Hi. I'm Professor Roger Louis Martinez Dávila and welcome to Coexistence in Medieval Spain: Jews, Christians, and Muslims. To create this course, I have crisscrossed Spain for almost fifteen years, from the North, Zaragoza, Burgos, Leon, and Santiago de Compostela, to the Center of the Peninsula, Salamanca, Plasencia, Segovia, and Toledo. And lastly, to the South, Seville, Cordoba, and Granada. It has been an incredible journey and I'm excited to share it with you. First, call me Roger. Like you, I'm always a student. I'm continuously learning about how much I still do not know. Even after turning tens of thousands of pages of manuscripts, and about fifty cathedrals, municipal, and national archives, and even one of the most precious jewels, the Vatican's Secret Archive, I know I'm still creating a more thorough perspective of interreligious relations in Medieval Spain. Thus, I think it's fair to say, we are pursuing this investigation, this journey together. I think I'm a bit closer to understanding Medieval Spanish coexistence. But this is only because of the generosity of the archivist, scholars, museum directors, and many others who have aided me. Over twenty institutions and scholars in Spain and the United States, formally and informally, are participating in the development and delivery of this course. To them, I am grateful and in their debt. Together we investigated medieval 1000-year-old stiff parchment manuscripts. The architectural remains of synagogues and mosques, and the ceramics and metal work that blended cultural traditions, all of them telling their own stories. Tales of Muslim, Arab, and Berber shock Cavalry quickly overrunning Visigothic Spain and establishing new norms that ensured basic religious protections for Jews and Christians, but at the expense of political fealty and head taxes assessed for every living man. Of the Islamic Kings creating fabulous cities like Cordoba, with a mixed population of several hundred thousand souls, and densely packed libraries that were the envy of the world. Other race to rediscover and innovate upon Greek knowledge, about the stars and science, so that Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars could design better astronomical devices to understand navigation, as well as the desires of God. Of tensions within the Muslim community, like the fraction that Umayyad killed for the Cordoba and too many smaller taifa or party kingdoms, and within the Christian community, like the wars between Leon and Burgos in 11th century and later, the Runi, a civil war, between the half-brothers, Peadar the cruel and Enrique the second of Trastamara of Castile. Of Jewish rabbis, merchants and chain mail makers, aligning their political and economic interests with Christian knights and churchmen to counter predatory interloping Christian Lords in Plasencia. A cathedral leaders in Burgos and Toledo seeking to find the very best craftsmen to create church altars and structures and always specified to hire a Muslim carpenter because they were the most talented. At the 15th century, intermarriage of Jewish Rabbinic and lower noble Christian families, the Santa Maria and Carvajal clans, and their creation of an illustrious lineage of Roman Catholic cardinals. One of whom twice was almost named the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. Of the collapse of positive forms that coexistence, the massive anti-Jewish riots of the 1390s, the implementation of blood purity laws banning persons who were Jewish and Muslim ancestries from church and governmental positions, and the implementation the Spanish Inquisition to seek out and penance wayward Christians. And the stories that speak of the end, the Edict of the Expulsion of 1492, the cast Jews from their homeland of 2000 years, and the subsequent expulsion of Muslims in 1592. I have dreamed about this opportunity to share these stories. That grant us a peek into the 13th-century history of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, and their relation to Medieval Iberia. Thank you for joining me on this quest. More importantly, thank you for indulging your own curiosity and seeking your own personal betterment. Now, I think it is time for us to get started.
