The Books of Cordoba

In the 10th century, Cordoba becomes one of the greatest intellectual centers of the Mediterranean world. In the caliphal palaces — not in the great mosque visible today — Arab chroniclers describe libraries containing hundreds of thousands of volumes, at a time when much of Latin Europe still possesses very few manuscripts. Umayyad power invests massively in copying, translation, and the circulation of knowledge.

Under the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba, particularly during the reign of al-Hakam II, the production and collection of manuscripts become a veritable political project. Agents are sent to different regions of the Islamic world to acquire rare works of medicine, philosophy, mathematics, or poetry.

Medieval sources mention gigantic libraries whose exact figures probably remain exaggerated. Even by greatly reducing traditional estimates, the gap with most Western European collections remains considerable. Cordoba then attracts copyists, scholars, translators, and jurists from different intellectual traditions.

Paper plays an essential role in this cultural expansion. Introduced from the eastern Islamic world, this technology remains much less expensive than parchment massively used in Christian Europe. The multiplication of copying workshops thus facilitates a wider circulation of scientific and literary texts.

An important part of this heritage progressively disappears with the political crises of the 11th century and subsequent religious transformations of the Iberian Peninsula. Several ancient Greek works preserved or commented upon in the Andalusian world will nevertheless be retransmitted later to Latin Europe through the intermediary of medieval translations carried out notably in Toledo.