Scripta Mediterranea (E-Journal)

Valverde, María Terresa Caro

Pellarés, Carmen Soto

English

Théorie de l'intertextualité dans la poésie de Mallarmé

Ehrlich, Carl S.

Philistine Religion: Text and Archaeology

Gagne, Laura

The Problem of Regional Variation of Mycenaean IIIC:1 Pottery: The View from Cyprus

Janeway, Brian

The Nature and Extent of Aegean Contact at Tell Ta'yinat and Vicinity in the Early Iron Age: Evidence of the Sea Peoples?

Alberti, Aitana

Aitana Alberti 
Always in Green Ink (Notes for a book of memoirs) 
Each morning you awaken with the dawn, you listen to the radio 
turned down very softly in order not to wake up your husband, you 
prepare a big pot of strong coffee, Cuban style, and you drink a large 
cup with very little milk and saccharin. In the garden the tropical 
plants, sowed in every sort of flowerpot, faintly shine beneath a lemon-
tree and an orange tree. Your garden is your repose. Your garden, locat-
ed at the edge of an avenue with a central walkway, like that other one, 
the first you ever had, in the distant south, until some municipal gov-
ernment decided to give way to progress and widened the street. Then 
the childhood promenade disappeared, and the enormous hardwood 
trees with their almost black trunks and small yellow flowers became a 
painful point of reference in the space of the initial memory, the most 
intense because from it all roads begin. 
Havana's Quinta Avenida, with its potbellied palms and stone 
benches, favours a return to a remote past, and Plea mar (High Tide), my 
home, is also the first book of poetry written by my father in Argentina 
and the name of a domestic publishing house, of unique books made by 
hand by me with rare paper, dried flowers, stones, shells and sand, 
gathered lovingly on travels to places made special by the people that 
inhabited them or by the prestige they attained in the intimate geogra-
phy that we each invent for ourselves with the passing of time. In this 
way the thick and dark sands of Isla Negra coexist with the leaves of a 
poplar-tree that would remind Falla in Alta Gracia of the black poplars 
of Machado, and a small green stone from the Paraguayan Lake 
Ipacaraf with multicoloured freesias of Palermo Park in Buenos Aires, 
where we used to ride on bicycles, Gorita, Tonica and I, the three of us 
daughters of exile, conscious that that park should have been Retiro 
Park, in the heart of a city unknown to us but so much our own through 
the telling and retelling about it, yet without a large river and port with 
ships of every flag. In the Retiro I would see, or had seen already in the 
teary and intensely blue eyes of my grandmother [dona] Oliva, the last 
autumn sun cast its light on the windows of a palace from an oriental 
fable, and in the still pond pitch the small sailing boats crowded togeth-
er at the shore, like wild geese resting from a very long migratory voy-
age. A secluded city, suitable for man -mother used to say-; not this 
infinitude of streets and more streets devoured by the pampa with such 
fury, that in order to finally leave the country the trains have to arm 
SCRIPTA MEDITERRANEA, Vol.XXII, 9 
10 Aitana Alberti 
themselves with a saintly patience. A courageous city that one, in the 
years of the Civil War. How happy we were then! And we women used 
to see the glimmer in the eyes of those who would talk to us every day, 
because it is difficult not to mention paradise when one has lost it. 
LParadise a war? Oh, mother, when I read your Memoria de la melancolfa 
(Memory of Melancholy) I understood so many things, including that 
strange affirmation that one could find something resembling happi-
ness amidst the bombs. 
It is curious. I never thought until recently that such a modest gar-
den as the one on Las Heras Street would suddenly take on such a sig-
nificant role in this story. I should say, rather, at the end of this story, 
with this 'coda' or these extra verses into which life after sixty is trans-
formed, when the beloved dead come together in the attics of dreams 
and in the mirror you watch as the tender and tired image of your 
mother irretrievably takes possession of your own. 
Punta del Este and its sea, the long seaside summer holidays -in 
fact, all the summers seemed but one, given their awaited and repeated 
consummation of happiness- blazed always like the indelible 
metaphor of childhood. The ever vigilant eye of the lighthouse, the 
small seals, Mansa Beach, the inaccessible Brava Beach, the mystery of 
Gorriti Island and Isla de los Lobos, the Gallarda -our beautiful house 
among the pines-, my friend Annette Ugalde, the solitary woods and 
the dunes... A setting difficult to surpass. And yet, I find that this tiny 
garden at Pleamar brings to me daily the steps lost by the young girl I 
was in that distant place, in the shady enclosure of its Portefio rival. 
Sitting beneath the shade of the lemon-tree I close my eyes. Voices 
come to me from I don't know where. Are they shadows that return or 
is it that to my years the past is more present than the present and the 
present is a dream yet to be? 
She sees the photograph, out of focus, of Pablo Neruda standing 
before his 'ocean comrade.' Mother's lap is warm like Sunday bread. 
She presses herself against the soft woollen skirt and with one eye bare-
ly half-open she looks over the tremulous lines of the waves, the sailor's 
cap, the sleepy smile of an Araucanian idol. Ricardo Neftalf Reyes, she 
repeats several times with difficulty, for she does not wish to take her 
mouth away from her mother's body. Neftalf, Neftalf ... what a strange 
name, mother. Well you can ask him yourself in a while why it was his 
name before and now he calls himself by another. 
Old images, mere trifles, small things still living because my 
thoughts keep them tied to the present with fragile threads, so easy to 
weaken in any imperceptible ripple of the river of forgetfulness. 
Pablo and Delia del Carril against the light in the garden of Los 
Guindos, in Santiago, from behind, each one wearing a black 
Araucanian poncho with white geometric designs. "La Tata touched my 
Always in Green Ink 11 
shells and that's not right, Rafael." "I didn't touch them." Yes you did 
touch them, you even changed the position of several of them. I am the 
great sea shell wizard and I know everything." Tata, Tatita, these shells 
are very rare and expensive and you should respect the orders of the 
greatest southern malacologist." "Uncle Pablo has millions of them, 
and I can't hear the sea?" 
Delia, by then alone in Paris, having escaped from the definitive 
infidelity of Pablo, hands me a book. Its title, Manifestes. Editions de la 
Revue Mondiale, 1925. "It's a gift for you," she says. It is a rustic, yel-
lowish little book. The inscription: "To Delia del Carril, with the esteem 
of a long friendship. Vicente Huidobro." 
Zenobia leaves a copy of the Losada edition of Platero y yo at my 
bedside. I have a high fever. A childhood illness has converted me into 
a suffering form covered with spots. No scratching, drinking cold 
water, kissing people secretly, like that small, cordial woman, who dares 
to stroke my sweaty brow with her hand. "To Aitana, your friend Juan 
Ramon." With time, the original jacket of the book was substituted by 
another drawn by my father: the purple profile of a little donkey sur-
rounded by violet flowers. "Platero, in Moguer's sky" ... 
Green ink (the ink always in green of Ricardo Neftali Reyes). "For 
Aitana Alberti, whom I love since before she was born. Your Uncle 
Pablo. August 1958." It was for my seventeenth birthday. Now I open 
the book bound in red. Its pages of India paper retain intact the com-
plete works (until then) of who was and is a presence. Nothing more 
and nothing less that that: a presence that only the forgetfulness of 
death will be able to erase. 
The walls were covered by paintings, photographs, valuable arche-
ological objects, amusing popular trinkets. Through the six windows, 
tall and narrow -two per room that together formed the drawing-
room- the joy of the Roman sun entered with great extravagance. 
Mother searched for the umpteenth time for her great golden ring. The 
one she herself designed, which Belgiorno, the finest goldsmith in 
Buenos Aires, would mount with grey pearls bought at a mysterious lit-
tle store from Peking. The two stars with a heart of a diamond and two 
authentic pearls from the Chinese Sea, that Marfa Teresa would never 
remove from her left ring finger, had strayed. It was the beginning of 
the nightmare, but we didn't know it yet. Only now do I realize the 
extent of the subterfuges that Marfa Teresa Leon's incredible intelli-
gence put into motion to shield us from the advance of the shadows, 
until these devoured her completely, with diabolical calm, throughout 
thirteen years of agony. We had never heard of Alzheimer's disease and 
although my maternal grandmother, dona Oliva, so beloved by Rafael, 
was "featherbrained" -they are his words- in the final years of her 
life - when she took a vow of poverty and would give up her meagre 
12 Aitana Alberti 
widow's pension to the nuns of a neighbouring school, and the little she 
saved she invested in inviting the patrons of a nearby bar to a cognac, 
inspiring in them profound respect that erect and slovenly old lady, 
with intense blue eyes, so enchanting and clever, whose husband, 
Colonel Angel Le6n, had fought in the Cuban War, and she, a young 
lady from Burgos, had waited for him patiently, gathering the linen of 
her trousseau in the shade of the famous provincial cathedral, with the 
constant dread that any day a black-edged envelope and not the beard-
ed and charming figure that would wrap her up in his arms to never 
leave her abandoned- it seemed impossible to us that this senile deliri-
um could be repeated a thousand times over, because Marfa Teresa 
Le6n Goyri was the indestructible and sustaining bastion of the brief 
Alberti family: dad, mom and I, and the poet and the girl felt protect-
ed "under the wings of her close embrace"*, secure that that most beau-
tiful woman, of total integrity and dignity, was immortal. One morn-
ing, after much insistence, the plumber finally arrived, assigned to 
unclog the washbasin in mother's washroom. And there, in the depths 
of the piping, was the ring. She took me to her room and distractedly 
removed from the shelf a small book bound in blue that I knew so well. 
She leafed through it quickly and, almost without looking at it, gave it 
to me. She was handing me the most important article of love that a 
young poet from Cadiz gave to her as a gift when they met. A copy of 
Marinero en tierra in which dad had glued the little cut-out heads of each 
of them together with an image sketched in Indian ink of "Our Lady of 
Beautiful Love" and in the silhouette of the sailor floating in a blue sea 
surrounded by simple fish. "Shipwreck and salvation of Rafael Alberti," 
he wrote below in rose-coloured wax pencil. And she had gone on past-
ing small photographs, testimony to their happiness, and others of dear 
friends, all of them unaware of the relentless dangers of time. 
Later, she placed the marvelous ring on my left ring finger. "Take 
these things with you and anything else you wish, my daughter. God 
only knows in whose hands they could end up." 
At the edge of the book there appears a tiny photograph of Federico 
surrounded by youngsters. They have printed "Huerta de San Vicente" 
over the poet's head. Laurita Garcia Lorca came to Havana and filled 
our hands with fragile souvenirs of her grandparents' summer home, in 
what were then the outskirts of Granada. Laurita manages the Casa-
Museo with moving dedication. This bookmark which indicates the 
advance in my reading reveals to me a Federico held for all eternity in 
an informal Cuban street scene. The three children, very young, possess 
the "Cuban colour" invented by Nicolas Guillen to classify in just man-
ner the subtle range of skin tones that each day surprise me with a new 
shade. And Federico smiles at me and I would like to know which park 
the bench belongs to in which he was sitting one afternoon, the place he 
Always in Green Ink 13 
would go to think about himself and dad, both so extraordinarily 
Andalusian, in the short life of one and the very long life of the other, 
and about how one of those lives would have been without the treach-
erous assassination, and the other if it had not succumbed to the sirens' 
song that threaten any traveller on the perilous seas of the frontier. 
I would like to say that I was in Buenos Aires when Federico 
arrived and immediately dazzled the people of that city, lifting them to 
heights of suspense like a brilliant bullfighter in the square of his great-
est achievements; yet that occurred eleven years before my birth and I 
was only able to hear certain stories according to some witnesses to the 
party that was the presence of Lorca in my city of the South. Here, in 
my tropical city, there's no one left to give an eyewitness account of his 
whirlwind passing through the Island, but there exists a veneration as 
far as the people are concerned, similar perhaps to that which someone 
so distinct as that aficionado of the bullfights with death, Ernest 
Hemingway, can arouse. 
I was in Granada recently to pay homage to Nicolas Guillen and 
Rafael Alberti in their centenaries. A Cuban poet and two Cuban musi-
cians accompanied me. The music of the lute and piano nourished the 
word, creating within the scene a magical circle. Cadiz and Cuba in 
Federico's Granada, looking for him at the Puerta de Elvira and in the 
village streets to the cathedral with Luis Garcia Montero; pursuing him 
in the gardens and patios of the Alhambra while hounded by the first 
chills of the winter; looking as far as the eye could see across the land-
scape of the Vega and the incipient whiteness of the Sierra Nevada, tak-
ing possession of us with that multiplicity of images that he saw daily, 
of the angel and of the duende (devil), that made him appear to descend, 
on a par with the great singers of the cante jondo (Andalusian gypsy 
singing), from the very same "Pharaoh's trunk" . 
Rafael did not visit Granada in Federicos' lifetime. For trivial rea-
sons, he never accepted his friend's invitations to spend the summer at 
Huerta de San Vicente. He made the trip in 1980, three years after his 
return to Spain, following "so many and such terrible things". How was 
he to think, when he was a carefree visitor at the Student Residence in 
Madrid, that they would kill the marvelous pianist, sketch artist and 
poet Federico Garcia Lorca, his recent friend, like a rabid dog in an 
unknown ravine, close to the city he loved so well, suddenly turned 
into hovel, into a hostile and unrecognized place? How could anyone 
then suspect, Father, that thousands and thousands of Spaniards would 
have to cross the French border on foot through the shortcuts in the 
mountains or be poorly heaped in chance transport, to be confined and 
mistreated in real concentration camps by citizens of the douce France, 
on the shores of the innocent Mediterranean Sea of childhood vaca-
tions? How could anyone have guessed during the amusing afternoons 
14 Aitana Alberti 
at the Resi, that thousands and thousands of Spaniards would have to 
learn languages as strange as Russian, Polish, Romanian, Czech, and 
even Chinese? How could those brilliant young people, each in his own 
way, that literary books group under the common denominator of the 
Group of 27, imagine themselves in other lands, exiled from their coun-
try and their bread, as living symbols of an infamy perpetrated against 
an entire nation? 
For the young Rafael, Granada would always be available, at the 
end of a few hours on a train (of that train that departs from Atocha sta-
tion, the last soil in Madrid tread upon by the assassinated poet), and 
his friend Federico Garcia Lorca would wait for him perhaps with 
Concha, his older sister, then girlfriend of the one in 1936, eight days 
before the glorious military rising who would take up the post of social-
ist mayor of Granada and would be killed by the fascists against the 
mud walls of the cemetery. Perhaps Manolo Angeles Ortiz, extraordi-
nary painter and another brother to Federico, would also be there, and 
dad sees them pass by the train window, that has slowed its march as it 
enters the station, and they run ahead to reach it, laughing and waving 
their hands in signs of welcome. Meanwhile Dad takes his suitcase 
down from the luggage-rack. He brings his Granadian friends some 
copies of Marinero en tierra, just released from the presses of El 
Adelantado in Segovia. Federico's impatience has caused him to jump 
into the compartment and now embraces and jostles him as if her were 
a child. 
Dad, you will go and meet that childhood that was so long-lasting 
that in a near future your friend will declare you having had it. You will 
see the Alhambra, the Generalife, the Albaycin, the Sacromonte, the 
Darro, the Genil, the tomb of the Catholic Monarchs and the Polinario 
Cafe. You will visit Fuentevaqueros and you will traverse the meadow 
at sunset, when still dense smoke rises from the earth and the dry plains 
(secaderos) of tobacco leaves recall certain Cuban landscapes. 
In the garden of Las Heras Street shadows have been falling. One 
can no longer distinguish the scarlet flowers of the poinsettias, that my 
paternal grandmother in El Puerto de Santa Maria called the Easter tree. 
You have read me poems by Federico, among others one dedicated to 
Isabel, mother of my friend Lina, granddaughter of Manolo Angeles 
Ortiz. You have told me about an imaginary Granada, that I will visit 
before you, remembering you in each step with tearfilled eyes, for there 
is still much, much time to go, before the 24th of February of 1980, when 
finally, by municipal order, they bestowed you the keys to Granada. 
Exactly thirty years. 
In Pleamar, Havana, facing the Gulf curren ts on January, 2002 
Translated by Maria L. Figueredo. 


