The Islamic conquest of Spain, also known as the Umayyad conquest of Hispania, was a significant event in the history of both Islam and Europe. Here's how it happened.
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Once North Africa was secured for Islam, the ancient Roman province of Spain, now under Visigoth rule, was within reach.
Here the available accounts contradict one another and are overlaid with legend, but a general outline of events can be known, and even some of the legends are illustrative of both the mindset of the day and some lingering tendencies.
The jihad in Europe began in 711, when Musa ibn Nusayr, who governed the Muslim provinces of North Africa under caliph Walid, sent his forces under the command of freed Berber slave Tariq ibn Ziyad to cross the strait that separated Africa from Europe and take the land for Allah.
According to one Muslim chronicler, the Muslims came to Spain at the invitation of an enraged Christian who was hungry for revenge.
Ibn Abd al-Hakam, writing in the ninth century, said that Tariq “with his female slave of the name Umm Hakim” arrived in Tangiers some time before Walid sent him to Spain, and “remained some time in this district, waging a holy war.”
He eventually made the acquaintance of a Christian, “Ilyan, Lord of Septa,” Count Julian of Ceuta, who had a proposition for him.
Count Julian was a ruler of some of the remaining Christian domains in North Africa, subject to Roderic, the reigning (and last) Visigothic king of Spain.
According to Ibn Abd Al-Hakam, Julian was “the governor of the straits between this district and Andalus” and “also the governor of a town called Alchadra, situated on the same side of the straits of Andalus as Tangiers.”
Tariq established contact with Count Julian. According to Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Tariq “treated him kindly, until they made peace with each other.” Eventually Tariq won Julian’s confidence to the extent that the count told him of his personal sorrow.
Julian, per Ibn Abd al-Hakam, “had sent one of his daughters to Roderic, the Lord of Andalus, for her improvement and education.” Like many a powerful man presented with a comely intern, however, Roderic had taken advantage of the girl, and “she became pregnant by him.”
When he learned of the violation of his beloved daughter, who became a vivid and controversial figure in Spanish legend under the name Florinda La Cava, presented variously as victim, seductress, and even prostitute, Julian was enraged.
He was determined to take revenge upon Roderic. It didn’t take him long to come up with a plan: Roderic had destroyed his daughter, so he would destroy Roderic’s kingdom. “I see for him no other punishment or recompense, than that I should bring the Arabs against him.”
Julian contacted his friend Tariq ibn Zayed and offered his help for a jihadi invasion of Spain. Tariq was skeptical, telling Julian: “I cannot trust you until you send me a hostage.”
Julian had no problem with that, and sent Tariq his two daughters; apparently, the prospect of their becoming the sex slaves of a Muslim ruler didn’t trouble him as much as Roderic’s behavior.
In any case, the reception of the girls convinced Tariq of Julian’s sincerity, and the plan went forward.
Julian also met with Musa ibn Nusayr and got his approval. Then the traitor provided the Muslims with ships to carry the warriors of jihad across the strait that would not arouse the notice of any Spanish sentries.
These were preferable to the Muslims’ own ships for being familiar to the Spanish people.
Ibn Abd al-Hakam explained: “the people of Andalus did not observe them, thinking that the vessels crossing and recrossing were similar to the trading vessels which for their benefit plied backwards and forwards.”
As he crossed the strait himself, Tariq spotted an island and left his female slave, Umm Hakim, there with a division of troops. These troops immediately sent a message to the people of that island, and to all of Spain, that the invaders would not hesitate at any brutality.
Finding no one on the island except a group of vinedressers, they took them all prisoner; then they chose one of them at random, whom they killed and dismembered. Then they boiled the pieces of his body, while meat was boiling in other cauldrons.
Out of the sight of their prisoners, they threw out the boiled pieces of their victim’s body, and then, as their prisoners watched, began eating the meat they had been boiling.
The vinedressers were convinced that the Muslims were eating the flesh of the man they had killed, and the Muslims freed them to spread this tale far and wide, so as to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah.” (Qur’an 8:60)
Tariq and his men landed at the Mons Calpe, a rock formation at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula; ultimately, the conquering Muslims would rename it Jabal Tariq in his honor—the mountain of Tariq, from which is derived the word “Gibraltar.”
It has become part of Tariq’s legend as an indomitable warrior that he ordered the Muslims to burn the boats that Count Julian had supplied, that had just carried them to Europe. The Muslims were going to take Spain from Islam or die there, but there was no going back.
Tariq posed this choice to his troops:
He reminded them of the rewards that awaited them if they won.
The Qur’an allowed a Muslim to have sexual intercourse not only with his wives but with the “captives of the right hand” (4:3, 4:24, 23:1–6) that were the spoils of war (33:50), and there were plenty of young women in Spain who could be used in this way:
”You have heard that in this country there are a large number of ravishingly beautiful Greek maidens, their graceful forms are draped in sumptuous gowns on which gleam pearls, coral, and purest gold, and they live in the palaces of royal kings.”
The caliph, meanwhile, was forsaking his rightful share of the booty; the only thing he wanted was for Islam to be established in Spain:
Tariq ended his address by calling upon his men to kill Roderic. There were others on the Christian side besides Count Julian who wanted him dead as well.
Roderic was a usurper, and some of the chronicles of the Muslim invasion of Spain have the sons of a previous Visigothic king, Witiza, aiding the Muslim armies against Roderic.
Also helping the Muslims was Witiza’s brother Oppas, the archbishop of Toledo and Seville. Whatever the historical value of these accounts, there has never been a shortage of nonMuslims willing to aid the jihad for their own purposes.
The two armies met near the Guadalete River in the lower Guadalquivir valley. As seemed always the case in the days of the early jihad conquests, the Muslims were vastly outnumbered.
Roderic appeared on the field of battle dressed as if he were certain of victory: he was arrayed in a gorgeous gold robe, with a crown of pearls on his head, and was carried on a litter of ivory. But the battle did not go well for the defenders.
According to Ibn Abd al-Hakam: “And there was never in the West a more bloody battle than this. The Moslems did not withdraw their swords from Roderic and his companions for three days.”
As the Visigoths’ losses mounted, Roderic fled the field of battle; his magnificent crown and robe were found on the riverbank, but there was no trace of the king.
The Muslims concluded that Roderic had drowned in the river; they beheaded someone else, sending the head back as Roderic’s to the caliph Walid, who was headquartered in Damascus, as a symbol of his triumph.
Count Julian’s thirst for revenge was not slaked by Roderic’s death. He went to Tariq and urged him to press on and conquer all of Spain: “The king of the Goths is slain; their princes are fled before you, the army is routed, the nation is astonished.“
“Secure with sufficient detachments the cities of Boetica; but in person and without delay, march to the royal city of Toledo, and allow not the distracted Christians either time or tranquillity for the election of a new monarch.”
Toledo was at that time the capital of Spain. Tariq heeded his advice and marched north, meeting very little resistance and capturing Toledo with relative ease.
Among the spoils he seized was a table of emeralds that was said to have belonged to King Solomon, taken from the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans as they were destroying it in AD 70.
Back across the strait, Musa heard of Tariq’s astonishing victories and grew envious. Not to be upstaged, he landed in Spain with an army of eighteen thousand Muslims and began seizing towns and cities that Tariq had bypassed, most notably Seville.
Some Christian turncoats who had entered Seville posing as refugees opened the gates of the city for Musa and his men, and the plunder began.
Leaderless, dispirited, riven with shortsighted factionalism and beset with widespread treason, Visigothic Spain collapsed with amazing speed before the invading Muslims.
By 718, just seven years after Tariq and his men burned their boats and determined to take the land for Islam or die, they had done so: Spain was almost entirely subdued.
Almost entirely. In Asturias in northwestern Spain, those among the Visigoths who were not utterly defeated or traitorous in 718 chose as their leader a man named Pelayo, who immediately told the local Muslim overlords that he would not pay the jizya.
He established what he called the Kingdom of Asturias and began to attack the Muslim bases in the area.
The jihad warriors made only perfunctory attempts to find and kill Pelayo and destroy his little kingdom, for they didn’t regard it as significant enough: they were pressing on into France, and a few Christian fanatics in a remote, mountainous region of Spain didn’t worry them.
However, after the harassment from Pelayo’s men caused a Muslim governor, Munuza, to flee the area, the Muslims had had enough. Munuza returned with a Muslim commander, al-Qama, and an army, to put an end to Pelayo’s Kingdom of Asturias once and for all.
Al-Qama and Musa brought with them the renegade bishop Oppas. According to an early tenth-century account, Oppas sought out Pelayo in his mountain hideaway and told him resistance was futile:
“I believe that you understand how the entire army of the Goths cannot resist the force of the Muslims; how then can you resist on this mountain? Listen to my advice: abandon your efforts and you will enjoy many benefits alongside the Moors.”
Pelayo was unmoved by this appeal to defeatism. He made a counterappeal to Oppas’ putative religion: “Have you not read in Sacred Scripture that the Church of the Lord is like the mustard seed, which, small as it is, grows more than any other through the mercy of God?”
”Our hope is in Christ; this little mountain will be the salvation of Spain and of the people of the Goths; the mercy of Christ will free us from that multitude.”
At first it appeared as if the Muslims would have no trouble overcoming this little rebellion, as they regained control of much of the area with little or no resistance.
