A History of Spain and Portugal

[Freebooter]

A History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter One
Ancient Hispania

[1] The Hispanic peninsula lies at the extreme southwestern tip of Europe, in the direction of Africa and the outer Atlantic. It is partially separated from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees and forms a geographic stepping stone between that continent and Africa. Despite its unique location, the peninsula does not form a fully unified geographic entity, for it is divided by steep internal mountain ranges and in some regions by virtual deserts. It is second only to Switzerland as the highest area in western Europe, the land rising rapidly from the narrow coastal lowlands to hill country. Save for the green belts that comprise the northern and northwestern fringes, it is a predominantly dry area, in most parts of which the rainfall scarcely exceeds fifteen inches a year. Though the peninsula contains mineral deposits of value, its soil has always been poor compared with that of most of western Europe. According to a classic categorization made in 1891, only 10 percent of the surface of the peninsula is genuinely fertile. Approximately 45 percent is moderately arable. Another 35 percent can be used for any sort of productive purpose only with difficulty, and l0 percent is totally useless.

Most formal histories of Spain devote considerable space to the peninsula's prehistory. During the past century some attention has been given to archaeology, and even more to hypothetical definitions of the various ethnic groups that inhabited the region before the [2] Roman conquest. A great deal of this remains speculation, for the data unearthed by archaeological study in Spain is still rather scant, and the origins, culture, and duration of pre-Roman ethnic groups are for the most part poorly defined.

During the first millennium B.C. the peninsula was inhabited by a complex variety of peoples, most of them organized into tribal groups. There has been much controversy over the ethnic and geographic origins of the ancient inhabitants. In the early twentieth century the "African" thesis was in vogue, postulating that the ancient Hispanic tribes were mainly the descendents of white migrants from northwest Africa. More recent interpretations, however, have stressed immigration and cultural influences from southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Conclusive proof for any single unified interpretation is lacking, but the weight of evidence now favors the "Europeanist" interpretation. At any rate, in ancient times the peoples of the peninsula were not radically distinct from but possessed many of the cultural characteristics of the population of other parts of southern Europe and the Mediterranean littoral. The largest single ethnic element were the Iberian tribes that moved into the peninsula at some point during the second millennium B.C.--whether from north Africa or southern Europe--and spread out over a broad area. The first clearly definable group of immigrants from central or northern Europe was a sizable wave of Celtic migrants who entered the peninsula during the eighth and ninth centuries B.C.

It appears that the main ethnic and genetic components of the historic Hispanic peoples were already present before the Roman conquest, and that the great majority of subsequent "Spaniards" (or "Portuguese") were descendents of the original highly diversified ethnic stocks established in the pre-Roman period. Though the peninsula has been subject to invasion and very light immigration throughout its history, population movement at any time since the Roman conquest was not heavy enough to alter the genetic or phenotypical composition of the inhabitants significantly. The Romans described members of most of the Hispanic tribes as rather short, dark-haired, white-skinned, and physically agile, if not particularly muscular-- characteristics which would seem to describe modern as well as ancient inhabitants of the peninsula.

Hispania, the name given by the Romans to the peninsula, was a strictly geographic label without specific cultural or political connotation. The peninsula had always been divided into geographic and ethno-cultural regions which differed greatly from each other. The most advanced of the ancient Hispanic communities was the kingdom of Tartessos in the south, covering roughly the modern region of western Andalusia. When first encountered by Greek traders, Tartesian [3] society was centered in a number of fairly large cities and had a well developed economy based on agriculture, cattle-raising, fishing, commerce, and mining. Its technology was comparatively sophisticated, as evidenced in its mining, shipbuilding, irrigation, and ox drawn plows. The society was highly stratified, dominated by warrior and priestly castes and a small class of large landholders and wealthy merchants. Much of its land cultivation and cattle production was undertaken on the large estates owned by the upper classes, and the bulk of the population were peasants with few rights. In general, Tartessos was not greatly dissimilar to other relatively advanced urbanized societies of the Mediterranean. It was governed by a despotic monarchy legitimized by divine myth and thaumaturgy. The Tartessian state reached its maximum strength in the late seventh and any sixth centuries B.C., dominating the southern part of the peninsula and wielding influence in the affairs of the west Mediterranean. By the fifth century it had fallen under Carthaginian domination, whence it later passed to Roman rule.

The largest ethnic group in the peninsula, the Iberians, were strongly tribal and warlike, qualities characteristic of the population of ancient Hispania as a whole. The most advanced of the Iberians and the people to whom the name Iberian was originally given (the word was extended in Greek usage to refer to the peninsula) lived in communities on the eastern coast. The eastern Iberians were considerably influenced by Greek and Phoenician merchants and immigrant colonies, who contributed much to their culture and political organization. Their communities never formed a major state, as did Tartessos, but were organized in a variety of small city-states not dissimilar to the Greek. In the east as in the south, forms of monarchy prevailed. The Iberian alphabet in the east was one of two alphabets found in pre-Roman Hispania; the other was the Tartessian alphabet in the south. Rather similar in structure, they were both alphabetic and syllabic in form.

Ancient Hispanic societies were increasingly primitive and less politically and technologically advanced the farther they were from the south and east and the nearer to the north and west. The tribes of the southern part of the central plateau revealed a transitional pattern; they were partly urbanized and semiliterate but proportionately more rural and pastoral than their counterparts to the south and east. The central tribes were also more representative in political and social structure. Their larger towns were governed by a form of republican assembly dominated by a semiaristocratic oligarchy.

The northern and western groups were almost completely rural and illiterate and never formed organized states. The most distinctive ethnic community among them was that of the Basques of the western [4] Pyrenees and adjacent foothills. The origin of the Basques is shrouded in mystery. Whether or not they were indeed the original, pre-Iberian inhabitants of the peninsula, as is sometimes conjectured, their language--which has persisted in rural regions to this day--is unique and non-Indo-European. Their society was familial and tribal, and their economy, like that of most of the peninsular tribes, was essentially pastoral. They remained comparatively secluded in their hills until late Roman times.

Celtic immigration spread through much of the northern part of the peninsula during the eighth and ninth centuries B.C. In the northern sector of the central plateau and in the Duero valley in the interior of the northwestern area the Celts fused with the earlier population to form so-called Celtiberian communities. Some of these practiced extensive agriculture along with raising flocks and herds, and in the Duero valley tribal collectivist social patterns prevailed. In the northern hills of Asturias and the central Cantabrian range tribal life was more primitive. There the original population were mostly immigrants from southern France and northern Italy and were apparently taller and more muscular than the average Iberian. Partly because of the poorer soil, the economy of the northwest was largely pastoral, and social patterns tended toward matriarchy, possibly from Celtic influence.

The west, called Lusitania by the Romans, is set apart from the northern and central areas by watersheds. The Lusitanians had a better-developed agrarian culture than was to be found elsewhere save in the sophisticated south and east. More prosperous than the groups of the center and north, their society was also more sharply divided by class. During antiquity, this western area was largely ignored by the outer world and by the advanced eastern and southern cultures. It had few metals, the principal commercial attraction of the peninsula.

The complete lack of political or cultural unity among the disparate societies of the peninsula impeded rather than facilitated their conquest by Rome. The incorporation of Hispania into the empire was a long, slow process, lasting from 218 B.C. to 19 B.C. (though the major part was completed by 133 B.C.). This was a much longer time than was required to subjugate other major portions of the Mediterranean littoral. The fact also that it was highlighted by celebrated examples of diehard resistance--the most famous of which was the struggle to the death of the town of Numantia in 133 B.C.--has led some Spanish historians to view the ancient Hispanic tribes as already "Spanish" in their cultural characteristics, particularly in their xenophobia and obstinate resistance to foreign domination. In fact, the relative difficulties encountered in subduing Hispania stemmed in part from the [5] very absence of any such coherent entity as "Spain" or an "Hispanic culture." Many of the tribes had to be conquered separately, one by one, whereas in more advanced or unified regions defeat of the central government was enough to bring the whole area under Roman sway. The cultural particularism of the Hispanic tribes, together with the formidable geographic obstacles imposed by the peninsula, are as important as Hispanic xenophobia in explaining the long delay in consummating the Roman conquest.

Yet the discovery of enduring characteristics common to prehistoric Hispania and historic Spain may not be entirely the product of the cultural imagination. Then, as later, the peninsula was a marginal area culturally as well as geographically, and participated only with some lag in the major developments of antiquity. Most of the peninsula's societies were economically and technologically backward compared with the advanced areas of Mediterranean civilization--a gap that for the most part was never fully made good in Spanish history. The ancient population of the peninsula was less urbanized and not merely more agrarian but more pastoral than the more sophisticated regions of Mediterranean Europe. The social structure was obviously more archaic, and in much of the peninsula dominated by a kind of military aristocracy. The emphasis was on military much more than on productive values. In some respects, these qualities of ancient Hispania paralleled those of most of the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world, but in Hispania they were more pronounced and were less challenged by alternate developments. Historically, the tendency in the peninsula toward such ways of life has been more widespread and persistent than elsewhere in Mediterranean and western Europe.

Moreover, there is some support for the notion that the rather baroque quality of Spanish esthetics was also characteristic of ancient times. In the more developed areas there was considerable emphasis on the gaudy and sumptuous. Much of the gold in the ancient Mediterranean came from the peninsula, which seems to have been the "El Dorado" of ancient times, and Hispanic gold ornaments were known throughout the ancient world. It has even been conjectured that the valuing of gold as a precious metal originated in the peninsula. Certainly the opportunity to obtain gold and other metals whetted Roman interest.

