Hello, everyone. Welcome to the first of the lectures being given by the Slate Professor of Finance the 2021.
These lectures are an important tradition at the University of Oxford. John Roskam began this tradition by presenting a series of public lectures on
art in 1870 after being appointed as the initial slate professor of fine arts.
Every year, a distinguished scholar is asked to follow in his footsteps.
My name is Geoffrey Bachem, and I am professor of the history of art at the University of Oxford.
It is my great pleasure to introduce this UCLA professor, Dr. Geralyn de Dodds.
Jerry Dodds is Harlequin of the German Professor, Faculty of Art History at Sarah Lawrence College in the United States.
Professor Dodds, scholarly work is centred on mediaeval, Iberian art and architecture,
and especially on issues of trans colouration and identity formation.
Amongst her publications are arts of intimacy, Christians, Jews and Muslims in the making of Castilian culture.
A renowned co-authored textbook.
Another book titled Architecture and Ideology of Early Mediaeval Spain, and a third titled New York Majesty Masjid The Mosques of New York City.
In addition, in 1992, Jerry was editor of the catalogue Al Andalus,
The Arts of Islamic Spain for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Alhambra, and served as curator of the exhibition of the same name.
She was also co-editor and curatorial consultant for the Arts of Mediaeval Spain at the Metropolitan Museum,
co-editor and consulting curator for Vivid Confidential, The Arts of Jews,
Christians and Muslims in Mediaeval Iberia, and with Edward Sullivan,
co-editor and curator for Crowning Glory Images of the Virgin in the Arts, Portugal The New Museum.
Interestingly, she's also written and directed a number of films in conjunction with museum exhibitions, as well as for wider audiences.
In 2018, in recognition of her exceptional contributions to the dissemination of knowledge of Spanish history and culture, Prof.
Dodds was the recipient of the Cross of the Order of Civil Civil Merit from the Government of Spain.
We are honoured that Professor Dodds has accepted our invitation to present this
year's slate lectures and are now happily hand over the microphone to her.
Thank you so very much for those very generous words. It's an enormous pleasure and honour to speak to you today.
Slide Lecture. Before beginning, I wish to extend my deepest gratitude to all of those who have worked under
these very unprecedented constraints to allow me to deliver these lectures.
In particular, Neil Mendoza,
provost of Oriel College and the Committee for Slate Lectures Holy Knights and Liz Green of the torch team who literally made this possible,
and most especially, I wish to thank Survey's roster.
Professor of Mediaeval Art in the Art History Department and Oxford and Geoffrey Batching,
professor of the history of art and head of art history for the practical and spiritual guidance in,
as Professor Bethune would say, very unreal times.
So the problem is, of course, maps like this.
All maps like this chromatically proposing a unity of identity aligned with religion,
eclipsing political alliance, shrouding social complexity, fixing temporality.
These maps become in your rustic for visualising mediaeval history retrospectively from the point of
view of the moment of the erasure of the last kingdom ruled by Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula.
The periods I wish to explore in these lectures begin at the fall of the busy gothic reign.
Also a time of discord and negotiation and not only one of religious unity.
And yet it's not until the advent of the polities ruled by Muslims on the peninsula that these chromatic
demarcations begin to dominate graphically with the Mayan emirate and the caliphate when disparate,
often hostile principalities ruled by Christians or nevertheless united in one shade again and continue in fictive unanimity.
As the great amide state breaks down into multiple principalities and a fragmented Christian North builds alliances across confessional boundaries,
all of which is erased by the privileging of the religious binary.
The map rejects and this continues through the fall of the Kingdom of Granada and its demise in fourteen ninety two with the rise.
Sorry. In fourteen ninety two, with the rise of the Kingdom of Spain, when Isabel of Castiel married Fernanda Barragan.
Although the prenup indicated that a dynastic union would be of two separate states, the Christians were still not unified.
Now I need to say that these particular maps were made for a book that wished to tell a far more complex story,
but that was so much the way in which we visualise things that this message went so unquestioned by the author.
Thirty years ago, who was, of course, me? The desire to construct a clear history regarding a mediaeval demographic that does not exist
today means that we tend to project the issues that seem most extraordinary to us on to the past.
And what's most extraordinary to us, whether we view this as an interesting or benevolent thing or whether we view it as threatening?
What's most extraordinary to us is to imagine a Western European place shared by Muslims and Christians under conditions of Muslim hegemony.
Walter Mignola reminded us of the ways in which reconceive and borders can recenter our epistemological and hermeneutic habits.
So perhaps one way to begin is to embrace the chaos of places without the clear borders of religions.
