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ABSTRACT
Madīnat Ilbīra was the capital of one of the territorial organization units of the Umayyad state. The city was founded in the second half of the ninth century, and then abandoned in the eleventh century as a result of the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba and the transfer of the centre of the region to Granada. Its remains were located only in the nineteenth century. Modern excavations and non-invasive geophysical prospections carried out in this century allow the reconstruction of the spatial system of the city in the era of its greatest prosperity, the location of the citadel and the main mosque, and the reconstruction of the city’s buildings.
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Notes
1 The concept of Islamisation as a key phenomenon in the creation of al-Andalus in social terms and as religious change can be summed up thus: some authors propose slow and gradual changes that take more than a century to complete, and others assume a faster model of change due to the conquest and migration processes of the eighth century. Likewise, the debate concerns the role of the state in these changes, types of taxation, economic extraction and ideological coercion; or a more down-to-top vision due to the arrival of Arabic and North African family contingents organised in tribes. See Acién, “Sobre el papel de la ideología;” Barceló, “¿Por qué los historiadores académicos;” Carvajal, “Islamización y arqueología;” Fierro, “The Islamization of al-Andalus,” 202–07; García-Garcia “Eso no se come;” García Sanjuán, “El concepto tributario;” Gutiérrez, “Early al-Andalus;” Kirchner, “The Archaeology of the Peasantry;” Manzano, Conquistadores, emires y califas; Ortega, La conquista islámica. For the plain of Granada, where Medina Elvira is located, see Carvajal, “Islamicization or Islamicizations?” and “Sobre cerámica, cambio tecnológico e islamización;” López, Mercaderes, artesanos y ulemas; Sarr, “Arabización e islamización.”
2 Gutiérrez, “Early al-Andalus,” 72–75.
3 Muñoz and Murillo, “Advances in Research on Islamic Córdoba,” 12–13.
4 As rightly pointed out by Acién, “Sobre el papel de la ideología,” 944–49, and “La formación del tejido urbano,” from an early stage, the right of private property was consubstantial with the theology and practice of Islamic society since this ideological basis was responsible for special conceptions on housing. The specific development of Islamic urbanism also derives from this. But the alleged labyrinthine plan defended by some historians for the Islamic city is currently indefensible in view of the archaeological data. Especially in the case of new cities, since they all have a plan that is shown in a tendency towards an orthogonal grid or in the way in which wastewater disposal is managed. The subsequent evolution of cities allows, by virtue of the absolute pre-eminence of the right of use in Islam, that private spaces are sometimes gained from public streets, or modifications in the plots such as the suppression of allures (adarves).
5 See Al-Andalus, país de ciudades; Panzram and Callegarin, Entre civitas y madina.
6 Malpica, “La primera ocupación de la Vega,” 177–81.
7 The first project (2005–2011) was directed by Antonio Malpica Cuello from the Department of Medieval History of the University of Granada. The second one (2015–2019) was carried out by a Spanish-Polish team and co-directed by Marian Rębkowski from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology Polish Academy of Sciences and Antonio Malpica Cuello. In October 2022 a new project has been started under the direction of Guillermo García-Contreras Ruiz, but since it is in the early stages, no new data are provided so far.
8 Obregón, “La evolución del paisaje,” 139–41; Malpica, “Madinat Ilbira, un proyecto de investigación,” 394.
9 Gόmez Moreno, Medina Elvira.
10 Apart from the projects, some archaeological rescue supervisions have been also conducted in the site, but they are of limited scientific importance.
11 Harris, Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy.
12 Gater and Gaffney, Revealing the Buried Past; Campana and Piro, Seeing the Unseen.
13 García-Contreras and Tejerizo, “La institucionalización de la arqueología.”
14 The first case is the town of Saltés (Huelva, southwest Iberia). The geophysical survey conducted there in the 1980s revealed the existence of a planned layout of medieval streets and buildings, Bazzana and Cressier, Shaltis/Saltés; Bazzana and Bedia, Excavaciones en la isla de Saltés. The second is Reccopolis, the only archaeologically identified town founded by the Visigoths that continued to be occupied until the end of the ninth century after a century of Islamization, Olmo, “The Materiality of Complex.” A recent geomagnetic survey has revealed a dense urban fabric, new royal palace buildings, extramural suburb and potentially one of the earliest Islamic mosques in al-Andalus, Henning et al., “Reccopolis Revealed.” The last case is Madinat al-Zahra, the Umayyad fortified palatine town on the western outskirts of Córdoba, built by Abd al-Rahman III as the symbol of new caliphal power, Vallejo, La ciudad califal. In 2015 and 2016, a combination of geophysical and geochemical surveys at different resolutions were conducted. They located possible areas of production and added more detail to the urban layout of the medina, Govantes-Edwards and Duckworth, “Revisiting ‘al-mulk’.” The application of geophysical techniques has been done in other early medieval urban contexts, such as the Vega Baja in Toledo, but we refer here only to those that have been published.
