ABSTRACT
The history of Hispania in the Middle Ages is encapsulated in a series of maps showing the movement of the frontier between Christendom and Islam which give the impression of an inexorable process of Christian Reconquest of the peninsula. Although modern historians are increasingly reluctant to commit themselves to lines drawn on maps, the idea persists that the conquest of 711 created an absolute division between the Christian and Islamic realms. On one side, according to this stereotype, was al-Andalus, her glories epitomised by the great mosque in Cordoba, where the Arabic language and Islam extinguished the faith and cultural inheritance of the indigenous Christians. In the beleaguered north, the rulers of the tiny Asturian kingdom clung to the idea that they were the heirs of the Visigoths and would eventually expel the ‘Saracens’, as they usually called them, from the peninsula (see Map 2.1). In an earlier paper I explored modern historiography of the Christian-Muslim frontier in Hispania in the early medieval period and developed some objections to it.1 The separation of medieval Hispanists into two camps – the Arabists and those studying the Latin sources – has fortified the notion that the Christian-Muslim frontier, both political and religious, is the key to this period, although some scholars, in particular Manzano,2 have attempted to surmount this barrier. My intention in this chapter is to reconsider the story of Mahmud ibn ‘Abd al-Jabbar of Mérida (d. c. 845) one of a small handful of individuals whose crossing of this frontier was recorded. Mahmud is particularly unusual in that both Latin and Arabic historians told stories about him. Analysis of their different versions of
1 A. Christys, ‘Christian-Muslim frontiers in early medieval Spain’, Bulletin of International Medieval Research, 5 (1999), 1-19.