And that's something, by the way, that Rose Walker approached rather courageously in her recent survey.
Of course, these principalities themselves, both those ruled by Muslims and Christians,
also wish to assert that their identities were defined by religions because one of the few truths we can state is enduring throughout the
periods will explore in these lectures is that an individual's religion was then a transcendent factor of social and political identity.
But however, sincerely felt uniquely sectarian categories of identity are enormously inadequate to the study of mediaeval.
Liberia, Muslims and Christians lived in societies that maintained legal, religious and social stances of public hostility.
But as Robert Burns has said, such public ritual expression consecrate societal hostility,
but also frees participants from much of the burden of personal hostility.
So Christians and Muslims join shared work together in economic, social, cultural and intellectual spheres.
This was not cultural tolerance that would not have been seen as a public virtue by either group.
It was instead, in Burns's words, an effective ground for unremitting interaction.
I wish to suggest in the next few weeks that one way we can mine that slippage,
the way in which the discourse of a simple bipolar opposition between Muslims and Christians breaks down is through a consultation of material
culture that betrays its subconscious meanings that holds its conscious assertions of separateness simultaneously with its ambivalent,
shared meanings.
The approach involves mining both surface semantics asserted by work up works of art and also the web of deeper meanings engendered by social,
political and economic forces.
It's not so much about actual austerity as it is about the perception and instrumental ization of alterative within cultural expression.
I'd like to begin here in the last years of the great admired caliphate, which we're going to talk about next week,
not in its capital, but in Toledo, the former metropolis founded on the site of the capital of the former busy gothic monarchy.
It had replaced.
We can descend one of Toledo's vertiginous hills to the mosque of Ibn al-Hadidi, named for its patron, also known as the mosque of Babylon Makhdoom.
After the gate of the city near which it was built, it was constructed in an elite sector of the city, not far from the dual Munich palace in 1999,
where it was a pious foundation meant to serve as a neighbourhood mosque for daily prayer
and also perhaps as a site for learnt pursuit of the elites who were its patrons.
Its nine day plan makes it like a little miniature, hyper style mosque, eight metres square open on two sides with a close Kibler wall.
The Kibler wall is, of course, the wall facing Mecca to the southeast.
However, the interior opens up to a tiered set of nine rib domes these Christian favourites saw as a miniature vertical version of a mock Sora,
a space set aside near the mirror up for the prayer of the elite of the Great Mosque of Cordoba.
There's the cord of a mixture now such private foundations of nine bay mosques
are found throughout the lands of Islam in North Africa or Central Asia.
But though they share some plan sites, they are wildly divergent in elevation, echoing not each other.
But the source of more August foundations in their own reasons.
In this way, these little mosques visually knit together devotional spaces that are not bound by a central religious hierarchy.
From Susannah Caldwell Kapila, we learnt that this mosque founder Ahmad Immunol Hadi,
the ultra light to leave that to lead in was likely instrumental in these references to the Great Mosque of Cordoba.
Even al-Khateeb tells us that he was a cultured and erudite faqih who was honoured to be amongst
those present in Cordoba in 1976 for the acclamation ceremony of the admired Caliph Hisham.
And so he saw himself the opulent additions that his son's father all had come.
The second had made their. Reflections of Cordoba can also be seen in the little mosque's poorly lobbed arches.
Interlacing arches and red and white blue Suarez, all constructed in the little mosque in local to lead a rich tradition.
We cannot trace how his architect, Mousseau Ben Ali, learnt to reference them, or as is likely,
if explicit references to Cordoba existed in other foundations of tifo, totally Toledo as well.
I'm sorry, not Typekit Toledo, Umea Toledo as well,
but the elaborate way in which Cordoba is referenced here must be seen in part as echoing the career and prominence of its founder.
And it subsequently became a model for time for Toledo, for the oratory in the later palace nearby, as Khalwale has shown.
And also it spawned a tiny copy of the Little Mosque of Lust toward Nereus,
built in the market near the tiefer rule in during the tiefer rule of Alma Moon or of his grandson here.
And yet the mosque have been Hadley would become something else altogether under Castilian rule.
One hundred and eighty six years after its original construction.
Around 11:45, an enormous apps and transept were grafted onto the eastern side of the fragile Nine Bay Pavilion,
subsuming it without entirely erasing it, incorporating the mosque building into the Church of the Holy Cross Santa Cruz.
The transept is only faintly expressed on the exterior, emphasising the fissure between the two buildings.
The effect today is of a voluminous apps poised and incident before it consumes the mosque,
which becomes a kind of spoil of war in a neat bipolar image entirely in keeping with its new 12th century patrons.
