Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba

The one who got away

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

When the Abbasids hunted down the Umayyad house in 750, one grandson of the caliph Hisham escaped. Abd al-Rahman crossed North Africa with a price on his head, reached al-Andalus in 755, exploited the feud between the Arab factions governing it, and took Cordoba in 756.

He did not claim the caliphate. For 173 years his descendants ruled as amirs, governing a province they had detached from the caliphate without ever formally denying that a caliphate existed — the same posture, in reverse, that the Samanids and Tahirids would adopt in the east. What they had that the eastern governors did not was legitimacy of their own: they were the Umayyad house, and the men in Baghdad were the ones who had taken it.

Abd al-Rahman III ended the ambiguity in 929, taking the titles caliph and amir al-mu'minin. The immediate provocation was the Fatimids, whose new caliphate across the strait was recruiting Berber clients in the Maghreb and whose claim, if unanswered, would have left al-Andalus a province of somebody's empire. By 929 there were three caliphs in the Islamic world.

It is also, precisely, a claim on the Umayyads of Damascus. Not a new caliphate but the old one, resumed a hundred and eighty-four years after it fell and four thousand kilometres from where it fell, by the descendants of the one man who got out alive.

A country to be retaken

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

Abd al-Rahman III came to the throne of Cordoba in 912 as ruler of Cordoba and not much else. The two decades in which he made that into a state worth calling a caliphate are the expansion of this polity, and almost all of it was fought against people who were already his subjects.

The rebel who killed an emir

The measure of how bad it had become is Umar ibn Hafsun, a lord of Christian descent who raised the southern uplands and held them for forty years against three successive rulers of Cordoba.

Al-Maqqari preserves the episode that made his name a byword. The emir al-Mundhir had him besieged in one of his strongholds and pressed so hard that he could not get out. So Ibn Hafsun offered to surrender — to come and live in Cordoba, on terms: his life spared, his property untouched. Al-Mundhir agreed, issued the letters of pardon and safe conduct, received him in his tent and treated him with great kindness. Ibn Hafsun then asked for pack animals to carry his baggage, and was given a hundred mules and ten companies of cavalry to escort his family to the capital.

The judges and theologians who had come out with the army, seeing the war finished, travelled home with the same convoy. Ibn Hafsun followed at a distance with a band of outlaws — like the hawk hovering over his prey, in al-Maqqari's phrase — fell on the column, killed the guards, took back his family and his treasure, and returned to the mountains.

Al-Mundhir fought him for the rest of his short reign and was killed in a skirmish against him in 888, two years and fifteen days after his accession. A reigning emir of Cordoba died fighting a rebel inside his own country. That is the state Abd al-Rahman III inherited a generation later.

Taking it back

What followed was two decades of reduction: strongholds, valleys, factional lords and rebel towns, one at a time, until al-Andalus was governed from Cordoba again. Only when it was did he take the caliphal title, in 929 — the order that matters, because it meant the claim described something rather than announcing an intention.

Then the direction of effort turned outward, and the instrument was not primarily an army.

An Idrisid prince of Morocco, with the Fatimids pressing him, swore vassalage to Cordoba and asked for troops. Abd al-Rahman III would not send any unless he was given the ports of Tangier and Ceuta as hostages. The prince refused; a Cordoban fleet went and ravaged his coast until he accepted. Holding the two ports, the caliph extended his authority over the country behind them until, al-Maqqari says, he was obeyed from Tahert to Sijilmasa, and the Zanata chiefs and the Idrisids and the other great families of the Maghreb came to court to kiss his hand and hold their lands in his name.

A caliphate that had begun the reign as one city was now the arbiter of North Africa, and it got there by demanding collateral from a man asking for help.

The limit

It stopped in 939. Ramiro II of Leon broke the Umayyad army at Simancas, and the retreat was worse than the battle: it was trapped and cut down at a defile outside Zamora that the Andalusis afterwards called simply the year of al-Khandaq — the ditch.

Al-Masudi, whom al-Maqqari quotes, describes an army breaking into the outer defences there and then being caught between them: forty thousand dead, some say fifty, many of them drowned in the water-filled moats between the walls. He calls it one of the most signal defeats ever inflicted on the Muslims of al-Andalus. The figures are his, and figures of that kind in this period are never independent of the telling; what is not in doubt is what the caliph did afterwards.

