Medieval Iberia Spain Routledge Encyclopedia Islam Jew Art History Religion Moor

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Seller: ancientgifts ✉️ (5,439) 100%, Location: Lummi Island, Washington, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 122658060071 Medieval Iberia Spain Routledge Encyclopedia Islam Jew Art History Religion Moor. The Encyclopedia covers the Hispanic kingdoms from 400A. D. to 1500A. D. and is interdisciplinary in scope with an emphasis on literature, language, history, arts, folklore, religion and science. Muslim and Jewish issues are also discussed.

“Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia” (Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages) by E. Michael Gerli (Editor).

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DESCRIPTION:  Hardcover with printed boards.  Publisher: Routledge (2002).  Pages: 950.  Size:  10¾ x 9¼ x 2 inches; 5½ pounds.  Summary: The first comprehensive A–Z reference to medieval Spain and Portugal, this groundbreaking work brings together some of the world’s leading medievalists to focus on the Iberian kingdoms from the fall of the Roman Empire to the aftermath of the Reconquista.  The 800-plus signed entries have been written by renowned specialists in the field, backed by an internationally distinguished board of associate editors. The wide-ranging contents encompass all topics of key relevance to the history, culture, and daily concerns of medieval Iberia, with interdisciplinary coverage including:

• Agriculture, industry, science, and technology.

• Details on history-making individuals, including kings and caliphs, queens, leading families, bishops, philosophers, warriors, and saints.

• Education and aspects of everyday experience, such as clothing, childhood, gender roles, and city life.

• Law, trade, and finance.

• Historical events and historiography.

• Literature, seminal literary works and movements, and studies of the diverse range of Iberian languages.

• Dance, music, painting, folklore, religion, philosophy, and more.

This unique encyclopedia takes in the entire spectrum of the Iberian peoples, providing in-depth entries on the vital role played by Muslims and Jews, as well as useful insights into their interactions with Catholic Spain and Portugal.  In the vast scope of its coverage, and in its authoritative, yet engaging treatment of the medieval Hispanic world, this new encyclopedia  is an invaluable tool for students, specialist researchers, and general readers alike.

• The first in-depth encyclopedia to concentrate on medieval Iberia.

• Over 800 entries on the medieval Hispanic world, from 400 A.D. through 1500 A.D.

• More than 200 contributors, including many of the world’s most respected medieval studies scholars.

• Editorial Board composed of renowned specialists in medieval history, art, literature, music, religion and philosophy, and other key fields.

• Comprehensive analytic index, thematic contents list, bibliography at end of all major entries.

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PUBLISHER REVIEWS: 

REVIEW:  Routledge is the world's leading academic publisher in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We publish thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide. Our current publishing program encompasses groundbreaking textbooks and premier, peer-reviewed research in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Built Environment. We have partnered with many of the most influential societies and academic bodies to publish their journals and book series. Readers can access tens of thousands of print and e-books from our extensive catalogue of titles. Routledge is a member of Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business.

REVIEW:  Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia contains more than 750 original entries contributed by a team of international scholars. The Encyclopedia covers the Hispanic kingdoms from 400A.D. to 1500A.D. and is interdisciplinary in scope with an emphasis on literature, language, history, arts, folklore, religion and science. Muslim and Jewish issues are also discussed. The Encyclopedia is a ready reference for all scholars, students and general readers researching medieval Iberia. Entries are arranged alphabetically and each entry is followed by a bibliography.

REVIEW:  As the first comprehensive reference to the vital world of medieval Spain, this unique volume focuses on the Iberian kingdoms from the fall of the Roman Empire to the aftermath of the Reconquista. The nearly 1,000 signed A-Z entries, written by renowned specialists in the field, encompass topics of key relevance to medieval Iberia, including people, events, works, and institutions, as well as interdisciplinary coverage of literature, language, history, arts, folklore, religion, and science. Also providing in-depth discussions of the rich contributions of Muslim and Jewish cultures, and offering useful insights into their interactions with Catholic Spain, this comprehensive work is an invaluable tool for students, scholars, and general readers alike.

REVIEW:  E. Michael Gerli, Commonwealth Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia, is a specialist in medieval and early modern Iberian literature and culture. Author of over 100 publications, Dr. Gerli serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals and presses in the US and abroad. He is a recipient of the Hispanic Review’s Edwin B. Williams Prize, and the Modern Language Association’s Division of Medieval Spanish Language and Literature’s John K. Walsh Prize. His Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction.

Acknowledgments.

Publisher's Note.

Arabic Transliteration.

Contributors.

Alphabetical List of Entries; Entries A to Z; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z.

Index.

PROFESSIONAL REVIEWS: 

REVIEW:  "Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia" is the eighth in the remarkable collection, Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, that Routledge has been publishing for several years. Edited by E. Michael Gerli, the volume tries to condense in 920 pages the most important facts, personages, and elements that contributed to the problematic culture of the Iberian Peninsula between the years 470 and 1500. These include the disintegration of the Roman administrative structures, the creation of the Visigothic State, the Islamic invasion, the immediate process of formation and consolidation of the four great Christian kingdoms of Portugal, Navarre, Aragón and Castile, material on the Islamic kingdoms in the south of the Peninsula, as well as information on religious minorities and the ability of Jews, Christians and Muslims to live together. Compiling this book must have been a tremendous task because of the wealth and the variety of the sources-- institutional, popular, religious, civil, literary, legislative-- which are absolutely overflowing in a territory that enjoyed the greatest cultural plurality in all medieval Europe.

The Encyclopedia reveals a primary interest in literature, music, and their history. This makes sense given that some of coordinators and contributors are prestigious philologists like Pedro M. Cátedra and Alan D. Deyermond and musicologists like Robert Stevenson. In addition, there are entries dedicated to the Islamic and Jewish peninsular cultures, and their representatives, codices, and texts. In all these cases, the authors of different entries have taken care to create a complete catalogue of the most varied samples of literature, philosophy, policy, thought and music from the Iberian Peninsula, as well as of their authors, whatever their religious creed. Moreover, the contributors have investigated the new historiographic tendencies and the cultural phenomena which produced those works, using the literary works and biographies not only as isolated elements of study, but also as sources for a history of the medieval Iberian culture.

In spite of the good opinion that Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia deserves, I must emphasize an important caveat as to the bibliographical update. Iberian medievalism has enjoyed a recent and outstanding renovation, made as much by Spanish researchers as by Hispanists worldwide. While the articles dedicated to the history of literature reflect this bibliographical renovation, it does not happen the same in the fields of the history of mentalities or material culture, since the revisions that they have been put under political history, social history, the history of art or archaeology from its more traditional variants have been excluded from the point of view of the bibliography. For example, in the encyclopedia the problems that are involved with concepts like "mozarabismo" and the "mudejarismo" lack discussion of the state of the question that the new historiographic tendencies have proposed on the matter.

Finally, it is possible to emphasize the customized treatment that is devoted to the most important personages of the history of culture in the Iberian Peninsula. A high number of them enjoys its own voice, which also happens with the social, political and cultural phenomena, without leaving out gender history. With respect to the history of institutions, the more outstanding monarchs, noble or ecclesiastics, each religious phenomenon or sociopolitical institutions have their respective entries, although they fall down a bit regarding other such decisive elements in the historical development of medieval Iberia as the evolution of the episcopate and the cathedral chapters. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that "Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia" is an in-depth work, of general interest for the scientific community and that also for the more general public it is an excellent approach to the medieval culture of the Iberian peninsula. [The Medieval Review].

REVIEW:  A valuable and comprehensive reference work...Stresses areas not well covered in other reference works...This work, which has no competitor, provides students and scholars with a useful starting point to begin their research...Essential. All libraries. [Choice].

REVIEW:  An exceptionally balanced survey of a complex society over an extended period of time...Highly recommended for academic libraries. [Gale Reference Reviews].

READER REVIEWS: 

REVIEW:  This is the quintessential source for the history of Medieval Iberia. Dense but readable. Excellent essays, comprehensive illustrations, you’ll not find a more complete reference in any other single source anywhere.  If you’re interested in Medieval history, this is essential.

ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND: 

REVIEW:  The Iberian Peninsula, also known as Iberia, is located in the southwest corner of Europe. The peninsula is principally divided between Portugal and Spain, comprising most of their territory. It also includes Andorra and a small part of France along the peninsula's northeastern edge, as well as Gibraltar on its south coast, a small peninsula that forms an overseas territory of the United Kingdom. The English word Iberia was adapted from the use of the Ancient Greek word (Ibēría) by Greek geographers under the rule of the Roman Empire to refer to what is known today in English as the Iberian Peninsula. At that time, the name did not describe a single political entity or a distinct population of people. Strabo's Iberia was delineated from Keltikē (Gaul) by the Pyrenees and included the entire land mass southwest (he says "west") of there.

The ancient Greeks reached the Iberian Peninsula, which they had heard of from the Phoenicians, by voyaging westward in the Mediterranean. Hecataeus of Miletus was the first known to use the term Iberia, which he wrote about circa 500 B.C. Herodotus of Halicarnassus says of the Phocaeans that "it was they who made the Greeks acquainted with...Iberia." According to Strabo, prior historians used Iberia to mean the country "this side of the Ibēros" as far north as the river Rhône in France, but currently they set the Pyrenees as the limit. Polybius respects that limit, but identifies Iberia as the Mediterranean side as far south as Gibraltar, with the Atlantic side having no name. Elsewhere he says that Saguntum is "on the seaward foot of the range of hills connecting Iberia and Celtiberia."

Strabo refers to the Carretanians as people "of the Iberian stock" living in the Pyrenees, who are distinct from either Celts or Celtiberians. According to Charles Ebel, the ancient sources in both Latin and Greek use Hispania and Hiberia as synonyms. The confusion of the words was because of an overlapping in political and geographic perspectives. The Latin word Hiberia, similar to the Greek Iberia, literally translates to "land of the Hiberians". This word was derived from the river Ebro, which the Romans called Hiberus. Hiber (Iberian) was thus used as a term for peoples living near the river Ebro. The first mention in Roman literature was by the annalist poet Ennius in 200 B.C. Virgil refers to the Ipacatos Hiberos ("restless Iberi") in his Georgics. The Roman geographers and other prose writers from the time of the late Roman Republic called the entire peninsula Hispania.

As they became politically interested in the former Carthaginian territories, the Romans began to use the names Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior for 'near' and 'far' Hispania. At the time Hispania was made up of three Roman provinces: Hispania Baetica, Hispania Tarraconensis, and Lusitania. Strabo says[8] that the Romans use Hispania and Iberia synonymously, distinguishing between the near northern and the far southern provinces. Whatever language may generally have been spoken on the peninsula soon gave way to Latin, except for that of the Vascones, which was preserved as a language isolate by the barrier of the Pyrenees.

The Iberian Peninsula has always been associated with the Ebro, Ibēros in ancient Greek and Ibērus or Hibērus in Latin. The association was so well known it was hardly necessary to state; for example, Ibēria was the country "this side of the Ibērus" in Strabo. Pliny goes so far as to assert that the Greeks had called "the whole of Spain" Hiberia because of the Hiberus River. The river appears in the Ebro Treaty of 226 B.C. between Rome and Carthage, setting the limit of Carthaginian interest at the Ebro. The fullest description of the treaty, stated in Appian, uses Ibērus. With reference to this border, Polybius states that the "native name" is Ibēr, apparently the original word, stripped of its Greek or Latin -os or -us termination.

The early range of these natives, which geographers and historians place from today's southern Spain to today's southern France along the Mediterranean coast, is marked by instances of a readable script expressing a yet unknown language, dubbed "Iberian." Whether this was the native name or was given to them by the Greeks for their residence on the Ebro remains unknown. Credence in Polybius imposes certain limitations on etymologizing: if the language remains unknown, the meanings of the words, including Iber, must also remain unknown. In modern Basque, the word ibar means "valley" or "watered meadow", while ibai[20] means "river", but there is no proof relating the etymology of the Ebro River with these Basque names.

The Iberian Peninsula has been inhabited for at least 1.2 million years as remains found in the sites in the Atapuerca Mountains demonstrate. Among these sites is the cave of Gran Dolina, where six hominin skeletons, dated between 780,000 and one million years ago, were found in 1994. Experts have debated whether these skeletons belong to the species Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, or a new species called Homo antecessor. Around 200,000 B.C., during the Lower Paleolithic period, Neanderthals first entered the Iberian Peninsula. Around 70,000 B.C., during the Middle Paleolithic period, the last glacial event began and the Neanderthal Mousterian culture was established. Around 37,000 B.C. during the Upper Paleolithic, the Neanderthal Châtelperronian cultural period began. Emanating from Southern France, this culture extended into the north of the peninsula. It continued to exist until around 30,000 B.C., when Neanderthal man faced extinction.

About 40,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans entered the Iberian Peninsula from Southern France. Here, this genetically homogeneous population (characterized by the M173 mutation in the Y chromosome), developed the M343 mutation, giving rise to Haplogroup R1b, still the most common in modern Portuguese and Spanish males. On the Iberian Peninsula, modern humans developed a series of different cultures, such as the Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures, some of them characterized by the complex forms of the art of the Upper Paleolithic.

During the Neolithic expansion, various megalithic cultures developed in the Iberian Peninsula. An open seas navigation culture from the east Mediterranean, called the Cardium culture, also extended its influence to the eastern coasts of the peninsula, possibly as early as the 5th millennium BC. These people may have had some relation to the subsequent development of the Iberian civilization.

In the Chalcolithic (about 3000 B.C.), a series of complex cultures developed that would give rise to the peninsula's first civilizations and to extensive exchange networks reaching to the Baltic, Middle East and North Africa. Around 2800 – 2700 B.C., the Beaker culture, which produced the Maritime Bell Beaker, probably originated in the vibrant copper-using communities of the Tagus estuary in Portugal and spread from there to many parts of western Europe.

Bronze Age cultures developed beginning around 1800 B.C., when the civilization of Los Millares was followed by that of El Argar. From this center, bronze technology spread to other cultures like the Bronze of Levante, South-Western Iberian Bronze and Las Cogotas. In the Late Bronze Age, the urban civilization of Tartessos developed in the area of modern western Andalusia, characterized by Phoenician influence and using the Southwest Paleohispanic script for its Tartessian language, not related to the Iberian language.

Early in the first millennium B.C., several waves of Pre-Celts and Celts migrated from Central Europe, thus partially changing the peninsula's ethnic landscape to Indo-European-speaking in its northern and western regions. In Northwestern Iberia (modern Northern Portugal, Asturias and Galicia), a Celtic culture developed, the Castro culture, with a large number of hill forts and some fortified cities. By the Iron Age, starting in the 7th century B.C., the Iberian Peninsula consisted of complex agrarian and urban civilizations, either Pre-Celtic or Celtic (such as the Lusitanians, Celtiberians, Gallaeci, Astures, Celtici and others), the cultures of the Iberians in the eastern and southern zones and the cultures of the Aquitanian in the western portion of the Pyrenees.

The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians successively settled along the Mediterranean coast and founded trading colonies there over a period of several centuries. Around 1100 BC, Phoenician merchants founded the trading colony of Gadir or Gades (modern day Cádiz) near Tartessos. In the 8th century B.C., the first Greek colonies, such as Emporion (modern Empúries), were founded along the Mediterranean coast on the east, leaving the south coast to the Phoenicians. The Greeks coined the name Iberia, after the river Iber (Ebro). In the sixth century B.C., the Carthaginians arrived in the peninsula while struggling with the Greeks for control of the Western Mediterranean. Their most important colony was Carthago Nova (modern-day Cartagena, Spain).

In 218 B.C., during the Second Punic War against the Carthaginians, the first Roman troops invaded the Iberian Peninsula; however, it was not until the reign of Augustus that it was annexed after two centuries of war with the Celtic and Iberian tribes and the Phoenician, Greek and Carthaginian colonies. The result was the creation of the province of Hispania. It was divided into Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior during the late Roman Republic, and during the Roman Empire, it was divided into Hispania Tarraconensis in the northeast, Hispania Baetica in the south and Lusitania in the southwest. Hispania supplied the Roman Empire with silver, food, olive oil, wine, and metal. The emperors Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, and Theodosius I, the philosopher Seneca the Younger, and the poets Martial and Lucan were born from families living on the Iberian Peninsula.

