Iberia (29 page)

To be accurate we should content ourselves with saying, ‘The
Muslims brought Islam to Spain,’ but that begs the question of
who the Muslims were and where they came from. It has therefore
become the custom to say, ‘The Moors occupied Spain,’ and this
locution applies to everyone, whether from Morocco on the west
or the Balkans on the east, and includes people from three
continents, Africa, Asia, Europe, and all complexions of skin. The
word blackamoor was invented to describe Negroes; the great
bulk of the Moors must have been white men tanned by the sun,
like Arabs.

The impact of Islamic culture on Spain is well exemplified by
Córdoba, for during several centuries this city was among the
most scintillating of the world and comparable to Damascus as
a center of Islamic culture. It was rich in palaces, gardens, libraries
and university buildings. Its ordinary homes were probably the
finest in Europe; for their amenities they could draw not only
from goods produced in the east but also those brought down
from Germany and the north. Muslim chroniclers claim, no doubt
with eastern exaggeration, that in those days Córdoba had a
population of about one million (today 190,000) and more than
three thousand mosques, public baths and palaces. It was
supposed to have had 260,000 buildings in all, including 80,000
shops. Its principal library had 400,000 volumes, and its poets
and philosophers made it the peer of Baghdad or Cairo.

It is important to realize that Córdoba was self-contained.
Under a series of cruel but capable military leaders it served as
capital for most of Spain and no longer felt itself subservient in
any way to Damascus. It conducted its own affairs and enjoyed
a reputation throughout the Muslim world as a center of learning
and medicine. Córdoba had its own publishing houses in which
scores of women were employed to make copies of the Koran for
distribution to mosques throughout Spain, and love poems
written in this city were circulated to all parts of the Muslim world.
In the eyes of Córdobans, the North African tribes from which
they had originally sprung were little more than savages to be
imported now and then for military service. Córdoba was a mighty
metropolis when Granada was a provincial headquarters, and it
was not until Spanish Christians captured the city and ended the
empire that Granada, protected by a rim of mountains, came into
its own as the last great Muslim city in Spain. Córdoba was lost
to Islam as early as 1236; Granada hung on till 1492, and that
accounts for the predominance of the latter during the concluding
centuries of Muslim rule.

To appreciate what Córdoba must have been like in its days of
grandeur, you must make an expedition out into the country west
of the city to the ruins of Medînat az-Zahrâ, but do it only if you
are possessed of a vivid imagination, for otherwise the trip will
be disappointing and even misleading. You depart from the park
at whose edge I found the statue of Seneca, cross the railroad
tracks and follow an interesting country road till a branch cuts
off to the right and twists up a steep hill. At the top you find
yourself facing an old fence and a barred door. Here there is
certainly no grandeur of Islam, and when the door is opened by
a woman in bedroom slippers you find nothing startling: the
merest outlines of walls that once ran down the slope up which
you have just driven, a few stones here and there indicating where
important buildings might have stood, and well down the side of
the mountain the only ruin that still has a roof. You would be
justified in asking, ‘Is this the glory of Islam? This barren hillside
with its unimpressive ruins?’

Then the guide begins to speak, and if you are able to credit
the greatness that once characterized Córdoba, you begin to
visualize what Medînat az-Zahrâ must have been like in the year
960. ‘We are five miles from Córdoba,’ the guide says, ‘and one
day when a foreign ambassador came to see the caliph who was
residing here, he found that a matting had been laid for him all
the way from Córdoba. It was lined by soldiers and eunuchs and
musicians who played music for him as he walked the five miles.
Along the whole route umbrellas kept him protected from the
sun and dancing girls accompanied him. When he reached this
place he found a palace that covered the entire hillside. The
sultan’s rooms alone numbered four hundred. The roof was
supported by 4,313 marble columns. The fountains were without
number, for merely to feed the fish required eight hundred loaves
to be baked each day. It wasn’t a palace, really, but a sultan’s city,
all under one roof. More than twenty-five thousand people
worked here. Slavonian eunuchs, three thousand seven hundred.
Other male servants, ten thousand. Female servants, six thousand.
Pages, at least a thousand. Musicians, many score. To feed only
the people living under this roof required seven tons of meat each
day, not to count the chickens, partridges and fish. It was the most
luxurious palace that Spain has ever seen, or the world either,
perhaps.’

