INTRODUCTION

Summary

The Christian conquest impacted the Muslim society of the Ebro in virtually every sphere, provoking a series of transformations which some historians believe to have been so dramatic that it is impossible to speak in any meaningful sense of continuity between the pre- and post-conquest cultures. While this position is certainly exaggerated and reflects a rather rigid conception of the nature of societal evolution, it is indeed the case that mudéjar society of the late thirteenth-century Aragonese and Catalan Ebro differed significantly from that of the eleventh-century Islamic Thaghr al-Aqṣā'. In order to appreciate the changes which resulted from the imposition of the foreign Catalan and Aragonese political and cultural regimes, and to understand what life meant for Muslims living under Christian rule, the character of mudéjar society must be investigated according to a number of criteria: administrative, economic, ethnic and social. Many scholars, however, have limited their research to the administrative structures of mudéjar society as perceived through Christian documentation. Valuable as this work has been, a descriptive methodology has clear limitations, and in using it, one must carefully navigate between the Scylla of endowing mudéjar society with a uniformity it did not possess and the Charybdis of analyzing the mudéjar experience as an isolated phenomenon which can only be apprehended in contrast to, rather than enmeshed in, the greater society of the Crown.