The Ornament of the World

-Granada... Seville... Córdoba... and Toledo -- the storied cities of southern Spain, centers of some of the most extraordinary art, culture, literature, and music ever created, all forged in the crucible of a remarkable time and place.

♪♪ -Spain is particularly interesting because it's one of the places where Christians, Muslims, and Jews confronted each other over a long period of time and in very, very basic ways.

♪♪ -Under many different political configurations, you had the ongoing creation of many different great cultural forms that would not have existed except for these complicated ways in which Jews and Christians and Muslims were living in the same time and place.

-They were using each other's languages, reading each other's poetry, arguing each other's philosophies in a way that was productive, in a way that helped create the world that we live in today.

♪♪ -Nowhere else in Europe did the three religions so thoroughly share a society and a culture.

It was period of coexistence, now known as La Convivencia, that lasted almost 800 years... a time of unprecedented collaboration, but also frequent violence.

-Ah!

[ Horse neighs ] -There are endless conflicts.

There are huge numbers of attacks against Jews.

-There were martyrdoms.

There were executions.

There were betrayals.

-It was not perfect.

There was tolerance rather than pluralism, but there was an openness to difference that was extraordinary in the medieval world.

-And that openness made possible the creation of a culture so wondrous that it was called the Ornament of the World.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The story of medieval Spain began here in a palace outside Damascus in what is now Syria.

♪♪ The year was 750, and the long-standing rulers of the Muslim Empire have just been overthrown.

-In 750, there was a massive coup, and it was a bloody coup.

-The palace was now occupied by the victorious Abbasid family.

The clan they defeated, the Umayyads, had been in power for nearly 100 years and had overseen the Muslim Empire's expansion to the farthest reaches of the known world.

The Umayyads were the second caliphate, or ruling dynasty, established after the death of Muhammad.

This royal lineage made them a continuing threat to the new rulers.

-Because the caliphate was a dynastic phenomenon in which a son could turn up later and claim that he was the true heir to the Muslim world, the Abbasids decided they needed to kill everyone, to destroy everyone in the house of the Bani Umayyah.

♪♪ -According to lore, after the coup, the Abbasids invited the Umayyads back to the palace in a gesture of reconciliation, but it was all a ruse.

[ Laughter ] -There was one particular moment when it seemed that there might be some sort of reconciliation, the Umayyads coming humbly to beg to be spared.

[ Indistinct talking ] -According to the story, at a certain point, the Abbasids arose and beheaded almost every Umayyad there.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -Ah!

-With the clap of a hand, in one fell swoop, virtually, the entire upper rank of the Umayyads had been extinguished.

[ Wine dripping ] -One young Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman, escaped the onslaught and fled.

An account of his journey survives to this day.

[ Water rushing ] -The incredible thing about this account is it's told in the first person, and at one point, he says, "We were encamped on the banks of a river, and my young son came to me crying, and I said, 'Come on.

You should be strong,' you know, 'You're my son,' but I looked behind him, and I saw the black flags of the Abbasids."

He speaks about picking up his young son and grabbing his younger brother and flying to the banks of the river... [ Splash ] ...and he has his young son on his back, and he starts to swim across the river... and his little brother keeps up with him for a while but then can't swim, and he's afraid of drowning and starts to go back.

-And the cavalrymen standing there on the bank beckoned him back, saying, "Not to fear, we've just come to take you to safety."

-Abd al-Rahman I makes it to the other side and drops off his son and turns around to get his brother, and he sees his brother on the far bank with the Abbasids, and he says he watches his brother's head tumble into the water.

[ Sword unsheathes, he ad splashes ] The Abbasids beheaded him immediately.

♪♪ [ Bird cries ] -For Abd al-Rahman, there was no turning back.

-The Abbasids were determined that no Umayyad of significance would survive, and so he was the most hunted man in the entire Muslim Empire.

♪♪ -Twenty-year-old Abd al-Rahman fled south several hundred miles, then west across North Africa.

-Where he was heading was for the tribe of his mother.

His mother was a Berber concubine of one of the Umayyads, and so he had Berber relatives and tribal affiliations.

♪♪ When he finally reached what is today Tunis, he was taken in by the tribe and given their protection.

-When he gets there, he doesn't just want to live his life out as some protected guy.

He's a young man, and he was bred to the caliphate.

He understands that these Abbasids are not the legitimate successors of Muhammad, that he is the real caliph and that legitimacy lies with him.

♪♪ -To reclaim that legitimacy, the last surviving heir to the Umayyad caliphate would need to leave Africa.

♪♪ Across the narrow Straits of Gibraltar, Abd al-Rahman could see the Iberian Peninsula and what is today southern Spain.

The territory was controlled by Muslim armies who had seized it back in the year 711 from Christians called Visigoths.

The Muslims named it al-Andalus.

It was officially part of the caliphate, ruled from Damascus and then Baghdad, but its distance from those capitals allowed its people relative autonomy.

Abd al-Rahman's supporters encouraged him to travel to al-Andalus and claim power.

The young prince had to weigh the risks.

-Should he be in North Africa and run a small business in leatherwork, or should he listen to these people who came to him from Spain saying to him, the most legitimate figure on the scene, "Come to Spain.

We want you to rule over us.

You bear the name.

You are a genuine Umayyad"?

I think that's almost irresistible.

-His relatives raise him a small army, and he goes across the Straits of Gibraltar onto the Iberian peninsula.

[ Horse neighs ] ♪♪ -Al-Andalus was in some disorder.

There had been one emir, ruling emir, after another.

-The Abbasids putatively held it by this time, but it was so far away from the center of power for the Abbasids that really easily was able to conquer the forces that were there.

♪♪ [ Indistinct shouting, swords clanging ] -At the end of the day, he was able to occupy Córdoba, enter the Amiral Palace, then proclaim himself the new emir.

♪♪ -When al-Rahman arrives in Córdoba, he encounters a rather sleepy city, a city that is really in decline with walls that are falling down and a bridge that has crumbled, and they were living in the city sort of in that state, not really having the funds or the wherewithal to improve it.

Abd al-Rahman, he knows Damascus.

He knows what a really good city ought to look like, and he sets about making Córdoba into a kind of new Damascus.

-Córdoba has some great bones, Roman streets and aqueducts and elements of Roman culture that have fallen out of use but are still there, and one can see how a prince coming from Damascus can look at this and recognize something valuable there.

-So Abd al-Rahman I does what any good Umayyad would do upon taking the city of Córdoba is that he makes a new center of the city, and he makes the center of the city into a mosque.

♪♪ -Abd al-Rahman built the Great Mosque of Córdoba over the top of what had previously been a church, where Christian Visigoths and Romans before them had been praying for generations.

-On fairly good evidence, we think that they legitimately rented that space and then eventually bought the building.

-Abd al-Rahman, looking around at this landscape, decides that he's going to appropriate the ruins of this former Roman Empire into his new imperial mosque.

-You have all of these columns and capitals from old Roman buildings that were scattered probably all over the countryside, and they were brought into and made a central part of the architecture of the mosque itself.

♪♪ -A hypostyle mosque has a kind of dispersed space.

There's not a sense of hierarchy.

There's no altar at which a priest might stand or have an image of Christ that would give you a sense that that was the most important place.

Instead, it's this broad hall in which every member of the community prays individually and equally.

It didn't matter if you were the caliph or the imam who led prayer.

Everyone was equal in the eyes of God.

♪♪ So its forest of columns really exemplifies that notion of a community in which religion was celebrated very democratically.

-Construction of the Great Mosque firmly established Islam at the heart of Abd al-Rahman's new kingdom, but the ruling Umayyads made allowances for their Jewish and Christian subjects.

[ Indistinct talking ] -Certainly, the Umayyads looked upon Christians and Jews in Spain as a subject population that they were going to govern and rule.

Wise administration, though, tells you that you don't want to disrupt the local populations.

You don't want to cause grievances that would make for unstable situations, rebellions and the like, and so they took a very hands-off sort of attitude.

-Abd al-Rahman governed non-Muslim populations according to a code, or dhimma, established a century earlier by Muhammad and his successors.

-When Muhammad encountered a community of Jews or a community of Christians, his policy was they did not have to convert.

If they submitted, he guaranteed them religious protection.

They were free to practice their religion under certain restrictions.

They could not proselytize.

They could not hold positions over Muslims.

They couldn't rule Muslims.

They couldn't build new churches.

They couldn't spread their religion, but otherwise, they were free to practice, and then they paid tribute to the Muslim community, the sign of submission.

