Part 8

The inscription might well have included the name of the brother of Garci Perez, Diego de Vargas, surnamed “El Machuca,” or “the Pounder,” who performed prodigies of valour at the breaking of the Moorish bridge of boats across the Guadalquivir, when the destruction of that gallantly-defended means of access to the city led to the capture of Seville by the Christians in 1248. These two brothers are the heroes of Spanish ballads, and were greatly distinguished by St. Ferdinand; the grateful monarch freely acknowledging their prowess by the bestowal of houses and lands wrested from the Moors. A curious “Repartimiento,” or Domesday Book of Seville, is still extant, and many families can trace their actual possessions back to this original partition.

Musa appointed his son, Abdelasis, a brave soldier and a humane ruler, to be governor of Seville. That he was a successful general, that he married Egilona, the widow of the unfortunate King Roderick, and was murdered by the order of Suleyman, brother and heir of the Khalif of Damascus, is all that history records of him. A malignant rumour, that he was scheming to make himself sole ruler of the Berber dominion in Spain, reached Damascus. Suleyman immediately sent emissaries to Seville with secret instructions that Abdelasis should be put to death, adding as an incentive to swift compliance with his order, that whoever among them executed the deed, should be appointed his successor as Amir of Seville. The delegates were armed with friendly letters to Abdelasis, who received them cordially, and entertained them in accordance with his exalted position as an amir under the khalif. It appears, according to the tradition, that the scheme was revealed to ’Abdullah Ibn, “who was the most eminent and most conspicuous officer in the army.” ’Abdullah, however, would have no hand in the projected assassination, but, on the contrary, endeavoured to dissuade the conspirators from their purpose, saying to them: “You know the hand of Musa has conferred benefits on every one of you: if the Commander of the Faithful has been informed as you represent, he has been told a lie. Abdelasis has never raised his hand in disobedience to his master, nor dreamt of revolting against him.” Suleyman’s emissaries, however, disregarded his words, and decided on the murder. One morn they stood among the rest at the gates of the palace, waiting till the governor should go to the mosque, and, when he appeared, followed him to prayer. Scarcely had he entered the “kiblah,” and begun to read the Koran, than one of the conspirators rushed upon the governor and stabbed him. Abdelasis, leaving the “kiblah,” took refuge in the body of the mosque, whither he was followed and slain. When the news spread through the city, the inhabitants

were roused to fury. The assassins produced the letters and commands of the khalif, but to no purpose; the people refused to abide by the sultan’s behests, and chose ’Abdullah to be his successor. ’Abdullah was, however, quickly displaced by Ayub, Suleyman’s nominee, and the conspirators then departed to make their report at Damascus, carrying with them the head of the unfortunate Abdelasis.

The author of the tradition, Mohammed Ibn, says that when these emissaries arrived at Damascus and produced the head of Abdelasis before Suleyman, he sent immediately for Musa. Upon his appearance, Suleyman, pointing to the head, said: “Dost thou know whose head that is?” “Yes,” answered Musa, “it is the head of my son Commander of the Faithful, the head of Abdelasis (may Allah show him mercy) is before thee, but by the life of Allah there was never a Moslem who less deserved such unjust treatment; for he passed his days in fasting, and his nights in prayer; no man ever performed greater deeds to serve the cause of the Almighty, or His messenger Mohammed; no man was more firm in his obedience to thee. None of thy predecessors would have served him thus. Thou even wouldest never have done what thou hast to him, had there been justice in thee.” Suleyman retorted, “Thou liest, O Musa, thy son was not as thou hast represented him; he was impious and forgetful of our religion, he was the persecutor of the Moslems, and the sworn enemy of his sovereign, the Commander of the Faithful. Such was thy son, O doting, foolish, fond old man!” Musa replied, “By Allah! I am no dotard, nor would I deviate from truth, wert thou to answer my words with the blows of death. I speak as the honest slave should speak to his master, but I place my confidence in God, whose help I implore. Grant me his head, O Commander of the Faithful, that I may close his eyes.” And Suleyman said: “Thou mayest take it.” As Musa was leaving the Hall of Audience one who was present wished to interfere with him, but Suleyman said: “Let Musa alone, he has been sorely punished;” and added: “The old man’s spirit is still unbroken.” But the old man, whose name had once stood for the symbol of conquest, whose initiative had won Spain for the Moor, had received his death sentence. Grief, which could not bend his spirit, seized upon his frame. The old man fell sick of grief and shame, and in a little while he was dead.

Suleyman’s treachery had its first result in the removal of the seat of Moorish rule in Spain to Cordova. Ayub, the successor of Abdelasis, recognising the insecurity of his tenure in Seville, forsook “the Pearl of Andalusia” with all speed, and when in 777, Abd-er-Rahman proclaimed himself sole ruler of Spain, it was from his palace at Cordova that the fiat was sent forth to the world. Seville, the first and the natural capital of the South, dropped into second place among the cities of the Peninsula, and it was not until 1078 that it re-established its claim as the Moorish metropolis. For three hundred and fifty years the Moslems were faithful to the sovereignty of Cordova; and although Seville came, by reason of its beautiful palaces, gardens, and baths, to be regarded as one of the fairest cities of earth; the alcazar and the lordly mosque, which now bear evidence of its former grandeur, are of a later Moorish period. And Seville grew in beauty under, and in spite of, the destructive influence of strife and conflict. While Abd-er-Rahman was cultivating the graces of Cordova, Seville was being desolated by many assaults. Yusuf, and, after his death, his three sons, made attacks upon Seville, and Hixem ben Adri el Fehri, who had stirred the Toledans to insurrection, was

subsequently defeated at the gates of Seville by the Governor, Abdelmelic. At a later date, Cassim, the son of Abdelmelic, fled with his army before the advance of the Wali of Mequinez, and was stabbed to death by his father for cowardice. Abdelmelic, who threw himself upon the invaders, was overcome and wounded in a night battle on the banks of the Guadalquivir; but, despite his hurt and his defeat, he rallied his soldiers, and drove the hitherto victorious Wali through the streets of Seville, and out again into the open country, where he was captured and killed.

Under the shifty and opportunist rule of Abdallah, who had caused his brother Mundhir to be murdered to make his way to the throne of Cordova in 888, Andalusia was split up into a number of independent principalities. The turbulent Ibn-Hafsun had made himself virtual King of Granada, the governors of Lorca and Zaragoza rendered but nominal homage to the khalif, the walls of Toledo rattled with the crash of contending revolutionary factions, and in Seville Ibrahim Ibn-Hajjaj treated with the King of Cordova on equal terms. In the time of Ibn-Hajjaj Seville was the most orderly and best-governed city in the Peninsula. The poets of Cordova, the singers of Baghdad, and the lawyers of Medina were attracted to the court of Ibn-Hajjaj, of whom it was sung, “In all the West I find no right noble man save Ibrahim, but he is nobility itself. When one has known the delight of living with him, to dwell in any other land would be a misery.” Yet in 912-13, Ibrahim Ibn-Hajjaj, who kept his state like an Emperor, opened the gates of Seville to the masterful and gallant Abd-er-Rahman III., and the city became once more subject to the self-proclaimed Khalif of Cordova. It was Abd-er-Rahman who planted Seville with palm trees, beautified her gardens, increased the number of her palaces, and made the Guadalquivir navigable by narrowing the river’s channel. Ibrahim “the Magnificent” received the Great Khalif with the homage which a feudal lord offers to his king, and the independence of Seville was at an end.

But Seville at this period was the rival of Cordova in intellectual eminence, and much of the Moorish thought and research which was destined to influence Spain in future ages was pondered, and practised, and published from the former city. Abu Omar Ahmed Ben Abdallah, called “El Begi,” “the Sage,” and unquestionably one of the most learned men of his time, was a native of Seville, and here he wrote his encyclopædia of the sciences. It was said that there was no man who could surpass him in knowledge of arts and sciences, and “even in his earliest youth,” says Condé, “the cadi very frequently consulted him in affairs of the highest importance.” Chemists, philosophers, astronomers, and men famous in every branch of science, resorted to “the Pearl of Andalusia;” while art was fostered in silk and leather manufactures, and the joy of life found expression in music, poetry, and the dance.

The victorious expeditions of Alfonso VI. found the Moors demoralised from the massacres of Cordova and Ez-Zahra, and the whole of Andalusia in a state of ferment, anarchy, and military unpreparedness. In every town of importance in the South a new independent dynasty sprang into existence, and the Abbadites exercised kingly sway over the so-called republic of Seville. Some of these usurpers and pretenders, as Mr. Lane-Poole has pointed out, were good rulers; most of them were sanguinary tyrants, but (curiously) not the less polished gentlemen, who delighted to do honour to learning and letters, and made their courts the homes of poets and musicians. Mo’temid of Seville, for instance, was a patron of the arts, and a prince of many

attainments, yet he kept a garden of heads cut off his enemies’ shoulders, which he regarded with great pride and delight. Yet Seville was secure and peaceful under these barbarous rulers until the menace of Alfonso’s inroads made Mo’temid silence the fears of his court with the reflection, “Better be a camel-driver in African deserts than a swine-herd in Castile.” So they fled from the danger of the Castilians to the succour that Africa was waiting to send them. A conference of Moorish rulers was held in Seville, and a message imploring assistance was despatched to Yusuf, the Almoravide king. Yusuf defeated the army of Alfonso near Badajoz in 1086. Four years later the King of Seville again besought the help of Yusuf against the Christians of the North. This time he came with a force of twenty thousand men at his back, and before the end of 1091 the leader of the Almoravides had captured Seville and established a dynasty which was to last until its overthrow by the Almohades in 1147.

The Almoravide rule, which was distinguished in the beginning by piety and a love of honest warfare, ended in tyranny and corruption, and the Almoravides gave place to a race more pious and fanatical than the demoralised followers of Yusuf had ever been. For a hundred and one years the Almohades remained masters of Seville. The monuments of their devotion and artistic genius are extant in the mosque and the alcazar, and we know that under Abu Yakub Yusuf a new era of commercial prosperity set in for Seville, and a new light arose to illumine the fast deepening shadows which fell over the vanishing glory of Cordova. The thunder of the blows which had reduced “the City of the Fairest” to a heap of ruins still echoed in the air, and mixed with the noise of the builders and artificers who were re-moulding Seville “nearer to the heart’s desire.”

The remains of Moorish architecture which we find in Cordova, in Seville, and in Granada, enable us to realise that the civilisation and art of the Spanish Moslems were progressive, and that each stage developed its varied and singular characteristics. “The monuments of Seville,” says Contreras in his _Monuments Arabes_, “produce quite a peculiar effect on the mind, a sublime reminiscence of ancient and profound social transformations, which only the inartistic aspect of bad restorations can dissipate--a vandalism inspired by the desire to see the building shining with colour and gold, and which impelled people to restore it without paying the smallest heed to the most elementary principles of archæology. The alcazar of Seville is not a classic work; we do not find in it the stamp of originality, and the ineffaceable character that one admires in ancient works like the Parthenon, and in more modern ones like the Escurial; the first on account of their splendid simplicity, and the latter for their great size and taciturn grandeur. In the alcazar of Yakub Yusuf, the prestige of a heroic generation has disappeared, and the existence of Christian kings, who have lived there and enriched it with a thousand pages of our glorious history, is perfectly represented there. The Almohades who left the purest African souvenirs there, and Jalubi who followed Almehdi to the conquest of Africa, left on the walls Roman remains, taken from the vanquished people. St. Ferdinand, who conquered it; Don Pedro I., who re-built it; Don Juan II., who restored the most beautiful halls; the Catholic monarchs, who built chapels and oratories within its precincts; Charles V., who added more than half, with the moderated style of this epoch of sublime renaissance; Philip III., and Philip V., who further increased it by erecting edifices in the surrounding gardens; all these, and many other princes and great lords, who inhabited it

for six centuries, changed its original construction in such a degree that it no longer resembles, to-day, the original Oriental monument, although we have covered it with arabesques, and embellished it with mosaics and gilding.”

All that succeeding generations have constructed in the alcazar has contributed to deprive it of its Mohammedan character. Transformed into a lordly mansion of more modern epochs, one no longer sees there the voluptuous saloons of the harem, nor the silent spaces reserved for prayer, nor the baths, nor the fountains, nor the strong ramparts, supporting the galleries, which, by circular paths, communicated with the rich sleeping apartments, situated in the square towers. It is not that Arab art is in a different form here to that seen in other parts of Spain; but while the Moors always built palaces in close proximity to fortified places, they here combined the two, and for that reason they sacrificed the exterior decoration to the works of fortification and defence. On approaching the palace, one finds marks of grandeur, but one must not look for them in the structure, but rather in the numerous reparations and additions which have been made there, and also in the solid walls, dominating the ruins of those castles, which seem to protest eternally against the cold indifference with which so many generations have passed over them. And if, on the one hand, there is no doubt that this is the old wall or the ancient tower, on the other hand, the traveller, greedy for impressions left by a past world, finds nothing but square enclosures, gardens and rectangular saloons of the mansions of the 16th century. Here there is nothing so majestic as the Giralda; nothing so essentially Oriental as the mosque of Cordova; nothing so fantastic and so picturesque as the alcazar of Granada. One only sees here the chronicle of an art, carried out by a thousand artists, obeying different beliefs, and which presents rather the appearance of a game played by children who had invaded the spot where the most valued works of their ancestors were preserved, rather than the passionate conception of the terrible descendants of Hagar, who in fifty years invaded half the globe. But one still catches something of the spirit of an art that was almost a religion, as one lingers in the quiet gardens of the alcazar; the deep impress of the Moor will never be entirely obliterated from the courts and saloons of this palace of dreams. As Mr. W. M. Gallichan writes: “The nightingales still sing among the odorous orange bloom, and in the tangle of roses, birds build their nests. Fountains tinkle beneath gently waving palms; the savour of Orientalism clings to the spot. Here wise men discussed in the cool of summer nights, when the moon stood high over the Giralda, and white beams fell through the spreading boughs of lemon trees, and shivered upon the tiled pavements. In this garden the musicians played, and the tawny dancers writhed and curved their lissom bodies in dramatic Eastern dances.”

