8 - Muslim Dress in Medieval Portugal: Textual Evidence in the Context of the Iberian Peninsula

Summary

Introduction

In the Iberian Peninsula from the 13^th to the 16^th centuries – when Muslims and Jews were eradicated from Iberian society – the most visible symbol of the distinction between Jews, Muslims and Christians was the body itself, dressed in distinctive clothing, or wearing a special badge. Clothes made visible a hierarchy in which the Jewish and Muslim population were inferior to Christians, a social order the Christians believed to be divinely established. This development was part of a broader process, the making of a res publica christiana, under the sway of the papacy: Christian-Latin ethnocentrism is also defined by opposition to the alterity of Jews and Muslims. The badge of Jews and the dress of Muslims therefore proclaimed them as ‘Other’. Clothing is just one dimension of the process, for which primary sources are often scarce and provide incomplete information. Sumptuary laws were also designed to maintain the social hierarchy, preventing inferior groups from imitating the luxurious dress of the nobility – even if this intended social order often overlapped with that of Muslims and Jews, manifesting the social differences within the minority groups.

Therefore, the presence of dress codes and the almost immediately perceptible match between referent and sign visually identified the hierarchy of medieval society. Nevertheless, the process of establishing ‘Muslim dress’ was gradual and differentiated over the res publica christiana as a whole. This text focuses on Portugal, in comparison with the realms of Castile and Aragon, in order to find common trends throughout the medieval period. The first part of this chapter will synthetize and, at the same time, analyse the process, supported by the very significant bibliography on dress codes and other characteristics that involved Muslim bodies in Castile and Aragon. The second, based on primary sources, complements this data with facts concerning the Portuguese realm, which has its own individual features, on the specific issue of how Muslims dressed. In fact, if ‘Moorishness’ was a common goal of the Iberian Monarchies (as was ‘Jewishness’), the process of achieving it was different through time and space. A limitation, however, constrains this text: without any visual representation of ‘the Moor’ in Portugal, the only sources available are the written ones, which necessarily restricts the perception of ‘Otherness’ and the scope of the analysis.