Emirate (and Caliphate) of Córdoba

The Umayyad state in exile, founded by the one member of the family who got away, and for two centuries the most sophisticated society in western Europe. Abd al-Rahman I escaped the Abbasid massacre of his relatives in 750, crossed North Africa and reached Spain, where he seized control in 756 and established an emirate that pointedly did not recognise Baghdad. His descendant Abd al-Rahman III went further in 929 and claimed the title of caliph outright, giving the Islamic world three rival caliphs at once. Cordoba under him may have held several hundred thousand people, with street lighting, paved roads, public baths and a library said to hold hundreds of thousands of volumes at a time when the largest collections north of the Pyrenees held a few hundred. The Great Mosque, with its forest of double arches in red and white, is a World Heritage site and now a cathedral. The state was religiously mixed, and Jewish and Christian communities held office under conditions that were better than elsewhere in Europe without being equal. Its scholars transmitted Aristotle to the Latin west; Averroes and Maimonides were both born in Cordoba. The caliphate collapsed in civil war after 1009 and fragmented into small taifa kingdoms by 1031. Those states paid tribute to Christian kings and then called in Berber dynasties from Africa. Toledo fell in 1085. Cordoba itself was taken in 1236. The state ruled most of the Iberian peninsula from 756 to 1031. Cordoba was its capital throughout. Its rulers took the title emir until 929 and caliph afterwards. Medina Azahara, the palace city outside Cordoba, is also a World Heritage site.

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