The truth is that Spain doesn’t have a natural capital because as a nation it is an amalgamation of ‘countries’. Toledo served as the seat of government for the Visigothic kings, but the fact that it did not regain this status under Ferdinand and Isabella is testament to how different were the many ‘bits’ that made up Spain. Toledo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could serve as a capital of Castile at best, but held no resonance for the Crown of Aragon.
The solution for many years was not to have a capital at all, and simply move the court around, spending a year or two here, then there, in a complicated and expensive way of trying to please everyone. Then one day in 1561, Philip II took his royal train to Madrid, a middling-sized town in Castile with around thirty thousand inhabitants, and never moved on. And although he later continued to travel around his domains, the offices of state would henceforth (excepting a brief interlude in Valladolid in the seventeenth century, and another during the Spanish Civil War) remain where they were. Madrid became the Spanish capital more by accident than by design.
There are several reasons given as to why Madrid had this role thrust upon it. All of them are legitimate and none definitive because Philip almost certainly never consciously made such a decision. In fact, it was only as recently as 2006 that the city’s role as capital was sanctioned by a specific law.
The most commonly cited reason is because Madrid is mathematically at the heart of Spain. Supposedly, if you measure all the land in the country and then work out its exact centre, you end up in Madrid, specifically its central square, La Puerta del Sol. Originally set on the outskirts of the medieval town, the square owes its name to an image of the sun that used to be found on the east-facing gate. It marks kilometro cero, – ‘kilometre zero’ – the starting point of all the major roads in Spain, which radiate out from the city like the hands of a clock.
That was a later development, however, in the eighteenth century. In 1561, Madrid was not quite a backwater, having hosted the royal court several times already over previous decades, but neither was it a cultural or economic hub. It did, however, have several features which pleased the king. First, it was good for hunting, and the Casa del Campo, the large parkland area to the west of today’s city centre, commonly hosted Philip and his successors in the preferred aristocratic pastime of the age. Second, there was no bishopric of Madrid at the time, so clerics posed little threat to royal authority, unlike in Toledo, seat of the Primate of the Spanish Church. Third, the town had a large castle dating from Moorish times, the Alcázar, which was strong enough to serve as the prison for King Francis I of France after his capture at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. And fourth, lying south of the high Sierra de Guadarrama, there was ample good-quality water (despite the Manzanares being such a sorry excuse for a river).
In addition, Philip’s third and favourite wife, Isabel de Valois, liked Madrid, claiming the climate suited her health. Sadly, it didn’t prevent her from dying shortly after childbirth in 1568, but by this point Philip had yet another reason for staying in Madrid – the construction only a few miles north of his architectural magnum opus, the Escorial.
Meaning ‘the slag heap’, El Escorial overcame the unpromising connotations of its name to become one of the most imposing buildings in the whole of Spain. Philip started it in 1563, practically coinciding with his arrival in Madrid, and paid for its construction using New World treasure not absorbed by the costs of his multiple wars abroad. It was intended to be the last resting place of his father, Carlos V, and then of Philip himself and all future kings of Spain. Carlos himself had died only five years before in 1558. With failing health, he had told his son to bury him wherever he saw fit. And so Philip had come across a slag heap near an old mine nestling in the southern foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama, and decided this should be the spot.
It took twenty-one years to build. The vast rectangular structure was constructed on a grid pattern, and as St Laurence was said to have been burnt alive by the Romans on a gridiron of similar shape, it was named after him: El Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Built out of pale limestone and with almost no decoration on the outside (by Spanish standards), it echoes much of the man behind it, with his austere, Counter-Reformation aesthetic and need to build high walls around himself: although punctuated by neat small windows and an occasional column or two, there is no mistaking that the monastery owes much of its outer appearance to the concept of a castle, a place designed to keep people out, much like Philip’s Spain itself. El Escorial was designed to be a symbol of the power and resilience of the Catholic faith.
Today it is still the final resting place of kings and queens of Spain, their bodies installed in el Pudridero, the ‘rotting room’, for the first twenty-five years before passing through to the Pantheon, where their desiccated and shrivelled remains are placed in special, one-metre-long coffins.
