The Rest Is History - 281: Spain: The Caliphate of Córdoba

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Today, Tom and Dominic are in Islamic Spain discussing Roman conquests, melancholy Emirs and vibrant harems... Don't miss the extraordinary story of the rise and fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hola y bienvenidos to The Rest is History, or should I say, Tom Holland, Merhaba, Salam Aleikum. Now, we are in the middle of our great World Cup odyssey, and we have reached the Kingdom of Spain. But Tom, you have chosen a topic from Spanish history before the Kingdom of Spain existed, haven't you? And one of the most colourful and dramatic topics in all European history. I have. It is, as your exemplary mastery of languages introduced at the beginning of this, suggested, it is the Caliphate of Córdova, which is the golden age of Muslim Spain. Cordova, the greatest city in Western Europe, its peak. So I want to look at how a caliphate came to be established in Spain,

its golden age, and its decline. So that's the plan, Dominic. So this is the world of, if anybody's been there, so I've been there, I guess you've probably been there, Tom, to Cordova, to the wondrous edifice that is the Mezquita. So basically this extraordinary building that is the most magnificent mosque with a massive great cathedral. Well, it's not. Yeah. Yeah.

So it got reconquered by the Christians in the long run and got converted into a cathedral. They just, I mean, it's the most, yes, it's the most appalling. And Dominic, do you know my solution to the whole Hagia Sophia, Cordova Mosque solution? It's basically they swap. Oh, yes, that is a good idea. So the Mosque of Cordova becomes a mosque. Yeah.

And Hagia Sophia becomes a cathedral. That's an excellent idea. And everyone's happy. So that's my way. But this is not about bringing solutions to contemporary geopolitical problems. This is about history, Dominic. So in the public mind, Tom, this caliphate is this sort of lost golden age, this paradise of babbling fountains, people in hospitals, kindly philosophers, multiculturalism.

Munching on oranges, listening to the tinkling of fountains. Exactly. People drinking sherbet, all this sort of stuff. Am I on the right track? Well, kind of on the right track. I mean, it is a great, great centre of urban imperial civilisation of a kind that would have been familiar to the Romans and indeed to people in Constantinople and Baghdad at the time. And it's of a different order of sophistication to anything that you would have got, say, in France or Germany or England at the time. Does that mean it was a multicultural paradise? Well, we will explore and find out. But I think that to put it in its context, we should go back to the beginning of how it is that large chunks of Spain comes under Muslim rule, under Arab rule.

And in a way, this is a sequel to an episode that we've already done on the one episode we did on Saudi Arabia, on the Kaaba, where there was a dynasty called the amayads played quite a key role and the greatest of these figures was abdul malik the guy who builds the dome of the rock and who just conceivably perhaps plays the key role in fixing the sacrality of mecca for future generations um so the amayads are the first great imperial dynasty of the Caliphate. And they preside over this age of astonishing imperial expansion on a kind of unprecedented speed and scale. And they spread eastwards as far as the frontiers of China, but they also spread westwards. And they go along the southern shoreline of the Mediterranean and they come all

the way to the Atlantic. And there, of course, the Pillars of Hercules, the straits separating Africa from Europe. And in 711, an Arab leader called Tariq bin Ziyad crosses over the straits of what will come to be called Gibraltar. And Gibraltar derives from the Arabic Jabal Tariq, the Mountain of Tariq. So that's what Gibraltar is. And he brings with him 10,000 men who are mostly Berbers, so from Morocco. And we talk about them, don't we, in our episode on Morocco. Don't know whether that's gone out yet or not,

because we're not sure what the running order is but uh ahead of them lies the land of spain to the romans hispania yeah you know a roman province for centuries and centuries deeply deeply romanized this is the homeland of trajan and of hadrian two of rome's greatest emperors with the fall the the collapse of roman power in the West, it gets taken over by a barbarian people called the Visigoths. And the Visigoths, as the Romans had been, are Christian. They've become Christian. In fact, they've become militantly Christian. And they are very, very into the idea of themselves as a kind of chosen people. So their capital in Toledo, in the centre of Spain, a new Jerusalem.

And they are the first Catholic people, Dominic, to practice anointing, the anointing of their kings. The anointing of kings. So when they have coronations, the Visigothic king is anointed. And this is a practice that we will witness in due course ourselves when the king gets anointed. Do you think the king in 2023, do you think he'll pay homage to his Visigoth forebears? I think it's unlikely, but in a way, the process, you know, standing there and being anointed, you're paying tribute to it, I guess, in a manner of speaking. I mean, it's a practice that derives from Israelite practice.

