4th Lesson: Islamic Spain

I.TIMELINE

a) The origins of islamism

Hegira         622

Death of Muhammad   632

Muslim conquest Alexandria  642

Division among sunnites and chiites (Ali) 656

Foundation of Kairwan  (Tunisia)  670

Muslims conquer Sebta (Ceuta)  709

b) Basic chronology of Al-Andalus

1. Conquest and occupation 711-756      

2. Emirate of Cordoba (756-929)

Abd-al-Rahman I 756-788

Hisham I 788-796

al-Hakam I 796-822

Abd-al-Rahman II 822-852

Muhammad I 852-886

al-Mundhir 886-888

Abdallah 888-912

Abd-al-Rahman III 912-929

3. Caliphate of Cordoba (929-1031)

Abd-al-Rahman III 929-961

al-Hakam II 961-976

Hisham II 976-1009

Amirid dictators:

al-Mansur 976-1002

Abdul-Malik 1002-1008

Last Caliphs 1008-1031.

4. First Taifa kings 1031-1090

Conquest of Toledo 1085

5. Almoravid empire 1090-1147

6. Almohad empire 1147-1212

Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa 16 July 1212

7. Second Taifa Kings 1212-1275

Conquest of Seville 22 December 1248

8. Marinid interventions 1275-1340

Battle of El Salado 30 October 1340

9. The end of the Nasri Kingdom of Granada 1340-1492

The Catholic Kings enter in Granada 2 January 1492

10. Mudéjars and moriscos in Spain 1492-1614

II. SOME WORDS

Hegira

Sharia

Quran

Aleya

Sura

Sunna

Hadith

Muslim

Sunnite

Shiite

Dhimmi

Emir

Caliph

Sultan

Cadi

Fakih

Mufti

Fatwa

Ramadan

Hadj

Jihad

Hajib

Visir

Wali

Mozarab

Muladi

Mudejar

Morisco

Gibraltar

Alcalde

III. SOME QUESTIONS

1. Why muslims came to Spain and occupied so quickly the peninsula?

2. Why Did Abd al Rahman I created and independent Emirate in Cordoba?

3. Why Muslim Spain never became a fully homogeneous society?

4. Why did Muslim authorities in Spain chosed the Maliki rite?

5. How were treated the Christians and the Jews in Al-Andalus?

6. What is the difference between an Emirate and a Caliphate, and why Abd al Rahman III dared to become a caliph?

7. The State organization of the Caliphate of Cordoba was centralized or decentralized?

8. Why the Caliphate did not last long after the Amirid Dictatorship?

9. Why the end of the Caliphate was not the end of Muslim Spain?

10. How were treated the muslims after 1492?

IV. TEXT

MUSLIM SPAIN: AL-ANDALUS

1. Conquest and occupation (711-756)

 The Visigothic monarchy had failed to build stable institutions, successful means for transmitting power, or a stable and loyal elite behind the throne. Strife between rival pretenders and their supporters persisted throughout the history of Visigothic Hispania.

During the latter part of the seventh century the main antagonism was between the descendants of Chindaswinth (642-653) and those of a subsequent ruler, Witiza (702-710). Supporters of Witiza's clan rused to accept the election of a rival candidate, Roderic, in 710, and sought assistance from the newly established Muslim overlords of North Africa. After a conquest that had taken nearly forty years.

After a small exploratory raid, the Muslim commander of Tangier, Tariq, led a force of perhaps no more than 12,000 men, mostly Berbers from northern Morocco, across the straits in 711. Their goals were apparently ambiguous at first. The intervention was organized at the behest of the Witizan clan; the invaders probably hoped at the least to win booty and to exert some degree of Muslim influence in Hispania, possibly to make it a client state of the Arab caliphate.

However, discovery of the hollowness of Visigothic power, both crown and oligarchy, coupled with a swift and decisive victory, expanded Muslim ambition. At that moment Roderic was engaged in trying to subdue Basque and Visigothic rebels in the northeast. He hurriedly marched south, where the invaders awaited him in July 711 at the Guadalete, a small stream in the extreme southern tip of Spain. There the Witizans arranged the withdrawal of the bulk of Roderic's forces; the outnumbered remainder resisted stubbornly but were destroyed. Roderic was killed, and the remnants of his army were shattered near Ecija, where they made a desperate attempt to bar the road to the north. Córdoba, demoralized and almost undefended, was quickly taken. Roderic's supporters in the Visigothic capital, Toledo, were then overthrown by the Witizans, who opened the gates to Tariq.

