Taifa of Seville

A caliph made of a mat-maker

Drafted from Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (1996)formation

The caliphate of Córdoba was formally abolished in 1031 and al-Andalus broke into the taifa kingdoms — Seville, Zaragoza, Toledo, Granada and a couple of dozen others, most of them a city and its hinterland. Seville became the largest of them.

The taifas were what happened when a centralised state disintegrated in a country full of cities. Some were taken by Berber commanders of the caliphal army, some by Andalusi notables, some by the saqaliba — the slave-soldiers of European origin the caliphate had bought and armed — and some, like Seville, by their own judges. Abu al-Qasim Muhammad ibn Abbad was the qadi of the city and its most respected citizen, and in 1023 he was the man in the room when it needed a government.

He had no army, so he bought one: Berbers, Arabs, Christians, foreigners, slaves from Nubia and the Sudan, recruited and paid. That is what a rich city with no military tradition of its own does, and it is a workable arrangement for exactly as long as the money holds.

And he had no legitimacy, so he manufactured some. The caliph Hisham II had disappeared in the collapse and was probably dead; nobody knew. Around 1035 Ibn Abbad produced a man he said was Hisham — by trade a mat-maker, who resembled him — installed him in Seville, and governed in his name. Several other taifas recognised the fiction and joined the coalition it gave them a lawful head for. It let Seville act as the legitimate successor of the caliphate against Berber rivals who could only claim to have taken things.

Rulers everywhere spent enormous effort on legitimacy — caliphal diplomas, descent from Ali, manufactured mahdis, borrowed imperial titles. This is the same requirement met at the cheapest available price, by a judge, with a lookalike, in a city that needed a government by Thursday. And it worked well enough that several of the neighbours signed on.

Swallowing the neighbours

Drafted from Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (1996)expansion

Seville became the largest of the taifas by eating the small ones, and the method was not usually a battle.

The western taifas were mostly single cities with a district attached — Mértola, Huelva, Silves, Niebla, Santa María del Algarve, Ronda, Morón, Arcos — several of them held by Berber commanders left over from the caliphal army, none of them individually able to resist a rich neighbour with a bought army.

The Abbadids took them one at a time across forty years, by purchase, by marriage, by installing a claimant, by inheritance arranged in advance, and where necessary by siege. By the 1060s Seville held most of what is now southern Portugal and western Andalusia.

Córdoba

The prize was the old capital, and taking it in 1070 was the moment Seville stopped being a large taifa and started being the plausible successor to the caliphate.

Córdoba in 1070 was not what it had been. The city had been sacked in the civil wars of the 1010s, the palace-city of Madinat al-Zahra outside it had been destroyed and quarried, and the population had fallen a very long way from what it had been under Abd al-Rahman III. What it retained was the name, the great mosque, and the fact that everybody in al-Andalus knew what it had been.

Al-Mu'tamid took it, lost it to Toledo, and took it back. His son governed there. It is the only taifa acquisition that carried an argument with it rather than just revenue.

What the expansion was for

Money, and the fact that money was what the state ran on.

An army that is entirely bought has to be entirely paid, every year, whether it fights or not. Seville's revenue came from an exceptionally rich agricultural hinterland — the Guadalquivir valley, olives and grain and horses — and from the trade of a river port, and neither of those grows quickly. Territory did.

So the logic of the state pushed outward continuously, and it was still pushing when the parias started going north. A polity that needs a rising income to pay a standing army, and that is simultaneously paying tribute to Castile out of the same revenue, has an arithmetic problem that only ends one way.

The axle of the mill-stone

Drafted from Khallikan, Biographical Dictionary (1842)expansion

The man who made Seville the largest of the taifas was not the poet-king. It was his father, and the Andalusi writers found him difficult to describe without reaching for metaphor.

Ibn Khallikan quotes Ibn Bassam, who was writing within a generation, and the passage is the fullest character sketch anybody produced of a taifa ruler:

Then the authority passed to Abbad, in the year 433; he at first bore the surname of Fakhr ad-Dawlat, glory of the empire, and afterwards that of al-Mu'tadid. He was the axle of the mill-stone of civil discord and the utmost limit of affliction: think of a man whom neither strong nor weak could withstand, from whom neither the near nor the distant could escape; a mighty prince who consolidated the power which had been shaken; a lion who, whilst crouching, devoured the fawn; a precipitate politician against whom even the astucious had to be on their guard, and a dastard of whom the bravest warriors stood in awe; misguided, he followed the right path; consolidating the state, he cut away and spared not; he assaulted, and the people were hostile to him.

