Al-Andalus
Muslim-ruled Iberia for nearly eight centuries, home to tenth-century Cordoba, one of the largest and most learned cities in medieval Europe.
For nearly eight hundred years, a large part of the Iberian Peninsula was not Christian Europe at all. It was al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled Iberia born in 711, when an army crossed from North Africa and toppled the Visigothic kingdom in a few short years. It would not fully disappear until 1492. In between sits one of the more remarkable civilizations of the medieval world, one that for a time made the rest of the continent look provincial.
Cordoba, the ornament of the world
The line went back to 756, when Abd al-Rahman I, a survivor of the Umayyad family slaughtered by the Abbasids in the East, fled to Iberia and founded an emirate at Cordoba. His descendant broke fully with Baghdad in 929, when Abd al-Rahman III declared himself caliph, and the capital grew into perhaps the largest city in Western Europe, its population running into the hundreds of thousands. It had paved streets, running water, public baths, and lamps that let a traveler ride for miles by night. Under Caliph al-Hakam II the royal library was said to hold hundreds of thousands of volumes at a time when a substantial monastery in the Christian north might own a few hundred. Physicians, astronomers, and mathematicians pushed their fields forward, and the Great Mosque, begun in 785 and enlarged for two centuries, still stands as the supreme monument of the age. A Saxon nun, Hroswitha of Gandersheim, called Cordoba the ornament of the world, and she was not exaggerating by much.
Convivencia, and its limits
The word convivencia, coexistence, describes how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side under Muslim rule. It is easy to romanticize and easy to dismiss, and both are errors. Non-Muslims were tolerated but subordinate: they paid a special tax and lived under legal disabilities, and stretches of relative openness alternated with episodes of violence, such as the 1066 massacre of Granada's Jews. Yet the arrangement was genuinely productive. It gave the world the philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes, whose commentaries on Aristotle reshaped European thought, and the Jewish sage Maimonides, born in Cordoba around 1138. And it made Iberia the great channel through which Greek and Arabic learning, much of it lost to the Latin West, flowed back into Christendom through translation centers like Toledo.
The long unraveling
Al-Andalus was never one stable state. The caliphate shattered after 1031 into a patchwork of quarreling taifa kingdoms, was twice rescued and ruled by North African dynasties, the Almoravids and then the Almohads, and steadily gave ground to the Christian kingdoms pushing south. Cordoba fell in 1236, Seville in 1248, until only the mountainous Emirate of Granada remained, surviving as a tributary until it too fell in 1492. What endured was not the polity but the inheritance: the architecture, the irrigation, the hundreds of Arabic words still buried in Spanish, and a long argument, not settled yet, about what a genuinely plural society is worth and what it costs. The double arches of the Great Mosque now hold up a Christian nave, which is about as literal an image of a layered past as history offers.