After this surprising victories the Arab governor of northwest Africa, Musa ibn Nusair, personally led a force larger than the first, some 18,000--a high proportion of them the best Arab warriors--in the second wave of [16] invasion. Muslim armies had perfected a swift, flexible, hard-hitting style of battle that proved extremely difficult for Visigothic levies to cope with. Seville, the largest city in the peninsula and center of Hispano-Roman culture, fell easily after a short siege. The remaining elements of the Roderician faction withdrew to Mérida, which withstood a long siege but finally fell on June 30, 713. Much of the Visigothic aristocracy resisted little or not at all. Theodemir, duke of the Cartagena district in the southeast, made a treaty allowing him to retain control of his territory so long as the inhabitants paid regular taxes to the Muslim command. The spring and summer of 714 were then devoted to subduing the heavily populated northeast. Zaragoza was conquered and many of its aristocrats put to the sword. Nearly all the territory northeast of Zaragoza was rendered tributary, after which the main Muslim column apparently marched westward across north-central Hispania before returning southward.

The Muslim "conquest" took only three years, but the Muslims in fact made no effort to conquer and occupy the entire peninsula. That would have been impossible for an army of no more than 30,000 to 40,000 men. They occupied directly only the main strongholds of south-central and northeastern Hispania, the old centers of Roman civilization. The old Suevic district in Portucale to the west and Galicia to the northwest were rendered tributary but not occupied. The Witizan clan served as clients of the Muslims, who could in a sense present themselves as the protagonists of a legitimist cause. During the first generation of occupation, three thousand estates from the royal domain were bestowed on the Witizans.

The Muslims were concerned first with booty and secondly with the prosecution of the jihad--the holy war to extend Islamic dominion ever farther afield. By 720 an expedition had crossed the Pyrenees and seized Narbonne, and this was followed for the next twenty years by intermittent onslaughts into France. Conquest beyond the Pyrenees was the major new concern of the overlords of "Al-Andalus" as the Muslims called their new peninsular domain. Between 721 and 732 three governors of Al-Andalus were killed leading expeditions into France, the last expedition culminating in a major defeat by the Frankish army at Poitiers in 732. This did not put an end to the Muslim offensives, however, for the Muslims were further encouraged by internal strife in southern

The relative ease with which Muslim domination was established over most of the peninsula can be explained by the fact that only some of the Visigoths resisted, and almost none of the rest of the population. Religious antagonism caused surprisingly little difficulty. Early Islam, despite its emphasis on the jihad, was comparatively tolerant of Christians and Jews as "peoples of the book." Moreover, there was little sense of racial antipathy; the majority of the first wave of invaders were not even Arabs, but Berbers who differed little in appearance from the Hispanic people.

To most of the population the conquest was represented as a liberation. Christians that remained in Muslim territory were called mozarabs. They were promised free practice of their religion and in some cases greater social and economic justice as well. The rights of the minority of Hispanic smallholders were apparently respected. Though Christians were required to pay a special tribute, it was at first modest. In all, exactions were perhaps no greater than under the Visigoths. For more than a century, the Christians in the towns were permitted to live a semi-autonomous local existence, and in some cases shared their churches with Islamic worshippers.

People began to accept conversion to Islam almost immediately, in large numbers. Muladís appeared.  At first Islamic overlords did not encourage mass conversion, because it reduced the number of non-Muslims who paid heavier taxes, but once the Muslim authorities were firmly established in power many Christians converted simply to be on the dominant side, escape special taxes, and gain greater economic opportunity. It has also been suggested that a portion of the enserfed sector of the peasantry accepted Islam to be freed of their servitude.

