Mujāhid's rise says much about the fluid, dangerous world of eleventh-century Spain. The saqaliba to whom he belonged were bought as boys, often from far to the north, and raised in the households of Córdoba's rulers as soldiers and administrators. When central authority crumbled, some of these formerly enslaved men emerged as warlords in their own right. Mujāhid built his power on the sea, ruling the mainland port of Dénia and reaching across the water to bring the Balearic Islands under his control. He was known as a raider and an adventurer, a man who launched naval expeditions into the western Mediterranean. The Balearics, sitting astride the sea lanes between Spain, Italy and North Africa, were a natural prize for a ruler whose strength lay in ships. From such beginnings came the kingdom that would define Majorca for the better part of two hundred years.

To understand the Taifa of Majorca, start with a collapse. For most of the tenth century, Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, had been unified under the Caliphate of Córdoba, one of the most brilliant states in Europe. In the early eleventh century it shattered into a patchwork of rival kingdoms, the taifas, each ruled by a local strongman. The islands' position made them both wealthy and vulnerable, a crossroads of Mediterranean trade and a target for every rising power. Majorca's throne passed through a succession of rulers and dynasties over the following decades. This first Majorcan taifa was not to last. In the early twelfth century a Christian crusade struck the islands, sacking their cities, and soon afterward the Almoravids, a fierce Berber dynasty sweeping up from North Africa, absorbed the Balearics into their expanding empire.

History then handed Majorca a strange distinction. On the Spanish mainland and across the Maghreb, the Almoravids were themselves overthrown by a new Berber power, the Almohads. But on the islands, a dynasty called the Banu Ghaniya refused to accept the change. From around 1147 they ruled a second, independent Majorcan taifa, and they became the last Almoravid holdouts anywhere in al-Andalus. Rather than merely defend their islands, the Banu Ghaniya went on the attack, carrying their war across the sea into North Africa in an attempt to topple the Almohads on their own ground. Their campaigns reached deep into the Maghreb, and for a time they seized cities far from their island base. One of their leaders even sailed off to carry the war into North Africa himself, leaving the islands behind to fight on foreign soil. For decades this small island state punched far above its weight, a stubborn remnant of a fallen empire that would not admit it had lost.

The stubbornness could not hold forever. In 1203 the Almohads finally took the Balearic Islands, ending the Banu Ghaniya's long resistance and bringing Majorca into their realm. Their rule, too, would be brief. In 1229 King Jaime I of Aragon landed with a Christian army, conquered the islands and made Palma the seat of a new Kingdom of Majorca, this time a Christian one. More than three centuries of Muslim rule came to an end. For the islanders, conquest meant upheaval, but the culture of the vanquished proved impossible to erase entirely. It survives in the Arab baths that still stand in Palma's old town, in the Moorish gardens beside the royal palace, and in the layout of streets first walked when the city answered to the name Madina Mayurqa.