Zaragoza

The city on the Ebro that was the cultural capital of the northern Iberian frontier, where Ibn Bajja served as vizier and taught philosophy.

Zaragoza under the Banu Hud was a frontier capital with a court that supported mathematics, astronomy and poetry, and a palace whose intersecting arches survive. Ibn Bajja served its ruler as vizier and was there when the city fell to Aragon in 1118. He wrote on Aristotle, on music and on the soul, and produced the argument that a philosopher living in a corrupt city must govern himself alone, which reads differently once you know he wrote it while his own city was being taken.