Pod Insights Gone Medieval The Rise and Fall of Al-Andalus About this episode Matt Lewis is joined by Professor Brian A. Catlos to explore the nearly eight centuries of Al Andalus, Islamic Spain. From a daring invasion in 711 led by Tariq ibn Ziyad to the emergence of great cities like Cordoba, Matt and Brian delve into the multicultural experiment where Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexisted, blending art, science, and culture, and they debunk some pretty huge fake news about Charlemagne.
Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
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2:49 Matt Lewis? Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.
3:30 Matt Lewis? Imagine a land where minarets pierced the sky alongside church spires, where scholars debated philosophy in grand libraries and where the scent of orange blossoms mingled with the call to prayer. This was Al-Andalus, Islamic Spain, a realm that lasted nearly eight centuries. The story of Al-Andalus began with a daring invasion in 7/11 as Tariq ibn Ziyad led a small army across the Strait of Gibraltar, defeating the Visigothic king Roderic in a battle that would change the face of Europe. Great cities such as Cordoba emerged to rival Baghdad and Constantinople, boasting paved
4:12 Matt Lewis? streets, street lighting and hundreds of public baths, when London was little more than a muddy village. But Al-Andalus was more than just a place. It was an idea, a multicultural experiment where Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisted, creating a unique blend of art, science and culture that would help spark the European Renaissance. From the breathtaking beauty of the Alhambra to the revolutionary works of philosophers, this was an extraordinary civilisation. Yet, as with all great empires, Al-Andalus faced its share of turmoil.
4:54 Matt Lewis? Yes, it was a place of faith, curiosity and creative spirit, but also, argues my guest today, one of violence, pettiness, cruelty, greed and hypocrisy. Arab Al-Andalus wasn't always a shangri-la of open-minded tolerance, nor were the Christians and Berbers who destroyed it barbarous Philistines. There were no good guys and there were no bad guys on a civilisational level, and few on an individual level. I'm Matt Lewis and on today's episode of Gone Medieval, I'm joined by Professor Brian A. Catlos, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
5:34 Matt Lewis? Among his prize-winning books is Kingdom of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain, which not only covers almost 800 years of stories involving Christians, Muslims and Jews, but also aims to dispel some of the myths about the period that Islamic Spain was a place of enlightened religious tolerance, or that it invoked a clash of civilisations.
6:09 Matt Lewis? So, welcome to Gone Medieval, Brian. It's fantastic to have you with us.
6:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's great to be here, always happy to talk about Muslim Spain.
6:16 Matt Lewis? Yeah, well, it's something we haven't covered yet on Gone Medieval and it seems like we've, we've missed a big fertile area, so it'd be really good to get into the, the roots of what's going on there and find out more about it. It's not something I know too much about, so I'm looking forward to this one as well. So I guess if, if we could start right at the very beginning, always a very good place to start. How and when does the, the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula get underway from North Africa?
6:43 Speaker 04 So the Muslim conquest of Spain took place shortly after the year 700. And this was part of a larger process of conquest, which began around the year 650, in the aftermath of the war between Rome and the Persian Empire. A war which weakened both empires at the very moment that a new power was coalescing on the fringes of the imperial world in the Arabian Peninsula. Okay, this is the origins of Islam, right? The prophet Muhammad saw himself as the last in the line of Judeo-Christian prophets, who was perfecting the message of the god of Abraham.
7:27 Speaker 04 And this religious ideology helped to pull together the traditionally divided and warlike Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula. And once they had sort of coalesced under this ideology, at the very moment that the Persian and Roman empires were weak, they essentially were able to pour into the political vacuum that had formed around the Mediterranean as a result of the sort of collapse or near collapse of these two empires. Persia was completely conquered by the Arabs, and Rome was sort of put on the ropes. Now, as the Arabs moved through this imperial world, both east and west,
8:10 Speaker 04 they moved along the coast of North Africa, which had been an important part of the Roman Empire. When they arrived at the end of Africa, as it were, in present-day Morocco, where were they going to go? They were going to keep following this route through the Roman world, and this led them into Spain. Spain was ruled over by a group called the Visigoths, who were Germanic barbarians, who had converted to Christianity and set up a kingdom there. And the Visigoths themselves were a sort of fractured group. They were in the midst of a civil war at the precise moment that these Arabs arrived, at their doorstep, as it were.
