The Caliphate of Cordoba and Madinat al-Zahra

Part oneA caliph in Cordoba

Imagine arriving in Cordoba around the year 950. You come in by the long Roman bridge over the Guadalquivir, and the first thing you see is the Great Mosque, its walls rising above the river. The paved streets are crowded, the markets are busy with cloth and leather, and the city is as large as any in western Europe.

This was the Cordoba of Abd al-Rahman III, who had come to the throne in 912 as a young man of twenty-one. By patient campaigning and by treating beaten rebels fairly he had brought the whole emirate back under one rule. Then, in 929, he did something no Umayyad in the west had done before. He announced that he was caliph, with the title an-Nasir, the Victorious.

The timing was careful. The Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad were growing weaker. In North Africa the Fatimids had already declared a rival caliphate of their own. Abd al-Rahman was a descendant of the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus, and he judged that his state was strong enough to claim the title.

Around 936 he began a new royal city about eight kilometres west of Cordoba, on terraces at the foot of the Sierra Morena. It was called Madinat al-Zahra. It held palaces, a mosque, gardens, workshops, barracks and offices of government, and it was built to impress the envoys who came from Constantinople, from the Christian kings of the north, and from the courts of Germany. The caliph's reception hall, now called the Salon Rico, had walls carved from floor to ceiling with plant patterns, and visitors had to walk through court after court before they reached the throne. The work went on for decades. Parts of the city have been excavated since the early twentieth century, and in 2018 UNESCO listed the site as a World Heritage Site.

Part twoThe city of books

Learning flourished under his son al-Hakam II, who ruled from 961 to 976. He was a quiet scholar and a lover of books who sent agents as far as Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo to buy and copy manuscripts. His library was said to hold hundreds of thousands of volumes, with a catalogue that ran to dozens of volumes of its own. Scholars came to Cordoba from across the Muslim world, and students from Christian lands came to learn from them.

The court was less narrowly Muslim than one might expect. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a Jewish physician, served Abd al-Rahman as both doctor and diplomat. Christians and Jews worked in the administration and in trade. They paid the jizya, the tax that non-Muslims owed, and they kept their own churches, synagogues and courts. It was not equality as we would understand it, but it was a good deal of freedom for the age.

One physician became known across Europe. Al-Zahrawi, who lived from about 936 to 1013 and worked at Madinat al-Zahra, wrote a vast medical encyclopaedia called al-Tasrif. Its section on surgery described and illustrated dozens of instruments, and when it was translated into Latin it became a standard text in European medical schools for centuries. Poetry and grammar flourished too. Ibn Abd Rabbih, a court poet who died in 940, collected his learning in a literary anthology called al-Iqd al-Farid, The Unique Necklace. Hebrew poetry and grammar were being revived among Cordoba's Jews at the same time, partly through the support of Hasdai.

Farmers meanwhile grew new crops brought from the east, such as rice, cotton, sugar cane and citrus, and irrigation channels fed the fields around the city.

Each ruler left his mark on the Great Mosque. Abd al-Rahman I began it, later rulers enlarged it, and al-Hakam II added the magnificent prayer niche and the dome in front of it. Its forest of columns, topped by arches of red brick and white stone, still stands.

Part threeThe strongman and the collapse

When al-Hakam died in 976, his heir Hisham II was only a boy. Real power slipped to a gifted and ruthless minister named Ibn Abi Amir, who took the title al-Mansur and is known in Europe as Almanzor. He kept the caliph in the palace and ruled in his name. He led his armies against the Christian kingdoms almost every year until his death in 1002, and in 997 he sacked Santiago de Compostela.

Without him the system soon fell apart. His sons could not hold it together. In 1009 a coup removed the caliph, and a civil war known as the fitna began. Berber troops, the Slavic soldiers of the court and rival Umayyad claimants fought each other, and each side called on Christian rulers for help. Madinat al-Zahra was sacked and left to ruin around 1010. In 1031 the leading men of Cordoba abolished the caliphate altogether. The land broke into small kingdoms. Eighty years of building were undone in a few.

Eighty years of building were undone in a few.

WatchThe lecture for this chapter

Lecture Al MuqaddimahThe Umayyad Emirate of Cordoba, Part 4 (912-976) (opens on YouTube)

The mapWhere it happened

• Cordoba
• the Great Mosque
• Madinat al-Zahra
• Sierra Morena
• Santiago de Compostela

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

SourcesSources for this chapter