The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (19 page)

royal court, and stimulated regional commerce. In addition to exotic

Muslim

Spain 95

foodstuffs, the caliphate exported books, silks, textiles, and manufactures. Andalusis also reexported slaves and furs from western Europe

in return for a variety of luxury goods ranging from Chinese porcelains to sub-Saharan gold. This rising prosperity helped the Iberian

population grow from four million to ten million between the end of

Visigothic rule in the early eighth century and Abd al-Rahman III’s

reign three hundred years later.16

The affl uence of tenth-century Al-Andalus fueled a cultural renaissance that drew merchants and visitors from around the Mediterranean.

Building on cross-cultural exchanges, Andalusis blended HispanoRoman, Visigothic, Berber, and Arabic forms with the cultures of the

wider Muslim world, which stretched to China, to create dynamic

works of art, architecture, and literature. The Arab chronicler and geographer Muhammad Abu al-Qasim ibn Hawqal admiringly noted that

Al-Andalus had no equal “in the whole of the Maghreb, or even in

Upper Mesopotamia, Syria or Egypt, for the number of its inhabitants,

its extent, the vast area taken up by markets, its cleanliness, the architecture of the mosques or the great number of baths and caravanserais.”17

Iberian Christians could not help but be impressed by these

achievements, and the northern kingdoms drew increasingly into AlAndalus’s economic and intellectual orbit. Overawed by the strength

of Abd al-Rahman III’s armies, many borrowed and adapted the material culture of the caliphate. More signifi cant, subject Christians in

Al-Andalus adapted to life under the Umayyads by learning Arabic

and embracing Arab customs. Muslims referred to this sort of arabized Christian as a
musta’rab
, or “one who claims to be an Arab without being so.” These Mozarabs played a central role in introducing

Andalusi culture into the northern kingdoms. Additionally, Christian

monks from the south used Cordoban geometric miniatures to decorate their manuscripts, which were often translations of Arab texts.

The achievements of tenth-century Al-Andalus were the culmination

of three centuries of imperial Umayyad rule. Nevertheless, an empire’s

prosperity and longevity depends on its ability to extract wealth from

its subjects, and the brilliance of the Andalusi caliphate ultimately rested

on the exploitation of common Iberians. Like all premodern imperial

regimes, the Umayyads relied heavily on coerced labor, and Musa and

the succeeding governors almost certainly took slaves after their victory

over the Visigoths. At the same time, most Umayyad subjects remained

96 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

free Christians during the fi rst two centuries of Muslim rule, which

conveniently made them subject to higher revenue demands.

At the elite level, however, conversion did offer an escape from

subjecthood. Just as romanization gave elite Britons a stake in the

Roman imperial enterprise, embracing Islam allowed HispanoRoman and Visigothic aristocrats to maintain their status under the

caliphate. In effect, both romanization and islamization facilitated an

alliance between imperial conquerors and local notables built on a

shared project to extract rural wealth and exploit subject labor.

The Umayyads could not match the achievements of the Spanish conquistadors and later generations of imperial rulers because

they had considerable diffi culty maintaining the social boundaries of

empire in Al-Andalus. The moral certainty of monotheistic religions

such as Islam and Christianity legitimized the conquest and subjugation of nonbelievers, but the evangelical obligation of these proselytizing faiths created opportunities for conversion that blurred the line

between citizen and subject. Although they portrayed themselves as

devout Muslim rulers, the Andalusi Umayyads had strong economic

incentives not to convert the common Iberians.

This implies that they were tyrannical imperial masters, but the

actual fate of Iberian Christians under Muslim rule is far from certain.

Nationalistic Spanish historians depict them as an oppressed majority that suffered for centuries until the northern Christian kingdoms

liberated them. The historian Richard Bulliet offers a much different

picture. Using genealogies in medieval Islamic biographical dictionaries, he estimated that the percentage of the Spanish population that

was Muslim increased from 8 to 70 percent between the ninth and

eleventh centuries.18 This suggests that the bulk of the indigenous

population either converted or emigrated to the Christian north.

Bulliet’s precise fi gures are questionable because his genealogical

data came primarily from elite families, and it is diffi cult to distinguish

Iberian Muslims from Christians with Arab and Berber names. Nevertheless, it seems certain that the Muslim population of Iberia grew

substantially under the caliphate. Cultural arabization facilitated conversion, but this was most likely a gradual process rather than a sharp

jump from one identity to another. Indeed, the distinction between

Christian and Muslim in al-Andalus was often imprecise. Conversion was most likely an urban phenomenon that had less of an impact

Muslim

Spain 97

on the much larger rural population. In the countryside, local elites

probably blurred the boundaries between Christianity and Islam to

protect their authority. In a society where Jews and Christians lived

as cultural Arabs, it must have been diffi cult to determine precisely

who was a Muslim.

This explains why the status of the subject majority under

Umayyad rule remains one of the great unanswered questions in

Spanish history. Nationalists depicted the Islamic period as a mere

interruption in the organic development of modern Spain and insist

that the Umayyads were an alien ruling class that had little infl uence

on the wider population. According to this narrative, Al-Andalus’s

cultural achievements were due to domestic Spanish infl uences, and

the Christian reconquest of Iberia, culminating in the fi fteenth century, saved Europe from Islamic tyranny. The
muwalladun
were

therefore never really Muslims or Arabs; they were simply forced

converts who regained their Spanish identity when freed from the

yoke of Muslim rule.19

Less chauvinistic and more romantic depictions of Spain’s Muslim

era portrayed it as a golden age of toleration when Jews, Christians,

and Muslims cooperated in building a culturally and technologically

advanced society. Central to this version of Andalusi history was the

concept of
convivencia
, the cross-cultural borrowing that came from

“living together” in harmony. The nineteenth-century American

writer Washington Irving celebrated the romantic grandeur produced

by
convivencia
in his
Tales of the Alhambra
. Later scholars seeking

an antidote to contemporary xenophobic depictions of Islam emphasized that
convivencia
reintroduced the west to lost classical GrecoRoman writings that survived in caliphal libraries after the collapse

of the Roman Empire.20

There is simply not enough historical evidence to reconcile these

competing narratives. Most Arab accounts of the invasion in 711 dated

from two to three centuries after the fact. These and later histories

consisted primarily of institutionalized myths, family histories, and

accounts of wars with the Christian north. They made almost no reference to the status or fate of the greater Iberian population. Spanish

