Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad was the poet-king of Seville, ruler of one of the richest courts in the Muslim world and one of the finest Arabic poets of his generation. This episode traces how he ended his life a captive in a small Moroccan town, and why the century that ruined him is one of the strangest in the history of Muslim Spain.
After the death of the hajib al-Mansur in 1002, the caliphate of Cordoba collapsed into civil war and then into roughly thirty small, competing kingdoms called taifas. These courts were militarily weak but culturally extraordinary, producing some of the finest Andalusi poetry, medicine, and astronomy of the age while paying tribute to survive. When Alfonso the Sixth of Leon-Castile took Toledo in 1085, the taifa rulers, al-Mu'tamid among them, invited the Almoravids across the strait to save them. The episode follows that decision through the Battle of Sagrajas, the Almoravid annexation of the very kingdoms that had summoned them, al-Mu'tamid's exile and death at Aghmat, and a second, near-identical pattern a generation later when the Almohads displaced the Almoravids in turn.
The episode also follows Ibn Rushd, known in Latin Europe as Averroes, born in Cordoba and rising to become qadi and court physician under the same Almohad dynasty that would later exile him, and traces how Toledo, the city whose loss triggered this whole chain of events, became within a generation the place where his commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Latin and taught in European universities for centuries. The episode closes at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 and the fall of Cordoba, Valencia, and Seville to Castile and Aragon in the decades that followed, setting up the final kingdom of Granada.
Sources include Ibn Bassam's al-Dhakhira, Ibn Idhari's al-Bayan al-Mughrib, the captivity poetry of al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad, the elegies of Ibn al-Labbana, Ibn 'Alqama's account of Valencia under El Cid, Firas Alkhateeb's Lost Islamic History, and Richard Fletcher's The Quest for El Cid.
Content Warning: this episode includes descriptions of war, siege, captivity, and a family's descent into poverty in exile.
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