Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton

echoing Pope Hadrian’s disquiet a few decades previously, considered sexual mixing of this sort sufficiently widespread to warrant explicit condemnation. In modern times the Spanish Arabist Julián Ribera went so far as to claim that the degree of interfaith sexual mixing was so extensive in Iberia during the early medieval period that the proportion of Arab blood running through the veins of the tenth-century Umayyad caliphs of al-Andalus was in fact infinitesimal.⁵⁴ According to this analysis, Andalusi society was ethnically and culturally hybrid to its very core.

      There remains the possibility, however, that among the Muslim élite, at least, inter-faith marriage pacts of the kind outlined above might have been simply a short-term phenomenon born of political and economic expediency: once the Muslim conquest of the Peninsula had been consolidated the practice may have passed into desuetude. Indeed, in his pioneering work on Islamic society in the Peninsula, published in 1976, Pierre Guichard argued forcefully that, far from mixing extensively with the Hispano-Gothic population, the majority of the Arab and Berber families who had undertaken the conquest were so anxious to preserve their “pure” breeding and lineage that they went out of their way to avoid intermarriage with the local population, be they Christians, Jews, or even muwallads.⁵⁵ They did this, Guichard posited, by maintaining “Eastern” patterns of kinship, according to which patrilineal descent and endogamous marriage, that is, within the kin group, remained the norm. His theory seemed to be corroborated, as far as the Arabs were concerned, at least, by writers such as the Andalusi polymath Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064), whose Kitāb Jamharat ansāb al-‘Arab, a genealogical account of the Arab tribes who had settled in al-Andalus after the Islamic conquest, consistently privileged the agnatic, that is to say, the male lineages of these families over the female ones.⁵⁶ It is worth noting in passing that Ibn Ḥazm also provided a number of examples of what he considered “unequal marriages” between Arab men and women of lesser social rank in his Naqṭ al-‘arūs. The names of those who “married down” in this way included the vizier to the emir Muḥammad I (852–86), Tammām b. ‘Amir al-Thaqafī, who reportedly married a daughter of the Christian Khalaf b. Rūmān.⁵⁷

      The alleged reluctance of some Muslims to intermarry with other faiths may have been reinforced by fears—articulated most powerfully by followers of the Maliki school of religious jurisprudence—of “corruption” by Christians or Jews, because it was believed that by her customs and morals the wife and mother might ultimately undermine the faith of her offspring, particularly if she lived within what was termed the dār al-ḥarb (the “Abode of War”), that is, the territories not under Islamic rule.⁵⁸ In his Kitāb al-bida‘, or “The Treatise Against Innovations,” Muḥammad ibn Waḍḍaḥ (d. 900) had sternly warned his coreligionists: “It is said that temptations will come with the companions of the Book, and they will be because of them.”⁵⁹ Meanwhile, the religious authorities zealously patrolled the boundaries between the faiths with regard to such matters as ritual purity, food taboos, festival celebrations, or burials, in order to define and strengthen the legal and social limits between Muslims and dhimmīs.⁶⁰ This climate of opinion helps to explain why in their accounts of the Muslim conquest Maliki scholars such as Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam chose to give such prominent coverage to the doomed marriage of ‘Abd al-Azīz b. Mūsā and his Christian wife, and even to echo the claim that ‘Abd al-Azīz b. Mūsā had converted to Christianity. Such accounts stood not merely as a stark warning of the danger that such overmighty subjects posed to the constituted authority in the Islamic world, but also as a reminder to fellow Muslims of the serious consequences that marriage outside the Islamic umma, or community, might bring in its wake.⁶¹

      However, a warning note should be sounded. In recent years several elements of the Guichard thesis have been called into question. It has been pointed out, for example, that the French scholar’s research was based upon an extremely small sample of texts, drawn from only a handful of Andalusi writers active during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and that he did not take into account the ideological concerns that underpinned those writings.⁶² The endogamous “Eastern” tribal structures that Guichard claimed to see across the ages may have been no more than a reflection of the political discourse of the age, which sought to emphasize the “Arabness” of the leading Peninsular families, not least that of the Umayyad caliphs of al-Andalus. The reality was that not only were many leading families ethnically hybrid, but also that most of the genealogies that were compiled during the tenth and eleventh centuries were replete with errors and imaginative inventions. As Ann Christys has observed, “many of the genealogies were more illustrious in their reconstructions than in actuality and the subject of ethnicity in al-Andalus became hopelessly confused.”⁶³ A case in point was the Banū Khaṭṭāb family of Murcia mentioned earlier, which while proudly trumpeting its Arab ancestry did not preserve any genealogical memory of its maternal Visigothic forebears.⁶⁴ In short, the ethnic “purity” that Guichard claimed to detect among the leading Muslim kin groups of al-Andalus may be no more than a mirage.⁶⁵

      Marriage Across Frontiers

      However, even if it were true that many Muslims at the level of the political and social élite later chose to eschew marriage with dhimmī, it is striking that a number of influential families went out of their way to seek brides who were not Muslims, and that in some cases they did so by arranging marriage alliances with the emerging Christian-ruled realms that lay to the north of the Peninsula, or even further afield.⁶⁶ The earliest recorded example of an interfaith marriage pact of this sort was that arranged by the Berber warlord known as Munnuza, the leading military figure in the northeast of the Peninsula, who rebelled against the Umayyad governor ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Ghāfiqī in around 731, reportedly in protest at the treatment of his countrymen by Islamic administrators in Libya.⁶⁷ The Chronicle of 754 reports that after Munnuza had raised the flag of rebellion, he sought to bolster his position in the northeast by marrying the daughter of the Frankish Duke Eudo of Aquitaine. The latter, having already suffered several attacks by Muslim forces, presumably saw the marriage as a means to forestall further aggression. Yet little good did the alliance do either of them. Munnuza was shortly tracked down by the emir’s forces to Cerdanya in the eastern Pyrenees, where he was besieged and then forced to flee to the mountains, finally throwing himself to his death from a high crag. His unfortunate bride—who is referred to in later sources by the name of Lampégie—was subsequently sent to the caliph’s court in Damascus. The Christian chronicler expressed unbridled satisfaction at Munnuza’s demise, which he saw as retribution for having “made himself drunk on the blood of Christians,” and in particular for his complicity in the murder of the local bishop of Urgel. However, he passed no judgment on Munnuza’s decision to take for himself a Christian bride.⁶⁸

      Even more striking was the case of the Banū Qasī family, which dominated the area of the Upper Ebro valley from at least the late eighth century to the early tenth.⁶⁹ The Banū Qasī were muwallads, supposedly descended from a Visigothic count named Casius, who is said to have reached an accommodation with the Muslim authorities at the time of the eighth-century conquest, made his way to Damascus to pledge allegiance to the Umayyad caliph, al-Walīd I, and subsequently converted to Islam.⁷⁰ How much credence should be accorded to this account of the family’s origins is debatable. Roger Collins has speculated that it may belong to “the spurious antiquarianism that became fashionable in the later Umayyad period,” and these doubts have been echoed more recently by Jesús Lorenzo Jiménez and Maribel Fierro.⁷¹ Even so, it is far from inconceivable that a Visigothic lord in the Upper Ebro might have brokered a pact with the Muslim invaders—just as Theodemir of Murcia is known to have done in 713—and that he or his successors later converted to Islam. The fact that some members of the Banū Qasī are later said to have renounced Islam and embraced Christianity serves to reinforce the impression that this was a muwallad family whose Islamic ties remained in some cases fragile.⁷²

      Whether or not the power of the Banū Qasī in the Ebro region predated the Muslim conquest, the family only comes sharply into focus in 788, when one member of the clan, Mūsā b. Fortun, briefly seized Zaragoza. From their power base at Tudela, the family came to enjoy a substantial degree of autonomy over the neighboring districts of Zaragoza and Huesca, and even—toward