Christian sources were equally opaque. There are virtually no existing

works by Andalusi Christian writers in Latin after the tenth century,

and the earlier texts that have survived relate primarily to the arabized

98 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

urban elite. Chronicles from the northern Christian kingdoms are

propagandistic, contradictory, and incomplete.21 Archaeology has the

potential to fi ll some of these gaps, but most Iberian archaeologists

focus on the Roman era.

Therefore, like Roman Britain, Muslim Spain was a relatively blank

canvas for later historians to sketch out a past refl ecting contemporary

interests and biases. In reality, it is extremely diffi cult to determine the

exact nature of Al-Andalus’s subject majority. Visigothic and Roman

nobles were a privileged elite at the time of the conquest, but it is

virtually impossible to know how their rural subjects identifi ed themselves. What is certain is that they were no more Spanish than the

peoples of preconquest Roman Britain were Englishmen.

It is clear, however, that the Umayyads were most comfortable

with Iberians who did not convert. Islamic law provided a clear blueprint for governing and exploiting
dhimmi
, in contrast to its relative vagueness on the thorny question of assimilating new Muslims.

Thus, administrative expediency led the early emirate to assume that

all Iberians were Christian. This allowed Andalusi offi cials to govern indirectly by transforming bishops and higher clergymen into

Umayyad functionaries responsible for law and revenue collection

in Christian communities. Hostigesis, the bishop of Málaga, actively

assisted the late emirate in registering Christian peasants for taxation. By the tenth century, the Iberian Catholic Church had become

so intertwined with the caliphate that Abd al-Rahman III had the

authority to appoint bishops. Recemund, a Christian offi cial in the

royal court, earned the bishopric of Elvira as a reward for serving as

the caliphal ambassador to a German prince. The Iberian church survived under Muslim rule by cooperating with the Umayyad regime,

but the gradual disappearance of all but seven of its preconquest bishoprics by the eleventh century suggests that its primary constituency

was shrinking.22

The church’s steady eclipse does not appear to have been a particular hardship for non-Muslim Iberians.
Dhimmi
played important

roles in the royal court throughout the Umayyad era. Christian

bureaucrats served in virtually every ministry of the early emirate,

and the emirs employed Christian doctors as their personal physicians. A Christian functionary named Rabi became so powerful (and

unpopular) collecting taxes and overseeing al-Hakam I’s palace guard

Muslim

Spain 99

that vindictive Cordobans murdered him upon the emir’s death. Iberian Jews do not appear to have played as prominent a role in AlAndalus until Abd al-Rahman III established the caliphate in the

tenth century. Free to practice their religion more openly after the

Visigothic demise, Jewish scholars such as Hasdai ibn Shaprut served

the caliphs as doctors and diplomats.

These intimate ties with the centers of Andalusi authority gave

Jews and Christians an incentive to adopt the trappings of Arab

culture even if they resisted the temptation to convert to Islam. In

this sense arabization rather than islamization was a key element in

bringing elite non-Muslim Iberians into the Umayyad imperial system. The resulting Arab acculturation was most obvious in Córdoba

and other urban centers where
dhimmi
lived in segregated neighborhoods but interacted regularly and closely with Muslims in the

bureaucracy, markets, and public squares. Intermarriage with Muslims also grew increasingly common. By the ninth century, Umayyad

Christian functionaries began to adopt Muslim styles of clothing, follow Islamic dietary laws, and translate Christian texts into Arabic.

The popular use of high Latin and vernacular versions of the early

Romance languages that would eventually evolve into Spanish waned

in the south. This cultural backsliding caused the Cordoban scholar

Paulus Alvarus to lament: “Alas, the Christians do not know their

own law, and the Latins pay no attention to their own tongue, so that

in the whole community of Christ there cannot be found one man

in a thousand who can send letters of greeting properly expressed

to his fellow.”23 These arabized Christians had no political ties to the

northern kingdoms, which they tended to disdain as primitive and

uncultured.

Yet their status as
dhimmi
limited their advance, and it is easy to

see why many elite Christians eventually gave up their religion to

seek greater social status. Qumis ibn Antonian, a high-ranking Cordoban civil servant under Muhammad I, converted because the emir

would allow only a Muslim to serve as his chief minister. Qumis won

the post after embracing Islam over the protests of Arab elites who

claimed that the Abbasids would use his Iberian origins to humiliate

the emirate. Conversions such as these were largely an urban phenomenon. Cities were centers of commerce, crafts, and administration and offered new Muslims the best chance of blending into the

100 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Arab elite. Indeed, for a time many urban Andalusis may have been

public Muslims and private Christians.

The blurred nature of imperial identities in the heterogeneous

urban population of Al-Andalus alarmed both Muslim and Christian

leaders. Mirroring concerns about the implications of conversion in

the wider ninth-century Muslim world, religious scholars worried

that Iberian converts infl uenced their fellow Muslims to adopt Christian cultural and dietary practices. Jurists of the Maliki legal school,