Córdoba and Al-Andalus

929 CE — Europe, Caliphate of Córdoba

Today: Southern Spain (Córdoba)

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.

Worth knowing: A 10th-century Saxon nun called Córdoba 'the ornament of the world.' Its library catalogue alone reportedly ran to 44 volumes — a list of books longer than most European libraries' actual holdings.

Pattern: Ideological movement — A belief system rises, spreads, institutionalizes, and then schisms — changing the rules people accept as legitimate.

Entry 110 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.