Copying Córdoba? Toledo and Beyond

Abstract

In recent years scholars have increasingly scrutinised the relationship between medieval Iberia’s material culture and its relatively plural society, one in which Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities lived together—peacefully or otherwise. In this article, I consider the reception of Islamicate architectural forms by focusing on the city of Toledo in central Spain, drawing conclusions of wider relevance for the study of Islamicate art and architecture. Following its conquest by king Alfonso VI of Castile in 1085, the Friday mosque of Toledo (Muslim Ṭulayṭulah) was converted into a cathedral, and then replaced in the thirteenth century by a building long celebrated for its combination of Gothic and Islamicate architectural elements. I reconstruct the appearance of Toledo’s lost mosque and propose possible motivations for the imitation of French and Andalusí buildings in its extant replacement. Building on Richard Krautheimer’s pioneering study of medieval architectural copies, I examine how these designs might have been transmitted in the thirteenth century, and how they can be understood ‘iconographically’. In considering inter-cultural exchange, scholars need, I argue, to take greater account of the available technologies of transmission and the distortions and possibilities they afforded.