Rupture with Subh and concentration of political power , the fortified residence built by
Abd al-Rahman III, where Almanzor luxuriously locked Caliph
Hisham II after the failed attempt at rebellion by the Caliph's mother
Subh, after long years of alliance between them. With
Ghalib eliminated and
Hisham unable to perform his duties as Caliph, Almanzor began to weigh preparing for the succession, and even the possibility of officially taking power. In 989, he tried unsuccessfully to have the
faqīhs accept his home, Medina Alzahara, as a major mosque. From 991 he positioned his son
Abd al-Malik in a similar way as
Al-Hakam had done with Hisham, appointing him chamberlain and supreme warden of the Caliphate's armies, although Almanzor did not step aside from those roles himself. At the same time, he discreetly presented to the
faqīhs who advised the senior Qadi the possibility that he himself might replace the Caliph because Hisham was incapable and no one else in the state could hold the position. The regency, formerly founded on Hisham's minority, could no longer be justified by his mere inability to carry out his functions. The opinion of the
faqīhs, however, was negative: if not Hisham, according to the legal experts, power should devolve to another member of the
tribe of Muhammad. Almanzor reluctantly accepted the decision, and in the following years he gradually assumed even greater powers, corresponding to those of the Caliph: he confirmed the official appointments with his own seal rather than that of the Caliph, in spite of nominally acting on his behalf, he appointed a new mint official, appropriated new titles and moved part of the administration to . He also had his name mentioned after that of the Caliph in Friday prayers and maintained a court parallel to that of the sovereign at al-Zahira. In 991, under pressure from the chamberlain, the council of
faqīhs changed their unfavorable opinion as to the conversion of Medina Alzahira into a major mosque, although its use continued to be frowned upon by many notable Cordobans. His attempts to seize power ended the long alliance between Almanzor and
Subh in 996. After twenty years as a representative of Subh, Almanzor confronted the Caliph's mother and her supporters. After the collapse of the alliance, Subh tried with all her might to eliminate Almanzor and united with all his opponents and enemies and divided the court into two factions, a group supporting Almanzor and the survival of his power and another group supporting Subh whose goal was to take over the government by her son. The clash between the two cliques was triggered by Subh withdrawing eighty thousand dinars from the royal treasury to finance an uprising against the chamberlain. Almanzor discovered this thanks to his agents in the palace, and he reacted by successfully petitioning the council of viziers and
Faqīhs to transfer the treasury to his residence, , characterizing Subh's theft as a robbery by the harem. With Almanzor sick, Subh took over the palace and tried in vain to block the transfer.
Abd al-Malik, Almanzor's son, won the support of the viziers. The Caliph repudiated the rebellion of his mother in late May 996, and Abd al-Malik took custody of both him and the treasure. Though the rebellion she headed on the peninsula lost steam due to loss of funding and the rapid defeat of its few supporters, the money she had previously taken allowed Subh to finance a rebellion in the Maghreb. Although Almanzor had not yet managed to quell this revolt by fall 997, it failed to gain any support on the peninsula. To reinforce his image and that of his son and successor, Almanzor organized a parade with the Caliph and his mother. The gesture served to dispel any doubts about the support of the Caliph for Almanzor, and thus refuted the allegations of
Ziri ibn Atiyya, launched from the Maghreb. After the procession,
Hisham was locked up – with all the comforts but without power – in , where his mother was probably also imprisoned. Having lost her confrontation with her former ally, she died shortly thereafter in 999. Almanzor, who had renewed his oath of allegiance to the Caliph with the proviso that he delegate his powers to his family, was strengthened. He sent his son to fight the North African rebellion, and took charge of all administrative power. He counted on the approval of the religious leadership who, fearing possible civil war, supported Almanzor's position as guarantor of stability and of the throne of the impotent Hisham. State power was divided in two: with Almanzor blocking exercise of the symbolic and legitimate power of the Caliph, while that of the chamberlain and his successors, devoid of legitimacy for being Yemeni
Mofarite and not of the Prophet's blood, controlled the Caliphate's policy.
