Researchers
Cordoba
Cordoba is the capital of al-Andalus and the city of the Great Mosque, the greatest urban centre in tenth-century Europe. The Umayyads who escaped Damascus ruled it, setting up first an emirate then a caliphate, and Abd al-Rahman III made it the jewel of the Islamic west: al-Hakam II''s library of hundreds of thousands of volumes, the city of Madinat al-Zahra he built for the caliphate, and schools of medicine, astronomy and law. Its caliphate broke apart in the fitna of 1031 into taifa kingdoms, then Almoravids and Almohads, until it fell to the Christians in 1236. Cordoba remains the emblem of al-Andalus: a peak where civilizations met on the banks of the Guadalquivir. Out of Cordoba came the names of the Islamic west — the philosopher Ibn Rushd, the mystic Ibn Arabi, the man of letters Ibn Hazm — and translations that travelled into Europe's universities. It fell to Ferdinand III in 1236, yet its Great Mosque stands today as a cathedral telling that Cordoba was once the whole west's mind, and that a civilization may lose its capital yet keep its lessons.