Beginning in the year 711 CE, Muslim armies based in North Africa took control of the vast majority of the Iberian peninsula, supplanting the Christian, Germanic Visigoths, who had themselves assumed power in the region in the wake of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Muslims named the land al-Andalus, and for the next five centuries, Islamic religious and legal discourse and Arabic cultural and intellectual trends were preeminent on the peninsula. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, Christian armies had regained control of most of what is now modern Spain and Portugal...

How do you represent a city that is and is not there? This has been the question for Jews since the days of the first destruction of the city in 586 BCE. It was the question for Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena, who ventured to retrieve a city that Emperor Hadrian had condemned to oblivion. A few centuries later, as Muslim tradition asserts, the conquering caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb entered the city looking for the “holy house,” bayt al-maqdis, as the Arabs called the city. What he was shown by Bishop Sophronius was a glorious Roman shrine to the resurrection; what he was shown by his Jewish native informants was the ruins of the original Temple, now a dung heap...

It may be tempting to skip over fanciful or implausible stories that seem to be ubiquitous in many medieval texts. But this narrative material can often give us unique insight into critical moments in history...