Cities of the Guadalquivir

I had seen for myself that the three jewels of Andalucia were Granada, Seville and Cordoba, and had no doubt that Granada was in every way the most brilliant of them all. Then, before I knew history, when I took things at their face value and listened to what others said, the truth seemed clear and simple.  Granada was the city of the Alhambra, the most ancient Islamic palace extant in the world and the most luxurious royal residence that, in its day, Spain had ever known. 

By comparison, Seville was a pleasant but prosaic place, a busy river port whose streets were dotted with disjointed remnants of the Moorish past.  Cordoba was more modest, a sleepy provincial town on the drier reaches of the same river.  And the mutilated carcass of a sprawling mosque at its heart was more of a monumental curiosity than a thing of beauty.

Granada not only was the city of the Alhambra – which, rather than a palace, was really a citadel where many palaces had once stood - but also the Albaicin, the hill on the other side of the valley where the twisting alleyways and secret gardens resembled a Moroccan casbah.

The Albaicin had itself once been a fortress, the first Moorish castle of Granada, of which the outer wall still poked up through bushes and cactus plants.  When the Christians reconquered the rest of Andalucia, the Moors who refused to live under their yoke fled to Granada. The flood of people from Cordoba and Seville, many of whom were wealthy and powerful, soon wanted  to create a much larger castle on the other side of the river, which took its name from the founding sultan, Alhamar.

A century later, on the slope above the fortress, an elegant city began to rise, where the Sultans of the Nasrid dynasty could live in the luxury, and seclusion, which befitted them as the guardians of Spain’s last surviving Muslim kingdom. It was the ruins of this earthly paradise that the first tourists discovered in the 19^th century, when they made their romantic pilgrimage to Granada from the north.

I have often thought that if the Alhambra stood on a plain, in a flat city like Cordoba or Seville, rather than towering on its cliff against a range of snowy mountains, it might not have had such appeal for the writers and painters of the day.  Also, the imaginations of the curiosity seekers were captivated by the lurid legends of the sultans and concubines, princes and viziers who lived there, ensnared in treachery and intrigue.

Finally, the Moors’ despair and dissolution before the final banishment bathed the whole saga in a crepuscular glow which earned it an immortal place in the European mind.  The poor people and their preachers clamoured for resistance to the infidels, but the sultans knew that all was lost and cynically plied to their will.

Even the style of their palaces reflected the influence of the Christian monasteries and cloisters, which the Moorish architects, as vassals of Castile, had visited. The flat walls serving as huge pages of the Koran gave way to an artful juxtaposition of alcoves and pavilions.  For the first time, too, the ancient prohibition of the graven image, equated with idolatry, was flouted.  Scandalously, the sculpted likeness of lions was allowed to adorn the fountain of the most exquisite patio ever conceived.  European painters – infidels - were even hired to decorate the surrounding alcoves with the portraits of kings and knights.

By the 13^th century, Moorish Spain was in decline, but it was an outwardly glorious one.  The enchanting rooms then built resembled petrified tents draped over spindly columns, affecting a softer, less religious look. The style they created became Granada’s unique contribution to universal culture, mudéjar. That was the name the Christians had traditionally given to the Muslims who chose to stay in the reconquered towns and who paid special tributes for the right to practice their own faith, but now it was used for the curious blend of European and Moorish art which resulted from the sultans of Granada making their separate peace with the kings of Castile.

And until today, whenever Muslims lament the loss of Spain, they blame it on the immorality of the granadinos, who fought for the Christians against their Moorish brothers, who drank wine like the infidels and wrote poems which exalted the pleasures of carnal love.   The “good life” of al-Andalus, and their bad neighbours, had corrupted them.

 

 

What I could not know then, because I was a foolish boy who preferred drinking from other men’s cups rather than from source, was that before Granada became the last refuge of the Moors, it was only a minor kingdom, all but forgotten among its mountains. Surprisingly, it was provincial Cordoba which had once been the blazing sun of the brief Moorish day, beside whch Granada was no more than a pale moon which appeared at sunset. Over the past centuries, Cordoba, which had once been far bigger and more powerful than Granada, was eclipsed by it, like a fallen giant hidden behind a standing dwarf.

And it was all because of the river. For the men of antiquity, Phoenicians, Romans and Moors, the “great river”, wadi al-kabir as became its definitive name, was a natural avenue which allowed traders to sail deep into the Andalucian hinterland to carry back wheat, olive oil and wine. The cities on it existed because of it, and rose and fell with its waters.

