INTERIOR COURT OF THE ALCAZAR.
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
SEVILLE
ALCAZAR—ARCADE IN THE PRINCIPAL COURT.