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Accursed, Superior Men: Ethno-Religious Minorities and Politics in the Medieval Mediterranean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2014

Brian A. Catlos
Brian A. Catlos*
Affiliation:
Religious Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Humanities, University of California Santa Cruz
*
Brian.Catlos@colorado.edu
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Abstract

One of the most salient features of the medieval Mediterranean is that it was a zone of intense interaction and long-term cohabitation of members of various ethno-religious communities whose relations are usually conceived of as fundamentally adversarial. Yet Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived amongst each other in both the Christian- and Muslim-ruled Mediterranean, even during the era of the crusades. Typically, such relationships have been presented as either fundamentally hostile, or cordial, and as related to the “tolerance” that host cultures were inclined to demonstrate as a consequence of their own religious orientation. This paper takes a different, phenomenological approach by focusing on a specific manifestation of this interaction: the emergence of out-group political elites in confessionally defined societies. Through the medium of three case studies—a powerful Jew in Islamic Spain, a powerful Muslim in Norman Sicily and a powerful Coptic Christian in Fatimid Egypt—I demonstrate that the status of minority elites was related to concrete political circumstances grounded in the particular environment of the region, and that, despite cultural differences that might have distinguished them, these societies developed near-identical strategies for engaging with minority elites. The language of religious polemic, exclusion, and marginalization was present, but it tended to serve as a post factum rationalization for repression rather than its cause, and tended to be deployed decisively only in certain circumstances. This provides new insights not only into Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations, but the fundamental nature of Mediterranean history and society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 844 - 869
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014 

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References

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12 There are a number of contemporary accounts and documents relating to the careers of Yūsuf b. Naghrālla and his father Ismaʿīl. The most important Arabic source is the Tibyān, written by ʿAbd Allāh b. Bulluggīn (or Buluqqīn), who reigned as the last Zirid king of Granada, and wrote an apologetic memoir while living out his years as an exiled prisoner of the Almoravids who deposed him. See Tibi, Amin T., ed., The Tibyān: The Memoires of ʿAbd Allah b. Buluggīn Last Zīrīd Amīr of Granada. Kitāb al-tibyān, (Leiden: Brill, 1986)Google Scholar. The most accessible source for the history of the taifa kingdoms, including Granada, is the idiosyncratic historical digest compiled by the Moroccan al-Maqqarī in the seventeenth century: ʿAḥmād b. Muḥammad al-Maqqarī, Nafḥ al-Ṭayb, 8 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣadr, 1968). It was published in partial English translation as The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, 2 vols., de Gayangos, Pascual, trans. (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1840)Google Scholar. The main Hebrew source is Ibn Daud's Book of Tradition, which traces the history of the Rabbinate from its origins to the early twelfth century: Abraham b. David Halevi, A Critical Edition with a Translation and Notes of the Book of Tradition: (Sefer Ha-Qabbalah), Cohen, Gerson D., ed. and trans. (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1969)Google Scholar. Like the Tibyān, it is a work marked strongly by a “political” agenda. The best English-language history of the Zirid regime is Handler's, Andrews, The Zirids of Granada, (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1974)Google Scholar; although Hady Roger Idris'sLa Berbérie Orientale Sous Les Zirides, (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1959)Google Scholar is more comprehensive. For an overall account of the taifa period, see Wasserstein, David, The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and for a broader political context, Kennedy, Hugh, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of Al-Andalus (London: Longman, 1996)Google Scholar. Several books and articles have been produced on Ismaʿīl's life and oeuvre; for example, Weinberger's, LeonJewish Prince in Moslem Spain: Selected Poems of Samuel Ibn Nagrela, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Schirmann's, Jefim “Samuel Hannagid, the Man, the Soldier, the Politician,” Jewish Social Studies, 13 (1951): 99–126Google Scholar; and “Jews under Umayyads and Taifas,” in Roth, Norman, ed., Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict, (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 73–112Google Scholar. For Yūsuf, see also Bargebuhr, Frederick, “The Alhambra Palace of the Twelfth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 19 (1956): 192–258CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Jews in Spain, Ashtor's, EliyahuThe Jews of Moslem Spain, 3 vols., Klein, Aaron and Machlowitz, Jenny, trans. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973)Google Scholar, is comprehensive, but dated and unreliable. Better is Gerber, Jane, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York: Free Press, 1992)Google Scholar. The world of the Jewish courtier-poets is best accessed through the works of Ross Brann, including, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Power in the Portrayal. Ismaʿīl's career, together with that of his son Yūsuf, is the subject of “The (Jewish) Man Who Would be King,” part one of Catlos, Brian A., Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power, and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), 15–66Google Scholar. For the Judeo-Arabic aristocracy as a whole, see Brann, Ross, “The Arabized Jews,” in Menocal, M. R.Scheindlin, R. P., and Sells, M., eds., The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Al-Andalus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 435–54Google Scholar; Wasserstein, David “Jewish Élites in al-Andalus,” in Frank, Daniel, ed., The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, and Identity (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 101–10;Google Scholar and Alfonso, Esperanza, Islamic Culture through Jewish Eyes: Al-Andalus from the Tenth to Twelfth Century (New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar. For Muslim perspectives on Ismaʿīl, see Wasserstein, David, “Samuel ibn Naghrila Ha-Nagid and Islamic Historiography in Al-Andalus,” Al-Qantara, 14 (1993): 109–26Google Scholar; and Emilio García Gómez, “Polémica religoisa entre Ibn Hazm e Ibn Al-Nagrila,” Al-Andalus 4 (1936): 1–28Google Scholar.

13 Bādis and Ismaʿīl's Jewish enemies were welcomed in Seville, and for a brief time during Ismaʿīl's reign Almería also had a Jewish wazīr, as did Zaragoza. See Roth, Norman, Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 87–88Google Scholar, 93–94.

14 By “Israel,” contemporaries referred, of course, to the Jewish people, rather than a territorial entity. This was an age of intense messianic aspiration among Rabbinical Jews, and some believed that Ismaʿīl himself might be the messiah (not the least, Ismaʿīl himself).

15 Jewish and Muslim sources concurred in this assessment of Yūsuf. See, for example, Daud, Ibn, Book of Tradition, 75–76Google Scholar.

16 Reports of the attack on the Jewish community of Granada are problematic. Ashtor evoked the assault in lurid detail, but his account of it was fantasy (Jews of Moslem Spain, III: 188–89). The only eyewitness account is that of ʿAbd Allāh b. Bulluggīn, thirteen years old at the time, who later recalled, “The Jew turned and fled for his life inside the palace pursued by the populace, who finally ran him down and did him to death. They then turned their swords on every Jew in the city and seized vast quantities of their goods and chattels” (Tibi, Tibyān, 75). Ibn Daud commented that Yūsuf “was killed on the Sabbath day, the ninth of Tebet 4827, along with the community of Granada and all of those who had come from distant lands to see his learning and power” (Book of Tradition, 76). Later Muslim chroniclers put the deaths in the thousands, but clearly exaggerated. See, for example, ʿIdhārī, Ibn, Al-bayān al-Mughrib, 3 vols., Lévi-Provençal, Évariste, ed. (Paris: Geuthner, 1930)Google Scholar, III: 275–76. In fact, Ibn Daud reports that members of Yūsuf's own family, including his wife and son, not only survived the event but remained in the kingdom, where they lived out their years. The noted Rabbi Isaac b. Baruk settled in Granada shortly after the attack, and Moses b. Ezra, the great philosopher and linguist, was born in Granada and lived through the events of 1066. See Encyclopedia of Islam, 2d ed., s.v. “Mūsā b. ʿAzra.” For a reassessment of the attack, see, “What if there was a Pogrom and Nobody Came?” in Catlos, Infidel Kings, 62–66.

17 For Philip of Mahdia and Norman Sicily, see Birk, Joshua, “From Borderlands to Borderlines: Narrating the Past of Twelfth-Century Sicily,” in Helfers, J., ed., Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 9–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Catlos, Brian, “Who Was Philip of Mahdia and Why Did He Have to Die? Confessional Identity and Political Power in the Twelfth-Century Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Chronicle 1 (2011): 73–103Google Scholar; idem, “Kings of Sicily, Kings of Africa,” in Infidel Kings, 127–79; and Epifanio, V., “Ruggero II e Filippo di Al Mahdiah,” Archivo Storico Siciliano N.S. 30 (1905): 471–501Google Scholar. The account also appears in most histories of Norman Sicily, for example, Idris, La Berbérie Orientale. I: 375–76; Brett, Michael, “Muslim Justice under Infidel Rule: The Normans in Ifriqiya, 517–555 AH/1123–1160 AD,” Cahiers de Tunisie 43 (1995): 20–21Google Scholar; Johns, Jeremy, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 215–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Metcalfe, Andrew, Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily: Arabic Speakers and the End of Islam (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 47–50Google Scholar.

18 The Zirid dynasty of Ifrīqiya was the same clan that ruled over the taifa kingdom of Granada. After a feud in the late tenth-century between two branches of the family, over who would rule Tunisia in the Fatimid's name, Zāwi b. Zīrī, the leader of the losing faction, took his followers to al-Andalus to serve in the caliphal army.

19 There are three accounts of Philip's trial, one in Latin and two in Arabic. For the Latin text, probably written within a generation of the events, see Romuald, “Chronicon,” Garufi, C., ed., Rerum italicarum scriptores 7, 1 (1935): 234–36Google Scholar. Two nearly identical Arabic accounts survive, one that the great fourteenth-century Maghribian historian/sociologist Ibn Khaldūn included in his “universal history,” the Kitāb al-ʿibar, and the other by Ibn al-Athīr, which was written sometime between 1280 and 1231. The scholarly consensus is that both were based on the writings of the refugee Zīrid prince ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Shaddād, who visited the Norman court at Palermo in 1156–1157 en route to his eventual home in Damascus, having been dispossessed of his lands by the Almoravid invaders. For the Ibn al-Athīr text, see ʿIzz al-Dīn b. al-Athīr, Al-Kāmil fī’l-ṭārikh, 13 vols., Tornberg, C. J., ed. (Beirut: Dar Ṣādir, 1966 [Leiden: n.p., 1851])Google Scholar, XI: 187. For Ibn Khaldūn's version, see ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad b. Khaldūn, Kitāb al-ʿibar wa-dīwān al-mubtada', 7 vols. (Cairo, ʻAbd al-Maṭbaʻah al-Miṣrīyah bi-Būlāq, 1867), V: 204–5Google Scholar. English translations of the Ibn al-Athīr and Romuald accounts can also be found in Johns, Arabic Administration, 215–17; and Houben, H., Roger II of Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 110–12Google Scholar. The Ibn al-Athīr text was translated into Italian: Amari, M., Biblioteca arabo-sicula: Ossia raccolta di testi arabiciche che toccano la geografia, la storia, le biografie e la bibliografia della Sicilia, 3 vols. (Lipsia: F. A. Brockhaus, 1857), I: 479–80Google Scholar.

20 Romuald records, “Then, with the magistrates having spoken, having been tied to the hooves of wild horses, he was violently dragged to the lime kiln which was in front of the palace, where he was loosed from the feet of the horses, thrown into the midst of the flames, and was quickly burned up. Moreover, the other accomplices and collaborators in his iniquity were also given the death sentence (“Chronicon,” 236).

