0837 to Córdoba

After an earlier start, I made my way to the Santa Justa Estación de Tren, in order to catch the 0837 AVE high speed train towards Barcelona. I was however only going one stop, to Cordoba, about 45 mins away.

If you’ve not heard of Córdoba, it was pretty much the centre of the Western world in the 10th century, when it was potentially the largest city in European with a population of at least several 100,000s, and known as a centre of advancements in medicine, mathematics, art, philosophy, literature, science, and other fields. (In contrast, no other cities had populations of more than 30,000).

Founded by the Romans in about 160 BC because of its strategic location. The city was razed to the ground in a siege and rebuilt by Julius Caesar in about 45 BC as a Roman colony, so all its inhabitants automatically became Roman citizens. The city was the birthplace of Seneca (the philosopher).

Like much of the rest of Spain, Córdoba was ruled by the Visigoths (an Eastern European tribe) from the 6th century until the arrival of the Moors in 712.

By 756, a Umayyad prince arrived who declared a politically independent emirate centred on Córdoba but still spiritually and culturally linked to the Caliphate of Damascus. In 929 the local emir promoted himself to Caliph and declared the caliphate of Córdoba, breaking away from religious connections to the Abbasid caliphate then based in Baghdad.

Within 20 years, the Umayyad rulers of Córdoba controlled three quarters of today’s Spain & Portugal plus the area between Algeria & Morocco and the Atlantic Ocean, with trade links to Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire. This was the height of al-Andalus, and Cordóba became second only to Byzantium in size, wealth and development.

But by the 11th century, al-Andalus had begun to decline and fragment, and the Umayyads gave way to 25 mini kingdoms, and then later the Almorzads from North and West Africa, and then by the late 12th century, a Berber dynasty from North Africa, the Almohads took over an empire from Tripoli to southern Portugal. And by the northern three quarters of today’s Spain and Portugal were back in the hands of the Christian monarchs, as the Reconquista gradually pushed across the Iberian peninsula.

However, my train didn’t quite take me back in time …Read more