The fall of the Visigothic monarchy marked the beginning of the Islamic phase of Spain's history. From 711 to 1492, Muslims controlled varying portions of Iberia, and their long presence had a profound influence on Spanish culture long after they lost political control. From their origins in the Arabian Peninsula during the time of the prophet Muhammad (c. 570–632), the Muslims spread quickly and widely throughout the Middle East and across North Africa. They conquered cities as they went, fighting when they had to and making deals with local authorities when they could. People who came under Muslim authority had the option of converting to Islam, but they did not have to do so to live peaceably under their new overlords. Christians and Jews, considered “People of the Book” or fellow monotheists, could retain their religion and customs if they refrained from proselytizing, if they paid special taxes, and if they agreed to political restrictions preventing them from having authority over Muslims.
The historical sources, both Christian and Muslim, for the end of the Visigothic monarchy and the conquest and establishment of Islamic Spain are not abundant and come from later periods. Contemporary accounts are not available, and later ones are contradictory and contain legendary accretions. Nonetheless, scholars generally agree on the main outlines of the early years of Muslim consolidation in Spain.
After the defeat of King Roderick in southern Spain, the Muslim commander Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād, commanding a mainly Berber army, sent troops toward Córdoba. They defeated a remnant of the Visigoths on the way and took the city after a long siege. Ṭāriq accepted the allegiance of disaffected groups in the area, including significant elements of the Jewish communities, a segment of the population oppressed by the Visigoths and especially discontented. Ṭāriq himself moved on Toledo, the Visigothic capital, which his forces easily captured, while a detachment of his army secured Córdoba. His immediate overlord Mūsā ibn Nasayr, governor of northwest Africa, arrived in Spain with a force of 18,000, many of them Arabs, and conquered Carmona, Seville, and Mérida. Ṭāriq and Mūsā joined forces in Toledo and wintered there. During the following year Ṭāriq went to the northwest while Mūsā secured the Ebro valley, thanks in part to the conversion to Islam of two prominent Christian families, who remained in control of the local area as the Banū Qasī and the Banū Amrūs. Mūsā advanced on Narbonne beyond the Pyrenees. In Orihuela in the southeast, the local Duke Thodemir made a favorable treaty with the Muslims allowing local autonomy in exchange for tribute in kind. In 714, the caliph in Damascus summoned Mūsā and Ṭāriq to report on their conquests. In their absence, Spain remained in the charge of Mūsā's son ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who extended Muslim power in the eastern regions of Iberia.
By early 716 the Muslims had conquered most of the peninsula with the exception of the far northwest and the mountainous regions elsewhere in the north. Within the remainder of the territory, there were undoubtedly pockets of resistance and areas of only nominal allegiance, but Muslim control was probably more effective than that of the late Visigoths. The new Islamic province received the name al-Andalus and came under the ultimate authority of the Umayyad caliph in Damascus. In 716 the caliph placed the newly conquered al-Andalus under the authority of the governor of Tunisia, with a subordinate provincial governor for Spain. Some twenty governors served in al-Andalus from 716 to 756, but their short periods of tenure made it almost impossible to quell rising in-fighting among the various factions of the leadership.
Muslim Arabs and Berbers formed the core of the invading armies and received a stipend from captured booty. In some cases, as when local landowners had fled their property, certain Muslim warriors gained control of landed estates. This practice occurred in Spain until about 750, creating in the process a large group of Muslim landowners. Friction developed as Arabs received the best lands and Berbers the worst.
After conquering most of Spain, the Muslim governors in al-Andalus made repeated advances into France, taking Narbonne in 719–21 but failing to capture Toulouse. In 725 they tried unsuccessfully to advance up the Rhone valley. In 732 they crossed the western Pyrenees at Roncevalles and took Bordeaux, advancing from there into central France. The Frankish leader Charles Martel met and defeated the invaders between Tours and Poitiers in October 732. Although the Muslim army did not suffer a severe defeat in the battle, the event marked the high point of the Islamic advance in Western Europe.
Economics and psychology help to explain why the Muslims drew back. First, their strategy aimed mainly to gain booty through short, intense campaigns; they disliked long and bitter fighting. Western Europe was relatively poor and backward in the early eighth century, with little easily removable plunder available. The power of the Franks was growing, while internal dissensions in the Islamic world multiplied, making Muslim soldiers harder to recruit, particularly for campaigns that yielded little plunder. In addition, the Muslims likely considered the climate north of the Pyrenees to be hostile and unfamiliar. They made one more raid into the Rhone area in 734, but from then on Charles Martel and his sons gradually but inexorably pushed the Muslims from France and had effectively contained them in Spain by 759.
Conquest, conversion, and assimilation
The conquerors of al-Andalus faced sometimes severe internal problems, and fissures along lines of ethnic and geographical affiliations. Even the elite Arabs split into rival factions: the Qaysites and the Kalbites, groups which had their origins in rivalries in the Arabian Peninsula. Closely resembling political parties, the same factions were also present in Damascus. To retain power, the caliph relied on one group at the expense of the other, changing sides periodically. As he drew his appointees in Spain from the party he favored at any particular time, the factional strife in Damascus gave rise to bitter feuds in Spain as well.
Friction between the Arabs and all other ethnic groups who later converted to Islam was already apparent in the Islamic world. The Arabs were proud of their status as the original Muslims and as the recipients of the best lands in conquered territories; the later converts and their descendants resented the Arabs’ assumed superiority. This resentment extended even to the Syrians and was especially acute among the Berbers, the majority of the invaders of Spain, who had contributed mightily to the conquest and then found themselves rewarded with allocations of considerably less desirable lands. Many of them were so disaffected that they joined a Berber revolt that started in Morocco in 740. The caliph sent a contingent of Syrians to Morocco to calm the unrest, but they failed. The survivors among them – some 7,000 out of an original 30,000 – transferred to Spain, where they defeated the Berber rebels in three areas of the south. The Berbers in Spain dispersed and some returned to Morocco. The Syrians remained in Spain.
Overall, relatively few Muslims went to the peninsula. Ṭāriq's mainly Berber forces numbered around 12,000, Mūsā's commanded about 18,000 Arabs, and 7,000 Syrians arrived in 741. The Iberian population at the time of the Muslim incursion has been estimated at anywhere from 4,000,000 to 8,000,000, mainly Christian but with important Jewish communities in the larger cities. Statistically, therefore, the Muslim presence was quite small, but conversions to Islam added to those numbers from the beginning and increased over time.
The converts from Christianity to Islam came from two quite different categories. At the top were members of the Visigothic royal house, high nobles, and influential families such as the Banū Qasī, dominant in the upper Ebro valley, who saw political advantages in joining with the new rulers. But members of the local elite were few in number. Far more numerous were the lowly Visigothic or Hispano-Roman Christians who converted to Islam. They typically occupied low positions in the social hierarchy. Despite these conversions, in the early centuries of Islamic Spain, most Christians retained their ancestral faith, though many adopted Muslim customs and learned Arabic – hence the term for them: Mozarabs (mozárabes), or Muslim-like. The sizeable Jewish communities in a number of cities also remained largely true to their faith. Both Christians and Jews lived as “People of the Book” in Islamic Spain, as did their coreligionists in other parts of the Islamic world.
From emirate to caliphate in Muslim Spain
Even though Spain lay far from the center of the caliphate in Damascus, events at the core of the Islamic world had a major unintended impact on al-Andalus, as Muslim Spain began to follow its own political path. In 750 the Abbasid family wrested the Damascus caliphate from the Umayyad dynasty. The scion of the defeated family, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Mu‘āwiya, fled to Morocco, where his mother's family had influence. Once there, he sent agents to the opposing groups in al-Andalus. The Qaysite faction refused to treat with him, but the Yemenis welcomed his proposals. He crossed the strait at the head of an army composed of Syrians, Yemenis, and some Berbers with Iberian connections. By May 756, he had destroyed the Qaysite army and had taken the title of emir of al-Andalus in the capital of Córdoba. ‘Abd al-Rahmān's action was revolutionary in that he assumed the office on his own and admitted no subordination to a higher authority. After 756, al-Andalus enjoyed de facto political independence, one of the first breaks in the political unity of the Islamic world.
‘Abd al-Raḥmān I, as he is traditionally styled, ruled his independent emirate effectively, and strengthened Córdoba as his capital, beautifying the city and building the principal mosque, a structure still impressive after twelve centuries. Córdoba became the focal point of al-Andalus, a position it enjoyed for over 200 years. Nonetheless, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān failed to solve his emirate's social problems. Religious and ethnic disunity continued to plague his successors in the eighth and ninth centuries. One emir after another managed to suppress revolts during the years 756 to 822, although at times with difficulty and considerable bloodshed. To rule effectively, without the constant threat of rebellion, the emirs had to consolidate their authority in al-Andalus. Aside from some apparently futile appeals to religious unity, force was the only solution to the chronic instability. Consequently, the emirs created a professional army, dependent on the emir and run by foreign mercenaries, including enslaved soldiers from elsewhere in Europe. Because many of these soldiers were Slavs, their name became synonymous with slave.
Slavery was present in the Islamic world, as it had been throughout the Mediterranean world and the Middle East in ancient and classical times. Muslims were not to enslave Muslims, only non-believers, but if slaves then converted to Islam they did not automatically become free, only eligible for manumission. Enslaved women had duties that included household labor, nursing, and acting as concubines. Enslaved men were artisans and laborers, and some became soldiers. In addition, enslaved soldiers were imported from beyond the bounds of the Islamic world, many from Central and Eastern Europe, as youths. They were converted to Islam and received military training, designed to instill in them complete loyalty to their commanders and their ruler. Islamic rulers from Spain to Egypt made use of these loyal troops, who often were freed in early middle age as they ascended in the ranks; they then formed families of their own.
The army created by the emirs solved the problem of dissent within al-Andalus and fostered conditions for the emirate to flourish culturally. Córdoba remained a vital center of al-Andalus after ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I. As his successors expanded and beautified the city, it grew to become one of Europe's largest. Ideas and intellectuals traveled to Spain from the Islamic heartland, and al-Andalus changed from a far-western outpost of the Islamic world to become a vital part of it.
In the intensified Islamic culture of Córdoba, many Christians adopted the manners and dress of the Muslims, and increasing numbers spoke Arabic. Acculturation brought these Christian Mozarabs closer to their Muslim neighbors. By the time of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān II (822–52), many Arabized Christians took the final step and converted to Islam. Some church leaders in Córdoba viewed the loss of their fellow believers to the Islamic ranks as a major threat to the continued existence of the Christian community and tried to check the tide of conversions. Their tactics, in extreme form, included courting martyrdom and encouraging their fellow Christians to do the same. Often they staged provocative displays of Christian faith that included denunciations of Islam and its prophet, deliberately seeking martyrdom; the Muslim authorities obliged by arresting and executing the leaders of the movement. The martyrs of Córdoba seem to have had little effect on the overall character of Islamic Spain, but they may in fact have bolstered Christian identity and morale. The Mozarabic community survived, but individuals and groups of Mozarabs unwilling to remain in Muslim lands moved into the Christian-controlled areas far to the north of al-Andalus.
Meanwhile, Islamic leaders in al-Andalus worked to build local power and make themselves less and less subservient to the emirs in Córdoba. When ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III became emir in 912, he faced a difficult situation, with central authority weakened beyond a relatively short radius from the capital. Through clever plans and strong tactics, he rebuilt central authority and reasserted control through an increased use of enslaved troops. He also increased the naval presence of the emirate in the Mediterranean and used it against his chief maritime rivals, including the Normans and the newly powerful Fatimid dynasty in North Africa.
The Fatimid dynasty, which later took control of Egypt, had assumed the title of caliph in challenge to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, to whom all Muslims owed obedience – at least nominally. The Fatimids based their challenge on their leader's descent from Muhammad's daughter Fatima, wife of Ali, Muhammad's cousin and a figure venerated by the Shi'ites. Although al-Andalus was already an independent emirate, and in practice had little to do with distant Baghdad or the maintenance of its authority, the emirs had every reason to view the rise of the Fatimids with alarm, once they established a power base in Morocco. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, in an effort to attain greater authority at home and a counterbalance to the Fatimids across the strait, took the title of caliph for himself, making al-Andalus completely independent from higher authority.
This assumption of the title of caliph conformed to ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III's program of building his political authority. He reorganized the structure of government in the caliphate of Córdoba, building an effective bureaucracy and a network of loyal provincial governors. That reorganization worked well for him and for his son and successor al-Ḥakam (d. 976), but in the late tenth century and into the eleventh, power slipped away from successive caliphs in two directions. In Córdoba itself, the chamberlains, or chief ministers of the caliphate, increased their own power and marginalized the caliphs. Outside the capital, local towns and cities became increasingly self-directing and independent from Córdoba. With the center unable to hold and with religious enthusiasm insufficient to sustain support for the caliph, political fragmentation became the rule. This fragmentation reached a climax in the early eleventh century, when the last Umayyad caliph, Hishām II, was overthrown and not replaced. In 1031, the various leaders of al-Andalus met in Córdoba and agreed to abolish the caliphate.
Why would they do so? The reasons for the end of the caliphate are still not completely clear, and numerous possibilities suggest themselves. Muslims had been in control in Spain for three centuries by then, and their leaders may have assumed this to have been a permanent and uncontestable situation. Though Christian forces had made advances in the north, Muslims still controlled over two-thirds of the peninsula and particularly the prosperous south and southeast, despite ethnic differences among the various Muslim communities. Moreover, the caliphs after ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III were not as capable as their precursors and relinquished authority to their chamberlains. Muhammad ibn Abī ‘Amir, with the nom de guerre al-Manṣūr (the Victorious), was the first of the chamberlains to attain authority over the caliphate. Yet he and his successors, known as the Amirid dictators, could not hold al-Andalus together. Localism grew as various urban leaders pursued independent courses.
The last caliph, Hishām II, was actually deposed twice, once in 1009 and definitively in 1013, giving way to a situation of seemingly endless squabbles and battles. When the most prominent urban leaders assembled in Córdoba in 1031 and abolished the caliphate, about thirty freestanding city-states emerged. Called the petty or party kingdoms or taifas (from the Arabic ṭā’ifa), each kingdom had a capital city and a greater or lesser hinterland; some were controlled by Slavs, some by Arabs, some by Berbers, and others by descendants of the former Hispano-Romans. In 1031, their leaders seem to have believed they could maintain themselves forever in this mosaic of tiny kingdoms. Over the course of the eleventh century, however, conflicts among the city-states multiplied, and the Christians in the north were quick to take advantage of Muslim disunity.
Origins of Christian states in the north
The initial Muslim invasion failed to conquer the mountainous regions in the north, which were isolated, poor, and sparsely populated. Thereafter, Muslim leaders paid little attention to the north and never made a concerted effort to stamp out the independent Christian groups on the borders of al-Andalus. This inattention allowed a space for remnants of the Visigothic ruling class to establish themselves in the Cantabrian Mountains and to join forces with the local elite. The first leader of Christian resistance to the Muslim conquest was Pelayo, who may have been a Visigothic noble – perhaps even associated with Roderick's court. In 718 or thereabouts, he succeeded in rallying enough support to inflict a sharp defeat on a Muslim army in the Cantabrian area known as the Picos de Europa. The battle took its name from a nearby cave with religious connotations: Covadonga (la Cueva de Santa María or Cova dominica).
Although the small battle is important only as the precursor of later engagements, Pelayo was quick to follow up his advantage. He examined his territorial base and encouraged other bands of Christians to join him, referring to his kingdom as Asturias and establishing its capital at Cangas de Onís. Many of the nobles and clergy who joined Pelayo's cause had been associated with the defunct Visigothic kingdom, and the same tensions between nobility and crown continued in Pelayo's movement. Although the clergy proved to be staunch royal allies, the war against al-Andalus did not have strong religious or racial motivations at this early date. The king wanted to expand his area of authority; the nobles wanted land. To secure their goals, they were willing to join forces to fight the Muslims or to deal independently with them, depending on the circumstances.
From Pelayo, the crown passed to Alfonso I (739–57), Visigothic duke of Cantabria and husband of Pelayo's daughter. He shaped a viable Asturian monarchy and began the territorial expansion of the kingdom. Alfonso's reign coincided with major difficulties among the Muslims of al-Andalus. As rebellious Berbers fought Arabs and Arabs fought each other, Muslim forces abandoned the north. Alfonso was able to pursue a vigorous extension of his authority that pushed the area of Christian control south to the valley of the Duero River, east to the Basque country, and west to Galicia. To secure these gains, Alfonso established garrisons at strategic points and attempted, wherever possible, to repopulate conquered areas with Christians. Nonetheless, the frontier between Christianity and Islam remained fluid and discontinuous. A vast, nearly deserted area lay between the areas under Christian and Muslim control, which one side or the other periodically invaded with large armies.
Within his Asturian kingdom, Alfonso I (known as “the Catholic”) relied heavily on the clergy, who proved much better allies than the sometimes unruly nobility. The clergy began to frame the war against the Muslims as a religious duty and to censure those reluctant to participate. In return for their political support, Alfonso and his successors granted land to the clergy and built churches, cathedrals, and monasteries that enhanced the power and visibility of the religious establishment. Nonetheless, the intermittent wars against the Muslims responded to material as well as religious motivations.
The death of Alfonso I in 757 coincided with the establishment and consolidation of the independent emirate of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I in al-Andalus. With the end of their internal struggles, the increased Muslim power in the south made it almost impossible for Asturias to expand farther. Alfonso's successors therefore concerned themselves with consolidating monarchical authority by countering noble challenges and moves toward independence. Because of that consolidation, the next great Asturian king, Alfonso II (791–842), inherited a realm that possessed great internal strength and cohesion.
Alfonso II, “the Chaste,” successfully repelled three attacks by Muslim forces. He also took advantage of Muslim unrest under al-Hakam I and ‘Abd al-Raḥmān II to make several raids into Muslim areas now in Portugal, where he took prisoners and booty and secured fortified towns. He encouraged many Christians living under the emir to move north to resettle the border areas. In his dealings with Christians north of the Pyrenees, Alfonso II entered into alliances with Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, but he took pains to maintain the political independence of his kingdom. He also continued the process of strengthening royal authority and administration, reinstituting the Visigothic legal code known as the Lex Visigothorum, Liber iudiciorum, or Fuero Juzgo (in Castilian translation), which had fallen into disuse. He moved the capital to Oviedo and encouraged the Basques to resist Muslim overlordship.
During Alfonso II's reign, an event occurred that was to have a tremendous impact on Europe and that would focus attention on Christian Iberia. In a field near the town of Iria Flavia in the far northwest of Galicia, local citizens discovered what were believed to be the sepulcher and remains of St. James the Apostle (St. James the Greater). The story of St. James – called “Santiago” in Spain – became one of the dominant myths of Catholic Spain. Even today, Spaniards widely celebrate July 25, the day of St. James the Greater in the Catholic calendar. Santiago was one of the original twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. As the traditional story goes, after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, Santiago undertook a mission to convert Spain to Christianity. He met with little success and was in despair when the Virgin Mary appeared to him, standing on a pillar. Her intervention heartened Santiago and inspired the foundation of a church on the spot where later churchmen would build the cathedral of Zaragoza. María del Pilar remains a popular baptismal name for girls, particularly in northern Spain.
Santiago's legend continued with his return to Palestine and his death there. When he died, his followers supposedly placed his body on board a ship that miraculously guided itself to northwestern Iberia. There, among the fiord-like rías of Galicia, the boat approached the shore, where a mounted pagan wedding party was riding along the ría. The bridegroom's horse stumbled and pitched him into the sea near the ship. Followers of Santiago in the ship saved the man by lifting him aboard, and one of them performed a spontaneous baptism, using as a dipper one of the scallop shells that clung to the bridegroom's clothing. Thereafter, the scallop shell became the lasting symbol of Santiago.
The pagans were gratified and impressed by the quick actions of the Christians, but when the latter asked the local ruler, Queen Lupa, for permission to bury the apostle, his body now resting in a stone coffin, she refused and imprisoned the Christians. They miraculously escaped from their confinement and fled. As bridges fell behind them, they were able to evade Lupa's pursuing troops. These seeming miracles began to attract local attention and led to many conversions to Christianity. Queen Lupa then feigned a change of heart and offered a plot for Santiago's burial. She told his followers to go up a nearby mountain and fetch the oxen there to pull the stone coffin to the burial place. She did not tell them that the mountain was the territory of a dragon and that the oxen were actually wild bulls. When the dragon challenged them, the Christians showed him the sign of the Cross, the mere sight of which caused his demise. Then they found the wild bulls, which became docile as they approached and allowed themselves to be yoked like oxen to move the coffin. By now, Lupa herself had become a believer and allowed the body to be buried in one of her fields. A small shrine marked the spot, but both were lost until the time of King Alfonso II, when a hermit discovered the shrine in a field marked by burning stars. In a burst of piety, local Christians soon built a church on the spot. They called the place Compostela, from the Latin Campus Stellae, or Field of Stars, and a town grew around it named for Santiago.
Santiago de Compostela became one of the most popular and important centers of Christian pilgrimage in all of medieval Europe, outranked only by Rome. Its pilgrim traffic declined in the sixteenth century due to wars and the rise of Protestantism, reducing the number of Northern European pilgrims. In the late twentieth century, however, interest in walking the road to Santiago enjoyed a resurgence, and the pilgrimage remains popular in the early twenty-first century among believers and non-believers alike. True pilgrims begin the trek in Paris at the Tour Saint-Jacques, and proceed south through the French countryside to the Pyrenees and the border with Spain. From there, they travel westward along one of two principal routes, sometimes through large cities that grew to cater to pilgrims, but more often through the countryside. As in the Middle Ages, chapels and churches mark the route, and hostels along the way provide lodging and food for the pilgrims.
The ninth-century growth of the town of Santiago in Galicia indicated the strengthening of Christian control in the area and the growing fame of the pilgrimage route. From its early nuclei in the Cantabrian Mountains and Galicia, Christian territory gradually expanded southward into Muslim-controlled areas, with the raiders sacking towns, destroying crops and seizing animals, collecting loot and captives for ransom or enslavement, and encouraging Mozarabs to return with the raiders and take up residence in Christian areas.
In the eighth and early ninth centuries, the lands of the valley of the Duero River were largely deserted. The Muslims had never settled the region extensively, and many Muslims left after the Berber revolt in the 740s. Late in the ninth century and into the tenth, the Christians began to establish settlements in the lands along the northern bank of the Duero, with strong points at Zamora and Toro, enabling the Asturian king Ordoño II to move his capital south from Oviedo to León. The Christian lands thereafter became the kingdom of León.
In the northeast of the peninsula, the growth of Christian control had close connections with the Frankish kingdom to the north. During the eighth century the Carolingians had pushed the Muslims south to the Pyrenees, and Charlemagne (742–814) wanted to push them even farther south and to establish a series of marches (or defensive frontier provinces) on the Iberian side of the mountains. He thought he saw his chance when the Muslim governor of Zaragoza asked for Frankish aid in his rebellion against the Umayyad emir, Hishām I.
The rebellion was not just a local Spanish Muslim squabble but reflected high politics in the wider Mediterranean world. At that point, the Umayyads were newcomers as rulers in Spain, while the Abbasids still ruled as caliphs in Baghdad and claimed authority over the entire Islamic world. In 778, Charlemagne led his army across the mountains into Spain by the western pass of Roncevalles, to help the Muslim governor regain Zaragoza. In Pamplona, he secured the friendship of local Christians, who provisioned his army on credit. Then he moved toward Zaragoza. Even with the aid of Muslim rebels, his siege of the city failed, and the Franks retreated along the route by which they had entered the peninsula, but they failed to pay their debts to the local Christian community. At Roncevalles, the locals ambushed Charlemagne's rear guard, resulting in the deaths of the heroes Roland and Anselm, among many others. This affair deterred Charlemagne from Spanish excursions for some years.
In later centuries, beginning in the late eleventh, the story became legend and eventually served as the basis for the great French medieval epic, La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland). The epic reflects eleventh- and twelfth-century concerns during the early Christian crusades into the eastern Mediterranean and significantly departs from the historic events. Rather than telling the story of a Frankish–Christian alliance with dissident Spanish Muslims, and a final battle that pitted Christians against Christians over an unpaid debt, the epic fictionalizes the events as a great Christian–Islamic confrontation.
Charlemagne himself never returned to Spain, but his forces established the Spanish March, beginning with the conquest of Gerona in 785. In 797, nearly twenty years after the debacle in Zaragoza and Roncevalles, Charlemagne sent an envoy to the Abbasid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd to seek an alliance against the Umayyads of Spain. The alliance came to nothing, but Hārūn sent as a gift to Charlemagne an elephant that for years impressed the king's supporters and terrified his enemies. In 801 many small towns near Barcelona, and – most important of all – Barcelona itself, came under Christian control. Tarragona and Tortosa were conquered a decade later, and added to the Spanish March, the whole of which was placed under the duchy of Aquitaine.
Soon, members of the local elite grew restive under the duchy's control. Much of the area, including lands in French territory, joined with Barcelona to form the county of Barcelona (later emerging as Catalonia). Although the counts at first recognized the overlordship of the Carolingians, before the end of the century Catalonia had become an independent state. The independence of the whole Spanish March was assured by the progressive weakness of Charlemagne's descendants. The attitude of the clergy in this area clearly indicated the diminishing authority of the Franks south of the Pyrenees. Whereas the clergy had formerly sought resolution of church questions at the Frankish court, they began to take their problems directly to the pope, or at least to the count of Barcelona.
By the middle of the ninth century, the entire northern section of the peninsula, from Galicia eastward along the Bay of Biscay and the southern slopes of the Pyrenees to Barcelona, was in Christian hands. Beginning from Asturias and its successor state León, as well as from Navarre, Aragon, and the county of Barcelona, the various Christian states in the north of the peninsula would eventually expand southward into Muslim territory. In the ninth and tenth centuries, however, no one could predict that Christian forces would prevail. Islamic Spain was still in the ascendancy, and al-Andalus had become one of the gems of the Islamic world.
The apogee of Muslim Spain
Islamic Spain at its height was a part of the wider Islamic world stretching from the Indus River to the Atlantic Ocean. It was a rich world, based initially on plunder and later enjoying a Golden Age based on agriculture, animal husbandry, mining, artisan production, and trade. Throughout this Islamic world, the common adherence to one religion and the unifying effects of the Arabic language, a single legal code, and common commercial practices all fostered commercial activity. Muhammad himself had been a merchant, and the high regard for merchants expressed in the Qur’ān reinforced the value of trade and its practitioners.
Nonetheless, despite the importance of cities and trade, the Islamic world remained predominantly rural, and the Muslims in Spain were responsible for introducing a wide range of agrarian improvements. They continued to make use of existing crops such as wheat, olives, and wine grapes (the latter despite religious prohibitions). Especially in the southern and southeastern regions, the Muslims also brought in new crops and new ways to produce them. Various citrus fruits, the fig, and the almond all came to Spain with the Muslims, as did sugar cane, rice, and saffron. Where feasible in the lower river valleys, they extended irrigated agriculture by building new projects or by expanding earlier ones dating back to the Romans. The Muslims had wide experience with irrigation works, learning about them in conquered areas from Syria to Spain and adopting and adapting the most efficient techniques. In animal husbandry, they developed the selective breeding of cattle, sheep, and horses, and introduced the ass from Egypt. They also raised domesticated chickens, peacocks, and doves.
Islamic cities were crucial nexus points for trade in rural produce, mined minerals, and, above all, in artisan production. While urban life in the rest of Western Europe languished between the fading of the Roman Empire and the twelfth century, the cities of Islamic Spain flourished. Córdoba, capital of first the emirate and then the independent caliphate, was the largest city in Islamic Spain, probably containing more than 100,000 inhabitants. Zaragoza, Toledo, Seville, Granada, Almería, and Málaga each had between 15,000 and 40,000. As in ancient times, the south and southeast of the peninsula continued to be the most vibrant and developed part.
