The conquest of 711 did not replace one population with another. A few thousand Arabs and some tens of thousands of Berbers arrived in a peninsula of perhaps four million people, and what followed over the next three centuries was not settlement but conversion — a slow, uneven, largely voluntary transfer of religious allegiance that produced, by the tenth century, a society in which the majority of Muslims were descended from Iberian Christians.
That process is the most important thing about al-Andalus and the least often described. It also generated the tensions — between Arab and Berber, between old Muslim and new, between Muslim and protected minority — that the caliphate existed to manage and that eventually destroyed it.
The conquerors, and their quarrel
The army that crossed in 711 under Tariq ibn Ziyad was overwhelmingly Berber, commanded by Arabs, and it took the peninsula with astonishing speed because the Visigothic kingdom was in the middle of a succession war and a good part of its nobility preferred terms to resistance. The Treaty of Tudmir, by which the Visigothic lord Theodemir kept seven towns and his own authority in exchange for tribute, survives and is the model for what happened in many places: a negotiated transfer, not a massacre.
The conquerors then fell out, and the fault line lasted three hundred years. Arabs took the best land in the Guadalquivir valley and the eastern plains; Berbers, who had done most of the fighting, were given the harder country of the meseta and the mountains, and resented it. The Berber revolt of 740–41 nearly ended Muslim rule in the peninsula altogether.
Within the Arab group there was a further division, between the baladiyyun who had come with the conquest and the shamiyyun, Syrian troops who arrived in 742, and between the northern and southern Arab tribal confederations, Qays and Kalb, whose feud had been imported wholesale from the Middle East and was still being fought in Spain long after it had ceased to mean anything there.
It was into this that Abd al-Rahman I arrived in 756, and the first Umayyad achievement was simply to hold the ring between groups that would otherwise have destroyed each other.
Conversion, and the muwallads
The best estimates — Richard Bulliet's work on the chronology of conversion, built from the frequency of Muslim names in biographical dictionaries — suggest that conversion was slow for a century and a half and then accelerated sharply. By around 800 perhaps a fifth of the population was Muslim; by 950 something over half; by 1100 the great majority.
The converts and their descendants were the muwallads, and their position was awkward. Islam holds that a convert is the equal of any other Muslim; the Arab aristocracy of al-Andalus did not behave as though it did. Muwallads paid taxes they should not have paid, were excluded from the better offices, and were reminded of their origins.
The result was a series of revolts that dominate the ninth century. The most serious was that of Umar ibn Hafsun, a muwallad lord who held the mountain fortress of Bobastro above Málaga from 880 and fought the emirate for nearly forty years, at one point controlling most of southern Andalusia; he converted to Christianity late in life, which cost him muwallad support and is still argued about. The emirate nearly collapsed under these risings, and Abd al-Rahman III's first two decades were spent reconquering his own country — Bobastro fell in 928, four years before he took Toledo.
Understanding that is necessary to understand the caliphate. When Abd al-Rahman III proclaimed himself caliph in 929 he was asserting authority over a society that had spent two generations demonstrating it did not accept the existing hierarchy.
The dhimma, and the Mozarabs
Christians and Jews who did not convert lived under the dhimma, the contract of protection: they kept their religion, their internal law, their courts and their clergy, and they paid the jizya, a poll tax, and accepted a set of restrictions on public worship, building, dress and legal standing against Muslims.
By the standards of eleventh-century Christian Europe this was a generous arrangement, and it is the basis of the convivencia literature. By the standards of equality it was a system of institutionalised inferiority that also gave the state a fiscal interest in conversions not happening too fast.
The Christians under it were the Mozarabs — musta'rib, Arabised. They spoke Arabic, wrote in it, took Arabic names, and produced a liturgical and legal literature in it; the ninth-century abbot Samson and the bishop Recemundus, who served as Abd al-Rahman III's ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire, are characteristic. What alarmed some of their clergy was precisely how comfortable it had become: Álvaro of Córdoba complained in the 850s that young Christians read Arabic poetry and could not write a decent Latin letter.
