ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore the evolution of royal cities in al-Andalus and Morocco and the spatial and ceremonial means by which they were linked to their larger civilian urban environments. My starting point is an article written in the early 1990s by Jere Bacharach, which suggested a typology for the positioning of governmental centres within medieval Islamic cities.1 He arranged the topographical relationship between loci of political power and cities in the medieval Islamic world into three stages. As the first stage, he identified the early combination of a centrally placed great mosque with the dAr al-imAra (seat of government) located adjacent to it. This association was most fully formalised in Umayyad Iraq and made government, in terms of both personnel and location, relatively visible to the general populace. The second stage was the distancing of royal complexes from urban centres on the same topographical plane characterised by ‘Abbasid Samarra, and the Fatimid royal cities of al-Mahdiyya (Tunisia) and al-Qahira (Egypt). The construction of such cities rendered power less visible and more mysterious. Bacharach’s third stage was the evolution of a separate but attached citadel physically dominating the city and inhabited by politicomilitary elites of alien origin. These elites interacted with the population at liminal points such as the parade ground (maydAn) and the hall of justice (dAr al-“adl), and signalled their presence in the civilian city by generous patronage of its infrastructure. According to Bacharach, the two main motors driving these changes were, first, the ideology and origins of the ruling elite, and, second, the changing composition of the civilian population from majority non-Muslim to majority Muslim, i.e. the shift from a city ‘Islamic’ in the sense of being politically dominated by Muslims to ‘Muslim’ in terms of social composition.
