Mozarabs
The Mozarabs, or more precisely Andalusi Christians,'' were the Christians of al-Andalus, or the territories of Iberia under Muslim rule from 711 to 1492. Following the Umayyad conquest of the Visigothic Kingdom in Hispania, the Christian population of much of Iberia came under Muslim control.
Initially, the vast majority of Mozarabs kept Christianity and their dialects descended from Latin. Gradually, the population converted to Islam—an estimated 50% by the year 951—and was influenced, in varying degrees, by Arab customs and knowledge, and sometimes acquired greater social status in doing so. The local Romance vernaculars, with an important contribution of Arabic and spoken by Christians and Muslims alike, are referred to as Andalusi Romance. Mozarabs were mostly Catholics of the Visigothic or Mozarabic Rite. Due to Sharia and fiqh being confessional and only applying to Muslims, the Christians paid the jizya tax, the only relevant Islamic law obligation, and kept Roman-derived, Visigothic-influenced civil law.
Most of the Mozarabs were descendants of local Christians and were primarily speakers of Romance varieties under Islamic rule. They also included those members of the former Visigothic ruling elite who did not convert to Islam or emigrate northwards after the Muslim conquest. Spanish Christians initially portrayed Muslims primarily as military or political enemies, but with time, Islam came to be seen as a religion and not merely a threat. Spanish Christians sought to discourage apostasy from Christianity and to defend Christian beliefs, but they increasingly became connected to the dar al-Islam, through shared culture, language, and regular interaction.
A few were Arab and Berber Christians coupled with Muslim converts to Christianity who, as Arabic speakers, felt at home among the original Mozarabs. A prominent example of a Muslim who became a Mozarab by embracing Christianity is the Andalusi rebel and anti-Umayyad military leader, Umar ibn Hafsun. The Mozarabs of Muslim origin were descendants of those Muslims who converted to Christianity following the conquest of Toledo, and perhaps also following the expeditions of King Alfonso I of Aragon. These Mozarabs of Muslim origin who converted en masse at the end of the 11th century, many of them Muladí, are distinct from the Mudéjars and Moriscos who converted gradually to Christianity between the 12th and 17th centuries.
Separate Mozarab enclaves were located in the large Muslim cities, especially Toledo, Córdoba, Zaragoza, and Seville.
Name
Mozarab is first documented in Christian sources from the 11th century; the term Mozarab was not used by Muslims to describe Christians. Contemporary Arabic sources described Christians as naṣārā, or imprecisely by their legal-religious status: ahl adh-dhimma or mu‘āhidūn.The term Mozarab, now sometimes applied broadly to all Christians in al-Andalus, is imprecise; many Christians living in Islamic Spain resisted Arabization, for example.
Status
and Jews were designated as dhimmi under Sharia. Dhimmi were allowed to live within Muslim society, but were legally required to pay the jizya, a personal tax, and abide with a number of religious, social, and economic restrictions that came with their status. Despite their restrictions, the dhimmi were fully protected by the Muslim rulers and did not have to fight in case of war, because they paid the jizya.As the universal nature of Roman law was eroded and replaced by Islamic law in part of the Iberian Peninsula, Sharia law allowed most ethnic groups in the medieval Islamic world to be judged by their own judges, under their own law: Mozarabs had their own tribunals and authorities. Some of them even held high offices in the Islamic administration under some rulers— a prominent example being that of Recemundus, a palace official, who, sometime between 961 and 976, wrote the famous Calendar of Córdoba for Abd ar-Rahman III, undertook various diplomatic missions in Germania and Byzantium, and was rewarded with the bishopric of Elvira. Furthermore, in 1064, Emir Al-Muqtadir of Zaragoza sent Paternus, the Mozarabic bishop of Tortosa, as an envoy to king Ferdinand I of León in Santiago de Compostela, while the Christian Abu Umar ibn Gundisalvus, a Saqaliba, served the same taifa ruler as the Wazir.
Conversion to Islam was encouraged by the Umayyad caliphs and emirs of Córdoba. Many Mozarabs converted to Islam to avoid the heavy jizyah tax which they were subjected to as dhimmi. Conversion to Islam also opened up new horizons to the Mozarabs, alleviated their social position, ensured better living conditions, and broadened scope for more technically skilled and advanced work. Apostasy, however, for one who had been raised as a Muslim or had embraced Islam, was a crime punishable by death.
Image:AntifonarioDeLeón.jpg|left|thumb|190px|León Antiphonary Folio, León Cathedral
Until the mid-9th century, relations between Muslims and the majority Christian population of Al-Andalus, were relatively cordial. Christian resistance to the first wave of Muslim conquerors was unsuccessful. In Murcia, a single surviving capitulation document must stand for many such agreements to render tribute in exchange for the protection of traditional liberties; in it, Theodomirus, Visigothic count of Orihuela, agrees to recognize Abd al-Aziz as overlord and to pay tribute consisting of a yearly cash payment supplemented with specific agricultural products. In exchange, Theodomir received Abd al-Aziz' promise to respect both his property and his jurisdiction in the province of Murcia. There was no change in the composition of the people on the land, and in cases like this one, even their Visigothic lords remained.
In the Moorish controlled region of Al-Garb Al-Andalus to the west of Al-Andalus, which included the modern region of Algarve and most of Portugal, Mozarabs constituted the majority of the population.
