Tema: A History of Spain and Portugal

A History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter Seven
Medieval Hispanic Catholicism

[131] Before the Muslim conquest, the centers of Hispanic Christendom lay in the towns of the south and east and so from the very beginning of the conquest fell under Muslim control. At first it was perhaps not difficult to adjust to Muslim political domination. The system of "discriminatory tolerance" practiced during the first two centuries and more of Muslim rule made it possible to maintain the diocesan structure of the Mozarab church. Indeed, the hierarchy gained a degree of freedom, for unlike the Visigothic kings, the emirs of Cordoba let the ecclesiastical hierarchy call their own councils (with one exception in 851) and elect their own bishops. Yet within little more than a century, the Mozarab church had become fossilized, largely cut off from the Christian community of western Europe, more and more heavily taxed, and subject to restrictions and the pressure of a dominant oriental culture. It sank into decadence and its following dwindled, as the most vital elements emigrated to the Christian principalities of the north.

The northern hill districts that escaped Muslim domination had been uncertain in their Christian identity before the eighth century, but during that century much of their uncertainty was lost, apparently in part as a reaction against the Muslim faith of their adversaries. The Asturian church was by no means entirely cut off from Mozarab Christianity. When the border was not disrupted by fighting [132], there was often a good deal of travel back and forth across the frontier, and Mozarab religious probably played an important role in the further Christianization and acculturation of the northern population.

The Asturian church, however, did not recognize the ecclesiastical overlordship of the metropolitan of Toledo, living under Muslim rule, and outright antagonism between Asturian and Mozarab Catholicism emerged by the end of the eighth century in the Adoptionist controversy. The customary Hispano-Visigothic religious definition of the two natures of Christ spoke of his "natural filiation" to the divine and of his "adoptive filiation" to the human, differing from the unified trinitarian interpretation that had become orthodox in most of Latin Christendom. After continued official usage of these terms at the Mozarab church council of 784 in Seville, the Asturian clergy protested. The issue was ultimately carried to Rome, perhaps the first such invocation of papal authority by Hispanic Christians, and in 794 the metropolitan of Toledo was excommunicated. Under Alfonso II (791-842), the Asturian monarchy created a separate ecclesiastical system independent of Toledo, thereby affirming the special identity of Asturias and the legitimate authority of its institutions as heirs to the Visigothic legacy.

During the ninth and tenth centuries, the Asturo-Leonese church grew in authority and wealth. It remained almost completely subordinate to royal power, for the Asturian kings dominated the selection of bishops and actually expanded the prerogatives of Visigothic rulers. But the clergy improved their own education somewhat, expanded parish and administrative operations, and increased their cultural and spiritual influence.

An important aspect of the expansion of the Asturo-Leonese church was the cult of Santiago (St. James) at Compostela in Galicia. The shrine there provided the main religious nexus with the rest of western Europe. By the tenth century, the pilgrim's route to it had become one of the most traveled in the west, and the thousands of voyagers along it provided stimulus for the development of the small northern towns. By the eleventh century the road to Santiago through the Pyrenees and across the north of the peninsula was a major force for Europeanization and modernization. The prestige of Santiago throughout Christendom was an important source of pride and identification for a monarchy that ruled over a poor, uncultured people subsisting on a largely pastoral economy. In turn, the bishop of Santiago de Compostela tried to assert leadership over the church in the kingdom of León. The diocese came to consider itself the equal of Rome, for the Leonese church at that time, though fully orthodox in [133] Catholic theology, clearly did not deem itself institutionally or organizationally subservient to the papacy.

From the earliest phase of Asturian territorial expansion, the church grew in wealth. Grants of land were made by the crown and by local overlords as well, and church property became especially extensive in Galicia. Monastic institutions also played an important role in taking over and resettling new territories. A definite contrast existed, however, in the social and economic pattern of Castile, where church endowments were proportionately much smaller and ecclesiastical leaders had a less imposing place in public councils than in Galicia and León.

