Mudéjares was the name given to those Moors who remained in Spain as vassals of the Christians, adapting themselves to their new situation but maintaining their Islamic culture and religion. As the Spanish reconquest advanced south, culminating in the fall of the last Moorish kingdom - that of Granada - in 1492, the number of mudéjares steadily increased, to the extent that in some areas they came to constitute a significant presence in civil society. Whether they prospered or were repressed fluctuated both in time and according to where they found themselves and therefore under whose direct rule they fell. In 1499, Ferdinand and Isabella – the Reyes Católicos - decreed the forcible baptism into Christianity of all the Moors and Jews and the conversion into churches of all the mosques and synagogues remaining in their kingdom. From then on, the mudéjares were renamed moriscos – Christianised Moors. These moriscos, and their Jewish counterparts, were stigmatised as ‘new Christians’. Over the next century or so, those who were assimilated disappeared as a distinct public cultural presence. Those who failed to disappear were periodically rounded up and expelled from Spain, the final and definitive expulsion taking place in 1609.

During the earlier period of peaceful mudéjar-Christian coexistence, the influence of mudéjares was marked and visible. They produced many of the most famous doctors, apothecaries and surgeons of the time and achieved notable success in the fine and applied arts, especially in architecture and decoration, as well as in literature and music. Literary works appeared in an Arabic form but with a Castilian content – and vice-versa. From the reign of Alfonso X El Sabio (The Wise) onwards, the mudéjares, like the Jews, began to produce aljamiada literature – Castilian or romance texts written in Arabic or Hebrew characters - and translated scores of important philosophical, medical, astronomical and other works.

Until now, no-one has spoken of mudéjar music. The mudéjares did not write music – in Arab culture, music was and is transmitted orally. We do, however, know the names of the Moorish musicians and of the instruments they played in the palace of Sancho IV of Castile, for example. We can still read the letters written by Alfonso de Aragón in 1329 to the King of Castile, asking him to provide a musician who could play the axabeba and the meocanon, both Arab instruments, and many other surviving documents which reveal that mudéjar musicians were very active alongside musicians of the Christian courts.

Songs survive, their authors unknown, like Calvi vi calvi, calvi aravi – an Arab text written in Castilian characters – as do many traditionally Arab works which later musicians adapted, adorned and collected together in songbooks and musical anthologies published during the 15th and 16th centuries. If we know how to look, we discover strophic structures invented in Al-Andalus, and melodies and rhythms similar to those used in Arab-Andalusian music, which have been preserved in the Maghrebi tradition. We find stories told in song, self-evidently from the point of view of the mudéjar minority, impotently lamenting the loss of their cities in battles with the Christians.

If we add to this the use of originally Arab musical instruments which, from the reign of Alfonso X, came to form part first of Castilian and Spanish culture, and shortly afterwards spread into the rest of Europe, we begin to realise that the legacy of Al-Andalus enormously enriched the social and cultural life of the time.

The rigorous efforts made by the religious and civil institutions of the 15th and 16th centuries to bury any trace of Islam in Spanish culture, together with the arrival of new and powerful Renaissance influences from elsewhere in Europe, resulted in the influence of Arab culture – which illuminated Iberia for 700 years - becoming hidden and forgotten.

Our aim is to unearth and understand the real history of these events. The deeper we look into it, the more indebted we come to feel to that Arab culture which left behind such evocative traces in our own.

Carlos Paniagua