Kenneth Baxter Wolf

Conquerors and chroniclers of early-medieval Spain

Preface Sources and Abbreviations Map Introduction Essays John of Biclaro and the Goths Isidore of Seville and the Goths An Andalusian Chronicler and the Muslims An Asturian Chronicler and the Muslims Texts John of Biclaro, Chronicle Isidore of Seville, History of the Kings of the Goths The Chronicle of 754 The Chronicle of Alfonso III Lists of Rulers Select Bibliography Index

The Poverty of Riches

Our text today reveals a young man very eager to get to Jesus. It is apparent that he had heard of Jesus’ ministry and the promise of eternal life. We will discover that this young man was blessed with all one could desire. He had wealth; he had status and position within society, and he was blessed with youthfulness. Having all of that, he possessed a desire for more. He longed to have the eternal life Jesus offered.

The Earliest Spanish Christian Views of Islam

Twenty-five years ago, in the first of three now well-known lectures, R. W. Southern noted the “extremely slow penetration of Islam as an intellectually identifiable fact in Western minds.” Southern attributed this delay to the distance that separated Latin Christians from the Muslims. In the case of the northern Europeans, this distance was physical. After Poitiers, the military threat posed by Islam receded and assumed its place as only one among many peripheral challenges to the authority of the Carolingians and their successors. For the Christians of Spain, who lived within the boundaries of Islam, the distance was psychological. Out of their fear of cultural absorption, they closed their minds to the new religion and reacted with hostility against it. As a result, according to Southern, the first generations of Latin ecclesiastics who were in a position to assess Islam either did not bother to comprehend it or did so using only the most distorted information available, depending on which side of the Pyrenees they lived on.

Crusade and narrative: Bohemond and the gesta francorum

Historiographical studies of the histories of the First Crusade have focused more on establishing the relationship between the extant texts than on the narrative structures adopted by their authors. In the case of the anonymous Gesta Francorum, the authors decision, first of all, to depict the expedition as a pilgrimage, and second, to cast Bohemond as its protagonist meant that he had to explain away the Norman leaders refusal to respect his oath to Alexius Comnenus as well as his failure to complete the pilgrimage. It may also have led the author to give extra narrative weight to the conquest and defense of Antioch, at the expense of Jerusalem.

Falsifying the Prophet: Muhammad at the Hands of His Earliest Christian Biographers in the West

Arguably there is no better way to appreciate character assassination as practiced by medieval Christians than to consider early Christian biographies of Muhammad. One might think Muhammad would have rivals for this distinction among the Jews and the heretics, the two religious categories aside from Islam that played the biggest role in shaping early Christian identity. But as common as Christian treatises against the Jews were, their prophets were immune from Christian censure due to their perceived indispensability in corroborating Jesus’s identity as the Messiah; Muhammad, whose prophecies postdated the Incarnation, was not afforded the same consideration. And while Christian writers regularly excoriated heresiarchs like Arius and Nestor, the reactions that Muhammad evoked were still more visceral, for, unlike Arius’s innovation, Muhammad’s never went away, and unlike Nestor’s, it was linked to a polity that threatened to swallow Greek and Latin Christendom altogether. These circumstances combined to assure Muhammad the lion’s share of attention from medieval Christian character assassins.

A Review of “The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Conflict”: Grieve, Patricia E., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 312 pp.,

older men and one in his twenties had been disfigured by a severe beating and shot several times, and two of the three had an ear cut. The court inquiry and investigation into the murder of the three unidentified men opens to an investigation of a far more complicated and historically revealing reality: the White Terror, or anti-Jacobin counterrevolution, in a small provincial town, population approximately 7,500. Sutherland’s work examines the prosecution of sixtyseven people, including two women, between 1795 and 1798 for the murder, assault, and robbery of more than forty-five neighbors; what this prosecution reflected about national, regional, and local politics; and how it changed as a result of the revolution. In short, his study tests the longstanding supposition among social historians that “preexisting cultural predispositions or heritages determine action” (xiv). What Sutherland reveals is a complicated net in which Aubagne reacted to the success of Jacobin political leaders in Marseilles, the regional urban center that exerted such economic influence over the rural town of Aubagne. From 1791, the revolutionaries of Marseilles were exporting support for the Jacobins into Nimes, Avignon, and Arles, as well as Aubagne. Resentment built immediately as the new national government co-opted regional powers, imposed new taxes, and ignored individual incidents of violence and murder within the newly reformed courts. Jacobinism in Aubagne dominated everything, and a “secret and particular committee” (123) monitored all. As the public turned on the Jacobins in bloody insurrections in Lyon, elected officials in Marseilles and the regional towns did not need to flee; they simply changed policies, rather than personnel. However, the defeat of Federalism in Marseilles required the correction of its laws and regulations. New laws were enacted that severely punished participation in Federalist institutions. Righting the wrongs imposed on towns and regions by the Jacobin judicial system wrought havoc and mayhem but was promoted as the only tool available. Revenge for the Terror, like revenge against the Old Regime, was swift and bloody. Massacres in Provence “were the result of the progressive loss of confidence in authorities and especially in the ability of the courts to mete out appropriate punishment” (237). Of course, acts of revenge do not explain why bloody violence and murder were generally seen as the appropriate way to right previous wrongs. Sutherland’s interpretation of court documents and biographical information on those accused, giving testimony, or killed makes the case that “public opinion demanded exceptional justice for exceptional crimes,” though few considered vigilantism anything more than the “extreme end of a continuum of judicial options” (255–56). Bands of self-appointed judges took it upon themselves to right wrongs, organized, and self-justified quite differently from crowds and the crowd mentality of revolutionary action. Wrongs righted include economic injustices between landlords, tenant farmers, and peasants and between merchants and consumers in the emerging fair market scheme of economics. The massacres and individual murders at Aubagne in the 1790s were local versions of similar incidents in regional capitals and Paris but at the core were primarily about local grievances and local enemies. Sutherland’s book is an incredibly rich study of the micro and the macro story of cultural practice and human motivation. It is well-documented, providing depth for the scholar through the use of archival sources. It is also very readable for anyone with some background in the general narrative of the French Revolution and the genre of cultural history.

60.00, ISBN 0-8018-9036-5 Publication Date: March 2009

List of Abbreviations. Preface. 1. A Developing Kingdom. The Visigoth Twilight? Visigothic Hispania and its Neighbours. 2. Adjusting to Conquest. Problems of Evidence and Interpretation. Military Occupation and the Restoration of Order. 3. The Tenacity of a Tradition. Christian Chroniclers and Arab Rulers. Toledo and the Spanish Church. 4. The Conquerors Divided. A Peaceful Decade in the Peninsula. Wars with the Franks. Arab versus Berber Arab versus Arab. 5. The Rise of an Adventurer. The Making of a Dynastic Legend. The Umayyad Coup da etat. 6. A Dynasty of Opportunities. Pelagius and the Asturian Revolt. The Kingdoma s Opponents: Muslims and Christians. 7. The Maturing of a Regime. The March to the Ebro. The a Arab Loevigilda . Administration and Control. 8. Some Winners and Some Losers. The Struggle for the Succession. The Return of the Franks. Adoptionism and the Decline of Toledo. Index.