Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines - Simon Barton The Middle Ages Series

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

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

      Chapter 2

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      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

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