Al-Andalus & Islamic Spain

In the year 950, the largest city in Western Europe was not Paris, not Rome, not Constantinople's western competitor. It was a city in what is now southern Spain, on the banks of the Guadalquivir River, where the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III had built a palace complex the size of a small town and stocked his libraries with books his agents had purchased across the Islamic world.

Córdoba had running water. Paved, lit streets. Seventy-plus public libraries. A population somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 people, depending on whose estimate you trust, while London at the same moment held perhaps 10,000. Scholars came from as far as Germany and Persia to study medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics within its walls.

This was The Arabic name for the territories of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim political control, spanning from the Umayyad conquest in 711 CE to the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in 1492. At its greatest extent, Al-Andalus covered most of modern Spain and Portugal. The term's etymology is disputed — proposed derivations include "land of the Vandals" and an Arabic adaptation of "Atlantis," though neither is conclusively proven., the name Arab geographers gave to Muslim-controlled Iberia. It lasted, in various forms and configurations, for nearly 800 years. That is longer than the gap between Christopher Columbus's voyage and today.