And so, again, it's this idea that the Visigoths are a kind of, you know, a reborn chosen people. However, the idea that God is showing them special favor receives a massive knock when his 10 000 men turn up and annihilate the physiogothic king who musically is called roderick right oh no poor roderick so the defeat of king roderick he and his army get wiped out and this is very bad need for the Visigoths because their entire regime promptly collapsed like a kind of stack of cards. And the expanse of, it's difficult to know what to call them, the Moors, the Arabs, the Muslims. I mean, they're none of these things, really. They're a consortium of pillagers with kind of faint muslim overlay at this point they're not massively

motivated by the teachings of muhammad they're basically motivated by a desire for loot at this point and ethnically most of them you said were berbers most of them are berbers yeah so it's a huge kind of raiding party that just gets this you know just strikes massively massively lucky because the vithigothic regime is very, very rackety. It collapses. And these newcomers, these invaders are able to conquer pretty much the whole of what will become Spain and Portugal. And Christian powers are kind of left in the mountainous reaches of the North. So they maintain their independence, but they are impoverished, backward, cooped up in rugged terrain.

Right. So that's kind of, I'm just looking at the map, Galicia, Asturias, Navarre. The rest of Spain and what we call Spain and Portugal has now fallen beneath the... Comes under, yeah, exactly. So how are people to interpret this? Because dramatic events in this period are understood in supernatural terms. So theigoths you know they're saying what's happened we're meant to be the chosen people and so they blame it on the the penchant of too many visigoths as they see it for illicit sexual activities oh no what have they been up to same-sex activities uh basically what have they been doing men have been sleeping with men and women have been sleeping with women. And this is God's cross about this.

And so he's punished them. So they take the view of sort of American televangelists from the 1970s. Yes, that's very much their take. For the Muslims, of course, this is brilliant. This is God's will. And the proof of this is that he's given them this great land and he's made them spectacularly wealthy. Because, you know, this is absolutely a classic imperial adventure. And the conquerors set out to exploit the lands that they have conquered

with great gusto. So they take lots of slaves. So a great chain of 30,000 slaves are sent off to Syria as a token of the conquest to the Umayyad court in Damascus. They plunder enormous amounts of loot. So they're not content with Spain. They start raiding deep into what will become France, into the kingdom of the Franks. And they impose a tax system on the conquered Christians and Jews. And this is prescribed in the Quran. It's a tax called

the jizya, which Christians and Jews are allowed to practice their faith. But in return, they have to acknowledge their inferiority in various ways, and they have to pay a tax. So they don't force people to convert. They don't really want people to convert because this is the source of their income. And can I just ask a quick question about this initial raid? Has it been ordered? Has it been done on a local basis? Or has it been ordered from Damascus by the Umayyad ruler? It's not entirely clear. I think that the Umayyads probably don't really have a sense of what's going on because it's a very, very long way.

They just have a kind of vague sense that it's the will of God that their rule of the world expand the limits of the world. And so they're all in favor of that. But basically, it's up to the locals to take such advantage of this as they want. It's a kind of franchise, basically. I was just looking at the map. I mean, the Umayyad Caliphate, it's so interesting, isn't it, that it's so less well known than the Roman Empire or the Empire of Alexander the Great or any of these things. When you look at the map, it is unbelievably big.

I mean, the Spanish conquest is right on the western periphery. And as you said, it goes all the way basically to the borders of China and India. And it's so quick. It's such a vast process of conquest. And I think that in a way, it's the kind of the last of the great ancient imperial projects. It emerges in the old imperial heartlands of the Near East. And it conquers both Persian empires and huge numbers of provinces of the Roman Empire. And it absorbs them in. And these are lands that are used to being subject to distant emperors, distant rulers. And so I think that facilitates it enormously. And Spain comes to be known as Al-Andalus.

It's unclear where this name comes from so some say that it echoes the vandals who would pass through and who um who passed through spain and come to to settle north africa yeah others say that maybe it's an allusion to atlantis oh i like that i've never heard that before i like that yeah so we're not sure but anyway it comes to be called al-andalus and spain is very rich land very rich in all kinds of, you know, its fields are rich. It's a very golden province. And so this is all hurrah. Yeah. Splendid news.

Everyone in Damascus is very pleased about it. However, the Umayyads do not stay in power. 750, they get toppled by a new dynasty, the Abbasids. And the tongue of the ruling caliph in Damascus is fed to a cat. So that's the end of him all the other are gathered together and crushed by the uh by their conquerors having a huge banquet on top of them so that's bad well and basically very very few umayyads survive this but one guy does and so in a way he's the kind of the aneas aneas escapes troy and goes off to found um rome the muslim equivalent of this the umayyadad equivalent of Aeneas is a guy called Abd al-Rahman bin Muawiyah.

And he is the grandson of an Umayyad caliph. So he's quite distinguished and he's hunted across North Africa. And he spends five years on the run going ever further westwards, trying to escape Abbasid agents who are out to get him. And in 755, he arrives in Al-Andalus. And within a year, he has entered the capital of Al-Andalus, which is the great and ancient city of Cordoba. So a Roman foundation. It's where Seneca, the tutor of Nero had come from. And by the time that Abd al-Rahman arrives, it's been capital of Al-Andalus for about 40 years. It's replaced Seville.