The night of the Hospital of St. John. They were in military order, born in the Holy Land,
but now in Iberia to aid both in military confrontation with Muslims and in
transforming the trouble the troubled alliances of Iberian kings in this case,
Alfonso the eighth of Castiel into the more regimented, confessional opposition of crusade.
It's a compact, uncomplicated image of Christian victory over a reductive Islam.
The destruction of the Kibler wall, the creation of a divergent and actualised orientation constituted a stage set for
the emergence of new social and political powers within the economy of conquest.
But as though news that those new actors emerged,
the very act of conversion fragmented and complicated the discourse that strove towards a morality constructed around two simple, unequivocal poles.
We might best step back for a moment to the changes of the previous two centuries in Toledo.
Less than a decade after the construction of the Little Mosque,
the Mayan caliphate fell and its land frank lands fragmented into a number of small Taifa kingdoms, of which Toledo was one.
These were heirs to the rich culture of the minds, but not to their military capacity,
creating more interdependent alliances with the kingdoms ruled by Christians,
political relationships rarely polarised uniquely on the basis of religion for the type of struggled with one another,
as did the sometimes fratricidal kingdoms of and Castiel, Galicia and Aragon in the North.
And any one might as easily take a Christian king for an ally as a Muslim ruler.
And as the northern kingdom strengthened over time,
they did not at first seek to occupy or christianised taifa lands, but instead extorted colossal tribute.
Police and military duties from the often fragile kingdoms.
The fall of the city of Toledo, from Muslim to Christian hands, including occurred in ten ninety five a century before the foundation of Santa Cruz,
the Taifa state of Toledo had already been in the Castilian clients for some time.
And Alfonso, the six of Leon and Castiel, shuffled its ineffectual ruler, Al Kadir, off to a scenic.
You're in Valencia. The administration of the city of Toledo had been in tatters and had been by.
Some tells us that the very scion of The Balawi Hadadi, a minister and the grandson of the founder of the mosque, was assassinated in the street,
an act believed by some to have been decisive in the capitulation of the city already shrouded in paranoia and uncertainty to its Castilian overlord.
After a protracted siege, Rodrigo humility rather accounts Alfonso,
the sixth took Toledo holding court in the palace of his former client and possessing its gardens.
Its reception rooms. Its diminutive palette, Palatine Mosque.
And a year later, Alfonso also appropriated Toledo's primary congregational mosque, converting it into a cathedral in alliance with his new Cluny.
York Archbishop Bernard have said Iraq about this building.
We know from best investigations, only that it is reconstructed as a hypos style mosque of 11.
Ihls something like thirty nine by sixty one metres and might have possessed some forms, recalling the Great Mosque of Cordoba.
Though I show you other vestiges of Islamic Toledo so as not to push the point.
Because the point is to imagine the material presence of a mosque converted to a cathedral.
Imagine worshipping in a type of style hole wrenched now towards the East with a growing line of chapels carved from its Kibler wall,
its new altars, as Tom Nixon has shown. We're endowed with relics by the Pope and Alfonso himself.
And Tom is surely correct to suppose that parts were soon painted.
The mosque turned to cathedral was a powerful stage set for the performance of military and ecclesiastical victory in experiential spoil of war.
But it was also a manifestation of deep devotion intensified in the face of another.
There's little is moving in this regard as the memory of James of Berrigan, who just after the submission of Murcia in the 13th century,
recalled in his book of deeds erecting an altar to the Virgin in the principal mosque.
Embracing the altar, the formidable conqueror wrote,
We wept so strongly and so heartily that for the time it takes to go a mile, we could not stop crying nor leave the altar.
Perhaps for this very reason, the body of the mosque thus repurposed also became powerfully policy.
MEUs, its forest of columns, would become the principal site of worship for Toledo's Christian community for over 130 years.
Prominent families buried their dead and its sun in its courtyard.
The altars that marked its Kibler now has relics that were index a call to holy bodies,
fervently revered material sites of intersection with the divine.
The mosque's conversion to cathedral served to bring to lead in Christians into intimate and proprietary contact with its own language of expression.
The visual environment for phenomenological transformation of cute community experience
that flowed above and around the simple imposition of a narrative of Christian victory.
With time,
it would become increasingly difficult for religious authority to be defined architecturally in Toledo so that what it began as a conversion
had slipped into something like a translation or data on the mall appropriation and incorporation into a body of collective visual identity.
Heather Edgar has shown the ways in which Alfonso's occupation of Toledo had been
a testing ground for the formation of subsequent Castilian colonial policy,
the city's neighbourhood mosques were confiscated by treaty dominated to the cathedral and
converted into parish churches around which new local colonial administration was organised.
