Hello, everyone. Welcome to the fifth of the six lectures being given by the Slade Professor of Fine Art.
The 2021. Some of you will know these lectures are an important tradition here at the University of Oxford.
John Ruskin was the first to give a series of public lectures on art in the 1870s after being appointed as the initial slate professor of fine art.
Every year, a distinguished scholar is asked to follow in his footsteps.
My name is Geoffrey Bachem, and I'm professor of the history of art at the University of Oxford.
It is my great pleasure to introduce this year's late professor, Dr. Geralyn Dodds.
Jerry Dodds is Harlequin of Dead Diamond, Professor, Faculty of Art History at Sarah Lawrence College in the United States.
Professor Dodd's scholarly work has centred on mediaeval, Spanish art and architecture,
and especially on issues of trans colouration and identity formation.
Amongst the many publications are arts of intimacy, Christians, Jews and Muslims in the making of Castilian culture.
A renowned co-authored textbook. In addition to her other books, catalogues and essays,
Jerry has also curated a number of important exhibitions and made informative films to accompany the.
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 Merit from the Government of Spain.
We are honoured the Professor Dodds accepted our invitation to deliver this year's slate
professor of fine art lectures and are now happily hand over the microphone to her.
Thank you yet again, Professor, batching for your exceedingly kind words.
My great thanks to the Committee for the Slade lectures for this honour,
for the support of the Department of Art History and to Liz Green and Holly Nights and the Amazing Torch Team.
Alphonso, the 10th of Castile, is called El Sabeel, which ought to be translated more the learnt than the wise.
He's celebrated, above all for his extraordinary cultural project the construction of an ideal law code,
the CFA Partidos Historical Chronicles that drew on an erudite breadth of sources and languages.
And he promoted the translation of texts with the notion of creating for Castiel, an elite secular culture in Castilian.
His translation project included mirrors for Prince's books on hunting the Koran,
the Talmud, the Talmud and the Kabbalah, and above all, scientific texts, in particular,
Arabic treatise not just translated but scientifically verified and updated because translation was also transformation,
not simply the reproduction of a text in another language, but also the transmission of knowledge.
The attention given by Alphonsus movement to Arabic learning is sometimes interpreted as part of a culture of inclusion.
But for Alfonso, this was the recuperation of a continuum of the knowledge into the cosmic dominion of the Christian intellectual tradition,
a kind of intellectual piece. The translation became part of EMPICS words Christian expansion and self-definition.
It was then appropriate to part of Alfonso's cultural imperialism in a way, an intellectual manifestation of a political goal.
He was not ultimately entirely capable of implementing in his world.
So when we see this much reproduced image of musicians from Alfonso's contiguous, often interpreted as a Christian and a Muslim,
although it's racial stereotypes are contextually more complex as I hope we'll see.
We should not be beguiled into thinking it's so much a poster for a sentimentalised confessional convention as it is one for a pacified,
expropriated cultural colonialism.
Very dear to Alphonsus heart, and a lively extension of the same policy was yet another cultural enterprise of tremendous scope.
But Candiace de Santamaria, a book of 419 songs assembled around the last two decades of his life.
It was written in mediaeval, Galicia in Portuguese and evolved literary language already in his time associated with love songs.
Alfonso was an accomplished troubadour poet himself.
You see him here dictating to two scribes, a secular musicians and monastic singers wait in the wings.
Indeed, he was formulated the collection and composed some of the poems, creating a persona for himself that he draws through the entire collection.
In his introductory poem, he announces. Not which I seek is to praise the Virgin mother of our lord, Holy Mary, the most wondrous of his creations.
Therefore, from this day forth, I hope I wish to be her troubadour.
And I pray that she will have me. Hence, from now on, I sing for no other lady.
So throughout these over 400 songs, Alphonso will take on the persona of the Virgin's troubadour in the language of courtly love.
And in the language of courtly love, he will negotiate these same imperial ambitions with her.
So today I'd like to talk about the country in honour of the Virgin's miracle in the city of Murcia.
