Muslims Living (and Eating) under Christian Rule: The Intersection of Muslim and Christian Food Ways in Spain, Italy, and the Crusader States

Large communities of Muslims wound up living under Christian rule in the aftermath not only of the Crusades but also of Christian conquests in Italy and, especially, Spain.  While forced into a subordinate, second-class status by the Christian conquerors, the Christian and Muslim (and Jewish) communities were hardly hermetically sealed off from each other.  In fact, the different religious groups typically depended on each other economically, hiring each other’s artisans, frequenting each other’s shops, even sharing the same butchers.  In exploring the co-mingling of Christian and Muslim food ways over the two-hundred year period from 1100 to 1300, this paper will suggest that a synthetic vision of Christian-Muslim relations will have to be built as much on an investigation of the mundane, but long-enduring interdependence of Christian and Muslim communities on each other as it is on the interpretation of sensational but relatively rare moments of explosive violence or sophisticated disputation between the followers of these two religions.