Part 6

The ceiling of the mosque was formerly covered with oval cartouches, bearing appropriate monitory inscriptions and pious sentences--such as, “Be not one of the negligent,” “Felicity,” “Blessing,” “There is no God but God, to whom all beings address themselves in their need”--thus inciting the minds of the faithful to contemplation and prayer. Some few of the cartouches are still remaining; but the inscriptions were, for the most part, carefully effaced when the mosque was transformed into a Christian temple. Those in the “mihrab,” and in the angles near the tower, may yet be seen.

The number of brazen chandeliers of different sizes in the mosque is computed at upwards of two hundred, and the number of cups attached, and containing oil, at upwards of seven thousand. Some of the oil-reservoirs for the great lamps were Christian bells, deprived of their clappers; inverted, and suspended from the roof. It is known that in the many expeditions against the Christian, bells were frequently removed from the churches and brought to Cordova. Sometimes the metal of the bells was recast into forms more in accordance with the Moorish style of ornament.

The following rites had to be observed in the service of the mosque: The ornaments were to consist only of brass, silver or glass lamps, which were lighted at night when the doors were opened for prayer. Some striking design was painted on the west wall, in order that the faithful should look in that direction. There was only one pulpit, which was on wheels, as the sermon was preached from any spot the Talvi wished.

The courts of the mosque were paved with porcelain tiles, over which pure water could flow. Those who did not wash themselves at home were obliged to do so in the Court of Ablutions before entering the sacred precincts. All shoes had to be left at the door of the mosque, and no buildings, such as inns and hostelries, and disreputable houses, were allowed in the neighbourhood. No Jews were allowed to pass before it. Women were not permitted to enter some mosques, because they were not circumcised, the sultana alone having an oratory, where she prayed for all women.

At midnight a mezzin mounted the minaret, and cried out: “God is great, to pray is better than to sleep”; at two o’clock in the morning he said the same; at four o’clock he placed a lantern at the end of a rod and said, “Day is breaking, let us praise God”; at the fourth prayer he hoisted a white flag, which was lowered at one o’clock, saying, “God is great.” Friday was their feast day, and a blue banner was hoisted at dawn, and left floating till half-past ten. The fifth prayer was at four o’clock in the afternoon, in winter at three; when the evening star appeared, the sixth prayer was called out; and at nine o’clock the last prayer of the day was said. Sand glasses were employed to mark the passage of the hours.

The state of Cordova died with Almanzor; and the races, who alternately took possession of the throne, did not leave the least trace in the mosque. Finally, St. Ferdinand, King of Castile and Toledo, completely routed the Moors, and the mezquita was purified and dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption. The following is an extract from the archives of the cathedral: “Let it be known that I, Ferdinand, by the grace of God, King of Castile, with the consent and approval of Dona Berenguele, my Mother, and

of Dona Juana, the Queen my wife, and of my children, Alfonso, Frederico, and Ferdinand, make a deed of gift to God of the Cathedral Church of Santa Maria of Cordova, and to you, Master Lope, my beloved chosen Bishop of the same, from now on, and to your successors, and the Chapter of Canons, &c. November 12th, 1238.” This pious monarch founded a chapel dedicated to St. Clement, which was erected against the south wall, embracing the space occupied by three naves from east to west, and by four transverse naves from north to south. This space was shut in with walls, leaving the two Arab arches inside intact, the altar dedicated to the saint being placed against the east wall. Many nobles followed the king’s example, and founded chapels, amongst them being that of St. Inez, erected by Piedro Diaz de Haro, in 1250, in the tenth principal nave, counting from the west wall, also against the south wall, and only occupying two transverse naves. St. Ferdinand endowed the cathedral so richly that on his death its benefices were very considerable. He was succeeded by his son, Alfonso X., who showed the same religious spirit as his father, giving large grants to the funds of the cathedral; and, in the year 1258, erecting the grand chapel, conceding many privileges to the work and the fabric. The donations made by other Christians up to this time had been of a very modest nature; and, as the Jews of Cordova were expending great sums on the erection of a synagogue, it seems as though the Christians were shamed into greater generosity to the cathedral, for at the same time the famous commander, Domingo Muñoz, erected the chapel of St. Bartholomew, and the chapter and the king decided to turn the mosque into a real Christian cathedral in developing Western architecture. The commander made his chapel in the angle formed by the inner south wall and the west side of the vestibule, or “maksurrah,” of Hakam II., taking the area of two principal and two transverse naves. As this chapel could not be lighted from outside on account of the west wing of the “mihrab,” and the khalif’s secret passage being behind, it was illuminated with light from the temple, a pointed door and four windows being made in the north wall.