To perceive in these desolate ruins the wizardry that was once
Medînat az-Zahrâ requires faith, and certain critics have recently
begun to question whether it was ever much more than the
normal-type summer retreat favored by all Moors. They point
out that such floor plans as can be extrapolated from the ruins
do not begin to provide space for twenty-five thousand people,
nor for a caliph’s quarters of four hundred rooms. And if anyone
did feed eight hundred loaves of bread daily to the fish, they must
have thrown it in the Guadalquivir, because there was no space
here for ponds of that magnitude. I found myself unable to accept
the grandeur that my guide reported, yet I was aware that she had
not invented these figures; they came from well-documented
contemporary sources, so that if what has come down to us is
mere invention, it was contemporary invention and not
afterthought. It is possible that those marble waiting rooms in
which ambassadors prepared themselves to face the caliph once
existed, but they have vanished as if made of paper. In doing so
they anticipated the disappearance of all Muslim culture from
Spain. On this hillside men may have governed for a while and
kept their thousand concubines, but their reality has evaporated
and even the buildings in which they luxuriated are known no
more.

Although I could not accept the figures given for Medînat
az-Zahrâ, I was hesitant to dismiss the legend because only a few
miles to the east stood the very real Great Mosque, and if a gigantic
thing like that was possible, Medînat az-Zahrâ was not impossible.
I first saw the mosque from the tower at the southern end of the
Roman bridge which crosses the Guadalquivir, and from there it
looked like an ordinary Christian church, ugly rather than
otherwise, set behind old brown walls, some of which were
crumbling, others of which bore false arches that led to nowhere
and pillars which should have supported huge gateways but whose
openings were bricked up. I spent a long time walking completely
around the mosque and failed to detect any façade, or any part
of a façade, which impressed me as worthy of what I had been
told lay inside. In fact, the outer walls were grubby and what
entrances there were consisted of uninspired square pillars
between which had been set short and stubby doorways capped
by Moorish half-moon arches whose tiles had fallen away in
various spots. Few of the world’s great buildings can be so
disappointing from outside.

Loath to believe that this was the building I sought, I withdrew
some distance to study it afresh, and it appeared as before: a
dumpy Christian church hidden by a wholly undistinguished
wall, except that now I could see the bell tower, and a sorrier bit
of architecture I had rarely come upon. It looked as if a tower
twice as high had been built, with no style whatever, and then
squashed down to half its height, so that all parts became sort of
ridiculous. They were too fat, too compressed, too formless.
Horizontal lines dominated the vertical, resulting in something
that was neither a satisfactory Gothic tower to accompany a
church nor a poetic minaret to grace a mosque, and I was ready
to dismiss the Great Mosque as a fraud.

When I passed through the dingy walls to enter the Patio de
los Naranjos (Courtyard of the Oranges) my disappointment was
increased, for here I saw a rather large area of no distinction in
which trees grew at random and around which walls ran, all in
bad need of a washing. Especially drab were the walls of the
mosque itself, a compromise between Moorish arches and
Christian brick but having the dignity of neither. I was really
perplexed as to why this building was so highly regarded, because
so far I had seen nothing.

I then entered the mosque by an unprepossessing door and
decided to look with unprejudiced eye at this so-called miracle;
and as I stood in the darkness and began slowly to adjust to the
shadows, I found myself in an architectural fairy tale, surrounded
by so many pillars and arches that I could not believe they were
real. I suppose that from where I stood I was seeing something
like four hundred separate marble columns, each handsomely
polished and with its own capital of Corinthian foliage. The arches
that rose above these columns formed a maze which attracted the
eye this way and that, for they were striped with alternate bands
of yellow and red, and they were extra impressive in that in certain
parts of the mosque they were double, that is, from the top of a
capital one arch was slung across to the facing capital, and then
three feet above that a second arch was thrown across in the same
plane, producing a wild confusion of line and weight.

