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“Exterminate” did not necessarily mean killing, since the Latin word exterminare also included the notion of expulsion, but the Aragonese king was not able to comply with these demands without losing the population that tilled and harvested the fields and provided essential revenue to the Crown itself.
    The treatment of Jews was often subject to similar constraints. Even when Jews were being subjected to increasing persecution elsewhere in Europe, Christian rulers in Spain continued to extend official protection to their Jewish subjects—with the reluctant approval of the Church. But Iberian tolerance was always more fragile and conditional than it seemed. And as Spain became more closely integrated into the rest of Christendom, its treatment of Jews and Muslims was increasingly susceptible to developments beyond the Pyrenees.
     
    From the eleventh century onward, the Latin Church entered a prolonged period of political and spiritual crisis, in which the fear of internal schism and the loss of papal authority was accompanied by an increasingly ferocious obsession with heresy. The medievalist historian R.I. Moore has described the evolution of Western Christendom in this period into a “persecuting society” in which “deliberate and socially sanctioned violence began to be directed, through established governmental, judicial, and social institutions, against groups of people defined by general characteristics such as race, religion, or way of life: and that membership of such groups in itself came to be regarded as justifying these attacks.” 1
    In 1209, the Papacy unleashed a savage internal crusade against the Albigensian (Catharist) heresy in southern France that bordered on a war of extermination. Following the elimination of the last Cathar strongholds in 1229, a papal Inquisition was established in Toulouse to eliminate its survivors, and its activities spilled over into northern Spain and Catalonia, where some Cathars had fled persecution. The Papacy’s obsession with schism and the internal “defilement” of heresy was matched by a renewed determination to establish clear boundaries between Christians and non-Christians. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council ordered Jews and Muslims throughout Christendom to wear distinguishing clothing in order to eliminate the possibility of “damnable mixing” with them. These regulations were applied in Iberia, though as was often the case, they were not universally enforced or observed.
    Spain was also drawn more closely into the orbit of Latin Christendom through the establishment of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and the emerging cult of Saint James Matamoros (Slayer of Moors) from the eleventh century onward. The pilgrimage route brought increasing numbers of Christians into Spain even as it enhanced the spiritual importance of Spain itself within Christendom. The promotion of the cult of Saint James owed much to the efforts of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in southern France, whose twelfth-century abbot Peter the Venerable authored two influential tracts on the “Saracen heresy” that were specifically intended for a Spanish readership. The powerful Cluniac abbots were fervent advocates of the Crusades, and their close links to the Christian rulers of the Reconquista, as well as their key role in organizing and facilitating the hugely popular Santiago pilgrimage route, provided another conduit through which European hostility toward the Saracens entered Spain.
    The militancy of the Latin Church in the later Middle Ages coincided with a period in which Iberian Christian rulers achieved a series of spectacular conquests over the Moors, and the momentum of the Reconquista appeared unstoppable. Unlike Islam, the Christian treatment of Muslims and Jews was always a pragmatic concession rather than a permanent religious obligation; it was driven primarily by the desire to ensure reciprocal treatment for Christians living in Muslim territory and by the