Zallaqa: the day the Reconquista stopped

In 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon took Toledo and styled himself Emperor of all the Spains. The Andalusi taifa kings, humiliated, begged the Almoravid Berber Yusuf ibn Tashfin to cross the strait. He crossed in 1086 and shattered Alfonso at Zallaqa. The Reconquista stopped for four hundred years.

By 1085 CE the Muslim state of Al-Andalus had been broken up for a generation. The great Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba had collapsed in 1031 into a fractious mosaic of small principalities called the taifas. There were about thirty of them. Their kings quarrelled with each other. They paid heavy tribute to the Christian kings of the north, the parias, to buy peace. The tribute impoverished them further. The Christian kings grew stronger.

The strongest of the Christian kings was Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon. He collected parias from Toledo, Seville, and Granada simultaneously. When Toledo defaulted, he took the city outright in 1085 CE, the first major Muslim capital lost since 711. Toledo had been Muslim for 374 years. Alfonso entered its great mosque, which he had promised the Muslim inhabitants would be preserved, and had it converted to a cathedral by force. He then styled himself Imperator totius Hispaniae, Emperor of all the Spains, and made clear his intent to take the rest.

The taifa kings met in emergency conclave. The great vizier Ibn Ammar of Seville argued that they had to seek help from a Muslim power outside the peninsula. The choice was uncomfortable: south of the strait, in the Maghreb, the Berber Almoravid state had risen. Its ruler Yusuf ibn Tashfin was a puritan Sunni of the strict Maliki school. He wore rough wool. He was reported to eat only barley bread. He was, in the eyes of the sophisticated taifa court poets, a desert barbarian.

The taifa embassy reached Marrakech, the Almoravid capital, in winter 1085-86. Al-Mu'tamid of Seville had said, when the choice was debated in Seville: "By Allah, I prefer to be a camel-driver in Africa than a swineherd in Castile." The line has been preserved in every Andalusi historical source.

He crossed the strait in June 1086 with a Berber army of about 12,000. His army was reinforced by Andalusi Muslim contingents from the taifa states to about 30,000 total. Alfonso VI raised a Christian host, Castilians, Leonese, French crusaders sent by the Pope, contingents from Aragon and Portugal, variously estimated at 40,000 to 60,000.

The two armies met at Sagrajas, called Zallaqa in the Arabic sources ("the slippery place," from the ground churned to mud by the fighting), on 23 October 1086 CE (12 Rajab 479 AH).

Alfonso's attack came at dawn on the Muslim right, held by al-Mu'tamid of Seville. Al-Mu'tamid's line began to give under the Christian pressure. Yusuf ibn Tashfin, holding the reserve, sent his Berber contingent to reinforce. Al-Mu'tamid himself, wounded three times, refused to withdraw.

Yusuf then executed the manoeuvre that broke the battle. He sent a fast column of Berber cavalry around Alfonso's flank to strike the Castilian camp behind the lines. The Christian camp was overrun. Alfonso's baggage and reserves were destroyed. When word reached the front line, the Christian rear began to waver. Yusuf then committed his elite Sudanese guard, the Haras al-Sultani, to a frontal assault. The Christian line broke.

The Christian dead were reported in the classical Muslim historians at 20,000 to 40,000. Alfonso VI escaped with about 500 of his household knights. He was wounded in the leg, he limped for the rest of his life. His army was destroyed. The Reconquista, which had seemed on the verge of taking the whole peninsula, stopped.

Yusuf ibn Tashfin left al-Andalus after the battle and returned to Marrakech. His duty, as he had defined it, was complete. But the taifa kings' request for help had exposed their political weakness. Yusuf's Almoravid ulama in Marrakech began urging him to take the taifa kingdoms directly, arguing that the taifa kings' payment of tribute to Christian powers, and their toleration of Andalusi Jewish and syncretic Islamic practices, made them politically illegitimate.

Yusuf crossed again in 1090. Over the following decade he annexed the taifa kingdoms one by one. Granada in 1090. Seville in 1091. Al-Mu'tamid of Seville, the poet-king who had brought Yusuf to al-Andalus, was deposed and exiled to Aghmat in Morocco, where he died in poverty writing some of the greatest Andalusi Arabic poetry ever composed. His famous line, from Aghmat: "You wept for a shirt of silk when the days had left you shirtless."

Yusuf ibn Tashfin died in 1106 CE at nearly a hundred years old, in Marrakech, ruler of a state that stretched from Senegal to the Ebro. The Reconquista would not resume seriously for another 130 years. When it did resume, under Alfonso VIII at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, Muslim al-Andalus still held Granada, Seville, Cordoba, and most of the south, territories Yusuf's crossing had preserved. Muslim Granada in particular would hold on until 1492, four hundred and six years after Zallaqa. Yusuf ibn Tashfin bought al-Andalus those four centuries.

What the story teaches

Zallaqa is remembered because it is the case study of what happens when a Muslim population, fragmented into feuding principalities and paying tribute to a foreign power, calls in an outside Muslim army to save it. The immediate result was salvation, the Christian advance stopped, al-Andalus preserved for four centuries. The medium-term result was that the foreign army also took over the local princes, on the grounds that their manifest political incompetence had brought the crisis in the first place. Al-Mu'tamid of Seville lost his throne to the very Almoravid he had crossed the strait to fetch. The classical Muslim historians take a specific lesson: calling for help from a stronger Muslim power is legitimate and often necessary, but the local leaders who call must accept that they may not survive the arrival of the help. A political community that cannot defend itself will be defended by whoever defends it, and whoever defends it will then rule it. The taifa kings understood this and called anyway, because the alternative was Christianisation of the peninsula. Zallaqa is remembered as their honourable defeat.