The Great Mosque of Cordoba extended and revised architectural review

When the Umayyad were supplanted by the Abbasids in 750 and the centre of Islam relocated from Damascus, Syria to Baghdad, Iraq, a Umayyad prince named Abed Al-Rahman I moved to Spain where Muslims were already established & founded a dynasty with Cordoba as its capital. The kingdom flourished, lasting for nearly 300 years (756-1031). In 929 a restored Umayyad caliphate was set up in Cordoba, in rivalry with the Abbasids in Baghdad: by any standard, Cordoba was the richest, most sophisticated city in Europe.

The Great Mosque of Cordoba's original construction under Abed Al-Rahman I - Part 1
The Great Mosque of Cordoba's original construction under Abed Al-Rahman I - Part 2
The first mosque extension under Abed Al-Rahman II
Building work on the Great Mosque of Cordoba by Abed AI-Rahman III
The extension under al-Hakam II
The last extension under Al-Mansor
The Great Mosque Of Cordoba's Pictures

The Great Mosque of Cordoba's original construction under Abed Al-Rahman I - Part 2

The mosque itself beguiles viewers with its solemnly austere, almost myste­rious impression of space and its numerous views through two-story arcades, making the space seem nearly weightless. The Spanish art historian, Manuel Gomez-Moreno, compared the two-story arcades of the Great Mosque of Cor­doba with the Roman aqueduct of Merida, whose entresol is also supported by brick arches, and therefore reveals distant similarities in construction. However, one is now more likely to find possible influences in mosques which have not fully survived. A good comparison is the Umayyad Great Mosque of Damascus (begun in 707), which also has a two-story arcade structure. There, though, unlike in the Cordoba mosque, the arcades are run parallel to the Qibla wall.

The lower arches reveal large, supporting round arches, resting on tall, capital-crowned columns. The upper arches are characterized by several small, shallow round arches, so arranged that one arcade division below matches’ two divisions above. Even if the positioning of the arches in the Umayyad Great Mosque of Damascus does not exactly match the Cordoba model, it is still incontestable that two-story arcades were a common feature of eastern Umayyad sacred architecture.

Christian Ewert cites early North African mosques to explain the arch arrangement. In the Amr Mosque of Fustat, (situated in pre­sent-day Cairo and dated 827), and in the Zaituna Mosque, Tunis (9th-cen­tury), the capital-crowned arcade columns are surmounted by inverted pyramid bases with shallow, cubiform blocks, on which the mosque's arches rest. These blocks distantly recall the pillars of the upper arches at the Great Mosque of Cor­doba, and are similarly supporting. We can thus suppose that they have adapted and extended systems first developed in North Africa. The combination of horseshoe and round arches in the Great Mosque of Cordoba is unusual, nev­ertheless. Horseshoe arches have precursors in local Visigothic buildings, but can also be found in pre-Islamic structures in the Middle East. However, com­bining horseshoe arches with alternating ashlars and brick in different colors must be considered a Cordoba invention, which in succeeding centuries remained a stylistic peculiarity of the Mezquita.

Though not the case originally, at the present time light determines the impression of space conveyed by the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Originally, the courtyard facade arcades were open, so that light from the mosque courtyard would fall into the prayer hall, bathing it in a warm glow that made the colored carpets on its floor shine radiantly. Because the floor was carpeted it did not seem strange that some taller columns - they were all reclaimed remnants of Roman and Visigothic buildings - had to be embedded more deeply in the floor. A striking feature is that only reddish columns appear in the center aisle, re­emphasizing that the central axis is oriented on the mihrab; while the side aisles have alternating black and red marble columns. The mosque's capitals warrant special attention. The original building mainly used Roman capitals of the Corinthian order. However, one also sees Visigothic capitals and even isolated pieces from the eastern Mediterranean. The Visigothic capitals differ from the Roman ones in terms of their flat relief work and a schematic, at times even geometric simplification of the vegetal decoration. The center aisle has the finest capitals, and these reused capitals further accentuate the central axis.

In 793 Hisham I, Abed aI-Rahman I's son, first had a minaret built. This supposedly stood against the mosque's north wall, but no archeological traces have survived to show this. Major rebuilding did not commence until the mid-9th century. The unique importance of the Great Mosque of Cordoba is not due solely to the fact that it was the city's main mosque, but also to the close connection between secular and spiritual power that made it the empire's religious and cul­tural center. Inside, people not only met to pray, but also discussed the religious and secular laws that were irrevocably determined here for the whole western Islamic world. Every ruler whose claim to rule originated from Abed aI-Rahman I, founder of the Spanish Umayyad dynasty, also gave the mosque he founded special respect. This might be shown in generous gifts - the building of a minaret, for example - or in constructing an extension. This also explains why over the centuries - almost to the end of the caliphate - work continued on the mosque.