The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

144 epilogue

And in precisely the same fashion as medieval Aragonese and Castilian

kings, Franco employed an elite guard of Moroccan soldiers, reviving the

curious tradition that this book has sought to unravel.^18

The tension between liberal and conservative Spaniards continued well

into the twentieth century, as epitomized by the prolonged polemic be-

tween two scholars living in exile from Franco’s Spain, Américo Castro

and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz.^19 These men reversed the methodological

poles of the debate. Castro, a romance philologist and student of Menén-

dez Pidal, transformed the notion of convivencia into a liberal value — the

positive association that has since prevailed. He argued that the history of

interactions between Christians, Jews, and Muslims had produced Spain’s

unique character, one that was grounded in pluralism and resistant to re-

ligious intolerance or what he called the “totalitarianism... of their be-

lief.”^20 Castro was challenged by the historian and positivist Sánchez Al-

bornoz, who maintained the traditionalist argument. Sánchez Albornoz

recapitulated the original, limited view of convivencia, seeing tolerance

as a negative value, as a strategic and venal gesture by elites toward reli-

gious minorities. Like Menéndez Pidal before him, Sánchez Albornoz con-

tended that medieval toleration had undermined “the vital passion” of

Spanish Catholicism.^21

These bitter and deadlocked debates continue to trouble the study of

medieval Iberia. In the copious literature on convivencia, most contem-

porary scholars dismiss these positions as politically motivated distortions

of the past.^22 They argue that the extremes of tolerance and intolerance

fail by empirical standards and that these perspectives paper over the in-

terplay and interdependence of the peaceful and violent interactions that

comprised everyday coexistence. Some scholars have called for a return

to strict empiricism; others, particularly in the American academy, have

sought refuge in the seemingly neutral terms of cultural theory.^23 Neither

response has managed to dislodge these debates or the question of reli-

gious tolerance from the center of public or scholarly discussion.^24 If the

polemical tone of the convivencia debates has diminished, its essential di-

chotomies continue to motivate and pattern scholarship.

Cultural approaches have failed to overcome the polemics between

liberals and conservatives because these twentieth- century debates were

never methodological in nature but rather moral. The convivencia debates

truly belonged to the fin- de- siècle derangements and the “crisis of culture”

that gripped Europe in the years before and after World War I, an event

that shook liberal confidence to its core.^25 To see the peninsular debates as