What is sometimes called the the US and cantina is particularly compelling because Alfonso tells it himself
in the first person and it directly expresses his personal experience in that extraordinary colonial city.
I shall tell a great miracle, he says, which I saw when God granted me mercy.
The miracle happened to an ancient church of the peerless queen, which stood there in the district of La Vishakha.
The moors had no power to do any harm, whatever in that holy place, nor to remove the church from there, although it lay in their domain.
The candidate presents Alphonso and us with a colonial dilemma.
The city's Muslims have asked that a church be removed from a part of the city, which by treaty was theirs.
Can a Christian monarch countenance the destruction of a church, though he has made such a pact in the miniatures of this codex from the Esquibel?
The story begins with an image of the Church of the Virgin in the suburb of Villa Abbey.
Shuka, with its exterior colour, will cut away so that the cult image of the virgin within is visible.
Seated on a high altar that seems more like a throne covered in textiles.
The actual image is still venerated today, a very restored version of the 12th or 13th century version,
Virgin of Added Sugar is believed to have been brought to the city at its conquest.
And you can see how the artist of the year has captured the way she leans forward a bit sheltering the Christ child in her lap.
She's a throne of wisdom, say disappear into a late version of a Romanesque type.
Her antiquity, now in the 13th century, proclaiming her authority, as well as the historical veracity of the digger.
Not at all. A painter's convention since virgins in the country does tend to be elegant gothic mothers and queens.
The miniature of the virgin within the church at the heart of the city appears twice on the page.
Standing Sentry to the contained agitation of the rest of the story.
She's one with the building in her archaic form and identification with the church.
Remind us that she transcends changes in rule that mere humans have in the words of the country.
No power to do any harm, whatever in that holy place. So the urban and historical context deserve, I think, some explanation.
Alphonsus father Ferdinand,
the third of Castile and Leon seising on the almost dynastic weaknesses had made conquest that would transform the face of the peninsula,
taking the great plural cities of Andalusia, Lubega in 12:33,
Cordoba in 12:36 and finally Seville in 12:48,
acquiring not only client states that paid tribute but also new lands whose exploitation
required a different economic model direct colonial intervention bringing lively,
diverse populations. But beneath the Castilian Lebanese banner, he expelled Muslims from Cordoba,
hoping to repopulate the city with Christians with very questionable success.
So a different strategy was attempted in the ancient stronghold of Moorthy, taken in 12:43.
We've touched on more often in these lectures. It's one of those places at times neglected because it seems peripheral to the to the
seemingly clearer conflictual dramas caused by the great North African dynasties.
The and it's an. We saw the transition of this border territory from busy gothic to amide rule under the Treaty of Woodmere,
which allowed the survival and abandonment of a church as it became a Muslim polity.
And in the 12th century, as the former capital of the Wolf King, it would Dornish,
whose material culture had such an impact on Toledo and and on its Iberia's monetary system.
At his death, mercy would fall into the hands of the Alamo hordes.
And after their demise would be governed by a to Wahkeel even Hood, another charismatic,
independent Muslim ruler who like you'd been Madonna's fabricated and Iberian Islamic identity in defiance of North African regimes.
This made Morsi a place at once Islamic and ardently Iberian, though not in neighbourhoods.
Time terror, terribly powerful like you've been, Madonna.
Even Hood was, by necessity, an occasional Castilian client, an ally,
which meant that he could be celebrated with approbation in the 13th century by Archbishop Rodrigo himIn as they gather as the ruler who quote,
cut off all the heads of the Alamo hordes he could find and quote, and who, interestingly, when he took the Alamo Heights towns.
And I quote Rodrigo here, considering that all the mosques were infected by the presence of the Alamo huts,
even who had had his priests purify them, sprinkling water.
Now, for Rodrigo's very Christian readers,
this was also a familiar scene because it sounded very much like a Christian purification and conversion, complete with priests.
