Shortly after bombs shredded four Madrid commuter trains and killed two hundred people last March, Muslim terrorists justified their gruesome attack as "settling old accounts against Spain, the crusaders." They were recalling bloody medieval centuries when Spain suffered Crusade and jihad as Muslims and Christians wrestled to control the Iberian Peninsula. But that's only part of the story. In A Vanished World: Medieval Spain's Golden Age of Enlightenment, Chris Lowney shows Muslims, Christians, and Jews rubbing shoulders peacefully in tiny Spanish villages, adopting each other's language, customs, and learning, creating a golden age for each faith, and pioneering innovations that revolutionized the West.

Spain's diverse society introduced the western world to paper, our Hindu-Arabic number system, advanced irrigation, cotton and citrus, architectural glory, and medical discoveries. While Europeans elsewhere wallowed in medieval squalor and ignorance, Spain flourished as the continent's commercial and cultural center. No less astonishing than Spain's material glories was the simple fact that her Muslims, Christians, and Jews often lived and worked side-by-side, bestowing tolerance and freedom of worship on religious minorities. These Muslims, Christians, and Jews, co-existing successfully for the first time ever in mainland Europe, offer wisdom, hope, and lessons learned to our modern age struggling to create a peaceful, constructive common society.

A Vanished World begins with Muslim invasion of Spain in 711 and ends with the world-changing year of 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella dispatched Columbus to the New World, vanquished Spain's last Muslim kingdom, and crowned the Spanish Inquisition's bitter work by forcing Jews to convert or emigrate. The 'era of the three religions' dissolved into religious intolerance that reverberates to the present day and still divides our world, underscoring the imperative to learn from our shared past in order to protect our future. Author Chris Lowney questions why three religions that worship the same God and deeply respect human dignity have so often turned on each other, and he draws from Spain's stories of hate and hope to show how only profound conversion of attitude can save humanity from the thicket of religious enmity that ultimately doomed Spain's unique civilization.

Image, above: Interior of mosque, Cordoba, Spain. Courtesty of Hispanic Society of America.