The chapter set about their work with more splendour. They selected the three first transverse naves of the noble apartment, beginning at the re-inforcing wall, which marks the prolongation of Hakam, giving to the single nave that they opened a length of one hundred feet from the inner door of the Alms Chamber to the central apartment of the three enclosed in the old “maksurrah.” They made the Alms Chamber into a vestibule, leaving the re-inforcing wall as it was without touching the bold ultra-semi-circular arches resting on pairs of columns; they pulled down the cadi’s apartment in order to make way for the transept, and also the three transverse naves it had occupied. The three columns in front of the Arab pillars, which stood in the length from east to west, were pulled down too, and three handsomer pillars were erected in their place, fortified at right angles by walls in the manner of buttresses, which intercepted the entire width of one transverse nave. Great pointed arches sprang from pillar to pillar, corresponding with the horse-shoe arches in front; a light and graceful dome stretched from one side to the other, divided into four compartments by three great arches, of which that nearest to the sanctuary rested on high columns, and the other two on well-carved brackets, with open-work borders suspended at a regular height above the spaces. Finally, they took the central apartment of the ancient “maksurrah,” where we presume the khalif sat, and erected there the Grand Chapel.

This chapel was built at the king’s expense, for which the grateful chapter resolved to celebrate the anniversary of his death, a practice which has been faithfully observed to the present day.

The arrangement of this space was perfectly adapted for the purpose of a Grand Chapel; the other room adjoining to the east being converted into a sacristy. It was doubtless in the same condition as when finished by the architects of Hakam II. At the north side it had a horse-shoe arch corresponding with the re-inforcing wall of the same khalif, and on the east side it had a great arched window and two little doors at the sides, which communicated with the tribune of the “Alicama,” at the south side, giving a splendid example of the rich Byzantine style of the time of Hakam, and forming a combination of segment arches crossing in space and forming crosses of undulating ribbons in the intercolumniations, the whole being similar to the decoration displayed in front of the vestibule of the “mihrab.” We do not know how the west side was decorated, where this space was united with the apartment of the cadi, which had been pulled down. In order to convert this into a Grand Chapel it was not necessary to disfigure it completely; it was sufficient to fill up the great northern arch, which in the time of the khalifs was closed by the first “maksurrah,” and also to block up the great window at the east, communicating with the tribune of the “Alicama;” to leave the two little side doors open for communication with the sacristy, and to enlarge the sanctuary as much as necessary, to shut it in at the south side with glass windows, and to place the customary chancel at its opening. Perhaps no more than this was done; but who is capable to-day of saying how much respect the king’s architects had for Arab-Byzantine work?

In the year 1260 Don Gonzalo Yanez, first gentleman of Aguilar, founded the Chapel of St. John the Baptist. Five years later the Bishop Fernando de Mesa built the Chapel of Santiago, in the south-east corner, near the Chapel of St. Clement. This chapel was wide and commodious, and the Arab arches in its area were not disturbed. In 1263 King Alfonso X. had the ancient aqueducts repaired, and in 1275 Prince Ferdinand gave an order for four Moors, who should be free from taxation, to be kept at work in the building operations of the cathedral. Two of these were to be carpenters, and two masons. This privilege was confirmed several times in succeeding years, and a charter exists, dated Cordova, 25th October, 1282, which orders that all the Moors living in the city, whether they were artificers or not, shall work for two days of the year in the cathedral. It was thought that these workmen would understand the repairing of Moorish work better than Christians, but the task was also meant as a humiliation. As time went on, these workmen, more or less, lost the traditions of their faith and their architecture, so that they were really of little service in preserving the original character of the edifice.

In 1278 the first statue of St. Raphael the Archangel was placed on the top of the minaret. At that time Cordova was visited by the plague, which worked terrible destruction amongst the inhabitants. It is related that St. Raphael appeared to Friar Simon de Sousa, of the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, and told him that God was moved with compassion, and that He would take away the visitation if a statue of St. Raphael himself were placed on the tower of the Cathedral, and if his Feast were celebrated properly every year. This was done, and the plague immediately ceased. A new chapel to St. Bartholomew was erected in 1280 by Martin Muñoz, nephew of the famous commander Domingo Muñoz; and after this, the Chapel of St. Paul,

which belonged to the family of the Godois. Then followed the foundation of the Chapel of St. Nicholas, by a pious Archdeacon; and of the Chapels of St. Benedict, St. Vincent, and St. Giles, and that of Our Lady of the Snow.

