Spanning the Strait

Spanning the Strait Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean Edited by Yuen-Gen Liang, Abigail Krasner Balbale, Andrew Devereux and Camillo Gómez-Rivas Leiden • Boston 2013 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spanning the Strait : studies in unity in the western Mediterranean / edited by Yuen-Gen Liang, Abigail Krasner Balbale, Andrew Devereux, and Camillo Gomez-Rivas. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-25663-7 (paperback : acid-free paper) 1. Iberian Peninsula—Relations— Africa, North. 2. Africa, North—Relations—Iberian Peninsula. 3. Acculturation—Iberian Peninsula—History. 4. Acculturation—Africa, North—History. 5. Gibraltar, Strait of— History. 6. Iberian Peninsula—Civilization. 7. Africa, North—Civilization. 8. Iberian Peninsula—Book reviews. 9. Africa, North—Book reviews. 10. Gibraltar, Strait of— Book reviews. I. Liang, Yuen-Gen, 1974- II. Balbale, Abigail Krasner. III. Devereux, Andrew. IV. Gomez-Rivas, Camillo. DT197.5.I24S63 2013 303.48’246061—dc23 2013038650 ISBN: 978 90 04 25663 7 (hardback) ISBN: 978 90 04 25664 4 (e-book) © Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoﬀ Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Printed in The Netherlands CONTENTS Introduction Yuen-Gen Liang, Abigail Krasner Balbale, Andrew Devereux and Camilo Gómez-Rivas, Unity and Disunity across the Strait of Gibraltar ................................................................................................................ 1 Articles Adam Gaiser, Slaves and Silver across the Strait of Gibraltar: Politics and Trade between Umayyad Iberia and Khārijite North Africa ............... 41 Linda G. Jones,The Preaching of the Almohads: Loyalty and Resistance across the Strait of Gibraltar ........................................................... 71 Hussein Fancy, The Last Almohads: Universal Sovereignty between North Africa and the Crown of Aragon ............................................................. 102 S.J. Pearce, “The Types of Wisdom Are Two in Number”: Judah ibn Tibbon’s Quotation from the Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-Dīn ............................................. 137 David Coleman, Of Corsairs, Converts and Renegades: Forms and Functions of Coastal Raiding on Both Sides of the Far Western Mediterranean, 1490-1540 ..................................................................................... 167 Marya T. Green-Mercado, The Mahdī in Valencia: Messianism, Apocalypticism and Morisco Rebellions in Late Sixteenth-Century Spain ........................................................................................................................... 193 Book Reviews Clifford R. Backman, on Samantha Kelly, The ‘Cronaca di Partenope’: An Introduction to and Critical Edition of the First Vernacular History of Naples, c. 1350 ........................................................................................................ 221 Travis Bruce, on Ramzi Rouighi, The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate. Ifrīqiyā and Its Andalusis, 1200-1400 ................................................... 224 Patrick Harris, on Cyrille Aillet, Les Mozarabes: Christianisme, Islamisation et Arabisation en Péninsule Ibérique (IXe-XIIe Siècle) ............. 228 Capucine Nemo-Pekelman, on D. Freidenreich, Foreigners and their Food. Constructing otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law ............. 231 Brenda S. Gardenour Walter, on Patricia A. Baker, Han Nijdam and Karine van’t Land, eds., Medicine and Space: Body, Surroundings, and Borders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages ................................................. 238 vi contents Alexandra Cuffel, on Marc Michael Epstein, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination ......................................................... 243 Pamela A. Patton, on Katrin Kogman-Appel and Mati Meyer, eds., Between Judaism and Christianity: Art Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elisabeth) Revel-Neher ..................................................................... 248 Miguel Ángel Vázquez, on Ana Labarta, Carmen Barceló and Josefina Veglison, València àrab en prosa i vers ....................................... 252 Index ......................................................................................................................... 