Christian settlers’ hog-raising disrupted Muslim irrigation systems in newly conquered Granada.

Evidence

Incoming Christian owners of livestock, on the other hand, accustomed as they were to the broad lands of the northern meseta central and to such practices as driving herds and flocks on to arable land after the grain harvest to clear fields of stubble (the derrota de mieses, “gleaning,” as it was termed), began assertively to put their hogs into the sugar cane stubble. Complaints seem to have centered on the damage done by the animals rooting into vital irrigation channels, but one may guess that the very nature of the beasts was the heart of the problem. For years nothing was done, but with herds of several hundred being turned into the fields, the damage they caused could no longer be ignored. The council of Motril sought to regulate the practice—not, significantly, to ban it. Only registered residents (vecinos) had the right to such pasture, and nobody might put out more than ten animals to graze (Vassberg 1984, 177). — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 398

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the derrota de mieses practice of turning livestock onto stubble after harvest, a northern meseta custom alien to the coastal irrigated south.
• SEED: Angle: how a seemingly economical pasturing regulation (capping at ten animals, resident-only rights) is actually cultural boundary-drawing encoded in municipal law — the ‘neutral’ rule that polices who belongs.
• FICTION: Story spark: a confrontation scene where pigs physically root through a vital irrigation channel — a material act that symbolizes the whole conquest, showing how the ‘irrational’ religious hatred is also a very concrete war over scarce water infrastructure.
• XREF: Echoes the animal-as-cultural-weapon theme in the pig/hog fighting harness claim and connects to the essay on trees where physical infrastructure (irrigation) encodes a whole way of life.