to action under the leadership of the vizier Abū al-Ḥazm Jahwar ibn Muḥammad ibn Jahwar. They then offered the oath of allegiance to Abū Bakr Hishām (1) ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ibn al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh, upon whom they bestowed the honorific al-Muʿtadd bi-llāh in Rabīʿ al-Awwal of 418 AH, when he was fifty-four years old.

He spent the following years moving about the frontier strongholds and entered Córdoba at the close of 420 AH. He had scarcely settled there before a faction of the troops rose against him. What followed was a chain of events too long to detail: they deposed him, dragged him from his palace while the women—barefoot, their honor violated—were driven along until they were herded into the Great Mosque like captives. They remained there for several days, the townspeople taking pity on them and bringing them food, until they were expelled from Córdoba.

Hishām then attached himself to Ibn Hūd, who had seized Zaragoza, Lérida, and Tortosa. He stayed with him until he died in 427 AH, the very year in which al-Muʿtalī was killed.

Thus ended, once and for all, the line of Umayyad kings; unity was lost, and al-Andalus fragmented into a number of petty kingdoms.

83 – Jahwar ibn Muḥammad ibn Jahwar, Abū al-Ḥazm al-Qurṭubī

The chieftain Abū al-Ḥazm al-Qurṭubī—the vizier—came from a family of longstanding authority and vizierate. He was among the shrewdest and most clear-sighted of men. He managed the affairs of Córdoba and took control of the city, yet, in his prudence, he never assumed the title of emir. He posted the doorkeepers and attendants at the palace gate but himself never left his own house, and he spent