The Moors in Spain

This history tells the story of Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, from the conquest led by Tariq ibn Ziyad in 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492: the Umayyad emirate and caliphate of Cordoba under Abd al-Rahman I and Abd al-Rahman III, the splendour of Cordoba with its great mosque, libraries and scholars, the breakup into rival taifa kingdoms, the coming of the Almoravids and Almohads, and the last kingdom of the Nasrids with its Alhambra.

Stanley Lane-Poole (1854–1931), a British historian of the Islamic world, published the book in 1886 in the Story of the Nations series, with additions by Arthur Gilman, and it celebrates the civilisation of al-Andalus in a way that was unusual for a European writer of his day. Read Washington Irving's The Alhambra and Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada.