The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  Spain was not like most of the other caliphal provinces, however. It was far more decentralized, and also, for a century at least, had a rather simpler economy than many, more like the economies of the rest of western Europe, with relatively unskilled and far more localized artisanal production, than like the economically complex and heavily urbanized provinces of the caliphate, Egypt or Syria or Iraq. Even its major cities, which under the Arabs as under the Visigoths were Córdoba, Seville, Mérida, Toledo, Zaragoza and a few others, were for a long time relatively small by comparison with those of the eastern Mediterranean. Spain was also, crucially, one of the only provinces conquered by the Arabs which did not have more than a fragmentary tax system. The standard procedures for Arab occupation, based on a paid military élite in a (perhaps new) garrison city, were thus impractical. The Berbers, newly Islamized (when converted at all) in the 710s, anyway doubtless wanted simply to settle on conquered land, and did so. But even the Syrians, who were sent in in the 740s as a normal paid army, soon settled on the land too - initially as tax-farmers, soon as landowners - and just did military service (for which they were paid by the campaign); they intermarried with the Visigothic aristocracy, and into the tenth century, as we shall see, there were families who were proud of both their Arab and their Gothic ancestry.

  The amirs took what tax they could from the start, and were heavily criticized by chroniclers for it from the start (as witnessed by a mid-century Christian source, still in Latin, the Chronicle of 754). All the same, they had none of the fiscal control of governors elsewhere. Unlike anywhere else in the caliphate, they had to face a Muslim landed aristocracy from (nearly) the start as well, who might be able to resist tax-paying more successfully than their still-Christian neighbours. Nor was there much of a paid ‘state class’, either civilian or military, for some time. The existence of the frontier with the Christians in the north also led to a military-political fragmentation, with half of al-Andalus separated off into marches (thugr), based on central-northern centres like Toledo and Zaragoza, or Tudela, power-base of the ex-Visigothic Banu Qasi family, over which the Umayyad amirs, based in the south, had little control for a century and more. Spain is very regionally diverse, with bad communications, and the Muslim conquest had caused its local societies to move sharply in different directions; these contrasts were also further exacerbated by the diversities of Arab and Berber settlement. The Berbers, for example, seem to have settled in tight tribal groups in more marginal areas, but to have become ordinary (and Arabized) landowners when living in or near cities. Given this local diversity, this political fragmentation, and the need for the Umayyad amirs from the start to recognize the relevance of the politics of land, Muslim Spain was indeed as much part of western Europe as it was part of the Arab political environment.

  Faced with this reality, the Umayyads were eventually rather successful for a time, but it was a long process and it was far from straightforward. ‘Abd al-Rahman I essentially established the centrality of his own family, which was a task not yet completed in 756 - the Banu Fihri, a powerful family in both Africa and Spain, who had supplied four governors in al-Andalus alone, were still revolting into the 780s. Father- son succession then followed into the 880s without a break, and, although there were certainly succession disputes between sons, and killings of potential rivals, there was actually no protracted disagreement about which Umayyad should rule until after 1000, a remarkable record, and one which both aided stability and was made possible by it. The state was still fairly skeletal until the 820s, however. ‘Abd al-Rahman I did employ a small paid army, but it is unlikely that his tax-base extended far outside the Córdoba-Seville region, linked by the lowlands of the Guadalquivir valley, and attempts by his grandson al-Hakam I (796- 822) to stabilize that taxation led to revolt in 818, not only in marcher centres like Toledo, where uprising was fairly frequent, but among the urban population of Córdoba itself. It was not until ‘Abd al-Rahman II (822-52), a subtler ruler, that an administrative system resembling that of the caliphs of the East took shape, with higher taxation, a bureaucratic class (headed here by the hjib, the chamberlain, not by the vizir - the latter was a lesser office in Spain, and there were usually several of them) and a wider political control. ‘Abd al-Rahman II in 825 built a new city, Murcia, in the previously marginal south-east, and settled it with Arab loyalists; he confronted the rebellious tendencies of Mérida by building a large internal fortress there in 835, and another in Toledo in 837; and he developed a formal court in Córdoba, now fast expanding as a city, whose growth in power, wealth and buying-power meant that it would not henceforth be disadvantageous to the capital for the amir to be strong there.

