The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (21 page)

as in the Roman Empire, there was a point where a suffi cient percentage of the subject urban and aristocratic population merged into the

dominant imperial elite that the original Arab conquerors lost control

of their imperial state. Nonetheless, the prominent role of Jews and

Christians as advisors, diplomats, merchants, artists, and men of letters during the caliphate demonstrates that some
dhimmi
remained

in Al-Andalus until the Almoravid and Almohad purges. Indeed, they

continued to play these roles for the
taifa
rulers.

Convivencia
came to a conclusive end under Berber rule as the

growing power of the northern kingdoms, coupled with the western European Crusades, introduced greater levels of mistrust and

intolerance into Iberia. The rulers of the Christian north had never

reconciled themselves to a Muslim presence on the peninsula, but

this did not prevent them from intermarrying with the Umayyad

royal family during the heyday of Al-Andalus. By the thirteenth century, however, northern chroniclers began to write about Muslims

in increasingly uncompromising terms. The Almoravids, who were

equally intolerant, responded to repeated northern attacks by declaring that the remaining Andalusi Christians were no longer entitled to

protection as
dhimmi
. In the urban centers, this resulted in massacres,

forced conversions, and mass fl ight to the north. The northern kings

also contributed to the demise of Christian Al-Andalus by forcing

the arabized Christian Mozarabs from “liberated”
taifa
states to emigrate to underpopulated regions in their own realms, thereby further

demonstrating that people were the most valuable and exploitable

imperial resource.

106 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Technically, Al-Andalus lasted from 711 to 1492, but real Muslim power in Iberia ended with the demise of the Almohads in 1212.

Weakened by new rivals in North Africa and Iberian revolts, the

Almohads fell to a Vatican-brokered alliance of the kingdoms of León,

Castile, Navarre, and Aragón. Their retreat to North Africa allowed

the Christians to overrun all of Iberia except for a small Andalusi

rump state known as the Emirate of Granada. Founded by Muhammad ibn Yusuf ibn Nasr, Granada was a weak federation of regional

warlords that paid tribute to the Kingdom of Castile. In essence,

Muhammad was a Castilian vassal who controlled only one-tenth of

the original Al-Andalus. The emirate survived on Christian sufferance and because its mountainous borders were heavily fortifi ed with

watchtowers and castles.

The complete Christian “reconquest” of Iberia was a much longer and bloodier process than the lightning Arab-Berber invasion

of 711. For a time, rulers such as Alfonso VI of León treated vanquished Muslim populations with relative tolerance. Upon capturing Toledo in 1085, he promised the city’s Muslims that he would

protect their property and religion. Crusading French monks and

knights fi ghting alongside the Iberians sabotaged the accord by

turning the main Toledan mosque into a church. Thereafter, massacres and mass enslavements by victorious Christian armies became

the norm.

Like the Mozarabs, Iberian Muslims now faced the choice of

oppression, conversion, or emigration. Most elites fl ed to North

Africa after failed rebellions in the thirteenth century, and those

who stayed behind were mostly urban artisans and peasant farmers. These Mudejars, whose name came from the Arabic
mudajjan
,

“those who remain,” were quite similar to the Mozarabs. Like their

Christian counterparts, most spoke the language of their rulers rather

than Arabic. But unlike the
dhimmi
under the caliphate, they had

no legal standing or protection. They lived in segregated neighborhoods and faced torture and death for proselytizing or having sexual

relations with Christian women. There was no Christian version of

convivencia
.

The increasingly precarious position of the Mudejars in the fourteenth century refl ected the importance of Christianity as a legitimizing ideology for the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Queen Isabella

Muslim

Spain 107

of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragón, whose marriage brought

political unity to the northern kingdoms, were self-declared Catholic monarchs. Their fi nal invasion of Granada in 1492 was a papally

sanctioned Crusade that provided a moral basis for their creation of a

single Spanish crown. Those Jews and Muslims who remained after

the completion of the Reconquista had to convert, emigrate, or practice their faith in secret to escape the persecution of the Inquisition.

The resurgent Spanish church was far more jealous and mistrustful

of rivals than its Visigothic forebearer, which had learned to coexist

with Umayyad rule.

Nationalist Spanish historiography tends to downplay the brutality of these times in celebrating the reemergence of the “true”

Roman and Christian Spain after centuries of oppressive Muslim

rule. It seems much more likely that the Reconquista was the culmination of another cultural realignment by Iberian elites who once

again adapted to the changing realities of imperial rule by gradually

shifting their identity. This time, however, the aggressive and intolerant strain of Christianity that legitimized the Reconquista made

it virtually impossible for the remaining Muslim elites to follow

the example of the Roman and Visigothic aristocracies in coming to

terms with the new conquering power. Although they were not yet

national, European identities were becoming much more rigid at the

dawn of the early modern era.

At fi rst glance, the original Arab caliphate and the Umayyad emirate/caliphate in Spain might not seem to fi t conventional defi nitions

of empire. Yet there is no denying the fundamental imperial character

of both versions of the caliphate. They arose through military victories that transformed alien peoples into subjects who in the immediate

postconquest era suffered enslavement, discrimination, and exploitation as a consequence of their inferior status. The Arabs ruled these

subject majorities indirectly, a tactic they learned from their imperial

Roman, Byzantine, and Sassanid predecessors. Although these conquests brought them tremendous power, Muslims also worried that

the wealth and cross-cultural intimacies of imperial rule would bring

corruption and social contamination. These anxieties beset all empire

builders.

