Free Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain by Matthew Carr

fourteenth-century chancery document in the Crown of Aragon lists more than thirty different Muslim trades, including accountant, arms maker, carpenter, jester, trumpeter, innkeeper, farmer, and eye surgeon. 3 Muslims also worked as dyers, tanners, shoemakers, armorers, dancers, gardeners, and muleteers.
    Muslim women worked as servants, midwives, and wet nurses, some of whom attended Christian women and children despite the prohibitions against such proximity. Even in Granada, where the traditional social structure was largely intact, the majority of the population consisted of peasants, small farmers, and urban artisans. There were exceptions to this proletarian profile. In Granada the landowning nobility had joined the exodus from al-Andalus, but many nobles remained after the conquest and continued to enjoy the wealth and status to which they were accustomed. Elsewhere in Spain, there were wealthy Muslim merchants and landowners who flourished even under Christian rule, some of whom were rich enough to rent land and property to Christians. In Aragon the powerful Belviss clan worked closely with the Christian administration, and its members continued to occupy the important position of qadi general —the chief appellate judge in Muslim Valencia and Aragon—as a dynastic post even in Ferdinand’s time. The Bellvis family were also allowed to trade internationally and had commercial connections in the spice trade that extended to Spain, Italy, and North Africa. But these cases were not common: unlike the Jews, Muslims rarely occupied economic and administrative positions in the upper ranks of Spanish society, nor were they associated with despised professions, such as tax collection.
    In a Christian society where manual labor was often seen as unworthy, the lowly socioeconomic status of Spanish Muslims tended to generate disdain rather than hatred. At the same time, their reputation for sobriety, frugality, and industriousness made Muslims extremely attractive to Christian employers and landowners—an appeal that was enshrined in Christian adages such as Quien tiene moro, tiene oro (whoever has a Moor, has gold) and cuanto mas moros, mas ganancia (the more Moors, the more profit). Muslim labor was a particularly prized commodity in Valencia and Aragon, where most Muslims worked as feudal serfs in the service of landowning Christian seigneurs.
    These Muslim vassals worked as rent-paying tenant farmers or sharecroppers on seigneurial lands. In addition to providing their lords with labor, rents, and a percentage of their crops, they were often subject to a range of onerous duties that did not generally apply to their Christian counterparts. Muslim vassals might be expected to collect the lord’s firewood, bake his bread, repair and make his family’s clothes, prune his vineyards, and tend his orchards. They might provide animals as gifts for his daughter’s wedding, transport his family and baggage when he traveled, serve in his private army, or deliver his letters—a task that could sometimes take more than a day in the more remote rural estates.
    As a result, the nobility in Valencia and Aragon regarded Muslim labor as indispensable to their continued prosperity. The Aragonese Crown also drew substantial revenues from the Muslim vassals, who constituted the “royal treasure” in a variety of ways, including Muslim labor on Crown lands known as realengo , and taxes imposed on a wide range of activities, from Muslim bathhouses and halal butchers to the sale of licenses to local shops, beggars, inns, and brothels. All this had mixed consequences for the Muslims themselves. Though Muslim vassals were often ruthlessly exploited, they received the protection of their lords and benefited from a remarkably relaxed attitude among the Aragonese and Valencian nobility toward their religious practices—an attitude that was often at odds with the more militant sectors of the Church. In Valencia, for example, the ecclesiastical