Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (review)

204 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) Augustinian paradigm into directions that Augustine never imagined. In early chapters, she also explores more strictly philosophical issues about nature and love. While there are many interesting comments here, the philosophical issues at stake tend to be subsumed within Newman’s broader interest in theology. Here, she is at her best. One of the most fascinating parts of the book is her discussion of late medieval attempts to integrate Mary into the blessed Trinity, a theological move that Augustine would have found completely alarming, and which was rejected by Martin Luther as distracting attention from the sovereignty of God and the redeeming work of Christ. God and the Goddesses is a major contribution to the study of the intersection of literature and religious belief in the European Middle Ages. It complements Peter Schäfer’s study, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kaballah (Princeton University Press, 2002). Medieval religious thought is far more diverse in its gendering of divinity than later centuries would think acceptable. Newman’s study invites us to think further about these issues. Constant J. Mews Monash University O’Callaghan, Joseph F., Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002; cloth; pp. xviii, 322; 8 b/w illustrations, 4 maps; RRP US$39.95; ISBN 0812236963. In the preface to this volume, Professor O’Callaghan notes that the events of 11 September 2001 ‘forcibly reminded the world that the rhetoric of crusade, holy war, and jihad… is a powerful weapon and is still with us’ (p. xiv). One might unkindly observe that this sentiment has been expressed repeatedly over the last two years or so, and take the opportunity to warn against the dangers of oversimplifying historical correspondences. Can the Spanish reconquista really shed any light on the ‘war against terrorism’, or vice versa? Nonetheless, O’Callaghan’s point is valid if it prompts readers interested in current tensions between the Christian and Islamic worlds to examine how those relations have differed in the past, and how they have evolved. The author’s aim is to provide a narrative of the most significant and (from a Christian perspective) successful period of the reconquista. In 1063 about 80% Reviews 205 Parergon 21.1 (2004) of the Iberian Peninsula lay in Moslem hands. By 1252 only a small region around Granada remained. That Christian contemporaries considered the reconquest to be a form of crusade should not surprise us. Historiography on the subject has long stressed the fact that the campaigns in Iberia were accorded the same status as crusades to the Holy Land or those called against heretical groups such as the Albigensians. In this sense O’Callaghan’s central thesis does not appear especially innovative. However, he does make a useful point in distinguishing between the overall (and ongoing) process of reconquest, and the individual campaigns that technically can be classified as crusades: those authorised by the pope, in which participants ‘took the cross’ and were granted remission of sins for fighting the enemies of the Church. The author stresses the way in which the Iberian experience acted as a model for the more famous crusades to liberate Jerusalem. Pope Alexander II offered indulgences to those fighting the Moslems in Spain as early as 1063, some 32 years before Urban II’s famous speech at Clermont launching the so-called ‘First’ Crusade. This serves as an important reminder that expeditions to the Holy Land were but one element within the wider panoply of medieval crusading, and were by no means the most significant undertaking at any given time. The Christian victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, for example, undermined Almohad rule in Spain, and provoked a joyous reaction from Innocent III. Only eight years earlier, the same pope had expressed his disgust at the fiasco of the Fourth Crusade, which sacked the Christian city of Constantinople. O’Callaghan also shows how the idea of religious warfare became especially powerful when linked to a more secular, nationalistic discourse that emphasised a mythic Iberian unity under Visigothic rule during the early Middle Ages. Following the introductory...