In 1015 and again in 1016 the Emir Mujāhid al-‘Āmirī of Denya (Latinized as "Museto") from the "taifa" of Denia, in the east of Muslim Spain (al-Andalus), attacked Sardinia and attempted to establish political control over it. The twelfth-century Pisan "Liber maiolichinus", a history of the 1113–1115 Balearic Islands expedition, records that Mujāhid had managed to take military control of the Sardinian coastal plain; the local Sardinian ruler and judge of Cagliari, Salusius, was in fact killed in the fighting and the Sardinian organised resistance broke down. However, over the course of those very years some joint expeditions from the Italian maritime republics of Pisa and Genoa managed to repulse the invaders and thus preserved Sardinia as a part of Christendom: these Pisan–Genoese expeditions to Sardinia were approved and supported by the Papacy, making them precursors of the Crusades, which began eighty years later. In 1022, some new invasion attempts were made by the Saracens, but a joint alliance between Pisa, Genoa and the Sardinian Judicates was able to prevent them from effectively doing so in 1052. Although the Arab attacks failed to achieve the island's conquest, they caused nonetheless a significant weakening of Sardinia's actual independence, leading to a struggle of the Italian powers for political influence over the island's independent states, with the sole exception of Arborea.