Islam Under the Crusaders: Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth-Century Kingdom of Valencia

by Robert Ignatius Burns

Overview

The struggle between Islam and the Crusaders comprised a dialogue of cultures on a broad geographic scale and a wide expanse of time, a perennial seesaw of conquest in the West as in the East. Father Burns' pioneering work on Valencia has demonstrated that the inner reality of this sustained confrontation lies as much in the colonial interims as in the battles.

Originally published in 1974.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691618517
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1679
Pages:	538
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.30(d)

Read an Excerpt

Islam Under the Crusaders

Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth-Century Kingdom of Valencia

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By Robert Ignatius Burns S.J.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05207-6

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CHAPTER 1

The King's Other Kingdom

Capital of a princely realm, Valencia stood like a giant among the cities of Islamic Spain. Muslim poets risked blasphemy to apply to Balansiya the Koranic themes of Paradise. Christians as far away as England spoke of it with awe as "famed Valencia" and "Valencia the great." It rose abruptly from a flat green countryside laced with irrigation canals, framed by the Mediterranean and by a far circle of austere hills. The broad Guadalaviar — the Wadi 'l-abyad or White River — wound along the city's northern flank to the sea. Within its walls a teeming populace thrived on commerce with far-flung ports of the Islamic world. Valencia's name evoked memories of great men of letters, mystics, and voyagers. Ash-Shaqundi (d. 1231) praised its inhabitants as compassionate to strangers, constant in friendship, and valiant in repulsing "the closeness of the enemy" Christians. Ibn 'Idhari in 1224 admired its peculiarly light-filled air. All agreed that Valencians lived with grace in a land of high prosperity.

Serpents come, and paradises must end. On the eve of Valencia's tragedy, her poet Ibn Hariq (d. 1225) reflected contemporary unease in his wryly humorous verses:

"Valencia is the dwelling of all beauty."
This they say both in the East and in the West.
If someone protests that prices there are high,
And that the rain of battle falls upon it,
Say: "It is a paradise surrounded by
Two misfortunes: famine and war!"

The year Ibn Hariq died, Christian crusaders invaded his homeland, harbingers of its downfall a decade later. The capital itself surrendered on a fall day, the seventeenth of the month of Safar in the year 636 from the Hegira, or in the infidels' calendar Tuesday, the vigil of the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, September 28, 1238. By a few strokes of the pen, the peace of defeat descended upon Balansiya, a brooding atmosphere soon carried over into the letters and poems of its population in exile.

The Survivors

The red and gold bars of Aragon flew from the massive northeastern tower called 'Ali Bufat. The stone battlements, which al-'Udhri had admired as among the most formidable in Spain, now stood empty of soldiers. In the maze of streets below, the clangor of armed men had given way to the bustle of civilians preparing for exile. All the efforts of the past months had come to nothing — the flame and catapults, the bloody sallies, the secret embassy to north Africa, followed by the heartbreak of watching a Tunisian relief fleet repulsed, and finally the deathwatch as Christendom's army fastened its grip while famine decimated the populace. In the end Abu 'l-Hamlat, the ruler's nephew, had to ride out to the pavilion of Aragon's king — Jaqmo, "the tyrant born to rule Spain" — to bargain for the lives of Valencia's people. The terms, though minimal, spared the population a mass sack such as these armies had recently loosed upon Majorca's capital. Evacuation of the city had to be accomplished within five days, the exiles bearing away whatever their backs could hold; safe passage without search or harassment prevailed south to Cullera for a period of twenty days. A seven years' truce stabilized the Christian-Muslim battlefront along the line of the Júcar River.

For three days Valencia city churned with hasty preparations. Muslims sacrificed their nonportable treasures for whatever money the crusaders cared to offer, "rich quilts of samit and fine drapings and sumptuous coverlets and much fair cloths of silk and gold and caparisons." On the third day the city emptied itself in a great flux of humanity — men, women, and children of all ages and every status. King James estimated the throng at fifty thousand, a gross exaggeration which conveys his sense of wonder at so immense a mob. The Conqueror himself, "with knights and armed men about me," punctiliously escorted the fugitives out onto the open fields stretching south between the city and the suburb of Ruzafa. Brutal incidents marred the occasion's military correctness. The prospect of helpless Muslims carrying their wealth roused the greed of escorting soldiers; some set about robbing their charges, even spiriting away women and children for sale as slaves. Angry at this affront to his honor, the Conqueror incontinently executed the culprits. More enterprising crusaders bypassed the convoy, penetrating into the Islamic zone beyond the point of safeguard so as to fall upon the refugees in the mountain passes. The exodus rolled on, many Muslims purchasing passage by sea on Barcelona merchantmen but most making their way overland, a long line creeping like a wounded serpent toward the safety of Cullera.

The grief of Valencia's population found eloquent expression as they abandoned their green country, their homes, bazaars, farms, graveyards, mosques, and places holding memories. Their letters and poems, lamenting the homeland, convey a stunned sense of loss. "Is it a dream ?" asks a refugee. "No, never in a dream could such a reality be seen." One outcast mourns "this immense woe," as though a "sea of sadness swells its waters," while "Valencia becomes the residence of an infidel leader." The lost city had been "lovely, a garden." "Tears show in every eye and cries of sorrow rise on all sides," the victims write; friends are scattered and brothers dead, and "a deluge of affliction has burst on us." All that was gracious, all that was sound is lost.

