Over time, this ideal kingdom of Andalucia began to crumble upon itself - Arabs killing Arabs; a bloating of the system, assasination, trickery, rivalries. Cordoba would fall, but the independent states under that caliphate - the taifas - remained, although hardly unified. This made Al-Andalus weaker by the decade. And soon, the Christians of the north would pounce on their first target - the northern taifa of Toledo, just south of today's Madrid. For the next four-hundred years, the Christians slowly pushed this Arab-Muslim world back, and across the Meditteranean.”
;But as the Muslims left a legacy of architecture and philosophy in the cities, they left their domesticated animals in the mountains and plains of the south. Extremadura was the frontier between the Christians and Muslims, a boundary wasteland. Today, Extremadura is largely empty plains of rust dirt, planted fields and straggly thistles. Like Madrid and Toledo, it's part of that risen Meseta, a plateau hundreds of miles long. A place for the sheep to graze.”
The sheep that make up our story of cheese from Extremadura come from the Middle East. Like dogs, sheep come from an other animal. But unlike dogs, whose ancestral Indian wolf is extinct, the sheep's wild ancestors still roam the old world. They are called Mouflon, and they approximate a big hairy beast in a sheep's body. Mouflon exist today in two subspecies. One in Central Iran and the other in the highlands of Corsica and Sicily.
“By the year 6,000 B.C.,” he writes, “the sheep was invaluable to the way of life for the Meditteranean and Middle Eastern peoples. By the time of the writing of the Book of Genesis, Middle Easterners were more than just dabbling with the genetic lineages of their domesticated animals. Even in this early book there is ample evidence that Middle Easterners were carefully bettering their animals’ stock. “I will pass through all thy flock to day, removing from thence all the speckled and spotted cattle, and all the brown cattle among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats…” (Genesis 30:32)”
)
){kind=link}