In the early fifth century A.D., Germanic peoples invaded the peninsula, namely the Suebi, the Vandals (Silingi and Hasdingi) and their allies, the Alans. Only the kingdom of the Suebi (Quadi and Marcomanni) would endure after the arrival of another wave of Germanic invaders, the Visigoths, who conquered all of the Iberian Peninsula and expelled or partially integrated the Vandals and the Alans. The Visigoths eventually conquered the Suebi kingdom and its capital city, Bracara (modern day Braga), in 584–585. They would also conquer the province of the Byzantine Empire (552–624) of Spania in the south of the peninsula and the Balearic Islands.

In 711, a Muslim army invaded the Visigothic Kingdom in Hispania. Under Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Islamic army landed at Gibraltar and, in an eight-year campaign, occupied all except the northern kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula in the Umayyad conquest of Hispania. Al-Andalus (possibly meaning "Land of the Vandals"), is the Arabic name given to what is today southern Spain by its Muslim Berber and Arab occupiers. From the 8th–15th centuries, only the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula was incorporated into the Islamic world and became a center of culture and learning, especially during the Caliphate of Córdoba, which reached its height under the rule of Abd-ar-Rahman III.

The Muslims, who were initially Arabs and Berbers, included some local converts, the so-called Muladi. The Muslims were referred to by the generic name, Moors. The Reconquista gained momentum about 718, when the Christian Asturians opposed the Moors, the southern march to push out the Muslims continued for three hundred years, so for another four hundred years, only the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula was transformed into a Romance-speaking and Arabic-speaking Muslim land, along with pockets of a large minority of Arabic-speaking Sephardi Jews.

Many of the ousted Gothic nobles took refuge in the unconquered north Kingdom of Asturias. From there, they aimed to reconquer their lands from the Moors; this war of reconquest is known as the Reconquista. Christian and Muslim kingdoms fought and allied among themselves. The Muslim taifa kings competed in patronage of the arts, the Camino de Santiago attracted pilgrims from all Western Europe, and the Jewish population set the basis of Sephardi culture.

During the Middle Ages, the peninsula housed many small states including the Kingdom of Castile, Crown of Aragon, Kingdom of Navarre, Kingdom of León and the Kingdom of Portugal. The peninsula was part of the Almohad Caliphate until they were finally uprooted. The last major Muslim stronghold was Granada, which was conquered by a combined Castilian and Aragonese force in 1492. Muslims and Jews throughout the period were variously tolerated or shown intolerance in different Christian kingdoms.

However, after the fall of Granada, all Muslims and Jews were ordered to convert to Christianity or face expulsion. Many Jews and Muslims fled to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, while others publicly converted to Christianity and became known respectively as Marranos and Moriscos. However, many of these continued to practice their religion in secret. The Moriscos revolted several times and were ultimately forcibly expelled from Spain in the early 17th century.

The small states gradually amalgamated over time, with the exception of Portugal, even if for a brief period (1580–1640) the whole peninsula was united politically under the Iberian Union. After that point, the modern position was reached and the peninsula now consists of the countries of Spain and Portugal (excluding their islands—the Portuguese Azores and Madeira and the Spanish Canary Islands and Balearic Islands; and the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla), Andorra, French Cerdagne and Gibraltar.

REVIEW:  Although early medieval Spain and Portugal may seem to stretch the definition of the "barbarian world" considerably—from the point of view of contemporaries they were perhaps one of the most "civilized" parts of the Western world at the time—they provide an interesting view of the transformation of the classical tradition as it merged with other cultures and gradually developed into new traditions that we recognize in the modern world.

It is only since the last decades of the twentieth century that archaeology has begun to transform our understanding of early medieval Iberia. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the archaeology of Spain and Portugal was for political reasons somewhat isolated from outside trends and restricted in its discourse. Since the 1980s, medieval archaeology in Spain has benefited tremendously from a great expansion in archaeological research and from active and energetic debate of the theoretical issues. Portuguese archaeology has developed less rapidly, but important new work began to appear in the 1990s. Well-documented salvage excavations in urban centers, more detailed study of the detritus of everyday life (such as utilitarian pottery, animal bones, and traces of irrigation systems), and regional surveys of surface evidence for settlements are among the new forms of evidence available; in part it is the freedom to discuss issues of social theory such as feudalization, structures of state power, and processes of ethnic distinction that has driven this expansion of archaeological research.

A brief overview of the sequence of events known from written historical sources helps to provide a framework for understanding the effects of modern archaeology on our understanding of early medieval Iberia. The Early Middle Ages have rarely been treated as a unified topic by historians; a great divide has traditionally existed between historians who study sources written in Latin and those who study sources in Arabic. The Latin sources tend to be frustratingly sparse and brief, but they are the only evidence for the period before 711 and the principal evidence for northern Spain after that date as well. The Arabic sources are more informative but also more limited in their coverage, and less accessible to most Western scholars. Only the florescence of archaeological research beginning in the late twentieth century has made it possible to transcend this linguistic divide and see the continuities in the Early Middle Ages of Spain and Portugal.

In 400 A.D., Spain and Portugal had been part of the Roman Empire for hundreds of years. A complex provincial administration based in major cities, trade connections with the entire Mediterranean basin, and a cosmopolitan culture combining classical Latin learning with the new imperial religion of Christianity were all part of the legacy of Roman rule. A few years later, however, the defenses of the western Roman frontier collapsed, and the Suevians, Vandals, and Alans, tribes from what is now Germany, entered the Roman provinces. The Suevians, together with fragments of the other tribes, took over what is now northern Portugal and northwestern Spain.

As the Western Roman Empire collapsed during the course of the fifth century, the Visigoths (a Germanic tribe from eastern Europe) formed a kingdom in southern France that eventually expanded into Spain. Over the course of the fifth century, the Visigoths extended their control over all of Roman Spain and Portugal except for the Suevian enclave in the northwest. Through a long series of wars with the Suevians, the native tribes of mountainous northern Spain, and eastern Roman armies that attempted to reestablish Roman rule in southern Spain, the Visigothic kings eventually united all of the Iberian Peninsula (together with a small portion of southern France) under their rule by the early seventh century. In doing so they created a tradition of central authority and ideological uniformity, all focused on their capital in Toledo, that gave them the most powerful government in western Europe at the time.

Between 711 and 720, an invasion by a small Arab and Berber army from North Africa overthrew the Visigothic kingdom, and all of Spain and Portugal became part of the Islamic Empire. Arab rule seems to have been established quickly and with little disruption of society, but a series of civil wars among the conquerors over the next several decades may have been more destructive. The developing divisions within the Islamic world soon resulted in the establishment of an independent Arab emirate in al-Andalus, as the Arabs called their Iberian realm, ruled by the Umayyad dynasty. By the tenth century this evolved into an independent caliphate, centered on the city of Córdoba.

Unlike the Visigoths, the Arabs were unable or unwilling to maintain central control in the mountains of northern Spain. Perhaps as early as 718, some Visigothic nobles in the Asturias of northwestern Spain had set up an independent, Christian kingdom. This kingdom gradually extended its control over Galicia, León, and Castille. During the ninth century other small Christian realms were formed by the Franks in Catalonia and the Basques in Navarre. By 1000 A.D., although the Arab Caliphate of Córdoba controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula, the Kingdom of León, the Kingdom of Pamplona, and the County of Barcelona in the north represented the origins of what would, over the course of the later Middle Ages, evolve into the modern countries of Spain and Portugal.

The written sources provide little detail, though, to flesh out this narrative with a deeper understanding of how society worked and how people lived their lives—in other words, the social and cultural processes that guided the course of historical events. Archaeological research is providing new insights into subjects where the texts raise many questions but provide few clear answers, such as the definition and evolution of ethnic and religious identities, the processes of political and social control, and the demographic and economic basis of society.

