The Moors in Spain

by Stanley Lane-Poole

At first of course there was a brief period of confusion, some burning, pillaging, massacring; but this was soon checked by the Arab governors. When things had settled down again, the subject populations found themselves at least no worse off than before, and they shortly began to perceive that they had benefited by the change of rulers. They were permitted to retain their own laws and judges; governors of their own race administered the districts, collected the taxes, and determined such differences as arose amongst themselves. The citizen classes, instead of bearing the whole burden of the State expenditure, had only to pay a poll-tax of no very exacting amount, and they were free of all obligations; unless they held cultivable land, in which case they paid the Kharaj or land-tax as well. The poll-tax was graduated according to the rank of the payer, from twelve to forty-eight dirhems a year, or from about three to twelve pounds at our present purchasing power of money; and its collection in twelve monthly instalments made it the easier to meet. The poll-tax was an impost upon heresy; it was levied only upon Christians and Jews: the land-tax, on the other hand, which varied according to the productiveness of the soil, was assessed equally on Christians, Jews, and Moslems. As a rule the old proprietors and cities preserved their property as before the conquest. The lands of the Church, indeed, and of those landowners who had fled to the mountains of the north, were confiscated, but even then their serfs were left upon them as cultivators, and were only required to pay a certain proportion, varying from a third to four-fifths, of the produce, to their new Moslem lords. Sometimes the cities, such as Merida and Orihuela, had been able to obtain exceptionally favourable terms from the conquerors, and were suffered to retain their goods and lands upon the payment of a fixed tribute. At the worst, beyond the poll-tax, the Christians were in no way subject to heavier exactions than their Moslem neighbours. They had even gained a right which had never been permitted them by the Gothic kings: they could alienate their lands.[7] In religious toleration they had nothing to regret. Instead of persecuting them, and forcing upon them a compulsory conversion, as the Goths had upon the Jews, the Arabs left them free to worship whom or what they pleased; and so valuable was the poll-tax to the treasury, that the Sultans of Cordova were much more disposed to discourage than to welcome any considerable missionary fervour that might deprive the State of so useful a source of revenue. The result was that the Christians were satisfied with the new régime, and openly admitted that they preferred the rule of the Moors to that of the Franks or Goths. Even their priests, who had lost most of all, were at first but little incensed with the change, as the old chronicle, ascribed to Isidore of Beja, written at Cordova in 754, shows. The good monk is not even scandalized at so unholy an alliance as the marriage between Roderick's widow and the son of Mūsa. But the best proof of the satisfaction of the Christians with their new rulers is the fact that there was not a single religious revolt during the eighth century.

Above all, the slaves, who had been cruelly ill-used by the Goths and Romans, had cause to congratulate themselves upon the change. Slavery is a very mild and humane institution in the hands of a good Mohammedan. The Arabian Prophet, while unable to do away with an ancient institution, which was nevertheless repugnant to the socialistic principles of Islam, did his utmost to soften the rigours of slavery. "God," said he, "hath ordained that your brothers should be your slaves: therefore him whom God hath ordained to be the slave of his brother, his brother must give him of the food which he eateth himself, and of the clothes wherewith he clotheth himself, and not order him to do anything beyond his power.... A man who ill-treats his slave will not enter into Paradise." There is no more commendable action in Mohammedan morals than to free slaves, and such enfranchisement is enjoined by the Prophet especially as an atonement for an undeserved blow or other injustice. In Andalusia, the slaves upon the estates that had passed from the Christians into the possession of Moslems were almost in the position of small farmers; their Mohammedan masters, whose trade was war, and who despised heartily such menial occupations as tilling the soil, left them free to cultivate the land as they pleased, and only insisted on a fair return of products. Slaves of Christians, instead of being hopelessly condemned to servitude for all their lives, were now provided with the simplest possible road to freedom: they had only to go to the nearest Mohammedan of repute, and repeat the formula of belief, "There is no god but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet," and they became immediately free. Conversion to Islam thus carried with it enfranchisement, and it is no wonder that we find the Spanish slaves hastening to profess the new faith and thus to become free men. The Catholic priests had taken small pains to graft the Christian religion into their hearts; they had enough to do to look after their estates and the souls of the nobles without troubling themselves about the spiritual wants of the ignorant; and the change from semi-pagan, semi-Christian, vacuity to a perhaps equally unintelligent apprehension of Islam was no very severe wrench to the servile mind. Nor were the slaves by any means the only converts to the new religion. Many of the large proprietors and men of position became Mohammedans, either to avoid the poll-tax, or to preserve their estates, or because they honestly admired the simple grandeur of this latest presentment of theism. These converts or renegades were destined to cause some trouble in the State, as will presently be seen. While admitted to the equality involved in conversion, they were not really allowed equal rights and privileges; they were excluded from the offices of State, and regarded with suspicion by the Moslems de la vielle roche as interested converts, people who would sell their souls for pelf. In the end these distinctions died out, but not before they had produced serious dissensions and even insurrections.

As far as the vanquished were concerned, we have seen that the conquest of Andalusia by the Arabs was on the whole a benefit. It did away with the overgrown estates of the great nobles and churchmen, and converted them into small proprietorships; it removed the heavy burdens of the middle classes, and restricted the taxation to the test-tax per poll levied on unbelievers, and the land-tax levied equally on Moslem and Christian; and it induced a widespread emancipation of the slaves, and a radical improvement in the condition of the unemancipated, who now became almost independent farmers in the service of their non-agricultural Mohammedan masters.

It was otherwise with the victors. There is no greater mistake than to imagine that the Arabs, who spread with such astonishing rapidity over half the civilized world, were in any real sense a united people. So far was this from being the truth, that it demanded all Mohammed's diplomatic skill, and all his marvellous personal prestige, to keep up a semblance of unity even while he was alive. The Arabs were made up of a number of hostile tribes or clans, many of whom had been engaged in deadly blood-feuds for several generations, and all of whom were moved by a spirit of tribal jealousy which was never entirely extinguished. Had the newly-founded Mohammedan State been restrained within the borders of Arabia, there can be no doubt that it would speedily have collapsed in the rivalry of the several clans; as it was, the death of the Prophet was followed by a general rising of the tribes. Islam became a permanent and world-wide religion only when it clothed itself with armour and became a church militant. The career of conquest saved the faith. The Arabs laid aside for awhile their internecine jealousies, to join together in a grand chase for booty. There was of course a strong fanatical element in the enthusiasm of conquest. They fought partly because they were contending with the enemies of God and His Prophet, because a martyr's Benjamin's cup of happiness awaited those who fell in "the path of God," as they termed the religious war; but there is no denying that the riches of Cæsars and Chosroes, the fertile lands and prosperous cities of the neighbouring kingdoms, formed a very large element in the Moslems' zeal for the spread of the faith.

As soon as the career of conquest was exchanged for the quiet of settled possession, the various jealousies and dissensions which the tumult and profits of invasion had kept to some degree in abeyance broke forth into dangerous activity. The party spirit of the Arab tribes extended to all parts of the vast empire they had subdued, and influenced even the Khalif at Damascus; the nomination of the governors of the most distant provinces was actuated by mere factious motives. In Spain, where the "Emīr of Andalus," as he was styled, was appointed either by the Governor of Africa or by the Khalif of Damascus himself, these party differences worked havoc with the peace and order of the kingdom during the first fifty years of Moorish rule. Governors were appointed, deposed, or murdered, in deference to the mandates of some faction, who resented the government being entrusted to a man of the Medīna faction, or would not have a clansman of Kays, or objected to the nomination of a member of the Yemen party; and, throughout the history of the domination of the Moors in Spain, these baleful influences continued to work injury to the State.[8]

In Andalusia, moreover, there was another and very important party to be reckoned with, besides the various Arab factions. The conquest of the peninsula had been effected almost entirely by Tārik and his Berbers, and these Berbers (who are the Moors proper, though the word is conveniently employed to denote the mixture of Arabs and Berbers) formed a leading factor in the new state of things. They were not an effete nation like the Romanized Spaniards; but a people full of life and martial energy. In their mountain fastnesses, and ranging the plains from Egypt to the Atlantic, in their numerous and widely distinguished clans, the Berbers had offered to the Arabs a much more formidable resistance than the trained soldiers of Persia or Rome. In many ways they resembled their invaders: they were clansmen like the Arabs; their political ideas were democratic like theirs, with the same reverence for noble families, which took away the dangerous qualities of pure democracy among an ignorant people. Their very manner of warfare was almost Arab. For seventy years the two races of nomads fought together, and when at last the Arabs obtained the upper hand, it was rather by the acquiescence of their foes than by any distinct submission. The Berbers permitted the Arab governor to hold his court near the coast, but insisted on preserving their own tribal government among themselves, and demanded to be treated as brothers, not as servants, by their antagonists. This fraternal system worked fairly well for a time. The Berbers, always a marvellously credulous people, were quick to accept any new faith, and embraced Islam with a fervour far exceeding anything the more sceptical mind of the Arab could evoke. Very soon Barbary became the hotbed of religious nonconformity; the arid doctrines of Islam were supplemented by those more mystical and emotional elements which imaginative minds soon engraft upon any creed soever; and the Mohammedan dissenter, expelled from the more rigid regions of orthodoxy, found a singularly productive soil for his doctrines in the simple minds of the Berbers. The same susceptibility to religious emotion, which had produced so general a conversion that the conquest of Spain was effected by a Berber general and twelve thousand Berber troops, soon led to further movements. The Marabout—saint, missionary, or priest—came to exercise a more potent influence over this credulous people than tribal chief or Arab governor could ever acquire. It needed but a few mock miracles to bring a host of gaping devotees about the shrine of the marabout, and so clearly had an Arab general realized this condition of popularity that, when he perceived the influence which a priestess exercised over the people by her jugglery, the subtle Moslem set to work in the same manner, and soon became an adept at legerdemain or whatever corresponded to spirit-rapping in those days, with the very best results. But a people so easily influenced by such means, a priest-ridden nation, is always liable to sudden and violent revolutions, which its priests can stimulate by a single word. The marabouts among the Berbers were responsible for most of the later changes that took place in North Africa: they set up the Fatimites, sent the Almoravides victorious through Barbary and Spain, and then put them down by the Almohades. They began very early to work against the Arab governors, and when one of these had indulged his passion for luxury at the expense of a cruel oppression of his subjects, the priests set the Berbers in revolt, and in a moment the whole of the western half of the Mediterranean coast was up in arms, and the Arabs were terribly defeated. Thirty thousand fresh troops were sent from Syria to recover the provinces, but these, joined to the Arabs that still remained in Africa, were repulsed with great slaughter, and the remnant were cooped up in Ceuta, where they daily awaited famine and massacre.

