Taifa of Toledo

The Taifa of Toledo was an Islamic polity in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula in the High Middle Ages, one of the petty kingdoms that emerged from the ruin of the Caliphate of Córdoba. Toledo itself had been the capital of the Visigothic Kingdom shattered by the Islamic conquest, and under the Umayyads it kept a strategic importance as the capital of the Middle March of al-Andalus, holding a relative autonomy despite repeated rebellion. When the caliphate fell in the early eleventh century, its ensuing civil wars let Toledo drift into full independence: around 1035 Abd al-Rahman ibn Dil-Nun, lord of Santaver, sent his son Ismail al-Zahir to take control of the city, and the Banu Dil-Nun — the Dhunnunid clan that had settled in Santaver centuries before — ruled the taifa through the rest of the century. Under the Dhunnunids the taifa expanded by conquest to the land of Calatrava, its court holding one of the richest cities of al-Andalus. The taifa lasted until the Christian conquest of Toledo in 1085, when Alfonso VI of Castile took the city, ending Muslim rule at the ancient Visigothic capital.