So he arrives and has the word not gone out? Detain this man, hand him over, you know? Al-Andalus is a long way from the Middle East. Right. It's a long way. And so, you know, I guess it's kind of a bit like the American colonies relative to, say, Britain during the period of the Civil War or something like that. People who wouldn't survive, say, in Britain can survive in the colonies. And so likewise, Abdulrahman is able to take possession of Cordova. And he has himself proclaimed emir, which is basically commander or prince, in the mosque of Cordova. So he's not proclaiming himself caliph, but he is calling himself emir right and he very

pointedly does not allow prayers to be offered for the abbasid caliph in distant baghdad i mean given that this bloke had a banquet on the bodies of his family i think that's perfectly reasonable exactly but obviously he's surrounded by all kinds of people who have no particular investment in the survival of the Umayyads. But he proves himself very, very capable at establishing his power. So he rules for about, I think, for 33 years. He establishes a very impressive degree of military and economic self-sufficiency. He crushes all his potential rivals within Spain. And he also suppresses every Abbasid attempt to kick him out of Al-Andalus. And he actually beheads the leader of one of these expeditions, pickles the head and sends it back to the Abbasids. And there's quite a lot of beheading

in this period going on. I actually quite enjoy that in a podcast. Not in real life, but in a podcast, I can live with it. if you like beheading you'll love this so dominic you mentioned the the great mosque of cordova this beautiful astonishing and comparable building um abdulrahman is the guy who begins it so he begins it in 785 traditionally it is said to have been built on the site of a christian cathedral that the cathedral in uh sacred to john the Baptist, that this cathedral, the Muslims had come and they had taken over half of it. And then with Abdulrahman, they take over the whole lot, level it and build the mosque on the site. It's not 100% certain that that happened. The debate around this is quite political.

As you can imagine, there are kind of very strong feelings on Christian side, on Muslim side. It's certainly possible. And at the very least, it's built on a kind of, as you know, a center of Christian power. And so therefore, building the mosque is making a statement about the supersession of Christianity, that Islam has replaced it. And this is visible in the very fabric of the mosque, because what the architects do is they take columns from pagan temples, from Christian churches. They have a very, very distinctive style where the arches alternate brick with stone, white with red. And these arches are constructed according to Roman method,

but there's a very kind of distinctive horseshoe style of the arches. And this is very visigothic. In due course, the Um emmaid rulers will construct a private prayer room and they will employ craftsmen from constantinople to gild it with exquisite mosaics so essentially the mosque bears witness to the absorption of defeated empires defeated cultures defeated faiths into the universal empire of Islam. And it is a magnificent, I mean, for anybody who hasn't, you know, whether you're listening to this podcast on the tube or going for a walk or whatever, do, if you haven't been, do Google the Mesquita of Cordoba, because it is a stunning building when you go and you see, people often say,

don't they, Tom, that the columns, which as you say, are from Roman temples or whatever, that they look like palm trees in an oasis or something, that there is this effect of walking into this forest of columns with the beautiful arches. It really is stunning. And even when the Christians in due course captured it and turned it into a cathedral, the complaint was, you know, you've ruined something that has no parallel anywhere in the world and that was a criticism of contemporaries you know in the 16th century it's charles v who does it anyway so this group this great mosque is built to serve as the center of an increasingly muslim population because um over the decades and then the centuries islam becomes ever more fashionable

and cordova itself becomes ever more clearly a Muslim city. So the Roman street plan starts to vanish. Muslim traders, by and large, don't use carts. So there's no need for the kind of the broad streets that had existed in the Roman period. The wine market is closed. Spain had been a great center for the wine trade in the Roman empire, but no place for that in Islam. And by about 850, Christians in Cordova are feeling increasingly under siege. Basically, Islam is where it's at. It's fashionable.

It's cool. Everyone's speaking Arabic. Muslim styles are everywhere. Christianity is coming to seem increasingly low status. You know, if you want a job in the bureaucracy, you basically got to be a Muslim. The fewer Christians there are, the more taxes are loaded on them. So it's financially demanding as well. So more and more people start to convert to Islam. And you get this extraordinary phenomenon in Cordova, where you get Christians who deliberately go out into the streets and attempt to court martyrdom by insulting the prophet. And the Muslim authorities don't you know, the Muslim authorities don't want, really want to act on this.