But Pelayo and his force of only three hundred men were hiding deep in the mountains; they swept into the valley at the village of Covadonga and surprised the Muslim forces, which vastly outnumbered them.
In a turnabout of the usual scenario in early jihad attacks, the Christians were both outnumbered and victorious. After another defeat at his hands, the Muslims decided to leave Pelayo and his tiny kingdom alone.
Pelayo’s words to Oppas proved prophetic. That Kingdom of Asturias and Battle of Covadonga were the beginning of the seven-hundred-year effort by the Christians of Spain to drive the Muslims out: the Reconquista.
As the conquest of Spain was being completed, the Umayyad caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz sent out a message to the governors of the various Islamic provinces, denouncing non-Muslims:
According to the 13th-century Muslim jurist Ghazi ibn al-Wasiti, Umar also “commanded that Jews and Christians should be forbidden to ride upon saddles; that no one belonging to the ‘Protected People’ should be allowed to enter a public bath on Friday, except after Prayer-time.“
”He ordered, further, that a guard should be set to watch both Jews and Christians whenever they slaughtered an animal, so that the guard should mention the name of Allah and of his Prophet [at such a slaughter].”
The Umayyad caliphate began large-scale dealing in slaves, requiring not only physical laborers but sex slaves for the harems of the caliphs and other high officials, as well as eunuchs who could be trusted to guard these harems.
The warriors of Islam drew these slaves beginning in the eighth century from regular raids in three principal areas: Central Asia, the northern fringes of Sub-Saharan Africa, and Central and southeastern Europe, which they called Bilad as-Saqaliba, slave country.
The ethnic designation “Slav” is derived from the Arabic “saqlab,” or slave.
Decades later, the Umayyads were vanquished by the Abbasids who became the new caliphs. But the Umayyads were not prepared to vanish from history.
Abd al-Rahman, an Umayyad prince and the grandson of the caliph Hisham ibn Abdel Malik, escaped Abbasid assassination squads and fled to al-Andalus, where he succeeded in gathering a force of Muslims who did not want to give their allegiance to the Abbasids.
Ultimately, he established himself as emir of Córdoba and continued to pursue jihad warfare against the Christian domains in Spain.
The Abbasid caliph Mansur was not willing to take the loss of Spain lightly, and directed the commander Ala’a ibn Mughith, who was stationed in North Africa, to invade Spain and destroy the Umayyad upstart.
Abd al-Rahman, however, captured Ala’a ibn Mughith and other Abbasid commanders. He had each beheaded, and then had their heads placed in finely decorated boxes that were sent to Mansur.
In the box containing Ala’a ibn Mughith’s head, Abd al-Rahman placed Mansur’s letter ordering his North African commander to go to Spain and fight Abd al-Rahman, along with a fragment of the black flag of jihad that Mansur sent Ala’a ibn Mughith to be his standard.
Mansur, receiving this macabre package, murmured, “Thank Allah there lies a sea between Abdur Rahman and me,” and made no more attempts to secure Spain for the Abbasids.
The ongoing war between the Christians and Muslims in Spain became part of Western Europe’s foundational legend and myth.
In 778, the grandson of Charles Martel, Charles, the King of the Franks, who became known to history as Charles the Great or Charlemagne, led an expedition into Spain at the invitation of a group of Muslim rulers who would not accept the authority of Abd al-Rahman.
These Muslim rulers were Husayn, the governor of Saragossa; Suleyman al-Arabi, governor of Barcelona and Girona; and Abu Taur, governor of Huesca. They promised fealty to Charlemagne if he would aid them against Abd al-Rahman.
Charlemagne, like so many Christian leaders much later lulled into complacency by their Muslim partners in “interfaith dialogue,” trusted them and went on the march.
When Charlemagne arrived at Saragossa, however, al-Arabi offered him his fealty as promised, but Husayn did not, claiming that he had never agreed to do so, and the gates of the city were not opened to him as promised.
Charlemagne’s forces laid siege to Saragossa, but when the Frankish king learned that the Saxons were revolting against his rule in northern France, he opted to abandon the siege and retreat across the Pyrenees.
On his way out of Spain, however, Charlemagne’s men destroyed the walls of Pamplona, the city of the Basques, out of fear that forces opposed to the king were coalescing there.
In revenge, the Basques, probably allied with some Muslim forces, ambushed the Franks at Roncevaux Pass, inflicting more severe losses on Charlemagne than he suffered at any other time in his career.
Over time, as century after century passed filled with aggression from the warriors of jihad, the Battle of Roncevaux Pass became in legend a Muslim ambush on Charlemagne’s retreating army.
In the eleventh century, three hundred years after the battle, the French epic poem known as The Song of Roland appeared, describing the heroism of Charlemagne’s nephew Roland, who is leading the rear guard of Charlemagne’s forces and is caught up in the Muslim ambush.
Roland has an oliphant, a horn made of an elephant’s tusk, which he can use to call for help, but he initially declines to do so, thinking it would be cowardly. Finally, Roland does blow his horn.
Charlemagne, way ahead of the rear guard, nonetheless hears Roland’s horn and hurries back, but it is too late: Roland and his men are dead, and the Muslims victorious. Charlemagne, however, pursues and vanquishes the Muslims, and captures Saragossa. Thus, the legend.
The Song of Roland was enormously popular and inculcated in the Christians who sang and celebrated it in what came to be known (in the European Middle Ages) as knightly virtues: loyalty, courage, and perseverance, even in the face of overwhelming odds.
These were virtues that would be needed if Europe was to hold out against the ever-advancing jihad.
The jihad in Spain slowed down considerably in the late ninth and early tenth centuries. In fact, the Christian domains in Spain were growing, but very slowly and amid many setbacks.
As in all wars, long and short, matters became complicated; on occasion, Christians and Muslims forged alliances for short-term goals.
Whatever the utility of these coalitions of convenience, and however successful they were, the jihad imperative remained a constant, and there was never any shortage of Muslims in al-Andalus who were ready to pursue it.
In 920, the forces of the Emirate of Córdoba routed the Christians of the Kingdom of León, the successor to Pelayo’s Kingdom of Asturias, at Valdejunquera. But those who were determined to resist the jihad were by no means wiped out, and they fought on.
From 929 on, the Umayyad rulers of Spain styled themselves as caliphs of Córdoba. That caliphate, and Islamic al-Andalus in general, has become a potent myth in the twenty-first century. Historians have painted it as a paradise of proto-multiculturalism.
Karen Armstrong, author of Islam: A Short History, claims that “until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain—a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.”
Historian María Rosa Menocal asserts that the Muslim rulers of Spain “not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive but, following Quranic mandate, by and large protected them.” This myth has come to be taken for granted in the West.
In his June 4, 2009, outreach speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, U.S. president Barack Obama said: “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia.”
Yet Umayyad Spain was hardly a comfortable place for the Christians and Jews who were subjugated there under the rule of Islam. Several decades after the Umayyads proclaimed their caliphate in Córdoba, the Holy Roman emperor Otto I sent an emissary, John of Gorze, to Spain.
John of Gorze noted that the Christians of al-Andalus were living in fear and suffering under the burden of systematic discrimination.
But when he proposed informing Otto I about the plight of the Christians in al-Andalus, a Spanish bishop told him that to do so would only make matters worse.
“Consider,” he told John, “under what conditions we live. We have been driven to this by our sins, to be subjected to the rule of the pagans. We are forbidden by the Apostle’s words to resist the civil power.“
“Only one cause of solace is left to us, that in the depths of such a great calamity they do not forbid us to practise our own faith.“
“For the time being, then, we keep the following counsel: that provided no harm is done to our religion, we obey them in all else, and do their commands in all that does not affect our faith.”
Dhimmis throughout the ages have enunciated a similar philosophy: just stay quiet, or matters will get even worse.
Islamic law forbade the dhimmis to complain about their state, on pain of forfeiting their contract of “protection”.
Dhimmi communities, therefore, learned to put up with the most humiliating degradation in silence, for fear that if they said anything about their condition to anyone, it would only become even more precarious and dangerous.
Even Menocal grants that the lives of the dhimmis in al-Andalus were severely restricted:
The Umayyad laws were designed to emphasize that Muslims had the dominant position in society, and that the Christians of Spain were decidedly inferior.
It was made unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous to live daily life as a Christian, so that the victory and supremacy of Islam was readily observable and regularly reinforced.
Dhimmi Christians also knew that all they had to do to end this daily discrimination and sporadic harassment and persecution was convert to Islam. Many did convert, because it was miserable to live as a Christian in al-Andalus.
Christians could never be sure that they would not be harassed. One contemporary account tells of priests being “pelted with rocks and dung” by Muslims while on the way to a cemetery.
The dhimmis also suffered severe economic hardship. Paul Alvarus, a ninth-century Christian in Córdoba, complained about the “unbearable tax” that Muslims levied on Christians.
Nor could Christians say anything about their lot, because it was proscribed by Islamic law, and criticizing Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur’an in any manner was a death-penalty offense.
In 850, Perfectus, a Christian priest, engaged a group of Muslims in conversation about Islam; his opinion of the conquerors’ religion was not positive. For this, Perfectus was arrested and put to death.
Not long thereafter, Joannes, a Christian merchant, was said to have invoked Muhammad’s name in his sales pitch. He was lashed and given a lengthy prison sentence. Christian and Muslim sources contain numerous records of similar incidents in the early part of the tenth century.
