Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton

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СКАЧАТЬ other scenarios suggest themselves. Teresa’s brother, Alfonso V, was but five years old when he succeeded to the throne of León in 999; as a result, power was initially entrusted to a regency council. During this period, the young king faced a number of challenges to his authority, including a series of aristocratic revolts, a wave of attacks on the Galician coastline by Viking marauders, and two major offensives by the forces of ‘Abd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar, in 1002 and 1005 respectively, as a result of which the Christians were forced to seek peace.⁹⁷ Is it not conceivable that it was after the second of these campaigns, by which time Princess Teresa could still have been no more than thirteen years old, that she was betrothed to al-Muẓaffar, only returning to León after his untimely death late in 1008?

      An alternative—and equally intriguing—possibility is that the bridegroom in question was al-Muẓaffar’s brother and successor as ḥājib, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, nicknamed Shanjūl (Sanchuelo). Ibn Idhārī al-Marrākushī relates that shortly after assuming power on his brother’s death on 20 October 1008 ‘Abd al-Raḥmān dispatched a letter to an unnamed “infidel king”’—in all likelihood Alfonso V of León, in the light of subsequent events—“in the same way that his brother had written to him previously.”⁹⁸ This letter is likely to have sought to renew the “pact of submission” with the Leonese that had been agreed at the start of al-Muẓaffar’s term in office as ḥājib six years earlier, and it was probably accompanied by a demand for contingents of Christian troops to supplement the caliphal army, in the same way as Leonese and Castilian forces had been required to assist al-Muẓaffar on his raiding expedition to Catalonia in 1003.⁹⁹ In January 1009, despite rumblings of discontent among some of the Umayyad aristocracy, who were affronted by both his recent nomination as successor to the caliphate and his increasing reliance on the Berber military, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān proclaimed a jihād and led an army of Berber mercenaries and a few volunteers from Córdoba to Toledo, from where he planned to invade the Leonese kingdom. Accompanying the expeditionary force was a group of Christians led by the Leonese Count Sancho Gómez, as well as a reported 70 members of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s extensive harem.¹⁰⁰

      However, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s plans soon unraveled. Shortly after he reached Toledo he was forced to abort the expedition when bad news reached him from Córdoba: the city had been taken over by a group of Umayyad conspirators on 15 February 1009; the caliph Hishām II (976–1013) had been deposed and replaced by the leader of the rebels, Muḥammad b. ‘Abd al-Jabbār al-Mahdī; and the palace at Madinat al-Zāhira, which had been built by al-Manṣūr, had been sacked. Given these multiple setbacks, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān opted to return south, but support for his cause soon began to crumble, and he was deserted by his Berber mercenaries. Leaving the women of his harem at his palace at Armilāṭ (Guadalmellato), to the north of Córdoba, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān fled with Count Sancho and a force of only 50 horsemen, with the intention of escaping north. However, he was tracked down by supporters of the new caliph Muḥammad and killed, along with the count, at a nearby Christian monastery on 5 March 1009. The women of his harem were sent back to Córdoba.¹⁰¹

      It seems clear enough that, like his father and brother before him, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān had sought an early military success against the Christians as a means to win personal prestige and thereby shore up his political authority at home. Whether he further attempted to emphasize his dominance over the Christians by engineering a marriage alliance with a Leonese princess, in this case Teresa Vermúdez, in the same way his father al-Manṣūr had done when he had sought the hand in marriage of Sancho Garcés II’s daughter—‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s mother—is unknown but by no means implausible. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s own status as heir to the caliphate and his Christian background on his mother’s side might also have helped to seal a peace deal. According to Ibn ‘Idhārī al-Marrākushī, one of the arguments that had been employed by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān when he persuaded Hishām II to appoint him his heir was to remind him that they were both born to Navarrese mothers.¹⁰² This might explain why it was later claimed by Christian writers, such as Lucas of Tuy (d. 1249), that the Muslim king had “pretended to be a Christian” and had sworn to provide military support to Alfonso V.¹⁰³ Conversely, one of the accusations flung at ‘Abd al-Raḥmān by his enemies within al-Andalus was that he was not a proper Muslim at all.¹⁰⁴ It is also noteworthy that Toledo was ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s main base of operations during the campaign against the Christians in 1009 and that after the Umayyad palace coup, faced by large-scale opposition to his authority, he apparently intended to make the city his power base from which to launch a counterattack against the rebels in Córdoba. The importance that he attached to the city can be seen from the fact that, once he had been forced to suspend the campaign and return south toward Córdoba, he sent a letter to the citizens of Toledo urging them to show loyalty to the caliph Hishām II. Subsequently, Count Sancho is said to have advised ‘Abd al-Raḥmān to escape north and ally himself with Wāḍiḥ, the governor of the Middle March, whose chief city was Toledo.¹⁰⁵ All this might explain the otherwise opaque comment by Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez (d. 1247) in his De rebus Hispanie that the “king of Toledo” sought a political alliance with León against Córdoba.¹⁰⁶

      We cannot prove categorically that ‘Abd al-Raḥmān “Sanchuelo” was indeed the “pagan king” to whom Teresa Vermúdez was betrothed. Other plausible candidates present themselves, such as the Umayyad pretender Muḥammad b. ‘Abd al-Jabbār al-Mahdī, who, when ousted from Córdoba by Sulaymān b. al-Ḥakam b. Sulaymān in 1010, briefly took refuge in Toledo, or even one of the various notables who sought to establish themselves as independent dynasts in Toledo in the years immediately after the fall of the caliphate.¹⁰⁷ What is entirely conceivable, however, is that at some point during the first decade of the eleventh century—at a time when the entire edifice of the Umayyad state was beginning to totter and when the Leonese monarchy’s own grip on power was uncertain—Alfonso V, or the nobles who wielded power on his behalf, might have sought to broker a marriage alliance with a Muslim potentate, just as other hard-pressed Christian kings had done in the past. Equally, one can quite imagine why a leading Muslim with designs on the caliphal throne, like ‘Abd al-Raḥmān “Sanchuelo,” keen to reinforce his own power and prestige, might have embraced such an alliance. Even if Bishop Pelayo’s account clearly contains some fantastical elements, it is unlikely to be a complete fiction.

      Be that as it may, one is bound to question why the Christian royal dynasties chose to enter into such interfaith marriage alliances, when the Church had traditionally preached against sexual mixing of this kind. We have seen that at the ecclesiastical council of Córdoba in 839 the assembled clerics had been at pains to denounce interfaith marriage, but if similar edicts were issued at church councils held in the Christian-dominated territories to the north of the Peninsula no record of them has survived.¹⁰⁸ It is entirely possible that the Muslim conquest had so utterly disrupted the apparatus of church government in the North that pastoral guidance for the laity, of the kind that had earlier been provided at regular church councils under the Visigoths, was in notably short supply. It was equally the case that prior to the eleventh century papal contacts with the bishops and churches of the Peninsula, as in most of the Latin West at this time, remained limited in the extreme. There is little evidence that any of the popes took an interest in the spiritual welfare of their Iberian flock, let alone that they voiced any concerns about the practice of interfaith marriage.¹⁰⁹ As Bishop Arnulf of Orléans pithily declared at the synod of Rheims in 991, “Spain knows nothing of papal decisions.”¹¹⁰

      Probably even more important than this, the decidedly weak political and military position in which the Christian monarchs found themselves for much of the tenth century, during which time the North was subjected to a series of devastating raids by Umayyad armies, probably meant that at times they had little room for maneuver when Muslim rulers demanded Christian brides as the price of peace.¹¹¹ In the circumstances, interfaith marriage alliances may have represented an indispensable means to achieve both peace and dynastic survival. Besides, Christian monarchs were not slow to recognize that kinship ties with the Umayyad dynasty СКАЧАТЬ