as Egilona and by Muslim writers as Aylū or Umm ‘Āṣim. The Chronicle of 754 gives this brief account:
After he [‘Abd al-Azīz] had taken all the riches and positions of honour in Seville, as well as the queen of Spain, whom he joined in marriage, and the daughters of kings and princes, whom he treated as concubines and then rashly repudiated, he was eventually killed on the advice of Ayyūb by a revolt of his own men while he was in prayer. After Ayyūb had held Spain for a full month, al-Hurr succeeded to the throne of Hesperia by order of the prince, who was informed about the death of ‘Abd al-Azīz in this way: that on the advice of Queen Egilona, wife of the late king Roderic, whom he had joined to himself, he tried to throw off the Arab yoke from his neck and retain the conquered kingdom of Iberia for himself.16
On the Muslim side, writing a century later, Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam describes these events in a far more dramatic fashion:
After his father departed, ‘Abd al-Azīz married a Christian princess, daughter of a king of al-Andalus. It is said she was the daughter of Roderic, king of al-Andalus, whom Tāriq killed. She brought him a great fortune in worldly things, such as cannot be described. When she came to him, she said, “Why do I not see the people of your kingdom glorifying you? They do not prostrate themselves before you as the people of my father’s kingdom glorified him and prostrated themselves before him.” He did not know what to say to her, so he commanded that the side of his palace be pierced with a small door. He used to give audience to the people, and for this purpose he would come to the inside of the door, so that someone entering to see him would have to lower his head on account of the smallness of the door. She was in a [hidden] spot watching the people, and when she saw this, she said to ‘Abd al-Azīz, “Now you are a great king!” The people heard, however, that he had constructed the door for this purpose, and some believed that she had made him a Christian.17
Alarmed by this behavior, a group of prominent Arab conspirators led by Ḥabīb b. Abī ‘Ubayda al-Fihrī, who was ‘Abd al-Azīz’s right-hand man, and Ziyad b. al-Nābigha al-Tamīmī, assassinated the governor while he was at prayer, perhaps with the connivance of the caliph Sulayman (715–17).18 Later authors, including the Andalusi chronicler Aḥmad al-Rāzī (d. 955), embellished this episode even farther, claiming that Roderic’s widow had encouraged ‘Abd al-Azīz to wear a crown studded with precious stones in order to further project his authority. It is also reported by some that the “royal couple” lived together in the church of Santa Rufina in Seville.19
Interfaith marriage brought with it two clear advantages for the Muslim élite that sought to consolidate its power in Iberia in the immediate aftermath of the conquest. First, it provided a means to legitimize the imposition of new lords over the Hispano-Gothic population, at a time when the pacification of the Peninsula was still precarious in the extreme and the number of Muslim settlers was relatively small. In this way, the Christian women of al-Andalus could be regarded as potential “peace-weavers” in the consolidation of Islamic rule, in the same way that intermarriage between Norman lords and local heiresses was later to provide a means to bind conquerors and conquered more closely together in the wake of the Norman conquest of England, Southern Italy, and Ireland.20 In the case of ‘Abd al-Azīz, however, the Arab governor is reported to have gone even farther, using his marriage to a member of the Visigothic ruling class as a means to associate himself with indigenous traditions of government, including perhaps crown-wearing, as part of an ambitious if ultimately doomed attempt to create a personal monarchy for himself in Iberia that might command support from the local population.21 In short, ‘Abd al-Azīz’s downfall was brought about by his political ambitions, which sought to deny the caliph’s authority over al-Andalus, and not by his decision to take for himself a Christian bride, as some authors would later imply. After all, Ziyād ibn al-Nābigha al-Tamīmī, one of the chief conspirators against the governor, is also said to have married a Christian noblewoman.22
The second advantage offered by marriage alliances between Muslim lords and Christian noblewomen was that they represented a means through which much of the landed wealth of the Visigothic magnate class could legitimately be channeled into Muslim ownership. Whereas property conquered by force of arms (‘anwatan) would have passed automatically into the hands of the invaders, there were large swathes of the country—like Theodemir’s power base in the southeast, for example—where Islamic authority had been recognized through a pact, and where the invaders had no such rights of ownership over these lands (called sulḥan).23 Interfaith marriage offered a solution to that problem, in that the children born to such mixed faith alliances, who were to be raised as Muslims, stood to inherit the property of their Visigothic grandfathers, through their mothers, as well as the lands that their Muslim fathers might have won as the fruits of conquest.
An account of how such arrangements might have worked out in practice is provided by Ibn al-Qūṭīya. Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s proud boast was that he was descended from Sara, grand-daughter of King Wittiza (694–710), whose sons had reportedly conspired against King Roderic at the time of the invasion and offered their allegiance to the Muslims. In return for this support, they had been confirmed in possession of their father’s estates, totaling some 3,000 properties spread across the Peninsula, or so it was claimed.24 Ibn al-Qūṭīya goes on to recount that when the eldest of Wittiza’s sons, Almund, later died, his lands in and around Seville were seized by his brother Artabas, prompting Almund’s daughter, Sara, and her younger brothers to travel to the court of the caliph Hishām I (724–43) in Damascus in search of restitution. The caliph ruled that Artabas’s usurpation of Almund’s legacy had been unlawful, and he also arranged for Sara to marry one of his clients, ‘Īsā b. Muzāḥim, who accompanied her back to the Peninsula and helped to recover her properties. It was from this marriage that Ibn al-Qūṭīya claimed to be descended. When later widowed in 755, Sara married again, this time to ‘Umayr ibn Sa‘īd al-Lakhmī, a member of one of the Syrian junds (military regiments) that had arrived in the Peninsula in 742 to help prop up Umayyad authority in the wake of a major Berber revolt. It was through this second marriage, which was said to have been arranged by the first independent emir of al-Andalus, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I, that the family of the Banū Ḥajjāj later came to enjoy extensive wealth and power in the region of Seville.25
How trustworthy is Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s account? Given that his History comprises more a colorful collection of exemplary and fabulous anecdotes than a detailed account of his times, and that even his pupil Ibn al-Faraḍī is said to have disparaged him as a spinner of tales (akhbār) rather than as a purveyor of serious history (ta’rīkh), his reliability as a historian has frequently been called into question. His account of how Sara traveled to Damascus to raise her case with the caliph certainly raises all manner of doubts.26 It has been pointed out, for example, that Wittiza’s sons could only have been young boys at the time of the conquest and that it is difficult to believe that they took the lead in offering to give support to the Muslims, as Ibn al-Qūṭīya alleges.27 On the other hand, the Christian Chronicle of 754 does make mention of the support lent to the Muslims by Wittiza’s brother, Oppa, so the idea that some of Wittiza’s kin—including perhaps his widow, who had briefly held the regency before Roderic seized the throne—were instrumental in negotiating with the Muslims, and that his sons were later beneficiaries of the deal, should not be dismissed out of hand. Whether “Sara the Goth” and her brothers really did journey to the caliphal court in Damascus, as is claimed, is highly doubtful. Such stories served above all to explain to posterity the process of accommodation between conquerors and some of the vanquished that had taken place at the time of the eighth-century Islamic conquest. Yet even if embroidered, the general thrust of Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s story, which illustrates how an interfaith marriage alliance provided the means by which the property of King Wittiza passed into Muslim control, is eminently plausible. As it is, a similar process of property transmission can be glimpsed in the case of a daughter of Theodemir of Murcia, who is reported to have married ‘Abd al-Jabbār b. Khaṭṭāb b. Marwān b. Naḍīr, another member of the Syrian army that