They don't want to kind of precipitate sectarian riots or anything like that. But you get Christians in Cordova who are deliberately trying to court martyrdom. And, you know, they duly do get martyred. And the whole thing gradually fizzles out. Because increasingly, Cordova is becoming ever more Muslim. So by about, you know, by 850, it's been estimated it's about 70 percent is muslim and the same is true out in uh in other urban settlements and increasingly the place where you find christians is out in the country so they're seen as that makes sense you know they're kind of associated with peasants but this generates a

problem because as you pointed out earlier, in a way, the Muslim authorities don't want mask versions because it diminishes the tax base, because you're dependent on Christians to pay the jizya. And so over the course of the ninth century, the state, the Emmaus state starts to fragment. And you have a process rather similar to what is starting to happen in France at the same time, where central power is diminishing and you are starting to get people putting up what you might call castles, fortifications, you know, on every crest of a hill. So sort of local warlords basically establishing their own bases. Yeah. And so you get kind of increasingly a state of anarchy. And by the beginning of the

10th century, the authority of the Emmaids has essentially become confined to Cordoba. And the entire system could have collapsed. But, Dominic, there is an incredible comeback. And this is entirely down to a man called Abd al-Rahman III, who comes to power in 912 when he is aged 23. I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, we will trace the course of his career, which witnesses the absolute golden age

of Islamic Spain. Excellent. And you talked about, you know, Sherbert and fountains and all that kind of stuff. His rule is pure Arabian nights. Excellent. So come back after the break

and you'll get Sherbert and fountains and you'll get the golden age of Islamic Spain. What's not to like? See you then. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

That's therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We promised you Sherbert and Fountains. Tom Holland, will you deliver? I certainly will. And it's all thanks to Abdelrahman III. This young man who comes to power, he is, I mean, he's not obviously charismatic. He's a little bit dumpy, I think.

Dumpy? Yeah, a little bit dumpy. He's a little bit kind of portly. He's not the fittest. Right. Who would he be played by? Well, we've just had the suggestion from our producer, a young Jonah Hill. Yeah. I suggested a young Eddie Large hill yeah i i suggested young eddie large tom but that reference will be lost on some of our listeners i think anyway he's he is he is young he is a little bit dumpy and he is naturally depressive so he's prone to melancholy okay he is also um although he's an emmaid and from syria he he has fair hair and he has blue eyes. Oh, that's a twist. Because his mother was Frankish and the Umayyads have been marrying Christian slaves. Do the Umayyads have multiple wives, Tom?

They do, yes. They have concubines and all that carry on? All that malarkey. All that malarkey. And so Abdulrahman is rather self-conscious about this. And so he dyes his hair and he darkens his skin. He darkens his skin he darkens his skin yeah because he wants to he wants to look a kind of authentic amayad from the golden

age of the dynasty so actually he should be played by justin trudeau yes okay so jonah hill crossed with justin trudeau that's it so he's so as i say he's not he's not naturally charismatic he's not a great general he's not a great general. He's not a religious leader, but he is, Dominic, he is very, very methodical. And he is a man with a plan. And the moment he becomes, he succeeds the rule of Cordova, he starts putting his plan into action. And basically his plan is to step by step overthrow everybody who is defying him and to destroy the power of all and every local lord out there. And he does this by targeting great cities like Seville, by targeting the smallest little fortified stronghold on a rocky outcrop. So he's like a man playing a board game or something.

Yes. Hoovering up yeah exactly uh and he's very very good so he's he's prepared all kinds of siege engines uh he's commissioned these and he's very expert at using them um he practices economic warfare so he uh a particular thing is cutting down fruit trees very good at that okay and uh whenever he captures a fortress he makes it his own by putting in his own garrisons, his own deputies, his own rulers. And so the result of this is that step by step, without any spectacular victories, but inexorably, he comes to reconstitute the empire that his

ancestors had claimed. And this becomes a virtuous circle because as he reconstitutes this empire, so it starts to form a kind of single market. And this single market in turn can then be reintegrated with the much broader single market that is the caliphate beyond the limits of Al-Andalus. So does he have decent relations now with the Abbasid caliphate or do they still regard him? They still regard him as a usurper, but merchants don't really care about that because they're all Muslim. They all speak the same language. They all have the same culture.

And so if you're in Al-Andalus, you know, you have lots of things that you can sell. You have oil, all kinds of stuff like that. But you can import, you know, sandalwood from India or spices. Yeah. Camphor from Borneo. I mean, you know, the reach of the caliphate is enormous. It's from the Atlantic to China to Malaysia. You know, it's an enormous, enormous expanse. And so Al-Andalus, now that it's entire again, benefits from this. The other thing that Abdulrahman does is he

launches jihad. And jihad, the idea that you exert yourself on behalf of God and is closely associated by kind of Muslim warlords with the practice of warfare against infidels, against Christians. And so he goes off to fight against the Christians of the North who've been gradually recovering. So these mountain kingdoms, basically. Yes, absolutely. And again, he kind of advertises this by a lot of beheadings. So I promised you beheadings. So a lot of heads of Christians are harvested and they're brought back and they're slung from the gates of the Great Mosque in Cordova. And these are kind of like billboards advertising his prowess. that basically by 929, so almost 20 years after he's come to power,

he is richer and more militarily potent than any Umayyad before him in Al-Andalus. And so in 929, he decides to take the ultimate step and promote himself to the level of caliph, which is a caliph is supposed to be the sole ruler of the house of Islam. Obviously, there is already a caliph in Baghdad, but Abd al-Rahman III isn't going to let a little technicality like that get in the way. And so he has himself proclaimed caliph in the great mosque in Cordova. And he has the wealth and he has the prestige and he has the military power to carry it off. So Tom, quick question on the assumption of the caliphate. Is there any, as it were, theological disagreement between him and the Abbasid caliphs?

