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Since the early years of the conquest, the Arabs were in contact with maritime Mediterranean space and equipped themselves as a naval power using the infrastructure and the naval administration left behind by Byzantines. In the western zone, Islamic rulers who took power needed services from the numerous communities with maritime vocations along the coasts of the western Maghreb and of al-Andalus. Official sources of the prince are rare, late, and give little information on those crews who were sailing under the pavilion of Islam, either for commercial or military purposes. At this time, sailors were soldiers as well as tradesmen, and the same ships were used for both activities. It was only with the establishment of the caliphate in Cordoba, in 929, that information on naval activity becomes more abundant. Nevertheless, in the course of the eighth and especially the ninth century, relations between Andalusian emirs and those of the western Maghreb are the source of a few details on the utilization of those sailors, bahriyyūn, by the emirates. The emirs' ascendancy over the coastal populations increased over the course of the ninth century. At the same time, the development of piracy in the direction of Carolingian shores and the spread of maritime commerce between al-Andalus and the western Maghreb, along with equally new maritime dangers such as Viking attacks from 844, favored a better organized maritime policy, based on the arsenal, that put sailors under the military authority of the Andalusian emirate. During the tenth century, the Cordoban caliph took advantage of this increasingly close relationship between bahriyyūn and power to make the sea and his sailors an essential domain of his sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]