Patronage, Historiography, and the Politics of Religion in Muslim and Christian Iberia, c. 1030-1150

Iberia c. 1030 to 1150 was characterized by decentralized political organization. Many small Muslim and Christian kingdoms established courtly and religious institutions and engaged in alliances and conflicts within and across religious lines. Muslim ?a’ifa (“party” or “small state”) kings sponsored scholarship, poetry, and other arts. Christian monks and clerics, under the institutional patronage of royals and elites, composed (and sometimes illuminated) historical chronicles, poetry, and religious texts. Texts produced in both of these settings – certain ?a’ifa courts and Christian monasteries – are the subjects of this dissertation. This period of Iberian history has received less attention from historians than most others; it is often dismissed as a transitional and chaotic time, and scholars who do recognize its cultural vibrance generally argue that such vibrance existed in spite of political circumstances, not because of them. There is also a lack of scholarly attention to the thematic relationships between work from the Arabic and Latin traditions. This dissertation studies primarily the Arabic and Latin historical texts from this period together from the perspective that political and cultural matters are inseparable. It argues that Iberia’s situation of political polycentrism fostered substantial patronage of scholarship and other creative activity. With many centers for administration and culture scattered across the peninsula that were often in competition with one another, rather than one lone capital, Iberian scholars and artists had access to ample support for their work from political leaders and institutions invested in demonstrating their legitimacy, wealth, righteousness, and taste by means of patronage. The historical writing that came out of these scattered centers reveals shared interest in many of the same peninsular entities, events, and dynamics and shared preference for familiar, though often imbalanced, peninsular relationships over engagement with extra-peninsular groups, especially the Almoravids (a north African empire that entered Iberia in the late eleventh century). Shared methods of rhetorical engagement with religious principles underscore further these writers’ participation in an identifiable, coherent period of scholarly culture. The following study is a starting point for an intellectual history of patronage and of the contents of materials that came out of patronage relationships.