The Medieval Review
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TMR ID:
05.09.13
Reviewed:
The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of
Catalonia and Aragon, 1050-1300
Series: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought:
Fourth Series, vol. 59
Catlos, Brian A.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004
Review Author:
Esther Pascua, University of St.
Andrews, epe@st-andrews.ac.uk
Publication Info:
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan University Library, Scholarly
Publishing Office
The Medieval Review
2005
URL:
http://name.umdl.umich.edu/baj9928.0509.013
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Brian Catlos is a well-known medievalist with seminal articles from 1996 on
the economy to the culture of 13th-century Mudejars. The object of this
review is his first book based on his doctoral dissertation completed in
Toronto in the year 2000 with the same title. This is an ambitious, mature and
comprehensive work on a topic that he knows well. Undergraduate and
postgraduate students along with specialists can learn a great deal from a
book that put forward a challenging interpretation in a clear and concise style.
The book is clever in structure. There are three parts. The first one begins
with the final stage of independent Muslim rule in the Ebro valley region in
the 11th century (pp. 1-71). The second part traces the transformation of
Islamic society and economy into Mudejar society under Christian
domination in the 12th and 13th centuries (pp. 123-323). Part three presents
six specific case studies illustrating particular aspects (pp. 327-389). An easy
text to read, every part and chapter has an introduction with the topics
presented and conclusions in line with the argument. Many issues played in
Catlos' mind when he wrote this book. In his own words, he presents a
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"revisionary" study since he aims to dive into the subtleties of the Mudejar
society of 13th century Aragon situating it within the larger context of the
Crown. He rejects the traditional approach that, in his view, casts a romantic,
static and reified view on the Mudejars as a homogeneous, acculturated,
poor, isolated and discriminated group that passively suffered Christian
subjugation. For Catlos, the Mudejars were a minority made of different
socio-economic strata with contrasting interests and positions. Religion was
just one of the multiple factors that formed their identity and they took an
active part in shaping their institutions and experience (pp. 4-8). Catlos
denies the existence of two well-defined and separated communities and
argues that they had more in common than the classical binomial of the
Victors and the Vanquished. He spares no efforts to explain and illustrate his
argument with great success and internal coherence. As part of this program,
the author makes the unusual effort for a medievalist to integrate social,
cultural and economic theory to account for the complexity of inter-religious
relations in his period.
The book grows in complexity--from very basic first summaries of
secondary literature that might put off some specialists in the topic to difficult
and thorough conclusions at the end. The introduction of the book can be
disappointing to the specialist or to the medievalist. The author shows from
the very beginning a great ability to address eagerly all the main debates, but
the list of issues presented still reflects the weight of the Doctoral Thesis and
the academy: general historical introduction to medieval Spain, geography of
the Ebro basin, historiography, sources, methodology, and main events of the
period.
The first part of the book suffers at some points from the same problem, but
has also brilliant insights. Part One presents the Muslim domination of the
Ebro (700-1200) in two chapters organized by topics and it is based entirely
on secondary historical and archaeological literature. These topics are:
immigration, conquest, settlement, conversion, agriculture, trade, language,
family and society, religion, ethnicity, administration, and power. They all are
highly controversial and have involved big names in long debates. However,
the author shows the capacity to summarize the positions fairly and to present
his own stand. Although this part is not the core of the book, the author
brings together the Anglo-American and the Spanish historiography, two
different universes not always connected. Finally, this part proves the need
and excellent result of integrating pre- and post-Christian periods to
understand historical processes in full. Catlos touches upon the keys to
understand the transition from the Caliphate to the Taifa period in the upper
frontier and the aspects that would remain during Christian domination. Also
in this part, one of the interpretative lines of the book appears (p. 55): for
Catlos, continuity rather than cataclysm is the key concept to interpret the
processes that took place in the Ebro basin during the 12 and 13th centuries.
The Christian conquest was a time of both, contact and war: a time of
reorganization and settlement towards the emergence of a multi-ethnic society
but equally a time of pacts, institutional transfers and alliances (pp. 118-119).
