The Age of Chivalry (24 page)

Spain's Islamic civilization reached its apogee during the tenth century and was centered on the city of Córdoba. This was home to the caliphate, the institution that exercised predominance over most of the Iberian Peninsula. With a population of about half a million, Córdoba was Western Europe's largest conurbation, and the caliphate's levels of economic prosperity, intellectual vitality and artistic originality made it an advanced civilization whose only possible European rival was Byzantium. Spain had by then experienced over two centuries of intense Islamic influence, and the caliph's government must have imagined it was set to endure on Spanish soil. But the invading army that had arrived from North Africa in 711 and set in motion a huge cultural transformation was only the latest in a wave of influences to affect the peninsula
.

By the end of the 11th century Spain's pre-existing Christian civilization was once again on the march, and determined to regain the lands it had lost. Spain had been Roman long before it became Christian, and Córdoba, conquered by the Roman army in 152
BC
and seized from the Carthaginians, became capital of the imperial province of Baetica. The transformation of the Roman world during the fifth-century imperial retreat inevitably affected Spain, and during 415–18 the Germanic people known as the Visigoths (or Goths of the West) made an initial foray into the country following their leader Alaric's celebrated sacking of Rome in 410. Another Germanic grouping called the Vandals had, however, already established themselves in southern Spain by 409. It was from there that in 429 their leader Gaiseric transported his people en masse to North Africa, where the Vandals were initially Rome's federated allies—although they were to become the waning empire's implacable foes.

The Visigoths became imperial allies in 418 and were settled for this purpose in Roman Aquitania, the region between the Garonne and the Loire valleys. In the fifth century an increasingly independent Visigothic kingdom expanded from this base in Gaul, spread across the Pyrenees to most of Spain and moved its capital from Toulouse to Toledo. The Visigoths, like the Vandals, had converted to Christianity by the mid- to late fourth century, and both peoples had adopted the faith's Arian form, which denied that Christ was part of the Godhead. For Catholic Christians this exclusive emphasis on the Savior's human status was a heresy, and one which also had a major political and military consequence. The Franks were another Germanic people, and Clovis, who became their king in
c
.481, had subsequently converted to Catholic Christianity. He found the Visigoths' Arianism a useful pretext to declare war and succeeded in dislodging the Visigoths from Gaul following the Frankish army's victory of 507 at the Battle of Vouillé, near Poitiers.

R
IGHT
The Great Mosque of Córdoba, now a Christian cathedral, was built over a period of 200 years and completed by 987
.

Attachment to Arianism gave a group identity to Spain's Visigothic rulers and set them apart from their Catholic subjects. But the conversion of King Reccared to Catholicism in 587, followed swiftly by that of Spain's Visigothic nobility, gave rise to an intense brand of religious nationalism in the peninsula. Reccared's father, Leovigild, had already united most of the peninsula under his rule between 567 and 586, and his approval of mixed marriages was leading to the Romanization of the Visigoths. By
c
.600, therefore, Spain's national identity had acquired some distinctive roots and was strongly allied to the cause of the Church. One of the casualties of this Hispano-Gothic fusion was the country's large Jewish population, and the intolerance to which they were subjected led many Jews to welcome the arrival of an army of Muslim invaders in 711. Some 7000 soldiers had left Tangier under the command of the city's Arab governor, Taiq ibn Ziyad, consisting mostly of non-Arab Berber tribesmen along with a number of Syrians and Yemenis. The Visigothic nobility had only recently elected Roderick—in all probability Baetica's military governor—to the throne, and dissidents who supported the claims of the previous king's two sons joined the ranks of defectors. Toledo and Córdoba fell to Islam, and the arrival in the following year of another invasion force, again mostly Berber, meant that by 714 Islam was in effective control over most of Spain, a country that became collectively known as al-Andalus.

A
BOVE
Chintila was the Visigothic king of Galicia, Hispania and Septimania from 636 until his death in
c.
640. His statue, sculpted by François de Vôge in 1753, stands in Retiro Park in Madrid
.

Immense religious and ethnic variety emerged as the new Arab ruling élite established its rule over a population consisting of Hispano-Romans and Visigoths. Cultural and political control was promoted by a policy allowing the peninsula's large numbers of serfs to become freemen provided they converted to Islam. Spanish Christians who kept their religion but adopted the Arabs' language and social customs were termed Mozarabs. Descendants of the pre-invasion population who converted to Islam were called Muwallads, and the Berbers who arrived in successive waves of migration had a
major impact on population patterns. In 741 there was a major uprising of Berber troops garrisoned in Spain after their fellow tribesmen in North Africa rebelled against Arab rule. The subsequent arrival in the peninsula of a large army of Syrians sent to reassert Arab control ensured an even greater ethnic mix. Berber settlement had been especially strong in the northwest, and the 741 rebellion gave the Christian kingdom of Asturias, a northern outpost established in 718 by fleeing Visigothic nobles and officials, a chance to incorporate Galicia.

