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After Conversion – Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity

Edited by Mercedes García-Arenal

AFTER CONVERSION

Iberia was, throughout the Middle Ages, the European territory with the longest and closest relationship with Judaism and Islam. Despite an irregularly pursued war of conquest and outbreaks of violence in different periods, Christians, Jews and Muslims coexisted for centuries in Spain, in stark contrast with the rest of Europe.

For almost eight centuries there existed in the Peninsula an Islamic polity of varying extension and fluctuating borders called Al-Andalus.

There, the Islamic model dictated that Jewish and Christian communities, while subject to the monarch, were to be governed by their own law and their own authorities, and in time a parallel model was likewise adopted in Christian Spain with respect to Muslims and Jews.

However, this situation came to an end in the late fifteenth century, and in fact, had already begun to deteriorate by the late 1300s.

The Christian conquest in 1492 of the last Islamic stronghold, the Naṣrid Kingdom of Granada, was immediately followed by a series of laws that forced the conversion or expulsion of Jews and Muslims. Thus, one sole religion was imposed upon the whole of early modern Iberian society.

Various waves of persecution and the forced conversion of Jews to Catholicism from 1391 to their expulsion in 1492 were followed between 1502 and 1526 – through a series of decrees promulgated at different times in Castile and Aragon – by the compulsory conversion of Muslims.

This constituted the final step in converting the Peninsula’s ethnoreligious plural society of the Middle Ages into a new sort of society in which a single religion held sway.

In this transformed society, there was to be just one Law, one revealed text, one set of culturally appropriate behaviours, and one accepted form of spirituality.

The integration of religious minorities destabilized traditional categories of religious difference and produced novel forms of social and political identity, while the strategies deployed for the assimilation of the Spanish multi-confessional past transformed the very conditions of early modern scholarly inquiry, in terms of writing both the history of Spain and the history of its languages.

The traumatic transition that produced this mono-confessional Spain also saw the emergence of shifting identities and new religious attitudes. These