The Romans brought political unity and juridical norms to the peninsula for the first time. Endemic warfare and raiding between the pastoral tribes and the more settled communities was brought to an end. The Roman road system was extended throughout, unifying Hispanic communications. During the golden age of Roman Hispania--from the first to the third centuries A.D.--the entire peninsula [6] was incorporated militarily and most of the population was incorporated culturally into the Roman world. Linguistic unity was slowly achieved as Latin-derived dialects replaced the former native languages, even among most of the common people. This process encountered the least resistance and went forward most rapidly in the more cosmopolitan south and east, where the upper classes, who controlled most of the land, often made common cause with the Romans. In other regions, tribal chiefs were brought into the Roman property system as latifundists.

There was extensive Roman immigration to the more developed eastern and southern areas of the peninsula. In other regions Roman culture was spread by administrators, educators, soldiers, merchants, and technicians. Sons of the Hispanic upper classes were sometimes sent to Rome for education. During the early part of the second century A.D. Rome was ruled by emperors of Hispano-Roman origin, and there were three more emperors from Hispania in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Several important philosophers and writers of the empire, including Seneca and Lucan, came from the peninsula. Yet it should be noted that nearly all these major figures were the offspring of Roman officials and colonists living there, not of Romanized native Hispani.

Large numbers of Hispanic troops served in the Roman forces; the closing phases of the conquest of the peninsula itself had been carried out to a considerable degree by Hispanic auxiliaries from the conquered regions. Indeed, the majority of the "Roman" troops that besieged Numantia had been Hispanic auxiliaries. (But conversely, the loss of life in the Hispanic wars had been a major factor in decimating the old Roman citizen army and converting it into a professional mercenary force.) Hispanic warriors had served abroad as mercenaries under Carthage, and later fought under diverse foreign banners after the fall of Rome. Altogether, the peninsula was the major source of mercenaries in the Mediterranean for nearly two thousand years.

The vital centers of Roman Hispania were its flourishing cities, and the key unit of local administration, the civitas, combined both town and countryside in a single district organized around the city. The boundaries of the civitas were often based upon ancient Iberian or Celtiberian tribal districts but under the Roman system were geared to the social and economic needs of the urban centers. In 73 A.D. the right of Roman law and citizenship was apparently extended to nearly all Hispanic towns. During the first and second centuries there was a great expansion of urban wealth and a fairly strong Hispanic urban middle class was formed. During the troubled final centuries of the empire the Hispanic cities seem to have been somewhat more [7] orderly than those of the eastern part of the Roman world, and economic decline from the third century on apparently affected Hispania proportionately rather less than certain other regions of the empire, including the most advanced and prosperous sectors.

Roman capital dominated commerce, in which Hispania played an essentially colonial role. Hispanic metals, especially gold, and Hispanic wool were imported by Rome in great volume. The peninsula also shipped large quantities of the three Mediterranean food staples, grain, olive oil, and wine, to Rome. By the fourth century, Hispania bad begun to rival Egypt as the empire's most important granary and continued to sustain a considerable volume of Mediterranean commerce as late as the fifth century.

Under Roman rule much of the countryside was transformed. Extensive irrigation projects were completed and the area under cultivation greatly expanded. Yet despite extension of the latifundia system, a sizable proportion of the cultivated area was evidently exploited as small, individual properties during the first part of the Roman period, partly as a result of the Roman breakup of collective and communal patterns in the north-center and west. Moreover, Roman reorganization and expansion of agriculture relocated and stabilized part of the tribal population in the north and west, bringing the people down from the hills and settling them on small farming plots. In general, the concentration of land in large latifundia was not as extensive as in Italy or Gaul until the second or third centuries.

At its height Roman Hispania may have had a population of five million or more. This was concentrated particularly in the more urban south and east but was also fairly dense in the south-central region, in Lusitania, and in parts of the northwest. Yet the Romanization of the peninsula was far from complete. Much of the north and northwest was influenced little by Roman life. Resistance was always strongest among the more primitive, warlike tribes of the Cantabrian mountain range in the far north. A somewhat tenuous military dominion was maintained, but even at the height of the empire there were only a few Roman towns in the far north. The Basques offered less direct military resistance but remained even more impervious to cultural assimilation.

Christianity spread through Roman Hispania during the second and third centuries. There, as elsewhere, it was a predominantly urban religion. Large portions of the countryside remained for a long time almost untouched, as did most of Cantabria and almost all the Basque region. By the beginning of the fourth century, however, Hispania apparently had a Christian minority at least as large proportionately as that of the empire as a whole--upwards of l0 percent. After the official recognition of the church early in the fourth century, [8] its following greatly increased, until almost the entire peninsula had become Christian. The pattern of Hispanic church organization was similar to that of most other parts of the empire: bishoprics became coterminous with the urban-centered civitas units and archepiscopal sees were established in provincial capitals. By the fifth century there had developed a distinctively Hispanic church, whose individual religious culture was most evident in the use of the special Hispanic rite (later inaccurately called the Mozarabic rite) in its services until the eleventh century. Theologically the Hispanic church was orthodox Catholic, though the Priscillian heresy of the late fourth century originated in Galicia (the northwestern corner of the peninsula) and Donatism was temporarily widespread in the fifth century. Yet the orthodox Hispano-Catholic church became increasingly strong and well organized, and provided spiritual and cultural leadership and identity which a faltering imperial government could no longer offer.

Hispania could not escape the general effects of the Roman social and economic decline from the third century on. If at first the economic decline seemed less severe than in parts of Gaul and northern Italy, this was because Hispanic agriculture had never developed to as high a level and because, aside from the barbarian devastation of 264-276, it did not at first suffer as much from the Germanic incursions.

The social changes that took place in the Hispanic countryside paralleled those of the rest of the empire. Latifundia increased in size and the pressure against small farmers and shepherds mounted. Inflation, taxes, warfare, and the drop in commerce produced great unrest, climaxed by sporadic peasant revolts in parts of Gaul and Hispania during the fourth and fifth centuries. Several efforts at land reform were made by the imperial administration in Hispania to protect and encourage small farmers, mainly in the central plateau, but institutional weakness and uncertain economic conditions frustrated these attempts. By the fourth century a significant minority of the peninsula's population lived as enserfed coloni on great estates, seeking shelter from the want and violence which the decline of imperial order and prosperity had left behind. Moreover, free peasants tended increasingly to place their land and labor at the service and the protection of large landlords by clientage relations known as commendatio and patrocinium.

The dissolution of Roman authority and its replacement by that of a Visigothic monarchy was a long, slow process. There was no sudden Visigothic invasion or conquest. The small host of the Visigothic ruler Ataulf that crossed the Pyrenees into Hispania in 415 acted as a federated army of the feeble Roman state, charged with expelling Vandal invaders from southern Hispania and subduing the Germanic [9] Suevi who had dominated the northwestern quarter of the peninsula for several years. From their principal base in southwestern France, Visigothic bands slowly began to extend their control over the more lightly inhabited central plateau of the peninsula, sometimes acting in the name of the emperor, sometimes merely advancing their own interests. The imperial government had broken down and the Hispanic population lacked the civil or military means to defend itself. The main body of Visigoths did not enter the peninsula until the reign of Alaric II (484-507), and then largely as a result of military pressure from the Franks to the north. They may have numbered no more than 300,000 in a peninsula with 4,000,000 inhabitants. The Visigoths were superior to the Hispani only in the application of armed force; economically, socially, and culturally the Hispanic population was in most regions far more advanced.

Though before their entry into the peninsula the Visigoths were culturally more Romanized than any other Germanic group, they were an essentially pastoral people, unlike the Ostrogoths and Suevi, whose societies were agrarian. The Visigoths settled in greatest numbers in the more sparsely populated, largely pastoral north-central area of the peninsula, and were thereby isolated from the main social and economic centers of the Hispanic population.

The Visigothic monarchy as an independent state was first proclaimed by Euric in southwestern France in 476, after the deposition of the last emperor in Rome by the Ostrogoths. The political center of the monarchy was not moved to the peninsula, however, until the reign of Athanagild (551-567), when a new capital was established at the town of Toledo in the central plateau, moving the axis of Hispanic life from the coastal regions for the first time. Visigothic authority was slowly expanded throughout the entire peninsula with the conquest of the Suevi during the reign of Leovigild (568-586) and the expulsion of Byzantine forces from their last remaining toehold in the southeast by Swinthila (621-631).

Like other post-Roman rulers in different parts of the former empire, the Visigothic kings of Hispania considered themselves the heirs of Rome and adopted Roman insignia and symbols of authority. They viewed themselves as successors, rather than destroyers or even replacers, of the empire. The Visigothic monarchy accepted the Roman theory of the state as a public power resting upon essentially absolute authority, though the official conversion to Catholicism that occurred during the reign of Leovigild accepted a modification of royal sovereignty by the religious and ethical tutelage of the church.

At the top of Hispano-Visigothic society there emerged an elite of some two hundred leading aristocratic families associated with the court and a broader aristocratic class of perhaps ten thousand people who held possession of most of the best land. Under the Visigoths, [10] the aristocracy did not form a closed caste but were steadily recruited from below on the strength of personal achievement or royal favor. Over a period of a century or more there occurred a partial fusion of the original Visigothic warrior aristocracy and the socioeconomic elite of Hispanic society.

The Visigothic monarchy remained an elective institution, each new king nominally chosen or ratified by the aristocracy. The crown was assisted in decisions and administration by an aula regia or royal council, but until the next to the last generation of Visigothic rule broad assemblies of notables were called to ratify important decisions, a last residue of the earlier tribal assemblies of the Germanic peoples. Administratively, the Visigothic monarchy relied on much of Roman usage and employed Hispanic personnel in local administration. By the sixth century, however, the Roman administrative system had fallen into such decay that it could not be revived, and in place of the old provincial system there evolved a new pattern of regional and local overlordship based upon regional dukes (duces) and heads of smaller districts or territoria called counts (comes). The new ducal administrative regions tended to coincide with the old Roman provinces, and the territoria of the counts with the old civitas units. The old municipal system also fell into desuetude and was slowly replaced by a pattern of royal administration and local overlords nominally ratified by the crown. Most of the Hispanic population remained juridically free, but the process of commendatio continued, as peasants pledged parts of their land or services to local overlords for security, and the class of enserfed coloni grew larger. Yet there were still a number of relatively autonomous local rural communities that preserved their legal identity.

