Forgotten Umayyad forts in Castilla-La Mancha: the history of the Fortress of Zorita and its role in cultural memory

Abstract

Monuments that testify to the Islamicate past of the Iberian Peninsula dot the landscape of nearly all of modern-day Spain and Portugal. For the better part of fifty years, archaeologists have identified and excavated sites with Andalusi pasts in Spain –yet few of their efforts are recognized. This is particularly true in the modern-day Autonomous Community of Castilla-La Mancha, located in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula. To date, many of the early medieval fortifications of the region, geographically defined as the Southern Meseta, are understood through a lens of conflict where Christian kingdoms and Islamic empires battled for control of the Iberian Peninsula. However, few sources from the time suggest this is an appropriate interpretation for the Umayyad period (711-976). Rather, this understanding is a result of an early modern nation-building project in which Spain embraced a Catholic triumphal history to the exclusion of others. This thesis challenges this understanding of Central Spain as a region with little Umayyad history using written, archaeological, and architectural evidence dating to the eighth through tenth centuries and then analyses cultural processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have led to the misremembering and occlusion of this Andalusi past. The Arabic written sources of later centuries refer to the area under investigation as a border space, specifically the thaghr al-awsaṭ. To date, scholarship has accepted this designation with little question as to whether late sources appropriately reflect dynamics born out of the Umayyad conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Looking at the contemporaneous written sources suggests approaching the Umayyad fortifications of Castilla-La Mancha as border spaces loosely tied to the dynastic centre in Córdoba is a definition born out of later conflicts. This is upheld by archaeological evidence in which the fortresses of the Southern Meseta show strong material ties to early Umayyad architecture and material culture of the Iberian Peninsula.

The understanding of the Southern Meseta as a liminal space that was first portrayed in late medieval Arabic chronicles held sway over the historiography of the region, with real consequences for the cultural patrimony of the region today. An interrogation of laws relating to cultural patrimony passed by the nation of Spain from 1844-1975, with a focus on those in the first third of the twentieth century, demonstrates how the historical understanding of Andalusi past as limited to the south of the Iberian Peninsula has affected how modern scholars approach the study of Umayyad history in Spain today.