Dynastic History | Great Mosque of Córdoba, the Mihrab — The Caliph Wrote to Constantinople for Tiles

Al-Ḥakam II succeeded his father in 961 and set about pushing the prayer hall of Córdoba's Friday mosque some forty-five metres further south. The mihrab he built at the end of it is not a niche but a small octagonal room, and the horseshoe arch framing it is faced in gold and coloured glass mosaic — a technique with no working tradition in al-Andalus at the time.

So the caliph wrote to the emperor in Constantinople. The account comes from Ibn ʿIdhārī, a North African historian compiling some three centuries after the fact, and it holds that Nikephoros II Phokas sent a master mosaicist and a consignment of glass cubes as a gift, and that Andalusi craftsmen were set to learn the work from him. The mosque's present custodians still describe the mosaics that way. Two courts corresponding as equals about decoration was itself the point: Córdoba had claimed the caliphate in 929, against Baghdad and against the Fatimids in Ifriqiya, and a Byzantine gift addressed to a caliph was a useful thing to have arrive.

The mihrab and the ribbed domes over the maqṣūra — the screened enclosure in which the ruler prayed apart from everyone else — were finished in 965. The dates for the campaign as a whole are not agreed: published accounts put its start at 961 or 962 and its completion in 968, 970 or 971.

The building has served as Córdoba's cathedral since 1236. The mihrab sits on the visitor route today, lit and roped off.

📸 Cover: The mihrab of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, Schnobby, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons