The territory that had been the Caliphate of Córdoba did not, after 1031, reunite under any single political authority for any sustained period. The post-caliphal Iberian Muslim history is, for the next four and a half centuries, a sequence of small successor states (the so-called taifa kingdoms — "factions" or "parties" — named by contemporary Andalusian and later Spanish-Latin historiography), interrupted twice by North African Berber-led reunifications (the Almoravid empire of c. 1086-1147 and the Almohad caliphate of c. 1147-1230), and ending with the long Christian reconquest that culminated in the fall of Granada in 1492. The post-caliphal period is, in cultural and political complexity, substantially greater than the caliphal period itself; it includes some of the most distinguished moments of medieval Iberian intellectual life (the Toledo translation school, the Maimonidean philosophy, the Andalusian poetic tradition of the eleventh and twelfth centuries) and substantially more of the architecture (the Alhambra, the surviving Almohad monumental works at Seville, the Almoravid and Almohad mosques) than the caliphate itself produced.
The first taifa period
The first taifa period (1031-1086) saw the emergence of about thirty small Muslim principalities in the former caliphal territory. The principal taifa kingdoms were Seville (under the Abbadid dynasty, the most powerful of the first-period taifas), Granada (under the Zirid dynasty), Córdoba (under the Jahwarid dynasty), Toledo (under the Dhul-Nunid dynasty), Zaragoza (under the Hudid dynasty), Valencia, Badajoz, and various smaller principalities. The total Muslim population of post-caliphal al-Andalus was probably about four million in 1050, of whom perhaps a quarter were ethnic Berbers, a quarter ethnic Arabs, and the remainder muwallads (converted Iberian populations).
The substantive politics of the first taifa period was a continuous and unstable system of inter-taifa warfare, payment of tribute (parias) to the northern Christian kingdoms (which had emerged from the post-1031 power vacuum as the substantively dominant military power in the peninsula), and substantial commercial and cultural exchange. The Christian kingdoms — Castile under Ferdinand I and his successors, León, Aragón, the Catalan counties — were, by the 1050s, militarily superior to any single taifa kingdom and used this superiority to extract tribute payments on substantial scale. The principal Christian success of the period was the capture of Toledo by Alfonso VI of Castile on the 25th of May 1085 — the substantive recovery of the former Visigothic capital and the first major Christian-Muslim territorial reversal of the post-conquest period. The fall of Toledo prompted the Cordoban-Seville Muslim leadership to request external Muslim assistance, which came from the Almoravid empire of North Africa.
The Almoravids
The Almoravid empire was the dominant Muslim power of the western Maghreb between approximately 1062 and 1147. It had been founded by the Sanhaja Berber religious reformer Abdullah ibn Yasin in the 1050s and consolidated by the military leader Yusuf ibn Tashfin in the 1070s and 1080s. By the time of the fall of Toledo in 1085, the Almoravids controlled approximately the western half of North Africa (modern Morocco, western Algeria, and parts of Mauritania and Mali) under a strict Maliki Sunni religious-legal regime that contrasted substantially with the loose religious-political culture of the Andalusian taifas.
The Almoravid intervention in al-Andalus began with Yusuf ibn Tashfin's invitation by the taifa kings in 1086 to assist in the resistance to the Castilian advance. The Almoravid army defeated Alfonso VI at the battle of Sagrajas on the 23rd of October 1086 in a substantial Muslim victory that temporarily restored the strategic position of the Andalusian Muslim states. Yusuf, however, soon recognised that the taifa kingdoms' political fragmentation made any sustained resistance impossible, and over the next decade his forces systematically deposed the various taifa rulers and absorbed their territories into a unified Almoravid state ruled from Marrakech. By 1110, the entire Muslim Iberian peninsula was under Almoravid rule.
