Captives and their Saviors in the Medieval
Crown of Aragon, by Jarbel Rodríguez
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University of America, 2007). 225 pp.

DARÍO FERNÁNDEZ-MORERA is Associate Professor
of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature
at Northwestern University. Among his books
are American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas
(1996),Cervantes y su mundo (2005), and Cervantes in
the English-Speaking World (2006).

For centuries, Muslims have captured
Christians in exchange for demands of
one kind or another. During the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, the United
States disbursed “protection money” to North
African Muslim pirates—against the advice
of Thomas Jefferson, who argued that paying
only encouraged attacks (“Millions for Defense,
not One Cent for Tribute,” was his
version of delenda est Carthago). When he and
John Adams tried to end the practice through
negotiation, they were told by Tripoli’s
ambassador to London that extorting money
and taking slaves was justified by the Quran,
which admonished Muslims to make Jihad
against unbelievers and take them captive
until they were ransomed. As President,
Jefferson finally got his wishes: in 1801 he
refused to pay what was de facto a traditional
tribute of non-Muslims (the jizya). The North
Africans then desecrated the American flag
and the President, without a Congressional
declaration of war but with Congressional
authorization, sent the U.S. Navy and Marines
against Tripoli. By 1816, after two
wars, the U.S. had succeeded in ending
Muslim attacks on ships and the enslavement
of Christians in the Mediterranean.

The eight centuries-long intermittent war
between Catholics and Muslims in the Iberian
peninsula had as one of its byproducts
the creation of a class of captives and slaves.
This readable, but fundamentally flawed,
book explains the phenomenon of captivity
concentrating on the kingdom of Aragon
and the capture of Catholics by Muslims.
The extant records facilitate this approach:
although a parallel activity, the capture of
Muslims by Catholics is less well documented,
perhaps because it had a comparatively lesser
impact. After all, for a long time Muslims
held the military initiative and their plundering
of Catholic kingdoms brought a steady
supply of slaves to Muslim lands. Eventually,
Christians reciprocated, raiding Muslim lands
and taking captives. Capturing Muslims was
therefore an imitative activity that never
quite reached the same magnitude. The
ransoming of Muslim captives, for example,
never led to the creation of specialized Muslim
organizations analogous to the Trinitarian
or Mercedarian orders. It is often forgotten
that it was not Christian armies that initially
invaded Islamic lands, but the other way
around—first the Middle East and North
Africa (both part of the Greek Orthodox
Roman Empire) and eventually Catholic
Europe itself through the Iberian peninsula
and into Southern France, where Muslim
armies were defeated and thrown back across
the Pyrenees by the Catholic King of the
Franks, Charles Martel. Eventually Spaniards
repeated this feat after the victory of
Navas de Tolosa in 1212 in a centuries-long
reconquest of formerly Catholic territory
(the Reconquista) that culminated in the final
defeat of European Islam at Granada in 1492.

The descriptions in this book of the hardships
suffered by Christian captives would
make for a good horror film. Hunger, cold,
and beatings were part of the experience.
The book also shows how female Catholic
captives often ended up as sexual slaves
within and without the harem—not a Catholic
institution and therefore not an incentive to
the capturing of masses of Muslim women.
This phenomenon of sexual servitude is related
to another one not discussed in the
book: since the invaders consisted of male
warriors, most of the various forms of Muslim
sexual union, from concubinage inside
and outside the harem to marriage, took
place by necessity with the females of the
conquered population. This process makes
speaking of an “Arab” Andalusia inexact at
best. The population was indeed increasingly
Muslim, for a number of reasons, but it was
not increasingly Arab. To begin with, true
Arabs—that is, those from the Arabian peninsula—
were a minority within the Muslim
armies from the beginning, exercising hegemony
over a mass of invaders made up of
Syrians and Berbers. Moreover, since in
Spain the subjugated natives outnumbered
the invaders, there resulted a mixed population
in which the Arab, Berber, and Syrian
elements were variously diluted. Indeed,
some of the great leaders of Muslim Spain
were the sons of formerly Catholic mothers,
blond women being favored by the conquerors:
the famous Abd-al-Rahman III even
had blue eyes and tinted his reddish hair black
in order to appear more “Arabic” before his
subjects. The son of Almanzor, Sanchuelo,
was the child of a Navarrese princess handed
over to Almanzor after his victories over the
king of Navarra. The favorite concubine of
Almanzor’s protector was also from Navarra.
Blond female slaves from Slavic lands were
also numerous, and some of their descendants
achieved positions of power within Andalusia.

In this otherwise informative book, the
author makes a few very misleading assertions.
One is the all too often repeated claim
that “Islam is not a proselytizing religion in
the same sense as Christianity[…]. Forced
conversions were also forbidden as the Koran
declared that ‘there should be no compulsion
in religion’.” But Islam is indeed a proselytizing
religion. That is why it came out of
Arabia and defeated and converted to Islam
“infidel” nations like the Greek Orthodox
Romans (“Byzantines”), the Zoroastrian
Persians, the animist Berbers, the Catholic
Visigoths, and many others. In Persia and
adjacent regions, Zoroastrian culture was
wiped out with ruthless brutality. In other
nations, animism was violently eradicated.

