Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton

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СКАЧАТЬ for the ḥājib to project his own power among the populace. Significantly, the Bāb al-Sudda was the location chosen by al-Manṣūr for the mass execution of some fifty Navarrese notables by way of retaliation for an earlier Christian attack on Calatayud; indeed, we are told that the ḥājib’s son, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, by then no more than fourteen, personally killed one of the nobles to whom he was related through his mother.¹⁷¹ By the end of the tenth century, it is apparent that jihād against the infidel and the large-scale enslavement of Christians that accompanied it had become significant instruments of political authority, a means to achieve social cohesion, and doubtless a significant stimulus to the local economy.¹⁷² At the same time, the expectation was that Muslim leaders would offer protection to the women of their own community: those who failed to do so were heavily criticized. When the Muslim general Wāḍiḥ refused to rescue a Muslim girl who had been taken by a Christian soldier who had entered Córdoba in support of the would-be caliph al-Mahdi in 1010, and the girl’s father was subsequently killed by the Christian despite paying a ransom, it was regarded as a particularly shameful act.¹⁷³

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

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

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

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

      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 СКАЧАТЬ