Christian Captives, Muslim Maidens, And Mary

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Christian Captives, Muslim Maidens, and Mary Author(s): Amy G. Remensnyder Source: Speculum, Vol. 82, No. 3 (Jul., 2007), pp. 642-677Published by: Medieval Academy of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20466003Accessed: 08-07-2015 10:48 UTC

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Christian Captives, Muslim Maidens, and Mary

By Amy G. Remensnyder

In 1575 Miguel de Cervantes, who had yet to write Don Quijote or any of the other works for which he became famous, headed home. He had just spent four years as a soldier in Spain's imperial armies in Italy and the Mediterranean, fight ing battle after battle against one of the most redoubtable military powers of his day, the Ottoman Turks.' He had acquitted himself honorably, receiving wounds that would plague him for the rest of his life. Now it was time to return to Spain. Yet Cervantes wouldn't see his native land for another five years. These would be years of intense suffering, of trauma even.2 The experiences he had during this difficult time would remain etched in his psyche, profoundly marking the novels and plays he was to write. For as Cervantes was making his way back to Spain, he was captured by the Turks and incarcerated in Algiers. Thus he joined the thousands of other Christians held in captivity by the Turks and their allies in North Africa.3 Some of these Christians remained permanently enslaved; others sought to gain their freedom by converting to Islam, while a fortunate few were ransomed by their families or charitable religious orders, as Cervantes himself was in 1580. Heavy labor, chains, crowded prisons, the constant fear of being sent to row

the galleys that plied the Mediterranean-the conditions endured by many Chris tian captives in North Africa were harsh enough that they incited dark rumors in sixteenth-century Spain.4 No wonder captives often attempted to escape, as Cer vantes did not just once but four times. Painful as his desperate efforts to flee captivity must have been, like his other experiences in Algiers, they would provide him with literary fodder. In a play he composed shortly after making it back safely to Spanish soil, Cervantes described with particular poignancy captives' desire to escape. He drew his subject matter from his own life: El trato de Argel is set in

I thank the participants in conferences held in April 2005 at New York University on the Virgin

Mary and at Providence College on Cervantes for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this

essay. I am also grateful to Philippe Buc, Alison Caplan, Deborah A. Cohen, Margaret Malamud, Tara

Nummedal, Moshe Sluhovsky, the members of the Medieval and Early Modern History Seminar at

Brown University, and the three anonymous Speculum evaluators for their thoughtful readings of this

piece. Thanks, too, are due the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned

Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the fellowships that made this research

possible. All translations are my own.

1 Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes, trans. J. R. Jones (New York, 1990), pp. 48-65.

2 For Cervantes' captivity as trauma, see Mar?a Antonia Garc?s, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale (Nashville, Tenn., 2002).

3 Ellen G. Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age (Madison, Wis.,

1983); Mercedes Garc?a-Arenal and Miguel Angel de Bunes, Los Espa?oles y el Norte de Africa: Sighs XV-XVIII (Madrid, 1992), pp. 209-55.

4 Friedman, Spanish Captives, pp. xxv-xxvi and 55-76.

642 Speculum 82 (2007)



Christian Captives 643 the slave house of Algiers; its characters are Christian prisoners and their Muslim masters; its subject, the captives' plight.

In the most autobiographical episode Cervantes wrote into this play, a Christian captive makes a break for freedom by fleeing from Algiers and crossing the desert in order to reach the Spanish fort at Oran.5 Cervantes could vividly evoke the dangers awaiting a captive who attempted this route to liberty, as he himself had tried it. Unfortunately, he failed to elude his Muslim masters and was dragged back to Algiers. But in El trato, Cervantes' fictionalized self-projection overcomes all obstacles to his freedom. His liberation is assured when he turns to a powerful figure for her miraculous guidance and protection: the Virgin Mary. "If you give me liberty, I promise to be your slave"-thus concludes the long lyrical prayer that El trato's captive addresses to the Virgin.6

It is entirely possible that when Cervantes himself faced the desert and all its dangers, he placed his hopes for freedom in Mary just as his play's character does. We know that Cervantes sought spiritual solace in the Virgin during his years of captivity-one of his fellow prisoners noted that while in Algiers, Cervantes com posed Marian poetry.7 Those poems have not survived, but it has been suggested that Cervantes drew on them for the lines of Marian praise scattered throughout El trato.8 Marian devotion in fact suffuses the play. A Christian woman, grieving because her son is about to be sold into slavery, implores her child never to forget the Virgin, "the queen of goodness," while another captive entrusts his soul to

Mary's care, knowing that in the "uncertain sea" of his misery she is the only sure guide.9 Cervantes even chose to end El trato with a moving scene in which the prisoners all kneel and cry out one after another in a sad chorus to Mary. Echoing the captive's desert prayer, they beg the Virgin to embrace them with her mercy and "free [them] from the hands of these Moors."10

This early play was not the only work in which Cervantes underlined the power of Marian devotion to free Christian captives. In the magical pages of his master piece, Don Quijote, the intimate relationship between the Virgin and liberation from Muslim masters appears again. Yet here Cervantes gives it a different twist, as can be seen in the chapters of part 1 (1605) collectively known as the "Captive's Tale."'II The male protagonist of this story, a Spanish soldier captured by the Turks in 1571, lies in hopeless captivity at Algiers with his fellow Christians. But one day he begins to receive money and even encouraging letters from an unexpected source: Zoraida, the daughter of Agi Morato, a wealthy and powerful Moor. In her letters Zoraida declares her devotion to the Virgin (learned from her Christian

5 On the autobiographical nature of this passage, see Garc?s, Cervantes in Algiers, pp. 40-45 and

153-56. 6 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El trato de Argel, lines 1974-91,2052-56, and 2067-71, in Obras

completas, ed. Florencio Sevilla Arroyo (Madrid, 1999), pp. 845 and 846. 7 Garc?s, Cervantes in Algiers, p. 127. 8 Ibid. 9 Cervantes, El trato de Argel, lines 295, 959-62, and 2516, in Obras completas, pp. 829, 835, and

850. 10

Ibid., lines 2490-2521, p. 850. For commentary, see Garc?s, Cervantes in Algiers, pp. 153-61. 11 Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha 1.4.39-41, ed. John Jay

Allen, 19th ed., 2 vols. (Madrid, 1998), 1:464-502 (hereafter cited as Don Quijote).



644 Christian Captives nurse), her desire to go to the land of the Christians in order to "see" Mary, her willingness to help the captives escape if they will take her with them, and her intention to marry the captive who lends his name to the whole story. In their epistolary exchange, Zoraida and the captive constantly invoke the Virgin as the protector of their risky enterprise. So central is Mary to their relationship that she more often appears as the object of Zoraida's desire than does the captive himself.

After Zoraida and the captives execute their dramatic escape and embark for Spain, unfortunately encumbered by a distraught Agi Morato whom they have been forced to kidnap, the Marian theme continues. To her father's horror, Zo raida declares herself to be a Christian and implores the Virgin to watch over her and her companions. When Agi Morato demands to know why his daughter has embraced Christianity, Zoraida utters Mary's name in reply. The former captives themselves invoke Mary's help in bringing their odyssey to a favorable conclusion. And on reaching landfall in Spain, Zoraida is delighted to find images of the Virgin in the first church she enters. Though not yet baptized, she now insists on being called by the name of the saint who has impelled all her actions: Mary.

Cervantes tells much the same story in his play Los banos de Argel, a work he published in 1615, although he may have written parts of it years earlier.12 In Los banos he calls the female protagonist Zahara rather than Zoraida. There are other differences of detail and staging.13 Yet Zahara is recognizably the same character as Zoraida: a Muslim maiden of Algiers whose Christian nurse taught her to love the Virgin and who now wants to escape to Christendom so that she can worship

Mary freely. Like Zoraida, Zahara carries on an epistolary exchange with a Chris tian captive whom she intends to marry. And like Zoraida, at the end of the play Zahara leaves Islam and Algiers behind. Although the audience does not witness her voyage to Spain, it watches as Zahara, too, exchanges her Muslim name for the name of the saint whom she so loves: Mary.

In telling these tales of Christian captives, Muslim maidens, and Mary, Cervan tes certainly drew on his own memories of his years in Algiers. Many of the characters in Los baizos and the "Captive's Tale" were people he had heard of or encountered while a captive. Cervantes modeled Zahara/Zoraida, for example, on the real-life daughter of the man the Spanish called Agi Morato but who ac tually exercised his power and influence in late-sixteenth-century Algiers as Hayyi

Murad.14 Yet Cervantes took considerable liberty with the facts of this woman's life: although much more is known about her father than about her, it is clear that she neither married a Spaniard nor converted to Christianity.15 In Don Quijote and Los banos, then, as in El trato de Argel, Cervantes used his consummate literary art to transmute his traumatic experiences as a captive into fiction. And

12 Miguel de Cervantes, Los ba?os de Argel, ed. Jean Canavaggio (Madrid, 1983). The dating of

the play's composition is controversial; for two opinions, see Canavaggio's comments (ibid., pp. 35

39); and Helena Percas de Ponseti, Cervantes y su concepto del arte: Estudio cr?tico de algunos aspectos

y episodios del Quijote, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1975), 1:275-76. 13 Percas de Ponseti, Cervantes y su concepto del arte, 1:242-57. 14

Jaime Oliver As?n, "La hija de Agi Morato en la obra de Cervantes," Bolet?n de la Real Academia

Espa?ola 27 (1947-48), 245-339. 15

Ibid., pp. 264-66.



Christian Captives 645 as he did so, he placed the Virgin at the emotional heart of his narratives of liberation and conversion. Why did Cervantes make Mary so central to these stories? The answers to this

question lie in a centuries-old Marian tradition that has attracted far too little scholarly attention: the ways that the Virgin offered Christians a symbolic field on which to articulate the nature of their encounters with non-Christians. We are just beginning to understand how medieval and early-modern Jews and Christians, so dangerously close to each other in so many ways, used Mary to emphasize their radical, irreconcilable difference.16 Behind Cervantes' stories of Christian captives and Muslim maidens lies the equally rich, if even less explored, history of Mary as the symbolic medium of Muslim/Christian relations.'7 These could be relations of exchange and dialogue, but just as often they were ones of conflict, played out on literal and metaphorical battlefields where Mary was as present as Cervantes makes her in his fiction.

Ever since the thirteenth century, in the Iberian Peninsula the Virgin had been an icon of an enterprise of which Cervantes himself had abundant experience: the military conquest of Muslims. Spanish knights and kings prayed to Mary before setting out on campaigns against Muslims; they carried battle banners emblazoned with her image; they shouted out her name as a battle cry; and they made thanks giving offerings to her when they came home victorious. They even institution alized her role as battle patron, establishing military orders and chivalric societies in her name. Elaborate legends evolved detailing how the Virgin had helped Chris tians to win crucial victories over the Muslims. Mary then was as much the patron of the so-called Reconquest as was a male saint much more famed for this role, St. James, or Santiago.'8

16 For example, Allyson F. Creasman, "The Virgin Mary against the Jews: Anti-Jewish Polemic in

the Pilgrimage to the Sch?ne Maria of Regensburg, 1519-1525," The Sixteenth Century Journal 33

(2002), 963-80; Denise L. Despres, "Immaculate Flesh and the Social Body: Mary and the Jews,"

Jewish History 12 (1998), 47-69; William Chester Jordan, "Marian Devotion and the Talmud Trial

of 1240," in Religionsgespr?che im Mittelalter, ed. Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niew?hner, Wolfen

b?tteler Mittelalter-Studien 4 (Wiesbaden, 1992), pp. 61-76; Hedwig R?ckelein, "Marie, l'?glise et

la Synagogue: Culte de la Vierge et lutte contre les juifs en Allemagne ? la fin du moyen ?ge," in Marie:

Le culte de la Vierge dans la soci?t? m?di?vale, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat, Eric Palazzo, and Daniel

Russo (Paris, 1996), pp. 513-32; Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval

Jews (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 7-39; Klaus Schreiner, Maria: Jungfrau, Mutter, Herrscherin (Munich,

1994), pp. 413-62; and Peter-Michael Spangenberg, "Judenfeindlichkeit in den altfranz?sischen Mari

enmirakeln: Stereotypen oder Symptome der Ver?nderung der kollectiven Selbsterfahrung," in Die

Legende vom Ritualmord: Zur Geschichte der Blutbeschuldigung gegen Juden, ed. Rainer Erb, Doku

mente, Texte, Materialen 6 (Berlin, 1993), pp. 157-77. 17 Only a few scholars have begun to consider this question. See, for example, Albert Bagby, "Alfonso

and the Virgin Unite Christian and Moor in the Cantigas de Santa Mar?a," Cantigueiros 1 (1988),

111-18; Alexandra Cuff el, "'Henceforth All Generations Will Call Me Blessed': Medieval Christian

Tales of Non-Christian Marian Veneration," Mediterranean Studies 12 (2003), 37-60; Amy G. Remen

snyder, "The Colonization of Sacred Architecture: The Virgin Mary, Mosques, and Temples in Medi

eval Spain and Early Sixteenth-Century Mexico," in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religious

Expression and Social Meaning in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara Rosenwein (Ithaca,

N.Y., 2000), pp. 189-219; and Amy G. Remensnyder, La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary, Conquest, and Conversion in Medieval Spain and Early Colonial Mexico (book manuscript in progress).

18 On Mary as a patron of the Reconquest, see Amy G. Remensnyder, "Marian Monarchy in



646 Christian Captives The Virgin's role in battle hardly ended in 1492, when the Christians took the

last Muslim stronghold in the Iberian Peninsula, the kingdom of Granada. In fact, when the Spanish turned their military attentions to the other side of the Atlantic, the martial Mary accompanied them. It is no accident that among the first images of the Virgin made by the indigenous peoples of the Americas was a war banner fashioned by Nahuas at the order of a conquistador sometime before 1531.19 Sixteenth-century Spaniards who fought back home against the Muslims in the Mediterranean also continued to turn to Mary for aid, as Cervantes himself must have been well aware. After all, he participated in one of the greatest Marian military victories of his day: the battle of Lepanto. For the rest of his life, he would even bear the scars of the wounds he received that day.

This battle, fought on October 7, 1571, pitted the famed Ottoman fleet against the warships of the Holy League, a Christian alliance comprising Spain, Venice, and the papal forces. The league's remarkable (if short-lived) triumph over the Ottoman armada was celebrated throughout western Christendom as a magnifi cent crusading achievement due to the Virgin Mary.20 The victors made a hand some thanksgiving offering to Mary, donating one of their prize trophies from the battle-the Ottoman flagship's lantern-to her renowned shrine at Guadalupe in western Castile.21 From the brushes of artists such as Paolo Veronese came dra matic scenes of the engagement with the Virgin presiding over a sea bristling with masts.22 To commemorate the battle's anniversary, Pope Pius V (d. 1572) even instituted a new Marian feast. He declared October 7 the feast day of Our Lady of Victory, a Virgin with a rather obvious connection to martial glory. Pius's suc cessor on the throne of St. Peter, Gregory XIII, renamed the feast for Our Lady of the Rosary. Gregory acted in the belief that Christendom owed the triumph at Lepanto to rosary prayers that had been recited at Rome on the very day that the

Thirteenth-Century Castile," in The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950-1350, ed. Robert

F. Berkhofer III, Alan Cooper, and Adam J. Kosto (Aldershot, Eng., 2005), pp. 253-70; Remensnyder, La Conquistadora; and Schreiner, Maria, pp. 376-77. On St. James and the Reconquest, see Klaus

Herbers, "Politik und Heiligenverehrung auf der Iberischen Halbinsel: Die Entwicklung des politischen

Jakobus," in Politik und Heiligenverehrung im Hochmittelalter, ed. J?rgen Petersohn, Vortr?ge und

Vorsehungen 42 (Sigmaringen, 1994), pp. 177-275; and Francisco M?rquez Villanueva, Santiago:

Trayectoria de un mito (Barcelona, 2004), pp. 183-222. In general on saintly patronage of the Re

conquest, see Joseph O'Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2003),

pp. 190-99. 19 "The Harkness 1531 Huejotzingo Codex," in The Harkness Collection in the Library of Congress:

Manuscripts Concerning Mexico, a Guide, ed. J. Benedict Warren (Washington, D.C., 1974), pp. 52,

63,108,116, and 118. For discussion of this image, see Tom Cummins, "The Madonna and the Horse:

Becoming Colonial in New Spain and Peru," in Native Artists and Patrons in Colonial Latin America, ed. Emily Umberger and Tom Cummins, Phoebus 7 (Tempe, Ariz., 1995), pp. 58-68. For further

discussion of Mary and warfare in the colonial Spanish Americas, see Remensnyder, La Conquistadora. 20 On Lepanto as a crusade, see J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716, rev. ed. (London, 2002),

p. 241. On the battle itself, see Hugh Bicheno, Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto, 1571

(London, 2003). 21 Gabriel de Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe consagrada a la sobrana magestad

de la Reyna de los Angeles, milagrosa patrona de este santuario (Toledo, 1597), fol. 156v. 22

Bicheno, Crescent and Cross, color plate 7.



Christian Captives 647 ships of the Holy League and the Ottomans clashed in the blue waters of the

Mediterranean.23 Christian soldiers such as Cervantes who fought at Lepanto did not need the

pope to tell them that Mary had been watching over them in battle. On October 7, 1571, all they had to do was to glance at the Spanish flagship. High in its rigging flew a banner bearing an image of the Virgin.24 Visible to friend and foe, the standard proclaimed that the Christians fought in Mary's name. As Muslims and Christians alike recognized, war banners were no mere pieces of cloth. Such banners, conspicuous with their bold colors and shapes even in the confusion of combat, not only served to signal men as they fought. Woven into their fabric was also a more symbolic value as a statement of the army's courage, persistence, and unity.25 Accordingly, Ottoman archers at Lepanto took care to aim their bows at the Marian standard crowning the Spanish flagship. When two Turkish arrows struck the banner, the Spanish were so angered that they sent aloft a tame monkey to pluck out these affronts to their lady and their honor.26 The wounding of the banner at Lepanto was witnessed by one of Cervantes'

peers, a Spanish lieutenant captured by the Turks in 1574. He remembered the incident vividly, describing it in a narrative that he composed from his North African prison. In his account, the lieutenant insisted on Mary's role as a patron of Christians in their conflicts with Muslims, recounting how at Lepanto she "fought" (the verb he uses is pelear) for "us."27 The memory of the glorious triumph over the Turks obtained with the Virgin's aid must have been comforting to this captive as he lay in prison, reminding him of a happier period of his life. In the abjection of captivity, he also looked to Mary for hope, composing devo tional poetry to her just as Cervantes did.28 As he whiled away his years in prison, this man then wrote of the Virgin in two roles: as a symbol and source of Christian military triumph over Muslims and as the worthy object of a captive's affections.

These two aspects of Mary really were one and the same, although the lieutenant

23 On the establishment of October 7 as a Marian feast day, see ibid., pp. 123-26; and Marina

Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, 1983), p. 308. On

the rosary, see Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in

Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, D.C., 2001), pp. 214-16; and Anne Winston

Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park, Pa., 1997). 24 Memorias del cautivo en La Goleta de T?nez (El Alf?rez Pedro de Aguilar), ed. Pascal de Gay

angos, Sociedad de Bibli?filos Espa?oles 13 (Madrid, 1875), p. 129. 25 Hence battle banners were highly desirable war trophies for both Muslims and Christians. See,

for example, Cr?nica de Alfonso X seg?n el ms. II12777 de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real (Madrid), ed. Antonio Carmara Ruiz (Murcia, 1998), 63, p. 183; Ibn 'Abd al-MunJim al-Himyar?, La p?ninsule

Ib?rique au moyen ?ge d'apr?s le Kit?b ar-rawd al-mi'tar, ed. and trans. ?variste L?vi-Proven?al, Publications de la Fondation de Goeje 12 (Leiden, 1938), pp. 18-19 and 165; "Relaci?n circunstan

ciada de lo acaecido en la prisi?n del rey chico de Granada, a?o de 1483," in Relaciones de algunos sucesos de los ?ltimos tiempos del Reino de Granada (Madrid, 1868), pp. 59-60; Rodrigo Amador

de los R?os, Trofeos militares de la Reconquista: Estudios acerca de las ense?as musulmanes del real

monasterio de Las Huelgas (Burgos) y la catedral de Toledo (Madrid, 1893); and Al-Andalus: The Art

of Islamic Spain, ed. Jerrilynn D. Dodds (New York, 1992), no. 92, pp. 326-27. 26 Memorias del cautivo, p. 129. 27

Ibid., p. 127. 28

Ibid., p. 133.



648 Christian Captives

never says so. In both roles, she became a means for Spanish Christians to envision victory over Muslims. The fiction composed by another former captive and par ticipant at Lepanto, Miguel de Cervantes, shows just how much the Virgin's role in the experience and representation of captivity belonged to the conflictual dia logue between Christians and Muslims also enacted with actual weapons of war. To be sure, when Cervantes came to write of Lepanto, unlike his fellow captive, he did not mention the Virgin.29 But Cervantes didn't need to-his stories of Christian captives, Muslim maidens, and Mary gave the same message of inevi table Christian triumph. In these tales, the Virgin serves as a symbol of Christian victory over Muslims on the spiritual battlefields of captivity and conversion, are nas that were very much extensions of the physical battlefield. Such is the meaning of the long medieval traditions that lay behind Cervantes' stories linking Mary and captives, on the one hand, and, on the other, Mary and converted Muslim maidens.

CHRISTIAN CAPTIVES

Medieval warfare, whether in the form of full-blown sieges or small-scale raids or skirmishes, produced a steady stream of captives. Taken as the human spoils of war by the victors, the captives were often held for ransom or sold into slavery.30 Medieval Iberia was no exception. The ever-shifting configurations of alliances and rivalries among the peninsula's Christian kingdoms, Muslim Granada, and various North African polities all sowed their own crops of captives, as did civil strife within kingdoms.3' Not surprisingly, the redemption of captives was often as much a central preoccupation for Christians (and Muslims) in medieval Iberia as it was for Spaniards in Cervantes' day.

Cervantes was hardly the first Christian to believe that the Virgin Mary was as powerful in this traumatic realm of human experience as she was in so many other arenas of fortune and misfortune. One of the earliest great Marian miracle col lections from the Iberian Peninsula, the late-thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa

Maria, provides abundant evidence of the pervasiveness of this conviction. This collection contains many stories in which the Virgin liberates captives from their confinement. By the time Alfonso X of Castile (d. 1284) ordered the composition

29 Cervantes, Don Quijote 1.4.39, 1:467.

30 On Muslim captives sold into slavery, see Stephen P. Bensch, "From Prizes of War to Domestic

Merchandise: The Changing Face of Slavery in Catalonia and Aragon, 1000-1300," Viator 25 (1994),

63-93; on Christians, see Carmen Argente del Castillo Oca?a, "Cautiverio y martirio de doncellas en

La Frontera," in IV estudios de Frontera: Historia, tradiciones y leyendas en La Frontera, ed. Francisco

Toro Ceballos and Jos? Rodr?guez Molina (Ja?n, 2002), p. 37. 31

James William Brodman, Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced on the

Christian-Islamic Frontier (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 1-14; Abdelghaffer Ben Driss, "Los cautivos entre

Granada y Castilla en el siglo XV seg?n las fuentes ?rabes," in Actas del congreso "La frontera oriental

nazar? como sujeto hist?rico": Lorca-Vera, 22 a 24 de noviembre de 1994, ed. Pedro Segura Artero

(Alicante, 1997), pp. 301-10; Anthony Lappin, The Medieval Cult of Saint Dominic of Silos, MHRA

Texts and Dissertations 56 (Leeds, 2002), pp. 337-41; Kathryn Miller, Guardians of Islam: Muslim

Communities in Medieval Aragon (New York, forthcoming in 2007), chapter 6; and O'Callaghan,

Reconquest and Crusade, pp. 148-49.



Christian Captives 649

of these lyric poem-songs in Mary's honor, the Virgin was famed across western Europe for her ability to help Christians escape their enemies' dungeons.32

The stories Alfonso X included in the Cantigas participated in this European wide tradition, with one significant distinction. In most places in western Europe, the Virgin freed her loyal devotees from the clutches of enemies who were them selves Christian. So the bellicose knights of twelfth-century southern France who misjudged their moves as they fought a rival lord and ended up in chains might call on Our Lady of Rocamadour to burst their bonds.33 In Alfonso's Castile, too, the Virgin freed Christians from Christians.34 But judging from the Cantigas, just as often the backdrop for the stories thirteenth-century Castilians told of Mary's miraculous intervention on behalf of prisoners was warfare between Christians and Muslims.3s

Typical of these tales of the liberation of Christians captured by Muslims of Granada and North Africa is a cantiga relating the fate of a Christian squire. While off on campaign against the Muslims in Andalusia, this Marian devotee had the misfortune to be taken prisoner. Yet even in the midst of brutal beatings by his Muslim captors, the squire never forgot the Virgin. Weeping so piteously he irritated his jailers, he prayed intently to her, begging for his freedom. Even tually his steadfast faith was rewarded. Mary appeared and shattered his chains, demonstrating the truth of the poem's refrain: the Virgin "can well guide pris oners, because she frees them from prison."36

The saintly heroine of this cantiga was one of Alfonso X's favorites: the Virgin of Villa Sirga.37 The songs of the Cantigas also praise other Iberian Virgins for such miracles of liberation, including the Madonnas of El Puerto de Santa Maria, Faro, Salas, Sopetr-an, and Tentudia.38 When a future chancellor of Castile, Pero Lopez de Ayala, was captured in battle by the Portuguese in 1385, he pled for his

32 Gabriela Signori, Maria zwischen Kathedrale, Kloster und Welt: Hagiographische und historio

graphische Ann?herungen an eine hochmittelalterliche Wunderpredigt (Sigmaringen, 1995), pp. 46, 222-23, and 234-40. On Alfonso as patron and author of the Cantigas, see among others Walter

Mettmann, "Algunas observaciones sobre la g?nesis de la colecci?n de las Cantigas de Santa Mar?a y sobre el problema del autor," in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Art, Music, and Poetry, ed.

Israel J. Katz, John E. Keller, et al. (Madison, Wis., 1987), pp. 355-66. 33 Les miracles de Notre-Dame de Rocamadour au XHe si?cle 1.10, 11, 18, 50; 2.2, 17; and 3.18,

22, 23, ed. Edmond Albe (Toulouse, 1996), pp. 118-20, 126, 162, 180-82, 202, 268-70, and 272

76 (see also 1.53, p. 166, for the liberation of a captive from Muslims). For discussion, see Signori, Maria zwischen Kathedrale, Kloster und Welt, pp. 222-23.

34 Alfonso X, el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 106, 158, 245, 291, 301, and 363, ed. Walter

Mettmann, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1986-89), 2:25-27,152-54, 338-42 and 3:75-77, 99-100, 236-37. 35 Ibid. 83, 95, 176, 183, 227, 325, and 359, 1:263-65, 292-94; 2:186-87, 201, 297-99; and

3:152-55,229-30. 36 Ibid. 227, 2:297-99. 37 The Virgin of Villa Sirga liberates another prisoner in Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 301,

3:99-100. On Alfonso's affection for this Virgin, see John Esten Keller, "King Alfonso's Virgin of

Villa-Sirga: Rival of St. James of Compostela" and his "More on the Rivalry between Santa Maria

and Santiago de Compostela," both in his Collectanea Hisp?nica: Folklore and Brief Narrative Studies, ed. Dennis P. Seniff and Maria Isabel Montoya Ram?rez (Newark, Del., 1987), pp. 61-76.

38 See references above in nn. 34-35.




freedom with as many Virgins as he could think of.39 By the late fifteenth century, however, one Spanish Virgin had won a reputation in this realm that far outshone that of her sisters: the Virgin of Guadalupe.40 Visitors to her shrine tucked into the rugged hills of Extremadura could hardly

help but be struck by the huge quantity of chains and shackles that grateful former captives had left there as ex-voto offerings. "We saw innumerable iron fetters, which captives freed from the Saracens through the intercession of the blessed Virgin brought here," wrote the German doctor Hieronymus Munzer, who came to Guadalupe in 1495.41 By 1515 pilgrims had brought so many chains that the Jeronymite friars who tended the shrine decided to melt down the accumulated ironware-it yielded enough metal that they were able to forge a choir grille.42 Several fifteenth- and sixteenth-century compilations of Guadalupe's miracles pro vided the narrative details to explain these offerings. In tale after tale, the Virgin helps Christians escape their Muslim captors, not only in Granada, but also on the more distant shores of North Africa.43 Cervantes himself must have seen the heaps of rusting irons laid before the

Virgin of Guadalupe, or at least heard reports of them: in one of his works, he included an extended description of the thicket of chains adorning Guadalupe's shrine.44 Yet as Cervantes' El trato de Argel and other texts reveal, in the late sixteenth century other Virgins, too, still had the power to deliver Christians from North African prisons. In Cervantes' play, a captive prays to the Virgin of Mont serrat for help in escaping his Muslim masters.45

The Virgin, however, was not the only wonder-worker to whom Christians held in captivity might appeal. Until at least the fourteenth century, other saints posed a serious challenge to Mary's talents in this domain. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the French saints Leonard of Noblat and Foy of Conques were much beloved for their ability to free captives.46 So, too, by the twelfth century was St.