Ichabod! The moody potentate, bowed down with the cares of high office, no longer treads the dim corridor, or lingers in the shade of the palm trees. No sound of gaiety reverberates in the deserted courts, no voice of orator is heard in the Hall of Justice. The green lizards bask on the deserted benches of the gardens. Rose petals strew the paved paths. One’s footsteps echo in the gorgeous patios, whose walls have witnessed many a scene of pomp, tragedy, and pathos. The spell of the past holds one; and, before the imagination, troops a long procession of illustrious sovereigns, courtiers, counsellors, and warriors.

This wonderful monument, which has moved generations of artists and poets to rhapsody and praise, and inspired

that picturesque Italian author, De Amicis, to people the gardens of the alcazar with Mo’temid and his beautiful favourite, Itamad, who had been dead nearly a century before the alcazar was erected, failed to create any impression in the mind of Mr. John Lomas, whose strictures upon the place in his _Sketches of Spain_ must ever be a standing reproof to those who dare to see Oriental beauty in this Sevillian castle. “Greater far,” says Mr. Lomas, “is the alcazar in reputation than in intrinsic worth. Like the Mother Church, it forms a sort of sightseers’ goal, and it shares equally in the good fortune of so entirely satisfying the requirements of superficial observers, that it is esteemed a kind of heresy to take exception to its noble rank as a typical piece of Moorish work. Yet it is just a great house, of southern and somewhat ancient construction--say the fifteenth century--with a number of square rooms and courts, arranged and decorated after Arab models as far as was possible in the case of a building designed to fulfil the requirements of Western civilisation. Nothing else. Of course, if the courts and towers of the Alhambra have not been seen--or are not to be compassed--there will be found here an infinity of fresh loveliness in design and colouring, together with a vast amount of detail which will repay study. But even then it must all be looked upon as an exceedingly clever reproduction of beautiful and artful forms, not as their best possible setting forth, or type. There are dark winding passages--evidently dictated by the exigencies of the work--but they yield none of the delicate surprises which form so great a charm of the old Moorish monuments. There is any amount of rich decoration and Moresque detail; but never the notion of the luxury and voluptuousness of Eastern life, or a suggestion of its thousand-and-one adjuncts. There are, here and there, indubitable traces of the original Eleventh Century alcazar of Yakub Yusuf” (it was not built until the latter part of the twelfth century) “but there is nothing either distinctive or precious about them, and the rest is a record rather of Christian than Arab ways.”

Mr. Lomas is perfectly correct in suggesting that the alcazar of Seville is, in great measure, a reproduction of the delights of the Alhambra, a reproduction due, without any doubt, to that school of architecture which embellished the sumptuous palace of Granada for the kings of the second Nazarite dynasty. In it we see the record of the ingenious almizates, of its gates and ceilings, of those stalactited domes, which dazzle and confuse, of those wall-facings encrusted with rich ornamentation, of those graceful Byzantine and Moorish geometrical designs, which even to-day are the despair of perspective painters, of those enchanting saloons where the genius of harmony seems to rest, and of those balmy gardens which invite repose, meditation, and melancholy.

While it is generally accepted that the city of Seville possessed no alcazar of striking importance until the declining power of the khalifate of Cordova made Seville the capital of an independent kingdom, there is substantial reason for believing that in the foundations of the present superb edifice there are unmistakable relics of an earlier work of truly Arab architecture. The Almohades so thoroughly effaced and distorted the magnificence of their predecessors’ work that it would be impossible to point with certainty to any of the original remains of this many-times-restored palace. The ultra-semi-circular arches which are seen in the Hall of the Ambassadors, those graceful arches which carry the mind from Seville to the graceful arcades of the mosque of Cordova, incline one to regard this apartment as a relic of Abbadite antiquity, while the rich columns with

their gilded capitals of the Corinthian style appears to contain authentic proof of their Arabic-Byzantine origin. Señor Pedro de Madrazo, whilst admitting the difficulty of determining the period to which the various parts of the alcazar belong, disregards the conclusions of Señores José Amador de los Rios and his son Rodrigo, who resolutely denied the antiquity of these ultra-semi-circular arches, and declares the Hall of Ambassadors to be an example of Abbadite architecture. He further attributes to the same epoch, the showy ascending arcade of the narrow staircase which leads from the entrance court to the upper gallery, and rises near the balcony or choir of the chapel, and the three beautiful arches, sustained by exquisite capitals, which remain as the sole relic of the decoration of the abandoned apartment situated close to the “Princes’ Saloon.”