Part 4

The first act in the long-drawn-out drama was the capture of Zahara by the troops of Granada, in 1481--provoked by the predatory incursions of the Marquis of Cadiz. The Christian garrison was surprised during a furious tempest, and put to the sword. The rest of the inhabitants were carried off in captivity to Granada. Abu-l-Hassan, inflated with pride, returned to his capital. There were popular rejoicings, but the wiser Moors shook their heads and predicted that the ruins of Zahara would fall upon their own city.

The fiery chivalry of Andalusia were not slow to retaliate. Two months after the capture of Zahara, the more important Grenadine stronghold of Alhama was taken by storm by the forces of the Marquis of Cadiz. The news produced the utmost consternation in Granada. Abu-l-Hassan at once set out with 53,000 men, and invested the place. Ferdinand the Catholic, who had now conceived the idea of reducing the whole kingdom of Granada, hurried to its relief; but he had only reached Lucena when tidings arrived of the raising of the siege by the Marquis’s hereditary foe, the Duke of Medina Sidonia. Abu-l-Hassan returned to the attack a few weeks later, and Ferdinand resumed his advance, before which the Moors retired. The Catholic sovereigns made their triumphal entry into Alhama on May 14, 1482.

Great preparations were made throughout Castile and Aragon for the prosecution of the war, but the army actually assembled before Loja on July 1--16,000 men--fell far short of Ferdinand’s requirements and expectations. The town was ably defended by one of the bravest Moorish chieftains, Ali Atar, who repulsed the Christians with severe loss. The King of Aragon narrowly escaped with his life, and was compelled to beat a retreat. Abu-l-Hassan swept the country as far as the Rio Frio.

Such a success, if it had been followed up, might have turned the scale in favour of the Moors. But at Granada, treason always followed closely on the heels of victory. Years before, a beautiful Christian captive, Doña Isabel de Solis, daughter of the Governor of Martos, had been added to the Sultan’s harem. Under the name of Zoraya, in the course of time, she bore him a son, Abu Abdullah, and rose to the rank of favourite Sultana.[C] Now, jealous, it is said, of a Greek slave, or perhaps antagonised by the first Sultana, Ayesha, she fomented a conspiracy against her aged lord, and was imprisoned with her son in the Alhambra. Thence they contrived to escape, and, exciting the populace in their favour, obliged Abu-l-Hassan to seek refuge at Malaga. Abu Abdullah, better known as Boabdil, or el Chico (the little), reigned in his stead, but Baza, Guadix, and other eastern towns remained faithful to their old allegiance.

These dissensions among the Moors, though ultimately benefiting the Spaniards, contributed indirectly to one of the most serious disasters that befell the latter during the campaign. For an expedition against Malaga, headed by the Marquis of Cadiz and the Grandmaster of Santiago, while threading its way through the passes of the Ajarquia, was attacked by the lieutenants of the old lion, Abu-l-Hassan, and cut to pieces. Eight hundred Spaniards were left dead on the field. Boabdil, emulous of the glory his father had acquired, marched out of Granada with 9700 men, and gave battle to the enemy under the Count of Cabra, near Lucena. The Moors were totally defeated, their bravest general, Ali Atar, was slain, and Boabdil himself captured by a private soldier, named Martin Hurtado.

Had this unlucky prince been left in the hands of his enemies, the war might have had a different result, but his mother and followers at once made proposals for his release. This was finally effected by a most dishonourable treaty. Boabdil was accorded a two years’ truce, covering all places that acknowledged his authority, and in return bound himself, not only to pay a tribute of twelve thousand golden ducats, but to assist with supplies the Spanish troops passing through his dominions to attack his own father. Having thus exchanged his honour for his liberty, the miserable Sultan returned to his capital, to find that the old King had possessed himself of the Alhambra. A collision between the two factions deluged the streets of Granada with blood. The alfakis and ancients at length arranged an armistice, and Boabdil was suffered to retire to Almeria, which was assigned to him as capital and residence.