Reform of army and administration The separation between the temporal power, held by Almanzor, and the spiritual, in the hands of Hisham as Caliph, increased the importance of military force, a symbol – along with the new majesty of the chamberlain's court, rival of that of the caliph himself – of the power of Almanzor, and an instrument to guarantee the payment of taxes. Almanzor successfully continued the military reforms begun by Al-Hakam and his predecessors, covering many aspects. On one hand, he increased the professionalization of the regular army, necessary both to guarantee his military power in the capital and to ensure the availability of forces for his numerous campaigns, one of the sources of his political legitimacy. This policy de-emphasized levies and other non-professional troops, which he replaced with taxes used to support the professional troops—often
saqalibas or Maghrebis—which freed the natives of al-Andalus from military service. Recruitment of
saqalibas and Berbers was not new, but Almanzor expanded it. On the other hand, he created new units, unlike the regular army of the Caliphate, that were faithful primarily to himself and served to control the capital. Emir
Abd al-Rahman I had already used Berbers and
saqalibas for a permanent army of forty thousand to end the conflicts that hitherto had plagued the emirate. At the time of Emir
Muhammad I, the army reached thirty-five to forty thousand combatants, half of them Syrian military contingents. This massive hiring of mercenaries and slaves meant that, according to Christian chroniclers, "ordinarily the Saracen armies amount to 30, 40, 50, or 60,000 men, even when in serious occasions they reach 100, 160, 300 and even 600,000 fighters." In fact, it has been argued that, in Almanzor's time, the Cordovan armies could muster six hundred thousand laborers and two hundred thousand horses "drawn from all provinces of the empire." ''. The chamberlain carried out wide-ranging military reforms. In order to eliminate a possible threat to his power and to improve military efficiency, Almanzor abolished the system of tribal units that had been in decline due to lack of Arabs and institution of pseudo-feudalism on the frontiers, in which the different tribes each had their own commander and that had caused continuous clashes, and replaced it with mixed units without clear loyalty under orders from Administration officials. The nucleus of the new army, however, was formed increasingly by Maghrebi Berber forces. The ethnic rivalries among Arabs, Berbers and Slavs within the Andalusi army were skillfully used by Almanzor to maintain his own power—for example, by ordering that every unit of the army consist of diverse ethnic groups so that they would not unite against him; and thus preventing the emergence of possible rivals. However, once their centralizing figure disappeared, these units were one of the main causes of the 11th-century civil war called the
Fitna of al-Andalus. Berber forces were also joined by contingents of well-paid Christian mercenaries, who formed the bulk of Almanzor's personal guard and participated in his campaigns in Christian territories. Almanzor's completion of this reform, begun by his predecessors, fundamentally divided the population into two unequal groups: a large mass of civilian taxpayers and a small professional military caste, generally from outside the peninsula. The increase in military forces and their partial professionalization led to an increase in financial expenses to sustain them. This represented an additional incentive to carry out campaigns, which produced loot and land with which to pay the troops. These lands, when handed over to the soldiers as payment, were thereafter subject to tribute and ceased to operate under a system of border colonization. The Caliphal army was funded by the taxpaying farmers in exchange for military exemptions, and consisted of local recruits as well as foreign mercenaries – Berber militias, Slav and Black slaves, mercenary Christian companies and
jihadi volunteers. At that time al-Andalus was known as
Dar Jihad, or "country of jihad", and attracted many volunteers, and though these were relatively few compared to the total army, their zeal in combat more than compensated for this. According to modern studies, these mercenary contingents made it possible to increase the total size of the Caliphal army from thirty or fifty thousand troops in the time of Abd al-Rahman III to fifty or ninety thousand. Others, like