But the mosque in Bernardini was part of a domestic properly public property,
probably obtained in speculation or is a grant to a coloniser, and so it did not fall into Episcopal hands.
In the ensuing century, Toledo became once again a frontier.
With the advent of new North African dynasties, Al Moravec and subsequently the Alamo had to build a powerful and who built a
powerful empire in the western Mediterranean by the middle of the 12th century.
The idea of crusade by then, a consistent part of papal discourse began to emerge as a strategic alternative for Christian Iberian monarchs,
bringing a wider swath of personal fiduciary support and a kind of high moral ground.
Alfonso, the sixth grandson, Alfonso the seventh, would fight a crusade for the Elmer Albert port of Almeria,
but he had nevertheless important Muslim vessels and allies.
Saif Dalawa of the Hooded Dynasty, who also defended him against his Christian rivals, have any and even more.
It's called the Wolf King, who, in Linnehan words, fought with an absence of confessional conviction.
At least the equal of that of the King Leone. This alliance with even more damage of Valencia and Murcia with Castiel light green on the map.
And if you look at the map, you'll see why this is a bad map, too, because even more Danish is light green.
Thought ardently against the Alamo hugs who are dark green.
But that Red Line is there to remind you who the Christians are and who the Muslims are to totally obscures the political situation.
But I digress. Where was I? One.
So when we say, oh, the alliance with even more Dornish of Valencia and Murcia with with Castiel continued through the minority of Alfonso,
the eight who secured his throne in Toledo by overcoming the supporters of his uncle, the very Ferdinand of whom Linnehan spoke.
And we very much lament Professor Linehan. One of the first to offer his fealty to the young Alfonso, the eighth was even more Danish himself.
A ruler with his own anti Elmo hat policy who came to Toledo in eleven sixty seven,
personally renewing his Vaseline with the little cane in return for his help in recuperating Alfonso's territories,
a treaty would restrain the arrogance from attacking in readiness for five years in return for a tribute of 40000 more.
A bit of gold and we're going to get back to those Moratinos. But in 11 72, even more Danish was killed and the Alamo had Caliph.
Abu Yusuf launched an expedition appropriating his realm in expansion that met a papacy ardent to expand the idea of crusade on the peninsula.
Now this map on the left from a wonderful new book about Alfonso the eighth by Miguel Gomes, Kyle Lincoln and Damien Smith is more like it.
It's complicated, and I'm very sorry that I made such an awful scan of it because it's really a useful map.
In three, only 11 years after Ibn Madonna just reception in Toledo, one Domingo Perez and his wife, Juliana,
donated a little mosque on their property to the Knights of St. John of the hospital for a chapel dedicated to the Holy Cross.
International military orders, like the hospitals, were essential to up until the eighth crusading ambitions.
He was glad of the manner in which they could garrison a castle against an Elmo hard foe that lingered very ominously to the south and east of Toledo.
However, the international orders fit awkwardly into local ecclesiastical structures and 186 document that sets out the
terms of the hospital right to make a church of this small mosque seethes with a with Episcopal suspicion.
It is clear Makhado comments that the king himself had to intervene to quiet the
archbishop's opposition to the construction of even so small a church in Toledo.
By that order, Archbishop Gonzalez president,
finally allowed the celebration of mass at Santa Cruz on condition that the Knights of St. John received no parishioners nor tithes nor first fruits.
In addition to a multitude of other strict assurances of Arch Episcopal Authority,
the order received the king's aid because it was serving both his spiritual and political programme.
In this moment, just after Alfonso's successful conquest of Cuenca as his chancery began to fashion him as king of the Christians,
allying him with Christianity artist Christian Dham,
not just the Christian cause, but a geographical place defined by Christianity in opposition to Islam and making him parenthetically,
the peninsular defender of the faith but unremarkable.
There was trouble in paradise, as other Christian Kings did not perform the requisite crusading image.
Only the Spanish pope Celestin would lament and 11 92 allied themselves with Saracens to war against other Christians in eleven point ninety five.
Addressing Kings of Spain, the same pope threatened excommunication against monarchs like Alfonso,
the 11th of Leone, who would ally himself with Elmo hugs when convenient.
Indeed, it's been suggested that the mosque of Ibn Haddadi fell into the hands of the hospitals in compensation for a hopeful,
hopeful series of military initiatives and because their prior had intervened in a
colloquium to broker a cessation of hostility between Afonso and his uncle Ferdinand,
the second of Leone.
Thus, the hospital is compact, monumental trophy of war was also an invitation to ignore the complexities and contradictions of that moment.