The Almoravid regime in al-Andalus (1086-1147) was substantially less culturally tolerant than the pre-existing taifa system. The substantial Andalusian Jewish community of the eleventh century — which had reached the height of its medieval prosperity under the taifa kings of Seville, Granada, and Zaragoza, with figures like the poet-philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol and the statesman Samuel HaNagid — was subjected to substantial new legal pressures under the Almoravids' stricter religious regime. The substantial Mozarabic Christian community of southern Iberia was also subjected to new pressures; the so-called Mozarabic exodus of 1126 (when several thousand Mozarabic Christians were forcibly deported by the Almoravids to North Africa) was the most substantial single episode. The cultural high points of Andalusian intellectual life continued, but under more constrained conditions.
The Almohads
The Almoravid empire collapsed in the 1140s under the pressure of a new Berber reform movement, the Almohads ("Unitarians"), originating in the High Atlas mountains of southern Morocco. The Almohad caliphate (formally proclaimed in 1147 by Abd al-Mu'min after the destruction of the Almoravid capital Marrakech) replaced the Almoravid regime across both North Africa and al-Andalus by 1172. The Almohad period in al-Andalus (1147-1232) was, in cultural terms, more open than the Almoravid period. The major intellectual figures of medieval Iberian thought — the Cordoban-born philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198), the Cordoban-born Jewish philosopher Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, 1138-1204) — operated, in their early careers, under the Almohad administration. The Almohad monumental architecture at Seville — the Giralda (the minaret of the principal mosque, now the bell-tower of Seville Cathedral), the Torre del Oro on the Guadalquivir — is the principal surviving architectural inheritance of the period.
The Almohad regime was, however, also substantially intolerant in its religious-legal policies. Maimonides' family was forced to flee Córdoba and ultimately Iberia (settling first in Fez and then in Egypt, where Maimonides became the personal physician of Saladin's vizier and produced his principal philosophical and theological works). The Almohad regime was, by Christian and Jewish accounts, the most religiously restrictive of any Muslim regime to operate in medieval Iberia.
The long Reconquista
The Christian reconquest of Iberia — the Reconquista, in subsequent Spanish historiography — was not a unified or continuous campaign but a long sequence of separate Christian advances by the various northern Iberian kingdoms over four and a half centuries. The principal phases were:
The early Reconquista (covering essentially the period 718-1085) was the slow Christian advance from the northern Asturian mountain refuges into the central Iberian plateau, culminating in the capture of Toledo in 1085.
The central Reconquista (1085-1252) was the substantive recapture of the bulk of the peninsula by the Christian kingdoms. The decisive battle was Las Navas de Tolosa on the 16th of July 1212, where a coalition of Castile, Aragón, Navarre, and Portuguese forces destroyed the Almohad army of Caliph Muhammad al-Nasir and opened the southern peninsula to Christian advance. Córdoba was recaptured in 1236; Seville in 1248; Valencia in 1238; the Algarve in 1249-1250.
The Granada period (1252-1492) was the long period during which the Christian kingdoms tolerated the survival of the small Muslim Emirate of Granada in the southern Iberian highlands. The Nasrid dynasty of Granada (founded by Muhammad I in 1238) survived for 254 years as the last Muslim state on the peninsula, paying regular tribute to Castile and conducting a complicated diplomatic relationship with the various Christian kingdoms. Its capital city Granada — and particularly the Alhambra palace complex begun by Muhammad I and substantially developed by his successors over two centuries — is the principal architectural and cultural inheritance of the late period of Muslim Iberia.
The Emirate of Granada fell on the 2nd of January 1492 to the united Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragón and Isabella I of Castile, after a ten-year siege campaign. The terms of surrender preserved, on paper, substantial religious and cultural rights for the Muslim population; the terms were systematically violated over the next century, with the forced conversion of the Muslim population to Christianity in 1502, the suppression of Arabic-language religious instruction in 1567, and the formal expulsion of the Morisco population (the descendants of the converted Muslims) between 1609 and 1614. The Muslim community of Iberia, after eight hundred years of continuous presence, was substantially destroyed.
The Caliphate of Córdoba, in the long view, was the brightest single moment of this eight-century presence. Its substantive cultural inheritance is the subject of the next chapter.
End of Chapter VII