Abd al-Rahman I: The Prince Who Escaped a Massacre and Founded a Dynasty

In 750 the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyad dynasty that had ruled the Muslim world for nearly a century, and then set about making sure no Umayyad would ever threaten them again. They hunted the family down and killed them. In one notorious case they invited a group of princes to a banquet under a promise of safety and slaughtered them there. One young man slipped the net. What he did over the next decade is one of the great escape stories of the medieval world.

The fugitive

Abd al-Rahman, a grandson of a former caliph, was about twenty when the killing began. The traditional account has him fleeing with his young son and a loyal servant, hiding in villages, and at one point throwing himself into the Euphrates and swimming for the far bank while Abbasid horsemen called out false promises of pardon from the shore. His brother, who believed them and turned back, was killed. Abd al-Rahman kept swimming. He spent the next five years moving west across North Africa as a hunted man, relying on his mother's Berber kin and staying a step ahead of the agents sent to find him.

A new state in the west

He reached the Iberian Peninsula in 755. Muslim Spain at that point was a province torn by feuding between Arab and Berber factions, answering in name to the distant Abbasid government but in practice ungoverned. Abd al-Rahman, a prince with a famous name and nothing left to lose, gathered support among the old clients of his family, defeated the local governor in battle near Cordoba in 756, and declared an independent Umayyad emirate. The dynasty the Abbasids believed they had wiped out had rebuilt itself a continent away, beyond their reach.

The Falcon of Quraysh

The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, no friend of his, is said to have called Abd al-Rahman the Falcon of Quraysh, a grudging tribute to a man who had crossed deserts alone and built a state from the wreckage of his family. He spent the rest of his life holding it together against rebellions and outside threats, including a force sent by Charlemagne, whose retreat through the Pyrenees gave rise to the famous tale of Roland. Near the end of his reign he began the Great Mosque of Cordoba, pouring into it a homesick prince's memory of the Syria he had lost. The building still stands, its forest of red and white arches the surviving signature of the world he made.

The Abd al-Rahman I print is part of the Riwayah Empires collection. You can view the print.

The state Abd al-Rahman founded became the brightest in Europe. For where it led, see the golden age of Al-Andalus.