For the next four years, the Catholic sovereigns abstained from any important military demonstration, contenting themselves with ravaging the wretched country and harrying its frontiers with incessant forays and marauding expeditions. Meanwhile, a strong man appeared on the scene in the person of Abu-l-Hassan’s brother, Abdullah Az-Zaghal. Determined to put an end to the divisions which, more than the prowess of the Spaniards, were bringing about the ruin of his country, this prince swept down upon Almeria, slew the governor, took prisoner Zoraya, but failed, alas! to secure the person of Boabdil, who fled to Cordova and placed himself under Ferdinand’s protection. Not long after, Abu-l-Hassan, aged and worn out, abdicated in favour of his warlike brother, and died at Mondujar. This event strengthened Boabdil’s claims upon the tottering throne; and he entered into a compact with his uncle, whereby both were to reign in Granada, the one in the Albaicin, the other in the Alhambra. Anxious to redeem his reputation, the newly restored monarch attacked the Christians near Loja with vastly inferior forces. He was soundly beaten and forced to take refuge in the Alcazar of Loja, whence he was only allowed to emerge on renewing the humiliating treaty he had concluded at Cordova. He was not, however, disposed to yield the crown to his rival, and returning to Granada, surprised and seized the Alcazaba. One of the most desperate conflicts recorded in the history of the city then occurred between the partisans of the rival sultans. Further bloodshed was at last averted by the intervention of ambassadors sent by Ferdinand. The old dual arrangement seems to have been temporarily resumed. Meanwhile, Ferdinand and Isabel once more took the field, and, in 1487, they invested and captured Velez-Malaga and the important city of Malaga, notwithstanding Az-Zaghal’s efforts to relieve both places. The brave Sultan now abandoned the capital to his nephew, and established his headquarters at Almeria. He succeeded throughout the year 1488, in repelling an invasion of his province; but in the following year, after the fall of the strong city of Baza, he bowed, as he himself expressed it, to the will of Allah, and surrendered all the places in his possession, including Almeria and Guadix, to the Catholic sovereigns. Mohammed XIII., as he is styled by Moorish historians, retired to Algeria, where he died, years afterwards, in indigence and obscurity.

There remained now, of all the Moorish dominions in Europe, but the single city of Granada, of which Mohammed XII., Boabdil, was at last undisputed sovereign. He formed the manly resolution to sell his hard-won crown as dearly as possible. He sallied from Granada, took Alhendin and Marchena by assault, and laid waste the country in possession of the Christians. Summoned by Ferdinand and Isabel to surrender the city in accordance with an alleged treaty, he replied, and probably with truth, that his proud and exasperated subjects would not permit him to do so. The population of Granada was swollen by refugees from all parts of the kingdom to thrice its normal figure. The Spanish king perceived that the surest method to reduce it was by blockade. With 20,000 men, including some of the first chivalry of all Europe, he entered the Vega, and built the town of Santa Fé, almost at the gates of the threatened city. This permanent establishment of the Infidels on their native soil plunged the Moors into profound gloom. No ray of hope remained to the unfortunate Boabdil. The city endured the horrors of a famine. The Spanish fleet precluded all hope of supplies from Africa, towards which country the wretched people still turned in expectation of help. The negotiations for the capitulation which the Sultan most reluctantly entered upon in October 1491, had to be conducted, through fear of the populace, with profound secrecy. Indeed, at the last moment, Boabdil, in danger of his life, besought Ferdinand to accelerate his entrance into the city. On January 2, 1492, accordingly, the Moorish king, attended by fifty horsemen, surrendered the keys to the Catholic sovereigns on the banks of the Genil, passing on to the domain allotted him by the conquerors in the rocky Alpujarras. The story of his stopping to gaze for the last time on his former kingdom, and of the rebuke administered to him by his mother, is well known. We are not told whether his eye caught the gleam of the great silver cross hoisted over the Alhambra by Cardinal Mendoza by way of signal to the Spanish host that the occupation of Granada was completed and that the dominion of Islam in Spain was for ever at an end.

