Madinat al-Zahra

Madinat al-Zahra was a palace-city built from 936 by the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III a few kilometres west of Cordoba in al-Andalus (modern Spain) as the seat of the caliphate; it was sacked and abandoned in the civil wars of the early 11th century and survives as an archaeological site. The physician al-Zahrawi (Albucasis, d. c. 1013), the great surgeon and author of al-Tasrif, took his nisba from al-Zahra and served at the caliphal court.