Always in Green Ink

Shatzmiller, Maya

Reviews 
New Directions in the Study of Islam and the Crusades 
Review essay of Michael Frassetto and David R. Blanks eds. Western Views of 
Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other, (New York, St. 
Martin=s Press, 1999) 233pp. Index; Robert I. Burns SJ and Paul E. Chevedden 
with the participation of Mikel de Epalza, Negotiating Cultures: Bilingual 
Surrender Treaties in Muslim-Crusader Spain, (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1999)xviii+279pp. 
Bibliography, index; Reuven Firestone, Jihad. The Origin of Holy War in Islam, 
(New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999) vii+195pp. Bibliography, 
index; Alan V. Murray, The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Dynastic History 
1099-1125, (Oxford, Linacre College, 2000) 280pp. Bibliography, index; Anne-
Marie Edde, La principaute Ayyoubide d=Alep (579/1183-658/1260), (Stuttgart, 
Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999). Freiburger Islamstudien, Band 21. 727pp. 
Appendices, maps, bibliography, index; 
Since its appearance Edward Said's book, Orienta/ism, with its disdain toward 
the professionals engaged in its study, has dominated the discussion of Islam 
and the West. The European interest in its past cultural perceptions of Islam and 
Muslims has been since recognized by the European associations of Islamists 
and Arabists, who have resorted to inviting political leaders from the Middle 
East to address their meetings, but so far it remains unequaled and unrecipro-
cated. Yet, the need for an intellectual dialogue between Islamic societies and 
the West has never been more urgent Only now has a less flamboyant and more 
balanced approach to the study of Western views of Islam and Muslims pre-
vailed, one which rightfully incorporates the scholarly study of Islam and 
Islamic societies in Europe since about WWI. Studies have appeared that high-
lighted the fact that the European perception of the Muslim was a changing and 
mutating concept, which varied at different periods in time according to the 
proximity to and involvement of the various nations and groups with Muslims. 
In other words, an evolutionary curve of the historical modus vivendi can be 
drawn from the early medieval perception of the gth century invading Arabs, to 
their co-existence in Muslim Spain and then to the Ottoman Turks who were 
masters and co-citizens of Europe and Europeans. 
The fundamental thesis of the book Western Views of Islam, a collection of 
papers dealing with this evolutionary curve, is the centrality of the question to 
the European psyche. The image of the Muslim extracted from the literary texts 
demonstrates how it changed, gaining different components with the passage 
of time, events and changing context. But as the individual cases studied by the 
authors show, no single methodology should be used, instead, both cultural 
and historical methodologies should be given equal credit. The papers highlight 
a variety of components. By the 11th century the hostile image of the Muslim, as 
reflected in the writings of a preaching monk, was that of a heretic, an image 
enhanced by comparison to the Pagan Romans as persecutors of Christians. 
That image remained dominant during the Crusades, a defining moment in the 
historical relationship, inaugurating the aggressive streak in the European-
SCRIPTA MEDITERRANEA, Vol. XXV, 2004, 73 
74 Reviews 
Muslim relationship throughout the Mediterranean region even though the 
terms Islam and Muslim had not yet appeared. At a later stage, even while the 
image of the pagan and the heretic still dominated, the religious image also 
incorporated Greek, Aristotelian, concepts such as triunity, which was passed 
through Averroes into Christian theology and surfaced in the Biblical exegesis. 
Another component, highlighted by the literary texts of late medieval Italy, 
while a continuation of the Chansons de geste, was the image of the Saracen as a 
warrior, an earlier image resulting from the wars with the Carolingians. The 
changing Muslim image retrieved symbols from the late classical period, com-
paring the Saracen to the Goths, Vandals and Lombards. The infusion of Roman 
elements into the old French portrayal of the Saracen are solidly in place here; 
The original Saracen was a pagan, idol worshiper and devil's disciple, with 
physical deformities, horns, magic, sorcery, but he was also depicted as bold, 
daring, genteel. The humanistic texts from 15th century Italy reflect the early 
European sense of intellectual power and authority over Muslim societies. 
Eventually, the warlike Saracen replaced the religiously dominated image of the 
heretic. New literature and a new image emerged with the appearance of the 
