Jews and Christians in al-Andalus

by free043

I'm looking for good sources (preverably books) on how Jews and Christians lived in al-Andalus, particularly during the Emirate and later Caliphate of Cordoba. Any recommendations?

I', currently reading Catlos' Kingdoms of Faith but the lack of references makes it very hard to check what his arguments and statements are based on factually.

mrhumphries75

Thanks for paging me, u/y_sengaku. For the emirate I'd also recommend *Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain* by Kenneth Baxter Wolf (1988). You can read it online. While it deals with one specific episode, the infamous Córdoba martyrs, the first chapter gives a good overview on the way the Mozarabs were treated early on.

hillsonghoods

Hi there, those interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.

y_sengaku

I, though a non-specialist in this area or this period, but as a person who mentioned Kingdoms of Faith in this recommendation thread just last week, also should perhaps tackle this one.

The easiest way to explore more specialized academic literatures is to check the further reading in the end section's of Catlos' book. While Catlos himself was originally specialized in Christian kingdoms (see his The Victors and the Vanquished in the bibliography), he certainly mentions the works of leading researchers of Al-Andalus like Fierro Bello and Thomas Glick, mentioned also by/u/mrhumphries75, specialist in Medieval Iberia, in this book recommendation thread last year.

My friend who are specialised in Late Medieval Iberia would recommend the following ones:

  • Manzaro Moreno, E. 'The Creation of a Medieval Frontier: Islam and Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, Eights to Eleventh Century'. In: Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands 700-1700, ed. Daniel Power & Naomi Standen, pp. 32-54. New York, 1999: The author had published La frontera de al-Andalus en época de los Omeyas (The Frontier of the Al-Andalus in the Emirate Era) (1991) in Spanish.
  • Wasserstein, David. The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002-1086. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985.

(Both are taken from the footnotes in his non-English essay).