Then, having said all that, Ibn Bassam adds the rest of it: a handsome face, a colossal stature, a liberal hand, presence of mind, and — before ambition led him to power — a close and acute reading in literature, done without serious study, without reading far, and without any interest in collecting books. He composed verse of his own that men of letters thought worth copying out. He had, it is said, about twenty sons and as many daughters.

What the family was

Ibn Khallikan begins where these things are supposed to begin, with descent, and the descent is worth having because of where it goes.

The Abbadids were Lakhmids, and traced themselves to al-Nu'man ibn al-Mundhir, the last king of al-Hira — the Arab client kingdom on the Euphrates that the Sasanians abolished four centuries before the family reached Spain. A poet made the obvious compliment:

The sons of Abbad, the progeny of the Mundhirs — there is an origin! — have added fresh lustre to the renown of their ancestors.

The first of them in Spain was a man from al-Arish on the edge of the Sinai desert, who settled in a village outside Seville. The first to emerge from obscurity was a qadi: Muhammad ibn Isma'il, who held the judgeship of Seville and administered it, Ibn Khallikan says, with such justice and moderation that he drew on him the attention of every eye and the love of every heart.

Then the city was besieged by a tyrannical prince, and the chief men came to the judge and said: Arise then with us, and let us go forth against him; we will give thee the sovereignty over us. He accepted. The besieger, who was drunk, mounted to meet them and was killed. That is how a judgeship became a kingdom.

The son

Al-Mu'tadid ruled Seville from 1042 and spent twenty-seven years swallowing the smaller taifas of the west. Ibn Bassam's verdict — consolidating the state, he cut away and spared not — is the polite version; the Andalusi tradition remembered him for what he did to the rulers he displaced.

His own son wrote a poem about him, and it is not about any of that:

A generous prince, bestowing thousands before the request is made, and who offers excuses, thinking his gifts too small. His hand is kissed by every mighty man, and were it not for its moisture — its liberality — we should say it is the sacred stone of Mecca's temple.

The son was al-Mu'tamid, and the fact that the poem exists is most of what the taifa century was about. A king who took his neighbours' cities one at a time kept a court at which his heir wrote verse good enough to be anthologised, about him.

The omen

Ibn Khallikan ends the reign with a scene.

Al-Mu'tadid was attacked by a quinsy. Feeling death coming, he had a singer brought in, intending to take an omen from the first words of whatever she sang. She began:

We kill time, knowing that it will kill us; mix then the wine, young girl, with the water of the cloud and give us to drink.

He drew a bad omen from it, and survived five days. He died at Seville on Monday 28 March 1069 and was buried the next day.

Seventeen years later his son, holding the largest kingdom in al-Andalus, wrote to Morocco for help against Castile.

The poet, and the men he bought off

Drafted from Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (1996)peak

Seville spent the middle of the eleventh century eating its neighbours. Al-Mu'tadid, who ruled from 1042, was a poet, a competent administrator and extremely violent: he annexed Arcos, Morón, Ronda and much of the Algarve, and in 1053 dealt with a group of Berber taifa chiefs by inviting them to a bathhouse and having the hot room sealed. By 1069 the Abbadids held most of western al-Andalus.

His son al-Mu'tamid is the figure the period is remembered by, and he is remembered for the right reasons and usually without the second half.

He was the finest poet among the taifa kings, in a generation where being a poet was a qualification for the throne rather than a hobby beside it. His court at Seville is the high point of Andalusi letters. His friendship with Ibn Ammar, a poet of no family whom he made his chief minister, is one of the famous relationships in Arabic literature — and he had him killed with a hatchet, in person, after Ibn Ammar rebelled and was captured. His wife I'timad, whom he had bought as a slave, is in half the anthologies.

The second half is the tribute. By the 1060s the taifa kings were paying parias to the Christian kingdoms of the north: annual sums, in gold, in exchange for not being attacked, and often in exchange for help against other taifas. Seville paid Castile. So did Toledo, Zaragoza and Badajoz. The money came out of an economy still running on Cordoba's inheritance, and it went into the treasuries of Castile, Leon and Aragon, where it paid for the castles and the cavalry that were used to demand more of it the following year.

That is the taifa system in one sentence, and it is why the period gets treated as decadence. The judgement is unfair to the culture and exactly right about the arithmetic: thirty small states, each individually rational in paying not to be the one attacked, collectively financing the power that would take all of them.

