 Ethelred the Pious |
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Al-Dara
الدّارة
Perched high in the Pyrennes, the city of Al-Dara marks the traditional northern limits of Andalusia. Its name is Arabic for "The Woods", but it may in fact derive from the name of a pre-Roman Iberic tribe that lived in the region.
History[]
Under the Umayyad caliphate[]
An extremely unimportant Christian city had occupied the spot of present-day al-Dara since ancient times. The history of the city, however, begins in 977 during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph Hisham in Cordoba. Hisham's vizier al-Mansur, the real power behind the throne, was finishing a magnificently successful campaign through the northern parts of Hispania. When his army reached a high pass through the mountains, al-Mansur decided to advance no farther. He named the place al-Dara and had a fortress built to defend the pass against the Frankish states to the north.
In 978 Al-Mansur decreed that al-Dara would serve as the seat of government of the entire northern march. Construction began on a mosque to serve the soldiers; over the years the mosque would be rebuilt many times on an ever grander scale. In 980 work began on a palace for a regional governor whose territory included the entire mountain range. The Banu Razin, or Razinid, family was tasked with the rule of the mountains. The family was of Berber origin but for some time had been based near the capital Cordoba. Dara became the base for the dynasty's conquests in southern Gaul.
For half a century the gubernatorial forces of Dara posed a constant - if unheeded - threat to the struggling Aquitanian Frankish kingdom. Through a series of incremental attacks and raids, al-Dara's boundaries were pushed down the northern slope of the mountains and into the plain beyond. Arabs and Berbers from across the sea began moving to Dara. By 1025 the eastern Pyrenees had become thoroughly Muslim.
Independent Razinid rule[]
In 1031, the Caliphate suddenly collapsed. Local rulers seized direct control of their territories throughout Andalusia, which now divided into an innumerable number of taifas competing for influence. Razinid Dara was one of the strongest of these states. Its strength kept the Andalusian civilization alive in the far north of al-Andalus.
The newly independent taifa of al-Dara established itself as a major power in southern Europe by conquering neighboring states, mainly Christian ones. Daran forces sacked Jaca, capital of Aragon, in 1044, reducing the kingdom to vassalage. Razinid forces pushed north as well, penetrating further into Aquitania. Since the dynasty of Western Roman Emperors was based in this region, these attacks were catastrophically destabilizing to the Christian empire. Emperor Pons was killed in 1044, and two different successors were raised up in different parts of the empire. Both struggled to raise troops to face the Moorish threat.
In 1046, the Razinids laid siege to Tolosa, the chief city of southern Gaul and seat of the imperial dynasty. The Moors managed to capture Arnulf II himself, the titular emperor. Other members of the family scraped together what they had to ransom him, but their power was broken. Tolosa fell late in the year. The loss destroyed both the imperial dynasty and the unity of their empire. But Christian forces immediately counterattacked under Raymond of Burgundy. He dealt a defeat to the Razinid army in the Battle of Aurillac, stopping their advance through Gaul. The Burgundians occupied the highlands of eastern Aquitania, while the Moorish rulers concentrated on defending their conquest.
Tolosa, a major regional city, drastically changed the internal dynamics of the Daran state. Though the nominal capital remained at Dara, Tolosa immediately began to eclipse it in importance. Many of the Moorish clans that had settled in the Pyrenees came down into the Tolosan plain, where their numbers were needed to defend against raiders from Burgundy and Neustria. Others relocated to the city to participate in its trading economy.
This great shift to Tolosa weakened Dara's control over its hinterlands in the Pyrenees. In the late Eleventh Century the Christian rulers of Aragon asserted their autonomy from al-Dara, playing the Muslim rulers of Dara and Zaragoza off one another. Some other mountain vassals, both Christian and Muslim, also began to drift away. As the emirate fragmented, the rule of the Banu Razin family increasingly came into question.
Under Salamid Tolosa[]
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The Iberian Peninsula in the early Twelfth Century, after Dara became a vassal of Salamid Tolosa.
In 1103, the Banu Salama, one of the most powerful vassal clans of the Banu Razin, seized power in the taifa. The Salamid dynasty was of Arab origin and impressively long lineage. The new emir, Rahman ibn Taur, allowed members of the Banu Razin to remain in power in their now-much-reduced mountain stronghold in Dara, now as minor vassal lords. As the Salamid emirate consolidated its hold in the region around Tolosa, Razinid Dara declined greatly in relative importance. The family and its territory remained important as a local power on the emirate's southern flank, sometimes supporting the ruling dynasty and sometimes threatening it.
Culture[]
At its height, Dara was an influential city, but being high up in the mountains, it was never very big. It was a well-planned place with a grid of wide streets. It was largely a Muslim city, though the local Romance dialect was widely spoken alongside Arabic. Christians who traded inside the walls mostly lived in outlying villages.
As the city declined in importance its layout became rather more scattered and its built-up zone contracted. But its fine tenth- and eleventh-century Andalusian buildings continued to testify to its former role as an Umayyad fortress and taifa capital. It remained a center of Muslim culture in the Pyrenees, which all around came to have a mixed, bi-religious character.
Legacy[]
The long-term importance of al-Dara was its role in spreading Islam and Andalusian civilization outside of the Iberian Peninsula. Dara changed the culture of the Pyrenees and of southern Gaul, transforming them into a region where Western Christendom and the Dar al-Islam overlapped and intermingled.