-This is far from the kind of pluralistic society in which everyone in a sense lives at peace with each other.

You pay a certain price for being allowed to live within Muslim civilization.

What you have is just a strange phenomenon where Christians and Jews may retain their religion, but they will become acculturated into Islamic civilization.

That is to say, they will speak Arabic.

They will write in Arabic.

They will eat like Muslims, all those practices of the dominant group within society.

[ Laughter ] -But for the Jewish population in Spain, the implementation of the Islamic dhimma offered a distinct improvement over life under the previous Christian rulers.

-The Visigoths who had been ruling in Spain before the Muslims arrived were very harsh toward Jews in particular.

They had very strict rules about how much Jews could operate in the public sphere, basically very little.

-The Visigoths, over the period of their reign, had become harsher and harsher with the Jewish community.

There were many different legal restrictions against owning land.

There were types of occupations they could and could not maintain, who they could marry, what type of wealth they could have.

So they were really in tremendously reduced circumstances.

-Jews probably welcomed the change of regime because it enhanced their status from a despised and recently suppressed minority to a community that could use its skills of literacy, of scholarship and traditions of learning as ways to incorporate in the political culture and political administration of the Umayyads.

-As long as Jews and Christians are paying the necessary poll tax in a timely way and understanding of their place as second-class citizens in a Muslim country, then they have complete freedom to engage in their political economy, their communal and religious affairs as they see fit, and they did so.

[ Indistinct talking ] -One sees the beginning of what will be called later La Convivencia, the marvelous collaboration of faiths and races that was distinctive in al-Andalus.

[ Indistinct talking ] -Convivencia -- Spanish for "coexistence" or "living together."

Nowhere else in Europe would the three religions share a society and a culture so thoroughly.

♪♪ Convivencia contributed to great prosperity in al-Andalus.

Córdoba became a luminous city filled with the buzzing of outdoor markets and the cacophony of new construction.

♪♪ Even the countryside was transformed with extensions and improvements to the old Roman irrigation system.

-Because they were able to control water and actually store it for use during the summer months and even into the fall, they were able to grow more crops, and they were able to grow crops that demanded more water than were naturally available in that kind of an environment.

-In the newly bountiful countryside, Abd al-Rahman built a lavish estate that he named Rusafa, recollecting the palace outside Damascus where he had spent time in his youth.

-Rusafa was this country estate that Abd al-Rahman built outside of the city.

It was a retreat, an escape from urban life and the congestion and the noises of Córdoba.

-Abd al-Rahman's retreat overlooked fields of wheat and fruit trees.

We know about it only from written accounts of its irrigated gardens and exotic plants, its opulence and beauty.

-He plants very interesting species of rare plants, some of which were actually imported from the East.

He's using it as a kind of botanical exchange point for the domestication of rare, unusual plant varieties.

[ Birds chirping ] -In Rusafa, he planted palm trees like the ones so common in Syria but previously unknown in al-Andalus.

♪♪ -A palm tree stands in Rusafa, born in the West, far from the land of palms.

I said to it, "How like me you are, far away and in exile, in long separation from family and friends.

You have sprung from soil in which you are a stranger, and I, like you, am far from home."

-It's this incredibly nostalgic poem.

It's just heartbreaking because you're watching this young prince, last survivor of his family, try to recreate something that is, of course, never going to be fully recreated.

-And yet -- and yet -- I think what is impressive and powerful is his ability to not let that keep him from building a new future.

He doesn't spend his life militating to get back his homeland.

He creates a different version of it, and I think he does that with great success.

♪♪ -Abd al-Rahman died in the year 788.

♪♪ But the new homeland that Abd al-Rahman created in al-Andalus continued to thrive.

Within two generations, the Umayyad community outgrew the mosque Abd al-Rahman constructed when he first arrived in Córdoba 30 years earlier.

-They need to expand the congregational mosque.

This is where the community as a whole gathers on Fridays, so it really is a measure of the size of that community.

-The expansion of the mosque reflects the growth of Córdoba, and the growth of Córdoba is being fueled partly by this flux of migration from the countryside from outlying villages into the city as people convert to Islam.

Converts to Islam often choose an Arabic name so that if you look at a Muslim's genealogy when you see that his name is Ahmad and his father's is Mohammad, his father's name was Ali, and his father's name was Lopez or Ruiz or something like that, then you can conjecture that that is the generation where the conversion took place.

If you take a lot of these genealogies, you can assign a date of conversion, and you get a graph of the growth of the community.

It starts very slowly and then at a certain point has a kind of a chain reaction or a going viral, and it suddenly appears everybody is becoming a Muslim.

♪♪ -As you might imagine, as happens even today, there were many people who were very unhappy about this process, about the intermarriage, about the conversion, about the fact that the Christian population seemed to be shrinking so dramatically, and in particular for them, melancholy lay in the fact that in the early Middle Ages, under the rule of the Visigoths, the church was enormously powerful.

-The memory of the time when the church was enormously powerful made them chafe even more against the hegemony of the Umayyads.

So a group of churchmen begin a kind of resistance movement.

[ Indistinct talking ] -The movement was led by the Christian monk Eulogius and encouraged by a layman, Paul Alvarus.

Alvarus was upset, not just by conversion, but by the fact that even the remaining Christians seemed unduly influenced by Arabic culture.

-"Alas, all talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books.

They have forgotten their own language.

For everyone who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves."

[ Indistinct talking ] -Where's the next generation and the generation after that of the priesthood going to come from if young Christian men are increasingly of the belief that they can continue to be good Christians, but Arabo-Islamic in all of their other cultural visages?

-Paul and Eulogius saw this as a crisis.

-Islam represented clearly a higher culture than the Latin culture of the Spanish Christians.

Everything that the Muslims did was better -- the art, the literature, their agricultural techniques.

The whole lifestyle was more attractive.

-It becomes a culture of extraordinary seduction and attraction for many people.

[ Indistinct talking ] -So for the Christian community, it becomes a problem.

They begin to lose their culture.

It's rolled over by this cultural juggernaut that is Arabic.

[ Indistinct talking ] -The resistance movement became known as the Córdoban Martyrs.

-They would go in front of a Muslim judge.

They would go in front of a Muslim ruler, and they would start saying the most horrible things they could think of about the prophet Muhammad.

-And these are things that they know very clearly are punishable by death, and they seek death.

-So what you see in the Córdoban Martyrs movement is this last-ditch attempt to halt this cultural interpenetration, to halt this process by which large numbers of Christians under Muslim rule were converting.

-The voluntary martyrs had a kind of deep cultural frustration, and this very rhetorical movement seemed to answer their need to put Christianity in the center of the spotlight.

-Beginning in the year 850, 48 Andalusi Christians were executed for offenses against Islam.

Eulogius himself, one of the last to be killed, was beheaded in 859.

-He was martyred in mid-afternoon of Saturday, the 11th of March, oh, blessed and wonderful man of his age who, in many martyrs, sent the fruit of his work ahead of him.

-But the deaths of the martyrs did little to stop the surge of Islam on the Iberian peninsula.

In fact, Muslim Córdoba was about to witness something Abd al-Rahman could only have dreamed of.

[ Chanting in Arabic ] ♪♪ On a Friday in January in the year 929, Spanish Muslims gathered to pray inside the Great Mosque of Córdoba.

[ Praying in Arabic ] There, they heard an extraordinary pronouncement.

The ruler of al-Andalus, Abd al-Rahman III, declared himself caliph, the legitimate sovereign of all of the Islamic territories.

The center of the Islamic world, he proclaimed, was Córdoba, and he, seven generations removed from Abd al-Rahman I, was Islam's true leader.

This directly defied a rival Islamic dynasty in North Africa as well as the Abbasid leadership, which ruled from Baghdad.

-He says, "Look, I've been kowtowing to the Abbasids down there in Baghdad, but the reality is this is a caliphate as much as that.

-Declaring himself the caliph didn't mean that suddenly, Muslims, you know, in Persia recognized him as their leader, but what it meant is that in order to make this claim stick or seem reasonable, he had to act like a caliph and also create a glamorous capital that was worthy of that status and title.

♪♪ -Abd al-Rahman III ruled over a city that by the 10th century was the largest in Europe.

Córdoba boasted sophisticated amenities like paved streets, lighting systems and running water.

♪♪ -The introduction of water transforms the city.

The city becomes cleaner.

They have bathhouses.

People can bathe at any time.

They also have a system of sewers that runs underground that washes away the waste.

