Gone Medieval - The Rise and Fall of Al-Andalus

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

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.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

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Find out who we really were with gone medieval. 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 Ziad 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 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.

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-Lar 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 civilizational 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. Catloss, professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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 history of the myths about the period that Islamic Spain was a place of enlightened religious tolerance or that it invoked a clash of civilizations. Welcome to God Medieval, Brian. It's fantastic to have you with us. Yeah, it's great to be here. Always happy to talk about Muslim Spain. Yeah, well, it's something we haven't covered yet on Gone Medieval, and it seems like we've

missed a big, fertile area, so it'd be really good to get into 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 we could start right at the very beginning, always a very good place to start. How and when does the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula get underway from North Africa? 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? Prophet Muhammad saw himself as the last in the line of Judeo-Christian prophets, who was perfecting the message of the God of Abraham. 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, 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, 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. 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 Roderick, hoped that these Arabs would help them overthrow Roderick and then they could dispose of the Arabs. Well, it didn't really turn out that way. In fact,

fact, what happened was that the Arab forces, well, I say Arab forces, but they were mostly 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 7-11. They meet the Visigothic forces, and it's kind of like a Battle of Hastings moment. There's a single battle which to 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 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 in history is on their side. 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. and 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. 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. It's a very similar tactic to

to kind of the Mongols, five or six hundred 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? Well, this all occurs actually just at a time when this newly established Muslim Imperium, the Caliphate, is heading into its own period of crisis, right? Between about the year 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 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 Umayyid 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, 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 Abdar Rahman, 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 core of followers and then he crossed over from North Africa to Spain and declared himself to be the legitimate ruler of Spain, Muslim Spain. 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-Dalus. So from the year 756,

Al-Alandalus, 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. Yeah. And so do we then see the establishment? of a capital? Where do they base themselves? 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 Guadal Kabir. This is from the Arabic Wadi al-Kabir, which means big river, right? So it's almost

navigable to the sea, so it's very well connected. And it's, it's a lot of the sea. 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, 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. 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? 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 in law, were only beginning to coalesce. And one has to remember 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 Alondalus 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 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 Visigods existed in, are cities that are cities that are made up.

of straight roads, set out on a grid pattern, 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 rather than the social structures of the Roman world, which is to say the way that cities develop, the way that neighborhoods develop, mirrored the sort of tribal and clan orientation of Arabic society. And then not too far into Muslim rule in Liberia, 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 roll on, you know, this fantastic, romantic story of how the Christians try 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 empire is almost unstoppable. Well, I'm going to have to reign 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 crusade. AIDS. 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 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, right, who first thought that maybe they could take advantage of this, you know, these Arabs in order 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 going to come down and conquer Al-Andalus. He comes down, hangs around for a while, and then decides he's going to 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 city in the north of Muslim Spain called Zaragoza, right? And the ruler of Zaragoza wanted to break away from Cordoba. He wanted to establish his own independent Muslim kingdom. So, who's he going to turn to? It's a little bit like the Cold War. If you wanted to resist the Americans, you turn to the Russians. If you wanted to resist the Russians, he 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, and, you know, he says, and, and, you 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 Charlamagne 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. And then as he's leaving Pamplona, it's the Basques that attack him. 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 Khalif, Haruna Rashid and Baghdad. They sent each other gifts. In fact, you know, Haruna Rashid famously sent Charlemagne an elephant, Abul 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. Yeah, so just for anyone who thought fake news was a new thing, it was been around since the time of Charlemagne when he invented the story of him being driven out of Al-Andalice by the Muslims. I wonder if you could give us an insight into how the Christian and Muslim cultures may be 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 of Arabic knowledge into Europe through Al-Andalus? 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, the Islamic world. So what happened? Well, and how did the Arabs get this knowledge?

The Arabs were, after all these nomadic, primitive desert warriors. Well, when the Arabs took over the Persian Empire, 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 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 sort of, sort of,

have taken over Persia, were in a position where they could absorb this knowledge, this Greek knowledge, this Persian knowledge, even technologies and knowledge is from as far away as India, and synthesized it into a new scientific culture. Now, how did this happen? 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 by these Persianized Arabs to fit into an Islamic concept of God in 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. 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 Alondalus, 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. And so this Persianate, Islamic, classical Greek culture is now transplanted far into the Muslim West in Spain.

