Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 342, April, 1844

The mood of the Beni-Umeyyah, who appear in their eastern reign only as gloomy and execrated tyrants, had been chastened by their misfortunes; and the virtues of Abdurrahman Ad-dakhel (the enterer or conqueror, as he is generally termed by historians) were emulated by his descendants. As an illustration of the character of his son Hisham, it is related by Al-Makkari, that on hearing that the people of Cordova said, that his only motive in restoring the great bridge over the Guadalquivir was to pass over it himself when he went out hunting, he bound himself by a solemn vow never to cross it again as long as he lived; but the reign of this beneficent prince lasted only eight years. His immediate successors, Al-hakem I., and Abdurrahman II., were almost constantly engaged in warfare, either against their own rebellious relatives and revolted subjects,12 or against the Christians of Galicia, who, by the middle of the ninth century, had advanced their frontier to the Douro and repeatedly repulsed the armies sent against them from Cordova; but we find no mention in the writers cited by Al-Makkari, either of the annual tribute of a hundred virgins, popularly said to have been exacted by the Moslems, or of the great victory in 846, by which King Ramiro redeemed his country from this degrading badge of vassalage.13 So widely extended was the martial renown of the Umeyyan sovereigns, that in 839 a suppliant embassy was received by Abdurrahman II. from the Greek Emperor Tufilus, (Theophilus,) then hard pressed by the arms of the Abbaside khalif Al-mutassem, to solicit his aid against their common enemy; and, though Abdurrahman declined to embark in this distant and hazardous enterprise, a friendly intercourse long continued to be kept up between the courts of Cordova and Constantinople. The military establishment was fully organized, and placed on a formidable footing. Besides the troops quartered in the provinces and receiving regular pay, the haras or royal guard of Mamlukes, whose commander was one of the principal officers of the court, was augmented to 5000 horse and 1000 foot, all Christians or foreigners by birth, who occupied barracks close to the royal palace, and constantly mounted guard at the gates. The coast was also defended by a powerful fleet of armed vessels, of which each of the seaports fitted out its proportion, against the hostile attacks of the Abbaside lieutenauts of Africa, and the predatory descents of the Majus14 or Northmen; who, after laying waste with fire and sword the French and English coasts, had extended their ravages into the southern seas even to the Straits of Gibraltar. Lisbon and Seville were sacked by them in 844; and their piratical fleets continued for many years to carry pillage and bloodshed along the shores of the Peninsula.

The simplicity which the first Abdurrahman had uniformly preserved in his dress and habits of life, was soon exchanged by his successors for royal magnificence, rivaling that of the Abbaside court at Bagdad. It was Abdurrahman II. who, in a love quarrel with a beautiful inmate of his harem, caused the door of her chamber to be blocked up with bags of silver coin, to be removed on her relenting—"and she threw herself on her knees and kissed his feet; but," naïvely adds the Arab historian, "the money she kept, and no portion of it ever returned to the treasury." The same prince testified his esteem for the fine arts, by riding forth in state from his capital, to welcome the arrival of Zaryab, a far-famed musician, whom the jealousy of a rival had driven from Bagdad, and who founded in Spain a famous school of music; and in his convivial habits, and the freedom which he allowed to the companions of his festive hours, his character accords with that assigned in the Thousand and One Nights, though not in the page of history, to Haroon-Al-Rasheed. He died in 852, leaving the crown to his son Mohammed, whose reign, as well as those of his two sons Almundhir and Abdullah, who filled the throne in succession, is but briefly noticed by Al-Makkari, though Señor de Gayangos has supplied some valuable additional matter in his notes. The never-ceasing contest with the Christians was waged year by year; and the Princes of Oviedo, though often defeated in the plain and driven back into their mountains, when the forces of Andalus were gathered against them; yet surely, though slowly, gained ground against the provincial walis or viceroys. At the death of "Ordhun Ibn Adefunsh," (Ordoño I.) in 866, their territory extended from the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay to Salamanca; and the Moslem power was diverted by the rising strength of Navarre, where the Basques had shaken off the divided allegiance paid alternately to the court of Cordova and the Carlovingian rulers of France, and conferred on Garcia-Ramirez, in 857, an independent regal title. But these distant hostilities, as yet, little affected the tranquillity of the seat of government, which was more nearly interested in the frequent revolts of the provinces under its rule,15 and particularly by the rebellion of the Muwallads, (or descendants of Christian converts to Islam;) which, though the information extant respecting it is somewhat scanty, would appear to have been little less than a struggle between the two races for the dominion of Spain. One of the Muwallad chiefs, named Omar Ibn Hafssun,16 maintained for years a sort of semi-independence in the Alpuxarras. Al-mundhir fell in a skirmish against him in 888, only two years after his accession; and the insurrection, after continuing through the whole reign of Abdullah, was only finally suppressed under Abdurrahman III.

The system of government under these princes, appears to have remained in nearly the same form as it had been fixed by Abdurrahman I. The monarch nominated, during his lifetime, one of his sons as his successor; and the wali-al-ahd, or crown-prince, thus selected, received the oaths of allegiance of the dignitaries of the state, and was admitted to a share in the administration—a wise regulation, which prevented the recurrence of the civil wars arising from the ambition of princes of the blood, which had distracted the reigns of Al-hakem I. and Abdurrahman II. The council of the sovereign was composed of the vizirs or ministers of the different departments, the katibs or secretaries, and the chiefs of the law; the walis of the six great provinces into which Abdurrahman I. divided his empire,17 as well as the municipal chiefs of the principal cities were also summoned on emergencies:—while the prime minister, or highest officer of the state, in whom, as in the Turkish Vizir-Azem,18 the supreme direction of both civil and military affairs was vested, was designated the Hajib or chamberlain. Of the four orthodox19 sects of the Soonis, the one which predominated in Spain, as it does to the present day in Barbary and Africa, was that of Malik Ibn Ans, whose doctrines were introduced in the reign of Al-hakem I., by doctors who had received instruction from the lips of the Imam Malik himself at Mekka; and was formally established by that prince throughout his dominions. The judicial offices were filled, as in other Moslem countries, by Kadis, whose decisions were regulated by the precepts of the Koran: but we find no mention (even before the assumption of the titles of Imam and Khalif by Abdurrahman III.) of any supreme ecclesiastical chief like the Sheikh-al-Islam or Mufti of the Ottomans;—though there were chief justices analogous to the Turkish Kadileskers, who bore the title of Kadi-'l-jamah.

The royal revenue was derived from a variety of sources. The principal were, a land-tax amounting to one-tenth of the produce of the soil and the mines, the capitation-tax paid by the Jews and Christians, and the fifth of the spoil taken from the enemy—an enormously productive item in a time of constant warfare—besides a duty of two and a half per cent on all exports and imports. These were the legitimate dues of the crown, sanctioned by the Koran; but the splendid court maintained by the later sovereigns of Cordova, their lavish expenditure in building, and their large military and naval establishments, often compelled them to have recourse to irregular methods of raising money, by forced loans and by duties laid on different articles of food, in direct violation of the Moslem law. The amount raised by all these means varied greatly at different periods. Under Abdurrahman II., the whole direct revenue is said not to have exceeded 1,000,000 of gold dinārs:—but the royal fifths, and other extraordinary sources of income, appear not to have been included in this estimate:—and a century later, under the third and greatest prince of that name, we are told, on the authority of the biographer Ibn Khallekan, that "the revenues of Andalus amounted to 5,480,000 gold dinārs, collected from taxes," (it is elsewhere said from the land-tax:) besides 765,000 derived from markets—exclusive also of the royal fifth of the spoil, and the capitation-tax levied on Christians and Jews living in the Moslem dominions, the amount of which is said to have equaled all the rest. An annual sum of equal amount, reckoning the dinār at ten shillings, had never in the history of the world been raised in a territory of the same extent, and probably equaled the united incomes of all the Christian princes in Europe—if we except the revenue of the Greek Emperor, it certainly far exceeded them. "Of this vast income," Ibn Khallekan continues, "one-third was appropriated to the payment of the army, another third was deposited in the royal coffers to cover the expenses of the household, and the remainder was spent yearly in the construction of Az-zahra and such other buildings as were erected under his reign." This tripartite allotment of the revenue is alluded to under several reigns: the expenses of administration and the salaries of the civil functionaries were included under the second head; and the third portion was, in ordinary case, reserved "to repel invasions and meet emergencies."