So if you can imagine walking through a medieval city that did not smell, that is an extraordinary indication of high standard of living, and that is the kind of thing that people from elsewhere commented upon when they came to Córdoba, that it was beautiful, partly because it appealed to the senses, all of the senses.

-The reports of the glamour of the city reached far and wide, and it's at that point when Córdoba really does feel to itself and to other visitors from both the East and the North it is very much the center of the civilized world.

-The German nun and poet Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim never visited Córdoba, yet the stories that reached her inspired her to call it the Ornament of the World.

-The brilliant Ornament of the World shown in the West, a noble city newly known for the military prowess that its Hispanic colonizers had brought.

Córdoba was its name, and it was wealthy and famous and known for its pleasures and resplendent in all things.

-Nothing better exemplified Córdoba's ascendancy than the opulent palace complex Abd al-Rahman III built outside the city.

He called it Medina Azahara and made it the new seat of government.

-Medina Azahara was built on the side of a hill overlooking a vast landscape, and, of course, overlooking the landscape was very important because that view exemplified in many ways your power over that land.

-He builds it, not as a single palace but as a sprawling complex of multiple palaces, multiple mosques, multiple gardens.

It is absolutely huge.

-The palace had things that are spoken of by poets for generations afterwards.

It had fountains with little statues of animals who spewed water into its pool.

♪♪ -You know, you were almost godlike in your powers.

If you could control nature, and part of that would be to control water, to send it spewing through little canals and to have it travel vast amounts of territory on aqueducts and to spew out of the mouths of precious, jewel-studded or gilded animals.

♪♪ That showed not only beautiful taste and luxurious appointments, but it also showed a kind of awesome power.

♪♪ -The city's resplendence extended beyond its architecture.

It was also a place of learning, home to great book collections that stood in marked contrast to the small monastic libraries scattered throughout the rest of Europe.

-The grandeur of the city lay in great measure because of the enormous numbers of books.

There is a legendary recounting that says there were as many as 400,000 books in Córdoba.

There's a complete inability to judge the literal truth of this, but I think the statement is meant to reflect what was a reality, which is, it's a culture that highly valued books as part of the overall culture.

-One young Córdoban who emerged from this vibrant culture was the Jewish physician and intellectual Hasdai ibn Shaprut.

-Most of the intellectuals in those days were physicians and philosophers.

That is, they were scientists, and they were thinkers, and Hasdai ibn Shaprut became a physician to the caliph for the caliph's court.

♪♪ -Hasdai rose through the ranks, eventually becoming the right-hand man to Abd-ar-Rahman III and the highest-ranking Jew in al-Andalus.

-Things had never been so comfortable for a Jewish community that they were aware of.

Jews' influence in the social and political realm as well as their social, economic accomplishments and their creative and productivity as authors of all of the Hebrew humanities had no parallel.

-Inspired by Abd-ar-Rahman's determination to make Córdoba the center of Islam, Hasdai ibn Shaprut set out to make it the heart of Jewish life, too.

He launched an attempt to wrest power from the rabbis in Baghdad, which had been the seat of Jewish learning for centuries.

-You have this Jewish community in Córdoba that says, "Nah, guys, we're not subservient to you.

We are actually better than you are.

We have achieved more than you have.

We are more central."

-Hasdai ibn Shaprut established the first center of rabbinical learning in medieval Spain, and so Sephardic Jewry had their own academy as a center of Jewish religious learning.

-And Hasdai was just beginning his campaign to promote Córdoba.

-I think one of the most important things that you learn about Hasdai through his writing is his sense of the centrality of Spain.

♪♪ -A delegation came to Córdoba from what was called at the time Khazaria in what is today Croatia.

This was a Turkic kingdom that legend had it was a Jewish kingdom.

-Hasdai ibn Shaprut asked the Turkic delegation to carry a letter back to the Jewish king.

-"Our land is called Sepharad in the holy tongue while the Ishmaelite citizens call it al-Andalus, and the kingdom is called Córdoba.

It is a land of grains, wines and purest fruits, rich in plants, a paradise of every sort of sweet and with gardens and orchards where every kind of fruit tree blossoms."

-It gives you a taste of his and, I think, the rest of the community's great love of this place that nourished them, that not only tolerated them, which is one thing, but which provided the wherewithal for this great well-being.

The true flourishing of the Jewish community, which could be said to begin with Hasdai, at least, as a symbolic moment, will continue and will, in fact, survive the destruction of the caliphate.

-The years of Abd-ar-Rahman III were the zenith of Córdoban power, but the Umayyad caliphate's brilliant star was about to fade.

♪♪ Abd-ar-Rahman III died in the year 961, followed 15 years later by his son.

Next in the line of succession was his 12-year-old grandson, Hisham, but the young Hisham, though caliph in name, was just a figurehead.

True power was seized by his ambitious chamberlain, who called himself Al-Mansur, The Victorious.

-Al-Mansur is kind of an interesting character.

Extremely despotic.

He claims for a while to rule in the name of the caliph, but in fact the young caliph is made impotent by him, and he's kind of a strongman in a lot of ways.

-Al-Mansur, like his predecessors, carried on Córdoba's tradition of architectural resplendence, expanding the Great Mosque, but he also had a militaristic bent.

He led a series of raids against Christian territories that went beyond any carried out since the beginning of the Islamic conquest.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -Spain, during the Muslim period, was divided into three zones.

There was the Muslim south, and then there were the Christian principalities in the north, and in between the two, the whole central area of Spain, was a kind of no-man's-land with sparse settlements but which they constantly being raided one side or the other.

What Mansur did was to turn these raids into full attacks upon the Christian north... [ Horse neighs ] ♪♪ ...and he ran a great number of them.

[ Horse neighs, swords clang ] But more seriously perhaps in terms of the long-range consequences, it was Mansur began to invoke the ideology of the Holy War, the jihad.

-Al-Mansur is the first player in this history who makes ideology and religious ideology central.

He rides out to battle against the Christians as a Muslim anti-Christian thing.

[ Horse neighing ] ♪♪ -But these recurrent battles took a toll on Al-Mansur's armies, and he needed an infusion of new blood to defeat the northern kingdoms.

[ Swords clanging ] To bolster his forces, he turned to Berber mercenaries from North Africa.

-And the Berbers have to be paid.

That's the thing about mercenaries.

They want to be paid.

-It was a dangerous game in which Al-Mansur paid his troops with the loot they plundered.

-Ah!

[ Thunder crashes ] -Emboldened by his successes, Al-Mansur turned his attention to the Church of Santiago de Compostela, a famous pilgrimage destination in the northwest of Spain.

-In 910, the first pilgrim from across the Pyrenees came on a pilgrimage, and then it became a river of pilgrims that descended from France and Germany, from the low countries, all the way to Saint James of Compostela.

-The pilgrims believe the remains of Saint James the Apostle were buried at the site, which made it one of the most sacred in Christianity.

[ Indistinct shouting, bell tolling ] But in 997, Al-Mansur made it the target of one of his most brazen raids.

[ Fire crackling ] -He takes the church bells, the bells of Santiago, and makes Christian prisoners carry them on their backs on the march back to Córdoba... ♪♪ ...and then Córdoba makes them into mosque lamps.

[ Fire crackling ] -The significance of bells is that they were the sign of Christianity.

Muslims have minarets from where the muezzin calls to prayer.

Christians have bells from which they call to prayer, and therefore, by bringing the bells it shows a dominance of Islam over Christianity.

-What it was about was who controlled the airwaves, who controlled the sounds that you heard because the call to prayer and the bells had come to represent the ascendance of one or another faith.

♪♪ -In total, Al-Mansur led 57 successful campaigns against the Christian north, but the string of victories soon came back to haunt him.

-The consequences are that the kings of Galicia and León and Castile and Navarra and Catalonia, who could never get on, after 25 years of this guy roaring into their kingdoms and taking their people for ransom and pillaging their wealth, they begin to collaborate.

♪♪ -To fight this ever-stronger Christian adversary, Al-Mansur recruited more Berber mercenaries, but the Berbers were more conservative than most Muslim Córdobans, and they were troubled by the growing materialism all around them.

-There is a sense of splendor and wealth that begins to create political opposition within the Islamic community that had not existed before.

♪♪ -When Al-Mansur died, Córdoba was further rocked by another succession crisis.

He had managed to maintain his charade of legitimacy despite his lack of Umayyad blood, but when his son tried to claim the title of caliph, the citizens of Córdoba rebelled.

