As I earlier posted, medieval Spain is much less studied than the rest of medieval Europe. Part of the issue is the language barrier. One really has to know both the medieval and the modern versions of Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Arabic, as well as Latin. But a number of younger scholars, most notably Americans, have started studying this fascinating territory.
The Iberian peninsula, although its own separate world, was closely tied to the rest of Europe through the Christian rulers who tried for over six centuries to make it their own. A lot of these Christian kings were in origin French, especially Burgundian. In addition, Christian Europe did a great deal of trading with Spain, as its ports along its eastern side could take goods into the Mediterranean, where they could be easily transported. Spanish horses and leather were considered especially valuable.
But there were distinct differences, such as that for most of the Middle Ages the Christians (and even some of the Muslims) used the Era dating, where the years were always 38 more than "anno Domini," so that while it was 1100 in France it was 1138 in Spain. No one knows how this started. There was talk at the time of it having something to do with Julius Caesar.
Today I want to expand on some of what I discussed earlier, concentrating especially on what's called the ta'ifa, a term which might be translated as "city state," a small, powerful principality. Medieval Spain was full of them. Indeed, there were at least three periods in medieval Spanish history when ta'ifas multiplied, at the expense of those rulers trying to establish large, centralized territories. Political historians tend to focus on those rulers with the most territory, but most politics then (as now) was local, and the ta'ifas filled the vacuum when the centralizers weakened.
Although one can see medieval Spain's history as permeated with conflicts between Christians and Muslims, it's more complicated, because Muslims also fought Muslims and Christians fought Christians. Political alliances did not always follow religion. As well as the various Christians trying to conquer their way south from the Pyrenees, there were Christians who had been there since the heyday of the Roman Empire. As well as Muslims who recognized the rulership of the local caliphs, there were also powerful lords from North Africa who thought that they ought to be in charge, and the local Muslims did not always agree. The rulers of the ta'ifas were right in the middle of all this.
(If you look at the map, you can see how close southern Spain is to North Africa, and not only at the Straits of Gibraltar. Spain was influenced as much by North Africa as by the rest of Europe.)
One of the last of the individual principalities to hold out against the governmental centralization that both Christian and Muslim rulers were trying to impose was headed by the dynasty of Banu Hud. They had held power as emirs in the northern part of the Iberian peninsula. but they lost their position in the early twelfth century. Far from giving up, they went on to establish a new center, a ta'ifa, in south-eastern Iberia.
But it was not enough to conquer, or even to make alliances with others who could help them. They also had to project an air of legitimacy, so that they would be accepted by the people they ruled. They ruled for over a century, even though there is serious doubt whether this dynasty actually was a series of fathers and sons or a succession of men who attached themselves to the line.
They were able to rule their ta'ifa for as long as they did because they were accepted, and the thirteenth-century members of the dynasty were considered native sons. This legitimacy was created through a combination of success as warriors (against both Christians and Muslims) and grandiose building projects, minting of coins, establishing laws, wearing clothing copied from the caliphs, and corresponding with the rulers of Baghdad as equals.
A fascinating history of this dynasty has recently been published by Anthony H. Minnema, The Last Ta'ifa: The Banu Hud and the Struggle for Political Legitimacy in al-Andalus (Cornell University Press, 2024).
© C. Dale Brittain 2024
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