Ethnic and religious differences such as the distinctions between Catholic Christians and Arian Christians, between Christians and Muslims, between Romans and Goths or Suevians, between Latins and Arabs, or between Arabs and Berbers were of paramount importance from the point of view of the writers of the historical sources, and the persistence of other unassimilated minorities such as Basques and Jews throughout this period added to the diverse mixture. What is not clear is the practical importance that these categories had in reality. They evolved over time, and distinctions that were important in one period became unimportant later on. By showing how these identities affected behavior, archaeology makes it possible to understand their evolution more fully.

Rome's Spanish provinces were among the most romanized parts of the empire, meaning that the native populations had widely adopted Roman culture and ethnicity. The modern Castilian (Spanish), Portuguese, and Catalan languages are all descended from the Latin brought by the Romans, and the Catholic religion of Spain and Portugal was a creation of the Roman Empire. It is not clear to what degree local ethnic identities survived romanization—certainly the Basques in the Pyrenees retained their language and identity, and other peoples in remote parts of the peninsula may have as well. Similarly, scattered pre-Christian religious practices are likely to have carried on for a long time in rural areas, long after the people who maintained them had become nominally Christian. But for the most part, as far as one can see in the available evidence, the Iberian Peninsula in 400 A.D. was inhabited by people who were Roman in ethnicity and Catholic Christians by religion.

The Germanic invasions of the fifth century disrupted this seeming unity by introducing new ruling elites that identified themselves as ethnically Suevian or Visigothic. The Visigoths were also distinct religiously, because they adhered at first to a different theological tradition in Christianity known as Arianism, characterized by an interpretation of the Trinity emphasizing the separateness of its elements rather than their unity as manifestations of a single god. Although the distinction between Arians and Catholics was of great importance to theologians, it seems to have had little practical effect on daily life. There is no way, for example, to distinguish an Arian cathedral from a Catholic one from their archaeological traces, nor do people seem to have made an effort to use clothing, household behavior, or burial rituals to proclaim their identity with one or the other form of Christianity. If there was an effect, it was a negative one—that only after 589, when the Visigothic regime officially adopted Catholicism, was the powerful intellectual tradition of the Hispano-Roman Catholics turned to the active ideological support of the Gothic state.

This conflict, however rarified, may nonetheless have had an effect on the attitudes of the Spanish Church. Jerrilynn Dodds, in Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain (1990), has suggested that the defensive position of the Spanish church, subordinated first to the Arian Visigoths and later to Islam, manifested itself architecturally in a use of constricted, horseshoe-shaped arches and apses as well as screens or barriers separating choir from congregation to create secretive, enclosed spaces for the performance of the liturgy. It is difficult, however, to verify such interpretations of subtle, subconscious meanings.

The Visigoths and Suevians constituted only a small minority of the population. In the fifth century their ethnic identity must have been quite distinct from that of the native Hispano-Roman population, but this identity has left few obvious traces archaeologically. They seem to have adopted the culture of the Roman provinces very rapidly in almost all respects. What were traditionally identified as Visigothic cemeteries in northern Spain, for example, are now thought by many to be related to changes in Roman society, not to Visigothic traditions. A few artifact types may have served specifically to signify this ethnic distinction, such as eagle-shaped brooches, but over time the sense of ethnic differentness between Hispano-Romans and the Germanic conquerors seems to have lost its importance to people. For the most part, the archaeological evidence suggests that the Visigoths and Suevians rapidly assimilated to Hispano-Roman culture. By the seventh century, the ethnic distinction between Hispano-Romans and the Germanic Visigoths or Suevians seems to have merged with and been superseded by concepts of social class and wealth. Like the distinction between Arianism and Catholicism, this ethnic divide does not seem to have had enough practical importance to sustain itself in the long run. In the eighth century and later, Latin Christians in Spain seem to have regarded their Visigothic and Roman pasts as parts of a single cultural heritage.

The social divisions brought about by the Arab conquest proved to be a different matter. Like the Visigoths and Suevians, the Arabs and Berbers were at first a small minority relative to the native population, and initially they brought few significant cultural differences, with the important exception of their religion. Unlike Arianism, Islam manifested its differentness not only in abstract theological concepts but also in many aspects of daily life, from what one could eat or drink, to the daily routine of prayer, to the appropriate placement of the dead in their graves. This religious distinction is not only more visible archaeologically, but it also would have given the boundary between Muslims and Christians more force in processes of cultural change. Cultural assimilation worked both ways in this instance—the Latin Christian population of al-Andalus gradually assimilated to the culture of their rulers, becoming Muslim Arabs, but the Islamic civilization that they adopted was itself heavily influenced by Hispano-Roman culture. The Great Mosque of Córdoba, for example, built in stages from the eighth to tenth centuries, combines elements of Hispano-Roman and Byzantine architectural styles into a building whose function was specifically Islamic.

The immediate effect of the Arab conquest on the archaeological record was probably small, due to the limited numbers of the invaders. It is debated, for example, whether Berber styles of pottery were introduced to Spain in the eighth century. The process of Islamization of the native population, however, had a more prominent impact over time; it is likely that by a.d. 1000 a majority of the population had converted to Islam, and Arabic was probably becoming the most common language.

Food remains provide one way to observe this process. In Roman times, pork was an important source of meat in many parts of Spain, and this continued to some extent through the Visigothic period. After the Arab conquest, the frequency of pig bones in archaeological sites gradually declined, probably indicating conversion of the population to Islam, which prohibits the eating of pork. Pig bones usually continue to be present in small quantities, though, suggesting the presence of a Christian minority even in mainly Muslim communities. An exception that proves the rule is a site in southeastern Spain called the Rábita de Guardamar, a retreat where Muslim warriors could combine asceticism, religious contemplation, and defense of their faith. Not surprisingly, such a specifically Islamic site lacks pig bones.

As the rulers changed from Romans to Visigoths to Arabs, the structures of political control and social dominance, unsurprisingly, changed as well. The scanty written documentation gives little insight into the processes of control, however, except to some degree in the caliphate toward the end of the Early Middle Ages. The Roman government was not the massive bureaucratic system that modern governments are, but by ancient standards it was a powerful and ambitious state. A complex taxation system was administered by professional civil servants, and the proceeds were used to support a standing army, public works such as roads and bridges, and of course the administrative system itself. The government produced massive quantities of coinage as a medium for its taxes and expenditures, and it produced many facilities such as forts and government buildings.

As the Roman Empire disintegrated, its successors such as the Visigoths and the Suevians attempted to retain as much of the Roman administrative system as served their purposes. Invasion and warfare must have disrupted many governmental functions, though, and they had probably already been in decline in later Roman times. In the middle of the fifth century, for example, while the city of Tarragona was still under Roman administration (which lasted there until around 470), what had earlier been public buildings and spaces, such as the provincial forum, had clearly lost their political function and were used as quarries for old building stone and dumping grounds for garbage. In Valencia, the Roman forum was replaced in the fifth century by a church (probably the city's cathedral) and a cemetery, not only indicating the decline of the former civic administration but also symbolizing how the church hierarchy was replacing the old institutions of local authority.

The Suevians and Visigoths, who had no tradition of administrative government, relied on surviving Roman institutions to control and exploit their new territories, but probably at a more limited level of activity. They produced coinage derived from Roman types, but in limited quantities and mostly in gold, suitable for large payments within the ruling class but not for everyday use in small transactions. Some public works and state construction projects continued under the Visigoths, but the evidence is much more scarce than for the Roman period; no facilities for a professional standing army are apparent, for example. The state seems also to have been less able to enforce even the policies it was interested in; for example, despite draconian legislation in the seventh century intended to suppress Judaism, Jewish tombstones inscribed in Hebrew were still made.

This decline of state control seems to have affected the entire population in another way. The Roman government had been able to maintain peace and enforce laws well enough for people to live dispersed throughout the country with reasonable security. As Roman rule broke down, however, people tended to live in more clustered settlements, often in defensible locations, in some cases reusing prehistoric hillforts. This change suggests that the people in the countryside were at increased risk from marauders, bandits, feuds, or other forms of small-scale violence. In sociopolitical organization as in many other things, the Christian north and the Islamic center and south followed different trajectories after the Islamic conquest. This has been made most clear since the late 1970s through studies of the social role of castles.

