Travel Guide
Cordoba's golden age
The whole brilliant civilisation of Al-Andalus — the one whose last flower was the Alhambra, an hour from Cortijo Bujio — began with a single fugitive prince fleeing for his life across three thousand miles. His story, and the golden century it led to in nearby Córdoba, is the foundation on which everything else in this region stands. And it starts, as so much here does, in Damascus.
In 750, the Umayyad dynasty that ruled the Islamic world from Damascus was overthrown and massacred by the Abbasids. One young prince, Abd al-Rahman, escaped. He crossed North Africa a hunted man and, in 756, seized power in Córdoba, founding an independent Emirate — a piece of the fallen Damascus state reborn at the western edge of the world. He was nicknamed al-Dakhil, "the Immigrant," and "the Falcon of the Quraysh." Homesick for Syria, he is said to have planted a palm tree in his garden and written a poem to it, seeing in the lone tree, far from its homeland, a reflection of himself. In 785 he began the Great Mosque of Córdoba — the Mezquita — one of the supreme buildings of the Islamic world.
Under his descendants, Córdoba became arguably the most advanced city in Europe. The high point came in 929, when Abd al-Rahman III declared himself Caliph — the supreme religious and political ruler — breaking finally with the East. To crown his caliphate he built a fabulous palace-city, Medina Azahara, just west of Córdoba, and — tellingly — modelled it in part on the old Umayyad palace of Damascus, a deliberate link across the centuries and the Mediterranean to his ancestors.
At its 10th-century peak, Córdoba had paved and lamplit streets, running water and public baths, and a royal library reputedly holding hundreds of thousands of volumes, when the greatest in Christian Europe held a few hundred. Scholars, poets and physicians came from three continents. This was the soil that grew the great minds of Al-Andalus. (See our guide to the scholars of Al-Andalus.)
This was not distant history for the country around the villa. The Cora de Elvira — the district that would become Granada, settled generations earlier by the jund of Damascus — was a province of this Umayyad state, governed from its lost capital of Medina Elvira on the Vega. When Córdoba shone, this region shone with it. (See our guides to the road from Damascus and Medina Elvira.)
No golden age lasts. Between 1009 and 1031, Córdoba tore itself apart in a civil war, the fitna; Medina Azahara was sacked and abandoned (its ruins lay lost until the 20th century), and the Caliphate shattered into the small kingdoms called taifas. Out of that fragmentation came the world of El Cid, the frontier wars, and eventually the last kingdom of Granada. Everything that followed — including the villa's own frontier landscape — grew from the collapse of Abd al-Rahman's dream.
Who was Abd al-Rahman I? An Umayyad prince who escaped the massacre of his family in Damascus in 750, fled to Spain, and founded the independent Emirate of Córdoba in 756 — the beginning of Al-Andalus as its own power.
Why is Córdoba so important? Under the Umayyads it became the most advanced city in 10th-century Europe, and in 929 the seat of a Caliphate, with a legendary library and the Great Mosque. It was the intellectual capital of the West.
What is Medina Azahara? The palace-city built by Caliph Abd al-Rahman III near Córdoba from 936, modelled partly on the Umayyad palace of Damascus. Sacked during the 11th-century civil war, it lay lost for centuries and is now a UNESCO site.
How is this connected to Granada? The Granada region (the Cora de Elvira) was a province of this Umayyad state. When the Caliphate collapsed after 1031, the fragments — including the future kingdom of Granada — set the stage for everything that followed.
Cortijo Bujio sits in a land shaped by the rise and fall of Córdoba. Read on about the scholars of Al-Andalus, Medina Elvira, the road from Damascus and Moorish Andalusia.
Sources: Encyclopædia Britannica ("Abd al-Rahman I"; "Abd al-Rahman III"; "Córdoba, Caliphate of"); Wikipedia, "Madinat al-Zahra"; Brian A. Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith.