Seneca.
Maimonides was born in Córdoba and lived not far from where his statue now stands, but shortly after his bar mitzvah the Muslims controlling the city launched a series of persecutions from which he fled. It was while wandering from one inhospitable city along the Mediterranean littoral to another that he became a notable scholar. We catch glimpses of him in Algeria, in Tunis, in Turkey perhaps, in Palestine definitely and finally in Egypt, where his medical proficiency earned him a livelihood. He was a prodigious worker, and one of the most attractive letters surviving from this age was written by him, explaining how he spent his days; he found time in his schedule for medical duties, contemplation, meeting with Jews seeking religious opinion, leadership of the synagogue and service as advisor to the sultan. His hours fitted together like the pieces of a mosaic and he reported that he had no time for even one additional obligation. His collected works, which are voluminous, are currently being edited and published uniformly by Yale University, which is appropriate, for he is one of the fathers of modern intelligence.
It was surprising for me to learn that Córdoba, so long the center of Islamic culture in Spain, contained no statue of the principal adornment of that culture, the philosopher Averroës (1126–1198), who played a major role in codifying Islamic thought and in bringing Aristotle to the attention of the west. It is quite possible that he knew Maimonides, whose life his own parallels, for he too was a medical doctor of note, and he too was expelled from Córdoba by the reactionary fanaticism of Moors, who despised books. He too ended his life as doctor-in-residence to a ruler in North Africa, in this case Morocco, and he was, in his field, at least as brilliant as Seneca, Hosius and Maimonides in theirs. It is extraordinary that Córdoba contains no memorial to so famous a son, but if there was one I failed to find it. It would be pleasant, in my next trip, to discover that the city had remembered Averroës, for then I could make an intellectual pilgrimage to the four statues and thus pay homage in turn to the finest pagan of Spanish history, the finest churchman, the outstanding Jew and the most brilliant Muslim. No one can explain why it was Córdoba that produced these four excellent men from four different religions.
Today the city betrays few signs that it was for so long the center of Islamic rule in Spain. The Moors crossed over from Africa on April 27, 711, and before the end of that year had captured Córdoba, where they remained till June 29, 1236. They thus occupied the city for half a millennium, making it their resplendent capital, but except for the Great Mosque and a fortress called the Alcázar, it is easier to find Roman ruins than Islamic, and this is true throughout Spain; Moors were in the peninsula from 711 to 1492, but in city after city, like Toledo and Salamanca, one finds little to remind him that these centers were once Islamic; and when a building has been preserved, it has usually been so well masked by later architects that it goes undetected.
A word as to nomenclature. The warrior tribes that invaded Spain from North Africa were united in only one thing: they were followers of Muhammad and his religion Islam. Insofar as their beliefs were concerned, it is proper to describe these men as Islamic. Unfortunately, the adjective derived from Islam has never come into popular use for identifying an individual follower; we rarely say, ‘He is an Islamite.’ Instead we use the word Muslim, philologically derived from the same root as Islam (one who submits), so that the adjective Muslim is identical with Islamic. The noun Muslim identifies a follower of Islam, and it is proper to describe the invaders as Muslims. Tribally, they were composed from such varied sources as Berbers of the Atlas Mountains, who comprised the vast majority of the early invaders, and men from former Roman colonies reaching from Morocco to Egypt. They were a mixed lot. The designation Moor is an imprecise word of no scientific meaning; its derivation is not religious, nor geographic, nor ethnic. Some experts claim that it comes from the Greek word for black or dark; others say it is derived from some African word meaning black, but few of the original Moors were Negroes. Historically it has come to mean ‘any member of the North African groups who invaded Spain, including the Arabs.’ I shall be using the word in that sense.
Who were the Arabs? Technically they were members of that incandescent and superior group which spread out from the Arabian desert and with matchless speed overran surrounding cultures. Muhammad’s Hegira took place in 622; he died in 632; the flood tide of the faithful did not reach Spain till 711, a delay of nearly eighty years. In that time the Arab leadership had been thinly dispersed, and it is unlikely that many pure Arabs crossed over into Spain, although it has always been popular to assume that they did. Spaniards prefer to speak of this experience as ‘the Arab occupation,’ as if the Muslims who surged across the Straits of Gibraltar had been mainly Arabs, but we know that in the first foraging party, which captured most of southern Spain within a few weeks and got all the way to Toledo, there were no Arabs at all. There were, however, small Arab cadres in most of the succeeding armies and Arab leadership in the government, but to extend this to ‘the triumph of Arab culture’ is meaningless, for there were few Arabs and less culture; the salient innovations in architecture, art, literature and philosophy were imported mainly from long-established cultural centers to the north of Arabia. It is, however, accurate to speak of an Islamic culture and to speak of it with a certain amount of awe, for at its heyday in Spain it must have been impressive. It reached Spain in later waves, after the Berbers and the other mountain folk had conquered the peninsula.
Finally, we know that when the fanatical fundamentalists of Islam, the Almoravids, conquered southern Spain in 1086, only to be supplanted in 1146 by the even more fanatical Almohads, there were no Arabs whatever in their ranks. Both groups were composed principally of mountain wild men recently converted to Islam and of the opinion that Arab leadership, what there was of it, had gone soft and was ignoring the true teaching of Muhammad. Of any thousand Islamic invaders chosen at random through the centuries, I suppose not more than three or four could have been Arabs, but Spanish writers have felt that in surrendering to Arab superiority there was honor, but in losing to Berber inferiority there was ignominy.
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 Afric
an 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.
Film makers from all parts of the world shoot motion pictures with Muslim backgrounds in Spain because the inhabitants recall the Moorish occupation.
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 c
reamy 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 directon 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.
Iberia Page 20