In much of western Europe, particularly France, medieval castles first appeared as part of a social transformation in which a class of feudal lords emerged during the tenth and eleventh centuries and seized for themselves on a local basis the political powers formerly exercised by the kings as well as by communities of free peasants, who were then reduced to serfdom. Castles served as the focal points of feudal settlement, and thousands were built during the decades around the year 1000. As feudal lords obtained economic power over the peasants, previously dispersed rural settlement was restructured in the form of larger villages located near the castles, so that compulsory labor service was easily accessible to the lords.

This transition to feudalism is generally agreed to have occurred also in Catalonia, which had close ties to France at the time. It is more disputed to what degree these changes happened in other parts of Spain or in Portugal. In the Kingdom of León, castles were built and villages were established as in France, but they seem to have happened separately, not as part of a single, drastic transformation of society. The written sources likewise suggest that neither royal power nor the freedom of the peasantry was so completely usurped there.

In Islamic al-Andalus, as well, castles became abundant, in contrast to their absence in most other Islamic lands at the time. And in some ways these castles may have had functions similar to those of northern Spain, especially in areas where the Muslim elite was formed from converted Hispano-Gothic nobles. Because society was organized differently in al-Andalus, though, the seizure of power by local nobles that was the essence of feudalism did not happen there. Castles in al-Andalus served as defensive refuges and as local outposts of the central administration, so rather than causing a restructuring of rural settlement for the benefit of local lords, they were instead placed where people already were.

Traditionally, the end of the Roman Empire was imagined in apocalyptic terms of collapse and destruction. Modern research has modified this attitude in many important ways, emphasizing the continuities from Roman times to the Early Middle Ages as well as the creativity and vitality of late ancient and early medieval civilization. Nevertheless, many changes occurred in the material aspects of life. Although there are difficulties with the evidence, the overall pattern appears to be one of economic decline from the later part of the Roman period through the Visigothic period, with gradual recovery beginning in the ninth or tenth century. These trends appear in the evidence relating to rural population, urbanism, and trade.

Under Roman rule, the Iberian Peninsula was densely settled with an assortment of towns and villages, small farms, and large aristocratic villas, most often situated in the best agricultural land. Although many of these sites remained occupied into the fifth and sixth centuries, the number of sites declined, and those that remained were smaller; also, as noted above, new sites were often in defensive locations. By the seventh century, a very different pattern had taken shape: people lived mostly in small sites, which were much less abundant and which were commonly located in mountainous areas or inaccessible hilltops. This pattern, which suggests both a substantial decline in population and a concern with defense instead of maximization of production, continued through the Arab conquest into the ninth century. Only from the late ninth or tenth century does there seem in many regions to have been an expansion of settlement back into lower, more productive, but also more vulnerable areas.

Towns and cities followed a broadly parallel trend. By late Roman times, not only the public buildings but also many residential areas of the towns had fallen out of use, suggesting a diminished number of residents. Although written sources seem to indicate that towns and cities remained important centers of civil and religious administration throughout the Early Middle Ages, the archaeological evidence is sparse. In many urban excavations in Spain, a late Roman level is immediately followed by deposits of the tenth or eleventh century or later, suggesting relatively little occupation during the intervening centuries. Some structures, especially churches, mosques, and fortifications, are known, but the paucity of associated habitation material seems to indicate that the towns remained centers of religious and political activity but were no longer centers of population or economic activity. The few locations where early medieval occupation levels have been found are often restricted in area and associated with defensive locations or religious facilities. In Mérida, one of the few towns where urban excavation has revealed early medieval habitations, they take the form of reuse of semi-ruined Roman buildings, subdivided into small apartments, eventually abandoned, and not replaced with new structures until the ninth century.

The decline in urban occupation is probably related to general changes in the economy during the Early Middle Ages. Under the Roman Empire, the countries around the Mediterranean were linked by active networks of long-distance trade, which can be observed archaeologically in the remains of nonperishable goods such as pottery. Even in the fifth and sixth centuries, pottery types made in what are now Tunisia, Turkey, and other places all around the Mediterranean were regularly available in the coastal cities of Spain and Portugal. After 550, however, these imports rapidly declined, and they ceased entirely by the latter half of the seventh century. Although exchange of goods and ideas did not cease entirely, long-distance trade on a scale large enough to be archaeologically significant did not resume until the tenth century and later.

The economic changes were not limited to overseas trade; the evidence for specialized production and local exchange within the Iberian Peninsula shows a similar pattern. In fact, for a long time this pattern obscured the archaeology of the Early Middle Ages. In previous generations, when medieval archaeology was closely connected with art history, the shortage of finely produced items in early medieval Spain and Portugal, compared to the Roman and late medieval periods, made it difficult to study the period. The Visigothic period was best known from metalwork such as brooches and belt buckles found in cemeteries and from stonecarving associated with churches. So skilled craftspersons continued to exist, but they seem to have been much less abundant than in the Roman period, since few such objects are found in ordinary sites. Referring once again to the artifacts that are most abundant on archaeological sites, the finely made, decorated table pottery of the late Roman period disappeared after the fifth or sixth century, and then only plain, coarse pottery was made—often without the use of the potter's wheel, which is essential for producing in large quantities—until new styles of decorated tablewares based on eastern Islamic traditions appeared in the late ninth century.

These patterns of economic production are far from the religious and political concerns of the written historical sources, but by elucidating the context in which the recorded events took place, they may provide an essential part of improved explanations of how culture and society changed in Spain and Portugal during the early Middle Ages. Historical events are necessarily shaped by the economic and social context in which they occur, and this context is lacking in the very limited written history of early medieval Spain and Portugal. For example, the inability of the Visigoths to form an effective resistance after their king was defeated at the beginning of the Islamic conquest has been attributed by historians to moral decay or overcentralized rulership. But it may be just as significant that the population of the region was at the bottom of a long process of decline in the eighth century and that economic disintegration would have made coordination difficult. These same factors also raise some interesting questions about the effects of the demographic and economic growth that appeared in the ninth and tenth centuries, such as whether some regions grew earlier or faster and therefore had advantages in political competition. Future archaeological research has the potential to address such questions, which could not even have been asked until the late twentieth century.

REVIEW:  Al-Andalus, also known as Muslim Spain or Islamic Iberia, was a medieval Muslim territory and cultural domain occupying at its peak most of what are today Spain and Portugal. At its greatest geographical extent in the eighth century, southern France—Septimania—was briefly under its control. The name more generally describes parts of the Iberian Peninsula governed by Muslims (given the generic name of Moors) at various times between 711 and 1492, though the boundaries changed constantly as the Christian Reconquista progressed.

Following the Umayyad conquest of Hispania, al-Andalus, then at its greatest extent, was divided into five administrative units, corresponding roughly to modern Andalusia, Portugal and Galicia, Castile and León, Navarre, Aragon, the County of Barcelona, and Septimania. As a political domain, it successively constituted a province of the Umayyad Caliphate, initiated by the Caliph Al-Walid I (711–750); the Emirate of Córdoba (750–929); the Caliphate of Córdoba (929–1031); and the Caliphate of Córdoba's taifa (successor) kingdoms.

Rule under these kingdoms led to a rise in cultural exchange and cooperation between Muslims and Christians. Christians and Jews were subject to a special tax called Jizya, to the state, which in return provided internal autonomy in practicing their religion and offered the same level of protections by the Muslim rulers.[5] Under the Caliphate of Córdoba, al-Andalus was a beacon of learning, and the city of Córdoba became one of the leading cultural and economic centres in Europe and throughout the Mediterranean Basin and the Islamic world.

A number of achievements that advanced Islamic and Western science came from al-Andalus including major advances in trigonometry (Geber), astronomy (Arzachel), surgery (Abulcasis), pharmacology (Avenzoar), and other fields. Al-Andalus became a major educational center for Europe and the lands around the Mediterranean Sea as well as a conduit for culture and science between the Islamic and Christian worlds.