Turk but even though the image of the Ottomans included different compo-
nents the negative overtones remained constant. 
Nowhere was the history behind the image better documented than in the 
Iberian Peninsula, where Christians and Muslims locked horns for several cen-
turies while engaging in a very different kind of conviviencia than occurred in 
the rest of Mediterranean Europe. The changing balance of power in the Iberian 
peninsula was a prolonged, drawn-out process, affecting the culture of both 
communities. While the medieval church referred to it as a "Crusade", and it 
did involve some similar historical questions such as settlement and coloniza-
tion, it was, on the whole, very different from the Crusades to the Holy Land. 
Bums/Chevedden and Epalza's book is a collective effort to reconstruct the 
process of Spanish occupation of the densely settled Eastern Iberia by attaching 
it to two bi-lingual treaties signed between Muslim cities' governors and the 
Aragonese king in the 13th century. The list of privileges provided to the 
Muslims reflect a desire to allow for continuous economic, social and even reli-
gious survival. What is impressive is the kindly, friendly almost comradely tone 
in which the Muslim commanders were addressed by the Christian kings in 
these documents. Intolerance, forced conversions and property expropriation 
all came later. The modem Spanish historiography, quoted here by Epalza, has 
looked for historical parallels between the medieval treaties and those con-
tracted between the Spanish government and Arab countries in the 18th centu-
ry in a desire to create a normal and universal pattern of relationships with the 
Muslims. 
Western interest in the Islamic concept of the Holy War, Jihiid, is usually 
linked to its revival at the time of the Crusades, but recently, for obvious rea-
sons, has become the center of attention. Firestone's book on the subject pre-
ceded the 9I11 attacks but his research makes it perfectly clear that the evolu-
tion of the concept of Jihiid within the Islamic theological body of literature 
should rather be linked to internal historical conditions, political, religious and 
social stimuli, traceable to an early period, from pre-Islamic Arabia through the 
rise of Islam. According to him, the crucial moment in the formation of the new 
concept of war occurred because at a certain point there was a shift from pre-
Reviews 75 
Islamic social conduct of the tribe to that of the early Muslim community, or 
from 'material war= to a 'religious war= and that it resulted from this particu-
lar antagonism and the rise of individualism. The decisive moment of the shift 
from non-belligerent to belligerent behaviour was related to the formation of 
the community in Medina, and the change in the sense of kinship from tribal to 
umma which made it possible. It was a shift to a political umma endowed with 
an ideological motivation. The attacks by the new Muslims on their Meccan kin, 
unimaginable during pre-Islamic times, were now possible. They called on God 
to justify it precisely because it was a major departure. The result was that the 
Muslims began to see all their future wars in ideological terms and all wars as 
wars against God. The transition which accompanied it from fractious and frac-
tioned clan to a unified community under God provided all that was needed in 
terms of the shift from a material war to a Holy War. This interpretation reduces 
the evolution in the Islamic concept of Holy War to a strictly internal develop-
ment based on short term and immediate needs without allowing for the long 
term interpretation of influences from an outside historical ideology, historical 
events, or political force. 
New insights into the relationship between Muslims and Christians among 
others are also provided by two new and very different books on the Crusades 
to the Holy Land by two historians, both of whom have chosen to write in the 
format of dynastic history. Alan Murray's approach to dynastic history is to use 
prosopograpica, the micro-history methodology par excellence. Focusing on the 
short period of the reign of the first three rulers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem of 
the Bouillon-Boulogne family, Godfrey, Baldwin I and Baldwin II, 1099-1125, he 
has set out to reconstruct their immediate milieu, their own family and 
entourage, clients vassals and friends both in Europe and the Middle East. By 
casting a wider net over the individuals surrounding the monarch and expand-
ing the view to include Godfrey's family affairs as dukes of Lotharingia, Murray 
has provided the context for Godfrey's election and the governance patterns 
adopted in Jerusalem. For instance, by reconstructing the sale of his ancestral 
