Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Rise & Fall of The Moors in Spain About this episode In 711 an Arab and Berber army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and invaded the Iberian Peninsula. Seven years later, their conquests had birthed the Muslim kingdom of al-Andalus. This marked the beginning of roughly 8 centuries of Moorish rule, during which al-Andalus became a conduit for the transmission of knowledge between the Islamic world and Europe.
Joining us today is Brian Catlos, a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the author of 'Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain'. He takes us through the history of al-Andalus, from its inception and expansion through to its dramatic downfall.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Max Carrey.
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2:07 Dan Snow? Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was a decapitation strategy, and that wasn't very unusual in medieval Europe, a place in which disparate, fragile kingdoms were held together by the charismatic leadership of a single man, a king. And today, the battle-winning strategy of Tarek ibn Ziyad can be summarised as finding that charismatic king and putting him to the sword. Tarek was the leader of a force of Muslims lining up in southern Spain in 711 against the ruler of much of Iberia, the Visigothic king Roderic.
2:48 Dan Snow? Tarek's job today was to find Roderic and kill him. A later chronicler put his romantic spin on Tarek's pre-battle speech. He said, “He told his men, ‘Should I fall before I reach to Roderic? Redouble your ardor, force yourselves to the attack and achieve the conquest of this country. In depriving him of life, with him dead, his soldiers will no longer defy you.’” This veteran knew what he was talking about. “And his men understood the assignment. These fast-moving cavalrymen, lightly armed, turbaned, in male shirts, they obeyed his command. Seeking out weak points in the more ponderous Visigothic army in front of them, they poured
3:30 Dan Snow? like water through the cracks until they found the enemy king and hacked him down. Around him fell the elite of his Iberian realm.” Tarek had led his men across the Narrows. They'd left Suta in North Africa. They'd landed at the Rock of Calpe, later renamed Gibraltar, which in Arabic derives from Jebel Tarek, the Rock of Tarek. One of the first recorded legends is that Tarek burnt his ship to prevent his army from deserting, just as Cortes did on the beach of Mexico centuries later. Tarek marched across southern Iberia. The full-scale invasion was underway. We don't know how long after he met King Roderic on the infamous battlefield of Guadalajara.
4:12 Dan Snow? We also don't know whether betrayal eased Tarek's victory, but the terrible clash that day was the decisive moment for control of Iberia. Following that battle for 800 years, parts of Iberia, or nearly all of the peninsula, were controlled by Muslim forces until just before 1500. At times, that realm even extended north to include parts of what is now southern France. That Islamic entity was known as Al-Andalus, possibly an Arabic word derived from the Vandals, the people that had ruled the peninsula after the fall of the Roman province.
4:50 Dan Snow? For long periods within the 800 years, Al-Andalus was a leading cultural and scientific and economic centre in the Mediterranean basin. Many of the great medieval achievements in science, both Islamic and Christian, come via Andalus: trigonometry, surgery, astronomy, cartography and mathematics. It also became an engine for the transmission of ancient texts into the rest of Europe. It was a conduit for cultural exchange between the Christian world and the Islamic. This is the story of Andalus. In this podcast, we're going to take an overview: its rise, its golden age and its dramatic fall.
5:34 Dan Snow? And joining me to tell me that story is Brian A. Catlos. He is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He's written a book, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain, and he's got more books coming out presently. So keep an eye out for those. But in the meantime, let's get into it. Here's the story of Andalus. Enjoy.
6:14 Dan Snow? Brian, thanks so much, buddy. Thanks for coming on the podcast.
6:16 Speaker 04 Oh, it's my pleasure. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
6:19 Dan Snow? Just try and paint a picture. You know, life comes at you fast, people say. People think the modern world moves fast. But just talk to me about the speed at which Islam explodes out of Arabia.
6:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, it was quite a sort of prodigious set of developments. You know, the world in the sixth century seemed really stable with these two great empires, the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire, which had been at odds with each other, you know, for the previous, how many centuries? And, you know, along the fringes of these empires are all sorts of groups that were kind of coalescing, barbarians, they're usually called. And one of these groups was the Arabs to the south. And so the Arabs, for many centuries, had been living on the kind of fringes of the imperial world, serving as mercenaries and traders and whatnot in the Persian and Roman world. And there came a moment at the turn of the seventh century, around the year 600,
7:15 Speaker 04 when Persia and Rome had this massive war, that Rome won, at least kind of formally, but really it ended up weakening both of them. And this provided a moment for, in this case, the Arabs, to expand into the political void that weakened Roman and Persian empires had left. And what really, the kind of special sauce to this was the fact that they adopted Abrahamic religion. So religion in the tradition of Judaism and Christianity. And this provided them with the sort of, well, with a few things. It provided them with a kind of moral foundation and justification for their political expansion.