[ Indistinct shouting ] In 1010, as chaos enveloped Córdoba, Berber mercenaries descended on the palatial Medina Azahara, the symbol of everything they felt had gone wrong in al-Andalus.

♪♪ -You can imagine what those marauders would've seen when they entered the palace.

They would've been absolutely stupefied by the luxury that they encountered there, every surface covered with carved stucco, every floor paved in beautiful, opalescent marble.

It must have been a treasure house, and they sacked it.

♪♪ -When the destruction was complete, the Umayyad dynasty was finished and, with it, the era of Córdoba's greatness.

With the dawn of the 11th century and the end of the Umayyad reign, al-Andalus was on the cusp of a new era.

-The 11th century is this wonderful, paradoxical period where you have this virtually catastrophic political situation in that the caliphate has broken up, and it's been replaced by a series of city-states, which are called taifas, and they're all fighting amongst themselves plus the Christian kingdoms in the north, but in the middle of this political chaos, you have this sudden flourishing of culture.

-It begins indeed in many ways the most remarkable time in the Muslim presence in Iberia.

These independent cities competed with each other, and in that competition, they produced a great upswell of commercial activity and even greater Convivencia.

[ Indistinct talking ] This is the time when the pluralism that is supposed to distinguish this experiment in al-Andalus really takes hold.

♪♪ -Instead of having one central court, there were now a whole variety of different city-states that were in competition.

These different courts competed for singers and performers and poets and writers.

-It's almost like Athens when, in its darkest days in the Peloponnesian War, it produced Sophocles and Aristophanes.

Out of political turmoil frequently comes extraordinary literary and artistic productions, and the same is true here with the taifas.

♪♪ -One of the art forms to reach new heights under the taifa kingdoms was Andalusian music.

♪♪ -The most characteristic form of Andalusian music, the muwashshah, really begins to spread and become popular in the 11th century.

♪♪ -The muwashshah is a form of music that's still played today because the melodies have been passed down from generation to generation.

♪♪ -The songs have a very simple, powerful structure, and that means when you listen to a song that you can really rather quickly pick up the melody.

♪♪ A typical scene would be set at a garden where the voice within the lyric is talking about the distance between him and his beloved.

-[ Singing in Arabic ] ♪♪ -The lover often describes how he has grown thin or grown pale because he's no longer eating because he has received no signal that his love has returned.

These are not happy love songs.

These are unrequited love songs.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The muwashshah was sung in Classical Arabic while a related form, called the zajal, was sung in Andalusi Arabic, which was the vernacular language of the day.

-The vernacular is what people speak as opposed to what people write.

I think Mark Twain is one of the great examples of a writer that stood out in his own moment because he attempted to give a written version of what would've been the Southern black vernacular.

-This kind of music was popular not only in al-Andalus, but also in southern France, where the troubadours were writing their lyrics not in Latin, but in Occitan, the local spoken language.

-[ Singing in Occitan ] -In both traditions, the Arabic and the troubadour poetry, there is a sort of wild frenzy of writing complicated, complex rhyme schemes.

It's very striking, the number of structural elements, the number of themes, the number of motifs that the two traditions share.

-Despite these common elements, no one is really sure how the two traditions came to be so similar.

-One of the problems historically has always been that people imagined that these were two very separate worlds, that you had the high courtly world of southern France, and then you had this somehow very distant and utterly removed world of Islamic Spain.

This division is almost totally illusory.

These were worlds that interpenetrated each other.

Things like musical instruments as well as the music played on musical instruments travel very easily.

There's no language barriers, nor is there much for song, which is something that you can appreciate if you pay close attention to the ways in which people who speak no English whatsoever can sing Beatles songs.

♪♪ -As music flourished, so did other arts.

Some of medieval Spain's most important thinkers and writers lived during the 11th century.

-The most famous of these figures in the Arabic-speaking world is Ibn Hazm, who's extraordinarily prolific man and wrote hundreds and hundreds of books and was a ferocious polemicist.

His counterpart with whom in fact he had a great polemical relationship is Samuel the Nagid.

-These two great intellectuals fled Córdoba after the fall of the caliphate.

-If you think of two figures that emerged from the collapse of Córdoba, Ibn Hazm, a Muslim on the one hand, and Samuel ibn Naghrillah, a Jew on the other, both are struggling to make careers in the wreckage.

-They shared much in common, but the course of their lives could not have been more different.

Ibn Hazm was born in 994 into a wealthy and influential Córdoban family.

The son of a powerful government official, he expected to follow in his father's footsteps, but the collapse of Córdoba derailed his plans.

-In his early years, he was deposed from office and imprisoned and eventually retired from public life at a relatively young age to devote himself to scholarship and to a kind of an intellectual rabble-rousing against all that he thought had gone wrong with Islam in al-Andalus.

-"Prosperity has been changed into a sterile desert, society into frightful loneliness, beauty into rubble-strewn plains, tranquility into terrifying difficulties."

-Well, Ibn Hazm in exile is a cranky roaming philosopher-writer.

He wrote very bitterly and harshly against his enemies of every sort, and yet he's remembered for one book, which is a book about love, and it's this wonderful book that is called "The Neck-Ring of the Dove," or "The Dove's Neck-Ring."

-"I've a sickness doctors can't cure inextricably pulling me to the well of my destruction, consented to be a sacrifice killed for her love, eager like the drunk gulping wine mixed with poison.

Shameless were those my nights, yet my soul love them beyond all passion."

-It's a book about the different ways in which people fall in love and how and where and when and why, but on the other hand, it's also a book about loss.

It's got embedded within it some of his pretty explicit meditations about the tragedy of the loss of first love, of Córdoba.

It's just filled with a certain kind of nostalgia.

-"Those rooms full of epigraphy, those adorned boudoirs that used to shine like the sun and which, with the sole contemplation of their beauty, sadness fled.

Now they are like the open jaws of savage beasts that announce the decline that is this world."

♪♪ -He writes of how heartbreaking it is to see the remains of what was once, you know, a beautiful palace or a beautiful villa, and all of it is just flattened, so he has this sense that Córdoba is just a kind of ghost of its former self.

You get the sense of a beautiful city that's just...gone.

-"My eyes wept.

My heart was pained.

My bosom was saddened by these stones.

My soul has risen in anguish."

♪♪ -He never got over the loss of the Umayyad hegemony, and he wandered all over, never found another home, never reconciled himself to his own exile, I think, in many ways, grew increasingly bitter.

He's an example of the ways in which even though there was this great poetic flourishing that is the 11th century that, for the Muslims, this is a bad period.

♪♪ That loss of that caliphate and that unity and that political stability is never recouped.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Ibn Hazm's counterpart in exile, a Jew named Samuel the Nagid, followed a very different path.

After the fall of Córdoba, he fled to the Mediterranean port city of Málaga.

The story of his rise has been passed down through generations.

-Samuel the Nagid was a very brilliant intellect and an extraordinary Arabic stylist working in a spice shop in Málaga.

According to this tale, his fame in this spice shop extended beyond his selling of spices.

-The maidservant of the scribe of the king was sent to that shop to buy spices, and when she saw how eloquent his computation and writing was, she conveyed that information to her boss, who then conveyed that information up the line, and he became a person of interest in the positive sense.

-Word of Samuel's talents reached the king of Granada, and he was invited into the royal entourage.

Granada was one of the taifa kingdoms, the small city-states that had emerged in the wake of the collapsed caliphate.

♪♪ The political, economic and cultural competition among these taifas was intense.

-The taifa king of Granada found himself in the difficult position of having many rival Muslim factions, none of whom he could really trust to administer his kingdom or to delegate power to, so he struck upon the solution of appointing a Jewish administrator and giving this Jewish administrator much more power than previous Jewish administrators had tended to have.

-Samuel the Nagid quickly rose to the position of vizier of Granada, second in power only to the king.

-Now this is truly extraordinary.

According to Islamic law, non-Muslims are forbidden from holding executive office over Muslims, but here you have the Nagid exercising executive power over Muslims in Granada.

♪♪ -Indeed, one of Samuel's most famous poems asserted that he was the general of a Muslim army.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -"My friend for me in my straits, the rock rose up, therefore, I offer praises, my poem to the Lord.

He recognized fear in my heart and erased it, so my song is sung to the healer.

He ravaged my enemies with pain, easing my own.

Someone objected, 'Who are you to pay homage?'

'I am,' I answered, 'The David of my age.'"

-Samuel's poetry marked an extraordinary innovation.