15 Gómez Martín et al., “Informe de exploración geofísica.” The authors unequivocally indicated that GPR offers considerable possibilities in the site, but at the same time they noted the difficulties in interpreting GPR under the existing measurement conditions.
16 Rębkowski et al., “Non-invasive Investigations,” 278.
17 Conyers, Interpreting Ground-penetrating Radar, and Ground-penetrating Radar.
18 Goodman et al., “GPR Time Slices.”
19 Malpica, “La ciudad de Madinat Ilbira,” 208–12; Malpica and González, “Las defensas de la ciudad,” 63, 70.
20 Malpica et al., “Intervención arqueológica de urgencia,” 5–7; Malpica et al., “Prospección arqueológica en el conjunto,” 151; Malpica, “La ciudad de Madinat Ilbira,” 211.
21 Carvajal, La cerámica de Madinat Ilbira, 288, 389
22 Gómez Moreno, Medina Elvira, 8–9.
23 Civantos et al., ”Actuación arqueológica,” 1561.
24 Malpica et al., Informe de la Segunda Campaña, 14; Malpica, Jiménez and Carvajal, “La cerámica de Madinat Ilbira,” 45.
25 Malpica, Memoria final, 44, 414–15.
26 Malpica, Memoria final, 428, 622, “La ciudad andalusí,” 43, and “Madinat Ilbira, un proyecto,” 400.
27 The study area is currently a flat olive grove resulting in data gaps, situated on a fenced plot containing buildings. In the southern part of the plot, there were remains of a dilapidated bituminous pavement and piles of debris.
28 Earlier, only single fragments of brick had been found, Malpica, Memoria final, 305, 809–10.
29 Interpretation has been hindered by the fact that, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the trench was not fully excavated.
30 Deviation of approximately 126o. Such a south-easterly direction toward Mecca is consistent with the orientation of mosques of al-Andalus, Rius, La alquibla, 104–26; Calvo, Las mezquitas.
31 Gómez Moreno, Medina Elvira, 9.
32 Martínez, “Estrategias de muestreo cerámico,” 109.
33 Román, “Análisis antropológico de un grupo.”
34 Malpica, “El surgimiento de la ciudad,” 100.
35 Gómez Moreno, Medina Elvira, 7–8; Rębkowski et al., “Archaeological Research,” 159–60.
36 Rodríguez, “Excavación arqueológica de urgencia,” 597.
37 Salvago, Memoria final de la intervención.
38 Martínez et al., “En los bordes de Ilbira.”
39 C14 calibrated datations following Reimer et al., “The IntCal20 Northern.”
40 Rębkowski et al., “Non-invasive Investigations,” 280–82.
41 Sarr, La Granada Ziri, 107–08.
42 The foundation and abandonment of Madīnat Ilbīra has been extensively discussed in the literature with approaches that range from its existence as a city before al-Andalus, its appointment as the capital of the Granadan plain as early as in the eighth century, or its foundation in the ninth century: Espinar Moreno, Medina Elvira, 13–16; Malpica, “El surgimiento de la ciudad,” 6–8, and “La primera ocupación,” 182; Sarr, La Granada Ziri, 59, “’Abd al-Rahmān,” 66–69, and “Arabización e islamización,” 185, 194, 199; López, Mercaderes, artesanos y ulemas, 67–78; Rębkowski et al., “Archaeological Research,” 160–64.
43 Mazzoli-Guintard, “Les villes d’al-Andalus,” 65–78; Manzano, Conquistadores, emires, 250.
44 Martínez et al.,”En los bordes de Ilbira,” n.37.
45 Malpica, “The Emergence of the City,” 20.
46 Malpica, “Madinat Ilbira, un proyecto,” 386; Malpica and González, “Las defensas de la ciudad,” 65–66; Rębkowski et al., “Non-invasive Investigations,” 292–95.
47 The system is comparable to that of the defensive wall of the town of Plad'Almata, where the base was made of ashlars forming the facing of the foundations, between which mortar was poured. On top of this, the wall itself was erected of rammed-earth (tapial) construction, Alós et al., “Organización territorial,” 162. In the case of Balaguer, this measure represents a very clear economy, since the ashlars, much more expensive, are replaced by rammed earth.