7:58 Speaker 04 And it provided them with a framework which gave them solidarity amongst themselves. So they essentially stopped fighting each other and turned all of that military energy outwards and were able to sort of flood out of the Arabian Peninsula. And, you know, virtually within a very short time, 15, 20 years, take control of what had been the Persian Empire and much of what had been the Roman Empire, threatening even Constantinople itself, which was at that point the capital of the Roman Empire.
8:29 Dan Snow? So they've unified, perhaps not unlike, people will be familiar with the story of the Mongols, not unlike the Mongols, so these warring tribes of lots of disparate groups within Arabia now joined together. They've been united by this devout set of beliefs. Is this something in the way they make war? Were they particularly adept? Was it their use of cavalry, speed, logistics? What made them so devastating?
8:51 Speaker 04 So imperial armies are institutionally kind of stiff and they develop tactics and approaches and strategies which worked for them as they were expanding. As conditions change, those strategies may no longer be the most appropriate. So we see this throughout history. Empires look for new military energies, strategies and advances from the periphery because this is what these peoples have. So one of the factors was that the Arabs were very good militarily. They were always fighting amongst each other, just like the Mongols had been. So that kind of put them in fighting form. And they had begun already
9:33 Speaker 04 to serve in the Persian and Roman Empire as clients and mercenaries. So Rome and Persia were not unknown quantities for them. They knew exactly what they were facing and they knew how to deal with both of these militaries. So they carried a tremendous advantage. In other cases, they had a disadvantage.
9:51 Dan Snow? They rode that advantage. They conquered what we now probably call the Middle East, the Levant. And then interestingly into North Africa and Egypt. And I guess that's not that surprising, given its neighboring territory, but also it had traditionally been part of this Roman Empire, well, for absolutely centuries at this point.
10:10 Speaker 04 Well, you know, there's that saying that politics of horrors avoid, right? And so basically what we saw was the collapse of these two empires and the Arabs essentially flooded into that zone. Now, what's interesting is they were able to do this.
10:27 Speaker 04 Taking advantage of the disarray and factionalism both within the Persian Empire and the Roman world. And so ever since Edward Gibbon, we've imagined the Islamic expansion as this sort of global conquest or a conquest that was thought of in global terms that was kind of premeditated, you know, as a sort of manifestation of, you know, divine destiny on the part of Islam. And there might have been a tiny element of that, but most of it was just taking advantage of the circumstances that lay before them and expanding into this political void, which was all part of this larger Roman and Persian world, which they knew very well. So this was not terra incognita for them.
11:12 Dan Snow? And that goes for the whole of North Africa, right? Not just Egypt, but the territory beyond that. That had been the breadbasket, the critical. It's sometimes difficult for us Europeans to think about it now because it feels like there's a bit of a line through the middle of the Mediterranean. But in fact, the southern shore had been as Roman as that northern shore.
11:29 Speaker 04 Absolutely. And this is really important, and you're quite right, that we had this prejudice that developed, you know, in the 19th century as we began to think of the idea of Europe, that somehow the classical world was divided into Europe, Africa and Asia. And it really wasn't. So Africa was part of this world. And prior to the Arabs, you know, North Africa had already been softened up. You know, the vandals, these Germanic barbarians had been down there conquering stuff. The indigenous people there had risen up against Roman rule. And there was all kinds of factionalism within what remained of Roman authority. And the Arabs were really adept at taking advantage of these divisions among the people that they were confronted with and ultimately trying to conquer.
12:14 Dan Snow? And I guess they'd have been familiar with that North African terrain. As you say before, this is not terra incognita. This is a place that suits the Arab way of making war.