And it echoed a trope seeded throughout his accounts of the Castilian colonial triumphs of
Christian ceremonies of purification and consecration of former mosques into churches.
In his triumphant account of the conquest and conversion of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, for instance, Rodrigo declares quote,
Once the filth of Muhammad had been removed, it was sprinkled with holy water purification and converted into a church.
In Become a Tent actually claimed that the Democrats were heretics,
a concept that played well in Rodrigo's manipulated history as it keep the archbishop licence to develop an analogy with Christian
practise that would not have been at all possible had anyone who had instead purified a church for conversion to a mosque.
Connecting these passages regarding Cordoba and Mercia, Rodrigo made a place for this mythologised urban hood,
a Muslim who was a Castilian ally, the enemy of his enemy.
In his utopian vision of a Christian ruled world. But this was an evanescent image that was about to change.
For the purification is the first and most essential component of the conversion ritual asserting separate confessional identities.
The body of a converted mosque, even a converted one like the great mosques of Toledo or Cordoba, consciously and continuously,
not consciously continuously re-enacted the impossibility of separate visual identities in a plural polis polity, as Cordoba still does today.
One cannot entirely control the effects of the material discourse.
So also the mosque become a cathedral of Toledo,
bore abiding witness to the diffusion of forms and their ongoing semantic transfer transformation in a Christian world.
The subject of Rodrigo's trope linking his world to neighbourhoods is purification, and it summons its mirror image contamination.
Revealing all of the anxiety of that frontier breached the tenuous ness of such a
web of order drawn over the unstable and chaotic colonisation of all underoos.
And that connects perhaps to White Toledo's cathedral, still wrapped in the appropriated body of its former mosque,
was now in the process of being converted to a gothic building.
And thanks to Tom Nixon for his reconstruction of that process in 144 BIRISI sees a surge in Gothic building in the 13th century.
As a way, it was possible for northern cities that we're now far from the frontier to militate.
And indeed, James, the first, famously attempted to motivate his Sea of West in going to replace its mosque building with a gothic one to build,
in his words, an honest cathedral in a Christian style.
And so. Archbishop Rodrigue of Minnesota rather recounts in 12:26, the King and the Archbishop,
Rodrigo placed the first stone of the Cathedral of Toledo that still conserve the form of a mosque since the time of the Arabs.
We are moving, perhaps from a habit of trance culture to its erasure in the confessional realm.
In 2043, as the transformation of the Moscow Cathedral of Toledo was underway, even Hood's son,
Muhammad had been hood surrendered the city of Mercia to the young son, to the young Prince Alfonso, and became a semi-independent vassal.
Fernandez Kingdom of Castile Hill, Murcia, a vibrant Islamic city of a proud Islamic territory,
had not been depopulated as Cordoba had it retained its local king as the Castilian Army took charge of its castles and defence.
But political, religious and economic affairs at first remained almost untouched.
In this early conflation of feudalism and colonial dominion, Castiel's Muslim clients were far from quiescent,
but they were essential for the continuation of agricultural and mercantile economy,
without which it would have been impossible to hold lands and realise much needed revenue.
Here, Prince Alfonso came into contact with the famous madrassa of Ibn Abubakar Rackety, who Alphonso?
Very likely, where Alphonso very likely learnt Arabic,
and he nurtured a religiously and linguistically diverse scholarly community that would provide a model for his intellectual enterprises to come.
The worse the country. Frames the story of its miracle within Alfonso's life following over 20 years of his relationship with the city.
He appears first as a prince wearing not a crown, but the Beretta.
And you can see here the Beretta of his oldest son, Fernando Little, who died in twelve seventy five and he's looking for all the world.
Like the young Alexander, in whom he was deeply interested this in a later 14th century, drawing from the lead,
the Alexander like Alexander, he was a ruler who from his youth governed to territory much larger than that to which he had been born.
One with multiple languages, cultures and confessions. And so I think here in part, he's constructing his own heroic narrative,
beginning with his time in Murcia, in the 40s, just after his father had concluded the treaty cut off.
