The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture.

• Author: Wasserstein, David J.
• Position: Book review

The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making cif Castilian Culture. Edited by JFRRILYNN D. DODDS. MARIA ROSA MENQCAL, and AWOAIL KRASNER BALBALE. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008. Pp. xiii + 395, color illus. $40 (cloth), $24 (paper).

In August 1002. al-Mansur, the hajib, or mayor of the palace, of Caliph Hisham II al-Mu'ayyad of Cordoba, died "and was buried in hell." as a Christian writer famously added (meaning Medinaceli in more this-worldly geographical terms). Almost exactly a quarter of a millennium later, on the last day of May 1252, Ferdinand III of Castile died and was buried in Seville. Each was buried deep inside territory that had once belonged to the other side. The death of each marked a signal point in Christian and Muslim relations in Iberia. The death of al-Mans[u.bar]r, unchallenged dictator of the Islamic state there, on his way home from yet another brutal and successful campaign against the Christians, was a statement (even without the Christian comment on his burial) about the strength of Islam in Iberia, about its rootedness there. about its ability to chaIIenge and to dominate the non-Islamic parts of the peninsula and beyond, and about the character of the peninsula as an Islamic place. The death of Ferdinand said much about ... exactly the same things.

Al-Mansur had, we are told, taken away the bells of the church of Santiago in Compostela and brought them to Cordoba as booty. Ferdinand sent them back, loaded onto the backs of Muslim prisoners. In a quarter of a millennium much, indeed the very course of history, had changed: in 1000 that course had been for centuries Islamic, and looked set to continue that way. By 12.50 it was clear that Islam was on the retreat, at least in Iberia, and would remain so. By then, little remained but Granada, and its survival for yet another quarter millennium would owe as much to geography and the realities of peninsular Christian politics as to any strength that the Muslims themselves there hung on to.

Ferdinand's tomb still survives in the cathedral (where once the great mosque stood) of Seville, adorned with four inscriptions, one each in Castilian, Latin. Arabic, and Hebrew. The use of the four tongues. we are told here, bespoke "a Castilian universe in which the public presence of Jews and Muslims was a matter of course, peoples of the realm with their own monumental languages in which the king himself could inscribe their versions of the life of Ferdinand" (p. 196). If this seems just a little overblown, perhaps this comes with the territory. And perhaps it is not so overblown as all that: the king who erected this tomb for his father was Alfonso X El Sabio, "the Wise." who patronized scholars and writing in all four of these languages. Arabic and Hebrew were both languages in use in his kingdom, for Jews and Muslims could still live and prosper under Christian rule in his time.

Apart from the name given to Iberia in the different languages--[Hi lspania, Sefarad, al-Andalus--the stories are the same in each version of the inscription: all give the king the same...