Yet if its function and outer appearance are offputting for the visitor, the inside of El Escorial is a gem. Frescoed walls and ceilings are home to one of the most important libraries in the country, while the chapel could serve as a cathedral given its size. The monastery itself became Philip’s favoured living quarters, making it not only a place for religious devotion but also a royal palace.
El Escorial is as much a reason for Madrid becoming Spain’s capital as any. Yet if placing the seat of government at the geographical heart of the country made sense on one level, it made none at all pragmatically. No boats could make it up the Manzanares, so from its establishment as the capital, for the following three hundred years Madrid had to be supplied by pack animal. Only with the coming of the railways in the late 1800s and the construction of modern roads in the early 1900s did it find itself properly connected to the rest of the country. That it survived so long as the seat of government in such circumstances – and given Spain’s tendency to break apart at the slightest opportunity – is little less than a miracle. But the fact remains that until just over a hundred years ago Madrid was more capital in name than anything else, effectively cut off not only from the rest of the country, but from the vast empire of which it was also, in principle, the heart.
And yet, despite all its problems, Madrid has something. It’s not always easy to define, but there’s a quality to the spirit of the place and its people which is special, a combination of pride, stubbornness, liveliness, friendliness and earthiness which is unique. This is the city which, despite throwing everything he had at it and with huge numbers of supporters on the inside, Franco could not conquer through military force. It is also home to many thousands of bars which have become almost synonymous with the city and Spain as a whole. It was here, in its frenetic and energised atmosphere, that the greatest cultural movement to emerge after Franco’s dictatorship – La Movida and the films of Almodóvar – was forged. And while there is beauty in abundance to enjoy in El Prado and other art museums, Madrid is less a city to look at than to feel.
WORLDS BEYOND WORLDS
One of Spain’s greatest gifts to the world has been its mystical traditions. Any vision of Spain which does not include this current is incomplete, for it is the power behind so much Spanish artistic and creative expression: Man’s eternal search, and his struggle with life and destiny born out of separation from the divine. This is the Spain of Santiago the Pilgrim, ever wandering, ever seeking answers, the Spain that wishes to explore and innovate, to find new ways, new thoughts, and break with orthodoxy.
Who were the Spanish mystics of prehistory? We can’t give them names, but the powerful ancient cave paintings at Altamira give a hint to their existence, extraordinary images which show a sense of awareness of realms beyond ordinary experience.
Historically documented mysticism in Spain begins with Priscillian, the gnostic. But while the militantly orthodox Santiago managed to slay this particular pilgrim brother, his influence continued for many years after his death (and, as mentioned earlier, may even be preserved in disguised form in the Camino de Santiago itself). ‘Mystic idea
lism’, according to the early twentieth-century Spanish scholar Miguel Asín de Palacios, is, in fact, embedded within the Spanish ‘race’ and cannot be subdued. And, following Priscillian’s example, it subsequently emerged in the ninth century in the shape of a man named Ibn Masarra.
Of local Hispanic origins, Ibn Masarra was born in Cordoba within a family that had previously converted to Islam. His father’s skin was said to be so pale that when travelling in the Islamic heartlands he was often mistaken for a northern European and had to take care not to be sold into slavery. Ibn Masarra is the first notable mystic of Al-Andalus, and as a Muslim and Arabic speaker his thinking is bracketed within the Sufi tradition, the mystical current associated with Islam. But mysticism by its very nature draws lifeblood from sources existing outside ordinarily understood confines of time and space. As Asín Palacios says, despite the oriental origins of his ideas, ‘the analogies which Ibn Masarra’s Sufism present with the Manichaean Gnosticism of Priscillian are so remarkable that one could take Masarrism as a continuation of Priscillianism’. Points of similarity include the existence of a ‘universal prime material’ from which everything is made, a divine origin for the soul, and its redemption via the teachings of prophets sent by God.
For Asín, Ibn Masarra not only takes up the torch of mysticism left by Priscillian, but firmly re-establishes it in Spain, providing the basis for many of the esoteric traditions which flourish in the country over the following centuries and which have a powerful influence on thinkers in the rest of Europe.
Followers of Ibn Masarra were concentrated in the southern city of Almería and at one point established a kind of Sufi republic there, where mystical ideas about the unity of the human soul with the divine were openly preached in the street. Spanish Sufis could be people of action as well as of otherworldly thought: one of their number even ruled a taifa kingdom in the Algarve until his assassination.
Following Ibn Masarra, however, the next major mystical expression came from Ibn Tufayl and his novel Hayy bin Yaqzan, mentioned earlier. Ibn Tufayl was the teacher of the philosopher Averroes, who lived long enough to meet the man considered the greatest mystic Spain has ever produced: Ibn Arabi. Born in Murcia in 1164, Ibn Arabi went on to be hailed as the Sheikh al-Akbar, the ‘Greatest Master’, a title which was translated by medieval Europeans as ‘Dr Maximus’. Like Priscillian before him, Ibn Arabi walked a dangerous tightrope between free-thinking mysticism and the orthodoxy of his period. He professed acceptance of the strict doctrines of his age, dominated by the Berber Almohad movement which had taken over Al-Andalus in the twelfth century, but simultaneously spent time with Sufis, eventually composing some of the most celebrated mystical verse ever written. His Interpreter of Desires is on the one level a collection of romantic and erotic poetry directed towards a beautiful young woman called Nizam. When he was attacked for producing this apparently impious work, Ibn Arabi then wrote his own commentary on it, showing his detractors how, in fact, it fitted their interpretation of Islamic law.
It was not enough, however, to protect him. Travelling from Spain across North Africa to the central Islamic countries, Ibn Arabi ‘the Andalusi’ was often violently attacked, only narrowly escaping death at the hands of a fanatic in Cairo. He finally died in his seventies in Damascus in 1240, but his influence continued to echo for centuries: Asín claimed that the writings of the Spaniard inspired Dante’s vision of Paradise, while a whole future school of Spanish mystics wrote in such a way that strongly suggests a link or connection with the Murcian.
Mystical writing and thought in medieval Spain was not the preserve of Muslims; the Jewish community also developed its own mystical school at the same time, and it was in Spain that the Kabbala, as it’s called, took greatest root, producing some of the most important figures to emerge from the Jewish mystical tradition. Among them was the philosopher Ben Gabirol, who drew on Ibn Masarra’s work as later Sufis did, developing ideas of the intelligent ‘prime material’ forming the building blocks of the universe. But perhaps the most important figure for the Kabbala is Moses of León (d. 1305), widely thought to be the author of the Zohar, the ‘Radiance’. This is the foundational book of Kabbala, published by Moses in Spain in the thirteenth century. Moses claimed it was actually the work of a second-century rabbi who had escaped Roman persecution by living in a cave, where he studied the Torah and was inspired by the Prophet Elija. It is believed that the book is, in fact, the concealed or esoteric part of the Oral Torah. The Kabbala movement went on to form an important element within the Spanish Jewish community and beyond. One of its centres was established in the Catalan city of Girona.
As well as producing one of the key figures in Sufism (Ibn Arabi) and Kabbala (Moses of León), Spain was also the birthplace of two of the most important mystics of the Christian tradition: the sixteenth-century saints, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. Many links have been drawn between the writings and beliefs of these two ‘Doctors of the Church’ and Sufi ideas, not least St Teresa’s concept of the seven castles surrounding the human soul. But if all true mystics are inspired by the same non-worldly source, then such historical connections are only, at best, of academic interest. What is remarkable about these two figures is not only how they continue a long Spanish pedigree of producing giant figures within mysticism itself, but, as with Priscillian, Ibn Arabi, Ramón Llull, Ansemlo de Turmeda and others, they successfully did so in the face of violent and potentially stifling orthodoxy.
The Spain of these two ‘pilgrims’ is the paranoid and increasingly insular country of Philip II and the Counter-Reformation. They themselves were persecuted by it: St John was imprisoned and tortured in Toledo by his enemies for several years before managing to escape. Yet against this unpromising backdrop both saints managed to shine a powerful light, not only reforming the decadent Carmelite order, but also producing some of the most sublime verse ever written in the Castilian language. St Teresa’s writings are still, today, among the best-selling books in the Spanish-speaking world. At a time when thinking and speaking beyond the tight strictures of a narrowly defined orthodoxy could bring great physical pain and death, these two mystics were able to write openly and elegantly about the direct relationship of the human soul with the divine – a dangerous idea which, paradoxically, threatened the role of a Church meant to act as an intermediary in such matters and whose entire power derived from the general acceptance of this ‘truth’.
