This chapter aims to tie together many of the themes in the preceding chapters with a four-fold strategy. First, it sets out a general overview of the Iberian economy during the medieval period. This includes an analysis of how and why the economic balance of power shifted from the Islamic to the Christian states during the medieval centuries. Then, it provides a broader picture of some major developments in the peri-Iberian European and Islamic-Mediterranean economies in the medieval period, including micro- and macroeconomic developments. Third, this chapter shows how different regions of Iberia connected with elements of the peri-Iberian economies set out in the previous section; specifically how the Islamic states maintained ties with North Africa and points further afield; how the Christian North and West connected with the northern Atlantic economy; how the south-west eventually built ties with the Atlantic islands, West Africa, and more distant markets; and how the Eastern peninsula maintained ties with various Mediterranean markets. Finally, the chapter ends with some general conclusions, including the idea that, as this volume amply shows, it is high time to dispel any lingering sense of an economic “Black Legend” when discussing the economy of medieval Iberia.

In Reconquista Spain, a barely united state turned its anxieties inward with anti-Semitic laws on blood purity among converts from Judaism and Islam. The same insecure state turned outward to conquer Mexico, where Franciscans spent fifty years recording Aztec human sacrifice in codices and color drawings. Castilians and Aztecs alike marked their external bounds and internal bonds with blood. Ethnicizing ideas of blood purity crossed the Atlantic to ruddy Christian perceptions of Mesoamerican sacrifice. Two blood-obsessed cultures met to reveal disturbing resonances in Christian blood language. Uses Sircoff on limpieza de sangre and Timothy Radcliffe on cultic irony in Hebrews.

Although a battle zone from early in its history, the Roman province of Hispania began to undergo external military pressure in the fifth century ce with the invasions of the Visigoths, Suevi, and Vandals.1 Within a century, the Visigoths had come to dominate the Peninsula, establishing their capital at Toledo and exchanging their Arian brand of Christianity for Roman Catholicism.2 Like its Roman imperial predecessor, the Visigothic kingdom was structurally weak and revealed this instability each time a sovereign died. Rulers were seldom replaced without a civil war in which members of the royal family and their supporters fought for the throne. In the last of these struggles, Roderick (710–11) was opposed by the heirs of his predecessor, Watiza (701–10), led by Count Julian of Ceuta on the African litoral. Gathering a small army of Berber tribesmen, many of who had recently converted to Islam, Julian led an assault against Roderick in the late spring of 711. He was eventually disposed by Tarik ibn Zīyad, an agent of the Muslim governor of Tangier.3