He recounts in The Contigo that although many times the Moors begged me to have the church removed,
showing me it would be a good thing if they did and their request was granted, it availed them nothing.
The image of Alphonso, as the prince depicts, depicts an orderly society in which submitted Muslims petition the solver from a position of mutually
acknowledged subjugation in framed beneath one arch of a gothic arcade coming to many of the country August.
Alphonso is both part of the narrative,
the culmination of the attention of a group of kneeling Muslims and also fronted a frontal iconic seated ruler.
His gesture of acquiescence underscores the fulfilment of the pact between the Muslims and the Christian
Lord supporting their petition to destroy the Church of the Virgin as it quote lay in their domain.
He's pictured as the just and pragmatic prince who understands that the productive into
interaction of peoples in a colonial setting demands binding obligation to his promises.
Despite the fact that the protagonists are not Christians, a prince governed by a dedication to justice.
But there is in the impressively authoritative language of the composition,
a sense of unease that we might read in the Prince's Frontal juxtaposed with the constrained kneeling not of Muslims in profile.
Well, Alfonso is inflamed and unimpeded. The Muslims compressed collected is bisected by a column so that they seem suddenly caged.
And one figure actually holds on to the column as if it were not a compositional convention, but physical bars by which they were restrained.
This marks both the artistic and social confines within which Muslims must move in this representation of uncontested control.
By contrast, even the Castilian guards and courtiers behind them are relaxed and unimpeded.
It is an image of visual control that recalls Harvey's analysis of one of the meanings of mood they are domesticated.
Indeed, when the historical Alfonso assumed the throne in 12:52, he would move to exert personal control within his protectorate of Morsi,
granting land to Christian settlers in violation of the Treaty of Ankara, which his father had made with with his mercy and clients.
This transgression would not be forgotten. In 12 64, an uprising of submitted Muslims throughout Andalucia erupted in Murcia as well,
in part through the stimulus of another futile client of Alfonso's Mohammed,
the first even Al Ahmar, the ruler of the Emirate of Granada and founder of the Nasser Dynasty.
But it was equally a response to Alphonsus gradual destabilisation of Castiel's treaty with more students.
In particular, the redistribution of Morsi lands to Christian settlers in an effort to tip the confessional balance.
The revolt was put down in 12 66 by Alphonsus father in law King James of Aragon on
behalf of Alfonso and in the interest of the security of his own bordering lands.
In a new agreement with more Muslims, James, who had more experience in maintaining such colonial relationships,
granted them a number of the rights they requested. They could retain their goods, practise their religion,
give the call to prayer and be judged by their own courts or concessions conceded in James's desire to return more.
Created the main mosque of the city, dedicating it to the Virgin.
Chronicling the number of mosques converted to cathedrals dedicated to Mary Amy Reid, insider laments that Santiago Metamorphose St. James,
the More Slayer seems to occupy the imagination of scholars so, so exclusively, while the Virgin is really the most active of colonial conquerors.
What one might go on to differentiate these two sacred conquerors in this particular country.
While St. James will be depicted as a military leader in polarised opposition to the Muslims whose bodies lie at his horse's feet,
the Virgin's position here is more ambivalent. She's a conqueror, to be sure, as Raymond Snyder has amply shown, but she's a more subtle strategist.
And this is perhaps why she's called into action in this complex moment in the conquest of Arab rule politics.
James of Aragon himself recounts how Morsy's principal mosque was appropriated during the negotiations for the surrender of the city after mass.
We climbed up to the castle and he, the Wazir, was with us and five of the chief Saracens of the city.
We said that the mosque near to the castle should belong to the Christians, but they said that would not be right for the treaty,
said they were to have their mosques and keep them just as in Seretse and times, we said that was correct.
But they did not understand we wanted them to keep their mosques. But what were the Christians to do?
They had no church to go to.
And the church should be at the castle gate for us to be able to hear them always and right by our heads every night while we were asleep.
Is if you think about it not fitting, you have two mosques in the city.