48 Vigil-Escalera, “Arquitectura de tierra,” 288, proposed years ago the coexistence of two main domestic models that are regularly repeated in different early medieval sites: on the one hand, the rectangular building unit, sometimes with internal division and with frequent recourse to juxtaposition, which in substance and form corresponds to the single-cell model of a simple house with a single rectangular room and multiple functions, distributed around open spaces. On the other hand, the building unit with a complex plan with three or four different rooms (one long and narrow, generally closing one of the sides) and a possible functional specialisation. Other authors have argued that reality is more complex in the case of continuous occupations, which show cohesive and stable residence patterns, typical of concentrated settlements such as cities. They also point out that the change can be interpreted in the transition dynamics of the eighth to tenth centuries with an Islamic house model characterised by the functional segregation of domestic spaces (Gutiérrez and Cánovas, “Construyendo el siglo VII,” 98–99; Gutiérrez, “Early al-Andalus,” 72–75). In any case, the alcazaba of Ilbīra (mid ninth to mid tenth century) shows clearly the predominance of the first model, similar to other sites with emiral contexts like Tolmo de Minateda (Albatece), Castillón de Montefrío (Granada), Marmuyas (Málaga), Alcaria Longa (Mértola, Portugal), Reccopolis (Guadalajara) or Peñaflor (Jaén), among others. For bibliography and further discussion, see Gutiérrez, “Coming Back to Grammar.”
49 Malpica, “La ciudad de Madinat Ilbira,” 232.
50 López, Mercaderes, artesanos y ulemas, 68.
51 Carvajal, La cerámica de Madinat Ilbira, 288; Malpica et al., “Estudio de la cerámica,” 1843–44.
52 Ibn Hayyan, Crónica del califa, 93 (Arabic) and 81 (Spanish translation).
53 Malpica, “The Emergence of the City,” 98, and ”El surgimiento de la ciudad,” 95–98.
54 Gómez Moreno, Medina Elvira, 8, 13; Simonet, Cuadros Históricos, 22–25; Sarr, “’Abd al-Rahmān,” 69–70. On whether Ḥanash al-Ṣanʿānī was a real or a semi-legendary character, see Fierro and Marín, “La islamización de las ciudades,” 69–70.
55 Calvo, Las mezquitas, 357–68.
56 González Gutiérrez, “Metrología y modulación en las mezquitas.”
57 According to Ibn Hayӯan and Abdullah ibn Buluggīn, the mosque was destroyed in the second half of the eleventh century, see Espinar Moreno, Medina Elvira, 18–23. See Sarr, “’Abd al-Rahmān,” 74–81, for destruction layers registered in the trench with radiocarbon dates from the the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This could have been the place of worship of one of the villages mentioned later, after the fall of Madinat Ilbira, the so-called qarya Ilbīra.
58 Malpica, “La ciudad de Ilbira,” 43, and Memoria final, 44, 350, 414; Carvajal, “Islamicization or Islamicizations,” 120.
59 Casal et al., “Espacios y usos funerarios,” 274–77. To clarify, we are not referring to funerary mosques themselves, a late and exceptional phenomenon in al-Andalus that seems to become general only from the Almoravid period onwards.
60 Malpica, “El surgimiento de la ciudad,” 95.
61 Malpica, Memoria final, 346–47, and “The Origins of the City,” 69, 76–77. A detailed description of the archaeological sequence that shows an evolution from a rural context with wells to a totally urbanised space can be found in Martínez et al.,”En los bordes de Ilbira.”
62 Below the cemetery a series of walls related to the earliest phase of settlement in this place were discovered (see above and ).
63 Examples include two intramural cemeteries in the city of Córdoba mentioned in the written sources: Pinilla, “Aportaciones al estudio de la topografía,” 211–12; Casal et al., “Espacio y usos funerarios.” For an example excavated in 1988 in Pechina (Almería) with a similar chronology, see Castillo and Martínez, “Excavación sistemática,” 52.
64 Rębkowski et al., “Non-invasive Investigations,” 283–86, 296.
65 Gómez Moreno, Medina Elvira, 8.
66 Navarro and Jiménez, “Algunas Reflexiones,” 283.
67 Its total dimensions are still unknown, but it is possible to identify it as an Islamic cemetery, probably the main necropolis of the town, see Malpica, “El surgimiento de la ciudad,” 100.
68 Sarr, “’Abd al-Rahmān b. Mu’āwiya,” 77.
69 Orihuela, “La casa andalusí,” 301; Gutiérrez, “Coming Back to Grammar.”
70 Olmo, “The Materiality of Complex;” Gutiérrez, “Early al-Andalus.”
71 González, “Las técnicas constructivas,” 38–42.
72 They have been documented with this function on other sites of more recent date, Gurriarán and Sáez, “Tapial o fábrica sencofradas,” 568.