Or is this purely a power play? No, there is no separation between politics and what we would mechanistically call religion. Everything is saturated with the ideals, the principles, the values of Islam. And so to lay claim to the rule of a caliphate is inevitably to make a theological statement. But there's nothing like a kind of sunny Shia split. No, it's not like that. It's not like that. But Abd al-Rahman is laying claim to the rule, not just of al-Andalus, you know, as commander of the faith rule, but of the whole Muslim world. I mean, that's obviously a joke. He doesn't have a hope of claiming that.

Basically, he has the heft to carry it off. That's the point. People don't laugh at him for doing it. It's not an obvious fraud. And the reason for that is that by this point, Cordova is, you know, is spectacularly large and wealthy. So it's, you know, population of 100,000. Crikey. So that would make it probably the biggest city in Western Europe, I guess? By miles. So the hyperbole that surrounds it is kind of ecstatic. It's a city of 900 baths, of 1,000 mosques, of tens of thousands of shops.

The libraries are on a prodigious scale. The Califal Library alone has 400,000 volumes. You have running water from aqueducts, you have paved streets. And for Muslims, Cordova ranks as a great capital. And for outsiders, you know, Christians from the Frankish North, it's spectacular. I mean, it's off the scale. They're stupefied by it. And we know that because we have the record of a visit to it by an abbot from the Rhineland called John, who goes there in 950. And John doesn't actually go to Cordova itself.

He goes to a place called Medinata Alzara, which is the kind of a Versailles that Abdulrahman has built outside Cordova. And John is overwhelmed by the spectacle. So he reports that the palace stretches for miles, that everywhere he looks, there are soldiers standing to attention, riding on horseback, maneuvering, doing drill. And John says that these soldiers filled our party with consternation, such was their arrogance and swagger. And even the gatehouses, John reports, are adorned with carpets and precious fabrics. There's a zoo that is moated. There are water features everywhere.

And there's so many fish in it that it requires 12,000 loaves to feed them. And most spectacular of all, there is a great reception hall. And it has a pool of mercury in the middle. And you stir the mercury, and it sends shivers of reflected sunlight dancing across the decorated marble walls. And above this, the roof is made of gold and silver and hanging from it, there is a colossal pearl. And so, you know, this is the kind of vision of how a Caliph should live, the kind of haunts, the fantasies of Orientalists everywhere. And this is the beginning of that tradition. This is, you know, a Westerner going and being blown away by the spectacle of the wealth and

the power of the Caliphal Court. This is exactly what I was expecting from a podcast about the Caliphate of Cordoba, which is amazing beauty, splendor. The other thing I wanted to ask about, so does this all rest on a foundation of relative, now I know you have strong views about this, but relative tolerance, i.e. it sounds like an architectural paradise, but is it also a kind of cultural and religious paradise, I suppose? I know religious is an anachronistic word. So the idea of paradise is obviously very important in Islam. It's a faith that has grown up in areas of the world that are naturally quite parched and dry. And so the ability to sustain a paradise, a garden, is again, a marker

of greatness. And so that's why the idea of gardens, of fountains, of flowing water, of animals, of fish, is so important to the sense that the Muslims themselves in Al-Andalus have of the greatness of this palace, and therefore by extinction of how we today have it, because we, you know, these understandings of what true greatness is mediated back to us. I mean, it's not tolerant in the sense that we would understand it. It's not a secular society. It's proudly and militantly Muslim. And by this point, Christians and Jews not a secular society. It's proudly and militantly Muslim. And by this point, Christians and Jews are a tiny minority. They remain subordinate. Of course, their position within the caliphate is upheld by Islamic law. They submit, and in exchange for

their submission, they're granted tolerance. Because they're people of the book. And this provides scope for what we might call kind of multicultural dialogue. So Muslim scholars and Christian scholars and Jewish scholars do meet. I think the multicultural angle can be massively overdone. And you see why people want to believe that there was a multicultural paradise back in the past that we can identify with. To be honest, the most multicultural activity in this period in the European context is the slave trade. So the reason why we call slaves slaves and not say the Latin word is servi is because large numbers of Slavs are being kidnapped and enslaved by the Saxons and the Franks on the Eastern frontier. This is how they are making their money, by exporting slaves to the vastly more advanced, technically and culturally sophisticated societies of North Africa and of Al-Andalus. So the slaves, the Slavs, are being led down through the Frankish lands. They come to Verdun, which is headquarters of Jewish doctors,

who will there take the most beautiful slaves and castrate them, sometimes with a complete panoptomy. So everything gets removed. And these are massively, massively prized. And then they get taken to the courts of Al-Andalus and specifically to the court of the Caliph at Cordova. And it's not just eunuchs who are going, and it's not just female slaves to serve as concubines. It's also soldiers. Basically, by this point, the Muslims of Al-Andalus aren't really interested in going off and fighting