 The third religious group in the peninsula, the Jews, who may have numbered 2 or 3 percent of the population, eagerly collaborated with the Muslims. Hispanic Jews had achieved considerable wealth under the Visigoths but were subjected to intermittent persecution. Muslim rule promised greater freedom and security. Jews sometimes assisted the Muslims, and a detachment of Jewish soldiers (perhaps related to Hispano-Jews exiled to the Maghreb) accompanied the invaders. Several important cities were given to Jewish leaders to govern temporarily after the Muslims took over. During the next three centuries Jewish financial and cultural influence expanded in southern and south-central Hispania. Because of their unique position, and also because of their linguistic skills, Jews served for generations as mediators between sectors of the Muslim and Christian populations.

The destruction of the Visigothic system of state and society was one thing, and the building of a Muslim Hispania something else that was much more difficult and took more time--indeed, nearly two centuries. The Arab clan leaders who formed the core of the new oligarchy quickly fell out with each other, and the heads of the caliphate in faraway Damascus revealed concern about maintaining control of their most distant dominion. The first official governor of Muslim Hispania, Abdul Aziz (who incidentally married Roderic's widow), was murdered by rivals in 716. During the four decades 715-755 there were approximately twenty different governors, many of them assassinated and only three retaining office as long as five years.

In addition to feuds between Arab clans and factions, a broad ethnic split emerged between the Arab aristocrats and the Berber population. The Arabs, who formed a minority among the mostly Berber invaders, assumed the place of privilege from the beginning and began to set themselves up as a landed Muslim neo-aristocracy. The Berber warriors, the rank and file of the invaders, tended to be shunted toward the less productive highlands. Many were settled on territory seized from or abandoned by the Visigoths in the northwest-central region. By 740 a major rebellion was underway across the straits in the Maghreb, where the Berbers were adopting Kharijism, a new, heretical form of Islam that accompanied protest against Arab domination of the Muslim empire. The revolt spread to the Berbers settled in the northwest-central part of the peninsula. They marched against the urban-associated Arab aristocracy in south-central and southern Hispania, outnumbering them, for the Arabs could not depend upon their new Christian subjects to fight for them. It may be that only the arrival of some 7,000 Syrian cavalry saved the aristocracy. During the 740s, the new polity in the peninsula virtually dissolved.

 The spectacle of general Muslim civil war did not encourage Hispanic loyalty, and small elements of the Christian population took advantage of this opportunity to migrate to the unoccupied northern mountains, whence border warfare had been waged since 718. After 750, crop failures and raiding brought widespread famine to the Berber-inhabited Duero valley of the northwest, forcing the remainder of the invaders to withdraw farther south. When political order was finally restored and the Berbers brought under control, the Duero valley south of the Asturian and Cantabrian hills had been evacuated, leaving a no-man's-land fought over by northern Christians and Muslims for the next two centuries.

2. The Emirate of Cordoba (756-929)

Unified government in Muslim Hispania was finally achieved after 755 by its first independent ruler, Abd-al-Rahman I (756-788), last surviving heir of the traditional Muslim Umayyad dynasty in Damascus after it had been deposed by the rival Abbasid dynasty. In flight from the Near East, Abd-alRahman, whose mother was a Berber, sought to regain an independent kingdom at the far western end of the Muslim world. Arriving in the peninsula in 755, he won the support not only of the Berbers but also of the strongest Arab faction, enabling him to overthrow the forces of the erstwhile governor outside Córdoba, the Hispano-Muslim capital since 719.

There Abd-al Rahman announced the establishment of an independent Umayyad emirate based on "true justice" and toleration for all religions and ethnic groups. This stand greatly strengthened his position among the heterogeneous population of the peninsula. He was eventually recognized as heir of the legitimate dynasty by nearly all regions save the independent Christian hill country of the far north, but years of intermittent campaigning were required to subdue dissident Muslim regional overlords.

Little effort was made to conquer and occupy the northern mountain areas, because of difficult geographic obstacles, the poverty of those regions, and the resistance of their inhabitants. Instead, three frontier districts or marches were established to hold the border, and the emirate adopted or accepted a variant of west European feudalism in dealing with the frontier areas. The key spots were mountains, castles, or fortified towns difficult to incorporate into a central system. Loose personal relations akin to vassalage were worked out with Muslim and at times with Christian overlords in the frontier area. The offensive military strength and the economic resources of the northern Christian hill people did not seem great enough to warrant the expenditure of means that would have been required to subdue those harsh, backward regions.

It is impossible to calculate the number of immigrants who entered the peninsula during the three centuries of the emirate. All told they may have accounted for the ancestry of 20 percent of the peninsula's population by the end of the tenth century, yet the influx in most years was quite small. Moreover, the bulk of the immigrants were not oriental Arabs but Maghrebian Berbers. The prosperous, increasingly cultured Al-Andalus must have looked very attractive to the rude tribesmen across the straits. But the more cultured Arabs tended to monopolize the most important lands, posts, and perquisites, and relations with the Berbers and other elements were never very good. Muslim Hispania never achieved a fully homogeneous society. Descendants of Arabs jealously preserved their family and tribal identities, together with a distinct sense of superiority to the rest of the Muslim population. Many of the Berber immigrants did not at first speak Arabic and for some time retained their separate community identity. The majority of the Muslims were of course descendants of Hispanic converts and never managed to absorb fully the aristocratic Arab elements; rather, upper-class HispanoMuslim muwalladun (or muladíes, as converts to Islam were later known in Castilian) later came to affect Arab ancestry or names for themselves. Interethnic tensions persisted throughout the history of Al-Andalus. They probably lay at the root of continuing internal political conflicts that were only temporarily assuaged, never eliminated.

 Nevertheless an Islamic culture in the peninsula developed with surprising rapidity. Though the first generation of Muslims had been relatively uncultured and had a rather weak grasp of Islamic theology, religious teachers arrived from the Near East soon after the conquest, and their numbers increased during the course of the eighth century. The roots of a genuine Muslim orthodoxy were established, in response to the problem of cultural heterogeneity and the challenge to the identity of the convert. Within three or four generations, Hispanic Islam was strongly identified with the Malikite rite. The religious teacher Malik (who died in Medina ca. 795) had propounded a rather simple and traditionalistic understanding of Islam, based on the formula of "the Koran, the words of the Prophet, and admitting that otherwise I do not know." The antirationalist conservatism of the Malikite rite was adopted as the semi-official observance of Muslims in the emirate during the reign of al-Hakam I (796-822). Malikite traditionalism, as propounded by local faqihs (jurists) throughout Al-Andalus, provided a degree of cultural unity for most of the Muslim population. Ultraorthodoxy was characteristic of Islam in the peninsula throughout almost the entire Muslim period, and contrasted notably with the greater tendency toward heterodoxy in other parts of the Muslim world. This may perhaps be explained by the peripheral location of Al-Andalus at the outer limit of Islamic lands, adjacent to Latin Christendom, containing a Christian minority (at first a Christian majority), and usually in a state of tension with its religious and cultural rival. It is interesting, too, that during the Middle Ages western Christianity also emphasized pragmatic legalism, ethics, and orthodoxy in contrast with the more speculative metaphysics of the Christian east.

A wave of major "orientalization" began during the reign of Abd al-Rahman II (822-852), who imported numerous oriental Muslim artists and educators. The high culture of the Middle East elicited a strongly eastward-looking orientation; though a few individual Hispano-Muslim art forms were developed by the tenth century (the muwashaha and zéjel songs and poems), the art and literature of AlAndalus was established almost completely on oriental Arabic forms.

Christian society in the south and east was completely unable to hold its own. The independent Christians of the north came to call their counterparts in the south Mozarabs, derived from the Arabic musta'rib, meaning Arabized or Arabic-speaking. Mozarab culture became fossilized, its postconquest literature for example rhetorical and usually mediocre, deficient in dialectic and analysis. Of course it must be recognized that Mozarab culture was placed under increasing pressure and not able to develop in full freedom. Limited tolerance never meant equality, and Christians were never permitted to dispute publicly the teachings of Islam. Religious practice and cultural opportunity were increasingly circumscribed. It is true that some towns had Christian majorities for a century or more, that most Mozarab dioceses were able to continue an uninterrupted line of episcopal succession for nearly three hundred years, that all-Mozarab church councils were occasionally called, and that some religious and cultural contacts were maintained with other parts of western Christendom.

Nonetheless, the strength and influence of Islam was increasingly felt. From about the beginning of the ninth century pressure mounted; taxes were raised and new restrictions were introduced, while the Muslim proportion of society steadily increased. One response to latent and then mounting persecution was the Christian "martyrs of Córdoba" movement of 850-859 in the course of which several score Christian spokesmen, confronting Islam directly, were put to death. A more common response was Mozarab emigration to the Christian principalities in the northern mountains. The Muslim state did not embark on a policy of extreme persecution until late in the tenth century, however, and the Mozarab minority persisted, in ever-dwindling numbers, until almost the end of Al-Andalus.

The growing strength and sophistication of Hispano-Muslim society was not reflected by political unity, for the ninth century was a time of political troubles for the emirate. Resentment among both Christians and Hispano-Muslims increased: against the overlordship of Córdoba by Muslims in other regions, against exclusivist Arab clans on the part of non-Arab Muslims, and against supposedly heterodox emirs by fanatical Mahikite faqihs. A major revolt occurred among the lower classes of Córdoba in 814, when popular discontent took the form of an uprising against the emir himself. This reflected the uncertainty about political legitimacy that had existed in Muslim Hispania since the emirate broke away from the central caliphate in the Near East. After the revolt was quelled, one-fourth of the population of the Andalusi capital was expelled.

Muslim revolts grew serious during the second half of the ninth century. At times the emir controlled only the greater Córdoba region. Major rebellions occurred in the districts of Toledo in the center, Seville and Bobastro in the south, Mérida in the southwest, and Zaragoza and Lérida in the northeast. The partly Christian city of Toledo was more or less autonomous from 873 to 930, required only to pay a nominal tribute to the emirate. A more fully autonomous principality was carved out in the upper Ebro valley of the northeast by the Banu Qasi dynasty, descendants of the Visigothic overlord Casio (Cassius) of Tudela, who had accepted Islam in 714 at the start of the conquest. The Banu Qasi ruled the upper Ebro region for two hundred years, waxing at times rich and powerful. At their height in the late ninth century they were sometimes called "third kings of Hispania" (following the emirs of AlAndalus and the kings of Christian Asturias-León). The most serious of the new revolts, however, was that begun by Omar ibn Hafsun at Bobastro in the hills above Málaga in 883. The descendant of muladíes, ben-Hafsun rallied Muslims and Christians alike and soon made most of the eastern Andalusian hill country independent of the emirate. In 894 he returned to Christianity, the religion of his ancestors. That cost the support of most of his Muslim following, but even so he held out in the Bobastro district until his death in 917. This domain was defended by his sons for another twelve years until it was finally reincorporated by the emirate in 929.

3. The Califate of Cordoba (929-1031)

An effectively unified state was finally achieved during the long reign of Abd-al-Rahman III (912-961).The son of a Navarrese princess, this greatest of Cordoban rulers was a short, blue-eyed Muslim who dyed his red hair black to match that of most of his subjects. In 929 he took the step of raising his dominion from an emirate, or kingdom, to a caliphate, or empire. Originally the Islamic world had been unified under a single caliphate as the political successor to the prophet's authority. The Umayyad emirate of Al-Andalus had been nominally subordinate to the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, but establishment of a new caliphate under the aggressive Fatimids in Egypt threatened military and political pressures through North Africa. Abd-al-Rahman III countered the claims and ambitions of the Fatimids by taking advantage of new Muslim theories to assert the imperial independence of Al-Andalus. This nominal authority also strengthened the claims of the Cordoban state over the local regions of the peninsula.

The caliph restored central control over all the Muslim population and carried on major border campaigns against the small Christian principalities of the north, receiving token submission from most of them. During the latter part of his reign he extended military dominion over part of the northwest Maghreb, briefly expanding Al-Andalus into an imperial domain.