Around 910, in one of many such episodes, a woman was executed for proclaiming that “Jesus was God and that Muhammad had lied to his followers.”
The Christians outside of the caliphate did not forget their oppressed brethren, and there were periodic confrontations, large and small, between those who wanted to restore Christian Spain and the warriors of jihad.
The jihad warriors continued to strike out at the resistance they were facing in conquering the northern portion of the Iberian Peninsula for Allah.
In 939, the Christians under the leadership of King Ramiro II of León met the forces of jihad under the command of Abd al-Rahman III, the caliph of Córdoba, at Simancas (also known as Alhandega) in northwestern Spain.
Abd al-Rahman was a scrupulous, doctrinaire Muslim ruler. The eleventh-century Muslim historian Ibn Hayyan of Córdoba recounted:
It is not surprising, considering his careful adherence to Islamic law, that Abd al-Rahman III was harsh with his Christian prisoners. Ibn Hayyan detailed a typical incident:
Abd al-Rahman III was also notorious for his cruelty toward the dhimmis. Ibn Hayyan related one sadly representative incident:
The tenth-century Catholic nun Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim recorded that Abd al-Rahman also happened upon a 13-year-old Christian boy who had been taken hostage.
Entranced by the boy’s beauty, the caliph made amorous advances upon him, only to be rejected; enraged, he had the boy tortured and then beheaded.
On another occasion, another one of Abd al-Rahman’s sex slaves found herself bearing the brunt of the caliph’s anger. Ibn Hayyim recounted:
Abd al-Rahman III was no more merciful toward his own people.
According to Ibn Hayyan, “I must also mention a horror with which an-Nasir terrorized people, which was by means of lions to make their punishment even more terrible, an action more proper of the tyrannical kings of the Orient, in which he imitated them, having the lions...“
“...brought to him by the little kings on the North African coast, since they are not animals proper to al-Andalus.“
The eleventh-century Muslim cleric Ibn Hazm of Córdoba added that Abd al-Rahman’s cruelty sometimes had a racial element:
In a small bit of retribution for all this savagery, Abd al-Rahman III and the Muslims were badly beaten at Simancas, and the jihadi army utterly wiped out.
Abd al-Rahman III managed to escape with his life, but although he remained caliph of Córdoba until his death in 961, he never again led the warriors of jihad onto the field of battle against the infidels.
This was no indication, however, that he blamed himself for the disaster at Simancas. Upon his return to Córdoba after the defeat, the caliph ordered the crucifixion of three hundred of his top officers.
Ibn Hayyan recounted that he ordered an attic built above the highest floor of one wing of his palace, specifically for this purpose:
Crucifixion was the punishment the Qur’an prescribed (5:33) for those who “make war upon Allah and his messenger”; apparently Abd al-Rahman considered that they had done that by their incompetent management of the battle against the Christians at Simancas.
An onlooker later recalled: “I was caught in the midst of the crowd…I turned away my eyes, almost fainting with horror at the sight…and such was my state, that a thief stole my pack [without my noticing it]. It was a terrible day that scared people for a long time afterwards.”
However, even with the decimation of the caliphate’s army, the Christians were too riven by infighting to take full advantage of the situation. The caliphate of Córdoba continued to exist, and to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah,” as the Qur’an ordered (8:60).
In 981, the de facto Córdoban ruler Almanzor, who had usurped the caliph’s powers, sacked Zamora and killed four thousand Christians, leveling a thousand Christian villages and destroying their churches and monasteries.
This roused the twenty-year-old King Ramiro III of León, who had become king at age five upon the death of his father, Sancho the Fat, to action.
But Almanzor was far more experienced, knowledgeable, and ruthless than Ramiro, who showed how outmatched he was as Almanzor defeated him three times in quick succession.
Emboldened by victory, Almanzor began conducting regular jihad raids into Christian lands. In 985, he sacked Barcelona; the following year, he destroyed León, burning monasteries as he went.
As he pursued the jihad against the Christian domains of northern Spain, Almanzor also determined to enhance the glory of his capital. He set a squadron of Christian slaves, their legs in irons, to the task of expanding and beautifying the Great Mosque of Córdoba.
In 997, he destroyed Santiago de Compostela, the city that housed the famous shrine of St. James, known as Santiago Matamoros, or St. James the Moor-Slayer.
As the warriors destroyed the shrine, they saved the gates and bells for the mosque at Córdoba; Islam forbade bells, but they could be melted down and put to other uses.
Newly enslaved Christians, captured at Santiago de Compostela, carried these precious spoils back to Córdoba on their shoulders.
Almanzor continued to pursue the jihad against the Christians of Spain with consistent success, becoming notorious among the Christians of Spain as he did so.
When he died, a Christian monk, bitter over the devastation he had wrought upon the native population of Spain, wrote him a succinct epitaph: “Almanzor died in 1002; he was buried in hell.”
