Abd al-Rahman I
Abd al-Rahman I was a grandson of the caliph Hisham who escaped the Abbasid massacre of his family in 750 by swimming the Euphrates while his brother, who turned back on a promise of mercy, was killed on the bank, crossed North Africa for five years with a price on his head, landed in Spain in 755 with one servant, and in 756 took Córdoba and made it the capital of an independent Umayyad state that lasted, in one form or another, until 1031; the Abbasid caliph, told how he had done it, called him the Falcon of Quraysh. He was born in 731 near Damascus, the son of a Berber slave-woman from what is now Morocco, and it was her people who hid him as he went west. Al-Andalus was governed by a Syrian Arab faction whose enemies, the Yemeni Arabs and the Berbers, wanted a leader with a name. The Umayyad clients in Spain wrote to him in Africa, and he beat the governor Yusuf al-Fihri at the Guadalquivir in May 756 and entered Córdoba as emir. The thirty-two years that followed were spent surviving. The Abbasids sent a governor in 763, and Abd al-Rahman sent the man's head back to the caliph packed in salt with the black banner. The Berbers of the north rose, the Yemenis rose, the Fihrids rose, and Charlemagne came over the Pyrenees in 778 at the invitation of a rebel emir of Zaragoza and went home through Roncesvalles. He met each with an army of Berber and Slav mercenaries loyal to himself alone, which was the model his descendants kept. In 785 he began the Great Mosque of Córdoba on the site of a Visigothic church, with the columns of Roman buildings and the double arches that made it, and planted a garden at his villa outside the city with a palm from Syria for which he wrote a poem about exile that survives. He died in September 788 and was succeeded by his son Hisham; his great-great-great-grandson Abd al-Rahman III took the title of caliph in 929.
- Lived: 731 CE – 788 CE
- Nationality: Umayyad
- Roles: emir, monarch, founder
