The Myth of Spain's Golden Age Under the Moors

It is commonly taught and believed that Spain experienced a sort of "golden age" following conquest by the Moors. However, Gates of Vienna has posted a lengthy excerpt from an article discussing the fact that there is no archaeological evidence to support this so-called "golden age." From the article:

Over the past sixty years intensive efforts have been made to discover this astonishing civilization — to no avail. Try as they might, archaeologists have found hardly anything, hardly a brick or inscription, for the first two centuries of Arab rule in Spain. Between 711 and 911 there is almost nothing, with substantial remains only beginning to appear around 925 or 930.

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The same poverty of material remains and signs of occupation is found throughout Islamic North Africa between the mid-seventh and mid-tenth centuries, and Richard Hodges and William Whitehouse speak of an Arab-created “dark Age” in the region during those years.


What could all this mean? Whatever interpretation we might put on it — and there are several possibilities — one thing is very clear: The opulent and refined Islamic civilization which up till now has been placed alongside and contemporary with a dark, ignorant and impoverished Christian Europe of the seventh to tenth centuries, is a myth. When Islamic cities do appear, in the middle of the tenth century, they are very comparable, in terms of size and level of culture, to the contemporary cities of Christian Europe. Our entire understanding of European and Middle Eastern history during the seventh to tenth centuries needs a radical rethink.