(985–1064)
In Arab eyes, Santiago was a Christian Mecca.—Jan van Herwaarden1
As the end of the first millennium approached in Europe, a growing sense of paralysis and inertia seemed to seize the Christian West. This malaise did not exclude northern Iberia. During the late 900s, Christian Spain had become a splintered confederacy of competing petty monarchs, despite all authoritative efforts to maintain a unified front against the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba. The old Kingdom of Asturias had been absorbed into the expanding Kingdom of León back in 924, although within the latter, Galicia always maintained its own identity while coastal Portugal was beginning to form its own as well. Taking the reigns of the Leónese kingdom in 985 was one of its least impressive monarchs, Bermudo II (953–999), nicknamed El Gotoso (“The Gouty”), who would continue to rule for the remainder of the century, notwithstanding all the disasters about to unfold within his realm. To the east and south, Castile, Pamplona, Navarre, Aragón, and Catalonia all maintained separate sovereignties. In effect, earlier territorial gains under Alfonso the Great had only produced serious internal divisions, reminiscent of the disunities which had earlier brought down the Visigoth kingdom. After victory at Simancas in 939 (see Chapter 4), Spanish Christian armies, particularly those of the northwest, were perhaps convinced that their appointed protector Santiago Matamoros and designated shrine at Santiago de Compostela would shield them from all external threats. They were soon to receive, however, a lesson in harsh reality, along with the pitfalls of overconfidence.
It was at this precise moment in history that Iberian Islam produced its most brilliant military genius. Muhammad ibn Abi Aamir (938–1002) began life in relative provincial obscurity before arriving Córdoba as a young law student, where his extraordinary abilities were soon recognized and he was hired as an estate manager by the caliph’s family. By age 40 he achieved the official rank of hajib or prime minister, a title he chose to never discard. Like his earlier Frankish counterpart Charles Martel (see Chapter 3), he realized that wielding absolute power did not always require royal blood or regal titles. Then like Julius Caesar of old, the new hajib of Córdoba proceeded to demonstrate that field experience was not a prerequisite for military aptitude. By 981, he had defeated his last Islamic rival for power (his own father in law), and assumed the humble appellation al-Mansur bi-llah (“Victorious by the Grace of God”). Christians knew him simply as Almanzor. Bringing in fresh hordes of Berber mercenaries from North Africa, Almanzor then turned his undivided attention to the defiant free kingdoms of the north. In 985, without warning, his forces sacked Barcelona, a city under Christian rule since the time of Charlemagne. The raid was akin to a calling card that displayed all of Almanzor’s trademark characteristics as a military strategist—audaciousness, speed, and unpredictability. For the next 15 years he waged almost non-stop warfare aimed at dismantling the Reconquista, culminating in the year 1000 with a bloody victory over combined Christian forces at the Battle of Cervera in Castile near Burgos.
Almanzor’s most famous (and notorious) achievement, however, occurred three years earlier in 997 when he accomplished what no Islamic leader had before or since, namely, to raid and pillage Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, along with its venerated shrine of Saint James the Greater. Outraged Asturian annuls of the time record that Christian mercenaries from the south figured among Almanzor’s invaders, strongly suggesting that not all Iberian Christians were as enamored of the Santiago cult, even at this relatively advanced stage in medieval history. Although Santiago de Compostela had been previously occupied in 968–970 by Norman freebooters, this was the first and only instance in which a non–Christian led army had taken the city.2 After yet another brilliant campaign, Almanzor entered a deserted Santiago unopposed on August 10, the Feast Day of Saint Laurence, where his troops proceeded to methodically raise the city to the ground, including the church over the Santiago shrine built by Alfonso the Great a century earlier.3 Then, according to all available sources, something unusual happened. Discovering that the physical grave site of Saint James was being guarded by a lone, elderly and unarmed monk, Almanzor ordered that both the tomb and the monk be spared, even placing guards around the shrine for protection.4
