Toledo 1085, the Almoravids and the Cid

I. The Taifa Kingdoms

The abolition of the caliphate of Córdoba in 1031 left al-Andalus divided among a large number of independent states, known as the taifa kingdoms from the Arabic muluk al-tawa'if, the kings of the factions. Their rulers came from three main groups. Some were Andalusi Arab or Muladí families of long standing, such as the Abbadids of Seville and the Banu Hud of Zaragoza. Others were Berber dynasties that had entered the peninsula as soldiers of al-Mansur, such as the Zirids of Granada and the Aftasids of Badajoz. A third group were Slavic military commanders, former slaves of the caliphal army, who seized cities on the eastern coast such as Denia, Almería and Valencia.

The taifa states competed with one another for territory and prestige, and their courts became centres of poetry, philosophy and science. The Abbadid king al-Mu'tamid of Seville was himself one of the finest Arabic poets of his age. Zaragoza under al-Muqtadir built the Aljafería palace, and its king al-Mu'tamin wrote a treatise on geometry. In Granada the Zirid kings employed Jewish ministers, Samuel ibn Naghrela, known in Hebrew as Samuel ha-Nagid, and after him his son Joseph. Samuel was a poet, Talmudist and commander of the Granadan army, and his career is described in Jews of Granada. The murder of Joseph and the massacre of much of the Jewish community of Granada in 1066 show how exposed such positions could be.

Politically the taifas were weak. Their armies were small, their revenues were consumed by court display and rivalry, and they were frequently at war with one another. The Christian kingdoms of the north, which in the previous century had sought the arbitration of Córdoba, now found themselves in a position to dictate terms.

II. The System of Parias

From the 1040s the rulers of León and Castile, Navarre and Aragon and the counts of Barcelona imposed tribute on the taifa kings. These payments, known in Castilian as parias, were paid in gold in exchange for protection against other Christian rulers and against rival taifas. Ferdinand I of León and Castile received tribute from Zaragoza, Toledo, Badajoz and Seville. His son Alfonso VI, who reigned in León from 1065 and over the reunited kingdoms from 1072 until 1109, raised the payments further.

The parias had several effects. They transferred a substantial part of the wealth of al-Andalus to the north, where it financed churches, castles and monastic foundations. Ferdinand I and Alfonso VI pledged an annual census to the abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, and Alfonso's gift of two thousand gold pieces a year helped pay for the building of the great third abbey church there. The parias also weakened the taifas, whose rulers had to tax their subjects heavily to pay, generating resentment among the Muslim population and among the religious scholars, the fuqaha, who argued that such taxes were contrary to Islamic law.

Christian intervention was not limited to collecting tribute. Christian rulers and soldiers fought for and against particular taifas, and Muslim rulers hired Christian troops. Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the future Cid, spent years in the service of the Muslim kings of Zaragoza. Alliances crossed religious lines freely, and the language of the treaties was that of lordship and protection rather than of holy war.

III. Alfonso VI and the Road to Toledo

Toledo, the old Visigothic capital, was ruled in the mid-eleventh century by the Dhu'l-Nunid dynasty. Its king al-Ma'mun, who reigned from 1043 to 1075, was an ally of Ferdinand I and later of Alfonso VI, and during the war between Alfonso and his brother Sancho II in 1072 Alfonso spent several months in exile at the Toledan court. On al-Ma'mun's death his grandson al-Qadir succeeded. Al-Qadir proved unable to control the factions of the city and was expelled in 1080, and he appealed to Alfonso for help.

The Arabic and Latin sources describe an agreement, perhaps reached around 1081, by which Alfonso would restore al-Qadir to power in Toledo and then install him as ruler of Valencia, receiving Toledo for himself. Alfonso besieged the city from 1084, devastating its hinterland over several seasons and cutting off its supplies. The inhabitants appealed to the other taifas without result. On 25 May 1085 Toledo surrendered.

The terms of the capitulation were generous. The Muslim inhabitants were guaranteed their lives, property, freedom to leave or stay, and the use of the great mosque. Those who left could take their goods with them, and those who stayed would pay the same taxes they had paid to their former rulers. Alfonso entered the city and took the title of emperor of all Spain, imperator totius Hispaniae, a claim to supremacy over Christian and Muslim rulers alike. In some charters he described himself as emperor of the two religions.

