HOW TO ADMINISTER A CONQUERED CITY IN AL - ANDALUS: MOSQUES, PARISH CHURCHES AND PARISHES Heather Ecker The Castilian conquests and colonizations in al-Andalus in the thir- teenth century present a number of paradigms of continuity and dis- continuity to students of medieval history and material culture. 1 One node of tension lies between the institutions of conquest and the physical context into which those institutions were implanted. Another, to which insufficient attention has been paid, is how the imported institutions were shaped by the very context that their sponsors sought to transform. Both nested ‘nodes’ of tension originate in the prob- lems of settlement faced by colonizers: whether to blend or to expel (or to contain), whether to restore or to rebuild, and whether to con- trol by persuasion or by force. For the Castilians, the lessons learned from one locale would be tried at the next, establishing a chain of precedents that can be traced back to Toledo, conquered by Alfonso VI in 1085. The ‘laboratory’ character of long-standing modern colonial inter- ventions, such as the French occupation of Algeria, ignored by medievalists, can help to explain practices which have been perceived not as experimental, but as normative. In her study of urbanism in Algiers under French rule, Zeynep Çelik writes, The first French law on “urbanism” dates from 14 March, 1919. Considered “the charter of modern urbanism,” this law called for a master plan for every town having more than ten thousand people in order to regulate growth and enable “beautification” (embellissement). The plan would thus determine the street network once and for all, specifying the layout and width of all the streets (including the design of new ones and the modification of old ones) and the location and character of all open spaces—public parks, gardens, and squares—as well as of monuments and public service buildings. Undoubtedly, the 1 Among the conquests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, here we are refer- ring mainly to the Castilian conquests and only briefly to those of the Aragonese, but not those of the Almohads, which brought other kinds of urban reforms and discontinuities. Robinson, Cynthia, and Leyla Rouhi. Under the Influence, edited by Cynthia Robinson, and Leyla Rouhi, BRILL, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/columbia/detail.action?docID=280856. Created from columbia on 2017-05-24 08:29:37. Copyright © 2004. BRILL. All rights reserved.