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illustrated song cycle The Canticles of Holy Mary of Alfonso the Learned testify to a blurring of cultural boundaries that often shocked medieval Christian travelers to Spain. In 1466, León of Rosmithal, the Baron of Bohemia, described a visit to a Castilian count at Burgos where he and his entourage were entertained by “beautiful damsels and ladies richly adorned in the Moorish fashion, who in their whole appearance and in their eating and drinking followed that fashion. Some of them danced very lovely dances in the Moorish style, and all were dark, with black eyes.” The Czech traveler found a similar Moorish influence at the Castilian court itself, whose king Enrique IV he reported indignantly “eats and drinks and is clothed in the heathen manner and is an enemy of Christians.” 15
    Enrique was criticized for his pro-Moorish sentiments by Spanish chroniclers, such as Alonso de Palencia, who called him an “enemy of the faith, passionate toward the Moors.” But the blurring of the cultural boundaries between Moorish and Christian Spain that bewildered foreign visitors did not necessarily mean that conflict and animosity were absent. Castilian nobles who liked Moorish silk or commissioned Moorish musicians to entertain them were perfectly able to fight the Muslim enemy on behalf of the faith. But if Muslims, Christians, and Jews regarded each other with hostility, incomprehension, and even revulsion, they were also obliged for long periods to live, work, and worship alongside each other and to accept each other’s presence as a permanent fact of Iberian life. At certain times, they were able to interact with each other in ways that may still have positive lessons for the present. And if such coexistence fell short of the premodern arcadia of religious and cultural pluralism that some historians have imagined, it was considerably more tolerant than the new order that followed its final collapse.

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    The Victors
     
    León of Rosmithal’s confusion and disgust at the “heathen” influences on the Castilian court reflected a wider suspicion among European Christians of the complicated and ambiguous relationships established between Muslims and Christians in Iberia. In a medieval world that was increasingly obsessed with establishing clear lines of demarcation between faiths and absolute conformity within the Church itself, the proximity of Christians and Saracens in Spain and the blurring of the external boundaries between culture and religion that sometimes resulted from it in terms of dress, language, and behavior was not viewed favorably. These relationships were to some extent made possible by Spain’s geographical and political isolation from the rest of Europe. Even at the height of Muslim power, Spanish Catholicism always maintained its spiritual connections to the Roman Church, but these ties were often frayed, and Spanish churchmen were obliged by their situation to make compromises that were unimaginable elsewhere.
    Even with the advent of the Reconquista, when the Church began to recover its political power and its dominant position in the peninsula, the clergy had to take into account an Iberian reality whose requirements were not necessarily in accordance with what was taking place beyond Spain’s borders. Crusading popes might call on Christians to drive the Saracens from the Holy Land, but it was not always possible to carry out a similar policy in Spain itself, where Muslims were often essential to the local economy within Christian kingdoms, and Christians who lived outside them were at risk of similar treatment. The Christian rulers of Spain always presented the Reconquista as a sacred enterprise on behalf of Christendom as a whole, but there was often a gap between rhetoric and practice. When James the Conqueror completed the Christian conquest of Valencia and Murcia, he was urged by the pope and by some of his own bishops to “exterminate the Saracens” in his newly acquired territories.