For much of its history, al-Andalus existed in conflict with Christian kingdoms to the north. After the fall of the Umayyad caliphate, al-Andalus was fragmented into a number of minor states and principalities. Attacks from the Christians intensified, led by the Castilians under Alfonso VI. The Almoravid empire intervened and repelled the Christian attacks on the region, deposing the weak Andalusi Muslim princes and included al-Andalus under direct Berber rule. In the next century and a half, al-Andalus became a province of the Berber Muslim empires of the Almoravids and Almohads, both based in Marrakesh.

Ultimately, the Christian kingdoms in the north of the Iberian Peninsula overpowered the Muslim states to the south. In 1085, Alfonso VI captured Toledo, starting a gradual decline of Muslim power. With the fall of Córdoba in 1236, most of the south quickly fell under Christian rule and the Emirate of Granada became a tributary state of the Kingdom of Castile two years later. In 1249, the Portuguese Reconquista culminated with the conquest of the Algarve by Afonso III, leaving Granada as the last Muslim state on the Iberian Peninsula.

Finally, on January 2, 1492, Emir Muhammad XII surrendered the Emirate of Granada to Queen Isabella I of Castile, completing the Christian Reconquista of the peninsula. Although al-Andalus ended as a political entity, the nearly eight centuries of Islamic rule which preceded and accompanied the early formation of the Spanish nation-state and identity has left a profound effect on the country's culture and language, particularly in Andalusia.

The toponym al-Andalus is first attested to by inscriptions on coins minted by the new Muslim government in Iberia, circa 715 (the uncertainty in the year is due to the fact that the coins were bilingual in Latin and Arabic and the two inscriptions differ as to the year of minting). The etymology of the name has traditionally been derived from the name of the Vandals. A number of proposals since the 1980s have contested this: Vallvé (1986) proposed a corruption of the name Atlantis. Halm (1989) derives the name from a Gothic term *landahlauts. Bossong (2002) suggests derivation from a pre-Roman substrate.

During the caliphate of the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid I, the Berber commander Tariq ibn-Ziyad led a small force that landed at Gibraltar on April 30, 711, ostensibly to intervene in a Visigothic civil war. After a decisive victory over King Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete on July 19, 711, Tariq ibn-Ziyad, joined by Arab governor Musa ibn Nusayr of Ifriqiya, brought most of the Visigothic Kingdom under Muslim occupation in a seven-year campaign. They crossed the Pyrenees and occupied Visigothic Septimania in southern France.

Most of the Iberian peninsula became part of the expanding Umayyad Empire, under the name of al-Andalus. It was organized as a province subordinate to Ifriqiya, so, for the first few decades, the governors of al-Andalus were appointed by the emir of Kairouan, rather than the Caliph in Damascus. The regional capital was set at Córdoba, and the initial influx of Muslim colonists were widely distributed – Arab colonists were assigned to the south and east, while Berber colonists were scattered across the west and center. Visigothic lords who agreed to recognize Muslim suzerainty were allowed to retain their fiefs (notably, in Murcia, Galicia, and the Ebro valley). Resistant Visigoths took refuge in the Cantabrian highlands, where they carved out a rump state, the Kingdom of Asturias.

In the 720s, the al-Andalus governors launched several sa'ifa raids into Aquitaine, but were severely defeated by Duke Odo the Great of Aquitaine at the Battle of Toulouse (721). However, after crushing Odo's Berber ally Uthman ibn Naissa on the eastern Pyrenees, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi led an expedition north across the western Pyrenees and defeated the Aquitanian duke, who in turn appealed to the Frankish leader Charles Martel for assistance, offering to place himself under Carolingian sovereignty. At the Battle of Poitiers in 732, the al-Andalus raiding army was defeated by Charles Martel. In 734, the Andalusi launched raids to the east, capturing Avignon and Arles and overran much of Provence. In 737, they climbed up the Rhône valley, reached as far as Burgundy. Charles Martel of the Franks, with the assistance of Liutprand of the Lombards, invaded Burgundy and Provence and expelled the raiders by 739.

Relations between Arabs and Berbers in al-Andalus had been tense in the years after the conquest. Berbers heavily outnumbered the Arabs in the province, and had done the bulk of the fighting, but they had been given the lesser plums of the conquest and were assigned the harsher duties (e.g. garrisoning the more troubled areas). Although some Arab governors had cultivated their Berber lieutenants, others had grievously mistreated them. Mutinies by Berber soldiers were frequent, e.g. in 729, the Berber commander Munnus revolted and managed to carve out a rebel state in Cerdanya for a spell.

In 740, a great Berber Revolt erupted in the Maghreb (North Africa). To put down the rebellion, the Umayyad Caliph Hisham dispatched a large Arab army, composed of regiments (Junds) of Bilad Ash-Sham[11] to North Africa. But the great Syrian army was crushed by the Berber rebels at the Battle of Bagdoura (in Morocco). Heartened by the victories of their North African brethren, the Berbers of al-Andalus quickly raised their own revolt. Berber garrisons in northern Spain mutinied, deposed their Arab commanders, and organized a large rebel army to march against the strongholds of Toledo, Cordoba, and Algeciras.

The al-Andalus Arab governor, joined by the remnant of the Syrian army (some 10,000) which had fled across the straits, crushed the Berber rebels in a series of ferocious battles in 742. However, a quarrel immediately erupted between the Syrian commanders and the older Andalusi Arabs. The Syrians defeated the Andalusi at the hard-fought Battle of Aqua Portora in August 742 but were too few to impose themselves on the province. The quarrel was settled in 743 with the distribution of the Syrians in regimental fiefs across al-Andalus – the Damascus jund was established in Elvira (Granada), the Jordan jund in Rayyu (Málaga and Archidona), the Jund Filastin in Medina-Sidonia and Jerez, the Emesa (Hims) jund in Seville and Niebla, and the Qinnasrin jund in Jaén.

The Egypt jund was divided between Beja (Alentejo) in the west and Tudmir (Murcia) in the east. The arrival of the Syrians increased substantially the Arab element in the Iberian peninsula and helped strengthen the Muslim hold on the south. However, at the same time, unwilling to be governed, the Syrian junds carried on an existence of autonomous feudal anarchy, severely destabilizing the authority of the governor of al-Andalus.   A second significant consequence of the revolt was the expansion of the Kingdom of the Asturias, hitherto confined to enclaves in the Cantabrian highlands. After the rebellious Berber garrisons evacuated the northern frontier fortresses, the Christian king Alfonso I of Asturias set about immediately seizing the empty forts for himself, quickly adding the northwestern provinces of Galicia and León to his fledgling kingdom. The Asturians evacuated the Christian populations from the towns and villages of the Galician-Leonese lowlands, creating an empty buffer zone in the Douro River valley (the "Desert of the Duero").

This newly emptied frontier remained roughly in place for the next few centuries as the boundary between the Christian north and the Islamic south. Between this frontier and its heartland in the south, the al-Andalus state had three large march territories (thughur): the Lower March (capital initially at Mérida, later Badajoz), the Middle March (centered at Toledo), and the Upper March (centered at Zaragoza).

These disturbances and disorders also allowed the Franks, now under the leadership of Pepin the Short, to invade the strategic strip of Septimania in 752, hoping to deprive al-Andalus of an easy launching pad for raids into Francia. After a lengthy siege, the last Arab stronghold, the citadel of Narbonne, finally fell to the Franks in 759. Al-Andalus was sealed off at the Pyrenees.

The third consequence of the Berber revolt was the collapse of the authority of the Damascus Caliphate over the western provinces. With the Umayyad Caliphs distracted by the challenge of the Abbasids in the east, the western provinces of the Maghreb and al-Andalus spun out of their control. From around 745, the Fihrids, an illustrious local Arab clan descended from Oqba ibn Nafi al-Fihri, seized power in the western provinces and ruled them almost as a private family empire of their own – Abd al-Rahman ibn Habib al-Fihri in Ifriqiya and Yūsuf al-Fihri in al-Andalus.

The Fihrids welcomed the fall of the Umayyads in the east, in 750, and sought to reach an understanding with the Abbasids, hoping they might be allowed to continue their autonomous existence. But when the Abbasids rejected the offer and demanded submission, the Fihrids declared independence and, probably out of spite, invited the deposed remnants of the Umayyad clan to take refuge in their dominions. It was a fateful decision that they soon regretted, for the Umayyads, the sons and grandsons of caliphs, had a more legitimate claim to rule than the Fihrids themselves. Rebellious-minded local lords, disenchanted with the autocratic rule of the Fihrids, intrigued with the arriving Umayyad exiles.