And Cordoba was the highest point on the Guadalquivir which their boats and barges could reach. No one could have preferred Granada, locked among rugged mountains, at least not before the 19^th century, with its fascination for arid precipices and impenetrable gorges.

When the Phoenicians established a trading post there, they named the place Kart Iuba - “City of Iuba” - in tribute to a general who died taking it from the native Iberians.  The sons of Carthage – named, in like manner, Kart Ago, “New City” – were the first foreigners to discover the wealth of the Guadalquivir Valley.  When the Romans drove the Carthaginians out of Spain, they founded a city on the site, which they called Corduba. 

The Romans introduced the olive tree to Spain so that they could ship the oil back to Rome, and they did so in such volumes that it ended by changing the very landscape of the imperial city. The galleys sailed up the Tiber and unloaded their clay jugs at a port just south of Rome, called Emporium.  There, the oil was poured into larger recipients for sale to the public and the used amphorae, battered by the sea journey, were smashed and carried by slaves to a dump which, after several centuries, had grown to the great height of 50 yards. 

When the Empire collapsed the dump, or mound was abandoned.  Earth and bushes covered the jagged surface and the provenance of its strange contents was forgotten.  A crucifix was erected on its summit, overlooking the city which had grown around it.  There are many more precious ruins in  Rome, and it was not until our times that the hill was found to be largely made of chunks of old amphorae from Cordoba, with the name of the manufacturer stamped on the bottom.  By then the hill stood in the midst of a suburb called Testaccio – “the shard heap”. 

 

 

After the long Roman period, and before the even longer Arab one, came the interlude of the Visigoths, whom we remember without affection for bringing Spain the fanatical Catholicism which bound it in ignorance for so long.  From the region of the Black Sea, these semi-Romanized people entered Spain as mercenaries in the pay of Rome.  It was a desperate attempt to defend its crumbling empire against the outright barbarians which had to fail.  

Within a few hundred years, the Visigoths had turned against their patrons, made themselves Spain’s first Christian monarchs, and ruined the country with their dynastic disputes.  What made the Visigoth monarchy so unstable was that it was not, like other monarchies, hereditary.  Rather, a new king was elected after each one died, which almost always led to bloodshed, since the rival families took issue with the result of the election, a stormy event in itself.

It was one of these palace rebellions which brought the Arabs into Spain, in the year 711. The king Witiza had been unthroned by Roderic, or Rodrigo as Spaniards know him, and in the civil war that followed Witiza’s followers sought help in North Africa.  Tempted by the wealth of Hispania, the general Tariq was sent across the water from Tangiers to land at Gibraltar, the great promontory which was later named for him “Tariq’s Mountain”.  Rodrigo was killed in the ensuing battle with the Moors, after which they swept over Iberia unopposed by the populace, which, in their despair of the Visigoths, welcomed them as liberators.  After conquering the entire peninsula except a mountain fief in the northwest, they established their capital in Cordoba. 

A governor was appointed by the Umayyads, the leaders of the Muslim empire who ruled from Damascus.  But in less than half a century, a rival clan in Baghdad overthrew and massacred the Umayyad clan.  The only one to survive, Abderraman, disguised himself as a shepherd and made his way across Egypt and North Africa, and, after several years, to Spain and Cordoba.  There, he restored the rule of the Umayyads and took power as prince or emir, proclaiming himself independent from Bagdad. 

Two centuries later Cordoba had become so rich and powerful that the emir, Abderraman III, went one step further, audaciously proclaiming himself Caliph, leader of all the Muslims, in defiance of the Caliph of Bagdad.  His first step as master of the new Caliphate was to crush the uprising of the old Christians who, since the invasion, had been cruelly treated for refusing to give up their faith. 

These downtrodden people, known as mozárabes, had been joined by Muslim rebels whose hatred of the Caliph was so great that they converted to Christianity in order to fight in their ranks. After a bloody civil war, the victorious Abderraman proceeded to subdue and federate all the tribes of al-Andalus. 

Once this had been done, the greatly strengthened Cordovans attacked the Christian kingdoms in the north.  The legendary general al-Mansur devastated many cities, taking captives who were sold as slaves or exchanged for ransom, and his campaigns were dreaded from Navarra to Galicia. 

On the most notorious of these forays, Almanzor, as the Spaniards called him, reached the city of Santiago de Compostela, the great sanctuary of the Reconquest. There, he struck the first blow in a vendetta which had to wait several centuries to come full circle. 

The terrified townsfolk of Santiago watched with horror as the arrogant warrior rode into the Cathedral on his horse.  When he reached the baptismal font – insult of insults! - he stopped so that his steed could drink from it.