Pray in them and leave us this one. They said they agreed.
It's questionable whether they have a choice. They had lost the terms of their original treaty in their revolt.
It is then interesting that James, with both the muscle and legality square in his court,
still felt the need to belabour this appropriation in his account.
Well, the idea of a protected Christian minority is inscribed in Islamic law.
Contemporary Christianity viewed pluralism largely as an unsustainable state.
The accommodation of challenge to the notion that Christianity holds uncontested truths so
that the existence of mosques in the protectorate was theologically dangerous terrain.
While the creation of churches was essential to perform confessional transcendence in a plural city under the rule of Christians,
James, his comment that really didn't make sense for him to have to hear the call to prayer is delivered with a certain swagger.
And it has a history. It echoes a venerable trope reminiscent of the writing writings of 19th century Christians who complained
bitterly about the call to prayer while the images assiduously controlled the ringing of bells in churches.
In one of his devastating northern raids, around 1000 a monster was said to have taken the bells from the Church of Santiago de Compostela to Cordoba,
where they were deprived of their Clapper's, silencing them to be used as scaffolds for lamps in court of his great mosque.
This practise was continued by Alma Robbins, Elmo Hearts and Marinades,
which is why we find bills from Spanish churches fanned fat fashioned into lamps in the kind of wheat and mosque in Fez and why.
If we're to believe Lucas of Tui Alphonsus, father of Ferdinand, the third when he conquered Cordoba in 12:36,
sent Cordoba Bill Lamps all the way back to the Church of St. James of Compostela on the shoulders of Saracens,
continuing a dialogue that had reverberated on both sides of the confessional divide for centuries.
And when this St James of Aragon to Valencia, the poet Ibn Almeida, John Toland reminds us,
lamented that in his city, the whole of the moisten would be replaced by the sound of bells.
So, James, this directive is a trope and a taunt that whereas before Morsi and Muslims had been able to
control this space and it sounds they would now forfeit aural control of the city is rubbing it,
it is rubbing it in. And he's also documenting his relief for those colonial rulers might countenance
the presence of Muslims in their need to conjure uninterrupted economies.
There was significant anxiety hidden in the appropriation of urban fabrics in which Muslims
outnumbered Christians and possessed by treaty the right to their own religious monuments,
the right to a material and oral manifestation of Islam in a Christian city.
And yet religious belief was not simply the symbolic terms in which a game of political were not mateship was enacted.
It's also good to remember that this is the same game so full of bravado who wrote about his personal
feeling when he mounted an altar to the Virgin in the same newly converted mosque in Murcia.
We heard it in the first lecture, but allow me to repeat it again.
It was in Murcia that the great conquered declared embracing the altar we sweat,
we wept so strongly and so heartily that for the time it takes to go a mile, we could not stop crying.
The poly semi of conversion is not just about the body of the mosque converted to a church.
It is also about the violent colonial project infused with deep belief.
As King Alfonso, the 10th surely equal in face to James, if not in administrative skill,
as soon as he took control of the city from his father in law,
he revoked James's orders regarding many of the Morsy and Muslims rights, expelling them from the Medina to the suburb of La,
the Shuka hoping to effect the repopulation of the city centre with Christians.
This, in closing and controlling of the population,
was not as practical for social stability and economic continuity as the arrogant street treaty of James had been.
And indeed, the city became restive. Mercy has submitted Muslims would, in the end, still outnumber civilians, agonies and cowardly Catalan settlers,
a colonial environment in which Byrne's remarks and overgrazed of Christian
settlers uneasily governed the conquered but restless Muslim minority majority,
a condition that made political stability fragile and left a ravaged economy.
But of course, Alfonso would tell a far different story in his retrospective targeting of the action
of the next frame occurred over 20 years after the image of Alfonso as Prince,
and yet the Mursi and Muslims are still frozen in the same kneeling posture, suspended in time in identical subjugation.
As if to assuage that demographic anxiety here, the Muslims are shown petitioning King James,
the first of Eragon following the uprising of twelve sixty four.