holdings before his departure, Murray has provided a plausible scenario for 
why Godfrey was determined to stay in the Holy Land. The fact that Baldwin I 
was already recognized as his brother's heir in Europe explains why the first 
succession on his death in 1100 was so peaceful. While Murray has not made 
much use of the continuity factor in the institutional structures between Europe 
and the kingdom of Jerusalem, he has identified the actors in each of the events 
and explored the individuals' family, vassalage and other relationships which 
explain why they were chosen to fulfill the role they did. The identity of indi-
viduals who accompanied Godfrey on the Crusade and staffed the new institu-
tions, carefully reconstructed from a variety of documents, resulted in a detailed 
history of the first generation. Enhanced by appendices which trace the indi-
vidual histories of each of them, this is a very intimate history, an insider story 
of the historical narrative. 
Anne-Marie Edde's dynastic history of the Ayyubid Aleppo principality 
between1183 to 1260, is a very different history. An important center ruled by 
Saladin's heirs, and the neighbour of Crusader Antioch, the history of Aleppo 
during a period not much longer chronologically than that of Murray's, is a 
comprehensive study which includes the political, social, economic, religious 
and literary life of the city and its dependencies. Written in the large format of 
76 Reviews 
the French These d'Etat it is a testimony both to the perseverance required of 
French historians, and to the wealth of the Islamic sources which have allowed 
an elaboration on this scale. While the relationship with Frankish outposts 
south and West of Aleppo are not the focus of the book, its political chapters 
reconstruct the division which followed Saladin's death and the infighting 
among his sons and brothers. That, and the Mongol invasion of the Middle East, 
explain the survival of the Crusaders' cities for another 100 years. Moreover, the 
elaboration of the institutional structures of the Ayyubid state offers interesting 
comparative possibilities. In spite of the general perception that Islam did not 
have "feudalism", at least not in the European sense, the land grants, iqtii, made 
by the Ayyubids to family members, military commanders and tribal chiefs 
affected the sultan's attempts to concentrate power in his hands in a very simi-
lar way to that in which the Frankish nobility conducted relations with their 
own monarchy. The constant lack of manpower, the occurrence of female 
regency, the military tactics and siege warfare, were all shared concerns of both 
the Latin cities and Aleppo's masters at different times. Moreover, Frankish 
Antioch's collaboration with the Mongols and the Armenians against Aleppo, 
reflect the degree of the Latins' integration in the region and their familiarity 
and share in the political game. The chapters dealing with the economy rein-
force this sense of peaceful Western integration by documenting the penetration 
of the Venetians into the regional trading network through numerous treaties 
now commonly signed with other Muslim rulers in the region. The chapters on 
the cultural and religious life demonstrate the sophistication of municipal and 
learning institutions that dotted the Alepine urban scenery and that neither 
Frankish society nor the Mongols, Kurds, Turks and others gathering at the 
gates could have either enjoyed or appreciated at the time. In the larger frame 
of the Islamic perspective of the history of the Crusades, this new synthesis 
manifests, how unique was the momentary unification that resulted in Saladin's 
triumph at Hattin. It was not the unity achieved by Saladin, but the political 
patterns described in the bickering of his heirs, which was the norm. These were 
the intrinsic patterns of the region during the roughly five centuries that sepa-
rated the Abbasid empire from that of the Ottomans, and during which the 
Crusades took place. The image conjured here is of a society of cultural strength 
and political fragility. 
MAYA SHATZMILLER 
The University of Western Ontario 
Nuessel, Frank & Cedeno, Arist6fanes (Ed.). Selected Literary Commentary in the 
Literature of Spain .Ottawa: Legas, 2004. 
Selected Literary Commentary in the Literature of Spain presents a collection of lit-
erary commentary from major literary works of the Spanish Peninsular canon. 
According to the authors, their intention has been to provide a representative 
sample of the historical development of literary theory and literary commen-
tary in peninsular literature. 
It comprises ten chapters with literary commentary found in the works of 
major writers. There are seven chapters on the Golden Age period including 