The prince under whom the vast revenue thus stated is said to have been collected, ascended the throne on the death of his grandfather Abdullah, in the 300th year of the Hejra, and the 912th of the Christian era:—and his reign, of more than fifty lunar years, saw the power and splendour of the Umeyyan dynasty attain its zenith. For some years after his accession, he headed his armies in person against the Christians and the partizans of Ibn Hafssun, who still continued in arms: but the severe defeat which he received in 939 at Simaneas, near Zamora, (called by Moslem writers the battle of Al-handik,) from Ramiro II. of Leon, disgusted him with active warfare; and he deputed the command of his armies to his generals and the princes of the blood, who, in annual campaigns, so effectually kept the Christians within their limits, that little territorial acquisition was made by them during his reign; while the voluntary adhesion of the Berber tribes, after the overthrow of the Edrisite dynasty in 941 by the arms of the Fatimite khalifs, gave him almost unresisted possession of great part of Fez and Morocco. The defeat of Al-handik, and the treason and execution in 950, of his elder son Abdullah, (whom disappointment at being postponed to his younger brother in the succession, had led to conspire against his father's life,) were almost the only clouds which dimmed the continual sunshine of his prosperity—and his grandeur was enhanced in the eyes of his subjects, by the assumption of the highest prerogatives of Islam. Hitherto the princes of his line had contented themselves with the style of Amirs of the Moslems, and Beni-Kholaifah or "sons of the Khalifs;" but in 929, "seeing the state of weakness and degradation to which the khalifate of the Beni-Abbas at Bagdad had been reduced," he no longer hesitated to adopt the titles of Imam and Khalif, with the appellation of An-nasir Ledinillah, (defender of the religion of God,) under which he is generally mentioned by historians.

The writers from whom Al-Makkari has drawn his materials, exhaust their powers of language in panegyrics on the unrivaled magnificence of the court of Abdurrahman; which was thronged both by men of letters whom the distracted state of the East had driven thither for refuge, and by ambassadors, not only from the princes of Islam, but from "Hoto the king of the Alaman," (Otho the Great of Germany,) the king of France, and numerous other Christian potentates. The reception of these missions was usually signalized by a gorgeous display of the pomp of the court—and the ceremonial on the arrival in 949 of the envoys of Constantine VII. of Constantinople, is described at length from Ibn Hayyan. "The vaulted hall in his palace of Az-zahra, which he had fixed upon as the place where he would receive their credentials, was beautifully decorated, and a throne glittering with gold and sparkling with gems raised in the midst. To the right of the throne stood five of the khalif's sons, to the left three others, one being absent from illness. Next to them were the vizirs, each at his post on the right or left of the throne. Then came the hajibs or chamberlains, the sons of the vizirs, the freed slaves of the khalif, and the wakils or officers of his household. The court of the palace had been strewn with the richest carpets; and silken awnings of the most gorgeous description had every where been thrown over the doors and arches. Presently the ambassadors entered the hall, and were struck with awe at the magnificence displayed, and the power of the Sultan before whom they stood. They advanced a few steps, and presented the letter of their master, Constantine son of Leo, Lord of Constantinah the Great, (Constantinople.) It was written on sky-blue paper, and the characters were of gold. Within the letter was an enclosure, the ground of which was also sky-blue like the first, but the characters were of silver: it was likewise written in Greek, and contained a list of the presents which the Lord of Constantinah sent to the Khalif. On the letter was a seal of gold of the weight of four mithkals, on one side of which was a likeness of the Messiah, and on the other those of the King Constantine and his son. The letter was enclosed in a bag of silver cloth, over which was a case of gold, with a portrait of King Constantine admirably executed on stained glass. All this was enclosed in a case covered with cloth of silk and gold tissue. On the first line of the Inwan or introduction was written, 'Constantine and Romanin, (Romanus,) believers in the Messiah, kings of the Greeks;' and in the next, 'To the great and exalted in dignity and power, as he most deserves, the noble in descent, Abdurrahman the khalif, who rules over the Arabs of Andalus: may God preserve his life!'" The conclusion of this splendid ceremony was, however, less imposing than the commencement; for a learned Faquih, who had been appointed to harangue the envoys in a set speech, was so overawed by the grandeur around him, that "his tongue clove to his mouth, he could not aticulate a single word, and fell senseless to the ground" Nor did his successor, "who was reputed to be a prince in rhetoric, and an ocean of language," fare much better; for though he began fluently, "all of a sudden he stopped for want of a word which did not occur to him, and thus put an end to his peroration." In this awkward dilemma, the reputation of the Andalusian rhetoricians was saved by Mundhir Ibn Said, who not only poured forth a torrent of impromptu eloquence, but delivered a long ex-tempore poem, "which to this day stands unequalled; and Abdurrahman was so pleased, that he appointed him preacher and Imam to the great mosque; and some time after, the office of Kadi-'l-jamah, or supreme judge, being vacant, he named him to that high post, and made him besides reader of the Khoran to the mosque of Az-zahra."