  Al-Andalus under ‘Abd al-Rahman II and his son Muhammad (852- 86), seen from the standpoint of the state, thus came more and more to match the ‘Abbasid heartland. The former patronized poets and scholars from the East, not least the important Iraqi musician and poet Ziryab (d. 857), who was rewarded for coming west by a huge salary. ‘Abd al-Rahman’s reign was also marked by the crystallization of an ‘ulam’ on an entirely eastern model, dominated by the Maliki law school, and soon present in every major city and plenty of minor ones. Al-Andalus, with its Umayyad legitimist tradition, was almost devoid of the disputes about right rule that were so important elsewhere, and even its law was not up for discussion. This in part marks its provinciality by comparison with the East, but the cultural continuum that linked them was unbroken; that would remain true in Ibn Hawqal’s time, as we have already seen. Indeed, Spanish historians, once history-writing began in the peninsula (with ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Habib, d. 853, a wide-ranging intellectual), were capable of writing in detail about eastern events on occasion; Andalusis were consistently informed about what went on in the ‘Abbasid world. The population was also, even if slowly, converting to Islam; a majority of al-Andalus was probably not Muslim until well into the tenth century, and Christians and Jews never ceased to be influential in Andalusi culture, but political leaders and major political centres were in general mostly Muslim now. A sign of this is the strange minority movement known as the ‘martyrs of Córdoba’, Christian extremists led by Eulogius (d. 859) and Alvar, who deliberately provoked their death in the capital by insulting Islam in public in the 850s. There were less than fifty of them, and they were clearly unrepresentative of the still-large Córdoba Christian community, despite the fascination their writings (conveniently in Latin) have had for recent scholars; but the desperation of their stand implies that they saw only extreme measures as adequate against the steady advance of Muslim hegemony.

  This process of increasing amiral power on eastern political models was falling apart, however, by Muhammad’s death, and the 880s-920s were a long period of generalized disturbance or fitna. Muhammad already had trouble with Toledo and Mérida; he made peace with the former in 873, and sacked the latter in 868, but then nearby Badajoz, which became an alternative political centre to Mérida in the 870s, turned to revolt too under the former Méridan leader ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Marwan al-Jilliqi (d. 892). In the 880s ‘Umar ibn Hafsun (d. 917) also revolted from his base at Bobastro in the far south, above Málaga. Under Muhammad’s son ‘Abd Allah (888-912), more and more local lords established effective independence, both in the marches and in the Andalusian heartland of the Guadalquivir valley. ‘Abd Allah was an ineffective and reclusive ruler, but the problem was a wider one. The Muslim landed aristocracy, many of whom (including Ibn al-Jilliqi and Ibn Hafsun) had at least partial Visigothic ancestry, had effective local bases and local loyalties. They could be happy with an expanding state, from which they could benefit, even though the growing fiscal demands of that state were opposed to their immediate interests, but if the state faltered they would look to their localities, rather than to the person of the amir. Beneath the ‘Abbasid-style political system in Córdoba, that is to say, the more western-style local political practice, already discussed, continued to exist. Iran, with its surviving Sassanian aristocratic families, offers the cl
osest parallel, including the survival of pre-Arabic political imagery in local social memory; the Zoroastrian legitimists that can be found in Iran as late as the tenth century have their parallel in ‘Umar ibn Hafsun, who actually converted to Christianity in 898. But Iran also had other regions with strong paid armies and depoliticized local societies, which tended to dominate politically. In Spain, the permanent paid army was still not substantial, and military service was largely controlled, as in other parts of the West, by the very aristocrats whose loyalty was now in doubt. When even Seville in 899 established effective autonomy under a member of one of its local élite families, Ibrahim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 911), called ‘king’ (malik) in the sources, the state risked breaking up.