39 Pero L?pez de Ayala, Rimado del Palacio 757, 762-70, 800-809, and 870-86, ed. Germ?n

Orduna (Madrid, 1987), pp. 264, 265-67, 272-74, and 293-96. 40

Fran?oise Cr?moux, P?lerinages et miracles ? Guadalupe au XVIe si?cle (Madrid, 2001), pp. 151

53; Pilar Gonz?lez Modino, "La Virgen de Guadalupe como redentora de cautivos," in La religiosidad

popular, ed. Carlos Alvarez Santal?, Mar?a Jes?s Bux? i Rey, and Salvador Rodr?guez Becerra, Autores, Textos y Temas, Antropolog?a, 18-20 (Barcelona, 1989), 2:461-71.

41 Hieronymus M?nzer, "Itinerarium Hispanicum," ed. Ludwig Pfandl, "Itinerarium Hispanicum

Hieronymi Monetarii," Revue hispanique 48 (1920), 1-179, at p. 107. 42 Gonz?lez Modino, "La Virgen de Guadalupe como redentora," p. 467. The friars apparently did

the same thing again in the seventeenth century; see Cr?moux, P?lerinages, p. 128. 43 See the miracles in Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS 1176, fols. 9r-12v, 14r-15r, and 19r-20r;

and in Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe, fols. 230r-231r, 237v-238v, 240v-242v,

244v-245r, 246r-v, 247v-248v, 260r-v, 262v-263r, 265v-266v, 268r-270v, 282r-283v, 286r-v,

292r-v, 293v-294v, 301r-v, 302v, 309r-v, 315v-316v, 320v-321v, and 471r-v. For analysis see

Cr?moux, P?lerinages, pp. 133, 137, and 149-51; and Gonz?lez Modino, "La Virgen de Guadalupe como redentora."

44 Cervantes, Persiles y Sigisimunda 3.5, in Obras completas, pp. 769-70.

45 Cervantes, El trato de Argel, lines 1980-85, p. 845.

46 Liber miraculorum S?nete Fidis 1.31-33; 2.6; 3.4, 5, 15, 19; and 4.4-9, ed. Luca Robertini, Biblioteca di "Medioevo latino" 10 (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 136-43, 166-68, 187-90, 203-5, 208-9,

227-39, 277-80, 284-87, and 300-303; Steven Sargent, "Religious Responses to Social Violence in

Eleventh-Century Aquitaine," Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques 12 (1985), 219-40.




James, whose magnificent shrine at Compostela attracted pilgrims from all across Europe.47 But even Spain's apostle had to bow his head before another saintly liberator: Dominic of Silos, venerated at the northern Castilian monastery famed today for its exquisite Romanesque sculpture. Dominic's command over the pow ers of liberation began in the late eleventh century and stretched well into the thirteenth century, as the piles of shattered chains accumulating at Silos attested.48 Between 1232 and 1287 alone, this saint freed 145 people, the vast majority of them Christians fleeing Muslim captors.49 The detailed stories of enslavement and escape that these men and women told to eager record keepers at Silos fill the lengthy book of Dominic's miracles compiled in the late thirteenth century by the

monk Pero Marin.50 Yet even this text so intent on celebrating Dominic as liberator provided proof

of the Virgin's growing reputation in this arena of saintly activity. In somewhat more than half the miracles in Pero Marin's collection, captives desperate for help pray not to Dominic alone but instead to "God, St. Mary, and St. Dominic."'51 Perhaps this appeal was merely a formulaic expression inserted by the note takers at Silos-but it is just as likely to reflect the hopes and expectations of the captives themselves.52 The language in one story has such simple directness that it leaves little doubt that the captive in question, a man named Goncalo de Sotavellanos, actually prayed just as earnestly to the Virgin as he did to Dominic.s3 Suffering from the humiliations imposed on him by his Muslim owners, Goncalo "turned to St. Mary and to St. Dominic," begging for their "mercy" (no mention is made of God). Goncalo even promised to "believe more" in Mary and Dominic if they freed him, a bit of pious bargaining to which the Virgin seems to have responded first. Early the next morning, Goncalo had a "vision" of "men in vestments pray ing and amidst them a very tall woman." The woman gave Goncalo the reassuring news that he would escape by nightfall, a message reinforced later by an apparition of Dominic himself. Unlike Dominic, however, the woman of the vision is never identified by name. But who else could she have been but the Virgin, answering Goncalo's prayers even before Dominic did?

The Virgin's intervention in an escape that the monk of Silos who shaped the tale did his best to attribute to Dominic foretold the future. By the fourteenth century, Dominic's popularity as a saintly liberator withered and died away, while

Mary's flourished. The Virgin's triumph in this realm even received institutional expression when she displaced another local saint to become the patron of the Spanish religious order dedicated to the redemption of captives.

47 Liber Sancti Jacobi: Codex Calixtinus 2.1, 11, 14, 20, and 22, ed. Klaus Herbers and Manuel

Santos Noia (Santiago de Compostela, 1998), pp. 161, 168, 169-70,176, and 177. 48 Gonzalo de Berceo, La vida de Santo Domingo de Silos 354-74, 732-53, and 763, ed. Brian

Dutton, T?mesis A/74 (London, 1978), pp. 90-94,149-52, and 153; Lappin, Medieval Cult, pp. 171

95 and 275-390. 49

Lappin, Medieval Cult, p. 361. 50 Los "miraculos roman?ados" de Pero Marin: Edici?n cr?tica, ed. Karl-Heinz Anton (Silos, 1988). 51

Lappin {Medieval Cult, p. 350) notes that this formula appears consistently in the Miraculos

roman?ados from p. 90 onward; the formula is also used on pp. 51, 78, and 82-87. 52

Lappin (Medieval Cult, p. 350) argues for the latter possibility. 53 Miraculos roman?ados, pp. 80-81.



652 Christian Captives This order owed its existence to a Catalan layman named Pere Nolasc, who

was deeply concerned about the plight of Christians captured by Muslims. During the 1230s Nolasc began to raise ransom funds in Barcelona and on the newly Christian island of Majorca, efforts that soon won him and his companions the status of a new religious order. At first these men took as their patron a local saint, Eulalia, the female martyr who had presided over Barcelona's cathedral for cen turies. They called themselves "The Brothers of the House of St. Eulalia of Bar celona" or the "Order of the Ransoming of Captives." But by the 1240s they had acquired a second saintly patron: Mary. By the fourteenth century, the Virgin so overshadowed Eulalia in the order's devotional and public life that the brothers now styled themselves the "Order of St. Mary of Mercy of the Redemption of Captives."54 Under Mary's protection, this order continued its charitable enter prise into the seventeenth century, as Cervantes himself knew from personal ex perience. Although he owed his own release from captivity to a rival ransoming order founded in France, the Trinitarians, he included in Los bauos de Argel a version of a scene he had witnessed in Algiers: the redemption of prisoners by Mary's order.55

The waxing Marian devotion of high-medieval Europe surely was a factor in Eulalia's eclipse as the celestial guardian of this order. Yet these men did not adopt Mary as their patron just to keep up with the latest trends in piety. As the name they took by the fourteenth century indicates, the brothers of the Order of St.

Mary of Mercy were also choosing a saint whose traits made her better suited than any other to watch over their mission: the Madonna of Mercy. This Virgin enjoyed increasing popularity in the high Middle Ages.56 The brothers may have selected her in part for linguistic reasons: the Catalan word for "ransom" merce-also meant "mercy."57 But they also must have thought of the tender maternal qualities of the Virgin of Mercy-often depicted sheltering her devotees beneath her capacious cloak-as powerfully embodying their own compassionate charity toward captives.

The Virgin of Mercy was not the only Madonna to enfold her devotees with maternal love. All versions of Mary, whatever their names, did so. The loving tenderness so associated with the Virgin in fact helps to explain not just why she aroused ever-growing affection in high-medieval Christians but also why she played such a prominent role as a liberator of captives.58 More than any other saint, she possessed just the qualities a Christian caught in captivity would seek

54 On the Mercedarians' institutional development, see Brodman, Ransoming Captives. On the in

troduction of Mary as the order's patron, see Bruce Taylor, Structures of Reform: The Mercedarian

Order in the Spanish Golden Age, Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions, Medieval and Early Modern Peo

ples, 12 (Leiden, 2000), pp. 14-16. 55

Cervantes, Los ba?os de Argel, lines 822-32, pp. 147-48. On the actual procedures of sixteenth

and seventeenth-century ransoming missions, see Friedman, Spanish Captives, pp. 105-64. 56 Paul Perdrizet, La Vierge de Mis?ricorde: ?tude d'un th?me iconographique (Paris, 1908). 57

Taylor, Structures of Reform, pp. 14-16. 58 The best explanation of the rise of Mary's cult in the high Middle Ages is Rachel Fulton, From

Passion to Judgment: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200 (New York, 2002), pp. 204

43. On Mary as a figure of mercy in the late Middle Ages, see Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul (above, n. 23), pp. 102-41.




in a heavenly guardian: a mother's boundless compassion and infinite mercy. In the realm of mother love, the Virgin had no real rivals. No other saint could claim to be both God's mother and the spiritual mother of all Christians.59 As the thirteenth-century Castilian priest Gonzalo de Berceo sighed in his book of Marian praise: "Men and women, we all look to you as mother.... We shall be as your children. Sinners and just alike, we hope for your mercy. "60 Merciful maternal intercession at Christ's celestial court, the softening of the

heavenly ruler's justice through his mother's tender pleas-this is exactly what medieval Christians hoped for from the Virgin. They beseeched Mary to persuade God to forgive their sins and to smooth their path through life's difficulties. Count less miracle stories of the high Middle Ages depict her extending her maternal love to human beings caught in dire situations, whether illness or war or natural disaster or any other misfortune. As Gutierre Diaz de Games wrote in his fifteenth century chivalric biography of Count Pero Niiio, the Virgin would always "help those in grief and distress at the time of their great need."'61 Christians held in Muslim captivity certainly fell into the category of "those in

grief and distress" who needed Mary's merciful and loving protection. So the poems in the Cantigas de Santa Maria celebrating the Virgin's release of captives repeatedly underscore. Sometimes Alfonso X's poets crowned their narratives of

Marian liberation with praise of "the glorious Virgin, the compassionate mother of God" who is "always able to help those in need."62 At other moments they described how Mary reached out "to free captives from prison" with the tender power of her hands, "which directly touched Jesus Christ."63 One cantiga even concludes with a joyous scene in which a former captive enters a Marian church, brandishing his shattered chains and shouting: "The Virgin did this, she who helps people in misery."64 The miracle collections from Guadalupe are no less insistent about the solace "the most merciful Virgin, who can leave no one without com fort," brings to Christians languishing in Muslim captivity.65 Cervantes himself paints the Christian captives of El trato de Argel as the Virgin's spiritual children who implore "our intercessor, [Christ's] mother who is our mother" for aid in obtaining their freedom.66 In comparison with the warm language of maternal

59 "Advocaciones de la Virgen en un c?dice del siglo XII," ed. Atanasio Sinu?s Ruiz, Analecta sacra

Tarraconensia: Revista de ciencias hist?rico-eclesi?sticas 21 (1948), 28; Clarissa Atkinson, The Oldest

Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), pp. 103, 105-6, and 118;

Fulton, From Passion to Judgment, pp. 224-26; and Dominque Iogna-Prat, "Le culte de la Vierge sous

le r?gne de Charles le Chauve," in Marie: Le culte de la Vierge (above, n. 16), pp. 86-87, 89, and 98. 60 Gonzalo de Berceo, "Los loores de Nuestra Se?ora" 218, in Gonzalo de Berceo, El duelo de la

Virgen; Los himnos; Los loores de Nuestra Se?ora; Los signos del juicio final, ed. Brian Dutton, T?mesis A/18 (London, 1975), p. 108.

61 Gutierre D?az de Games, El victorial: Cr?nica de D. Pero Ni?o 62, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, Colecci?n de Cr?nicas Espa?olas 1 (Madrid, 1940), p. 180.

62 Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 83, 1:265; see also 95,1:292. Similar descriptions of Mary's mercy color the poems about the liberation of captives from other Christians: ibid. 158,291,301, and

363; 2:152-54 and 3:75-77, 99-100, 236-37. 63 Ibid. 359, 3:229-30. 64 Ibid. 227, 2:299. 65

Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe, fol. 247v. 66

Cervantes, El trato de Argel, lines 2492-93, p. 850.



654 Christian Captives love suffusing the Marian miracles of liberation, the descriptions of captives in voking the mercy of other saints such as Dominic can only seem tepid. Mary's maternal mercy could have an intensely personal significance for Chris

tian captives. Hence the expressions of gratitude in the form of pilgrimage and offerings by many of those former captives who believed they had the Virgin to thank for their newfound liberty. But often there was also a deliberately public dimension to their gratitude. At Guadalupe, men and women who had benefited from Mary's help in escaping from Muslim captivity would recount their stories to the friar in charge of the shrine's ever-thicker miracle books. In the sixteenth century, twenty-seven pilgrims to Guadalupe also made sure to have their mirac ulous liberations recorded in the authoritative form of notarized certificates.67 They sought such certificates from the highest secular authority they could find on reaching Christian soil. Witnessed by viceroys, corregidors, captains, or even just the notary of whichever Christian town first received the former captive, these certificates were quite public declarations of the captive's reintegration into Chris tendom and the Virgin's role in effecting it. As one historian has recently said, for Christians, these certificates represented so many victories over the Muslims.68

Both medieval and early-modern Christians could in fact conceive of the whole enterprise of freeing captives, whether undertaken by saints or religious orders, as one theater in the wars against Muslims.69 Accordingly, contemporaries often gave quite triumphal readings to the Virgin's powers to liberate prisoners from the Muslims. Marian deliverance of captives could, for example, accompany Christian military victory. Such was the case when the North African city of Oran fell to the Spanish in 1509. According to capitulary records from Guadalupe, many of the Christians who poured forth from slave houses when the Spanish forces en tered this city made vows to thank the Virgin for their miraculous freedom.70 To fulfill their promises, they came in droves to Guadalupe, as many as several hun dred a day according to the monastery's admittedly self-interested record keeper.

This coincidence between Christian military success against the Muslims and the Marian liberation of Christian captives takes on further resonance in light of another aspect of the victory at Oran. Mary had helped the Spanish take the city, or so Count Pedro de Navarro, the man who led the assault, believed. Before setting off for the Maghreb, he had visited the shrine of Guadalupe to ask the Virgin to help him prevail against the Muslims.71 And after his successes not only at Oran, but also Tripoli and Bougie, he made an impressive thanksgiving offering to Guadalupe: a lamp engraved in intricate detail with the images of the three conquered cities.72 This object had as its living counterparts the pilgrims who came to Guadalupe to celebrate their escape from Oran's prisons-lamp and pilgrims alike rendered homage to Mary's role in Christian triumph over the Muslims.

The Virgin's liberation of captives could indeed foreshadow the inevitability of

67 Cr?moux, P?lerinages, p. 46.

68 Ibid. 69

Lappin, Medieval Cult, pp. 280-81; Friedman, Spanish Captives, pp. 127-28. 70

Cr?moux, P?lerinages, p. 81. 71

Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe, fol. 155v. 72

Ibid., fol. 155r-v.



