Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo [Jimenez de Rada] and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain (review)

Bold and original, this is not a biography of the great polymath primate Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada of Toledo (1170?–1247), but an exploration of the program that constituted his inner vision and outer enterprises, as these worlds progressed in tension. The component facets of his achievements did not stand independently but converged to create a unity in plurality. His crusading and textual contacts with Islam, his expansionist settlement policy, his tools as an historian and exegete, his patronage of scholarship and Arabic translation, and his polemics against Jews and Muslims—each activity interacted with the others toward a unified field.

With a mystical core in the divine unity, he saw himself and not the Spanish kings as heir to a primate-managed Visigothic Spain. The Castilian orientation usually posited by historians for his career was absolutely subordinated to the larger claims of his real political theology.

Central to Lucy Pick's concerns is Rodrigo's place for Jews and Muslims within Christendom, a balance of his theories with practical local interactions, the two forming an intertwined discourse. Both are particularly on display in his Dialogus libri uite and in the popularized presentation of that same vision in the didactic drama the Auto de los Reyes Magos. Pick argues persuasively that the much-discussed Auto, central in Spanish literature, corresponds closely in content with its counterpart the Dialogus, the latter inspiring the Auto. She concludes indeed that Rodrigo "commissioned the Auto and dictated its form and content." The link between the two works "broadens our understanding of the goals and significance of polemic within the larger sphere of relations between Christians and those of other faiths."

Rodrigo's polemics in this view aimed at neither suppressing nor converting the non-Christians of Spain and Europe but rather at clarifying the inner differences of each community, so that each had its own theological role, a stabilizing self-definition for each which paradoxically justified and defended Spain's Jews and Muslims in the guise of a polemical attack while assuaging the anxieties of Christians. Thus the paradox dissolves as polemic preserves coexistence. Eventual failure of this coexistence, therefore, invites the question how rather than why.

Among intriguing positions is Pick's nuanced view of Rodrigo as amplifying and transforming the role of crusade in Spain, promoting an internationalized form. She sees him also as transforming the nature of the Spanish frontier. Similarly the battle of Las Navas powered by Rodrigo is given a deeper meaning through the Auto, where the three warrior kings who fought there become the three magi-kings, the Almohad sultan taking on the role of Herod. In all this, Rodrigo is simultaneously "innovative and formative" while also reflecting wider European currents.

Typical of the book's plausible insights is the author's closing suggestion that the successor of Rodrigo, in the converging achievements of his program and vision, must be Alfonso X the Learned.

This is not an easy book to summarize in brief. It is dense in content and meticulous in procedure and it rewrites any number of elements in medieval Spanish history. Its conclusions are sometimes less persuasive than its rich arguments and its dialogues with the positions of others. Provocative in general scheme and in multiple detail, it is a welcome addition to the growing library on medieval Spain's pluralist society.