Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton

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СКАЧАТЬ set out in exhaustive detail the legal procedure that was to be followed in these towns and the system of municipal government that was to operate. Furthermore, they addressed numerous other aspects of urban life, such as the organization of the local militias whose responsibility it was to defend these communities against attack or to undertake offensive operations, regulations regarding economic activity, labor rights, the role and status of women, and so on.¹⁴

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

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

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

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

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

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

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