Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World by David A. Wacks

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World by David A. Wacks Albert Lloret Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World. By David A. Wacks. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. The introduction to Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World has two goals. The first is to assert the critical framework of the study—that is, researching the interaction of the territories, cultures, and politics of the Mediterranean basin—and, in subsequent chapters, the relevance of this Mediterranean-centered approach becomes apparent in the geographical background of the literary works under scrutiny as much as in their discursive and political relevance. The second is to define the place of the Iberian Peninsula with respect to the medieval wars of conquest of the holy sites of Christendom in the Middle East. The focus of this second goal is not so much placed on military or apologetical contributions coming from Iberia to the Middle Eastern Crusades. Rather, Wacks concentrates on explaining how the history of those contributions affected the way in which the military campaigns of the Iberian Christian kingdoms against Al-Andalus were ideologically conceived, imagined, and predicated as a holy war. Thus, medieval Iberian chivalric works engaged with the Crusades in clearly distinct discursive forms. Given the book’s focus on literary prose works written in Arabic, Castilian, and Catalan, the introduction pays particular attention to the ideology of the Crusades and to practices of proselytization and conversion of Muslim and Jewish populations in the Christian-dominated territories of the Iberian Peninsula. It ends with a cursory catalogue of mainly Castilian examples of Crusade fiction; and, in my opinion, a lyric subgenre such as the Occitan canso de crozada, a variety of sirventes, would also yield interesting responses to the kinds of questions the author entertains in the introduction. I mean this as a remark on the monograph’s relevance beyond its intended scope, not as critique of Wacks’s choice of works. Chapter 1 advances an interpretation of the Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani—an Andalusi work written in Granada c. 1250—as an example of Crusade fiction. Ziyad is a significant but neglected example of the complexity of cultural hybridity in medieval Iberia. The work was generically indebted to both Arab popular epic and Arab popular narrative texts such as the 1001 Nights. But its anonymous author drew, too, on Christian Crusader and Arthurian fiction to create a narrative led, paradoxically, by an Arab and Muslim hero. This reliance on Christian [End Page 143] chivalric fiction explains many of the work’s features, from its detailed descriptions of combat to the mass conversion of pagans to Islam. For Wacks, Ziyad emerges as an outstanding work in its context because of the way in which it evinces a degree of cultural assimilation of Muslim Granada to the Christian north. He argues that this assimilation was an aesthetic choice, not an ideological one, because it is exemplified in other artistic and literary products of the time. The author of Ziyad maintained the religious values of Arab epic, negotiating and adapting them to the generic features of Christian chivalric fiction. Chapter 2 centers on the Castilian Libro del caballero Zifar, dated to the first quarter of the fourteenth century. A thorough reading of a fragment of Zifar’s prologue gives Wacks a starting point for unpacking the book’s political and ideological agenda. He contends that Zifar embodies a cultural translatio. Its Christian author’s appropriation of Andalusi culture is interpreted as spolia—that is, as a way of enhancing the cultural capital of his work, one that accounts for key formal aspects of the text, such as its Arabizing toponyms and anthroponyms and its transformation of Arthurian fiction into a vehicle for sapiential literature. At the same time, the prologue of Zifar is understood to be performing a vindication of the Mozarabic elites of the Church of Toledo over adventitious Castilian dominance. This political maneuver—the affirmation of Mozarabic identity—may have been allegorized in the plot of the romance. Finally, Wacks suggests how two of the Arthurian motifs that the book contains, the only fantastic ones in the work (whose source is debated), could...