In 929 CE, Abd al-Rahman III, ruler of Cordoba, took the title of caliph, rejecting the lesser title his family had held for five generations and setting himself against two rival claimants to leadership of the Muslim world, in Baghdad and in North Africa. This episode follows what he built to back that claim up: Madinat al-Zahra, a purpose-built palace city on three stepped terraces outside Cordoba, complete with a mint, a reception hall built specifically to overawe foreign envoys, and, under his son al-Hakam II, one of the largest libraries the medieval world had seen, run day to day by a woman named Lubna who had been born enslaved.
The episode then turns to a different population in the same cities: the Christians and Jews who lived under Muslim rule in al-Andalus as ahl al-dhimma, "the protected people," a legal status that guaranteed their lives, property, and worship while also taxing them, subordinating their legal testimony, and restricting their public standing. It traces the 850s martyrs of Cordoba, a small group of Mozarab Christians who deliberately broke the one law that held the whole arrangement together, and Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a Jewish physician and diplomat who rose to the top of the same caliph's court while still living under that same unequal law.
Together, the two threads ask the same question from opposite directions: what does it mean when the same legal and physical architecture, at the same moment in history, produces both genuine protection and genuine inequality, without either canceling out the other.
Drawing on Ibn Hayyan's al-Muqtabis, al-Maqqari's Nafh al-Tib, Eulogius of Cordoba's own account of the martyrs he chronicled and ultimately joined, and modern research from Lost Islamic History and the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, this episode is part two of a four-part series on Muslim Iberia.
Content Warning: This episode describes the execution of religious dissenters in 9th-century Cordoba, including public accounts of martyrdom.
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