-What he does is, he takes the Arabic meter and Arabic rhyme, and he puts it into Hebrew and takes the language of the synagogue out of the synagogue, into the salon and into the vineyard and into the garden.

-So beginning with Samuel, you really have this golden age of the new Hebrew poetry.

-"Gazing through the night and its stars or the grass and its bugs, I know in my heart these swarms are the craft of surpassing wisdom.

Think.

The skies resemble a tent stretched taut by loops and hooks and the moon with its stars a shepherdess on a meadow grazing like beasts in their ample stalls fleeing our terror of death, like a dove, its hawk in flight, though we'll lie in the end like a plate hammered into dust and shards."

-Samuel died of natural causes in 1056.

The extraordinary thing about Samuel the Nagid -- truly unprecedented in Jewish history -- is that he transferred power to his son, and his son, Yusef, took over his office as the prime minister of Granada.

-Joseph had all the talents of his father except one.

Joseph lacked the humility of his father.

-That shortcoming was about to have terrible consequences.

-When one is a vizier of a kingdom, you have to have a pretty strong ego, so it's not surprising that someone like Shmuel HaNagid would write a poem in which he would say, "I'm the David of my generation."

He might write that in poetry, but he would be much more humble when addressing a Muslim of his class or status or certainly the royal family.

That might not be the case with his son.

-Joseph lacked the political suavité of his father because he was -- this word is often used -- arrogant.

-There was great resentment of the prominence of the Jewish community on the part of the lower classes, but not exclusively only there.

-The very fact of Jewish success created new discourses, new ways of criticizing Jewish power.

-In any event, there was a major uprising, and there was a massacre in which Joseph was killed, and the Jewish community was really slaughtered.

[ Horse neighs ] [ Swords clang ] This was 1066, and it marks the first case of real serious Muslim violence against Jews as Jews in medieval Spain.

[ Rain falling ] -We have uprisings and revolts and assassinations in the history of al-Andalus all the time, most of which have nothing whatsoever to do with the Jews.

So in a certain sense, Joseph was the wrong person in office at the wrong time, and his community was an easy target.

But from a more narrow perspective of Jewish history, it reacquaints one with the precariousness of Jewish life as a small minority.

♪♪ -The most important explanation of this is, it's kind of a release valve.

It's part of this view that medieval Spain works in these contradictions by having these little periodic explosions, and it's also true that even though you have this massacre of the Jews towards the end of the 11th century, that the Jews of that period still understand this to be a good moment.

That attitude that Hosdi first articulates in the middle of the 10th century that, you know, Córdoba al-Andalus is the center of the universe.

This is the best place Jews or anybody else has ever lived in, etc.

etc., is still held onto.

You'd rather be a Jew in an Islamic universe certainly than you ever would in the Christian north.

♪♪ -In the late 11th century, the Christian kingdoms in the north were growing in power.

They turn their attention to Toledo, one of the most prominent Muslim city-states.

In 1085, Alfonso VI, the Christian ruler of Leon Castile, brought Toledo under his control.

-It's not just any old city.

It is also, and heavily symbolic for the Christians, is the old Visigothic capital.

It's like getting the capital back.

This is a great turning point in the history of medieval Spain because it's the first large Islamic city-state taken by the ascendant Christian kingdoms.

-And Alfonso accomplished this momentous power shift without spilling any blood.

Toledo's Muslim leader, weakened by years of conflict with rival taifas, gave Alfonso the keys to the city in exchange for a safe escape.

The cultural richness of Toledo amazed the arriving Castilians.

-These Castilians come out of a rugged, relatively primitive universe, relatively mono-cultural, and now they walk into Toledo, and it's a city filled with other languages, other religions, other kinds of Christians.

-There was no city like Toledo in the north of Spain, no cosmopolitan city teeming with goods from around the world, with all this diversity of knowledge and learning.

So coming into this city and possessing it was an extraordinary cultural change.

-Alfonso VI called himself the Emperor of All the Spains.

-So that means that Alfonso respects the status quo he finds.

There are guarantees of freedom of worship in the same way that the Muslims had done.

Really, what has changed is the guy who occupies Toledo rather than the culture itself.

-But Muslims in the taifa kingdoms surrounding Toledo saw Alfonso's seizure of power there as a direct threat.

-The conquest of Toledo by Alfonso VI worried the leaders of the other taifas because it did change the paradigm.

Very often, you might lose a military battle and now you would have to pay tribute to a different overlord, but you always maintained your own small kingdom and authority within it to some extent.

The conquest of Toledo really changed the balance and seemed a much more drastic move that threatened their political autonomy.

-With Toledo in hand, Alfonso's army stood poised to attack the great taifa of Seville.

Al-Mu'tamid, the King of Seville, contemplated his options.

-There's this Alfonso juggernaut.

So Al-Mu'tamid, as the most powerful of the taifa kings and as the head of Seville, appeals against some of their better judgment, perhaps, to the Almoravids, the Muslim group that is in power across the streets of Gibraltar in Morocco.

-Fierce warriors, the Almoravids had already conquered much of North Africa.

-The Almoravids had a particular puritanical reforming brand of Islam.

It had emerged initially as a religious movement that grew in political power.

They saw the Andaluses as immoral Muslims, and they imagined that their military and political weakness was partly due to their having lost the true dictates of Islam and growing lax in their practice of it.

Al-Mu'tamid's son warned his father that the Almoravids were risky allies, but the king felt he had no choice.

-I have no desire to be branded by my descendants as the man who delivered al-Andalus as prey to the infidels, and for my part, I would rather be a camel driver in Africa then a swine heard in Castile.

-Soon after the Almoravids arrived on Andalusian soil, they defeated Alfonso's army in a battle so savage it was named al-Zallaqa, or slippery ground, for the tremendous amount of blood shed that day.

-The Almoravids do, in that sense, save Seville for the moment, but they also understand, having been there, that this is a place that's ripe for the picking.

-A few years after their successful battle against Alfonso VI, the Almoravids come across again, this time uninvited.

-Now not to help Al-Mu'tamid or the taifas, but to take them over.

Al-Mu'tamid appeals.

Who does he appeal to to help him out by the swine heard himself, Alfonso, and Alfonso, in fact, which is even more interesting, heads out to go and help Al-Mu'tamid to defend him against this predatory raid now of the Almoravids, but too little too late, and not only is Seville and the rest of what remained of al-Andalus taken as the colony now of the Almoravids, but poor Al-Mu'tamid is taken prisoner and eventually sent to Morocco to rot and die in a jail there.

-The Almoravid Empire would help to forestall for centuries the ultimate Christian conquest of Spain.

But under Almoravid influence, the culture of al-Andalus was beginning to change.

-The Almoravids brought with them the more rigorous, religiously austere and legalistically serious culture, and this is the kind of culture that they imposed on al-Andalus.

-The Almoravids regarded the state of Spanish Islam as deplorable, as corrupt, as a softened and as altogether too much wedded to the notion of Convivencia.

Convivencia was a dirty word.

In practical terms, it meant something of an end to the free movement across religious boundaries, participation in a common high-culture of music and art, things that made Andalusia distinctive as a Muslim society.

-With the Almoravid rulers controlling the south of Spain, many Jews, Christians and even other Muslims fled those territories for the diversity and religious tolerance still found in Toledo to the north.

But the unique openness of religious life in Toledo would soon be threatened as well, not by Muslims, but by a puritanical current within Christian Europe itself.

-There was no embedding within Christianity of any notion of what you did with minority communities.

There was no expectation that a Christian state should or could have these minority populations, except in Spain.

The rest of Christendom doesn't do this.

People say, "Are you kidding me?

You've got, you know, the Jews live here, the Muslims... What is this?"

I mean, many of them are in fact fascinated by this, but it is an oddity within the Christian world.

In the 11th century, this oddity came under attack by conservative reformers within the church hierarchy.

The reformers targeted the most Mozarabs, Andalusian Christians who had adopted Arab language and culture in the 7th century but had remained true to their own faith for over 400 years.

-Pope Gregory VII, the great reformist Pope, stood for Christian orthodoxy of a very severe type and regarded the Mozarabs not as heroic Christians who had held out under enemy occupation for 400 years, but as heretics.

-The Mozarabs had their own distinctive religious and liturgical culture that they were eager to maintain.

-The liturgy was called the Mozarabic Rite, and it is performed to this day in a chapel in the Cathedral of Toledo, but in the 11th century, traditionalists in the church put pressure on Alfonso VI to stop the Mozarabs' practices and force them to conform to the standardized Roman Rite.

-This didn't go over well with the Christian community.

