Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton

In the pursuit of greater autonomy, members of the Banū Qasī wove a complex web of diplomatic contacts with neighboring states, most notably with the Basque Arista family of the embryonic Christian kingdom of Pamplona-Navarre, with whom they forged numerous marriage alliances.⁷⁴ For example, we are told by the late tenth-century Christian Roda Codex that in 872 Mūsā b. Mūsā married Assona, daughter of Íñigo Arista, founder of the Pamplonan royal dynasty⁷⁵; meanwhile, the chronicler al-‘Udhrī records that Mūsā b. Mūsā’s son, Muṭarrif b. Mūsā, married Velazquita, a daughter of one Sancho, “lord of Pamplona” (d. 873).⁷⁶ A few years later, in 918, another such marriage pact prompted Furtūn b. Muḥammad to ally himself with King Sancho Garcés I of Pamplona (905–25) against the then Umayyad emir ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III (912–61).⁷⁷

      A similar matrimonial strategy was pursued by another muwallad kin group, the Banū Shabrīṭ and its close relatives the Banū Amrūs, whose center of power lay in the Central Pyrenees around Huesca.⁷⁸ Thus, it is recorded that one of the family members, Muḥammad al-Ṭawīl, married Sancha, daughter of Count Aznar Galíndez II of Aragon.⁷⁹ The porosity of the frontier between Christian and Muslim zones of influence at this time is further demonstrated by the fact that after the death of Muḥammad al-Ṭawīl in 913, his widow Sancha left Huesca and returned to Pamplona, where she married King García Sánchez I (931–70).⁸⁰

      For their part, the Umayyad rulers of al-Andalus may have been keen to emphasize their pure Arab descent along the male line from the family of the Prophet Muḥammad, but they too are known to have sought Christian brides of high rank from across the frontier.⁸¹ Thus, the Roda Codex records that the Umayyad emir ‘Abd Allāh (888–912) married Onneca (Íñiga)—known to Muslim writers as Durr—who was the widow of Aznar Sánchez of the Arista family⁸²; their son Muḥammad, who also later took a Christian slave as his concubine—called Muznah in the Arabic sources—was the father of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, the self-styled caliph of al-Andalus.⁸³ The example of the Umayyads was later followed by the all-powerful ḥājib (chief minister) Muḥammad b. Abī ‘Āmir (d. 1002), better known by his honorific al-Manṣūr, who demanded the hand in marriage of a daughter of Sancho Garcés II of Navarre (970–94) as part of a peace deal brokered with the king, probably in 983.⁸⁴

      Unfortunately, however, our sources have practically nothing to tell us about the circumstances that gave rise to such cross-border marriage alliances. It is probably safe to assume that for the most part freeborn Christian brides were not party to the negotiations that preceded such matrimonial pacts and that their consent was rarely sought, although that did not necessarily mean that all female members of the family were completely excluded from such deliberations.⁸⁵ No marriage contracts survive, more is the pity, nor are we left with even a description of how, in the case of freeborn Christian women, the undoubtedly delicate negotiations that preceded the marriage might have been conducted between the two parties. However, a glimpse of such matters is provided by the brief and idiosyncratic Chronicle of the Kings of León, which was composed by Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo sometime between 1121 and 1132.⁸⁶ In his unremittingly hostile account of the reign of Vermudo II of León (982–99), the bishop makes fleeting reference to the marriage alliance that was subsequently arranged “for the sake of peace” between the king’s daughter, Teresa Vermúdez, and a certain pagan (i.e., Muslim) king of Toledo by her brother Alfonso V (999–1032). According to Pelayo, the princess proved an unwilling participant in the marriage, and when the king mocked her protests and subsequently raped her, he was struck down by a vengeful angel. On his deathbed, the king ordered that Teresa be allowed to return to her Leonese homeland. It was there that she took a nun’s habit and later died in Oviedo, where she was buried in the monastery of San Pelayo.⁸⁷

