Mozarab

The Mozarabs (in Spanish, mozárabes; in Portuguese, moçárabes) were Iberian Christians living under Muslim dominion, and their descendants.

As Christians are dhimmi or tolerated non-Muslims living under the rule of a Muslim government, they and Jews were allowed among Muslims if they paid the jizyah, a personal tax. As the universal nature of Roman law was eroded away, most ethnic groups in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages expected to be judged by their own judges, under their own law: Mozarabs had their own tribunals and authorities. Some of them held high offices in Muslim courts. Conversion to Islam was encouraged, but not demanded under the tolerant regime of the Ummayad caliphs and emirs of Córdoba. Apostasy, however, for one who had been raised as a Muslim or had embraced Islam, was a crime punishable by death.

Until the mid-9th century, relations between Muslims and the Christian population of al-Andalus, probably still a majority, were cordial. Christian resistance to the first wave of Muslim conquerors was feeble. In Murcia, a single surviving capitulation document must stand for many agreements to render tribute in exchange for the protection of a traditional liberties; in it, Theodomirus (Todmir in Arabic), count of Orihuela agrees to recognize Abd al-Aziz as overlord and to pay tribute consisting of a yearly cash payment supplemented with specific agricultural products. In exchange, Theodomir received Abd al-Aziz' promise to respect both his property and his jurisdiction in the province of Murcia (Wolf). There was no change in the composition of the people on the land, and in some cases even their Visigothic lords remained.

In the generations that followed the conquest, Muslim rulers promulgated new statutes clearly disadvantagous to dhimmi. The construction of new churches and the sounding of church bells were eventually forbidden. But when Eulogius recorded the martyrology of the Martyrs of Cordoba during the decade after 850, it was apparent that at least four Christian basilicas remained in the city including the church of St. Acisclus that had sheltered the only holdouts in 711, and nine monasteries and convents in the city and its environs (Wolf), although their existence soon became precarious.

Restrictions that forbade Christians to occupy any position in control of Muslims did encourage Christian slaves to gain their freedom by declaring conversion to islam; this had a dampening effect on Christian position in the social structure. Eulogius comments repeatedly on the burdensome tax that Christians bore.

Eulogius' writings documenting story of the Cordoba martyrs of 851-59, encouraged by him to defy Muslim authorities with blasphemies and embrace martyrdom, contrast these Christians with the earlier official Christianity of Reccared, the previous bishop of Cordoba, who counseled tolerance and mutual forbearance with the Muslim authorities. However, Christians became increasingly alienated not only because they could not build new churches or ring church bells, but primarily because they were excluded from most positions of political, military, or social authority and suffered many other indignities as unequal under the Islamic law. By the mid 9th century, as the episode of the Córdoba martyrs reveals, there was a clear Christian opposition against the systematic pressure by a variety of legal and financial instruments of Islam, towards their conversion and absorption in Muslim culture.

The initial official reaction was to round up and imprison the leaders of the Christian community. Towards the end of the decade of the martyrs, Eulogius' martyrology begins to record the closing of Christian monasteries and convents, which to Muslim eyes had proved to be a hotbed of disruptive fanaticism rather than a legitimate response against a slow but systematic elimination of Christianity.

As previously with the Muslims, so as the Reconquista advanced, the Mozarabs integrated into the Christian kingdoms, where the kings privileged those who settled the frontier lands. They also migrated North in times of persecution.

Language

During the early stages of Romance languages development in Iberia, a set of romance dialects was spoken in Muslim areas of the Peninsula by the general population. This is known as the Mozarabic language, though there never was a common standard.

This variety of Romance is the first documented in writing in the Peninsula as choruses (kharjas) in Arabic and Hebrew lyrics called muwashshahs. As they were written in Arabic alphabet (aljamiado), the vowels had to be reconstructed. In some aspects, it is more archaic than the other Romances.

This Romance variety had a significant impact in the formation of Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan (especially Valencian), which explains why these languages have so many words of Arabic origin (Mozarabic was, understandably, quite influenced by Andalusi Arabic and vice versa). The northward migration of Mozarabs explains the presence of Arabic toponyms in places where the Muslim presence didn't last long.

The cultural language of Mozarabs continued to be Latin, but as time passed, young Mozarabs studied and even excelled at Arabic.

Religion

The Mozarabs remained out of the influence of French monks and conserved the Visigothic rite of Mass, also known as the Mozarabic rite. The Christian kingdoms of the North, though, have changed to the Latin rite (Castile in 1080) and appointed Northern bishops for the conquered sees. Nowadays, the Mozarabic rite is allowed by a Papal privilege at one chapel of the Toledo Cathedral. The St. Isidro hermit in Madrid also holds occasional Mozarabic masses. A Mozarab brotherhood is still active in Toledo.

Conversion to Islam opened new social horizons to Mozarabs. Some Christian authorities (Alvaro from Cordoba and Eulogius) were scandalized at how the young ones preferred the Arabic culture and language and, in 851, tried to raise confrontation by publicly offending Islam. They expected that, by becoming martyrs, they would visibilize the conflict. There were executions of Christians until 11 March 859. The Islamic authorities, however, often chose to consider them as madmen, thus deflecting tensions.

References

Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain, ch 1 "Christians in Muslim Córdoba"
Rageh Omaar, An Islamic History of Europe. video documentary , BBC Four ^*: August 2005.

Al-Andalus | History of Spain

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References