But what shall we say of the stupendous buildings erected both in Africa and in Andalus during the administration of al-Manṣūr? What of his addition to the Great Mosque of Córdoba … a work so highly meritorious in the eyes of God that it would, of itself, have procured him a place in Paradise! What of the magnificent palaces and gilded pavilions erected at his command, and which equalled, if they did not surpass, those constructed by the Sultans of the family of Umayya!
Al-Maqqarī, Nafḥ al-Ṭīb, II, 218
∵
During the night of 27 Ramadan 392/9 August 1002, Muḥammad ibn Abī ʿĀmir – known to history as al-Manṣūr – died.1 He had come to power because of the minority of the caliph Hishām II (r. 976–c. 1010), and continued to rule de facto even after Hishām had attained his majority. Al-Manṣūr’s rule lasted twenty-four years, during which time al-Andalus, within its borders, witnessed perhaps its greatest period of stability and prosperity, due in no small part to his always victorious twice-yearly campaigns. His rule and that of the dynasty he established – through the short-lived administrations of his two sons (1002–10) – is a key period in the history of al-Andalus, a period during which the Umayyad regime made important territorial and political gains in the Maghrib and Christian Iberia. It is only in recent years, however – and especially since the ‘Milenario de Almanzor’ in 2002, the year designated to commemorate the passing of a millennium since his death – that scholars have begun to approach the history of this period on its own terms, rather than allowing inherited biases from medieval and twentieth-century historiographies, both Muslim and Christian, to inform their understanding.
A range of conferences and published proceedings have appeared since 2002,2 as well as biographical monographs intended to bring al-Manṣūr’s story to a more general readership. Apart from the difficulties of tracking down these publications, they are mainly written in Spanish, apart from that by Philippe Sénac, which was originally written in French.3 Spanish scholarship all too often lies outside the reach of Anglophone scholars and consequently this historical period remains largely unknown. The papers within these conference proceedings that discuss material culture do not engage specifically with the ʿĀmirids themselves, but serve to provide a general picture of the state of al-Andalus at the turn of the millennium. Though Sénac is an archaeologist, his monograph is primarily historical, and while he mentions material remains from the ʿĀmirid period he does not fully engage with it as evidence. Ballestín Navarro’s 2004 study is based on a thorough re-examination of the anonymous historical text, the Kitāb al-Mafākhir al-Barbar (c. 1312), in particular for what it tells us about the Umayyads’ and ʿĀmirids’ relations with the Maghrib. Echevarría’s 2011 publication, though targeted at a general readership, is deeply informed by good scholarship and provides a very useful state of the question. Bariani’s 2003 monograph is the encapsulation of her years of scholarship on the political history of al-Manṣūr’s rule: as well as revisiting well-known historical sources, she engaged with lesser-known, previously unpublished texts, to present new interpretations of key events, such as Hishām’s accession and the rupture with Ṣubḥ. Oddly, these texts and her interpretations have not been taken up by later historians. Bariani is also one of the few scholars to attempt to engage with the material evidence of the ʿĀmirid period, for example in her 2002 article on the reconstruction of al-Madīnat al-Zāhira from historical sources. However, as with all the studies mentioned here, the artistic and archaeological evidence is primarily illustrative: for example, both Bariani and Sénac use on their book covers a painting of ‘R. Almanzor’ by Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), without providing any context for this anywhere inside their books.4
This use of an artwork as pure illustration, without engaging with it or its particular context and meaning, remains the mode in which the material culture of the ʿĀmirid period is considered. An appreciation of the dynasty’s rich cultural environment, the arts and architectural projects which they sponsored, and the messages of power which these arts expressed, remain largely absent from the studies of this period. Discussion of material culture is never properly integrated into the historical arguments presented, which they fully complement – it remains in the background. It is not for lack of evidence that this aspect of the ʿĀmirid period has been neglected: not only was al-Manṣūr the only non-Umayyad patron of an extension to the Great Mosque of Córdoba, which was also the largest ever added to that monument; but he constructed a palace-city comparable in scale and magnificence to the caliphal foundation, Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ; while a considerable number of extant objects and associated fragments, made from luxurious materials such as ivory and marble, and often on a spectacularly large scale, can be associated with the ʿĀmirids through the inscriptions they bear. On the other hand, the material evidence presents a number of difficulties: no ruins of the palace-city remain above ground, and its exact location has never been convincingly established; only one of the surviving objects bears an inscription naming al-Manṣūr himself; and, as we will see in Chapter 5, the messages in his mosque extension are not as clear as those of the previous building campaigns in that monument. However, by drawing together these different strands, in combination with a consideration of the ʿĀmirid court and the surviving poetry that was sung in the ḥājibs’ praise, the evidence exists for a contextualisation of ʿĀmirid artistic and cultural patronage.
The principal reason why no such analysis has ever been undertaken is perceptual. Al-Manṣūr – in the guise of the folkloric construct ‘Almanzor’ – has come to represent a sort of bogey-man for the Spanish, the punishment with which to threaten children who don’t behave.5 Spanish scholars, too, can be emotive on the subject: Pérez de Urbel called al-Manṣūr an ‘evil genius’,6 and the ambiguity of his relationship with the caliph’s mother, Ṣubḥ, has tarred him with the salacious brush of the Arabian Nights. This approach persists to the modern day: most histories of al-Andalus will employ the concepts of ‘dictatorship’, ‘usurpation’ and ‘ambition’ in descriptions of the ʿĀmirid period, and an issue of the magazine El Legado Andalusí, dedicated to the ‘Milenario de Almanzor’, was entitled ‘El tirano ilustrado’ (‘The tyrant illustrated’).7 Reinhart Dozy said of al-Manṣūr that ‘we find it impossible to love him, and difficult even to admire him’.8 There is also a tendency to describe al-Manṣūr in terms of other authoritarian rulers: he has been called a ‘César Andaluz’, and likened to Attila, Machiavelli, Richelieu, Napoleon, even Kruschev!9 However, most persistent in twentieth-century Spanish scholarship are the parallels between al-Manṣūr and the Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco (r. 1936–75): one frequently encounters the ḥājib of a millennium before referred to by Franco’s titles – ‘el Caudillo’ or ‘Generalísimo’ – and an apologist historical novel written in 1946 by Luis Antonio de Vega (Almanzor) even drew explicit parallels between the two ‘beneficent dictators’.10 Al-Manṣūr has become legendary, even novelised, in a way that the Umayyad amirs and caliphs of al-Andalus have not.11
In terms of cultural studies, al-Manṣūr has been characterised as an anti-cultural figure, the only art he patronised being the art of war. One of the main reasons for this characterisation is his purge of al-Ḥakam II’s famous library, a cultural crime of which he has never been acquitted. This incident is often cited as one of the ways in which al-Manṣūr sought to undermine the high culture of the caliphs,12 indulging in a deliberately ignorant act, but is never properly contextualised. In fact, one of the most important ways in which ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III (r. 912–61) had articulated the legitimacy of his new caliphate a generation earlier was by claiming to defend Sunni Islam against the rise of Shiʿism under the Fatimids and Buyids.13 Any departure from the Maliki norm was ruthlessly suppressed. When al-Manṣūr became ḥājib, he took up the mantle of the Umayyad defence of orthodoxy as an element in the articulation of his own power. This important religious dimension to al-Manṣūr’s ḥijāba, including the tactics he employed to build support among the ʿulamāʾ, provide an important context for his purge of al-Ḥakam II’s library.
The act of purging the library, especially through burning the books, is anachronistically interpreted from the perspective of events in twentieth-century history. Modern reactions have thus been highly emotive, employing the language of the Inquisition – Lévi-Provençal even called it an ‘autodafé’.14 Again, it has been most consistently viewed in the light of twentieth-century Fascism. This is clearly illustrated in the introductions to both books on the Cordoban ivories by José Ferrandis Torres (1900–48). His overview of the ʿĀmirid period seems to resonate with personal responses to the political upheaval which Spain underwent throughout the 1920s, culminating in the rise of Franco and Civil War, and with his own nostalgia for the earlier liberal government:
“The political physiognomy of the Cordoban caliphate changed radically with the government of Almanzor. Cordoba had been the centre of worldly culture during the tenth century; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III and al-Ḥakam II had intervened personally in the aggrandisement of Arab Spain; they had encouraged liberty of discussion in philosophical problems and had created the best library in the world; the whole of Europe watched with envy the power of the Cordoban monarchs, Arab leaders adapted by an exquisite culture to the sweet and delicate life of Andalucía. With Hishām II, the government of Almanzor predominated, who being more intolerant persecuted the philosophers and burned their books; he supported militarism and rode with a personal guard … Thus he impoverished Cordoba and left her to be the capital of a caliphate now converted into one of the many states of the Taifa kinglets.”15
This quotation from Ferrandis also reveals the historiographic tendency to see the cultural achievements of the first two Andalusi caliphs, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III and al-Ḥakam II (r. 961–76), as a ‘Golden Age’ – achievements that have shone so brightly, they have cast into shadow other periods of artistic production in al-Andalus. The art itself has become almost a metaphor by which modern scholars judge the caliphal period as a whole; in comparison, other periods are usually found artistically less interesting and culturally less significant. The development of Andalusi art historical studies in Spain has been accompanied by the explicit perception that such a warrior as al-Manṣūr could not have engaged in cultural patronage. It is also often implied that he was an unwilling patron, forced into the construction of ‘pious works’ by al-Andalus’s strict Maliki jurists. The art of this period is expected to be degenerate, because of al-Manṣūr’s perceived disinterest in it; as will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 6, objects or surviving architectural decoration have been attributed to the ʿĀmirid period precisely because of what is considered to be their ‘impoverished’ style, technique, even material. As characterised by Juan Zozaya, ʿĀmirid art was a ‘shepherd’s style trying to copy a prince’s’.16
These views tend to perpetuate the damning sentence passed long ago by the two pioneers of Andalusi art history, Manuel Gómez-Moreno (1870–1970) and Leopoldo Torres Balbás (1888–1960). For Gómez-Moreno,
“[Hishām] was only a name for history, while accumulating infamies Almanzor established himself in tyranny, his pre-eminence as odious as it was based on militaristic impulse. He imposed force, without a care for the culture fomented under al-Ḥakam, and the fruit which Almanzor offered in exchange for his usurpation were conquering advances in Africa and the destruction of the Christian powers in the north of the Peninsula. However, he submitted himself to the fanatical exigencies of the Maliki sect, incarnated in the jurists, purging the incomparable library of al-Ḥakam because it did not seem orthodox, and he proposed to enlarge the Great Mosque even more, perhaps more than necessity to distract attention from public affairs.”17
While for Torres Balbás,
“It is amazing to think that in the brief space of some twenty years the artistic decadence was so considerable that one sees the transition from the splendid, in all respects, work of al-Ḥakam II, to the routine and impoverished, in forms and technique, under the omnipotent minister. Faced with the inexistence or ignorance of a social or political event that could explain this decline, the suspicion arises that al-Ḥakam II was the great motivator of this artistic and cultural movement, since before his accession to the throne, and once he had gone, there was no-one interested in its prosecution. Artistic preoccupations were strangers to the Maliki fanaticism and triumphant militarism of the author of the purge of al-Ḥakam II’s magnificent library. Probably the dispersal of the Cordoban ateliers which worked on Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ and the Mosque occurred before the siege and decadence of Cordoba and the destruction of the royal city in the first years of the eleventh century.”18
These negative views have not been helped by the failure of scholars to study the ʿĀmirid period on its own terms: it is usually only considered as a transitionary stage through which the caliphate passed on its way to the Fitna, the civil war leading to the disintegration of the caliphal state into the disparate city-states of the eleventh century, known as the Taifa period. While individual objects, such as the Pamplona casket (Figures 120–127), are famous among Islamic art historians, they are usually considered as products of ‘the caliphal period’, rather than recognised as creations of a distinct historical and political context and patronage process. The ʿĀmirid palace-city, al-Madīnat al-Zāhira, is always understood in terms of the discourse of ‘usurpation’, while the Cordoba mosque extension is consistently perceived as stylistically inferior. Gómez-Moreno dismissed al-Manṣūr’s mosque extension as a ‘slavish copy’ of al-Ḥakam’s extension, ‘with hardly anything new artistically’,19 while Torres Balbás considered its decoration ‘uniform and monotonous’.20 But, as discussed in Chapter 5, the subordination of the ʿĀmirid extension to that of al-Ḥakam II – expressing architecturally the continuity of his regime with that of the Umayyads – was al-Manṣūr’s main message.
1 Sources and Historiography
These emotive modern responses derive entirely from medieval historiography, especially from the literal demonisation of ‘Almanzor’ by the Christian chroniclers of the ‘Reconquista’. The thirteenth-century Chronicon Mundi of Lucas de Tuy introduces the apocryphal Battle of Calatañazor, in which Almanzor is represented as a servant of Satan, who weeps for his ultimate defeat by the Christians.21 The twelfth-century Historia Silense relates the famous epitaph, ‘Mortuus est Almanzor, et sepultus est in Inferno’ (‘Almanzor is dead; he is buried in Hell’).22 On the other hand, the main branch of Islamic historiography on this period derives from the writings of Ibn Ḥayyān (987–1076), ‘the greatest historian of medieval Spain’,23 which projects a strongly pro-Umayyad view of the period, since he blamed the ʿĀmirids for the eventual fall of the Andalusi caliphate. This historian devoted one or more of the sixty volumes of his Matīn to a history of the ʿĀmirid dynasty, the Akhbār al-Dawlat al-ʿĀmiriyya. Written around the middle of the eleventh century, it was based on his own eye-witness testimony and that of his father, Khalaf ibn Ḥayyān (951–1035), who was a vizier at al-Manṣūr’s court. This work, now unfortunately lost, was undoubtedly the common source for all later histories of the ʿĀmirids, as Cristina de la Puente has discussed.24 Several sources, for example, repeat the following sentence, which must have originated with Ibn Ḥayyān’s lost history of the ʿĀmirids: ‘Hishām al-Muʾayyad was left with no more marks of the caliphate (rūsūm al-khilāfa) than the invocation [of his name] on the minbars, and the inscription of his name on the products of the ṭirāz and the coinage (sikka)’.25 The personal bias of al-Manṣūr’s earliest historiographer has thus been transmitted by historians of al-Andalus all the way up to al-Maqqarī (c. 1577–1632).26
Another fundamental eye-witness account for the early years of al-Manṣūr’s career is the Akhbār mulūk al-Andalus by ʿĪsā ibn Aḥmad al-Rāzī about whom very little is known other than that he was a secretary in the caliphal court and died at the end of the year 989. Only four years (June 971 to July 975) from al-Rāzī’s court annals have survived, reproduced by Ibn Ḥayyān in volume VII of his Muqtabis. These contain fascinating information about the daily life of al-Ḥakam II’s court, and have recently been used as the basis for a book by Eduardo Manzano on the administration of court and state in the late tenth century.27 These annals were translated into Spanish by Emilio García Gómez as the Anales Palatinos del Califa de Córdoba al-Ḥakam II, and formed the basis of a number of articles by him on aspects of Cordoba’s topography and state ceremonial.
The second and third volumes of Ibn ʿIdhārī’s al-Bayān al-Mughrib provide the most extensive primary historical source on the ʿĀmirids. This late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century history of al-Andalus and the Maghrib relied heavily on Ibn Ḥayyān for information on the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is likely that Ibn ʿIdhārī’s direct source was actually the Dhakhīra of Ibn Bassām (d. 1147), which is responsible for preserving much of Ibn Ḥayyān’s lost work through the verbatim quotation of long passages; both later works therefore preserve Ibn Ḥayyān’s pro-Umayyad stance.28 Many other medieval historians have transmitted sections of works which have not otherwise survived.29 Among the most significant for the study of the ʿĀmirids is a biography of al-Manṣūr by Ibn Saʿīd (d. 1286); the polymath, Ibn al-Khaṭīb (d. 1374), a courtier from the Nasrid court in exile in Marinid Morocco – his Kitāb Aʿmāl al-Aʿlām was written for the Marinid sultan al-Saʿīd II (r. 1358), who had succeeded to the throne in infancy and was thus interested in the precedents of other rulers who had begun their reigns as children, Hishām II being an obvious example;30 the great historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406); and a number of anonymous works written in the Maghrib in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the Kitāb al-Mafākhir al-Barbar (c. 1312) which, as mentioned above, provides detail of al-Manṣūr’s relations in North Africa; and the Dhikr Bilād al-Andalus (late fourteenth/early fifteenth-century), again indebted to Ibn Ḥayyān but containing information which does not appear in other histories. We also know of other works which have not survived, such as the history of the ʿĀmirid dynasty written by al-Manṣūr’s librarian Ibn Maʿmar al-Lughawī (d. 1032),31 and another work of Ibn Saʿīd dedicated to the splendours of al-Madīnat al-Zāhira.32 Echoes of these works can be found in unattributed anecdotes transmitted by other historians, in particular al-Maqqarī.