73 Gόmez Moreno, Medina Elvira, 8–9, 13 and Appendix. We cannot know if stones were the material used exclusively in the walls or if they were used again as the basis for work in tapial. The layers of collapse in which they were found seems to suggest placement higher up in the walls.
74 Malpica, “The Emergence of the City,” 98–99, 108.
75 Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam, 202–04.
76 Jiménez Castillo et al., “Taller de vidrio y casas,” 437; Govantes-Edwards and Duckworth, “Revisiting ‘al-mulk’,” 40–42.
77 Casal, “The Rabad of Saqunda,” 124.
78 Castillo, Martínez, “Excavación sistemática del yacimiento,” 55.
79 Carvajal et al., “Contextualización de un yacimiento.”
80 Molina et al., “Cerro del Cortijo;” Jiménez, “Cerámica tardoantigua y emiral,” 221.
81 Álvarez, “El yacimiento altomedieval,” 1551.
82 Ruiz, “Intervención arqueológica,” 2913–14.
83 Not only between the courtly spaces and the rest of the city, but also in the suburbs that formed throughout the tenth century. Very different qualities have been identified in the suburban buildings, reflecting the social and economic positions of their owners, whereas official architecture financed by the Umayyad rulers had specific well defined characteristics (use of ashlars, monumental doorways, decorations, etc.). But this is not the case for Ilbīra. For the city of Córdoba and its architecture, see Camacho and Valera, “Espacios domésticos en los arrabales;” Casal, “The Rabad of Saqunda;” León and Murillo, “Advances in Research on Islamic Córdoba.” For Madinat al-Zahra, see Vallejo, La ciudad califal.
84 Some traces of the walls were recorded on the Tajo Colorado summit adjacent to the site on the northwest side, see Malpica and González, “Las defensas de la ciudad,” 67.
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Notes on contributors
Marian Rębkowski
Marian Rębkowski is a medieval archaeologist, since 2019 the director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. His research has focused on medieval urbanization, early state formation in Central Europe, Christianization as well as religious and cultural interaction of this period. He conducted several excavations of medieval towns, monasteries and fortifications, mostly in Poland but also in Andalusia. His most recent books concern one of early medieval Baltic emporiums (Wolin – the Old Town, vol. I-II, Szczecin 2019) and the origins of the Duchy of Pomerania (Die Entstehung Pommerns, Köln-Wien 2023).
Guillermo García-Contreras Ruiz
Guillermo Garcia Contreras Ruiz is a Senior Lecturer (profesor contratado) at the Department of Medieval History and Historiographic Sciences and Techniques of the University of Granada and also the head of the Chair of Gómez Moreno established there for the research on Madīnat Ilbīra. His scientific interests concern different aspects of medieval archaeology, specially Islamic archaeology, landscape archaeology, palaeoenvironmental studies, castles and fortifications, urban development, rural settlements patterns or exploitation and consumption natural resources. Currently he is one of the PI-s of the ERC Synergy grant “Re-thinking the “Green Revolution” in the Medieval Western Mediterranean (6th–16th centuries).”
Cristina Martínez Álvarez
Cristina Martínez Álvarez M.A. was graduated from the University of Granada. She participated in all scientific projects concerning Madīnat Ilbīra. Her main research has focused on the study of early Islamic ceramics in al-Andalus. Currently she is a PhD student at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (Doctoral School “Anthropos”) with the thesis entitled “Islamization in kūra of Ilbīra (al-Andalus). Comparative study on pottery production and distribution in the early Islamic period in south-east Iberian Peninsula.”
Robert Ryndziewicz
Robert Ryndziewicz M.A. is a staff member in the Laboratory of Bio- and Archaeometry at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. Currently also a PhD student at the Doctoral School “Anthropos” with the thesis “The cognitive potential of non-invasive geophysical methods. Theoretical and practical aspects of the use of archaeological geophysics in the study of medieval towns.” Specialist in near-surface geophysics applied for archaeological prospection. He has extensive field research experience, including non-invasive archaeological prospections in the Nile Valley, Middle East and Europe.
Wojciech Filipowiak
Wojciech Filipowiak is an adjunct at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in the Centre for Medieval Archaeology of the Baltic Countries in Szczecin. His doctoral thesis entitled “The shipbuilding in early medieval Wolin” was completed in 2016. His main areas of research are early medieval urbanization, shipbuilding, slavery, Slavs outside the Slavic area and the archaeology of myth. In 2016 he was a member of a project aimed at locate the early medieval Qarjat as-Saqaliba in Marocco.