      We shall return to the ideological significance of this episode in a later chapter. For now, it is the historicity of Pelayo’s account that concerns us.⁸⁸ Documentary sources confirm that there was indeed a Princess Teresa born to Vermudo II and his second wife Elvira García of Castile. She can first be traced in the records on 18 August 1017, when she confirmed a grant made by her mother, Queen Elvira, to the bishop and chapter of Santiago de Compostela; on 17 December of that same year, with her sister Sancha Vermúdez, she engaged in a lawsuit with one Osorio Froilaz over the monastery of Santa Eulalia de Fingoy.⁸⁹ On 1 March 1028, Teresa granted some property of her own in the city of León to the church of Santiago; and on 27 January 1030, again with her sister Sancha, she gave an estate at Serantes to the same see.⁹⁰ These Compostelan documents were later copied into the twelfth-century cartulary known today as Tumbo A, and a painting of the two sisters was added.⁹¹ In both donations Teresa was styled Christi ancilla, which demonstrates that by 1028 she had joined a religious community, in all probability that of San Pelayo de Oviedo, as Bishop Pelayo tells us, which is where she died on Wednesday 25 April 1039, according to her epitaph.⁹² However, no documentary record of Teresa’s supposed marriage to a Muslim king has survived.

      The identity of the “pagan king” to whom Teresa was reportedly betrothed has provoked lively but inconclusive debate among historians. The nineteenth-century Dutch Arabist Reinhardt Dozy ventured that the ruler in question was none other than the redoubtable al-Manṣūr, who was reported by the North African historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) to have married a daughter of Vermudo II in 993.⁹³ Dozy further speculated that it must have been in 1003—the year after the death of al-Manṣūr, when his son and successor as ḥājib, Abd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar, made peace with Alfonso V—that Teresa must have returned to León.⁹⁴ Not all scholars have been convinced, however. Given that Vermudo II had only married his second wife Elvira of Castile in 992, their daughter Teresa could have been only a babe in arms at the time of her supposed betrothal, if indeed she had been born at all.⁹⁵ Emilio Cotarelo and Hilda Grassotti have both argued, rather, that the princess who married al-Manṣūr was the daughter of Sancho Garcés II of Navarre mentioned earlier, whose betrothal to the ḥājib c. 983 was recorded by other sources, and that it was the memory of that marriage agreement that reached Bishop Pelayo at the beginning of the twelfth century and was transformed into legend.⁹⁶

      However, other scenarios suggest themselves. Teresa’s brother, Alfonso V, was but five years old when he succeeded to the throne of León in 999; as a result, power was initially entrusted to a regency council. During this period, the young king faced a number of challenges to his authority, including a series of aristocratic revolts, a wave of attacks on the Galician coastline by Viking marauders, and two major offensives by the forces of ‘Abd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar, in 1002 and 1005 respectively, as a result of which the Christians were forced to seek peace.⁹⁷ Is it not conceivable that it was after the second of these campaigns, by which time Princess Teresa could still have been no more than thirteen years old, that she was betrothed to al-Muẓaffar, only returning to León after his untimely death late in 1008?

      An alternative—and equally intriguing—possibility is that the bridegroom in question was al-Muẓaffar’s brother and successor as ḥājib, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, nicknamed Shanjūl (Sanchuelo). Ibn Idhārī al-Marrākushī relates that shortly after assuming power on his brother’s death on 20 October 1008 ‘Abd al-Raḥmān dispatched a letter to an unnamed “infidel king”’—in all likelihood Alfonso V of León, in the light of subsequent events—“in the same way that his brother had written to him previously.”⁹⁸ This letter is likely to have sought to renew the “pact of submission” with the Leonese that had been agreed at the start of al-Muẓaffar’s term in office as ḥājib six years earlier, and it was probably accompanied by a demand for contingents of Christian troops to supplement the caliphal army, in the same way as Leonese and Castilian forces had been required to assist al-Muẓaffar on his raiding expedition to Catalonia in 1003.⁹⁹ In January 1009, despite rumblings of discontent among some of the Umayyad aristocracy, who were affronted by both his recent nomination as successor to the caliphate and his increasing reliance on the Berber military, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān proclaimed a jihād and led an army of Berber mercenaries and a few volunteers from Córdoba to Toledo, from where he planned to invade the Leonese kingdom. Accompanying