Córdoba and Al-Andalus

Muslim-ruled Córdoba became the largest city in Western Europe, with paved and lit streets, running water, and a library said to hold hundreds of thousands of volumes at a time when the largest collections north of the Pyrenees held a few hundred. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived under a legal order that taxed and subordinated non-Muslims but largely let them practice — a coexistence that produced remarkable scholarship and was punctuated by episodes of persecution. Scholars there preserved and argued with Aristotle, and their commentaries, translated in Toledo, reached Paris and Oxford.