Seville had remained in the power of the Mussulmans five hundred and thirty-six years. We, who see all Spain Spanish and remember it was so at the beginning, are apt to look on the Moorish occupation as a mere episode or interlude in the history of the country. It is difficult to realize that the sway of the Crescent lasted in Seville for as long a period as has passed with us since the death of King Edward III.
Yet there are few monuments remaining to-day to commemorate a civilization which endured five centuries. The Moors have left their impress, it is true, in a scarcely definable way on the city, the physiognomy of which is more Oriental than that of Granada, a later seat of Mohammedan empire. But this is in great part due to the men who lived under the Christian kings, who had caught the spirit of the Moors and perpetuated their traditions of art and culture. Here we have no such mighty memorials of the vanished race as the Mezquita or the Alhambra. Still, a few memorials of that far-off age there are; and we will go in search of them.
Here on the quays of the Guadalquivir rises a polygonal tower of three storeys, poetically termed the "Torre del Oro." But here we find no Danaë awaiting a rescuer, but only the harbour master and his assistants. When the Almohades ruled in Seville a great iron chain was drawn across the river, and a tower built on either side to support it. The tower on the Triana side has long since disappeared, but the "Torre del Oro" remains as it was built in 1220—except, indeed, for the small turret or superstructure added in the eighteenth century. It is said, too, that it was once adorned with beautiful glazed tiles, from which (though this seems unlikely) it derived its name. In the days when it stood the brunt of the attack from the squadron of Ramon Bonifaz, it was connected with the Alcazar by a wall, called, in military language, a curtain. This was not demolished until the year 1821. At the same time disappeared the main entrance to the Alcazar.
The Almohades did much to embellish and to improve the city during their century of sovereignty. The only important Mohammedan work remaining to us in Seville belongs to that period, and illustrates the victory of the African or Berber over the Byzantine influences traceable in earlier Moorish architecture. The new conquerors of Andalusia were a virile, hardy race, and there is something vigorous and coarse in their handiwork. They developed an excessive fondness for ornamentation which mars much of their work, and were too much addicted to the use of painted stucco and gilding. To them we owe the stalactite roofing, afterwards developed with such success at the Alhambra. "It is certain," says Don Pedro de Madrazo, "that the innovations characteristic of Mussulman architecture in Spain during the eleventh and twelfth centuries cannot be explained as a natural modification of the Arabic art of the Khalifate, or as a prelude to the art of Granada, for there is very little similarity between the style called Secondary or Mauritanian, and the Arab-Byzantine and Andalusian; while on the other hand it is evident that the Saracenic monuments of Fez and Morocco, of the reigns of Yusuf Ben Tashfin, Abdul Ben Ali, Al Mansûr, and Nasr, partake of the character of the ornamentation introduced by the Almohades into Spain."
The most important example of this style is the far-famed Giralda Tower, at the north-eastern corner of the Cathedral, the most renowned of minarets and one of the strongest buildings in the world. It was built in the reign of Yakûb al Mansûr by an architect whose name is variously written Gabir, Hever, and Yever. Quantities of Roman remains and statuary were used in making the foundations. The wall at the base is nine feet in thickness, which increases with the height. The lower part is of stone, the upper part of brick. For the first fifteen metres the four faces of the tower are plain; at that height begins a series of vertical windows, mostly of two lights, some with the horseshoe, others with the pointed arch; while on either side the masonry is carved into what seem panels of trellis work. There is much in the details of this decoration to interest the student of Moorish art, who will recognize in them the inception of many forms developed (and not always to advantage) at Granada.
But the Giralda as we now see it is a third as high again as it was left by the Almohades. In their time it was crowned by a pinnacle to which were attached four balls of gilded copper—one of which was so large, we are told, that the city gate had to be widened that it might be brought hither. The iron bar supporting the balls weighed about ten hundredweights, and the whole was cast by a Sicilian Arab named Abu Leyth at a cost of about fifty thousand pounds of our money. The balls were thrown down by an earthquake in 1395, when their proportions were carefully ascertained.