INTRODUCTION

Summary

La tolerancia, la ocasional simbiosis de las creencias, cuadra bien con haber iniciado su vida el hispano-cristiano a caballo sobre su creencia, el caballo de Santiago.

Américo Castro

¿Tolerancia hispano-cristiana medieval? Sí; pero tolerancia de las minorías, no del pueblo, sacudido por la pasión y enfervorizado por la guerra divinal.

Claudio Sánchez Albornoz

In 711, when Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād led his modest contingent of Berber and Arab forces across the Straits of Gibraltar, he could hardly have imagined that within a few years almost the whole of the Iberian peninsula would be drawn into the dār al-Islām (“the Islamic world”). Within the following two centuries al-Andalus – Islamic Iberia – was to become the western pole of the Muslim world, not only geographically, but also commercially and culturally. Rising from de facto to formal independence in 929 under ῾Abd al-Raḥmān III (912–961), its capital, Córdoba, was among the most important urban centers west of the Indus, rivaled only by Cairo, Constantinople, and Baghdad. So it was to remain until 1031 when a series of civil wars and revolts concluded, heralding not only the Caliphate's demise but the beginning of the end of Islamic domination of the peninsula. Almost immediately the mulūk al-ṭawā'if (or “Taifa Kingdoms”), a constellation of “sectarian” principalities dominated by local and Berber factions, sprang up to fill the power vacuum, vying with each other for a greater share of Andalusi territory.