Raids
Since the death of Ramiro II of León in 950, his kingdom along with the kingdom of Pamplona and the county of Barcelona had been forced to recognize Cordoba's sovereignty through an annual tribute, with default resulting in reprisal campaigns. Almanzor began carrying these out in 977 and he continued to do so until his death in 1002, although most were concentrated in his later years when he was most powerful. In parallel with the Maghreb campaigns, Almanzor was devoted to the war against the Christian kingdoms of Iberia. Although the various sources are in conflict on the precise details, it is estimated that he made about fifty-six campaigns, twenty of these being in the first period from 977 to 985. In these offensives, Almanzor balanced attacks on centers of political and economic power with those against sites of religious importance. The famous raids, cavalry strikes and aceiphas, literally "summer campaigns" and called by the Christians cunei, had as their tactical and economic objective the taking of captives and cattle from the enemy; strategically they sought to generate a state of permanent insecurity that prevented Christians from developing an organized life outside of castles, fortified cities or their immediate vicinity. Their main feature was the short duration of the campaigns and the remoteness of the points reached by them. In spite of the military success of the many incursions, they failed to prevent in the long term ruin of the state. Although they halted the advance of Christian repopulation and dismantled important fortresses and cities, they failed to significantly alter the boundaries because Almanzor rarely occupied the territories he plundered.
The region most affected and vulnerable to the campaigns was the Douro valley. This was the destination for Christian settlers who were driven to repopulate it due to demographic pressure in Asturias, the heartland of the kingdom. This area was protected by the Cantabrian Mountains, a narrow strip of land that nonetheless could defend itself—unlike Leon or Galicia, which were more vulnerable to Moorish cavalry raids. In fact, Almanzor's campaigns reached all of Christian Spain with the exception of the Cantabrian coast, and contributed to León and Galicia coming more solidly under the sovereignty of the Asturian Crown, but still with great autonomy, due to the weakness of the kingdom's expansion.
The first eight campaigns were carried out with the support of his father-in-law Ghalib. Among them were three in the Salamanca lands (two in 977 and one in 978), another against Cuéllar (the same year), one against Pamplona and Barcelona (the long summer campaign of 978), one against Zamora (or maybe Ledesma, according to other authors, in the spring of 979) and one against Sepúlveda (in the summer of 979, which he could not take, although he razed its surroundings). The eighth was one in which he accompanied to Algeciras the forces destined to Maghreb, between September 979 and early 980.
The ninth campaign, in the spring of 980, was that during which the rupture between Almanzor and Ghalib took place and is known as "the one of betrayal" for Ghalib's surprise assault on Almanzor's son-in-law at Atienza. The confrontation followed a short raid through Castilla. The next four offensives (one in the fall of 980, two in the spring of the following year and one in the summer) took place during the conflict between the two rivals. During the last campaign – that of Almanzor's victory over Ghalib, he regained control of the fortresses of Atienza and Calatayud, held by partisans of his rival.
As a result of the defeat of Ghalib in the summer of 981, Almanzor's forces continued their advance, looting and destroying the lands around Zamora at the end of the summer. Later, they defeated Pamplona, León and Castile at the Battle of Rueda (or Roa) and recovered Simancas, which was razed. The loss of Simancas disrupted the Christian defensive line along the Duero, which later campaigns eventually dismantled. These losses, along with Almanzor's support for rivals to the Leonine crown, first Bermudo against the weakened Ramiro III and later rival counts, one of which briefly took the throne, plunged León into a political crisis that it submitted to Almanzor for arbitration. In general, Almanzor supported the noble families opposed to the monarch of the moment to take advantage of intra-Leonese squabbles. From 977, he launched attacks into León's territories almost annually.
The Galician and Portuguese counts, hostile to Ramiro III as they had been to his father, sought to appease Almanzor after the Trancoso and Viseu campaign of the beginning of the winter of 981 and for this they sought to impose a new king, Bermudo II, crowned in October 982 in Santiago while Almanzor pillaged the outskirts of León. Castile and León, continually exposed to Cordoban assaults, on the other hand, supported Ramiro. In 983, Almanzor plundered the area surrounding Salamanca in the fall, after failing to take it, and Sacramenia at the beginning of winter, slaughtering the men and taking the rest of the population captive. In his attempt to halt the Christian advance south of the Duero, he continued assailing the Leonese and Castilian positions in this area and the most important points of repopulation, such as Zamora (984) or Sepúlveda the same year, razed before he fell on Barcelona. The destruction of Sepúlveda forced Ramiro to submit to Córdoba in 985, the year of his death due to natural causes, as Bermudo had done before. Bermudo's submission had been accompanied by that of other Portuguese and Galician counts. This imposed the presence of Cordoban forces on the Leonese kingdom, as a protectorate, which it remained until 987.
The expulsion of the Cordoban troops from León by Bermudo triggered the 988 campaign against Coimbra and the torching of the Monastery of San Pedro de Eslonza in the first retaliatory campaign in 986, in which he also took León, Zamora, Salamanca and Alba de Tormes before attacking Condeixa.
