| Santa Maria, strela do dia... Alfonso X of Castile often dreamed of stars. More than of the future of his kingdom. A great humanist, a mediocre sovereign. Can one be both? But he bequeathed, amongst other accomplishments, what is considered the greatest source of our knowledge of Spanish music in the Middle Ages, the Cantigas de Santa Maria. A work which one cannot comprehend if one does not know the great historical lines of the Iberian Peninsula, and of Castile.
Under Muslim domination from the beginning of the 8th century, as it was also under the Reconquista (9th to the 13th centuries), the Iberian Peninsula offered a cultural, linguistic and religious coexistence in the bosom of which certain groups, Mozarabs (Christians under Muslim rule) first, then Mudejars (Muslims in Christian territory), were intermediaries between the West and the Hispano-Arab world.
Contrary to the ravaging feudal division of the greater part of Europe, the Caliphal state of Abd-al-Rahman III maintained a fecund centralism, in the context of which minorities, in exchange for a tribute, could play a far from negligible economic role.
The persistence of Visigothic influence, especially in art, was one of the components of a culture that knew how to assimilate with originality its various sources; the Arabic language, in addition, linking the literary and philosophical heritage of the Mediterranean civilizations. |
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