After the death of Almanzor, there was no leader of comparable strength ready to take his place. The Muslims in Spain were beset with infighting.
Berbers from North Africa entered Spain and challenged Umayyad authority; taking Córdoba in 1013, they began massacring Jews, and initiated a wholesale slaughter of Jews in Granada.
The caliphate of Córdoba came to an end in 1031, as the last Umayyad caliph, Hisham III, was imprisoned and exiled, and the Muslim chieftains who ruled the various regions of Muslim Spain could not agree on a successor.
Al-Andalus henceforth became a collection of small Muslim emirates and fiefdoms. In the early 1060s, King Fernando I of León won a series of victories over the four most important of these small Muslim states (taifas): Zaragoza, Toledo, Badajoz, and Valencia.
In a turnabout of the jizya, he forced them to pay tribute. In 1064, he successfully laid siege to the fortress city of Coimbra and freed most of Portugal from Islamic rule.
After he died, those who were grateful for his stand against the jihad began to refer to him as Ferdinand the Great.
Meanwhile, the disarray, lack of central authority, and overall weakness of Muslim Spain in the middle of the eleventh century led to no lessening of the plight of religious minorities, since that plight was mandated in the core texts of Islam.
Jews in al-Andalus sometimes had it even worse than Christians did. In the middle of the eleventh century, a Jew named Samuel ibn Naghrila gained the trust of the Muslim rulers and was granted political power in Granada.
Later, Samuel’s son Joseph also held positions of great honor and responsibility.
Islamic law mandated that a non-Muslim could not hold authority over a Muslim, but as with all legal systems, there are some people who flout the rules and periods of relaxation in which the rules are simply ignored.
However, the Muslims in Granada knew Islamic law and were considerably resentful of the power of Samuel, and later of Joseph.
The Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq composed verses addressed to the Berber king Badis that vividly demonstrate the Muslim conviction that Muslims must enjoy a place superior to that of the dhimmis, who must endure a state of humiliation.
Of Granada’s Muslim ruler, Abu Ishaq wrote:
Abu Ishaq referred to the Jews as “apes” because the Qur’an depicts Allah transforming Sabbath-breaking Jews into apes and pigs (2:63–65; 5:59–60; 7:166). The Muslims of Granada heeded Abu Ishaq’s call.
On December 30, 1066, rioting Muslims, enraged by the humiliation of a Jew ruling over Muslims, murdered four thousand Jews in Granada. The maddened Muslim mob crucified Joseph ibn Naghrila and plundered the homes of the Jews.
The Christians continued to advance in Spain. In a major defeat for Islamic al-Andalus, the forces of King Alfonso VI of Castile and León captured Toledo, the old capital of Visigothic Spain, in 1085.
The leaders of the various taifas, alarmed, in 1086 called for help from the Almoravids, a Berber Muslim dynasty that had taken control of Morocco and its environs in the middle of the eleventh century.
The Almoravids, fearsome in appearance for their practice of wearing veils over the lower half of their faces, which they did to protect themselves from the twin threats of desert sands and evil spirits, entered Spain swiftly.
Their king, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, sent a messenger to Alfonso VI, offering him the standard Islamic choices for the People of the Book: conversion to Islam, submission to the hegemony of the Muslims, or war.
Alfonso wrote back a contemptuous refusal; when Yusuf received the paper containing this message, he turned it over and wrote on the back, “What will happen, you shall see.”
What Alfonso saw was nothing that he wanted to see. The battle, at the village of Sagrajas north of Badajoz, was an unmitigated disaster for the Christians. Alfonso lost over half of his army.
When it was over, the Muslims beheaded the Christian corpses and arranged their heads into piles; the muezzins then climbed atop the piles of heads to call the Muslims to prayer, displaying in the blood and gore of the Christians’ heads the victory and superiority of Islam.
Yusuf and the Almoravids had stopped the momentum of the Christians in Spain and ensured that Islamic al-Andalus would endure. But the whole situation was nonetheless unprecedented.
The forces of jihad had seldom had this much trouble holding a territory they had conquered for Islam, and seldom would again.
Even as the Almoravids united the taifas under their rule and continued to wage jihad against the Christians, the Muslims were still quite often on the defensive. The Christians were determined not to let Spain be Islamized, and they kept pushing against the Muslim domains.
Alfonso VI was thus determined even in defeat. He sent out appeals for help to Christian leaders all over Spain and France, warning them that the Almoravid advance deeply endangered Christianity in Spain, and asking them to come join him in the defense of Christendom.
Alfonso sent one of these appeals to Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, a Castilian warrior with whom Alfonso had a long history. Rodrigo had been a Castilian commander under King Sancho II of Castile, the son of Fernando I, Ferdinand the Great.
