A Unique Bilingual Surrender Treaty from Muslim‐Crusader Spain

n array of pacts, truces, and alliances defined the relationships between A Muslim and Christian powers during the Middle Ages. These agreements constituted a special kind of encounter. Driven by need or greed, two startlingly different sets of cultural and legal assumptions, rhetorical traditions, and belief systems confronted each other uncomfortably. Each treaty or truce that the parties contracted represented a unique local circumstance, a tangle of options, dangers, opportunities, personalities, and historical and geographical contexts. Each player in the seesaw struggle between Cross and Crescent was, in a sense, a negotiating culture, literally negotiating to keep or to surrender elements of their cultural identity.' Most of the documentation surviving from European or Islamic realms fails to convey the misconceptions and self-delusion suffered by the two sides and equally fails to illuminate the respective cultures represented in the often discordant negotiations. Now a truly remarkable bilingual surrender treaty opens a new perspective on the past that has been largely concealed until recently. From the vantage point created by the al-Azraq treaty, we can observe the larger confrontation of cultures across the medieval Mediterranean world. The treaty is an extremely rare document. International agreements between Muslim and Christian powers were common in the Middle Ages. In the case of surrender treaties, each side presumably kept a bilingual copy with the Latin or Romance language text interlined with Arabic. Copies held by Muslims have long since disappeared, as the Muslim governments themselves disappeared. The