8:51 Speaker 04 And in what's really a sort of frequent occurrence historically, the Visigoths imagined that they might be able to take advantage of the arrival of these Arabs in order to lead this civil war to the conclusion that they had hoped. Specifically, the opponents of the Visigothic king at the time, whose name was Roderic, hoped that these Arabs would help them overthrow Roderic, and then they could dispose of the Arabs. Well, that didn't really turn out that way. In fact, what happened was that the Arab forces, well, I say Arab forces, but they were mostly
9:32 Speaker 04 actually made up of North African Berbers who had been recruited and at least ostensibly converted to Islam as the Muslim armies moved across North Africa. So these people cross over to the Iberian Peninsula in the year 711. They meet the Visigothic forces, and it's kind of like a Battle of Hastings moment. There's a single battle which determines the outcome of this history. The Visigothic army is absolutely routed by the Arabs. The Arabs, of course, are being helped by certain factions within the Visigothic nobility. And the king is killed. Most of the nobility is wiped out, at least the warriors, and so the Iberian Peninsula
10:17 Speaker 04 lies open to the Arabs. So the Arabs move through the Iberian Peninsula, conquering each city one at a time, usually through negotiation, sometimes as the result of a prolonged siege. And this was really the modus operandi of the Arab expansion. The way it was managed, I mean, when you think about it, it's really quite incredible. You look at the Arabian Peninsula, it's not a place that is densely populated, right? So essentially, there's not that many Arabs, right? But they're very determined, right? And they feel that God and history is on their side.
10:59 Speaker 04 And the way they manage this conquest is they'll sort of pull up with their army outside of a given town or city, and they did this all over the sort of the Near East and the Mediterranean world. And basically, they would offer the inhabitants a choice. Look, either you surrender to us and you become our subjects, and if you do that, we'll allow you a certain amount of autonomy, self-governance. You can follow your religion as you have, you can basically rule over yourselves, but you have to be loyal to us and your taxes go to us. Or... If you don't do that, then we'll attack and conquer you, and we can do whatever we want with you. We can take all your stuff. We can enslave you. We can enslave your women, your children, and so on and so forth.
11:43 Speaker 04 And so this is the way that the Arabs managed to essentially take over almost all of Spain in a period of just a few years.
11:51 Matt Lewis? It's a very similar tactic to the Mongols five or 600 years later, isn't it? You know, if you surrender, we will treat you well. If you refuse, we will flatten and destroy you. Now you decide. In the wake of that initial conquest, then, do we end up with a single kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula? Or have we got a set of fractured groupings there?
12:12 Speaker 04 Well, this all occurs, actually, just at a time when this newly established Muslim empire, the Caliphate, is heading into its own period of crisis. Right between about the years 650 and 750, the Islamic world, as I said, was transformed from the Arabian Peninsula into an empire, a complex empire that stretched almost from India to the Atlantic. And it was kind of a situation in which the center couldn't hold. And the Arabs themselves were extremely disunited. So the Islamic world, as this conquest was taking place
12:54 Speaker 04 and in the aftermath, was heading into its own political crisis, which led to a revolution, which saw the destruction of the first Caliphate, the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which had been established in 660, right? And the emergence of a new Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, based in Baghdad. Now, when most people think of the Golden Age of Islam, it's the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad that they think of. This is the world of the 1,001 Arabian Nights, Haruna Rashid, and all of these sort of scientific and cultural and technical advances that we associate with this Golden Age of Islam. So what happened? As a consequence of this revolution,
13:39 Speaker 04 the new ruling family, the Abbasids, obviously, wanted to eliminate any chance that the people that they had overthrown would take over. So they deliberately hunted down and killed everyone they could who belonged to the previous royal family, the Umayyads. Now... A single Umayyad prince, a young man named Abdurrahman, managed to escape the massacre and headed westward secretly, keeping just ahead of the abbasid agents, until he managed to gather a sort of loyal corps of followers. And then he crossed over from North Africa to Spain and declared himself to be the legitimate ruler of Spain, Muslim Spain.
14:25 Speaker 04 Now, it's important to note, he didn't say that he was the legitimate caliph, but he said he was going to be the prince of Al-Andalus. So from the year 756, Al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, was established as a sort of independent entity within the Islamic world under the rule of this Umayyad family that had previously been the family of the caliphs.
14:49 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And so do we then see the establishment of a capital? Where do they base themselves?
14:55 Speaker 04 They set up their capital quite quickly at a city called Cordoba. Now, Cordoba is a good choice for a capital. It's in the south of Spain, which is the sort of most prosperous and fertile part of the peninsula. It's also located on a river, the Guadalquivir. This is from the Arabic Guadalquivir, which means big river, right? So it's almost navigable to the sea, so it's very well connected. And it's also different from the previous capital. The capital of the Visigothic Kingdom had been Toledo, which is kind of almost smack dab in the center of the Iberian Peninsula. And one sees in history that when conquerors establish a new regime,
15:39 Speaker 04 one of the things they often do is change the location of the capital. And the reason they do that is that it helps break all of the sort of entrenched political relationships and undermines the existing political elite and allows them to set up essentially a new system. So this is part of the motivation for the shift in the capital from Toledo to Cordoba in the south.
16:06 Matt Lewis? Fascinating. So presumably then we start to see an influence on things like the architecture. So for example, there's the Great Mosque of Cordoba, which we can still go and see today. Presumably then, the arrival of the Muslims in Spain is having a distinct impact on its culture, its architecture, its political structures?
