Hisham II

Hisham II was caliph of Cordoba for most of thirty-five years and ruled for almost none of them, which is why the caliphate did not survive him. He succeeded his father al-Hakam II in 976 at eleven, and his mother Subh and the chamberlain Ibn Abi Amir - al-Mansur, Almanzor to the Christians - governed in his name. Al-Mansur then kept him there: the young caliph was walled into the palace of Madinat al-Zahira, screened from public business, proclaimed at Friday prayers and never seen, while al-Mansur conducted some fifty campaigns against the Christian north, sacked Santiago de Compostela and carried its bells to Cordoba, and passed his own office to his sons. The arrangement made al-Andalus the strongest power in the peninsula and hollowed out the institution it acted for. When the Amirid line collapsed in 1009 there was nothing behind it. Hisham was deposed, restored, deposed again, and disappeared in 1013 when Berber troops sacked Cordoba; several later pretenders claimed to be him. The fitna that followed broke the caliphate into the taifa kingdoms by 1031, and the Christian kingdoms spent the rest of the century taking tribute from them. Madinat al-Zahra, the palace city his father had built outside Cordoba, was sacked in the same collapse and left as ruins that are now a World Heritage site. Cordoba under his nominal reign was probably the largest city in Europe. The taifa kings who divided the inheritance were individually rich and militarily helpless, which is the condition that brought first the Almoravids and then the Almohads across from Morocco.

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