IV. The Conversion of the Great Mosque

The guarantees given to the Muslims of Toledo did not last long. In 1086, during Alfonso's absence, the newly appointed archbishop Bernard of Sédirac, a Cluniac monk from France, and Queen Constance, also a Burgundian, took possession of the great mosque and consecrated it as the cathedral. According to the account of the thirteenth-century historian Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Alfonso was angered and intended to punish them, but the Muslim leaders of the city interceded and asked him to accept the change, fearing reprisals. The account may reflect later interests, but the conversion of the mosque became a symbol of the shift from the pragmatic arrangements of the taifa era to a more assertive ecclesiastical policy.

Bernard was made primate of Spain by Pope Urban II in 1088, and he brought French clergy to staff the cathedral and other sees. The Roman rite, which Alfonso had introduced in his kingdom at the Council of Burgos in 1080 in place of the Mozarabic liturgy, was imposed in Toledo, although six parishes of the city were allowed to keep the old rite for the Mozarab Christians, as they still do in the chapel of the cathedral.

Toledo remained a city of three religions for centuries. Its Muslim population declined through emigration, but a Mudéjar community remained. Its Jewish community grew and became the largest in Castile, playing a central role in the royal administration and in learning. The story of that community is told in Jews of Toledo. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Toledo also became the main centre for the translation of Arabic scientific and philosophical works into Latin, often through the collaboration of Jewish and Christian scholars, a subject discussed in The Reconquista and Bible Scholarship.

V. The Court of the Emperor of the Two Religions

The court of Alfonso VI reflected the mixed society over which he ruled after 1085. His titles in Latin charters stressed his imperial claim, while his relations with the Muslim and Jewish populations of Toledo were governed by the capitulation and by royal privileges. Jewish courtiers served him as physicians and financial agents. One of them, Joseph ibn Ferrizuel, called Cidellus, was the king's physician and a man of great influence, and Judah ha-Levi addressed poems to him in praise. Another, Amram ibn Shalbib, served as a royal envoy and treasurer. The Jewish chronicler Abraham ibn Daud recorded the patronage of such figures as a protection for the community.

Alfonso's personal life also crossed religious lines. His consort Zaida, the widow of al-Mu'tamid's son, came to him after the Almoravid conquest of Seville and was baptised. Their son Sancho was recognised as heir. In Toledo, Arabic remained the language of contracts among the Mozarab population for more than two centuries after the conquest, and thousands of Arabic documents of the Mozarabs of Toledo, dating from 1083 to the fourteenth century, survive in the cathedral and municipal archives. They show Christian families with Arabic names buying and selling land, marrying and making wills according to customs inherited from al-Andalus.

The policy of Alfonso VI was not consistent toleration. His demands for tribute impoverished the taifas, his armies raided Muslim lands for plunder and captives, and the conversion of the great mosque of Toledo showed the limits of the guarantees. Nevertheless, the arrangements made at Toledo set a pattern that later Castilian kings followed when they took other cities, allowing Muslims and Jews to remain under their own laws in return for taxes and loyalty. These communities, the Mudéjars and the aljamas of the Jews described in The Aljamas, became a lasting part of the Christian kingdoms until the expulsions of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

VI. The Appeal to the Almoravids

The fall of Toledo alarmed the remaining taifa kings. Alfonso's demands for tribute increased, and his armies raided as far as Seville and Tarifa. The kings of Seville, Badajoz and Granada decided, with reluctance, to seek help from across the straits. In North Africa a new power had arisen in the preceding decades, the Almoravids, al-Murabitun. The movement had begun in the 1040s among the Sanhaja Berbers of the western Sahara under the preacher Abd Allah ibn Yasin, who taught a rigorous form of Maliki Islam. Under their commander Yusuf ibn Tashfin they had conquered Morocco, founded Marrakesh around 1070 and taken Ceuta in 1083.

Al-Mu'tamid of Seville is credited with a famous remark explaining his decision: that he would rather be a camel driver in Africa than a swineherd in Castile. Whether or not he said it, the statement captures the dilemma of the taifa kings, who feared that the Almoravids would remove them but feared Alfonso more. In 1086 Yusuf crossed the straits with an army and landed at Algeciras.

