Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [55]
The state of the country harmonized with the prosperity of the public treasury. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, the arts, sciences, all flourished. The traveller’s eyes were gladdened on all sides by the well-cultivated fields, irrigated upon scientific principles, so that what seemed the most sterile soil was rendered fertile … Cordova [sic], with its half million inhabitants, its three thousand mosques, its splendid palaces, its hundred and thirteen thousand houses, its three hundred public baths, and its twenty-eight suburbs, yielded in size and magnificence only to Baghdad … The fame of Cordova penetrated even distant Germany: the Saxon nun Hroswitha, famous in the last half of the tenth century for her Latin poems and dramas, called it the Jewel of the World.67
In the courts of Christian Europe, Cordoba’s products—ivories, silks, bronze vases fancifully shaped as peacocks, stags, and imaginary beasts, chests of gold dinars—all became emblems of a world of incomparable civilization and luxury. Heathen Al-Andalus may have been an enemy of Christ. Nonetheless, it was alluring.68
CHAPTER FOUR
“The Jewel of the World”
AT THE HEART OF THE JEWEL-LIKE CITY OF CORDOBA WAS THE GREAT Mosque. It was built by Abd al-Rahman I from 785 to 787, and extended and embellished by his successors. Its architectural origins were complex, with suggestions of Byzantine forms as well as strong echoes of Syria. The Ummayad caliphs had ruled in Damascus from 641 to 750, when they were overthrown by their rivals the Abbasids, and all except one of the Ummayad family were hunted down and killed. The survivor—Abd al-Rahman—fled west to the remotest portion of the Mediterranean Islamic world. In Spain he found loyal supporters. Under his rule, Al-Andalus declared itself independent from the new Abbasid Caliphate, based in Baghdad. Abd al-Rahman I created a powerful state centered on Cordoba that eventually became the Ummayad Caliphate of Cordoba in 929.
The Great Mosque he built was the first evidence of this self-governing status. In structure and function it resembled the mosques of the East; but its forest of columns, crowned with polychrome double arches whose wedge-shaped stones (voussoirs) radiated from the arch’s center, were found in no building in the East. This was a characteristic of Visigothic buildings, and was adapted and extended by Mozarabic craftsmen.1 At each stage of its elaboration, the mosque became more Hispanized, and less like the great religious buildings of the Muslim East.2 There was also a direct connection with the Christian East, for in 965 Caliph Al-Hakam wrote to Constantinople asking for the services of a skilled mosaicist for the mosque. Not only did the caliph’s envoys return with a craftsman, but with 320 quintales of mosaic squares that “the King of the Rumi sent as a gift.”3
The same Hispanized cultural fusion—part Arab, part Mozarabe—was found in the palace of Madinat al-Zahra built outside Cordoba by Abd al-Rahman III, who had in 929 declared himself caliph, commander of the faithful, and defender of the religion of God. The new palace was a testimony to his exalted status. There marvels were to be seen: the same arches characteristic of the mosque, but more massive and emphatic; stone tracery like a forest of vegetation spreading over walls and columns; little water fountains gushing from the beaks of bronze birds or the mouths of sturdy horses; and ivory and alabaster boxes intricately carved with scenes of the court. These are almost all that now remains of life within this palace, which once rivaled the great palace of Constantine in Constantinople.4 Madinat al-Zahra had some of the elements to be found in the Ummayad palaces of Syria and Jordan, but many more that originated