The rise of the Leonese church in the ninth and tenth centuries contrasted with the steady decline of the Mozarab, a decline which first reached crisis proportions in the Cordoban martyrdoms of the 850s, at the very time when the cult of Santiago was beginning to take firm hold in the north. Sizable Mozarab emigrations to the northwest in the second half of the ninth century apparently made significant contributions to Leonese culture, but it is not clear that the influx of southern Christians had any very original effects on the religious structure and ethos, for these were fairly well defined in León by that time. Moreover, though there were instances of other heresies besides Adoptionism among the Mozarabs between the ninth and eleventh centuries, Leonese Catholicism remained rigidly orthodox throughout, as a militant frontier religion holding to a firm, rather narrow identity in tense opposition to a powerful spiritual foe.

By contrast to the theologically orthodox but regionally autonomous and somewhat archaic church in León, the church in the Catalan counties, from the end of the eighth century, was organized under the administrative system of west European Roman Catholicism. The native Hispano-Visigothic liturgy and forms persisted for a long time in León, but in Catalonia, which did not obtain a cis-Pyrenean metropolitanate of its own until the eleventh century, they gave way almost immediately to the more typical Roman rite. The economic endowments and the political influence of the church in Catalonia were more typically feudal. The church there, too, soon amassed considerable wealth, and enjoyed a greater autonomy because of the decentralization of political authority. Propertied monasteries in Catalonia remained strong supporters of the Frankish crown even after its decline, in opposition to the local power of the counts and overlords. Church-state tensions were more extreme in Catalonia than in León. Perhaps the most atrocious example was the fate of Arnulf, archbishop of Narbonne, who in 912 excommunicated Count Sunyer II of Ampurias (a district in northeast Catalonia). The count's henchmen [134] waylaid the hapless archbishop, blinded and mutilated him, and tore out his tongue before he died.

Between Catalonia and Castile-León, on the other hand, a partly pagan territory existed for some time, since the Christianization of the bulk of the Basque population did not get underway until the tenth century. By the end of that century, most of the Navarrese had been converted, but the inhabitants of Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa were not fully brought within the sphere of Christianity until after establishment of the bishopric of Alava in the eleventh century.

The full institutional authority of the Roman papacy was introduced into the peninsula by way of southern France and Catalonia. The papacy's increasing diplomatic influence proved useful at the time of the Cordoban offensives in the tenth century, and the counts of Barcelona entered into regular relations with the papacy from the third quarter of that century on. They were followed a generation later by Sancho the Great of Navarre, whose political hegemony in northern Spain was to some extent assisted by papal diplomacy.

The effect of papal diplomacy on the Hispanic kingdoms from the late tenth century on was both centripetal and centrifugal, with the latter predominating. The papacy did exert some influence toward Hispanic political unity by trying to discourage internecine warfare and encourage cooperation in the struggle against the Muslims, but it also encouraged the independent or separatist ambitions of the several kingdoms in order to increase its own influence in each and gain larger contributions. Pope Alexander II (1061-1073) used his diplomatic influence to ratify the independence of the "kingdom" of Aragón, whose rulers were willing to recognize papal suzerainty. In the twelfth century, as has been seen, a similar relationship developed with the crown of Portugal.

Having established leadership over Latin Christendom, the papacy insisted on uniform liturgical practices. Another major influence for standardization was acceptance of the Benedictine monastic rule, which tended to reform behavior, improve administration, and straighten out frequently confused jurisdictions between monastic and secular domain. The Roman rite, together with monastic and ecclesiastical reforms, had first been accepted in Catalonia and Navarre, and then in Aragón under Sancho Ramírez. They were officially adopted for Castile-León at a church council in 1080, marking the full incorporation of the Castilian-Leonese church into the network of medieval Roman Catholicism. The state, however, continued to control indirectly the elections of most bishops.