  ‘Abd Allah’s grandson and successor, ‘Abd al-Rahman III (912-61), was the ruler who reversed this trend, and by doing so he inaugurated three generations of strong central power, the strongest known in Spain between the Romans and the thirteenth century. ‘Abd al-Rahman III understood that the only way to cope with this decentralization was to fight, systematically and without a break. In only two years he re-established control over the Guadalquivir valley; thereafter he pushed outwards, expanding his army as he did so, not just in the old amiral heartland but in the marches as well. Bobastro fell in 928, Badajoz in 930, Toledo in 932. ‘Abd al-Rahman for the most part incorporated the lords he uprooted into his army or else into the civilian state class in Córdoba, but they were, crucially, separated from their local power- bases and incorporated into a tax-based political system that was less superficial in its similarity with the East than in the previous century. This was underlined further by a great increase in slave and ex-slave soldiers, who were mostly Saqliba, ‘Slavs’ (though the word extended to include other northern Europeans). From as early as 916 this enlarged army was also sent north against the Christians, which further allowed ‘Abd al-Rahman (who, unusually, often led his own troops) to impose himself in the marches. In the end, he came fully to control all of al-Andalus except the Upper March in the far north-east, whose lords gave him military service and tax but remained autonomous. Even there, the main old ex-Visigothic family, the Banu Qasi, had lost its power by 907, and was replaced as a regional focus by the Tujibis, a family close to the Umayyads, which had been given Zaragoza in 890 in one of Amir ‘Abd Allah’s rare effective interventions. This hegemony was not weakened, except partially in the Upper March, by ‘Abd al-Rahman’s only serious military defeat, against the Christians of León in 939 (see Chapter 20). This overall success, plus the collapse of ‘Abbasid power in the same period and the Fatimid establishment of a rival Shi‘a caliphate in 910, led ‘Abd al-Rahman III to proclaim himself caliph, as al-Nasir, in 929.

  The tenth century was the period when the ceremonial of the ruler developed most fully. Córdoba gained a series of new suburbs, and, with its monumental mosque in the centre, greatly enlarged by ‘Abd al-Rahman’s son al-Hakam II (961-76), moved into the league of Constantinople and Cairo as a metropolis. ‘Abd al-Rahman also founded around 940 an impressive new court and administrative centre at Madinat al-Zahra’, just north-west of the city. Here, caliphal ritual is recorded in a number of texts, from the Life of John of Gorze, ambassador for Otto I in around 953-6, intransigent in its (and its subject’s) hostility to Islam but unwillingly impressed by the complexity of the court, to the 971-5 section of the history by ‘Isa al-Razi (d. 989), preserved a century later in the Muqtabis of Ibn Hayyan (d. 1076), which provides us with several detailed accounts of particular ceremonial moments at the high points of the Muslim religious year. In the caliph’s main reception hall at Madinat al-Zahra’, all major officials had their allotted positions, in two lines, with the caliph at the end; the majesty of caliphal power was intended to be, and was, made very clear.

  The tenth century was also a period of larger-scale economic activity. We shall see in the next chapter that al-Andalus participated in Mediterranean exchange, through the port of Almería, founded (or, rather, walled and expanded) by ‘Abd al-Rahman III in 955. Internally, too, we can see in recent archaeology the development of centralized and professional artisanal production of ceramics and glass, including glazed pottery in east Mediterranean styles, not least a ‘green and manganese’ decorated ware, which appears extensively on Spanish sites of the period, and which seems to have been made largely in Córdoba and other major centres. That latter ware has explicit caliphal associations, as can be seen in the frequent inscription al-mulk (‘power’) along the edges of plates and bowls, especially but not only in Madinat al-Zahra’. But this sort of artisanal activity cannot be in itself ascribed to ‘Abd al-Rahman or his political success. Tenth-century artisanal work built on that of the ninth, which was notably more professional than that of the eighth; it testifies to the steady development of hierarchies of wealth and élite demand in most of the Muslim parts of the peninsula. (Not the Christian parts; but Arab-made artisanal goods, especially carpets, cloth and leather, were nonetheless prized there as luxuries.) One thing this growing economic complexity shows is that the rich aristocracies of the ninth century had by no means gone away; they had simply been absorbed into the caliphal political hierarchy, or else into the local ‘ulam’ hier archies of the cities of al-Andalus - or else both, for Spain was not that large, and the deracinated Slav (and, later, Berber) armies were only part of the ‘state class’. Their identity and assumptions are well expressed by the historian and grammarian Ibn al-Qutiya (d. 977), son of a judge in Seville, who wrote a chatty history full of stories about the huge landed wealth of his ancestors, who supposedly included Sara ‘the Goth’ (al-Qtiya), granddaughter of King Wittiza; Ibn al-Qutiya was nonethe- less as focused on the doings of the Umayyads as any other historian, and clearly bought into the values of the court. All that ‘Abd al-Rahman did here - not a small thing, however - was to create the political foundation for the linkage of the local economies and societies of the ninth century in a single network, covering the whole of the Spanish caliphate.