VII. The Battle of Sagrajas

Alfonso was besieging Zaragoza when he learned of the Almoravid landing. He raised the siege and gathered his forces, which included contingents from Aragon and knights from beyond the Pyrenees. The two armies met on 23 October 1086 at Sagrajas, known in Arabic as al-Zallaqa, near Badajoz. The Andalusi contingents under al-Mu'tamid bore the first Castilian charge and were nearly broken, but the Almoravid troops, organised in disciplined ranks with drums and a reserve of black African guards, attacked the Castilian camp and then the flank of Alfonso's army. Alfonso was wounded in the leg and escaped with a small remnant.

The victory at Sagrajas halted the Castilian advance but did not reverse the conquest of Toledo. Yusuf returned to Africa soon afterwards because of the death of his son. The taifa kings resumed their quarrels and, in some cases, their payments to Alfonso. Christian forces held the fortress of Aledo in the south-east as a base for raids, and an Almoravid siege of Aledo in 1088 failed because of divisions among the Andalusi rulers.

The news of Sagrajas travelled widely. In France it prompted a number of nobles, among them Duke Odo of Burgundy, Queen Constance's nephew, to lead an expedition across the Pyrenees in 1087. The force achieved little in Spain, but it was an early example of the participation of French knights in the Iberian wars that the reform papacy was beginning to encourage.

VIII. The Almoravid Annexation of al-Andalus

Yusuf concluded that the taifa kings were unreliable allies and that their taxes and their tribute to the Christians violated Islamic law. The Andalusi fuqaha issued opinions supporting their removal, and the famous jurist and theologian al-Ghazali in the east was consulted and gave his approval. In 1090 Yusuf returned to the peninsula and deposed the king of Granada, Abd Allah ibn Buluggin, who wrote in exile at Aghmat a remarkable memoir, the Tibyan, describing the politics of his reign. In 1091 Almoravid forces took Córdoba and Seville, and al-Mu'tamid was sent into exile in Aghmat, where he died in 1095 and where his tomb is still visited. Badajoz fell in 1094.

The Almoravids reunited al-Andalus, with the exception of Zaragoza and, for a time, Valencia, under the authority of Marrakesh. Their rule was initially welcomed by many Andalusis because it brought the abolition of non-Qur'anic taxes and a reinvigorated defence. Over time, however, the Almoravid regime was resented as a rule of foreign soldiers, and its strict Maliki legalism came into tension with the culture of the Andalusi cities. The Christians of al-Andalus suffered under the new regime. After the expedition of Alfonso I of Aragon to Granada in 1125, which was joined by many local Mozarabs, large numbers of Mozarab Christians were deported to North Africa in 1126.

Jewish communities in Almoravid al-Andalus continued to flourish in some respects. Lucena, near Córdoba, remained a centre of Talmudic learning under Isaac Alfasi and Joseph ibn Migash, and poets such as Moses ibn Ezra and Judah ha-Levi were active in this period, although both eventually left. Judah ha-Levi's Kuzari and his poems of longing for Zion were written partly in reaction to the precarious situation of Jews between the competing powers.

IX. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar

The most famous figure of these decades is Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as the Cid, from the Arabic sayyid, lord, and as the Campeador, the champion. He was born around 1043 at Vivar, near Burgos, into the lesser Castilian nobility, and he was brought up at the court of Ferdinand I with the future Sancho II, whom he served as standard-bearer. After Sancho's murder at the siege of Zamora in 1072 Rodrigo entered the service of Alfonso VI and married Jimena Díaz, a kinswoman of the king.

In 1081 Rodrigo was exiled, apparently after leading an unauthorised raid into the kingdom of Toledo, then allied with Alfonso, and perhaps also because of enmity with powerful nobles at court. He offered his services to the Muslim king of Zaragoza, al-Muqtadir, and his successors al-Mu'tamin and al-Musta'in, and for five years he commanded the forces of Zaragoza against their enemies, who included the Christian king of Aragon and the count of Barcelona. In 1082 he defeated a coalition of the Muslim ruler of Lleida and the Catalans at Almenar, capturing Count Berenguer Ramon II of Barcelona.

The Cid was briefly reconciled with Alfonso after Sagrajas but was exiled again in 1089 after failing to arrive in time to relieve Aledo. From then on he acted as an independent military entrepreneur in the east of the peninsula, collecting tribute from the Muslim lords of the Levante, including the ruler of Valencia, al-Qadir, the former king of Toledo. He captured the count of Barcelona a second time at Tévar in 1090.