They had a distinctive identity and a distinctive culture that they were eager to preserve, so they resisted attempts to change the way that they prayed.

-This conflict within the Christian community posed a problem for Alfonso VI, who was beholden to the Pope in Rome.

According to lore, Alfonso VI decided to resolve the dispute by subjecting both the Mozarabic and the Roman Rite to what was called The Ordeal.

-During the Middle Ages, very often trial by combat or trial by fire was a way to resolve the truth of a situation.

Which Latin Mass was the correct or true one?

And they subjected them to the fire and decided whichever one emerges unscathed will be the true one.

-The story that was told was that the Roman Rite burned up immediately.

The Mozarabic Rite emerged unscathed.

-This is a fanciful story about the trial by fire, but what it reflects is actually the strength of local resistance.

The consensus of the community was so strong that the Mozarabic Rite had actually passed through this trial, that it was impossible for the new political and ecclesiastical authorities to overcome popular loyalty to that religious tradition.

-The history of Christianity is not one of some uniform thing from the beginning.

On the contrary, it's a series of both regional and philosophical quarrels within the community itself.

What is interesting about medieval Spain is that, because of the peculiar historical conditions, there is a pragmatic challenge to the Roman version, if you will, of what Christianity is.

For me, this is what makes it important as a historical period.

You use it to shatter these myths of monolithic understanding of what that faith is all about.

-As the 12th century dawned in Toledo, the city's persistent intellectual richness helped fuel profound changes in the rest of Europe.

-In the 12th century, there is this revival of learning in certain centers in France and in England, but this revival of learning is really a revival of Roman learning.

What these people lack is access to Greek learning.

-After the fall of the Roman Empire, most of the scientific and philosophical works of Ancient Greece were unknown in Europe, but these works could still be found in the libraries of Toledo, which contained ancient texts that had been translated into Arabic centuries earlier.

-In 9th century Baghdad, a school of translation was established to translate into Arabic all of the great works of the legacy of Ancient Greece, especially, of a medical, scientific and philosophical nature, and these textual treasures were copied and transmitted all throughout the Islamic world, including North Africa, and eventually made there way to al-Andalus.

-These guys from London or Paris, at a certain point, it comes to their attention that there's these libraries there where people are reading Aristotle, but you have to know Arabic to be able to read it.

-So a demand arose for Greek works in a language that Europeans could read, a demand that was met in many cases by Jews who had fled the Almoravids in the south.

-The way the translations seemed to have worked was it was done orally by and large.

Somebody translated orally into a middle language, either Castilian or Hebrew, and then a second person would translate from Hebrew or Castilian into Latin.

-All of these efforts of translation and production and dissemination in al-Andalus and in Toledo produced what some historians call a 12th century Renaissance in Spain, and it is from there that the intellectual legacy of Ancient Greece and Rome was transferred from Islam into Christendom.

-Europeans were particularly eager to become reacquainted with Aristotle.

In the 12th century, one of their sources were the writings of Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher and scholar.

They also read commentaries by Maimonides' contemporary from Córdoba, Ibn Rushd, a Muslim intellectual and legal scholar who became known in the West as Averroes.

-Everybody needs a commentary on Aristotle because it's not exactly pellucid, right?

It's complicated stuff, and Averroes seemed to have understood it in a particularly trenchant fashion.

-People didn't approach philosophy by saying, "I want to find out what Aristotle, the great ancient master, had to say."

What they said was, "I want to understand Aristotle," and the best way to understand him is to follow in authoritative commentaries, where they have explained and analyzed and arrived at the true understanding or interpretation of Aristotle's philosophy, and so Averroes, far from having a kind of secondary status as merely a commentator, was actually an authoritative guide to understanding what they were after.

-Averroes tried to reconcile the apparent discrepancy between logic and belief, philosophy and revelation.

-I think there was an understanding that philosophy really contradicted revelation, and that's what Averroes was trying to explain to himself how this can be, how philosophy can say one thing and that revelation can say another.

-He wanted to harmonize these two and ended up absolutely coming down on the side of the canons of reason.

This was never the orthodox position among Muslim theologians, and for that reason, Ibn Rushd fell out of favor and really isn't studied very often in the Muslim world.

-In the Christian world, however, his fame grew.

He heavily influenced the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the philosophy and Christian theologian who famously argued that faith and reason are complimentary.

By the time of the Renaissance, Averroes stature was so great that Raphael included him in his Vatican fresco, "The School of Athens."

-Very often when we think of the translation movement, we think that Arabic culture and the Arabic language preserved the Greek traditions of philosophy and science that then were recovered by Latin Europe in the 12th century.

But this is, I think, a real misperception of the situation.

Arabic, as a language, had among medieval Latin scholars a great deal of prestige and status because it was identified as a philosophical and scholarly language in its own right, and so we can look at the Arab period and Arab scholars as continuing a tradition rather than just preserving it.

-As the decades past, Toledo grew as a magnet for scholars, but its importance as a center of translation also took on a very different dimension.

-The translation movement is always cited as an example of Convivencia, of how the two sides sort of reconciled.

But there's more to the translation movement.

There is, for example, Peter the Venerable.

-In 1142, Peter the Venerable, the great abbot of the most powerful and important monastery in Latin Europe, Cluny, made a trip to Spain and visited Toledo, and while there, he conceived of the idea that there needed to be some answer to Saracens, as the Muslims were known, that seemed to him that they were going unchallenged.

Who was speaking up to challenge these grave errors that he saw?

-Up to this point, not only has no one responded to this heresy, which, more than any other, has led to the eternal damnation of the bodies and souls of the great part of the human race, but no one has taken the least pains to research or study what this pestilential heresy is or whence it has come.

-He thought that the first step towards providing an authoritative, polemical refutation of Islam was the acquiring of genuine knowledge about Islam.

-Peter eventually finds this man named Robert of Ketton, clearly an Englishman, and Robert was actually a great scholar of mathematics, and he knew Arabic because, as many of these scholars did, he had to learn just enough to be able to read the mathematical texts that he wanted to be able to read.

Peter was apparently able to, in effect, bribe Robert to put aside the work that he was really interested in so that Robert would take charge of the project, the very difficult project, it must be said, of translating the Koran into Latin.

-This is part of the kind of interest in new forms of knowledge, but it is also a way in which you have access to a text so you can engage it polemically, that is to say, against it.

-Now the Christians began to have ammunition for polemics.

They knew something about the life of Muhammad and could start attacking his polygamy and his other practices that they found objectionable.

This is not exactly Convivencia.

Peter the Venerable of Cluny is just the beginning of this increasingly aggressive view on the part of Christianity that the Muslims could be had.

The Christian princes of the north began to think, "We can win this," while at the same time, the Roman church was thinking exactly the same thing.

-The Church had launched a crusade, or Holy War, in Jerusalem at the end of the 11th century and made it clear that it considered the Iberian conflicts to be religious crusades as well.

-The Church wants to create this vision of a cosmos in which it's either Christianity or nothing.

The Christians, of especially Rome, would like to see a polarized battle which becomes a kind of emblem of a battle of good against evil, of Christianity against Islam, which is not at all how things have been up until now.

But with the coming of the Almoravids from North Africa, then there became the possibility to imagine black and white, right and wrong, Muslim/Christian.

-Despite these festering political and religious conflicts, in Toledo, cultural life continued to flourish, now under the reign of Alfonso X, known as Alfonso the Wise.

-Alfonso's intellectual activity and his range of activity caused him to be referred to as the wonder of the world.

-There was a famous story told of him in a later chronicle, that Alfonso had claimed if he had been present at the creation of the world, things would have been done better.

-Alfonso X created an enormous corpus of new literature in Spain.

One of his great productions was known as the "Cantigas de Santa Maria," the "Songs of Saint Mary," and it's an incredibly illuminated manuscript of songs dedicated to the Virgin Mary that are illustrated with scenes of 13th-century Iberia.

What it does is essentially show us a snapshot of many aspects of life in the 13th century that we otherwise might not have access to.

-The scenes of daily life include illustrations of Christians, Muslims and Jews working together.

-These scenes are amazing, of course, because they explicitly show Muslim and Jewish scribes sitting together with a Christian scribe and translating something, that translation movement of Toledo.

-The "Cantigas de Santa Maria" depict a Spain of religious and cultural diversity, a continuation of Convivencia now under Christian rule, but the tide of religious intolerance was gaining strength on the Iberian Peninsula.

-There can be a coincidence between the sort of Convivencia you find in the Toledo translations and extremely sanguinary dealings with not just Muslim kings but with Christian kings too.