  Al-Hakam continued his father’s political practices; he was well known as a literary patron, too. His military expansion, especially in 972-5, was southwards, into Morocco, which had been largely left to its own devices after the Fatimid move into Egypt. At his death, however, his son al-Hisham II (976-1009, 1010-13) was only fifteen; power was seized by one of al-Hakam’s military leaders in Morocco, Muhammad ibn Abi ‘Amir, who had a loyal detachment of Berbers to help him win a coup against their Slav rivals. Ibn Abi ‘Amir steadily eliminated all other powerful figures in the court, and in 981 assumed supreme power as ruling ajib for a figurehead caliph, even giving himself the ruling title of al-Mansur (in Spanish Almanzor, 981-1002). Al-Mansur greatly developed the Berber component of his army to counterbalance the Slavs. He fought in Morocco, too; but he principally sent his armies to the north, against the Christian kingdoms and principalities, whom he defeated time and again, notably but not only in the devastating sack of Barcelona in 984 and of Santiago de Compostela in the far north-west in 997; his son al-Muzaffar (1002-8) continued this as well. In this military dominance, coupled with a substantial internal stability, and a continuation of the central ceremonial role of Córdoba - where al- Mansur built yet another suburban administrative centre, Madinat al-Zahira - the Umayyad caliphate appeared to reach its height.

  As with the ‘Abbasid high point under al-Mu‘tasim and al-Wathiq, however, this hegemony would not last. Indeed, almost as soon as al-Muzaffar died, al-Andalus disintegrated into a twenty-year civil war (1009-31). The detailed reasons for this lie outside our period; they essentially lie with the political ineptness of al-Muzaffar’s successors, and power-struggles between Berber and Slav leaders. But this fitna was far more serious than its predecessor a century earlier; it included a violent sack of Córdoba itself in 1013, and the abandonment of the nomination of caliphs altogether, by now all of them figureheads, in 1031. By that date al-Andalus was divided between thirty or so kingdoms, known as the Taifas (from t’ifa, ‘faction’), and it neve
r recovered ‘Abd al-Rahman’s political unity or al-Mansur’s military protagonism. This collapse was so fast and so complete - far faster than that of the ‘Abbasids, and resulting in independent polities that were in many cases single city territories, far smaller than the successor states in the East - that it needs some comment.

  Some of the Taifa kingdoms were ruled by regional army commanders, Slav or Berber, who simply turned their commands into autonomous, and then independent, units as central authority collapsed in the 1010s, as in the East. Some, especially in the north-east, were ruled by long-standing families whose local power had been recognized even by ‘Abd al-Rahman III, the Tujibis in Zaragoza or the Dhi’l-Nunids of the upland Santaver area, who in 1018 occupied Toledo. But some, including perhaps the richest, Seville, were taken over by local landowners who had civic, not state, office: not necessarily from the same families who had dominated around 900, but at least from the same social stratum. We have to conclude that ‘Abd al-Rahman III had not definitively ended the presumption, which had always been stronger in al-Andalus than elsewhere in the Muslim world, that landownership brought potential rights to political authority. And, even more important: notwithstanding the substantial territorial reorganizations of the caliphal period - with governorships both large and small tightly controlled by central government, and many of the local fortifications of the first fitna simply taken over by the state - ‘Abd al-Rahman and his successors had not succeeded fully in undermining that other core Spanish presupposition, that practical politics was local. In both these respects, the Visigothic inheritance of al-Andalus comes out in the Taifa period. The amirs and caliphs succeeded in establishing a tax-based state, such as had not existed in Spain since the Roman empire, and this indeed continued under the Taifas; but they did not manage to move their Andalusi population to the assumptions that prevailed in Egypt or Iraq, even in the fragmented tenth century, that only the control of the state mattered, and that a land-based local politics was marginal. When the state faltered, in the 1010s as in the 880s and, earlier, in the 710s, Spain’s localities at once moved centre stage. When a degree of reunification belatedly came this time, with the Almoravids at the end of the eleventh century, the Christians had taken Toledo and the whole balance of power had shifted.