Santiago the Slayer may have murdered Santiago the Seeker, in the shape of Priscillian and others, but at the height of his powers, with the Inquisition ruling almost supreme, his Pilgrim brother produced not one but two shining lights, the culmination of mystical thought in Christian Spain, and an inspiration for religious expression and belief at a time of persecution and State-sponsored paranoia.
In the seventeenth century mystical thought took on a less religious tone, becoming, in a way, more secular. The ‘unreality of reality’, the transient nature of the ordinary physical world, however, still lay at its heart. The key book to deal with this was the world’s first ‘modern’ novel, Don Quixote, while it also played a part in the creation of Velázquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas.
Cervantes plays with our sense of reality with the very first sentence of his great work: ‘En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme . . .’ – ‘Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember . . . [my italics]’. Whether Cervantes has a specific town in mind or not is unimportant; we are already in a vague terrain, undefined, dreamlike – as in a fairy tale – where strange and curious things can happen. Geographically, La Mancha is the closest thing in Spain to a blank canvas, huge, empty, dry and mostly flat, well inland and with few features beyond its featurelessness. It is a perfect setting for the novel, a world where it’s hard to know what’s what, in the company of a protagonist with a singularly loose grip on ‘reality’. Impoverished and proud, he dreams for himself a different life, in which his chamber pot becomes a helmet and
he himself an upstanding knight from Spain’s Heroic Age. His ordinary surname, Quijano, takes on the more romantic associations of Sir Lancelot (‘Lanzarote’ in Spanish) by changing to ‘Quijote’. The ordinary serving girl in the next town becomes his beloved, the village idiot his ‘page’, and, of course, mere windmills on the horizon are in fact giant, terrorising monsters for him to slay.
Cervantes is writing at a time of rigorous censorship. And yet he manages to slip dangerous concepts through to his readers nonetheless. Early on he explains that the book is not, in fact, his work at all. He is, rather, merely copying down a translation from the Arabic of a much older, Moorish text, penned by one Sidi Hamete Benengeli. ‘Sidi’ is an honorific a bit like the Spanish ‘Don’ which we have already come across in the form of ‘El Cid’. ‘Hamete’ could pass as a garbled version of ‘Muhammad’, while ‘Benengeli’ suggests ben – ‘son of’ – engeli, very similar to the Spanish ángeles – ‘angels’. At the very height of the Counter-Reformation, then, with persecution of religious minorities at its most intense, Cervantes managed to produce a bestseller purportedly written by a Spanish Muslim (a Moor) who is, in fact, a ‘son of angels’ – an echo of the very direct relationship between man and God which St Teresa and St John had been championing only a few years before.
But there’s more. Why windmills? Why, of all things, in his most celebrated scene, should Don Quijote tilt at these structures? A clue may lie in the supposed Moorish origins of the book. As mentioned before, the Spanish Inquisition was not the first organisation to impose strict religious orthodoxy on the Peninsula through violence. Similar movements had existed within Al-Andalus, particularly under the Almohads, who persecuted Jews in particular and forced many Christians to flee to the northern kingdoms. The Almohad leader was known in Arabic as the Emir al-Mu’minin, a figure of terror on the Christian side. Memories of this ‘bogeyman’ remained in folk culture, but his name was garbled, becoming Miramamolín in Spanish. Which is where an enticing play on words emerges related to Don Quixote, for molino means ‘mill’ or ‘windmill’, while mira means ‘Look!’ So by having his hero tilt at windmills, Cervantes is saying, ‘Look at the windmill,’ which in turn evokes memories of the Almohads and their policy of religious persecution. So who is Don Quijote really charging at? On one level, yes, mere windmills which in his mind are evil monsters. Yet this is a world where things are not what they seem, and those windmills, in fact, are symbols of violently imposed religious orthodoxy, or in other words, of the inquisitorial society in which the author himself lived. In an upside-down world, one must be upside down in relation to it oneself in order to see things as they really are. As Cervantes said: ‘Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all to see life as it is and not as it should be.’ Cervantes is holding up a mirror, showing Spain to herself.
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