Christopher Wood, Director, Australians Studying Abroad

San Miguel de Escalada nestles on the side of a lonely hill in Spain’s northern meseta not far from the city of Leon. This rustic tenth-century hermitage was probably built by a religious community of fugitive Mozarabes, Christians who had formerly lived in Al Andalus, the name for Muslim Spanish territories. The sturdy little complex comprises two parts. At one end, an earlier massive tower has fortress-like walls and buttresses which speak of conflict and fear. Next to it is a church with a portico of horse-shoe arches obviously derived from Islamic architecture. San Miguel is therefore a hybrid whose forms tell two very different stories. They tell of the conflict between medieval Christianity and Islam but equally hint at a dynamic interaction between these two great cultures which coexisted in Iberia for over seven hundred years.

The church has a nave, two aisles and sanctuary, forms  typical of a western Christian basilica. Separating the nave from the sanctuary, however, is an iconostasis, a screen typical of churches in the distant Byzantine Empire. Horse-shoe arches also grace this screen and the arcades separating the aisles from the nave. The airy interior space of the church, in fact, echoes the spaciousness of hyperstyle Iberian mosques like the Great Mosque at Cordoba.

Why did the builders of this church incorporate such a variety of forms which hint at contradictory meanings? To understand this, it is necessary to explore the ambiguities and nuances of Spanish medieval history. In 711 AD an army of Berbers from North Africa crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and eventually defeated the forces of the Visigothic kingdom at the Battle of Guadalete. An emirate (governorship) owing nominal allegiance to the Umayyad Caliphs of Damascus was established at Cordoba which subsequently became the largest, richest city in western Europe. When in 750 the Damascene dynasty was overthrown by a competing family, the Abbasids, the Caliphate was moved to Baghdad. One Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman, escaped slaughter and fled west to Spain. In 756 he established the Umayyad emirate of Cordoba which later became a Caliphate to rival Baghdad (929). Cordoba grew to be a famous centre of learning, renowned for its poetry, its huge libraries and its fine calligraphers, many of whom were women.

Spain is a large, arid country of high mountain ranges – the highest in Europe after Switzerland – which separate vast, lonely Mesetas. There are few navigable rivers, which elsewhere in Europe were the highways of the Middle Ages. Spain’s climate and ecology resemble those of North Africa rather than verdant Europe north of the Pyrenees. This was a difficult country to populate and control, which accounts in part for the cultural diversity and regionalist particularism of modern Spain.

The Muslims conquered most of the Iberian peninsula by 722 AD but never crossed the high Cantabrian range which isolates Spain’s rainy north coast from its great continental meseta. Here the tiny Christian kingdom of the Asturias was born, its capital Oviedo. In 914 King Odrono II felt strong enough to cross the Cantabrian mountains and establish a new capital on the northern rim of the meseta at Leon, which had once been the military headquarters of the Roman Legio VII Gemina. The new Kingdom of Leon eventually merged with the County of Castile to create the kingdom which gave modern Spain its language and much of its culture. Other small realms, Navare, Aragon, and the County of Barcelona, also burgeoned. These nascent kingdoms were often too preoccupied with dynastic and territorial squabbles amongst themselves to unite against Muslim Spain.

In 1031, however, the illustrious southern Caliphate fell, riven also by internal tensions. Islamic Spain fractured into a number of small independent kingdoms, the Taifas Reyes. Many of these, weakened by further strife, fell prey to the Christian monarchs’ appetite for protection money and ultimately for territory. In 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile, with El Cid at his side, conquered the great Muslim city of Toledo. This prompted an invasion by the Berber Almoravids from sub-Saharan Africa who were in turn supplanted in 1147 by the Almohads from the Moroccan High Atlas. In 1212 the Christian kingdoms finally united and with French aid crushed the Almohad armies at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. This opened the broad, southern Guadalquivir Valley to Ferdinand III – San Fernando – of Castile. He conquered Cordoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. Only the small Nasrid Kingdom of Granada survived. In 1492 Isabella of Castile and her husband Ferdinand of Aragon vanquished this last Spanish Muslim state (and in the same year expelled the Jews from Spain and funded Christopher Columbus’ search for the Indies). Henceforth, Christian Spain became centre of a great Empire, plunderer of America and champion of Catholicism against the Ottoman Empire in the east and the north European Protestants.

The crusading zeal which led to the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, to the eventual capture of Granada and the conquest of the Americas developed slowly, however. The small 10th century Christian community at San Miguel de Escalada, despite its emigre status, would not have espoused any cogent, unified theory of a Christian holy war against the infidel. After all, it was not until the 1140s - more than four hundred years after the appearance of Islam in Spain - that the Koran was actually translated, giving western Christians their first meaningful understanding of the beliefs of their foe. This does not mean that all was peaceful in Spain before the twelfth century. Although scholars have used the term convivencia to suggest that peaceful relations initially existed between the ‘peoples of the book’ (Muslims, Christians and Jews) both within Caliphal Al Andalus and to its north in the tiny Christian kingdom,  many instances of tensions between the three creeds can be found. Nevertheless, Christians gained much from Muslims. Cordoba was part of a vast trade system which extended across North Africa and east through Greater Syria, the Euphrates valley, Persia and Central Asia to China and India. Iberian Christians could to an extent share the wealth and lustrous culture of their southern neighbour. As late as the eleventh century some Christian kingdoms even used Muslim gold dinars as currency, much as opponents of the USA in Iran accept greenbacks from foreign tourists today.

Even after the ideology of Crusade emerged, cultural borrowings continued. Appropriation of Muslim objects, styles and motifs abounded throughout Christian Spain, prompted by a desire for display. As late as the fourteenth century the Castilian king Pedro the Cruel used Muslim craftsmen to build a palace in Seville which resembled Muhammad V’s Alhambra Palace in Granada. In Las Huelgas Reales, the aristocratic nunnery founded outside Burgos by Alfonso VIII’s wife Eleanor, daughter of Henry II of England, hangs a great embroidered tent flap captured from the Almohad armies at Las Navas de Tolosa. Did the nuns preserve this treasure merely as a symbol of Christian triumph? It is more likely that they saw in it a richness appropriate to their own high status. The architecture of Las Huelgas Reales supports this view. Its exterior, in a severe English architectural style, hides cloisters adorned with intricate Arab stucco work sporting exotic beasts like camels and elephants, inspired by the motifs on carved Islamic ivory caskets.

No wonder the mosque-like little church of San Miguel de Escalada is a hybrid. Even the Mozarabic Liturgy performed within it mingled Arabic language and music with Christian sentiment. This lonely, robust yet eclectic small shrine reflects the vastness of Iberia and a heritage of cultural syncretism which Spaniards have sometimes denied but which shaped their country.