The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (18 page)

Abd al-Rahman thus established himself as an imperial ruler. Seeking a base from which to restore the fortunes of his family, he transformed Al-Andalus from a caliphal province into a hereditary Umayyad

emirate. Initially, the term
emir
referred to an Arab provincial governor

or general, but over time it became a title for an independent Muslim

90 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

ruler. To common Iberians, who had endured imperial rule since Roman

times, it must have seemed as though the Umayyad emirate was the

same empire under new management. Following precedent, Abd alRahman and the succeeding Umayyad emirs retained many of the

imperial institutions inherited from their predecessors. They relied

on Visigothic law and legal offi cials in the rural areas, and employed

non-Muslim magistrates, who most likely were holdovers from Roman

times, to adjudicate urban cases that did not fall under Islamic law. Little,

as far as the common Iberians were concerned, had changed.

The emirate’s direct reach never extended very far into the countryside, but Abd al-Rahman ended the chaos of the “governors’ era”

by creating a more centralized administration. Shifting his capital to

Córdoba, he established specialized departments for fi nance, justice,

foreign relations, frontier defense, and the supervision of
dhimmi
.

Viziers from loyal Umayyad client families ran these bureaus, but the

Umayyads also employed Jews and Christians in specialized administrative and technical positions. As in most all premodern empires,

their power base was largely urban. Abd al-Rahman and his heirs

appointed provincial governors, but ultimately Al-Andalus was a feudal state. As such, the emirate needed powerful local elites to wage

war, collect revenue, and extend its authority into the countryside.

These vassals were a heterogeneous group that included
baladiyyun
,

Syrians, Umayyad
mawali
, Berbers, and
muwallad
(Iberian converts). Abd al-Rahman I commanded their loyalty, but his weaker

heirs often lost control.

It took the emir roughly two decades to establish his authority

over the most productive southern regions of the peninsula. For a

time, he fantasized about using Al-Andalus as a base to recapture the

caliphate, but he eventually settled for dropping the Abbasid caliph’s

name from Friday prayers. The Abbasids, in turn, similarly schemed

to retake their wayward province and, most likely hoping for a general

uprising, sent a representative to reclaim the Iberian governorship.

Abd al-Rahman returned this underling’s head as a warning. AlAndalus was thus permanently shorn from the caliphate. Like Roman

Britain, it was originally one of the most remote territories of a wider

empire. Yet none of the Umayyad governors or emirs were able to

replicate Constantine’s feat in using a power base on the periphery to

claim, or in Abd al-Rahman’s case recapture, the imperial metropole.

Muslim

Spain 91

Instead, the slow pace of medieval travel and communication allowed

the Andalusi emirs to set themselves up as independent rulers, a feat

that eluded the Roman provincial governors.

Although Abd al-Rahman and his heirs never stopped hating the

Abbasids, the emerging Christian kingdoms of northern Spain were

a much more tangible threat. Neither the Romans nor the Visigoths

had been able to control the people of the peninsula’s northern mountainous regions fully. Christian chroniclers recorded that a minor

Visigothic noble named Pelayo exploited this tradition of resistance

by escaping north to found the Kingdom of Asturias. Pelayo is something of a mythical fi gure, but his successor and reputed son-in-law,

Alfonso I, made himself known to the Umayyad emirs by raiding

south into Muslim territory. Alfonso’s heirs intermarried with the

royal house of Pamplona/Navarre, thereby sowing the seeds of the

Kingdom of Castile, which would reconquer the peninsula for Christianity in the fi fteenth century.

From the hindsight of romantic nationalism and modern antiIslamic phobia, the early northern kingdoms might appear as Christian bastions that valiantly held out against the Muslim invaders. In

reality, Asturias and the other small northern kingdoms served a useful purpose by providing an opportunity to raid, loot, and establish

jihadist credentials. The emirs rarely tried to seize Christian territory.

Instead, they established a fortifi ed frontier stretching from the Ebro

River valley in the northeast to what is today northern Portugal in

the west. Popularly known as the Thughr, or “front teeth,” these borderlands consisted of small semi-independent fi efdoms ruled mostly

by Berbers and
muwallad
converts. Interestingly, the Banu Qasi clan

that controlled the Ebro Valley claimed descent from a Visigothic

noble, Count Cassius. Musa ibn Forton, a member of this family who

ruled from the city of Zaragoza in the late eighth century, married into

the Pamplona royal family while remaining a vassal of the Umayyad

emirs. Romantic nationalism aside, the lines between Christian and

Muslim Iberia blurred markedly in the early medieval era.

This trend became more pronounced as direct Umayyad infl uence

over Iberia declined after Abd al-Rahman I’s death in 788. Struggles

between his sons over succession brought a return to factionalism,

and the emirate’s military might waned as landed Arabs, the backbone of the Umayyad armed forces, gained the right to buy their way

92 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

out of their obligation for military service. Moreover, the political

unreliability of Syrian and Berber troops led the emirs to use slave

soldiers as bodyguards and household troops. These foreign but more

dependable forces were too expensive to be used in large numbers.

The emirs therefore lost control over much of Al-Andalus to their

own vassals. At its lowest point in the late ninth century the emirate had direct control over only Córdoba and its immediate suburbs,

and Emir Abd Allah had to acknowledge Muslim warlords throughout the peninsula as local kings. The extended occupation of fortifi ed

hilltop settlements in the south suggests widespread rural unrest and

implies that the emirate’s extractive reach was also slipping.

Financial problems born of the relatively loose boundaries of subjecthood were at the root of this instability. Conversion to Islam by

common Iberians reduced the emirate’s revenues from the
jizya
(poll

tax) and the
kharaj
(land tax). Muslims paid only the
zakat
, and perhaps the
kharaj
if they had acquired land from Christians. Although

Al-Andalus recovered from the Mediterranean-wide recession following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the emirs did not have the

power to tap the peninsula’s commercial and agrarian wealth directly.