The cultural and economic life of Visigothic Hispania was carried on almost exclusively by the native Hispani, to whom was due the relative prosperity of part of the sixth and seventh centuries. Roman law had to be relied upon in administering the affairs of the social and economic infrastructure, and over a period of two centuries there evolved a slow fusion of Visigothic custom and Roman common law. The general trend was away from the Roman system of explicit private property toward more communal, reciprocal, usufructural relations in the ownership and use of property. The Hispano-Visigothic modus vivendi found codified expression in the promulgation of the Liber ludiciorum (later commonly known in Castilian as the Fuero Juzgo) in 654. This fusion of aspects of Visigothic personal codes with Latin civil and property law superseded several less complete codifications and provided an organized code on which to base property rights and civil administration for the Visigothic aristocracy and, to some extent, the Hispanic common people.
[11] It has sometimes been maintained that under the Visigothic monarchy a mode of theocracy developed that thereafter characterized Hispanic religion and government. Such a notion is considerably exaggerated. Even during the Arian period of the Visigothic monarchy, when a great theological gulf existed between the rulers and organized Christianity, the Hispanic bishops proved themselves to be obedient to legally established authority. They rarely hesitated to uphold the power of the state in the secular realm, even to the extent of supporting one Arian king against his rebellious (but orthodox Catholic) son. When finally the monarchy accepted Catholicism in 589, it was made clear that this conversion was not forced upon the state by the church but was freely decided upon by the monarchy to promote its own interests. The church lost a significant measure of independence by recognizing the right of the crown to appoint the members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The king became the nominal head of church councils and took a formal responsibility to see that church affairs were properly run. The subsequent Councils of Toledo were organized along more or less Byzantine lines as mixed assemblies of high ecclesiastical and state officials, with the clerics responsible for church affairs and the secular officials bearing primary responsibility for state legislation.

Thus rather than theocracy there developed a church-state symbiosis in which the power of the crown was uppermost but in which the church played a major role in trying to stabilize public institutions and authority. After the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633. approval by the councils was required to legalize succession to the nonhereditary Visigothic throne, anathematize usurpers, and ratify amnesties. Church leaders were increasingly employed by the crown in administration because they were the primary source of educated, technically competent, and trustworthy personnel. Yet the crown did not intervene in the theological affairs of the church; religious councils were presided over by an archbishop, not the king. The Christian church became the only cohesive institution in Visigothic Hispania.

The early Hispanic church reached its cultural height during the era of Isidore of Seville (first third of the seventh century), shining briefly as the brightest center of learning in western Europe. For the common people it provided the only identity and hope which they knew during this period. Hispanic monasteries played a special role, becoming quite numerous, and the most active force in raising spiritual standards, expanding the influence of the church, and providing a spiritual leadership for the church.


Toward the end of the Visigothic period the church had become a major property holder, with almost every parish and monastery of note possessing lands or rights that provided it with income. The [12] church had achieved a special legal status, developing a code of canon law and special tribunals for the clergy and their affairs. The Hispanic church thus came to constitute a fairly well ordered state of its own within the poorly structured Visigothic political framework.

Yet despite its outwardly imposing strength, the Hispanic church failed to incorporate all the population of the peninsula within its following even as late as the seventh century. The peoples of the northern hills remained vague in their religious identification, while the Basques were almost untouched by Christianity. Even among the more densely inhabited southern and eastern districts, conversion of much of the rural population remained nominal at best. Hispanic Christianity was still to a considerable degree an urban religion, and tended to become weaker the farther one moved from the principal centers of population.

This was the more significant because it may be roughly generalized that throughout the Visigothic era the urban economy and society of southern and eastern Hispania continued to decline. The failure of administration, which the Visigothic crown was unable to restore, the absence of monetary order, progressive disruption of trade routes, and the decline of economic opportunities all continued even after the disorders of the fifth and sixth centuries had ended. The rise of Muslim power in the east Mediterranean during the seventh century presaged new commercial and military challenges. By that time Hispanic urban society had lost most of the vigor and prosperity that it had known during the high Roman period.

Even at its height, Roman rule had been unable to eliminate the strong regional and ethnic differences that divided the peninsula, and these became more pronounced again under the Visigoths. Fusion between the Visigothic elite and the Hispani population was never complete. The northwestern corner of the peninsula, ruled for two hundred years by the Suevi monarchy, remained a distinctive, not thoroughly assimilated region. The southwestern tip of France, known as Septimania, remained under Visigothic rule and tended to link northeastern Hispania with France. The sophisticated eastern coastal region had long been interconnected with the commerce and culture of the Italian peninsula, while the equally sophisticated towns of the south were closely associated with northwest Africa and with Byzantine commerce. In the far north, Asturians and Cantabrians were at best only partly assimilated, and the Basques remained almost entirely apart. Finally, there was a significant Jewish minority in the southern and eastern towns that played a major role in manufacturing and commerce. Subjected to attempted conversion and sporadic persecution by the Visigothic crown in the seventh century, Hispanic Jews were a politically disaffected and potentially rebellious element in the major towns.

[13] The Visigothic monarchy never developed a cohesive polity. Visigothic aristocrats and military leaders deemed themselves part of a personal power association with the crown and resisted extension of control. Royal succession remained elective, and the entire history of the monarchy was one of revolt, assassination, and internecine feuding. This insecurity placed a premium on military power, but the monarchy could not marshal resources to restore the independent standing army of Rome. Instead, a process of protofeudalization developed early and was expanded more rapidly in Visigothic Hispania than in Merovingian France. Decentralization was unavoidable, and power became a matter of personal relationship and example. The chief lieutenants of the crown were rewarded for their services by salaries or stipendia in the form of overlordship of land or temporary assignment of income from land held in precarium, that is, on a nominally revocable basis. This system was actually first used by the church to support local establishments, and by the seventh century was widely employed by the crown and also by the magnates (the high aristocracy) to pay their chief supporters and military retainers. The process of protofeudalization inevitably carried with it a splintering of juridical and economic sovereignty that further weakened political unity.

If the Visigothic aristocracy was unable to develop a unified, viable political system, it was nevertheless itself the beginning of the historic Hispanic master class. In this Visigothic caste the military aristocracy of the peninsula had its roots, creating a style and a psychology of the warrior nobleman that provided the dominant leadership for Hispanic society for more than a thousand years; this psychology ultimately managed to superimpose its values and attitudes on much of the society as a whole. Yet the success of the aristocratic ethos was a consequence of the experience of medieval Hispania, not of the rule of the Visigothic oligarchy, which largely proved an historic failure.

In the seventh century the caste relationship between the ruling group and much of the peasantry was little better than that of master to serf. A large proportion of the peasantry had been reduced to a kind of serfdom, and as the economy declined, economic exactions very likely increased. Evidence indicates that many Hispanic serfs and even many free peasants did not consider the protection and leadership they received worth the service demanded of them. During the last Visigothic century there were a number of peasant revolts and urban riots in protest against economic conditions.

In sum, the political and social structure of Visigothic Hispania was brittle and incohesive. It survived only until the first major challenge from without, then collapsed much more rapidly than it had been built.

Bibliography for Chapter I

[333] There are four recent multivolume general histories of Spain. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the dean of Spanish philologists and a leading medievalist, has edited an Historia de España composed of contnbutions from the leading specialists in each period. Publication was begun in 1935, and the most recent volume (26) extends the history through 1833 only. Parts of the six-volume Histona de España edited by Luis Pericot Garcia (Barcelona, 1935-62) are of high quality, but this work is less full and more uneven. The older singleauthor work, Antonio Ballesteros y Beretta's Historia de España y su influencia en la Historia Universal, 12 vols. (Barcelona, 1918-41), is especially notable for its copious bibliographies. Ferran Soldevila's Historia de España 8 vols. (Barcelona, 1952-59), is the only multivolume general account written from a Catalan viewpoint. Luis Garcia de Valdeavellano began a multivolume Historia de España (Madrid, 1955), but the two volumes completed extend only through the early Middle Ages. See also his Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas: De los orígenes al final de la Edad Media (Madrid, 1968). On social and economic history, see Jaime Vicens Vives, ed., Historia social y económica de España y América, 5 vols. (Barcelona, 1957-59), which is uneven but very useful, and Vicens's own Historia económica de España, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1964), now available in an English translation published by Princeton University Press. Though somewhat out of date, the basic bibliographical reference to Spanish historiography is B. Sánchez Alonso, Fuentes de la historia española e hispanoamericana, 3d ed., [334] 3 vols. (Madrid, 1952). Sánchez Alonso has also written the principal account of early Spanish historiography, Historia de la historiografia española, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1947-50).

The dean of Spanish prehistorians and leader of the "African" school is Pedro Bosch Gimpera. His two most important general works are Etnología de la Peninsula Ibérica (Barcelona, 1932), and Los pueblos de España (Barcelona, 1946). A somewhat similar interpretation is given by Luis Pericot García, La España primitiva (Barcelona, 1950). The best recent general synthesis of the history of ancient Hispania is Julio Caro Baroja's España primitiva y romana (Madrid, 1957). Martín Almagro, Ongen y formación del pueblo hispano (Barcelona, 1958), is also useful. Concerning ancient Hispanic art history, see José Camón Aznar, Las artes y los pueblos de Ja España primitiva (Madrid, 1954), and Luis Pericot García and Eduardo Ripoll Perello, eds., Prehistoric Art of the Western Mediterranean and the Sahara (Chicago, 1964).

