188 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINabortive rising against 'Abd aI-Rahman I in 758-9, also joined them.
These garrison cities in the marcher zone were especially volatile, as
they were the centres of concentration of large numbers of Arab and
Berber warriors, whose primary allegiance was not to any amir but
rather to their tribal leaders.· In fact a complicated web of personal
and tribal loyalties must have existed, together with attendant feuds
and antipathies, that created local authority and also developed a
network of alliances that united towns and tribes over wide areas. The
imposition of oaths of loyalty to the new ruler at the outset of each
reign, to be taken by all office-holders and tribal leaders, attempted,
as in the Carolingian Empire, to harness local power to the central
authority by means of supernatural sanctions.^8
The independence and ambitions of some governors with en-
trenched local support made them particularly difficult to control
from Cordoba. The most striking case is that of the Banu Qasi, who
dominated the Ebro valley throughout the ninth century. The activ-
ities of this family feature frequently in the Muqtabis of Ibn I:Iayyan.
Although their claim to descent from a Count Cassius of Visigothic
date is most improbable, it is certain that they were muwallads and
their careers show how deeply rooted their power in the upper Ebro
actually was. Belief in a family history that extended back to the social
Clites of the Visigothic past was shared by them with the chronicler
Ibn al-Qii~iya and the kings of the Asturias amongst others, but in all
of these cases this may have been more the accompaniment of con-
temporary social status than its cause.^9
In the case of the Banu Qasi, this tradition of their high descent
in terms of peninsula society was cunningly interwoven with other
elements intended to magnity their pedigree as Muslims. Fortun, the
son of their eponymous ancestor Cassius, was reported to have trav-
elled to Damascus after the fall of the Visigothic kingdom, and there
to have affirmed his loyalty in person to the caliph Walid I and em-
braced Islam as the client (mawali) of the Umayyads. These frankly
apocryphal tales come from the work of the scholar and courtier Ibn
I:Jazm (994-lO64), chief minister of 'Abd al-Ral].man V, who claimed
noble Persian descent but was generally suspected of being a Spanish
mawali. Such pretensions were probably not uncommon in the upper
ranks of society in the later Umayyad period. 10
The Banu Qasi first come into prominence at the very end of the
eighth century as allies of a mawali rebel in Zaragoza and Huesca
called Bahllll ibn Marzuk (c. 796). One of the family was governor of