[402] In the preceding chapters an enormous quantity of material has been presented. Much of it may seem contradictory, some even internally inconsistent. It has been shown, for instance, that Muslim communities under the Crown of Aragon were well-structured, well-organized, and complex municipal bodies, with considerable independence and autonomy, but that they were in every way inferior and subordinate to the Christian universitas, and that the officials of the latter could intervene in all aspects of life in the morería if it interested them to do so. It has been argued that individual Mudéjares prospered during the period of this study, that there was a wealthy class of Muslims high in the civil service who enjoyed exceptional royal favor, that Muslims not only took full part in but were indispensable to the economy of Aragon and Valencia; yet it has also been claimed that Muslims as a group were utterly ruined by the economic demands of the Crown during the war, and that they were preyed upon, robbed, and financially exploited by all levels of Aragonese society. One chapter demonstrated that Muslims were liable to the exact same military and feudal duties as their Christian counterparts, and another pointed out that they did not even enjoy the right to bear arms, and that they could be and were enslaved on a massive scale for any of a hundred reasons, or for no reason at all. The survival of the system of Muslim jurisprudence formed the content of one chapter, but the same chapter demonstrated that in well over half the cases involving Mudéjares their judicial rights were flagrantly violated by Christian officials. To make matters more confusing, the material [403] suggested that these usurpations frequently redounded to the benefit of the Muslims, and often transpired at their request. That Mudéjares enjoyed a number of "rights" consonant with those enjoyed by the lower classes of medieval Christians in Europe generally was accepted and elaborated, as was the fact that Muslims were basically non-persons before Spanish law: such rights as they enjoyed could be terminated at will by monarchs, officials, clerics, or private landholders; they had no claim to citizenship, could not hold public office except over Muslims, and had no part whatsoever in the making of decisions which vitally affected them (as Christians did through the Corts).

Chapter VII on oppression chronicled many and varied forms of harassment, oppression, and abuse of Mudéjares by Christians, who invariably escaped any punishment, and who seem to have felt absolutely no compunctions about harming or exploiting their Muslim compatriots. But the same pages showed many Christians taking up the causes of the oppressed Mudéjares, speaking out against the abuses, demanding redress from the king, trying fiercely to protect their Muslim vassals or friends from injustices of this type. Indeed, with a slight shift of emphasis, the chapter could be used to counter its own argument. Taxes were shown to have wiped out the economy of many aljamas and burdened others severely, and such abuses as forced loans, exorbitant fines, and illegal exactions were recognized to have accounted for the desperate plight of individual Muslims by the end of the war; but at the same time, the remarkable leniency of the Crown in regard to proroguing [404] or remitting taxes was examined in great detail, and data as presented established that the Aragonese monarchs remitted about or half of all taxes owed them by Muslims throughout the entire period of this study. Muslims were not, a final chapter concluded, very well integrated into Valencian society, and defected to Castile in astounding numbers when presented with the opportunity. Yet the same documentation revealed that in Aragon Mudéjares were so thoroughly assimilated that almost none could read or write Arabic, and they acquitted themselves in the war as being among the most loyal of Peter's subjects.

Such contradictions may be difficult to comprehend. For those disposed to know whether Muslims were "well" or "ill" treated, or whether the Christians of Aragon-Catalonia-Valencia were "kind" or "cruel," "tolerant" or "intolerant," the presentation of these conflicting data may be frustrating. Such contradictions and uncertainties, however, were the reality of fourteenth-century Aragonese Mudéjar life, and the historian cannot alleviate the unpleasantness of confusion by covering it up or shunting it into convenient categories.

There are, moreover, sufficiently abundant, well-documented cases of the treatment of minority groups in recent times to make confusion on such matters unnecessary, and, indeed, culpable. It should be quite clear by now that one group is not "just" or "unjust" to another group, nor well or ill disposed, nor on either side of any other intellectual dichotomy. Attempts to class treatment of one group by another [405] as part of some deliberate, uniform policy on the part of the rulers or a dominant class not only obfuscate, but distort. The condition Muslims in medieval Spain should be understood as the result of a continuum of historical factors, some contingent upon human will, others coincident with it, and still others wholly unrelated to the actions or wishes of any humans or groups of humans.

