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Cordoba Medina Azahara

MEDINA AZAHARA, Spain - To hear historians tell it, this buried city three miles west of Córdoba was the Versailles of the Middle Ages, a collection of estates and palaces teeming with treasures that dazzled the most jaded traveler or world-weary aristocrat.

The city was built in the 10th century and sacked around 1010 by Islamic purists from North Africa.
Pools of mercury could be shaken to spray beams of reflected sunlight across marble walls and ceilings of gold, according to contemporary records.

Doors carved of ivory and ebony led to sprawling gardens full of exotic animals and sculptures made of amber and pearls.
 

"Travelers from distant lands, men of all ranks and professions in life, following various religions, princes, ambassadors, merchants, pilgrims, theologians, and poets all agreed that they had never seen in the course of their travels anything that could be compared to it," wrote the 19th-century historian Stanley Lane-Poole in his book "The Story of the Moors in Spain."

Archaeologists are more hesitant, saying that while many of those marvels may have existed, physical evidence of them has yet to be found. But they, too, are full of superlatives.

"This was the largest city ever built from scratch in Western Europe," covering nearly 280 acres, Antonio Vallejo, the chief archaeologist here, said in an interview. "Most large Western cities grow over time. This was built in a single effort, from a single design."

Medina Azahara, also known as Madinat al-Zahra, was an Islamic metropolis built in the 10th century as a testament to Spain's proclamation in 929 that it was the true caliphate of the Muslim world.

The construction of the city, which began around 940, was a singular moment in history, when the most vibrant intellectual and cultural force in Europe was rooted in Islam, and when the heart of Islam was in many ways rooted in Europe.

But around 1010, Medina Azahara was sacked by Islamic purists from North Africa who considered the Muslim culture it represented far too liberal in its interpretation of the Koran. The raid effectively wiped the city off the map for a millennium.

The historical value of the site is difficult to overstate, he and other scholars say.

Medina Azahara represented a society that, despite its location on a predominantly Christian continent, became in many ways the embodiment of the Islamic world at its peak, when Muslim achievements in fields like science, philosophy and mathematics towered above virtually all others.

That society was called Al Andalus, the Arabic name for the Iberian Peninsula when it was under Muslim control, a period that lasted nearly 800 years, ending in 1492 with the surrender of the last Muslim stronghold in Granada.

María Rosa Menocal, a professor of Spanish at Yale and author of "Ornament of the World," a book about Muslim Spain, said that Al Andalus and its capital, Córdoba, were probably justified in considering themselves the center of the known universe when Medina Azahara was built. "There was no comparison between Córdoba and anything else in Europe in the 10th century - like New York versus well, a rural village in Mexico," she said in an e-mail interview.

Córdoba had running water, paved and lighted streets, and, when large collections of books were scarce in Europe, some 70 libraries, the biggest containing 400,000 volumes, according to some accounts.

Al Andalus introduced Western Europe to paper, algebra, advanced irrigation techniques and Latin translations of many of the classic works of Greek philosophy.

The confluence of Islamic and European heritages is a crucial but often overlooked chapter in world history, scholars contend, and perhaps its greatest exponent is the ruined city that Mr. Vallejo is fighting to preserve.

Medina Azahara "never symbolized anything in European history because virtually no one who was not a part of the Islamic Spain orbit knows/knew anything about it," Ms. Menocal wrote.

Abd al-Rahman III, who founded the city, envisioned it as a showcase of the virtues of Al Andalus and as affirmation of his claim that he was the true caliph of the Muslim world. As the ruler of what was then one of the world's wealthiest civilizations, Rahman not only stocked the city's main palace with luxuries, but also turned it into a bustling emporium of musicians, astronomers, poets, doctors, botanists and mathematicians, historians say.

Its destruction signaled the beginning of the end of the only Muslim culture ever to flourish in Western Europe, and led to the decimation of a unique branch of Islam that had taken root a continent away from the influences of the Islamic centers of the Middle East.

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