Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"'The ornament of the world' is the famous description of Cordoba given to her readers by the tenth-century Saxon writer Hroswitha, who from her far-off convent at Gandersheim perceived the exceptional qualities and the centrality of the Cordoban caliphate. . . . The cultivated nun Hroswitha of Gandersheim was involved enough in the diplomatic and social circles of the court of Otto I that she wrote a glowing account of the Muslim city based on her conversations with one of the emissaries to Otto’s court sent by the caliph Abd al-Rahman in 955. . . . In the end, it would be al-Andalus’s vast intellectual wealth, inseparable from its prosperity in the material realm, that made it the “ornament of the world.” The rich web of attitudes about culture, and the intellectual opulence that it symbolized, is perhaps only suggested by the caliphal library of (by one count) some four hundred thousand volumes . . . ," [No more than 400 manuscripts in largest library in Christian Europe at this time;] [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 12, 32-3]