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In the second part of the book, the centre of Catlos' research and mostly
based on archival work, this topic reaches momentum. The author's main
purpose is to show how the multiple interactions between the Muslim
minority and the dominant Christian culture lead to integration rather than
exclusion and to the emergence of a community strongly diversified in terms
of interests, identities, and strategies. In order to appreciate this, he analyses
several aspects organized in four chapters. Chapter Three is on financial and
judicial administration of the Mudejar society, the aspect better studied from
the documents produced by the Christians and a central topic of current
historiography. Chapter Four is on their economic role. Chapter Five is on
the upper oligarchy of the Mudejars, those who monopolized the offices, and
on the slaves, the two sectors more closely connected with the Christians.
Finally, chapter Six treats Mudejar ethnicity and social interactions described
around the topics with denser evidence such as defense, sexual relations,
communal violence and crime. There are thoughtful insights in these chapters
and superb examples and cases. For instance, the aljama is described as a
corporate manifestation of the Muslim community and identity and as an
active response of the Muslims to the attempts by Christians to integrate two
distinct administrative schemes. This turns out to be relevant for
understanding later developments in the increasing interference of Christians
in the aljama offices, in the nature of its power, systems of representation
and the use of the franquitas as a mechanism of Mudejar divisiveness (pp.
136-137). Catlos tends to minimize the boundaries between Christian and
Muslim communities, sometimes to a critical point, and chooses to talk of
adaptation to a Christian system (p. 154) rather than on the violence or
coercion involved in such a process. Catlos finds his inspiration in the
evidence that indicates that Muslim and Christian communities worked
together to resist taxation or in any other situation where they feared an
external threat. He argues that corruption and corrupted officials existed
between Muslims and Christians equally and both faced same type of abuses
(pp. 161, 171, 174). The chapter on the economy is the most demonstrative
of the way he applies his assumptions and of his theoretical background. He
makes thoughtful remarks on the exaricus who he defines as a free peasant
living under similar conditions as Christian tenants (p. 180) and on the strong
continuity in the evolution of land tenure from Arab-Islamic sharik mode into
the Latino-Christian exaricus, in irrigation and animal husbandry, craft and
mercantile activities. The economy for Catlos was a powerful engine of
integration because of the wide range of economic activities carried out by the
Mudejars and because their participation in the Christian market drew
Mudejars into "Occidental" modes of economic interchange. In my view, this
is a clear example of how much the author pushes forward his argument. It
seems to me that none of the two arguments is a proof of integration without
carefully checking the dynamic of such integration in the market. The two last
chapters of the book introduce social analysis of a group that was far from
homogenous. The part on the slaves is a great example of how far Catlos can
go in the knowledge of the reality of a group (he deals with topic such as the
black market, fugitives, owners, manumission, baptizatus). He also reviews
some other aspects of the Mudejars' identity such as language and religion.
Here again he concludes that the upper classes of urban oligarchy and the
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slaves, both contributed to the cross confessional integration, as conduits for
"occidental" influence on Mudejar society. The chapter on defense provides
pertinent nuances to some of the Anglo-American historiography obsessed
with the influence of the crusading ideas in the Spanish Reconquest (p. 282).
However, in his constant zeal to prove his approach in favor of integration,
there are radical interpretations of some revealing anecdotes (see the Costums
of Tortosa, p. 290). Equally, sex, violence, and discrimination put in context
by Catlos all speak of a generalized problem for both societies rather than of
discrimination of a specific ethnic group (p. 314). Contrasting the different
chapters of this second part, it seems that Catlos regards ethnic issues as
prejudices or emotional outpourings and opposes them to economic
background and social conflicts, the "real" factors in order to define social
dynamics and decision-making, but I will come back to this point at the end
of the review.
The third part of the book complements brilliantly the previous one. Now, the
reader faces a microhistorical and prosopographical approach in a series of
six case studies to show the quotidian dynamic of this multi-ethnic medieval
society. In a detailed narrative format, the six cases illustrate the idea that
there were not two rival ethno-social systems and that social and economic
contexts defied ethnic clusters. Case 1 illustrates the confessional identity of
fiscal officers whose ethnic identity passed into a subordinate position in
their decision making process. Case 2 shows how Mudejars abandoned their
responsibility to their community by colluding with Christians when they
were confronted with fiscal pressure. Case 3 reflects Mudejar feuds and the
colonial character of Muslim administration under Christian rule. Case 4
explores the political autonomy of the Muslim aljama and the wise
management of some of its officials. Case 5 presents the opposite: the
concentration of power in particular individuals and families carrying out
minor abuses, dubious financial dealings, and their machinations for the
leadership of the community. Case 6 indicates that the stresses and tensions
within the aljamas were not the mere result of the subordinate status of
Muslims. On the contrary, Mudejar officials acted in response to their own
interests. This third part provides an excellent material for teaching
undergraduates on the "real life" of this community and for giving them a
flavor of historians' archival work.
I would like to conclude with a commentary on what I think is the theoretical
core of the book. Catlos had already discussed the matter of convivencia or
Muslim/Christian interaction in an article written in the year 2001. Its title
speaks volumes of his own stand when he plays with the words co-existence
and convenience ("Christians, Musulmans i Jueus a la Corona dÁrago
medieval: un cas de conveniencia," L'Avenc, p. 263 (2001): pp. 8-16). He
denies that religious-cultural identity was the primary matrix of human
relations in 13th-century Aragon and he makes clear in the book that each
individual participated in a number of communities of different types:
religious, parochial, commercial, familial, social, and municipal (p. 389). The
remark is central to develop conceptual tools to go deeper into the internal
complexity of ethnic and cultural identities. However, to understand the
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contradictions and inconsistencies that he finds in his evidence between
identity and economic interests, Catlos applies social theory, but unconcerned
with cultural studies, he puts together quite an explosive combination. On
one side, his references come from old American Social Theory from
Rothsteins (1972), to R. Levine and D. Campbell (1972), H. Siverts (1969),
J. Stewart (1950) with clear functionalist tones. On the other, he adds later
developments of economic theory produced by neo-institutional economics
and the economy of the firm (Davies, 1994). All throughout the book, and
particularly in the conclusions, the author deals primarily with sentiments,
expectations, feelings, and identities, which at some points become rational
interests, economic calculations, and selfish personal benefits. Catlos lacks a
theory to understand his actors and therefore portrays them as "traitors,"
individuals that "in a given circumstance" have to chose among "one's sense
of belonging and one's self-interest." At this point, "their choices of action
were made rational to excuse their moral compromise." On one side people
define their identities within different spheres of social interaction, on the
other their interests appear clear to them away from their own community and
in terms of their own family and personal benefits. The result is an odd
combination that obliterates the latest sociological studies on collective action
and identity (A. Pizzorno, Ch. Taylor, A. Honneth, L. Moscoso and P.
Sanchez Leon and J. Izquierdo Martin), which would have helped Catlos to
show that identities matter to define the choice, preference, and course of
actions of individuals and groups. These authors depart from the instrumental
and utilitarist principles of microeconomics that have naturalized the
ontological notion of the homo economicus and his cost/benefits calculations.
They put the emphasis on the collective representations shared by a
community and they explain how these representations shape their identity
and hence their parameters to make calculations. This perspective turns out
central in times of transition as those attended by Catlos. In times of
institutional change, communities and groups show different level of
compromise to traditional collective interpretations. Some of them go into a
sort of de-identification with some values as represented by their own
community and a re-identification with others. In other words, some people
enter in others' systems of values, identities or communities leaving their old
one. This is precisely the time and processes that Catlos works with: a
community in deep change where some groups and individuals (elites of the
aljama, slaves?) are becoming others. If there is time to finish with the
simplistic binomial of the Victors and the Vanquished, accompany it with the
end of the dilemma among irrational moral identities versus rational economic
calculations. In the end, there are only identities.
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