Cordoba and cultural exchange

In 711 CE, Muslim forces crossed from North Africa into the Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal), and within years most of it was under Islamic rule, a region called al-Andalus. Its capital, Cordoba, grew into one of the largest and most sophisticated cities in Europe. By the 900s CE it had paved, lit streets, public baths, and a library said to hold hundreds of thousands of books, at a time when most European towns had no paved streets and only a handful of monasteries owned more than a few dozen books total. At the city's heart stood the Great Mosque of Cordoba, begun in 785 CE, famous for its forest of red-and-white striped double arches.

Cordoba is remembered for a real, if imperfect, period of cultural exchange: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars worked in the same city, sometimes the same libraries, translating and debating Greek philosophy, medicine, and science together. Jewish and Christian communities paid a special tax and had a different legal status than Muslims, so this was not full equality by modern standards -- but it was still an unusual amount of scholarly cooperation for its time. Two philosophers born in Cordoba show this exchange: Ibn Rushd (known in Europe as Averroes), a Muslim philosopher whose commentaries on Aristotle later shaped European universities, and Moses Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher and physician whose writings influenced Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers alike. Later, translators in Toledo converted many of these Arabic texts into Latin, carrying Greek philosophy and Islamic-era science north into the rest of Europe -- one of the bridges that helped build the Renaissance you will study later this year.