New Directions in the Study of Islam and the Crusades.

Catlos, Brian

Reviews 
Irrigation and Society in lslamic Granada. 
Trillo San José, Carmen. Agua, tierra y hombres en al-Andalus. La dimension agrfcola 
del mundo nazarf. Granada: Ajbar, 2004. ISBN: 84-609-0718-X. 307pp + 11 maps and 
figures + 12 colour photographs. 
Idem. Una sociedad rural en el Meditemineo medieval: el mundo agrfcola nazarf. 
Granada: Libro de Bolsillo, 2003. ISBN: 84-607-8623-3. 221pp + 11 maps and 
figures. 
The Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (1238--1492), although famous for its most 
grandiose monument, the Alhambra palace, has traditionally been relegated to 
the sidelines of history. Regarded neither as pertaining to the historical Europe 
nor to the Islamic world proper, historical hindsight in view of the conquest of 
1492 has made of it little more than a postscript to the grand history of Golden 
Age Muslim Iberia. This is an historiographical injustice that Carmen Trillo 
endeavours to right in her investigation of the rural society and economy of late 
Medieval Granada. This is no easy task: there are relatively few sources for the 
political history of the kingdom, but for agricultural history the panorama is 
even more bleak. As Trillo explains, a number of factors including the nature of 
Islamic law and custom, the effects of the conquest and the tendency for land to 
be exchanged among family members has meant that few archival records from 
the Muslim period were maintained and almost none have survived. Thus, 
these two works draw heavily on Castilian documentation originating in the 
wake of the conquest, which was carried out in spurts from the mid-thirteenth 
to the late-fifteenth century. Most notable among these sources are the libros de 
repartimento, the surveys drawn up by the Christians in order to distribute the 
conquered lands among the victors. Trillo acknowledges the dangers of using 
Castilian documentation to shed light on the pre-conquest era, but argues con-
vincingly that valuable and valid insights can be gained from it. Because of the 
spotty nature of the surviving material Trillo focuses on a handful of specific 
locales mostly in the environs of the capital, for example the area of El Quempe, 
Cenete, and the irrigation system of Aynadamar, which serve as case studies 
illustrating the broader themes addressed in the work. 
Trillo argues that the arrival of the Muslims in the early eighth century pre-
cipitated a veritable agricultural revolution in Iberia, one in which the large-
scale dry cereal farming and viticulture which had been the hallmark of the 
Roman period declined in importance. The transformation was produced 
thanks to the "green revolution" (as Andrew M. Watson has described it) which 
resulted from the introduction of plants and products from across the Islamic 
world. High-value market-garden crops demanded the development of the 
same sorts of complex irrigation systems which had developed in North Africa 
and the Middle East. These systems, however, could only emerge as a result of 
the colonization which followed the Muslim conquest in the areas where Arabs 
and Berbers settled. The agricultural and hydraulic profile of the new settle-
SCRIPTA MEDITERRANEA, Vol. XXVI, 2005, 75 
76 Reviews 
ments reflected the agnatic endogamous extended family structures typical of 
the Islamic world (as Guichard, Glick, Barcel6 and Acien have described). 
Thus, by the tenth century the Andalusi countryside, as a result of this "revolu-
tion" came to be comprised of small villages each related to a single clan, direct-
ed by a council of elders, and only loosely supervised by the caliphal state. 
Here a relatively homogenous community of small proprietors worked inten-
sively irrigated market gardens raising diversified crops aimed not at supply-
ing a commercial or industrial market but rather at guaranteeing self-sufficien-
cy for the small-holder through diversification. In addition to the land that was 
held by individuals (mamluka), lands held in common, by the community or of 
unascribed ownership (harim, and mawat), provided each village with grazing 
land, fields for dry crops, and a margin for expansion. 
This reflects the characterization of Andalusi society accepted by most 
scholars. The larger question which Trillo endeavours to answer is: was there a 
subsequent revolution in the Nasrid kingdom that by the fifteenth century, had 
led to the decline of the agnatic and endogamous system that, according to 
Guichard and others was essential to Andalusi society? (Una sociedad rural, p. 
24) This is an important question as it relates directly to the nature of the impact 
that Castilian domination would have on the socio-economic panorama of 
southem Spain. By the sixteenth-century large-scale mercantile plantation oper-
ations had emerged, geared, for example, to supplying sugar to an export mar-
