The Islamization of Spain in William Rowley and Mary Pix: the politics of nation and gender.

The sustained Muslim presence in Spain between 711 and 1492 provides a fascinating example of intercultural dynamics that has never ceased to engage the imagination of many authors. One episode in particular, the Islamic invasion and conquest of 711, was in its very swiftness so hard to explain that it has puzzled everyone for centuries. Historians nowadays explain it away more as the result of the weakness of the Gothic Christian kingdom than the strength of the invading North Africans. Mostly this weakness appears to have been connected to the ancient elective system of succession, which was challenged by certain parties. (1) Garcia de Cortazar and Gonzalez Vega have described how after the death of King Witiza in 710 his sons did not accept the election of a new king in the person of Roderick, earl of Betica. (2) The "Witizan" faction started negotiations with the North African Muslims for their help against Roderick through a Christian mediator, Julian, governor of the North African town of Ceuta, and in July 711 the Muslim leader Tariq, landing with his troops near Gibraltar, defeated and killed Roderick in Guadalete. (3) Four months later, the North Africans had occupied Toledo, the capital, in central Spain, and then continued to advance northward. By 725 they had reached the French town of Carcasonne. (4) They encountered little organized resistance until close to the end of the century, at Roncesvalles. (5)

Thus the history of the Muslim invasion of Spain started with fragmentation, division, and civil war, while the slow recovery of lands from Islam for the tiny Christian pockets of resistance demanded the painful efforts of many generations until at last victory was achieved with Ferdinand and Isabella's conquest of Granada in 1492. Between the mythic separation and loss of the kingdom and the myth-building reunion of the Reconquista stood eight centuries of frontier friction and cultural symbiosis. During the Middle Ages the Iberian Peninsula was a privileged place where three great cultures came together. Muslims, Jews, and Christians shared a cultural continuum torn by sporadic though intense strife. Not surprisingly, this long period has proved to be an endless source of rich inspiration for writers of all backgrounds to the present time. (6)

The purpose of this article is to address the politics of the representation of the Islamic irruption on the Iberian Peninsula in the plays of two Stuart playwrights, William Rowley and Mary Pix. Rowley's All's Lost by Lust, first performed in 1622, tells the events of Tariq's invasion and Roderick's defeat in a vague but still recognizable form. His deployment of the Islamic characters in his play is shaped on an anti-Spanish intent because the presence and actions of the Moors help to convey the inadequacy and decadence of the Spanish Christians. In 1705, Mary Pix adapted this play in her own The Conquest of Spain, though her emphasis was on the figure of the ravished woman as the focus of intercultural and patriarchal conflict. Her revisions of Rowley's play de-emphasize the participation of the Moors and introduces a doubling technique that, stressing the commonalities between Moors and Christians in their victimization of women, thus subordinates racial concerns to her preoccupation with patriarchy.

I. The Islamic Invasion in the Early Spanish Historical Ballads

Notwithstanding the efforts of historians, the events surrounding the Islamic conquest of Spain remain steeped in legend. Pedro Chalmeta has hypothesized that Julian tried to conceal his role in the "loss of Spain to Islam" by circulating the rumor that King Roderick had seduced his beautiful daughter Florinda, who had been sent to the king's capital, Toledo. By virtue of this tale, Julian ceased to be a traitor and became the avenger of his honor, while his North African allies merely assisted in putting to rights the wrong committed by a corrupt king. According to Chalmeta's thesis, this story was given credence by the Islamic chroniclers, and eventually it was to be reproduced in the anonymous ballads composed in Christian Spain. (7)