Cultural Exchange
In the pre-Islamic past, the Visigoths were backward in their culture. The arrival of the Moors in Spain led to cultural exchanges which allowed them to flourish in architecture, music, art, and literature.
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“The commingling of languages, religions, and styles of every sort - food, clothes, songs, buildings - took place not only within the Iberian Peninsula, although certainly most vigorously there, but with increasing intensity far beyond the Pyrenees.”
Maria Rosa Menocal, "The Ornament of the World" |
“The peninsula thus entered the Middle Ages as a land in which three religions and cultures coexisted and overlapped.”
Raymond Carr, "Spain: A History" |
An illustration from the Spanish monk Beatus of Liebana's commentary on the Apocalypse, a manuscript produced at the abbey of Saint-Sever (South western France) in the middle of the 11th century. The scene is from a part of the manuscript devoted to the genealogy of Christ. The influence of Arabic art ts notable. (Courtesy of UNESCO)
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... From an artistic point of view, the interaction among the three religious communities emerged a style of art exclusive of Spain, the Mudejar (different to the Romanesque and Gothic of Europe) which would reach later some places in America, and which means the use, the success, of the Islamic esthetics in Christian buildings (churches, palaces, castles, monasteries, and in the synagogues. Many other influences among these three groups would appear in techniques of construction, techniques of irrigation, in the customs, the gastronomy, the music, the literature, and the Spanish language."
Professor Almudena Ariza Armada, NYU Madrid, Spain, Medieval Al-Andalus History Expert |
