THE ARAB CONQUEST 179valley in the ninth century, saw themselves as the descendants of a
Visigothic count Cassius, although their genealogy is not long enough
to stretch them back to the period of the Visigothic kingdom and the
name Cassius would there have been totally anachronistic. On both
scores an eighth-rather than seventh-century origin is indicated. In
general it is clear that in Al-Andalus social authority had many differ-
ent roots, and that in most respects Cordoba represented the excep-
tion and not the rule.
The capital has left many memories of itself in the pages of the
extant histories, but it suffered badly and many of its greatest features
were destroyed in the civil war of 1009-1010. With the final collapse
of the Umayyad Caliphate in 1031 its days of greatness were over and
for the remaining centuries of Muslim rule in the peninsula it was
eclipsed by Seville, which became the centre of government and re-
cipient of the rulers' patronage under the dynasty of the Almohads
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus Cordoba and the memory
of its departed glory came, as did Granada after 1492, to take on a
symbolic quality. It became the embodiment in literary representa-
tion of a paradise, lost because of the vices and shortsightedness of
the Muslims of Al-Andalus. As a consequence some of the physical
descriptions of the city may have been invested with a more than
objective reality, which it is unwise to take literally.
One of the fullest of these comes from the Book of Variegated Leaves
on the Ornamental Beauties of Andalus by Ibn Sa'id (c. 1230), which was
much quoted by Al-Maqqari. The breadth of the city was said to be
ten miles from east to west, although this includes the two completely
detached palace suburbs of Medina Azahara and Medina Azahira.
The royal palace inside the city was on the site of a building used by
the Romans and the Visigoths. (It may be under the present episco-
pal palace.) As well as the walled inner city, twenty-one, or according
to other writers twenty-eight, suburbs were created, which were not
fortified until the time of the civil war (c. 1010). The whole of the city
and its suburbs were supposedly lit by lanterns at night, and water was
provided through aqueducts and pipes to all parts for ornamental
and practical requirements. Steam baths certainly existed, one of which
has been excavated, although this is a far cry from the three hundred,
or by another account seven hundred, that literary sources mention.
From its final Umayyad phase an estimate of the number of its build-
ings by an unnamed 'trustworthy writer' is given as 200,077 for pri-
vate houses, 60,300 for the residences of nobility and 8,455 for shops.