Mujahid was one of the Saqaliba, enslaved men, many of Slavic origin, taken into the service of al-Andalus and often trained for its palaces and armies. He was educated in the court of the powerful ruler Al-Mansur, rose to become a high functionary of the caliphate, and won his freedom along the way. When central authority collapsed after 1010, he did what a number of ambitious commanders did in that chaotic decade: he seized a piece of the fragmenting empire and ruled it in his own name. That a man who had been someone's property could end as the founder of a dynasty says something about the strange mobility of that world, even as it should not soften the brutality of the system that enslaved him in the first place.

Denia was a state built around ships. As early as 1011 it became the first taifa to strike its own coins, a declaration of independence in silver. Its navy was formidable. In 1015 that fleet seized the Balearic Islands and pushed on to Sardinia, planting a camp on the island as a springboard toward the wealthy Republic of Pisa. The gamble failed. The combined fleets of Pisa and Genoa drove the Denians off, and in the fighting Mujahid's own heir, Ali Iqbal al-Dawla, was captured and not ransomed until 1032. Denia's ships kept raiding the coasts of Liguria and Tuscany for years, and the kingdom earned a fearsome reputation for piracy against Christian shipping. It was a violent trade, one that filled the treasury by emptying other people's holds, and it defined how the wider Mediterranean saw this small, aggressive power.

For all its raiding, Denia at home was strikingly cosmopolitan. It hosted an influential Sephardic Jewish community whose members held top positions in the government and were, by the sources' own account, essential to the kingdom's growth. Mujahid protected Denia's Christians in return for their loyalty and worked closely with Jewish merchants. He also became a patron of scholars, sheltering writers and religious jurists who were fleeing the disorder that had swallowed Cordoba. A ruler who had risen from slavery seemed to understand the value of talented outsiders, and his court became a refuge for exactly the kind of people that a collapsing empire tends to scatter.

Mujahid did not ignore the land at his back. Over the 1020s and 1030s he pushed south and inland, taking Murcia, Lorca, Orihuela, and Elche, and extending his reach to the Segura River, before a mediated peace with Valencia in 1041 steadied the frontier. When he died in 1045 he was succeeded by Ali Iqbal al-Dawla, the ransomed son, born to a Christian mother, who held the inheritance together for some thirty years of relative peace and prosperity, all of it underwritten by the commercial fleet in Denia's harbor. The unraveling came steadily. The Balearics broke away in 1050, and in 1076 the mainland kingdom was swallowed by the taifa of Zaragoza. Denia's independent chapter was brief, but for a few decades a formerly enslaved man had run a sea-power out of a Valencian port, and the Mediterranean had learned to watch its horizon for his sails.