21 For the case of Ibn Dukhān, see Catlos, B., “To Catch a Spy: The Case of Zayn Al-Dîn and Ibn Dukhân,” Medieval Encounters 2 (1996): 99–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Traitors and Spies,” ch. 8 in Catlos, Infidel Kings, 213–38. The story is reported by neither Muslim historians (e.g. Ibn al-Athīr), nor in the Coptic History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church; Sāwīrus b. al-Muqaffa‘ et al. , eds., Tārīkh batārika al-kinīsa al-miṣriyya, History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, vol. 4, Atiya, Aziz Suryal et al. , trans. (Cairo: Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, 1943)Google Scholar. Contemporary references to the Christian official are found in the satirical poetry of ʿUmārat al-Yamānī (d. 1174 CE); see Derenbourg, Hartwig, ed., ‘Oumâra de Yémen: Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: Leroux, 1897), I: 215, 294Google Scholar. The first narrative account of his fall appears in the polemic of al-Nābulusī, written some eighty years after the events, and edited in Cahen, Claude, “Histoires coptes d'un cadi medieval,” Bulletin: Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale 59 (1960): 133–50Google Scholar. If al-Nābulusī’s information is correct, we can place the execution of Ibn Dukhān sometime between 1160 (14 Rajāb, 555), when al-ʿĀḍid came to the throne, and September 1161 (19 Ramaḍān, 556), when Talāʿi' b. Ruzzīk, the wazīr, who is described as his employer, was assassinated.

22 Cahen “Histoires coptes,” 147. Zayn al-Dīn is quoting Qur'ān 5:76. For the particular context of al-Nābulusī's recording of the episode in the thirteenth-century, and the tale's afterlife, see “The Tale and the Telling,” in Catlos, Infidel Kings, 236–38.

23 For Christians and Muslims participating in each other's popular religious festivals, and for official patronage of Christian festivals by the Fatimid Caliphs, see Staffa, Susan, Conquest and Fusion: The Social Evolution of Cairo A.D. 642–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 47–48Google Scholar, 68, and 383–84.

24 For the Crusaders' ambivalent attitudes toward native Christians, see Christopher Hatch MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

25 For the Coptic minority in Egypt, see Brett, Michael, “Al-Karaza Al-Marqusiya: The Coptic Church in the Fatimid Empire,” in Vermeulen, Urbain and van Steenbergen, J., eds., Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras IV (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 33–60Google Scholar; Eddé, Anne-Marie, Micheau, Françoise, and Picard, Christophe, Communautés chrétiennes en pays d'Islam: du début du VIIe siècle au milieu du XIe siècle (Paris: SEDES, 1997)Google Scholar; Grypeou, Emmanouela, Swanson, Mark, and Thomas, David, eds., The Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and van Donzel, E., “Badr Al-Jamali, the Copts in Egypt and the Muslims in Ethiopia,” in Ian Richard Netton, ed., Studies in Honour of Clifford Edmund Bosworth (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 297–309Google Scholar. As elsewhere in the Islamic world, deliberate cases of martyrdom (such as by blasphemy) were rare. For an exception, see Armanios, Febe and Ergene, Boğaç, “A Christian Martyr under Mamluk Justice: The Trials of Ṣalīb (d. 1512), According to Coptic and Muslim Sources,” Muslim World 96 (2006): 115–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; this case bears startling similarities to the “voluntary martyrdom” movement by native Christians in ninth-century Islamic Córdoba. See, for example, Coope, Jessica, The Martyrs of Córdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

26 The dissolution of the Caliphate of Córdoba coincided with a period of consolidation and dynamism among the Christian principalities of the Iberian Peninsula, marking the beginning of what came to be known (and thus distorted) as the “Reconquest.” Castile-León, Aragón, and Barcelona each became involved in taifa kingdom politics as aggressors, allies, and protectors, seeking to extract tribute from the disunited Muslim kingdoms with the eventual aim of conquering them. Meanwhile, the Almoravids, a movement of Ṣanhāja Berbers from the Sahel, had taken over the former territories of the Caliphate in the Maghrib. In the late eleventh century they would be invited to al-Andalus by the desperate taifa kings, but they would come, not as allies and liberators, but as conquerors. So dissatisfied had many Andalusis become with Almoravid rule that the Castilian king, Alfonso VI, was able to present himself as the protector and patron of native Muslims. See Pidal, Ramón Menéndez, La España del Cid, 2 vols. (Madrid: Plutarco, 1929), II: 760–64Google Scholar.