The cities of Islamic Spain produced a wide range of goods from the metals mined in the peninsula, including weaponry, fine gold work, and minted gold coins. Leather goods produced from local hides also occupied an important place in artisan production; even today, words associated with leather, such as “cordovan” and “morocco,” date from the leather industries of Islamic Spain. Other skilled artisans wove cloth from wool, cotton, linen, and silk, all produced in the peninsula. The Muslims introduced the production of paper – a Chinese invention – to Spain in the ninth century, and developed an export industry from the tenth century. They also developed major industries for the production of glass and ceramics, including the brilliant decorative tiles that still adorn palaces and mosques from Spain's Islamic period. From fields and shops all over al-Andalus merchants exported goods to markets in the western Mediterranean and beyond. Integrating Spain into the wider Islamic world did not happen overnight, but, by the ninth century, the connections and trade routes were in place and fully functional.
Economic expansion under the Romans, Visigoths, and the Muslims and their Christian counterparts undoubtedly took a toll on Spain's natural resources, though historians have not accorded that story the attention it deserves. Building construction, mining, shipbuilding, and – above all – glass- and tile-making all consume large amounts of wood. How did Spain's primordial forests fare over the course of a millennium of economic development? Here the evidence is murky and the interpretations widely divergent. Some scholars suggest that the Muslims expanded timber production and carefully managed the forests, while others argue that deforestation and the start of environmental degradation began in the Islamic period. Until scholars have time to examine this issue in more detail, it remains an open question. There is no doubt, however, that the Islamic period saw the expansion of artisan production and the growth of cities, both of which required the exploitation of forests.
Along with economic expansion, the rate of conversions to Islam increased during the heyday of the caliphate of Córdoba, troubling as it was to Christian and Jewish leaders. Even for the Christians and Jews who stayed within their ancestral religions, their material culture inexorably absorbed elements from the dominant Islamic forms that surrounded them. This included distinctive features of housing design, cuisine, and dress. Language changed as well, with the common use of Arabic by members of all three religious groups in Islamic Spain. The transmission of knowledge from Arabic scholarship and Arabic translations of the classical heritage of Rome, and especially Greece, to Latin Christendom was thus facilitated, and it would gather momentum in subsequent centuries.
Iberia, late eleventh century. In contrast to the unity of the peninsula under Roman rule, the political divisions in the late eleventh century show the separation between Christian and Muslim areas during the medieval period.
The eleventh century marked the beginning of an important change in the relations between Christian and Muslim territories in Spain. As the caliphate collapsed, local rulers pursued independent courses in the taifa kingdoms, some of which controlled only a principal city and its immediate surroundings, while others controlled large regions. The most important taifas were Zaragoza, Toledo, Badajoz, and Seville, ruled by Arabs; Granada, ruled by Berbers; and Valencia, with kings of Slavic origins, descendants of the military slaves. The taifa period produced a brilliant cultural flowering, as the taifa kings prided themselves on maintaining glittering courts in contention with their rivals. They built palaces and civic buildings, amassed large libraries as testimony to their real or pretended intellectual attainments, and recruited and supported distinguished scholars.
Politically, no single taifa was a match for the emerging Christian kingdoms of the north, though Christian Spain was not yet strong enough to reconquer and repopulate extensive territories. Instead, Christian leaders intervened in the squabbles among the taifas, forming alliances with some taifas against others, or launching independent attacks to sack cities and capture territories. Instead of attacking, they might threaten a vulnerable taifa into paying protection money in the form of tribute (parias). All of these activities, which included frequent raids (algaras), honed the military skills of the Christian warrior class and reinforced their loyalty to their leaders. Although Christianity and Islam defined the two sides of the cultural frontier, religious differences were decidedly secondary motivations in their conflicts during the eleventh century. Moreover, during peaceful intervals, a variety of cultural, commercial, social, and political exchanges occurred across the religious frontiers.
Although the Christian states in the north gradually increased in power at the expense of the taifas during the eleventh century, they also expended great effort in disputes among themselves. Moreover, Christian rulers had a tendency to divide their hard-won territories among their heirs, dissipating part of their power. Despite these disadvantages, a few powerful kings were able to amass considerable power and territory in their lifetimes. Sancho III, called “the Great” (“el Mayor”), king of Navarre (1000–35), was one the first of these powerful leaders. Sancho extended his authority into Cantabria, joined Castile to Navarre, and seized the Tierra de Campos (between the rivers Pisuerga and Cea) from the kingdom of León. He also gained control of the counties of Aragon and asserted a degree of overlordship in the counties of Catalonia. Having put together the largest Spanish Christian kingdom since the time of the Visigoths, Sancho the Great began to call himself “the king of all the kingdoms of Spain.” He brought the nobles into line and pacified his territories. Navarre was open to influences from Europe beyond the Pyrenees, and Sancho extended this by fostering pilgrim traffic on the road to Santiago de Compostela. The hegemony of greater Navarre did not outlive Sancho, however. On his death in 1035, his testament divided his estates among his sons, naming the three eldest as kings: García, king of Navarre; Fernando, king of Castile; and Ramiro, king of Aragon. Thus both Castile and Aragon owe their origins as kingdoms to the testament of Sancho the Great.
The first king of Castile, Fernando I (1035–65), made himself the most noteworthy of the sons of Sancho. When the king of León, Bermudo III, tried to retake the Tierra de Campos that Sancho the Great had annexed, Fernando I fought him at Támara. Bermudo died in the battle, allowing Fernando to claim and take his kingdom, thus temporarily unifying Castile and León. Fernando later defeated and killed his elder brother García of Navarre (1035–54) at the battle of Atapuerca, which allowed him to extend Castile's border with Navarre as far as the Ebro River. He also continued forays against the Muslims, extending his control over Muslim towns in the west, including Viseu and Coimbra in what would become Portugal, although the Muslims later regained them temporarily. As an indication of Fernando's power and reputation, he forced the Muslim rulers of Toledo, Seville, Badajoz, and Zaragoza to pay him tribute. In sum, Fernando I converted Castile into the most powerful of the Christian states, yet, when he died in 1065, he divided his holdings. His eldest son, Sancho, received Castile and ruled it as Sancho II; Alfonso got León; and García got Galicia. He left cities to his daughters. Urraca received Zamora, Elvira got Toro, and both secured income from monasteries throughout their father's lands.
Sancho II (1065–72) embarked on an aggressive policy and seized Galicia and León from his brothers, but he died at the hands of an assassin while laying siege to his sister's town of Zamora. Alfonso, who had gone into exile in Muslim Toledo, then succeeded Sancho as Alfonso VI of Castile. The highlight of Alfonso VI's reign was the conquest of Toledo. After a long siege, Alfonso's forces entered the city in 1085 and made it part of Castile. Toledo's conquest meant that Castile had a powerful fortress-city to protect recently reconquered towns south of the Guadarrama Mountains. Toledo was the largest city that the Christians had taken from the Muslims to that point, and it retained a large Muslim population.
The Christian capture of Toledo marked the beginning of a new stage in Christian–Muslim relations. In 1086, a year after Toledo fell, the Muslim ruler of Seville called in the Almoravids (al-Murābitūn) from Morocco for help against expanding Christian power. The Almoravids, or Almorávides, as they were known in Spanish, arose in the western Sahara, where the Moroccan ‘Abd Allāh ibn Yāsin preached a reformist Islamic message to the Berbers that demanded strict adherence to the tenets of Islam, coupled with less tolerance for non-Muslims. He formed a ribat, or religious community, on the Senegal River not far from the Atlantic coast and attracted followers.