French Cluniac monks, who entered León in significant numbers during the second half of the eleventh century, were important agents of religious Europeanization. Encouraged by the crown, they quickened [135] the cultural life of the church, improved its administrative standards, and were especially concerned to purify morals. By the close of the eleventh century, many of the bishoprics in León, Galicia, and Portugal were occupied by Cluniac monks. They had much less influence in Castile, where there was some tendency to identify them with Leonese centralism.

The monasteries had played a key role in the early history of León and Catalonia, and in some respects their influence increased after the eleventh century as their organization and administration advanced. The conduct and preparation of the clergy were also improved. Immorality, violence, and participation in all manner of secular conflicts had been fairly common among high as well as low clergy, and were never overcome at any point in the Middle Ages. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, the influence of papal, Cluniac, and local church reforming movements seems to have helped effect a distinct improvement in the education and behavior of the clergy.

The development of the thirteenth-century universities was also related to Europeanization, for the main cultural, intellectual, and spiritual impulses in Christian Hispania throughout the Middle Ages came from western Europe, in particular from France and Italy. The influences from the Muslim south were either aesthetic--in architecture, clothing, language--or technical--in building, irrigation, crafts, medicine, and science. The modes of learning and the content of education were thoroughly Latin Catholic. All the universities were in the north, away from centers of Muslim culture.

The institutionalization of the idea of the crusade was another result of the Romanization and Europeanization of Hispanic Catholicism. The nature of and difference between the goals of reconquest and crusade in Hispanic history have become topics of considerable controversy. Some commentators have called the Leonese-Castilian reconquest of the early Middle Ages the first major example of the crusading impulse in Europe. Others, such as Menéndez Pidal, have denied that there was originally any conscious crusading sense. They have held that in the first centuries the Leonese and Castilians fought for concrete objectives of land, cattle, and booty. Ortega y Gasset went farther and uttered the well-known dictum that "something which lasted for eight centuries can hardly be called a reconquest." Américo Castro has pointed to the relative tolerance frequently found in medieval Hispania and has defined historically Hispanic society and culture as a unique blend of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim influences into which the crusading spirit was first injected from the outer world of Latin Europe after the eleventh century. These questions constitute one of the main problems in Hispanic history. It has [136] now been fairly well proven by Menéndez Pidal, Sánchez Albornoz, and others that the early Asturo-Leonese monarchy did define itself as the heir of the Visigothic state and embrace a goal of reconquest, but there is no indication that this included the subsequent Latin Christian ideal of religious crusade. The evidence seems generally to support the contention that the idea of the crusade was fully implanted only after the end of the eleventh century and was generated by broader European influences.

Almost from the beginning, Leonese-Castilian society was marked by a degree of religious identification unknown in France or Italy, but the impulse to reconquest by Christian society was not synonymous with a crusading desire either to convert or to exterminate the infidel. At first, the reconquest was largely a political and military enterprise to recover what had been Hispano-Christian territory. The fact of the Muslim and Jewish religions was accepted by the northerners, just as was the example of partial tolerance shown by Al-Andalus. The acceptance of a degree of toleration did not imply relativism or equality, for Leonese-Castilian Christians were firmly convinced of the inferiority of the Muslim and Jewish religions, as they were of the legal inferiority of Muslims and Jews. This sense of religious superiority was in no way diminished by having to recognize the higher cultural and technological achievements of the Muslim and Jewish society of the south.

Américo Castro contends that centuries of contact or confrontation with Muslims and Jews resulted in a semitization of Spanish culture and religion. This analysis is used in part to explain the thoroughness and intensity with which religion became identified with nearly all aspects of Spanish life, including the ultimate quasi-totality of the church-state bond and the final rejection of pluralism of any kind. While Castro is unable to verify this contention fully, it is evident that historical confrontation with large, sophisticated, and in some ways culturally superior non-western, non-Christian societies could not but leave some impress. It is one thing, however, to claim that Spanish or Castilian society developed a unique set of values in confrontation with Muslims and Jews, and something else to contend that it absorbed an exotic psychology directly. This it did not do; specifically Muslim and Jewish values were overtly and categorically rejected. The resulting tensions, however, interacted to produce a unique culture and psychology.

