Cordoba was an education. The great Mesquita, dating from 784, with its Moorish and Christian decorative art side by side says it all. Here was the center of Western Islam and the great Islamic civilization, in Europe’s greatest city by the year 950. Under the Umayyads, there was one culture with three religions living peacefully together. The idea of a time when Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisted and expressed their faiths freely is amazing, but the Mesquita is also an emblem of the Christians overtaking the Muslims. A basilica, now an active Catholic Church, was built in the center of the great mosque. To make this history even more complex, the mosque of 700 years was formerly a Visigoth Christian Church. All this history is manifested in the incredible beauty of the place, along with displayed artifacts from its Visigoth past. Mark and I slowly took it all in and then walked the old streets where Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, and Seneca, the great Stoic, walked many centuries ago.