He never led an army in person again. He went on making war on the Christian north for another twenty years, every year, by ordering his frontier governors to do it.

The Christian kingdoms sent embassies to Cordoba to seek his friendship anyway, which tells you the defeat had not changed the balance. But the caliph had drawn a conclusion about himself, and the state he left to his son was one that had found its edges.

The state behind the title

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

Abd al-Rahman III took the caliphal title in 929, after two decades spent retaking a country the Ibn Hafsun revolt and the Arab factional lords had fragmented — the title following the state rather than announcing it, which is why it stuck. What he built behind that title is the thing worth examining in detail.

It was a salaried machine. The army was deliberately not an Arab tribal levy: it was recruited from saqaliba, slaves of European origin, and from Berbers brought over from the Maghreb, and it was paid from the treasury. Troops with no local kin had no local faction, which is precisely why a caliph who had just spent twenty years fighting local factions wanted them. The same reasoning produced the same instrument in Baghdad, Cairo and Ghazna, and the reader who has been through those pages already knows what it costs.

From 936 he built Madinat al-Zahra, a palace-city outside Cordoba, and moved the government into it. The caliphate was now a place as well as a claim.

The Maghreb policy the first chapter gave as the provocation for the title turned into a thirty-year proxy war once he had it. Ceuta was taken in 931 and Melilla before it, and both caliphates then fought through Berber clients rather than armies, buying the same tribes away from each other. The Umayyads were paying for troops in Cordoba and for allegiances in the Maghreb out of the same treasury, and the second bill is the one the sources are quietest about.

What al-Hakam left

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

Al-Hakam II ruled for fifteen years from 961 and is remembered for what he collected rather than what he took. He extended the Great Mosque of Cordoba into the form most of its later fame rests on, and he ran an acquisition programme for the library — agents buying and copying in Baghdad, Cairo and Kairouan — that made Cordoba a place eastern scholars had reason to write to. The figures the sources give for the number of volumes are enormous and none of them can be checked; what can be said is that the collecting was systematic, funded, and organised abroad.

The more useful thing about his reign is structural, and it is the setup for everything after it.

The state his father built was personal in a specific way. The administration worked out of the palace, the army was salaried and professional, and both answered to the caliph rather than to any constituency that could have replaced him. That is an efficient arrangement and an unusually capturable one: a machine with a single point of control is a machine that changes hands completely when the point of control does.

In 976 al-Hakam died and left Hisham II, who was about eleven. Nothing had gone wrong. The treasury was full, the frontier was quiet, the army was intact, and al-Andalus was the strongest state in the western Mediterranean. Within a few years the chamberlain was running all of it, and the caliph was a formality in a palace. The next chapter dates that takeover and follows it to the end.

Calling that a decline would be wrong. Al-Andalus lost nothing for another thirty years: the treasury stayed full, the frontier stayed quiet, the army stayed intact, and the raiding went further into Christian territory than it ever had. What happened between 976 and 1009 was a state at full strength being operated by somebody other than its owner. There is no ordinary word for that condition, and the absence of one is itself the warning — a polity can be capable of everything except surviving the death of the man holding the controls.

The chamberlain who did not need the title

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

Ibn Abi Amir, called al-Mansur, was a lawyer's son from a minor Arab family who entered the palace administration as a clerk and by 981 was governing al-Andalus. He never claimed the caliphate. He did not need to: he had the caliph.

The method is worth setting out, because versions of it recur wherever a palace and an army are in different hands. He attached himself to the household of Hisham II's mother, took the chamberlainship — the hajib, the office controlling access to the caliph — and then used control of access as the whole of his authority. Hisham was kept in Madinat al-Zahra, of age, uncontested and unseen, for the rest of al-Mansur's life. In 978 al-Mansur built himself a rival palace-city, Madinat al-Zahira, and moved the government into it, so that the administration met in his house and not the caliph's. Coins were struck and the Friday sermon preached in Hisham's name throughout.

He held it by campaigning. The sources credit him with something over fifty expeditions against the Christian north in twenty-five years, of which the raid that reached Santiago de Compostela in 997 and carried its church bells back to Cordoba is the one everybody remembers. These were not conquests — almost none of the ground was held — and they were not meant to be. They kept an army in the field, produced plunder to pay it, and manufactured the one thing a usurper without a claim could offer: a continuous demonstration that the arrangement worked.