While such chronicles are essential for laying the building blocks for our understanding of a historical period, it can be difficult, as David Wasserstein has noted, ‘to penetrate beyond the smokescreen of great events to their motive causes and the processes underlying them’.33 Such sources tell us almost nothing about the processes of cultural and artistic patronage, nor do they comment on material possessions or physical settings. It is therefore necessary to supplement the evidence of chronicles with other sources, most importantly (in this case) literary and poetic works as well as the material evidence itself. Key among the former are the surviving works of Ibn Ḥazm (994–1064), another eye witness whose father Aḥmad (d. 1012) served in the ʿĀmirid court, and who actually lived in al-Madīnat al-Zāhira. Works such as his treatise on love, Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma (‘The Dove’s Neckring’), or the historical Naqṭ al-ʿArūs (‘Freckles of the Bride’), contain incidental anecdotes and details which help to build a fuller picture of the ʿĀmirid material world. Another form of eye-witness testimony derives from the panegyric and other poetry composed in honour of the ʿĀmirids by their large circle of salaried poets. Many poetic samples are preserved in the annals, but more importantly for the ʿĀmirid period is the surviving collection (dīwān) of one of al-Manṣūr’s ‘poets laureate’, Ibn Darrāj al-Qasṭallī (958–1030). As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, Ibn Darrāj was present at many ceremonial and private gatherings of the ʿĀmirid court, as well as on the battlefield of some of al-Manṣūr’s campaigns, and he refers to these in verses composed for the occasion. His poems even contain evidence for embassies from the Christian rulers of Iberia for which we have no other historical data. An analysis of the imagery he and other ʿĀmirid court poets used in their verses provides an important framework within which to understand the visual imagery of the objects created contemporaneously and for these same patrons, as discussed in Chapter 8.
The modern scholarship on al-Manṣūr and the ʿĀmirid period has been primarily the work of Spanish scholars and, in addition to those monographic studies mentioned above, I am indebted to scholars such as Cristina de la Puente, María Jesús Viguera, Maribel Fierro, Alejandro García Sanjuán, Juan Souto, Susana Calvo Capilla, as well as the very many others who have gone before them and whose works are cited in the bibliography, for laying the groundwork for my own study. In the historical sections of this book, I will summarise the main issues and discuss what I see as the most relevant themes, but refer the reader who wants to find out more detail on the history of this period to these studies. Not many English-language scholars have engaged with this period on its own terms: special mention should be made of the historical works of David Wasserstein and the art-historical works of Cynthia Robinson, both dedicated to the beginnings and development of the Taifa period, so their studies approach the ʿĀmirid period from the perspective of what followed.34 In general, most historians of whatever nationality treat the Umayyad period as if it ended with the death of al-Ḥakam II in 976, a shortcoming which I hope my own study will finally address.
2 The Ḥijāba
Deriving from ‘ḥajaba’, ‘to prevent, protect; conceal, screen’, the ḥājib – often translated to English as ‘chamberlain’ – was the man who placed himself between the caliph’s curtain (sitr) and those who desired admittance to the caliphal presence.35 The incumbent of this office was thus the ‘Master of Ceremonies’ at state events, as well as the caliph’s ‘Protector’. It was a distinctively Umayyad office – it already existed at the time of Muʿāwiya, but it fully evolved in al-Andalus.36 It came to signify the same role as that of vizier in the Islamic East: the highest official in the State, with equal responsibility for the house of the ruler, and in particular the tutelage of his children, and the Chancery. He was the counsellor and confidant of the ruler, but also the person to whom he delegated authority, especially in a military capacity. The ḥājib was the only man authorised to impart or communicate the caliph’s orders.37
By the time al-Manṣūr came to occupy this office in the 970s, these roles and responsibilities were well-established. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I (r. 756–88), the first Umayyad amir in al-Andalus, appointed five successive ḥujjāb during his reign, though the office seems to have been restructured under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II (r. 822–52) so that by the amirate of ʿAbd Allāh (r. 888–912) the function of ḥājib was properly constituted as an institution of the state apparatus.38 In the early years of his rule, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III continued the practice of appointing ḥujjāb, though the two men he named to this office were selected from among the patrician families of the Umayyad state. This had not been the norm hitherto and was no doubt a deliberate stabilising policy on the part of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, after the turbulent civil war years which preceded his accession.39 Badr ibn Aḥmad (ḥājib 912–921) was one of the highest dignitaries of the state at the start of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s reign; he was head of the cavalry, prefect of the guard, and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s qāʾid.40 As Echevarría notes, al-Manṣūr was not the first state official to direct the Andalusi troops: the ḥājib of amir Muḥammad had also been head of the cavalry and, though not a ḥājib, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III’s freedman Ghālib became the most important general of the Andalusi armies under al-Ḥakam II.41
After Badr’s death the office of ḥājib was filled by Mūsā ibn Muḥammad ibn Ḥudayr (d. 933). But after the latter’s death, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān appointed no successor to the ḥijāba, probably because – as a consequence of declaring himself caliph – he was centralising more and more state authority in his own person. Instead of a single ḥājib, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān surrounded himself with a particularly large number of viziers, again a way of making roles in the state administration for members of the Cordoban elite.42
The office was revived by his son al-Ḥakam II, who appointed as ḥājib his father’s freedman, Jaʿfar al-Ṣiqlābī, on the very day he took office in 961. He held this office until his death in 971. Jaʿfar’s ḥijāba is particularly well-documented thanks to the many inscriptions that survive in which he is named as carrying out the caliph’s orders, and to the important epigraphic study in which Manuel Ocaña reconstructed the development of Jaʿfar’s career in great detail.43 Al-Ḥakam came to rely profoundly on his ḥājib and following Jaʿfar’s death, he was succeeded to this office by another Jaʿfar, al-Muṣḥafī, descendant of a Berber family that had settled near Valencia in the ninth century.44 During ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III’s reign, many Berbers reached high office, and several members of the Banū al-Maṣāḥifa held positions at court, before and after Jaʿfar.45 His father, ʿUthmān ibn Naṣr ibn Qawī (d. 325/937), had reached the level of vizier under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān and may have been tutor to the young al-Ḥakam; it is possible that Jaʿfar al-Muṣḥafī was educated alongside the prince.46
