[8] His portentous rise to power has been explained by an insatiable thirst for dominance, but historian Eduardo Manzano Moreno warns that "it must be understood within the framework of the complex internal struggles that developed within the Umayyad administration.

[1][20] The family's position improved significantly with the appointment of ibn Abi ʿĀmir's paternal grandfather as Qadi of Seville and his marriage to the daughter of a vizier, governor of Badajoz and doctor to Caliph Abd al-Rahman III.

[37] In late February of 967,[19][40] he was given charge of Abd al-Rahman, son and heir of Al-Hakam II by his favorite,[29][41][42] the Basque[43] Subh (Aurora),[1][44] a slave with very diverse training, from singing to Islamic jurisprudence to poetry, who owed her power to her ascendancy over the caliph as the mother of his children.

[36][45][46][47] Although his role was probably secondary,[46] his responsibility managing the estates of the heir to the throne and those of his mother granted Ibn Abi ʿĀmir close proximity to the reigning family,[48] and he quickly began to accumulate important positions.

[46][81] Some schools of Islamic jurisprudence rejected the possibility of a minor becoming Caliph,[75] but the Umayyad Al-Andalus tradition had secured the inheritance from parent to child,[82] while the case of Abd al-Rahman III set a precedent for primogeniture.

[71][96][98][100] He quickly broke up the plot with the help of Subh, and instructed Ibn Abi ʿĀmir,[71][89][90][101] then a senior official and member of the court with privileged access to the young Caliph and his mother, to murder the pretender.

[35][125][126] Ibn Abi ʿĀmir won military prestige by repulsing Christian forces and attacking Cuéllar during a second 977 campaign,[119][120][127] and Salamanca in the autumn of the same year,[128][129] not for conquest, but to weaken the enemy and gain domestic popularity.

[105][141][150] An improvised attempt to stab the Caliph to death failed[149][150] and led to the brutal repression of the conspirators at the insistence of Subh and Ibn Abi ʿĀmir, not without overcoming the resistance of major legal advisors.

[169] After several joint raids into Christian lands, mainly led by the veteran Ghalib despite the growing military experience of Ibn Abi ʿĀmir, a confrontation erupted in the spring of 980,[174][175] over a campaign around Atienza.

[198][200] For twenty years, until the breakup of his alliance with the caliph's powerful mother in 996,[201] Ibn Abi ʿĀmir acted in part as her representative, advisor, treasurer, mediator, informant, and her commander of the armies and the police.

[202] Despite years of competition at court for power and administration by others, however, the Caliph, upon reaching his majority, made no move to assume control,[202] possibly due to some kind of illness or other inability to carry out the responsibilities of his position.

[207] In 988 and 989 he had to face a double threat: a long drought[209] that caused famine and forced him to apply some social measures to alleviate the shortage (delivery of bread or rescission of taxes, among others) and the emergence of a new rebellion against him in which his eldest [210] son sought to replace him.

[150][193][211][212][213] Almanzor managed to disrupt the conspiracy,[214] which had been joined by the governor of Zaragoza, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muhammad of the Banu Tujib,[214] and that of Toledo,[213] an Umayyad descendant of Caliph Al-Hakam I,[215] 'Abd Allah bin Abd al-'Aziz al-Marwanid[214] also known as Abdullah Piedra Seca,[150][193][212][216][217] but his efforts to get his son to submit proved fruitless.

[238][239] Almanzor discovered this thanks to his agents in the palace,[217][236][240] and he reacted by successfully petitioning the council of viziers and Faqīhs to transfer the treasury to his residence, Medina Alzahira [es], characterizing Subh's theft as a robbery by the harem.

[271] Almanzor's completion of this reform, begun by his predecessors, fundamentally divided the population into two unequal groups: a large mass of civilian taxpayers and a small professional military caste, generally from outside the peninsula.

[264] For similar reasons, the Barcelonan count Borrell II created the figure of the homes of paratge- who obtained privileged military status by fighting against the Cordobans armed on horseback – after losing their capital in the fall of 985.

[284] In contrast to the prominent role the navy had played in previous decades under Abd al-Rahman III,[285] under Almanzor it served only as a means of transporting ground troops,[286] such as between the Maghreb and the Iberian Peninsula, or Alcácer do Sal's ships in the campaign against Santiago de Compostela in 997.

[287] He repulsed raids by al-Magus (idolaters) or al-Urdumaniyun ('men of the north', vikings),[289] in the west of al-Andalus in mid-971;[290] at the end of that year, when they tried to invade Al Andalus,[291] the admiral left Almería and defeated them off the coast of Algarve.

[295] During the Catalan campaign, Gausfred I, Count of Empurias and Roussillon, tried to gather an army to help the locals but then several flotillas of Berber pirates threatened their coasts, forcing them to stay to defend their lands.

[296] To ensure control of the military, Almanzor eliminated the main figures who could have opposed his reforms:[273] in addition to the death of Ghalib, the participation of the governor of Zaragoza in the plot of his eldest son served as a justification to replace him[150] with another, more amenable, member of the same clan, the Banu Tujib.

[323][324] The success of the Umayyad political machine, continued by Almanzor,[321] allowed him to concentrate the offensive power of the Berber tribes on the expansion of the regions that recognized his legitimacy and limited clashes among those accepting Córdoba's protection.

[299][329][332] The disagreements among the various tribal leaders loyal to the Umayyads did produce one crisis: the favor shown by Almanzor to Ziri ibn Atiyya of the Maghrawa Berbers upset other chiefs, who ended up rising in arms.

[360] 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,[360] but still with great autonomy, due to the weakness of the kingdom's expansion.

[389] 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)[390][383] or Sepúlveda the same year,[391] razed before he fell on Barcelona.

[216] 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".

[432] At the end of 994, on the occasion of the wedding between Bermudo II and a daughter of the Castilian count,[433] Almanzor took León[432] and Astorga,[376] the Leonese capital since 988, and devastated the territory, perhaps also intending to facilitate a future campaign against Santiago de Compostela.

[452] 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,[343][454] but this did not prevent the formation of a broad anti-Córdoba alliance that united not just the people of Pamplona and Castile,[422][455] but also the ancient Christian clients of Almanzor.

[350][376][467] 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."

[478] 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,"[479] usually also described as having blue eyes, large breasts, wide hips, thick legs and perfect teeth[480] that "the gynaecea of the royal families and the aristocracy supplied as concubines and legitimate wives.

[317] 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.