Next, he ordered the bells to be taken down and had them carried back to Cordoba, 500 miles to the south and on the backs of Christian captives, as war trophies.  There, oil lamps were attached to their mouths and they were hung like chandeliers in the great mosque. The bell was the symbol of Christianity and the lamp of Islam, so desecrating one or the other was sure to enrage. 

More than two centuries after this affront, when the king of Castile took the city of Cordoba, his first action, which can have surprised no one, was to enter the Mezquita on his horse.  There, he ordered the long-lost bells to be stripped of the lamps and sent all the way back to Santiago, on the backs of Muslim captives.

 

 

At the turn of the millennium, Cordoba had become the largest city in the known world, with amenities such as sumptuous public baths, a library visited by scholars of all religions and Europe’s first illuminated streets. The breadth of the great mosque was such that 20,000 men could prostrate themselves among its 800 columns, when they gathered for Friday prayers.

Jewish, Christian and Arab scholars worked on the translation of ancient documents, and theologians who dared to dabble in philosophy ventured to introduce the humanism of the ancient Greeks to Islam.  Although privately encouraged by their wealthy patrons, they were often publicly denounced as heretics and had to choose between imprisonment and exile. One such was the renowned, and reviled Ibn Rushd, better known as Averroes. 

To consecrate his new glory, the Caliph built a luxurious palace which he gallantly named for his favourite concubine, Medina Zahara, “the city of Zahara”.  But less than a century later, the great Caliphate was destroyed by a bitter civil war waged from two ends of the society.  From above, there were jealous rivals among the Arab nobility who wanted to seize power and, from below, North African peasants who rebelled against the taxes demanded of them to pay for the endless warfare.

By the year 1031 of the Christian calendar, scarcely a century after it was created, the Caliphate had disappeared and the fabulous palace with it, ransacked by the downtrodden Berbers.  The coalition of rebellious nobles broke up into dozens of small kingdoms, stretching from the northeast to the southwest of the peninsula. 

For fifty years, these taifas, as they were known, rivalled one another with the splendour of their courts, the eloquence of their poets, the wisdom of their viziers and the beauty of their dancers.  War, in the Middle Ages, was the sport of kings both Christian and Muslim, so when neighbourly envy turned to raging antagonism, which it all too often did, they did battle with one another, and if they needed help, they thought nothing of forming alliances with the Christian barons on the northern frontier. 

This gave rise to the venerable institution of parias, a yearly tribute in gold which the “kinglets” had to pay their Christian counterparts to promise not to attack them, and for their protection when attacked.  The sums were so great that their collection in the form of taxes often caused bloody uprisings.  For example, the amount of gold delivered by the Sultan of Granada to the King of Castile, in the 13^th century, represented a fifth of the kingdom’s total revenue.

The Christians were all to glad to divide and conquer, with the legendary Cid hiring out his professional military services to help one Moor fight the other. The house of cards began to totter in the year 1085, when the Castilians took back Toledo. The loss, almost four centuries since Toledo became Muslim, sent a wave of terror throughout al-Andalus.  Which proud city would be the next to fall?

But all the Castilians wanted, now that they had regained the ancient capital of the first Christian monarchs, was gold.  Alfonso VI, emboldened by the ease with which he had conquered Toledo, ordered the emir of Seville, the largest of the taifas, to pay him forthwith double the amount of parias which had been traditionally exacted by Castile.

The king of Seville, Al-Mutamid, made a plea for help to the only True Believer who could give it to him, even though he knew what it might cost.  He sent a pitiful letter to the sultan of Marrakech, warning him that the infidels were about to fill the mosques of the city with their crosses and their monks and force their odious beliefs upon the Muslims.

Before long a legion of religious fanatics led by Ibn Tashfin, king of the al-Moravid dynasty, sailed across the Strait of Gibraltar.  The cause was just, and the wealth of al-Andalus would provide tributes and plunder to make the expedition profitable.  But instead of protecting the sectarian kingdoms, the Moroccans subjugated them and imposed their own austere rule.  The Almoravids, as they are called in Spanish, felt only contempt for the corrupted andalusís who had strayed from their faith by indulging in the same pleasures as the infidels, and, above all, by concerting with them.

The new masters relentlessly persecuted the Jews and Christians and punished the Muslims who did not live by religious law, and made themselves bitterly resented by all the andalusís.  One can imagine the sigh of relief they heaved when, half a century later, the Almoravid sultanate was overthrown in Marrakech and, without a power base, the warrior-monks had to withdraw.

