Petty States: Fall of Granada

Abstract

From the ruins of the Umayyad caliphate there emerged an apparently fortuitous conglomeration of petty states which spent themselves in fratricidal quarrels and, after falling in part a prey to two Moroccan Berber dynasties, succumbed one after the other to the rising Christian power of the north. In the first half of the eleventh century no less than twenty such short-lived states arose in as many towns or provinces under chieftains and kinglets called by the Arabs mulūk al-ṭawā’if (Sp. reyes de taifas, party kings).