The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (20 page)

which became the dominant form of Islamic jurisprudence in AlAndalus, devoted themselves to rooting out these sinful innovations

and equated heresy with political subversion. At all costs, they strove

mightily to maintain the imperial boundaries that separated devout

Muslims from their unbelieving subjects.

Christian leaders, who felt they were watching their community

disappear before their eyes, were even more dismayed by these blurred

identities. Drawing inspiration from the heroic martyrs of the late

Roman era, a handful of scholars and Christian zealots in Córdoba

began to publicly disparage Islam in the 850s. It is telling that they

knew just what to say to enrage the Muslim clerical establishment.

Seeking to force the Andalusi authorities to put him to death, Isaac de

Tábanos, a civil servant and the son of a prominent Christian family,

provoked a Muslim judge by publicly slandering those who followed

Muhammad: “Such a man is full of the devil, is promoting devilish

delusions, is handing out a cup of deadly poison, and will suffer the

pains of eternal damnation.”24 The Muslim cleric attempted to defuse

the situation by suggesting that only a drunkard or madman would

be so self-destructively rash, but Isaac openly declared that he was

sane and challenged the authorities to put him to death.

The Umayyads grudgingly obliged him, but the subversion continued when a prominent cleric named Eulogius publicized Isaac’s

defi ance and sacrifi ce to inspire more martyrs. Between 850 and

857, the emirate executed forty-eight Cordobans for blasphemy or

apostasy. Some were Christian zealots like Isaac, but others were

the products of mixed marriages who were technically Muslims.

Flora, who was raised a secret Christian by her mother after her

Muslim father died, tried to run away to a monastery, but willingly

accepted torture and death when her Muslim brother denounced

her to the authorities.

Muslim

Spain 101

The Cordoban martyrs were not anti-imperial revolutionaries.

Rather, they sought to preserve their faith and identity by making

Muslim rule less tolerable for Iberian Christians. They died horribly,

but they succeeded in disrupting the elite alliances and compromises

that held Andalusi society together. Faced with their inexcusable

blasphemy, Abd al-Rahman II and his successor Muhammad I had to

crack down by executing Eulogius, destroying new churches, dismissing Christian bureaucrats, and increasing taxes on non-Muslims.

The emirs also pressed the Andalusi bishops, who were equally

horrifi ed by the martyrdoms, to exercise greater discipline over their

fl ock. The bishop of Córdoba went into hiding because he could not

control the city’s Christian community to the emirate’s satisfaction, but in 854 a council of Christian nobles and clergymen had no

choice but to denounce Isaac and his followers publicly as heretics. As

Umayyad functionaries, they had little sympathy for this small group

of fanatics who threatened their leadership of Christian Al-Andalus.

The execution of Eulogius, who eventually became a Catholic saint,

helped put an end to the organized martyrdoms in Córdoba. Even so,

individuals continued to make fatal public expressions of their faith

well into the tenth century despite the relatively easy option of emigrating to the Christian north.

Taken together, the ninth-century
muwallad
revolts and Christian

martyrdoms demonstrate the precariousness of the imperial social

boundaries defi ning citizen and subject in imperial Al-Andalus. While

religion would appear to sharply defi ne identity, the distinction between

Christian and Muslim and between Iberian and invader blurred considerably under the Umayyads. Conversion and arabization were two of

the most obvious forms of interaction, but conjugal relations and intermarriage between Muslim Arab men and Christian Iberian women

introduced gender as a problematical marker of imperial identity. The

Romans almost certainly established relationships with female Britons,

but there is little direct historical or archaeological information about

how these contacts fi t into the larger processes of Roman imperialism. In contrast, documentary evidence makes it easier to tease out the

implications of cross-cultural sex and marriage in Al-Andalus.

As in most empires, the conquerors of Iberia considered subject

women a legitimate form of plunder. The initial phase of imperial

domination under the early Arab caliphate produced clear guidelines

102 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

on how Muslims could enslave or marry non-Muslim women. As

dhimmi
, Jewish and Christian females did not have an obligation to

convert to Islam if they became the wives or concubines of Muslim

men, but Islamic law dictated that their children had to be raised as

free Muslims. The case of the Cordoban martyr Flora, however, suggests that the daughters of these unions were sometimes, perhaps

often, secretly brought up as Christians. This implies that over time

religion and imperial citizenship became gendered within the narrow

confi nes of elite Andalusi families as sons identifi ed themselves as

Arabs and Muslims and daughters as Iberian and Christian.

Arab and Berber men may have subjugated Iberia politically and

made Islam the dominant imperial ideology, but they were themselves

assimilated into Iberian culture over succeeding generations through

intimate relations with their female subjects. Iberian women introduced sons and daughters to their culture and taught them to speak

local dialects. The most signifi cant and infl uential of these children

were the Umayyad rulers themselves. Although they proudly traced

their lineage to Damascus, most members of the royal family were

the sons of Christian mothers ranging in status from slave concubines

to northern princesses. According to the Andalusi theologian and historian Ibn Hazm, all but one of the Andalusi caliphs had blond hair

and blue eyes. By the ninth century, Muslim clerics worried openly

about the contaminating infl uences of Christian wives. At the very

least, they were free to eat pork and drink wine before they had sex

with their Muslim husbands or nursed their Muslim children. More

signifi cant, they blurred the imperial social boundaries that enabled

the Andalusi regime to extract wealth from its Iberian subjects.