The Arab caliphate was relatively unstable and short-lived compared to other ancient and medieval empires. Initially, it held an

108 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

advantage over Rome in having Islam as a powerful legitimizing

engine of empire. While the Romans were self-confi dent, the fi rst

Muslim armies were absolutely certain that God sanctioned and facilitated their victories over nonbelievers. Yet Islam’s clear and powerful

obligation on all Muslims to proselytize complicated, and ultimately

undermined, the rigid social boundaries required for sustained imperial extraction. Although the
mawali
converts suffered institutionalized discrimination by the original Muslim Arabs, they became equal

partners in the imperial project within a few centuries. Conversion

thus became a means of escaping subjecthood. The Abbasid revolution had complex origins and consequences, but the
mawali
’s central

role in overthrowing the Umayyad regime meant that once-subject

peoples had captured the empire. Although historians do not generally write of the later Roman Empire in this fashion, it seems likely

that Roman empire builders suffered a similar fate. Conversely, the

realities of indirect imperial rule led the Arabs to adopt and assimilate the cultural values of their subjects much more extensively than

their Roman predecessors. This was romanization in reverse.

The Umayyad regime in Iberia embodied the same strengths and

weaknesses as the original imperial caliphate. As a peripheral offshoot of a sprawling transcontinental empire, Al-Andalus was a far

more manageable imperial unit. The Romans had already done the

heavy lifting of setting up the extractive systems of empire, and the

Visigoths had begun the process of adapting these institutions to

the medieval era. It was therefore a relatively simple matter for the

Umayyads to take up where the earlier empire builders had left off.

But the caliphal imperial systems that initially proved effective in

colonizing and reordering imperial Al-Andalus also fl oundered over

the thorny question of subjecthood. Islamic evangelicalism helped

win over Iberian notables by allowing them to retain their status and

wealth through conversion, but the
muwallad
revolts of the ninth

century represented, at least in part, an attempt by these elites to

recapture their political power within an Islamic context. More signifi cant, the cross-cultural exchanges that were at the heart of
convi-

vencia
were profoundly incompatible with imperial rule.

In blurring the political, religious, social, and gendered boundaries between citizen and subject,
convivencia
essentially turned

the Umayyads into Iberians. Abd al-Rahman I, the founder of the

Muslim

Spain 109

dynasty, was the son of a Berber woman, and his heirs had no qualms

about having sex with Iberians to father their successors. Abd al-Rahman III’s caliphate dominated the peninsula, but it was very much

a hybrid Iberian institution that probably would have seemed quite

alien and upsetting to the original
baladiyyun
Arab settlers. Just as

romanization allowed subject communities to create new conceptions

of Romanness, islamization in Al-Andalus gave Iberians the opportunity to redefi ne what it meant to be a Muslim and an Arab. The

Andalusi Umayyads’ inability to maintain suffi cient distance from

their subjects ultimately cost them their privileged imperial identity.

They may have built an empire, but they failed as colonists. Cut off

from the Arab heartland, they eventually became Iberians.

Later generations of Spaniards told the story of Roderic and Hercules’s Tower to explain how their ancestors had suffered the indignity of becoming imperial subjects. Yet the majority of rural Iberians

did not need to become Muslims. Their overlords may have shifted

from Christianity to Islam and then back again, but the rural population escaped the full weight of imperial oppression because medieval

empires were relatively weak.

Centuries later, the peoples of the Andean highlands invented a

fable strikingly similar to the myth of the tower to explain how they

had fallen victim to a much more invasive and pernicious form of

imperial rule. They told the story of how the Inka emperor Wayna

Qhapaq had called the conquistador descendants of the Visigoths

down on them by rashly opening a box brought to him by a mysterious messenger in a black cloak. Like Roderic, he could not contain his

curiosity, and opened the box to fi nd that it contained butterfl ies and

moths that scattered throughout the land. Clearly inspired by the

Greek story of Pandora that came to the Andes with the Spaniards, the

insects were “the pestilence of measles, and within two days . . . many

[Inka] captains died, all their faces covered with scabs.”27 Faced with

devastating epidemics, the collapse of Inkan power, and merciless

invaders, the Andeans used this millenarian story to explain how

imperial conquest had turned their world upside down.

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3

Empire by Franchise

It is tempting to imagine what the Inka ruler Atawallpa was thinking

as the Spanish friar Vicente de Valverde approached him, Bible in

hand, on November 16, 1532. Seated high on a litter borne by his

most senior nobles in the plaza of the Andean city of Cajamarca,

the Sapa Inka (emperor) looked down on a delegation of foreigners.

Through his interpreter Felipillo, Valverde was to speak for a small

band of conquistadors who had landed on the coast two years earlier.

Atawallpa probably considered the Spaniards to be impertinent,

exotic, and potentially dangerous; his spies had kept him fully aware

of their activities as they made their way into the central Andes. As the