Early Granadan Muslim-Christian concord rested on exceptional individuals, not institutions

Evidence

Of the various issues of Muslim-Christian relations that arose in post- Reconquest Granada, the most sensitive was what may be termed the elche question, even though relatively few individuals were directly involved. … Tendilla had great success in engaging “friendly” Muslims in the civil administration of the city, Talavera had his priests use Arabic in their religious preaching, and they were listened to. Relations on the whole were thus good, peace prevailed, but those floods of instant converts that all pious Christians desired (expected?) did not appear. As the decade passed, the free-and-easy administrative improvisations of the early days, arrangements that had worked because of the personalities involved, had to be replaced by bureaucracy, for the population of incoming Christian settlers soon built up, and the old generation of experienced frontiersmen died out. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 168

Categorization

• XREF: Pattern echoes Weber’s routinization of charisma — personalized arrangements give way to bureaucratic order as the founding generation dies.