The vanished gardens of Cordoba Aug 09 2010 Cordoba is a city in
southern Spain that was capital of the Umayyad caliphate of the
same name during the Middle Ages. In the tenth century, it
passed Baghdad the largest city in Islam and may have been the
largest in the world. Cordoba House is the name of a proposed
complex on Park Place in Lower Manhattan, two blocks from the
World Trade Center site, sometimes called the "ground-zero
mosque." Newt Gingrich thinks the name is "a deliberately
insulting term" that tests "the historic ignorance of American
elites." In particular, he cites transformation of a church in
Cordoba into a mosque as "a symbol of Islamic conquest" over
Christian Spain. Carl Pyrdum, a graduate student who blogs at
Got Medieval, wrote a long, well-footnoted post detailing the
problems with Newt's history. Notice how carefully he's phrased
his claim to give the impression that during the medieval
conquest of Spain the Muslims charged into Cordoba and declared
it the capital of a new Muslim empi