the barbarous Christians in the north. You know, they want to kind of hang around, enjoying the fruits of their incredible civilization. So the Caliph Abdul Rahman III is importing huge numbers of Slavic soldiers who are known as Saqaliba. And these are the soldiers that Abbot John, when he visits the Caliphate Palace, sees. And the reports get back to the Frankish lands and it's hailed by people there as this brilliant ornament. This is the most exquisite place in the world. It doesn't matter that it's a Muslim capital. It is seen as being the most wonderful place. And Abdulrahman presides over

this golden age. He rules for 49 years. But very sadly, he confides in his diary towards the end of his life that in all that time, he had only known 14 days of happiness. 14 days? 14 days. It's very exact. Yeah. Yeah. It's very sad. What happened on those 14 days? Many people have wondered.

So I've diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness, which have fallen to my lot. They amount to 14. Yeah. I mean, he's very exact about it. Yeah, exactly. He's been counting them up. Yeah. But, you know, he's clearly a great ruler.

Cordova reaches its kind of imperial apogee, but it's dependent on peace. Everything is very, very centralised. And the caliph himself, you know, out in his Versailles equivalent, is becoming increasingly isolated. So he spends an awful lot of time in his harem. Is that right, Tom? Well, this is the stereotype. We don't really know, but he definitely isolates himself

from the kind of the throng and the surge of Cordova itself. And a city like Cordova and an empire like that of the Umayyad Caliphate can only be maintained in conditions of peace. It's dependent on the existence of a bureaucracy. So when you have a virtuous circle, it upholds this kind of great imperial structure. But if the structure starts to fragment, if the conditions of peace that enable the economy to function and the bureaucracy to do what it has to do starts to go into decline, then you have a problem. It's not initially a problem after Abdul Rahman's death, because his son al-Hakam is a very effective caliph as well,

very shrewd, very sophisticated. But then in 976 al-hakam is succeeded by his son who is 14 years old and this is a guy called hisham yeah and uh do you want to know what i took how a top historian has described the reign of hisham this is yourself tom he passed the entire span of his reign within the gilded cage of cordova citadel the anonymous and indolent victim of his own general uselessness oh golly i hope no one says that about you yeah it'd be very sad wouldn't it and this is also happening in in in baghdad as well there's a sense in which the caliph is is ceasing to be an actor and he's starting to become a cipher or a symbol or a phantom however you want to cast it in a way tom

could you not argue that that is a tribute to the resilience, the sophistication of the bureaucracy? It doesn't need a single warlord to cow people, that actually the machine can run quite happily and he can mess around in his harem and drink his sherbet. Well, so what actually happens under the reign of Hisham II is that the effective master of the caliphate is seized by his vizier. So his prime minister, his main minister.

And this is a guy who is called Ibn Amir. And he's a very celebrated warrior. He's a very distinguished religious scholar. He's very stern. He's very masterful. And in 981, he adopts the absolutely brilliant title of the victorious one, Al-Mansur. And basically, Al-Mansur, he despises the wealth and the sophistication and the glamour of Cordova. He sees it as decadent, as depraved, as dissipated. And he's desperate to see the Muslims of Cordova taken back to the good old days when they went off and fought with Christians and were austere and didn't just kind

of sit around looking at giant pearls and stirring mercury pools and all that kind of stuff. And so he's resolved to correct it. And he does this in two ways. And the first is that he sets in train a very radical process of public reform. So scholars who are suspected of heresy are publicly crucified in Cordova. And he employs agents to go through the Caliphal Library and to winnow it of heretical texts. And these are then burnt in public bonfires. So the age of tolerance is definitively dead with this fellow. He's not in favor of tolerance at all. And the other measure of how he's not in favour of tolerance is that he is massively in favour of jihad. He is hugely in favour of that. So he goes

off, he burns Barcelona. He repeatedly invades the Kingdom of Leon, which is starting to emerge as one of the more powerful Christian kingdoms. And in 997, he attacks the holiest of all the Christian shrines in Northern Spain, which is Santiago de la Compostela, where supposedly St. James is buried. And there are various very improbable stories as to how St. James ends up buried in Santiago. And St. James, Santiago comes to be associated by the Christians with fighting the Moors. Obviously, this doesn't go down well with Almanzor. And so he launches this great attack on Santiago.

He occupies it for a week. He burns everything that he can. He destroys the cathedral. He plunders it. He takes large numbers of slaves. And when he marches back to Cordova, he makes Christian captives carry the bells from the cathedral all the way to Cordova, where they are hung up in the mosque and they are used as candle holders. And the Christian slaves he's brought are either set to work building

extension to the mosque, so make it even more domineering at the center in Cordova, or they're beheaded. And again, their heads are sent to the mosque. So again, this is very much a theme. You advertise your piety by beheading Christians and hanging them from the gates of the mosque. So all of this is about making, well, I suppose it's not about making the Caliphate of Cordova great again, because it's already great, but it's about making it holy again.

