Taifa of Albarracín

The Taifa of Albarracín was a medieval Berber taifa kingdom that existed from 1012 to 1104, centred at the walled mountain city of Albarracín above the Guadalaviar in the lands of what is now Aragon. It was led by the Berber dynasty of the Banu Razin tribe, which had arrived in the peninsula after the conquest of Spain by Tariq ibn Ziyad; from their fortress city the Banu Razin kept one of the smallest but most defensible of the taifas of al-Andalus through the age of the party kingdoms. Like its fellow taifas the polity passed between tribute, alliance and war with the greater powers around it, and in 1104 the taifa fell to the Almoravids, who folded it into their empire. Its political life was not quite over: in 1167, under the pressure of the wars between the Almoravids and the new Almohad invasions, the emir Muhammad ibn Mardanis ceded the Taifa of Albarracín to Pedro Ruiz de Azagra, a Navarrese noble, whose family made the Señorío de Albarracín an independent lordship under the crown of Navarre — but the Muslim taifa of the Banu Razin, the state shown on the map, had ended in 1104.