ket. These might possibly be linked to the sprawling aristocratie estates, Muslim 
latifundia, which are commonly believed to have been a defining feature of the 
countryside south of the Gaudalquivir. Trillo argues that there was indeed a 
social revolution in Nasrid Granada, but that the role and importance of the 
aristocratie estates was exaggerated by contemporary chroniclers and geogra-
phers and hence has been misunderstood by modem historians. Here detailed 
reconstruction of irrigation and fields systems and, where possible, the patch-
work of field ownership, shows that with the exception of royal estates, these 
country manors were much more modest than has been previously assumed. 
Moreover, even on larger estates, the fields themselves were typically worked 
by shirka, share-cropping, in which the tenants managed the land using the 
same strategies and approaches as the small free-holders. 
The revolution it seems consisted in the gradual weakening of the clan sys-
tem. Despite the various strategies that were employed to ensure that landed 
patrimony remained within the ambit of the broader patrilineal extended fam-
ily (including mainemorte, pious donations, gifts inter vivos, etc.) tendencies 
such as the right for women to inherit property under Islamic law, contributed 
to its gradual dispersal. Once the lands held by a given clan were no longer 
contiguous, and could not be managed or controlled as a whole, individual land 
ownership became more important. The sale and purchase of land became 
more common as the stigma attached to the loss of clan patrimony disappeared. 
As a consequence, social inequalities became more acute, and new local elites 
emerged. The members of these local elites, consisting of wealthier farmers 
who often also occupied religious or administrative positions, became increas-
ingly interested in exogamous marriage as a means of forming alliances with 
nuclear families of similar social and economic standing rather than strength-
ening their bonds with poorer members of their own clans. 
By the late fifteenth-century the Granadan social revolution was well 
Reviews 77 
underway and the Andalusi countryside presented a diverse panorama of 
property types and increased concentration of land ownership in the hands of 
a privileged few. This occurred on a much more modest scale than in the Latin 
world where the emergence of feudal structures acted as a catalyst for social dif-
ferentiation and the eventual emergence of a capitalist class that shared no affin-
ity with the productive classes. In principle the realignment of Nasrid society 
reflected the same shift towards exogamy that Goody describes Latin society 
undergoing after the eleventh-century, but with the difference that here this 
process was not deliberately sponsored by a religious institution. Whereas in 
the West the Church imposed the exogamous model, in al-Andalus the ideal of 
the agnatic endogamous society continued to exercise a profound influence as 
a social model whether it was actually practised or not. In the end, the process 
of transformation in Granada was dramatically truncated by the Christian con-
quest, which imposed a new model of administration, social organization and 
economic exploitation. For Trillo, the proto-capitalism of the sixteenth-century 
plantations could not have emerged out of the Kingdom of Granada which was, 
drawing on the language of Samir Amin, a tributary society, fundamentally dif-
ferent from that which was emerging in the West. 
Of the two works under consideration here, both cover essentially the same 
basic subject although they differ in format and emphasis. Una sociedad rural 
serves more as an introduction to the topic, while Agua, tierra y hombres en al-
Andalus will be of more interest to scholars and to North American readers, 
given that it is more complete, more scholarly in format and presentation and 
that it presents a broader and more coherent approach to the topic at hand. 
Trillo not only draws on a whole range of theoretical approaches (archaeology, 
sociology, economics) effectively but draws convinncing and thought-provok-
ing comparisons to similar or contrasting situations in contemporary England, 
France and the Low Countries, and Byzantium, not to mention the contempo-
rary and modem Maghrib, Egypt and Palestine. As such her work not only 
addresses a notable historical lacuna but does so with a degree of sophistication 
and a scope that local studies typically lack. This work will be of interest not 
only to experts in Islamic Spain, but to students and scholars of the economy 
and rural society of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, the 
Mediterranean and the Islamic World. 
BRIAN A. CATLOS 
University of California Santa Cruz 


Irrigation and Society in Islamic Granada.

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