Taifa courts, established in important cities like Cordoba, Seville, Toledo, and Saragossa, among others, became new centers of artistic culture that vied with one another to attract intellectual and artistic talent. Taifa architecture sometimes evoked the vanished glories of the Cordoban caliphate while pushing established repertoires in new directions. The Aljafería Palace of Saragossa, constructed during the reign of the independent Hudid ruler Ahmad I b. Sulayman, Sayf al-Dawla 'Imad al-Dawla al-Muqtadir (r. 1049-82) exemplifies these characteristics in the fantastic interpretations of the Cordoban interlacing polylobed arches and the carved stucco ornament of its interior spaces.

The Taifa kingdoms ruled from the early eleventh century until the thirteenth century reconquista, when the Islamic territories of the Iberian Peninsula were conquered by the Castilian forces of northern Spain.

Sources:

Bosworth, C.E. 1996. "The Muluk al-Tawa'if or Reyes de Taifas in Spain." In The New Islamic Dynasties. New York: Columbia UP, 14-20.

Robinson, Cynthia. 1995. Palace architecture and ornament in the "courtly" discourse of the muluk al-tawa'if : metaphor and utopia. Ph.D. dissertation: University of Pennsylvania.

Wasserstein, D. 1985. The rise and Fall of the Party Kings. Politics and Society in Islamic Spain 1002-1086. Princeton: Princeton UP.