What was life like for Christians and Jews in Moslem-controlled Spain during the Middle Ages? Before the reconquest by Catholic Spaniards, were they treated fairly or poorly? I figure it was probably somewhere in between, but please enlighten me with specifics! Any info would be appreciated!
A quick and very generalized answer. Spain wasn’t Islamic controlled as we understand it. And they were never kicked out of Spain either.
Short version: The Islamic rulers sat around in Alhambra and ruled through feudalism. The natives payed lip service to Islam and went by their everyday grinding life of serfdom. There was no “special treatment” other than being a serf is no fun life.
When Los Reyes Catolicos kicked out “the Boy King” (he was 36 at the time) Boabdil, it just meant that the court moved out of Alhambra and across the Sierra Nevade to Las Alpujarras some 30 kms away.
The serfs then went on serfing and started being Catholics.
Jews and Christians in Muslim Spain were treated pretty well – far better than Muslims and Jews were treated under the Catholic kings that followed.
Under the Umayyad caliphate (700 AD to about 1000 AD), Jews and Christians were considered dhimmi (protected people; “people of the book”) because they worshipped the same god as the Islamic rulers. There were some restrictions (no proselytizing, no building of new churches and synagogues), but they were allowed to practice their own faiths. The Jews were generally more willing than the Christians to cooperate with the Muslim leaders, and there were some very high-ranking Jewish officials in the Islamic government.
There’s a good book on Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations in Spain called The Ornament of the World, which I highly recommend if you’re interested in the subject.
Heck, better than many Christians were treated by their Catholic Majesties. But then again that’s damning by faint praise.
One thing that has to be borne in mind is that there was no uniform “Islamic Spain” during its 781-year history – the facts-on-the-ground varied with whether you lived in the period of the Ummayads, the Taifas, the Almoravids, the Almohades etc. until the Granadan emirate. Some were more centralist, some more feudal, some more pious (the Almoravids were quite fundamentalist for their time), some more secularist. But most of the time nobody was forcing the minorities with a choice of (a) torture or (b) exile after confiscation of all their goods or (c) conversion, under the threat of being back to (a) if someone did not think you acted converted enough . As mentioned, non-Muslims had some limitations on their action, plus, they were subject to a special extra tax, that sometimes could be quite heavy.
And do note that the dhimmi also required a tax, that is a payment that was required to be made by the Christians and Jews to their Moslem overlords. They were treated relatively well (read: allowed to continue to live) just so long as they payed their “tax” and did not make an effort to oppose Moslem rule. Please do not think of it as some enlightned age where differing religions lived together in harmony. It was a form of servitude that was merely modified by convienience.
It was quite harsh and often enforced by force. It was not by any means a reasonable situation to live under and one merely adapted (like the Jews most likely did given their small numbers) because one’s survival depended upon it. The dhimmi was often quite harsher for true minorities in Persia and the Arabian penninsula.
Just to expand on the above a bit…
The evidence from the early conquest period ( ~711-749 ), such as it is, seems to suggest that the Arab-Berber conquest followed a similar pattern to that in former Byzantine territories. By and large communities that resisted were subject to pillage and enslavement, but the bulk came to arrangements ( probably typified by the Treaty of Theodomir in 713, in which a local Visigothic lord negotiated the capitulation of seven towns in the southeast ) in which the local inhabitants maintained a measure of internal autonomy and freedom of worship in exchange for regular taxation and an agreement not to give shelter or aid to, nor conceal, rebels. There is no particular evidence that the taxation was initially much different than it was under the Visigoths ( though there is precious little evidence of rates of Visigothic taxation, either, so its a bit of a wash ). However the early Muslim invaders ( not numerous ) were completely exempt from taxation except zakat ( alms - basically a Muslim poll tax, often set at ~2.5% ). Insomuch as non-Muslims ( and recently converted non-Arab Muslims for a time ) really bore the burden of the state tax revenue, conversion was not particularly encouraged, in fact occasionally actively discouraged as it was economically disadvantageous for the parasitic Muslim ruling class. Indeed at times we see periods where governors would re-distribute seized Christian assets back to their original owners in Spain - perhaps in part due to legal propriety, but simple economics may have been at work as well.
As more of the populace throughout the Caliphate began to slowly convert and the initial flood of conquest booty dried up, the tax issue became a more pressing concern for the state. At some point ( traditionally under Umar II, 717-20, but there are some problems with this assumption - interestingly enough Umar II, a somewhat saintlike figure in Islamic hagiography who encouraged conversion by peaceful suasion and was opposed to aggressive expansionism, appears to at one point have considered pulling back and abandoning Spain ) Muslims became liable for the land tax ( kharaj ) as well as zakat and as land revenue would normally make up the bulk of the tax receipts for medieval states, the switch from paying jizya ( non-Muslim poll tax ) + kharaj to the only a little lower zakat + kharaj no longer resulted in a severe blow to the treasury ( Umar II also instituted such innovations as custom taxes, 'ushr, with differing rates for Muslims and non-Muslims ). But this process probably wasn’t well-established until after the Abbasid coup ( 749 ). We know that the Umayyad Caliph Hisham ( 724-743 ) was notorious for trying to grind taxes out of his non-Muslim subjects and it is during his reign that one Spanish governor is accused in one account of doubling the taxes of the Christians - however this was reversed a few years later by his successor ( but taxation would continue to fluctuate a great deal with location and time ).