Relying on irregular land taxes, military exemption payments, and

licensing fees on frivolities such as falconry, they lost the resources to

mint coins by the late ninth century.

The empty treasury forced the Umayyads to demand more taxes

from all Iberians regardless of their religious status. Not surprisingly, a broad cross section of Andalusi society including Berbers,

frontier warlords, Arab immigrants,
muwallad
converts, and, most

likely, common Christians bitterly resisted this push for economic

and administrative centralization. Iberian converts were an even bigger problem. Even though the
muwalladun
had embraced Islam, the

Andalusis regarded them as second-class Muslims, a subordinate distinction that did not exist in the wider Islamic world. The taint of the

muwalladun
’s non-Islamic origins lingered, as “pure” Arabs openly

derided them as inferior. Finding it easier to defend the boundaries of

ethnicity than religion, the Andalusi elite made a science of genealogy to emphasize the pedigree of their Arab lineage, thereby suggesting that
muwalladun
were untrustworthy. Unlike the
mawali
of the

larger caliphate, the Spanish
muwalladun
lacked patrons or sponsors

to ease their absorption into the community of Muslims.

Muslim

Spain 93

These tensions came to a head in the ninth century when systematic discrimination and the weakness of Umayyad regime inspired

muwallad
feudal elites to rebel. The
muwalladun
of Toledo, who were

most likely descended from the old Visigothic aristocracy, staged a

general uprising in 807 that Emir al-Hakam I crushed ruthlessly.

Rural
muwallad
warlords proved much harder to deal with. Living

on the rent and tribute of the rural peasantry, they were neither folk

heroes nor popular anti-imperial nationalists. Rather, they were local

power brokers from Iberian families that had converted to Islam to

preserve their infl uence. Recognizing the waning power of Córdoba,

they now calculated that they could safely defy the emirate.

Umar ibn Hafsun, who claimed descent from a Visigothic count,

mounted the most serious challenge to Umayyad sovereignty. Operating from his fortifi ed base at Bobastro in the Málaga Mountains,

the
muwallad
warlord held sway over most of southern Iberia from

878 until his death from natural causes in 917. His forces failed to

capture Córdoba, but the Umayyad military was equally incapable

of dislodging him from his mountain stronghold. Putting military

methods aside, Abd al-Rahman III fi nally captured Umar’s fortress by

exploiting divisions among his sons. His propagandists then sought

to discredit the
muwallad
leader by claiming to have discovered that

he had been buried as a Christian when they dug up his body to crucify him posthumously. There is no denying that the Hafsunid family

had Christian support, but in actuality the great
fi tna
(rebellion) by

Umar and his fellow warlords was an attempt by rural elites to regain

the autonomy they lost at the time of the Muslim conquest.

It fell to Abd al-Rahman III to revive the fortunes of the Umayyad

line. The grandson of a princess of Navarre and the son of a Christian

slave concubine, Abd al-Rahman was technically 75 percent Iberian.

He reportedly had blue eyes, light skin, and reddish hair that he dyed

black to appear more Arab. His grandfather, Emir Abdullah, chose him

as his heir over a host of uncles and nephews with equally valid claims

to power. Concerned with political challenges from his own offspring,

the emir apparently concluded that he could trust the young man to

wait to come into his political inheritance by natural means.

Taking power in 912 at the age of twenty-one, Abd al-Rahman

III reorganized the emirate in a bid to reassert his authority over all

of Al-Andalus. He expanded and reorganized its central bureaucracy

94 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

and provincial administration, which enabled him to collect fi ve and a

half million silver dirhams per year. This was roughly eighteen times

the annual income of his forebearer Abd al-Rahman I, and it provided

the resources for an Umayyad military revival.15 Warlords and petty

kings who submitted retained a measure of authority, but those who

resisted faced retribution at the hands of a new force consisting of

Arab allies, Berbers, northern Christian mercenaries, and slave soldiers from North Africa, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Abd al-Rahman III explicitly used jihadist language to legitimize his campaigns against rebellious
muwallad
nobles, whom he

accused of abandoning Islam to return to Christianity. Confi dent in

his hold on power, in 929 he declared himself caliph of the entire

Muslim world, in direct opposition to the Abbasids. His forebearers

never made such a claim, but his was a less audacious move in an era

when the Abbasids were mere fi gureheads in Baghdad and a rival

Shi’a Fatimid caliphate already existed in North Africa. The declaration of an Umayyad caliphate in Al-Andalus meant very little in

the wider world of Muslim politics, but it bolstered Abd al-Rahman’s

legitimacy at home.

The Iberian Christian kingdoms also gave the new regime a useful

foil. Styling himself a champion of Islam, Abd al-Rahman resumed

the raids on the north for slaves and booty. These continued until 939,

when the caliph almost lost his life in an ambush. Apparently shaken

by his brush with death, Abd al-Rahman shifted to extracting tribute

and concessions from Christian rulers. He forced León and Navarre

to acknowledge his suzerainty and restored his client Sancho the Fat

to the Navarese throne.

As the greatest power in Iberia since Roman times, Abd al-Rahman III’s caliphate presided over an impressive economic renewal.

Rejoining the Mediterranean commercial world, Al-Andalus gained

access to a broad array of useful crops, including rice, hard wheat,

cotton, citrus fruits, bananas, spinach, and sugar cane, that Arab

agronomists introduced into the Islamic heartland from Asia. Most

of these plants required extensive irrigation for commercial production. Andalusi experts solved the problem by combining imported

techniques with local Iberian irrigation practices dating from Roman

times. The resulting agricultural boom raised living standards, fed the