There are a variety of monographs dealing with individual regions, cultures, or aspects of prehistoric Hispania. On Tartessos, see Adolph Schulten, Tartessos, rev. cd. (Madrid, 1950). Other significant works of Schulten are Hispania (Barcelona, 1920), and Numantia, 4 vols. (Munich, 1914-31). On Greeks, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians in the peninsula, see Antonio García y Bellido, Fenicios y cartaginenses en Occidente (Madrid, 1942), and Hispania gracca, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1948). For the Iberians, see Antonio Arribas, The Iberians (New York, 1965). The two best works on the peoples of the northern mountain ranges are Julio Caro Baroja, Los pueblos del norte de la Península Ibérica (Madrid, 1943), and Julio González Echegaray, Los cántabros (Santander, 1966).

On Roman Hispania, see R. Thouvenot, Essai sur la province romaine de Bétique (Paris, 1940); J. de Sena Ráfols, La vida en España en la época romana (Barcelona, 1944); C. H. V. Sutherland, The Romans in Spain 217 B.C.-A.D. 117 (London, 1939); and F. J. Wiseman's manual, Roman Spain (London, 1956). M. Tarradell, cd., Estudios de economía antigua de la Península Ibérica (Barcelona, 1968), is tedious but rewarding.

There is no satisfactory history of Visigothic Hispania. The best general account has been written by Manuel Torres as volume 3 of Menéndez Pidal's Historia de España. See also E. A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain (Oxford, 1969); Ramón de Abadal, Del reino de Tolosa al reino de Toledo (Madrid, 1960); and volumes I and 3 of J. Orlandis, cd., Estudios visigóticos (Madrid, 1964). There is a narrative of Visigothic history in Harold Livermore's The Origins of Spain and Portugal (London, 1971). The church under the Visigoths is treated in Z. García Villada, Historia eclesiástica de España, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1929); A. K. Ziegler, Church and State in Visigothic Spain (Washington, D.C., 1930); and Abadal, La batalla del adopcionismo en la desintegración de la iglesia visigoda (Barcelona, 1949). Two key monographs on institutional changes by Claudio Sánchez Albornoz are Ruina y extinción del municipio romano en España (Buenos Aires, 1943), and El 'stipendium' hispano-godo y los orígenes del beneficio prefeudal (Buenos Aires, 1947). The Germanic kingdom of the Suevi in the northwest corner of the peninsula is treated in Wilhelm Reinhard, Historia general del reino hispánico de los suevos (Madrid, 1952).

[Freebooter]

A History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter Two
Al-Andalus

[14] It is difficult to determine in detail exactly what happened in Hispania during the crucial years after 700, for little direct source material has survived. Though the Visigothic aristocracy had achieved a degree of fusion with Hispanic society and had secured its dominance as a warrior caste, much of it was corrupted by wealth and power and it had at best a very feeble sense of political legitimacy. The Visigothic monarchy had failed to build stable institutions, successful means for transmitting power, or a stable and loyal elite behind the throne. Strife between rival pretenders and their supporters persisted throughout the history of Visigothic Hispania. Leovigild, the strongest of its rulers, had himself to face a five-year revolt by his son. Ratification of the elective, as opposed to the hereditary, right by the councils of Toledo in the seventh century sustained Visigothic law but guaranteed endemic civil war. It was not uncommon for factions to accept and encourage foreign intervention on their behalf. In part because of this, Byzantium had been able to control much of southern Hispania for approximately seventy years, from the mid-sixth century down to the third decade of the seventh century, and the Frankish monarchy intervened actively on several occasions in the seventh century. The quick and easy Muslim takeover is understandable only in terms of this persistent failure of political institutions, the accepted custom of foreign intervention, and the apathy or submissiveness of most of the [15] Hispanic lower classes, accustomed to nearly a millennium of rule by outsiders, first by the Romans, then by the Visigoths.

During the latter part of the seventh century the main antagonism was between the descendants of Chindaswinth (642-653) and those of a subsequent ruler, Witiza (702-710). Supporters of Witiza's clan rused to accept the election of a rival candidate, Roderic, in 710, and sought assistance from the newly established Muslim overlords of North Africa. The Visigothic dissidents obviously failed to appreciate the dynamism and integrative potential of the Islamic culture that had swept out of Arabia only a few generations earlier. Their miscalculation was probably due in part to the considerable difficulty encountered by the Muslims in subduing the Berber Kabyles of the Maghreb during the preceding half-century. The latter, like the Hispanic tribes confronting the Romans, had put up a more determined resistance than had most of the more civilized regions farther east. The conquest of the Maghreb had taken nearly forty years, and was nominally completed only in 705-710.

After a small exploratory raid, the Muslim commander of Tangier, Tariq, led a force of perhaps no more than 12,000 men, mostly Berbers from northern Morocco, across the straits in 711. Their goals were apparently ambiguous at first. The intervention was organized at the behest of the Witizan clan; the invaders probably hoped at the least to win booty and to exert some degree of Muslim influence in Hispania, possibly to make it a client state of the Arab caliphate.

However, discovery of the hollowness of Visigothic power, both crown and oligarchy, coupled with a swift and decisive victory, expanded Muslim ambition. At that moment Roderic was engaged in trying to subdue Basque and Visigothic rebels in the northeast. He hurriedly marched south, where the invaders awaited him in July 711 at the Guadalete, a small stream in the extreme southern tip of Spain. There the Witizans arranged the withdrawal of the bulk of Roderic's forces; the outnumbered remainder resisted stubbornly but were destroyed. Roderic was killed, and the remnants of his army were shattered near Ecija, where they made a desperate attempt to bar the road to the north. Córdoba, demoralized and almost undefended, was quickly taken. Roderic's supporters in the Visigothic capital, Toledo, were then overthrown by the Witizans, who opened the gates to Tariq.

Civil war was at first even more debilitating to the Visigothic kingdom than the foreign invasion. By 712 the kingdom lay divided and virtually leaderless, its central military elite destroyed. Consequently the Arab governor of northwest Africa, Musa ibn Nusair, personally led a force larger than the first, some 18,000--a high proportion of them the best Arab warriors--in the second wave of [16] invasion. Muslim armies had perfected a swift, flexible, hard-hitting style of battle that proved extremely difficult for Visigothic levies to cope with. Seville, the largest city in the peninsula and center of Hispano-Roman culture, fell easily after a short siege. The remaining elements of the Roderician faction withdrew to Mérida, which withstood a long siege but finally fell on June 30, 713. Much of the Visigothic aristocracy resisted little or not at all. Theodemir, duke of the Cartagena district in the southeast, made a treaty allowing him to retain control of his territory so long as the inhabitants paid regular taxes to the Muslim command. The spring and summer of 714 were then devoted to subduing the heavily populated northeast. Zaragoza was conquered and many of its aristocrats put to the sword. Nearly all the territory northeast of Zaragoza was rendered tributary, after which the main Muslim column apparently marched westward across north-central Hispania before returning southward.

The Muslim "conquest" took only three years, but the Muslims in fact made no effort to conquer and occupy the entire peninsula. That would have been impossible for an army of no more than 30,000 to 40,000 men. They occupied directly only the main strongholds of south-central and northeastern Hispania, the old centers of Roman civilization. The old Suevic district in Portucale to the west and Galicia to the northwest were rendered tributary but not occupied. The Witizan clan served as clients of the Muslims, who could in a sense present themselves as the protagonists of a legitimist cause. During the first generation of occupation, three thousand estates from the royal domain were bestowed on the Witizans.

The Muslims were concerned first with booty and secondly with the prosecution of the jihad--the holy war to extend Islamic dominion ever farther afield. By 720 an expedition had crossed the Pyrenees and seized Narbonne, and this was followed for the next twenty years by intermittent onslaughts into France. Conquest beyond the Pyrenees was the major new concern of the overlords of "Al-Andalus" (literally "land of the Vandals"), as the Muslims called their new peninsular domain. Between 721 and 732 three governors of Al-Andalus were killed leading expeditions into France, the last expedition culminating in a major defeat by the Frankish army at Poitiers in 732. This did not put an end to the Muslim offensives, however, for the Muslims were further encouraged by internal strife in southern France. The Gallo-Roman inhabitants of Provence stubbornly resisted domination by the Frankish monarchy to the north and summoned Muslim forces to their aid in 735. Two expeditions were dispatched into Provence during the next three years, but the expansion of Frankish military power threw the Muslims on the defensive, [17] and they were barely able to retain a foothold in Septimania immediately northeast of the Pyrenees.

The relative ease with which Muslim domination was established over most of the peninsula can be explained by the fact that only some of the Visigoths resisted, and almost none of the rest of the population. Religious antagonism caused surprisingly little difficulty. Early Islam, despite its emphasis on the jihad, was comparatively tolerant of Christians and Jews as "peoples of the book." Moreover, there was little sense of racial antipathy; the majority of the first wave of invaders were not even Arabs, but Berbers who differed little in appearance from the Hispanic people. Some of these Berbers were themselves not yet fully assimilated into Islam. (For that matter, the Berbers of northwest Africa were not effectively converted until after the adoption of the local Kharijite doctrines in the eighth century.)

The Muslim invaders were greedy for land and booty, but the main targets of their rapaciousness were the Visigothic aristocrats who resisted them. To most of the population the conquest was represented as a liberation. Christians were promised free practice of their religion and in some cases greater social and economic justice as well. The rights of the minority of Hispanic smallholders were apparently respected. Though Christians were required to pay a special tribute, it was at first modest. In all, exactions were perhaps no greater than under the Visigoths. For more than a century, the Christians in the towns were permitted to live a semi-autonomous local existence, and in some cases shared their churches with Islamic worshippers.