12:24 Speaker 04 Well, familiar, yes, but you know, North Africa is significantly different from the Arabian Peninsula and Syria and Mesopotamia. There are stretches of desert and sorts of territory that may resemble. Arabia and the Levant, but much of the Maghrib, northwest Africa is actually quite mountainous. And for the Arabs, it was really a long, drawn out and stubborn process to subdue the indigenous Berber inhabitants of North Africa. The conquest of Persia, the Persian Empire and the sort of more urbanized Roman Empire of the Levant was quite quick, right? The Arabs were able to knock out the Byzantines and the Persians and install
13:08 Speaker 04 themselves as the new rulers, right? They couldn't do that in North Africa. It was really kind of a slog and it took several decades, really half a century for them to reach as far as the Atlantic coast through a process of fighting these Berbers, inducing some of them to convert to Islam and therefore join their armies. And so it was really, you know, it was not an easy campaign by any stretch of the imagination.
13:35 Dan Snow? Interesting. Okay, so they they reached the Atlantic coast of North Africa. There's an obvious place to go now. You can see it. You can see it's close by. And that is what we what we now call southern Spain. It was Iberia. Again, this had been part of the Roman Empire. So presumably there was local intelligence. There were lots of people around the traders and there were very, very strong links across that narrow mouth to the of the Mediterranean Sea.
13:59 Speaker 04 Absolutely. And the historiographical tradition, the folk narrative, which became part of our story of the conquest of Islamic Spain, and which definitely has, you know, some grains of truth, is that it was actually a Christian nobleman, whose name was Julian, right, who had some territory on the Moroccan side of the Straits of Gibraltar, who sort of induced and invited and facilitated the Arabo Islamic invasion of Spain in the year 711. The story is, and you know, this is the way history works, people, you know, invent sort of parables and fairy tales. The story was that he had sent his daughter to the court
14:39 Speaker 04 of King Roderick, who was the Visigothic King of Spain at this time of Hispania, controversial and unpopular figure. In his own right and that he had abused her in some way. And so Julian was sworn to revenge. And so when this Arab Berber army shows up on his doorstep, he's like, well, guys, you know, I got something for you. I'm going to get you some ships. I'm going to send you over to Visigothic Spain and you guys can take it over. So that's kind of the story that developed and there is something there. Even if not in the details, then of the sorts of relationships, as you pointed out between North Africa and Europe, which were quite close.
15:18 Dan Snow? What does the Arab army look like at this point? Is it, is it a bunch of Arabians? Or are there now people from throughout North Africa? There are former, you know, former Roman soldiers, administrators, Persians. I mean, what do you think it would have looked like as it gathered on the shore, ready to invade Spain?
15:35 Speaker 04 Well, at this point, one has to think about Arabia. There were Arabs living in Arabia and in the Levant, but you know, bottom line is there weren't that many Arabs in terms of numbers, right? So we have this, this kind of tiny, barely kind of inhabited peninsula, the Arabian Peninsula. And in the mid six hundreds, Arabs, you know, flood out and they, as I said, they conquer much of the Roman Empire, much of the Persian Empire, and most of them stay there. So we're dealing with increasingly smaller numbers of Arabs as we get further west. But as I said, they're kind of like the, the core of the snowball, right? So the, the advance through North Africa is like a snowball rolling down a hill.
16:16 Speaker 04 The more Berber tribes these Arabs subdue, the more convert, at least superficially to Islam and join their army. That means they can conquer more and convert more so that by the time you get to, you know, the end of the line in the Straits of Gibraltar, you're looking at a Arab elite, which is nominally in charge of an army, which is largely the immense majority, actually, made up of Berbers. So the actual conqueror, the guy who was the commander who first crossed was named Tarek Ibn Ziyat. And by tradition, he is a Berber convert to Islam. His boss, Musa Ibn Nusair, was probably from Syria
16:58 Speaker 04 and was likely the son or grandson of a Christian captive and convert to Islam. So the Arab element becomes increasingly diluted. Arabs have a lot of prestige in this new world order. But this far west, there's not that many real Arabs, so to speak.
17:15 Dan Snow? So, okay, let's take us across the straits. They land in Iberia. Is it like the Maghreb? Is it like the Atlas Mountains? Is it brutal, slow? Or is there a decisive battle and then another province falls into their lap?
17:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, I guess you could think of this as sort of a precursor of the Battle of Hastings, right? In the sense that what we have is when Teracchib and Ziad forces cross over to the south of Spain, the Visigothic king Roderic is actually fighting an insurgency in the north of Spain. This is why I compared it to the Battle of Hastings, right? With Harold up in the north. And he hears news of this invasion force that's landed. So he basically gathers his army and he rushes south as fast as he can and he meets them in battle. What he doesn't know is that part of his forces have already made a deal with
18:09 Speaker 04 the invaders and they turn on him during the battle. So it's an absolute rout. Again, another Hastings. Roderic is, we're not completely sure, but it seems that he must have been killed in the battle. And basically, the entire Visigothic army, at least those who are prepared to resist the invasion, are wiped out at that battle. And so essentially, the entire peninsula was largely undefended and lay open before the Arabs. And very quickly, they managed to kind of take over almost all of it through a combination of force, negotiation and intimidation. And then, of course, went beyond Spain into the Visigothic territories of the south of France, which were also part of the Visigothic
18:51 Speaker 04 Kingdom and which were also, at this point, open for conquest.
18:56 Dan Snow? So, yeah, the Arabs have arrived. Islam has arrived in Southern Europe. What is the nature of their relationship with the Caliphate back? Are they taking orders from HQ? Or are they like the Vikings, are they sort of going a little bit and establishing local power structures and not that fussed what's going on back in the centre?
19:13 Speaker 04 Well, they are, but you know, it's really, you know, tricky in an age of primitive technology and communication, when you're talking about large distances, to understand how the exercise of power could happen in these kingdoms, these imperia that span thousands of miles in an age basically of horses being the fast, of pigeons being the fastest way of communicating. So what we see is some interesting indications. So as I said, the guy who took over, who was formerly in charge of the invasion, Musa ibn Nasir, became governor of Al-Andalus, which is the Muslim, the Arabic word rather, for, for Spain. And this was inherited
19:57 Speaker 04 by his son, whose name was Abdul Aziz, who kind of continued the pacification. You know, the whole thing seemed really kind of up in the air. And at one point, actually, one of the caliphs, Umar II, I think, was decided that he was probably just going to abandon Al-Andalus. He said, you know, Al-Andalus is too far away, it's too cold a place, the people are too unfriendly, you know, we're just going to give it up. Now, that didn't happen, right? And what happened was that the local governor, the local ruler, started to entrench himself. Now, how does one rule when one's, you know, colonizing a territory? You have to integrate yourself with the indigenous elite. And so this is what he did. And Abdul
20:41 Speaker 04 Aziz marries the wife of the former King Roderick, who was killed. And the story is that she started trying to turn him into a new king, who was kind of independent of the caliphate, right? And at one point, she actually got him to wear a crown, which was considered to be really un-Islamic, and a sign that he was wavering in his loyalty to the caliphate. And that provoked an uprising of his own men, who accused him of apostasy, of leaving Islam for Christianity, and they killed him. And that was sort of the end of that little family. And a new family was then put in power as the governors. But you got to remember.
21:23 Speaker 04 That at this point, you know, Islam is only kind of developing as a religious culture. And a lot of people, you know, they know they worship the one God of Abraham, but they're not really sure what the boundaries are between Islam or Christianity, or even maybe what the doctrine of Islam is other than the basics. So the boundaries between Christianity and Islam are often really, really fuzzy at this point.
21:48 Dan Snow? Listen to Dan Snow's History. It's the story of Al-Andalus more coming up.
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24:21 Dan Snow? And Iberia remains kind of fuzzily linked with the main caliphate, the main Islamic world, doesn't it? It just seems like it's a long way away. It's a difficult journey to get there. It ends up not marching to the tune of whoever happens to be ruling in Baghdad, for example.
24:40 Speaker 04 When we think of Islamic Spain, we usually think of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, the Alhambra Palace, and all these phases of power and glory. But for the first couple hundred years of its existence, Islamic Spain was basically the sticks. It was the middle of nowhere. It was poor. It was considered to be uncultivated and barely hanging on in the face of this massive indigenous Christian population, and so on and so forth. So for a long time, it was really just kind of struggling to maintain. There was a famous episode in the middle of the ninth century, or a little bit later, actually, late ninth century, when a thinker, a scholar from Al-Andalus,
25:24 Speaker 04 Ibn Abdurabi, wrote this massive encyclopedia of
25:28 Speaker 04 Cultural knowledge. He was trying to show off how sophisticated Al-Andalus had come. And he sent a copy to the court at Baghdad. And in Baghdad, they just laughed at it. They said, you know, this is, you know, garbage. This is just, basically, they're recycling and trying to copy our culture. So what happened? Two things happened. And one was that around the year 900, the Al-Andalus, which at that point was not a caliphate, okay? Al-Andalus was ruled by princes. They called themselves emirs. These were members of the Umayyad family. And it's kind of an interesting situation because what happened was the Umayyads were the first family to dominate the caliphate. Okay, they ruled the Islamic world from Damascus from 660 to 750.
26:13 Speaker 04 There was a revolution in 750, which wiped out the Umayyad family, the Abbasid revolution. And this is what established Baghdad as the capital of the Islamic world. One member of that family, the sole surviving prince, escaped to Al-Andalus to kind of carry on the family name. But he did not present himself as a caliph. There could only be one caliph in Islam. So he was just a kind of a prince. So there was this kind of latent enmity and tension between the Abbasids in Baghdad and the Umayyads in Al-Andalus. The turning point comes around the year 900, when Al-Andalus starts to get rich. Right? It starts to get rich because it starts expanding into North Africa
26:56 Speaker 04 and connects to sources of abundant and pure gold in West Africa. This coincides with a period of disaster in the Abbasid East. Baghdad is sort of coming apart at the seams. We have this massive migration of scholars, of thinkers and of courtiers from Baghdad to Al-Andalus. The kind of process is wealth, political stability, plus the injection of this now mature Islamic culture, Persian-influenced Islamic culture into Al-Andalus. And this is when we get the sort of glory of the caliphate.
27:37 Dan Snow? And so you get, what, sort of cities, mosques being built, beautiful architecture. Can I ask, if we'd got a time machine, I mean, most of the population of what is now Spain and Portugal, would they have been Muslim? Or is this still like the English attempt to colonize Ireland? Is there a kind of Muslim elite and a downtrodden Christian laboring class, for example?
27:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's a little bit complicated because what happens is it takes a long time for the majority of the population to convert to Islam. So when the Muslims first arrived, there's very few of them, right? As I said, so they have to rule and they have to construct the society with the collaboration of the Christians that are there, right? As the sort of Arab element becomes stronger, as Islamic institutions develop, they begin to increasingly kind of sideline the Christians out of the political kind of sphere, right? What this does is it prompts more and more of these Christians to convert to Islam, right?
28:44 Speaker 04 So we have this gradual process in which the indigenous population of Spain, most of whom were Christian at the time of the conquest, there were a few Jews as well, right? End up converting to Islam. But there remains a very powerful and potent Christian population. And they're not really downtrodden. I mean, they have a kind of position in Islamic society, which is subordinate. They're, you know, quote unquote, second-class citizens. But they're legitimate citizens with rights before the law. And what's interesting is they become completely, even if they keep their Christian faith, they become completely acculturated and they adopt the Arabic language and all the sort of outward manifestations of Arabic culture.
29:25 Speaker 04 They become called, we call them today Mos-Arabs, which comes from the Arabic word Mustarid, which means someone who wants to be an Arab. These were the Christians of Al-Andalus.
29:35 Dan Snow? So this doesn't sound like the kind of culture war clash of civilizations that perhaps we've come to associate with Christians versus Muslims in Spain.
29:43 Speaker 04 No, I mean, there was always an element of that. Okay, there were some people who right from the get go saw the Arab and Berber invaders as these sort of infidel hordes who were, you know, pouring into Hispania to destroy Christendom. And to be fair, I mean, they did sack a lot of churches, but you know, who can blame them? Churches are always full of good stuff. There's all kinds of gold and jewels and stuff like this. This is why the Vikings went for the churches, right? So, you know, there was a little bit of an element of that. But we know that most people tended to view this process in somewhat dry pragmatic terms. So I'll give you an example. If we go back to some of the earliest accounts of the conquest we have, the first Arab account
30:27 Speaker 04 of the conquest we have is dated to the late ninth century. Okay, so that's pretty late. That's like more than a hundred years after. But we have Christian chronicles, like the Chronicle of 754, which describes the conquest and the aftermath. And it doesn't really describe it in terms of a clash of civilizations at all. It kind of dryly describes and characterizes the Arab and Christian rulers or the Muslim and Christian rulers, complimenting them when they were good, you know, saying that there were things that they did were bad. So on the ground, it seems like that element of civilizational conflict, while it was certainly always there, wasn't what was determining how people interacted with each other and formed alliances. And it
31:09 Speaker 04 wasn't really informing the way they thought of each other in a lot of circumstances.
