³⁵

Despite complicity in such atrocities, Miguel Lucas and Ponce de León were no simple bigots with one-dimensional understandings of Islam. Both had extensive and personal dealings with Muslims, could respect them as noble and brave opponents, and even admired their culture. The ability to work with Granadans, moreover, was essential to military success on the frontier. The almogávares accosted by the constable’s men accompanied a certain Juan, a “Moor who had converted to Christianity” (vn cristiano tornadizo morisco). This man, who had been residing in Miguel Lucas’s home, was traveling to Granada in order to collect information under the pretense that he wanted to return home and again live as a Muslim.³⁶ Ponce de León, meanwhile, owed his 1487 victory to information brought to him by a Muslim knight wishing to convert. Although initially suspicious, Ponce de León eventually concluded that the information must be reliable, as the Muslim who brought it was “such a strong knight” (cauallero tan esforçado).³⁷

While one might dismiss such stories as ruses de guerre that imply no sincere rapport with Muslims, the point is not that these were the only times that Miguel Lucas or Ponce de León interacted with Muslims but rather that such contact was so customary that it played a role even in instances of savagery. The same Murcian concejo that paid bounties for Muslim heads in 1435 also conducted business with local Muslims that ranged from providing space within the city for their worship to contracting them as skilled masons and artisans to enforcing debts owed by Christians to Muslims.

All this took place in an atmosphere of continual physical insecurity. The Granadan frontier remained a dangerous place in the late fifteenth century. Although we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that the heavy lifting of the conquest of Iberia had been accomplished two centuries earlier and that Granada’s final defeat lay only decades away, people are generally not conscious of living at the ends of eras. The many declared truces, moreover, gave little comfort to those who suffered at the hands of raiding parties who ignored them.

There was, in fact, no such thing as an effective truce.³⁸ To get a sense of how even periods of supposed peace were dominated by the fear of war, we might look at how the concejo of the frontier city of Jaén responded to news that Castile had signed a truce with Granada. This agreement, negotiated by Abū al-Hasan ‘Alī of Granada and Diego Fernández de Córdoba, Count of Cabra, was signed in March 1475 and meant to last for two years. At the time, however, the Catholic Monarchs faced serious opposition to their succession in Castile as well as war with Portugal. Hoping for an extended period of stability on their southern flank, they sought a new, more enduring pact. This was finalized on 11 January 1476 and added an additional four years to the terms of the original accord, or until March 1481.³⁹ The unusual duration of the truce seems to have raised expectations of stability, and the authorities in Jaén did their best to ensure that relations with Granada remained positive.

In that same month of January, for instance, the concejo agreed to pay restitution to the Muslims of nearby Cambil for an alleged theft of farm implements whose perpetrators could not be located.⁴⁰ A more serious threat to the peace emerged on 21 February when word reached Jaén that the town of Huelma, to the southeast, was besieged by local Muslims. The concejo reacted with a strongly worded letter to the ruler of Granada demanding both reparations and an end to hostilities. In response, the Granadans justified their actions by contending that Diego de Viedma, alcaide of Huelma, had instigated the fight, as he “had committed many crimes against the Moors of Guadix, having taken Muslims captive or ordered them taken as well as having stolen mules and mares during a time of peace.”⁴¹ An envoy was sent to Granada to sort things out and both sides agreed to withdraw their claims for restitution.

In May, rumors reached Jaén that Muley Hacén (as Abu al-Hasan was known in Castile) was approaching Cambil with a large force. In response, the concejo delayed a planned transfer of troops to the Portuguese front and discreetly placed watchers in the mountain passes “because we do not know what the Moors are up to.”⁴² Nothing happened for several months but on 8 August “came news that the king of Granada has mobilized and entered Christian lands to do evil and damage. Later the council ordered that the people of the city, both knights and infantry, be warned.”⁴³

Jaén itself appeared to be in no danger; the incursion was directed to the southwest, toward Priego de Córdoba and Alcalá la Real. Even so, the concejo continued to avoid provocations. They carefully facilitated trade, investigated crimes against Muslims, and punished offenders. Yet they also did everything possible to prepare for attack. They instituted regular watches on both the city walls and on towers guarding key roads and ordered that these fortifications be repaired. Most important, and most problematic, were Jaén’s militia and cavalry forces. The concejo was perturbed to find that many of those legally required to provide military service were unprepared to do so. On 15 July, the regidores, or council members, reported that “the caballeros de cuantía [non-noble urban knights] of this city are much diminished and are not the caballeros they used to be, and from this situation comes great harm to the city and disservice to the monarchs, our lords.”⁴⁴

