“The inhabitants of Cordova,” says Ahmed-El-Makkari, the great Arab historian, “are famous for their courteous and polished manners, their superior intelligence, their exquisite taste and magnificence in their meals, dress, and horses. There thou wouldst see doctors, shining with all sorts of learning; lords, distinguished by their virtue and generosity; warriors, renowned for their expeditions into the country of the infidels; and officers, experienced in all kinds of warfare. To Cordova came from all parts of the world students eager to cultivate poetry, to study the sciences, or to be instructed in divinity or law; so that it became the meeting-place of the eminent in all matters, the abode of the learned, and the place of resort for the studious; its interior was always filled with the eminent and the noble of all countries, its literary men and soldiers were continually vying with each other to gain renown, and its precincts never ceased to be the arena of the distinguished, the retreat of scholars, the halting place of the noble, and the repository of the true and virtuous. Cordova was to Andalus what the head is to the body, or what the breast is to the lion.”
To-day there is nothing left in Cordova but the mosque, the bridge, and the ruins of the alcazar to mark the spot where, in the time of Abd-er-Rahman III., a city, ten miles in length, lined the banks of the Guadelquivir with mosques and gardens and marble palaces. The royal palaces of the Great Khalif included the Palace of Lovers, the Palace of Flowers, the Palace of Contentment, the Palace of the Diadem, and the palace which the Sultan named Damascus, of which the Moorish poet sang, “All palaces in the world are nothing compared to Damascus, for not only has it gardens with the most delicious fruits and sweet-smelling flowers, beautiful prospects, and limpid running waters, clouds pregnant with aromatic dew, and lofty buildings; but its night is always perfumed, for morning pours on it her gray amber, and night her black musk.” The city contained over fifty thousand palaces of the nobles, and twice that number of houses of the common people, while seven hundred mosques and nine hundred public baths had close companionship among a community who made cleanliness co-ordinate with godliness.
But perhaps the greatest monument of Moorish architecture that was ever created in Spain, the most wonderful city and palace that has ever been constructed, is to-day a name and a memory of which not a trace is in existence. That marvellous suburb of Cordova, called Ez-Zahra, “the Fairest,” which was built at the suggestion of the favourite mistress of Abd-er-Rahman III., and was
CORDOVA
THE MOSQUE—ORNAMENTAL ARCHED WINDOW.