Almanzor was well aware of the importance attached to the Santiago cult (see header quote), and at first glance his extraordinary behavior might seem difficult to believe; yet upon further reflection, appears quite plausible. Islamic military occupations had traditionally been much more lenient than those of their Christian counterparts, which was always a factor in their ability to make massive territorial conquests. Perhaps he deduced that the cult had by then become so powerful in the popular imagination that if the old tomb were to be desecrated, a new and even more miraculous one would simply be concocted; or possibly, he may have been thinking about appropriating the cult for his own purposes. Saint James, it must be recalled, was a pre–Islamic figure, a martyred disciple of a holy figure (Jesus) venerated by Islam as a prophet, though not divine. As such, James and Jesus belonged to the Quranic People of the Book (Jews and Christians). Almanzor did take trouble, however, to confiscate the famed bells of the Santiago church built by Alfonso, bringing these back to Córdoba as trophies, then melting them down for re-consecrated, symbolic use in the Great Mosque.5
At this historical low ebb tide for the Reconquista, several things are noteworthy. The first is that the indomitable Almanzor, despite 15 years of unbroken successes in the field, could not succeed in destroying or subduing the Christian Iberian kingdoms. In effect, by the end of the first millennium these had become too strong to conquer merely by winning battles or pillaging cities. Despite all their divisions, the Christian kingdoms of the 10th century were not like the dysfunctional Visigoth kingdom during the early eighth century (see Chapter 3), nor was the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba the same dominating overlord that it had been two centuries earlier. Christians, despite all their deadly rivalries and internal disputes, were now united in a way that their Visigoth ancestors had never been. Secondly, the climactic Battle of Cervera had proved to be the most costly and unnerving of Almanzor’s victories, dissuading the ever prudent commander of the faithful from further pressing his advantage into hostile territories. Reportedly at Cervera, Christian knights had sworn oaths not to retreat or leave the field under any circumstances, dead or alive, and many proved good on their word. Thirdly and perhaps most important, the previously separatist Christian kingdoms had somehow become closely allied and firmly strengthened through adversity, even as the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba, notwithstanding the repeated victories of Almanzor, became imperceptibly more divided and weaker than ever.6 All in all, it might well be argued that Saint James the Greater was still looking out for the best interests of the Christian cause even in the midst of military defeat and economic desolation.
Almanzor died at age 64, although it is unclear whether the immediate cause of death was the Reconquista or the endless cares and fatigues of his office. In the year 1002, while leading yet another raid into the heart of Castile, his forces were ambushed and defeated near Calatañazor. Vague, contradictory sources all agree that he survived the disaster, retreated, and died soon afterwards, either from wounds or a broken heart or both. His track record as a military leader places him among the most successful in European history; like Hannibal of Carthage, he was not personally beaten in the field until his final campaign, despite waging non-stop warfare for several decades in one of the world’s toughest military theaters. Upon his death, however, the Umayyad Caliphate immediately went into a tailspin. The precedent set by Almanzor of caliphate advisors assuming true power over the caliphs continued, but with no one of his abilities emerging as a successor. Less than 30 years later in 1031, the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba, whose line of authority stretched back four centuries, crumbled into a patchwork of taifas or Arabic city-states stretching across Al-Andalus. Islamic Iberia then found itself in a divided political and military situation similar to the northern Christian kingdoms only half a century before, still generally united against its common enemies but acting independently and with no central authority to enforce alliances.
Given that Islamic Spain remained independent for another four centuries, it appears impressive in hindsight that these city-states managed to hold on for as long as they did. In many respects, the taifas still represented a far more cultured and superior civilization than their northern counterparts with whom they cohabitated the Iberian Peninsula. Moreover, by the second millennium most of these city-states had achieved their own unique blend of Arabic and European cultural influences, giving them a separate identity from both the Christians and their North African counterparts across the straits of Gibraltar. In a similar manner, the Christian kingdoms were beginning to absorb Islamic cultural influences, just as their Mozarabic brethren to the south had done previously. For western civilization this cross-fertilization would prove to be a highly positive development, although both sides would probably have been slow to admit anything of the kind. These perceived advantages, however, would soon be undermined by fresh waves of Islamic fundamentalist invasions arriving from North Africa. Then again, these fanatical jihadists about to land on Iberian soil would be doing most of the fighting to preserve Islam in Spain and Portugal over the next few centuries against the re-energized ambitions of the Christian Reconquista.