The Berbers in Andalusia, always in intimate touch with their kinsmen over the water, were quick to feel the influence of such a revolution as was then (741) going forward in Africa. They had cause to grudge the Arabs their lion's share of the spoils of Spain, which had been the trophies of the Berbers' bow and spear. While the Arabs, who had only arrived in time to reap the advantages of the conquest, had appropriated all the most smiling provinces of the peninsula, the Berbers found themselves relegated to the most unlovely parts, to the dusty plains of Estremadura, or to the icy mountains of Leon, where they had to contend with a climate which severely tried natures brought up in African heats, and where, too, they had the doubtful privilege of forming a buffer between their Arab allies and the Christians of the North. Already there had been signs of disaffection. One of Tārik's Berber generals, Monousa, who had married a daughter of Eudes, Duke of Aquitaine, raised the standard of revolt when he heard of the oppression of his countrymen in Africa; and now, when the Berber cause was triumphant across the Straits, a general rising took place among the northern provinces; the Berbers of the borders, of Galicia, of Merida, Coria, and all the region round about, took up arms, and began to march south upon Toledo, Cordova, and Algeciras, whence they intended to take ship and go to join their compatriots in Barbary.

The situation was full of peril, and the Arab Emīr of Andalusia, Abd-el-Melik, who had sternly refused to lend any assistance to the Syrian Arabs shut up in Ceuta, now found himself in this dilemma, that either he must submit to his own rebellious Berbers, or he must invite the co-operation of the very Syrians whom he had persistently refused to succour, and who, when they arrived, might possibly turn out to be a worse plague than that they came to remove. In grave apprehension, he sent ships and brought over the Syrians, after first making them promise to go back when their work was done. Thus reinforced, the Arabs of Andalusia put the Berbers to utter rout, hunted them like wild beasts through the country to their mountain fastnesses, and gratified their vengeance to the full. And then the event which Abd-el-Melik had endeavoured to guard against came to pass. The Syrian auxiliaries refused to exchange the rich lands of Andalusia for the deserts of Africa and the spears of triumphant Berbers; they defied and murdered Abd-el-Melik, and set up their own chief in his stead. The result was a long and obstinate struggle between the old Arab party and the new-comers, accompanied by much bloodshed and devastation. The struggle was only decided when the Khalif of Damascus sent over a new and able governor, who divided the hostile factions by giving them settlements in cities far apart from each other, and banished the more turbulent of their leaders. Thus the Egyptian contingent of the Syrian army was settled in Murcia, which they re-christened "Misr" or Egypt; the men of Palestine at Sidonia and Algeciras; the people of the Jordan at Regio (Malaga), those of Damascus in Elvira (Granada), and the battalion of Kinnesrin at Jaen.[9] From this time one of the causes of faction in Andalusia was removed, but party spirit still ran high, and government was often changed to anarchy, until a ruler armed with peculiar prestige, carrying in his person the authority and blood of the Khalifs of Damascus, came to take into his hands the sceptre of the disturbed country and to unite for awhile all factions under the standard of the Sultan of Cordova. This young man was the new ruler whom Charlemagne had so unsuccessfully come to expel, and his name was Abd-er-Rahmān the Omeyyad.