X. The Cid in Valencia

In 1092 al-Qadir was murdered in Valencia in a revolt led by the qadi Ibn Jahhaf, who sought Almoravid support. The Cid laid siege to the city, which surrendered in June 1094 after a long blockade and famine. He ruled Valencia as an independent prince, nominally acknowledging Alfonso VI, until his death in 1099. He defeated Almoravid armies sent to recover the city at Cuarte in 1094 and at Bairén in 1097.

His rule in Valencia was harsh at times. According to the Arabic historian Ibn Alqama and the later writer Ibn Bassam, he had Ibn Jahhaf burned alive after the surrender, and the great mosque was converted into a cathedral, with a French cleric, Jerome of Périgord, as its bishop. Yet he also maintained Muslim officials and a Muslim administration, and Ibn Bassam, who detested him, nonetheless called him one of the miracles of God. After his death Jimena held the city for three years, but in 1102 Alfonso VI judged it indefensible and ordered its evacuation. The city was burned and the Almoravids occupied it. The Cid's body was carried to the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña near Burgos, and in the twentieth century his remains and those of Jimena were placed in Burgos Cathedral.

XI. The Legend of the Cid

Within a generation of his death Rodrigo had become the subject of literature. The Latin Historia Roderici, written probably in the twelfth century, is a sober account close to the events. The Carmen Campidoctoris, a Latin poem perhaps written around 1083 or somewhat later, celebrates his early victories. The great vernacular epic, the Cantar de mio Cid, survives in a single fourteenth-century manuscript copied from a text dated 1207 by its scribe Per Abbat. It presents the Cid as a loyal vassal unjustly exiled who wins back the king's favour by his deeds and arranges honourable marriages for his daughters after an insult by the infantes of Carrión.

The Cantar does not present its hero chiefly as a crusader. It shows him fighting Muslims for booty and honour, but also enjoying the friendship of the Muslim lord Avengalvón, and its villains are Christian nobles. Later chronicles and ballads transformed the Cid into a champion of the faith and of Castile, and the legend that his embalmed body was tied to his horse to win a final victory over the Almoravids dates from the thirteenth century. Modern historians, beginning with Ramón Menéndez Pidal, whose La España del Cid appeared in 1929, and later Richard Fletcher, have sought to recover the historical figure from the legend, emphasising that he was a frontier warlord of his time who served Christian and Muslim masters alike.

XII. Ucles and the Defence of Toledo

After the conquest of Valencia by the Almoravids, the pressure on the Castilian frontier increased. Yusuf ibn Tashfin died in 1106 and was succeeded by his son Ali ibn Yusuf. In 1108 an Almoravid army under Ali's brother Tamim defeated the Castilians at Uclés, east of Toledo. Among the dead was the infante Sancho, Alfonso VI's only son, born to his Muslim consort Zaida, a former daughter-in-law of al-Mu'tamid who had been baptised as Isabel. The defeat left Alfonso without a male heir. He died in 1109 and was succeeded by his daughter Urraca, whose reign was dominated by conflict with her second husband, Alfonso I of Aragon.

The Almoravids took several towns of the Tagus valley, including Talavera and Madrid, and besieged Toledo itself in 1109 and again in 1110 and 1114, but they never retook the city. Toledo's walls, its position above the gorge of the Tagus and the determination of its garrison held. The defence of Toledo marked the limit of the Almoravid counter-offensive.

XIII. Zaragoza and Alfonso the Battler

In the east the decisive advance came from Aragon. Alfonso I of Aragon and Navarre, known as the Battler, who reigned from 1104 to 1134, took up the long struggle for the Ebro valley. The taifa of Zaragoza had survived longer than the others, partly because the Banu Hud had kept good relations with the Almoravids, but in 1110 the Almoravids occupied Zaragoza after the death of al-Musta'in in battle. In 1118 Alfonso, supported by a council at Toulouse that had proclaimed the expedition a crusade with papal indulgence, and joined by knights from southern France such as Gaston IV of Béarn, a veteran of the First Crusade, besieged Zaragoza. The city surrendered in December 1118.

