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TOLEDO, Spain -- For a half
millennium, give or take, Christianity and Islam battled for Spain. Some
leaders of both sides believed that the only good infidel was a dead
infidel. Others, however, on both sides practiced for long periods of time a
pragmatic tolerance from which we might learn today.
In this fabled city, immortalized by El Greco's famous painting of a thunderstorm and silver icons of Don Quixote, varieties of tolerance survived for centuries -- first under Muslims and then under Castilians after Alfonso VI occupied this city after a bloodless siege. Alfonso might have been a good Chicago politician because he persuaded the Muslims and the Jews to remain in the city and continued a policy if not of politically correct tolerance then at least of pragmatic acceptance of one another. |
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Christians wore Arab
clothes, sponsored a construction style that combined Arab and Roman
elements, and worked on the development of archives of Greek documents with
emphasis on philosophy, the existence of which gave the Catholic
philosophers of the Middle Ages a new source for their reflections. Toledo
became the capital of Spain and the king surrounded himself with wise
advisers, most of whom were Jews. The policy of tolerance continued when San
Fernando captured Seville and integrated the three groups in a similar modus
vivendi. It was not a perfect union by any means. Jews were commonly forced to live in ghettos. New Berber dynasties crossed over from Africa and waged holy wars. Yet, when San Fernando captured Cordova, site of the Caliphate of the west, he did not pursue the practice of replacing the Al Jami mosque with a cathedral. Later, in a strange manifestation of the oddities of the restraint that existed in many times and places for 500 years, the Christians of Cordova built a cathedral inside the mosque. The combination is, to this observer, a terrible mess, but it does demonstrate a desire to keep everyone happy. Peace among diverse groups seems to require the skill to find solutions that everyone can live with, more or less. |
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How this strange ethno-religious coalition might have developed is difficult
to judge. That it existed at all, however, is evidence that the Reconquest
was not a ruthless and fanatical Christian crusade, as the guide books,
written usually by English Protestants, would portray it, save till the end.
San Fernando's descendant, Isabel "The Catholic," brought it to a stunning halt when, after she and her husband conquered Grenada in 1492, she ordered all those who were not Catholic to leave the country. The Moors and Jews who wanted to stay had to become Catholic. In a mass baptism of thousands, priests walked about the cathedral square in Seville and sprinkled them with baptismal water. The Spanish Inquisition was charged with searching out the false converts. Most of the Moors went back to Africa. Most of the Jews tried to live double lives. Some eventually settled in New Mexico and became devout Catholics and still keep some Jewish customs. Isabel's attempt to crush Muslims and Jews in Spain was not only a horrendous violation of human dignity, it was unbearably stupid. It deprived the "new" country of some of its wisest and most productive citizens and ended a great, if far from perfect, experiment in accommodation among the three religions of the book. The lesson of the successes and the final failure of this experiment -- and its sad and terrible consequences -- seems to be never trust your own ideologues and do trust those practical men who try to find ways that people of different traditions can live together..
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