During the four centuries of Moorish rule, Toledo was a leading cultural center. The existing Christians were allowed to worship as usual, and the city also was very welcoming to Jews, who tended to be chased out of most other places. At the time, Christian Europe was pretty much a cultural black hole, lots of illiterate clans killing one another, while the Muslim world maintained the knowledge of the Ancient Romans while adding many new discoveries to this base. So the intermingling of faiths in Toledo served a key role in disseminating this knowledge to Christian Europe, which in turn gave rise to the Renaissance.



When Toledo was reconquered, the Christians didn't exactly return the favor. They eventually threw out both the Jews and Muslims from Spain, which decimated Toledo, and to make matters worse, they moved the capital to Madrid. This cultural destruction was matched architecturally as well, and only this tiny mosque remains from the four centuries of Moorish rule. It was spared only because the Christians found a figure of Christ that had been glowing in the dark of the building's basement throughout the occupation. The tenacity of this figure supposedly showed the superiority of Christianity, although preventing the city from being occupied by the Moors in the first place would have been more impressive. God works in mysterious ways I guess.