The great river port of the lower Guadalquivir: see of Isidore, capital of the Abbadid taifa and of Almohad al-Andalus, and after its conquest by Ferdinand III in 1248 one of the chief cities of the Crown of Castile.
Seville stands on the Guadalquivir where the river is still navigable from the Atlantic, some eighty kilometres inland, and it has been a port city since Roman Hispalis. In the Middle Ages it was the metropolitan see of Visigothic Baetica, one of the great cities of al-Andalus, the capital of the Almohad empire in Spain, and after 1248 the chief city of Castilian Andalusia.
Each of its rulers left a monument that still defines the city: the Almohad Great Mosque, whose minaret survives as the Giralda bell tower of the Gothic cathedral; the twelve-sided Torre del Oro on the riverbank; and the Alcázar palace rebuilt for Peter of Castile in the Mudéjar style in the 1360s.
Under the Visigoths Seville was the intellectual capital of Spain. Its bishop Leander converted the prince Hermenegild, who rebelled against his Arian father Leovigild from the city in 579 and was defeated in 584, and Leander's younger brother Isidore, bishop from about 600 to 636, wrote the Etymologies, the encyclopedia through which the Middle Ages read ancient knowledge.
Musa ibn Nusayr took Seville in 712, and as Ishbiliya it became one of the principal cities of al-Andalus. Its exposure on the river brought the first Viking attack on al-Andalus in 844, when a Norse fleet sailed up the Guadalquivir and held the city for weeks until the army of the emir Abd al-Rahman II destroyed it; the emir then gave Seville its first walls and a shipyard. His Great Mosque, built by the qadi Umar ibn Adabbas in 829–830, served the city until the Almohads replaced it, and the base of its minaret survives in the bell tower of the church of El Salvador.
After the collapse of the caliphate of Córdoba, Seville's qadi Abu al-Qasim Muhammad ibn Abbad made himself ruler in 1023 and founded the Abbadid dynasty. His grandson al-Mu'tamid, king from 1069, was a celebrated poet who annexed Córdoba and made Seville the strongest of the taifa states, while paying tribute to Alfonso VI of León and Castile.
When Alfonso took Toledo in 1085, al-Mu'tamid invited the Almoravid emir Yusuf ibn Tashfin into Spain, reportedly saying he would rather herd camels in Africa than pigs in Castile. The Almoravids defeated Alfonso at the Battle of Sagrajas in 1086 and then turned on the taifa kings; they took Seville in 1091 and exiled al-Mu'tamid to Aghmat in Morocco, where he died a prisoner in 1095.
The Almohads took Seville in 1147 and made it their capital in al-Andalus. The caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf began a new Great Mosque in 1172, and his son Yaqub al-Mansur completed its minaret in 1198, crowning it with gilded bronze spheres. The Almohads also built a pontoon bridge to Triana, new walls, and in 1220–1221 the Torre del Oro guarding the river harbour.
The Almohad collapse after 1224 left Seville exposed. Ferdinand III of Castile, who had taken Córdoba in 1236 and Jaén in 1246, laid siege to the city in the summer of 1247. A Castilian fleet under Ramón Bonifaz broke the pontoon bridge to Triana in May 1248, cutting Seville off from its hinterland, and the city capitulated on 23 November 1248; much of its Muslim population left, and Ferdinand made his entry on 22 December.
Ferdinand III died in Seville in 1252 and was buried in the converted mosque, and his son Alfonso X made the city one of the capitals of his court; Alfonso died there in 1284, having kept its loyalty against his rebellious son Sancho. The royal shipyards founded in 1252 built galleys for Castile's navy, and Genoese merchants settled in their own quarter and financed the trade in olive oil, wine and wool.
Peter of Castile preferred Seville to every other city and rebuilt its Alcázar from 1364 with craftsmen from Granada and Toledo, whose Arabic inscriptions praise him as sultan. In 1391 the sermons of the archdeacon Ferrand Martínez set off the pogrom that destroyed the Jewish quarter and spread across Castile and Aragon. The Almohad mosque was pulled down from 1401 for the Gothic cathedral, the largest in Christendom when it was completed in 1506.
Almohad Seville was enclosed by walls of rammed earth with more than a hundred towers, a stretch of which survives beside the Macarena gate in the north, and the Alcázar and the Great Mosque formed a single fortified government quarter near the river. The minaret was climbed by ramps rather than stairs, wide enough for a rider. Across the Guadalquivir the suburb of Triana was joined to the city by the bridge of boats and guarded by the castle of San Jorge.
After the conquest Alfonso X divided the city's houses and the lands of its countryside among Castilian nobles, churches, military orders and settlers in the Repartimiento of Seville, completed in 1253, whose register survives. The Jews received a walled quarter east of the Alcázar, today the Barrio de Santa Cruz, with three former mosques as synagogues; the Muslims who stayed lived as a small mudéjar community in their own district; and the Great Mosque, consecrated as the cathedral, kept its courtyard of orange trees, which survives as the Patio de los Naranjos.