The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [15]
The astrolabe, with which the Arabs could tell the date and hour from the position of certain stars. Movable sights on the instrument were aligned with the star and the relevant numbers and signs were read off from windows (left) or at the circumference (right).
Word spread in Europe of the culture beyond the Pyrenees. The northern part of Spain, round Barcelona and along the foothills of the northern mountains, was Christian; it had never been fully settled by the invading Arabs, who had arrived in Spain in 711, landing at Gibraltar. By 720 they had taken Cordoba, Toledo, Medina, Zaragoza and all of southern Spain from the Visigoths, barbarians-in-residence. The Arabs named their new territory Al-Andalus, the land of the Vandals, from which comes the modern name Andalusia.
For two hundred years after the invasion Al-Andalus was a backwater of Islam, far to the west of the centres of learning and commerce in Baghdad and Damascus. Gradually, however, the land bloomed and became rich. By 932, when the Umayyad Caliphate took power, with its capital in Cordoba, Spain was the jewel in the crown of Islam.
Irrigation systems imported from Syria and Arabia turned the dry plains of Andalusia into an agricultural cornucopia. Olives and wheat had always grown there. The Arabs added pomegranates, oranges, lemons, aubergines, artichokes, cumin, coriander, bananas, almonds, palms, henna, woad, madder, saffron, sugar-cane, cotton, rice, figs, grapes, peaches, apricots, rice. The Muslim peasants who worked the land were given shares in the property. The most spectacular Arab innovations, however, were formal gardens like those of the Generalife (from jannat-al-arif, the Inspector’s paradise) in the Alhambra, Granada.
Andalusian wealth exemplified in the sophisticated architecture of the Lion Court in the Alhambra, Granada.
Andalusia became rich and elegant. In the capital, Cordoba, where the enlightened and intellectual Hakam, the second ruler of the new dynasty, founded the great mosque, there were half a million inhabitants, living in 113,000 houses. There were 700 mosques and 300 public baths spread throughout the city and its twenty-one suburbs. The streets were paved, and lit. There were bookshops and more than seventy libraries. The boast of Arab Spain was the great central library of Cordoba, built in the Alcazar, or Royal Palace, around 970. The catalogue alone filled forty-four volumes, each fifty pages long. There were over 400,000 titles in the library, more than in the whole of France.
The Arabs used paper, a material still unknown in the West. Here, its availability encouraged the development of a highly literate community with regular postal services delivering correspondence as far away as India. They also used paper money for their transactions. Most of the Caliphate revenue came from export and import duties. By the ninth century the country was producing wool and silk (in Almeria and Malaga), glass and brass (in Almeria), pottery (in Paterna, near Valencia), gold and silver (in Jaen), iron and lead (Cordoba), rubies (Malaga) and swords (Toledo). There was a major tanning industry in Cordoba, employing over 13,000 workers. Textiles were also produced there, as were ceramics and crystal.
In a culture which did not permit realism in art, Spanish Arab patterned ceramic work reached heights of artistic expression unequalled anywhere in Europe.
This rich and sophisticated society took a tolerant view of other faiths. Thousands of Jews and Christians lived in peace and harmony with their Muslim overlords. The material bounty of the land was used to enhance the quality of life. Above all, religion and culture went hand in hand. Where Islam went, so did its thirst for knowledge and its application. One of the arbiters of taste in ninth-century Cordoba was a musician and singer called Ziryab. A leading exponent of the musical forms of Medina and Baghdad, he was enticed to Cordoba by the Umayyads. There he