259 Unity and Disunity across the Strait of Gibraltar Yuen-Gen Lianga, Abigail Krasner Balbaleb, Andrew Devereuxc and Camilo Gómez-Rivasd,* a Department of History, Wheaton College, Norton, MA 02766, USA b Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, 38 West 86th Street, New York, NY 10024, USA c Department of History, Loyola Marymount University, University Hall, 1 LMU Drive, Suite 3500, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA d The American University in Cairo, The AUC, NYC Office, ARIC Department, 420 Fifth Avenue, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10018-2729, USA *Corresponding author, e-mail: [email protected] “Dans le Far-West méditerranéen, les côtes d’Espagne et d’Afrique se rapprochent au point que d’une rive on distingue les feux allumés sur l’autre rive. La Méditerranée occidentale n’est plus, ainsi qu’on la justement remarqué, qu’un bras de mer, une Manche, un ‘Channel’ facile à traverser et qui ne peut jouer le rôle d’obstacle.”—Fernand Braudel (1928)1 “Les historiens, à mon avis, ne nous ont donné le plus souvent en étudiant les rapports de l’Espagne et du Maghreb, qu’une vue partielle de la question.”—Ibid.2 The Spain–North Africa Project and the Western Mediterranean In 1928 a twenty-six year old secondary school teacher living in French colonial Algiers named Fernand Braudel published his first article.3 Though little remembered today, “Les espagnols et l’Afrique du Nord de 1492 à 1577,” a 108-page essay in Revue Africaine, anticipated by twenty-one years La 1 Fernand Braudel, “Les espagnols et l’Afrique du Nord de 1492 à 1577,” Revue Africaine 69 (1928), 193. 2 Braudel, “Les espagnols et l’Afrique du Nord,” 190. 3 This was Braudel’s first article on the Mediterranean. He had previously published on the French Revolution. 2 yuen-gen liang et al. Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, a work that established him as one of the preeminent historians of the twentieth century.4 It was in his 1928 article that Braudel first articulated a vision of an interconnected Mediterranean world by focusing on the aqueous bound- ary between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa and identifying it as a “frontière insuffisante.” Here in the westernmost corner of the Mediterra- nean, the Strait of Gibraltar and the adjoining Alborán Sea did not divide the two landmasses so much as bring them together. Braudel’s concept of geographic connectivity applies to the intertwined political, sociocultural, and economic ties between the northern and south- ern shores of the Strait in the premodern and modern periods. For hun- dreds of years in the Middle Ages, Muslim dynasties like the Umayyads, Almoravids and Almohads built empires that spanned Iberia and North Africa. Even when political power was fragmented in the eleventh century under the Mulūk al-Ṭawāʾif (Taifa States), relations across the Strait still flourished. As Christians consolidated hegemony in Iberia in the late Mid- dle Ages, first Portugal and then Spain crossed the Strait and established fortified settlements on the North African littoral. Portugal occupied towns on Morocco’s Atlantic coast until 1769. Likewise, Spain controlled enclaves on the Maghrib’s Mediterranean coast throughout the early modern period, conquered a new protectorate in northern Morocco that endured from 1908-1956, and possesses the cities of Ceuta and Melilla to this day. Although the political and religious dynamics had changed, many of the trans-Strait ties that had characterized the medieval period persisted. Braudel wrote his article in Algiers at the height of France’s occupation, one that still dom- inates historical memory and public consciousness in Algeria and France decades after French withdrawal. Still, the budding historian recognized the significance of Ibero-Maghribi connections that long preceded French- Algerian relations. These ties had only been partially studied in his time. Though many scholars, especially French and Spanish colleagues, have fol- lowed in Braudel’s footsteps, even fifty years after the Revue Africaine essay, Andrew Hess referred to it as the “Forgotten Frontier.”5 For this and many 4 For an equivalent work on the Portuguese empire in North Africa, see David Lopes, “Les portugais au Maroc,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne 14 (1939), 337-368. 5 Andrew Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978). unity and disunity across the strait of gibraltar 3 other reasons, the long history of connections between the Iberian Penin- sula and North Africa demands sustained attention

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