People began to accept conversion to Islam almost immediately, in large numbers. The process went forward most rapidly in the population centers of the south and east, and in the meantime practically all the collaborationists among the Visigothic aristocracy embraced the Muslim religion. It is sometimes alleged that the rapid and comparatively facile Islamization of most of the peninsula was the result of the corruption and inattentiveness of the Hispanic church and the lack of piety and orthodoxy among the Visigothic aristocracy. In fact, it is difficult to demonstrate that the Hispanic church was significantly weaker than others of Latin Christendom or that the Visigothic nobles were appreciably less religious than their Frankish counterparts. Rather, Islamization probably stemmed primarily from the complete military and political defeat of the Catholic Visigothic state and from the prestige of the dynamic Muslim empire and its all-conquering armies. At first Islamic overlords did not encourage mass conversion, because it reduced the number of non-Muslims who paid heavier taxes, but once the Muslim authorities were firmly established in power many Christians converted simply to be on the dominant side, [18] escape special taxes, and gain greater economic opportunity. It has also been suggested that a portion of the enserfed sector of the peasantry accepted Islam to be freed of their servitude. Moreover, it is doubtful that many ordinary people perceived the great religious gulf between Christianity and Islam that has subsequently been taken for granted. Rather than as the antithesis to Christianity, many probably saw it as a mere variant of simplification. Finally, according to a later claim of Muslim chroniclers, some Visigothic aristocrats were attracted by the opportunity under Islamic law for polygamy and legal concubinage.

The third religious group in the peninsula, the Jews, who may have numbered 2 or 3 percent of the population, eagerly collaborated with the Muslims. Hispanic Jews had achieved considerable wealth under the Visigoths but were subjected to intermittent persecution. Muslim rule promised greater freedom and security. Jews sometimes assisted the Muslims, and a detachment of Jewish soldiers (perhaps related to Hispano-Jews exiled to the Maghreb) accompanied the invaders. Several important cities were given to Jewish leaders to govern temporarily after the Muslims took over. During the next three centuries Jewish financial and cultural influence expanded in southern and south-central Hispania. Because of their unique position, and also because of their linguistic skills, Jews served for generations as mediators between sectors of the Muslim and Christian populations.

The Arabs, who formed a minority among the mostly Berber invaders, assumed the place of privilege from the beginning and began to set themselves up as a landed Muslim neo-aristocracy. Urban life in the peninsula, too, attracted many. Entering at a higher cultural level than had the Visigoths three centuries earlier, they formed an urban elite, and though at first only a small minority in the Hispano-Christian cities, sank deeper cultural and economic roots and helped expand the influence of Islam in the cities rapidly. The Berber warriors, the rank and file of the invaders, tended to be shunted toward the less productive highlands. Many were settled on territory seized from or abandoned by the Visigoths in the northwest-central region.

The destruction of the Visigothic system of state and society was one thing, and the building of a Muslim Hispania something else that was much more difficult and took more time--indeed, nearly two centuries. After the Visigothic collapse there was a tendency for the inhabitants of various parts of the peninsula to revert to the regionalism and localism characteristic of an earlier era. Muslim power advanced too far too fast to combine all these territories into a well-ordered system. The Arab clan leaders who formed the core of the new oligarchy quickly fell out with each other, and the heads of the caliphate in [19] faraway Damascus revealed concern about maintaining control of their most distant dominion. The first official governor of Muslim Hispania, Abdul Aziz (who incidentally married Roderic's widow), was murdered by rivals in 716. During the four decades 715-755 there were approximately twenty different governors, many of them assassinated and only three retaining office as long as five years.

In addition to feuds between Arab clans and factions, a broad ethnic split emerged between the Arab aristocrats and the Berber population. By 740 a major rebellion was underway across the straits in the Maghreb, where the Berbers were adopting Kharijism, a new, heretical form of Islam that accompanied protest against Arab domination of the Muslim empire. The revolt spread to the Berbers settled in the northwest-central part of the peninsula. They marched against the urban-associated Arab aristocracy in south-central and southern Hispania, outnumbering them, for the Arabs could not depend upon their new Christian subjects to fight for them. It may be that only the arrival of some 7,000 Syrian cavalry saved the aristocracy. During the 740s, the new polity in the peninsula virtually dissolved. The spectacle of general Muslim civil war did not encourage Hispanic loyalty, and small elements of the Christian population took advantage of this opportunity to migrate to the unoccupied northern mountains, whence border warfare had been waged since 718. After 750, crop failures and raiding brought widespread famine to the Berber-inhabited Duero valley of the northwest, forcing the remainder of the invaders to withdraw farther south. When political order was finally [20] restored and the Berbers brought under control, the Duero valley south of the Asturian and Cantabrian hills had been evacuated, leaving a no-man's-land fought over by northern Christians and Muslims for the next two centuries.

Unified government in Muslim Hispania was finally achieved after 755 by its first independent ruler, Abd-al-Rahman I (756-788), last surviving heir of the traditional Muslim Umayyad dynasty in Damascus after it had been deposed by the rival Abbasid dynasty. In flight from the Near East, Abd-al-Rahman, whose mother was a Berber, sought to regain an independent kingdom at the far western end of the Muslim world. Arriving in the peninsula in 755, he won the support not only of the Berbers but also of the strongest Arab faction, enabling him to overthrow the forces of the erstwhile governor outside Córdoba, the Hispano-Muslim capital since 719. There Abd-al Rahman announced the establishment of an independent Umayyad emirate based on "true justice" and toleration for all religions and ethnic groups. This stand greatly strengthened his position among the heterogeneous population of the peninsula. He was eventually recognized as heir of the legitimate dynasty by nearly all regions save the independent Christian hill country of the far north, but years of intermittent campaigning were required to subdue dissident Muslim regional overlords.

Little effort was made to conquer and occupy the northern mountain areas, because of difficult geographic obstacles, the poverty of those regions, and the resistance of their inhabitants. Instead, three frontier districts or marches were established to hold the border, and the emirate adopted or accepted a variant of west European feudalism in dealing with the frontier areas. The key spots were mountains, castles, or fortified towns difficult to incorporate into a central system. Loose personal relations akin to vassalage were worked out with Muslim and at times with Christian overlords in the frontier area. This meant an uneven border and an incomplete political system on the Christian fringe, but the offensive military strength and the economic resources of the northern Christian hill people did not seem great enough to warrant the expenditure of means that would have been required to subdue those harsh, backward regions.

It is impossible to calculate the number of immigrants who entered the peninsula during the three centuries of the emirate. All told they may have accounted for the ancestry of 20 percent of the peninsula's population by the end of the tenth century, yet the influx in most years was quite small. Moreover, the bulk of the immigrants were not oriental Arabs but Maghrebian Berbers. The prosperous, increasingly cultured Al-Andalus must have looked very attractive to the rude tribesmen across the straits. But the more cultured Arabs tended to monopolize the most important lands, posts, and perquisites, and [21] relations with the Berbers and other elements were never very good. Muslim Hispania never achieved a fully homogeneous society. Descendants of Arabs jealously preserved their family and tribal identities, together with a distinct sense of superiority to the rest of the Muslim population. Many of the Berber immigrants did not at first speak Arabic and for some time retained their separate community identity. The majority of the Muslims were of course descendants of Hispanic converts and never managed to absorb fully the aristocratic Arab elements; rather, upper-class Hispano-Muslim muwalladun (or muladíes, as converts to Islam were later known in Castilian) later came to affect Arab ancestry or names for themselves. Interethnic tensions persisted throughout the history of Al-Andalus. They probably lay at the root of continuing internal political conflicts that were only temporarily assuaged, never eliminated.

The emirate was nevertheless free of such strong anti-Arab outbursts as occurred among the native Muslim populace of Iraq and Iran during those centuries. Abd-al-Rahman I encouraged the settling of Arab aristocrats directly on the land, overseeing the cultivation of estates, and by the tenth century the gap between the Muslim aristocrats and the muladí peasants was apparently not as great as that which had existed in much of the former Hispano-Visigothic society.

An Islamic culture in the peninsula developed with surprising rapidity. Though the first generation of Muslims had been relatively uncultured and had a rather weak grasp of Islamic theology, religious teachers arrived from the Near East soon after the conquest, and their numbers increased during the course of the eighth century. The roots of a genuine Muslim orthodoxy were established, in response to the problem of cultural heterogeneity and the challenge to the identity of the convert. Within three or four generations, Hispanic Islam was strongly identified with the Malikite rite. The religious teacher Malik (who died in Medina ca. 795) had propounded a rather simple and traditionalistic understanding of Islam, based on the formula of "the Koran, the words of the Prophet, and admitting that otherwise I do not know." The antirationalist conservatism of the Malikite rite was adopted as the semi-official observance of Muslims in the emirate during the reign of al-Hakam I (796-822). Malikite traditionalism, as propounded by local faqihs (jurists) throughout Al-Andalus, provided a degree of cultural unity for most of the Muslim population. Ultraorthodoxy was characteristic of Islam in the peninsula throughout almost the entire Muslim period, and contrasted notably with the greater tendency toward heterodoxy in other parts of the Muslim world. This may perhaps be explained by the peripheral location of Al-Andalus at the outer limit of Islamic lands, adjacent to Latin Christendom, containing a Christian minority (at first a Christian [22] majority), and usually in a state of tension with its religious and cultural rival. It is interesting, too, that during the Middle Ages western Christianity also emphasized pragmatic legalism, ethics, and orthodoxy in contrast with the more speculative metaphysics of the Christian east.

A wave of major "orientalization" began during the reign of Abd al-Rahman II (822-852), who imported numerous oriental Muslim artists and educators. The high culture of the Middle East elicited a strongly eastward-looking orientation; though a few individual Hispano-Muslim art forms were developed by the tenth century (the muwashaha and zéjel songs and poems), the art and literature of Al-Andalus was established almost completely on oriental Arabic forms.

Christian society in the south and east was completely unable to hold its own. The independent Christians of the north came to call their counterparts in the south Mozarabs, derived from the Arabic musta'rib, meaning Arabized or Arabic-speaking. Mozarab culture became fossilized, its postconquest literature for example rhetorical and usually mediocre, deficient in dialectic and analysis. Of course it must be recognized that Mozarab culture was placed under increasing pressure and not able to develop in full freedom. Limited tolerance never meant equality, and Christians were never permitted to dispute publicly the teachings of Islam. Religious practice and cultural opportunity were increasingly circumscribed. It is true that some towns had Christian majorities for a century or more, that most Mozarab dioceses were able to continue an uninterrupted line of episcopal succession for nearly three hundred years, that all-Mozarab church councils were occasionally called, and that some religious and cultural contacts were maintained with other parts of western Christendom. Nonetheless, the strength and influence of Islam was increasingly felt. From about the beginning of the ninth century pressure mounted; taxes were raised and new restrictions were introduced, while the Muslim proportion of society steadily increased. One response to latent and then mounting persecution was the Christian "martyrs of Córdoba" movement of 850-859 in the course of which several score Christian spokesmen, confronting Islam directly, were put to death. A more common response was Mozarab emigration to the Christian principalities in the northern mountains. The Muslim state did not embark on a policy of extreme persecution until late in the tenth century, however, and the Mozarab minority persisted, in ever-dwindling numbers, until almost the end of Al-Andalus.

The growing strength and sophistication of Hispano-Muslim society was not reflected by political unity, for the ninth century was a time of political troubles for the emirate. Resentment among both Christians [23] and Hispano-Muslims increased: against the overlordship of Córdoba by Muslims in other regions, against exclusivist Arab clans on the part of non-Arab Muslims, and against supposedly heterodox emirs by fanatical Mahikite faqihs. A major revolt occurred among the lower classes of Córdoba in 814, when popular discontent took the form of an uprising against the emir himself. This reflected the uncertainty about political legitimacy that had existed in Muslim Hispania since the emirate broke away from the central caliphate in the Near East. After the revolt was quelled, one-fourth of the population of the Andalusi capital was expelled.

Muslim revolts grew serious during the second half of the ninth century. At times the emir controlled only the greater Córdoba region. Major rebellions occurred in the districts of Toledo in the center, Seville and Bobastro in the south, Mérida in the southwest, and Zaragoza and Lérida in the northeast. The partly Christian city of Toledo was more or less autonomous from 873 to 930, required only to pay a nominal tribute to the emirate. A more fully autonomous principality was carved out in the upper Ebro valley of the northeast by the Banu Qasi dynasty, descendants of the Visigothic overlord Casio (Cassius) of Tudela, who had accepted Islam in 714 at the start of the conquest. The Banu Qasi ruled the upper Ebro region for two hundred years, waxing at times rich and powerful. At their height in the late ninth century they were sometimes called "third kings of Hispania" (following the emirs of Al-Andalus and the kings of Christian Asturias-León). The most serious of the new revolts, however, was that begun by Omar ibn Hafsun at Bobastro in the hills above Málaga in 883. The descendant of muladíes, ben-Hafsun rallied Muslims and Christians alike and soon made most of the eastern Andalusian hill country independent of the emirate. In 894 he returned to Christianity, the religion of his ancestors. That cost the support of most of his Muslim following, but even so he held out in the Bobastro district until his death in 917. This domain was defended by his sons for another twelve years until it was finally reincorporated by the emirate in 929.

An effectively unified state was finally achieved during the long reign of Abd-al-Rahman III (912-961). The son of a Navarrese princess, this greatest of Cordoban rulers was a short, blue-eyed Muslim who dyed his red hair black to match that of most of his subjects. In 929 he took the step of raising his dominion from an emirate, or kingdom, to a caliphate, or empire. Originally the Islamic world had been unified under a single caliphate as the political successor to the prophet's authority. The Umayyad emirate of Al-Andalus had been nominally subordinate to the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, but establishment of a new caliphate under the aggressive Fatimids in [24] Egypt threatened military and political pressures through North Africa. Abd-al-Rahman III countered the claims and ambitions of the Fatimids by taking advantage of new Muslim theories to assert the imperial independence of Al-Andalus. This nominal authority also strengthened the claims of the Cordoban state over the local regions of the peninsula.

The caliph restored central control over all the Muslim population and carried on major border campaigns against the small Christian principalities of the north, receiving token submission from most of them. During the latter part of his reign he extended military dominion over part of the northwest Maghreb, briefly expanding Al-Andalus into an imperial domain.

The strength of the tenth-century caliphate was due as much to the efficiency of the state system as to the size and prosperity of its population, for the caliphate developed the best organized administration found anywhere in western Europe during that era. This had begun nearly a century earlier under Abd-al-Rahman II, who had commenced to refashion what had begun as a fairly simple despotism into a well-articulated structure patterned after the Abbasid caliphate in Damascus. Executive authority was nominally autocratic, administered by an hajib or chief minister through batteries of visirs or departmental ministers for varied aspects of administration, with complements of subsecretaries, scribes, and clerks. A fairly efficient treasury with some degree of central accounting was eventually developed. Theoretically, each district of the emirate was administered by a regional wali, or governor, responsible to the central government for the affairs of his province. The legal system was headed by a cadi aljamaa (chief justice), though his authority was restricted to the Córdoba district. The court structure was divided by region and municipality, with separate jurisdictions for different kinds of grievances according to civil need and Muslim custom.

Muslim military organization in the peninsula had long been rather rudimentary, resting upon the militia of the local Arab clans and other regional elites. Though originally made up mostly of infantry, Muslim armies came to rely especially on light cavalry, patterned in part on the Arabic model and armed with lances, darts, and small shields. Early in the emirate a permanent standing army had been begun with the formation of an elite corps of several thousand slaves from eastern Europe and Africa. Abd-al-Rahman III did not solve the problem of central military organization, but his forces were the most numerous yet employed by Muslim power in the peninsula and in their time were without peer in western Europe. The ports of the eastern, southern, and western coasts of the peninsula had long had large commercial fleets, but an armed navy of significance took form [25] for the first time under Abd-al-Rahman II. For a brief time it was perhaps comparable to that of the Byzantines.

The political strength and military glory of this reign coincided with the first full flowering of the high culture of Hispano-Muslim society as well as its broad economic expansion. During the tenth century the state, society, and culture of Al-Andalus were more advanced than anything to be found in Christian western Europe. The studies in philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, botany, and medicine carried on by the intellectual elite of Muslim Hispania between the mid-tenth and twelfth centuries have earned standard references in medieval history textbooks. Economic achievements were equally impressive. During the ninth and tenth centuries new Persian and Nabatean agricultural techniques were introduced, old irrigation systems restored, and new ones developed. East Mediterranean fruits, as well as grain, olives, and rice, were important crops. Conditions of land tenure varied greatly. Most farms were family farms, many of them rented or worked on shares from aristocratic overlords but a not insignificant number held independently by Muslim smallholders. Exact measurement is impossible, but productivity, at least in the irrigated valleys and huertas of parts of the south and east, was apparently well above ordinary west European standards of the time. Grain production in the dry areas was less successful; from the ninth century on grain had intermittently to be imported from northern Africa.
The real strength of Al-Andalus lay in its cities, with their productive economies, skilled labor, technological development, and learning. Nearly all had been effectively Muslimized and culturally Arabicized by the tenth century. They excelled in the production of silk and other textiles, ceramics, leather work, armaments, and some types of fine steelworking. Al-Andalus had proportionately more artisans in its cities than had any other part of western Europe at that time. Commerce flourished well beyond the range of the peninsula.

Above all other cities, the capital, Córdoba, was the urban showplace of the caliphate. Textbook estimates of a population of one million people may be dismissed, but there were apparently well over one hundred thousand. In size, services, culture, and economy, the city was without a peer in western Europe and rivaled in the east only by Constantinople. Some of the enduring works of Hispano-Muslim architecture in Córdoba and other cities were at least begun in the tenth century. The architecture of Al-Andalus is often referred to as Moorish, yet its surviving specimens considerably surpass what was built in Morocco during that (or most subsequent) periods.

Although aside from the great mosque at Córdoba, the outstanding examples of Hispano-Muslim architecture are of a later time (for example, the Giralda of Seville, twelfth century, and the Alhambra of Granada, fifteenth century).

[26] The population and cultural centers of Al-Andalus were for the most part the same towns and regions that had flourished under the Romans (and to a lesser degree under the Visigoths). Some of the people and atmosphere of the cultural vanguard of Romano-Christian Hispania were absorbed into Hispano-Muslim society, and it was not merely an accident that the high culture of Al-Andalus was superior to that of the Maghreb during the same period. It started from a higher base.

That Hispano-Christian culture affected Hispano-Muslim society cannot be doubted, yet its effect was negligible compared to the great impact of orientalization brought by the establishment of Islam in the peninsula. There are many regional variations in Islam, but the Hispanic peninsula was the only major part of western Europe that was for some time torn out of the matrix of western Christendom. All the culture as well as the religion of Al-Andalus was patterned on oriental norms and precedents. Non-Islamic Hispanic precursors for these ideas and trends are simply not to be found. The high culture of Al-Andalus was derivative, and oriental in inspiration. The only major exceptions lay in some of the arts: architecture, metalworking, and popular literature, where a synthesis of sorts was worked out between autochthonous Hispanic skills and motifs and oriental forms.