Christian Captives 655 Christian military victory over Muslims, as a letter quoted in a fifteenth-century Castilian chronicle reveals.73 Written in the spring of 1409, the letter was ad dressed to the master of a famous Spanish military order, the Order of Santiago, who then forwarded it to the regent of Castile himself, Ferdinand (later king of Aragon). The news it brought both men as they mustered their forces for a cam paign against the kingdom of Granada was welcome: Mary had performed a great miracle in Antequara, one of the Muslim cities Ferdinand was eyeing as a possible target. According to the letter, two Christian boys, held in Antequara as hostages for their older male relatives, were visited in their dungeon one day by the Virgin. She comforted the children, telling them to put aside their fears and promising them they would safely escape from their captivity. A few days later, the boys found a way out. But once beyond the city walls, they lost their way. Wandering hopelessly, they were about to give up and return to Antequara when Mary ap peared again and led them to the safety of a nearby Christian town.

As Prince Ferdinand read the letter recounting this Marian miracle, he must have been pleased. It was after all a most hopeful sign-perhaps these events meant that just as Mary had returned the children to Christian territory, so An tequara itself would be delivered to the Christians. As the chronicler who quoted the letter well knew, Ferdinand's desire to conquer this city would be fulfilled just one year after the miracle occurred. Some contemporaries even attributed the spectacular victory of 1410 that attached Antequara's name to Ferdinand's for centuries (historians know him as Ferdinand of Antequara) to the saint who earlier had freed the Christian boys from the city: the Virgin. In a flattering poem com posed by the court poet Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino (c. 1345-1425), the Virgin commands Sts. James and John to accompany Ferdinand as he laid siege to Antequara-their orders were to make sure her favorite knight won.74 The chronicler who preserved the letter about the captives does not credit Mary

directly with Ferdinand's victory at Antequara, though he does depict the regent as having her blessing in his campaigns against Granada.7s But this writer makes no bones about the deep connection between the Virgin's miraculous aid to the young hostages of Antequara and her ability to help men on the battlefield. He passes immediately from the letter about the captives to a long disquisition about the Virgin's willingness to intervene on behalf of Christian warriors when they cross swords with Muslims.76 For the chronicler, both are proof that Mary actively supports Christians in "their work of war against the infidel."77 Accordingly, he frames this whole chapter not simply as about Mary's miracles, but as about

Mary's miracles on behalf of Christians.

73 Alvar Garc?a de Santa Mar?a, Cr?nica de Juan II de Castilla, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo (Madrid,

1982), pp. 282-83. 74 Cancionero de Juan Alfonso de Baena 4, ed. Jos? Mar?a Az?ceta, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1966), 1:24

25. See also Villasandino's poem praising Ferdinand's devotion to Mary; ibid. 65, 1:143. For further

discussion, see Angus MacKay, "Ferdinand of Antequara and the Virgin Mary," in Angus MacKay and Ian Macpherson, Love, Religion and Politics in Fifteenth Century Spain, Medieval Iberian Pen

insula, Texts and Studies, 13 (Leiden, 1998), p. 134. 75 Garcia de Santa Mar?a, Cr?nica de Juan II, pp. 118, 129-31, and 190-91. 76

Ibid., pp. 283-84. 77

Ibid., p. 283.



656 Christian Captives This religious edge is sharpened by a simple phrase the Virgin uses as she con

soles the boys in their dungeon at Antequara. She tells them "to keep the faith (que guardassen la fee)."78 Mary's words could be read as an exhortation not to despair. But surely in this era the expression still had its literal meaning: the Virgin is also instructing the boys not to renounce Christianity. Captives, whether Muslim or Christian, were very often subject to the pressure-and the temptation-to convert to their master's faith.79 The efforts by both Muslims and Christians to redeem their coreligionists from captivity then might be motivated by the need to remove members of their faith from situations that might provoke conversion.80 Accordingly, the redemption of captives became a symbolic battlefield on which Muslims and Christians might affirm their religious identities.8' Rescuing captives languishing in the hands of the unbelievers was tantamount to the triumph of one's own faith and the defeat of the alien faith-as one text from Guadalupe declared, Mary's ability to free captives was proof that Christianity and not Islam was the "true and holy faith (ley). "82 Hence the rhetorical link between military victory and the liberation of captives.

In the miracle stories of the Cantigas de Santa Mar/a and those from Guadalupe, Mary wins many such symbolic victories for Christianity. Not only does she an swer the prayers of Christian captives and break their chains, but she also inter venes to shore up their allegiance to Christianity should it waver. As with the two boys at Antequara, she prevents captives from converting to Islam or causes them to return to Christianity if they have given in and become Muslims.83 What saint could better help Christians imprisoned by the Muslims escape the trap of an alien faith than Mary? A loving mother always ready to help her human children in their hour of need, the Virgin also embodied the faith to which the captives were to cling-she was, after all, the Church, Ecclesia.A4 In fact, Mary's identity with Ecclesia may have motivated her appearance on the symbolic battlefield of the redemption of captives as much as did her maternal tenderness. In turning to her

78 Ibid., p. 282.

79 For the medieval period: Bensch, "From Prizes of War"; Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, El Sarraihs

de la Corona Catalono-Aragonesa en el segle XIV: Segregado i discriminado (Barcelona, 1987),

pp. 74-81; Lappin, Medieval Cult, pp. 293-96; Miraculos roman?ados, pp. 65-67, 95-96, and 109; and Francisco de As?s Veas Arteseros and Juan Francisco Jim?nez Alc?zar, "Notas sobre el rescate de

cautivos en la frontera de Granada," Actas, ed. Segura Artero (above, n. 31), pp. 233-34. For the

early modern period: Bartolom? Bennassar and Lucile Bennassar, Les chr?tiens d'Allah: L'histoire

extraordinaire des ren?gats XVIe et XVIIe si?cles (Paris, 1989), esp. pp. 202-340; Friedman, Spanish

Captives, pp. 58, 77, 88-89, and 90; and Garc?a-Arenal and de Bunes, Los Espa?oles y el Norte de

Africa, pp. 212-39. 80 Ferrer i Mallol, El Sarrains, pp. 71-81; Argente del Castillo Oca?a, "Cautiverio y martirio,"

p. 47; Friedman, Spanish Captives, pp. 81 and 146. 81 Miller, Guardians of Islam.

82 Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe, fol. 292r.

83 For example, Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 325, 3:152-55; Madrid, BN MS 1176, fols.

9r-12v; Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe, fols. 240v-242r. 84 On the equivalence between Mary and the Church, see Marie-Louise Th?rel, Le triomphe de la

Vierge-Eglise: A l'origine du d?cor du portail occidental de Notre-Dame de Senlis. Sources historiques, litt?raires et iconographiques (Paris, 1984), esp. pp. 78-193.




for comfort in their oppressive prisons, captives were affirming their membership in the church, their very identities as Christians. The Virgin's capacity to free Christians from captivity and servitude represented the liberating power of faith itself. This then is the long and rich history that lies behind Cervantes' invocation of

the Virgin in El trato de Argel. When Cervantes came to write Los banos de Argel and the chapters of Don Quijote called the "Captive's Tale," he added further nuance to his portrait of the Virgin's potent role in the conflictual dialogue be tween Muslims and Christians. As his Muslim maidens Zahara and Zoraida show, if Mary as mother and Ecclesia could be the triumphant vehicle for Christians' liberation from Muslim captors, she could also extend her powers to people trapped in spiritual dungeons: the Virgin might prompt Muslims to flee the prison of Islam and embrace Christianity.

MUSLIM MAIDENS

In relating stories of how Marian devotion made Muslims convert to Chris tianity, Cervantes tapped into an old hagiographic tradition.85 The popular Mar ian miracle collections of the high Middle Ages provide eloquent evidence that medieval Christians loved to tell tales of how the Virgin induced non-Christians, particularly Jews and Muslims, to convert to Christianity.86 This is reflected quite clearly in Alfonso X's Cantigas de Santa Maria. For the Jews and Muslims who populate many of the cantigas, Mary could be a terrifying figure, punishing them for their lack of belief in her special nature as the virginal mother of God or, in the case of the Muslims, helping Christians inflict military defeat on them.87 But in these poems, the Virgin most frequently interacts with Jews and Muslims not to harm or chastise them but to bring them to Christianity.88 The evangelical Mary of the Cantigas was to some extent a creature of her time,

embodying the hopeful belief nurtured by many thirteenth-century Christian think ers that Muslims teetered on the brink of mass conversion to Christianity.89 This ill-founded Christian optimism soon evaporated.90 But the Virgin's role in con

85 Francisco M?rquez Villanueva also makes this suggestion, though his analysis differs considerably from mine; see his Personajes y temas del Quijote (Madrid, 1975), pp. 102-6.

86 On the reasons for Mary's association with conversion, see (from n. 17 above) Cuff el, "Hence

forth"; Remensnyder, "Colonization," pp. 197-98; and Remensnyder, La Conquistadora. 87 For examples of punishment inflicted on Jews, see Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 4 and 34,

1:63-66 and 143-44. For military defeat of Muslims with Mary's aid, see ibid. 165 and 185, 2:164

67 and 204-7. 88 Ibid. 28, 46, 167, 192, and 205, 1:128-32 and 171-73 and 2:168-69, 218-23, and 251-53

(Muslim conversions); 4, 25, 85, 89, and 107, 1:63-66, 117-22, 268-70, and 278-81 and 2:27-30

(Jewish conversions). For discussion: Vikki Hatton and Angus MacKay, "Anti-Semitism in the Cantigas de Santa Mar?a," Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 60 (1983), 189-99, esp. p. 195; and Mercedes Garcia

Arenal, "Los moros en las Cantigas de Alfonso X el Sabio," Al-Qantara: Revista de estudios ?rabes

6 (1985), 133-51, esp. pp. 145-47. 89 Robert I. Burns, "Christian-Islamic Confrontation in the West: The Thirteenth-Century Dream of

Conversion," American Historical Review 76 (1971), 1386-1434. 90

Benjamin Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims (Princeton,

N.J., 1984).




version did not disappear along with the "dream of conversion. "91 In late-medieval Spain, miracle stories similar to those of the Cantigas were repeated and new, even more ambitious ones added to them. The belief in Mary's powers to persuade Muslims to convert to Christianity continued into Cervantes' day, as the sixteenth century miracle collections from Guadalupe eloquently demonstrate.92 A play composed in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century by Cervantes' fellow literary luminary Lope de Vega also provides evidence of the persistent association between the Virgin and the conversion of Muslims. Lope's plot features a king of Morocco prompted to seek baptism by a sudden access of Marian devotion.93

The authors of these stories often narrate conversion using the same evocative imagery of captivity and liberation that was so associated with other Marian miracles. Here, though, this language is metaphoric, an expression of spiritual rather than physical conditions. Such is the case in an enigmatic letter now in the Barcelona archives, dated 1325 and addressed to Pope John XXII.94 Identifying the actual author of this letter is not easy, but it purports to be from "Bobacre," the Muslim "lord of the city of Affrica" (probably the Tunisian port of Mahdia).95 Bobacre relates how one night he had a vision of a beautiful woman who identified herself as the Virgin. Urging Bobacre to reject Islam in favor of Christianity, Mary "commanded" that he "come out of diabolical captivity (a diabolica capcione)" and convert to the "true catholic faith." This description of Islam as a prison whose door the Virgin imperiously flings open is arresting. It recalls the play be tween the physical and the spiritual in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, whose poets drew explicit parallels between Mary's ability to help prisoners escape from their fetters and her powers as mediatrix to release Christians from the equally weighty if less material-bonds of sin.96 When the Virgin freed Muslims from the spiritual snare of unbelief, she could

in fact also free them from physical forms of enclosure, as a poem from the Can tigas suggests.97 The protagonist of this cantiga is a Muslim man from Almeria

who had been captured by Christians. Enslaved as many Muslim captives were,

91 "Dream of conversion" is Burns's formulation (see n. 89 above). 92

Cr?moux, P?lerinages, pp. 206-8; Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe, fols.

231r-233r, 234v-235r, 247v-248v, 273v-274r, 289r-v, 301v-302r, and 315v-316v. 93

Lope de Vega, La tragedia del rey Don Sebasti?n y bautismo del pr?ncipe de Marruecos, acts 2

and 3, in Lope de Vega, Comedias, ed. Manual Arroyo Stephens, 15 vols. (Madrid, 1993-98), 8:452

517. 94

Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d'Arag?, C Jaume II Cartas extra series, caixa 136, no. 517. The

text has been edited with some errors of transcription (including reading "Bobacre" as "Bobaire") by Heinrich Finke in Acta Aragonensia: Quellen zur deutschen, italienischen, franz?sischen, spanischen, zur Kirchen- und Kulturgeschichte aus der diplomatischen Korrespondez Jaymes II. (1291-1327), 3

vols. (Berlin, 1908-22), 2:757-58. 95 On the identification of "Affrica" as Mahdia, see Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, L'Espagne ca

talane et le Maghrib aux XHIe et XlVe si?cles: De la bataille de Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) ?

l'av?nement du sultan m?rinide Abou-l-Hasan (1331), Biblioth?que de l'?cole des hautes ?tudes his

paniques 37 (Paris, 1966), pp. 493-94. On the circumstances of the letter's composition and its au

thorship, see below, pp. 664-65. 96 Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 176, 227, 245, and 291, 2:186-87, 297-99, 338-42 and

3:76. 97 Ibid. 192,2:218-23.



Christian Captives 659 he ended up in the possession of a Christian who lived near Toledo. The Christian man tried to convert him, but had no success-the Muslim stubbornly refused Christianity, especially obdurate in his rejection of the Virgin. His master punished him by locking him up. Sensing easy prey, a demon attacked him-here was a soul ripe for plucking, since it had refused Christianity. The Muslim fought back desperately. Then he received a new visitor: Mary. She told him that to escape the demon, he would have to renounce Islam. The Muslim wisely decided to obey her. The next morning he poured forth the story of the vision to his master, who released him from confinement. Baptized as Mary had ordered, the convert spent the rest of his life as a good Christian in her service. This man's liberation from physical captivity mirrored his escape from the spiritual prison of Islam-and he owed both to the Virgin. The poem's title itself succinctly captures the Virgin's powers in both these realms: "How St. Mary Freed a Moor Whom a Demon

Wanted to Take and Made Him Become a Christian." Other miracle stories articulated the Virgin's ability to effect both physical and

spiritual liberations somewhat differently. In, for example, two stories from Gua dalupe, one set in the final years of the campaign for Granada and the other somewhere in North Africa during the late fifteenth or sixteenth century, Marian devotion inspires Muslim men to seek baptism and to free Christian captives.98 The structure of these tales is reminiscent of Cervantes' own stories of Marian conversion. So pronounced, in fact, is the resemblance that it is evident Cervantes was working from this long hagiographic tradition, which provided vivid proof of the Virgin's ability to free souls and bodies at once. The rich narrative possi bilities this aspect of Mary offered Cervantes as he crafted his portraits of Zahara and Zoraida were heightened by an overlapping strand of Christian tradition equally important to him: the tales clustered around the figure of the female Mus lim convert who frees captives. Cervantes certainly was not the first author to spin stories of Muslim maidens

who help Christian captives escape and then themselves convert to Christianity and take a Christian husband.99 That honor belongs instead to a Norman monk of the twelfth century, Orderic Vitalis, who included such a tale in his sprawling Historia ecclesiastica.100 Orderic's immediate source was probably a knight com ing home from combat in what was then called the Holy Land: the tale is set in the immediate aftermath of the First Crusade, and its male hero, the captive whom the Muslim maiden hopes to marry, is Bohemond of Antioch.10' According to Orderic, neither Bohemond nor the Muslim maiden who helps him escape calls on Mary or any other saint. To be sure, on regaining his freedom, Bohemond vows to make a thanksgiving pilgrimage to St. Leonard of Noblat, a promise he apparently actually fulfilled during a visit to France in 1105-7.102 Yet as Orderic

98 Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe, fols. 247v-248v and 315v-316v.

