Specially drawn for The Spanish Series
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is said that many of the pillars were brought from the plunder of Narbonne, the French town on the Mediterranean.
[2] The new Christian Church was dedicated to SS. Faustus and Marcial. The priests quitted their Cathedral peacefully, bearing in procession the relics and images of the saints.
[3] The maksurrah is a screen or enclosure surrounding the mih-rab, with a sort of throne or platform where the Sultan sits, elevated above the level of the Mosque. The whole of that space which was taken up by the maksurrah is now occupied by the chapel of St. Estevan.
[4] The mih-rab is a recess having a cavity within one of its walls, wherein stood that copy of the Koran held in highest veneration. The cavity also marked that point of the compass towards which stands the Ka’bah, the object of veneration at Mecca.
[5] The four columns are yet in place in what is now the chapel of St. Peter. Behind the mih-rab at Cordova was a room where other copies of the Koran were kept. Both the sanctuary, and the mih-rab room, now form part of St. Peter’s Chapel, which the inhabitants vulgarly call La Capilla del Zancarron—the chapel of the shin-bone—from a popular belief that the shin-bone of the Prophet was there preserved.
[6] Foseyfasa.—Gayangos tells us that the word is not in the dictionaries, but that, according to an old Arabian writer, it is a substance of glass and small pebbles crushed and baked together, uniting, with great variety of colour, great brilliancy and beauty; it is sometimes mixed with silver and gold. One of the conditions of peace granted to the Emperor of Constantinople by the Khalif Al-walid was that the Emperor should provide a certain quantity of foseyfasa or enamelled work for the great Mosque at Damascus. Idrísí, in his description of the Mosque of Cordova, says that the enamel which covered the walls of the mih-rab came from Constantinople.
[7] Merwan, the last Khalif at Damascus of the Beni Omeyyah dynasty, was the ancestor of Abd-er-Rahman I.