Ibn al-Abbar, vizier to Valencia's exiled ruler, cried out in pain: "Where is Valencia and its homes, its warbling birds and the moan of its doves?" Forever gone is its fresh, green countryside, like time long passed. "Has Valencia committed some crime," he asked, "that such should be its fate?" The Valencian intellectual Abu 'l-Mutarrif b. 'Amira bewailed the choice of slavery or death. "What friends have gone away, what companions have left their fatherland," he declaimed. "Everywhere one hears only mourning and weeping"; in every eye one reads suffering. Evil has pierced to the heart of our country; the hawk has seized its prey; the lion has slain our brothers, whose loss makes us weep. "Valencia the beautiful, the elegant, the brilliant!" The infidels have silenced in it the call to prayer and have stifled the breath of Islam's faith. Valencia, "metropolis of the coast, capital of sea and land, admiration of the gifted, which shone with rays of beauty and of light" — Valencia is gone!

The anguish echoed abroad. In the south the poem of al-Qarta-janni (d. 1285) had the rivers of Moorish Spain running tears, Valencia's Guadalaviar matching the woe of Seville's Guadalquivir, while the Júcar below Valencia turned mad with grief. In ar-Rundi the elegiac note swelled to organ tones:

A curse smote her Muslims and the bane gnawed her,
Until vast regions and towns were despoiled of Islam.
Ask Valencia what became of Murcia,
And where is Játiva, or where is Jaén?

To some extent these were poetical conceits, an arabesque of conventional images, belonging to a fall-of-cities theme adopted by Hispano-Muslim poets since the conquest of Barbastro in the eleventh century. The tragedy of Valencia's fall supplied occasion for evoking platonic nostalgia, a thirst for the One beyond transitory creation. For the exiles, however, the tragedy was real.

While literary Muslims indited these laments, Christian notaries briskly listed the deserted properties, assigning them to crusaders or immigrants. Approximating as best they could the odd Arabic names, they rudely gave away the pleasure gardens of Avixelo, of Habenadin, and of Dolonseri; the small house of Aladip and the larger one of Alahant; and the complex of buildings owned by Alboegi. Barons and bishops fell heir to the proud establishments of Valencian aristocrats, while shoemakers and soldiers took over homes belonging to displaced persons of humbler station whose lowly names and sorrow are perpetuated down the centuries on these lists. In the countryside, especially, many properties continued to function as before, their Muslim tenants accommodating themselves to the Christian heirs. The Repartimiento or book of land division represents an inventory of such local treasures as a dovecote, an orchard, a park, a villa, and a garden around "a large palm tree." To run through the catalogue of transferred properties, with one faceless 'All or Muhammad succeeding another, becomes a poignant experience.

The fall of Valencia was merely the most dramatic episode in a long crusade against the Islamic kingdom of Valencia. The clearing of the city and partitioning of its surrounding territory create an impression of victory and Christian presence belied by the facts. The illusion is fortified by the continuing conquests in the south, by the imposition of Christian institutions ecclesiastical and civil throughout the conquered kingdom, and by the circumstance that the mass of documentation from this time forward virtually ignores the resident Muslims. So much was this true that it is possible to write a considerable history of Christian Valencia with no more than an infrequent glance at the Muslim remnant. From the start a handful of Christians assumed possession of the main cities, ports, and defenses, inaugurating a dynamic life in which Mudejars persisted largely as labor force and social problem. Bemused by the process, an earlier generation of scholars entertained the strange idea that the Muslims had been "expelled," or that only the rural or seignorial categories remained, or at best that Muslims stayed on as oppressed serfs, except for isolated communities whose strategic position had won them fairer terms. On the contrary, the majority of the conquered remained in the kingdom, their society and institutions wounded and withdrawn but still omnipresent. What is more, they remained as organized communities and as a respectable military force. This dissident majority formed a sea on whose sullen surface Christian immigrants at first had to cluster like infrequent atolls.

Valencia continued to look much like other Islamic lands; when the muezzin called over the countryside, it even sounded much the same. Islamic courts passed judgment; Moorish officials administered affairs as usual. Arabic names, uneasy on the Catalan tongue, defined the realm from top to bottom and obtruded at many turnings within the cities. External landmarks tended to persist — boundaries of political units, roads, baths, ovens, mills, vineyards, merchants' inns, markets, and even the kinds of houses. Many customs carried over. "Ancient Moors" were cited to court to settle precedents for Christians. "As was the custom in the former days of the Saracens" became a repetitious formula in the royal registers, for Christians as well as Moors. The crown prescribed irrigation procedure "as anciently was the custom in the time of the Saracens." The Burriana irrigation system functioned, according to its 1235 Christian charter, "just as it was in the time of the Saracens." The irrigation networks in the central part of the realm were assigned to the control of Valencia city a year after the conquest, "so that with them you can irrigate according as was anciently the custom." Despite the imposition of a Valencian money and a Christian calendar, the Islamic calendar served the domestic needs of the Muslim majority, and Arabic coins continued to be minted here by the Christian king.

