While most of Europe stumbled through the Dark Ages, Córdoba's libraries held 400,000 volumes — and its street lamps stayed lit.
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.