Hostilities, hostilities between military orders and cathedral chapters and hostilities between Christian Kings,
Santa Cruz invites the viewer instead to repose in a simple,
bipolar, bipolar opposition between Christianity and Islam, writ large with an eye to the future to the new Jerusalem.
This meaning resided not only in the building's obvious triumphalist gesture,
its insistence that mosque and church belong to two different confessions.
It is also present in the visible fissure between the mosque and church,
which included a kind of temporal stratigraphy revealing two distinct historical realities before and after conquest.
You might say that the renovated, renovated building chronicles this appropriation in the manner of a new memory eternally re-enacted.
If the OP seems poised to devour the mosque,
it repeatedly performs an ongoing military process in which the Knights of St. John were actively involved.
Past and future are thus in dialogue.
The physical rupture enacts a temporal one as the ultimate eradication of Islam is material materially mythically predicted and celebrated.
Now I need before going on to the rest of this to thank a number of colleagues.
If I haven't been able to be at Oxford, I've certainly had a wonderful intellectual community in this case Luli Feliciano,
Abigail Bahubali and Umberto von Giannina for incredible discussions.
A wonderful month on virtual virtual seminar, in fact, can turn concerning the work that follows.
Celestin, the third pupil of Eleven Ninety Two, followed the capitulation of Jerusalem to Saladin in the 787.
He, in fact urged the Kings of Spain to the kind of truce the hospital is mediated so
that they might instead turn their hostilities to avenge the loss of Jerusalem.
And I thank Miguel Gomez for help in this.
Although there have been suggestions that the paintings of Santa Cruz responded to later crusading activities,
we might instead think of drawing those same interpretations into this earlier time as part of the
energetic days of the original rebuilding of the chapel in the late eleven eighties with Alfonso's aid,
the years following the king's conquest of Cuenca as he angled for the role of Peninsular Defender of the Faith,
buttressing his own peninsular power as the hospitals scrambled to mediate those Iberian Christian alliances.
Cold War by successive popes. And before Alfonso's disastrous defeat, as at a luckless.
A formidable Christ, Panopto Crutcher, against Blue Sky and a field of stars attended by prophets,
saints and originally attached to Morph is enormously imposing even in its present abraded state
because of the outside scale of the apps with regard to the little that enclosed Nine Bay nave,
its Latin inscriptions intensified this authority, especially the passage from Matthew 25.
Come you blessed of my father? Possess you, the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world?
Miguel Gomez, who transcribed and studied these passages, argued convincing convincingly that this is a triumphalist exhortation.
The painting in all articulates the wider church's indisputable role as arbiter of the
divine on Earth in a building where figural representation would have been unthinkable.
Very, very, very, very few years before, well, a century before.
Let's be honest, the two centuries before sorry,
the Christ and Majesty sacrilege sacrifices the bellicose gesture of the chapel itself and the wars it memorialises
in a building that would echo for centuries a material embodiment of Jerusalem for future Spanish builders.
It is also an embodiment of the ideas expressed in Silverstein's 19 11 92 bill exhorting the Spanish kings to turn from each other to Jerusalem.
How then, as we approach the task of practising art history in mediaeval, Iberia,
do we reconcile these very triumphal, very international themes with the specific Spanish notion of reconquest?
The term reconquest suggests a continuous seven century war of territorial recovery
waged by a waged way by a Iberian Christians against Muslims in the name of confession.
Let's try that again. A continuous seven century war of territorial recovery waged by Liberian Christians against Muslims in the name of confession.
Depicted here in a remarkably obvious rainbow of territorial gain.
This is the worst map that I'll show you. Far from being united in the cause of Christian context.
These Spanish kings needed to be goaded. They needed actually to be threatened into unanimity by the papacy, by its legs and by its military orders.
There certainly existed in early mediaeval Iberia and intermediate and intermittent
teleological order to recuperate the lands and the ancient kingdom of the Visigoths.
But the notion of a sustained programme to restore the territorial domain of Christianity begins in earnest,
with a reformed papacy of the 11th and 12th centuries,
which Damien Smith sees as gathering sporadic mediaeval Iberian ideas into a more formal concept.
As the letters of popes to Iberian rulers become packed with terms like RECUPERAR and risky query,
offering a particularly Iberian extension of crusading ideology.
You mean you might say that reconquest was a rhetorical device developed to restrain Iberian kings from acting like Iberian kings?
Santa Cruz was dragged into this corner of the discourse, not in the 12th century when it was built.
But in the 19th century in Reconquista heyday, when Spanish identity became synonymous with triumphal Catholic confession,
the romantic period required for Santa Cruz more than a crusade.