Fernando had been king of Castile and León; when he died, Sancho became king of Castile, and his brother Alfonso became king of León. (A third brother, Garcia, became king of Galicia.)
Sancho, suspecting that Alfonso intended to make war upon his two brothers and unite their kingdoms under his rule, struck preemptively: his commander Rodrigo defeated Alfonso in battle, and Sancho became king of León as well as Castile.
Soon afterward, however, Sancho was murdered. Since he had no children, his kingdoms passed into the possession of his eldest brother, who was none other than the one he had just warred against and deposed, Alfonso.
Rodrigo and a group of other Castilian noblemen then forced Alfonso to swear, solemnly and repeatedly, that he had not been involved in Sancho’s murder.
Alfonso had no choice but to comply, but his heart began to burn in bitter resentment toward those who had humiliated him— principally Rodrigo, whom he eventually exiled. Rodrigo was a Christian. He knew well what the warriors of jihad had in store for the Christians of Spain.
But the Christian king whom he had served had exiled him. Whether out of necessity or a desire for revenge, or both, Rodrigo offered his services to Yusuf al-Mu’taman ibn Hud, the king of the Muslim taifa of Zaragoza.
He fought so valiantly in the service of the Muslims that they began to call him El Sayyid (The Master), which in Spanish folklore became El Cid.
By that name, El Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar has become one of the great heroes of Spanish history, and the central figure of the Cantar de Mio Cid, the renowned Spanish epic poem.
For when he received Alfonso’s appeal, he returned and again took up the struggle against the Almoravids. He took the city of Valencia from the Muslims, and in 1097 defeated the jihadis decisively at Bairén, near Gandia in southeast Spain.
When El Cid died in 1099, the Christians of Spain controlled two-thirds of the Iberian Peninsula. The momentum of the jihad had been decisively broken.
And the impetus for more initiatives against the Muslims came continuously from the systematic mistreatment of the Christians who still lived in the Islamic domains.
Even when they were not facing active persecution, if Christians and Jews didn’t abide by the restrictions placed upon them as dhimmis, they could in accordance with the Sharia be lawfully killed or sold into slavery.
Around 1100, the Muslim governing official and poet Ibn Abdun detailed the rules for dhimmis in Seville:
If the dhimmis violated any of these provisions or any of the others that enforced and reminded them daily of their subjugation, they could be sold into slavery. In 1126, several thousand Christians were sent to Morocco to serve as slaves.
Once again, the Muslim leadership was acting within the bounds of its right to kill or enslave dhimmis who violated the terms of their protection agreement. Indeed, Umayyad Spain became a center of the Islamic slave trade.
Muslim buyers could purchase sex-slave girls as young as eleven years old, as well as slave boys for sex as well, or slave boys raised to become slave soldiers. Also for sale were eunuchs, useful for guarding harems.
Blonde slaves seized in jihad raids on Christian nations north of al-Andalus were especially prized, and fetched high prices. Slave traders would use makeup to whiten the faces and dye to lighten the hair of darker slaves, so that they could get more money for them.
A twelfth-century witness of the sale of sex slaves described the market:
If the girls did not cooperate, of course, they would be beaten or killed.
The Andalusian slave market became particularly important in the eleventh century, when two of the other principal markets from which the Muslims drew slaves, Central Asia and southeastern Europe, dried up.
The Slavs by this time had converted to Christianity and were no longer interested in selling their people as slaves to Islamic traders. In Central Asia, meanwhile, the Turks had converted to Islam.
The primary market for slaves among Muslims was for non-Muslims, as enslaving fellow Muslims was considered a violation of the Qur’an’s requirement to be “merciful to one another” (48:29); hence Muslim slave traders had to look elsewhere for merchandise.
Though the Reconquista in Spain continued to diminish Islamic al-Andalus and the two centuries of the principal Crusader period saw the forces of jihad both in Spain and in the Holy Land on the defensive, it didn't improve the lot of Christians and Jews living under sharia.
In the early 12th century, a Berber Muslim scholar named Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Tumart began to preach that the ruling Almoravids had strayed from pure Islam, and that the Muslims in its domains needed to return to full implementation of the teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah.
His message found a ready audience among Muslims who had imbibed the Qur’anic notion that Allah bestowed or withheld his blessings to a society in direct correlation to how obedient it was to his commands.
In 1121, his followers proclaimed him the Mahdi, the savior figure who was to return before Judgment Day in order to prepare and purify the believers.
His followers, according to a contemporary chronicler, “swore that they would fight for him and dedicate their lives to his service.” Ibn Tumart died around 1130, but the movement he began lived on.
The rigorists, who called themselves Almohads (monotheists), rapidly gained ground, and in 1147 were able to overthrow the Almoravids in North Africa; the Almohad leader, Abd al-Mu’min al-Gumi, declared himself caliph.
Over the next twenty-five years, the Almohads gained control over all the remaining Muslim domains of al-Andalus.
Life was not pleasant for non-Muslims in Almohad Spain. The Muslim historian Ibn Baydhaq detailed how the Almohads treated the Jews as they advanced:
The renowned Jewish philosopher Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides, was born in Córdoba but fled the supposedly tolerant and pluralistic Muslim Spain in the 1160s. He later remarked:
The Almohads meant to revive the spirit of jihad among the Muslims of Spain and expand those domains.
Driven by a revivalist fervor rivaling that of the jihadis of earlier centuries, the Almohads won a series of victories over the Christians, capturing Alcácer do Sal, the gateway to Lisbon, in 1191.
Four years later, they declared a new jihad against the Christians of Spain and decisively defeated King Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1195—the most disastrous defeat the Christians of Spain had suffered since the debacle at Sagrajas 109 years before. In 1197, they besieged Madrid.
In line with their rigorist origins, the Almohads made sure to enforce the humiliation of the dhimmis in their domains. The thirteenth-century Muslim historian al-Marrakushi noted that in 1198, Abu Yusuf, the Almohad ruler in Spain,
Abu Abd Allah, however, was not offering actual justice or equitable treatment:
Meanwhile, with Saladin’s defeat of the Crusaders at Hattin and Jerusalem in 1187, just a few years before these reversals in Spain, the Christian losses in the Holy Land and in Spain made it appear as if Christendom was beset by an implacable foe with a global reach.
And, indeed it was. In February 1210, Pope Innocent III wrote to Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo, urging the Christians of Spain not to make the same mistakes that had led to so many defeats at the hands of the Muslims in the Holy Land—chiefly disunity and impiety.
His warning appeared all the more urgent the following year, when the Almohads under the leadership of their caliph, Muhammad al-Nasir, invaded Spain with a huge army of jihadis and began advancing again.
Innocent, aware of the urgency of the situation, sent new letters calling for unity and renewed religious fervor to other Christian leaders, both spiritual and temporal, culminating in letters in 1212 to the bishops of France.
In these letters, he informed them of the gravity of the jihad threat and calling for spiritual and material aid for Alfonso and the other Christian rulers who were preparing to confront the Almohads.
Innocent also wrote to Alfonso, urging him to humble himself before the Lord, and not to try to engage the Almohads if he was not confident of victory, but to seek a truce if necessary.
Then he called for a general fast among the people of Rome and a procession in the city to pray for the peace of the Church and the favor of God in the battle with the Muslims in Spain.
On July 16, 1212, the Christians won a massive victory over the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in the southern Spanish province of Jaén.
The caliph Muhammad, in imminent danger of being captured, fled in a panic, leaving behind his standard, which the Christians recovered and sent to the house of a religious order near Burgos, where it remains to this day.
King Alfonso VIII wrote happily to Pope Innocent III:
Innocent received the news as an answer to his prayers. The power of the jihad in Spain was definitively broken. From 1212 on, the Christians in Spain made steady gains.
Not only the jihad that the Almohads had called in 1195, but the jihad that began when Tariq ibn Ziyad burned his boats and declared to his men that they were going to conquer or die, was now a spent force.
It would still be nearly 300 years before Islamic rule in Spain ended completely. In 1236, the Christians captured Córdoba; in 1243, they took Valencia; and in 1248, Seville. By 1249, the emirate of Granada was all that was left of Islamic al-Andalus.
In 1280, however, the Muslims of Granada defeated an invading Christian force, and the Reconquista was stymied for a time.
By that point, however, the Muslims of Spain were directing their energies solely to holding on to the territories they had, not to winning more.
Only toward the end of the fifteenth century came the culmination of what is to date the largest-scale resistance to jihad that has ever been successfully undertaken.
In 1469 King Ferdinand of Aragon married Queen Isabella of Castile. Their combined forces began to confront the last remaining Islamic strongholds in Spain.
In 1492, after ten years of war, they defeated the Emirate of Granada, the last bastion of al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula.
Seven hundred eighty-one years after Tariq ibn Ziyad’s boats (the gift of the Christian Count Julian) landed in Spain, with the Muslim commander determined to take the land or die there, the Christians had fully driven the warriors of jihad from Spain.
To this day, Spain remains one of the few places once ruled by Islam but no longer; usually what the jihadis have conquered, they’ve kept.
Because of the Qur’anic command to “drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191), Spain remains high on the list of countries that contemporary jihad groups hope to reconquer for Islam.
In conclusion, the "Golden Age of Spain" under Islam was a myth. It was not a putative period of ecumenical harmony, and was by no a kind of perpetual medieval Woodstock Summer of Love.
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