During this earlier period of Islamic rule al-Andalus remained part of the empire presided over by the Umayyad dynasty of rulers based in Damascus. Arab tribal rivalry within Spain was intense, but this did not diminish the desire for northern expansion, and that thrust was maintained until 732 when the Franks, under their leader Charles Martel, defeated an invading force near Tours. Defeat by Byzantium in Anatolia during 740 suggested that Islam might be reaching its territorial limits in the East as well as the West, and the caliphate of Syrian rulers was about to pay the price. Muslims who desired a continuous and consistently Islamic expansion had always considered the Umayyads too secular in style and were apt to dismiss the Damascus regime as merely “the Arab state.” Nonetheless, it was the Umayyads who had broken with the ancestral Arab custom of allowing tribal leaders to elect their leader or caliph, and they established the new principle of hereditary rule within a dynasty. Following major revolts in Iran, Iraq and Khorasan, the Umayyad army was defeated in 750 at the Battle of the Great Zab river in Mesopotamia. The victors were the new 'Abbasid dynasty, whose forces set about the bloody business of exterminating the preceding regime's leading members and supporters.

'Abd al-Rahman, the former caliph's grandson, was 16 in the year of his family's deposition and managed to escape the slaughter. Accompanied by a few loyalists, the young prince at first led the life of a fugitive in North Africa, but in 755 he succeeded in making the journey across the straits of Gibraltar from Ceuta to al-Andalus. 'Abd al-Rahman was now leading an army composed mostly of mercenaries, but he also benefited from pro-Umayyad sentiment among the local population. The governor of al-Andalus owed a nominal obedience to the now 'Abbasid-controlled caliphate, but he was still the region's effectively independent ruler. Following a military defeat, his capital city of Córdoba was seized. The Umayyad prince proclaimed himself to be emir of Córdoba and as such the rightful ruler of al-Andalus, the peninsula conquered by his ancestors. The further arrival from Syria of Umayyad partisans and officials ensured the dynasty's survival in its new base.

THE GLORY OF ISLAMIC SPAIN

711
An Islamic army consisting mostly of Berber tribesmen leaves North Africa and arrives in Spain. Toledo and Córdoba, centers of the Christian Visigothic kingdom, fall to the invaders.

714
Most of Spain is Muslim-controlled and becomes known collectively as al-Andalus.

750
The Umayyad dynasty, rulers of the Islamic caliphate in the Middle East, are expelled from power by the 'Abbasids. Islamic Spain becomes politically independent of the 'Abbasids.

929
'Abd al-Rahman III adopts the title of caliph and thereby establishes his religious independence of the 'Abbasid caliphate. He restores his dynasty's authority over Islamic rebels in Spain.

933
Fall of Toledo, last center of Muslim resistance, to the Córdoban caliphate.

976
Completion of Córdoba's Great Mosque.

978–1002
Period in office of Abu 'Amir al-Mansur as chief minister of the Cordoban caliphate and effective ruler of Islamic Spain. The caliphate establishes its authority in northwest Africa, which is administered as the viceroyalty of Cordoba.

A
BOVE
The Battle of Roncesvalles in 778, as depicted in the
Song of Roland,
is the subject of this illustration
(c.
1335/40) from a manuscript which forms part of the
Grandes Chroniques de France
(1274–1461). Roland lies dead on the ground, while a Christian knight prays over his body
.

Al-Andalus had therefore ceased to be a territorial province of the caliphate centered on Baghdad, and the institution termed the emirate of Córdoba ruled the peninsula as an independent territory. As emirs instead of caliphs, al-Rahman and his immediate successors were nonetheless claiming political rather than religious independence from the 'Abbasids, and they still had to confront major internal challenges. 'Abbasid partisans, followers of the former governor—especially in Toledo—as well as Berbers in the grip of messianic movements and who controlled most of central Spain, were all able to resist the expansion of the Córdoban emirate for some 20 years. By the late 770s 'Abd al-Rahman had defeated these particular opponents and was extending his authority to northeastern Spain, where a variety of local Arab leaders were contesting the right to local predominance. Regional overlords in Barcelona and Zaragoza invited the Franks to intervene with military assistance, but the arrival of an army led by Charlemagne prompted a change of heart. Realizing, in all probability, that so mighty an ally could turn into a threat, garrisons in the two cities refused admittance to their putative supporter, and Charlemagne's army had to retreat through the Pyrenees.

In the late summer of 778 the rearguard of the Franks' army was attacked at the mountain pass of Roncesvalles and then massacred by warriors drawn from the local Basque population. Roncesvalles was a major humiliation for Western Europe's greatest military power, and the capture of Zaragoza by emirate forces in 783 was a further containment of the Frankish Christian threat along the border zone. Major bouts of dissidence among the Arab nobility, lasting for a generation from the end of the eighth century, would nonetheless pose a significant threat to the emirate's control of the peninsula. There were other dangers, too. Muwallads might have converted to Islam, but they and their descendants had a keen sense of their own native Iberian identity, and many of them rebelled as a group in the second half of the ninth century. Mozarabs protesting against the increasing Arabization of their fellow Christians were a major public order problem in the mid-ninth century. Embracing martyrdom, they embarked on a systematic campaign of reviling the prophet's name in public—an offense punishable by death from 850 onward. Asturias, with its capital at Oviedo, emerged during this time to become an important Christian frontier state, and especially so after the discovery of St. James's supposed tomb at Compostella. With its expansion to the south, the territory became known as the kingdom of León from 910 onward, and Mozarabs flocked there in increasing numbers.