Granada and the Alhambra / A brief description of the ancient city of Granada, with a particular account of the Moorish palace

by Albert Frederick Calvert

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.