- The Umayyad Regime
The Government of a Divided Society
CORDOBA under the Umayyads filled many of the role of Visigothic
Toledo as royal residence, cultural centre and capital. It was, how-
ever, less strategically placed as far as the north of the peninsula was
concerned, though it should be borne in mind that the Muslim rulers
were more often interested in events in North Africa than in those in
inaccessible Cantabria and the Asturias. The Umayyad court was not
peripatetic in the way that the Visigothic one had been, although the
amirs did on occasion command military operations in person in
which event the entire population of Cordoba was required to evacu-
ate the capital. I Thus the complexities of social and racial divisions
previously mentioned, the lack of close interrelation between the
government in the capital and the provinces, and the re-emergence
of a frontier zone within the peninsula, made the problems of order
and the imposition of authority even more difficult for the Umayyads
than they had been for their Roman and Visigothic predecessors.
Best known are the conflicts that the Muslim rulers had to face in
their relations with the emerging Christian states in the north. Viewed
anachronistically from the hindsight of the fall of Granada in 1492
and the final expulsion of the Moriscos, the creation of the tiny king-
doms in the Asturias and the Pyrenees and their struggles against the
power of Cordoba look like the beginnings of the long, gradual but
linear process of the Christian reconquest of the peninsula, the
Reconquista. Such a perspective is distorted in that it seems to imply
dogged resistance, inevitable hostility, and religion as the motivating
force of the conflict. Probably at no stage did the simple ideology of
crusade really apply in the peninsula. Motives and relationships were
always mixed, even more so than in the eastern Mediterranean con-
tacts between Christianity and Islam. This was especially true of the
early centuries. In particular, although there has been some recogni-
tion of the ambivalence in Christian attitudes, an impression is often
given that a more uncompromising attitude existed on the Muslim
side and that the Islamic rulers were unrelenting in their determina-
tion to destroy the Christian states. The Umayyads did frequently take
the field against the northern kingdoms, and it may appear that, but
for the demands put upon them by their own internal problems, they
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