31:14 Dan Snow? Well, and look at Charlemagne, right? The great Franco-German, as we might, I guess, European, Northern European leader, the OG, Northern European ruler. He was happy to go to war against Muslims in Iberia, but he was also happy to ally with them, right?
31:29 Speaker 04 Well, yeah, I mean, we think of, we often look at the figure of Charlemagne through this, you know, kind of adventure that he had in Islamic Spain, which is the kind of seed of the story which became the French epic, The Song of Roland, right? So The Song of Roland, which develops the story much later, like the 11th and 12th century, we see Charlemagne's army going over to Muslim Spain, right? Not really having a lot of success there. And then on the way out, they're massacred by these treacherous, monstrous Muslims who kind of, you know, set upon them as they're leaving Spain through the Purities. But if we look at the historical context of that, we see that Charlemagne sent his
32:08 Speaker 04 army to Spain in order to form an alliance with a local Muslim ruler against the Emir in Cordoba. So right away, it's not a clash of civilizations. And in fact, when he was leaving Spain, when his army was leaving Spain, the army that attacked him was mostly made up of Christian Basques. So, you know, that story is kind of a little bit of a historical canard. And if we look at the career of Charlemagne, he was much more focused on expanding into Christian and pagan territories, particularly in the Northeast. He saw the Islamic Caliphate in Baghdad as another great power, you know, kind of like,
32:50 Speaker 04 you know, Trump sees Putin, you know, we got to negotiate with these guys. We're the two great powers and so, you know, we can kind of get along and what we have to do is we have to create stability in the world by imposing our authority on everybody else. You know, Charlemagne wasn't going to go up against Harun al-Rasheed, particularly after Harun al-Rasheed sent him a bunch of gifts, which blew Charlemagne's mind. I mean, Harun al-Rasheed had elephants and, you know, clocks and all kinds of silks and stuff like that. So Charlemagne knew that, you know, the Islamic world was kind of in another league in terms of prosperity, technology and power.
33:24 Dan Snow? Well, speaking of technology and power, I guess you've mentioned those cultural exchange clocks and things. There's also math, mathematics, the phasing out, I suppose, of those Roman numerals and the coming of the numeral system that we still use today, that that was part of that. That would have come to us via the Islamic world, possibly Iberia, I suppose. And also many of the classical texts that have been. Lost or destroyed in in northern Europe, I guess, would being reintroduced.
33:49 Speaker 04 Absolutely. And, you know, the Arabic numerals are a really good example because they're kind of the tip of the iceberg. Bottom line is, in practical terms, many of the advances that we associate with the late Middle Ages and early modern period in Europe, including, you know, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Scholasticism in the Middle Ages, they wouldn't have been possible, at least they wouldn't have happened the same way or in the same timeframe without the tremendous influence of the Islamic world. So I talked about how when Cordoba started getting rich around the year 900, they were able to kind of import all of the intellectual and popular and literary
34:30 Speaker 04 culture that had developed in this Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad into Al-Andalus. So what happens is around the year 1000 or a little bit later, 1000-ish, Europe starts kind of developing. There are a couple of reasons for this. A lot of it's climate. Population starts rising in Europe. And when you have a population rise, your society can be more complex. And Europeans started seeing the potential that this advanced Islamic civilization offered. So I'll give you a story. This is a story which is relating to one of the guys who's often credited with bringing those Arabic numerals to Europe.
35:13 Speaker 04 Okay, so there's this monk from the old Vern, which is in central France. His name is Gerbert of Al-Riak. He's pretty well connected in the imperial household of the Holy Roman Empire. And he journeys down to Spain to get his hands on some of this Islamic learning that he's heard so much about. Now, according to his memoir, which is completely false, he ended up moving down to Cordoba and studying there with a Muslim magician who taught him all sorts of, you know, scientific and magical secrets. Until finally Gerbert escapes and eventually makes his way to Rome, becomes the tutor of the Holy Roman Emperor, reforms the European educational
35:54 Speaker 04 introduces Arabic numerals and goes on to become Pope Sylvester the Second. So that just gives you an indication of how blown away Europeans were by the sophistication of this culture and how eager they were to appropriate and incorporate it into their own system. And it didn't bother them at all that it came from the Islamic world. They were happy to acknowledge that they were absorbing all of this knowledge from the Islamic world, both scientific, philosophical, and even theological.
