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from buying meat from Muslim butchers, but such meat was sometimes cheaper, and Christians bought it anyway. Muslim builders and craftsmen built churches and cathedrals, and Muslim and Jewish doctors tended Christian patients. Muslims gambled and got drunk with Christians in taverns. They worked alongside each other in the fields and sometimes in the urban workplace. Muslim and Christian merchants formed joint business ventures.
    There are also glimpses of a shared Iberian reality in which all three faiths participated on an equal basis. In 1322–1323 church councils in Valladolid and Toledo complained that there were Christians, Jews, and Muslims who were attending each others’ marriages and funerals and that Christian women were inviting their Jewish and Muslim friends to mass. In the drought-afflicted town of Valés in 1470, Jews, Muslims, and Christians all prayed together for water. As late as 1486, Ferdinand prohibited Christians in the town of Tortosa from allowing Muslims to worship in their local church on Islamic holy days, where they were heard “to ululate and venerate the festivals and things required of them by their Mahometan sect and diabolical custom.” 13
    In a famous poem, Ibn Arabi, the great Sufi mystic of al-Andalus, expressed what many have taken to represent the essence of Andalusian tolerance:
    My heart can take on any form; it is a pasture for
Gazelles and a monastery for Christian monks.
A temple for idols, and for the Kaaba of the
Pilgrims, and for the tables of the Torah, and for the book
Of the Koran. 14
     
    For much of the history of al-Andalus, this ideal was not even an aspiration, yet nor was it entirely absent. The spirit that Ibn Arabi expressed can be seen in the tombs of Christian rulers and ordinary Christians inscribed in Arabic and Latin, in the Jewish poets of Córdoba, in the mysterious Mozarabic verses known as kharjas , written in Latin and attached to the ends of longer Hebrew or Arabic poems. In 1137, after Alfonso VII’s return to Toledo from the battle of Aurelia, a Latin chronicle records that Muslims, Jews, and Christians all participated in musical processions and celebrated the Christian victory “each one singing praise to God . . . in his own language.” In the “book of games” compiled by King Alfonso the Learned, the great thirteenth-century king of Castile, a Christian and Muslim knight can be seen playing chess—an Arab import that was hugely popular with the Christian upper classes—with their lances outside the tent.
    Though Alfonso took part in the conquest of Seville by his father, Ferdinand, in 1248, he insisted that the inscriptions on Ferdinand’s tomb should be written in Latin, Arabic, Castilian, and Hebrew. The “emperor of culture” also commissioned a team of researchers and scientists to translate some of the major works of Iberian Islam into Castilian. Jews, Muslims, and Christians all contributed to the extraordinary intellectual adventure of the Toledo “translation school” in a community of scholars for whom the quest for knowledge transcended religious divisions. For centuries, Iberia constituted the frontier zone between Islam and Christendom, and as in many frontier regions, physical proximity and familiarity allowed for cultural transmissions, influences, and exchanges that were not always possible elsewhere.
    This cross-fertilization can be found in the fusion of Mozarab and Mudejar architectural styles and motifs, in the fashion for Moorish silks and kaftans among the Castilian nobility, in the Arabic recipes compiled for the kings of Valencia, and in the popularity of Moorish music in Christian society. Christian rulers often employed Moorish musicians and dancers to entertain their courts, and Muslim musicians were also invited to Christian churches to enliven long Easter vigils, to the horror of the ecclesiastical authorities. The Moorish and Christian musicians joyously playing music together in the beautiful