The splendor of the Caliphate of Cordoba, celebrated in song and dreamt of by Andalusian poets, was not just the work of a generation (that of ‘Abd al-Rahman III) but the result of a highly complex historical process in which a number of factors came into play: a millennium-old urban trajectory, the strength of Islam in shaping the urban landscape and sociability, the Umayyad conception of power implemented by the first independent emir and transformed, under parameters taken from the Abbasid enemy, by ‘Abd al-Rahman II to later be «revolutionized» by the first caliph who, aware of the system’s limitations and pressed by the social-economic changes taking place in al-Andalus, by the weakening of the more theoretic than real figure of the Abbasid Caliphate and by the Christian pressure on borders and the Fatamid threat in north Africa, to strengthen his power through an ideological legitimization based on the caliphate dignity to overcome traditional Umayyad tools: military strength and the subsequent ability to collect taxes.
Cordoba, al-Andalus, Islamization, urban planning, architecture, archeology.