In 982, he launched the "campaign of the three nations' possibly against Castile, Pamplona and the Girona Franks, that forced the king of Pamplona, Sancho II to give to Almanzor a daughter, who would take the name Abda. This union would produce the last of Almanzor's political dynasty, Abd al-Rahman Sanchuelo. In 985, exploiting the subjugation of León and Castile, he attacked Barcelona, which he managed to take in early July, treating it harshly. Almanzor had previously attacked the region in the summer of 978, when for several months he ravaged the plains of Barcelona and parts of Tarragona, conquered by the Barcelona counts some decades earlier. In an almost three-month-long campaign, he captured the city with the help of the fleet, imprisoned Viscount Udalard I and Archdeacon Arnulf and sacked the monasteries of Sant Cugat del Vallés and Sant Pere de les Puelles.
In 987, he made two campaigns against Coimbra, conquering it during the second on 28 June. Unlike previous offensives, focused on looting and destruction, this time he repopulated the area with Muslims, who held the area until 1064. In 988 and 989, he again ravaged the Leonese Duero valley. He assaulted Zamora, Toro, León and Astorga, which controlled access to Galicia, and forced Bermudo to take refuge among the Galician counts.
After concentrating most of his attacks on León, he went on to launch his forces against Castile from 990, previously the object of only four of thirty-one campaigns. The west of León would, however, suffer one last attack in December 990, in which Montemor-o-Velho and Viseu, on the defensive line of the Mondego River, were surrendered, probably as punishment for the asylum that Bermudo had granted to the Umayyad "Piedra Seca". The failed collusion of his son Abd Allah and the governors of Toledo and Zaragoza triggered a change of objective. Fearing his father's anger over his participation in the plot along with the arrested governor of Zaragoza, Abd Allah had fled to take refuge with count García Fernández of Castile. As punishment and to force the surrender of his son, the chamberlain took and armed Osma in August. The broad raid achieved its goal and on 8 September, the Castilian count returned to Abdullah to his father in return for a two-year truce. Moving on from Castile, the following year he attacked the kingdom of Pamplona. Sancho II tried to appease the Cordoban leader with a visit to the capital of the Caliphate at the end of 992, but this failed to prevent his lands from being subject to a new foray in 994. The last half of the decade saw general submission of Pamplona to the Caliphate along with its repeated attempts to avoid any punitive Cordoban campaigns.
In 993 Almanzor attacked Castile again, for unknown reasons, but failed to take San Esteban de Gormaz, simply looting its surroundings. He succeeded in taking it the following year, along with Clunia. The loss of San Esteban dismantled Castilian defenses along the Douro, while the taking of Clunia endangered lands south of the Arlanza.
At the end of 994, on the occasion of the wedding between Bermudo II and a daughter of the Castilian count, Almanzor took León and Astorga, the Leonese capital since 988, and devastated the territory, perhaps also intending to facilitate a future campaign against Santiago de Compostela. In May 995, the Castilian Count Garcia Fernandez was wounded and taken prisoner in a skirmish near the Duero and, despite the care of his captors, he died in Medinaceli. He was succeeded by his prudent son Sancho, who had fought with Córdoba against his father and managed to maintain an informal truce with the Caliphate between 995 and 1000. The ties between Castile and the chamberlain were sealed with delivery of one of the new count's sisters to Almanzor as a wife or concubine. Urraca Sanchez, nicknamed "the Basque", adopted the Arabic name Abda after being given to Almanzor by her father Sancho II of Pamplona. Urraca and Almanzor had a single son, named Abd al-Rahman Sanchuelo that became chief minister of Hisham II, Caliph of Córdoba. As retribution for the support of the former count by the Banu Gómez, counts of Saldaña and former allies of Córdoba, their seat of Carrión was attacked in a raid that reached the monastery of San Román de Entrepeñas. At the end of 995, a new incursion against Aguiar, southeast of Porto, forced Bermudo II to return the former Umayyad conspirator "Piedra Seca."
In 996, he again launched a raid on León and destroyed Astorga to force them to resume the tribute payments. In the summer of 997, he devastated Santiago de Compostela, after the Bishop, Pedro de Mezonzo, evacuated the city. In a combined operation involving his own land troops, those of Christian allies and the fleet, Almanzor's forces reached the city in mid-August. They burned the pre-Romanesque temple dedicated to the apostle James the Great, and said to contain his tomb. The prior removal of the saint's relics allowed the continuity of the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route that had begun to attract pilgrims in the previous century. The campaign was a great triumph for the chamberlain at a delicate political moment, as it coincided with the breakdown of his long alliance with Subh. The Leonese setback was so great that it allowed Almanzor to settle a Muslim population in Zamora on his return from Santiago, while the bulk of the troops in Leonese territory remained in Toro. He then imposed peace terms on the Christian magnates that allowed him to forego campaigning in the north in 998, the first year this happened since 977.
In 999, he made his last foray to the eastern borderlands, where, after passing through Pamplona, he sacked Manresa and the plains of Bages. In April he attacked the County of Pallars, governed by the kin of the mother of count Sancho García of Castile. It is suggested that the attacks could have been triggered by the Pamplonan king and Catalan counts ceasing to pay tribute to Córdoba, taking advantage of Almanzor's distraction in crushing Ziri ibn Atiyya.