It had endured seven hundred and eighty-one years--a period only sixty years short of that which has elapsed since the Norman Conquest of England. More remarkable still, the Sultanate of Granada had survived the virtual break-up of the Saracen empire by over two centuries. When we consider its limited area, its isolated position, the might and the inveterate hostility of the neighbouring states, and the attacks to which it was unceasingly subjected, we cannot but feel the liveliest admiration for the valour and sagacity of its rulers and the stout-heartedness of its people. Had not the Court been too often the theatre of contending factions, had not those factions turned their swords against each other, the Sultanate of Granada might have outworn Spain’s military and national vigour, and have endured to our own day as a western Turkey. For the spirit of Tarik, of Abdurrahman, and of Almansûr was not altogether dead, even in the brave but ill-starred sovereign to whom alone historians ascribe the downfall of the kingdom, and whom they, strangely enough, accuse of effeminacy and weakness. The Moors of Granada knew how to fight a losing fight; in gambler’s parlance, when they had lost the tricks, they struggled to win the honours. They proved themselves worthy of their ancestors; and the finest, as it was also the latest, monument of the Mohammedan dominion in Spain is Granada the noble and the memorable.

THE ALHAMBRA

The Alhambra, or Red Palace, the Acropolis of Granada, is the finest secular monument with which the Muslims have endowed Europe. It belongs to the last period of Spanish-Arabic art, when the seed of Mohammedan ideas and culture had long since taken deep root in the soil and produced a style which might more properly be called Andalusian than Moorish. If the Muslims left a deep impression upon Spanish thought and art, it must not be supposed that they altogether escaped the influence of their Christian neighbours. During the last two centuries of their occupation the rigid puritanism of their creed was greatly relaxed, especially as regarded art--always the reflection of the customs and spirit of a people. The wave of the Renaissance did not leave untouched the shrunken Moorish empire, and if Castilian kings did not hesitate to employ Muslim artisans in the construction of their cathedrals, the Sultans of Granada did not disdain the advice of Christian artists in the embellishment of their palaces. The Alhambra remains a thoroughly Mohammedan monument, but one which symbolises a phase of Mohammedan culture and institutions almost peculiar to one country and epoch. Nowhere else and never since has Islam reached such a pitch of refinement. The Alhambra stands as the high-water mark of its art and civilisation.

There will never be produced a new Alhambra, any more than a new Parthenon or new Pyramids; for these great buildings were the expressions of ideas and aspirations peculiar to societies which have long ago perished. Thus, the Red Palace of Granada is not interesting merely as a Mohammedan edifice left isolated in the far west of Europe, but as the monument of a people and a civilisation long dead and gone. A sadness, too, attaches to it, proceeding from the memory of the violent extinction of that people with a mission unfulfilled--fraught, as it seems to have been, with so much of light and beauty to the Christian and the Muslim worlds.

The Sierra Nevada thrusts forward a spur which overlooks Granada on the south-east, and is divided by two clefts or barrancos into three eminences. The easternmost of these is crowned by the Generalife, the westernmost by the ancient fortifications known as the Torres Bermejas or Vermilion Towers. The hill between the two--in shape aptly compared by Ford to a grand piano--is that on which the various buildings, collectively styled the Alhambra, are reared. Here there existed a settlement in remote Celtiberian days; and the later city of Illiberis or Elvira stood here, and perhaps extended to the Torres Bermejas. When the Moors came they erected a fortress--the Alcazaba--on the point of the Alhambra hill, overlooking the Vermilion Towers. To this they gave the name of _Alhamra_, “the red,” as Riaño thinks, to distinguish it from the Alcazaba in the Albaicin quarter, or perhaps from some confusion of the new building with the old. The builder, according to Al Khattíb, was one Sawar Alcaysi, who lived in the second half of the ninth century; though Contreras says it was known as the Tower of Ibn Jaffir, and Ford names Habus Ibn Makesen as the founder. At all events, the structure dated from the earliest period of the Arabic domination, and Al Ahmar found here, on taking possession of Granada, a small town girdled with walls and defended by a citadel.