It required the recuperation of a lost kingdom.
In his 1857 Estonia, that was Templars de Espana, Alfonso Becker recounts the legend behind one of Santa Cruz,
his name Christo de la Luthe Christ of the Light King Alfonso the the.
The 6th is imagined riding past the Little Mosque in his triumphal entry to Toledo, accompanied by the mythologised hero of the reconquest.
el-Said said this was impossible, of course,
since the historical Rodrigo Diaz Davy bought and said was still in exile and not present at the taking of Toledo.
He was. What's more, in the service of the Muslim ruler of Zaragoza,
in whose behalf you waged war against the Christian Council of Barcelona in the King of Aragon.
But in Becker's vision, the victorious entourage stops instead as the side horse,
as the city's horse stops to kneel in front of the Little Mosque of Ibn al-Hadidi.
The city investigates and finds hidden in the space beneath the mosque, a crucifix,
an image of the virgin and a Visigoths lamp that had miraculously remained illuminated for 300 years,
awaiting the reconquest of the city by a Christian king.
The addition of the seed to the sea militarise as this image of Christian Toledo weighing
in late laying in wait for its reconquest and it wraps it in a cloak of national unity,
actually snatching the little mosque or snatching the Church of Santa Cruz from the grasp of cruise,
from the grasp of the Crusaders who fought for all Christians and then dedicating its capture instead to Spain,
a Spain that would not even be thought of for another three centuries after the chapel was built.
The idea of a lost, originally busy gothic church beneath the mosque,
which was given by subsequent scholars the dignity of a patron as grand as the busy gothic king, a sign of guilt clung to the site until the 1980s.
This was still a very popular tourist narrative today, despite the archaeological record of the site,
which makes it clear that there are no traces of the busy gothic church beneath it.
No constructed strategic reviews at all between the mosque and the Roman Road, on top of which it was built.
The archaeology The archaeologists reached a wall that has shown this fictive history.
Busy Gothic church, followed by mosque, followed by once again victorious Christian Chapel creates a fairy tale ancestry for
Santa Cruz and a kind of minor set of monumental genealogical diagram of Reconquista,
an idea that did not die with the 19th century.
Alejandro Go, Garcia said once recent biting critique of Raquel Keystone's survival in contemporary discourse included this remark
from former Spanish president Jose Maria odds not pictured here in a prophetic earlier article dressed as El CID.
I've not met a national fear of Islam after terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004 with
the same kind of 19th century pseudo historical revisionism that we saw in Becker.
His comment? We are a nation made against Islam.
But of course, these desperate narratives of conquest and erasure must eventually break down.
Because even the triumphal incorporation of the little mosque into the chapel is accomplished through
its integration through multiple agents into a wider artistic language that is local and transcultural.
And now indigenous language of expression begun when Alfonso the 6th appropriated the Great Mosque of Toledo as the city's cathedral a century before.
The dialogue with local builders resulted in a mantle of poorly lobed arches, an extension of the language in which the mosque is built.
These ardent crusaders, even as they draw lines in the sand,
have become part of endeavoured to raise its words, a local living tradition of urban architecture.
And then Santa Cruz's figural and a bit graphic I can knowledge you of authority
within is entirely and framed by sporadically legible Arabic calligraphy.
I can graphically Santa Cruz can be seen to be.
And this is, in Tom Nixon's words, authenticated by its exotic forms, the Arabic writing and high domes equating the building with the Holy Land.
Such a meaning was explicit and not taken on passively, asserted Miguel Gomes.
But as the expression of quote conscious conquerors.
That said, this particular calligraphy is not generic.
It is a fairly new and recognisable style that spells out alone good fortune and well equal and prosperity,
occasionally incorrectly suggesting that it was suggesting that it was transcribed by the painter from a copy book, perhaps without understanding.
The message is commonly commonly paired on widely disseminated luxury objects.
The combination repeatedly appears on stamped ceramics on an ivory inlaid flute, for instance,
the use of Arabic in the Chapel of Santa Cruz has thus often been considered in
terms of confessional demographics through the much contested term conventions.
And by now, you will have seen as we make another detour that what is most conflictive in the history of art is actually our agonistic history,
a graphical tradition at the centre of which is this apparently harmless term.
In Spanish convention means in the fact of living together without placing a value judgement on the quality of the cohabitation.
It appeared in the work of the distinguished philologist Ramon Men in this piddle,
but entered enduring critical discourse when his student, a medical Castro,
used it to develop the impact of the lived experience of what he termed three castes Christians, Muslims and Jews,
whose interaction proved productive and stimulating in framing Spanish identity through times of both peace and conflict.
