The Capture of Barbastro: Terror, Vengeance, and Politics In 11th-Century Spain

The year was 1064, 31 years before Pope Urban II was to proclaim the first Crusade against the Muslims of the Holy Land. For three centuries, from the Muslim conquest of 711 until the final disintegration of the powerful Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031, the Iberian Peninsula had been dominated by Islamic regimes. The political void left by the demise of the Caliphate was filled by a constellation of petty Muslim states known as the taifa kingdoms and by the encroachments of the Christian principalities that had clung to the margins of the peninsula as tributaries of the caliphs. In the following decades political initiative in the peninsula began to swing in favor of the Christians who competed amongst themselves for tribute from the

Page 173

Muslim neighbors with whom they continued to enjoy close relations and who, incapacitated as they may have been, were nevertheless the protagonists of societies far wealthier and culturally and technologically superior to those of the Latins. Along the mountain frontier, raiding and skirmishing was a constant in which local potentates chose their allies and enemies with little regard to religious conviction, but when Christian forces assembled outside of the walls of Muslim Barbastro the terrible events which were to follow seemed to herald a new kind of warfare.

The army that assembled before the large and prosperous town was said to have numbered some 40,000 (surely an exaggeration of the contemporary “media”) and was made up not only of Aragonese Christians but also of a sizable contingent of Norman knights. These had been given the blessings of an obscure and distant holy man (as he would have seemed to Muslim eyes), Pope Alexander II, who had promised them salvation should they risk their lives in battle with the infidel. Siege was laid and after a while the inhabitants of the town, pressed by lack of food and water, parlayed terms of surrender. This was the usual practice in Muslim-Christian warfare in the peninsula, where opposing parties shared a sense of commonality and recognized that respecting treaties was the best way to ensure their own security. The Muslim population agreed to abandon Barbastro in exchange for safe passage for themselves and their goods. But, to their surprise and horror, as they moved away from the town they were swept upon by the Christians who slaughtered the men without mercy. Carrying the women and goods back, the attackers installed themselves in luxurious decadence in the homes of the dead Muslims, whose wives and daughters now served them as slaves and concubines.

The Islamic West was shocked and outraged by the events, not only because of their repulsion at the wholesale massacre of civilians who had been given safe-conduct but also because it shattered the illusion of the invincibility of Muslim power and was irrefutable proof of the decline of Islamic hegemony in the peninsula. Shock at the events engendered a new vision of Christendom in the eyes of learned Muslims (ulama): an aggressively violent culture whose desire for pillage precluded pity for children, women, and the aged. In their outrage, Muslim religious figures began to characterize current political events in the peninsula as fruit of a confrontation of civilizations. Geographically removed from the events, many of them were not in a position to appreciate the subtleties of local factors or differentiate between the different subsets of Christians (in this case, Aragonese and foreigners) and the varying attitudes that these groups had towards Muslims, warfare, and the honoring of truces. The act was, in their eyes, morally as much as militarily unacceptable and they strove to rally and unify all Muslims against a new threat which they perceived fundamentally as Christian.

The Muslim military response was measured but not slow and al-Muqtadir ibn Hud of Zaragoza, the king to whom the defeated town belonged, began to assemble a coalition for the counterstrike. Popular support ran high among the Muslims of the peninsula and of al-Muqtadir’s domains, who were eager to participate in the campaign of vengeance and retribution. (However, despite initial enthusiasm among other Muslim rulers of the peninsula to contribute troops to the counterattack, their presence in the force which al-Muqtadir eventually led was largely symbolic and numerically limited.) In 1065, only nine months after the Normans’ act of cold-blooded treachery, the forces of Zaragoza, which according to chroniclers were aided by “the kings of Muslim Spain and the people of the frontier,” assaulted the city. They took it by force and meted out the same fate to the Christian defenders as the refugees had suffered: plunder, death, and captivity.

It is tempting to envision the massacre of Barbastro as a turning point in Christian-Muslim relations in the Mediterranean, and some see it—in view of the papal sanction which it had acquired—as the real birth of the Crusades. Indeed, within 40 years, “armed pilgrims” of Latin Europe had stormed through the Holy Land and seized Islam’s third holiest city, Jerusalem, massacring its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants wholesale (despite the surrender agreement which had ostensibly guaranteed their protection). The Christian ideology of grand ecumenical confrontation, which sprang out of the Roman church’s maturation as a centralized imperial-style organization, was met by Muslim thinkers, who refined the Islamic concept of jihad to signify a divinely sanctioned military conflict against unbelievers.

Seen from the distant perspective of the 21st century, the fears of the ulama seem to have been justified. Toledo fell in 1085, Barbastro again in 1101, and Zaragoza in 1118. There were grievous battles and occasional massacres. Despite the

Page 174

intervention of fundamentalist Berber regimes from North Africa, Christian kingdoms managed to push the balance in their favor. Within two centuries, Islamic political power had been all but swept from the peninsula, leaving only the tiny kingdom of Granada, a vassal-state of Castile. Looking back, it is tempting to imagine two titans, Christianity and Islam, fortified respectively by ideologies of Crusade and jihad, locked in a struggle for the fate of Hispania. A closer look at the events of these centuries betrays a different picture, which belies the fulminations of the ideologues.

Although Christian kingdoms did indeed gain territory at the expense of their Muslim neighbors, neither group was unified in a political sense. Both Muslim and Christian powers continued to follow their own agendas with little regard for ideology, making alliances among each other to dispose of common enemies, trading, and exchanging diplomats. The grand ideals of confrontation remained in the realm of the abstract or in the sphere of propaganda. The ulama continued to preach against the Christians and the Christian clergy against the Muslims but as soon as wounds were healed they were quickly forgotten. Indeed, the modus operandi of the Christian conquerors continued to be negotiating surrender, particularly in Aragonese lands. The Muslims for their part continued to trust in the promises of the Christians, despite memory of the massacre.

How, then, does the terror and anguish of the bloodbath at Barbastro fit in to the history of Christian and Muslim Spain? In the end, it was an episode which contributed to a general attitude of confessional confrontation but one which was limited in currency to a small proportion of the public and which found little resonance in the contemporary world of realpolitik. A shockingly dramatic and violent event such as this provokes an emotional outpour on the part of the public—one which may be harnessed by the powers that be to justify or support certain policies. But with the catharsis of a retributive strike the desire for vengeance ebbs and the popular memory dissipates. For their part, governments, despite initial moral posturing, soon find themselves constrained or directed by material or political concerns that may encourage policy-making with their erstwhile foes. As in any process of grieving, the unpleasant memories of the past are buried and life goes on much as before.

Page 175