ENTER THE TURKS 119had some half a million inhabitants and boasted hundreds of bathhouses,
hospitals, schools, mosques, and other public buildings. The largest of
many libraries in Cordoba reputedly contained some five hundred thou-
sand volumes. Spain had other urban centers as well, cities of fifty thousand
or more at a time when the biggest towns in Christian Europe did not ex-
ceed twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Once-mighty Rome was merely a
village now, with a population smaller than Dayton, Ohio, a thin smatter-
ing of peasants and ruffians eking out a living among the ruins.
At first, therefore, the political split in Islam did not seem to imply any
loss of civilizational momentum. Andalusia traded heavily with the rest of
the civilized world. It sent timber, grains, metals, and other raw materials
into North Africa and across the Mediterranean to the Middle World, im-
porting from those regions handcrafted luxury goods, ceramics, furniture,
rich textiles, spices and the like.
Trade with the Christian countries to the north and east, by contrast,
amounted to a mere trickle-not so much because of any hostility be-
tween the regions, but because Christian Europeans had virtually nothing
to sell and no money with which to buy.
Muslims formed the majority in Andalusia, but many Christians and
Jews lived there as well. Umayyad Spain may have been at odds with the
Baghdad khalifate, but its rulers followed much the same social policies as
in all the Muslim conquests so far. Both Christian and Jewish communi-
ties had their own religious leaders and judicial systems and were free to
practice their own rituals and customs. If one of them got into a dispute
with a Muslim, the case was tried in a Muslim court by Islamic rules but
disputes among themselves were adjudicated by their own judges accord-
ing to their own rules.
Non-Muslims had to pay the poll tax but were exempt from the char-
ity tax. They were excluded from military service and the highest political
positions, but all other occupations and offices were open to them. Chris-
tians, Muslims, and Jews lived in fairly amicable harmony in this empire
with the caveat that Muslims wielded ultimate political power and proba-
bly radiated an attitude of superiority, stemming from certainty that their
culture and society represented the highest stage of civilization, much as
Americans and western Europeans now tend to do vis-a-vis people of third
world countries.