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3 A Royal Wedding (Lleida, 1150) The Moors ruled parts of Spain for nearly eight centuries. The first and decisive invasion took place in 711, and by 732 Muslim forces had advanced as far as central France. Defeated at Poitiers by the Frankish armies of Charles Martel (grandfather of Charlemagne), the invaders retreated south of the Pyrenees. For the next 350 years, Muslim and Christian rulers faced each other across an oscillating frontier that stretched more or less northeast from central Portugal to the River Ebro at Tudela, and then turned east to run parallel with the Pyrenees, north of Zaragoza and Lleida, striking the Mediterranean coast just south of Barcelona. In- fighting on both sides of the border radically affected the fortunes of war. The Christian reconquest began in earnest with the fall of Toledo in 1085 and, over the next seventy years, gradually pushed the frontier south, occasionally making inroads into Andalusia, but settling, by the middle of the twelfth century, on a line meandering east from Lisbon, south of Toledo, north of Valencia, and heading into the Mediterranean north of the Balearic Islands. The decisive campaign of the reconquista , in which the kings of Aragon-Catalonia and Castile-León simultaneously drove south, disputing their own adjoining boundaries as they went, took place between 1227 and 1248. Thereafter, Moorish rule in Spain was confined to the emirate of Granada, stretching along the Mediterranean coast and north of the Sierra Nevada from Gibraltar to the north of Almería. On the whole, Moors and Christians did not let their territorial conflicts unduly impede their relationships as neighbors and trading partners. Convivencia, the ability of Spanish Christians, Moors, and Jews to live together in a pluralistic culture , where each enjoyed in the other’s territory a measure of civic, religious, and economic freedom, was at its height during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries . Neighborliness did not, however, diminish the Spanish desire to recapture all that had once been lost. The last bastion of Muslim occupation, the city of Granada itself, fell to Ferdinand and Isabella in January 1492, just nine months before Columbus set foot in the Americas.1 Violet Alford assumed that the development of dramatized mock battles between Moors and Christians could be linked to the progress of the reconquest. In the wake of the advancing frontier, she wrote, the theme of the expulsion of the Moors “fastened like a leech” onto older seasonal rituals in which “dancing brotherhoods . . . were charged with the calling in of Spring” by leaping “to shake Mother Earth” and “clashing” swords and sticks and making “other noises” to expel “Winter and its evils.”2 But the surviving evidence suggests that the early moros y cristianos owed far more to the tournament and the epic than to pre-Christian seasonal rites 31 and is, in any case, too fragmentary to demonstrate an orderly advance of the drama with the frontier. I am aware of very few accounts of mock battles between Moors and Christians before 1492. The two earliest reports depend on secondhand nineteenth-century citations of manuscripts now lost, and the first evidence of a sustained tradition of local performances comes from the fifteenth-century Barcelona Corpus Christi procession, which regularly included a dance of Turkish infantry and Christian hobby horses. Even in the sixteenth century, most moros y cristianos were occasional, staged as part of a royal entry or other special event. Presuppositions apart, the argument for the advance of the moros y cristianos with the frontier stems from a reference, in a nineteenth-century history of Spanish music , to a “dance of Moors and Christians” in Lleida in 1150. “This was,” according to Alford, “the first Morisca ever invented. The Moors had been driven from Lérida [Lleida] but one year previously, and a hated enemy could hardly have been converted into a Court dancer in less time than that.”3 If dance followed reconquest so quickly in Lleida, she reasoned, it must have continued to do so elsewhere. But Alford’s argument begs several questions, not the least of which is the reliability of the reference (and here the reader will have to bear with a short report of bibliographical detective work on my part). Alford had read the report of the Lleida dance of Moors and Christians in Mariano Soriano Fuertes’s Historia de la música española . . . (1855). Soriano himself cites as his authority a scholar by the name of Teixidor, who, he tells...

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