Notably, these preparations were not instigated by the credible threat of invasion but had been ongoing since at least the start of the year, with the first orders (on 3 January) coinciding with the beginning of the available records.⁴⁵ Nor did the vigilance end with the Granadan incursion. In 1479, the concejo maintained ten permanent night watchmen on the city gates as well as an unspecified number of others at the various towers around the city at a cost of ninety mrs. each per month. In that same year, corregidor Francisco de Bobadilla personally inspected each of the cavalry mounts and arranged numerous troop reviews to insure that the militia was ready to fight.⁴⁶ Despite their determination to rigidly observe its terms, local authorities had scant confidence that the signing of a royal truce would bring real stability. Indeed, stability was not in everyone’s interests, as demonstrated by the case of Francisco Sánchez de Baeza. This man, a stonemason, was contracted in May 1476 to repair the parapets of Pegalajar, a key point in Jaén’s outer defenses that directly abutted the Muslim lands near Cambil. But he never did the work and defended his inaction by pointing out that he was unable to do it alone and his son Antonio, who was to have assisted him, had instead left to pursue the more profitable business of raiding the Muslims.⁴⁷

Such constant anxiety could be creative and dynamic. In stirringly romantic terms Juan de Mata Carriazo described how the risks and rewards of frontier skirmishing brought people to action and led to “a singular elevation of individual virtues, a natural selection of frontier populations, with its automatic elimination of the weak and its exaltation of the strong, the bold, and the undaunted.” The frontier provided opportunities for glory in abundance and here, in song and in deed, the Castilian knighthood found its pinnacle of fame while the lawless and rebellious, welcome nowhere else, sought atonement in “this unquiet and heroic world of the Granadan frontier.” To his credit, Carriazo saw the other side of the coin as well, noting that the frontier offered only peril and frustration for the peasantry on both sides. Raiding stripped the land of its bounty, killed its keepers, and stymied attempts to improve its productivity.⁴⁸

And for what? Perhaps the most vexing aspect of the fifteenth-century frontier was the continuity of organized violence despite a dearth of concrete accomplishments. Neither of the most obvious motives for warfare—financial gain or religious animosity—fit well with the pattern of conflict. The economic repercussions included lost trade, burnt crops, ransoms for captives, and the expense of maintaining standing armies, all of which far outweighed the lucre brought in by raiding parties. Those adversely affected included the wealthiest and most powerful members of society and so we should expect to see their voices raised against actions that undermined their interests. And indeed, it was Jaén’s elites who ensured that the city did its utmost to uphold the truces of 1475 and 1476. Yet the collective power of the elite nearly always failed to prevent disruptive raiding in times of truce.

Part of the problem was the mountainous and underpopulated Andalucían terrain, difficult to police even under ideal circumstances. But much of the marauding took place with the approval, or at least the benign indifference, of frontier authorities. If this reluctance to enforce a true peace stemmed from the idea that there should not be pacific relations with the enemies of God, why did the fighting remain localized and limited? Only on rare occasions was conquest or conversion the goal (let alone the achievement) of an attack. With the exception of Fernando de Antequera’s campaigns early in the century, attempts to reassert the crusading drive lacked sufficient support to accomplish much of anything. Holy war was no longer a unifying message and would not be so again until well into the reign of the Catholic Monarchs.

It was the interaction of competing realities—an ideology of holy war, a tradition of convivencia, and a lack of physical security—that defined the amiable enmity so prominent in what we might call the frontier mentality. The fundamental characteristic of this mind-set was not, as Carriazo would have it, a creative tension or a drive to heroism. Rather it was indecision that prevented the elite from pushing too vigorously for stability while also confounding the ambitions of those who sought a return to general warfare. Holy war was central to the self-image of many Castilians and especially the frontier nobility, offering purpose and rationalization as well as dreams of glory. But the realization of its objective, the expulsion of Muslims from Iberia, posed a very real danger to their raison d’être. And so the raids continued, judges, ransomers, and city councils kept a modicum of order, knights made their reputations in savage battle, and kings negotiated truce after truce. All the while, the farmers, herders, and merchants on both sides endured, working shared lands, trading when they could, smuggling when they could not, and engaging daily in a thousand little interactions with their “enemies.”

My purpose is, in part, to describe how fifteenth-century frontier Christians coped with the anxieties resulting from the gap between ideology and reality. Unrestrained violence against members of certain religious groups served as one form of release. The rejection of fixed religious identities was another. But these were both modes of extreme behavior, which, if left unchecked, bore the risk of even greater insecurity. More successful were the urban spectacles that offered a means of publicly addressing the contradictions inherent in intricate ideas of conflict and coexistence. That the dialectic between urban spectacle and attitudes toward members of different religious communities took place in frontier cities is therefore relevant. It is ironic, then, that this tradition of pageantry ultimately contributed to the rejection of frontier compromises and to the redefinition of Castilian society as exclusively Christian.