In general this somewhat benign ( if discriminatory ) pattern continued through the later Spanish Umayyad phase ( technically 756-1031, though effectively 1008 ) and the taifa period ( 1008 - 1086 ). Conversion continued at a steady pace ( though the Bulliet Curve’s predictions of 75% conversion by the 11th century is probably inaccurate ) and the shrinking dhimmi community continued to be subject to a fair degree of toleration ( by contemporary standards ). In terms of internal matters Christians were subject to the old Visigothic Forum Iudicum, rather than Islamic law, with its own parallel system of judges ( almost always Christian clerics ). Similarily with the Jewish communities. There seemed to have been no uniformity to living conditions, as sometimes Muslim and Christian populations intermingled, sometimes they lived in distinctly different communities/city quarters - in general the rural Christian communities tended to live more apart from Muslim neighbors than their urban counterparts. Jewish communities, overwhelmingly urban, mixed more freely.
It is possible you might ( emphasis on might ) be able to make a generalization that the average Muslim subject was a bit more suspicious of Jews than Christians, whereas the average Muslim ruler was the opposite. Jews get a slightly harsher treatment ( at least on the surface ) in the Qur’an, owing to the period of resistance of Jewish tribes to Muhammed and as Jews were looked upon with even greater suspicion by Christians, they were an easy scapegoat for occasional societal tension. But for Muslim rulers, Jews didn’t represent the potential Third Column that Christians did and as a populace that had generally more to gain under Muslim rule than the contemporary Christian opposite, were perhaps considered slightly more trustworthy. Consequently and in concert with an open and thriving Jewish intellectual community in Spain ( which experienced something of a ‘Golden Age’ of Judeo-Islamic scholarship into at least the 12th century ), a number of Jews were able to gain significant status in Muslim Spain. Most prominently Samuel ibn Nagrila, who from 1038-1056 the senior minister of the taifa state of Granada. His son Joseph succeeded him 1056-1066, but was then assassinated in an anti-Semitic backlash, it being considered rather heretical for a non-Muslim to be ruling Muslims in an ostensibly Muslim state. In the ensuing mob violence up to a few thousand Jews were murdered by mobs in a St. Bartholmew’s Day-like massacre ( however this particularly violent episode appears to be an exception to the rule in this period ).
With the arrival of the Almoravids ( al-Murabitun - in Spain 1085-1170’s ) and just as bad or worse, the Almohades ( al-Muwahiddun - in Spain 1145-1230’s/40’s ), this pattern changed. Both groups started as puritannical religious orders in the general environs of Morocco ( extending into modern Mauritania in the case of the desert-origined Almoravids ), regarded the liberal taifa states as “soft” at best, heretical at worst and far more harshly extorted, persecuted, even at times attempted to force-convert the dhimmi communities in Spain. Tolerance ( including towards more liberal Muslim philosophy ) pretty went out the window.
After the Almohad collapse in then the 1230’s and the extension of the Chrisiian Reconquista deep into al-Andalus, only the Nasrid kingdom of Granda survived in the extreme south ( ~1237-1492 ). This very long-lived ( if ever precarious ) state seemed to have had few if any Christian subjects. Non-Muslim minorities were pretty much limited to small urban Jewish communities in Malaga, Lucena, and Granada itself. My information here is a bit more limited, though it did seem to serve as one of the refuges for Jews fleeing the bloody purge of 1391 in the Christian kingdoms to the north. Of course immediately after its conquest in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella famously expelled ( or offered conversion or death ) the Jews.
- Tamerlane
Can you elaborate on this statement, Tamerlane? I haven’t seen a refutation of it, but then, I’m woefully behind on this subject.
Well, I’m basing this on the argument in L.P. Harvey’s Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 ( 1990, University of Chicago Press ). He makes the point that the best ( if very rough ) estimates of the Muslim population in all of Iberia circa 1300 is ~1,000,000 ( this is better established than the figures for earlier periods, though obviously still uncertain ). But if you accept Glick’s projection of Bulliet’s Middle East conversion curve to Spain, you arrive at a figure of ~5,600,000 Muslims 200 years earlier. Bulliet’s curve was based on much better data in the Middle East as opposed to what Glick had to work with in Spain and Harvey makes what I think is a very valid point that:
If Glick is right, the Muslim population must have dropped from 5,600,000 to 1,000,000 in two centuries. Such rapid change seems highly unlikely, even though there may have been a rapid decline as a result of fighting and emigration to North Africa. It seems to me that Glick’s figure of 5,600,000 is too high, and that Bulliet’s curve is not replicated exactly in the history of the penninsula. This does not mean I do not agree with Glick’s general view of an Islamic Spain that was demographically buoyant during the early Middle Ages, and which benefited from the self-confidence that flowed from that buoyancy.
So less a refutation, than a qualification that the figures might be at least a little off. Still it defnitely true that Islam went into steep demographic decline after the Almohads - it’s just a question of how steep.
- Tamerlane
Thanks for your feedback. I opened this thread because I had studied (albeit briefly) under Thomas Glick at Boston University, but anything I could have added to the discussion had already been posted.
Damn your quick fingers.