The political circumstances in which Jaʿfar al-Muṣḥafī was succeeded to the ḥijāba by al-Manṣūr will be discussed in Chapter 1, but it is important to acknowledge that there is a historical context in which al-Manṣūr acceded to this long-established office. Many of the roles he took early in his career have precedents among his forebears in this office, and they too were able to accumulate great riches which they used to engage in artistic patronage. Jaʿfar al-Ṣiqlābī had an official residence at the heart of the palatine core of Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ, physically close to the caliph’s private quarters, which has been identified and now partially reconstructed by archaeologists. He may also have had a private villa (munya) in the city’s environs, from which architectonic elements with figurative decoration may be the only remaining trace. Jaʿfar al-Muṣḥafī also owned a lavish munya, al-Muṣḥafiyya, which passed into al-Manṣūr’s possession after al-Muṣḥafī’s fall from grace.47 Further, he or one of his ancestors may have founded a neighbourhood mosque in the city centre of Cordoba (masjid al-Muṣḥafi min dākhil Qurṭuba).48 One of the two Jaʿfars even minted coins struck with ‘al-ḥājib’ at the top and his own name, ‘jaʿfar’, at the bottom. These so-called ‘Jaʿfarī dinars’ were mashhūr bi’l-Andalus, ‘famous throughout al-Andalus’. They start to be minted in 967, before al-Muṣḥafī comes to power as ḥājib, and thus might be best associated with al-Ṣiqlābī, as Martínez Enamorado argues;49 however, they continue to be minted until 984, long after al-Ṣiqlābī’s death. According to Ibn Ghālib, cited by Ibn Sa‘īd, al-Muṣḥafī was the one who minted Jaʿfarī dinars.50 The historical confusion might stem from the fact that both men had their names on the coins, as Meouak seems to believe. Nevertheless, this forms an important precedent for al-Manṣūr, who included his kunya ʿāmir on the coinage as soon as he was appointed ṣāḥib al-sikka. These two Jaʿfars, as precedents for ḥājibal patronage, will be discussed further in Chapter 6; but for now it should be observed that the conditions in which al-Manṣūr came to the ḥijāba and then operated in this role did not come from nowhere: they had established historical precedents which must be taken into account.
3 Structure of the Book
The central thesis of this book is the ways in which al-Manṣūr and his two sons used their patronage of culture, literature, art and architecture to express the legitimacy – that is, the rightness – of their role as regents, de facto rulers on behalf of the caliph of al-Andalus. This is the first study to do this. The study of artistic and cultural patronage requires a multi-disciplinary approach, and the nature of the evidence employed here is varied: it encompasses history, poetry, numismatics, epigraphy, archaeology, architectural and art history. Though throughout I refer to the ʿĀmirids’ patronage, the focus is largely on the dynasty’s founder, al-Manṣūr. The political, cultural and artistic policies of his two short-reigning sons cannot be separated from those of their father; furthermore, the nature of the material evidence is such that, in isolation, neither the objects nor the architecture is sufficient to provide a complete picture. All three patrons must thus be studied in conjunction.
Chapter 1 examines al-Manṣūr’s origins and his rise to power, his accumulation of caliphal-style titulature, and the ways in which he sought to confront the main issue of his ḥijāba – its legitimacy. It is a complex period, and this chapter brings together recent research in Spanish in order to make the full panorama of this historical period available for the first time to an English readership. The chapter has a chronological spine, while highlighting key themes of relevance to the later discussions. Though jihad is an important such theme, I do not discuss the ʿĀmirids’ military campaigns in detail, as these have been the most studied aspect of their administration and have accumulated a long bibliography.51 Aspects of their military activities will be touched on in other contexts and, for reference, the dates and names of al-Manṣūr’s campaigns are included in the Timeline provided in Appendix 2.
I do, however, aim to highlight the importance of North Africa at this period. Relations with Christian Iberia have dominated the historiography, as they have in general in the study of medieval Iberia, as if the clash of religions/cultures, or its polar opposite, the ideal of convivencia, were the only lenses through which to examine this region. As Amira Bennison notes, ‘Eurocentric historiography has tended to perceive the Umayyads as oriented towards the Christian north and Byzantium’, but relations with North Africa and the Berber notables ‘are given considerably more space’ in al-Rāzī’s Annals than embassies from Byzantium or the Christian kingdoms.52 She notes that the Umayyads’ central foreign policy objective, especially under al-Ḥakam II, was the assertion of Umayyad Sunnism against Fatimid Shiʿism in North Africa, and this is the theatre in which Ibn Abī ʿĀmir – the future al-Manṣūr – first rose to a position of trust in al-Ḥakam’s court. As Xavier Ballestín notes, ‘the critical moments in his career did not happen in Cordoba or on the northern frontier, but in the Maghrib, both at the start of his career and when he reached the culmination of his power’.53
Another important element of the context draws on Laura Bariani’s research into the mental and physical incapacity of the caliph Hishām II. Through careful examination of the Arabic primary sources, Bariani has demonstrated that the situation in al-Andalus at this period was decidedly more complex than the Ḥayyānī view of ʿĀmirid usurpation has allowed.54 She argues that Hishām II was never mentally or physically capable of taking up the reins of power, even when he attained his majority. Rather than a simple scenario of usurpation, al-Manṣūr’s power was legally delegated to him by the caliph, with the crucial support of the queen mother, Ṣubḥ; but in order to protect Hishām against conspiracies to replace him with a more capable Umayyad relative, al-Manṣūr and Ṣubḥ needed to keep Hishām’s condition a secret. As such, the ʿĀmirids’ position is shown to have been fully legalised in Islamic law, even conforming to a recognised model of delegated authority. However, the ḥājibs’ ability to maintain that position derived from the ways in which they cultivated the loyalty of the ruling elite, the affirmation of the religious elite, and fulfilled the traditional duties of the caliph.
