Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"At the end of the road, this revolution in poetry would affect all of Europe, but it had its conspicuous start in the Iberian Peninsula and was well under way by the mid-eleventh century. . . . The old Christians of Cordoba moved into exile in the north, to find that their coreligionists were far stranger than their old Muslim neighbors, and much-coveted Islamic craftsmen were hired to build fine buildings, including churches, in newly Christian cities, and now Hebrew songs could be heard in distinctly Arabic accents. The constant rivalry among the taifas also sparked poetry, and every other art form—a rivalry, implicitly at least, for the succession to Cordoba. . . . But almost all dreamed that they might succeed Cordoba as the cultural center of that world, and so they filled their courts, their walled cities, with philosophers, architects, musicians, but most of all with poets, who could make them shine more brightly than the other Andalusian stars." [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 106-7]