This book is divided into two parts. The first of these outlines the various contexts for late medieval Castilian frontier spectacles to clarify their presentation, reception, and functions. These performances often built on familiar and ritualized forms, such as those of a tournament or a religious procession, while overtly or subtly manipulating their content. Interpreting these events presents multiple difficulties. We only know of medieval spectacles through written representations that generally offer only the perspectives of the elites who sponsored the events. Even this is retrospective and highly mediated, reflecting not only the personal biases of the author but often also a conscious attempt to control the spectacle’s meaning.⁴⁹ In interpreting these pageants, I therefore focus extensively on their social, political, and physical contexts, arguing that ritualized performances bear multiple and situated meanings that only become clear when considered in this manner.⁵⁰ Chapter 1 therefore explores the relations between enacted performances and written descriptions in order both to permit multiple readings of a pageant and, when possible, to best identify the perceived intent behind a particular presentation.

Spectacles could succeed only through the complicity and participation of audiences. This was especially true of political theater, a point I demonstrate using the 1465 “Farce of Ávila as an example. Without the audience’s perspective, we can have only a warped understanding of what a particular event meant. Spectators, however, generally did not record their experiences or responses. I therefore examine the discourses current in Castilian society about the nature and character of public performances, highlighting the disparate perspectives of the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners. This allows us to move beyond the mediated presentation of the goals of elite sponsors and offers a range within which the responses of most spectators were likely limited.

In Chapter 2, I argue that civic spaces bore meanings to local residents that could contribute to or define the overall experience of a spectacle. Siting, decoration, size, and even the choice of materials for buildings were often consciously chosen to convey a message or establish a mood. The particular conditions of the Iberian frontier had long provided rulers with both the need for effective modes of expressing their readings of social, political, and religious issues and an abundance of themes with which to do so, making the region a crucible of “rhetorical architecture.”⁵¹ In exploring the various physical contexts for spectacle, I pay particular attention to ephemeral architecture, temporary structures tailor made for specific events. These could range from viewing stands and barricades to whimsical wooden castles and palaces. All served to repurpose quotidian spaces, transforming them in various ways. As with the spectacles themselves, however, civic spaces could have multiple meanings and could be understood in ways unanticipated by rulers.

Part II substantiates the framework established in the initial chapters by looking at specific performances from Jaén, Córdoba, and Murcia. Through these examples, I trace evolving understandings of Christian society and the place of Muslims and Jews within it from the 1460s to the 1490s, a period when well-established traditions of frontier life were challenged by a growing intolerance and a renewed push for holy war. Chapter 3 tells the story of Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, the frontier magnate who, hoping to reap material rewards and fame, rallied a reluctant populace to support his plans for intensified frontier warfare in the 1460s. Appreciating the importance of strong commercial and personal ties between Andalucía and Granada, he did so with vivid theatrics that pointed to the benefits of Christian victory while ensuring the people that such a triumph would not destroy those transfrontier relationships. This was, at best, an uncertain vision of convivencia, one that required Christian victory and Muslim submission, but it did acknowledge the cultural contributions of non-Christians. The enemy was to be converted and embraced, not expelled or eradicated.

But Muslims were not the only minority religious community in Andaluceía cities. Jews and recent converts were also alternately, or even simultaneously, viewed with welcome and suspicion. When a wave of anti-convert riots swept through Andalucía in 1473, the catalyst was a Marian procession in Córdoba interrupted by inadvertent insult to the Virgin by a young convert girl. In the ensuing riot, the Passion story was dramatically retold through the death of a blacksmith who called on all to avenge his death at the hands of the converts. Chapter 4 places these events in the context of noble factional politics, arguing that the procession and ensuing violence were a deliberate provocation meant to release previously suppressed popular resentment of converts’ social and economic success. By linking anticonvert sentiment to the Virgin Mary and the Passion story, the procession and the blacksmith’s stylized death released a wave of violence that far surpassed the expectations of both nobles and commoners.

War with Granada, which had previously consisted primarily of frontier skirmishing, began in earnest soon after Fernando and Isabel took the throne in 1474. This newly confident and aggressive pose toward the Muslims of Granada inspired fresh approaches to representing ideal relations between members of different religious groups. Muslims and Jews were no longer seen as economically relevant groups. Instead, they were remnants of the past and symbols of the defeated. They were unwelcome but yet not enemies. Irrelevant but still the focus of much attention. Chapter 5 examines how this diminished social role was dramatized in Murcia through triumphal renditions of the city’s Corpus Christi celebration organized to commemorate the conquests of Málaga and Granada. Forced to wear their finest clothes and participate in the Christians’ triumph, Murcian Jews and Muslims were relegated to the rear of the processions, a position often occupied by prisoners of war. There were no incitements to violence, no overt rejections. Instead the revelries expressed that non-Christians were no longer part of society. Instead, they were defeated enemies, reminders to all of Christian triumph. With the end of the frontier would come an end to frontier accommodations.

I close the book by briefly considering the long-term implications of the disintegration of traditional modes of frontier life, touching upon the expulsions of Jews and later Muslims from Iberia, the Inquisition, and the transference of particular attitudes toward religious others to the New World. I also place the events in fifteenth-century Castilian history in the context of the broader Mediterranean encounter between Christians and Muslims and of continuing uncertainties about the role of Muslims and Jews in Iberian history.