ABSTRACT
The issue of mixed unions plays an important part in the grand narrative told by many historians of medieval Spain about the integration and transculturation of the various ethnic and religious groups that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula after the Muslim invasion. One version claims that the Arab and Berber conquerors came without their families, intermarried with indigenous women or took them as concubines, and were absorbed both biologically and culturally by the people they conquered. This view, which was defended, for instance, by Simonet and Albornoz, is brilliantly illustrated in the following citation: “Après plusieurs générations le sang des chrétiennes et des néo-musulmanes avait assimilé et intégré les quelques apports orientaux, et la ‘race’ espagnole brillait d’un éclat à peine entaché. L’Espagne reste l’Espagne …” (Guichard, 1977, 126). 1 The examples underpinning such ideas were that most of the Umayyad caliphs who ruled al-Andalus had slaves of Galician or French origin as mothers. This fact is mentioned in several medieval sources such as Una descripción anónima de al-Andalus which mentions, among others, Muzayna, a Christian umm al-walad to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh, as well as the well-known Subḥ, mother of Hishām al-Muʾayyad (Una descripción anónima, 1983, 169, 184; see also Manuela Marín, 2000, 129). According to the argument of assimilation of the conquerors into the indigenous population, not only the ruling family took Christian women as their concubines—so did the lower strata of society. A more nuanced version, which puts emphasis on the mutual influence that people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds exercised on each other, tries to explain the particular Andalusi people and culture in the following terms:
Ils [les conquérants arabes] n’avaient pu évidemment s’astreindre à une endogamie qui eût, dans une certaine mesure, préservé la pureté de leur sang arabe, et dû, dès le début, prendre des femmes du pays pour épouses ou pour concubines. De telle sorte qu’au Xe siècle, on pouvait considérer que les Arabes qui se targuaient d’une origine kaisite ou yéménite légitime–avec ou sans le biais de walaʾ, qui devait fausser tant de généalogies en attribuant à des clients d’Arabes d’origine berbère ou 93espagnole une ascendance arabe imaginaire—avaient dans leur veines infiniment plus de sang européen ou africain, ou même de sang noir, que de sang asiatique
(Lévi-Provençal, 1967, 174)