One can explain the historical trajectory
of Islam as a militarily proselytizing religion
despite the Quranic injunction against forced
conversion because the more peaceful sura
two, invoked even by scholars who should
know better, is considered earlier than the
sura nine, where the opposite is commanded—
namely, to make war against and
convert the infidels. In Islamic interpretative
practice, earlier suras are superseded by later
suras whenever there is a conflict of meaning.
Sura nine (also called the “Song of the
Sword”) makes such statements as “fight and
slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize
them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in
every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and
establish regular prayers […] then open the way for
them” (9:5) and “Fight those who believe not in
God nor the Last Day nor hold that forbidden
which hath been forbidden by God and His
Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth,
even if they are of the People of the Book, until
they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and
feel themselves subdued” (9:29).

In the glorious age of Islamic expansion,
this sura was often recited by Islamic armies
before Muslim warriors went into battle.
One may wonder why the scholarly author
of this book skipped this sura, which supersedes
the one he chooses to quote. In Spain,
Islam followed this normal course. As a result,
although many Catholics adapted or gave up
their faith, many others fled to the northern
Catholic kingdoms to escape such options as
to convert to Islam or die, or pay the jizya (the
special tax imposed on Christians and Jews)
and submit to a Muslim hegemony that, from
the earliest conquests of Islam (cf. the fundamental
“Pact of Umar”), relegated Christians
to a secondary status (dhimmitude) which,
among other things, forbade them to bear
arms, ride a stallion, hold processions, or
otherwise celebrate Christianity except inside
a church, build new churches, toll church
bells, or proselytize; and that required Christians
to stand up and defer to Muslims whenever
the occasion arose. After 1138 A.D.,
thousands of Jews, too, fled Muslim lands to
the Spanish Catholic kingdoms to find a
better life.

Claiming that Islam lacks proselytizing
institutions because it lacks the preaching
orders of Catholicism or Protestant missionaries
is misleading as well because Islam does
have an equivalent and certainly hierarchical
system of imams, mullahs, ayatollahs, and
other offices that can and do convert people
as effectively as priests and missionaries.
Today the success of Islamic preachers in the
West and in other parts of the world such as
Africa is common knowledge.

It is also inaccurate to assert that Islam
“allowed intermarriage.” Islam did not allow
a non-Muslim man to marry a Muslim
woman. It allowed the marriage of a Muslim
man to a non-Muslim woman, but stipulated
that any resulting children must be brought up in
the Muslim faith. This rule is one of several
reasons for the well-known invariable decline
in the number of Christian faithful in
Christian lands conquered by Islam. This has
not changed: even today, one reads of foreign
men who convert to be able to marry a
Muslim woman. Islam is a one-way street, and
in more than one sense: in medieval times,
Muslim authorities punished with death those
who abandoned Islam. For centuries, those
who abandoned Christianity and Judaism
also risked their lives, but for a long time
neither religion has killed its apostates. Islam,
however, still does: newspapers frequently
carry stories of former Muslims who upon
conversion to Christianity risk death in Islamic
countries.

This book claims that forcing conversions
of Catholic captives was the exception, not
the rule, contrary to Catholic contemporary
claims. Although it mentions “other equally
credible sources” to support this claim, it
does not list those sources. A reading of the
testimonies provided in the pages of this
book, however, leads to a different conclusion:
captives were clearly under enormous
pressure to convert in order to lessen or avoid
the difficult conditions in which they lived.
The literature supporting the existence of this
pressure is of two kinds. One includes a
manual used by Catholic preachers to
strengthen the faith of the captives and combat
the temptation to convert. Another is an
abundant literature consisting of diplomatic
correspondence, chronicles, hagiographic
materials, and “other sources” indicating
that captives were put under pressure to
convert if only to lessen or avoid the burden
of captivity and de facto slavery. The life of
Santo Domingo de Silos, which produced
one of the masterpieces of medieval Spanish
literature—the thirteenth century poem Vida
de Santo Domingo de Silos by Gonzalo de
Berceo—is in part a litany of the saint’s
miracles preventing apostasy among captured
Catholics.

The reality of captivity led to the creation
of unique Catholic institutions and procedures.
Religious orders such as the
Mercedarians and the Trinitarians were
founded to assist captives and if possible
obtain their freedom through ransom. As late
as the seventeenth century, priests from these
orders were helping Catholics pay for their
freedom. The temporal and geographical
parameters of this book prevent it from
examining the case of probably the most
famous Catholic captive of all times: Miguel
de Cervantes. After participating in the
Catholic victory over Islam at Lepanto (October
7, 1571), Cervantes was captured by
Muslim pirates and taken to North Africa,
where he was kept as a slave in Argel (1575-
1580). In his works he includes possibly
autobiographical passages showing the fictional
speaker bleeding from beatings received
at the hands of his masters; and several
contemporary witnesses attest to Cervantes’
sufferings in captivity and his Christian steadfastness
(see the most recent and thoroughly
documented biography: Krzysztof Sliwa’s
Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra). His
strong faith may be contrasted with the
actions of at least one of Cervantes’ fictional
characters who became a “renegade” by
converting to Islam. In one of his poems,
Cervantes calls upon Philip II to attack
Muslim lairs in North Africa and liberate the
over 25,000 Christian slaves kept in Algiers;
and at one point in Don Quixote, the hero
declares his desire to go to North Africa to
fight Islam. Cervantes was eventually ransomed
through the efforts of the Trinitarian
friars. This experience with a providential
religious order may have influenced
Cervantes’ decision to profess as a Tertiary
Franciscan lay brother in the last year of his
life. (On this point, see Darío Fernández-
Morera, “Cervantes and Islam: A Contemporary
Analogy,” in Cervantes y su mundo,
ed. K. Reichenberger [Kassell, 2005], 123-
66.)