36:29 Dan Snow? This is Dan Snow's History. More on Islamic Spain coming up after this. Don't go away.
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37:11 Speaker 03 Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.
37:49 Dan Snow? So tell me, Brian, when does it all go wrong for Islamic Spain and Portugal? Is it sort of changes to European outlook, to aggression, to ability to project force? Or is this a crisis caused from decay within?
38:03 Speaker 04 Well, we've got to parse it a little bit, okay? Because the thousand years of Islamic Spain wasn't one thing, okay? We have really, you might say, two or three major phases, right? One is the development of Umayyad power, this family that developed Al-Andalus and became the caliphs, right? Ultimately, their caliphate, their kingdom, which was really the most powerful and wealthiest kingdom in Western Europe around the year 1000 collapses. There are a number of reasons for this. Part of it is institutional crisis, a crisis of rule,
38:43 Speaker 04 which saw essentially a populist demagogue take over and appropriate the institutions of state. This coincided with negative climate change, which affected all of the Islamic world, and with the corresponding rise of European powers, right? Which began to attack Al-Andalus. So by about the year 1100, that old caliphate has been wiped away. The second phase of Islamic power in Spain is the Nasr Kingdom of Granada, which coalesces around the year 1230 or so. And that's really a different beast, you know? So we're really talking about a couple of separate processes. One, we have this big caliphate in Cordoba, this international imperium,
39:28 Speaker 04 which collapses quite suddenly, like the other international imperiums of the day. The Byzantine Empire went through the same thing, the Abbasid Caliphate, right? And then later on, we have this other little kingdom kind of hanging on by its fingernails at the bottom of the peninsula, right? And this kingdom, the Nasr Kingdom, survives for so long because there's no real potential or effort on the part of Christians to conquer it. So it's kind of a stasis, it's kind of a status quo. And it's not until really the late 1400s that the Christian kingdoms of Spain get it together and decide that they're going to conquer this kingdom and are able to do so. So it's a couple of different processes.
40:10 Dan Snow? Just to come back to the Imperium, I like the way you describe that. So this kind of entity that stretches from North Africa down with its tentacles into West Africa and up into beyond the Pyrenees from time to time. When that collapses, who's filling that vacuum? Are these indigenous Christian, what we now call Spanish and Portuguese people, just like popping up going, okay, I'm declaring independence, we're carving out a new piece of Iberia here? Or are these people from what is now France invading and hacking out little empires?
40:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
40:42 Dan Snow? So. Sorry, big, big questions today, sorry.
40:45 Speaker 04 That's, that's a complicated one. So when the Caliphate falls apart, just after the year 1000, we have a couple of things happen. Okay, around the north of the peninsula, there's all these little Christian kingdoms that have kind of been clients of the Caliphate. And now suddenly they're free, right? So they're free both to try to attack what used to be the Caliphate and to attack each other. Muslim Spain fractures into a dozen little local kingdoms. And their makeup is really, you know, varied. Some of them are run by local, you know, Arab elites, some are run by Berber warlords, some are run by ex-slaves, right? In some of them, indigenous Christians and Jews are extremely powerful, even at times ruling them, right?
41:30 Speaker 04 So it's really this interesting, kind of creative, free for all. And then what happens? Two things happen, is that from the south, new forces of Berber's coming in. North Africans who have created a new empire in the south, the Almaraevits, and they impose themselves on the south of Spain and conquer the Muslim kingdoms, right? From the north, we have a similar process, the one that you alluded to, where Northern European nobility, particularly Catholic nobility from Burgundy, which was kind of like the epicenter of, you know, feudal Europe at this time, begin to infiltrate the royal
42:11 Speaker 04 houses of the Christians' kingdoms of Spain and sort of take them over, kind of parasitically from inside out, right? So Spain becomes these two realities, Muslim Spain and Christian Spain. But what's interesting is we think of it in terms of conflict between Muslim and Christian Spain. But most of the conflict was happening among the Muslims and among the Christians. And the sort of Muslim Christian conflict was almost, in many cases, secondary. The processes that were going on among people of the same faith.
42:46 Dan Snow? Okay, so you've got centuries of brutal, internecine, ever shifting warfare, which a very simple label like the Christian reconquest that is totally useless in describing.
42:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, if you want to paint with the widest possible brush, you could say there was a Christian conquest because if you look at the map in the year 1000, it was almost all Muslim. If you look at the map in 1500, it's all Christian. But that doesn't describe the way things function. You know, what we see are alliances being made among Muslims and Christians. When, when the Almoravid Berbers came over, they were unpopular among a lot of Muslims. A lot of Muslim warlords joined the Christian forces in order to fight them and vice versa. So it's kind of one of those things where the closer you get to the picture, the messier it gets. And it's only when you pull way back that you seem to be able to see the clear lines of a historical narrative.
43:44 Speaker 04 But you can't get confused by them because for people on the ground, that's just not how they saw things a lot of the time.
43:52 Dan Snow? And it was in that fateful decade when everything in the world happened in the 1490s that finally Muslim power was, was eradicated from the peninsula.
44:02 Speaker 04 Exactly. I mean, the big turning point was sort of a historical happenstance. The two most, there were three, there were several Christian kingdoms in Spain, but the three most powerful ones were Portugal, Aragon and Castile. And Aragon and Castile were the real heavy hitters, right? They were always at each other. Their royal families were all interrelated, but they were always fighting each other. And this is kind of what saved the Nasr Sultanate of Granada for so long, right? But then in the late 1400s, the queen of Castile, who was the ruler of Castile in her own right, marries the heir to the kingdom of Aragon, to the crown of Aragon. And now most of Christian Spain is effectively united, right? With that.
44:46 Speaker 04 The Nastur Kingdom of Granada doesn't have any more diplomatic cards to play. They can't play the two sides off each other because they're united. And this is when that conquest comes. And it takes a long time. It takes, you know, a solid 25 years. It's not easy until finally in 1492, the people of Granada surrender.
45:05 Dan Snow? And just quickly, as a final thought, the Spanish and the Portuguese did so much to try and eradicate every piece of evidence for that Islamic history, despite it lasting for centuries. Today, looking at Iberia, what is the legacy of that long period of Islamic rule?
45:25 Speaker 04 Well, one thing you have to say is that in some ways, they tried to eradicate, but in many ways, they actually appropriated it. You know, in the very era that Aragon and Castile had joined together, even before, and they, you know, they had made it their mission to like destroy Islamic political power in Spain. They remained enamored of Islamic culture. They were building palaces that looked like Muslim palaces. You know, you can go to Seville and you can go to a building which is called the Alcaza, the royal castle, which was built by King Pedro. Well, it was most of it that we see today was built by King Pedro I in the mid 1300s.
46:07 Speaker 04 And you can look at it, you can say, geez, this looks a lot like the Alhambra Palace, right? The Alhambra Palace, what we mostly see today, was actually built a few years after that by the same workers, right? So there was this intense kind of acculturation of Spanish Islam into elite and popular Christian culture. What they tried to eradicate was the power of Islam and eventually the religious identity of Islam. But that took a long time. And when they conquered Granada, for example, the Christian kings, their policy was not to oblige anyone to convert to Christianity.
46:49 Speaker 04 In fact, they guaranteed the rights of Muslims to continue living as Muslims under Christian rule, just as Christians had enjoyed under Islam. Didn't last very long, but that's due to, you know, some rather unexpected political developments.
47:06 Dan Snow? Interesting, very interesting indeed. Thank you very much, Brian Catlos. Tell us, what is your book called?
47:13 Speaker 04 Well, the book we've been talking about is called Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain. And right now, I'm working on a couple of other projects. One is called The Age of Convergence: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean, and the Origins of the West, which will be coming out with Oxford University Press. And another book, which is aimed at sort of taking kind of more of a look at today, and applying some of the lessons of this period, which is called, I think it's going to be called, The Politics of Identity, Diversity, and Division: From the Multi-Religious Mediterranean to the Polarized Present. So those are the two things I'm working on right now.
47:51 Dan Snow? Well, thank you. They sound fascinating. Can't wait to check them out. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
47:56 Speaker 04 All right. Well, thanks for having me. It's been a real pleasure.
48:09 Speaker 01 Verizon has a whole lineup of products and services designed to simplify your daily life. Smashed phone screen? Covered with our protection plan. Spending for the family? Rewarded with our credit card. Staying close to your kids, even when you're apart? Solved with our Kid's Smart Watch. Choose total protection for your eligible tech. Earn savings on everyday spending, and set smart family controls, all with Verizon. Pick what works for you today at Verizon.com/extras.
48:39 Speaker 03 Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No. But we'll wake up trying, again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at Optum.com.
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