Abd-ar-Rahman III in his court receiving an ambassador in Medina Azahara, Còrdoba In 756, the exiled Umayyad prince Abd al-Rahman I (nicknamed al-Dākhil, the 'Immigrant') ousted Yūsuf al-Fihri to establish himself as the Emir of Córdoba. He refused to submit to the Abbasid caliph, as Abbasid forces had killed most of his family. Over a thirty-year reign, he established a tenuous rule over much of al-Andalus, overcoming partisans of both the al-Fihri family and of the Abbasid caliph.

For the next century and a half, his descendants continued as emirs of Córdoba with nominal control over the rest of al-Andalus and sometimes parts of western North Africa, but with real control, particularly over the marches along the Christian border, vacillating depending on the competence of the individual emir. Indeed, the power of emir Abdallah ibn Muhammad (circa 900) did not extend beyond Córdoba itself. But his grandson Abd-al-Rahman III, who succeeded him in 912, not only rapidly restored Umayyad power throughout al-Andalus but extended it into western North Africa as well. In 929 he proclaimed himself Caliph, elevating the emirate to a position competing in prestige not only with the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad but also the Shi'ite caliph in Tunis—with whom he was competing for control of North Africa.

The period of the Caliphate is seen as the golden age of al-Andalus. Crops produced using irrigation, along with food imported from the Middle East, provided the area around Córdoba and some other Andalusī cities with an agricultural economic sector that was the most advanced in Europe by far. Among European cities, Córdoba under the Caliphate, with a population of perhaps 500,000, eventually overtook Constantinople as the largest and most prosperous city in Europe.[15] Within the Islamic world, Córdoba was one of the leading cultural centres. The work of its most important philosophers and scientists (notably Abulcasis and Averroes) had a major influence on the intellectual life of medieval Europe.

Muslims and non-Muslims often came from abroad to study in the famous libraries and universities of al-Andalus, mainly after the reconquest of Toledo in 1085 and the establishment of translation institutions such as the Toledo School of Translators. The most noted of those was Michael Scot (c. 1175 to c. 1235), who took the works of Ibn Rushd ("Averroes") and Ibn Sina ("Avicenna") to Italy. This transmission of ideas remains one of the greatest in history, significantly affecting the formation of the European Renaissance.

The Córdoba Caliphate effectively collapsed during a ruinous civil war between 1009 and 1013, although it was not finally abolished until 1031 when al-Andalus broke up into a number of mostly independent mini-states and principalities called taifas. These were generally too weak to defend themselves against repeated raids and demands for tribute from the Christian states to the north and west, which were known to the Muslims as "the Galician nations", and which had spread from their initial strongholds in Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, the Basque country, and the Carolingian Marca Hispanica to become the Kingdoms of Navarre, León, Portugal, Castile and Aragon, and the County of Barcelona. Eventually raids turned into conquests, and in response the Taifa kings were forced to request help from the Almoravids, Muslim Berber rulers of the Maghreb. Their desperate maneuver would eventually fall to their disadvantage, however, as the Almoravids they had summoned from the south went on to conquer and annex all the Taifa kingdoms.

In 1086 the Almoravid ruler of Morocco, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, was invited by the Muslim princes in Iberia to defend them against Alfonso VI, King of Castile and León. In that year, Tashfin crossed the straits to Algeciras and inflicted a severe defeat on the Christians at the Battle of Sagrajas. By 1094, ibn Tashfin had removed all Muslim princes in Iberia and had annexed their states, except for the one at Zaragoza. He also regained Valencia from the Christians.

The Almoravids were succeeded by the Almohads, another Berber dynasty, after the victory of Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur over the Castilian Alfonso VIII at the Battle of Alarcos in 1195. In 1212, a coalition of Christian kings under the leadership of the Castilian Alfonso VIII defeated the Almohads at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. The Almohads continued to rule Al-Andalus for another decade, though with much reduced power and prestige. The civil wars following the death of Abu Ya'qub Yusuf II rapidly led to the re-establishment of taifas. The taifas, newly independent but now weakened, were quickly conquered by Portugal, Castile, and Aragon. After the fall of Murcia (1243) and the Algarve (1249), only the Emirate of Granada survived as a Muslim state, and only as a tributary of Castile until 1492. Most of its tribute was paid in gold that was carried to Iberia from present-day Mali and Burkina Faso through the merchant routes of the Sahara.

The last Muslim threat to the Christian kingdoms was the rise of the Marinids in Morocco during the 14th century. They took Granada into their sphere of influence and occupied some of its cities, like Algeciras. However, they were unable to take Tarifa, which held out until the arrival of the Castilian Army led by Alfonso XI. The Castilian king, with the help of Afonso IV of Portugal and Peter IV of Aragon, decisively defeated the Marinids at the Battle of Río Salado in 1340 and took Algeciras in 1344. Gibraltar, then under Granadian rule, was besieged in 1349–50. Alfonso XI and most of his army perished by the Black Death. His successor, Peter of Castile, made peace with the Muslims and turned his attention to Christian lands, starting a period of almost 150 years of rebellions and wars between the Christian states that secured the survival of Granada.

From the mid 13th to the late 15th century, the only remaining domain of al-Andalus was the Emirate of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in the Iberian Peninsula. The emirate was established by Mohammed I ibn Nasr in 1230 and was ruled by the Nasrid dynasty, the longest reigning dynasty in the history of al-Andalus. Although surrounded by Castilian lands, the emirate was wealthy and enjoyed a period of considerable cultural and economic prosperity. However, for most of its existence Granada was a tributary state, with Nasrid emirs paying tribute to Castilian kings. In 1469, the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile signaled the launch of the final assault on the emirate. The King and Queen convinced Pope Sixtus IV to declare their war a crusade. The Catholic Monarchs crushed one center of resistance after another until finally on January 2, 1492, after a long siege, the emirate's last sultan, Muhammad XII, surrendered the city and the fortress palace, the renowned Alhambra (see Fall of Granada).

By this time Muslims in Castile numbered half a million. After the fall, "100,000 had died or been enslaved, 200,000 emigrated, and 200,000 remained as the residual population. Many of the Muslim elite, including Muhammad XII, who had been given the area of the Alpujarras mountains as a principality, found life under Christian rule intolerable and passed over into North Africa." Under the conditions of the Capitulations of 1492, the Muslims in Granada were to be allowed to continue to practice their religion.

Mass forced conversions of Muslims in 1499 led to a revolt that spread to Alpujarras and the mountains of Ronda; after this uprising the capitulations were revoked. In 1502 the Catholic Monarchs decreed the forced conversion of all Muslims living under the rule of the Crown of Castile, although in the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia (both now part of Spain) the open practice of Islam was allowed until 1526. Descendants of the Muslims were subject to expulsions from Spain between 1609 and 1614 (see Expulsion of the Moriscos).] The last mass prosecution against Moriscos for crypto-Islamic practices occurred in Granada in 1727, with most of those convicted receiving relatively light sentences. From then on, indigenous Islam is considered to have been extinguished in Spain.

The society of al-Andalus was made up of three main religious groups: Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The Muslims, though united on the religious level, had several ethnic divisions, the main being the distinction between the Berbers and the Arabs. Mozarabs were Christians who had long lived under Muslim rule, adopting many Arabic customs, art, and words, while still maintaining their Christian rituals and their own Romance languages. Each of these communities inhabited distinct neighborhoods in the cities.

