Violence against Muslims

We will spend less time on Christian violence against Muslims, which in the Latin West was by far the most rare. In some ways, perhaps strangely, anti- Jewish and anti-heretical violence seem to resemble each other more than each does anti-Muslim violence.

After the Muslim conquest of most of the Iberian peninsula in 711, a Muslim polity of one kind or another would exist on the peninsula until 1492. First was Al-Andalus, a western outpost of the Umayyad caliphate, which in the tenth century evolved into the flourishing, independent cali­phate of Cordoba. This eventually fragmented into several smaller, disjointed taifa kingdoms. Muslim Iberia was reunited through conquest, first by the Almoravids and then by the Almohads from Muslim North Africa. But this re­entrenchment could not ultimately stem the military expansion of Christians from the north of the peninsula, and by the end of the thirteenth century only the small Muslim kingdom of Granada in southern Iberia remained. This long arc was tracked with violence of different kinds, and reflected Christian Iberia's increasing links with its western European neighbours as conquest expanded. That expansion corresponded with the increasing coherence and sophistication of the most important Iberian kingdoms - Aragon and Leon- Castile - and engagement with Latin Christian politics, papacy ambitions, and ecclesiastical culture and mentality.

The discussion of the crusades in this volume can flesh out Iberian and Italian warfare between Muslims and Christians. Yet more pertinent as a comparison to anti-Jewish and anti-heretical violence is the treatment of Muslim minorities. In Christian anti-Muslim violence, there are many resem­blances with the above violence against Jews and heretics. In the Iberian kingdoms (where Muslims living under Christian rule were known as mudejares) and in Sicily, the Muslims' position resembled that of the Jews, with Muslims belonging to the king as servi and under his jurisdiction, a position of simultaneous protection and insecurity.^[953] While there were long periods of peace and examples of contact and friendship, multiple motives and moments of stress prompted Christian popular violence against Muslim minorities. In Norman Sicily, for example, the years around èáî saw several massacres of Muslims in Palermo and elsewhere, related to the murder of ‘amir of amirs' Maio of Bari in èáî, and to palace intrigue, noble conflicts with royal administrators, and anger at the loss of colonies in Africa.^[954] In Iberia from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, anti-Muslim violence and riots repeatedly struck newly Christian towns. Also, as was the case for Jews and heretics, the twelfth century saw a rise in polemics written by clerics - who may never have met a Muslim - as churchmen like Peter the Venerable and Guibert of Nogent condemned Islam with accusations of diabolism, sexuality and heresy; disseminated outrageous stories about Muhammad; and delved into the Qur'an in order to discredit it.

While we see many similarities in violence, there are important differences between Muslims on the one hand and Jews and heretics on the other. Unlike Jewish communities, Muslims were not stable, centuries-old subject settle­ments, but rather groups that beginning in the high Middle Ages had to accommodate new Christian rulers, new Christian neighbours, and new Christian legislation governing their religious, social and political lives. In addition, this redefinition of their status, and its management, occurred within a broader context of Muslim rule and power elsewhere. European Christians and Muslims alike were sensitive to the existence of Muslim polities in North Africa and in the East. This exacerbated Christian fears about Muslim minorities, influencing both secular and ecclesiastical discus­sions about violence against them. Muslims in Iberia and Italy were fre­quently suspect as a sabotaging fifth column, seeking external support from Muslim states to rebel against Christian rulers. (Muslims remaining in non­Muslim states - dar al-harb, the ‘house of war' - were liable to criticism from co-religionists living properly under Islamic law.) Years of rebellions by Sicily's Muslim minority, encouraged by Muslim amirs in North Africa, eventually led Frederick II to deport Sicily's Muslim community to the town of Lucera in 1223.^[956] In Iberia's expanded Christian kingdoms, which initially struggled to boost Christian settlement in formerly Muslim territory, a persistent fear was mudejar rebellion aided by North African Muslims. This violence indeed dotted Valencia and Leon-Castile. According to King Jaume I of Aragon and Valencia, ‘He should expel all the Moors of the Kingdom of Valencia, because they are all traitors...

Consequently, and strangely, it is fair to say that medieval Christians recognised Muslims' own power and violence, and not just in the fearful terms of a threat demanding divine justice or salutary Christian violent defence. Christian and Muslim confrontation in warfare fascinatingly pro­duced a kind of valorisation of Muslim ‘chivalry' that appeared in a long tradition of romance literature. On the ground, that recognition also appears in the practical acceptance of Muslims as agents of violence who could be usefully deployed, as in the five Muslims who, in 1285, rode to Christian Aragon on mules they had borrowed from Jews in Muslim Granada, and placed themselves in King Pere III's military service. No Christian ruler had Jewish or heretical Christian bodyguards, like the Muslim corps surrounding both Emperor Frederick II and king of Aragon Pere III (r. 1276-85).⁴⁰ Alongside familiar demonising rhetoric, and both popular and state persecu­tion, European Christians carved out (at least temporarily) a space for Muslims that juxtaposed both theological error and damnation, and practical utility.