Co-invented did not signify for him tolerance or Hanham harmony.
Indeed, he saw each cast as forced to live with the other two at the same time, it passionately desired their extermination.
And this revealed the terms most persistent problem, the assumption of uniquely sectarian identities,
as if to latest Franks and Castilian and most Arabs as Christians were united in cultural, social and political identity.
An idealised version of Competencia served in the past to mystify interactions between
religious groups while sympathy while simultaneously fetishising their differences,
though now superseded or present inability to let go,
has more recently been focussed on rehearsing Castro's dispute with Claudio Sanchez, a modern off or on quite learnt analysis of the term,
which I take to be a kind of scholarly methadone, even as we abandon cold dementia, were kept lament.
So Lucy pick in the Spain is different school of historiography as if these conditions existed in no other place.
Popular notions of Competencia are perceived today as an answer to the right wing embrace of Reconquista or to Samuel Huntington's reductive Clash
of civilisations convention as the collective projection of a 20th 21st century ideal of tolerance that the 21st century cannot itself achieve.
The city of Toledo is still enmeshed in its well-known tourist campaign. Ciudad de Las Vegas,
to the city of the three cultures that sails by the complex conditions of the violent marriage of the mosque and Church of Santa Cruz,
enclosing it in a sentimental image of been throughout its extensive history.
The Tourist Council of Toledo declares Toledo has been known as a cradle of tolerance.
Or more recently as the city of three cultures with the coexistence of Jews, Muslims and Christians.
Gregory Hutchinson has written very interestingly about this.
Scholarly Eye-rolling has more recently obtained amended this statement, but the popularity of this approach remains.
To which an outpouring of critical papers analysing the commodification of contrived cultural utopias can testify.
My remarks this term will centre on relations between Christians and Muslims, but it must be said that this construct, a cradle of tolerance,
was even more disturbing as Toledo's two standing synagogues are drawn into the web of its
romanticised version of convention in the synagogue of Samuel Halevi Halevi Aboulafia Pedro,
the first tree Chamberlain and treasurer who enjoyed it only three years after he was
imprisoned and tortured to death in 13 sixty or the synagogue called today Santa Maria.
La Blanca for the church became when St. Vincent Ferrer is thought to have incited a mob
to anti-Jewish riots that led to its appropriation at the turn of the 14th century.
During the years of devastating pogroms, conventions, like many liberal parties, can be dangerous in the wrong hands as dangerous as Reconquista.
We might perhaps best see buildings like Santa Cruz as sets for colonial performances
of essentialist ideologies that mask anxieties concerning their multiple,
layered and dynamic identities not only in this case in the exterior marker of a mosque's Christian ization,
but also in its absorption into an ideological prism that sought to purify its own creeping trends cultivation.
And then that trance cultivation wasn't always about Muslims, because Arabic,
a pig raphe in Santa Cruz hovers ceaselessly between the exotic and the local in
this bilingual funerary cenotaph from Toledo dated a few decades before Santa Cruz.
His consecration, the epigraph is clear, and the message is in Latin, in Arabic are coherent,
complementing one another in their accounts of the death of the Christian Michael, son of Sam in.
The Arabic text is slightly more complete and poetic,
containing as it does a prayer and the Bismillah in the name of God, the mercy, merciful and compassionate.
And the two texts are interwoven, not simply reproducing one another, but progressive complement,
progressively complementing one another in the Toledo into which the hospital had come Arabic.
And even the Bismillah could be dissociated from Islam.
At Santa Cruz, the calligraphy is part of a language of forms taken from objects and settings of an urban context, shared priorities, priorities.
That was the wrong word. Shared proprietary Lee, thank you very much.
Shared as if by propriety, not just by Muslims and most Arabs, but also by Castilian, said Franks.
And so the Knights of St. John sought to draw their Arabic calligraphy away from
that and build those ambivalent local meanings that people felt entitled to.
In Toledo, instead to a realm of clarity, something like confessional opposition.
The ground of the text of the inscription at Santa Cruz, which is the image on the top,
is red and textured in a way that might be interpreted as a textile and the writing black with a fine white outline.
Other characteristic characteristics of inscriptions on elite textiles and here later textile of Alphonsus daughter very gwalia,
which has been reversed. Though textiles travel through trade and direct commissioning,
they're used here as repealing the appropriation of the mosque from a shared cultural language to a constructed memory
of rich spoils of war that served in this type feel of signification to intensify the chapel's triumphal message.
And yet there's also something alive and current about this appropriation discursive epic.
Griffey is new and unusual and likely copied from a model that used my tooth, which is late on Robin or more than Nishi.