Fascinating. Do we get any idea of the kind of the specific contributions that are coming out of Al-Andalus at the moment? Do we have examples of poetry or medicines or technological advancements or anything like that? 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, right? Try writing down a couple Roman numerals and multiplying or dividing them. You get lost in seconds. So again, going back to Islamic Persia, Muslims there had adopted a sort of idea of how numbers work from India, right? 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 zero, 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 three or four hundred 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? Computers are based on binary systems, right? Ones and zeros. So without, 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. Well, they might be based on eyes and exes instead. Exactly. 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? 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 and 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.

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 Islam. world. Now, to our years 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, 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. Yeah. And if we could just come back to kind of a more grand sweep of what's happening with Al-Andalise, 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? Well, for a long time, Al-Alandalus 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-Alandalus itself. and everything began to change around the year 900.

Around the year 900, the Islamic world started a splinter. Now, I said that when Abdur Rahman came to Al-Andalus, he was very careful not to call himself a caliph. He just called himself the prince of Al-Andalus. The reason was there was a very strong idea in the Islamic world that there could only be one caliph, the caliph in Baghdad. 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, the ruler of Al-Andalus, Abdarapun III, declared himself to be a Khalith as well. If there can be two, there might as there'll be three.

Exactly. You could have as many as you want now, right? So what happened, though, was that 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 Umayyad 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, they blossomed into essentially a world power. 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 eighth without gold, essentially. I suppose, yeah, yeah, pleasing the title. And how do we then see it move forward? I mean, it endures for pretty much the rest of what we consider to be the Medici. period, how do we see it progressing through the sort of the high in the late medieval periods? What's happening to Al-Andalus then? 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. 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 is something of a powder keg. 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 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 Mansoor, 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. 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? Well, 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. The caliph is now unnecessary, right? And what he didn't realize was it was the idea of the caliph that was holding the society together.

Right. 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 most powerful and stable kingdom in Western Europe to utterly disintegrating. 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? A bit of both. It was a hard nut to crack, and the Christian kingdoms didn't have a very good nut cracker. So over the course of more or less a century, most of the territory of Alondalus, which is held by Muslims' laws 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 because it could play these various kingdoms off each other. So the main four kingdoms that were in Spain were the kingdom of Navar. the kingdom of Aragon, Castileon, 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 all Andalus.

And the kingdom of Granada was able to manipulate those rivalries in such a way that it could survive for hundreds of years. 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. 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 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? 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. In Alondalus 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 belong 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. The political position of Al-Andalus became, you know, more tenuous. And at this point, these elements within the society of Al-Alandalus turned against each other. And we didn't get to it, but in the aftermath of this 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-Maravids and then the Al-Mohads.

And historians have often looked at these invasions, particularly the Al-Miravid invasion, 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 Almaravids 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-coo, 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 Thay 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 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 going to end for us, but in 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? 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 belong to, right, that's when things are going to go downhill really quickly. And it's not going to end well for anybody. Yeah, no, it's really interesting. That's my optimistic take on things. Sorry.

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? 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 Christian society and culture. So, you know, one of the things that Islam did is there a religion. was that it established certain set rights for women.

And in this sense, at least from a 9th and 10th century perspective, it was pretty progressive. Unlike through most of the rest of the world, including the Christian West and including within 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. 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, 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 ruff or a rumin. will have several wives, each of whom have children. And so what we see are these political dynamics playing out within the palace 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. Yeah, yeah, it's a really interesting insight, I think. I wonder as well if you think there is a legacy of the Muslim presence in Al-Anda L'Avus that we can still see today. Is there a cultural, a political legacy to its presence there? 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 Abdur Rahman arrived 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 castles 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. 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, that there would not

be this enduring sort of presence or memory or vestige of Islamic culture, you know, running through Spanish culture, essentially. 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-Andalise? Wow, that's a tough question because... Oh, it was supposed to be a treat. It wasn't meant to be a tough question. No, because, you know, 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 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, I'd probably be Abbas Ibn Farnas. Yeah, it'd be fun to be there at his first test flight,

helping pick through the wreckage afterwards. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Brian. It's been absolutely fascinating. You've done an incredible service covering this immense amount of history in some real detail with some great insight here, all in under an hour too. So thank you very, very much. Well, thank you for having me.

That'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-Sid,

that's a good fit for this topic too. There are new installments 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. 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 Hits podcasts add free. Sign up now at www.com forward slash subscribe. Go on. You know you want to. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hit.