It was not thought wise to make any great efforts to introduce the art of the West into a city which could not as yet be considered sure of not falling again into the hands of the infidels. In the year 1369 Don Enrique, the Fraticide, came to the throne of Castile. He desired to carry out the wishes of his father, and to give him a place of sepulchre worthy of his high renown. For this purpose he ordered a Royal Chapel to be erected in the cathedral at the back of the Grand Chapel in the Arab Tribune, which served as a sacristy. He decided to bury here his grandfather, Don Fernando X., whose body had been laid under the grand chapel by order of his Queen, Constanza. This fabric must have taken some considerable time, for the stucco, wood and tile work are really wonderful. Mohammedan art had undergone a complete transformation; the grandiose Arab-Byzantine style had been succeeded by the effeminate Moorish school, first practised by the Almoravides, and after by the Almohades; and the Moorish architects and decorators of Cordova could not remain uninfluenced by the taste which had become general through the artificers who had renovated the Alcazar at Seville, and who had embellished the Alhambra at Granada. Nothing was more unlike the architecture of the days of Hakam II. than that employed now in the construction of the Royal Chapel. Two parts are noticed--an upper and a lower. The Moorish architect who directed the work had windows with ornamented arches in the new style opened in the east and west sides, which were longer than the others. He ordered, too, that Saracen art, emancipated from the Byzantine traditions, should be stamped on the ornamentation of the four walls, and on the cupola that crowned them. These arches were given festoons with lobules, which boldly, though corruptly, hid the true object of the curves. They were also set in square compartments, forming many edges beautifully worked with hammer and chisel. The framings were crowned with beautiful little cornices of small interlaced and open-worked arches, and above them ran round all the four sides a wide facia of little pine-shaped domes, which imitated stalactites of crystallised gold, having a most surprising effect, and of a sort until then unknown in the most famous mosque of the West.

In the east and west walls, which were the longest of the rectangle, the arches with lobules, which could not be opened, were in relief; and resting on the light cornice were two tablets with lions. There were four of these lions--two on the western and two on the eastern facia, equi-distant from one another; and from each lion to that which faced him sprang a great arch, whose facing projected some feet over the lower zone, and from each lion to that by his side sprang another great arch, which did not project beyond the facing of the lower wall. These four upper arches, each one with twenty-one trefoil lobules, formed a perfect square, their four supports being at an equal distance, thanks to the ingenious method of cutting the longer sides, putting the lions perpendicularly over the great lower arches. Once this difficulty was overcome it was doubtless an easy matter to raise the cupola, which was to crown the fabric. The ancient dome must have been similar to that which has been discovered in the Chapel of Villaviciosa, but it must have seemed poor in the eyes of King Henry II., so accustomed to seeing the Moorish cupolas with stalactites; so they placed a cornice on the arches described above, and on this

rested the segments of the circle, which form the elegant and strange African cupola.

The following distribution is seen in the lower portion: Towards the middle of the east side there is an arch formed of little domes with stalactites, slightly pointed, sufficiently deep, enclosed in a sort of framing of gilded stucco, forming beautifully interlaced branches. The square compartment finishes at the lower end in a wide facia, which runs on both sides on a high socle of minute and beautiful tiling, and between the complicated ornaments in relief circles are formed, enclosing the arms of Castile and Leon. To the right side, on this same facia, is an ornamental arch of eleven lobules enclosed in another framing, entirely covered with tracery in relief, sustained by two very slight columns, built into the wall. Joined to this is another arch, much lower, with seven lobules, also ornamented, and sustained by columns of the same style as those just described, bearing a shield with the same arms. The left side has the same ornamentation, with the difference that both the arches have seven lobules, because the wall has more frontage on this side: and another difference was that in the north-east corner it had an ornamentation of minute open-work instead of a shield. The wall opposite had the same distribution with a deep central arch and small arches at the side, with little columns in the Gothic style, which show already that the style is no longer purely Moorish, but a sort of base mixture of the decorative art of the East and the West. Perhaps we may consider this the true concession of the Moorish artificers to the art preferred by the Court, and as their final abandonment of the pure style, which had been traditional with them.

In 1521 the Bishop Don Alonso Manrique obtained permission from the Emperor Charles V. to erect the Gothic cathedral, which is in existence to-day. Three years later, when he visited the buildings, the Emperor repented having given his permission. Indeed the Christian work appears cold and pallid by the side of that of the Arabs.

As Amados de los Rios, a great Spanish antiquary and Orientalist, sings in his mournful requiem over the departed glories of the mosque: “Neither the sumptuous Christian fabric that to-day rises in the midst of those countless columns, nor all the treasures of art lavished upon it by the celebrated artists of the sixteenth century who erected it, nor that interminable series of chapels of every epoch which, resting against the walls of the mosque disfigure it; nor the clumsy angels that seem to suspend their flight to shed glory over the Divine service, nor the words of the Evangelist sounding from the seat of the Holy Spirit, can dispel or banish, in the slightest degree, the majesty of those wandering shades that in vain seek in the sanctuary the sacred volume whose leaves, according to tradition, were enamelled with the blood of the Khalif Othman, martyr to the faith. A world of souvenirs here enthrals the mind of the traveller as he gazes with a feeling of sorrow upon these profanations--works dedicated by the intolerant, yet sincere, faith of our ancestors; impelled by the desire of banishing for ever from that spot, consecrated to the law of Jesus, the spirit of Mohammed and the ghosts of his slaves that haunt it, and will for ever haunt it while it exists. For, in spite of the mutilations it has endured, and of the changes it has undergone, there is impressed upon it, by a superior ineradicable law, the seal of the art that inspired it, and the character of the people by whom it was planned and erected.”

Don Amados is not alone in his eloquent, if unavailing, protest. When Charles V. observed St. Peter’s Chapel rising out of the very centre of the mosque, he rebuked the Bishop,

Alonso Manriquez, who had erected the incongruous edifice, in no measured terms. “You have built here,” said the king, “what you or anyone might have built elsewhere; but you have spoilt what was unique in the world.” Alas! the monarch had forgotten, or did not choose to remember, that the reprimand came with a very bad grace from one who, for his never-completed palace at Granada, had torn down whole courts and halls of the Alhambra.

The mosque of Cordova is still to-day, by universal consent, the most beautiful Mussulman temple, and one of the most wonderful architectural monuments in the world. The susceptible Italian author, Edmondo de Amicis, has given us a vividly picturesque description of his first impression of the interior of the building. “Imagine a forest,” he says, “fancy yourself in the thickest portion of it, and that you can see nothing but the trunks of trees. So, in this mosque, on whatever side you look, the eye loses itself among the columns. It is a forest of marble, whose confines one cannot discover. You follow with your eye, one by one, the very long rows of columns that interlace at every step with numberless other rows, and you reach a semi-obscure background, in which other columns seem to be gleaming. There are nineteen aisles, which extend from north to south, traversed by thirty-three others, supported (among them all) by more than nine hundred columns of porphyry, jasper, breccia, and marbles of every colour. Each column upholds a small pilaster, and between them runs an arch, and a second one extends from pilaster to pilaster, the latter placed above the former, and both of them in the form of a horseshoe; so that in imagining the columns to be the trunks of so many trees, the arches represent the branches, and the similitude of the mosque to a forest is complete. The middle aisle, much broader than the others, ends in front of the “maksurrah,” which is the most sacred part of the temple, where the Koran was worshipped. Here, from the windows in the ceiling, falls a pale ray of light that illuminates a row of columns; there is a dark spot; farther on falls a second ray, which lights another aisle. It is impossible to express the feeling of mysterious surprise which that spectacle arouses in your soul. It is like the sudden revelation of an unknown religion, nature, and life, which bears away your imagination to the delight of that paradise, full of love and voluptuousness, where the blessed, seated under the shade of leafy palm trees and thornless rose bushes, drink from crystal vases the wine, sparkling like pearls, mixed by immortal children, and take their repose in the arms of charming black-eyed virgins! All the pictures of eternal pleasure, which the Koran promises to the faithful, present themselves to your bright mind, gleaming and vivid, at the first sight of the mosque, and cause you a sweet momentary intoxication, which leaves in your heart an indescribable sort of melancholy! A brief tumult of the mind, and a spark of fire rushes through your brain--such is the first sensation one experiences upon entering the cathedral of Cordova.”

Listen again to the musings of this same impressionable writer, as he gazes at the ceiling and walls of the principal chapel, the only part of the mosque that is quite intact. “It is,” he says, “a dazzling gleam of crystals of a thousand colours, a network of arabesques, which puzzles the mind, and a complication of bas-reliefs, gildings, ornaments, minutiæ of design and colouring, of a delicacy, grace and perfection sufficient to drive the most patient painter distracted. It is impossible to retain any of the pretentious work in the mind. You might turn a hundred times to look at it, and it would only seem to you, in thinking it over, a