99 Nor was he the last?this motif appears in English ballads from the late eighteenth century; see

Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (New York, 2004), p. 83. 100 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History 10.24, ed. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1969-80),

5:358-79; F. M. Warren, "The Enamoured Moslem Princess in Ordericus Vitalis and the French Epic," PMLA 29 (1914), 341-58.

101 Warren, "Moslem Princess."

102 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History 10.24, 5:376-78.




describes it, there was nothing miraculous about this captive's liberation or the maiden's conversion. The tale is really about Bohemond's bravery and the bold cunning of the Muslim woman who loves him. It was in this form that the story passed into French epic, becoming part of the stock repertoire of motifs that an author might exploit to enhance a hero.103

In Orderic's wake, however, it was not only jongleurs who sang of a Muslim maiden who helped Christian captives escape and then herself converted. Perhaps influenced by epic as hagiographers often were, the authors of Marian miracle stories also appropriated this character. The language and conceits of epic firmly shape the earliest extant instance of such borrowing: the late-fifteenth-century legend gilding the origins of the shrine of Notre-Dame de Liesse in France and its wonder-working image of Mary.104 According to this text, three twelfth-century French crusaders are taken prisoner by the Muslims and brought to the sultan of Egypt.105 Languishing in his prison, they are visited by his daughter, Ismerie. At her father's orders, Ismerie tries to convert the captives to Islam but soon falls under the spell of what they tell her about Christianity. She is especially captivated by their description of the "beautiful Virgin Mary"-she even asks the captives to sculpt an image of the Virgin, promising that in return she will help them escape. The captives, who as good knights have never in their lives touched sculptors' tools, are saved when angels bring them an exquisite Marian image. Upon seeing it, Ismerie decides not only to free the captives but to accompany them back to France and convert to Christianity so that she might serve Mary and her son.

Some scholars have argued that this French legend was Cervantes' inspiration for the "Captive's Tale."'106 It is certainly possible. Pilgrims who visited Liesse might have returned home with stories of the shrine's statue, stories that then passed mouth to mouth until they reached Cervantes either during his years abroad or in Spain itself. Yet the considerable differences in structure and focus between Cervantes' stories and the Liesse legend should give us pause. Further more, Ismerie moves in an epic, fantastic crusading world of the past, whereas Zoraida and Zahara inhabit a city of the present, Algiers as Cervantes and his contemporaries knew it. In fact, there is no need to look as far away as France to find a story about a Muslim maiden converted through love of the Virgin that could have been Cervantes' inspiration. By the late sixteenth century, a tale much more like the ones he himself would write was told at a Marian church that there is every reason to believe he had visited: Guadalupe, the home of a Castilian Virgin

most famed for her role in liberating captives. In Cervantes' day, pilgrims to Guadalupe learned of a Muslim maiden named

Fatima who lived, not in crusader Egypt like Liesse's Ismerie, but in late-fifteenth

103 Warren, "Moslem Princess."

104 On the history of the shrine, see Bruno Ma?s, Notre-Dame de Liesse: Huit si?cles de lib?ration et de joie (Paris, 1991).

105 "Comment Ihymage N[ost]re Dame de Liesse autrement ditte de Lience fut trouuee, auec les

miracles": Notre-Dame de Liesse, sa l?gende d'apr?s le plus ancien texte connu, ed. Comte de Hennezel

d'Ormois (n.p., 1934). 106 G. Cirot, "Le Cautivo de Cervantes et Notre Dame de Liesse," Bulletin hispanique 38 (1936),

378-82; Hugues Vaganay, "Une source de 'Cautivo' de Cervantes," Bulletin hispanique 39 (1937), 153-54.




century Tangiers.107 Fatima's wealthy father had decided to marry her off to a powerful fellow Muslim. But she had been talking with the Christian captives held in her father's prison, and her heart was now set on converting to Christianity. Fatima entrusted her fragile hopes of being baptized to two sources of refuge that the captives had told her about: the Virgin of Guadalupe and the cross. Upon learning that her father had quite other plans for her, she was seized by despair. Preparing to leap to her death from a high tower, she suddenly saw a burst of light "in the direction of the land of the Catholics." Resplendent at its heart was the Virgin of Guadalupe. Comforted by this vision, Fatima descended from the tower, released the captives from their fetters, and made the arduous journey with them to Spain. The Virgin of Guadalupe protected them the whole way. Soon after arriving in Spain, Fatima was baptized and then hurried to thank the Virgin by making a pilgrimage with her companions to Guadalupe. The former captives left the shrine after offering their chains to Mary, but the converted Muslim woman stayed at Guadalupe for the rest of her life as the Virgin's servant. So well in fact did the convert care for Mary that the townspeople nicknamed her "the good Christian"-la buena Christiana.

A late-sixteenth-century historian of Guadalupe, Gabriel de Talavera, included this story in his proud account of his monastery and its glories.108 Talavera wrote in 1597. But la buena Christiana first appears in a handful of laconic documents dating from a full hundred years earlier-exactly the era in which the miracle is set. Reticent as these texts are, they nonetheless suggest that this woman was not the creature of pure hagiographic fable that Notre-Dame de Liesse's Ismerie so clearly was. These documents reveal that a woman called la buena Christiana actually lived at Guadalupe in the late fifteenth century. This woman was asso ciated with the monastery in some way, for an account book from the 1470s notes that she was granted food from its kitchen for the rest of her life.109 She was well off enough to own "houses" and a good enough Christian that she loaned them to the inquisitors as an audience hall when they came to Guadalupe in 1485.110 At her death, she left these houses to the monastery-in Cervantes' day they were still called las casas de la buena Christiana."'1 The monastic community evidently cherished this woman's memory, for they housed her remains in a tomb located in their church. By the late sixteenth century, this tomb sported a marble plaque that could have been read by any literate pilgrim such as Cervantes. Inscribed on it was the story of la buena Christiana's miraculous Marian conversion."12

Just who was this woman buried in state in Guadalupe's church? It is hard to know. But it is probable that she was not who the marble plaque adorning her tomb said she was: the daughter of a wealthy and noble Muslim of Tangiers

107 Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe, fols. 231r-233r.

108 Ibid., fols. 231r-233r.

109 Germ?n Rubio, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe (Barcelona, 1926), p. 219. 110

Diego de Ecija, Libro de la invenci?n de esta Santa Imagen de Guadalupe y de la erecci?n y

fundaci?n de este monasterio y de algunas cosas particulares y vidas de algunos religiosos de ?l 4.67, ed. Angel Barrado Manzano (C?ceres, 1953), p. 345.

111 Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe, fol. 233r.

112 Ibid., fol. 233r.




converted through love of Mary. In Muslim Spain and Muslim North Africa, voluntary conversion to Christianity by high-ranking Muslim women was ex tremely unusual.'13 To be sure, in the late sixteenth century some women married to powerful Muslim men in North Africa did eventually flee their husbands and go to live as Christians in Christian kingdoms. But these women were renegades Christian captives who converted to Islam and then were married off to male renegades or to natural-born Muslims.14 By escaping to Christendom, they were not converting, as la buena Christiana and Cervantes' Zahara and Zoraida were supposed to have done, but rather returning to their original religious identity.

So unlikely was the conversion of high-ranking Muslim women that in contrast to several known instances in which medieval Muslim princes embraced Chris tianity, there is only one documented case of a medieval Muslim princess doing so: a late-eleventh-century woman related by blood to the taifa rulers of Toledo and by marriage to the princes of Seville."51 Political turmoil alone led her to the baptismal font. Losing her husband, Al-Ma mun, during the violent upheavals accompanying the fall of one taifa kingdom after another to the Almoravids, a North African Berber dynasty, this woman took refuge with Alfonso VI of Leon Castile (d. 1109). At this Christian court, she seems to have found safety-and more. Eventually she became Alfonso's concubine and then his wife. It was some time during her years with this king that she made the expedient decision to adopt his religion.

This woman earned a certain notoriety among Muslims. Well into the fifteenth century, jurists as far away as Morocco would cite her conversion to Christianity as a cautionary tale proving the religious perils of sexual relations between Muslim

113 M. J. Rubiera Mata, "Un ins?lito caso de conversas musulmanas al cristianismo: Las princesas toledanas del siglo XI," in Las mujeres en el cristianismo medieval: Im?genes te?ricas y cauces de

actuaci?n religiosa, ed. Angela Mu?oz Fern?ndez, Laya 5 (Madrid, 1989), pp. 341-47, at p. 341. The

fact that none of the articles in a recent collection about conversion to and from Islam focuses on (or even mentions significant evidence of) female converts is telling; see Conversions islamiques: Identit?s

religieuses en Islam m?diterran?en, ed. Mercedes Garc?a-Arenal (Paris, 2001). In 1588, a very young female member of the ruling house of Tunisia was baptized in Palermo, but the circumstances leading to her conversion are not at all clear given the fragmentary nature of the evidence; see Salvatore Bono, "Conversioni di musulmani al cristianesimo," in Chr?tiens et musulmans ? la Renaissance: Actes du

37e colloque du CESR (1994), ed. Bartolom? Bennassar and Robert Sauzet, Le Savoir de Mantice 3

(Paris, 1998), p. 440. In any case, given her young age (she is described as a figliuola and an infante), it is extremely unlikely that she herself made the decision to convert.

114 As?n, "La hija de Agi Morato" (above, n. 14), p. 248; and the texts cited in Miguel de Cervantes,

El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, 10 vols. (Madrid, 1947-49), 3:242-43, n. 5; and in

Cervantes, Los ba?os de Argel, p. 23. For the social and religious situation of female renegades in

North Africa, see the contemporaneous description of Diego de Haedo, Topograf?a e historia general de Argel 30 and 35, ed. Ignacio Bauer y Landauer, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1927-29), 1:119 and 165; and

the analysis in Bennassar and Bennassar, Chr?tiens d'Allah (above, n. 79), pp. 289-307. 115 On Muslim princes, see Burns, "Christian-Islamic Confrontation" (above, n. 89), pp. 1392-94.

On the identity of the Muslim princess and the circumstances leading to her conversion discussed in

this paragraph, see Evariste L?vi-Proven?al, "La 'mora Zaiyda,' femme d'Alphonse VI de Castille et

leur fils l'Infant Sancho," Hesp?ris 18 (1934), 1-8; Bernard F. Reilly, The Contest of Christian and

Muslim Spain, 1031-1157 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 92 and 96; and Rubiera de Mata, "Un ins?lito caso,"

pp. 343-45.




women and Christian men.116 Among Christians she naturally enjoyed a much more positive reputation. Transformed from political refugee into a heroine of epic romance, by Cervantes' era Christians even honored her as a saint.117 Surely she would not have been singled out to receive such attention from either Muslims or Christians if her behavior had been typical for a Muslim woman. The mere existence of these traditions then suggests what the events of her life reveal: it took rare circumstances to make Muslim women freely convert to Christianity. Even

Muslim women living under Christian rule were far less likely to renounce Islam in favor of Christianity than were their male counterparts unless they found them selves in one of two situations: either they were captives of Christians or they were women who, having slept with Christian men, could escape the harsh punishments that would otherwise be their lot by converting.118

La buena Christiana's Marian conversion then probably belonged more to the realm of story than of reality. So, too, did the conversions of Cervantes' own

Muslim maidens: the actual woman upon whom Zahara and Zoraida were mod eled never herself embraced Christianity.119 Yet even if these stories about Mary's liberations of Muslim maidens from the spiritual prison of Islam did not possess the same degree of verisimilitude that lay behind the tales of her ability to free Christian captives from Muslim masters, they nonetheless were equally eloquent vehicles for the expression of triumphal Christian attitudes toward Muslims. For conversion itself is a form of spiritual conquest and colonization. It represents the victory of one religion over another. Hence seventeenth-century Spaniards staged the baptism of Muslims as jubilant public ceremonies.120 Nor do the dense layers of meanings clustered around conversion in the premodern Spanish world end there. So tightly bound up with other levels of identity was religious affiliation that the victories enacted on the spiritual plane by conversion could reverberate loudly in other arenas.

In particular, spiritual submission to Christianity could signal or accompany political submission to Christians. The potential political weight of conversion often influenced actual high-level maneuverings between Muslims and Christians. So in the 1220s, Abu Zayd, the last Almohad ruler of Valencia, bet this card as he tried to gain Christian support in his efforts to hold onto the kingdom slowly

116 P. S. van Koningsfeld and G. A. Wiegers, "The Islamic Statute of the Mudejars in Light of a New

Source," Al-Qantara: Revista de estudios ?rabes 17 (1996), 28 (and n. 43); David Nirenberg, "Muslims

in Christian Iberia, 1000-1526: Varieties of Mudejar Experience," in The Medieval World, ed. Peter

Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London, 2001), p. 71; Gerard Wiegers, Islamic Literature in Spanish and Aljamiado: Y ?a of Segovia (Fl. 1450), His Antecedents and Successors, Medieval Iberian Peninsula, Texts and Studies, 8 (Leiden, 1994), p. 6 (n. 30).

