The Essential Enemy: The Image of the Muslim as Adversary and Vassal in the Law and Literature of the Medieval Crown of Aragon

Abstract

One of the truly unforeseen consequences of the downfall of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics was the disappearance of the orchestrated enmity of the world’s two superpowers that has come to be called the Cold War. This struggle was not merely the military and geopolitical rivalry of two jealous powers but, thanks to impact of a virulent nationalism, exercised the emotional appeal of a religion. Despite the obvious perils of such a situation in that two equally mighty adversaries were on constant alert to strike or parry the first blow in an atomic Armageddon, the Cold War gave to its participants a malleable enemy, one they could mold not from reality but rather from their own fears and weaknesses. With the collapse of this doctrinal enmity in the late 1980s, the true complexities of life without “separate but equal” adversaries has dawned on the late twentieth-century world, in that narrow international hatreds seem much more complex than they are comforting. 1 Another era founded on such a dyad of detested but essential adversaries was that of medieval Spain, where Muslim stood against Christian along a frontier that functioned as both battle line and connector. The purpose of this paper is to review this history of hatred and interdependence by delineating the image of the Muslim in the Christian psyche as expressed in the law and literature of the medieval Crown of Aragon. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.