16:25 Speaker 04 Yes, indeed, but this takes time. And the reason it takes time is, well, there's a couple of reasons. One is that, you know, when we imagine civilizations, like Islamic civilization, we imagine it as it existed in its sort of fully-realized state. But Islamic culture, society, and religion was very much at this point in a process of self-realization. A lot of the things that we associate with the Islamic world in terms of architecture, art, even the finer points of religious belief and law, were only beginning to coalesce. And one has to remember
17:09 Speaker 04 that the conquest was carried out essentially by a very small group of people. So what we have is a handful of Arabs arriving in Spain at the head of an army which was largely made up of these North African Berbers, many of whom actually left the peninsula after the conquest. And so it was a situation in which the Arabs in Al-Andalus, for the first century or so, were really under threat of being overwhelmed by the indigenous people. So this process of transformation from a sort of Roman Christian world to what we would call an Islamic world
17:53 Speaker 04 was one that took place over the course of several centuries. But certainly, it was a different world than the one that had come before. And one can see that in the sort of makeup of the city of Cordoba. Roman cities, for example, which is the world that the Visigoths existed in, are cities that are made up of straight roads set out on a grid pattern, right? Designed for the traffic of chariots and carts and so on and so forth. And Islamic cities have a very different aspect. They're made for foot traffic and donkey traffic, essentially. And they developed in a way which reflected the social structures of the Arabian world
18:36 Speaker 04 rather than the social structures of the Roman world. Which is to say, the way that cities developed, the way that neighborhoods developed, Mirror the sort of tribal and clan orientation of Arabic society.
18:52 Matt Lewis? And then not too far into Muslim rule in in Iberia, we get the pushback that comes from, most notably from Charlemagne. And you know, from a Christian European point of view, you then get the kind of the Chanson de Rollon, you know, this fantastic romantic story of how the Christians tried to liberate Al-Andalus from the Muslims. How close did Charlemagne come? How much of a threat was he? And how did Muslim Spain stand up to him? Because Charlemagne has this reputation of being, you know, the builder of empires, almost unstoppable.
19:22 Speaker 04 Well, I'm gonna have to rain on that parade a little bit, I'm afraid. This is a vision we have of this period in medieval history, which is really informed by later views of history, particularly the sorts of views of history that started to emerge in Northern Europe as a consequence of the Crusades. So we imagine often, you know, the Islamic conquest of Spain as part of this kind of civilizational clash between Christianity and Islam. You know, Islam embodied by the Caliphate and, you know, Christianity or Christendom
20:02 Speaker 04 embodied someone like Charlemagne or the Byzantine Emperor. And, you know, to a very limited extent, this was kind of true. But the fact is, when we look on the ground, it doesn't hold at all. What we see is that the political players on the ground didn't discern of the world in that way. They didn't see themselves as being involved in some grand contest between Christianity and Islam. They saw themselves as pursuing their own ends and agendas in a way that would benefit them. So, you know, as I said, the conquest of Al-Andalus couldn't have taken place without the active participation of members of the Christian nobility.
20:47 Speaker 04 Right, who first thought that maybe they could take advantage of this, you know, this, uh, these Arabs in order to, to sort of get a better position in the civil war that was going on. But even after the Arab conquest, Christians were deeply involved in the running, at least initially, of this Muslim kingdom. And they saw their own fortunes as tied to it. On the other hand, there were many local Muslim rulers who did not feel an affinity necessarily with Cordoba or with the rulers there. So we have this story from the Song of Roland, right? In which Charlemagne, the emperor, the Christian emperor in the north, decides he's gonna come down and conquer Al-Andalus.
21:30 Speaker 04 He comes down, hangs around for a while, and then decides he's gonna go home, right? So as his army is crossing back over the Pyrenees on his way back, he hasn't really achieved anything, right? He's attacked. Now, according to the Song of Roland, he's attacked by these kind of treacherous and monstrous Muslims that set upon his rear column and, you know, decimate part of his army kind of thing, right? And it's a great story, but it's absolutely kind of the opposite of what happened historically. What happened was that there was a, a city in the north of Muslim Spain called Zaragoza, right? And the ruler of Zaragoza wanted to break away from Cordoba.
22:14 Speaker 04 He wanted to establish his own independent Muslim kingdom. So who's he gonna turn to? It's a little bit like the Cold War. If you wanted to resist the Americans, you turned to the Russians. If you wanted to resist the Russians, you turned to the Americans. So he wants to resist Cordoba. So he says to Charlemagne, "Charlemagne, why don't you come over and help me, right? And together we'll conquer Cordoba." Well, Charlemagne brings his army down to Zaragoza, and at that point, the ruler of Zaragoza kind of has second thoughts and kind of goes cold on the deal. So Charlemagne has to go home. So as Charlemagne is going over the Pyrenees, where does he stop? He stops in the Basque Country. The Basques at this point are officially Christians, right? So technically his allies. But what he does is, he stops off in order to beat up on the Basques a little bit.
