This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Spain gathers two cities that carried Islamic, Jewish and Christian learning through al-Andalus and into the councils that shaped the Visigothic and later church, one a caliphal capital and the other a capital of translation.
Cordoba was the capital of the Umayyad emirate and caliphate of al-Andalus and one of the largest cities in tenth century Europe. Its Great Mosque, begun in 785 and enlarged repeatedly, was converted into a cathedral after the Christian conquest of 1236 and remains in use as one, its arcades preserved around a sixteenth century nave. The city produced Maimonides, whose family left during the Almohad persecutions, and Ibn Rushd, whose commentaries on Aristotle reshaped both Islamic and Latin philosophy.
Toledo was capital of Visigothic Spain and the site of a long series of church councils, the third of which in 589 received the Visigothic kings out of Arianism and is the first known to have recited the creed with the filioque added, a phrase that later divided the Latin and Greek churches. After the Christian capture of the city in 1085 its translators worked from Arabic and Hebrew into Latin, moving Greek philosophy and Arabic science into the Latin west. Its synagogues of Santa Maria la Blanca and El Transito survive as buildings converted after the 1492 expulsion.
One city argued Trinitarian doctrine into the Visigothic creed and then translated the wider world into Latin; the other built a mosque grand enough that a cathedral could be dropped inside it and both still stand.