Christians in Al-Andalus (8th-10th centuries) Ann Christys '-L . Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Leeds, School of History. March 1999 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. Christians in Al-Andalus, (8th-10th centuries) Ann Christys PhD, March, 1999. Abstract: The historiography of early Islamic Spain has become polarised between the Arabic narrative histories and the Latin sources. Although the Arabic sources have little directly to say about the situation of the conquered Christians, a willingness to engage with both Latin and Arabic texts opens up a wide range of material on such controversial topics as acculturation and conversion to Islam. This thesis examines a number of texts written by or attributed to Christians living in Al-Andalus before the fall of the caliphate, early in the eleventh century. It begins with two eighth-century Latin chronicles and their wholly Christian response to the conquest and the period of civil wars which followed it. The reliability of Eulogius' testimony to the Cordoban martyr movement of the 850s is considered in the light of Alvarus' Vita Eulogii and other evidence. Tenth-century Cordoba is briefly described as a backdrop to the later sources. The passions of two Cordoban martyrs of this period show that hagiography allowed for different accounts of dissident Christians. The status of bishop Recemund as the author of the Calendar of Cordoba and the epitome of 'convivencia' is re-evaluated. The translation into Arabic of Orosius' Seven Books of History Against the Pagans is set in the context of other Christian texts in Arabic. The final chapter considers the episodes in Ibn al-QuTiya's History of the Conquest of Al-Andalus dealing with the Christian population, and especially with the Visigothic family from whom he may have been descended. Whilst an attempt is made to draw this material together, the result is a series of Christian perspectives on the Islamic conquest, rather than a new narrative of cultural survival or assimilation. 1 Contents Preface 1 Abbreviations 11 Transliteration, placenames and dates 11 List of maps and illustrations 111 1. Introduction I 2. News from the East in the eighth-century chronicles 11 3. The martyrs of Eulogius 47 4. Cordoba in the tenth century 76 5. Two more martyrs of Cordoba 83 6. Recemund and the Calendar of Cordoba 118 7. The Arabic translation of Orosius 148 8. The descendants of Sara the Goth 177 9. Conclusion 204 Bibliography 208 11 Preface Writing this thesis has, of course, taken far longer than I could have imagined. In the last two years, when it has been 'nearly finished' it has been greatly improved and I have been reanimated by presenting sections of the work to different audiences. There are too many people to mention everyone individually, but I would like to thank in particular the medievalists of the School of History, University of Leeds, as well as Mayke de Jong, Rosamund McKitterick, Walter Pohl and their students of the Utrecht-Vienna-Leeds-Cambridge symposia, Jinty Nelson, Barbara Rosenwein and her colleague Zuhair Ghazzal, who rescued the last copy of the 'Urüsfüs from the publisher's basement in Beirut, the Historians of Medieval Iberia, particularly Roger Wright, and the organisers and participants in the 'Places of Power' conference of the European Science Foundation in Belaggio, September 1998. I have been greatly assisted by the staff of the Brotherton library, the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid the former Escuela Espanola de Arqueologia in Rome and its director Javier Arce, and by several patient language teachers, especially Shelley Abu-Shanab and Monica Palmis. John Wreglesworth read the whole manuscript with exemplary care, corrected innumerable mistakes and raised enough questions for another thesis. My debt to my supervisor Ian Wood goes back to the first few weeks of my time as an undergraduate in the School of History, where I was a refugee from the unwarranted certainty of medicine. Ian's approach to the great unknown of the early Middle Ages, based on imaginative reading of the way early medieval authors had recorded their world rather than on explanation of what actually happened, was a revelation. I am grateful to Ian for humouring my obsession with the history of Spain for almost a decade, and for providing me with so many opportunities to develop as a historian. He is not to blame if the end result is still so difficult to understand. Finally, although he should perhaps have come first, I would like to thank Roger Collins for writing Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity 400-1000, which I read during my first visit to Spain in 1983 and the rest, I hope, is history. 