The Christian minority of Muslim-dominated Iberia that adopted the language and outward manifestations of Arabo-Islamic culture came to be referred to as Mozarabs (from Arab. must‘arib, “would-be Arab”) in the later Middle Ages.
In the centuries following the Islamic conquest of Iberia (711) the overwhelming majority of the native population converted to Islam, leaving a small but cohesive Christian minority, strongest in Toledo (the Visigothic metropolitanate) and Cordoba (the Muslim capital). Offered security in exchange for submission by the Islamic pact of dhimma (the “pact of protection” granted by Islam to non-Muslims), Christians were free to live and worship according to their traditions provided they did not affront Islam or challenge its authority. An episcopal structure survived at least into the ninth century, but family-dominated monasteries seem to have comprised the nuclei of piety.
Social pressures resulting from conversion to Islam and the encroachment of Arabic culture, and which precipitated the incidents of the “voluntary martyrs” of Cordoba, are reflected in the writings of St. Eulogius (d. 858) and his contemporary Paul Alvar. These martyrs can be divided into two types. Technical apostates, that is, Muslim men’s children who had been raised under the influence of a Christian mother or relatives, were put to death if they persisted in the Christian faith. Deliberate martyrs, by contrast, were Christians who provoked their own deaths by publicly insulting the Islamic faith and subsequently refusing the various offers made by the Muslim authorities to secure pardon. In the decades following the death of Eulogius, Mozarabs were involved in the muwallad (convert family) rebellions of ‘Umar ibn Hafsun. Eleca, the last bishop of Zaragoza, left for the Asturian capital of Oviedo in 893. Yet many Christians occupied important posts in the Muslim administration through the period of the caliphate (to c. 1035); the tenth-century courtier, scientist, and diplomat Bishop Reccemund (Arab. Rabi‘ ibn Zayd) is an example. Some also chose to emigrate, settling in the frontier zone of the river Duero, where examples of their churches survive to this day.
With the fragmentation of the caliphate and the rise of the independent Taifa kingdoms, the politico-military initiative passed to the Christian principalities of the Iberian Peninsula, provoking profound changes in the situation of the Mozarabs. Sisnando Davldez, a Portuguese Mozarab, is emblematic of this age. Having served as an official of the Muslim ruler of Seville, he became the first governor of Coimbra for Fedinand I of Castile and Leon (1064) and of Toledo for his son Alfonso VI (1085), also serving as envoy to the courts of Zaragoza and Granada. In a famous speech to the Taifa king ‘Abd Allah ibn Bulughghin, he enunciated Alfonso’s program of Christian reconquest.
With the arrival of the Almoravids and their domination of the Taifa kingdoms, the position of Mozarabs under Muslim domination deteriorated. Allegations that they had abetted the famous raid of Alfonso I of Aragon into the south of Spain in 1132 and thus abrogated their pact of protection led to a mass deportation to North Africa, where they and their descendants remained until the advent of the Almohads in the late twelfth century.
By the late eleventh century the Mozarabs clearly comprised a distinct ethnic group, a fact recognized in the privileges and promulgations of the Aragonese and Castilian kings. Despite their contacts with Christendom abroad they had remained isolated from Latin innovations and maintained, for instance, their own “Visigothic” liturgy. This soon became a target for agents of the Roman Church, notably the Cistercians and Pope Gregory VII, who provoked Alfonso VI to ban the rite following a rigged trial by ordeal to which it was subjected in 1077. Increasingly marginalized in Toledo itself, some Mozarabs emigrated to the Cid’s principality of Valencia or to Aragonese lands, where they joined local Mozarabs and refugees whom Alfonso I had led back from his incursion into Almoravid territory.
to their facility with the Arabic language, learned Mozarabs played an important role in the transmission of classical and Arabic learning to the West, notably through the translation activity that took place in Toledo. But apart from there, within a century or so Mozarabs seem to have been all but completely assimilated by the culture of the Latin Christian settlers who arrived with the Christian conquests. In 1500 the Mozarabic rite was rehabilitated, undoubtedly because it could no longer be construed in any way as a threat to the Roman Church.
-Brian A. Catlos
See also: Conversion: Iberia; Reconquista
Bibliography
Burman, Thomas E., Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050-1200 (Leiden: Brill, 1994).
Cagigas, Isidro de las, Los Mozarabes, 4 vols. (Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1947-1948).
Coope, Jessica, The Martyrs of Cordoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
World History
