num_pages: 328
description: CALIPHS AND KINGS: SPAIN 796-1031 The last twenty-five years have seen a renaissance of research and writing on Spanish history. Caliphs and Kings offers a formidable synthesis of existing knowledge as well as an investigation into new historical thinking perspectives and methods. The nearly three-hundred-year rule of the Umayyad dynasty in Spain (756-1031) has been hailed by many as an era of unprecedented harmony and mutual tolerance between the three great religious faiths in the Iberian Peninsula  Christianity Judaism and Islam  the like of which has never been seen since. And yet as this book demonstrates historical reality defies the myth. Though the middle of the tenth century saw a flowering of artistic culture and sophistication in the Umayyad court and in the city of Crdoba this period was all too shortlived and localized. Eventually twenty years of civil war caused the implosion of the Umayyad regime. It is through the forces that divided  not united  the disparate elements in Spanish society that we may best glean its nature and its lessons. Caliphs and Kings is devoted to better understanding those circumstances as historian Roger Collins takes a fresh look at certainties both old and new to strip ninth- and tenth-century Spain of its mythic narrative revealing the more complex truth beneath.
language: English
title: Caliphs and Kings: Spain, 796-1031
publisher: Wiley-Blackwell