ethno-religious minorities 371
tremendous role they played in the agrarian and craft economies, and their value to
royal, seigniorial and ecclesiastical powers. Relations with municipalities and local
Christian communities were somewhat more ambiguous. In southern Castile and in
Valencia, where there had been serious uprisings from the 1260s, and where incursions
from Granada and North Africa were common, tensions ran high, and as the populace
associated mudéjares with foreign Muslim enemies, episodes of popular violence
occurred in the 1400s. Nevertheless, these tended to be localized events, and through
the fifteenth century, Muslim communities in Iberia remained viable, diverse and
reasonably prosperous—particularly the elite practitioners of high-demand crafts,
such as building and decorative arts. That said, there was certainly a progressive
decline in mudéjar rights, vis-à-vis judicial autonomy, freedom of movement, and the
practice of religion. Across the peninsula segregation and ghettoization (often for
fiscal purposes) and the requirement to wear special clothes or haircuts became more
common, even as the aristocracy, particularly in Castile, indulged in a deliberate and
flamboyant cultural Maurophilia. Indeed, such “reverse acculturation” can be
observed across the social spectrum both in Iberia and Sicily.
In sum, although Christian ideology was structurally and ideologically antagonistic
to the notion of religious diversity and accommodation, political pragmatism and
socio-economic integration were the forces that shaped policy on the ground, and
minorities persisted, where they were seen as useful. Christian minorities, chiefly
Greek Orthodox, were certainly relegated to a secondary status (and were subject, for
example, to enslavement), whereas those qualified as heretics, such as the Cathars,
were aggressively eliminated. On the other hand, the existence of Muslim minorities
presented a problem from the Islamic perspective. Unlike the Jews, who had devel-
oped a framework for the legitimacy of their subordination to non-Jewish societies in
a diasporic context, judicial authorities in the dar al-Islam generally considered those
Muslims living willingly under Christian rule to be effectively apostates, unless they
were doing so under coercion or threat of death. In that case, by the doctrine of taqi-
yya (“dissimulation”), Islamic law allowed oppressed Muslims to hide their faith, even
to the point of outwardly converting to Christianity.
The modern and contemporary Mediterranean (post-c.1550 Ce)Between 1492 and 1525 the age of formal diversity in the Christian Mediterranean
would all but end, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492) and Portugal
(1497), and the forced conversion of the remaining Muslims, between 1499 and
- The Jews who were expelled went to Islamic lands, northern Europe, or Italy.
After thriving initially, in the second half of the 1600s Jews in many Italian cities
were either severely repressed or simply expelled. Jews fared little better in the
Islamic Maghreb and Ifriqiya, where communities (quite substantial in Morocco)
survived, but were increasingly vulnerable to persecution, rationalized by an ever-
narrower understanding of dhimma. In Egypt the Christian community was
reduced, but remained powerful, particularly the Coptic elite, who continued to
control the financial administration. On the other hand, the Ottoman Sultans
actively embarked on a pro-minority policy, cultivating these communities and ena-
bling their members to dominate courtly and military circles as a counterweight to
the ever-restive Turkic nobility.