The movement began to expand its political control northward through Morocco, and controlled most of it by 1080. Six years later, the Almoravid leader Yāsuf ibn-Tāshfīn crossed the strait with a large army, complete with camels and drums, and routed the Castilians at a battle near Badajoz. In 1090 he returned in another campaign and took over much of al-Andalus (with the major exception of Zaragoza), arousing fears on the part of some taifa rulers, notably those of Badajoz and Granada. He also made excursions into Christian territory but could not retake lands that Christian rulers had fully occupied and repopulated.
Yūsuf's successors continued to control much of al-Andalus for some fifty years. Given the less tolerant attitude of the Almoravids toward non-Muslims, many Jews began to think that Christian Spain offered a safer haven and moved north, where they were welcomed into Christian kingdoms. By about 1145, the Almoravid Empire had fallen apart. Nonetheless, during their ascendancy, religious hostility increased on both sides of the Muslim–Christian divide.
In response to the Almoravid invasions, more foreign knights and monks came into Iberia from across the Pyrenees from the end of the eleventh century onward, and they brought with them an implacable hostility toward the Muslims. The knights and corresponding naval forces from Northern Europe also brought advanced siege tactics and weaponry, as well as new techniques of naval warfare. On both land and sea, they provided significant help to the Spanish Christian forces on several occasions. Nonetheless, they often expressed dismay at the willingness of Spanish leaders to honor surrender treaties with the Muslims and to extend good terms to them. As their militant attitudes toward the Muslims penetrated Spain, successive popes offered spiritual benefits and financial support for campaigns against the Muslims. In this new atmosphere, campaigns of the Spanish Reconquest, as it came to be called, often received the same standing as crusades to Palestine and elsewhere.
Despite this increasing militancy, it was still possible for exchanges and mutual respect to cross religious frontiers in Spain. One example is the welcome that the exiled King Alfonso of León received from the Muslim ruler of Toledo during his exile. By far the clearest example of the permeable frontier between Christian and Muslim areas was the career of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as “El Cid,” who became one of the emblematic figures of the Reconquest. Born to a minor noble family from the town of Vivar near Burgos in the mid 1040s, Rodrigo entered the court of Prince Sancho to receive his education while Fernando I was still alive. After Sancho knighted him, Rodrigo sometimes joined Sancho and Fernando I in battle. After Sancho became king, Rodrigo served as the king's standard bearer (alférez), head of the king's militia. His prowess eventually earned him two nicknames: El Cid (from the Arabic sidi, lord or leader) and “Campeador” (from the Latin campi doctor, or chief field instructor), though he gained the former nickname toward the end of his career, and later writers may have invented the Campeador nickname.
Rodrigo was one of Sancho's main advisers, and when the king died, Rodrigo joined the administration of Alfonso VI. After accumulating enemies in Alfonso's court, he went into exile, during which he served five years in the military forces of the Muslim king of Zaragoza. Rodrigo was back in Alfonso's court at the time of Toledo's capture and then was exiled again. This time he raised an army and campaigned from Castile eastward toward Valencia, which he conquered and then succeeded in holding for the rest of his life. His widow Doña Ximena was able to hold Valencia for a few more years before Muslims retook it. In all of Rodrigo's campaigns he employed Muslims and received help from them. That is clear even in the fictionalized story preserved in the Poema del Cid (“The Poem of the Cid”), Castile's major medieval epic, and in the lavish 1950s Hollywood film with Charlton Heston as El Cid, and Sophia Loren as Doña Ximena. By contrast, The Song of Roland, the French national epic, depicts the battles between Christians and Muslims as wars to the death, and Muslims as the personification of evil. In other words, these two national epics, written at about the same time, nicely illustrate the differences in Christian depictions of Muslims north and south of the Pyrenees. As the twelfth and thirteenth centuries progressed, it remained possible in Spain for exchanges and cordial relations to exist across the religious divide, but they became increasingly more difficult.
In addition to sparking the increase in Muslim–Christian hostility, Alfonso VI's conquest of Toledo unintentionally set the stage for the emergence of an independent Portuguese kingdom. Numerous French knights had joined Alfonso's campaign and participated in the successful siege of Toledo. Alfonso rewarded them handsomely. One of them, Henry of Lorraine (known in Spain as Enrique de Lorena), married Alfonso's illegitimate daughter Teresa and received as dowry the county of Portugal, a small territory in today's Portugal, to the south of Galicia. When Henry died in 1112, Teresa acted as de facto queen in the name of their son, Afonso Henriques (Sp. Alfonso Enríquez). During his long reign, Afonso extended the area of Portugal by reconquering lands south to the Tagus River. In 1147 his troops, reinforced by contingents of northern crusaders on their way to Palestine, took and held the city of Lisbon. Afonso and his dowager mother worked to make Portugal independent of León-Castile. He declared himself king in 1143 and a vassal of the pope in 1144; he finally received papal recognition of his kingship in 1179.
A few years earlier, a new wave of invasions from North Africa had begun. A second Berber Empire had arisen in Morocco, founded by a scholar named Muhammad ibn Tūmart. Born in the Atlas Mountains in the 1080s, he studied in various intellectual centers of the Islamic world and developed a strict interpretation of Muslim belief. Ibn Tūmart attracted followers called the Almohads (Almohades in Spanish, Muwahhidūn in Arabic), and declared himself to be the Mahdī, a leader inspired by Allah, in 1121. Following Ibn Tūmart's death, ‘Abd al-Mu'min became the leader and began to expand Almohad influence in Morocco. He made a brief excursion into Iberia in 1145 or 1146, but the real beginning of the Almohads’ power was in 1147, when they drove the Almoravids from Marrakesh. They followed this success by expanding their power eastward across North Africa as far as Tripoli.
In 1172, the Almohads conducted a major campaign in Spain, first taking Seville and later a large portion of al-Andalus. They won a large victory over the forces of Alfonso VIII of Castile at the battle of Alarcos, near Ciudad Real, in 1195. This disastrous defeat – Alfonso VIII narrowly escaped capture or death – and the failure of coordination among the Christian forces when promised Leonese troops never arrived, galvanized secular and clerical leaders. Responding to the appeal of Pope Innocent III, the Christian kingdoms resolved to combine forces and take the offensive against the Almohads. Contingents from Castile, Aragon, León, and Navarre, with the addition of some French knights, met the Almohad army at Las Navas de Tolosa in July 1212 and won an overwhelming victory. That battle marked the end of major Muslim power in the peninsula, although it took the Christian forces some time to recover from the strains, losses, and expenses that had brought them victory.
Many Spanish Muslims recognized the battle of Las Navas as the beginning of the end for Almohad power, and some local rulers rose against them, with aid from Christian kings. Fernando III of Castile collaborated with the Muslims and used their help in his successful campaigns in Andalusia and Murcia. He conquered Córdoba in 1236, Murcia in 1241–3, Jaén in 1246, and – the most important prize of all – Seville in 1248. He captured Seville with a joint land and naval campaign by Castilian forces, for which northern port cities provided the ships that were decisive in the victory. Thereafter, northern merchants, shipbuilders, and mariners took an active role in developing port facilities and commerce in the south.