Also in 999, the death of Bermudo II in September produced a new minority in León through the ascent to the throne of Alfonso V, but this did not prevent the formation of a broad anti-Córdoba alliance that united not just the people of Pamplona and Castile, but also the ancient Christian clients of Almanzor. Sancho of Castile, until then a faithful ally who had managed to avoid the incursions of Córdoba into his territory, joined the alliance and provoked Almanzor into launching an attack. To his great surprise, the Castilian Count assembled a large force bringing together his own troops and those of his allies, who intercepted the Córdoban units north of Clunia in a strong defensive position. In the hard-fought battle of Cervera (29 July 1000), Almanzor's side gained the victory, after the rout of much of his army through the intervention of eight hundred cavalry.
After the victory, at the end of the year Almanzor made another strike at the western border, where he took Montemor-o-Velho on December 2, 1000, after overcoming fierce resistance. For its part, the kingdom of Pamplona suffered several attacks after the defeat of Cervera, in 1000 and again in 1001 and 1002. After Cervera, Almanzor accelerated the number of strikes, despite being sick and needing to be carried on a litter at times.
His last campaign, also victorious, was made in 1002, when he was mortally ill, having suffered from gouty arthritis for twenty years. He aimed to avenge the quasi-rout of Cervera and punish the Castilian count Sancho, architect of the alliance that almost defeated him. San Millán de la Cogolla, dedicated to the patron saint of Castile and in the territory of Pamplona, allied with Sancho, was sacked and burned; in Pamplona, Almanzor ordered a retreat due to his worsening health, and he died en route to Córdoba before reaching the capital.
The victorious campaigns of Almanzor were due to his skills as a military tactician and the army he commanded, which was a highly professionalized force of a size that dwarfed any counterattack that the Christian kings and counts could mount to meet him: "rarely above 1000 knights or 2000 or 3000 men in total." They had few weeks in spring or summer to gather what was often no more than a few hundred knights and men. "The most frequent average seems to have been a knight for every two or three auxiliary riders (squires and others) and one of these for every two or three peons." In those days an army of ten or fifteen thousand men – a third knights and the rest peons – was the maximum concentration of forces that a medieval ruler could muster when presenting battle. For example, Muslim campaigns had formations of only one thousand to ten thousand men. "An army of ten or fifteen thousand men is considered in every way exceptional and few historians would be willing to admit that on some occasion that number was actually reached by a host during a battle."
In his campaigns Almanzor emphasized cavalry operations, so much so that he had reserved the islands of the Guadalquivir for horse breeding. These marshes around Seville, Huelva and Cádiz had suitable pastures for raising horses. Mules were imported from the Balearic Islands and camels from Africa, the latter raised in the semi-desert area between Murcia and Lorca. According to Vallvé, "Normally participating in his campaigns were twelve thousand horsemen, enrolled in the military hierarchy and provided, in addition to that customarily due the usual soldier, with a horse with their harnesses, weapons, accommodation, payments and bonuses for various expenses, and fodder for their horses, based on their role."
Almanzor's campaigns were a continuation of a policy from emirate times: the capture of numerous contingents of Christian slaves, the famous esclavos or francos, in Arabic Saqtïliba or Saqáliba (plural of Siqlabi, "slave"). These were the most lucrative part of the loot, and constituted an excellent method of paying the troops, so much so that many campaigns were little more than slave raids. From these came many eunuchs who were essential elements for handling harems; others were purchased already castrated in Verdun and disembarked in Pechina or Almería according to Liutprand of Cremona. However, the most valuable take was the beautiful girls, selected according to "the predilection they had for the blonde and redhead Galicians, Basques and Franks," usually also described as having blue eyes, large breasts, wide hips, thick legs and perfect teeth that "the gynaecea of the royal families and the aristocracy supplied as concubines and legitimate wives." As in the case of the eunuchs, some slaves were bought from pirates attacking the Mediterranean coast, others came from Slavic or Germanic populations passing through several hands from Vikings, and there were also blacks imported from Sudan. Most of these slaves, however, were children who would be Islamized and assigned to work at court, including the work of eunuchs. Jews and, to a lesser extent, Muslims were involved in this lucrative trade, thanks to their ability as interpreters and ambassadors.
During the rule of Almanzor's Amirí regime, the already-rich Al-Andalus slave market reached unprecedented proportions. For example, the Moorish chronicles mention that after destroying Barcelona in July 985, Almanzor brought seventy thousand chained Christians to the great market of Córdoba and, after destroying Simancas in July 983, he captured seventeen thousand women and imprisoned ten thousand nobles. Obviously, these figures must be carefully evaluated, but likewise given the enormity this type of trade reached during his tenure, Almanzor is described as "the slave importer". The commoners of Córdoba even asked his successor to stop the trade since, to get a good husband for their daughters they had to raise the dowries to exorbitant levels because the young Christian slaves were so numerous and cheap that many men preferred to buy them instead of marrying Muslims.