Alfonso went on to take Tudela, Tarazona, Calatayud and Daroca, and in 1120 he defeated an Almoravid army at Cutanda. His campaign to Granada and Andalusia in 1125 and 1126 was a long raid rather than a conquest, but it brought back thousands of Mozarab settlers to populate the Ebro valley. Alfonso had no children, and in his will he left his kingdom to the military orders of the Temple, the Hospital and the Holy Sepulchre. The will was set aside after his death in 1134, but it reflected the penetration of crusading institutions into Spain.

XIV. The Massacre of Granada in 1066

The career of the Jewish vizier Samuel ibn Naghrela in Zirid Granada was exceptional, and its end shows the tensions that the taifa system could generate. Samuel served King Habbus and then his son Badis from the 1020s until his death in 1056, directing the administration and commanding the army in annual campaigns against Almería and Seville. His Hebrew poems describe these campaigns, and his biblical and halakhic writings made him one of the leading Jewish scholars of his age. He also composed a Hebrew collection modelled on the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, drawing on the wisdom tradition of passages such as Proverbs 1:1-7.

His son Joseph succeeded him as vizier. Joseph was less cautious, and he aroused the hostility of sections of the Berber elite and of the Muslim religious scholars. The poet Abu Ishaq of Elvira wrote a notorious poem urging the Sanhaja Berbers to rise against the Jews, whom he accused of arrogance and of holding office contrary to the law. On 30 December 1066, after rumours that Joseph intended to betray the city to the ruler of Almería, a mob stormed the palace, killed Joseph and crucified his body, and then attacked the Jewish quarter. Many members of the community were killed. Some later sources speak of fifteen hundred families, a figure that cannot be verified.

The massacre is often cited as the first major pogrom in Islamic Spain. It did not end Jewish life in Granada, which revived in the following decades, but it showed that the prominence of Jewish officials in taifa courts depended on the protection of a ruler and could provoke a violent reaction when that protection failed. The episode belongs to the same years in which Christian rulers in the north were extracting tribute from Granada and its neighbours, and the anxieties of the period were felt by every community.

XV. The Armies of the Eleventh Century

The armies that fought in these wars differed in composition and tactics. The Castilian and Leonese forces were built around heavily armoured cavalry. The noble knight wore a mail hauberk reaching to the knee, a conical iron helmet with a nasal guard and carried a long kite-shaped shield, a lance and a sword. Behind the nobles came the municipal militias of the frontier towns, which supplied both villein knights and infantry, and the households of bishops and abbots. Campaigns were usually short and seasonal, and the main objective was often the devastation of enemy land and the collection of booty rather than the capture of cities.

The taifa armies relied heavily on mercenaries, both Berber and Christian. They were often small, and their rulers preferred to buy peace through tribute rather than risk battle. The Almoravid armies were of a different kind. They included large bodies of infantry armed with long spears and shields of oryx hide, archers and javelin men, light cavalry, camel troops and a guard of African slave soldiers. Their discipline under drums and banners impressed Christian observers. At Sagrajas and Uclés the combination of a firm infantry line, flank attacks and the use of reserves overcame the shock of the Castilian charge.

Sieges required different skills. Toledo was taken by blockade and attrition rather than assault, and the Cid's capture of Valencia came after twenty months of encirclement and famine. Siege engines such as mangonels and towers were used, but walls built of stone and rammed earth were difficult to breach, and the starvation of the defenders usually decided the outcome.

XVI. Catalonia and the Restoration of Tarragona

While Castile advanced in the centre, the counts of Barcelona expanded in the north-east. Ramon Berenguer I, count from 1035 to 1076, collected parias from Zaragoza, Lleida and Tortosa and issued the first parts of the Usatges, the customary law of Barcelona. His successors struggled with internal division and with the Almoravid threat, but Ramon Berenguer III, who ruled from 1097 to 1131, extended his authority over the counties of Besalú and Cerdanya and through marriage acquired Provence.

The old metropolitan see of Tarragona, ruined since the eighth century, had a symbolic importance for the Catalan church. In 1089 Urban II urged Count Berenguer Ramon II to restore the city, offering the indulgence of a pilgrimage to those who contributed. The project advanced slowly. In 1118 Bishop Oleguer of Barcelona was made archbishop of Tarragona, and in 1129 the Norman knight Robert Bordet was granted the city as a principality to repopulate it. Tarragona became the archiepiscopal see of the Catalan and Aragonese church, and the slow resettlement of its territory illustrates the role of ecclesiastical initiatives in the advance of the frontier.