The Muslim geographer Ibn Hawqal, who visited the country in the middle of the 10th century, spoke of frequent revolts by Mozarab peasants employed on large estates, probably those of the ruling aristocracy. There is also substantial evidence that Mozarabs fought in the defense of the thaghr, participating in raids against Christian neighbours and struggles between Muslim factions. For instance, in 936, a significant number of Christians holed up in Calatayud with the rebel Mutarraf, only to be massacred in a desperate stand against the Caliphate forces.
There is very little evidence of any Christian resistance at Al-Andalus in the 9th century. Evidence points to a rapid attrition in the North. For instance, during the 1st centuries of Muslim rule, the Mozarab community of Lleida was apparently ruled by a qumis and had its own judiciary, but there is no evidence of any such administration in the later period.
Although Mozarab merchants traded in Andalusi markets, they were neither influential nor numerous before the middle of the 12th century. This stemmed from commercial disinterest and disorganization in the early Middle Ages, rather than any specific or religious impediments set up by the Muslim rulers. Unlike Andalusi Muslims and Jews, Mozarabs had little interest in commerce because of their general perception of trade as lowly and despicable. This was in stark contrast to the greater respect accorded to merchants in Jewish and Muslim societies, where trade was frequently combined with other callings, such as politics, scholarship, or medicine.
It is often mistakenly assumed that Mozarab merchants forged a vital commercial and cultural link between the north and south across the Iberian frontiers. Mozarab refugees may have had influence in northern Iberian trade at places like Toledo, but there is no reason to believe that they engaged in commerce with their abandoned homeland. Most traffic between Al-Andalus and Christian regions remained in the hands of Jewish and Muslim traders until the dramatic shifts initiated by European commercial expansion throughout the 11th and 12th centuries. With the development of Italian maritime power and the southward expansion of the Christian Reconquista, Andalusi international trade came increasingly under the control of Christian traders from northern Iberia, southern France, and Italy. By the middle of the 13th century, it was an exclusively Christian concern.
There were frequent contacts between the Mozarabs in Al-Andalus and their co-religionists both in the Kingdom of Asturias and in the Marca Hispanica, the territory under Frankish influence to the northeast. The level of literary culture among the northern Christians was inferior to that of their Mozarab brethren in the historic cities to the south, due to the prosperity of Al-Andalus. For that reason, Christian refugees from Al-Andalus were always welcomed in the north, where their descendants came to form an influential element. Though impossible to quantify, the emigration of Mozarabs from the south was probably a significant factor in the growth of the Christian principalities and kingdoms of northern Iberia.
For most of the 9th and 10th centuries, Iberian Christian culture in the north was stimulated by the learning of Mozarab immigrants, who helped to accentuate its Christian identity and apparently played a major role in development of Iberian Christian ideology. The Mozarab scholars and clergy eagerly sought manuscripts, relics and traditions from the towns and monasteries of central and southern Iberia that had been the heartland of Visigothic Catholicism. Many Mozarabs also took part in the many regional revolts that formed the great fitna or unrest in the late 9th century.
The ability of the Mozarabs to assimilate into Moorish culture while maintaining their Christian faith has often caused them to be depicted by Western scholars as having a strong allegiance to Catholicism and its cause. However, the historian Jaume Vicens Vives offers another view of the Mozarabs. He states that one of the Emperor Charlemagne's major offensives was to annihilate the Moorish frontier by taking Zaragoza, which was an important Mozarab stronghold. However, the offensive failed because the Mozarabs of the city refused to cooperate with the Catholic emperor. Vives concludes that the Mozarabs were primarily a self-absorbed group. They understood that they could gain a great deal by remaining in close contact with the Moors.
There was a steady rate of decline among the Mozarab population of Al-Andalus towards the end of the Reconquista. This was mainly caused by conversions, emigration towards the northern part of the peninsula during the upheavals of the 9th and early 10th centuries and also by the ethno-religious conflicts of the same period.
The American historian, Richard Bulliet, in a work based on the quantitative use of the onomastic data as furnished by scholarly biographical dictionaries, concluded that it was only in the 10th century when the Andalusi emirate was firmly established and developed into the greatest power of the western Mediterranean under Caliph Abd ar-Rahman III, that the numerical ratio of Muslims and Christians in Al-Andalus was reversed in favour of the former. Prior to the middle of this century, he asserts, the population of Al-Andalus was still half Christian.
The expansion of the Caliphate had come primarily through conversion and absorption, and only very secondarily through immigration. The remaining Mozarab community shrank into an increasingly fossilized remnant.
Relatively large numbers of Mozarab communities did, however, continue to exist up to the end of the taifa kingdoms; there were several parishes in Toledo when the Christians occupied the city in 1085, and abundant documentation in Arabic on the Mozarabs of this city is preserved. An apparently still significant Mozarab group, which is the subject of a number of passages in the Arabic chronicles dealing with El Cid's dominion over Valencia, was also to be found there during this same period. Similarly, the memoirs of the emir of Granada clearly indicate the existence of a relatively large rural Christian population in some parts of the Málaga region towards the end of the 11th century. Until the reconquest of Seville by the Christians in 1248, a Mozarab community existed there, though in the course of the 12th century Almoravid persecution had forced many Mozarabs in Al-Andalus to flee northward.