27 The Norman d'Hauteville family had arrived in southern Italy in the mid-eleventh century and began to aggressively carve out territory at the expense of local Latin Christian powers, Byzantines, and local Muslim lords. Sicily was conquered in the 1060s by Roger II's father, Roger Guiscard, Duke of Apulia. Roger II obtained royal title from the papacy and set out to consolidate and expand his holdings, focusing both on the Byzantine Empire and Zirid Ifrīqiya. The Fatimid Caliphate was a natural ally. The subjects over whom Roger and his successors ruled were overwhelmingly Byzantine by culture with a significant Muslim minority. As sovereigns of three distinct peoples—Latins, Byzantines, and Muslims—the Norman kings of Sicily purposely cultivated an ambivalent identity as reges, αυτοκράτορες, and mulūk.

28 Christians may have remained a numerical majority in Egypt as late as the fourteenth century, whereas Jews constituted a small but important minority in the Fatimid period. Bulliet's hypothesis of an early conversion of Egypt, with the large majority of conversions having taken place by 1000 CE, is now generally regarded as premature (and anyway, it relates to converted population rather than a total population). See Bulliet, Richard W., Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 There were Rabbinical, Karaite, and Samaritan communities in the Caliphate. For a recent study, see Rustow, Marina, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. The importance of contemporary Jewish merchants in the caliphate is attested to by the “Geniza” documentation, which is the foundation of Goitein's A Mediterranean Society.

30 Two years after Ibn Dukhān's execution, the rival wazīrs Shāwar and Ḍirghām (see below) were struggling for control of Egypt. When a desperate Ḍirghām appealed to Amalric II of Jerusalem (1197–1205) for aid, Frankish forces entered Cairo in an unsuccessful attempt to prop up the caliphate.

31 The Norman kings were famous for not worrying about their subjects' religious beliefs. In an episode recounted by the Muslim traveler Ibn Jubayr, an earthquake struck Palermo in 1169. As the palace shook, William II (1166–1189) heard his various panicked servants invoking the protection of Allāh, whereupon he is said to have reassured them: “Let each invoke the God he worships, and those that have faith shall be comforted.” Broadhurst, R.J.C., The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, Being the Chronicles of a Mediaeval Spanish Moor Concerning His Journey to the Egypt of Saladin, the Holy Cities of Arabia, Baghdad the City of the Caliphs, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily (London: J. Cape, 1952), 341Google Scholar; cf. Ibn Jubayr, W. Wright, and M. J. de Goeje, eds., 2d ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1907), 325.

32 As it happens, al-Nābulusī himself served in the treasury and had been disgraced and imprisoned. After, he became something of a crusader (a grating, but here appropriate metaphor) against financial corruption in the Egyptian bureaucracy, and composed a lengthy tract exposing widespread malfeasance, which he dedicated to the Ayyubid sultan, al-Malik al-Šàlih Najm al-Dīn (1220–1249). See Owen, C., “Scandal in the Egyptian Treasury: A Portion of the Lumaʿ al-Qawānīn of ʿUthmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 14 (1955): 70–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Lewis, Bernard, “An Anti-Jewish Ode: The Qasida of Abu Ishaq against Joseph Ibn Nagrella,” in Lieberman, Saul, ed., Salo Wittmeier Baron Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday (Jerusalem: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1975), 659–63Google Scholar.