22:59 Speaker 04 And then as he's leaving Pamplona, it's the Basques that attack him.
23:05 Speaker 04 So the story that was passed down through this poem, which became this, really, the French National Epic, the Song of Roland, has absolutely nothing to do, or very little to do, with the actual history that happened. Charlemagne did not see himself as engaged in some civilizational conflict. He had very friendly relations with the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rasheed in Baghdad. They sent each other gifts. In fact, you know, Harun al-Rasheed famously sent Charlemagne an elephant, Abu Abbas, which absolutely blew Charlemagne's mind. So this idea of conflict, you know, certainly it existed in some sort of abstract form, but on the ground, it didn't really play out that way.
23:50 Matt Lewis? Yeah, so just for anyone who thought fake news was a new thing, it has been around since the time of Charlemagne, when he invented the story of him being driven out of Al-Andalus by the Muslims. I wondered if you could give us an insight into how the Christian and Muslim cultures maybe transferred knowledge between each other? Because we have this image that the Christians, centuries later, will go to the Near East on what we call the First Crusade, and in some ways forgetting that there's this crusade almost going on in Iberia all of the time, anyway. We have this image that they go there and they come back with lots of knowledge from the Arab world. But given that the Arab world is in Europe at this point, in southwest Europe, is there much interaction between the two cultures? Are we seeing a transfer
24:32 Matt Lewis? of Arabic knowledge into Europe through Al-Andalus?
24:36 Speaker 04 Absolutely. In fact, much more than the contact that crusaders had with Muslims in the Near East. Al-Andalus was crucial for the transmission of knowledge from the Arab Islamic world into the Christian West. And in fact, you could argue that, you know, the sort of the hallmarks of European history, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, so on and so forth, could not have happened the same way had it not been for these linkages at the Islamic world. So what happened? Well, and how did the Arabs get this knowledge? The Arabs were, after all, these, you know, nomadic, primitive desert warriors. Well, when the Arabs took over the Persian Empire,
25:20 Speaker 04 they inherited all of the culture of the Persian Empire. Right? But the Arabs were also part of a larger world, a larger world which included Christianity and Judaism.
25:32 Speaker 04 And which was soaked with the culture of the classical world. We think of, for example, of Greek philosophy and Greek science as being something European, but it wasn't European at all. It was the sort of cultural baseline of the entire Near East. So what happened was that these Arabs, who had now sort of taken over Persia, were in a position where they could absorb this knowledge, this Greek knowledge, this Persian knowledge, even technologies and knowledges from as far away as India, and synthesize it into a new scientific culture. Now, how did this happen?
26:17 Speaker 04 It happened largely through the medium of native peoples. Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, new converts to Islam, who were involved in a massive process of translation of ancient texts into Arabic, so that they could be understood within this new Islamic world. And in the process of adapting this knowledge, they didn't just translate, but they actually improved on it and deepened it. So what we see is we have the sort of the basis of classical intellectual civilization now being processed
26:59 Speaker 04 by these Persianized Arabs to fit into an Islamic concept of God and the world. But it so happens that the God of the Muslims is the God of Abraham. He's the same God as the God of the Christians and the Jews. So they can understand each other. They're all dealing with basically the same sort of idea of what God is and how the world works, right? So there's a lot of interchange between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers, who find they agree on, you know, 90% of things, and they only have a few theological differences. So if they park those theological differences, then they can collaborate.
27:42 Speaker 04 And this is really the secret to this tremendous cultural renaissance that takes place in, most of all, in Baghdad, in the 9th and 10th centuries. Now, what happens? In the 9th century, the Abbasid caliphate enters into a time of crisis. Persia becomes a place of upheaval and danger. And many intellectuals leave the court of Baghdad, some of whom trek westwards, as far west as Al-Andalus, where they find an environment in which, just like Baghdad, they can work and live and be supported, right? Where their work is seen as valuable.
28:26 Speaker 04 And so this Persianate Islamic classical Greek culture is now transplanted far into the Muslim West in Spain.
28:37 Matt Lewis? Fascinating.
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32:52 Matt Lewis? Do we get any idea of the specific contributions that are coming out of Val Andalus at the moment? Do we have examples of poetry, or medicines, or technological advancements, or anything like that?
33:02 Speaker 04 Well, I think the most obvious, and perhaps most consequential, piece of knowledge or technology that's passed on is what we call Arabic numerals. The numbers we use today, the numbers from 1 through 9 and 0, were bequeathed to us, or were adapted by us, from the Arabs in Spain. Previously, the only numerals that had been used in the Latin West were Roman numerals. I don't know if you're familiar with Roman numerals, but they're very difficult to do mathematics with. Try writing down a couple of Roman numerals and multiplying or dividing them, you get lost in seconds.
33:43 Speaker 04 So, again, going back to Islamic Persia, Muslims there had adopted a sort of idea of how numbers worked from India. And this included the value of the number depending on what position it was. And it included a very particular innovation, which was the number 0, which didn't exist in the Roman world. Okay, so, once we had this numerical system, and once this became adapted by Christians in Western Europe, which was a process which actually took about 300 or 400 years, this opened the door to essentially the world of higher mathematics that we live in today. Think about computers. What are computers based on?
34:26 Speaker 04 Computers are based on binary systems, right? Ones and zeros. So, you could say that without this influence from the Islamic world, we might not have computers today. We probably would. We would have just got them some other way. But this is the way it happened.
34:41 Matt Lewis? But they might be based on Is and X's instead.
34:43 Speaker 04 Exactly.
34:44 Matt Lewis? But how much do we know about how Christians and Jewish populations in Al-Andalus got on with the Muslims who were ruling there? Because famously, the Christians, when they get to the Holy Land, aren't great to Muslim and Jewish populations. Whereas Muslims tended to be much more tolerant of Christian and Jewish populations than Christians were when they were in charge. What do we see happening in Al-Andalus?
35:08 Speaker 04 First of all, we have to go back to the sort of beginnings of Islam. As I said, Muhammad saw himself and his followers saw him as the last in the line of essentially the prophets of the biblical tradition and of the New Testament tradition. For example, in Islam, Jesus is considered a prophet. So Muslims did not consider themselves really as belonging to a different religion. They were merely members of a group that had perfected, as it were, the religion of the God of Abraham. And so they didn't see Christians and Jews as followers of the wrong religion. They saw them as following the right religion, but wrongly.
35:49 Speaker 04 And there was a very strong current of individual responsibility in Islam, which is to say, you have to come to God yourself, right? Ideally, there's no such thing as a forced conversion, because it doesn't work, because you don't believe. And so Jews and Christians were allowed to occupy a sort of middle ground in which they weren't Muslims. So they didn't have full rights as citizens, as it were, of the Muslim world. But they belonged to religions which were considered protected. And so you might say they were sort of legitimate second-class citizens within the Islamic world.
36:31 Speaker 04 Now, to our ears today, that doesn't sound very nice because we live in a world in which we believe in a sort of egalitarian ideal in which all people are equal, but that certainly was not the case at the time. And it's hard to get into the way people thought about things because today we think about freedom and community in terms of our individual choices. But then it was very much a case of the survival of a community. So this secondary status that Christians and Jews occupied in the Islamic world, although it had many disadvantages, in a way is what allowed them to survive as groups. You know, if you contrast what happened to religious minorities in the Christian West,
37:15 Speaker 04 which was that they all disappeared, and you look at what happened in the Islamic world, we can see across the Islamic world, all sorts of weird little Christian and Jewish denominations that managed to survive for 1,500 years. Because they were given this sort of status as secondary but legitimate subjects within the Islamic world. A lot of opportunities, but a lot of vulnerabilities.
37:38 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And if we could just come back to kind of a more grand sweep of what's happening with Al-Andalus, we've seen an early invasion, the creation of effectively a kingdom that becomes separate from the caliphate. How does it particularly evolve from that point onwards?
37:52 Speaker 04 Well, for a long time, Al-Andalus was sort of really hanging on by its fingernails. It was this Islamic outpost in the far west. It was not particularly prosperous for a long time. It had a series of, you know, a sort of rolling series of revolts by, either by neighboring Christian rulers or by factions within Al-Andalus itself. And everything began to change around the year 900. Around the year 900, the Islamic world started to splinter. Now, I said that when Abdurrahman came to Al-Andalus, he was very careful not to call himself a caliph. He just called himself the prince of Al-Andalus.
38:36 Speaker 04 The reason was, there was a very strong idea in the Islamic world that there could only be one caliph, the caliph in Baghdad. Right? And so it was inconceivable that the Islamic world could be divided. That changed around the year 900. There was a major fracturing within the Islamic world. We've heard of the Sunni and Shia divide, right? Well, the Abbasids were Sunni Muslims, but there were a lot of Shia Muslims as well. And just after the year 900, a group of Shia Muslims set up a rival caliphate, the Fatimid Caliphate, based in North Africa. And this kind of, this sort of blew the lid off the idea that there could only be one caliph, right? And so at that moment,
39:21 Speaker 04 the ruler of Al-Andalus, Abdur-Rapun III, declared himself to be a caliph as well.
39:27 Matt Lewis? If there can be two, there might as well be three.
39:29 Speaker 04 Exactly. You could have as many as you want now, right? So what happened though was that
39:38 Speaker 04 the conflict that grew between this new Fatimid Caliphate in North Africa and the Umayyad Caliphate in Al-Andalus turned into a Cold War which drew the Umayyads south across the Straits of Gibraltar and down into Africa. And in Africa, they were battling with the Fatimids, largely through the medium of these Berber proxies. As they moved south, they moved deeper into Africa until they began to access the gold reserves of Central Africa, and this changed everything. Once the Umayyad Caliphs of Cordoba had access to the gold of Central Africa,
40:22 Speaker 04 they blossomed into essentially a world power.