Chapter 2 examines the adoption by the ʿĀmirids of caliphal-style court ceremonial and their conduct of diplomatic relations with Christian Iberia and the Maghrib, as well as further afield, including Byzantium. In elaborate embassies staged at al-Madīnat al-Zāhira, their clients and defeated enemies were made to participate in awe-inspiring displays of submission. Adopting caliphal ceremonial in this way sought to symbolise and strengthen the ḥijāba’s official representation. Al-Manṣūr also adopted a strategic policy of dynastic marriage, including with the key families of Christian Iberia, forming important bonds of kinship across the borders of different faiths. In this, he seems to have been deliberately following a long-standing policy among the Umayyad amirs. Through their sponsorship of a highly literary culture, the ʿĀmirids carefully cultivated personal bonds with the Cordoban elite, which were crucial in the legitimation of their political position (Chapter 3). These bonds were forged through the propagation of intimate poetic gatherings in the gardens of the ʿĀmirids’ palaces, and this intense literary patronage stimulated the development of what has been described as ‘the greatest literary age of al-Andalus’.55 The intense sponsorship of books and learning during the ʿĀmirid period, if not necessarily by the ḥājibs directly, belies the notion that this was an anti-intellectual period.
The cultivation of a flourishing court was one of the principal means by which the ʿĀmirids articulated their regency. However, the most striking manifestation of their power and position was the construction of a palace-city, al-Madīnat al-Zāhira, which imitated both the form and function of the caliphal foundation at Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ. Just as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III had used the construction of his palace-city to epitomise the Umayyads’ claim to the caliphate and to monumentalise the caliphal title he had adopted, so al-Manṣūr used architecture not just to emblematise his titulature but also to convey his claims of continuity with the Umayyad regime. Chapter 4 reconstructs the appearance and infrastructure of al-Madīnat al-Zāhira from historical and literary texts, as well as some surviving architectonic elements that might be associated with it.
For art and architecture, the primary sources are naturally the objects and the monuments themselves. Chapter 5 provides a detailed study of al-Manṣūr’s construction of an extension to the Great Mosque of Cordoba, the Umayyad dynastic symbol par excellence, which has never received such focused attention. In contrast, most authors on the mosque skim over the ʿĀmirid extension, as discussed above. But here is actually where we can retrieve the messages conveyed through al-Manṣūr’s use of architectural patronage most clearly. By subordinating his extension to the Umayyad monument by imitating its architectural form, al-Manṣūr again laid claim to continuity with the caliphs, while at the same time making a literally monumental statement of the changed Realpolitik. The regents not the caliphs now exercised the regal role of constructing public works. However, the most explicit messages are those which he inscribed on the eastern façade of his extension: though no foundation inscription remains, the selection of particular Qurʾānic passages, and their intertextual relation to passages used in the epigraphic programme of the mosque’s interior, declared al-Manṣūr’s intention to uphold the strictures of Malikism against heterodoxy. In this, again, he aligned himself with policies championed by the caliphs, and thus staked his claim to be the only effective power in the state.
The book’s final chapters examine the ways in which the ʿĀmirids used their patronage of the luxury arts to visualise their messages of power. Chapter 6 discusses what can be reconstructed of the structure and personnel of the caliphal luxury arts industry, in order to elucidate how processes of artistic patronage actually worked in tenth-century al-Andalus. It examines whether a branch of this industry was transferred to al-Madīnat al-Zāhira, and looks at the precedents for artistic patronage among al-Manṣūr’s predecessors in the office of ḥājib. It also discusses the highly strategic ways in which al-Manṣūr used objects, as display or as khilʿa. The principal objects which form a corpus of ‘ʿĀmirid art’ are compiled and discussed as a group for the first time in Chapter 7. These objects are selected on the basis of inscriptions that connect them directly to ʿĀmirid patronage, or because of their strong stylistic associations with those so-inscribed. These objects include some of the most famous and spectacular creations to have survived from tenth-century al-Andalus, such as the Pamplona casket (2.1), or the marble fountain basins made for al-Manṣūr (1.2) and ʿAbd al-Malik (2.3.1), but discusses them alongside less-well-known objects or those made for ‘anonymous’ patrons whose stylistic characteristics allow us to date them to this period. The discussion concludes with an attempt to outline the ‘language’ of ʿĀmirid art, those elements that distinguish and characterise these objects and the architectonic decoration introduced in Chapter 4, from those of earlier (caliphal) or later (Taifa) periods.