The strength of the tenth-century caliphate was due as much to the efficiency of the state system as to the size and prosperity of its population, for the caliphate developed the best organized administration found anywhere in western Europe during that era. This had begun nearly a century earlier under Abdal-Rahman II, who had commenced to refashion what had begun as a fairly simple despotism into a well-articulated structure patterned after the Abbasid caliphate in Damascus. Executive authority was nominally autocratic, administered by an hajib or chief minister through batteries of visirs or departmental ministers for varied aspects of administration, with complements of subsecretaries, scribes, and clerks. A fairly efficient treasury with some degree of central accounting was eventually developed. Theoretically, each district of the emirate was administered by a regional wali, or governor, responsible to the central government for the affairs of his province. The legal system was headed by a cadi aljamaa (chief justice), though his authority was restricted to the Córdoba district. The court structure was divided by region and municipality, with separate jurisdictions for different kinds of grievances according to civil need and Muslim custom.

4. The Amirid Dictatorship (976-1008)

The Cordoban state reached the height of its power in the middle of the tenth century under Abd-alRahman III, yet survived for only seventy-five years more. No state in Europe or the Mediterranean basin during the Middle Ages possessed the instruments to guarantee central government unless strong leadership and a continuous principle of legitimacy were preserved; by the eleventh century these were lacking in Al-Andalus. Abd-al-Rahman III's successor, al-Hakam II, ruled for fifteen years, but when he died in 976 he left as heir a twelve-year-old son who was recognized as Hisham II. The government was soon dominated by its vigorous and efficient hajib, an Hispano-Arab known to history as al-Mansur ("The Victorious"). In 981 young Hisham was forced to officially ratify the complete authority of the hajib over all aspects of government.

The historic title al-Mansur was won in a long series of summer campaigns against the Christian principalities of the north. The motives were more political and economic than religious, but al-Mansur found it useful to strengthen his position by preaching the jihad against the northern Christians, little troubled by the fact that Christian mercenaries sometimes served in his forces. At one time or another he ravaged every major part of Christian territory save Navarre, with whose ruling dynasty he was allied by marriage. No ruler since the original conquest had inflicted such heavy damage on Christian Hispania. Moreover, at the very end of the century his son, Abdul-Malik, restored Cordoban authority over the northwest corner of the Maghreb, of which the city of Fez was the center. Al-Mansur died in 1002 at the height of power, exhausted by his triumphant exertions. He was succeeded by Abdul-Malik, who quickly obtained from the impotent Hisham the same plenary authority held by his invincible father. Abdul-Malik survived his father by only six years, however, dying in 1008, possibly assassinated.

The Amirid dictatorship had raised the caliphate to the pinnacle of its military power, yet sowed within it the seeds of its political destruction. For one thing, the dictatorship fatally weakened the principle of political legitimacy. Al-Andalus had always been difficult to rule, relying on both forceful leadership and administration and the legitimate authority of the Ummayad dynasty. In the long run, the dictatorship supplied force alone; it replaced the dynasty, yet could not develop a new principle of legitimate descent from Mohammed.

5. The breakup of the Caliphate (1008-1031)

Soon after the death of the second Amirid, the political unity and authority of the caliphate collapsed altogether. Once the legitimate succession had been interrupted it was never successfully restored. Many regions of Al-Andalus were resentful of their treatment under the dictatorship and refused to heed new leaders in Córdoba. The feckless Hisham was deposed in 1009, briefly restored the following year, then deposed again. Altogether, over a period of twenty-three years, six relatives of the Ummayads and three members of a rival, half-Berber family disrupted the throne. The slave pretorians functioned as a powerful independent faction and the bands of Berber mercenaries who had become more numerous during the preceding half-century usurped power in local districts. Regional Arab oligarchs and clans withdrew into local exclusivism, and the state system soon dissolved. Córdoba was wracked by demagogy, riots, and pillaging, while the educated and wealthy fled. In 1010 the city was sacked by a Catalan expedition brought in by Muslim dissidents at Toledo.

The localism and factionalism that had proved an almost insuperable obstacle for the Visigothic monarchy also undermined the caliphate, and its official end was finally declared by a group of local leaders meeting in Córdoba in 1031. In the former capital it was replaced by a local government of notables ruling only the greater Córdoba district.

6. The First Taifa kingdoms (1031-1090)

After the collapse of the caliphate, political power coalesced around local leaders, oligarchies, or ethnic groups and coalitions in the principal urban economic centers of Al-Andalus. Nearly all the first overlords were local commanders and notables who had achieved power through the political and military network created by al-Mansur. The result was a series of about thirty regional taifa (local faction) kingdoms that divided up approximately the southern 75 percent of the peninsula.

