384 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.

The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon,1050–1300. By Brian A. Catlos. Cambridge University Press. 2004. xxiv +449pp. £60.00.

The experience of the Muslim, or Mudéjar, communities of eastern Iberia,who were brought under Christian authority in the wake of the Aragonesecampaigns of ‘Reconquest’ between c.1090 and 1250, has been the object ofextensive scholarly scrutiny during the past four decades. For the most part,however, it has been the post-conquest Kingdom of Valencia that has attractedthe lion’s share of the attention: patterns of social interaction between Christiansand Muslims in the Aragonese and Catalan areas of the Ebro valley, fromTudela to Tortosa, if not entirely overlooked, have not received the attentionthat they undoubtedly deserve. This state of affairs is now remedied in impressivefashion by Brian A. Catlos. Drawing upon a substantial corpus of unpublisheddocumentary sources gained from research in state and ecclesiastical archivesin the region, Catlos adopts a comparative, interdisciplinary approach to hissubject with which, as he puts it, ‘to de-reify the Islamic society of the Crownand to analyze it as one mode of social identity within the complex whole ofmedieval Catalano-Aragonese society’ (p. 8). In doing so, he seeks to explainhow a distinctive Mudéjar identity was forged in the Ebro basin in the aftermathof Christian conquest.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first, Catlos draws on existinghistoriography to provide an overview of the Muslim domination of the Ebroregion from the time of the early eighth-century conquest down to the impositionof Christian rule by the end of the twelfth. This is the least original and autho-ritative of the three sections, in that Catlos is reliant on the research of others,and it contains a number of points of interpretation that are open to challenge.For example, the suggestion that the partition of his kingdom by Sancho III ofNavarre in 1035 drew on Visigothic political practice (p. 90) is questionable, asis the now largely discredited assertion that the Barbastro raid of 1064 was aproto-crusade (p. 13). In the second part, the administrative and economicstructures of post-conquest Mudéjar society and the nature of economic andsocial interaction between Muslims and Christians are subjected to illuminatingscrutiny. The third and final part consists of six case studies that explore indepth the features already highlighted in the previous section.

The book is rounded off by a substantial and thought-provoking conclusion.Catlos’s arguments are lucidly and convincingly articulated. He argues persua-sively that it would be a mistake to view Mudéjars purely in terms of their ethnicor religious identity, or to portray them exclusively as disadvantaged and passivevictims of Christian domination. The reality was that far from being a fossilizedrelic of the Islamic past, Mudéjar society in the thirteenth-century Ebro regionwas a ‘dynamic component of the aggregate society of the Crown of Aragon’(p. 259) fully capable of asserting its rights. Conveniencia (pragmatism) not convi-vencia (coexistence) was the order of the day on both sides of the religiousdivide. To cite just one example, the discovery that the Templars as well as thecrown benefited considerably from the profits of Muslim prostitution is note-worthy indeed. Taken as a whole, this is an extremely important contribution toexisting scholarship and to the ongoing debate over the nature of Christian–Muslim social interaction during the middle ages.University of Exeter SIMON BARTON