The army was the problem underneath. To campaign every year he recruited heavily from Berber contingents brought over from the Maghreb, who were loyal to him personally and had no standing in Cordoban society at all. That is the same instrument Abd al-Rahman III had used for the same reason, applied harder, by a man whose position rested on nothing else.

He died in 1002 on the way back from a campaign. His son held the arrangement for six years. His second son claimed the succession to the caliphate itself in 1008, which was the one thing the fiction could not survive.

What the jurists were asked

Drafted from Safran, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (2013)aside?What aside means

Al-Andalus is usually introduced through convivencia, coexistence, and that is not the most interesting evidence available. The interesting evidence is not that three communities coexisted — they did, as they did across the whole Islamic world on the same legal terms — but that Andalusi jurists spent two centuries answering questions about where one community ended and the next began, which is not a question that arises where the boundary is obvious.

Safran's material is the jurists' own: legal opinions, court practice and handbooks from the ninth and tenth centuries, read for the problems they were actually brought. They are strikingly practical. What is the status of a child whose parents are of different faiths. Whether a Muslim may buy meat butchered by a Christian, share a bathhouse, attend a funeral, accept a gift at a festival. What happens when a convert's family does not convert. What to do about a Christian who converts, is married, and now has a marriage the law reads differently. Whether the son of a convert may inherit from a non-convert grandfather.

Those questions arise because the boundary was dissolving in exactly the ways that make boundaries hard to police: conversion running one way in large numbers over generations, intermarriage, and Arabic becoming the language everybody used — including Christians, whose own bishops complained that young men read Arabic poetry and could not construe Latin. A ninth-century Cordoban current went further and sought martyrdom by public blasphemy, which the authorities were markedly reluctant to grant and which the Christian community's own leadership was divided about; the episode is legible as a protest against assimilation rather than against persecution.

Two things follow from it. It supplies the texture that a political history of amirs and campaigns cannot: the state in these chapters was administering a population that was becoming Muslim and Arabic-speaking underneath it, and the caliphal claim of 929 was made over a society in the middle of that change rather than after it.

And it comes at the problem from a direction the political narrative cannot. A history of amirs and campaigns is written from chronicles; this one is written from law, from cases about what a boundary between communities actually was when somebody had to rule on it.

The week

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

Al-Mansur died in 1002 and the arrangement he had built survived him by six years. Al-Maqqari records what the Andalusis called those six years afterwards, and the name is the whole of the tragedy: al-usbu, the week, because they were like the first week after a marriage.

Abd al-Malik

The succession was managed as though it were a throne, which in substance it was. Al-Mansur died at Medinaceli on campaign and was buried where he fell. His son Abd al-Malik came back to Cordoba, and the caliph Hisham II — who had by then been kept in his palace for a quarter of a century — clothed him with the robe of honour himself and signed his appointment as chamberlain, exactly as he had done for the father.

Al-Maqqari notes, in the middle of the ceremony, what it cost: this was not achieved without some alteration among the eunuchs of the palace, but at last those who leaned were put straight and the ill-disposed became loyal. A dynasty of chamberlains changing hands required a purge of the household staff, and the chronicler mentions it the way one mentions the weather.

Abd al-Malik then did what his father had done. Eight campaigns against the Christian north; Leon taken and destroyed in 1004; the titles Sword of the State and the Victorious. The Maghrawa ruler of Fez acknowledged Hisham as his liege and was granted the investiture of western Africa on condition that he proclaim Hisham's name and Abd al-Malik's from every pulpit and send Cordoba one horse, one shield and a sum of money each year, with his son as a hostage.

Then Abd al-Malik died on the way back from a campaign in 1008, and the week ended.

The one thing the fiction could not survive

His brother Abd al-Rahman took the chamberlainship and kept Hisham as secluded as before. And then he asked for the succession itself.

Hisham complied. The counsellors of state and the notaries were assembled to witness it and authorise it by their presence, and a contemporary writer told al-Maqqari it was a very solemn ceremony.

It was also the end. The arrangement had worked for thirty years precisely because it never said out loud what it was. An Umayyad caliph reigned; a chamberlain governed. The moment the chamberlain's family was written into the succession, every Umayyad in Cordoba and everyone who had accepted the fiction had a reason to act, and they did. Abd al-Rahman was assassinated. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Jabbar was proclaimed as al-Mahdi.

What twenty years of it looked like

After that the caliphate stopped being a thing anyone held for long.