Some of the taifas, chiefly Seville, Granada, Badajoz, Valencia, Toledo, and Zaragoza, quickly developed into fairly strong regional emirates or principalities, dominating large areas of the surrounding countryside and devouring their weaker neighbors.

The taifas managed to preserve most of the economic achievements of Al-Andalus and often to develop them further. Some of their capitals reached a greater level of prosperity and sophistication in the eleventh century than any towns under the caliphate save Córdoba. Hence the collapse of the Hispano-Muslim state did not bring the collapse of Hispano-Muslim culture.

The taifa kingdoms and their successors were the late blooming of Muslim Hispania's Indian Summer. Wracked by incessant factionalism, they divided and dissipated their civic and military energies. When the military balance in the peninsula began to change in the middle of the eleventh century, the taifas could not defend themselves in regional isolation and were destroyed one by one. The dissolution of the caliphate had been the political prelude to the political and military decline of all of Al-Andalus. They needed help of North African Muslims.

7. The Almoravid Empire (1090-1147)

The Almoravids were a Berber dynasty of Morocco, who formed an empire in the 11th century that stretched over the western Maghreb and Al-Andalus. The term "Almoravid" comes from the Arabic "al-Murabitun" which is the plural form of "al-Murabit" - literally meaning "one who is tying" but figuratively meaning "one who is ready for battle at a fortress". The term is related to the notion of Ribat, a frontier monastery-fortress.

 From the year 1053, the Almoravids began to spread their religious way to the Berber areas of the Sahara, and to the regions south of the desert. By 1062 Yusuf ibn Tashfin founded the city of Marrakech after having brought into complete subjection what is now known as Morocco, Western Sahara and Mauretania. In 1080, he conquered the kingdom of Tlemcen (in modern-day Algeria) and founded the present city of that name, his rule extending as far east as Oran.

In 1085 Alfonse VI of Castile and Leon occupied Toledo from the muslims. It was the old capital of the visigothic Kingdom and became a symbol. The Taifa kings feared that the Christians would conquer rapidly the rest of Al Andalus and they asked the help of Almoravids. In 1086 Yusuf ibn Tashfin was invited by the Muslim taifa princes of Al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula to defend their territories. Yusuf ibn Tashfin crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Algeciras, and defeated Alfonse VI at the Battle of az-Zallaqah (Battle of Sagrajas). He was prevented from following up his victory by trouble in Africa, which he chose to settle in person.

He returned to Spain in 1090, avowedly for the purpose of annexing the taifa principalities of Iberia. He was supported by most of the Iberian people, who were discontented with the heavy taxation imposed upon them by their spend-thrift rulers. Their religious teachers, as well as others in the east, (most notably, al-Ghazali in Persia and al-Tartushi in Egypt, who was himself an Iberian by birth, from Tortosa), detested the taifa rulers for their religious indifference. The clerics issued a fatwa (a non-binding legal opinion) that Yusuf was of sound morals and had the religious right to dethrone the rulers, whom he saw as heterodox in their faith. By 1094, Yusuf had annexed most of the major taifas, with the exception of the one at Saragossa. Yusuf did not reconquer much territory from the Christian kingdoms, except that of Valencia, but he did hinder the progress of the Spanish Reconquista by uniting al-Andalus.

After friendly correspondence with the caliph at Baghdad, whom he acknowledged as Amir al-Mu'minin ("Commander of the Faithful"), Yusuf ibn Tashfin in 1097 assumed the title of Amir al Muslimin ("Commander of the Muslims"). He died in 1106, when he was reputed to have reached the age of 100. The Almoravid power was at its height at Yusuf's death: the Moorish empire then included all of North-West Africa as far as Algiers, and all of Iberia south of the Tagus as far eastward as the mouth of the Ebro, including the Balearic Islands.

 Three years afterwards, under Yusuf's son and successor, Ali ibn Yusuf, Sintra and Santarém were added, and Iberia was again invaded in 1119 and 1121, but the tide had turned, the French having assisted the Aragonese to recover Zaragoza. In 1138, Ali ibn Yusuf was defeated by Alfonso VII of León, and in the Battle of Ourique (1139), by Afonso I of Portugal, who thereby won his crown. Lisbon was conquered by the Portuguese in 1147.

