Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton

while interfaith marriage was an important mechanism with which to encourage assimilation between Muslims and Christians in the years immediately following the conquest, it also had the potential to cause friction between the two. That, at least, is what a later account of the rebellion against Muslim authority that was hatched in the northernmost region of Asturias by the Christian warlord Pelayo (Pelagius) would have us believe. As so often, the sources for these events are both sparse and problematic in equal measure.³³ According to the A Sebastianum version of the late ninth-century Christian text known to historians as the Chronicle of Alfonso III, Pelayo was a Visigothic notable of royal descent; the Roda version of the same text, which differs in emphasis and a number of details, has him as the swordbearer of kings Wittiza and Roderic.³⁴ The latter version relates that in the early stages of the Muslim conquest Islamic authority over Asturias was wielded by one of Tāriq b. Ziyād’s supporters, a Berber called Munnuza, whose center of power was the coastal settlement of Gijón.³⁵ During his governorship of the region:

      A certain Pelayo, who was the swordbearer of kings Wittiza and Roderic, oppressed by the authority of the Ishmaelites, had come to Asturias with his sister. On account of his sister, the aforementioned Munnuza despatched Pelayo to Córdoba as his envoy; but before he returned, Munnuza married his sister through some ruse. When Pelayo returned he by no means approved of it and since he had already been thinking about the salvation of the Church, he hastened to bring this about with all of his courage. Then the evil Tāriq sent soldiers to Munnuza, who were to arrest Pelayo and lead him back to Córdoba, bound in chains.³⁶

      This was supposedly the spark that detonated a Christian revolt in Asturias. The chronicle goes on to narrate Pelayo’s flight from the Muslims, his election as dux (lord) of the region, and his subsequent victory at Covadonga at the foot of the Picos de Europa Mountains in 718, or possibly 722, depending on which version of events we follow. “From then on,” the late ninth-century Chronicle of Albelda declared, “freedom was restored to the Christian people … and by divine providence the kingdom of Asturias was born.”³⁷ How much of this we can take at face value is a moot point. It may be the case that claims that Pelayo enjoyed connections to the Visigothic royal house, either by blood or by service, were so much wishful thinking by later chroniclers keen to portray the Asturian realm as the legitimate successor to the Visigothic kingdom. Alternatively, it is plausible that Pelayo—like Theodemir before him—was a local noble, who had decided to come to terms with the invaders in the wake of the collapse of the Visigothic monarchy, only to repudiate those terms at a later date.³⁸ The motivation ascribed to Pelayo’s revolt, namely his desire to avenge the dishonor brought about by his sister’s marriage to Munnuza, might be construed simply as an easily understandable justification for his revolt after the event, in an age when the defense of family honor was considered essential. That said, it is by no means impossible that Pelayo’s inital pact of surrender with the Muslims had been sealed by a marriage alliance between his sister and Munnuza, just as Theodemir’s presumed son, Athanagild, may have engineered the marriage of his sister to Khaṭṭāb at the time of his agreement with the Syrians, when they settled in the southeast of the Peninsula.

      To sum up thus far, the various strands of evidence that have survived—scattered, exiguous, and problematic though they may be—all seem to point in the same direction. They suggest that interfaith marriage between Muslim men and Christian women became a significant tool in the process of pacification and colonization that took place in the period immediately following the Islamic conquest and in the aftermath of the arrival of the Syrian junds in 742. Furthermore, even though only a handful of examples have come down to us, recorded by later historians because the élite protagonists were deemed particularly “newsworthy,” it is safe to assume that marriage alliances of this sort occurred with frequency at other levels of society too. So commonplace indeed had the practice evidently become by the end of the eighth century, that in a letter he composed sometime between 781 and 785 Pope Hadrian I expressed dismay that so many daughters of Catholic parents in the Peninsula had been given in marriage to Muslims or Jews.³⁹ Hadrian’s letter was a response to missives dispatched to him by the Frankish clergyman Egila, who had been consecrated bishop by Archbishop Wilcharius of Sens c.780 and sent to the Peninsula to preach.⁴⁰ Such anxieties were voiced anew at an ecclesiastical council held in Córdoba in 839, when the assembled Christian clerics denounced “the impious marriage of various faithful with the infidel, sowing crimes among our morals.”⁴¹ It is worth noting in passing that mixed marriages between Muslims and Jews are far less well documented.⁴²