Fortunately for the Umayyads, these cross-cultural social contacts were largely limited to city dwellers and nobles. Common rural

Iberians, who interacted rarely with the Arab settlers, had far less

incentive to follow the lead of their learned or urban counterparts in

embracing Islam or adopting Arab cultural practices. The exploitive

realities of medieval rule meant that, despite the Islamic legal protections for converts, those who did convert remained subject to tribute

payments in the form of
jizya
and
kharaj
if they lived within reach

of Umayyad tax collectors
.
By the ninth century, the Umayyads pretended that they ruled an entirely Muslim state, but it appears that

relatively isolated agrarian and pastoral majorities continued to prac-Muslim

Spain 103

tice their version of Christianity quietly. This probably explains why

Ibn Hawqal found the Iberian countryside to be still largely Christian

in the mid-tenth century.

These realities did not prevent Abd al-Rahman III from making

the Andalusi caliphate into a major political and economic infl uence

in the western Mediterranean, but as was the case with his forebearer

Abd al-Rahman I, his successors struggled to maintain his legacy. Following the death of his son al-Hakam II in 976, real power in the

caliphate fell into the hands of a hereditary line of chamberlains who

ruled through Abd al-Rahman’s relatively impotent heirs. The most

infl uential of these ministers was Muhammad ibn Abi Amir, who

took the title al-Mansur, “the victorious,” in celebration of his military accomplishments in the north. He copied the Quran by hand and

expanded the grand mosque in Córdoba to establish his legitimacy,

but his piety did not deter him from marrying a daughter of the king

of Navarre. Their son Abd al-Rahman, who had the Christian nickname Sanchuelo, ended the power of the chamberlains in 1009 by

rashly trying to depose the puppet Umayyad caliph. The resulting

civil war, in which six different Umayyad princes tried to seize power,

fatally weakened the caliphate and fragmented Al-Andalus.

This fratricidal struggle brought a fi nal and decisive end to three

centuries of Umayyad rule and produced more than sixty petty kingdoms run by
muwalladun
, Berbers, Arab elites, descendants of the

chamberlains, and former slave soldiers. Lasting from 1031 to 1084,

the
taifa
(faction/party) era saw the reemergence of local authority

on the Iberian Peninsula. Ironically, it also marked the high point

of Andalusi cultural achievement, as the various regional potentates

became patrons of the arts and letters to burnish their royal credentials. The fragmentation of the caliphate into petty kingdoms also

created opportunities for northern Christians. Fernando I united the

kingdoms of León and Castile under a single crown, and his heirs

recaptured the old Visigothic capital of Toledo. Flexing their military might, they exploited the confl icts between the
taifa
rulers and

extracted tribute from Muslim clients. These payments became a signifi cant revenue stream for the Christian kingdoms and a source of

shame for the proud Islamic rulers of Al-Andalus.

The pendulum swung back in favor of the Muslims in the early

eleventh century when Sinhaji Berbers invaded the peninsula. Known

104 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

in Spanish history as the Almoravids, they followed charismatic

Muslim clerics who preached a return to the purer form of Islam of

the original
rashidun
caliphs. The Almoravids conquered Morocco in

1083 and crossed into Spain eight years later in response to a plea

from a
taifa
ruler for help against the Christians. Their leader, Yusuf

ibn Tashufi n, reunited southern Al-Andalus but could not recapture

Toledo. The Almoravids condemned the Andalusis for their decadence and weakness, but Yusuf’s heir Ali himself became enamored

with the rich court of life of medieval Iberia. Weakened by constant

warfare with the north and revolts by Andalusi regional elites, the

Almoravid regime collapsed with Ali’s death in 1143. Once again, AlAndalus broke into petty
taifa
states until a new and even more puritanical Berber movement known as the Almohads intervened four

years later. For the next half century they governed southern Iberia

as a province of their larger North African empire.

It is diffi cult to determine exactly how these developments affected

non-Muslim Iberians. Interestingly, urban Christianity appears to

have largely disappeared from what remained of Al-Andalus after

the
taifa
era, and eleventh-century Arab historians made no further

mention of Andalusi Christians. The Latin-based vernacular language, known to linguists as Romance, seems to have fallen out of use

in the southern Iberian cities, and the
taifa
rulers relied largely on

interpreters to communicate with non-Muslims. When King Alfonso

VI of León conquered Toledo in 1085 his forces found that the population spoke only Arabic. Technically, practicing Christians required

an established clergy to administer the baptismal rites to sustain a

Christian identity over succeeding generations, but the church had

largely disappeared from much of Al-Andalus by this period.25

The majority of Iberians still might have considered themselves

believers, but it would have been diffi cult for them to remain formal

Christians without the ministrations of the clergy. Moreover, archaeological evidence indicating the widespread use of North African

cooking vessels and dinnerware suggests that much of the population

followed the dietary and social practices of the wider Islamic world in

the tenth century.26 This does not necessarily mean that a majority

of rural Iberians became Muslims. Local particularism was still more

than strong enough in the medieval era that they may well have lived

alongside Berber and Arab migrant communities while continuing to

Muslim

Spain 105

speak regional dialects of Romance among themselves and observe

the Christian faith in their own way. Seeking to escape the tribute

demands of the later caliphate, the
taifa
states, and the Berber invaders, rural communities may have disappeared from the historical

record as they tried to ride out these diffi cult times by withdrawing

deeper into their own local worlds. Consequently, they would have

had little reason to revolt against “foreign” Muslim rulers.

It is likely that the majority of urban and aristocratic Mozarabs

either converted to Islam, emigrated north, or retreated to the relative

isolation of the countryside by the end of the
taifa
era. The Cordoban

martyrdoms show that conversion had already begun to shrink the

urban Christian community by the ninth century. This suggests that,