THE UMA YYAD REGIME 219the local civil wars in which Arabs, muwallads and Christians all be-
came involved, the monasteries, however poorly endowed, must have
been natural targets for aggression. In such circumstances, flight into
the currently better-ordered Christian realms would be an attractive
proposition.
However, the removal of these, the most militantly Christian ele-
ments in the society of Al-Andalus, may be closely related to the
emergence from the period of conflict of a more stable and powerful
Muslim state. As in other parts of the Islamic world, the cumulative
effects of conversions to Islam would have been making themselves
felt by the late ninth century, even though Muslims might still have
constituted a minority of the population. For one thing, the growth
of substantial numbers of muwallads challenged the survival of the
traditional tribal organisation of the Arabs in Al-Andalus. The latter
had also ceased to be of direct value to the state with reliance on
large slave armies. Tensions between Arabs and muwallads clearly grew
in the course of the ninth century, as did those between both of these
groups and the remaining Berbers. Conflicts are frequently recorded
in all of the extant Arabic sources. Likewise, the divergencies between
Cordoba, with a large population of muwallads and of slaves, and the
rest of the Umayyad realm, were strongly marked. Distributions of
largesse to the soldiers and remissions of taxes, together with the
advantages of the rulers' architectural and artistic patronage, bene-
fited the citizens of the capital. It is notable that the collapse of the
Cordoban Caliphate was followed by a brilliant flowering of culture
in many provincial centres in the succeeding Taifa period.
These and other problems came to a head in the reign of 'Abd-
Allah, although the last years of Mul}ammad I and the brief rule of
Al-Mundhir were also very troubled. Ibn l:Iayyan provides the fullest
account of the revolts and disturbances under 'Abd-Allah.^84 The Banu
Qasl, threatened by the rise of the Tujibids, were active once more
in the upper Ebro valley, and also captured Toledo in 896. However,
this powerful family was brought to an abrupt end when its head
Mul}ammad was killed besieging Zaragoza in 898, and his son Lope
fell in battle in 907. With their demise, relative order and stability
returned to the Ebro valley and the central march for the rest of the
century.
More serious for the regime in Cordoba were the many muwallad
revolts occurring in the west in Badajoz, Merida, Beja and Faro, and
in the east over a wide area in the regions of Jaen, Granada and