During the conquest of Seville, the Muslim king of Granada actively supported Fernando III. The kingdom of Granada remained as a tributary to the Castilian kings thereafter, obliged to pay an annual sum in gold. The Granadan kings did not always honor their agreement with the Castilian rulers and often missed their tribute payments, but the arrangement suited both sides for more than two centuries. Granada remained in Muslim control until 1492. Its geography made it easy to defend and hard to attack, and it served as a refuge for dissident Muslims living under Christian rule, and therefore as a safety valve against dissent in Castile.
Fernando III brought about the definitive union of the kingdoms of León and Castile, both of which had had functioning parliaments (cortes) since the late twelfth century. Fernando was a unifier in other ways as well. He was a crusader and a contemporary of the French King Louis IX, canonized as St. Louis for his zeal in defense of the Catholic faith. Whereas Louis was a thoroughgoing crusader and an almost fanatical opponent of the Muslims, Fernando held rather different views. He fought long and successfully against the Muslims of Spain, and took great satisfaction in converting former mosques into churches in the areas he conquered. Nonetheless, when he conquered territories, he continued the policy of toleration toward Islam and Judaism, considering himself to be the king of all three religious communities. He, too, would eventually be canonized, as San Fernando, but less for his religious zeal alone than for his exemplary life and benevolent rule. Among his other achievements, Fernando III founded the University of Salamanca, one of the oldest and most distinguished universities in medieval Europe.
Fernando's son Alfonso X followed his father as king of León and Castile (1252–84). Known to history as Alfonso the Wise (“el Sabio”), he excelled as an intellectual leader and a patron of learning, but he failed badly as a political leader for Spain. Alfonso wasted time and money in a campaign to be elected as Holy Roman Emperor. Although he was able to bribe his way to winning the election, the Germans would not accept a foreign emperor, and the Spanish nobility did not want their king to decamp to Central Europe while supporting himself with Castilian wealth. The position of emperor therefore remained open until 1273, when Rudolph of Habsburg was elected, the first in a long line of Habsburg emperors. Alfonso spent the last years of his life fending off efforts to depose him and dealing with rival claimants to the succession, contested by a son and by a grandson by another son.
Iberia, late thirteenth century. By this time, Christian kingdoms had reconquered all of Iberia, except the Muslim kingdom of Granada.
Alfonso X's cultural contributions, by contrast, gained him deserved and lasting fame. They were part of a large movement of the transmission of knowledge from the Islamic world to the Latin West through the translation, often by Jewish scholars in Spain fluent in both Arabic and Latin, of Arabic scientific treatises and Arabic versions of Greek and Hellenistic scientific and philosophical works. Alfonso X himself translated or supervised the translation of Arabic works of science and chess, compiled law codes and historical works, and wrote poetry. As part of his efforts to centralize and rationalize royal authority, he sponsored the creation of a new law code for León and Castile, the Siete Partidas (lit., the Seven Divisions), which relied heavily on Roman law and, to a lesser extent, on traditional customary law. The first part dealt with religion; the second with kingship; the third with the administration of justice; the fourth with matrimony; the fifth with contracts; the sixth with testaments; and the seventh with infractions and punishments. Because the Siete Partidas is such a wide-ranging and thorough set of laws and customs, historians use it frequently as a window on thirteenth-century Spain. Ironically, it was not applied in Castile during his reign, because the nobles objected to its enhancement of royal power. Later jurists in Spain did make great use of the Siete Partidas, however, and it continues to form a component of the modern Spanish legal corpus.
King Alfonso also had a great regard for history and compiled a number of important works, employing a team of researchers and writers. The most significant works were a history of Spain, La historia de España – also known as the Crónica general – and a universal history, the Grande e general historia. The former was a compilation of earlier sources up to Alfonso's day and included all of Spain, not just the Leonese-Castilian portion. The latter was a compendium of historical knowledge from the beginning of Christian history to the late thirteenth century. Both histories were written in Castilian rather than Latin, because Castile was one of the first countries in Europe to use the vernacular for scholarly endeavors and public administration. In fact, the Grande e general historia was the first universal history of the European Middle Ages written in a vernacular language. Alfonso X was also a poet and wrote his verse in Galician instead of Castilian, because the softer sounds of Gallego seemed more appropriate for poetic discourse. Scholars attribute to him the Cantigas de Santa María (“Songs of Praise for the Virgin Mary”), a masterpiece of medieval poetry. The stories in the Cantigas are richly expressive and magnificently illustrated; modern scholars value them highly for their unparalleled window on thirteenth-century life.
Many scholars describe the thirteenth century in Spain as a sort of religious and cultural Golden Age, during which Christian, Islamic, and Jewish communities could live alongside one another in a harmonious relationship, or convivencia. This was not, however, what the modern world considers true toleration, with mutual respect and acceptance of diverse beliefs. Instead, we can best think of it as a wary civic harmony, fostered by the crown in the interests of social peace and punctuated from time to time by violent clashes. Nonetheless, given that three diverse religious communities shared a common space, and the numerous possibilities for constant strife and mutual hatreds among them, medieval Spanish convivencia was remarkable indeed.
As the events of the twelfth and thirteenth century unfolded in Castile, the Christian leaders in the eastern part of Spain also expanded the area under their control. The kingdom of Aragon, extending from the Pyrenees to the Ebro valley, had developed along lines similar to Castile. Catalonia, in the northeast corner of the peninsula, was a collection of counties, of which Barcelona was the most important. The union of Aragon and Catalonia took place in an extraordinary chain of events following the death of the king of Navarre and Aragon, Alfonso I “the Battler,” in 1134. Because he had no heirs, Alfonso left his kingdom to the military orders dedicated to fighting the Muslims.
The Aragonese nobility decided that they could not honor this unprecedented bequest and therefore set it aside. They then chose a new king, Alfonso's brother Ramiro, who accepted the crown as Ramiro II. Unfortunately, Ramiro had become a monk, and his vows precluded marriage, which once again threatened the line with extinction. The nobles persuaded Ramiro to petition the pope for permission to leave the monastery and marry. When the pope granted his request, he married and sired a daughter, named Petronilla. The Aragonese nobles then arranged for the count of Barcelona, Ramón Berenguer, to become engaged to marry Petronilla, then still an infant, and to assume the kingship of Aragon. With the succession settled, Ramiro retired to his monastery again. All of these extraordinary events played out in a three-year period.
From 1137 on, Ramón Berenguer ruled a unified Aragon and Catalonia. When Petronilla came of age, the couple married. The king led a reconquest of frontier lands and offered generous terms to the Muslims, allowing them to live under Christian authority and to retain their religion. The rulers of Aragon and Catalonia also held possessions north of the Pyrenees in what is now France. Just as there was no medieval kingdom of Spain, medieval “France” was a collection of royal lands, counties, duchies, and quasi-independent cities. The French king ruled from Paris but had no authority over the Mediterranean region called by later scholars “Occitan” or “Languedoc,” whose Provençal language is closely akin to Catalan. Trade and travel across the Pyrenees and along the sea-coast of the western Mediterranean linked the two areas. Ramón Berenguer began to extend his authority in Languedoc, and his son Alfonso II (1161–96) later enforced that authority, styling himself the “king of the Pyrenees.”