My first impression was of this wilderness of columns and
arches; my second was expressed in an involuntary cry: ‘It’s so
big!’ I think no words could prepare one for the magnitude of
this immense building. Its columns stretch away to darkness in
all directions, so vast are the distances, and the fact that light
enters at unexpected places adds to the bewilderment. Also, those
vibrating bands of yellow and red increase the confusion, so that
one cannot focus on a specific spot in the distance, for his eye is
constantly drawn to another. The men who built this mosque,
over the remains of a Visigothic church, had a vision of
permanence and magnitude that still stuns the imagination.

My eyes never became adjusted to it, but when they had ceased
darting this way and that, I started a slow circuit and after some
minutes came to a section where the columns were of special
beauty, a kind of creamy white and dark brown, and where the
sets of double arches drew the eye to a focus on the far wall, where
carving of the most exquisite sort graced a series of intricate
arches. A group of French tourists went past, and I heard the
guide saying, ‘Now we approach the mihrab.’ This is the niche
set into the wall of every mosque, indicating the kiblah, that point
which one faces when praying if he wishes to kneel in the direction
of Mecca. The mihrab in Córdoba was the finest I had ever seen,
and I am familiar with all the great mosques of the east except
those in Mecca and Medina. It was a niche large enough to stand
in, covered with delicate tracery in blue and bronze, with passages
from the Koran written in gold against a blue ground. It was
ornate beyond description, yet it hung together to create a
sensation of Asiatic splendor as alien to the continent of Europe
as the cry of the muezzin. I was overcome by the beauty of this
spot, by the tragedy of its vanished significance. The psychological
distance between this alcove and the cathedral in Toledo is at least
as great as the distance between the moon and the earth. Perhaps
it is greater, for one day, apparently, the moon and earth will be
united by human contact but it seems unlikely that the mihrab
and the cathedral ever will be.

Christian and Muslim were further alienated by a relic
preserved in the great mosque, the verified arm of Muhammad.
It was the holiest item in Muslim Spain and was invoked by
generals when going into battle against the Christians. It seems
to have had magical properties capable of inspiring Muslim armies
and terrifying their opponents, and for the better part of a century
this arm had a clear field in Spain, without losing one battle; then
in desperation the Christians came up with a surprising
countermeasure which bestowed invincibility on them, but we
shall not meet this new force until the last chapter.

I had been wandering about the mosque for the better part of
an hour, keeping to the outer walls because I wanted to savor the
immensity of the place, when I became aware that a structure of
some size rose in the middle of the eight hundred and fifty pillars,
and I walked casually in that direction to find that my earliest
impression of the mosque, the one I had gained from the tower
at the Roman bridge, was correct. Here, lost in this wilderness of
columns, hid a full-sized Catholic cathedral, and one of colossal
ugliness. When the Christians captured Córdoba in 1236 and
expelled the Moors, it was understandable that they should wish
to convert the now useless mosque into a cathedral, for the Moors
had done the converse in 711 when they captured the city. I think
no one can complain of such conversion; it is one of the logical
consequences of war, and if the truth were known, Sancta Sophia
in Constantinople, which started life as a cathedral, did not suffer
much by being sanctified as a mosque. In Córdoba, the Christians
did little to damage the mosque; they merely ripped out a few
rows of pillars so that the interior would look like a church with
a central nave plus two aisles on each side, and thus it stood from
1236 to about 1520; I suppose the untrained eye entering the
building in those centuries could not have detected that changes
had been made, because the visual difference between a thousand
columns and eight hundred and fifty cannot be significant.