117 Rubiera de Mata, "Un ins?lito caso," pp. 342-43 and 347. The sixteenth-century vita and mira

cula are edited in "De Casilda virgine, Burgis Hispaniae," Acta sanctorum, April, 1:847-50. 118 For evidence of Mudejar female converts, see R. Ignatius Burns, S.J., "Journey from Islam: In

cipient Cultural Transition in the Conquered Kingdom of Valencia (1240-1280)," Speculum 35

(1960), 337-56, at pp. 348 and 349, n. 62. On Mudejar women who converted to escape the legal

penalty of servitude, see Ferrer i Mallol, El Sarrdins (above, n. 79), pp. 19-24. For the conversion of

enslaved female captives, see Bono, "Conversioni di Musulmani," p. 434. 119

As?n, "La hija de Agi Morato," pp. 264-66. 120 Bernard Vincent, "Musulmans et conversion en Espagne au XVIIe si?cle," in Conversions isla

miques, ed. Garc?a-Arenal, pp. 193-205.




slipping from his grasp. He declared political allegiance to James I of Aragon and told the pope he was thinking of converting-a thought he acted on by 1236.121 Other Muslim rulers hoping for military aid from Christian rulers also found it convenient to hint that they were contemplating entering the Christian fold. The early-fourteenth-century Hafsid sultan of Tunisia, Ibn al-Lihyani, was particularly adroit at this game. During the many years of his negotiations with James II of Aragon, Ibn al-Lihyani not only played to Aragonese imperial ambitions in the Maghreb by proposing that Tunisia become James's client state but he also dan gled the enticing bait of conversion before the excited eyes of his potential ally and lord.122

The nexus between spiritual and political allegiances so deftly, if ultimately unsuccessfully, exploited by al-Lihyani appears, too, in the stories Christians could tell about Muslim princely converts, whether real or legendary.123 Indeed, in the world of Christian legend, the conversion of Muslim princes was rarely devoid of political resonance. Christians could rhetorically shape such princely renuncia tions of Islam in order to create a political map distinctly aligned in favor of Christendom.

Such is the case in a tantalizing set of three letters addressed to Pope John XXII and relating to one of al-Lihyani's immediate descendants, Abu Bakr, whom we have encountered before as "Bobacre," Marian convert and lord of the Tunisian city of Mahdia.124 Announcing Abu Bakr's decision not only to embrace Chris tianity but to bring an army of converts with him and to deliver his city to a Christian lord, these letters could represent a canny continuation of the politics of his relative al-Lihyani and therefore an effort to gain Christian military sup port against Muslim rivals.125 Yet the political picture painted in these texts fits suspiciously well with contemporaneous Aragonese ambitions in North Africa. Perhaps Abu Bakr's conversion and its military consequences were then pure con coctions of the Christian men who signed their names to two of the letters: Domi nicus Sancii and Alfonsus Petri. Dominicus and Alfonsus were Mahdia's alcayts, that is, the leaders of the Catalo-Aragonese mercenaries employed by the city's

Muslim ruler.126 As such, they were also the unofficial representatives of the king of Aragon and therefore well aware of how nicely his continuing territorial aspi

121 Robert I. Burns, "Almohad Prince and Mudejar Convert: New Documentation on Abu Zayd," in Medieval Iberia: Essays on the History and Literature of Medieval Spain, ed. Donald J. Kagay and

Joseph T. Snow (New York, 1997), pp. 171-88. 122

Dufourcq, L'Espagne catalane, pp. 488-93. Non-Christian rulers on the northeastern fringes of

Christendom also used the promise of baptism as a political bargaining tool; see Rasa Mazeika, "Bar

gaining for Baptism: Lithuanian Negotiations for Conversion, 1250-1358," in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville, Fla., 1997), pp. 131-45.

123 Adam Knobler, "Pseudo-Conversions and Patchwork Pedigrees: The Christianization of Muslim

Princes and the Diplomacy of Holy War," Journal of World History 7 (1996), 181-97. 124 See above, p. 658, and Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d'Arag?, C Jaume II Cartas extra series,

caixa 136, nos. 515-17. No. 517 has been edited in Acta Aragonensia, 2:757-58. For the identification

of "Bobacre" as Abu Bakr, governor of Mahdia and descendant of Ibn al-Lihyani, see Dufourcq,

L'Espagne catalane, pp. 493-94. 125 On the political problems faced by Mahdia in 1325, see Dufourcq, L'Espagne catalane, pp. 493

94. 126 On alcayts see ibid., pp. 101-4, 412-13, and 436-37.




rations in the Maghreb would be served by the submission of Mahdia and its lord to Christianity.127 Yet whether Abu Bakr's conversion was a Christian literary fabrication, his own invention, or a genuine experience, the letters render it an act as pregnant with political consequences as it was with religious meaning. And on both stages, Mary plays a leading role. She impels Abu Bakr's change of spiritual affiliation and all the triumphs for Christianity it triggers.

If Christians could read political victory into the conversions-real, suggested, or legendary-of high-ranking Muslim men, what did they make of the legendary conversions of Muslim maidens such as Guadalupe's la buena Christiana and Cervantes' Zoraida and Zahara? After all, even in legend these women could not exercise the overt political power their male counterparts did. They could not bring armies and cities over to Christendom. Yet if anything, in Christian legend, the Marian conversions of Muslim women had even deeper layers of political and cultural significance than did the conversion of Muslim men. For implicit in the spiritual conquest enacted by conversion is the appropriation of the convert by his or her new religion-and it is one thing to appropriate the men belonging to the enemy camp and entirely another to appropriate the women. The domination, whether real or imagined, of the enemy's women often ex

presses triumph as eloquently as any victory won through the clash of arms can. As a narrative trope, it draws its power in part from the equivalence so often made between the female body and a territorial polity or a people.128 Christians of late medieval and early-modern Spain were well aware of this. In the ballads and romances that enjoyed such popularity, they would have heard Christian knights compare Muslim cities ripe for conquest to beautiful women equally ready for the plucking and learned, too, of Muslim princesses whose sexual union with Chris tian heroes symbolized the defeat of Muslim territory.129 Perhaps this ability of the feminine to embody the collective colored how Christians understood legends about converted Muslim maidens, such as Zoraida and la buena Christiana. If so, these stories told of more than individuals embracing a new religion-they nar rated the submission of Muslims to Christians and of Islam to Christianity. Whether the Christian victory embodied by these female converts was collective

or individual, all the tales endow it with a keen edge that could not have been produced by the religious defection of a man. In each of these stories, the Muslim maiden's conversion involves her resounding rejection of the Muslim man whose intimate property she is. Ismerie, la buena Christiana, Zahara, and Zoraida all defy their fathers' authority in one way or another. Each helps Christian captives escape her father's prison and then herself flees beyond his control. Their rejection of the father and all he stands for culminates in their renunciation of his religion.

127 On these Aragonese ambitions see ibid. 128

Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L.-R. Higonnet, "The Double Helix," in Behind the Lines:

Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1987),

pp. 37-38. 129 Pedro Correa Rodr?guez, Los romances frontizeros, 2 vols. (Granada, 1999), 1:297 and 301-2.

For discussion, see Louise Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts ofReconquest Castile (Ann

Arbor, Mich., 1996), pp. 17-30; Juan Victorio Mart?nez, "La ciudad-mujer en los romances frontize

ros," Anuario de estudios medievales 15 (1985), 553-60; and Mar?a Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, El

Moro de Granada en la literatura (del siglo XV al XX) (Madrid, 1956; repr. 1989), p. 32.




Despite her father's tender pleas, Zoraida is so unshakable in her decision to leave Islam that some literary critics have condemned her as a heartless, disloyal child.130 Yet here Zoraida merely accompanies her literary sisters as they all heed Christ's repeated exhortations in the New Testament to cast off the ties of blood kinship in favor of spiritual family (Matthew 12.46-50, 10.29; Luke 14.26).

In their quest to convert, these women often spurn not only their fathers but other male Muslim authority figures. Both Guadalupe's la buena Christiana and Cervantes' Zahara elude marriage to the Muslim men chosen for them by their fathers. These are not the gestures of women seeking to escape patriarchy itself: Zahara selects a Christian husband for herself, as does Zoraida in the "Captive's Tale." Sexually and spiritually appropriated for Christianity, Zahara and Zoraida become living affronts to Muslim male honor. So, too, the conversions of la buena Christiana and Ismerie bring humiliation and shame upon the Muslim men, whether father or potential husband, whose authority they shrug off. The inability of these men to control women supposedly under their protection parallels Islam's inability to retain the maidens' religious loyalties. Muslim men and Islam itself are exposed as emasculated, impotent forces, incapable of commanding obedience or arousing desire.

The Muslim maidens of these tales direct their desire instead toward a much more worthy object: the Virgin Mary. All of these women-Notre-Dame de Liesse's Ismerie, Guadalupe's la buena Christiana, and Cervantes' Zahara and Zoraida-are characterized by intense longing for the Virgin. Zoraida, for ex ample, openly yearns for Mary. In contrast, her relationship with the Christian captive whom she has chosen as her husband is strikingly devoid of sexual pas sion.'3' So pronounced is the language of Marian desire in the legend from Liesse that it almost takes on lesbian proportions. The story reads like a love affair from the romances, with the Virgin in the role of lovely lady and Ismerie as the impas sioned suitor. "Inflamed with love" and "ravished by love," Ismerie spends hours shut up in her room thinking about "beautiful Mary," as the Virgin is almost invariably described in this text.'32 When Ismerie first sees the image of Mary brought by angels, she is so struck by its beauty that she falls to her knees, the gesture of a lover as much as a devotee. She then hides the image in her room, taking it out of its silk wrapper only to kiss and hug it a hundred times over.133 This Marian desire could symbolize the convert's longing for the church as

embodied by the Virgin. Yet this reading would not explain why these Muslim maidens' yearning for the Virgin also manifests itself as the determination to take Mary as their Christian name. Cervantes' Zahara and Zoraida are in fact quite insistent about being called Mary. When the captive recounts his story to Don Quijote and company, he makes the mistake of introducing Zoraida by her Mus

130 M?rquez Villanueva, Personajes (above, n. 85), pp. 132-34; Percas de Ponseti, Cervantes y su

concepto del arte (above, n. 12), 1:226-42 and 261. 131

M?rquez Villanueva, Personajes, pp. 116 and 120; E. Michael Gerli, Refiguring Authority: Read

ing, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes, Studies in Romance Languages 39 (Lexington, Ky., 1995),

p. 53. 132 "Comment Ihymage fut trouuee" (above, n. 105), pp. 47, 48, 52, and 54. 133

Ibid., pp. 53-54.




lim name. Deeply upset, Zoraida is provoked to utter the only words she will say during this episode: "No, no, Zoraida! Mary, Mary . .. yes, yes, Mary, Mary!"'134 In Los banos de Argel, Zahara's very last line is even "now my name is not Zahara anymore but Mary."135 Notre-Dame de Liesse's Ismerie also takes Mary as her baptismal name.'36 Guadalupe's la buena Christiana, however, does not. She chooses instead the name Isabel, perhaps a nod to the queen reigning at the time of her conversion. Yet she is the exception that proves the rule. The crowd of Christians at this woman's baptism urge her to take the name of Mary. She refuses, declaring that "it is not right that the slave should take her mistress's name."'137 The expectation that lies behind this interchange is clear: Muslim female converts should be called Mary. And so in the ballads about frontier life that entertained Spanish audiences of the sixteenth century, they often were.138

Even the legendary afterlife of the one medieval Muslim princess who really did convert to Christianity was shaped by this expectation. Twelfth-century Christian chroniclers recorded the baptismal name of this daughter or granddaughter of one of the last Muslim rulers of Toledo as Isabel.139 But by the thirteenth century, she appears instead as Mary.140 This was no casual substitution, as one late-thirteenth century text underscores in its dramatic account of her baptism. In this story, her new husband, Alfonso VI, sternly forbids the officiating clerics from giving her the name she so keenly wants: Mary. Yet this woman cleverly foils the king by persuading the prelates to baptize her as Mary but to tell Alfonso that they called her Isabel.'4'

These legendary converts who happily shed their original names to become Mary had at least some historical counterparts. Fragmentary evidence from thirteenth century Valencia suggests that Mudejar women who converted to Christianity often did receive this name at baptism.142 In this they were little different from girls born to Christian families: beginning in the thirteenth century, the name Mary enjoyed increasing popularity across western Europe.143 So common did it become that by the sixteenth century approximately one-quarter of the Christian women living in Spain were called Mary.144

The Muslim maidens of legend then may seem to blend into this crowd of Marys, their name choice merely a reflection of actual patterns among converts

134 Cervantes, Don Quijote 1.4.37, 1:454.

135 Cervantes, Los ba?os de Argel, lines 1059-60, p. 155.

136 "Comment Ihymage fut trouuee," p. 60. 137

Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe, fol. 323v. 138 Correa Rodr?guez, Los romances frontizeros, 1:354. 139 Cr?nica Najerense 3.56, ed. Antonio Ubieto Arteta, Textos Medievales 15 (Valencia, 1966),

p. 118. 140

Rodrigo Jim?nez de Rada, Historia de rebus sive historia Gothica 6.30, ed. Juan Fern?ndez

Valverde, CCCM 72/1 (Turnhout, 1987), p. 214. 141 Primera cr?nica general de Espa?a que mand? componer Alfonso el Sabio y se continuaba bajo

Sancho IV en 1289 847, ed. Ram?n Men?ndez Pidal, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Madrid, 1955), 2:521. 142

Burns, "Journey from Islam" (above, n. 118), p. 349, n. 62. 143 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950

1350 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), p. 274. 144 Bernard Vincent, "Les Morisques et les pr?noms chr?tiens," in Les Morisques et leurs temps:

Table ronde internationale 4-7 juillet 1981, Montpellier (Paris, 1983), pp. 57-69.




and Christians. But the heavy emphasis that Christian storytellers such as Cer vantes placed on the new name of these fabled converts suggests otherwise. For a Muslim woman to take the name of Mary was a significant act, at least as these legends construe it. In accepting the Virgin's name as their own, these legendary converts express their likeness to the saintly patron of their conversion. As they take on Mary's name, they take on her identity, a message strongly reinforced by other elements of these stories. Even the one convert who does not take the Virgin's name-Guadalupe's la buena Christiana-is nonetheless just as Marian a figure as her sisters. Like them, la buena Christiana plays a role strongly reminiscent of

Mary's own: she is a merciful virgin who helps prisoners escape. The parallels between convert and Mary are perhaps most pronounced in the

"Captive's Tale." As some critics have noted, Cervantes skillfully uses Marian imagery to draw his portrait of Zoraida. He describes his virginal Muslim maiden as "Our Lady of Liberty" and the file that cuts through captives' chains.145 Surely, too, Cervantes intended Zoraida's name-the Arabic word for star-as an allu sion to the Virgin's identity as the stella maris, the "star of the sea."'146 The cap tives' frequent references to Zoraida as "our star" are then wordplays in more ways than one.147 Such explicitly Marian language does not appear in the other tales of converted Muslim maidens. Yet the structural similarity between these women and the Virgin is unmistakable. Chaste liberators offering hope to Chris tian captives, the Muslim maidens become so many reflections of Mary herself. This mirroring of the Virgin by Muslim women was not merely a literary effect

employed to heighten the Marian nature of these stories. It was freighted with meaning, as is rendered beautifully explicit in a poem from the Cantigas de Santa Maria that describes Castilian knights besieging a Muslim castle.148 When the Christians set fire to the castle's tower, the Muslims who had retreated inside run out onto the battlements to escape the smoke and flames. All die there except for a woman who sits on the edge of the tower clutching her son in her arms. When the Christian attackers see her, they draw in their breaths with wonder. As the poem says: "This image seemed to them like the way that the Virgin Mary is depicted holding and embracing her Son. "149 The artist who portrayed the scene did his best to bring out the likeness of the Muslim and child to the image of the Virgin and Child. This mother and her child are perched in the battlements in exactly the same way that in an earlier cantiga a statue of the Madonna and Child nestles between the battlements of a Christian frontier castle under attack by Mus lims. 150

145 Cervantes, Don Quijote 1.4.41, 1:495; Garc?s, Cervantes in Algiers, p. 215.

146 Gerli, Refiguring Authority, pp. 46, 50, and 52.

147 Garc?s, Cervantes in Algiers, pp. 214-15.

148 Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 205, 2:251-53. For the historical circumstances described

in this poem, see Joseph F. O'Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria: A Poetic Biog

raphy, The Medieval Mediterranean: Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400-1453,16 (Leiden, 1998),

pp. 89-90. 149 Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 205, 2:253. 150 For the Muslim and child, see Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS Banco Rari 20, fol. 6r. For the

statue of Mary and Jesus in the battlements of the Christian castle, see Biblioteca de El Escorial MS

TI. 1, fol. 247r.




