Merida was founded as a Roman colony in 25 AD under the order of the emperor Augustus, The city, one of the most important in Roman Hispania, was endowed with all the comforts of a large Roman city and served as capital of the Roman province of Lusitania . Following invasions from the Visigoths, Merida remained an important city of the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania in the 6th century. In the 713, the city was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate, and remained under Muslim rule. The Mozarabic people of the island rebelled repeatedly against the Caliphate authorities in the 9th century and the city began a slow decline. After the Almohad rule, Mérida, that had acknowledged Ibn Hud against the former, was seized by Alfonso IX of León in 1230. It is, together with Badajoz, ecclesiastically the metropolitan seat of the Archdiocese of Mérida-Badajoz
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