As the second millennium began in the Old World, a tragically unaware New World carried about its business, some of which included its own wars and catastrophes, but on a much less epic scale. In modern day southwestern United States, the Ancient Pueblo Peoples by then were engaging in construction activities recognizable in scope to their early European counterparts. In what later became the state of New Mexico, the Taos Pueblo began emerging on its present location, and today claims the distinction of being the longest continuously habited dwelling structure in North America.7 More impressively, within the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico, the densest concentration of pueblo dwellings ever known to exist, including the remains of the Pueblo Bonito or “Great House” were all probably taking shape by this point in time.8 All of these developments were roughly concurrent with the founding and expansion of Santiago de Compostela in Galician Spain, although the latter remains one of the world’s most active sites of religious pilgrimage, while the former is comprised mostly of ruins abandoned by their original inhabitants long before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors during the 16th century. At the dawn of the 11th century, however, the main focus of Iberian Christians was how to most quickly recover all that had been lost, especially now that the Umayyad Caliphate was in its final stage of decline following the death of Almanzor.
As previously noted, the havoc wreaked on northern Iberia by Almanzor seemed to have long-term positive effects for the Reconquista. Because Basque country held relatively firm during the crisis, its influence now began to spread. Not long after the death of Almanzor, the young Sancho III of Pamplona (c.990–1025) came to power while still a teenager. After reaching adulthood and consolidating a firm hold on his own kingdom, Sancho began looking west. In 1027–1029, he scored a diplomatic triumph when the rightful Count of Castile was unexpectedly assassinated by malcontents. Sancho promptly designated his youngest son, Prince Ferdinand (1015–1065) as the new Count of Castile, a convenient way to assume control of Castile since Sancho’s queen (Ferdinand’s mother) was also the sister of the assassinated count.9 By 1034, Sancho had incorporated León into his kingdom as well; northern Spain was once again reunited under a strong ruler. Thanks to this aggressive unification process, and thanks to Sancho’s inherited political ties with neighboring France, east-to-west pilgrimage traffic along the Camino de Santiago rebounded and rapidly expanded to new unprecedented proportions. The popularity of this pilgrimage route grew despite the physical shrine of Santiago having itself been mostly demolished during the Almanzor raid of 997. Upon Sancho’s death in 1035, his son Prince Ferdinand nominally remained Count of Castile while his elder brother García Sánchez III ruled Pamplona, his half-brother Ramiro I ruled Aragón, and his brother-in-law Bermudo III ruled León. This divided arrangement, however, would not last long.
Similar to Almanzor before him, King Ferdinand I El Magno (“The Great”) spent the first phase of his long rise to power by subduing rivals close to home, which often included his own relatives. Between 1037 and 1056 he respectively defeated and killed his brother-in-law and older brother in battles that not only resolved longstanding territorial disputes, but consolidating those rival kingdoms, for all practical purposes, into a single unified entity. By 1056, Ferdinand was styling himself Emperor of Spain, although his over-awed half-brother, Ramiro I of Aragón, had begun addressing him by that title as early as 1036. Then borrowing a page from the Almanzor military playbook, Ferdinand began launching large-scale lightning raids or razzia aimed at disrupting the Islamic taifas. Unlike Almanzor, however, Ferdinand did not have to bring in outside mercenaries. Between 1057 and 1065, Portugal, Zaragoza, Toledo, Seville, and Valencia all bore the brunt his unpredictable and irresistible assaults. During all his wars, Ferdinand was never personally defeated in battle, and voluntarily withdrew from Valencia only when his health began to fail. Predating the First Crusade by several decades (see Chapter 6), these campaigns represented the first prolonged contact between Europeans, more specifically, the Reconquista Christians of northern Iberia, with Muslim civilians (along with their Christian Mozarabic subjects) in Muslim-held southern Iberia. As such, there must have been a significant degree of culture shock, especially for the invading Christians. It was one thing to confront a more advanced civilization within its own habitat; it must have been quite another to find Mozarabic Christians benefiting as subjects living within that more tolerant civilization.
In 1064, as Portuguese Coimbra was being retaken by Ferdinand’s raiding armies to the west, the far northeastern side Iberia witnessed the city of Barbastro in Aragón brutally sacked and its Muslim population mercilessly slaughtered by Christian forces comprised largely of Frankish and Norman mercenaries from the other side of the Pyrenees Mountains. This ugly event was sadly reminiscent of nearby Pamplona’s fate at the hands of Charlemagne’s marauding army in back in 778 (see Chapter 3), as well as presaging the French-led First Crusade that would be unleashed against the Holy Land before the end of the 11th century (see Chapter 7). The Reconquista had now assumed an entirely new level of aggression and bloodlust as Iberian Christians correctly sensed that centralized Islamic resistance no longer stood in their way; as a consequence, there was easy loot was to be had, and lots of it. This was a far cry from more recent previous centuries in which Santiago Matamoros appeared supernaturally to preserve outnumbered, underdog Christian kingdoms against powerful infidel invaders. Now the tables had turned, and Muslim southern Iberia may well have totally collapsed had it not been for the sudden illness and death of Ferdinand in 1065, along with the arrival of fierce Almoravid reinforcements from North Africa shortly thereafter.10
When King Sancho II of Castile and León inherited his father’s impressively expanded realm in 1065, Sancho’s royal standard-bearer was a 25-year-old Castilian knight by the name of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, dubbed El Campeador (“Great Warrior”).11 Later, however, he was to become far more renowned by his Latinized Arabic nickname El Cid (“Master”).12 Díaz had come of age participating in the lightning campaigns of Ferdinand the Great into southern Iberia, during which he appears to have mastered, if not invented, an entirely new style of fighting and recruiting. This style often blended similar (and dissimilar) tactics of Christian and Islamic chivalry into a unified, unorthodox, and highly effective brand of frontier warfare. According to tradition, a good part of his military apprenticeship had been spent in and around the theater of Ferdinand’s Zaragoza invasions. Here, the Cid found himself in the novel position of commanding and fighting alongside local Muslim allies agreeing to be Ferdinand’s vassals, either fearing the formidable reputation of El Magno or preferring him over other invaders, particularly the French or their Spanish French allies.13 Much was learned quickly by everyone involved. As a result, the Cid’s movements would dominate the Iberian Reconquista for the remainder of the 11th century (see Chapter 6). Meanwhile, as Christian domains in southern Iberia expanded, Santiago de Compostela continued to rebound as a pilgrimage destination from the destruction experienced during the terrifying invasion of Almanzor less than a century previous.
Ferdinand’s audacious raids into southern Iberia had other consequences besides intimidation and conquest. The militant cult of Santiago Matamoros now found itself with a more pious competitor, the Virgin Mary, so prevalent with Mozarabic Christians and one never relegated to any secondary tier of veneration.14 While the territorial unifying efforts of Sancho, Ferdinand and their immediate successors during the mid–11th century did much to increase pilgrimage traffic along the Camino de Santiago, Christian southern Iberia, under the relatively tolerant rule of its Muslim overlords, had always clung to its traditional and longstanding customs. One of these, perhaps the greatest, was formal worship of the Madonna and Christ child. Moreover, this direct confrontation of the Santiago cult with its Marian counterpart represented perhaps only the most conspicuous clash of a profound cultural divide between northern and southern Iberia. Religious, political, and social differences had always existed, and still do, for that matter. Most of these regional variances are well beyond the scope of this study; however, a sampling may be gleaned merely by comparing longstanding traditions of depicting the Virgin in religious artwork. Their contrasting tone and emphases with those emerging simultaneously from the north for Santiago Matamoros are often notable. For example, because southern Iberian society tended to be more multicultural, its artwork also frequently displayed more diverse influences in terms of race, religion, and style.15 It is also well worth recalling that Saint James the Greater had his own close Marian associations, both as the possible nephew of the Virgin (according to some), and for having been, based on another very old tradition, the first Christian to experience a Marian vision during his own lifetime (as well as hers), occurring conveniently enough, near the southern Iberian city of Zaragoza (see Chapter 2).
