You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled as “The Frontier of al-Andalus from the Perspective of the Banū Qasī, 842-907: Categories and Theory” organized by the Department of History.
Date: 27 November 2025, Thursday
Time: 16.30
Avenue: A-130 FEASS Seminar Room
Title: The Frontier of al-Andalus from the Perspective of the Banū Qasī, 842-907: Categories and Theory
Speaker: Jonathan Jarrett, Krea University
Abstract:
During the mid-to-late-9th century CE the Umayyad emirate in the Iberian Peninsula endured a period of prolonged political breakdown. This was driven particularly by indigenous convert aristocratic kin-groups, fighting for position in a hierarchy now dominated by foreigners. A famous one of these kin-groups was the Banū Qasī, or ‘sons of Cassius’, who between 842 and 907 CE were the main power in an extended frontier zone centred on Zaragoza which defended the Muslim heartlands in the Peninsula from the Christian north-east. This family have been the object of a recent in-depth study by Jesús Lorenzo Jiménez, allowing their position in Andalusī politics to be reassessed. Seizing this opportunity, this lecture will show how the Banū Qasī were able to use their location at the edge of Islamically-controlled space to make themselves essential to its definition and maintenance. When loyal to Córdoba, the Banū Qasī allowed Umayyad power to be expressed as far north as the high Pyrenees; but with a single act of defiance they could switch the boundary of Umayyad control southwards by a hundred miles or more. This paper foregrounds the frontier as the tool with which they set out to achieve their aims, and uses their example to question categories of frontier in modern theorizations more widely.”
Bio:
Dr Jonathan Jarrett was until recently Associate Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leeds and will soon be Associate Professor of History at Krea University. His PhD is from Birkbeck, University of London and was published as “Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010” in 2010, when it was runner-up for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize. He has also taught at the Universities of London, Oxford and Birmingham and is chiefly interested in questions of power, authority and consensus, which he pursues especially in frontier zones, anywhere and in any period but especially the Christian-Muslim frontiers of the Iberian Peninsula, in which area he is also a long-term collaborator with Professor Zavagno.