ba-dev-silence-advantages
Sentence Switcher
Intertextual Reference
Quiz
Art
Your Poem
Random
Export as Markdown
Click sentences from quotes below to build your poem
— Constantine's Sword - James Carroll
As if shaken by a continent-wide seismic shift, convivencia broke apart into violent imbalance around the time that the crusading fervor first swept through northern Europe.
A far stricter sect of militant Muslims, who rejected Iberian intermingling and aesthetics—and the soft life of beauty reflected in the elegant Moorish style—crossed over from North Africa in about 1145, a turn in the story remembered as the Almohad Invasion.
For two decades, this puritanical contingent of Muslims fought the ruling Iberian caliphates, as well as Christians and Jews, before finally establishing control, in the south and center.8 But by then, astir with a crusading fervor of their own, the Christian kingdoms in the peninsula’s far north had begun the campaign of reconquista, with the ambition of restoring all of Iberia to Christian control.
The Spanish epic poem El Cid dates to this period (c.
1140).
Taken as a celebration of Christian resistance to Muslims, it nevertheless carries the curves of convivencia, since the Christian hero ends as a man in the middle, associated as much with Muslims as with his own kind.
By the middle of the twelfth century, in the thick of the crusading era, the time of tolerance was passing.
When the Christian Alfonso VII conquered Córdoba in 1146, he ordered a cross put atop the Great Mosque, in which, before the Almohads, Catholic Masses had been freely celebrated.
King Alfonso declared that henceforth the mosque would be a church.
The Muslims would recapture Córdoba in short order, and would remove the cross.
They struck out at Christians and Jews alike, with unprecedented ruthlessness.
==Perhaps the most striking signal of the demise of convivencia was the decision, in 1159, by the brilliant twenty-four-year-old Maimónides to abandon Córdoba, because Jews there were being forcibly converted or murdered by the now fanatical Almohads.
Maimonides fled with his family to Egypt, where he would become famous as a physician.
He never returned to Iberia.
In tribute to his stature, he became known as a second “Moses the Egyptian,” although he always identified himself as an Iberian.==