Beneath the surface of the kingdom of Valencia lay a submerged kingdom much more populous — King James's other realm, his Muslim vassals and subjects. What were to be the relations between the two peoples? How would James manage his Islamic kingdom and how would he fit it into his realm? He could not simply treat Valencians like the negligible Muslim minorities back in Aragon and Catalonia; on the other hand, he did not dare regard his conquest as a remote tributary appendage. Valencia was a special kingdom, for which the king had special plans.

The Crudasers

James I of Aragon controlled a mixed set of realms. Aragon proper, whence his royal title derived, comprised a feudal upland region not unlike its neighbor Castile. Catalonia, a progressive mercantile coastland with modified feudal survivals, belonged to the urban world of Languedoc, Provence, and Italy. The two areas were unevenly yoked, differing in psychology, resources, social structure, institutions, and even languages. The Catalans, speaking a language related to Limousin, formed an integral part of the troubadour culture. Many parts of lower Languedoc were bound to the Catalan king by feudal links. But the Roussillon region, and Montpellier with its university, belonged more directly to King James's realms, as much as Catalonia or the Pyrenean counties. All these entities, with their multiple law codes, privileges, and parliaments, found their center of unity only as part of the "Crown" of Aragon. To the distress of those who inherited the more dominant or Catalan culture, historians speak loosely of all as Aragonese and of their realms as Aragon.

Though the king was the essential symbol and key of unity, he did not reign unchallenged. Like contemporary kings he liked to surround himself with Roman lawyers, affecting the imperial prerogatives and trappings of a true monarch. Neither the feudal barons, who saw him rather as a first-among-equals suzerain, nor the townsmen, who accepted him more as a partner and a guarantor of communal semiautonomy, acquiesced completely in the royal vision. The political regime of the crown of Aragon was a modus vivendi, a constant readjustment of relationships between the several self-views held by its component parts. This may explain why King James (1213-1276) was not merely a man of letters and the author of an excellent autobiography but preeminently, in the best sense of the word, a politician. He was also a passionate defender of the Christian religion, a notorious womanizer, and a formidable crusader. Attended by a retinue of lawyers and counselors, he wandered restlessly back and forth over his unwieldy realms, spending a third of the last forty years of his rule within the kingdom of Valencia.

Unlike his father, Peter the Catholic (1196-1213), who had lost his life fighting to retain control of Languedoc against the encroaching Albigensian crusade, James the Conqueror reserved his military strength for expansion into the Mediterranean world, first to the east to absorb the Balearics, then south to annex Valencia. The time spared from feudal or foreign wars and from other business he devoted to these conquests and their troublesome consolidation. In the enterprise of Valencia James associated his son and successor, the troubadour king Peter the Great (1276-1285). James was an Homeric figure, larger than life both in physique and in exploits; Peter gained more substantial fame as heir to the Hohenstaufen, by blunting French expansion during the War of the Sicilian Vespers and by absorbing Sicily. For both men, the same thrust toward Mediterranean empire appears in the creation of an extensive North African sphere of influence.

The peoples who together comprised the crown of Aragon in the thirteenth century stood among the most advanced in Europe, Pano-plied in commerce, finance, and the varied contrivances of urban prosperity. The forward-looking elements of their commonwealth were enclaved in towns which amounted to semiautonomous City-states, each governing itself and its dependent villages by an elected complex of legislative council, executive jurates, and judicial Justiciar. In this century the realms boasted one of the greatest universities of Europe at Montpellier, incomparably the greatest lawyer in Penyafort, a famous scholastic philosopher in Lull, and a mature vernacular literature. The towns of northern Italy sought the leadership of James against Emperor Frederick II; southern Italy found its champion in Peter. Even the Mongol khan, knowing Aragon's strength, courted alliance. The men of this federated realm were a courtly and successful people whose armies and navies moved across the central stage of world affairs in this and the following century.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Illustration, pg. xi
• Preface, pg. xiii
• Abbreviations, pg. xxxi
• I. The King's Other Kingdom, pg. 3
• II. Death of an Islamic Empire, pg. 26
• III. The Physical Setting, pg. 46
• IV. The Human Geography, pg. 64
• V. City and Country: Basic Classes, pg. 89
• VI. Surrender Terms: Universality and Pattern, pg. 117
• VII. Burriana, Valencia, and the Townsmen, pg. 139
• VIII. Incorporation: Motives and Mechanisms, pg. 155
• IX. Islam: An Established Religion, pg. 184
• X. The Law and Its Interpreters, pg. 220
• XI. Christians and the Islamic Judiciary, pg. 249
• XII. The Muslim in the Feudal Order, pg. 273
• XIII. The Military Aristocracy, pg. 300
• XIV. Patriot Mudejar Lords, pg. 323
• XV. Horizontal Power: The Rulers, pg. 353
• XVI. The City-State Polities, pg. 374
• XVII. The Islamic Establishment: Vertical Power, pg. 401
• Bibliography, pg. 421
• Index, pg. 457