Why Punishing Blasphemous Speech That Triggers Murderous Reactions Would Likely Lead to More Deaths

Internally the period of tolerance lasted a bit longer than you've suggested but that was due mostly to the hammer and tong strategy set up by King San Cho Noe I working so well ~ Castile (Castle) and Leon (Lion) working in tandem to advance into a Moslem principality, conquer it, convert everybody, then recover economically, which period would coincide with Castile beginning its advance into a different area.

The third kingdom, Carvajal (symbolized by a bull), was dropped from the scheme within the first 50 years or so.

The extended toleration arose out of the Christian practice of NOT forcing conversions ~ which gave the noble ranks the opportunity to move somewhere else. The peasantry were simply shuttled back and forth ~ their concerns were not of importance to either side.

That war went on for centuries ~ finally, the last Islamic kingdom was overcome and the Spanish Christians dropped the 'No forced conversions' nonsense!

This policy has an echo in the Treaty of London 1604

As you recall the Turks took over the last piece of a functioning Eastern Empire about 1420 and during the remainder of the century worked on the residual portions we call "The Balkans" ~ there they encountered a totally different sort of problem ~ the Orthodox prince with Western friends, and by the 1500s that included Protestant Western friends.

For a variety of reasons the king of Spain, Filippe I formed the Catholic League of Christian Mediterranean powers, built a vast armada, sailed East (This time instead of West to England where he'd once been king) and utterly destroyed the Ottoman navy and commercial fleets!

That fixed that problem ~ he proceeded then to resolve the Balkans questions before he passed on. Even Captain John Smith who was Virginia's first governor had been a POW in the fight against the Turks.

Throughout that whole period the Christians pushed the toleration question ~ the Moslems conformed only as they saw a benefit. If they saw no benefit the Spanish, and then the Catholic League, and the Western powers would simply have to resort to killing them all.

We are back to that dilemma again.

Not really — at least not in the Muslim held parts of the Iberian peninsula — the Almohads returned to a strict, harsh treatment of dhimmis and attempts at forced conversions, such that many Jews and Christians emigrated to either non-Almohad Muslim lands, or the Roman Empire (by your leave, 476 was a non-event, the Empire finally fell in 1453 after dwindling to a city-state).

You are right, of course, that there were other, later periods and places where the Muslims got pragmatic and adopted tolerant, even cosmopolitan, attitudes, but these invariably alternated with periods where some revival of Muslim religious fervor would trigger active persecution. I was only addressing the basis in fact for the myth of Andalusia as a “golden age”.

My point is simply that any 'golden age', and there were several, had a primarily Christian impetus, and that Moslems only went along with it when overpowered, outnumbered, and, of course, free of even larger Islamofascist invading armies.

There was, of course, the intermarriage problem ~ Spain was remarkably successful and from the first (of the post Roman Empire) governments to the last, they had the big bucks.

Some folks like to credit that fact to the Jewish mercantile and industrial class ~ others believe a constant infusion of new capital from the more primitive parts of Europe (Britain, Frankish kingdoms, Scandinavia, Mediterranean, and the Middle East) definitely helped.

For quite a long while ~ centuries ~ Spain was, at least, a place of refuge for the rich, the educated and the talented.

With the discovery of America everything changed of course. BTW, that hurt the Breton and Cornish nobles the most ~ Spain was no longer a place they could advance in ~ they began rotating up to Scandinavia by the mid-1500s, and to the Americas.

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