For several decades al-Andalus returned to its previous ways, with the divisive kingdoms holding court once more and laissez-faire verging on laissez-aller.  But, after the Almoravid episode, their vulnerability was plain to all, and before long another Moroccan tribe, the Almohads, invaded in turn, crushing the taifas once more and imposing their puritanical creed, albeit less harshly than their predecessors.

But the Almohads’ dominion was cut short, another half a century later, when the Christians sent a huge force of Castilians and Aragonese to crush them on the northern confines of Andalucia, in 1212.  The battle marked the turning of the tide for the Moorish fortunes in Spain.  Once the crusading knights had gained their foothold in the upper reaches of the Guadalquivir Valley, it was only a short time – in the slow motion of medieval history - before they had taken first Cordoba and then, further downstream, Seville. 

This meant that all of Spain, with the exception of the Kingdom of Granada in the far south, was henceforth in Christian hands. And Granada no longer posed a threat, having voluntarily chosen the humiliating status of vassal of Castile, to avoid being liquidated. The increasing difficulty of getting supplies from North Africa meant that it also depended on the Christians for imports of cattle and grain. 

By the time it too was swallowed up in 1492 – not, it should be said, without putting up a long and bloody fight – the Kingdom of Granada had become a quaint anachronism, a subject of curiosity and even mockery, which owed its survival to its unimportance, as well as to artful diplomacy and regular shipments of Sudanese gold.

But, most of all, Granada had no river which galleys could sail up with armies and down with olive oil and wine, so it was a small prize – as well as being much smaller in size - when compared with the cities of the Guadalquivir.

 

 

When Cordoba was conquered, in the 13^th century, the Christians scarcely touched the ancient mosque, building a small Gothic church under its roof, tucked away on one side of the ancient prayer room, which for 300 years was the city’s cathedral.  But 300 years later, a great classical temple was built in the center of the mosque, which made it necessary to remove many of the columns and arches and the roofs they supported. 

The minaret underwent the inverse process.  It was encased in a broader, higher steeple, so that, when climbing the spiral ramp to the bell tower, the visitor realizes that it is inwardly Moorish, even though its outer face is Christian.

When the time came to conquer Granada, the campaign was launched from Cordoba.  The Arab fortress, downstream from the Mezquita, was adapted to serve as the lodgings and headquarters of Isabel and Fernando, earning it the name Alcázar de los Reyes Católicos.   When the knights set out to besiege the Alhambra, the bishop blessed them and their mounts in the cathedral-mosque’s court of ablutions, the Patio de los Naranjos, before the south gate.

The great mosque of Seville met a very different fate: the prayer room was replaced altogether by a vast cathedral in the grandest Gothic style.  But its minaret, judged big enough to support a bell tower worthy of the church, was left as it was, even though the style of the intricately chiselled brickwork clashed with the sober elegance of the Cathedral stones.

On the left bank of the river is another Moorish tower, a twelve-sided cylinder bristlng with battlements.  It was named La Torre del Oro in Christian times, because the people of Seville believed that the gold brought from America was stored there, when the ships moored along the river bank.  

But in Moorish times, the tower was part of the great wall which surrounded the city, down to the water’s edge.  From it a chain was stretched across the river to another tower on the right bank, to prevent unwanted ships from entering Seville.

And so it was that the river which gave the city life was also its downfall, for the Moors in 1248.  When King Ferdinand III, twelve years after taking Cordoba, laid siege to Seville with his armies, he decided to also attack the city by the river.  He ordered the Castilian fleet to sail from Cantabria in the north around the peninsula and up the Guadalquivir. 

When the invading galleys reached the pontoon bridge that joined the two banks, they easily cut their way through.  When they reached the great chain, it took several rushes from the flagship captained by Ramón de Bonifaz before it snapped. The feat was commemorated in the coat of arms of Cantabria, which shows a boat on waves with two halves of a broken chain falling beneath it.

The triumphant Fernando had soon ridden up the ramp of the great minaret on his horse, secure in the knowledge that Seville, with, all of the Guadalquivir from the highlands of Andalucia down to the Atlantic Ocean, was now part of Christendom.

Over the following centuries, nature and history saw to it that Cordoba became the sleepy backwater it was in 1961, when I first saw it.  The river silted up, and became unnavigable for the larger boats used after the discovery of America.

When I visited Seville that spring, its deep water port, 50 miles from the sea, bristled with cranes and the smokestacks of small freighters which carried away the region’s wine, olives and cork.  But the only vessels I could see in Cordoba, when I crossed the Puente Romano, were fisherman’s skiffs drifting between the sand bars, those curious islets where, midstream, stood the ruins of ancient mills, which must have been built when the river began to fill up with mud.

 

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