40:28 Speaker 04 It was the gold of Africa that financed their military. It was the gold of Africa that financed this tremendous cultural blossoming that took place in Cordoba in the 10th century. You can't have a Golden Age without gold, essentially.
40:43 Matt Lewis? I suppose, yeah, yeah, clues in the title. And how do we then see it move forwards? I mean, it endures for pretty much the rest of what we consider to be the medieval periods. How do we see it progressing through the sort of the high and the late medieval periods? What's happening to Al-Andalus then?
40:59 Speaker 04 You know, it's one of the ironies of history that it was the same circumstances that enabled Cordoba to transform itself into a world power with the same forces that led to its downfall. Okay, essentially, along with the gold that was coming up from Africa, the Caliphate began to import more and more Berbers from North Africa to serve in its army, right? And the army of the Caliphate of Cordoba became essentially a mercenary army. It ceased to be a popular army, right? And the problem with mercenary armies is that mercenaries aren't necessarily loyal to the state that employs them.
41:45 Speaker 04 There were other factors as well. Arabs and Berbers are quite different culturally. And there was quite a bit of cultural animosity between Arabs and Berbers. Arabs considered Berbers to be like, you know, barbarians, hence perhaps the word Berber. And it only took about 50 or 60 years for political tensions to build within Al-Andalus, wherein these Berbers who had now arrived were taking a greater and greater political role and edging out many of the people who were in the established elite. Okay, so this positioned the Caliphate of Cordoba as something of a powder keg.
42:28 Speaker 04 There were a lot of underlying tensions sort of waiting to explode. This coincided with a political crisis. The Caliphate of Cordoba became a victim, as it were, of its own success. It became so rich and so powerful and so institutionally well-developed that it became possible for the Caliph himself to essentially stop ruling and to rule through a sort of bureaucratic structure through a series of intermediaries. Now, in a way, this sounds really good because it's sort of a kingdom that runs itself. But what happens when the kingdom starts running itself is that the ruler becomes less and less necessary. And so what we see at the same time as this transformation is happening and
43:12 Speaker 04 there's these tensions between Berbers and Arabs in Al-Andalus, we have a political evolution happening where the bureaucracy is essentially taking over the caliphate. Right? Once the bureaucracy takes over the caliphate, and it does so in the form of a particular individual, an individual named Al Mansour, who was the prime minister or the wazir of Al-Andalus, and who ended up essentially taking over the kingdom and ruling it from within, we're heading towards crisis.
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45:57 Matt Lewis? So from there, we see them going from this golden age to moving into this crisis. What happens, because presumably the Christians are spotting an opportunity to get a foot back in the door, how does Al-Andalus begin to fracture and fall apart?
46:13 Speaker 04 Well, you know, this is the way empires fall. Empires often fall quite suddenly when they appear to be at their zenith. So if we look at Al-Andalus in the year 1000, what was it? It was the most powerful kingdom in the West, essentially, the richest kingdom in the West. It was ruled by a bureaucracy which was high functioning. It had a booming economy. It had a powerful army, apparently, right? But it had all of these underlying tensions. Now, there was one moment, and this is the mistake that the bureaucracy made, in which the ruler decided that he was going to dispense with the caliph.
46:57 Speaker 04 The caliph is now unnecessary, right? And what he didn't realize was it was the idea of the caliph that was holding this society together. So once the idea of the Caliph of Cordoba was challenged, all of these tensions suddenly bubbled over. We had a civil war suddenly erupt, which set the Berber forces against the Arab forces. And this happened at the precise time that the Christian kingdoms that had been sort of huddled on the periphery of Al-Andalus were able to take advantage of this sudden weakness and essentially pour in. And so, within a period of 30 years, the Caliphate went from being ostensibly the
47:42 Speaker 04 most powerful and stable kingdom in Western Europe to utterly disintegrating.
47:47 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And we end in a situation towards the end of the medieval period where the last kind of bastion of Muslim Al-Andalus is the Emirate of Granada. Is there a particular reason why that place holds out the longest? Is there anything special about that? Or was it simply the hardest nut to crack?
48:07 Speaker 04 A bit of both. It was a hard nut to crack, and the Christian kingdoms didn't have a very good nutcracker. So, over the course of more or less a century, most of the territory of Al-Andalus, which is held by Muslims, is lost to Christians. Now, when we talk about Christians, when we say the word Christians, we think of them as a united group. But of course, the Christians of Spain were not united at all. They consisted of a collection of various kingdoms that were all fighting against each other. And as long as these kingdoms, these Christian kingdoms, were fighting against each other, this gave the sort of progressively weaker Muslim kingdom an opportunity to survive
48:49 Speaker 04 because it could play these various kingdoms off each other. So the main four kingdoms that were in Spain were the Kingdom of Navarre, the Kingdom of Aragon, Castile Leon, and Portugal. Navarre is in the north, so it's kind of out of the picture. But essentially, we had three Christian kingdoms fighting over Al-Andalus. And the Kingdom of Granada was able to manipulate those rivalries in such a way that it could survive for hundreds of years.