The palace of Az-zahra, where the eyes of the Greeks were dazzled by this costly pageant, is one of the familiar names of the romance of Spanish history:—it is known to all the world how Abdurrahman, to gratify the capricious fancy of a beautiful and beloved mistress, expended millions, and tasked the labour of thousands, in erecting on the plain beyond Cordova a fairy palace and city which might bear her name and be her own. And like a fairy fabric did Az-zahra vanish; for so utterly was it destroyed, during the wars and civil tumults attending the fall of the race which raised it, that at the present day not a stone can be found, not a vestige even of the foundations traced, to show where it once stood; and all that we know of this "wondrous freak of magnificence" is drawn from the glowing accounts of contemporary writers, who saw it during the brief period of its glory. It is principally from Ibn Hayyan that Al-Makkari has copied the details of this marvellous structure, with its "15,000 doors, counting each flap or fold as one," all covered either with plates of iron, or sheets of polished brass; and its 4000 columns, great and small, 140 of which were presented by the Emperor of Constantinople, and 1013, mostly of green and rose-coloured marble, were brought from various parts of Africa. Among the principal ornaments were two fountains brought from Constantinople, "the larger of gilt bronze, beautifully carved with basso-relieve representing human figures,"—the smaller surrounded by twelve figures, made of red gold in the arsenal of Cordova: they were all ornamented with jewels, and the water poured out of their mouths. The famous fountain of quicksilver, which could be set in motion at pleasure, was placed in the Kasr-al-Kholaifa, or hall of the khalifs, "the roof and walls of which were of gold, and solid but transparent blocks of marble of various colours: on each side were eight doors fixed on arches of ivory and ebony, ornamented with gold and precious stones, and resting on pillars of variegated marble and transparent crystal:—and in the centre was fixed the unique pearl presented to An-nassir by the Greek Emperor." The mosque and baths attached to the palace were on a corresponding scale of magnificence: and the number of inmates, male and female, is said to have been not less than 20,000. The expenses of the establishment must have consumed the revenues of a kingdom, if we are to believe the statement, that 12,000 loaves of bread were daily allowed to feed the fish in the ponds! "But all this and more is recorded by orators and poets who have exhausted the mines of eloquence in the description,"—says Al-Makkari, who, after enlarging upon "the running streams, the luxuriant gardens, the stately buildings for the accommodation of the guards and high functionaries—the throngs of soldiers, pages, eunuchs, and slaves, attired in robes of silk and brocade, moving to and fro through its broad streets—and the crowds of judges, katibs, theologians, and poets, walking with becoming gravity through the spacious halls and ample courts of the palace,"—concludes with a burst of pious enthusiasm. "Praise be to God who allowed those contemptible creatures (mankind) to build such palaces, and to inhabit them as a recompense in this world, that the faithful might be stimulated to the path of virtue, by reflecting that the pleasures enjoyed by their owners were still very far from giving even a remote idea of those reserved for the true believers in paradise!"

"Abdurrahman," as Al-Makkari sums up his character, "has been described as the mildest and most enlightened of sovereigns. His meekness, generosity, and love of justice, became proverbial: none of his ancestors surpased him in courage, zeal for religion, and other virtues which constitute an able and beloved monarch. He was fond of science, and the patron of the learned, with whom he loved to converse.... We should never finish, were we to transcribe the innumerable anecdotes respecting him which are scattered like loose pearls over the writings of the Andalusian poets and historians,"—but as the "pearls" selected possess but little novelty in the illustration of the kingly virtues which they commemorate, we prefer to quote once more the oft-repeated legacy to posterity, in which this "Soliman of the West," as he was called by his contemporaries, confessed that, like his eastern prototype, he had found all his grandeur "but vanity and vexation of spirit."—"After his death a paper was found in his on handwriting, in which were noted those days he had spent in happiness and without any cause of sorrow, and they were found to amount to fourteen. O, man of understanding! consider and observe the small portion of happiness the world affords, even in the most enviable position! The khalif An-nasir, whose prosperity in mundane affairs became proverbial, had only fourteen days of undisturbed enjoyment during a reign of fifty years, seven months, and three days. Praise be given to him, the Lord of eternal glory and everlasting empire! There is no God but he!"