Under the direction of ʿĀmirid personnel, particular messages were expressed in these objects’ iconography, which can be retrieved through a comparative study with the poetic imagery employed by ʿĀmirid court poets. The discussion in Chapter 8 shows that al-Manṣūr and his sons deliberately employed images to project their self-perception as fulfilling the virtues of the ideal ruler. This message was strengthened by a meaningful relationship between text and image, and this chapter also examines inscriptions on ʿĀmirid luxury arts, by discussing the semantics of particular epigraphic formulae and how these reinforce the messages of the iconography. Finally, the Conclusion draws these various methodological strands together, looking at the legacy of the ʿĀmirids into the Taifa period, in particular how their legitimising strategies were perpetuated by their clients and descendants who came to rule Taifa states after the disruption of the Fitna years. It looks at some of the early examples of Taifa art – in particular, architectural construction in Málaga and Toledo and the patronage of ivory carving by the Banū Dhū al-Nūn – for what these could say about styles, trends and techniques that had come to the fore in now-lost examples of ʿĀmirid architecture, especially since the artisans who produced these works had likely worked at the ʿĀmirid Dār al-Ṣināʿa before the Fitna.
The multi-disciplinary approach adopted in this study thus allows, for the first time, for an evaluation of the full spectrum of ʿĀmirid cultural patronage. Indeed, it creates the field of ʿĀmirid art. Moreover, by relating aspects of the ʿĀmirids’ cultural policies to those identified in studies of the articulation by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III of his caliphal legitimacy,56 it can be seen that in many ways al-Manṣūr imitated a model of legitimation invented by that caliph. Janina Safran’s studies have identified as fundamental elements in the articulation of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s caliphal legitimacy the ideological importance of his military activities, and his continued commissioning of regular campaigns throughout his reign (though he never again led the army personally after his rout at the Battle of Alhándega in 939); the development of his capital as a centre of learning and culture, which attracted men of talent from both Maghrib and Mashriq, and where he commissioned poets and historians to record his feats; the monumental construction in which he engaged at the Great Mosque of Cordoba and Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ; and the diplomatic relations which he developed with those states that bordered Andalusi interests (Christian Iberia, the Maghrib, Byzantium), and the consequent elaboration of an etiquette of court receptions and public ceremonies.57 By these means, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān established an Andalusi model of ideal kingship. As will be seen throughout the discussions in this book, this was a model which al-Manṣūr closely followed, since these were the very same means he employed to articulate the legitimacy of his ḥijāba.
Al-Manṣūr thus deliberately articulated his ḥijāba as if it were a caliphate, and sought to legitimise his position by engaging in the types of patronage that had traditionally been the preserve of caliphs. By employing the full range of available strategies, and by negotiating a delicate balance of power, al-Manṣūr and his sons were able to retain control of the ḥijāba for more than thirty years. It was a period when al-Andalus was at its most peaceful, secure and wealthy, and when some of the most spectacular artistic creations of the tenth century were made. It is hoped that through this study, the ʿĀmirid ḥijāba may be recognised as a significant historical and artistic period in its own right, with its own political context and concerns, rather than viewed askance through a biased historiographical lens that presumes its inferiority to the caliphal period. In consequence, not only will its key historical events be fully acknowledged, but also its great cultural achievements.
Bayān II (1951):301.
The key conferences and resulting publications are Valdés Fernández 1999; Martínez Enamorado and Torremocha Silva 2001; Torremocha Silva and Martínez Enamorado 2003; Garrot Garrot 2004, a book which is impossible to find, even in the main libraries in Madrid; Del Pino 2008. A Portuguese conference – Colóquio Internacional Almançor Ibn Abi ‘Amir e a Península Ibérica, held in Évora, 27–29 November 2002 – apparently remains unpublished.
Sénac 2006. This was translated into Spanish in 2011.
This painting represents ‘Almanzor’ as part of a cycle of paintings of the Infantes de Lara, probably commissioned by the house of Arias de Saavedra who claimed descent from the Lara family: see Delenda and Ros de Barbero 2010, 210–11, 473 (cat. II-253). I am extremely grateful to Akemi Herráez Vossbrink for discussing these paintings with me.
I am grateful to Dr Roger Boase of Queen Mary’s, University of London, for discussing this aspect of Spanish folklore with me, which he knows through his experience at the Catalan village of Sant Martí d’Empúries. This region preserves an inherited memory of al-Manṣūr’s frequent campaigns in that region, not least his spectacular campaign against Barcelona in 985.
In his Historia del Condado de Castilla (Madrid, 1945), II, 677, cited by Bariani 2001, 407. Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel y Santiago was a conspicuous Francoist, the first abbot of the Benedictine abbey of El Valle de los Caídos, where he was buried in 1979, four years after the death of Francisco Franco (d. 1975). His political bias thus deeply informed his writing of history. My thanks to Xavier Ballestín for this information.
El Legado Andalusí, no. 10, año III, 2o Trimestre, July 2002.
Dozy 1913, 533.
Many of these are noted in the historiographical overview in Martínez and Torremocha 2001, esp. 36–51 on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship. Ghazi 1962, 529, described al-Manṣūr’s political ethics as ‘khroutchevienne’, and at p. 534 called him ‘ce Richelieu andalou’.
Martínez and Torremocha 2001, 51. They quote a passage from this book which refers to al-Manṣūr’s suppression of ‘enemies from within’, and the need to maintain a strong interior all the better to triumph over one’s external enemies – clearly the use of a perceived historical ‘precedent’ to justify the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Even otherwise sensible recent historians have called al-Manṣūr ‘caudillo’, such as Echevarría 2011 and Puerta Vílchez 2013a.
In addition to Simonet’s Almanzor: una Leyende Árabe (1858; reprinted 1986) and De Vega’s Almanzor (1946), there are a plethora of millennial novels such as Ángel Espinosa Durán, Almanzor, Al-Mansur, el Victorioso (1998); Jesús Sánchez Adalid, El Mozárabe (2001); Magdalena Lasala, Almanzor: el gran guerrero de al-Andalus (2002); José Luis Rodríguez Plaza, El Esclavo de Almanzor (2002). Sánchez Adalid has recently revisited the success of his earlier book and published El camino mozárabe (2013). His most recent novel, Los Baños del Pozo Azul (2018), turns his attention to the relationship between Ṣubḥ and al-Manṣūr, and the rupture between them.