This poem is historically specific enough to be recounting a real event. Just imagine the scene: the men sucking in their breaths in astonishment, nudging each other, muttering, "They're right. Looks just like that statue in the church at home." The tower was unsteady, weakened by fire, about to collapse. So, the cantiga says, the Christians prayed to the Virgin Mary, the prototype of the image they had before their eyes, asking her to save these Muslims. Miraculously, when the tower fell, the Muslim woman and her child landed without injury. The poem's conclu sion is foretold in the bodies of the woman and her child: they converted to Chris tianity. The illuminations underline the Marian quality of this convert even more ex

plicitly than do the words of the poem.15' In one frame, the Christians lead the pair, still in the Marian pose of mother with child, before the very kind of image they had unwittingly created with their bodies: a statue of Mary with Christ in her arms. A Christian gestures with one hand at the statue and with the other to the Muslim mother, explaining the miracle to her and indicating to the viewer the continuum between the two maternal figures. In the final frame, under the im passive gaze of the Marian majestas, the Muslims, still in mother-and-child mode, shiver in the baptismal font.

In this story of religious colonization, the likeness between the woman's ma ternal body and Mary's both saves and betrays her. Represented as a living Marian icon, this Muslim naturally is appropriated for Christianity. A similar dynamic operates in the tales about maidenly Muslim converts such as Zahara and Zoraida. Embodying the Virgin in attributes and often name, they, too, become so many flesh-and-blood images of her. The stories about these converts thus take a stance on a specific issue over which Muslim and Christian polemicists had clashed for centuries: the validity of representational images as devotional objects. Christian thinkers themselves, of course, held widely varying opinions on this subject. Vi olent controversy over image veneration roiled eighth-century Byzantium, while in medieval western Europe, respected theologians and condemned heretics alike could articulate distinct reservations about statues and paintings of sacred figures. In the sixteenth century, adherents of Protestant reform launched destructive at tacks on images, prompting the Catholic authorities gathered at the Council of Trent to articulate a measured defense of the role of art in worship.

Despite the lack of unity of Christian opinion, the veneration of images could feature in Muslim-Christian polemics with Christian apologists fervently defend ing the practice against Muslim accusations of superstitious idolatry.152 Graphic proof of the ability of the human form to represent sacred figures, the stories of Muslim maidens as mirrors of Mary participate in these Christian apologetics on behalf of images. The formal tracts written by apologists such as a Spanish priest held captive in early-seventeenth-century Tunis made their points in defense of

151 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS Banco Rari 20, fol. 6r.

152 For an example see Miguel As?n Palacios, Abenh?zam de C?rdoba y su historia cr?tica de las

ideas religiosas, 5 vols. (Madrid, 1927-32), 1.19.11, 3:112. For discussion, see Louis Cardaillac,

Morisques et chr?tiens: Un affrontement pol?mique (1492-1640) (Paris, 1977), pp. 330-31; and Ana

Echevarr?a, The Fortress of Faith: The Attitude towards Muslims in Fifteenth Century Spain, Medieval

Iberian Peninsula, Texts and Studies, 12 (Leiden, 1999), p. 163.




images quite explicitly, while these tales about Muslim female converts are nec essarily more subtle.153 Yet at moments two of these stories are almost as direct as the apologists: they not only depict Muslims who become icons of Mary, but they also show these women venerating Marian images. Ismerie respectfully kneels before the wondrous image of Our Lady of Liesse; when Zoraida first reaches Spain, she eagerly learns how to honor images of the Virgin.154

As living images of Mary, these Muslim maidens thus symbolize one of the many polemical dividing lines between Islam and Christianity. Yet if they served as tri umphant statements of religious difference, their ability to represent the Virgin also demarcated a space in which the distinction between Muslim and Christian might dissolve. Embodying a figure at the heart of Christianity, these women sug gest that the distinction between Muslims and Christians was not indelibly written on the body. Instead, their stories express a nonracialized notion of the boundary between Muslims and Christians, a sense of common humanity linking them. Indeed, the identity between these women and the Virgin serves as a powerful, if tacit, admission that Islam and Christianity shared something: Mary herself.155 As many Christians in medieval and early-modern Iberia were well aware, the

Qur'an enshrines Maryam, as she is called in Islamic tradition, as the virginal mother of the prophet ISa, the woman whom God has "chosen above all other women" (sura 3; see also suras 19, 21, and 66). The authors of learned commen tary on the Qur'an elaborated on the qualities that made Maryam so special, while

Muslim poets sang of their love for her.156 Maryam figured, too, in the devotional lives of Muslims, who could make pilgrimages to see the places she had stopped during the flight to Egypt-the date tree that leaned over to allow the exhausted mother to collect its fruits, the spring from which she had drunk and in which she had washed her child's diapers.157

To be sure, Maryam as Muslims knew her was not exactly identical to Mary as she was understood by Christians. Muslims vehemently denied that Mary was the mother of God and were no less accepting of the notion of her perpetual virginity. These points of disagreement gave Christians and Muslims a powerful

153 "The Captive of Tunis," Tratado e la defen?a de la santa fe Cat?lica Christiana, respondiendo ?

los argumentos que de nuestros sagradas escrituras nos opone el Mahometano, Paris, Biblioth?que nationale de France, MS espagnol 49.

154 "Comment Ihymage fut trouuee," p. 53; Cervantes, Don Quijote 1.4.41, 1:501. 155 For a detailed discussion of the ramifications of Mary as a figure shared by the two faiths, see

Remensnyder, La Conquistadora. 156

J. M. "Abd el Jalil, Marie et l'Islam (Paris, 1950); Jane D?mmen McAuliffe, "Chosen of All

Women: Mary and Fatima in Qur'anic Exegesis," IslamoChristiana 7 (1981), 19-28; Jane I. Smith

and Yvonne Haddad, "The Virgin Mary in Islamic Tradition and Commentary," The Muslim World

79 (1989), 161-87; D. A. Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of CA Hsha bint

Abi Bakr (New York, 1994), pp. 152-74. 157 Burchard of Strasbourg's account in Arnold of L?beck, "Chronica," MGH SS 21:238 (I thank

Benjamin Kedar for this reference); Lucette Valensi, La fuite en Egypte: Histoires d'Orient et d'Occident

(Paris, 2002), pp. 89-113 and 203-26; Rudolf Kriss and Hubert Kriss-Heinrich, Volksglaube im

Bereich des Islam, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1960-62), 1:84, 162, 172, 223, 227, and 242. For other

evidence of medieval Muslim devotional practices involving Maryam, see Cuffel, "Henceforth" (above, n. 17); Mikel de Epalza, J?sus otage: Juifs, chr?tiens et musulmans en Espagne (VIe-XVIIe s.) (Paris,

1987), pp. 170-99; and M?nzer, "Itinerarium" (above, n. 41), pp. 61-62.




way to proclaim their difference from each other, an opportunity they took ad vantage of not only in written polemic but in physical gestures. According to a late-fifteenth-century chronicle, for example, Juan de Vera was sent from Castile in 1482 as royal ambassador to the Nasrid court at Granada. While lingering in the shaded patios of the Alhambra he happened to overhear some Muslims dis cussing "matters of faith." Perhaps as deliberate provocation, one said that Mary did not remain a virgin after Christ's birth. Enraged, de Vera accused him of lying. Then, drawing his sword, he struck the man on the head.158 Exactly forty years later, Ignatius Loyola, future founder of the Jesuits, had a similar run-in with a

Muslim of Aragon who denied Mary's perpetual virginity. Only divine interven tion stopped Loyola, who had not yet traded his soldier's arms for the weapons of religious life, from stabbing the Muslim to death to avenge this insult to Mary's honor. 159

Yet as de Vera and Loyola knew, Mary belonged to both Islam and Christianity. A shared figure, she created the potential for religious proximity between Muslims and Christians-a possibility that bothered Muslim and Christian theologians alike.160 But it also was actualized in the devotional practices of many Muslims and Christians in the medieval and early-modern Mediterranean world. Members of both faiths could be found venerating Mary at shrines such as Tentudia in western Castile, Saidnaya in Syria, Trapani in Sicily, on the island of Lampedusa, and all along the route of the flight to Egypt-a mingling of Muslims and Chris tians that in some cases continues to this day.161 And at Saidnaya, Trapani, Lam pedusa, and perhaps Tentudia, too, Muslims joined Christians in venerating just those objects embodied by the Muslim maidenly converts of legend: images of

Mary. Faithful reflections of this figure standing on the borders between Christianity

and Islam, the Muslim maidens of legend at times share Mary's religious hybridity. Critics have long remarked on the ambiguity of Zoraida's religious identity some have even seen her as a mixture of Muslim and Christian, a "fantasy bridging Islam and Christianity."'162 And Zahara, declares one character in Los bahos de Argel, is a "cristiana mora"-a Christian Moor, a Moorish Christian depending

158 Andr?s Bern?ldez, Memorias del reinado de los reyes cat?licos 47, ed. Manuel G?mez-Moreno

and Juan de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1962), p. 123. 159 Pedro de Rivadeneira, "Vida del padre Ignacio Loyola" 3, Biblioteca de autores espa?oles, 60:17. 160

Cuffel, "Henceforth." 161 Tentudia (thirteenth-century evidence): Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 329,3:162-65. Said

naya (evidence from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries): Burchard of Strasbourg's account in Arnold

of L?beck, "Chronica," MGH SS 21:240; Paul Devos, "Les premi?res versions occidentales de la

l?gende de Sa?dnaia," Analecta Bollandiana 65 (1947), 245-78; Daniel Baraz, "The Incarnated Icon

of Saidnaya Goes West: A Re-examination of the Motif in the Light of New Manuscript Evidence," Le Mus?on 108 (1995), 181-91; William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the

Christians of the East (New York, 1998), pp. 186-91; Bernard Hamilton, "Our Lady of Saidnaya: An Orthodox Shrine Revered by Muslims and Knights Templar at the Time of the Crusades," in The

Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History 36

(Woodbridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 207-15. Trapani and Lampedusa (seventeenth- to twentieth-century

evidence): "The Captive of Tunis," Tratado, fol. 76v; Ron Barka?, "Une invocation musulmane au

nom de J?sus et de Marie," Revue de l'histoire des religions 200 (1983), 264-65. 162

Garc?s, Cervantes in Algiers, p. 219.




on how one translates this oxymoronic phrase.163 The identification Zoraida and Zahara feel with Mary and their deep devotion to her in part allow their religious indeterminacy. Yet in the end, Cervantes pulls back from the unsettling possibility of the blur

ring of religious boundaries between Muslim and Christian offered by Mary/ Maryam. At crucial moments in the action, both Zahara and Zoraida loudly proclaim themselves to be Christian.164 Just what makes them Christian and not Muslim? After all, Cervantes never shows either being baptized. It is their Marian devotion that allows these women to define themselves as Christians.

If the veneration of the Virgin stands for conversion, in the process Mary herself is claimed for Christianity and her role within Islam denied. Although in another of his plays Cervantes explicitly acknowledges Mary's place in Islam, he does not do so in his stories about Zahara and Zoraida.165 True, Zahara and Zoraida al ways call Mary "Lela Marien," thus giving the saint they so love the honorific (lalla) she actually enjoyed among Muslims.166 But this modest recognition of

Maryam is overshadowed by the way Cervantes structures his stories to effectively erase the Muslim Mary. He is not alone in this-the tales from Guadalupe about la buena Christiana and from Notre-Dame de Liesse about Ismerie do the same. In these stories, no Muslims other than the female converts mention Mary. The

Muslim maidens themselves do not seem to know about Mary because she belongs to Islamic tradition. Instead, each learns about her from Christians, whether from male Christian captives as in the case of Ismerie and la buena Cbristiana or from female Christian slaves as in the case of Zahara and Zoraida. Thus while Cervantes flirted with the possibilities created by the Virgin as a

figure straddling the boundaries between Islam and Christianity, he ultimately claimed her for Christianity. This was perhaps the final in the series of triumphs over Muslims articulated through his stories of Christian captives, Muslim maid ens, and Mary. And it signaled an important shift in the way that the Virgin could be used as the dividing line between Islam and Christianity in Spain. To be sure, during the long centuries down to 1501/2 in Castile and 1525/26 in Aragon, when Muslims lived in these Christian kingdoms with a recognized status as Mudejars, Christians could use the differences between Mary and Maryam as a way to dis tinguish themselves from Muslims. But just as they did not deny Muslims a right to live among Christians, they did not deny that Muslims could respect Maryam. Medieval Spanish Christians could even recount miracle stories in which Mus

lims benefited from the Virgin's wondrous powers. In these tales, Muslims earned Mary's favor by acting exactly like Christians-praying to her in a church, ven erating her statue, and carrying battle banners adorned with her image.167 Pow

163 Cervantes, Los ba?os de Argel, line 756, p. 109.

164 Ibid., line 419, p. 134; Cervantes, Don Quijote 1.4.41, 1:495.

165 Cervantes, La gran sultana do?a Catalina de Oviedo, lines 1738-52, in Obras completas,

p. 1018. 166

As?n, "La hija de Agi Morato," pp. 322-23. 167 Muslims venerating the Virgin in a church: Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 329, 3:162-65

(see also the illumination to no. 165, which depicts a sultan making an offering to Mary in a church; Biblioteca de El Escorial MS T.I.l, fol. 222r). Muslims venerating a statue of the Virgin: Alfonso X,

Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 183, 2:201-2; also the twelfth-century Latin version of Benedict of Peter




erful, if veiled, messages of religious colonization thus lurk in these stories tailoring Muslim veneration of Maryam to the pattern of Christian devotion to the Virgin. Nonetheless, the Muslims of these tales do not have to take the ultimate step of conversion. They can venerate Mary without renouncing their own religion. Mar ian devotion does not make them into Christians, unlike Cervantes' maidens. Cervantes wrote in a context very different from the one in which these medieval

stories emerged. A new configuration of religious affiliations prevailed in Spain and it affected the ways that Mary served as a boundary between Islam and Christianity. During Cervantes' lifetime, there were no more Mudejars in Spain but only Moriscos: Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity and their descen dants. Not always enthusiastic practitioners of the religion that had been imposed on them, these people were often subject to interrogation by the Spanish Inqui sition.168 While the inquisitors struggled to hold back the current of crypto-Islam that they believed ran strong in the Moriscos, their tribunals also worked to root out yet other Christians whose orthodoxy was suspect: men and women swept up in the religious ideas proposed by reformers such as Erasmus and Luther.169

If during the firestorm of confessionalization that consumed sixteenth-century Europe, the Virgin emerged as an icon of Catholicism, with adherents to the old version of Christianity championing her cult against reformers' attacks, she had just as large a part to play in the fight against the presumed threat of crypto Islam.170 Tellingly, among the litmus tests used by inquisitors to determine the degree of Christianity of Moriscos accused of apostasy was precisely the one Cer vantes uses to declare Zoraida and Zahara Christians: Marian devotion.'17 Per haps this inquisitorial strategy made Moriscos afraid to say anything about the Virgin. Some authors at any rate imagined that it did. Never utter a word whether good or bad about Mary lest you fall afoul of the Inquisition, one Morisco ad

borough, Gesta r?gis Henrici Secundi, ed. William Stubbs in The Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry II

and Richard I, A.D. 1169-1192, Rolls Series 49/1-2 (London, 1867), 2:121-22. Muslims using a

banner of the Virgin in battle: Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Mar?a 181, 2:196-97. 168 For an introduction to the large bibliography on the complicated issue of the Moriscos' religious

beliefs, see L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500-1614 (Chicago, 2005); Mercedes Garc?a-Arenal, "El

problema Morisco: Propuestas de discusi?n," Al-Qantara: Revista de estudios ?rabes 13 (1992), 491

503. For an introduction to the equally large literature on the Spanish Inquisition, see Henry Kamen,

The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, Conn., 1997). 169

Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, pp. 83-102. 170 In the wake of the Council of Trent, Catholic artists could even depict Mary brandishing a sword

to defend the church from Protestant attack; see Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul (above, n. 23), p. 213. On Mary, confessionalization, and the range of views among the Reformers about her, see Beth Kreitzer, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the

Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 2004); Thomas Freeman, "Offending God: John Foxe and English Prot

estant Reactions to the Cult of the Virgin Mary," in The Church and Mary, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies

in Church History 39 (Woodbridge, Eng., 2004), pp. 228-38; Bridget Heal, "Marian Devotion and

Confessional Identity in Sixteenth-Century Germany," ibid., pp. 218-227; Diarmaid MacCullough,

"Mary and Sixteenth-Century Protestants," ibid., pp. 191-217; and Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, Conn., 1996), pp. 153-63.

171 See references below in nn. 180, 183, and 186-87.



674 Christian Captives monishes his family in a fictional dialogue composed by a Spanish Franciscan of the late sixteenth century.172

In this friar's imaginative rendering of his world, there is no room for the Mus lim Maryam, only for a Mary overwhelmingly identified with Christianity. Other sixteenth-century Spanish texts even more blatantly effaced Mary's role in Islam to make her into a marker of Christianity. The singers of popular ballads and the authors of local histories of the Reconquest invented tales of heroic Christians who venerated the Virgin and of enraged Muslims who persecuted her as a figure alien to their faith.173 Such stories also came to life in the plays of Golden Age dramaturges.174 This increasing silence surrounding the fact that Jesus's mother be longed as much to Islam as she did to Christianity could simply show ignorance about a faith no longer openly practiced on the Iberian Peninsula. But it is equally likely to reflect a desire to keep the boundaries between Islam and Christianity crisp in this era when the religious ambiguity of the Moriscos threatened to blur them.

For their part, Moriscos were evidently aware of the increasingly tight link between Mary and Christianity.175 In striving to articulate their own religious identities in the complex climate of sixteenth-century Spain, some Moriscos even contributed to this association between the Virgin and the faith named after her son. To proclaim themselves good Christians, Moriscos could make Mary into a symbol of their religious probity, as they did in a particularly flamboyant fashion in late-sixteenth-century Granada. There, some Moriscos fashioned for their com

munity a spectacularly grandiose role in Christian salvation history of the past and of the future.176 One of the principal guarantors of this history recorded in archaicizing Arabic on lead tablets was the Virgin, pure and immaculately con ceived, as growing numbers of Christian believed her to be.177 Mary had dictated the text in person and ordered it be translated into Arabic. Why into Arabic? "The

172 Juan de Pineda, Di?logos familiares de la agricultura christiana 11.23, ed. Juan Meseguer Fer

n?ndez, Biblioteca de autores espa?oles, 162:369. 173 Correa Rodr?guez, Los romances frontizeros (above, n. 129), 1:407-10 and 444-48 and 2:707

12; Jos? Rodr?guez Molina, "Santos guerreros en La Frontera," in IV estudios, ed. Toro Ceballos and

Rodr?guez Molina (above, n. 30), pp. 456-61. 174

Lope de Vega, "Los hechos de Garcilaso de la Vega y moro Tarfe," in Comedias, ed. Arroyo

Stephens (above, n. 93), 1:1-58; "El Triunfo del Ave Maria," ed. Ram?n de Mesonero Romanos, Biblioteca de autores espa?oles, 49:173-94. The latter play enjoyed enduring popularity; see Carrasco

Urgoiti, El Moro de Granada (above, n. 129), pp. 85-87. 175 On the wide range of attitudes toward Mary among Moriscos, see Cardaillac, Morisques et

chr?tiens (above, n. 152), pp. 264-79. 176 Los libros pl?mbeos del Sacromonte, ed. and trans. Miguel Jos? Hagerty (Madrid, 1980). For

discussion, see Dar?o Cabanelas, "Intento de supervivencia en el ocaso de una cultura: Los Libros

pl?mbeos de Granada," Nueva revista de filolog?a hisp?nica 30 (1981), 334-58; and the articles in

the special edition of Al-Qantara: Revista de estudios ?rabes 24 (2003). 177 On the Immaculate Conception in these forgeries, see T. D. Kendrick, St. James in Spain (London,

1960), pp. 86-103; Suzanne L. Stratton, The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art (Cambridge,

Eng., 1994), pp. 68-69. For the popularity of this Marian doctrine in Spain during this period, see

Estella Ruiz Galvez Prigo, "M?cula y pureza: Maculistas, inmaculistas, y maculados (Espa?a s. XV a

s. XVII)," in Les conversos et le pouvoir en Espagne ? la fin du moyen ?ge, ed. Jeanne Battesti Pellegrin

(Aix-en-Provence, 1997), pp. 139-61.




Arabs are one of the most excellent peoples," says Mary, "and their language one of the most excellent languages. God chose them to -support his law in the last times."'178 Here Mary assures the Moriscos' identity as both Arabs and Chris tians.179 Those Moriscos who sought instead to remain connected with the religion of

their ancestors also might turn to the Christian Mary-but only in order to reject her and thus proclaim their allegiance to Islam. Some of these crypto-Muslims adhered to Islamic teachings, declaring that while Mary was a virgin, she certainly was not the mother of God.180 Well schooled in the Qur'anic interpretation of Mary, these Moriscos tended to come from regions that had been densely popu lated by Muslims until late in the fifteenth century.18' If they were not familiar

with the Qur'an itself, they could glean their knowledge of the virginal Maryam from the legends told and written down about her in aliamiado, the version of Spanish used by Moriscos.182

But other crypto-Muslims had much less knowledge of the religion they wanted to practice. They were not familiar with the Qur'anic stories about Maryam. So little in fact did these Moriscos know about Maryam and so strongly did they associate Christianity with the Virgin that, in an odd echo of Cervantes, they themselves could deny Mary's role in Islam. In their efforts to distinguish them selves from Christians, these men and women could reject not only Mary's status as mother of God but even something asserted in the Qur'an-her virginity.'83 By 1525 inquisitors expected Moriscos to deny Mary's virginity.184 Muslims from North Africa who came to Spain tried to teach these Moriscos the error of their ways, with varying success.185

Perhaps the North African visitors were aware of even bigger doctrinal errors being made by Moriscos. In order to feel themselves a part of the umma, some Moriscos took the final step of expunging Mary completely from their understand

178 Libros pl?mbeos, p. 125. 179

Among the intents of these forgeries was to present the Moriscos as Christian while guaranteeing their ethnic identity as Arabs; see Mercedes Garc?a-Arenal, "El entorno de los plomos: Historiograf?a

y linaje," Al-Qantara: Revista de estudios ?rabes 24 (2003), 295-325, esp. p. 311. 180

Cardaillac, Morisques et chr?tiens, p. 269; Mercedes Garc?a-Arenal, Inquisici?n y moriscos: Los

procesos del Tribunal de Cuenca (Madrid, 1978), pp. 107-8; Mercedes Garc?a-Arenal, Los Moriscos

(Granada, 1996), p. 207. 181

Cardaillac, Morisques et chr?tiens, p. 279; Garc?a-Arenal, Inquisici?n y moriscos, pp. 107-8. 182

Leyendas aljamiadas y moriscas sobre personajes b?blicos, ed. Antonio Vespertino Rodr?guez

(Madrid, 1988), pp. 334-36; Antonio Vespertino Rodr?guez, "Las figuras de Jes?s y Mar?a en la

literatura aljamiado-morisca," in Actas del Coloquio internacional sobre literatura aljamiada y morisca,

Colecci?n de Literatura Espa?ola Aljamiado-Morisca 3 (Madrid, 1978), pp. 259-94. On aljamiado and the religious texts available to Moriscos, see Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500-1614, pp. 128-154

and 156-59. 183

Cardaillac, Morisques et chr?tiens, pp. 270-71; Garc?a-Arenal, Inquisici?n y moriscos, pp. 107

8; Autos de fe y causas de la Inquisici?n de C?rdoba, ed. Rafael Gracia Boix, Colecci?n Textos para

la Historia de C?rdoba 4 (Cordoba, 1983), pp. 27, 90, 143, 165, 206, and 218. 184 Deborah Root, "Speaking Christian: Orthodoxy and Difference in Sixteenth-Century Spain,"

Representations 23 (1988), 125. 185

Cardaillac, Morisques et chr?tiens, pp. 268-69 and 421-37; Garc?a-Arenal, Inquisici?n y moris

cos, pp. 129-30.




ing of Islam, at least if the testimony they and their accusers gave before the Inquisition is to be believed. "[I] do not believe in the Virgin Mary, and [I] do believe in Muhammad"; Moriscos "believe in God but do not have the Virgin

Mary"; Moriscos should "be like the Moors of the kingdom of Granada, who did not believe in God or Our Lady"; Moriscos call "St. Mary . . . St. Xaria, which in their language means 'shit' 186 -those statements and others like them cede

Mary to Christianity, effacing her from Islam just as effectively as Cervantes did in his stories of Muslim maidens and Christian captives.

It is against this backdrop of the Virgin's newly charged role in the complex play of religious identity in Cervantes' day that the words of Francisco de Espi nosa, a Morisco who was hauled before the Inquisition in the 1560s, make sense. In his confession, Francisco heaped scorn on various aspects of Christianity, in cluding the belief that if captives held by Muslims prayed to the Virgin, she would free them.187 With this declaration, Francisco not only sought to align himself with Islam by denying the Virgin's miraculous powers. In rejecting Mary's ability to liberate Christian captives, this Morisco also refused the narrative of Christian victory over Muslims that so powerfully undergirded the Virgin's role in the Chris tian experience and representation of captivity.

Francisco probably had not learned of the belief he so disparaged by reading the miracles of the Virgin of Guadalupe or any other text. It seems more likely that this Morisco had heard stories of the Virgin's powers to free prisoners from people he knew, whether other Moriscos who recounted these tales with incre dulity or Old Christians who related them with satisfaction. Whatever his sources, Francisco's testimony suggests just how deeply rooted in the culture of ordinary Christian men and women Mary's association with the liberation of captives was by the sixteenth century. Not all of them, of course, had personal experience of her favor in this domain. But they nonetheless did not need learned hagiogra phers-or literary geniuses like Cervantes-to tell them that the Virgin was the powerful ally of Christians suffering in the bahos of Algiers or Tunis.

It might be wise then to ask whether the sixteenth century really signaled the end of the medieval Mary, as some historians have proposed.188 True, from the confessional tumult and other radical changes of the sixteenth century, the Virgin emerged as a figure in many ways quite different from her medieval sister. Sixteenth-century Catholic preachers increasingly instructed their audiences to see Jesus's mother as a passive figure, a model of obedience to God, rather than the powerful wonder-worker of medieval tradition.189 But sermons can tell only one side of the story of devotion. Even in the era of the Counter-Reformation, preach ers did not completely control the Virgin. She lived in the hearts of her devotees

186 Autos de fe y causas, pp. 104,105,129, and 143; Dolors Bram?n, Contra moros ijueus: Formado

i estrategia d'unes discriminacions al pa?s Valencia, Serie "La Unitat" 62 (Valencia, 1981), p. 92; and

Cardaillac, Morisques et chr?tiens, pp. 271 and 418. 187 Francisco says that while Christian captives may pray and make offerings to Mary, they are

liberated not by her but by the ransoms they pay their captors; see Garc?a-Arenal, Inquisici?n y moris

cos, pp. 121 and 124. 188

Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul. 189

Ibid., esp. pp. 188-207.




as well. And these men and women knew that in the struggle against the Muslims, whether on the battlefield at Lepanto or on the battlefield of captivity, Mary was always ready to help, "fighting" on behalf of Christians, to repeat the words used by one of Cervantes' contemporaries.190

The weight of centuries told them so. For it was not the circumstances of the sixteenth century-the skyrocketing numbers of Spaniards suffering in captivity, and the confrontation with the Turks, a Muslim enemy more vigorous than Gra nada had ever been-that first prompted Christian men and women to believe Mary held out hope in wars with the Muslims. Instead, this was a role forged for the Virgin in the piety of the high Middle Ages. Cervantes' Muslim maidens and Christian captives themselves could no more have existed without their medieval counterparts than could Don Quijote have ridden off into La Mancha without his many heroic predecessors. The Marian stories of captivity and liberation that culminate in Cervantes' characters reveal the long fingers of the Middle Ages reaching deep into the early-modern world, crumbling chronological barriers that scholars far too often treat as solid walls.

Memorias del cautivo, p. 127. See above, p. 647.

Postscript: I regret that I have not been able to integrate the findings of Jarbel Rodriguez's Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Washington, D.C., 2007), as his study was

published after this article was already in proof.

Amy G. Remensnyder is Associate Professor of History at Brown University (e-mail: [email protected]).



Christian Captives, Muslim Maidens, And Mary

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