Al-Mahdi turned against the Berber regiments his predecessors had recruited; they were driven out of Cordoba, camped outside it, and proclaimed a rival, Sulayman. Sulayman beat al-Mahdi and took the capital; al-Mahdi beat Sulayman and restored Hisham. Then the Berbers came back and took Cordoba by storm. There was a general massacre; Hisham was secretly put to death; houses were sacked, and men distinguished for piety and learning died with everyone else.

Then the Hammudids, who claimed descent from Ali. Ali ibn Hammud killed Sulayman and was proclaimed at Cordoba, and for eighteen months governed strictly and well — al-Maqqari has an eyewitness story of him meeting a Berber trooper riding out of the Gate of Amir with a load of grapes, asking where he had got them, being told I seized them like a man, and having him beheaded on the spot, with the head set on the grapes and paraded through the streets as a warning.

Then he learned that the Andalusis had raised an Umayyad claimant in the east, and he changed entirely. He let the Berbers loose again. The great buildings of the Umayyads were demolished or stripped, the rich were imprisoned until they ransomed themselves — and when their families came to the prison gate with led horses to carry them home, he confiscated the horses too, and the prisoners walked.

Ali was assassinated. His brother was elected by the army, expelled by the people, shut out of Seville, and ended a prisoner of his own nephew. Umayyad claimants were proclaimed and put to death in succession.

The caliphate was not conquered. It was used up — by men who each needed it for about a year.

What ten men did

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

The historian Ibn al-Raqiq set down the arithmetic of the day Cordoba changed hands, and it is the arithmetic that shocked him rather than the violence.

Between noon on Tuesday the fifteenth of Jumada II in the year 399 and the following Wednesday — one day — Cordoba was taken, Madinat al-Zahra was destroyed, one caliph was deposed and another appointed in his place, the power of the house of al-Mansur was overthrown and its vizier killed, citizen militias were raised, and the whole succession of viziers was swept away and replaced.

And then the sentence he thought most remarkable of all: that it was accomplished by ten men, who were charcoal-sellers, butchers and dung-carriers serving in the new caliph's army.

The man they raised

The new caliph was al-Mahdi, and the way he had survived to be available is the best joke in the story.

When al-Mansur had taken the state over and killed or exiled every Umayyad who stood between him and it, he had left this one alone — on the grounds that he was feeble-minded and of no consideration among the people, and therefore not worth the trouble. That man destroyed everything al-Mansur built, and inherited his wealth and his power.

He was, on the account preserved here, dissolute, cruel, vindictive and without administrative talent, and a tolerable poet. There is a verse of his about a sprig of myrtle handed to him by a page while he was drinking with guests. It compares the boy's walk to a lion's and the myrtle's fragrance to the boy's, and it is a perfectly pleasant piece of work, and it was composed by the man in whose name Cordoba was being burnt.

Thirty years, and then taifas

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

Cordoba in the tenth century was probably the largest city in western Europe, with a library the sources credit with hundreds of thousands of volumes, a translation and scholarly culture that later fed Latin Europe, and a caliph whose recognition was sought from Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire.

It came apart in about thirty years, by a mechanism that was not unique to Cordoba. A chamberlain ruling through a caliph too young or too secluded to rule himself is the same arrangement as the Buyid amirs in Baghdad and the Fatimid viziers in Cairo — arrived at independently, three times over, because a palace and an army in different hands has only so many stable configurations.

There is no agent to name for the ending. No foreign army, no rival dynasty, no conquest. A caliphate that had recently been the strongest state in the western Mediterranean was dismantled by the mechanism it had used to make itself strong, which is the same story as the Abbasids at Samarra a century and a half earlier.

What survived was the reputation

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

Three things did not survive the twenty years of civil war that followed the coup of 1009, and one did.

Not a caliphate. In 1031 the office was simply abolished by the notables of a city that had had enough of it, and al-Andalus broke into the taifa kingdoms — Seville, Zaragoza, Toledo, Granada and a couple of dozen others, each a fragment of the state ruling itself.

Not the palaces. Madinat al-Zahra had taken twelve years to build, and lasted about seventy years from foundation to ruin.

What survived was the reputation. The Andalusi historians whose accounts of this are preserved were writing under the taifa kings and after them, and what comes through the quotations is a settled conviction that something enormous had been lost, and a precise, almost forensic interest in how few people it had taken to lose it.