Al-Andalus — the Emirate

The exception was a small corner which the Arabs called Ishbaniya, in the mountains of Asturias, where Gothic survivors and local mountainmen had held out, led by Pelayo. The otherwise minor Battle of Covadonga was the turning point after which the Moors decided not to take the trouble to subdue this hostile, unrewarding land.

Although Al-Andalus was controlled by Arabs, it was far from being an Arab country. For one thing, there were more Berbers than Arabs among the Moors (which is no more than a collective term for both). For another, the conquerers brought no women with them, so the next generation of Moors was already half Hispanic. Moorish Iberia consisted essentially of these descendents, together with converted Christians called muwallads.

The great clash between Muslim and Christian Spain was vaguely taking shape, in spite of the fact that the Moors had no great interest in converting their subjects to the Muslim faith. Christians and Jews were liable to pay a special tax, and in any case Muslims considered them fellow "people of the book," though many Christians did convert, probably out of self-interest, and it is possible that this conversion occurred en masse. But a very few Christians sought martyrdom, while others fled, some to Asturias where refugees were welcomed, and which was becoming the seed of the new Christian Spain.

Pelayo's daughter married a local chieftain called Alfonso, who recovered a great deal of territory from the Moors, turning Asturias into a kingdom and reigning for eighteen years, until 757, by which time it occupied about a quarter of the peninsula.

Meanwhile, in 749 in Damascus, the unpopular ruling Umaiyid dynasty was massacred by the Abbasids. Abd-er-Rahman, a twenty-year-old Umaiyid and the son of a Berber harem slave, escaped and fled to Morocco, with the intention of reaching Al-Andalus, which was in a state of chaos due to struggles between Yemenite and Kaishite Arabs, not to mention the Berbers, Syrians and Hispano-Goths. Abd-er-Rahman's mother's family gave him support in Morocco and a pro-Umaiyid group in Al-Andalus prepared his arrival there.

He landed at Almuñecar, Granada, in 755, and within a year had defeated his opponents and been declared Emir. He was to reign for over thirty years and found a dynasty that would last for nearly three centuries.

The Abassid Caliph, who had moved the capital to Baghdad, was in no real position to enforce his authority. Abd-er-Rahman paid lip service to the religious authority of the Caliph and otherwise ignored him, taking control of the army, tax collection and government as if he were an independent power, which to all intents and purposes he was, though he continued to call himself Emir as if he were still the representative of the Caliphate.

In 777, the Caliph bribed Frankish King Charlemagne to invade Spain. Charlemagne sent his nephew Roland with an army which unsuccessfully attacked Saragossa. The disgruntled Franks sacked Pamplona on their way back and were in turn ambushed by indignant Basques in the Pyrenean Roncesvalles Pass. In a classic example of mediaeval misinformation, the episode, including Roland's death, is chronicled in The Song of Roland as if the Franks' enemies were the Moors rather than the Basques.

Almost all of Abd-er-Rahman's descendents had to deal with at least one major uprising or attack from abroad. Hakam I dealt with rebellion with ruthlessness, crucifying 300 insurgents on the banks of the Guadalquivir near Cordoba, and expelling so many more that they founded the still visible Andalusian quarter of Fez in Morocco. In 844 his son, Abd-er-Rahman II, had to repel an invasion by Vikings, who sailed up the Guadalquivir to Seville, which they sacked for a week before being forced to flee back to sea.

But by this time, the emirate was stable, indeed Al-Andalus was one of the most prosperous countries in the Mediterranean, both culturally and economically. Its prosperity came from its flourishing agriculture, the Moors having retrieved Roman irrigation methods neglected by the Goths; mining, notably copper from the Rio Tinto; and trade, as the maritime trade routes between North Africa and Europe passed through Córdoba and were used in the other direction for the export of Andalusian goods. With economic prosperity came cultural flowering: Abd-er-Rahman II was a patron of scholarship and the arts, and Córdoba, by then the undeniable capital of Moorish Spain, was possibly one of the most civilized places in Europe.

It was certainly one of the cleanest: at a time when cities elsewhere were mediaeval rat-holes, usually lacking the most rudimentary public bathing facilities or sanitation, Córdoba had hundreds of public baths and even indoor plumbing. It was large by the standards of the time, with a population of around a hundred thousand (not the hundreds of thousands claimed by Moorish historians, but sizeable enough - Paris had less than twenty thousand inhabitants). Its products such as leatherwork, textiles or metalwork were famous, and its souks thriving. And its Great Mosque was second only to Mecca as a place of Muslim worship.

The Great Mosque of Córdoba was built on the site of the church of St Vincent, half of which the Muslims had converted for their own use, leaving the other half to the Christians. When the Great Mosque was planned, the Emir actually bought the Christian half of the church from its congregation (in contrast, when the Spanish Muslim community sought permission in 2002 to worship symbolically within the now unconsecrated Great Mosque (inside which is the present-day Córdoba Cathedral), the hostility aroused was distasteful to say the least).

Christian Spain and Moorish Al-Andalus were separated by wide strips of depopulated territory called marcas or marches. In addition, Charlemagne had established the Marca Hispanica, Spanish March, south of the Pyrenees in the area which would later become Catalonia. Galicia had been given to the Berbers to settle, but they found it too wet and too difficult to cultivate. When they moved south in search of better land, the Asturians occupied Galicia. They also colonized the unpopulated land north of the River Duero, the north of the Middle March, and built large numbers of castles to protect it. Hence the name, Castile.

At the beginning of the 10th century, King García I moved the capital of Asturias to León, in an evident threat to expand southwards into Moorish territory. Meanwhile, the Basques established the Kingdom of Navarre, in the most mountainous part of the Basque Country, from the region of La Rioja and the Pyrenees.

Around about this time, the legend of Santiago came into existence. According to this, on the eve of an important but almost certainly non-existent battle against Abderramán II at Clavijo in La Rioja, Saint James, Santiago, appeared to Ramiro I of Asturias (or Galicia, or both), promising victory. The next day, the Christian soldiers attacked, shouting "Santiago!" and the saint appeared mounted on a white horse, whereupon the Moors understandably fled. Saint James had become Santiago Matamoros, the Moor Slayer. Around the same time, a local bishop claimed to have located the corpse of Saint James and Alfonso II of León ordered a church to be built around the tomb. In 910, Alfonso III the Great ordered the church to be replaced with a basilica. The tomb had became a pilgrimage destination and in no time would become the third most holy place in Christendom, after Jerusalem and Rome.

In 912, Abd-er-Rahman's seventh descendent, Abd-er-Rahman III, came to power in succession to his grandfather, Abdulla (none of whose sons had survived him, all having been executed or poisoned). Abd-er-Rahman III represents the apogee of Moorish civilization, as a "statesman, soldier and leader on the same level as, for example, Napoleon Bonaparte," as Isabel Hervás Javega puts it. Although his reign was to be one of nearly continuous warfare, it was the high point of Moorish Spain in terms of both power and cultural achievement. And the beginning of 929 marks the change from emirate to caliphate: Abd-er-Rahman III declared himself caliph (as well as Prince of Believers, Defender of the Faith and the like), and as such of equal rank and no longer subject to the Abassid Caliph of Baghdad.