Al-Mu'tamid understood it. He is reported to have said, when his son argued against calling in the Almoravids, that he would rather pasture camels for the Berbers than herd swine for the Castilians. It cost him his kingdom within five years.

What the small courts made

Drafted from Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (1996)aside?What aside means

The taifa century is the most productive period in the history of al-Andalus, and the reason for it is the same fragmentation that ruined the taifas politically.

Thirty small courts competing for prestige is a better market for a poet than one large one. Cordoba's scholars, secretaries and singers dispersed after 1031 into Seville, Zaragoza, Toledo, Granada, Almería, Badajoz and the rest, and every taifa king needed a chancery, a library and a court poet in order to look like a king. Al-Mu'tamid of Seville, in the chapter before this, was one of the better poets of the century and employed several of the others.

Three things came out of it that outlived every one of those states.

Ibn Hazm of Cordoba wrote the Tawq al-Hamama, the Ring of the Dove, in the 1020s: a treatise on love, its symptoms and its accidents, illustrated from people he knew and from his own life, in a register no other Arabic prose of the period uses. He also wrote the Fisal, a comparative critique of religions and sects — Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, Muslim — which is one of the earliest works of comparative religion anywhere and is argued from texts rather than from abuse.

The muwashshah and the zajal — strophic poems in classical Arabic and in colloquial Andalusi Arabic respectively, with a closing couplet often in Romance or in mixed Romance and Arabic. Those closing lines, the kharjas, are the earliest substantial evidence of Ibero-Romance vernacular poetry that survives anywhere, preserved because Arabic and Hebrew poets quoted them. The form was invented in al-Andalus and spread east across the whole Arabic-writing world.

And Toledo. When Alfonso VI took the city in 1085 — the event two chapters earlier that panicked al-Mu'tamid into sending for the Almoravids — he took a working Arabic library and a population of Arabic-reading Christians and Jews with it. Within two generations Toledo was the place where Latin Europe went to read Arabic. Gerard of Cremona and the translators around him rendered Ptolemy's Almagest, Euclid, Galen, al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina's Canon and Ibn Rushd's commentaries out of Arabic and into Latin.

That is the second leg of a journey that had begun four hundred years earlier. Greek science was translated into Arabic at Baghdad across two centuries on caliphal money; Toledo is where a large part of it was translated out again, because a taifa capital with a library changed hands and the new owners did not burn it.

It is worth stating what that means about the political history. The taifa period is conventionally treated as a decline — the caliphate broken, al-Andalus fragmented, the Christian kingdoms advancing, and eighty years of small courts paying protection money until the Almoravids arrived to end the humiliation.

All of that is true, and the same eighty years produced more poetry, more science and more transmission westward than the caliphate had in its whole existence. A dozen courts competing for the same limited supply of scholars will outbid one court every time, and the reason is not that fragmentation is good for learning but that patronage is, and fragmentation multiplies patrons.

Instalments

Drafted from Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (1996)contraction

Alfonso VI took Toledo in 1085. It was the largest of the taifa capitals, an old Visigothic royal city, and its fall was the moment the tribute the taifa kings had been paying Castile for thirty years stopped being protection and became instalments.

What the parias were

Tribute, paid annually in gold by Muslim kings to Christian ones, in exchange for not being attacked.

It had begun as protection money and it worked for a while: Ferdinand I and then Alfonso VI of Castile took large sums from Seville, Toledo, Zaragoza and Badajoz, and in return left them alone and occasionally lent them troops against each other. For a taifa king it was a rational purchase. Paying a neighbour not to invade is cheaper than an army, and the money came from cities that were still extremely rich.

The problem is what it did over thirty years. The gold went north, where it financed exactly the military establishment that was collecting it; the taifas grew poorer and Castile grew stronger on their own money; and the tribute had to be raised by taxes the religious law did not authorise, which handed the jurists an argument.

Toledo in 1085 is where the arrangement was shown to be an instalment plan. A king who has been paid not to take a city for twenty-five years can still take it, and now he can afford to.

Camels and swine

Drafted from al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (1843)end

Al-Mu'tamid, Abd Allah of Granada and al-Mutawakkil of Badajoz sent to Morocco for the Almoravids — a Saharan movement holding both ends of the West African gold road, invited across the strait by kings who wanted a battle won and not a government replaced.

Al-Maqqari preserves the argument that went on inside al-Andalus about it, and al-Mu'tamid's answer to it became proverbial.

His fellow rulers warned him what he was importing. A kingdom without heirs and one long sword do not find room in the same scabbard, they told him. His reply became a proverb in Spain:

Better be a camel driver than a driver of pigs

— meaning, al-Maqqari explains, that he would rather be Yusuf's prisoner and guard his camels in the desert than become the captive of Alfonso and keep his swine in Castile.

He also set out his reasoning, which is more careful than the epigram suggests. His position, he said, was of two sorts, one of doubt and one of certainty. Whether Yusuf or Alfonso would keep his promises was doubtful either way. What was certain was that leaning on Yusuf was an act agreeable to God and leaning on Alfonso was not. Given a choice between two uncertainties, he took the one that was not also a sin.

They got the battle. Yusuf ibn Tashfin crossed, beat Alfonso at Sagrajas near Badajoz in 1086, and went home. Then he came back, and in 1090 and 1091 he deposed the taifa kings one after another — with legal opinions from the jurists of al-Andalus and from the east holding that rulers who paid tribute to Christians out of taxes the law did not permit had forfeited their authority. The Andalusi jurists signed. It is worth pausing on that: the religious establishment of the taifas certified the removal of the taifa kings.

Seville was besieged and taken in September 1091. Al-Mu'tamid was shipped to Morocco and confined at Aghmat below the Atlas, where he lived four more years in poverty with his family, and wrote — the poems from Aghmat are the most admired he produced, and among the most admired in the language. His daughters are reported to have spun for a living. He died there in 1095 and is buried there.

The shape of it

The state was destroyed by the army it had itself imported, on a legal argument its own scholars endorsed, after a battle fought on its behalf and won.

Very few polities end that way. It is not a miscalculation about whether the Almoravids would win — they won — but about what winning would leave behind. A movement that crosses a strait to fight somebody else's war and finds that the people who invited it are richer, more sophisticated and militarily useless has no particular reason to go home twice.

The judgement on al-Mu'tamid is still contested. Al-Mu'tamid is either the man who saved al-Andalus from Castile for a century and a half, or the man who ended Andalusi self-rule to avoid paying a tribute. Both readings were current within a generation and both are current now, and there is no obvious way to settle it: the counterfactual in which he pays Alfonso for another twenty years is unavailable.

The old man at Aghmat

Drafted from al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (1843)afterlife

Al-Mu'tamid died at Aghmat, below the Atlas, in 1095, four years after being shipped out of the city he had ruled for twenty-seven.

Al-Maqqari records what happened at the graveside, and it is the detail that has kept the story alive for nine hundred years. When the funeral service was read, the prayer of the stranger was chanted, as if he had been an adventurer — the rite used for a man with no connections and no standing in the place, said over a king, without regard, al-Maqqari writes,

either to the nobility of his birth, or to the extension of his empire, or the splendour and magnificence of his court; or to his having ruled over Seville and its districts, Cordova and its Az-zahrá. Such, however, are the ways of this world.

What he wrote in prison

The poems from Aghmat are the most admired he produced and among the most admired in Arabic, and they were written by a man in chains with his daughters spinning for a living.

One fragment al-Maqqari preserves is addressed to the fetters themselves:

Chains! do ye not know that I am a Moslem? I will watch at night, until ye are moved to pity.

That is not a great king's complaint about injustice. It is a man pointing out to a piece of ironmongery that it has made a category error, which is either the last resort of somebody with nothing else to argue with or a joke, and is probably both.

Five hundred years later

In 1601 al-Maqqari went to look for the grave.

He was at Marrakesh, went out to Aghmat, and found that nobody could tell him where the tomb was. He and his companions asked such of the inhabitants as they met, without success, until

at last an old man, bent with age, showed us the place, saying, "Here lies a king of Andalus, and by his side she whom his heart loved tenderly."

They recognised it from a description in verse written by another visitor two and a half centuries earlier — Ibn al-Khatib, vizier of Granada, who had made the same journey for the same reason — and stood there for some time, al-Maqqari says, assailed by fear and thought.

The woman beside him was Rumaykiyya, the mother of his children, who had died at Aghmat before he did.

Why anybody kept going

Because al-Mu'tamid became the standing image of what happened to al-Andalus, and he became it almost immediately.

A poet-king, in the richest and most cultivated court in the western Mediterranean, who made a choice between two humiliations and chose the one he thought God preferred; who was proved right about the Christians and wrong about the Muslims; and who ended in a village in the Atlas, buried as a stranger, with his wife beside him and his children spinning wool.

Andalusi exiles told that story to each other for five hundred years, and then for another four hundred after there was no al-Andalus left to be exiled from. Al-Maqqari, writing in Cairo in the 1620s about a country his own family had been driven out of, went to stand at the grave first.