TWO

Spain

4

The Spanish Umayyads

138–422/756–1031

The Iberian peninsula, excepting the Christian kingdoms of the north

Arab and Berber troops crossed over the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco to Spain in 92/711 and speedily overthrew the Visigoths, the Germanic military aristocracy who had ruled Spain until then. Over the next decades, the Muslim forces drove the remnants of the Visigoths into the Cantabrian Mountains of the extreme north of the Iberian peninsula, and even penetrated across the Pyrenees into Frankish Gaul, until Charles Martel defeated them just to the north of Poitiers, in the battle called by the Arabs that of Balāṭ al-Shuhadā’, in 114/732. During these early years, Spain was ruled by a succession of Arab governors sent out from the east, as the most westerly province of the Islamic empire, called in the Arabic sources al-Andalus (almost certainly notfrom *Vandalicia, the land of the Vandals, whose passage through Spain over two centuries before had left virtually no traces, but more probably from a Germanic expression meaning ’share, parcel of land‘). But in 138/756,‘Abd al-Raḥmān I, later called al-Dākhil‘the Incomer‘, and one of the few Umayyads to have escaped slaughter in the ‘Abbāsid Revolution, appeared in Spain and founded the Umayyad amirate there.

In a peninsula where the facts of geography militated against central control and firm rule, the establishment of the Umayyad state was an achievement indeed. The amirate was based on Seville (Ishbīliya) and Cordova (Qurṭuba), but the Amīrs‘ hold on the outlying provinces was less secure. Although a good proportion of the Hispano-Roman population became Muslim (theMuwalladūn), a substantial number remained Christian (the Musta‘rabūn, Mozarabs), and looked to the independent Christian north for moral and religious support. In particular, Toledo (Ṭulayṭila), the ancient capital of the Visigoths and the ecclesiastical centre of Spain, was a centre of rebelliousness. Among the Muslims, there were many local princes whose military strength as marcher lords enabled them to live virtually independently of the capital Cordova; these flourished above all in the Ebro valley of the north-east, the later Aragon and Catalonia (e.g. the Tujībids of Saragossa and the Banū Qasī of Tudela). In the later ninth century, there were two centres of prolonged rebellion against the central government by its own Muslim subjects, one around Badajoz under Ibn Marwān the Galician, and the other in the mountains of Granada under Ibn Ḥafṣūn.

Despite these weaknesses, and despite the continued existence of the petty Christian kingdoms of the north, the Spanish Umayyads made Cordova a remarkable centre of craft industries and trade, and as a home for Arabic culture, learning and artistic production it was inferior only to Baghdad and Cairo. The tenth century was dominated by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, called al-Nāṣir ‘the Victorious‘, who reigned for fifty years (300–50/912–61). He raised the power of the monarchy to a new pitch; court ceremonial was made more elaborate, possibly with Byzantine practice in mind, and ‘Abd al-Raḥmān countered the pretensions of his enemies the Fāṭimids by himself adopting the titles of Caliph and Commander of the Faithful in place of the simple previous designation of Amīr. In this way, the rather vague ideological basis of the state, which had prevailed for over 150 years – in which the Umayyads had never been able to decide whether they were still a part, albeit peripheral, of the Islamic oecumene, or whether they were ruling over a localised, Iberian principality, Muslim in faith but turned inwards politically – was relinquished. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān now clearly set aside the doctrine of orthodox religious theory that the caliphate was one and indivisible. No longer relying primarily on the Andalusian Arab jundsor territorially-based military contingents, the Caliph built up the army‘s strength with fresh Berber tribesmen from North Africa and with slave troops brought from various parts of Christian Europe (the Ṣaqāliba). The Christians of the north were humbled and an anti-Fāṭimid policy pursued in North Africa. But after the death of al-Hakam II in 366/976, the succession devolved on minors and weaker candidates, so that real power in the state passed to the Ḥājibor chief minister Ibn Abī ‘Amir, called al-Manṣūr ‘the Victorious‘ (the Almanzor of Christian sources); it was he who captured Barcelona and who on one occasion sacked the shrine of St James of Compostella in Galicia.

Yet early in the eleventh century, the ‘Āmirid Ḥājibslost control and the Umayyad caliphate fell apart. Possible reasons for this have been much discussed by historians. It has been argued, for instance, that the numbers of Muslims in al-Andalus had increased by conversion from Christianity in ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s reign so that the Muslims were perhaps for the first time a majority there and felt a new confidence from this strength and a greater feeling of control over the land; hence they no longer saw the necessity of a strong, central government as vital for the preservation of Islam in the Iberian peninsula. If this was the case, such confidence was misplaced. The last, ephemeral Umayyads could not maintain the primacy in the state of the old Andalusian Muslims, essentially Arabs and Muwalladūn, in face of the military strength of the Berbers and ṣaqāliba. Their short reigns alternated with periods of rule by the Berberised Arab Ḥammūdids, local rulers in Malaga, Ceuta, Tangier and Algeciras (see below, no. 5, Taifas nos 1, 2). The Umayyads finally disappeared in 422/1031, and Muslim Spain fell into a period of political fragmentation, in the course of which various local chiefs and ethnic groups held power (the age of the Mulūk al-Ṭawā’ifor Reyes de Taifas: see below, no. 5); not until the coming of the Almoravids (see below, no. 14) at the end of the century did al-Andalus experience unity again.

Lane-Poole, 19–22; Zambaur, 3–4 and Table F; Album, 13–14.

EI¹‘Umaiyads. II’ (E. Lévi-Provençal).

G. C. Miles, The Coinage of the Umayyads of Spain, ANS Hispanic Numismatic Series, Monographs, no. 1, New York 1950.

E. Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l’spagne musulmane, Paris 1950–67, I–II, with Table at II, 346.