Rulers and Resources in Early Medieval Iberia from c. 800-1009: Umayyad State Fiscality and Astur-Leonese Landed Politics Compared

This chapter examines the chronology, development and incidence of taxation in al-Andalus in order to shed light on the resources available to the Umayyad emirs and (after 929) caliphs of Córdoba. It argues, in contradistinction with an established historiographical position that imagines efficient fiscal structures to have been imposed only during and after the rule of the tenth-century caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, that by the ninth century the Umayyad state was already able to extract very significant amounts of taxation in both kind and coin from its Muslim and dhimmī communities. Finally, in order to set these findings in a broader context, this chapter offers a very brief review of the resources available to the Astur-Leonese kings with whom the Umayyads of Córdoba uneasily shared the peninsula