Abd al-Rahman III

Abd al-Rahman III inherited a disintegrating emirate at twenty-one and left the strongest state in western Europe. He became Umayyad emir of Córdoba in 912, when the authority of his house had shrunk to the city and its immediate surroundings, with rebel lords holding the rest of al-Andalus and the Christian kingdoms pressing from the north. He spent twenty years reducing the rebels one by one, the longest resistance being Umar ibn Hafsun's mountain strongholds. In 929 he took the title of caliph, which no ruler in the west had claimed, asserting equality with Baghdad and answering the rival Fatimid caliphate in North Africa. Under him Córdoba became the largest and richest city in Europe, with paved and lit streets, a library of enormous size, and a court that drew scholars, physicians and musicians from across the Mediterranean. He built the palace-city of Madinat al-Zahra outside the capital. His administration was deliberately cosmopolitan: Christians and Jews held high office, and his own physician and diplomat Hasdai ibn Shaprut was Jewish. He was defeated badly by the Christians at Simancas in 939 and did not lead an army in person again. He is quoted, probably apocryphally, as having counted fourteen days of pure happiness in a reign of half a century. He kept a standing army of Slavic and Berber mercenaries rather than relying on Arab tribal levies, which insulated him from the factionalism that had nearly destroyed the emirate. He also built a fleet that made Córdoba the leading naval power of the western Mediterranean. His grandson's regent al-Mansur later dismantled the political settlement he had built, and the caliphate collapsed within seventy years of his death.

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