Mozarabs Erotic

The Mozarabs were the Christians of al-Andalus, the Iberian population that stayed put and kept its faith after the Umayyad conquest of 711, and they lasted under Muslim rule until their communities were deported, dispersed, or absorbed into the reconquering kingdoms by the thirteenth century. They were not newcomers. They were the Hispano-Roman and Visigothic townspeople of Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, Mérida and Lisbon who paid the poll tax, kept their bishops and churches, and over generations learned to think in Arabic. The name comes from an Arabic word meaning "Arabized," and it was coined in the Christian north, not by the people it describes. To Muslim neighbors they were simply the Nazarenes, protected and taxed; to northern monks they were a puzzle, Latin churchmen who argued theology in Arabic and dressed like everyone else in Córdoba.

Their vernacular was a Romance tongue, the Andalusi Romance once labeled "Mozarabic," a cousin of Castilian and Portuguese that survives mostly in the kharjas, short vernacular refrains stitched onto Arabic and Hebrew poems. Alongside it they spoke Andalusi Arabic, and by the tenth century the Psalms and Gospels existed in Arabic for congregations who no longer followed Latin. Latin stayed in worship. That worship, the old Hispanic rite of the Visigothic church, is what outlived them. When the rest of Iberia adopted the Roman rite in the 1080s, Toledo's parishes were allowed to keep the older one, and it is still celebrated every morning in a side chapel of Toledo Cathedral under the name the Mozarabic rite.

Their history has two sharp turns. In the 850s a wave of Cordoban Christians, led by the priest Eulogius, publicly denounced Islam and were executed, a deliberate martyrdom that split the community between those who wanted confrontation and those who wanted to keep living. Then, under the Almoravids and Almohads in the twelfth century, toleration collapsed: churches were shut, and thousands of Mozarabs were deported to Morocco or fled north. The refugees carried a recognizable art with them, horseshoe arches, alfiz-framed doorways, and the blazing illuminated Beatus manuscripts that still sit in northern monasteries. The people themselves dissolved into Castile, León and Aragon, their Arabic names Latinized, their Romance swallowed by the dialects around them. Toledo families still hold hereditary membership in the Mozarabic parishes, a living footnote to a people that otherwise vanished into modern Spain and Portugal.