49:19 Speaker 04 The end came when the Christian Spains were united, or almost united. When Fernando and Isabel in the late 1400s, Fernando, the King of Aragon, and Isabel, the Catholic, the Queen of Castile, married. This united the two most powerful Christian kingdoms in the peninsula. And then the jig was up essentially for Granada. There was no one they could play off against each other.
49:44 Matt Lewis? And so eventually it's kind of Ferdinand and Isabel who will kind of end the reconquista and return the Iberian Peninsula fully to Christianity. What do you think are some of the important lessons that we might be able to learn from the fall of Al-Andalus in terms of politics or culture or religion? Or just how empires function?
50:04 Speaker 04 Well, that's a good question. I mean, really, the point of history is drawing lessons for today. Although, you know, one has to be careful in drawing parallels too closely. But, you know, I would say that there are lessons to be learned. And Al-Andalus, at least the caliphate, which was really the sort of, you know, the glory days of Muslim Spain, came to an end largely as a consequence, I would say, of divisions within that society itself. And in some ways, you can see how those divisions are paralleled in the polarization of our world today. Today, we talk about the right and the left.
50:45 Speaker 04 In Al-Andalus, in the year 1000, Muslim society there was divided very deeply, on the one hand, between people who identified as Arabs and people who identified as Berbers. But also people who belonged to what we would probably call now the religious right and the secular left. They had very different worldviews. And for a long time, as long as Al-Andalus was functioning politically and economically in a way that kind of met everyone's expectations, those people got along with each other. But then cracks started to form. The economy started to weaken.
51:25 Speaker 04 The political position of Al-Andalus became, you know, more tenuous. And at this point, these elements within the society of Al-Andalus turned against each other. And we didn't get to it, but in the aftermath of the civil war in Al-Andalus, what happened was that two Berber regimes in succession came over from North Africa to rule Al-Andalus, first the Al-Muravids and then the Al-Mohads. And historians have often looked at these invasions, particularly the Al-Muravid invasion,
52:07 Speaker 04 as one of these sort of super pious foreign Berbers who came into Al-Andalus, you know, destroyed the dream of a tolerant society and basically, you know, turned it into a fundamentalist regime. Well, that's not really true. What it overlooks is the fact that the Al-Muravids were actually called into Al-Andalus. They were invited into Al-Andalus by the equivalent of the religious right. And so it's a process in which it was not so much an invasion, but a kind of self-coup,
52:46 Speaker 04 in which a certain portion of the elite was no longer satisfied with the way that the kingdom was going, and they thought they could transform it by inviting in this foreign power that would help them reshape Al-Andalus in the way they thought it should be, which is as a sort of pious Islamic kingdom. It didn't work out in the end. And I think you can see parallels with, you know, modern crises of liberal democracies in the West, you know, notably the way that some authoritarian regimes sort of play
53:25 Speaker 04 on the sort of social conservative ethos in order to gain popular support, and most dangerously are willing to engage with foreign powers who are essentially rivals in order to try to reshape their own society. And, you know, I don't know how it's gonna end for us, but, you know, Al-Andalus, from the perspective of most people, it didn't end very well. It led to the collapse of Islamic power in Spain, and essentially, the party was over for everybody. So I think if there's a historical lesson we want to learn from this, it's that, you know, we better learn to get along with each other, right?
54:06 Matt Lewis? Yeah.
54:07 Speaker 04 Because there's enough people outside that want to do us harm, right? When we start turning on each other, whatever sort of community you you belong to, right, that's when things are gonna go downhill really quickly, and it's not gonna end well for anybody. So.
54:23 Matt Lewis? Yeah, no, it's really interesting.
54:25 Speaker 04 That's my optimistic take on things. Sorry.
54:27 Matt Lewis? That's fine. And I did want to just, a slight tangent as we come to the end. I did want to ask you a question about the role of women in Al-Andalus, as you present it in your book. How were women treated in Muslim society in Al-Andalus?
54:41 Speaker 04 Well, you know, historically speaking, women have been treated like, pretty badly across the ports. So, it's funny, we know, the image we have of Islam today is, you know, the Taliban and Burkas and so on and so forth. But, you know, that's not really, you know, emblematic necessarily of Islamic society and culture at all, any more than the Puritans are sort of representative of of Christian society and culture. So, you know, one of the things that Islam did as a religion was that it established certain set rights for women. And in this sense, at least from a, you know, a ninth and 10th century perspective, it was pretty progressive. Unlike through most of the rest of the world,
55:24 Speaker 04 including the Christian West and including within Jewish Jewish society and law, you know, women had clearly established rights as people, as legal personas, the right to own property. They had, you know, all sorts of rights under law. Not the same rights as men, right? But they had rights. So women actually enjoyed, or could enjoy, if they were wealthy particularly, quite a bit of power and agency, right? Not so much in an official capacity. You don't see a lot of female Muslim rulers, right? But what you do see is a lot of women in the Islamic world wielding power just under the radar.