Al Khattíb refers to the Citadel of Granada in these terms: “The southern part of the city is commanded by the suburb of the Alhambra or Medina Alhamra, the court of the sultanate, crowning it with its turrets, its lofty towers, its strong bastions, its magnificent Alcazar, and other sumptuous edifices, which by their splendour ravish the eye and the soul. There is, too, such an abundance of waters that, overflowing in torrents from the tanks and reservoirs, they form on the declivity streams and cascades, whose sonorous murmurs are heard afar on. At the foot of the walls are spacious gardens, the domain of the Sultan, and leafy groves, through the dense greenery of which the white battlements gleam like stars. There is, in short, around the circuit of the walls, no spot that is not planted with gardens and orchards.” The scene has not greatly changed since the Arab wrote. Gurgling brooks still run down the slopes of the Alhambra Hill, and nightingales sing in the thick woods of elm.

The Alcazaba, being the oldest part of the palace-fortress, should be studied first. It is entered by the Torre and Casa de las Armas, through a horseshoe arch in red brick, with fine azulejos or glazed tiles. To the left is the Torre de Homenage, with which war and time have not dealt too gently. It contains, it is interesting to note, a Roman votive altar, embedded by the Moorish builders in the masonry, and inscribed by “the grateful Valerius to his most indulgent wife, Cornelia.” At the opposite extremity of the Alcazaba is the Torre de la Vela, or Watch Tower. It is in two storeys, communicating by a dark and narrow staircase, with loopholes in the wall.[D] In this tower is hung a famous bell, to be heard, it is said, at Loja, thirty miles away. It is rung on the anniversary of the Conquest of Granada, on which day it is the custom, according to local superstition, for damsels, desirous of husbands, to strike it with all their strength. On the summit of this tower the cross was first planted by _el tercer rey_, Cardinal Mendoza. The view from the platform, of city and snow-clad Sierra, luxuriant Vega, and white-walled towns and villages, is as extensive as it is beautiful. At the foot of the Torre de la Vela extends the place of arms, defended by two towers, now styled de los Hidalgos and de la Polvora, and formerly known as the Paniagua and Cristóbal del Salto--names suggesting legends now forgotten.

An ancient document at Simancas names among the towers connecting the Alcazaba with the rest of the fortress, the Torre del Adarguero, “the Tower in which dwelleth the servant of Doctor Ortiz,” the Torre de Alquiza, the Torre de Hontiveros (now the Torre de las Gallinas), and the Tower and Room of Machuca. Of these remains exist, but of another tower, referred to as the Torre de la Tahona, no trace remains.

The Alcazaba, according to the most recent researches, was separated from the site of the palace by a ravine where, after the Conquest, cisterns were constructed by order of the Conde de Tendilla and over which the existing Plaza de los Algibes was formed. These works appear to have necessitated the demolition of a wall which ran across from the Torre de las Gallinas on the north to the beautiful Puerta del Vino on the south. This gateway is now quite isolated from the wall of circumvallation. Over the horseshoe arch is an inscription in stucco, of the usual Moorish character, invoking the Divine protection for the builder, Sultan Mohammed V. It appears to commemorate some striking victory. Over the arch again is a fine double window or ajimez. On the keystone is seen the key, so often figuring as a symbol in all parts of the Alhambra, with a G in Kufic characters--perhaps the initial letter of the city. The interior façade has a large horseshoe arch and the twin-windows above. The Puerta del Vino was probably the entrance to the courts and gardens of the palace.

Having crossed the Plaza de los Algibes, we leave behind us the early Moorish works, and approach the buildings which owe their foundation to the Nasrite or Grenadine dynasty. The story which credits Al Ahmar (Mohammed I.) with the creation of the Red Palace in the middle of the thirteenth century appears to be well-founded, for when the Alhambra is referred to as existing in earlier times, it is undoubtedly the Alcazaba that is meant. To the same hands may be safely attributed the great outer wall of the Alhambra which girdles palace and fortress, following the inequalities of the hill’s contour. Al Ahmar has left his device, _Wa ha ghalib ila Allah_ (There is no conqueror but God), in many parts of the building. These words were uttered by him in mournful deprecation of the acclamations of his subjects on his return from assisting the Christians in the Conquest of Seville. During the two and a half centuries of the Nasrite rule, the palace underwent many radical transformations and renovations, so that it is difficult to distinguish between the works of the various sultans. Ford infers, rightly as it seems to us, from the frequent repetition of their names upon the walls, that Yusuf I. and Mohammed V. had the largest share in the embellishment and restoration of the edifice. Since the Reconquest many changes and additions have been made--notably the Palace of Charles V., to which detailed reference will be made later.

The summit of the Alhambra hill was probably peopled in Al Ahmar’s time, and it continued to be so during the reigns of his successors. The population thus dwelling at the foot of the throne was mainly composed, in later times at least, of hangers-on at the Court, ex-favourites and discarded sultanas, ulemas and doctors of the law, soldiers of fortune, and ambassadors, permanent and extraordinary. Such powerful tribes as the Beni Serraj, which exercised so much influence in the last stages of Nasrite rule, would also have had quarters for their leaders here. The little town--which seems to have had no parallel before or since--extended from the eastern extremity of the hill to within as near the doors of the palace as the temper of the monarch for the time being may have permitted.

The precise limits of the palace, even at the time of the Conquest of the Catholic sovereigns, have never been ascertained. Portions of it were undoubtedly demolished to make room for the palace of Charles V. On the other hand, it is recorded in the archives of the Alhambra that various private houses were acquired for the purpose of enlarging the older building. But making due allowance for demolitions, extensions, and restorations since the fifteenth century, we have before us in the Palace of the Alhambra a magnificent example of the last or third period of Hispano-Arabic architecture.

On the general plan of the edifice, the remarks of Contreras are worth quoting _in extenso_: “We penetrate into every Arabic monument through an outlying tower, or between two towers, except in the dwelling-houses of the people, in which case the entrance is by a small, square opening, a portal useless among us, though seen with frequency in the ancient houses of Andalusia. A long, narrow hall cuts the axis perpendicularly, thus determining the distribution into two wings of the edifice. By the meeting of the two axes is found the entrance, before which we find those effects of perspective which are so fantastic in these buildings. Following the ingress we find a court with tanks and fountains, with light and graceful arcades. Behind the second gallery, following the same central axis, are oblong naves which cross each other at right angles to the extreme end of the building, where the cupolas or turrets of the innermost dwelling apartments rise majestically above the level of the edifice and are reflected in the waters of the basins. The halls of a house of this kind, according to its rank or grandeur, were arranged in little pavilions on the long sides of the courts, as various in their style of decoration as the tents of a Turkish camp, where the quarters of an Amir may be found beside those of the common soldiers. And if these rows of chambers are now found disposed according to the strict alignment of Mudejar eaves, it is an indication that the severe genius of the Christian conquerors has transformed them, not permitting those crests, cupolas, or steeples which disturb the symmetry of the decoration.

“Outside this plan, absolutely classical, which we may compare to a cross with the transverse arm prolonged and cut at various distances by perpendicular arms parallel to each other, but of different length, the Spanish Arabs found no other easy method of building, so that, while diminishing or prolonging the arms of the axis as much as the dependencies of the largest palaces might require, they never departed from the system, wherever they might build.... This, then, is the true scheme of the Alhambra, and it is quite other than that conceived by the classicists of the eighteenth century, with its façades, angles, and squares.”

It must, however, be admitted that order is much more conspicuous in the decoration than in the ground plan of the palace. All Moorish ornamentation is based on a strictly geometrical scheme, and every design may be resolved into a symmetrical arrangement of lines and curves at regular distances. The intersection of lines at various angles is the secret of the system. All these lines flow from a parent stem, and no figure or ornament is introduced at random. Moslem ornamentation abhors irregularity and rejects symbolism. The law of Islam which forbade the delineation of living objects was not, however, always observed in this palace of half-Europeanised Arabs.