ed by would-be assassins intent on adding him to the list of slaughtered Umayyads. Having evaded them he wandered in exile for six years, making a long clandestine journey through North Africa until he arrived in southern Spain, where he proclaimed himself as caliph in his own right, and established an independent capital in the sweltering city of Córdoba—in the hottest part of Spain, where temperatures rival the roiling heat of Arabia. Over the following two decades he steadily brought the Muslim territories in Iberia together in what became known as the Emirate of Córdoba.
Like Baghdad, and the city of Kairouan in the province of Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia), which remained part of the
Powers and Thrones
Dan Jones