Realpolitik........................

The effects of the long-term presence of two expansive religious ideologies, each originally foreign to the Andalusian ethic, transformed the nature of the conflicts at hand.  They made religious-ideological warfare a reality, cultural orthodoxy a real possibility, and monochromatic identity a realizable ideal.  And yet it must be said that neither Castilian Christians nor the Nasrid Muslims of Grenada were ever vociferous advocates of these notions, although certainly both societies moved toward far more conspicuous levels of religious segregation and intolerance.  They nevertheless continued to deal with each other in a universe characterized by realpolitik and by cultural openness of the sort that led to the building of Seville's Alcazar in the fourteenth century.

-Maria Rosa Menocal,  Ornament Of The World:  How Muslims, Jews, And Christians`Created A Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain