Abd al-Rahman I Founds the Emirate of Córdoba
A surviving Umayyad prince reached Spain in 755 and founded a state that lasted 275 years. The Abbasid revolution of 750 had destroyed the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus and killed almost the entire family, reportedly at a banquet to which they were invited under safe conduct. Abd al-Rahman was about nineteen, escaped by swimming the Euphrates, and spent five years crossing North Africa with a price on his head, protected by his mother's Berber relatives. He landed in Spain in 755, where the Muslim territory conquered forty years earlier was in the hands of quarrelling Arab and Berber factions, and beat the governor outside Córdoba in 756. He then declined to claim the caliphate, styling himself emir, which left the religious question open and the political one settled. The Abbasid caliph is said to have called him the falcon of the Quraysh. What his dynasty built at Córdoba became the largest city in western Europe, with paved and lit streets, running water, some seventy libraries, and a Great Mosque begun in 785 on the site of a church whose Christian half was bought rather than seized. Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars worked there, and the translations made in Spain carried Aristotle, medicine and mathematics into Latin Europe. Abd al-Rahman III took the title of caliph in 929. The state fragmented into small kingdoms in 1031. He also planted a date palm from Syria in his garden at Córdoba and wrote a poem to it about exile, which survives. It is the earliest personal verse by a ruler of al-Andalus and is still taught in Spanish and Arabic schools. The emirate's relations with the Christian north were not a permanent crusade in either direction. Alliances ran across the religious line in every combination, Christian rulers took Muslim wives and Muslim rulers hired Christian troops, and the frontier was a zone of raiding, tribute and trade rather than a wall. The library assembled by al-Hakam II in the tenth century is said to have held some 400,000 volumes at a time when the largest in Latin Europe held a few hundred. Much of it was burned by a fundamentalist chief minister within a generation to demonstrate his orthodoxy, and the rest was dispersed when the caliphate collapsed in 1031.
- Year: 756 CE
- Category: Political