8. The Almohad Empire (1147-1212)

The Almohad Dynasty (from Arabic al-Muwaḥḥidun, "the monotheists" or "the unitarians"), was a Moroccan Berber-Muslim dynasty founded in the 12th century that established a Berber state in Tinmel in the Atlas Mountains in roughly 1120.

The movement was started by Ibn Tumart in the Masmuda tribe, followed by Abd al-Mu'min al-Gumi between 1130 and his death in 1163, the Almohads defeated the ruling Almoravids, extending their power over all of the Maghreb. Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) under the Almoravid dynasty, followed the fate of Africa.

The Almohad dominance of Spain continued until 1212, when Muhammad III, "al-Nasir" (1199–1214) was defeated at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in the Sierra Morena by an alliance of the Christian princes of Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal. Nearly all of the Moorish dominions in Iberia were lost soon after, with the great Moorish cities of Cordova and Seville falling to the Christians in 1236 and 1248 respectively.

The Almohads continued to rule in Africa until the piecemeal loss of territory through the revolt of tribes and districts enabled the rise of their most effective enemies, the Marinids in 1215. The last representative of the line, Idris al-Wathiq, was reduced to the possession of Marrakesh, where he was murdered by a slave in 1269; the Marinids seized Marrakesh, ending the Almohad domination of the Western Maghreb.

9. Second Taifa Kingdoms and Marinids (1212-1340)

 After the fall of the Almohad Empire Muslim Spain was again divided in independent Taifa Kingdoms, that could not resist Christian militar offensives. By 1250 Aragon and Portugal had finished the Reconquest and fixed their frontiers with the Kingdom of Castile-Leon, where Ferdinand III (1217-1252) had conquered from muslim cities as important as Cordoba (1236), Jaen (1246), and Seville (1248).

The Christian advanced was slowed down by the Civil War that opposed Alfonse X of Castile and his Son Sancho IV since 1275. The former called a Bereber dynasty from Norther Africa in his help: the Marinids. They will remain since then the firm allies of the Nasri Kingdom of Granada.

The Marinids had overtaken the Almohads controlling Morocco in 1244, and briefly controlled all the Maghreb in the mid-14th century. They supported the Kingdom of Granada in Al-Andalus in the 13th and 14th centuries; an attempt to gain a direct foothold on the European side of the Strait of Gibraltar was however defeated at the Battle of Salado in 1340 and finished after the Castilian conquest of Algeciras from the Marinids in 1344.

10. The Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (1340-1492)

After the battle of El Salado, the Taifa Kingdom of Granada, founded by Ibn Nasr in 1238, remained the only Muslim independent kingdom in Spain. Twenty-three different emirs ruled Granada from the founding of the dynasty by Mohammed I ibn Nasr until January 2, 1492, when Muhammad XII surrendered to the Christian Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile.

The relatively long lasting history of the Nasrid Kingdom was essentially due to the fact that this part of Spain (South East of the Iberian peninsula) is hilly and therefore difficult to occupy militarily, and second because the kingdom of Castille was torn by Civil Wars from 1350 to 1479, when the Catholic Kings (Isabel and Fernando) won the succession war started 5 years earlier. This enabled them to start the conquest of the Kingdom of Granada in 1483. It was a long and difficult war that ended in 2 January 1492 when Isabel and Fernando entered Granada after the surrender of the last Nasrid king Mohamed XII.

11. Mudejar Spain (1492-1614).

The occupation of Granada did not mean the expulsion of muslims. They were first tolerated with their religion and their laws and customs. Nevertheless step by step the pressure of the Catholic Church forced the Spanish muslims called “mudéjares” (from the Arabic word “Mudaijan” which means domesticated) to convert to Catholicism and became moriscos. The Moriscos would still remain in Spain for a century until they were expelled by Philip III between 1609 and 1614, because of the social pressure exerted by “Old Christians”.

Sources:  http://libro.uca.edu/payne1/payne1.pdf, wikipedia and Aguilera-Barchet, Bruno (2007) Iniciación histórica al Derecho Musulmán. Madrid: Dykinson.