In the 10th century a massive conversion of Christians took place, and muladies (Muslims of native Iberian origin), formed the majority of Muslims. The Muladies had spoken in a Romance dialect of Latin called Mozarabic while increasingly adopting the Arabic language, which eventually evolved into the Andalusi Arabic in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians became monolingual in the last surviving Muslim state in the Iberian Peninsula, the Emirate of Granada (1232-1492). Eventually, the Muladies, and later the Berber tribes, adopted an Arabic identity like the majority of subject people in Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and North Africa. Muladies, together with other Muslims, comprised eighty percent of the population of al-Andalus by around 1100.[24]   The Jewish population worked mainly as tax collectors, in trade, or as doctors or ambassadors. At the end of the 15th century there were about 50,000 Jews in Granada and roughly 100,000 in the whole of Islamic Iberia. Non-Muslims were given the status of ahl al-dhimma (the people under protection), with adult males paying a "Jizya" tax, equal to one dinar per year with exemptions for the elderly, women, children, and the disabled. Those who were neither Christians nor Jews, such as pagans, were given the status of Majus. The treatment of non-Muslims in the Caliphate has been a subject of considerable debate among scholars and commentators, especially those interested in drawing parallels to the coexistence of Muslims and non-Muslims in the modern world.

Jews constituted more than five percent of the population. Al-Andalus was a key centre of Jewish life during the early Middle Ages, producing important scholars and one of the most stable and wealthy Jewish communities. The Caliphate treated non-Muslims differently at different times. The longest period of relative tolerance began after 912 with the reign of Abd-ar-Rahman III and his son, Al-Hakam II, when the Jews of al-Andalus prospered, devoting themselves to the service of the Caliphate of Córdoba, to the study of the sciences, and to commerce and industry, especially trading in silk and slaves, in this way promoting the prosperity of the country. Southern Iberia became an asylum for the oppressed Jews of other countries.

Under the Almoravids and the Almohads there may have been intermittent persecution of Jews, but sources are extremely scarce and do not give a clear picture, though the situation appears to have deteriorated after 1160. Muslim pogroms against Jews in al-Andalus occurred in Córdoba (1011) and in Granada (1066). However, massacres of dhimmis are rare in Islamic history. The Almohads, who had taken control of the Almoravids' Maghribi and Andalusi territories by 1147, far surpassed the Almoravides in fundamentalist outlook, and they treated the non-Muslims harshly. Faced with the choice of either death or conversion, many Jews and Christians emigrated. Some, such as the family of Maimonides, fled east to more tolerant Muslim lands.

The Alhambra is a reflection of the culture of the last centuries of the Moorish rule of al-Andalus, reduced to the Emirate of Granada. Many ethnicities, religions, and races coexisted in al-Andalus, each contributing to its intellectual prosperity. Literacy in Islamic Iberia was far more widespread than in many other nations in the West at the time. From the earliest days, the Umayyads wanted to be seen as intellectual rivals to the Abbasids, and for Córdoba to have libraries and educational institutions to rival Baghdad's. Although there was a clear rivalry between the two powers, there was freedom to travel between the two caliphates[citation needed], which helped spread new ideas and innovations over time.

The historian Said al-Andalusi wrote that Caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III had collected libraries of books and granted patronage to scholars of medicine and "ancient sciences". Later, al-Mustansir (Al-Hakam II) went yet further, building a university and libraries in Córdoba. Córdoba became one of the world's leading centres of medicine and philosophical debate. When Al-Hakam's son Hisham II took over, real power was ceded to the hajib, al-Mansur Ibn Abi Aamir. Al-Mansur was a distinctly religious man and disapproved of the sciences of astronomy, logic, and especially astrology, so much so that many books on these subjects, which had been preserved and collected at great expense by Al-Hakam II, were burned publicly. With Al-Mansur's death in 1002, interest in philosophy revived.

Numerous scholars emerged, including Abu Uthman Ibn Fathun, whose masterwork was the philosophical treatise "Tree of Wisdom". Maslamah Ibn Ahmad al-Majriti (died 1008) was an outstanding scholar in astronomy and astrology; he was an intrepid traveller who journeyed all over the Islamic world and beyond and kept in touch with the Brethren of Purity. He is said to have brought the 51 "Epistles of the Brethren of Purity" to al-Andalus and added the compendium to this work, although it is quite possible that it was added later by another scholar with the name al-Majriti. Another book attributed to al-Majriti is the Ghayat al-Hakim, "The Aim of the Sage", which explored a synthesis of Platonism with Hermetic philosophy.

Its use of incantations led the book to be widely dismissed in later years, although the Sufi communities continued to study it. A prominent follower of al-Majriti was the philosopher and geometer Abu al-Hakam al-Kirmani who was followed, in turn, by Abu Bakr Ibn al-Sayigh, usually known in the Arab world as Ibn Bajjah, "Avempace". The al-Andalus philosopher Averroes (1126–1198) was the founder of the Averroism school of philosophy, and his works and commentaries influenced medieval thought in Western Europe. Another influential al-Andalus philosopher was Ibn Tufail.

As Jewish thought in Babylonia declined, the tolerance of al-Andalus made it the new centre of Jewish intellectual endeavours. Poets and commentators like Judah Halevi (1086–1145) and Dunash ben Labrat (920–990) contributed to the cultural life of al-Andalus, but the area was even more important to the development of Jewish philosophy. A stream of Jewish philosophers, cross-fertilizing with Muslim philosophers (see joint Jewish and Islamic philosophies), culminated with the widely celebrated Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, Maimonides (1135–1205), though he did not actually do any of his work in al-Andalus, his family having fled persecution by the Almohads when he was 13.

In the book Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia Daniel Eisenberg describes homosexuality as "a key symbolic issue throughout the Middle Ages in Iberia", stating that "in al-Andalus homosexual pleasures were much indulged in by the intellectual and political elite. Evidence includes the behavior of rulers, such as Abd al-Rahmn III, Al-Hakam II, Hisham II, and Al Mu'tamid, who openly kept male harems; the memoirs of Badfs. last Zirid king of Granada, makes references to male prostitutes, who charged higher fees and had a higher class of clientele than did their female counter-parts: the repeated criticisms of Christians; and especially the abundant poetry.

Both pederasty and love between adult males are found. Although homosexual practices were never officially condoned, prohibitions against them were rarely enforced, and usually there was not even a pretense of doing so." Male homosexual relations allowed nonprocreative sexual practices and were not seen as a form of identity. Very little is known about the homosexual behavior of women.

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ABOUT US: Prior to our retirement we used to travel to Eastern Europe and Central Asia several times a year seeking antique gemstones and jewelry from the globe’s most prolific gemstone producing and cutting centers. Most of the items we offer came from acquisitions we made in Eastern Europe, India, and from the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean/Near East) during these years from various institutions and dealers. Much of what we generate on Etsy, Amazon and Ebay goes to support worthy institutions in Europe and Asia connected with Anthropology and Archaeology. Though we have a collection of ancient coins numbering in the tens of thousands, our primary interests are ancient/antique jewelry and gemstones, a reflection of our academic backgrounds.

Though perhaps difficult to find in the USA, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia antique gemstones are commonly dismounted from old, broken settings – the gold reused – the gemstones recut and reset. Before these gorgeous antique gemstones are recut, we try to acquire the best of them in their original, antique, hand-finished state – most of them originally crafted a century or more ago. We believe that the work created by these long-gone master artisans is worth protecting and preserving rather than destroying this heritage of antique gemstones by recutting the original work out of existence. That by preserving their work, in a sense, we are preserving their lives and the legacy they left for modern times. Far better to appreciate their craft than to destroy it with modern cutting.

Not everyone agrees – fully 95% or more of the antique gemstones which come into these marketplaces are recut, and the heritage of the past lost. But if you agree with us that the past is worth protecting, and that past lives and the produce of those lives still matters today, consider buying an antique, hand cut, natural gemstone rather than one of the mass-produced machine cut (often synthetic or “lab produced”) gemstones which dominate the market today. We can set most any antique gemstone you purchase from us in your choice of styles and metals ranging from rings to pendants to earrings and bracelets; in sterling silver, 14kt solid gold, and 14kt gold fill. When you purchase from us, you can count on quick shipping and careful, secure packaging. We would be happy to provide you with a certificate/guarantee of authenticity for any item you purchase from us. There is a $3 fee for mailing under separate cover. I will always respond to every inquiry whether via email or eBay message, so please feel free to write.

  • Condition: NEW and without blemish. See detailed condition description below.
  • Format: Oversized illustrated hardcover w/laminate covers
  • Length: 950 pages
  • Dimensions: 10¾ x 9¼ x 2 inches; 5½ pounds
  • Publisher: Routledge (2002)

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