Medieval Spain Medieval Spain Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay Edited by Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman Editonal matter and selection © Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman 2002 Chapters 1–14 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0-333-79387-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-42000-1 ISBN 978-1-4039-1977-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403919779 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data Medieval Spain : culture, conflict, and coexistence/edited by Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Spain—Civilization—711–1516. I. Collins, Roger, 1949- II. Goodman, Anthony, 1936- DP99 .M34 2002 946’.02—dc21 2002022085 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Contents Introduction: Angus MacKay and the History of Later Medieval Spain vii Roger Collins A Bibliography of Angus MacKay’s contributions to the subject xvii Anthony Goodman Notes on the Contributors xxii 1 Continuity and Loss in Medieval Spanish Culture: the Evidence of MS Silos, Archivo Monástico 4 1 Roger Collins 2 Traitors to the Faith? Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, c. 1100–1300 23 Simon Barton 3 Jews and Moors in the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X the Learned: a Background Perspective 46 Robert I. Burns 4 Trading with the ‘Other’: Economic Exchanges between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Late Medieval Northern Castile 63 Teofilo F. Ruiz 5 Catalina of Lancaster, the Castilian Monarchy and Coexistence 79 Ana Echevarria 6 Alonso de Cartagena’s Libros de Seneca: Disentangling the Manuscript Tradition 123 N.G. Round 7 Laus Urbium: Praise of Two Andalusian Cities in the Mid-Fifteenth Century 148 Brian Tate 8 Peace and War on the Frontier of Granada. Jaén and the Truce of 1476 160 Manuel González Jiménez 9 Songbooks as Isabelline Propaganda: the Case of Oñate and Egerton 176 Dorothy Severin v vi Contents 10 Court Poets at Play: Zaragoza, 1498 183 Ian Macpherson 11 Conversion in Córdoba and Rome: Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana Andaluza 202 John Edwards 12 The Making of Isabel de Solis 225 José Enrique López de Coca 13 The Conquest of Granada in Nineteenth-Century English and American Historiography 242 Richard Hitchcock Introduction: Angus MacKay and the History of Later Medieval Spain Roger Collins Amongst the leading British hispanists of recent decades, Angus Mackay is exceptional, not so much because he was trained as a historian as in the fact that he has passed his entire scholarly career in university departments of History; principally that of the University of Edinburgh. For most readers this may hardly seem a paradox. Where else, it might be asked, would you expect to find a historian of Later Medieval Spain, especially one of such eminence? However, it has been one of the peculiarities of British universities that very few history departments have felt able to include hispanists in their ranks. In consequence, a surprisingly large number of the most outstanding British his- torians of Later Medieval Spain have made academic homes for themselves in departments of Spanish language and literature or of Hispanic Studies (that is, including Portuguese). Put another way, this has meant that many of the best known scholars of Later Medieval Spanish literature in the British Isles are by training historians, and are as happy to devote themselves to historical as to literary researches. This, it may be thought, has resulted in a very fruitful fusion of two disciplines that ought to be closely linked, but that in many other areas and periods of cultural study are all too often kept artificially sepa- rated. It could be argued that this has been one of the great strengths of British medieval hispanism over the past half century or more. This may seem a round-about way of starting an encomium, but the partic- ular circumstances described, which have affected the nature of the study of Later Medieval Spain in British universities, may help to explain something of the career, writings, and achievement of Angus MacKay. Thus, it should be added that the reasons why departments of history have not found much room for medieval hispanists are not the result of prejudice, so much as a reflection of the limited role that any Spanish dimension, with few excep- tions, has been allowed to play in most British school and university syllabus- es. This in turn reflects something of the dead hand of a tradition that, unthinkingly, regarded southern Britain (excluding Wales), northern France, the Rhineland, and Italy from Rome northwards as the only parts of medieval Europe in which significant events occurred in the medieval centuries, or which had worthwhile contributions to make to the development of European civilization. To this may be added another, more pragmatic factor, in the form of the lim- ited availability of works in English on the history of Spain in this period. vii viii Angus MacKay and Later Medieval Spain However, it is one of the achievements of Angus MacKay and his generation of hispanists that this second reason is no longer a valid one. There now exist more books and articles written in English on Later (and Earlier) Medieval Spain, as well as English translations of original Latin and Spanish texts, than there are comparable items to be found that relate to the history of France or Germany in the same period. One consequence of this is that there are now really no excuses for Spanish medieval (and modern) history not to take its appropriate place in the curriculum. The situation outlined here so briefly, if perhaps a little provocatively, might have been expected to have resulted in something of a chicken and egg quandary. If little or no Spanish medieval history was being taught in Britain, how would anyone become a Spanish medieval historian, and thus write the books that should make it possible for Spanish medieval history to become teachable? There must be strong reasons or particular circumstances that enabled potential historians of Spain to defy the logic of this argument, and emerge as fully fledged hispanists. So, it is not unreasonable to wonder how Angus came to be the kind of scholar that he is. In his particular case, it would at least be fair to suggest that his birth in Peru in 1939, where his father was then working for the British Council, may have given him an interest in, and certainly provided a close acquaintance with Hispanic language and culture, even if not of a medieval kind. In particular, the passing of several formative years in South America equipped him with a more than enviable command of the Spanish language, not just academically but also at the level of the street. To this would be added in the 1960s a thor- ough submersion in the Spanish of Spain, while he was there carrying out the research for his doctoral thesis. In subsequent years his unselfconscious blending of the argot of the Lima back streets of his youth with the high speech of Castilian polite discourse would provide ‘understandably a source of great entertainment to his peninsular Spanish friends.’ As will be clear, while his youthful experiences and linguistic opportunities may have given him a leaning towards matters Hispanic, an undergraduate course in history in a British university in the early 1960s would not have done much to strengthen or sustain it. Here, however, Edinburgh, where he arrived in 1960, was a more than fortunate choice of university, as the influ- ence of Denys Hay, who was for many years the holder of the chair of medieval history, proved decisive. It was with his active encouragement that in 1963 Angus went on to undertake a doctoral thesis under his supervision on Economy and Society in Castile in the Fifteenth Century. As a Renaissance scholar, Denys Hay’s own research interests were primarily directed towards Italy, and focused on cultural and intellectual history far more than economic. So his willingness to direct Angus’s attention towards the relatively little studied kingdom of Castile, and to support his research on its economic history, repre- sented academic philanthropy of no mean order; something its beneficiary warmly acknowledged. Angus MacKay and Later Medieval Spain ix That this thesis would involve extended periods of work in Spanish state and ecclesiastical archives was inevitable.