The Caliphate of Córdoba.
The brightest century in Europe.

The Caliphate of Córdoba is the brightest single moment in the long story of al-Andalus — the eight-century Muslim political presence on the Iberian peninsula (711-1492). For about a century, between the proclamation of the caliphate by Abd ar-Rahman III in January 929 and the formal abolition of the caliphate by the Council of Córdoba in 1031, the state was the largest, wealthiest, most populous, and most culturally distinguished polity in western Europe. The city of Córdoba had perhaps half a million inhabitants — comparable to the contemporary Constantinople and several times larger than Paris, London, or Rome. Its great library, accumulated by the caliph Al-Hakam II in the 960s and 970s, contained perhaps 400,000 manuscripts at a moment when the largest monastic library in Christian Europe contained perhaps 600. Its scholarship in mathematics, medicine, astronomy, philosophy, agriculture, and poetry was substantively in advance of anything contemporary Christian Europe could produce. Its architecture — the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the now-ruined city of Madinat al-Zahra — remains, a millennium later, one of the principal architectural inheritances of the medieval Mediterranean.

The volume's chapters cover this period in nine sections: the long Umayyad emirate (756-929) that prepared the caliphate; the caliphal proclamation of 929 and its political logic; the building of Madinat al-Zahra; the cultural high-water mark under Al-Hakam II; the de-facto regency of Al-Mansur and the military campaigns against the northern Christian kingdoms; the dynastic civil war (fitna) of 1009-1031; the post-caliphate Taifa kingdoms; the longer-term cultural legacy; and the principal sites where the caliphate's physical inheritance can still be visited.

The Caliphate is one of the most contested topics in modern European historiography. The romantic interpretation — al-Andalus as a multi-confessional paradise of convivencia in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexisted in mutual flourishing — was popularised in the 1990s by María Rosa Menocal's book The Ornament of the World and has been substantially questioned by subsequent scholarship (David Nirenberg's Communities of Violence, Darío Fernández-Morera's The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise). The opposing interpretation — al-Andalus as a brutal Muslim conquest regime imposed on the indigenous Iberian Christian population — has its own ideological and historical limitations. The volume's editorial position is that the Caliphate was a substantial and historically consequential polity whose actual character must be assessed by the substantive documentary record, which is rich, multilingual, and substantially preserved.