Évariste Lévi-Provençal, argue that the Cordoban armies in the field with the Almanzor were between thirty-five thousand and seventy or seventy-five thousand soldiers. Contemporary figures are contradictory: some accounts claim that their armies numbered two hundred thousand horsemen and six hundred thousand foot soldiers, while others talk about twelve thousand horsemen, three thousand mounted Berbers and two thousand
sūdān, African light infantry. According to the chronicles, in the campaign that swept
Astorga and
León, Almanzor led twelve thousand African and five thousand Al Andalus horsemen, and forty thousand infantry. It is also said that, in his last campaigns, he mobilized forty-six thousand horsemen, while another six hundred guarded the train, twenty-six thousand infantry, two hundred scouts or 'police' and one hundred and thirty
drummers. or that the garrison of Cordoba consisted of 10,500 horsemen and many others kept the northern border in dispersed detachments. However, it is much more likely that the leader's armies, even in their most ambitious campaigns, may not have exceeded twenty thousand men. It can be argued that until the eleventh century no Muslim army on campaign exceeded thirty thousand troops, while during the eighth century the trans-Pyrenean expeditions totaled ten thousand men and those carried out against Christians in the north of the peninsula were even smaller. In the time of Emir Al-Hakam I, a palatine guard of 3000 riders and 2000 infantry was created, all Slavic slaves. This proportion between the two types of troops was maintained until Almanzor's reforms. The massive incorporation of North African horsemen relegated the infantry to sieges and fortress garrisons. This reform led to entire tribes, particularly Berber riders, being moved to the peninsula. The main weapon of the peninsular campaigns, which required speed and surprise, was the light cavalry. To try to counteract them, the Castilians created the role of "villain knights" – ennobling those free men who were willing to keep a horse to increase the mounted units – through the
Fuero de Castrojeriz of 974. For similar reasons, the Barcelonan count
Borrell II created the figure of the
homes of paratge- who obtained privileged military status by fighting against the Cordobans armed on horseback – after losing their capital in the fall of 985. In contrast to the prominent role the navy had played in previous decades under Abd al-Rahman III, under Almanzor it served only as a means of transporting ground troops, such as between the Maghreb and the Iberian Peninsula, or
Alcácer do Sal's ships in the campaign against
Santiago de Compostela in 997. During this time, military industry flourished in factories around Córdoba. It was said to be able to produce a thousand bows and twenty thousand arrows monthly, and 1300 shields and three thousand campaign stores annually. As for the fleet, its network of ports was reinforced with a new base in the Atlantic, in Alcácer do Sal, which protected the area of
Coimbra, recovered in the 980s, and served as the origin of the units that participated in the campaign against Santiago. On the Mediterranean shore, the naval defense was centered at the base of al-Mariya, now
Almería. The
dockyards of the fleet had been built in
Tortosa in 944. Initially the maritime defense of the Caliphate was led by Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Rumahis, a veteran admiral who had served Al-Hakam II and was Qadi of
Elvira and
Pechina. He repulsed raids by
al-Magus (idolaters) or
al-Urdumaniyun ('men of the north',
vikings), in the west of al-Andalus in mid-971; at the end of that year, when they tried to invade Al Andalus, the admiral left Almería and defeated them off the coast of
Algarve. In April 973, he transported the army of Ghalib from Algeciras to subdue the rebellious tribes of the Maghreb and end Fatimid ambitions in that area. As in 997, when the Al Andalus fleet hit the
Galician coast, in 985 it had ravaged the
Catalans. During the Catalan campaign,
Gausfred I, Count of
Empurias and