A steady gaze at that period would not principally describe it as well as Convivencia.

If this was Convivencia, let me have something else.

It was too dangerous.

-Even in religiously diverse Toledo, the battle against Islam found a strong ally, the Archbishop Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada.

As archbishop, Jimenez de Rada wrote a history of Spain.

It was a history that would, for centuries, shape the way Spanish Christians viewed their past.

-Rodrigo is responsible for the narrative of the Reconquista, the Reconquest, that is still very powerful in Spain today.

He is the man who is responsible, in large part, for later understandings of this period as simply the time of great conflict between Christians and Muslims.

-In his retelling, the initial Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula back in 711 was swift and thorough.

The Muslims won their battles decisively, but there was one exception, a place where the Christians resisted with astounding courage.

In the valley of Covadanga, in the mountains of Asturias, a fearless Christian king named Pelayo held off a Muslim army thousands of times larger than his own.

-According to the story, Pelayo, the one who turns back the tide, preserves that enclave of Spanish Christianity in the north and sets in train this whole myth of the survival of the true Spain, that this wave of Islam comes over Spain, but there's one little island that is preserved in the north, which is the real thing, the authentic Spain.

-He casts all this history as having been from the outset one of staunch ideological Christian resistance to the Muslims.

They landed in 711, and from 712 until 1492, this was our great mission.

This is utter nonsense from almost every single perspective, but we should be alerted to the implausibility of this by the duration of time that is involved.

-Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada was more than an archbishop and chronicler of Spanish history.

He was also a crusader.

He saw that, with the help of the Pope in Rome, Christian armies stood a chance of ejecting Islamic rule from the peninsula once and for all.

-He wrote this incredible letter to the people of Spain, telling them that they should go seek their death against these Muslims who are coming from abroad, because if they didn't, they would be destroyed by this scourge of Muslims.

-in 1212, Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada got his wish when a coalition of Christian armies from Aragon, Navarre, Castile and France met an army of Berber Muslims known as Almohads on the fields of Las Navas de Tolosa.

-Catholics and Muslims fight as Catholics and Muslims, not as warriors, some of whom happen to be this or that, and so this great Catholic army meets the Almohad army at Las Navas de Tolosa and defeats it.

-This was a very significant victory.

It was a significant victory because it was very clear that from now onwards, the Christians were on top.

[ Bell tolling ] -Nine years after the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada came to the Church of San Roman in Toledo to reconsecrate it as a holy place for Castilian Christians.

-This old church had been a Visigothic church, but in addition to the traditional Christian images, the church is covered with iconography and inscriptions that are clearly in conversation with Islamic architecture.

Surrounding many of these scenes are inscriptions in Arabic, prosperity and good fortune, repeated again and again and again and again.

The Arabic writing was done by Christians.

The church was reconsecrated with the Arabic writing.

-Some of this seems so flagrantly contradictory to us because we've fallen into the trap of believing that because it's Arabic, it must be Muslim, and thus it's foreign to Christians whereas, you know, by the beginning of the 13th century, stuff that's Arabic is part of the definition of being a Castilian Christian.

-Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, the churchman and warrior who championed the Spanish Crusade at Las Navas de Tolosa, felt right at home among these Arabic inscriptions.

♪♪ -He is, himself, a scholar of Arabic, and marvelously, when his body is exhumed, it's discovered, which actually shouldn't surprise us at all, that he's buried in these wonderful gowns that have hems that have Arabic writing.

Even at this moment of most sort of severe cultural and ideologically driven Christian sentiment against Muslims, to be a high-end Christian statesman is to be able to wear Arabic gowns.

-The Christian victory at Las Navas de Tolosa was the first of many over the next 60 years in which one Muslim city after another, including Córdoba, fell to Christian rule under King Ferdinand III of Castile.

But one Muslim city-state survived, Granada, which was able to maintain its independence because Muhammad ibn Nasr, the founder of the Nasr Dynasty, had helped King Ferdinand conquer the rival Muslim city of Seville.

-We often forget, why is it set up that way?

Well, it's set up as the last Muslim kingdom by the Castilian kings, and which will last 250 years.

♪♪ -Granada is incredibly prosperous because they have access to the trade with North Africa, and the Port of Malaga, which is the port of Granada, it's an incredibly important port with mercantile connections to the entire Mediterranean.

So they pay very heavy tribute to the Castilian kings.

As long as they pay, they are exempted from a final attack.

-They're embattled in one way or another from the beginning, and yet -- and yet --- even they, in this embattled, subservient sometimes cornered, literally, position, exert extraordinary cultural influence because at some turn, the Nasrids, who begin to see the building of the great architectural monument that is the Alhambra, and it is the Alhambra and all the style that goes with that that will set the style for the Castilian kings for generations.

♪♪ -A century after Muhammad ibn Nasr helped Ferdinand conquer Seville, two young princes would rise to leadership.

Sixteen-year-old Muhammed V assumed power in Granada just 4 years after 16-year-old Pedro I, also known as Peter the Cruel, was crowned king of Castile in Seville.

-Peter was both, you know, aesthetically impeccable but also personally irascible and a madman and had all sorts of people executed at different points in time, but even though he was a homicidal maniac, Peter was also the last of the Castilian kings who still views Castilian identity as deeply entwined with Jewish communities and learning and Jewishness, if you will, as well as with Arabic culture.

-In the mid-14th century, political intrigue forced Muhammed V to flee the Alhambra.

The young leader sought asylum in Seville at the Alcazar, the palatial home of his friend, Pedro I.

Their time together there had a profound influence on its architecture.

-When Muhammad comes, he brings a taste that Pedro finds very interesting, and he and Pedro walk around, you know, looking at what could happen in the palace that belongs to Pedro, talking about architecture, talking about ideas, some of which came from the Alhambra.

In the Court of the Maidens, for example, you see an open courtyard.

Surrounding it is an arcade... the presence of water, the presence of gardens, the use of highly colored, really quite beautiful ceramic tile, and the delicate columns.

I think Muhammad helps Pedro to build that courtyard because the courtyard looks very Islamic.

♪♪ At some point, Muhammad is able to return home, packs his bags.

"Thank you.

I've had a very nice time at the Alcazar."

He goes back to the Alhambra, but he's still building.

I mean, he's an architect.

He loves to build, and so he now undertakes his own building intervention, and that is the Court of the Lions.

The Court of the Lions, therefore, is, if anything, a copy of the Christian Alcazar.

We need to think of them as being in a conversation, and in a conversation when one person speaks, the other one answers, and then the first one answers back, and that is exactly what is happening between these two buildings.

It's a kind of conversation of architecture in which palace speaks to palace, and they respond to each other.

♪♪ -But as that conversation continued, the Alhambra increasingly became an expression of Muhammad's extravagant architectural tastes, which reflected his beliefs about the dominion over which he ruled.

-The Alhambra is this incredibly nostalgic monument that musters 700 years of Islamic cultural hegemony on the Iberian peninsula to make a sort of last defiant statement to a world from which the Nasrids are waning and Islam is waning.

♪♪ A large number of the inscriptions on the building are poetry expressing the immutability of the power of the sultan.

The poems seem to be answering an unvoiced threat, which is, of course, the threat of a place which will soon be without power very soon in history.

♪♪ -I think it's important to understand that it is a shared culture.

It's not so much that you have this separate Castilian culture that somehow borrows this stuff.

All of our old terminology is wrong, but rather that they have this deeply intertwined, shared culture.

It's that culture that you see most gloriously perhaps in the Alhambra, but that you also see in one of the great surviving synagogues of Spain, which is called the Transito, the synagogue built by Samuel ha-Levi, Peter's Jewish finance minister.

-Samuel stood at the end of a long line of powerful and influential Jewish advisors to Spanish rulers.

-Samuel has a sumptuous house in Toledo and built adjacent to that house a synagogue.

It's a private synagogue, but he opens it to the community.

He lets them in to pray, and that building shows the same kind of cultural complexity and openness to other cultural traditions that we see at the Alcazar of Seville.

It is, of course, a synagogue.

It is, of course, for Jewish prayer, but it has stucco work that is very similar to the kind of stucco work we see back in Seville, and it has not only Hebrew inscriptions, but it also has Arabic, and it has the coat of arms of Pedro of Castile.

-When Samuel ha-Levi builds this synagogue, he has a dedication plaque put up in which he dedicates it to his wonderful monarch who supported him in all things and who is extraordinarily wise.

