While Paris was a muddy village and London a provincial backwater, the streets of Córdoba were paved and lit by lamps, and its royal library held some 400,000 volumes — more books than every Christian library in Europe combined. For a century, the brightest city in Europe was Muslim, and it knew it.
The empire in images
The rise
The story begins with a crossing. In 711 Tariq ibn Ziyad — a Moroccan commander — led his army across the strait from North Africa and landed on the rock that still bears his name: Jabal Tariq, Gibraltar. Within a few years his forces had shattered the Visigothic kingdom. Morocco had conquered al-Andalus.
Four decades later came the fugitive. In 750 the Abbasids massacred the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus; one prince, Abd al-Rahman I, escaped across North Africa and landed in Iberia in 755, where he founded an independent emirate with Córdoba as its capital. His descendants ruled al-Andalus for nearly three centuries, building a realm that at times covered most of the Iberian Peninsula.
The decisive step came in 929, when Abd al-Rahman III — the eighth Umayyad ruler of Córdoba — surveyed the chaos of rival claimants and the swagger of the Fatimid caliphate in North Africa, and proclaimed himself caliph. It was a declaration of religious and political independence: Córdoba would answer to no one, neither Baghdad nor Cairo. The caliphate of Córdoba was born, and with it the city's golden age.
The zenith
At its zenith, around the year 1000, Córdoba was the largest city in Europe, with perhaps half a million inhabitants, paved streets, running water, and street lighting that left visitors from the Christian north speechless. The caliph al-Hakam II assembled a library said to hold 400,000 volumes — its catalogue alone reportedly ran to forty-four volumes — while the palace-city of Madinat al-Zahra rose outside the walls, a marble statement that Córdoba was the equal of Baghdad.
The caliphate was a machine for knowledge. Scholars translated Greek philosophy, advanced algebra and astronomy, and wrote medical treatises used for centuries; irrigation and paper mills transformed the economy. Under the strongman al-Mansur, Córdoban armies dominated the peninsula, extracting tribute from the Christian kingdoms of the north — who paid in gold and left with a grudging respect for the civilization outshining them.
The fall
The fall was sudden and self-inflicted. After al-Mansur's death in 1002, the caliphate's Berber, Arab, and Slav factions tore it apart in a civil war — the fitna — that raged from 1009 to 1031. Caliphs were enthroned and murdered in quick succession; Madinat al-Zahra was sacked and abandoned to the hills. In 1031 the caliphate was formally abolished, and al-Andalus shattered into dozens of taifa kingdoms, each with its own petty king and its own court poets.
The taifas were brilliant and doomed. Too divided to resist the Christian kingdoms pushing south, they bought survival with tribute — parias, gold paid to León and Castile — until the payments bought only delay. One by one they fell, or called in North African rescuers who stayed on as conquerors. Córdoba never recovered its primacy; the light dimmed, though it never quite went out.
The legacy
Córdoba's true empire was intellectual. Through the translators of Toledo and elsewhere, the Greek and Arabic science preserved and extended in al-Andalus flowed into medieval Europe — the algebra, the astronomy, the medicine that seeded the Renaissance. Averroes of Córdoba argued that reason and faith could coexist, an argument Europe is still having.
The Spanish language still carries the caliphate in its vocabulary — thousands of Arabic words, from azúcar to ojalá — and the Mezquita of Córdoba, a forest of striped arches with a cathedral planted in its middle, remains the most eloquent building in Spain: two civilizations in one stone, neither quite able to evict the other.
The library's catalogue reportedly ran to forty-four volumes — which means the index of the library was larger than most European libraries of the age. Some archives take their job seriously.
And the whole story starts with a Moroccan crossing: Tariq's strait, Tariq's rock, Tariq's conquest. Al-Andalus was a Moroccan landing that became a civilization.