“Emir” or “Amir” means prince in Arabic. It acted as a general title for a ruler who wasn’t claiming to be the successor (Caliph) to Muhammad. Abd al-Rahman was probably too busy actually winning a kingdom for himself to think much about titles. He just was an Emir.
Emir Abd al-Rahman had at least four sons, though it’s not clear who their mothers were. They were probably high-class Umayyad Arab girls living in Toledo and Cordoba, but they could have included a Spanish princess, as later Emirs certainly married girls from the Christian kingdoms. The son who inherited from him, Hisham, may have had a Spanish mother. Thus began the trend in which the Umayyad Emirs of Andalusia sometimes had blue eyes and red hair, sometimes the darker skin of North Africa. They didn’t seem to pay any attention to “race” as such, just to ruling family power.
Emir Hisham came to the throne in Cordoba in 788 at about age 30. Charlemagne was 46 years old and busy fighting the pagan Saxons, and Harun al-Rashid was in his mid-twenties. Hisham’s two brothers at first refused to accept his accession.
In 793, Hisham decided to renew war against the northern Franks, who had claimed authority over “the Spanish March,” a section of norther Iberia. The King of Asturias had boldly begun building up his small Christian kingdom, and both were pushing the borders south town by town. Hisham called on his city governors to join in sending men, and they attacked Narbonne, Carcassonne, and Girona. These cities were in the area the Romans had called Septimania, along the Mediterranean coast. They defeated the Duke of Toulouse at Carcassonne, where they carried off loot to enrich Cordoba’s Mosque building project.
Hisham seems to have been a pious man who lived austerely, trying to emulate the old stories of Caliph Umar rather than the more recent stories of his Umayyad grandfathers in Damascus. When Hisham died in 794, he named his son Hakam as his successor, but Hisham’s brothers were still alive, and again contested the succession. In Arab tradition, they should have inherited as brothers. One of the brothers even went to the court of Charlemagne to intrigue against Hakam. In the end, their rebellions were defeated.
Emir Hakam spent his reign, until 822, putting down other rebellions. There were Christian Visigothic kingdoms and many Arab or Berber city governors such that at any given time, someone was contesting the rule of Hakam. One of his responses was to create an elite army of African mercenaries; they were not Berbers but came from farther south, perhaps all the way from Sudan. Oddly, the first commander of his personal bodyguard was a Visigoth—which goes to show how unpredictable alliances were.
One rebellion was against the new taxes needed for his small professional army. Following its suppression, 15,000 rebels were expelled from Cordoba. Their uprising was motivated by strict Medinan Islamic values, so when a number of them settled in the new city of Fez, Idris’ kingdom gained scholars. That they were scholars may be why they were exiled, not executed.
Perhaps during the reign of Emir Hakam, Bishop Theodemir of Iria Flavia in the northern kingdom of Asturias announced that he had discovered the body of Saint James, brother of John, disciple of Jesus. This began the tradition of Christian pilgrimage to the tomb of St. James at Compostela. How were Christians doing at this time? Let’s look at that next.
- God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, David Levering Lewis
- Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity 400-1000, Roger Collins