Although earliest surviving artwork from Iberia was mostly created during the pre–Renaissance and Gothic periods, the aforementioned tendency in southern Spain to de-emphasize the Santiago tradition appears to have been noticeably manifest by that time period. Though dating several hundred years after the milieu of Ferdinand the Great, an excellent example of this sensibility can be found in the distinctive work of Pere Serra, a Catalan painter active during the latter half of the 14th century. Much like his Italian contemporary Altichiero da Zevio (see Chapter 4), Pere Serra’s striking religious portrayals anticipated the early Renaissance with their sophistication, attention to detail, and expressive intimacy. Virtually nothing is known of Serra’s life, except that he came from a family of artists and specialized in decorative altarpieces. By this point in the history of the Reconquista, all of Catalonia and surrounding environs firmly belonged to Christian Spain, although during the reign of Ferdinand, neighboring Zaragoza and Valencia were active theaters of conflict while Barcelona itself had within recent memory been sacked by Almanzor’s mercenaries. Serra also painted (again, like Altichiero) during an era in which most of Europe was still recovering from the ravages of the Black Death, as well as reeling from schismatic divisions within the Roman Catholic Church (see Chapter 9). Unlike Altichiero, however, Serra turned to a different rallying point for Christendom, namely, the Virgin Mary. This was particularly appropriate in Catalonia where non-stop invasions and upheavals had been unpleasant features of everyday life since the ancient Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage.
During the mid–1380s Serra produced one of his most impressive works, an altarpiece for the Tortosa Cathedral, located approximately midway between the cities of Barcelona, Zaragoza, and Valencia, at the mouth of the famed Ebro River.16 Serra’s Lady of the Angels altarpiece, complete with flanking panels of eight saints and apostles (including Saint James the Greater) are today seen in the Museu Nacional d’Arte de Catalunya of Barcelona. The centerpiece and focal point of attention are a beautiful Virgin and Child surrounded by six musician angels, predominated by peaceful dove imagery—the Christ Child holds a symbolic dove—as opposed to the grisly conquistador-like Matamoros or violent sacrifices of Christian martyrdom. The Catalonians were a people deeply appreciating the blessings of peace, having themselves previously known little else but war and upheaval. In a separate panel to the right of the Virgin are SS. John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, James the Lesser, and Paul; in another panel to the left, SS. Peter, Claire, James the Greater, and John the Evangelist. James the Greater is portrayed second from the left next to his brother John, as a humble pilgrim with staff, codex, hat, and cockle shell badge, one of many saints paying homage to the Virgin. Thus James assumes a much more modest position within a much bigger religious hierarchy, one including James the Lesser, as if to make a special point that there were two apostles bearing that name. Interestingly, however, James the Greater is the only figure on all three panels depicted as glancing directly at the viewer. All other reverent eye contacts in the holy assembly are on the Madonna, the Christ Child, Heaven above, or meekly to the ground below. This is not the James of Santiago Matamoros or Son of Thunder courageously dying for his faith in the face of persecution; rather, he seems to be personally inviting everyone in the congregation to come and join him on a great religious pilgrimage, presumably to his own shrine on the opposite side of the Iberian Peninsula in faraway Santiago de Compostela.
With the passing of Ferdinand the Great in 1065, European history seemed to enter yet another new phase of shifting allegiances and power realignments. In 1066, Duke William of Normandy decisively conquered Saxon England, personally riding into the Battle of Hastings on a Spanish steed given to him by a knight making a previous pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.17 In doing so it appears that William the Conqueror had, figuratively speaking, covered all bases for his bold endeavor across the English Channel. Meanwhile in Iberia, Ferdinand’s tremendous reversal of fortunes in favor of the Christian Reconquista had caused considerable political instability and unrest within the Islamic city-states to the south. That same year (1066), in the city of Granada, Islam’s greatest Iberian stronghold for another four centuries to come, a spontaneous massacre of its most prominent Jewish citizens was carried out by Islamic fundamentalists under the helpless or complicit watch of Muslim authorities. For over three centuries previous, Iberian Jews had been close allies of the Umayyad regime and its taifa satellites. Now all of that seemed to be changing, or at least far less enthusiastically embraced as a convenient political alliance between local rulers and a Jewish minority once severely oppressed by its former overlords.18 Consequently, Jewish influence within Iberian Muslim courts, one so definitive since the time of Abd-ar Rahman III of Córdoba (see Chapter 4), now began to perceptibly wane. The shift represented a startling contrast with the beginning of the 11th century, when Almanzor terrorized all of Iberia with both Christian and Jewish vassals in his enthusiastic train of followers. Within the mere span of a generation, the tables had truly turned. The next hundred years would witness a significant consolidation of Reconquista Iberian power, with a major assist from the French, including a French-led military push into the very heart of the Middle East.