Difficulties developed when the region became the focus of a heretical religion, that of the Cathars or Albigensians. Among other tenets, they held that a cosmic struggle between nearly equal forces of good and evil accounted for the unfolding of human history. The early Christian church had condemned this “dualism” as heresy, but echoes of such dualistic beliefs continued to crop up from time to time, especially in remote areas with a tenuous grasp of Christian orthodoxy. The Cathars of Languedoc gained many converts and much support, and, at their high point around 1200, they may have enjoyed the loyalty of a majority of the population in the region. Church officials were obviously concerned.
Pope Innocent III launched a military crusade against the Albigensians early in the thirteenth century, led by Simon de Montfort. King Pere II of Aragon, “the Catholic” (1196–1213), had vassals in the Cathar area who, while remaining Catholic themselves, favored the Albigensians because of their popularity among the peasants and townspeople. Law and custom obliged Pere II to support his vassals, but at the same time he was a very good Catholic and was also a vassal of the pope. Before the crusade, he tried to mediate between his vassals and the church officials and crusaders. When war became inevitable, Pere II ended up fighting against the crusaders, in support of his vassals. Pere had been one of the leaders of the great Christian victory at Las Navas de Tolosa against the Muslims in 1212. The following year, in an ironic turn of events, he lost his life fighting against the Catholic Church at the battle of Muret. Because of Pere's support for the Albigensians, the monarchs of Catalonia and Aragon lost all of their possessions north of the Pyrenees, which eventually came under the authority of the king of France.
Pere's son Jaume I, called the Conqueror (1213–76), became king at the age of twelve and worked for some fourteen years to end the disorder that had developed during his father's adventures outside the realm. By 1227 he had reestablished order, including a functioning parliament (Corts) in Catalonia. With relative stability at home, the king could look to expand. After the loss of their trans-Pyrenean lands, the monarchs of Catalonia and Aragon had to look elsewhere to enlarge their holdings. Muslim territory was the most obvious target. Eastward, in the Balearic Islands, the Muslims held Mallorca, Minorca, and Ibiza. Mallorca served as a major maritime base for Muslim corsairs who raided the Spanish coast for booty and slaves. Jaume I launched a campaign against Mallorca in 1227 and took the main city of Palma; by 1230 he had secured control of the whole island. Minorca remained in Muslim hands as a tributary state for fifty years. In 1277, forces led by the bishop of Tarragona took Ibiza, and Catalans began moving to the Balearic Islands in large numbers. By the end of the thirteenth century, they formed the majority of the population, and the islands became a separate kingdom.
Jaume I's major accomplishment was the conquest of the kingdom of Valencia, which was one of the principal taifa kingdoms and had grown rich from its Muslim agricultural heritage of terracing and irrigated agriculture. The huerta of Valencia was an extensive irrigated plain, heavily populated and highly productive. Jaume's conquest took thirteen years to complete. In 1238 he took the city of Valencia, and by 1248 he had conquered the entire kingdom. Many members of the Muslim elite left but others remained in the new Christian kingdom, as did many peasants and urban dwellers. Catalans were the major Christian settlers to the region, as they were in the Balearic Islands, and Catalan became its principal language.
Jaume I collaborated with his Castilian counterparts in the conquest of Murcia, and Castile secured control of the conquered kingdom, according to the terms of the Treaty of Almizra of 1244, which confirmed and slightly modified the Treaty of Cazorla (1179) designating then-unconquered Murcia as a future Castilian territory. That left nowhere in the peninsula for the Crown of Aragon to expand. To the north, Jaume I had made a treaty with the king of France at Corbeil in 1253, in which he recognized his father's losses north of the Pyrenees. In return, France gave up claims to the Spanish March, which dated from the time of the Carolingians. In modern times, the Republic of Andorra is the last remnant of the many small counties that once made up the Spanish March, and it remains under the joint sovereignty of the French President and the Catalan bishop of Urgel. With expansion by land closed off, the monarchs of Catalonia and Aragon looked eastward into the Mediterranean, beyond the Balearic Islands.
Pere III, “the Great” (1276–85), Jaume I's son, cast his glance toward Sicily, where he had dynastic claims based on his marriage in 1262 to Constance, daughter of Manfred Hohenstaufen, the illegitimate son of Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen and the last of the Sicilian rulers of that dynasty. In Pere III's time, the ruler of Sicily was Charles of Anjou, leader of a cadet branch of the French royal house, who defeated Manfred in 1266 and gained control of Sicily. Sicily had long been a crossroads where the diverse cultures of the Mediterranean met, and sometimes fought, but generally they coexisted well enough. Greek, Roman, Muslim, Jewish, and Norman elements had made Sicily a place of relaxed accommodation among the diverse peoples of the Mediterranean. Failing to appreciate the local culture, Charles tried to impose rule in the French style, with new laws, new taxes, and French officials. Smoldering popular discontent with the French administration broke into the open in 1282, when a revolt erupted in Palermo after townspeople attacked French officers accused of raping a young girl. The revolt broke out at vespers time, and thus the long war that followed is called the War of the Sicilian Vespers.
The Sicilian rebels asked for help from Pere III, who conveniently had a large fleet assembled just two days’ sail from Sicily. The initial conquest was fairly easy for Pere, but the subsequent war with France dragged on for twenty years before the pope and the French monarch recognized Sicily as belonging to Aragon. A new group of mercenary soldiers formed in Catalonia during the long war, recruited from subjects of the Crown of Aragon and foreigners. These Almogávares were professional soldiers, offering themselves for hire. A group of some 6,000 of them, under the command of Roger de Flor, formed the Catalan Grand Company, which contracted to support the Byzantine Empire against the Turks. When their full pay was not forthcoming, they began to conquer Byzantine territory on their own, ending up with two duchies in Greece, including Athens. Their conquests were independent actions and not officially under the auspices of the Aragonese kings, but they nonetheless had close ties with the Crown of Aragon.
All told, as the thirteenth century ended, the various Christian powers in Iberia were clearly in an expansive mode. They had nearly completed their takeover of the peninsula from the Muslims, with the Leonese-Castilian conquest of much of Andalusia, the Catalan–Aragonese conquest of Valencia, and the Castilian–Aragonese conquest of Murcia. In the independent kingdom of Portugal, Christian forces completely drove the Muslims out, with the conquest of the Algarve by 1249. In the Spanish kingdoms, only Granada remained in Muslim hands. With the medieval reconquest of Iberia all but over, the notable political developments during the last centuries of the Middle Ages would play out in Christian lands.
The Great Mosque at Córdoba (Andalusia), built from the eighth to the tenth centuries, was one of the marvels of Islamic Spain. The characteristic keyhole arches of red and white defined a vast space for the daily prayers of the faithful.
The Torre del Oro (Tower of Gold) in Seville, a twelve-sided watchtower built in Almohad times (c. 1220), formed part of the city's walled fortress or alcázar. The lantern was added to the top in the mid eighteenth century.
The entry portico of the co-cathedral of Santa María in Guadalajara (Castile-La Mancha) shows the amalgam of Islamic and Christian architecture common in the period.
The graceful Romanesque bridge at Puente la Reina (Navarre) was built in the eleventh century to accommodate the growing number of pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela.
Medieval convents typically included a colonnaded interior walkway around a garden or patio, which provided access to the outdoors for the cloistered residents. This cloister in the convent of Las Dueñas (Salamanca) is one of the finest examples.