The sweeping effect of orientalization may be seen not merely in the high culture but in the common social patterns. Family standards and practices were patterned on those of the upper-class Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, and social customs were profoundly orientalized. A major example was the seclusion and restriction of women, something for which there was no parallel or precedent in Hispano-Christian society. The medieval Hispano-Christian family was distinctly more individualistic and egalitarian. Even the minor aberrations of Hispano-Muslim society were probably not as unusual as they have sometimes been made out. Fondness for wine has been presented as a triumph of the Hispanic over the Islamic, but there was also drinking in the Middle East. Sexual mores were typically Muslim as well, particularly in the apparently high incidence of homosexuality.

The Amirid Dictatorship 976/981-1008

The Cordoban state reached the height of its power in the middle of the tenth century under Abd-al-Rahman III, yet survived for only seventy-five years more. No state in Europe or the Mediterranean basin during the Middle Ages possessed the instruments to guarantee central government unless strong leadership and a continuous principle of legitimacy were preserved; by the eleventh century these were [27] lacking in Al-Andalus. Abd-al-Rahman III's successor, al-Hakam II, ruled for fifteen years, but when he died in 976 he left as heir a twelve-year-old son who was recognized as Hisham II. The government was soon dominated by its vigorous and efficient hajib, an Hispano-Arab known to history as al-Mansur ("The Victorious"). In 981 young Hisham was forced to officially ratify the complete authority of the hajib over all aspects of government.

Al-Mansur relied on two factors to cement his dictatorship: religion and a strong centralized army. He allied himself with the influential Malikite faqihs in suppressing the few scattered expressions of Islamic heterodoxy that had appeared at Córdoba and won a reputation among the superstitious lower classes as a defender of the faith. He also expanded the standing army. Large numbers of Berber mercenaries were brought in from the Maghreb, and Christian mercenaries were accepted as well. The ordinary militia levies of Al-Andalus were reorganized by special regiment rather than by local district in an effort to counteract the centrifugal effect of regional loyalties. Al-Mansur built the most powerful military machine yet seen in the peninsula, but it broke the traditional service patterns of Al-Andalus and severed bonds between local leaders and the Cordoban government. It became to some extent an instrument of control over the rest of Al-Andalus and a resented agent of centralization.

The historic title al-Mansur was won in a long series of summer campaigns against the Christian principalities of the north. The motives were more political and economic than religious, but al-Mansur found it useful to strengthen his position by preaching the jihad against the northern Christians, little troubled by the fact that Christian mercenaries sometimes served in his forces. At one time or another he ravaged every major part of Christian territory save Navarre, with whose ruling dynasty he was allied by marriage. No ruler since the original conquest had inflicted such heavy damage on Christian Hispania. Moreover, at the very end of the century his son, Abdul-Malik, restored Cordoban authority over the northwest corner of the Maghreb, of which the city of Fez was the center. Al-Mansur died in 1002 at the height of power, exhausted by his triumphant exertions. He was succeeded by Abdul-Malik, who quickly obtained from the impotent Hisham the same plenary authority held by his invincible father. Abdul-Malik survived his father by only six years, however, dying in 1008, possibly assassinated.

The Amirid dictatorship wielded by al-Mansur and Abdul-Mahk from 976/981 to 1008 had raised the caliphate to the pinnacle of its military power, yet sowed within it the seeds of its political destruction. [28] For one thing, the dictatorship fatally weakened the principle of political legitimacy. Al-Andalus had always been difficult to rule, relying on both forceful leadership and administration and the legitimate authority of the Ummayad dynasty. In the long run, the dictatorship supplied force alone; it replaced the dynasty, yet could not develop a new principle of legitimate descent from Mohammed. By the tenth century Shiite doctrines in the Muslim orient had tried to establish a new principle of legitimacy on the basis of divinely appointed leaders, imams, who were nominal descendants of the Prophet and were held to enjoy divinely delegated charismatic authority. But the Amirids could claim no such descent from Mohammed. Appeals to the jihad proved insufficient to bolster what was eventually revealed as a purely opportunistic military regime. Traditional relations between the regions were disrupted, and replaced with purely military bonds.

Breakup of the Caliphate 1008-1031

Soon after the death of the second Amirid, the political unity and authority of the caliphate collapsed altogether. Once the legitimate succession had been interrupted it was never successfully restored. Many regions of Al-Andalus were resentful of their treatment under the dictatorship and refused to heed new leaders in Córdoba. The feckless Hisham was deposed in 1009, briefly restored the following year, then deposed again. Altogether, over a period of twenty-three years, six relatives of the Ummayads and three members of a rival, half-Berber family disrupted the throne. The slave pretorians functioned as a powerful independent faction and the bands of Berber mercenaries who had become more numerous during the preceding half-century usurped power in local districts. Regional Arab oligarchs and clans withdrew into local exclusivism, and the state system soon dissolved. Córdoba was wracked by demagogy, riots, and pillaging, while the educated and wealthy fled. In 1010 the city was sacked by a Catalan expedition brought in by Muslim dissidents at Toledo.

Had a leader as resolute and resourceful as Abd-al-Rahman III or al-Mansur emerged, he might have been able to restore caliphal authority. As it was, the caliphate had been unable to institutionalize political unity in the face of geographic obstacles, ethnic diversity, class divisions, and a persistent spirit of localism. The idea of Muslim unity had little currency, for Cordoban power in the tenth century had been based largely on political, not religious, standards and values. Nor did the small Christian states of the north seem very [29] threatening in the early eleventh century; united defense of the faith was not an issue. Rather than undergo the Amirid experience again, the regions almost unanimously preferred to pull apart. The localism and factionalism that had proved an almost insuperable obstacle for the Visigothic monarchy also undermined the caliphate, and its official end was finally declared by a group of local leaders meeting in Córdoba in 1031. In the former capital it was replaced by a local government of notables ruling only the greater Córdoba district.

The Taifa Kingdoms

After the collapse of the caliphate, political power coalesced around local leaders, oligarchies, or ethnic groups and coalitions in the principal urban economic centers of Al-Andalus. Nearly all the first overlords were local commanders and notables who had achieved power through the political and military network created by al-Mansur. The result was a series of about thirty regional taifa (local faction) kingdoms that divided up approximately the southern 75 percent of the peninsula. Some of the taifas, chiefly Seville, Granada, Badajoz, Valencia, Toledo, and Zaragoza, quickly developed into fairly strong regional emirates or principalities, dominating large areas of the surrounding countryside and devouring their weaker neighbors. The taifas were typically governed by local dynasties of Arab aristocrats or local Berber military factions, but power was sometimes disputed by a variety of heterogeneous claimants: Arab oligarchs, Berber mercenaries or immigrants, the "Andalusian" or ordinary Hispano-Muslim majority, and other mercenaries or forces of slave pretorians. Political transition went most smoothly in border districts dominated by military leaders. In the Andalusian interior quarreling was more protracted.

The taifas managed to preserve most of the economic achievements of Al-Andalus and often to develop them further. Some of their capitals reached a greater level of prosperity and sophistication in the eleventh century than any towns under the caliphate save Córdoba. Hence the collapse of the Hispano-Muslim state did not bring the collapse of Hispano-Muslim culture.

Indeed, the famous "high culture" of Muslim Hispania, while building on the achievements of the tenth-century caliphate, was mainly a product of the new scholarship and writing of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The same was true of the most enduring creations of Hispano-Muslim art and architecture. It was during the taifa and the subsequent Almoravid period that the popular Hispanic song [30] and verse forms--the muwashahas and zéjels--were formally incorporated into written literature and subsequently gained a vogue in Islamic art.

A striking and dominant characteristic of Hispano-Muslim literature was its essential materialism and hedonism. Love lyrics and erotic poetry in Al-Andalus often surpassed those of the middle East, religious literature and mystical verse were rather poorly developed. The society's religion remained hyperorthodox, but it did not lead to a high religious culture in literature or theology. There were few new religious ideas in Al-Andalus.
The taifa kingdoms and their successors were the late blooming of Muslim Hispania's Indian Summer. Wracked by incessant factionalism, they divided and dissipated their civic and military energies. When the military balance in the peninsula began to change in the middle of the eleventh century, the taifas could not defend themselves in regional isolation and were destroyed one by one. The dissolution of the caliphate had been the political prelude to the political and military decline of all of Al-Andalus.

Parallel between the Caliphate and the Later Spanish Empire

There are certain intriguing parallels between the circumstances and historical patterns of tenth-century Al-Andalus and sixteenth-century Spain. Both empires were launched, as is customarily the case with expansionist systems, before their respective societies had reached their fullest cultural development. Both emphasized imperial expansion and foreign issues to the detriment of internal problems. Neither achieved a fully integrated civic entity: the Umayyad caliphate was not effectively integrated, and the Habsburg monarchy was pluralistic, revealing centrifugal tendencies. Both strongly emphasized religious issues in mobilizing for expansion; religious orthodoxy was later stressed by both in their periods of political decline. The renewed assertion of reorganized military power marked the last generation of strong government and the prelude to civic decline (compare al-Mansur and Olivares). The full flowering of Andalusi culture came after the collapse of the caliphate; that of Habsburg Spain, at least in esthetics, after the apogee of politico-military power under Felipe II. A major difference between the two was that the economic prosperity of Al-Andalus survived the passing of the caliphate. Seventeenth-century Spain exhausted its economy in war; the Muslim taifas never organized the military strength that their economies could have supported.

Bibliography for Chapter II

[335] The first critical comprehensive study of Al-Andalus was Reinhardt Dozy, Histoire des musulmans d'Espagne, 711-1110 (Leiden, 1861; Eng. tr., London, 1913). Dozy's work has been extended and corrected by E. Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l'Espagne musulmane, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Paris, 1950-53), which covers only the years through 1031. Lévi-Provençal has treated the apex of Al-Andalus in L'Espagne musulmane au Xme siécle (Paris, 1932). A useful brief survey in English has been provided by W. Montgomery Watt, A History of Islamic Spain (Edinburgh, 1965). On the events of the eighth century, see the last part of Harold Livermore's The Origins of Spain and Portugal (London, 1971).