Roussillon, tried to gather an army to help the locals but then several flotillas of Berber pirates threatened their coasts, forcing them to stay to defend their lands. To ensure control of the military, Almanzor eliminated the main figures who could have opposed his reforms: in addition to the death of Ghalib, the participation of the governor of Zaragoza in the plot of his eldest son served as a justification to replace him with another, more amenable, member of the same clan, the Banu Tujib. The admiral of the fleet, who maintained a significant budget, was poisoned in January 980 and replaced by a man faithful to Almanzor. As in the Army he encouraged the recruitment of Berbers faithful to him, so in the Administration he favored the
saqalibas to the detriment of native officials, again with the aim of surrounding himself with personnel loyal only to him. Land transport routes were dotted with strongholds, since ancient Al Andalus dignitaries sought to control communications. Messengers were bought in
Sudan and specially trained to handle Almanzor's messages and to transmit the official reports that his foreign ministries wrote about the annual campaigns. The Caliphate ruled by Almanzor was a rich and powerful state. According to Colmeiro, it is estimated that in a pre-industrial society, for every million inhabitants, ten thousand soldiers could be mustered. Even assuming the chronicles exaggerated tenfold the real numbers – these speak of eight hundred thousand soldiers – the caliphate could have had eight million inhabitants. Those who use more bullish criteria estimate between seven and ten million, but the population was probably much fewer. Traditionally speaking, around the year 1000, the caliphate occupied four hundred thousand square kilometers and was populated by three million souls. By comparison, the Iberian Christian states comprised one hundred and sixty thousand square kilometers and half a million people. By the 10th century, 75% of the population under the Umayyads had converted to Islam, a number reaching 80% two centuries later. By comparison, at the time of the Muslim invasion, Spain had about four million inhabitants, although there is no shortage of historians who would raise that estimate to seven or eight million. His realm also had large cities like Córdoba, which surpassed one hundred thousand inhabitants;
Toledo, Almería and
Granada, which were around thirty thousand; and Zaragoza,
Valencia and
Málaga, all above fifteen thousand. This contrasted sharply with the Christian north of the peninsula, which lacked large urban centers.
Defense of religious orthodoxy and legitimation of power One of the instruments Almazor used to strengthen his power was his court, at which writers and poets celebrated his virtues—praise that was used as propaganda among the people. . The stability and prosperity of the regime and its rigorous defense of Islam, which Almanzor showed through various pious gestures, gave him popular support. Also numbered among these gestures were copying a Koran that he took with him during his campaigns, and the expansion of the
mosque of Cordoba (987–990). The political ambitions of the chamberlain had important repercussions on culture and religion, which he was forced to support. His image as Islam's leader led to the censorship of some sciences considered non-Islamic, and to the purging from Al-Hakam's important library of works considered heretical. His political interests required him to ingratiate himself with the lawyers when his power was still unsteady, and led him to censure logic, philosophy and astrology, despite his appreciation for culture. His meddling in religious matters led to the appointment of his own uncle, himself a veteran qadi, as the principal qadi after the death of the hostile Ibn Zarb, who had opposed some of his proposals. The main expression of his defense of religion, however, was his military campaigns against the Christian states, a method of legitimization that the caliphs had used before but which Almanzor took to extremes. Successive victories, despite their transient benefits to the realm, had a great propaganda effect, both in the Caliphate and in the enemy states of the north. To each crisis of his political career, he responded with large and/or multiple military campaigns. The campaigns also had a beneficial economic effect because of the loot – especially abundant slaves – obtained by them and because of the security they granted to the borders.
