84 ISLAM AT WAR
Talavera, sacked it and put its Muslim population to the sword. Er-Rahman
responded with an attack on the fortress of San Estevan de Gormanz, but
the attack was a failure and his army was decimated during the retreat. In
920 the combined armies of Leon and Navarre attacked and sacked Pam-
plona. Er-Rahman responded with raids and incursions, but in the one major
battle his army was again destroyed, his general killed, and the viceroy of
Saragossa was taken prisoner. Er-Rahman was present at the battle and
barely escaped. Simancas was the first important victory of the Christians
over the Moors in what would be a 460-year campaign to recapture Spain.
The war, however, was not to be a string of Christian victories, and in
981 Zamora was captured by the Moors. Worse, at the end of the tenth
century the great warlord Almansur (938–1002) awoke the real possibility
of total Moorish domination of the peninsula, with an empire based on
Cordoba. During his time, the Christian ambassadors of Leon, Navarre,
Barcelona, and Castile made homage to Cordoba to deliver tribute. In 997
his forces plundered the greatest Christian shrine on the peninsula, the
shrine of Santiago of Compostela. Almansur’s death in 1002 resulted in
the splintering of his empire, and his Christian subjects were as quick as
his co-religionists to pick up as many pieces as possible.
When the Umayyad dynasty in Spain finally fell apart in 1031 it was
replaced for fifty-five years by a collection of thirty little Muslim states,
each with its own king perched in some well-defended city. The shock of
the Christian successes prompted these kings to invite the Almoravids of
Morocco—a successful sect of Berber zealots—to establish a dynasty.
This introduction of a foreign military/religious order into the Iberian
Peninsula makes an interesting parallel with the crusades that would
shortly erupt into the Holy Lands. In both cases the newcomers were
initially successful. In both cases their success ended about the time that
they acquired wealth and position, and in both cases the zealots—Berber
fundamentalists and ignorant Frankish knights—caused fatal damage to
their causes by destroying any real hope for a mingling of the cultures.
The Almoravid replacement by Almohads did nothing to better the
process.
Around this time, the kingdoms of Navarre and Castile again joined
forces and conquered Leon. InA.D. 1009 one of those Moors, Sulaiman,
called on Sanco, the count of Castile, to support him. In return, the Mus-
lims gave Castile 200 fortresses that they had taken from Castile over the
years. At the battle of Cantich, 10,000 Moors were killed or drowned
attempting to escape from the Castilians. Later, Sulaiman, supported by
9,000 Catalan Christians, engaged a Moorish army of 30,000 men and
defeated them. This episode is merely symbolic of the frequent shifts in