To read of the Cordova of the Moors is like reading a chapter of Oriental romance. But the story is not legendary. This marvellous city, equal in grandeur to Baghdad, was a great beacon-light of culture for three hundred years. Its mosques, its schools, and its hospitals were famous throughout the world. Sages, poets, artists found here every scope and assistance for the development of their philosophy and their art. There were no ignorant natives, and no class living in penury and squalor. The Moors were almost perfect masters of the art of civilisation. They esteemed education; they taught tolerance; they inculcated a love of beauty in daily life, and lived cleanly, and on the whole, sanely. The life was jocund, but sober, for the Moors abstained from wine. "The City of Cities," "The Bride of Andalus," are the names bestowed on the beautiful city of Cordova by the Moorish writers of that age. In the twelfth century Abu Mohammed wrote of Cordova as "the Cupola of Islam, the convocation of scholars, the court of the sultans of the family of Omeyyah, and the residence of the most illustrious tribes of Yemen. Students from all parts of the world flocked thither at all times to learn the sciences of which Cordova was the most noble repository, and to derive knowledge from the mouths of the doctors and ulemas who flourished in its cultured life. Cordova was 'to Andalus what the head is to the body.'" The city once boasted of fifty thousand resplendent palaces, and a hundred thousand inferior houses. Its mosques numbered seven hundred, and the cleanly Moors built nine hundred public baths. The city stretched for ten miles along the banks of the Guadalquivir, flanked with walls, battlements, and towers, and approached by guarded gates. Throughout the world men spoke in veneration of its four great wonders--the immense and gorgeous mosque, the bridge over the Guadalquivir, the suburb city of Az-Zahra, and the sciences which were studied in the colleges. Abderahman III. built a palace a few miles from the city, called Medinat-az-Zahra. It was named after the beautiful Zahra, one of the sultan's mistresses. A figure of Zahra was carved over the chief gateway of this fairy city. Medinat-az-Zahra was a town rather than a royal residence. There was a splendid mosque upon the site; the suburb had colleges, baths and marts. Forty years were spent in building this retreat for the caliph and his favourite. Upon the decoration of its buildings Abderahman spent large sums of money. El Makkari, the Arab historian, states that the columns of the buildings came from the east, and that the marble walls of the palace were shining with gold. The caliph even proposed to remove the dark background of hills, but instead the slopes were planted with fruit-trees.