The Alhambra and the Kremlin: The South and the North of Europe

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

OUTER WALL OF THE ALHAMBRA.

When the empire of the Moors in Spain was broken into hostile factions, preparatory to its final extinction, the city of Granada fell into the hands of Zawi Ibu Zeyri, who was its first king, and established his royal residence here. The towers or castle on the summit of the hill, and commanding the whole city, were called Alhambra, which means red castle, and to this color the stones turn after exposure to the air, from the oxide of iron they contain.

Within the walls of this castle, covering an area of several acres, the successive Moorish kings erected palaces, and embellishing them according to their own tastes, joined walls and towers, and courts and fountains and gardens, until in process of time the great enclosure became filled with the edifices which this luxurious and extravagant race of monarchs desired for themselves, their wives and concubines, and the hosts of servants and dependants which such a style of life, in such a country, must demand. At this moment, the palace of the Russian emperor holds five thousand persons, all actually required to wait upon the Czar and his household and one another. In the Seraglio of the Sultan of Turkey 40,000 oxen were eaten yearly, and 400 sheep a day. An army would therefore be as easily lodged as the family of a Moorish king in the palace at Granada. What it was in the days of Abu-Abdallah, who has the traditional honor of having built the palace itself, or of Yusef I., who added lustre to its walls by his gorgeous decorations, we can form but a faint conception from what we see of it now that it is stripped of its purple and gold, and has nothing of its former splendors but the mouldering walls and shattered stairs and broken floors.

The first prince who took up his abode in the Alhambra itself was Alhamar, from whom it has been by many supposed that the palace itself was named. He was a wise, gentle, and noble ruler, so widely differing from most of his race that he actually preferred peace to war; and, to make it possible for him to pursue without interruption his vast beneficent plans for the improvement of the condition of his people, he consented to pay an annual tribute to Ferdinand, King of Arragon. Alhamar constructed roads to the distant parts of his empire, which then reached to Gibraltar; he built colleges and hospitals; and the canals that carried waters far into the plains for irrigation were the work of this barbarian king. Under his reign the city rose to its zenith of splendor. The arts and sciences flourished as the vine and fig-tree in a genial soil. Wealth, learning, genius, taste, and chivalry lent their aid to heighten the attractions of this fair city. Yusef, one of his successors, added many buildings to those that he had left, and others were crowded into the arena in after reigns, so that for two hundred and fifty years it was growing in such magnificence and beauty, as the soft, languid, and effeminate tastes of a luxurious, debauched, and decaying race of irresponsible, licentious, and decaying monarchs, with a host of wives to prompt them to indulgence in every whim of fancy, could invent to add to the delights of their terrestrial paradise. What could be looked for as the result of such lives but the ruin of the empire. Kings had but short reigns, for intrigue, lust, ambition, and murder made one after another give place to a rival who sought his bed quite as much as his throne. The usurper soon became the enfeebled voluptuary of the harem, and the arm that was as strong as Hercules in the battlefield became as weak as a woman’s when love, not war, was the passion of the hour. A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. The cities of the Moors no longer were in league, but each, jealous of the rest, was in succession sieged and sacked.

At last Granada stood alone in its independence and its impending ruin. Mohammed Ibu Otsman had bowed his neck to the Queen of Castile, and the Alhambra was the only Moorish gem which remained to be transferred to the Christian crown. Ferdinand of Arragon, by marriage with Isabella of Castile, formed at once a union of hearts and arms that prepared the way for the overthrow of the last remnant of Moorish power in Spain. Columbus, repulsed from his native country, had strangely sought aid in this distracted land. As if a higher will than his own were directing his weary steps, he had pursued these conquerors of the Moors over the mountains, and found them in their tents within sight of the red towers on the heights of Granada. They had other conquests than of unknown worlds in view. The prize they sought was gleaming, like a sun, between them and the snows of Sierra Nevada. They turned a deaf ear, in the din of war, to the tales of the adventurous sailor. And he went away.

He had gone a day’s journey on his solitary way to Seville and had reached Loja, where we had fleas and cake for our lunch this morning, when a messenger from the queen arrested his steps and brought him back to the royal presence and favor. They gave him the blessing and the gold he needed, and then they conquered the Moors, and Granada, with its Alhambra, fell into their hands. And in the same year Columbus gave them a new world in the West.

Years and years since, even in the long time ago when the sunny days of childhood were yet in the glow of their noon, I remember wondering “what the Alhambra is.” It had to me then, and all the way along the lengthening years of life, a dreamy rather than a real existence, and if at times I read its story, the “Tales of the Alhambra” rather increased than weakened the sense of dream-life in which alone it was to be enjoyed.

In Malaga I went into a Spanish bookstore and asked for English books on Spain. The bibliopole sent me into the garret of his shop, where in a corner was heaped a pile of odds and ends of English literature, such as might have been left behind by some poor invalids who had perished in their perusal, while seeking to get a new lease of life in this delicious clime. But among them were several copies, in paper covers, of Irving’s “Tales of the Alhambra,” whose uncut leaves showed them to have been unread and kept for sale to passing pilgrims like myself. I carried one off. It would be pleasant to read on the spot: and I have read them with fresh delight, while every court and wall and tower, every fountain, stream, plain, hill is linked with the stories that the old master told while he dreamed within the ruins of the palace that his fiction has made more famous than its history. But reading tales about the Alhambra do not tell us what it is, and it is quite likely that my account will give you no more intelligible an idea of it.

We have ascended the hill through a long avenue shaded with elms, and approach a massive gate, the gate of judgment, a seat of justice in olden times, where in the open air, as was common in Oriental climes, the magistrates, the elders, were accustomed to administer the law. “Then he made a porch, where he might judge, even a porch of judgment.” I Kings, vii. 7. Many other passages of Scripture allude to the same custom. A square tower surmounts the gate, and the pillars are inscribed with Arabic legends. The horse-shoe arch has a mighty hand in bas-relief, with the fingers pointing upward, and on the second arch is a key in stone, and the tradition is that the gate was impregnable until the stone hand should take the stone key and unlock the gate for the enemy to enter. Without waiting for such a miracle, we pass through the two-leaved gates, and by a winding and still ascending path we reach the terrace on which the palaces and villas of the Moorish kings were built. This plateau is about half a mile long, and narrow, surrounded by red walls six feet thick and thirty feet high, and made strong by many towers, each one of which was the residence of some of the household of royalty. The various styles of architecture within and on these walls are the best illustrations of the successive races and tastes and power of the men who have ruled on this lofty eminence. Rome and Carthage has each in its turn been master here, and left his sign-manual in characters that time has spared. More incongruous than any thing else is the Tuscan palace of Charles V., and a modern parish church has risen on the ruins of a mosque. Napoleon’s soldiers were followed by the English, and modern war is not a whit more mindful of the proprieties of art and sentiment than the old savagery which we despise. Ruin, desolation, decay is now the spirit of the place. It is impressive, eloquent indeed; perhaps more so than those ruins in Egypt and Greece and Rome that have the hoar of more centuries upon them. It is not so strange, nor so mournful, that the columns and walls should now be in the dust that did their duty two, three thousand years ago. It seems to be almost becoming that the temples of old paganism should moulder in the dispensation of faith that worships in spirit only. But it is painfully suggestive of the transient nature of all human art and power that these massive structures with gorgeous decorations, whose splendor is only equalled by the fancies of romance, have had their rise, their reign, and their ruin all within the lapse of the last ten hundred years.