56:08 Speaker 04 Right? And that may not seem important, but it is. And in fact, what's really interesting is that unlike in Christianity, Islam legitimizes polygamy, right? So a man legally can have up to four wives. So obviously, kings, right? Typically had many wives and many more concubines. So we have this curious thing that happens within Islamic political culture, within the palace, which is that a king or a caliph or a ruler will have several wives, each of whom have children. And so what we see are these political dynamics playing out within the palace
56:51 Speaker 04 in which these women, who are typically very wealthy and powerful and have established their own networks of politics and patronage, are essentially fighting against each other to ensure that their child is the one that succeeds to the throne. So, you know, they don't wear the crown, but women are often very powerful within the political world of Islam.
57:16 Matt Lewis? Yeah, that's a really interesting insight, I think. I wondered as well if you think there is a legacy of the Muslim presence in Al-Andalus that we can still see today? Is there a cultural, a political legacy to its presence there?
57:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. I think the most obvious thing is what you pointed out before, which is the architectural heritage. You can go to Cordoba and you can, you know, walk through the streets, some of which still resemble the sort of character of an Islamic city. But you can go to the Great Mosque, you know, which was founded soon after Abdul Rahman arrived in, in 756, which is this incredible, you know, world-class jewel of architecture. But all across the peninsula, there are the remains of the Muslim presence, the visible remains in the form of, of castles and, and bathhouses and so on and so forth. But more than that, I mean, one sees the imprint of Islamic culture in the food of Spain.
58:13 Speaker 04 A lot of the typical dishes, you know, derive ultimately. From the Islamic world, most of the ingredients in the food that people eat there, if they didn't come from Latin America after the 1500s, came from the Muslim presence. So, I mean, this is the way humanity works. You know, we adopt and absorb and co-op and appropriate all of the influences around us. So, you know, it would be impossible to think that without this, or that there would not be this enduring sort of presence or memory or vestige of Islamic culture, you know, running through Spanish culture essentially.
58:50 Matt Lewis? Yes, fascinating stuff. I'm conscious, we've kind of shoehorned you into covering about 800 years of really, really complex history in under an hour, and you've done an absolutely fantastic job, Brian. Thank you very, very much. I found that absolutely fascinating. But I wondered, before we finish, as kind of a treat, as thank you for doing this, if I could pop you in a time machine and send you back to any point in the history of Al Andalus, is there a moment that you would like to witness, or is there a person that you would like to meet from that kind of eight centuries of the history of Al Andalus?
59:22 Speaker 04 Wow, that's a tough question, because...
59:27 Matt Lewis? Well, it was supposed to be a treat. It wasn't meant to be a tough question.
59:30 Speaker 04 Because, no, no, because, you know, most, most people that we study in history are absolutely awful. So, I guess if I had to meet anyone, it would probably be Abbas ibn Farnas, who was this, you know, intellectual inventor who lived in 10th century Cordoba and who was credited with attempting the first manned artificial flight. So, he built himself a flying machine and took off. Apparently, he crashed but survived. But I guess if I had to meet anyone, it'd probably be Abbas ibn Farnas.
1:00:11 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it'd be fun to be there, his first test flight, help him pick through the wreckage afterwards. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Brian. It's been absolutely fascinating, and you've done us an incredible service covering this immense amount of history in some real detail with some great insight, all in under an hour, too. So, thank you very, very much.
1:00:29 Speaker 04 Well, thank you for having me.
1:00:31 Matt Lewis? It's been a pleasure. Thank you. I hope you've enjoyed this episode as much as I have. If you'd like to explore some of its themes further, we have an episode in the vaults about medieval cookery that includes a visit to Al-Andalus. There's an episode on Charlemagne, who tried to dislodge the Muslims from the southern Iberian Peninsula. There's also a great episode that Eleanor did recently on El-Sidd that's a good fit for this topic, too. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval.
1:01:14 Matt Lewis? You can sign up to History Hit for access to hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free. Sign up now at www.HistoryHit.com/subscribe. Go on, you know you want to. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just Gone Medieval with History Hit.
1:01:49 Speaker 01 Hi, everyone. It's Katie Couric. And on my podcast, Next Question, we love stories about how women are taking control of their lives. They are increasingly leading financial decisions in their households, yet many say they don't feel fully prepared for the long-term financial choices ahead. Real confidence comes from knowing your financial future is protected, whatever happens. Pacific Life has helped generations protect what matters today and prepare for tomorrow with life insurance and lifetime income solutions. It's a promise Pacific Life has kept for nearly 160 years, so its customers can keep theirs.
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