Out of that anxiety came the martyrs of Córdoba. Between 850 and 859 some forty-eight Christians deliberately sought execution by publicly denouncing Islam in front of witnesses — a capital offence — in what was, on any reading, a campaign of provoked martyrdom rather than a persecution. The emirate executed them reluctantly and the Christian community was divided about them; a council of Córdoba's own bishops condemned the practice. It is the sharpest single episode for anyone testing how tolerant al-Andalus actually was, because both the tolerance and its limits are visible in it.
The Jews
Jewish communities had been in Iberia since Roman times and had been treated appallingly under the later Visigoths, whose councils ordered forced baptism, the seizure of children and, by the seventh century, enslavement. The conquest was, for them, an improvement so that Christian chroniclers accused them of assisting it.
Under the caliphate they became a prosperous and intellectually formidable minority. The emblematic figure is Hasdai ibn Shaprut, physician to Abd al-Rahman III, who ran the caliph's foreign correspondence, negotiated with Byzantine and German embassies, translated Dioscorides with a Greek monk sent from Constantinople, and used his position to patronise Hebrew learning — inviting grammarians and poets to Córdoba and founding the tradition that produced Samuel ibn Naghrillah, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi and, later, Maimonides.
This is the Hebrew golden age, and it was real. It was also conditional and it ended badly: the Granada massacre of 1066, in which a mob killed the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrillah and several thousand others, is a reminder that the position rested on the protection of rulers rather than on any right, and the Almohad persecutions of the twelfth century drove the community out altogether — Maimonides among them.
Slaves, and the saqaliba
The caliphate ran on slavery on a scale, and this belongs in any honest account of it.
Domestic and agricultural slaves came from raiding and purchase across the Christian north and from sub-Saharan Africa. The distinctive Andalusi institution, though, was the saqaliba — literally Slavs, in practice captives from central and eastern Europe traded down through Verdun and Provence, often castrated en route by merchants in Frankish territory, and sold into the caliph's household.
They became a political class. Bought young, without family or tribal connections, and wholly dependent on the ruler, saqaliba were used exactly as the Abbasids used Turkish slave soldiers: as a counterweight to an Arab aristocracy that could not be trusted. By the end of the tenth century they numbered in the thousands in Córdoba, held military commands and palace offices, and after the caliphate's collapse several of them founded taifa kingdoms of their own — Denia, Almería, Valencia and Tortosa were ruled by former slaves.
Women in the harem could rise similarly. Subh, a Basque concubine, became the mother of the caliph Hisham II and, with al-Mansur, effectively governed al-Andalus for a decade. It was a society in which a captured child might end as a king and in which that possibility depended entirely on having been a captured child.
The land, and the water
Underneath all of this was an agricultural revolution, and it is the part of al-Andalus that has outlasted everything else.
The conquest brought crops and techniques from the eastern Islamic world along a chain that ran from India and Persia through Egypt and North Africa: hard wheat, rice, sugar cane, cotton, citrus, bananas, aubergines, spinach, artichokes, saffron and the mulberry that fed a silk industry. Many of them required summer irrigation, which Roman and Visigothic agriculture had not generally practised.
The engineering came with them: the qanat and the acequia, the noria waterwheel, and above all a body of law and custom for distributing water among users. The water tribunal of Valencia, which still sits every Thursday outside the cathedral and settles irrigation disputes by oral judgement, traces itself to this period and is arguably the oldest continuously functioning judicial institution in Europe.
The vocabulary went into Spanish and stayed there. Acequia, aceituna, alcachofa, arroz, azúcar, naranja, algodón, almacén, aduana — several thousand words, concentrated overwhelmingly in agriculture, irrigation, building and administration, which is a fair summary of what the caliphate left behind when everything political about it had gone.
End of Chapter III