When we look at that plaque, we see that the plaque is written in Hebrew, but we also see it inscribed with the arms of the king of Castile, the castle and the lion.

That's very important because it's showing us that this style, which looks incredibly Islamic to us, is the style that represents the king of Castile.

-But Peter paid a price for his close relationship to Samuel.

-One of the propaganda lines against Peter the Cruel was that he was a favorer of Jews, again, a theme that's used against every Christian king in Spain, that he's empowers Jews too much over Christians.

In fact, they even circulated stories that Peter the Cruel wasn't actually the son of his father, the king, but that he was a Jewish baby who had been smuggled into the cradle by the queen to cover up the fact that she was barren.

So the way in which you criticize a king you don't like is by calling him a Jew lover, and against Peter the Cruel, this was deployed at levels of intensity that we'd really hadn't seen before.

-Even Samuel became vulnerable.

After the synagogue was completed, Peter suspected him of embezzling the funds to build it and, in 1360, had him executed.

♪♪ A few years later, Peter himself was killed.

-Peter's bastard half-brother, whose name is Henry Enrique, murders him.

It is Henry who, in fact, cultivates and foments what will be these terrible massacres of Jews in 1391, and after that, nothing is ever the same again.

-Ah!

Ah!

-And soon came the events that marked the beginning of the end of Jewish life in Spain -- a series of massacres.

-They begin in Seville in 1391 where there's an attack on the Jewish community that first starts on Easter and then is frustrated and picks up again a few weeks later.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -As the rumor of that massacre spreads, the same is done in cities all over large parts of Spain, for example, in Valencia and Barcelona and Eudona, big centers of Jewish population.

♪♪ -Thousands of Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or be slaughtered.

-The factors that lead up to this are not clear, but a big part of everything that happens in the second half of the 14th century has to be understood in at least some general way as being a byproduct of the devastation of the Black Death, the plague of these years.

♪♪ -The coming of the Black Death was something new to Europe, a kind of scourge of God, which needed explanation and precipitated a massive crisis, of course.

When a third of the population dies, you need an explanation, and you tend to think if you're thinking in Christian terms, in messianic terms, in apocalyptic terms, and the apocalypse is meant to bring with it certain kinds of events, including the massacre and mass conversion of the remaining Jews in the world.

So in some ways, 1391 is an attempt to hasten or to participate in the apocalypse by forcing the conversion of the Jews.

-Though Jews would remain in Spain for another century, the golden age of Jewish participation in Spanish society was over.

♪♪ Like the Spanish Jews, Muslims were living on borrowed time.

Soon Granada, the independent and protected Nasrid kingdom, would be embattled.

[ Swords unsheathing ] -There is an increasingly sharp alignment of Spain as kind of the defender of Europe against Islam and an increasingly powerful ideology of the Christian kings as purifiers of Christian Spain from the dangers posed by Islam, by Judaism.

-The final push to rid Spain of non-Christians began in 1469 when the two most important kingdoms united against the Nasrids.

-What leads to the last act in this drama is really the coming together of the two primary kingdoms now of Spain of Castile and Aragon.

-It was a feat accomplished not by war, but by the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile.

-Through their marriage, you finally achieve this thing that had not been achieved before, which is a real unification of the Christian kingdoms.

-Ferdinand and Isabella launched a 10-year siege of Granada, ultimately forcing the Muslims to surrender and marking the end of Muslim rule in Iberia.

-So the Muslims became subjects of their Catholic majesties, a title given Ferdinand and Isabella by the Pope after their victory at Granada.

The Catholic majesties declared that the Muslims would be their protected subjects: Mudejars.

-The capitulation stipulates that the Muslims will be granted freedom of religion, freedom to wear their own clothes, in other words, continue to be culturally Muslims.

-But the Catholic monarchs chose not to offer the same protection to the Jews of Spain.

In 1492, just 3 months after conquering Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella issued the infamous Alhambra Decree which gave Jews 90 days to convert or leave Spain forever.

♪♪ -If they do not conform and comply with this command and should be found in our said kingdom and lordships and should in any manner live in them, they incur the penalty of death and the confiscation of all their possessions.

-Tens of thousands of Jews packed their belongings and left Spain in search of more welcoming shores.

The Mudejar Muslims remained, protected for the time being, but their troubles were not over.

-The powerful forces of intolerance were growing so strong that eventually the Mudejars' status was abrogated, which meant that the Muslim population had to do the same thing as the Jews were forced to do in 1492, that is to say, either convert or leave.

[ Hoofbeats ] -All the well-to-do Muslims or the majority of them fled.

♪♪ Those who remained converted to Christianity only nominally.

They retained the way in which they dressed, the way in which they ate, the manner in which they spoke.

They spoke Arabic.

They retained their identity.

-But there was real anxiety about the religious status of the Moriscos, as they were called, the forcibly converted former Muslims who had entered into Christianity.

Oddly, the Moriscos were under greater threat to their way of life, their culture and their practices after having converted to Christianity than they were as subjected Muslims.

Use of Arabic and the Arabic script, going to public bathhouses -- These kinds of things were invested with a kind of meaning that undermined their status as good Christians, but we might even say as good Spaniards.

-So Christianity finds itself faced with the fulfillment of its dream, and the fulfillment of its dream creates a vast anxiety.

-Having forced people to convert, they then doubted the sincerity of the conversions.

I mean, what else is new?

And then had to find some sort of mechanism to help themselves out of this dilemma, and the mechanism was, of course, the Inquisition.

♪♪ -Ferdinand and Isabella had first established the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1480 to protect the purity of the Christian faith.

But after Muslims and Jews were ordered to convert or leave, enforcement of Christian orthodoxy intensified.

The tribunal interrogated, tortured and killed thousands of Spaniard suspected of continuing to harbor allegiance to Judaism or Islam.

-The Spaniards are the last among the Christians of Europe to convert to the idea that Christians don't co-inhabit territories with Jews and Muslims and thus they become the most rabid enforcers of that notion.

-The idea of a purely Christian kingdom or a purely Muslim kingdom had always existed as an ideal for both of these religions.

What happens is that in Christian Spain, that dream became something of a reality, but the nature of the dream changed.

You might almost say it changed from a dream into a nightmare.

-Eight hundred years after Muslim armies first invaded Spain, the period of Convivencia drew to a painful, prolonged and bloody close, and ending so traumatic, it has obscured the more enduring story of medieval Spain, of a time and place where Muslims, Jews and Christians created a common culture that was unique, one whose legacy still endures today.

[Lyrics] [ Foreign ] Spain remains to this very day the product of the combination of these three cultures, and the people themselves are ethnically part of that mixture of people that forge a new kind of civilization and culture, ♪♪ ...one that still has a lot of remnants and visual presence of the past.

♪♪ The presence of the past in the present.

♪♪ -The mosque Abd al-Rahman built when he first came to al-Andalus is today known as the Cathedral of Córdoba, a place where two great faiths seem to collide, even as they coexist.

-What you see is essentially the appropriation of the sacred places of the defeated as a way of, in a sense, marking your victory.

Nowhere is this more obvious and more insulting and more horrid than in the construction of a Gothic cathedral right smack in the center of the Great Mosque of Córdoba.

-The Great Mosque started as a church.

It became a mosque.

It became a church again.

Now, its primary draw is that it is a former mosque, and everybody wants to come see the former mosque.

It's a monument that is so complex in its cultural and religious roots that it's hard to extricate one strand from the other.

-In medieval Spain, different people with different languages and different world views and different ways of life and different talents were somehow welcomed even with lots of problems and lots of tensions.

[ Indistinct talking ] -There were martyrdoms.

There were executions.

There were battles fought.

There were betrayals.

There were also alliances, and there were moments that were truly moments of Convivencia.

-What's important about the period we call Convivencia is that we see that every one of these moments contains both a kind of drive to coexistence... and a kind of drive to the fulfillment of ideals that we might call anti-coexistence -- messianic purification, expulsion, conquest.

-You have this culture created that could not have been created by any one of these three religious groups but that is very much a product of this co-mingling of Muslims and Christians and Jews... and it has different forms, different monuments, different poems, different languages at different points, but none of it exists if you disentangle it from the other communities.

Culture is powerful and often contradictory to political and ideological narratives.

It tells us a different story.

Sometimes it tells the more lasting and important and enduring story.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Learn more about this extraordinary period and discover resources for educational and community use at pbs.org.

"The Ornament of the World" is available on DVD.

The book is also available.

To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

This program is also available fo r download on iTunes.

♪♪