Who ruled Córdoba?

Córdoba lies on the Guadalquivir in southern Spain, at the foot of the Sierra Morena and at the head of the river's navigable course in antiquity, where a bridge carried the main road through the fertile valley of Andalusia. That position made it a provincial capital under Rome and, from the 8th to the 11th century, the capital of Muslim Spain. At its height under the Umayyad caliphs it was one of the largest and most cultured cities in Europe, and its Great Mosque, later converted into a cathedral, is the most famous monument of that age.

An Iberian town stood here before the Romans, who took control of the Guadalquivir valley after defeating Carthage in 206 BCE. In the 2nd century BCE the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus founded Corduba beside the native settlement, and it became the chief city of the province of Further Spain under the Roman Republic. During the civil war it took Pompey's side, and Julius Caesar sacked it in 45 BCE. Rebuilt with settlers from the army, Colonia Patricia became the capital of the province of Baetica. The philosopher Seneca and his nephew, the poet Lucan, were born here. In late antiquity the city passed to the Visigoths, whose king Leovigild took it in 572 after years of local resistance.

Muslim forces captured Córdoba in 711, and within a few years it was the seat of the governors of al-Andalus under the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus. When the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads in 750, a surviving prince, Abd al-Rahman I, fled west and made himself emir in Córdoba in 756. In 785 or 786 he began the Great Mosque, which his successors enlarged several times over the next two centuries. In 929 Abd al-Rahman III declared himself caliph, and he built a palace city, Madinat al-Zahra, in the hills west of town. Tenth-century Córdoba had markets, libraries, baths and paved streets, and was a meeting place for Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars.

The caliphate collapsed in civil war after 1009. Berber troops sacked Madinat al-Zahra and much of the city, the caliphate was abolished in 1031, and Córdoba became one of many small rival kingdoms. It then came under the North African Almoravids and, from the mid 12th century, the Almohad Caliphate. This troubled time still produced two of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages, both born in the city: the philosopher and judge Averroes in 1126 and the Jewish scholar Maimonides in 1138, whose family left when the Almohads persecuted non-Muslims.

King Ferdinand III of Castile took the city on 29 June 1236, one of the decisive gains of the Reconquista, and many of its Muslim inhabitants left. Under the Crown of Castile the Great Mosque was consecrated as a church, and in the 16th century a Renaissance cathedral was built in the middle of its forest of columns. The Catholic Monarchs used the city's Alcázar as a base for their long war against Granada in the 1480s. With power shifting to Seville and the Atlantic trade, the city declined into a quiet provincial capital for several centuries.

Industry and railways brought slow growth from the 19th century, and Nationalist forces held the city throughout the Spanish Civil War. UNESCO named the Mosque-Cathedral a World Heritage Site in 1984 and later extended the listing to the old town around it. Today Córdoba has about 325,000 inhabitants, making it the third city of Andalusia.