Where Eagles and Vultures Dare

Abstract

Abstract This chapter analyzes the earliest authoritative evidence for Ibn Firnās’s famous flight, preserved in a manuscript in the Real Academia de Historia in Madrid. It considers details about the flight device and garment in this account that are absent from the later textual sources on which historians have had to rely. The chapter considers religious and cultural meanings specific to the medieval Islamic contexts that the flight may have held for Ibn Firnās and his intellectual circles. It considers Rusāfa, the first Córdoban royal villa, as a spatial and social context for the flight and proposes that this was an important site of court science. Finally, the chapter considers topographical features of the site long associated with the experiment and proposes that it may have inspired the idea for the experiment and contributed to its success.