It has been the purpose of this study to show the operation of these historical factors on the situation called convivencia, and their effects on the Mudéjares. A disastrous war, for instance, straining severely the finances of the king and the ruling classes, drove them to seek money from any source which was not securely protected by iron-clad guarantees inextricably bound into the fabric of society. Muslims were the element of Christian society most exposed and least protected by the rigorously traditional safeguards of medieval culture.

Likewise, in regard to law, Muslim rights to emigrate were terminated because they could be terminated. Most of the Christian population apparently did not enjoy this right at all, and yet the very system which denied the privilege to the majority protected absolutely the same right for the few who did enjoy it. The king could not have denied this right to the members of the Catalan Corts without severely jeopardizing his own economic survival, nor could he have granted it to the serfs of the Count of Luna without risking revolt and dethronement. But he could grant or deny it to Muslims without fear of any repercussions stronger than protest and complaint, and without seriously [406] disrupting any other elements of the societies under his rule.

In regard to enslavement, intervention in sexual mores, limitations on property transfer, abridgement of legal process, even the practice of religion, the same factors explain -- as far as any historical phenomenon can be explained -- the quirks of the treatment of Mudéjares at the hands of the ruling Christian element of their society. Questions of tolerance, kindness, justice, intention, etc., are peripheral issues, affecting only a small percentage of the facts which have been considered here. The primary forces affecting the Mudéjares were the very same forces affecting the rest of the society in which they lived: war, inflation, depopulation, economic stagnation, political struggles, class tensions, long-term climatic and agricultural trends, and the thousand other factors one must figure into equations relating to a particular human condition.

But the effects of these forces were different for the Muslims than they were for the other members of the society in which the Mudéjares resided; not uniformly different, not always different, perhaps not even dramatically different, but they were different, as the preceding chapters have attempted to demonstrate. The reason is simple: the Mudéjares were an imperfectly assimilated element in a culture dedicated to stability, homogeneity, and tradition. Medieval society was designed to withstand the storms of a harsh and turbulent age by lashing each and every member and constituent part of its composition to another part; it was the fate of the Muslims of Spain to have been incorporated into this whole late, irregularly, and with considerable [407] ambivalence on the part of the rest of the society, The position they occupied in that society could be described in a number of ways in modern terms, the Muslims occupied the bottom rungs of a rigid, paternalistic hierarchy. Pressure exerted on this hierarchy resulted n efforts on the part of those at each level to alleviate their own distress at the expense of those below them: since the Muslims occupied he bottommost rungs, and since access to the higher levels was for the most part denied them, they suffered the most from this pressure and its side-effects. In those areas where Muslims were in a competitive relation to Christians -- among the lower classes in Valencia, for instance, or the civil service in Aragon -- they fared well or ill depending on the particular circumstances of their position, and their ability to make their political or economic power work for them. In no case could it be argued that the general situation of Muslims, whether desirable or undesirable, was due to the bigotry or tolerance of particular Christians, or to the enlightenment or fanaticism of the ruling classes, or to the justice or injustice of Christian authorities. The situation of the Muslims and their relation to the Christian society around them was created and maintained by organizational and structural forces which operate on most pluralistic societies, which respond to stress by exaggerating social distinctions and cleavages regardless of the desires or wishes of individuals involved, and which are better analyzed in terms their effects than their moral desirability.

[408] As for the attitude of the Christians toward the Mudéjares, canons of scholarship, decency, and common sense unanimously enjoin upon the researcher total abstinence from conscious moral judgements regarding his findings. Few modern minds would find the benevolent paternalism of Aragonese monarchs toward "the royal treasure" a praiseworthy attitude, but it would be grossly unfair to judge the behavior of medieval Spaniards by the standards of cultures which have largely rejected the ideals most dearly cherished in fourteenth-century Spain. It is not, moreover, the province of the historian to praise or blame, but merely to understand. If the present study has given rise to greater understanding, however limited, it has more than fulfilled the expectations of its writer.