The Maghreb campaigns The meager Cordoban cereal production forced the Umayyads to obtain stocks from the Maghreb, and, thus, to oppose Fatimid expansion in the region, which jeopardized their supply. At stake was commercial control of the western Mediterranean. Unlike his campaigns on the Iberian Peninsula and with the exception of the one carried out jointly with Ghalib at the beginning of his career, Almanzor did not take a personal role in the fighting in the Maghreb, but simply a supervisory one. The effective direction of the fight was in the hands of subordinates, whom he would ceremonially accompany to Algeciras to see off the troops as they crossed the strait. Abd al-Rahman III had conquered Ceuta and
Tangier and fortified them in 951, but he had not been able to prevent the Fatimids from taking control of the Maghreb in 958–959, after burning the Umayyad fleet in Almería in 955. In 971, Umayyad clients suffered another heavy defeat. The Fatimid march to Egypt around 972 benefitted the Umayyads, who were left facing a Fatimid client, the
Sanhaja Berber
Buluggin ibn Ziri. The Caliphate's strategy began by the fortification of Ceuta, manned by a large garrison. In May of 978, the
Zenata tribes seized the city of
Sijilmasa, at the northern end of the trans-
Saharan gold, salt and textile trading routes, and where they founded a pro-Córdoba principality ruled by Jazrun ibn Fulful, the city's conqueror. The success of the Umayyad political machine, continued by Almanzor, allowed him to concentrate the offensive power of the Berber tribes on the expansion of the regions that recognized his legitimacy and limited clashes among those accepting Córdoba's protection. This conquest, which gave great prestige to Hisham and Almanzor—and affronted the Fatimids because it was the city where its founder had appeared before the Berber
Kutama tribe—allowed them to counteract the influence of the Fatimids who, after moving to Egypt, had left these regions under the control of the
Zirid dynasty. Ibn Ziri launched a victorious campaign that temporarily disrupted the Zenata and allowed him to recover much of the Western Maghreb before besieging Ceuta. The refugees there asked for help from Almanzor, who sent a large army that he accompanied as far as Algeciras, to repulse Ibn Ziri, who decided to retire although he continued harassing Umayyad supporters until his death in 984. The effects of Ibn Ziri's inroads, however, were transient: at his death most of the tribes of the region once again accepted Cordoban religious authority. In 985, before the Idrisid
Al-Hasan ibn Kannun, who had proclaimed himself Caliph, returned from his refuge in the Fatimid court in Egypt, Almanzor saw off a new army that crossed the Maghreb to confront him under command of his cousin. Reinforcements were later dispatched, commanded by the eldest son of Almanzor, and his father-in-law, the governor of Zaragoza. Overwhelmed, the Idrisid negotiated his surrender and proceeded to the Cordoban court, but Almanzor had him assassinated on his way to the city, and later executed his cousin who had granted safe conduct to the rebel. The disagreements among the various tribal leaders loyal to the Umayyads did produce one crisis: the favor shown by Almanzor to
Ziri ibn Atiyya of the
Maghrawa Berbers upset other chiefs, who ended up rising in arms. They defeated the Cordoban governor of
Fez, who died in combat, and Ibn Atiyya in April 991. After this defeat, Almanzor understood the need to grant control of the region to local Berber leaders instead of trying to govern through Iberian delegates. This strategy aimed to attract the support of local tribes to the Umayyads. Fundamentally, the fate of the campaigns depended on the changing loyalties of the various tribal leaders, although, in general, the Zenata supported the Umayyads while the Sanhaja supported the Fatimids. Almanzor unsuccessfully attempted to divide the territory between Ibn Attiya and another tribal chief who had abandoned the Fatimids—the uncle of al-Mansur ibn Buluggin, son and successor of Buluggin ibn Ziri. So, Almanzor gave all lands controlled by the Caliphate to Ibn Atiyya, who managed to defeat the rebels and supporters of the Fatimids in 994, and founded a small principality centered on
Oujda. The crisis between Almanzor and the royal family in 996–998 caused a confrontation between him and Ibn Atiyya, who considered Almanzor's attitude towards the Caliph to be disrespectful. Seeing in Ibn Atiyya a threat to his power, Almanzor dismissed him and sent forces to combat him. The
Banu Maghrawa, the
Banu Ifran and
Banu Miknasa joined the Al Andalus forces landing at Tangier, soon receiving reinforcements commanded by the Almanzor's son, already chamberlain. At the beginning of August 998, Almanzor himself went to Algeciras with the numerous reinforcements destined to participate in the campaign. In October 998, Abd al-Malik managed to defeat Ibn Atiyya and put him to flight, although Almanzor still sought local support for the Umayyad administration. Until his death, however, the territorial government remained in the hands of successive Iberian officials. The campaigns in the Maghreb also had an important consequence for Iberian politics: Almanzor brought Berber troops and warlords to the peninsula, both to form his personal troops and as contingents in the campaigns against Christian territories. Some of these leaders were even named viziers, which did not prevent their occasional fall from grace. == Campaigns against Christians ==