The Golden Age of Al-Andalus: When Cordoba Outshone Europe

For most of the medieval period, the most sophisticated city in Europe was not Rome, Paris or London. It was Cordoba, the capital of Muslim Spain, and on most measures that mattered it was not close.

How it began

Al-Andalus was founded in 711, when Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa and brought most of the Iberian peninsula under Muslim rule within a few years. Decades later Abd al-Rahman I, the one prince to survive the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in the east, escaped across the Mediterranean and founded an independent emirate that outlasted almost everyone who tried to end it.

The city that outshone a continent

At its height Cordoba had paved streets, public baths, running water and street lighting, and a library said to hold hundreds of thousands of volumes. Travellers from the Christian north described it with the awe of men who had never seen a city run at that scale. While the rest of Europe was still some distance from organised universities, Cordoba was exporting medicine, mathematics and music.

The names attached to it remain in the record. Al-Zahrawi, the father of surgery, worked here. Abbas ibn Firnas attempted controlled flight here, centuries before the idea was taken seriously elsewhere. Ziryab, arriving from Baghdad, reshaped everything from music to the very order in which a meal was served.

The end

Al-Andalus did not fall in a day. It contracted over centuries, kingdom by kingdom, until the surrender of Granada in 1492 closed it entirely. What it left behind, in architecture, in agriculture, in the vocabulary of Spanish itself, is still visible across the country for anyone willing to look.

The Streets of Cordoba print and others in the Golden Age and Empires collections take their subjects from this period.