For example, Saʿīd al-Andalusī 1991, 61, says ‘Abū ʿĀmir performed this act … to discredit the doctrine of the caliph al-Ḥakam’.
See Safran 1998 and 2000.
Lévi-Provençal, HEM, II, 218. In his Civilisation Arabe en Espagne, 98, it is described as ‘un geste théâtral de vandalisme’.
Ferrandis Torres 1928, 82.
Personal communication, November 2001.
Gómez-Moreno 1951, 162–5.
Torres Balbás [1996], 578–9, my italics.
Gómez-Moreno 1951, 162.
Torres Balbás 1956, 578.
Martínez and Torremocha 2001, 33. On the Christian historiography of al-Manṣūr, see Echevarría 2000; Bariani 2001; Bariani 2003, 225–233; Valdeón 2004; Echevarría 2011, 22–27.
Historia Silense, ed. Pérez de Urbel and González Ruiz- Zorilla (Madrid, 1959), 176, cited in Echevarría 2000, 104 n. 36, 114. A similar epitaph is found in the Chronicon Burgense, ed. Huici Miranda, in Crónicas Latinas de la Reconquista, I, 1915, 34.
Menocal et al 2000, 114. His two great works, the Muqtabis and Matin, totalled 70 volumes.
De la Puente 1997, 370–371. See also Molina 1994, 11; ‘Ibn Ḥayyān’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition; Chalmeta 1972.
Bayān II:296 [translation, 459–460]; Dhikr Bilād I:180 [II:191]; al-Maqqarī 187 (Analectes, I:258).
De la Puente 1997, 367–374. Al-Maqqarī often names Ibn Ḥayyan as his source.
Manzano 2019.
De la Puente 1997, 371; Molina 1994, 6–8 (on Ibn Bassām); 9 (Ibn ʿIdhārī).
For a helpful overview of the historians who have written about the ʿĀmirid period, see Ballestín 2004a, 17–21; Echevarría 2011, 13–22.
Echevarría 2011, 21.
Echevarría 2011, 17; Bongianino 2017, 35.
Sénac 2006, 46.
Wasserstein 1985, 13.
It is unfortunate that the most recent book in English to treat this historical period presents a rather unreconstructed view of the ʿĀmirid ḥijāba, and makes no reference to any of the more recent Spanish studies. Richard Hitchock 2014 is blatant about accusing al-Manṣūr of being ‘anti-intellectual’, stating that ‘The pursuit of philosophy and astrology was to come to an abrupt halt after [al-Ḥakam’s] death’ (p. 86). Further, in discussing the purge of al-Ḥakam’s library, that al-Manṣūr ‘would not have hesitated in condemning to the flames or the rubbish dumps works that had brought such renown to his predecessor’ (p. 97). Here Hitchcock indulges in a melodramatic interpretation of the sources and, while admitting that the act was primarily expedient, implies that al-Manṣūr revelled in an act of unmitigated tyranny, because fundamentally he was ‘anti-intellectual’.
‘Hadjib’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition; Meouak 1994–5; Meouak 1999, 64–65.
Meouak 1994–5, 155.
Echevarría 2011, 45.
Meouak 1994–5, 157–8.
Fierro 2005.
Meouak 1995, 380–83. Badr established his own dynasty – his sons and grandsons held high office under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, al-Ḥakam II, al-Manṣūr and Sanchuelo, including the kātib who wrote documents condemning Ibn Masarra and poets under al-Manṣūr and Sanchuelo. Fierro 2005, 40, observes that the fact ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III’s close collaborator in early years was called Badr might be significant as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I’s success in al-Andalus owed much to the energy and devotion of his own manumitted slave called Badr.
Echevarría 2011, 174.
Meouak 1994–5, 160–2; Kennedy 1996, 85, who also observes that the number of Ṣaqāliba in the administration and military massively increases under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III.
Ocaña 1976; Martínez Enamorado 2006 gives a list of the offices he held. He says (p. 20), ‘De alguna forma, el caso de Jaʿfar al-Ṣaqlabī sirve para alumbrar el camino a Muḥammad ibn Abī ʿĀmir’.
Meouak 1999, 181. Jaʿfar’s grandfather may have been one Naṣr al-Muṣḥafī al-Naqqāt, who was a reader of the Qurʾān and had even placed the diacritical marks in the text of the Holy Book (yunaqqitu al-maṣāḥif). It may be that they settled in Valencia because it was already emerging as the important book-producing centre that it became under the Almoravids in the twelfth century.
Meouak 1999, 163.
Meouak 1999, 182; Echevarría 2011, 43.
Meouak 1999, 181, citing Nafḥ al-ṭīb, I, 471; Zanón 1989, 99.
Meouak 1999, 181, citing Codera ed., Al-Takmila, I, 343.
Martínez Enamorado 2006, 42.
Meouak 1999, 189. Canto & Ibrahim 1995 believe them to have been minted by al-Muṣḥafī.
For recent bibliography on al-Manṣūr’s campaigns and references to earlier works, see De la Puente 1999a and 2001; Echevarría 2000; Bariani 2003, 193–233 (part VI); Echevarría 2011, Chapter IV ‘El Poder de las Armas’.
Bennison 2007a, 74.
Ballestín 2004a, 14–15.
See the works by Bariani listed in the bibliography, especially Bariani 1998 and 2003.
Khadra Jayyusi 1992a, 326.
Especially studies by Janina Safran and Maribel Fierro.
Safran 1998, 193.