Córdoba was for a time one of the largest and most populous cities in the world. The time was circa 800-1000 CE, when its main rivals were Constantinople, Baghdad and Chang-an. Chang-an, for readers unfamiliar with China, was the capital of the Tang dynasty, which ruled the greatest empire in the world of that day. Chang-an was a long way from Baghdad and Constantinople, and the inhabitants of the western world knew nothing about China then. But they did know about Córdoba.
In 712 CE the armies of Islam conquered the Iberian peninsula. At that time the center of power in the Islamic world was the city of Damascus, ruled by the Umayyad Caliphate. But in 750 the Abbasid family overthrew the Umayyads and massacred nearly all of them. One of the few survivors, Abd al-Rahman, escaped and established an emirate in Iberia, al-Andalus, making his capital in Córdoba. While the new Abbasid Caliphate made Baghdad their capital, the successors of Abd al-Rahman proclaimed their own caliphate in Córdoba, and from there dominated Iberia as well as North Africa for the following two centuries.
Under the successors of Abd al-Rahman Córdoba became both an economic powerhouse and the leading center of learning in the Western world. Muslims, Christians and Jews congregated and worked there, with the Christians absorbing the lost scholarship of antiquity, transmitted to them by Muslim and Jewish scholars, and then disseminating that learning to the unlettered barbarian kingdoms of northern Spain and France.
Those northern Spanish barbarian kingdoms had almost immediately begun to coalesce and expand after the Muslim conquest of the eighth century. At first they made little headway against the power of the Caliphate of Córdoba, which dominated the south but tended to disregard the northern regions as poor and backward. But eventually, in the eleventh century, civil war tore apart al-Andalus and the relentless advance of the Reconquista began in earnest. In 1236 the forces of Ferdinand III of Castile took control of Córdoba once and for all.
For a while Córdoba continued to prosper under the Christian kings. The first Córdobans whose fortunes took a turn for the worse were the Jews, who had experienced a golden age under the Islamic caliphate. Especially after the ascent of Henry II to the throne of Castile, the Jews of Castile experienced increasing discrimination and persecution, and in the pogroms of 1391 the Jewish community of Córdoba was decimated. Until the late sixteenth century, however, Córdoba remained a large and thriving city; after that, a long decline ensued, and was reversed only in the twentieth century. Nowadays it is a city of medium size, with 325,708 inhabitants in 2018.
Our visit to Córdoba began on the west bank of the Guadalquivir River, where the heart of the old city lies. At that point the river is spanned by a fabled stone bridge which has been in existence at least since the first century BCE, though it has been rebuilt, restored and repaired many times over the centuries. For two thousand years, until the 20th century, it was the only bridge over the Guadalquivir at Córdoba. Now there are several, and the Old Roman Bridge has been restricted to pedestrian traffic since 2004. The Moorish rulers built two towers, one at each end of the bridge. The tower at the east end, called the Calahorra Tower, still stands in something like its original form.
A little way downstream of the Roman bridge on the west bank of the Guadalquivir stands the Albolafia Mill, another relic of antiquity. It may have originally been built by the Romans, along with several others, but in its present form it dates from the days of Moorish rule. Water was extremely important to the originally desert-dwelling Arabs and their Berber co-religionists, who all made extensive use of hydraulic technology throughout their domains; their word for water-wheel, noria, was adopted into Castilian Spanish, and from there spread to English as well. In Moorish times the Albolafia noria, turned by the force of the river’s current, poured water into an adjacent aqueduct, which then piped the water into emir’s palace and the city beyond. Most of the aqueduct has not survived the vicissitudes of time, but one arch is still standing and is visible in some of our photos.
The mill survived the Reconquista, but in 1492 Queen Isabella, who was staying in Córdoba, complained that the noise of the noria gave her a headache and had it dismantled. Actually, the headache was probably also a result of the ceaseless entreaties of Christopher Columbus, who visited Córdoba at that time to present one of his many petitions to her and her husband to fund his venture to the Indies. However that may be, the noria must have been rebuilt in the following century, because the Albolafia was converted sometime during that period to serve as a flour mill, and wheels are necessary to grind flour, no? In any case, the flour mill ceased operation in the 20th century, and the city council had to hire an antiquarian architect in the ’60s to reconstruct the noria. In its current incarnation, which is supposedly an exact replica of the original, the noria is a very impressive structure, and in addition to being a major tourist attraction, the mill is a godsend to the local cats, who feast on food provided by the operators.
We disembarked from our tour bus next to the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos, the palace in which Ferdinand and Isabella were living when Columbus came to pester them about financing his maritime ventures. Time did not permit us to explore the interior of the palace, which was unfortunate because it is considered a prime example of Mudejar architecture; but we did take numerous photos of its rather forbidding exterior as well as of the neighborhood around it. The Córdoba Alcázar began as a fortress of the Visigoths and became the emir’s palace under Moorish rule; in 1328, about a hundred years after the Christians retook Córdoba from the Moors, King Alfonso XI of Castile ordered a new palace built on the site, so that it was thenceforth known as the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos, the Alcázar of the Christian Kings, even though it still looks Islamic because it was built in Mudéjar style, with sumptuous baths, fountains and gardens. Ferdinand and Isabella made it the headquarters for their assault on the last remaining Moorish kingdom in Spain, the Emirate of Granada, which they took in 1492, at which time they also finally acceded to Columbus’ pleas to be allowed to discover America (which, of course, was not his actual intention). Unfortunately, they also made it the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition, which they had established in 1480. The Moorish baths proved useful for waterboarding – 15th-century Europeans considered bathing to be unhealthful, anyway – so they were converted into torture chambers.
The Córdoba Alcázar is a square-shaped structure with a tower at each corner. The oldest is the Torre de los Leones, at the northwest corner, where the entrance to the palace is located, as well as the royal chapel. The octagonal tower at the northeast corner originally had a clock and was known as the Clock Tower, but is now called the Torre del Homenaje, or Tower of Homage. The Torre de la Paloma, Tower of the Dove, at the southeast corner, is a reconstruction of the square-shaped original, which was demolished in the 19th century; it had also been known as the Torre de la Vela, or Watchtower. The round Torre de la Inquisición, Tower of the Inquisition, has a sinister appearance that lives up to its name, which it owes to having housed the archives of the Inquisition for centuries. It was formerly also known as the Torre de los Jardines, the Tower of the Gardens.
Most of our stay in Córdoba was quite rightly devoted to visiting the Mezquita, but just as we reached its precincts we paused to linger in the Plaza de San Rafael. San Rafael is the guardian angel of Córdoba, and there is a tall monument in the Plaza with a statue of him by a French sculptor, Michel Verdiguier, who is also responsible for some of the Mezquita sculptures, on the top. Near it, at the north-west end of the Old Roman Bridge, stands the Puerta del Puente, or Bridge Gate. This replaced an old Roman gate of the city; the occasion for its construction was a visit to Córdoba by King Philip II in 1572, but it was not actually completed until much later. It was also rebuilt in 1928 and restored anew in the 21st century.
