THE CHRISTIAN REALMS 263of Aragon and Castille in the later Middle Ages can be traced to this
earliest period of their existence.
Catalonia, once subjected to Frankish influence and with its dis-
tinctive cultural, legal and administrative traditions, was patently dis-
tinguishable from the rest of the peninsula and had a long future of
political independence ahead of it. However, this should not obscure
the fact that it was one amongst several parts of a greater whole. The
richness of Spain in the diversity of its regional cultures and their
histories is one of its greatest glories, though perhaps for those who
seek to rule all of it, one of the greatest difficulties that they have to
face. Problems that troubled the Romans, the Visigoths and the
Umayyads still survive to confront their successors.
At the end of the first millennium AD, what may have looked like
a stable pattern of political relationships had been created in the
peninsula. The Caliphate of Cordoba, a formidable Mediterranean
power that ruled not only most of Spain but also, from Fez, parts of
North Africa, had risen in prestige, military strength and physical
magnificence throughout the course of the tenth century. The Chris-
tian states to the north, under their own rulers, lived in its shadow.
Toda, Queen-Regent of Pamplona-Navarre, had put her state under
the protection of 'Abd al-RaQman III, and one of her successors,
Sancho Garces II sent a daughter to marry the great Al-Man~. 'Abd
al-RaQman III, himself the grandson of a Pamplonan princess, re-
ceived suppliant kings from Leon, and even distant Catalonia had
been shown its vulnerability by the sacking of Barcelona in 985. Despite
the vicissitudes of the two previous centuries, the Umayyads had come
as near as their Roman and Visigothic predecessors to achieving the
unification of the peninsula under a single dominant authority. They
were to be the last so to do for over five hundred years.
Yet within the first forty years of the eleventh century the whole
political complexion of Spain had radically altered. The Umayyad
dynasty destroyed itself in civil wars between rival candidates, a pro-
cess in which the dependants of Cordoba, Christian and Muslim alike,
and its own military servants, the Berbers and the slave armies, took
an active part, and the caliphate was extinguished. The weakening of
the role of the Umayyad caliph during the minority of Hisham II and
the achievement of dictatorial power by Al-Man~iir played an impor-
tant part in subverting the established basis of authority in Al-Andalus,
but the career of the great vizier, whose palace of Az-Zahira rivalled
that of 'Abd al-RaQman III at Az-Zahara, shows that the effective