Between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries there occurred fundamental changes in the attitudes towards Muslims and Jews. For Alfonso VI of Castile, dealing with the Muslims was mainly a political, not a religious, enterprise, and in the thirteenth century, the tomb of Fernando III was inscribed with the title "king of the three religions." [137] In some of the campaigns of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, French crusaders either quarreled with or deserted their Castilian and Aragonese allies because of the latter's refusal to slaughter conquered Muslims. Ramón Llull and the Dominicans of Valencia proposed to educate and convert, not expel or even subdue, Muslims of neighboring regions. While Jewish communities were totally expelled from every other part of western Europe, they continued to flourish and multiply in the Hispanic kingdoms.

Attitudes and policies began to change during the course of the fourteenth century. Tolerance was above all a matter of official policy; the common people, both Christian and Muslim, were usually intolerant. The official position of the church, as distinct from that of the crown, was to accept the guarantees of tolerance but at the same time to put pressure on the crown to keep the Jews in their place and prevent them from becoming too influential in Christian society. The spread of the crusading ideal, with its violence and intolerance, may not have changed civic attitudes in the peninsula at first, but it left its effect over the course of six or eight generations. The anti-Muslim feeling of the crusades was accompanied by a great deal of anti-Jewish sentiment as well. The impact of the fanaticism and intolerance of the Almoravids and Almohads has been noted in a previous chapter. And finally, the total military superiority achieved by Christian society by the middle of the fourteenth century obviously lessened the need of Hispano-Christians for systems of discriminatory toleration.

Following the close of the thirteenth-century reconquest, the church's wealth and power increased. It held domain over at least 15 percent of the land in the Hispanic kingdoms, and of that 15 percent the crusading orders alone held more than one third. Over half of Galicia was under Church dominion. The church also collected a special tax from the Muslims and Jews of the Christian kingdoms. As the largest holder of capital, the church had even begun to invest in the royal debt in Castile, and the Cortes of Castile repeatedly petitioned the crown to prohibit acquisition of territories under royal domain by the church. Evidence of the wealth and splendor of the church by the thirteenth century was the construction of the great Gothic cathedrals of Castile (León, Burgos, Toledo, Cuenca), which was begun at that time.

Yet the church did not follow up the reconquest by extending parish organization and church facilities equally through the southern part of the peninsula, where the establishment of new churches lagged. In the eleventh century, approximately twenty episcopal sees had existed north of the Duero. During the next hundred years or so, approximately twenty new sees were created in the central portions of [138] the peninsula, and often were given responsibility for leadership and defense in newly settled areas. During and after the thirteenth-century reconquest, only seven new sees were established in the south, where the crusading orders often filled the place of episcopal organization. By that time, the monasteries had become very active in the wool export trade, and many small churches were established in the sheep-raising regions of the central Meseta: in some of its districts there was a church for every one hundred people by the late Middle Ages. Churches were proportionately fewer in the south, where at first there was only limited immigration and less need. Even after the Christian population increased, church organization was thinner in regions of Extramadura, Andalusia, and Murcia. The slack was partly taken up by the mendicant orders, before their decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In modern times, certain areas of the south would stand out as the major "unchurched" districts of the peninsula.

In the Hispanic kingdoms, as elsewhere, the wealth and influence of the medieval church aroused varying degrees of opposition. This stemmed primarily from the crown, the towns, and a few antagonistic critics and thinkers. Conflict with the papacy was common on the part of the Portuguese and Aragonese monarchies during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, though infrequent in Castile. At first, Jaume The Conqueror refused to pay the customary Aragonese tax to the papacy, and in Portugal a certain amount of church land was taken back under royal domain. In Castile, as well, a series of measures against church economic power were taken during the early fourteenth century, though the partial vacuum created in some districts by the Black Death resulted in further extension of ecclesiastical properties. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the church's economic strength in the Aragonese territories apparently did decline somewhat.

