Writing in a convent in Saxony in the tenth century, the nun Hrotsvitha called Cordoba the "ornament of the world." She had never seen it, but news of its wealth, libraries and gardens had traveled across Europe. Cordoba was then the capital of al-Andalus, the name for the parts of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule, and its story is told today both as a model of coexistence and as a myth in need of debunking. The truth lies in the details.
From conquest to caliphate
In 711 an army of Arabs and Berbers under Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa and defeated the Visigothic kingdom; within a few years most of the peninsula was under Muslim rule. In 756 Abd al-Rahman, the Umayyad prince who had escaped the Abbasid massacre, made himself emir of Cordoba. In 929 his descendant Abd al-Rahman III declared himself caliph, rivaling both the Abbasids in Baghdad and the Fatimid caliphs in North Africa. Under him and his son al-Hakam II, Cordoba was perhaps the largest and richest city in western Europe. Its Great Mosque, begun in 785 and enlarged over two centuries, still stands. Later writers said al-Hakam's library held 400,000 volumes; the figure is almost certainly exaggerated, but the library was large by any standard.
Convivencia
The Spanish word convivencia, "living together," was popularized by the historian Américo Castro in the twentieth century to describe the mix of Muslims, Christians and Jews in medieval Spain. Its high points are real. Jewish culture had a golden age of its own: the Jewish physician and diplomat Hasdai ibn Shaprut served Abd al-Rahman III, and Hebrew poets such as Judah Halevi drew on Arabic verse forms. Christians living under Muslim rule, called Mozarabs, adopted Arabic language and dress. The philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138 to 1204), the greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, was born in Cordoba and wrote most of his works in Arabic. Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars read the same books and argued about the same questions.
The limits
Coexistence was not equality. Christians and Jews lived as dhimmis, paying the jizya and accepting legal restrictions. In the 850s a group of Christians in Cordoba, later called the martyrs of Cordoba, deliberately denounced Islam in public and were executed; their story shows both the pressure some Christians felt to assimilate and the narrow limits on open dissent. In 1066 a mob in Granada killed the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and many of the city's Jews, after a poet stirred anger against Jewish officials. Tolerance depended heavily on rulers and circumstances.
After the caliphate broke apart in 1031 into rival small kingdoms called taifas, Christian kingdoms to the north pushed south, and Alfonso VI of Castile took Toledo in 1085. Desperate taifa kings called in the Almoravids, a strict Berber movement from North Africa, and later the Almohads took power. The Almohads, from the mid-twelfth century, pressed Jews and Christians to convert or leave; Maimonides' family fled Cordoba and eventually settled in Egypt. Christian kingdoms were often no gentler. The last Muslim state, Granada, fell in 1492; Spain expelled its Jews that same year, and within a few decades its Muslims were forced to convert.
Two schools of interpretation
Writers who stress coexistence, such as María Rosa Menocal, who borrowed Hrotsvitha's phrase for the title of her book, see al-Andalus as evidence that different faiths can share a high culture. Critics, such as Darío Fernández-Morera, argue that this picture hides discrimination, violence and religious hierarchy, and that it is used to score political points today. Both camps cite real evidence. A careful reader can hold two truths at once: al-Andalus was more pluralistic than most of its neighbors, yet it rested on the legal inferiority of religious minorities.
Toledo and the translators
When Toledo passed to Christian rule, its libraries and its Arabic-speaking Jews and Mozarabs made it a center of translation into Latin. The most productive translator, Gerard of Cremona (about 1114 to 1187), came from Italy to Toledo and translated dozens of works from Arabic, including Ptolemy's Almagest and Ibn Sina's Canon. Often a Jewish or Mozarab scholar would render the Arabic into spoken Castilian, and a Latin scholar would then put it into Latin. The final level follows these books north.
Worked example: two travelers in Cordoba
Imagine two visitors in Cordoba around 960. A Jewish merchant from Baghdad finds synagogues, Hebrew scholarship and a fellow Jew high in the caliph's service; he writes home that he is freer than in many Christian lands. A Christian priest finds that church bells may not ring loudly, that new churches are hard to build, and that his nephew is drifting toward Islam for the sake of a career; he writes home of humiliation. Both letters could be honest. Judging a society by the standard of human dignity means asking how it treated each group, not just its most successful members, and comparing it fairly with its neighbors as well as with modern ideals. By the first test al-Andalus looks unusually open for its time; by the second it falls short, as every medieval society did.