      Other sources reinforce the impression that interfaith marriage between Muslims and Christians had become relatively frequent at lower levels of society by the middle of the ninth century. The evidence in question is provided by a clutch of Latin texts that were produced in response to the Christian “martyrdom movement” that briefly convulsed Córdoba during the 850s. The movement, which erupted in 851, appears to have been a response to the quickening pace of conversion of Andalusi Christians to Islam by the middle of the ninth century and the ongoing Arabicization of society that threatened to obliterate the traditional Latin literary heritage of the Christian Church in the Peninsula, or so some thought.⁴³ According to the accounts of the movement penned by the priest Eulogius of Córdoba and his disciple Paul Albar, at least forty-eight Christians deliberately courted “martyrdom” at the hands of the Islamic authorities by publicly denouncing Islam or by encouraging muwallads (converts to Islam) to apostatize, both of which actions carried the capital penalty under Islamic law.⁴⁴

      How much credence should be attached to these accounts is difficult to assess. The texts present—yet again!—numerous methodological problems for the historian, not least because several of the cases reported by the movement’s leading light, Eulogius, appear to have been literary inventions “lifted” from various non-Hispanic martyrologies.⁴⁵ Be that as it may, it is striking that at least twelve of those Christians who were executed by command of the Umayyad authorities during this period were said to have come from religiously mixed families.⁴⁶ Not only that, the accounts also suggest that in some cases—in clear contravention of Islamic law—the children born to those couples had not been raised as Muslims. It was for this reason that the Islamic authorities regarded such voluntary martyrs as apostates.⁴⁷ Jessica Coope has gone so far as to declare that “hatred between relatives in mixed families was one of the engines that powered the martyrs’ movement.”⁴⁸ It is apparent that Eulogius viewed such sexual mixing as a root cause of the troubles then assailing the embattled Christian community in al-Andalus. He condemned one such mixed marriage as a “wolfish union”; elsewhere he continued the vulpine motif when he compared another interfaith marriage alliance to a wolf invading his flock.⁴⁹ In a similar vein, Paul Albar, referring to the martyr Leocritia’s mixed background, declared vituperatively that she was “begotten of Gentile dregs and born from wolf’s flesh.”⁵⁰ Be that as it may, Eulogius and Paul Albar did not subject the women who had married Muslims to direct criticism, doubtless conscious that it was thanks to their influence that their children had embraced Christianity and later become martyrs.⁵¹

      It seems unlikely that these mixed marriages were mere literary devices conjured up by Eulogius or Paul Albar. This impression is confirmed by the fatwa, or legal ruling, attributed to the jurisprudent Abū Ibrāhīm Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm of Córdoba (d. 965), which refers to another such marriage alliance that came to the attention of the authorities. In this case, a woman had been born to a Muslim father and a Christian mother, who had brought her up as Christian after his death. The woman had subsequently married a Christian with whom she had a child. Questioned by the judge, she claimed that her father had converted to Islam while serving elsewhere in the mercenary guard. The judge pronounced that in order that she should not be punished as an apostate, she would need to provide reliable testimony that her father’s conversion had indeed occurred away from the family home.⁵²

      In short, the evidence outlined thus far suggests that intermarriage between Muslim men and Christian women had become relatively commonplace at lower levels of society by the mid-ninth century, that in some cases—in clear contravention of Islamic law—the children born to those couples were not raised as Muslims, and that the conversion of some but not all