On 8 September 949, among the palaces and gardens of Madinat al-Zahra outside the city of Córdoba, a diplomatic conference was underway. The host was the caliph of alAndalus, Abd al-Rahman III, and his guests were representatives from the Christian emperor Constantine VII, who had just arrived from Constantinople.
Spain breaks free
Only two centuries earlier, the first Abd al-Rahman had fled for his life from Damascus, where the rest of his Umayyad Muslim family had been massacred by their rivals in Baghdad, the Abbasids. Now, in 949, the Muslims of Spain and the Byzantine Christians both had an enemy in the Abbasid caliph, and they hoped to secure an alliance that would quite literally reach from the edge of the known world in Spain, all the way to Constantinople, where Europe and Asia met.
Credit for arranging the conference went to the Jewish diplomat, physician, and scholar, Hasdai ibn