In the fulness of years and glory, Abdurrahman died of a paralytic stroke at Az-zahra, on the second or third of Ramadhan, A.H. 350, (Oct. 961,) and was succeeded, according to his previous nomination, by his son Al-hakem II., who assumed on this occasion the title of Al-mustanser-billah, (one who implores God's assistance.) This prince has been characterized, by one of the ablest of recent historians,20 as "one of those rare beings, who have employed the awful engine of despotism in promoting the happiness and intelligence of his species;" and who rivaled, "in his elegant tastes, appetite for knowledge, and munificent patronage, the best of the Medici:"—nor is this high praise undeserved. Though he more than once headed his armies in person, with success, against the Christians and Northmen, and maintained on public occasions the state and magnificence which had been introduced by his father, the toils of war and the pomp of royalty were alike alien to his inclinations, which had been directed from his earliest years to pursuits of literature and science. The library which he amassed is said by some writers to have amounted to the almost incredible number of 400,000 volumes: and such was his ardour in the collection of books, that even in Persia and other remote regions, the munificence which he exercised through agents employed for the purpose, secured him copies of forthcoming works even before their appearance in their own country. "He made Andalus a great market for the literary productions of every clime ... so that rich men in Cordova, however illiterate they might be, rewarded writers and poets with the greatest munificence, and spared neither trouble nor expense in forming libraries." Nor were these treasures of literature idly accumulated, at least by Al-hakem himself; for so vast and various was his reading, that there was scarcely one of his books (as we are assured by the historian Ibn'ul-Abbar) which was not enriched with remarks and annotations from his pen. "In the knowledge especially of history, biography, and genealogy, he was surpassed by no living author of his days: and he wrote a voluminous history of Andalus, in which was displayed such sound criticism, that whatever he related, as borrowed from more ancient sources, might be implicitly relied upon."

The reign of Al-hakem was the Augustan age of Andalusian literature; and besides the numerous learned men whom the fame of his father's and his own liberality, with the security of their rule, had attracted to Spain from other regions of Islam, we find in the pages of Al-Makkari an extensive list of native authors, principally in the departments of poetry, history, and philology, who are said to be "a few only of the most eminent who flourished during this reign"—but none of their names, however noted in their own day, are known in modern Europe. Nor was the gentler sex, as is usually the case in the lands of Islam, excluded from the general taste for letters; and one of our author's chapters is almost entirely filled with a catalogue of the poetesses who adorned Andalus at this and other periods of its history. One of these, Mariam or Mary, the daughter of Abu-Yakub Al-ansari, who rose into celebrity in the latter years of Al-hakem, appears to have been one of the earliest bas-bleus on record. Independent of her poetical talents, she gave lectures at her residence at Seville "in rhetoric and literature; which, united to her piety, virtue, and amiable disposition, gained her the affection of her sex, and procured her many pupils: she lived to old age, and died after the 400th year of the Hejra," (A.D. 1010.) The favourite study of the Moslems, the divinity and law of the Koran, was cultivated with especial zeal under a monarch who was himself a rigid observer of its ordinances; and various anecdotes are related by Al-Makkari of the extraordinary deference paid by Al-hakem to the eminent theologians who frequented his court. The Khalif himself "attended public worship every Friday, and distributed alms to the poor; he laid out large sums in the construction of mosques, hospitals, and colleges for youth;21 and being himself very strict in the observance of his religious duties, he enforced the precepts of the Sunnah (tradition) throughout his dominions." With this view, severe edicts were directed against the use of wine, which had become prevalent among the Andalusian Moslems; and Al-hakem was with difficulty restrained, by representations of the ruin which would be thus brought on the cultivators, from ordering the destruction of all the vines in his dominions. But the reign of this excellent and enlightened prince lasted only fifteen years; and at his death, (Sept. 976,) which was caused by the same malady that had proved fatal to his father, the glory of the house of Umeyyah expired.