The Fall of Toledo

Toledo, the great and ancient city that crowns a rocky hill almost encircled by the gorge of the river Tagus in the very centre of the Iberian peninsula, had been for centuries one of the chief cities of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, and after the break-up of the caliphate of Cordoba in the early eleventh century it became the seat of one of the most important of the taifas, the petty kingdoms into which Muslim Spain had fragmented. The taifa age was one of brilliant culture but of political weakness and division: the little kingdoms warred with one another, and many of them bought peace from the rising Christian kingdoms of the north by paying them tribute, the parias, which only strengthened their enemies. In 1085 Alfonso VI, king of Castile and Leon, the most powerful of those Christian rulers, to whom Toledo itself had been paying tribute and in whose affairs he had become entangled, took the city, after a long blockade, by surrender, on terms that promised its Muslim inhabitants their lives, property and the use of their great mosque (a promise soon broken as the mosque was turned into a cathedral). The fall of Toledo, one of the most famous and strongest cities of Spain, was the first great loss of the long Christian Reconquista and a profound shock to the whole Muslim world; and it was the immediate cause of a fateful step, for the alarmed taifa kings, unable to defend themselves, called across the strait for the help of the Almoravids, the stern Berber power of North Africa, whose intervention would transform the struggle for al-Andalus. This scene depicts Toledo at the time of its fall. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.