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Infidel friends: Charles V, Mulay Hassan and the theatre of majesty 449

encounters between Christian and Muslim rulers, due not only to
religious differences but also to the very complicated negotiation of
rank and reciprocity. Sultan Saladin explained it more clearly when
Richard, King of England, arrived in Palestine in 1192 and sought a
meeting with him: Saladin refused with well-founded arguments,
reminding him that it was customary for kings to meet each other only
after a peace treaty had been agreed, and thereafter «it is not seemly
for them to make war upon each other» .
8
However, it was licit to meet a prince of a different religion as a
victor or a protector, exhibiting preponderance and dominion. As a
Burgundian ruler with a crusader background Charles V did not have
a long tradition for such encounters but he did as king of Castile and
Aragon . The long coexistence between Christians and Muslims in the
9
Iberian Peninsula throughout the Middle Ages enabled the deve-
lopment of a specific tradition of interreligious royal encounters which
Charles V revived. From the foundation of the Nasrid Kingdom of
Granada as a vassal of Castile to the final conquest of Granada by the
Catholic Kings (1246-1492), these encounters gave rise to a specific
iconographic tradition of submissive Muslim kings before Christian
sovereigns. In the Chapel of Saint Catherine of the Cathedral of
Burgos, for example, there is a fourteenth century wooden carving of
Alhamar (Muhammad I, the first Nasrid king of Granada), kneeling
before Ferdinand III of Castile and kissing his hand as a sign of
vassalage. The delivery of the keys of the city of Granada from its last
king, Boabdil, to the Catholic Kings (1492) was also repeatedly
represented in Castilian contemporary art .
10

8 J. Gillingham, Richard I, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999, pp. 20-21; I.
Shoval, King John's Delegation to the Almohad Court (1212): Medieval Interreligious
Interactions and Modern Historiography, Brepols, Turnhout, 2016.
9 The Iberian Reconquista (from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries) was
connected to the general movement of the Christian Crusades, but was often fought
under specific rules and less violent forms of conquest due to the long coexistence and
vicinity of Muslims and Christians. When the Christian Kings of Portugal or Aragon
sought aid from Northern Europeans crusaders for conquering some cities, the result
was catastrophic: both in the sack of Barbastro (1063) and Lisbon (1147), these
northern knights killed and sacked whereas local capitulations forbade such actions. L.
Villegas-Aristizábal, Norman and Anglo-Norman Interventions in the Iberian Wars of
Reconquest Before and After the First Crusade, in P. Oldfield, K. Hurlock (eds.),
Crusading and Pilgrimage in the Norman World, Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, 2015,
pp. 103-122.
10 Boabdil’s surrender was carved in the choir of the cathedral of Toledo (by Rodrigo
Alemán) and the Royal Chapel of Granada (by Felipe Vigarny). See F. Pereda Espeso, Ad
vivum? o cómo narrar en imágenes la historia de la Guerra de Granada, «Reales Sitios»,
154 (2002), pp. 2-20; M. Á. Ladero Quesada, La rendición de Granada, en el gran lienzo
de Francisco Pradilla, in G. Anes, C. Manso Porto (eds.), Isabel La Católica y el arte, Real
Academia de la Historia, Madrid, 2006, pp. 186-189.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVII - Agosto 2020
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)