The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama Read Online Free PDF Page A

border to become favored attractions in far-flung Christian towns. Al-Andalus was never quite a multicultural melting pot, and yet as different traditions commingled and refreshed each other, as difference itself was celebrated in place of the conformity enforced by less confident societies, individuals with their own perceptions and desires emerged from the shadows of a rigidly hierarchical world.
    This was a remarkable phenomenon in Dark Ages Europe, which had plunged into a continent-wide depression and was convinced the world was growing old and apocalyptic fires were flickering on the horizon. Spain, in contrast, was vibrant with exotic new crops transplanted from the East and heady with the fragrance of orange blossom wafting across the land. Córdoba, the Islamic capital on the banks of the Guadalquivir River, was transformed into the most magnificent metropolis west of Constantinople, its markets heaped with delicate silks and carpets, its paved and brightly lit streets hung with signs offering the services of lawyers and architects, surgeons and astronomers. The shelves of the main library—one of seventy in the city—groaned with four hundred thousand books, a thousand times the number boasted by the greatest collections of the Christian West. The Great Mosque—in Spanish the Mezquita—was a Gothic church transformed into an optical illusion, a shifting dream space of dainty marble columns supporting arches piled on arches in red and white candy stripes. With its population approaching half amillion, Córdoba was for a while the largest city on earth; it was, wrote a Saxon nun, “the brilliant ornament of the world.”
    Al-Andalus reached the peak of its power in the tenth century, when its ruler discovered he had become too grand to stomach his status as a mere emir , or governor, and proclaimed himself the true caliph, the heir to the legitimate line of succession from Muhammad and the leader of all Muslims. To match his new magnificence Abd al-Rahman III built himself a sprawling palatine city outside Córdoba. Teeming with treasures, with doors carved from ivory and ebony that opened onto moated gardens complete with exotic menageries, gaudy sculptures fashioned from amber and pearls, and gargantuan fish ponds whose inhabitants were fed twelve thousand freshly baked loaves a day, it was a blazing statement of dynastic intent. The long line of ambassadors who tripped over themselves to offer fitting gifts to the new caliph were received in a hall of translucent marble, with at its center, beneath a giant pendant pearl, a pool filled with mercury that dazzled them when it was stirred at the operative moment.
    Yet after three centuries, the Islamic powerhouse on mainland Europe crumbled to nothing in a historical flick of the fingers. Like every nation that succumbs to a superiority complex, it had grown too complacent to heed the danger signs. The fairy tale that climaxed with its haughty caliphs sequestered in their palace of marvels came to a fitting end at the hands of an evil courtier named Abu Amir al-Mansur—“the Victorious”—who was indeed so victorious that he won fifty-two out of his fifty-two battles. Most were fought with unprecedented fanaticism against the descendants of the Goths who had clung on in the northern fastnesses of Spain, and al-Mansur’s notoriety earned him the Westernized name of Almanzor. Almanzor locked up the boy caliph who was on the throne, built himself a rival palatine city on the opposite side of Córdoba, turned al-Andalus into a police state, and outraged his urbane subjects by roping rough Berbers and even Christian mercenaries into his military campaigns. On his death in 1002, MuslimSpain imploded into civil war; a few years later, resentful Berber troops tore down the showpiece home of the caliphs, just seventy years after it had risen to astonish the world.
    Al-Andalus fragmented into a patchwork of competing city-states, and the Christian kings across the