Even the contact, I'll tell you, while Lake Bell might have carried a palimpsest of political meanings in the original model.
In Amoroso points out that even Madonna Alfonso's old vassal used this refrain at a massive scale in official contexts and in cursive script,
and sees it as something approaching a more ish,
maybe dynastic model functioning as a Luke does in all my luxury arts as a marker of even more danishes political identity.
And then the way that it frames the apps at Santa Cruz parallels the use of inscriptions in the classroom inside of a Madonna in Murcia,
but possibly also transmitted through local buildings in Toledo or through objects manufactured for loyal royals and local elites.
Though even my donors had died at least 15 years before, depending on how you date the paintings,
this style of a graphic and its motto we're still fashionable at the time they were
maladroit transcribed from a copy book onto the triumphal arch of Santa Cruz.
The epigraph reflects the repeated impact of material culture from tribute or
trade from Ibn Barnhardt by danishes period of Vaseline to the crown of Castiel,
perhaps even of luxury goods that arrived in Toledo during his visit 15 years before.
And it carried perhaps more of the memory of even more Dornish in particular than the hospital is imagined.
Even more donations gold dinner of an al moravec type called the Castiel Mohabbatein or Lupino Lupino,
as in Wolf King as they called him to distinguish it from less dependable coinage,
became the standard of exchange in mediaeval Iberia and in the Mediterranean and beyond.
Something like the Florin later on. The mortar of even more donations to contends dominated everything.
It was the armature of monetary dominion. A year after even more donors, his death, Alphonso,
the aid would continue the famous dinner at the same weight and value for trade and for political economy as a means.
James Tedesco, firms of stabilising its economic value and continuing its hegemonic implications.
Nixon, too, saw this as a bid for continuity. It's Arabic, a piggery is arranged like that from Ibn Bardon is just meant, as is the language of power.
The imam of the church, Christian, the Pope, even Madonna, his coin pronounces him to be prince of the believers and may be aided by Allah.
Alfonso's announces the prince of the Catholics, Alfonso's son of Santo.
May God aid him and protect him. Barbel will suggest, in fact, that Alphonso was styling himself as the A.L. Mohamud successor of his former vassal.
An idea that greatly complicates the notion of how you defend Christian and complicates the vision presented in the hospital as chapel.
Because incorporating even more donations,
coinage into Alfonso's material image was part of the construction of his identity as a defender of the Christian faith for the whole messy
peninsula where the rim of IBM or the North Ark proclaimed Follow the path of Allah and if anyone desires a religion other than Islam,
never will it be accepted of him. Alfonso's re posted in the name of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit,
the one God Allah he that believeth and is baptised shall be saved more nuanced than conversion.
This is this is translation as transformation.
Forms associated with with even more Danish are not permeating Toledo as an instrument of his own political programme in the Church of Santa Cruz.
The continuity of this particular kind of Arabic and the motto along volleyball equal marks the
incorporation of the Wolf King's ambivalent identity into the fabric of the city's culture.
In the years following his alliance with Alfonso, the 8th at both random and explicit embrace of his cultural mark.
That this fashion should collide with the crusading ideologies of the hospital of Saint John is one of the incessant,
fabulous ironies that spring from the material histories of mediaeval Iberia.
So it is about Christian them in the end, but it is about a rich, messy Iberian style of Christian too full of not just Muslims,
so Boltons, but charismatic Muslim allies, Arabs, Christians transformed colonials.
The Knights of St. John worked hard to contrive that at Santa Cruz, a transcultural palimpsest would appear to be a triumphal appropriation.
It was an attempt to polarise Toledo's persistent cultural slippage, as it could be read in the patterns of quotidian patronage.
But to reinvent my Danish calligraphy as uniquely a marker of an exotic other or as a spoil of war in Toledo was ultimately futile.
The AP Griffey and the skill of poorly logged arches at Santa Cruz would continue to echo the ways in which
the Knights themselves were absorbed into the very cultural and political context they sought to control.
Religious differences performative but also dynamically compensatory at Santa Cruz.
It's perhaps in the space between Arabic writing as a token of victory and Arabic writing as a
trace of transforming identity that carries the burden of the meaning of the Church of Santa Cruz.
To work towards a less agonistic history of art in mediaeval Liberia,
we need perhaps to continuously prod those histories as a protean web of relations rather than as a series of bounded
subjects to destabilise meanings that can be too easily drawn on a map that are meant to appear unsullied by ambivalence.
My hope is to explore a few more confused, fusing examples of this with you this term.
With this in mind, I should warn you that they never completely untangle.
Thank you very much.