the enemy it was victoriously fighting, gaining momentum ‘with each meal shared,
or bridle admired, each textile or ivory box received in tribute,’ and with each story told.”
—Gabriel Martinez-Gros
Most people don’t know the high watermark of multiculture that was medieval Spain, where Jews, Christians and Moslems collaborated across multiple spiritual disciplines and artistic traditions following prior blood and tumult.
This gorgeous volume, heralded as a “Book of the Year” by the Times Literary Supplement, explores these vibrant interactions among highly different and sometimes opposing cultures—and details how their contacts with one another transformed them all.
The narrative chronicles of the intense history of Castile in the wake of the Christian capture of the Islamic city of Tulaytula, now Toledo, in the eleventh century and traces the development of Castilian culture as it was forged in the new intimacy of Christians with the Muslims and Jews they had overcome.
The authors bring the culture to life through its arts, architecture, poetry and prose, in a singularly compelling combination of literary and visual arts. These legacies endure throughout Europe and the Middle East today, and even as far away as the southwestern United States where for but one example my own Kabbalah lineage traces directly to fourteenth century Toledo, and a rare present day example of a flaming Masonic sword that guards my home hails from the longstanding master metallurgists of the region as well.
There are those who would posit that different religions and cultures are ever opposed, but earth pasts less chronicled reveal times and places where our common heritage and human interests reign supreme over the crude instincts of the hateful resource gluttons who would divide us.
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