Right, holy again. Properly Islamic again. But even though it looks as though it's the Christian kingdoms of the north that are being harrowed and gashed and wounded, the truth is that the whole time, even under Al-Mansur, this great conqueror, the seeds of the downfall of the Caliphate of Kordova itself are being sown because al-mansur when he goes on his wars he is more reluctant to rely on slavic slaves than his you know his caliphal predecessors had been and instead he recruits people from north africa so he recruits berbers yeah and they in the words of one muslim chronicler they are famed for their exploits their qualities and their valor in the face of the christians and these are the kind of guys that Al-Mansur wants.

And so he recruits ever larger numbers of Berber war bands. He billets them across the caliphate. And the people in Cordova and beyond are not very keen on having a load of, as they see it, barbarian zealots kind of dumped on them, particularly since they're having to pay for them. So, you know, there aren't enough Christians to fund them now. So Muslims are having to be taxed and they don't like this. They don't like having to pay for these guys. And so as the tax rate spirals upwards, the resentment of people in Al-Andalus towards the Berbers escalates, particularly in Cordova, but also beyond it, you start to get this great swirl of ethnic hatreds, incredible hostility on the part of

the inhabitants of al-Andalus towards these, as they see it, barbarian immigrants. And so this is not religious. This is purely ethnic, basically. It's basically, yeah, it's basically ethnic. They don't like them. They don't like them. 1002, Al-Mansur dies, and he's succeeded as vizier by his son, Abdul Malik, very popular name in this period. Abdul Malik, unlike his dad, is an alcoholic, but he's also very keen on jihad. So he's very expert. So it seems to kind of tick along. He goes off and, you know, does his stuff on the northern frontier. But then in 1008, he dies and is succeeded by his brother, who is the son of a Christian concubine and is disdainfully known by everyone in Cordova as Sanchuelo. He's a very devout Muslim, but he has this kind of mocking name. And Sanchuelo forces poor old Hisham II, who's still very much around in his gilded cage being useless.

He forces Hisham to name Sanctuelo as heir. Sanctuelo is absolutely not a diplomat. So he forces everyone at court to start wearing Berber fashions and Berber style of turban. So this goes down like a cup of cold sick. He gallops off on Jihad to the north. And while he's away, an Umayyad fugitive sneaks into Cordova, rallies all the other Umayyads who've basically been dispossessed by this new family of viziers, deposes Hisham II and lays claim to be caliph. And basically, he says to the Cordovans, the Umayyads are back. Everything's back to normal. Let's pile in.

And so lots of Cordovans rally to his cause. They burst into the palace. They invade the harem. They grab all the most beautiful women, kind of parcel them out among themselves. And then when they learn that Sanctuelo, who's up in the north fighting the Christians, has been assassinated, his corpse is brought back. It's stuck up on a gibbet. And this new caliph goes so far that he puts a bounty on the head of every Berber in Cordova and beyond. And so this unleashes an absolute orgy of carnage and bloodshed. You get huge mobs spilling out. They're being given money for every Berber head that they can find.

And so there's huge mass slaughter. Their women are raped, tethered together to be sold as slaves. Pregnant women have their babies cut out of their wombs. It's a monstrous scene. And of course, it's a terrible, terrible mistake. Because even though they've wiped out all the Berbers in Cordifer, they have not wiped out all the Berbers in Al-Andalus. And these are guys who are very, very proficient at warfare. They're not going to take this kind of treatment lightly. And so they form a great army and they lay Cordova under siege in 1010. The Caliph, the Umayyad Caliph who has set all this in motion,

the Cordovans realize this has been a terrible mistake. So they depose him and restore Hisham II, who's still kind of on the on the scene he's very much the henry the sixth of right yeah the the emmaid caliphate and they endure a three-year siege and desperate scenes cannibalism eating leather eating rats all that kind of stuff and after three years each the burbers break in complete slaughter put it absolutely to the torch. Hisham II, at last, it's presumed is killed. So he's finally gone. And this great, golden, wealthy city, a city that can compare with Constantinople or Baghdad, is put to the torch, and it will never again reclaim that golden primacy, nor ever again will there be a ruler who can lay claim to a kind of caliphal status. You do get spectral caliphs, but they're rulers of nothing. And you start to get

increasing numbers of Muslim rulers who don't even tend to be caliphs, so local warlords. And this is a process of fragmentation that leaves al-andalus kind of shattered now this is what they call the fitna isn't it the fitna yes sort of anarchy or civil war or whatever that lasts for what 20 years well it lasts yeah i mean it actually lasts for you know it it's never reunited it fragments into different kingdoms and it's this of course that enables the predatory christian kingdoms of the north to start really really reclaiming the Visigothic lands that have been lost. And, you know, within a century of the sack of Cordova, Toledo has been retaken and the kings of Castile and Leon are really starting to press southwards. So the thing that's amazing about the Caliphate of Cordova is the incredible pinnacle of sophistication and wealth and glamour that it attains.