111 Abbreviations AASS: Acta Sanctorunt quotquot tot orbe coluntur, ed. Bollandus J. et al., (Antwerp and Brussels, 1634-). BL: London, British Library manuscript. BN n. a. lat.: Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, nouvelles acquisitions latines, manuscript. CCSL : Corpus Christianorumn, Series Latina, (Turnhout, 1952-). CSCO: Corpus Scriptorun Christianorum Orientalium, (Paris and Louvain, 1903 -). SS: Scriptores Syrii, ed. Brooks E., Guidi I., and Chabot J-B, (6 vols., Paris, 1903-7). CSM: Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, ed. Gil Fernandez J, (2 vols., Madrid, 1973). DHEE: Diccionario de Historia Ecclesiästica de Espana, ed. Aldea Vaquero Q., Marin Martinez T., Vives Gatell J., (4 vols, Madrid, 1972-5). El: Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. Gibb H. A. R. et al, (Leiden and London, 1960-). ES: Espana Sagrada, ed. Florez E. et al. (Madrid, 1747-). MBN: Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, manuscript. MGH: Monumenta Gerntaniae Historica. AA: Auctores Antiquissimi, (15 vols., Berlin, 1877-1919). PL: Patrologia Cursus Cotnpletus, Series Latina, ed. Migne J-P, (221 vols., Paris, 1841-64). Settintane: Settimanedi studio del centro italiano di studi medievo, (Spoleto, 1954-). Transliteration, placenames and dates Apart from Muhammad, Arabic names are transliterated according to the system adopted in the Cambridge History of Islam, except that the limitations of the word-processing programme mean that h appears as H, s as S, t as T and th as Th. Placenames are given in their Spanish version except for Cordoba, Seville and others well-known in English. All dates are given with the equivalent Common Era [AD] dating. iv List of maps and illustrations Christian and Muslim Spain c. 890 9 Eulogius' itinerary in Navarre 48 Cordoba in the tenth century 80 Northwest Spain in the tenth century 87 Columbia University MS X, 893, f. lr. 164 I 1. Introduction 'Although formerly Spain abounded plentifully in every liberal art and in each one those thirsting for the fountain of knowledge were devoting themselves everywhere to the study of letters, this study along with the arts vanished entirely when she was inundated by the forces of the barbarians. And so assailed by necessity both writers were wanting and the deeds of the Spanish perished in silence. " This quotation, from the twelfth-century Chronicle of Silos, is a piece of anti-Muslim polemic, but it cannot be denied that there is a great gap in the narrative evidence for the Christians under Islamic rule. Kennedy's recent history of Muslin Spain and Portugal devoted just three pages to the Christian population of al-Andalus in the period between the conquest of 711 and the collapse Umayyad in Yet hundred of the caliphate the early years of the eleventh century .2 one years ago, Simonet made the 'Mozarabs', as he called them, the subject of a large volume, of which a substantial part deals with the first three centuries after the conquest. ' Simonet wrote with the prolixity of the nineteenth century but he had plenty of material; although manuscripts are still reappearing, especially in North Africa, most of the evidence had already been discovered. Today, however, the question of what happened to the indigenous population of the Iberian peninsula after 711 is beset with methodological problems which have narrowed the field of 850s, Islam. research to two subjects - the Cordoban martyrs of the and conversion to Simonet, who was first and foremost 'a Catholic, above being an Arabist, a professor, or ' Historia Silense ed. Perez de Urbel J. and Gonzalez Ruiz-Zorilla A., (Madrid, 1959), 1, p. 8, trans. Russell J. C., 'Chroniclers of Medieval Spain', Hispanic Review, (1938), III, p. 226 from Espana Sagrada, XVII, p. 270. 2 Kennedy H., Muslim Spain and Portugal, (1996), pp. 48 and 67-68. ' Simonet F., Iistoria de los Mozärabes de Espana, (Madrid, 1897, repr. 1984). The use of the term 'Mozarab' [musta'rib/Arabicized] for Christians under Islamic rule is an anachronism in early Islamic Spain; it first appeared in eleventh-century texts and its use in discussions of early Islamic Spain prejudges one of the questions at issue: see e. g. Burman T. E., Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050-1200, (Leiden, 1994), and ibid., 'The Tathlith al-wadäniya' and the Twelfth-Century Andalusian Christian Approach to Islam' in Tolan J. (ed. ), Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam: A Book of Essays, (New York and London, 1996), pp. 109-130, at p. 110, citing Hitchcock R., 'Quienes fueron los verdaderos mozärabes' Nueva revista de flologia hispänica, (1981), XXXI, 574-585. In this study I will refer to native population as 'the Christians of al-Andalus', making the distinction between those who remained Christian and the converts to Islam only where their religious affiliations are known. The use of 'Islamic' for the conquest, political institutions, etc. does not imply that all those involved were Muslims. 2 anything elsei4 narrated, with considerable hyperbole, the story of embattled Christians under alien rule who kept the flame of Catholicism burning.