13th Century Treaties Paint Portrait of Two Worlds

Like lost holy relics, the ancient treaties that marked the surrender of much of Islamic Spain to Christian conquerors in the 13th century were deemed missing for centuries--believed to have mysteriously disappeared in the Middle Ages.

But a pair of Los Angeles scholars recently made a remarkable discovery at the Royal Archives in Barcelona when they recovered two surrender treaties from the Muslim-Christian wars.

The discovery, the scholars say, sheds new light on Islamic and Christian cultures at a crucial moment in their development.

“Thirteenth century Spain was the crucible for the clash between Christianity and Islam,” said Robert I. Burns, a history professor at UCLA and a renowned authority on medieval Spain who is also a Jesuit priest. “This finding is important because these are the only treaties from that crusade era where we have the actual artifact.”

“When you compare the Arabic and the Latin, you can see the difference in mentalities between the empires. It gives you a better idea of what was going through their heads at that time,” he said.

The Moors made Spain their home for almost eight centuries and permanently marked the land with their cultural legacy, signs of which are still visible in Spanish monuments such as the Mosque of Cordoba. The Christian Reconquest of Spain stretched over several hundred years, culminating in 1492, when the Catholic monarchs, Isabel of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon conquered Granada, the last stronghold of Islamic Spain.

The new treaties date to an earlier part of the Reconquest, the battles waged by King James I to secure the coastal region of Valencia between 1225 and 1276. The initial discovery of the treaties was made in 1991, when an archivist in Spain found some peculiar manuscripts that had not yet been deciphered. The archivist notified Burns who, in turn, called Paul E. Chevedden, an expert in Arabic and a historian at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, for help.

Together, Burns and Chevedden traveled to Spain and spent the next eight years reconstructing and translating the remarkable ancient texts.

The treaties were eventually identified as remnants of two surrender agreements negotiated by James and his Islamic opponents. The tattered documents, written in alternating Latin and Arabic on parchment, are believed to be the only treaties from the period to have survived more than 750 years in their original bilingual form.

The first treaty marks the surrender of the Islamic city of Jativa in 1244. The second treaty recounts the surrender of one of the last great Muslim rulers, Al-Azraq, in 1245.

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With the reconstruction completed, Burns and Chevedden have published an account of the documents in a new book called “Negotiating Cultures: Bilingual Surrender Treaties in Muslim-Crusader Spain Under James the Conqueror”.

Chevedden, who was responsible for decoding and interpreting the Arabic, said the bilingual nature of the treaty is part of what makes the finding significant. In addition, because the Arabic secretariat of the Christian chancery was staffed by Jews at the time, the treaties embody the convergence of the three religious cultures of medieval Spain: Jews, Christians and Muslims.

“Other than these two texts, there is little documentation in Arabic for this era of Muslim society or for Muslim-Christian interaction in Spain,” Chevedden said. “Looking at these treaties, it gives you several perspectives of the understanding of a holy accord.”

Reconstructing the fragile documents proved a painstaking task for Burns and Chevedden. Over the centuries, the treaty of Jativa seems to have separated into two or more sections that tore along fold lines. The ravages of time and water damage further reduced the document to a crude L-shaped form that had no complete sentences.

The treaty of Al-Azraq was in better condition, Burns said. But both documents were badly blotted from black ink that had oxidized to brown. The UCLA scholars said the translation required reading the documents under magnifying ultraviolet lamps that helped track trace amounts of fluorescence.

“We worked on it for years,” Burns said. “We kept going back to it again and again to see what we could construct from the language.”

The struggle for control of Jativa was a fierce battle in which the Muslims mounted a defiant defense. When the Muslims proposed a surrender agreement in 1244, King James yielded to most of the Muslim demands, leaving them with wide powers to run their own affairs. As part of the pact, the larger of the two castles in Jativa remained in Muslim hands for two years and the smaller castle was handed to James.

The provisions reveal that James was not in a position to dictate terms of the treaty, but was compelled to offer incentives to entice Jativa to surrender. In the November issue of the British periodical History Today, Burns and Chevedden write, “James had to disguise by bravado his true anguish about conceding considerable autonomy to Jativa.”

While those facts had been known to historians, the discovery of the treaty illustrates striking differences in the Latin and Arabic versions. Instead of being direct translations of each other, the Arabic text emphasizes points crucial to the Muslims, while the Latin portion emphasize areas critical to the Christians.

“You have the Christians saying things to the Muslims like, ‘You are now our vassals and under our rule.’ Then, you have the Muslims saying, ‘This is a truce and we are at the same footing,’ ” Burns said. “So, then you’re left with the question: Why did the Muslims surrender?”

Although the siege of Jativa is well documented in the autobiography of King James the Conqueror, little had been known about Al-Azraq. In fact, most historians regarded the Muslim ruler as an isolated oddity until Burns and Chevedden rescued the treaty, revealing that his surrender in 1245 was actually a ruse to gain time to launch an Islamic counter-crusade.

“The great war that erupted two years after Al-Azraq’s capitulation drew the attention of wider Christendom and required a full-fledged papal crusade and a 10-year campaign before the king was able to achieve victory,” Burns said.