MARIBEL FIERRO Hostages and the Dangers of Cultural Contact: Two Cases from Umayyad Cordoba* Hostages are captives of a peculiar sort. Rather than having been captured during war, they are in the hands of the enemy as free persons who have temporarily lost their freedom, either because they were given and kept as a pledge (for example, for the fulfilment of a treaty) or in order to act as a substitute for someone who has been taken prisoner1. The prisoner, usually an important person, can regain his or her freedom under certain conditions, usually by the payment of a ransom. When those conditions are fulfilled, the hostage is released. In the medieval period, the taking of hostages was linked to conquest, the establishment of treaties, and the submission of rebels. The Spanish word for »hostage« (rehén, pl. rehenes) derives from the Arabic root r.h.n (which produces, in Classical Arabic, rāhin, pl. rahāʾin)2, and this origin attests to the fact that the practice of taking hostages was widespread in medieval Iberia and more generally in the Mediterranean3. The Muslims had not, however, invented it4. We lack specific studies dealing with hostages in Islamic lands and the procedures related to their taking and release, as well as their life as hostages, in spite of the fact that medieval historical and, more generally, literary sources are full of references to this widespread, persistent, and accepted practice which had advantages for both par- * This paper was undertaken as part of the project »Knowledge, heresy and political culture in the Islamic West (second/eighth–ninth/fifteenth centuries) = KOHEPOCU«, F03049 Advanced Research Grant, European Research Council (2009–2014). I wish to thank Daniel König for his suggestions and comments. 1 Johannes J. G. JANSEN, Hostages, in: Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, Brill Online, http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopaedia-of-the-quran (19/6/2011) (only accessible to subscribers). See also Peter WALLISER, Geisel, in: Lexikon des Mittelalters, 10 vols., Stuttgart 1977–1999, vol. 4, cols 1175–1176. 2 For the Andalusi rendering of the Arabic word, see Federico CORRIENTE, Diccionario de arabismos y voces afines en iberorromance, Madrid 2003, s.v. »reenes«; ID., Dictionary of Arabic and Allied Loanwords: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and Kindred Dialects, Leiden 2008, s.v. »reenes«. 3 On the general context, see Giulio CIPOLLONE (ed.), La liberazione dei captivi tra Cristianitá e Islam. Oltre la crociate e il gihad: tolleranza e servizio umanitario, Cittá del Vaticano 2000; Yvonne FRIEDMAN, Encounter Between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Leiden 2002; Sylvie CAUCANAS, Rémy CAZALS, Pascal PAYEN (eds.), Contacts entre peuples et cultures. Les prisonniers de guerre dans l’Histoire, Toulouse 2003; Giuseppe LIGATO, La croce in catene. Prigionieri e ostaggi cristiani nelle guerre di Saladino (1169– 1193), Spoleto 2005. 4 For the practice of hostage-taking in Ancient Rome, see M. James MOSCOVICH, Hostage Princes and Roman Imperialism in the Second Century BC, in: Échos du monde classique 27 (1983), p. 297–309; Stephan ELBERN, Geiseln in Rom, in: Athenaeum 68 (1990), p. 97–140; Joel ALLEN, Hostages and Hostage-taking in the Roman Empire, Cambridge 2006. 74 Maribel Fierro ties. Many hostages were members of the enemy’s elites, and holding them not only served to bring about the cessation of fighting, but also opened the way to the possibil- ity of their acculturation or religious conversion, and thus to the establishment of close ties were they to become rulers after their release. In al-Andalus, this can be illustrated by referring to the case of the son of the taifa king of Denia, Muǧāhid al-ʿĀmirī (ruled ca. 403–436/1012–1045). Muǧāhid had attempted to conquer Sardinia in 406/1015. When retreating from the island, however, his fleet was almost completely destroyed by a combination of bad weather and bad decision-making. His mother, his son, and other relatives were made captives by the Pisans. Muǧāhid tried to ransom them but only succeeded in some cases. His mother – who seems to have been a Christian and was probably of Italian or Sardinian provenance – refused to go back, while his son ʿAlī was kept as a hostage to guarantee that Muǧāhid would not attempt the conquest of Sardinia again5. Brought first to the court of the Holy Roman emperor (Henry II), ʿAlī was then moved to Pisa thanks to the intervention of a Pisan merchant, who seems to have had commercial interests with Denia6. ʿAlī was seven years old when he was taken captive, and seems to have been educated in the Christian religion, forgetting Arabic. More than ten years passed before he was finally ransomed and went back to