The fourteenth century spiritual decline of European Christendom was reflected in the peninsula, where it was perhaps worse in the lands of the crown of Aragón and in Portugal than in Castile. The problem of the morals and conduct of the clergy was never solved during the Middle Ages; in thirteenth-century Catalonia Jaume the Conqueror had the tongue of the Bishop of Gerona cut out for revealing secrets from the confessional. One of the most common objects of protest by church councils-- barraganla, or concubinage, among the clergy--was not necessarily looked upon as immoral by the common people, who accepted the common-law marriages of village priests as comparatively natural relationships.

All told, there were three major medieval religious reform movements in the peninsula, and they reflected those in Latin Christendom [139] as a whole. The first was the Cluniac and papal reform of the eleventh century that has been discussed earlier. The second was the monastic reform movement of the thirteenth century: the Cistercians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Augustinians. Most of the new thirteenth-century orders were composed of mendicant friars who came into close contact with the people and emphasized preaching and social service. They also encouraged learning and played a major role in development of the universities. Yet even the mendicant orders amassed property, and some came to be classed with the privileged and unconcerned among the clergy.

The last movement of reform took place in the late Middle Ages and was diverse and disunified. It began sporadically in the late fourteenth century, gathering momentum only one hundred years later. One of its first manifestations was the attempt of leaders of the Castilian hierarchy in the 1370s and 80s to purify morals, expand education, and encourage royal power in the hope that it would use its authority over other sectors of the church. A monastic movement of spiritual and moral revival known as the Observancia stimulated new interest in evangelicalism among the mendicant orders. The rise of the Jeronymite order in the second half of the fourteenth century, encouraging a more contemplative, internalized religion, was another significant new expression of reform. Late medieval spiritual ferment, though certainly not involving most of the clergy and the faithful, was expressed in new ideals of interiorism and antisacramental mysticism and in a growing vein of apocalypticism. In addition to the Jeronymites, the Carmelites and reformist Franciscans were active in trying to encourage spiritual change and growth. These elements played a major role in the subsequent "Catholic reform" of late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Castile.

Recruitment by the church remained comparatively democratic throughout the Middle Ages. Even after the aristocracy had become quite stratified, the clergy were still drawn from nearly all social classes and were the only institutional group in direct contact with and attempting to minister to all the population.

The Catholicism of Castile and Portugal retained its simple, direct frontier ethos and somewhat archaic quality throughout the Middle Ages. Hispanic religion was popular and vital but not intellectually creative. Nearly all its high theological cultural and structural-functional ideas came from western Europe. The nearest thing to an Hispanic school of philosophy and theology was that of the Catalan Ramon Llull. The Hispanic kingdoms were perhaps the most theologically and religiously orthodox in Latin Christendom.

Variant tendencies were definitely more marked in the Aragonese lands. Though during the Middle Ages scholarly studies developed in [140] a more secular framework in Castile also, classical secular themes drew most attention in the northeast, thanks to French and Italian influences. Only in Catalonia and Valencia did religious thought and seeking lapse into serious heresy. Both Albigensian and Waldensian heretics penetrated Catalonia, but few reached Castile. In Aragon the humillados of Durando de Huesca developed ideas of religious communalism and were apparently influenced by both of the former groups, yet stayed within the Catholic system and were recognized by Pope Innocent III. The more radical forms of Franciscanism appeared in Catalonia, northern Aragón, and Vizcaya at Durango. In later times, the Spanish Inquisition would find little that was suspicious enough to examine or proscribe in Castilian religious literature, but a fairly large number of heterodox writings to delete from the religious literature of the Catalan-speaking regions.