James T. Monroe has written a stimulating analysis, Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (Leiden, 1970). C. Sánchez Albornoz, ed., La España musulmana, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1946), provides accounts of major aspects of the entire period. Cultural onentalization and its sources are examined in Mahmud Ali Makki, Ensayo sobre las aportaciones orientales en la España musulmana (Madrid, 1968). The most up-to-date general study of the Mozarabs is Isidro de las Cagigas, Los mozárabes, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1947-48). E. P. Colbert, The Martyrs of Córdoba (850-859) (Washington, D.C., 1962), presents a revised interpretation of the major incident of Mozarab history.

There are cogent insights on Andalusi culture in the work of the leading twentieth-century Spanish Arabist, Miguel Asín Palacios, Obras escogidas, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1946-48). Henri Terrasse, Islam d'Espagne (Paris, 1958), deals mainly with art and architecture. A general account of the remarkable development of science in Al-Andalus will be found in J. A. Sánchez Pérez, La ciencia árabe en la Edad Media (Madrid, 1954). Rodolfo Gil Benumeya, Marruecos andaluz (Madrid, 1942), discusses interaction between Al-Andalus and Morocco.

[Freebooter]

A History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter Three
The Early Christian Principalities and the Expansion of Asturias-León

[31] The real dividing line between the Roman and medieval worlds came not with the Barbarian invasions of the fifth century but with the Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. This interpretation, known to historians as the Pirenne Thesis, is more applicable to the history of the Hispanic peninsula than to that of any other part of western Europe. The historically enduring Hispanic kingdoms were those created in the aftermath of the Muslim conquest of most of the peninsula. The eight-century reconquest that followed was an historic enterprise without parallel in human history. Elsewhere invading forces and cultures have either been quickly repelled and eliminated or else as in Russia accepted as overlords by the native population. Exotic forces, once firmly implanted, have been absorbed by or have transformed the autochthonous culture. In Hispania, invading Muslim society could not be simply defeated and rejected, and much less could it be absorbed. Yet it was not completely accepted, either, and resistance by small independent groups of the indigenous population was maintained for centuries, becoming the major conditioning factor in the Hispanic cultures, until finally the Muslims had been completely defeated, subjugated, and ultimately expelled from the peninsula.

It should be remembered that the resistance of that minority of the population which remained Christian and independent was not inspired [32] by any racial antagonism between Hispano-Christians and Berber-Arab Muslims. For that matter, after a generation or so the great majority of Muslims were Hispanic converts. Hence the antagonism was essentially cultural and religious.

Origins of the Kingdom of Asturias

The only parts of the peninsula relatively untouched by the Muslim invasion were the mountainous regions of the far north in the Pyrenean and Cantabrian ranges. These areas had never been fully integrated into either of the preceding Hispanic political communities, Roman or Visigothic. The native Cantabrian and Basque populations stoutly resisted outside domination, though the Cantabrians had been partially Romanized and had reached a modus vivendi with the Visigoths. Small groups of native Cantabrians and Hispano-Visigoths resisted Muslim dominion in the more inaccessible parts of Asturias and the eastern Cantabrians (the latter, somewhat shakily organized as the duchy of Cantabria under the Visigoths, roughly corresponded to the modern province of Santander). About the year 718 they recognized as leader a warrior named Pelayo, apparently a Visigothic aristocrat. Pelayo's stronghold lay in the Picos de Europa district of eastern Asturias, near the center of the greater Cantabrian range. In 722 his followers ambushed and destroyed a Muslim attack force below the mountain of Covadonga, giving the Christians their first clear-cut victory. After the death of Pelayo (737) and of his son Fáfila (739), the military leaders of Asturias and Cantabria elected as successor Pelayo's son-in-law Alfonso, the son of the late Visigothic duke of Cantabria. He subsequently became known to history as Alfonso I (739-757), first regular ruler of the nascent kingdom of Asturias.

[33] The Muslim governors of the peninsula did not make an all-out effort to occupy the northern ranges. The number of Muslim fighting men was at first small, and operations against irregulars in mountainous terrain were extremely difficult, largely nullifying the Arabs' technological advantage in the open field. Furthermore, the few people living in the Pyrenean and Cantabrian ranges were economically and culturally backward. They had little to offer a conqueror and were scarcely worth the price, particularly when the most prosperous, cultured, and urbanized areas of the south and east had been occupied so easily. Moreover, after the first decade, the Muslim invaders were sorely distracted by their own internal quarrels, which gave the Christian resistance in the north further relief.

Under the leadership of Pelayo, the Asturians had been exclusively on the defensive. The first counteroffensive was begun by Alfonso I, taking advantage of the Muslim civil war between Arabs and Berbers that raged after 740, and of the great famine of 748-753, which temporarily weakened Muslim power and caused many of the Berber immigrants who had occupied parts of the northwest to leave. Alfonso's small forces, stiffened with modest cavalry detachments, descended from the mountains and raided parts of the Duero valley, killing or enslaving the small garrisons of Berber soldiers, liberating the Mozarabs, and in many cases moving them from the indefensible lowlands back into the hill country. With this and other immigration, the Asturo-Cantabrian hills acquired a slightly larger population. In the meantime, much of the Duero valley below Asturias, already hard hit by the famine of mid-century, was devastated and depopulated, turned into a thinly peopled no-man's-land between Christians and Muslims for the next century and more, forming something of a shield behind which the small kingdom of Asturias was able to forge its own institutions.

Apparently there was substantial immigration into Asturias and Galicia during the eighth and ninth centuries. This augmented the human and cultural resources of the small kingdom and enabled a distinctly institutionalized monarchy to form a nucleus of strength around its capital, first in the mountain village of Cangas de Onis, then in the town of Oviedo.

The new kingdom was ethnically heterogeneous. Its original inhabitants were a complex of Hispano-Visigoths (and Hispano-Suevi in Galicia), Hispano-Roman Galicians with strong Celtic residues, native Cantabrians and Basques, Mozarab immigrants from Al-Andalus, and a few small groups of Berber captives. Pre-Roman ethnic identities had still not been fully erased, and local or regional differences were strongly felt. In some cases they were reaffirmed or accentuated in the anti-Muslim resistance and the process of reconquest [34] and resettlement that followed. The only unifying factors in the early years of the kingdom were the crown, the church, and above all the frontier, for it was common determination to resist Muslim domination that brought together the diverse population of Asturias.

Though the rudeness of life in the early centuries of Asturias-León may sometimes have been exaggerated, the society was simple and backward compared with areas of Al-Andalus, France, and Italy. Thrown back on the least-developed regions of the peninsula, medieval Hispano-Christian society began under the burden of a formidable lag in social and economic achievement. Rural communities were largely self-sufficient and lived mostly by herding sheep and cattle. The moist, hilly, nonfertile land did not encourage cultivation, and crops were limited. There were scarcely any skilled workers, and only simple clothing and rudimentary weapons and tools were produced. Society was completely rural; no city worthy of the name developed in greater Asturias for nearly two hundred years. During that period trade and commerce were extremely slight, and though some money was available, nearly all of it came from outside; no coins were minted by the kings of Asturias.

Formation of the Pyrenean Counties

Farther east, autonomous nuclei of Hispanic people survived in the interior valleys of the Pyrenees throughout the eighth century. Their numbers were slightly increased by Christian immigration from the south, and they were to some extent sheltered by the mountainous terrain. Yet their population was small, even compared with the kingdom of Asturias, and at first they were obliged to come to terms with Muslim authorities, accepting a kind of tributary status. The Pyrenees lay astride the route of Muslim expansion into western Europe, and because the northeastern part of the peninsula was more urbanized and productive than the northwest and also more Mediterranean and warm, it drew greater attention from the Muslims. All the main cities in the northeast--Zaragoza, Pamplona, Tarragona, Barcelona, Lérida, Gerona--were occupied directly, and the more southerly of them were soon in process of Islamization. Facing heavy military pressure and lacking any buffer zone, the small Hispanic population of the Pyrenees was at first completely hemmed into the mountain area.

As the Muslims had moved up into the peninsula, a number of Visigoths and lower-class Hispani had crossed the Pyrenees into Septimania. Though the Muslims established a tenuous subordination of Septimania in their destructive raids between 718 and 732, they [35] were unable to extend their control permanently beyond the Pyrenees for reasons discussed in the foregoing chapter.

Frankish counterattacks from the north, followed by the outbreak of civil war among the Muslims, quickly altered the balance of power. After 742, part of Septimania renounced its tributary status, though the remaining Gothic overlords in Septimania sometimes preferred distant association with Córdoba to Frankish domination. In 756 Narbonne, the largest town in the region, acknowledged the sovereignty of the Frankish monarchy, which soon incorporated all the territory down to the Pyrenees. Charlemagne attempted to roll back the Muslim frontier by extending a Frankish protectorate over northeast Hispania at the behest of anti-Umayyad Muslim dissidents. In 778 a Frankish expedition against Zaragoza failed, but in 785 the Christian inhabitants of Gerona, in the northeastern corner of the peninsula, accepted Frankish suzerainty. In a series of limited campaigns fought between 785 and 811, Franks occupied and fortified the strongpoints of the southern Pyrenean foothills. The eastern and central Pyrenean regions were then organized on the Frankish principle into six counties -- Urgel, Pallars, Barcelona (seized in 801), Ribagorza, Sobrarbe, and Aragón -- under the Frankish monarchy.

The counties of the Pyrenees were more intimately associated with the culture and institutions of the rest of western Europe than was the semi-isolated kingdom of Asturias on the other side of the peninsula. Development of a semi-feudal political structure based on Frankish models, military reliance on Frankish assistance, the religious influence of Caroli