This episode covers the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba and the century and a half that followed, when al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled Spain and Portugal, fractured into roughly thirty rival kingdoms known as the taifas, and then watched two North African dynasties, the Almoravids and the Almohads, arrive as rescuers and stay as rulers.
It opens with al-Mansur ibn Abi Aamir's 997 raid on Santiago de Compostela and traces the fitna civil war, the 1031 abolition of the caliphate, the wealthy and militarily fragile taifa courts of rulers like the poet-king al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad of Seville, the mercenary career of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (El Cid), the 1086 Battle of al-Zallaqa, and the Almoravid annexation that followed it. It then follows the same pattern repeat under the Almohads, and spends real time on the philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes, whose commentaries on Aristotle were burned in Cordoba and Marrakesh even as they were being translated into Latin a few hundred miles away in Toledo.
It's a story about what happens when a divided society's only remaining option is to invite in a stronger outside power, and about how ideas can outlast the governments that produced them and the governments that tried to destroy them.
Drawing on Ibn Idhari al-Marrakushi's chronicle al-Bayan al-Mughrib, the court poetry of Ibn Darraj al-Qastalli, and modern scholarship including Firas Alkhateeb's Lost Islamic History and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Ibn Rushd.
Content Warning: this episode includes descriptions of medieval warfare, the sacking of a city, and the public burning of books.
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