It is possible to discern during the Middle Ages the establishment of a certain anti-objectifying bent in the Castilian mind that to some extent discouraged analysis. Religion provided total caste identification in much of the peninsula, and ultimately a sense of prenational group identity, the only unity in a divided and uncertain world. Yet if Hispanic Catholicism was on the whole fixed, incurious, and anti-individualistic by the end of the Middle Ages, this was true to an only slightly lesser degree in most of western Christendom. During the fifteenth century there was considerable religious ferment and questioning among small groups, and an extensive spirit of anticlericalism (directed solely against individual elements of the clergy and not against the church or Catholic theology). The closed, fanatical, caste Catholicism later thought of as typical of Hispanic religiosity did not come to fruition until the second half of the sixteenth century, and was more than simply a product of the Middle Ages. New pressures for religious redefinition and individual understanding of spiritual realities were perhaps no weaker in the peninsula at the close of the Middle Ages than in most parts of western Europe, and nowhere was religious fervor stronger.

Bibliography for Chapter VII

[339] There exists a vast corpus of Hispanic hagiography and ecclesiastical chronicles, but the real history of religion in the peninsula has received little attention. There are two general church histories: Z. García Villada, S.J., Historia eclesiástica de España, 5 vols. in 3 (Madnd, 1936), which stops at the eleventh century, and the dated work of Vincente de la Fuente, Historia eclesiástica de España, 4 vols. (Barcelona, 1855-59). Peter Linehan, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1971), is broader in scope than the title suggests. Aspects of the medieval church-state struggle are treated in Johannes Vincke, Staat und Kirche in Katalonien und Aragon wáhrend des Mittelalters, 2 vols. (Münster, 1931), [340] and D. Mansilla Reoyo, Iglesia castellano-leonesa y Curia romana en íos tiempos del Rey San Femando (Madrid, 1945). The standard work on the pilgrimages to Santiago is L.Vázquez de Parga, J. M. Lacarra, and J. Una Riu, Las peregnnaciones a Santiago de Compostela, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1948). J. Pérez de Urbel, Los monjes españoles en la Edad Media, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1945), is of limited use; see also P. Maur Cocheril, Etudes sur le monachisme en Espagne et au Portugal (Paris, 1966). The establishment of church institutions in the Levant has been studied by R. I. Burns, S. J., The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1967). On the idea of the crusade, in addition to the work by José Goili Gaztambide cited in bibliography 4, see Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzuggedankens (Stuttgart, 1935). An alternative strategy is the topic of Burns's "Christian-Islamic Confrontation in the West: The Thirteenth-Century Dream of Conversion," American Historical Review 76, no.5 (Dec. 1971): 1386-1434.

The two leading rival interpretations of medieval Hispanic culture and society are Américo Castro's The Spaniards (Berkeley, 1971), rev. ed. of The Structure of Spanish History; and Sánchez Albornoz's España: Un enigma histórico, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1956). Castro's Aspectos del vivir hispánico (Santiago de Chile, 1949, Madrid, 1970), is useful on late medieval Castilian religious currents.

The nineteenth-century polymath Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo produced a massive study of spiritual heterodoxy, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, 8 vols. (Santander, 1946-48), but it is biased and out of date. Heresy in Catalonia has been studied by Jordi Ventura in "El Catarismo en Cataluña," Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras 28 (1959-60): 75-168, and "La Valdesía de Cataluña," 29 (1961-62): 275-317.
A classic history of Hispanic Jewry is José Amador de los Ríos's Historia social, política y religiosa de los judíos de España y Portugal, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1875-76). Two more recent accounts are A. A. Neuman, The Jews in Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1942), and Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1961). Both concentrate on the Jewish communities in Catalonia-Aragon; Baer emphasizes political and interethnic relations, while Neuman gives more attention to internal Jewish history.

I find rather good this resume on hispanic history by Stanley G. Payne. Regarding the portuguese history chapter, the sixth, it's quite isent and complete. A nice piece of light but reliable history reading.