When quote the moors rebelled from Mercia to civil in quote,
the cantata bypasses the complexities of the governance of Murcia following the rebellion,
recounting only that James quote made the cathedral out of the Great Mosque,
fixating on the theme of this particular contigo, which is confessional real estate,
the Morsy and Muslims ask again permission to have the Church of the Virgin removed.
To the suburb to which they've now been confined.
And yet, miraculously, although he can said it's consented to it, they could not touch a single nail of it.
Alphonso, the tenth now Crown is king, also acquiesces in the next panel.
The candidate does not record his repudiation of James's pact with the Muslims
or the forced forced exile of the Muslim community to the suburb of Shocker,
called here their domain. These appear as stable a historical circumstances within the entire discourse
of the contigo in each of these images of Muslims supplicants before king.
The Christian rulers embody a kind of timeless authority, while these historical Muslims subjugated,
constrained and in profile in potential movement or evanescent.
And yet, so the images are formulaic.
Alphonsus written account is really quite personal for this moment, which falls during the years in which the canting us were written, he writes.
After this, it happened that I went to Morsi. And most of the Muslim community ask me to remove the church from their midst.
But I was loath to do so for it had been freshly painted.
However, very reluctantly, I granted their request. The juxtaposition of personal,
even anecdotal experience it happened that I went to Morsi and it had just been freshly painted in the text with the recurrence of the formal,
authoritative compositions of the miniatures marks Alfonso's attempt to reconceive his legacy as a just monarch.
And yet Alfonso had, in reality not upheld either.
Castiel's original pact with the Muslims were those made by James, and his attempt at population had greatly faltered.
We can read a kind of. Slippage in the framing miniatures of the Virgin in her church,
a visual echo of the dilemma of the Morsy and Muslims in the face of this myth of order and control,
the compact urban fabric ringed tightly by Crennel needed walls is made more dense and impenetrable
by skewed roof lines and overlapping forms redolent of the constricted circumstances of the Muslims.
A hint of empathy at the reduced circumstances.
Their justification for wishing to remove the church, which had attracted Christians from beyond the peninsula.
Indeed, by the resettlement of 12 72,
Morsi and Muslims lived in less than half the area they had previously possessed under the treaty accorded to them.
By James N12 66.
But then the same image also depicts the Virgins Church in the embrace of this compressed and displaced community of Muslims that had lost homes,
property and its own mosque. It envisions, as the triumphal text cannot, twin colonial dilemmas posed by the resettlement of Morsi,
the subaltern sequestration and the colonists anxiety in the face of their numbers and in fear of another revolt.
And thus the panel of ministers repeats its visual taboos like an incantation for the subjugation and control of Muslims,
one in which the scale of the church and the version herself create a mythic vision of control.
That control was increasingly impossible as Morsi and Muslims were relegated to a sliver of land beyond the walls of the Medina,
Alfonso's Roman law called the of Martina's, which was never enacted in his lifetime,
proclaims quite clearly that quote more shall not have mosques in Christian towns.
The mosque, which they formerly possessed, shall belong to the king and he can give them to whomsoever he wishes.
And indeed, after the rebellion of the Horace, Alfonso conceded all the mosques that remained in the medina of Murcia to Christian settlers.
But the Moorthy, a cantina, drives home the paradox that belies the regal ideal.
The Castilian colonial project required the maintenance of a pacified indigenous
population of an alternate faith in direct contradiction to a utopian Christian hegemony,
which, unlike Islam, admits no alternative faiths.
The final miniature of prostrated Muslims before a leader is structured by the same gothic arches, they are, on one hand, palatial.
But we begin to understand that they also signified the consistent structure of the Law of Castilian land
use rule in a frame emblazoned with the arms of Leone and Castiel beneath the scaffold of that law,
the knees that kneeling Muslims make their pleas before their local authority, their own King Alfonso's vassal in the twelve sixties.