And then the utter implosion. Yeah. And it's an extraordinary story. Of course, Muslim Spain endures for a very, very long time after this, you know, right the way up to the age of Ferdinand and Isabella. Granada doesn't fall to 1492, but it's, you know, the balance of power with the sack of cordova shifts from from muslim spain to christian spain yeah so the granada stuff because people often think of granada and the alhambra when they think of islamic spain but that's really just an epilogue isn't it it's kind of afterthought the high point is cordova in what the 10th century yeah yeah it's the 10th

century and in terms of the sort of the culture, Tom, the philosophy, literature, science, am I right in thinking that Cordoba is a kind of oasis of all this? Okay. So our view of the early medieval period, and maybe you will say this is now, this is a very late 20th, early 21st century, sort of, as it were, a liberal projection. The common view is, you know, that Islamic Spain, the Caliphate of Cordoba, is an oasis of intellectualism and thought and people engaging with the classical legacy, while out in the sticks, the Christians are living in mud. It is, it is. So the Caliph of Cordobava sees himself as, say, an equal of the Emperor in Constantinople and has good relations with him. So the Emirates had always been accused by the Arabs of a habit called a Qasariya, so behaving like a Caesar. And so the Emperor in Constantinople and the Caliph in Cordova, they kind of swap books. They send messengers, they view each other as being kind of

equals. The Caliph views, say, the kings of Germany, Otto the Great and his heirs, with a kind of mild contempt. I mean, he sends books to the emperor in Constantinople, he sends wild animals to Otto, because these are the kind of things that will impress a barbarian. And the kind of community of scholarship that the Caliphate presides over means that all kinds of texts can be imported into Cordova. So Aristotle famously, and in due course, when Toledo is captured, Toledo becomes a great center of translation, presided over by Christian kings, but with Muslim scholars and Christian scholars and Jewish scholars all working together. And that really is, you know, this idea of the tolerance and the dialogue. And absolutely, that's a part of it. The idea that there is a kind of community of scholars that perhaps transcends the sectarianism that also very powerfully exists because it has to, you know, it has to be said that there is a lot of beheading of Christians going on. This is happening.

And 1066, a date famous in England, there is a pogrom of Jews in Granada. So it's not like Christians and Jews are treated as equals. They're not. They're institutionally inferior. But that institutional inferiority means that there is a place for them. The difference between say that the role that say that jews have in christian europe is that there isn't a religiously prescribed role for the jews because in the new testament it makes no sense to think of it in those terms

whereas in the quran there is a sense of jews and christians existing and so their treatment can be prescribed by by the quran but every multicultural, there has to be a dominant society. Our dominant framework is a secular one. You know, we prescribe freedom of religion, but we don't prescribe freedom of religion to the degree that to do what they want to do, to practice their faith, to study one another, whatever. But the framework is absolutely a Muslim one. And people who offend against that, you know, will be dealt with. So two questions before we wrap up. Question number one, if you have to live anywhere in 10th century Europe, you know, the time machine condemns you to life in Western Europe.

Is Cordoba the obvious place to choose? Oh, I think Malmesbury. Malmesbury. The court of Athelstan. Right. There's no sherbets and fountains there, right? I think if you want running water and baths and libraries and all that kind of stuff and imports from China and the Indian Ocean. Frankly, those sound very good to me. Cordoba is the only place to be.

Okay. And so the second question, is there, I mean, I know we have many times had great fun pouring scorn on what ifs, but is there an alternative history in which the Caliphate of Cordoba survives or evolves in some way so that there is there an alternative history in which the Caliphate of Cordoba survives or evolves in some way so that there is still an Islamic Spain today? I think so. Yeah, I think so. I don't think there's anything inevitable about it. I mean, it's not just about the weakness of the state structures in Cordoba. It's also about the growing strength of the Christian kings. And that reflects a kind of a growing self-confidence that's economic, that's religious, that's cultural on the part of the Christians of Northern Europe. So who knows?

I think it would be, you could imagine an alternative timeline where there is still an Islamic presence in Southern Spain. It's fascinating. I think we'll have to come back to the Reconquista. Well, if you think about it, I mean, we talked about in our history of Portugal about the attempt by the Portuguese to conquer North Africa. Yeah. If they'd done that, perhaps we'd be saying, well, can you imagine a counterfactual in which Morocco is still Muslim? Of course.

So who knows? Interesting questions. Tom, that was absolutely fascinating. The best thing about it, as with quite a lot of these World Cup-themed podcasts, is that it really made me, while I was listening to you, want to go back to Cordoba and go and see the Mezquita and all that sort of stuff. So the Spanish Tourist Board should be very grateful to you.

I hope so. Thank you so much to all of you for listening. And we will see you next time. So thank you, Tom, and goodbye. Hasta luego. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

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