Denia, where he returned to Islam and learned Arabic again. He eventually succeeded his father as ruler of Denia, with the name of »Iqbāl ad-dawla«. Some of the authors cited above have suggested that he could have been influenced in his policies by his experience as a hostage and his alleged conversion to Christianity, although it is diffi- cult to specify such influence, which was probably limited to the establishment of close ties with the merchant who had taken care of him. As part of a larger project focused on the practice of hostage-taking7, and as a sequel to the study of the treatment of prisoners in medieval Iberia8, this paper will highlight two cases related to hostages in Umayyad al-Andalus that took place in the second half of the third/ninth century and in the first half of the fourth/tenth century respectively. During their stay in their enemy’s territory, the hostages who are the protagonists of these two cases came into contact with the ways of life of their captors, thus raising the possibility of them becoming both the recipients and the agents of cultural transfer. In both cases, such cultural transfer was evaluated as dangerous, but from different per- spectives. In the first case, it was the captors who felt that there was a danger in teach- ing Arabic epic poetry to the hostages of rebellious non-Arab lords. In the second case, 5 María Jesús RUBIERA, La taifa de Denia, Alicante 1985, p. 70. 6 Travis BRUCE, The Politics of Violence and Trade: Denia and Pisa in the Eleventh Century, in: Journal of Medieval History 32/2 (2006), p. 127–142. 7 I am interested in how this system worked, whether there were specific occasions on which hostages were taken, who the hostages were, how they were treated, how their stay in the hands of their ›hosts‹ affected their lives, and, when they were able to regain freedom, how their ex- perience as hostages possibly affected the societies to which they returned. These issues are not exclusive to the Muslim world, as they can also be found in Ancient Rome (see note 4) and the British Empire. 8 See Maribel FIERRO, Francisco GARCÍA FITZ (eds.), El cuerpo derrotado: cómo trataban musulmanes y cristianos a los enemigos vencidos (Península Ibérica, ss. VIII–XIII), Madrid 2008. Hostages and the Dangers of Cultural Contact 75 it was the hostage who felt that a sexual proposal from the enemy ruler endangered both his religion and his culture. The dangers perceived by such real or potential agents of cultural transfer have much to tell us about prevailing representations of the self and the other, about the values that were attached to one’s identity in this period, and about the ways in which such values were portrayed and transmitted. TAMING THROUGH ACCULTURATION: THE RIGHTEOUS UMAYYAD CLIENT AND THE BANŪ QASĪ HOSTAGES In his »tārīḫ iftitāḥ al-Andalus« (History of the Conquest of the Iberian Peninsula), the Andalusi scholar Ibn al-Qūṭiyya (d. 367/977) included some anecdotes on the client (mawla) Umayya b. Šuhayd, who held important positions in the Umayyad administra- tion. One of the anecdotes reports that Umayya one day visited the quarters where hostages were confined (dār ar-rahā’in), which was near the Bridge Gate in Cordoba. The young hostages of the Banū Qasī were reciting aloud the heroic odes of ʿAntarah. Ibn Šuhayd said to one of the guards, ›Bring their teacher (muʾaddib) to me!‹ When he had seated himself on the carpet-of-office (firāš) of the civil governor of the city (ṣāḥib al-madīna), the teacher was brought in and Ibn Šuhayd remarked, ›If it was not for the fact that I am going to excuse you for your ignorance, I would punish you severely! You have gone to demons who have sorely grieved the emirs and taught them poetry, which will give them an insight into real courage (šuǧāʿa)! Stop doing it! Teach them only poems like the drinking songs of al-Ḥasan b. Hānī, and similar humor- ous verses (al-hazal)9‹. The protagonist of the anecdote, Umayya b. ʿĪsā b. Šuhayd (third/ninth century), was a descendant of Šuhayd b. ʿĪsā b. Šuhayd b. al-Waḍḍāḥ10, an Umayyad client and loyal servant, to the extent that the first Umayyad emir ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān I (ruled 138– 172/756–788) put him in charge of Cordoba when he left his capital to fight the Yeme- nis, who did not acknowledge his rule. According to some sources, this Šuhayd was an Arab of the Ašǧaʿ tribe; according to others he was a mawla of the Umayyad Muʿāwiya b. Marwān b. al-Ḥakam; other sources state that he was a Berber or Rūmī (most proba- bly Byzantine) prisoner of war and that his ancestor al-Waḍḍāḥ fought in the famous Battle of Marǧ Rāhiṭ in the year 64/684. Šuhayd had entered al-Andalus with ʿAbd ar- 9 Translation adapted from David JAMES, Early Islamic Spain.