The text tells us that Alfonso had given them permission to destroy the Church of La Vishakha,
and then the community applied to their own authority to bring this about all the Muslim community,
the text reads, went to the Muslim king to ask him to have it done.
But he said, I will not for money on deals severely with those who displease or.
The Muslims of Malaysia wisely sold Alfonso's delicate problem how to stabilise and rule a multi confessional community by law.
And at the same time serves the needs of the church, which cannot be held to terms of compromise as regards alternative faiths.
The Virgin, apparently understanding Alphonsus Dilemma, intervened to re-establish cosmic order where it is needed.
Alphonso was certainly aware of the inclusion of the Virgin in the Koran and of Muslim participation in certain type types of adoration of the Virgin.
But the Muslim leader of the Muslim community, who says I will not for Mariam deals severely with those who displease her,
is rather acknowledging the Virgin's power as a frontier authority as a colonial Muslim of Castilian desire.
He recognises her sovereignty. He sits beneath a single arch of the arcade.
But unlike Alphonso and James, he sits in three quarter view on a chair post on a dais,
a device that allows the painter to diminish the iconic implications of the frontal presentation of the Christian Kings.
And our gaze doesn't rest on the Muslim leader, but his deflected heavenward by his appointed by his pointing finger.
He is like the other Muslims, more in profile, his authority contingent on his actions and ultimately pleading.
And then this panel reverses the direction of the other images, so we must read it from right to left as if it were an Arabic text.
Amongst the many ways in which this reversal works in the language of the composition
is to remind us that this miniature depicts a different language of law,
one to which Christians are not subject, but that nevertheless falls within the dazzling breadth of the Virgin's authority.
It reveals the third space the transcultural tive world within which Alphonsus must control the propaganda machines work.
Alfonso's cultural project endeavours to sweep every hint of ambivalence into the folds
of the Virgin's cloak to make all a purposeful part of her increasingly complex cosmos.
Because the actual world was not in the consistent ordered that the miniature and the country would like us to suppose,
there is an urgency here to create images of subtly defined hierarchies that visually perform separateness
control of the boundaries between Christians and Muslims in the midst of their uneasy coexistence.
But encased in that inverted composition is a palimpsest of ambivalence and some anxiety.
There are, on one hand, a canned tiger and a miniature that assume a common recognition of how the Arabic language is read and deploys.
This meaning that betrays an understanding of the workings of local Muslim government
of the diverse legal positions that a Muslim might hold in Christian society,
and an understanding that Muslims are a necessary part of this colonial state.
They further acknowledge is within the possible order of things a situation in a colonial city in which
a church might be destroyed in a Muslim neighbourhood despite uncontested tested Christian identity.
The image attempts to contain these colonial contradictions in an orderly structure, but they are so tightly packed,
so disciplined and contained that they betray [INAUDIBLE] in the armour of the Castilian, its actual ability to successfully colonise the city.
In another of Alfonso's First-Person accounts,
is the story told in multiple Candiace of his acquisition of a much desired Port AU Kinuthia or a canopy in the country to obtain,
of course, in violation of his pact with the Muslims of her is a fact predictably obscured by the text.
In one country, a powerful Muslim official in Gaza complained that Christians were calling the
town by the name of Puerto de Santamaria in contravention of their treaty.
It must have sounded to him as if the Virgin were preparing an offensive, which indeed she was the name of this.
Antigua is, after all, how Holy Mary took a place for herself in the Kingdom of Seville and called it where today Santa Maria,
as in the Mausi and Antigua Alfonso goes to great lengths to uphold his pact,
even violently punishing Christians who use this forbidden new Marian name.
But in the end, under the persuasive influence of the Virgin,
the Uggla Thiel yields both the city and its name quote to secure peace in the land, unquote.
Here again, docile and wise Muslims yield rights and transgress their own boundaries in the name of peace.
This laundered forensic history is also intimately intertwined with the miracles surrounding the creation of a new church in three of the US.
The vision helps a Mason M. Ali find a cache of stone when materials are needed.
She creates a flood that brings wood to the very construction site and saves workers from a falling tower during construction.
But the cycle in no place states what archaeology has taught us that this church in what is today the Castillo de San Marcos?
Was built within a converted mosque, a blue wall marked by a rob was covered beneath plaster,
while the church arcades Reeves Bollea appropriated from the mosque's prayer hall arcades.
The country of Puerto de Santa Maria are entirely mute regarding the conversion,
but they betray substantial slippage as regards the connexion of the church to
the mosque that was there before the falling tower of twenty three sixty four.
Many agree, must have been the minaret of the mosque and the Mason M. Ali, with the president's common to good Muslims in the country,
has quote realised that the Virgin had kept those stones like a treasure, although he was more in the miraculous stones themselves.
Quote found just like that under the Earth,
good sized and neatly squared already quote hover like the inter textual spectres of a pre-existing building wilfully
erased transmuted from a mosque into a miracle but still haunting the construction of the Church of the Virgin.
Alphonso was not interested in this late literary fashioning of his legacy in
being known for converting mosque buildings into churches as his father had,
as Rodrigo recounted. He wished to be known for making churches a new.
I wanted to not begrudge James the conversion of the Great Mosque of Mercia.
He wished to, as the yet departed us proclaims, make churches where they had not been any within these gothic arcades.
He sought to obscure the ambivalence of conversion in a dream of containment any reason.
And for this, he increasingly must rely on the Virgin to manage the impossible twin agendas
of colonial conquest and the cosmic expectations of the domain of Christ.
The final minute you're in Canada, 169 is a kind of postscript to the bulk of the story in barricaded in the dense walls and towers we see.
Caricatured black heads and arms bristling with the tools needed to dismantle the virgins church behind them or three
turban light complexioned Muslims like the Morsy and Muslims of the preceding miniatures who watch the proceedings.
The figures of the attackers are subsumed by the architecture of the scene as
if to depict their apparent insignificance in the face of the towering church.
The text continues later when Abu Yusuf, Lord of Saleh, passed by with a great army.
The most thought to take Mercia by trickery in order to exalt their faith, however,
the Holy Virgin undid their treacherous plot and she drove them out of their.
Therefore, now her church is free for never can Mohammed hold power there because she conquered it,
and furthermore, she will conquer Spain and Morocco and say no to an asylum.
This final image is set at the time of the myriad invasions of Andalusia in 2005 and the blackened
complexion caricatures embedded in the city fabric or types for these foreign non Spanish Muslims.
The Pentagon does not state that the troops of abusive came to Murcia or attempted to dismantle the church,
but the painter seises on the idea as a way of picturing their impotence in the face of the Virgin's power.
It's impossible. It's not. It's possible. It's possible that the miniaturise is unclear which Muslims sought to take or by trickery.
The Morsi and Muslims or the marine ants. But the artist nevertheless goes to great pains to distinguish between the two groups,
the dark complexioned figures with pickaxes and the turban light complexion, Morsi and Muslims behind them, although their complicity is implied.
What is most interesting is their limited quality neither participating in the attempted
destruction of the church nor maintaining a salubrious distance from the marine invaders.
The painter sees their dilemma and expresses it in terms of race and dress.
They are neither foreigners nor Christians. They are the famous Morsi and Muslims, once independent Castilian allies.
Now sadly contingent and vulnerable, inhabiting a third space for which there will soon be no real place in Iberia that of Iberian Muslim.
The sculpture of the Virgin gives material credence to this miracle that took
place scarcely more than a decade before the composition of this country.
The Canticle was perhaps meant to reassure Christian settlers that there were appropriated land
was under control while Muslims were trapped in a splinter of territory beyond their walls.
The Contigo reminded them that they could depend on the virgin to bridge the divide
between life on the frontier and the cosmic expectations of sacred history.
For who else but the virgin can compel Muslim vessels Mercy and Siberians for over 500 years to suppress their own interests,
subvert their own agency in the ultimate interest of a peace one at the price of their own erasure.
Thank you.