In 1114 and 1115 Ramon Berenguer III joined a Pisan expedition against the Balearic Islands, which had become a base for Muslim corsairs. The allies took Majorca, but held it only briefly before an Almoravid fleet arrived. The campaign was celebrated in a Latin poem, the Liber Maiolichinus, and was treated by contemporaries as a crusade.

XVII. Sources and Their Perspectives

Historians of these decades depend on sources written from different standpoints. The Latin chronicles of the period are few and brief. The Historia Silense, written in León in the early twelfth century, celebrates Ferdinand I and treats the Muslim rulers as enemies of God, while the Chronicon of Pelayo of Oviedo reflects the interests of the Asturian church. The Historia Compostellana, compiled for Archbishop Diego Gelmírez of Santiago, documents the politics of Urraca's reign in detail. Royal and monastic charters, which survive in large numbers, record donations, privileges and the movement of the king's court.

The Arabic sources are fuller, but many survive only in later compilations. The historian Ibn Hayyan of Córdoba, who died in 1076, wrote a great history of al-Andalus, of which parts survive, and Ibn Bassam of Santarém preserved much of his work in his anthology, the Dhakhira, written in the early twelfth century. The memoirs of Abd Allah of Granada give a ruler's view of the coming of the Almoravids. Later historians such as Ibn Idhari and Ibn Khaldun preserve earlier material. These texts describe the Christian advance as a disaster brought on by the sins and quarrels of the taifa kings.

Hebrew sources add another perspective. The poems of Samuel ha-Nagid, Moses ibn Ezra and Judah ha-Levi and the historical work of Abraham ibn Daud reflect the experience of a minority living under both powers, and they record the movement of scholars from city to city as political conditions changed. Read together, these sources make it possible to see the eleventh century not as a simple confrontation of Christian and Muslim but as a complex system of alliances, tributes and rivalries in which religious ideas gained strength over time.

XVIII. The Crusading Idea in Spain

The years between 1064 and 1118 saw the gradual application to Spain of the ideas that culminated in the First Crusade. In 1064 a force that included Norman, French and Italian knights, encouraged by Pope Alexander II, captured Barbastro in Aragon. The city was retaken by its Muslim lord within a year, but the expedition is often described as a precursor of the crusades. Gregory VII claimed that the kingdom of Spain belonged by ancient right to the see of Peter and encouraged knights to fight there. Urban II, who launched the First Crusade at Clermont in 1095, urged the Catalan nobles not to go to the east but to restore Tarragona instead, and promised them the same remission of sins as those who went to Jerusalem. In 1123 Calixtus II, at the First Lateran Council, granted equal indulgences for the Spanish and the eastern wars.

These developments drew on a new theology of meritorious warfare. Earlier Christian teaching, including the counsel of Matthew 5:38-39 and the words of Romans 12:17-19, had been interpreted in the Latin West through Augustine's doctrine of just war, which permitted defensive war under legitimate authority but did not regard fighting as a penitential act. The reform papacy of the late eleventh century went further, presenting war against the enemies of the Church as a work of penance. In Spain the new ideology joined the older Asturian idea of the recovery of the Gothic kingdom, producing the fusion of crusade and reconquest that dominated the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

XIX. Consequences for Learning and the Biblical Text

The conquest of Toledo had consequences beyond the battlefield. The city's libraries, its Arabic-speaking Mozarab and Jewish populations, and the patronage of its archbishops made it the principal point of contact between Arabic and Latin learning in the twelfth century. Translators such as Gerard of Cremona, Dominicus Gundissalinus and the converted Jew Avendauth rendered into Latin the works of Aristotle with their Arabic commentaries, and the astronomical, medical and mathematical treatises of the Islamic world.

Toledo was also a centre of Hebrew learning. Abraham ibn Daud, the historian whose Sefer ha-Qabbalah of 1161 set out the chain of rabbinic tradition, lived there, and in the thirteenth century the city produced some of the finest Hebrew Bible manuscripts of Sepharad, carefully written and furnished with Masoretic notes. The Almoravid period, by contrast, saw the beginning of the dispersal of Jewish scholars northwards that would become a flight under the Almohads, a story told in The Almohad Persecution. The next stage of the Reconquista, culminating at Las Navas de Tolosa, was fought against those Almohad successors.

XX. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.