Overthrown by the Abbasids, the deposed Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahmân I fled Damascus in 756 and established an independent emirate in Córdoba. His dynasty consolidated the presence of Islam in Al-Andalus (as Spain was known to Muslims). By the time of the reign of Abd al-Rahmân II (822–852) Córdoba was becoming one of the biggest and most important cities in Europe. Umayyad Spain had become a centre of the Muslim world that rivaled the Muslim cities of Damascus and Baghdad. "The emirs of Córdoba built palaces reflecting the confidence and vitality of Andalusi Islam, minted coins, brought to Spain luxury items from the East, initiated ambitious projects of irrigation and transformed agriculture, reproduced the style and ceremony of the Abbasid court ruling in the East and welcomed famous scholars, poets and musicians from the rest of the Muslim world. But, the most significant impact of the Emirate was its cultural influence over the non-Muslim local population. An "elegant Arabic" became the preferred language of the educated – Muslim, Christian and Jewish, the readership of Arabic books increased rapidly, and Arabic romance and poetry became extremely popular. The popularity of literary Arabic was just one aspect of the Arabization of the Christians of the Iberian Peninsula which led contemporaries to refer to the affected populations as "Mozarabs (mozárabes in Spanish; moçárabes in Portuguese – from the Arabic: musta’rib; ‘like Arabs’, ‘Arabicized’"