34 For Ibn Ḥazm on the Banū Naghrālla and Jews, see Perlmann, Moshe, “The Medieval Polemics between Islam and Judaism,” in Goitein, S. D. et al. , eds., Religion in a Religious Age (Cambridge: Association for Jewish Studies, 1974), 108–10Google Scholar; and “Eleventh-Century Andalusian Authors on the Jews of Granada,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 18 (1948): 269–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 ʿAbd Allāh b. Bulluggīn, the last king of Granada, whose autobiography records Yūsuf's death, refers to the unfortunate wazīr with palpable hostility as “the Jew,” whose name ʿAbd Allāh evidently cannot bring himself to commit to paper. Yet the same author refers to Yūsuf's father, Ismaʿīl, respectfully as “Abū Ibrāhīm,” and praises him. This is understandable, since Ismaʿīl b. Naghrālla had brought prosperity and security to the kingdom and protected King Bādis, whereas ʿAbd Allāh believed that Yūsuf, the son, was a traitor who had been responsible for the murder of his own father, Bulluggīn.

36 Ismaʿīl's Jewish enemies plotted against the Jewish wazīr and his patron, the king Bādis, with the disenfranchised Zirid prince, Yaddayr. When their plot failed, they took refuge in Seville. Handler, Zirids of Granada, 53.

37 Romuald, “Chronicon,” 235. The ultimate source of the Arabic accounts was likely a Muslim or Muslims who witnessed the events.

38 As translated by Johns in Arabic Administration, 212.

39 See Ibn al-Athīr, Al-Kāmil fī'l-ṭārikh, XI: 187; and Ibn Khaldūn, Kitāb al-ʿibar, V: 204–5.

40 See Catlos, “To Catch a Spy,” 102.

41 Communal identity was defined primarily in terms of law, the authority of which was based entirely—whether explicitly or implicitly—on religious foundations. Consequently, diverse societies were characterized by a diversity of legal systems, each of which was considered valid (although the legal system associated with the majority community was held to be of a higher jurisdiction). The majority community could only concede such legitimacy in cases where minority religio-legal beliefs were regarded as being logically consistent and well intentioned, if mistaken—what I have described as a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

42 Translations of the Qur'ān are taken from The Qur'an, Khalidi, Tarif, trans. (New York: Penguin, 2008)Google Scholar.

43 The principle of the subjugation of non-Muslims (initially “People of the Book,” or Jews and Christians) to Islamic rule within a framework of tribute and protection goes back to the time of the Prophet. In the great age of Arabo-Islamic military expansion in the mid- to late seventh century, individual Muslim commanders negotiated vague, ad hoc tributary treaties of submission with the constituent communities of the various locales they conquered. Centuries later, as Islamic law coalesced, a tradition developed whereby it was held that there was a detailed and standard Islamic policy towards minorities that the Caliph ʿUmar had established when Jerusalem was conquered. In still later centuries, in zones where minorities came under social and political pressure from Muslims, the details of the “pact” were interpreted in increasingly restrictive and even punitive ways. In other regions, political convenience dictated the extension of the pact even to idolaters and polytheists (notably Hindus of the Indus and Ganges regions), groups specifically excluded from dhimma by Revelation. See, for example, Ayoub, Mahmoud, “Dhimmah in Qur'an and Hadith,” in Hoyland, Robert G., ed., Muslims and the Other in Early Islamic Spain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 25–35Google Scholar; Fattal, Antoine, Le statut légal des non-musulmans en pays d'Islam (Beirut: 1995)Google Scholar; Donner, Fred, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Muztar, A. D., “Dhimmis in an Islamic State,” Islamic Studies Islamabad 18 (1979): 65–75Google Scholar; Bat Ye'or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (London: Associated University Presses, p, 1985)Google Scholar.

44 This position was crystallized in the consilia of the early fourteenth-century canon jurist Oldradus de Ponte, who ruled, “Those [Muslims] willing to live in peace and quiet ought not to be interfered with.” See Zacour, Norman P., ed., Jews and Saracens in the Consilia of Oldradus de Ponte (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 80–82Google Scholar.

45 The legal position of Muslims and Jews was based on the legal position toward Jews and pagans as expressed in the late Roman law. For an overview, see Friedenreich, David M., “Muslims in Canon Law, 650–1000,” in Thomas, David et al. , eds., Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographic History, vol. 1: (600–900) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 83–98Google Scholar; and Friedenreich's “Muslims in Western Canon Law, 1000–1500,” in the same Thomas et al. collection, vol. 2: (1000–1500), 41–68.

46 A. García y García, Constitutiones concilii quarti lateranensis una cum commentariis glossatorum (Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1981), 108–9Google Scholar.

47 As a non-sovereign ecumenian community in the Medieval Mediterranean, Jews had limited opportunities to bring the weight of statal authority down on religious rivals. Nevertheless, medieval rabinnical responsa consistently condemned and vilified Jews who adopted non-Jewish ways and mixed in Gentile affairs. Jews in Muslim lands were free to launch polemics against Christians, and those in Christian lands against Muslims, and they did. However, the bitterest rivalries emerged within the Jewish community, particularly in struggles between Rabbinical Jews and Karaites, and Maimonideans and anti-Maimonideans. The battle against Karaism is a dominant theme in Ibn Daud's Book of Tradition, and Ismaʿīl b. Naghrālla was an ardent and proud participant. Centuries later, opponents of Maimonidean thought went so far as to denounce his writings to the Inquisition. For an overview, see Singer, Isidore and Adler, Cyrus, The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901–1908)Google Scholar, s.v. “France,” 460–61.

48 This transition generally took place over the course of the first two centuries of Islamic rule. See, for example, Cotton, Hannah, ed., From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially the essays in part V, “Greek into Arabic,” 352–481.

49 Ḥasdai b. Shaprūt was declared nasi (“prince,” or “patriarch”) of the Andalusi Jews in tenth-century Córdoba. He was an intimate confidant of the Emir-cum-Caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III (912–961) and carried out a number of important diplomatic missions for him. His contemporary, the Christian aristocrat Rabīʿ b. Ziyād, also served the Caliph as a diplomat, and was rewarded with an appointment as Bishop of Elvira. See Christys, Ann, Christians in Al-Andalus, 711–1000 (Richmond: Curzon, 2002), 108–34Google Scholar; Fletcher, Richard A., Moorish Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 62Google Scholar.

50 This can be seen, for example, in the thirteenth-century Kingdom of Aragón, where Jews continued to dominate the royal administration into the 1280s, when the Uniones, a noble/municipal revolt, forced Alfonso III of Aragón (1285–1291) to yield a series of concessions, including a ban of Jews from formal administrative service. See Antón, Luis González, Las uniones aragoneses y las cortes del reino, 2 vols. (Zaragoza: CSIC, 1975)Google Scholar.

51 For the development of the Arabic language chancery of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, see Johns, Jeremy, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Dīwān (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Moore, R. I., The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 The promulgations of the papacy regarding the restrictions placed on Muslims and Jews in Christian lands, for example, went largely ignored in lands which actually had significant minority populations. For example, in the Crown of Aragon a prosperous Jewish community participated openly in public life through the thirteenth century and beyond. See Assis, Yom Tov, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213–1327 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1997)Google Scholar.

54 The Angevin king Charles II (1285–1309) couched the enslavement in religious terms; it was clearly undertaken for pragmatic reasons, and without pressure from the Church. See “Pushing the Boundaries: Italy and North Africa (ca. 1050–ca. 1350),” ch. 3 of Catlos, Brian A., The Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, ca. 1050–1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 90–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Popular violence is another matter. For example, the devastating pogroms of 1391 that swept over the Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula were not sanctioned by the Church—quite to the contrary. Nor were they symptomatic of an inexorable decline of the status of Jews. Mark D. Meyerson's recent work on the aljama of Morvedre (Sagunt) shows that Jewish communities were able to re-establish a stable equilibrium vis-à-vis their Christian neighbors. A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

56 Many went to Zaragoza, and others to Toledo, Seville, and Cordoba. Jews remained in Granada's capital and in provincial towns. In fact, not long after the Granadan massacre, the Jews of Lucena (a town north of the capital) staged a tax revolt. Jewish prosperity and security in the kingdom was only brought to an end by the arrival of the Almohads in 1148. See Handler, Zirids of Granada, 123–26.

57 After the brief tenure of Maio of Bari as chamberlain (see below), which ended in his assassination, power in the palace returned to the “palace Saracens.” One of the later crypto-Muslim slaves, the powerful commander (qā'id) Peter (Barrūn), did, in fact, defect to the Almohads and openly apostatize in 1167, when he sensed his position in the realm was no longer tenable. He went on to serve as a commander in their navy against the Normans. See Metcalfe, Muslims and Christians, 46–51, and Johns, Arabic Administration, 222–26.

58 In the mid-nineteenth century, Lane reported that many Copts were accountants, who served primarily in government bureaus. See Staffa, Conquest and Fusion, 248. As late as 1961, Coptic Christians owned 51 percent of Egyptian banks. Ibrahim, Saad Eddin et al. , The Copts of Egypt (Cairo: Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies, 1996), 12Google Scholar.

59 Tibi, Tibyān, 77, 80–81. Indeed, al-Nāya's assassin was a Christian notable loyal to the Zirid dynasty.

60 Indeed, in his desperation to defeat Shāwar, Ḍirghām formed an alliance with Amalric II (1197–1205), which lead to a brief Frankish occupation.

61 With the exception of the Qipchaks, who were introduced as slaves into the Mediterranean, specifically Egypt, all of these groups were ethnically narrow, warrior elites who came from lands on the Mediterranean's periphery that were, comparatively, religiously homogenous. They were relatively recent converts to Abrahamic religions and defined their “political” program in terms of enforcing orthodoxy through force.

62 See Bulliet, Richard W., Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

63 In 1099, Frankish Crusaders shocked Muslim opinion by first reneging on the surrender agreement made with the inhabitants of Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān and, beyond this, eating some of their dead. In 1085, the Muslim community of Toledo surrendered to Alfonso VI of Castile in exchange for a broad range of liberties and safeguards. However, soon after the conquest the French Cluniac monk Bernard de Sedirac was named archbishop, and promptly contravened the various agreements. In 1066, Norman warriors conquered the Muslim town of Barbastro with papal blessing. When the inhabitants agreed to leave the town in return for their safety, the Normans agreed, but in the event swept down on the departing refugees killing the men and abducting the women. Both the Almoravids and Almohads took a rigorous approach to minorities, particularly when they first entered Islamic Spain. For the Almohad's deliberate annulation of the pact of dhimma, see Corcos, David, “The Nature of the Almohad Rulers' Treatment of the Jews,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 2 (2010): 259–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 264–65.

64 See, for example, several works by Catlos: “Contexto social y ‘conveniencia’ en la Corona de Aragón: Propuesta para un modelo de interacción entre grupos etno-religiosos minoritarios y mayoritarios,” Revista d'història medieval 12 (2002): 220–35Google Scholar; “Cristians, Musulmans i Jueus a la Corona d'Aragó medieval: Un cas de «Conveniència»,” L'Avenç 236 (2001): 8–16Google Scholar; The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 404–8Google Scholar; and Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, ch. 10, “Deed,” and postscript, “Conveniencia, Intolerance … or ‘Questions Badly Put’?” 508–14 and 515–35, respectively.

65 The two poles of this debate were staked out in reference to medieval Spain by Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz and Américo Castro, and are articulated in the work of scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Maria Rosa Menocal, respectively. See, for example, Sánchez-Albornoz, Claudio, España: un enigma histórico (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1956)Google Scholar; Castro, Américo, España en su historia: Cristianos, Moros y Judíos (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1948)Google Scholar; Lewis, Bernard, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Perennial, 2003)Google Scholar; and Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little Brown, 2002)Google Scholar.

66 See Brann, Power in the Portrayal, 36.