Córdoba

city · earth

The Umayyad capital of al-Andalus and, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the largest and most institutionally developed city in western Europe — with a court that recruited scholars and musicians from Baghdad and Kairouan and paid them at rates that made the journey worth making. It is the specific place where the Mediterranean corridor in this Journey can be dated rather than merely inferred. The musician Ziryāb arrived here in 822 to take service with the emir ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II, bringing with him a repertoire and a teaching method formed in the Abbasid court, and the school of performance that grew from that appointment is the beginning of the Andalusi tradition as a distinct thing. Córdoba is therefore the hinge between two musical worlds that European histories usually narrate separately: the instrument, the theory and the profession arrive here from the east, and the European lute departs from here — or at least from this region — for the north.