pull of distinctive clothing presented a real problem in an age when religious and secular authorities wished to establish conformity in both external appearance and internal belief. This was very different from the medieval concerns, expressed in the Fourth Lateran Council, which had worried about an inevitable pull toward the assimilation of visual identity. Visual confusion of identity was a bad thing in 1215, when the overall desire was to preserve difference where difference existed. Crusaders needed to know that they were fighting the right enemies; tax collectors needed to be able to identify non-Christian subjects; preachers should be able to target their audience; jurists knew that different codes of law applied to different groups; and above all people must avoid jumping into bed with somebody of a different faith.
Overall, religious difference was a persistent fact of medieval Iberian life. Despite a strong rhetorical and polemical impulse urging the conversion of Muslims, there were no actual widespread, concerted, or successful efforts in this direction before the sixteenth century.42 Instead, while rulers such as Alfonso VI and Alfonso X of Castile and Jaume I of Aragon may have wished—on some level—to rule over entirely Christian kingdoms, they were also well aware not only of the practical obstacles to mass conversions but also of the economic and structural advantages to maintaining their subject non-Christian populations. Thus, Mudejars should look different from Christians, as a reflection of their Muslim identity; just as later Moriscos, being New Christians, must look the same as their Old Christian coreligionists.
Visual Identity in Medieval Spain
The effort to preserve difference, as opposed to mandating assimilation, resulted in medieval attitudes toward vestimentary legislation that were profoundly different from those of the sixteenth century (even while both traditions arose from the same basic premises about visual identity). In the wake of the Lateran IV rulings in 1215, Christian legislators all over Europe established dress codes and signs by which Jews and Muslims could be easily identified.43 Jews were the exclusive focus for such laws in most regions of western Europe, where there were no Muslim communities. Both subject religious communities were present in Spain, but even here vestimentary rules were not always equally applied to the two groups. Legislation relating to Jews in Castile and Aragon tended to focus on special signs (often stars) to be worn on clothing, particular colors (frequently yellow), and peculiar hats, but laws for Muslims more often required distinctive styles of clothing or hair. Only occasionally, as in a law of 1408 from Castile that ordered Muslims to wear badges in the shape of crescent moons, were Mudejar rules directly parallel to those of their Jewish contemporaries.44 Sometimes, Muslims were not even cited in Iberian laws relating to visual distinction. This was the case in the Siete Partidas, a comprehensive law code commissioned by Alfonso X in the later thirteenth century, which mandated that “Jews shall bear certain marks in order that they may be known” (los judios deuen andar sennalados por que sean connoscidos) without mentioning any similar law for Muslims.45
The reasons for this disparity in the thirteenth century are unclear. One might posit that by the time of the Lateran rulings, Jews in Spain already had a long history of life and assimilation under Christian rule, whereas Muslim subjects were still a relatively recent phenomenon, dating only from the last decades of the eleventh century. Muslim communities in Castile and Aragon also often maintained ties with family, business associates, and coreligionists in Andalusi regions still under Muslim control and in North Africa, and these connections may have fostered ongoing differences in dress and appearance. Mudejars, on the whole, were less acculturated with their Christian neighbors and less urbanized than were their Jewish counterparts, and this may have lessened Christian worries about confusion of identity. However, this situation appears to have changed over time, as one might expect, as generations of Muslims continued to live under Christian rule in Castile and Aragon and began to adapt their external appearance to their local context. So it is noteworthy that only in the later thirteenth century, two hundred years after the conquest of Toledo and many decades after the Fourth Lateran Council, did Iberian Christian legislation begin to focus serious attention on Mudejar dress and hairstyles. Before that, all evidence indicates that Muslims in Christian Spain generally dressed according to their own vestimentary systems and that they maintained a distinctive visual identity by their own choice.
There are three main sources for evidence telling us about visual distinctions in clothing and personal appearance in medieval Spain: sumptuary legislation, descriptions of dress in chronicles and literature, and depictions in art and sculpture. There are also other items of textual evidence, including wills, sale documents, and personal inventories that document clothing but usually say less about identity. Material evidence also survives, in the form of medieval articles of clothing and Andalusi textiles preserved in Christian tombs and treasuries. Virtually all of the textual sources on clothing and appearance date from the thirteenth century and after. Although one might think that twelfth-century fueros (as one example) would be a rich source for details of legislation about differential Muslim and Christian dress, they are not. This silence may further suggest that the visual distinction between Muslims and Christians was not perceived as a legal problem in Christian Spain before the later thirteenth century.
Almost all such evidence relating to differences of Christian and Muslim appearance in later medieval Christian regions is mediated through Christian perceptions and is found in sources produced by Christian authors and artists. The exception, textiles woven and embroidered in Andalusi ateliers, nonetheless reflects Christian appreciation and use of these materials. Although we have some visual and textual data on clothing and appearance from al-Andalus and Naṣrid Granada, for example, in legal texts (ḥisba treatises and fatwa collections) or images (illustrations in the tale of Bayāḍ and Riyāḍ [see Figure 1], or paintings of Muslim and Christian warriors on ceilings in the Alhambra), these sources are very limited in number as compared to their Christian-context counterparts.
Notably, however, there are a few Andalusi sources that discussed clothing and religious identity before the development of Christian concerns in the thirteenth century. Arabic legal writings about dhimmi clothing were generally based on the aforementioned Pact of ‘Umar, a text that was familiar to Andalusi jurists and others. The early twelfth-century Sevillian market inspector Ibn ‘Abdun reiterated the regulation that Christians and Jews should dress differently from Muslims, but he also remarked that one ought not to sell used clothes that had belonged to a Christian or Jew without clearly informing the buyer about their origins.46 Apparently the appearance of the clothing was not sufficient in itself. In Córdoba, another early twelfth-century jurist, Ibn Rushd (d. 1126; the grandfather of Averroës), answered a query about whether it was necessary to wash clothes that had belonged to a Christian before wearing them for Muslim prayer. His answer turned on the issue of whether or not the Muslim wearer knew that the clothes had previously been worn by a Christian.47 Both of these cases suggest that in al-Andalus, at least, there were often no obvious differences in styles of clothing worn by Muslims and their local Christian (dhimmī) neighbors.
Figure 1. Ḥadīth Bayāḍ wa Riyāḍ (ca. 1240). Vatican Arabo 368, fol. 22r. Andalusi depiction of contemporary Muslim garb, showing men’s and women’s head coverings. © 2017 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
The first Iberian statute to reflect the rulings of Lateran IV appeared in the canons of the Council of Tarragona in 1239, with a brief statement that “Jews and Saracens must distinguish themselves from Christians in matters of dress,” and that interfaith wet-nursing and cohabitation were prohibited.48 This idea was considerably elaborated in later secular legislation sponsored by Alfonso X of Castile at the Cortes of Seville in 1252, which ordered that “wherever there are Moors who live in towns that are also inhabited by Christians, they must be sure that their hair is clipped all around their heads, and parted in the middle without any longer pieces [sin tapet]. They should wear beards, as is mandated by their law, and they may not wear any items made of çendal, nor any white, green, bright red, or dark red fabrics, nor white or gold shoes.”49 The Cortes of Valladolid, in 1258, for their part issued a long list of sumptuary