The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  Pedro Machuca, survey plan for the construction of the Palacio

  Real of Charles V (lower left) next to the Alhambra.

  MISUNDERSTANDING

  The Ottoman mosque on the Acropolis was destroyed in 1687 by a Holy Christian League; but even before that explosion, it exemplified the uneasy three-way relationship between Islam, Christianity, and antiquity. The mihrab of the mosque housed both the throne of Plato and a miraculous mosaic of the Virgin Mary; the headless sculptures that freckled the exterior of the building were at once the cynosure of pagan art and testimony to monotheistic iconoclasm. It is said that Mehmet the Conqueror wept when he saw the Parthenon, so moved was he by its beauty and its spoliation.

  Islam and Christianity were both inheritors of classical culture: the Latinity of medieval monks and the Greek learning of Islamic scholars may be traced in parallel through the Middle Ages, as classical authority was handed down, preserved, and transformed, from generation to generation. But, though these traditions were sometimes complementary, they were not identical. The Architect’s Dream could not have been painted in the Islamic world; even if it had, it would have had to depict different buildings, standing in very different historical relationships with one another. The classical learning of Western Christianity was twisted by centuries of barbarism, and its fragments were appropriated by the very tribes who had destroyed the Roman Empire. Islam, on the other hand, engaged with the metropolitan culture of the Levant with greater ease and continuity.

  With the dawning of the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, these parallel traditions were brought into sharp contrast. Renaissance means, literally, “rebirth”; in the eyes of Renaissance scholars, antiquity was a corpse waiting to be resurrected rather than a living body that had continued to grow. Indeed, the very notion of the Middle Ages was a Renaissance invention, shorthand for the long sleep of civilization between the ancient past and the reawakened present. There is no equivalent sense of discontinuity in the Islamic Mediterranean.

  The Reconquista of the Alhambra in Granada represents—like Ayasofya in Istanbul, which is its mirror narrative—a meeting of Christendom and Islam at the dawn of the Renaissance. But while Ayasofya is subtly laid over the structure of Hagia Sophia, the Palacio Real of Charles V merely stands next to the Alhambra in a shotgun marriage of sorts. Both palaces in Granada were descended from the palaces of antiquity, but by very different routes, and so they were unable to communicate with each other. The Alhambra remained barren: an exotic oddity, incomprehensible except as an object of delighted reverie.

  IN JANUARY 1492, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon completed the Reconquista of Spain from the Moors. They looked up from their encampment of Santa Fe in the plain; they saw the standard of the Cross raised over the Alhambra of Granada; and they set out to take possession of what God had granted them.

  On their way, they met a group of Moors heading down the hill. Among them was the deposed emir of Granada, Abu Abdallah Muhammad, whom they called Boabdil. The two parties stopped briefly, but negotiations were no longer necessary. Boabdil had already handed over the keys to his fortress. In return the Christian party now produced his young son, who had been their hostage, and they gave him back to his people. And then the two parties continued in their opposite directions.

  Isabella and Ferdinand made their way up into the Alhambra. They purified the castle mosque with holy water and proceeded into the Hall of the Kings in the Court of the Lions, where a Mass was sung to the accompaniment of a tinkling fountain. Then they donned Moorish robes, and they set up their thrones in the Hall of the Ambassadors in the Court of the Myrtles. Within a month, they would send Christopher Columbus to find a western passage to the Indies that bypassed the Moorish shipping lanes. Within six, he would return to tell them that he had planted the standard of the Cross in an entirely new world.

  Abu Abdallah Muhammad’s train trudged on into the mountains. It is said that he looked back at the fortress that had been the seat of his ancestors and burst into tears. His mother rebuked him, saying, “You do well to weep like a woman for what you would not defend like a man”; and having sighed the Moor’s last sigh, he went on his way. The hill where this happened is still known as El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro.

  Muhammad had been granted land in the hills above Granada, but he did not stay to witness the conversion of what had once been Moorish Al Andalus into Spanish Andalucia. Instead he crossed the sea and went to serve the kings and chieftains of the Maghreb. It is said that inhabitants of that part of Ifriqiya kept their keys and title deeds in expectation of the day when they would be restored to their houses and their estates in Al Andalus. They are still waiting.

  IN 1526, TWO of the grandchildren of Isabella and Ferdinand were married to each other. Keiser Karel was the Holy Roman Emperor; king of the Romans; emperor of Constantinople; duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Limburg, Lothier, and Luxembourg; count of Artois, Flanders, Hainault, Holland, Namur, Zeeland, and Zutphen; king of Aragon, Majorca, Valencia, Navarre, and Sardinia; count of Barcelona; king of Naples and Sicily; king of Castile and Leon; archduke of Austria; duke of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola; and count of Tyrol. His bride was his first cousin Ysabel, the Infanta of Portugal, heiress to the fabulous wealth of the Portuguese empire. Since Vasco da Gama had sailed east to follow the Moors, and Columbus west to avoid them, the sun never set upon the dominions of Portugal, which stretched from Brazil to the coasts of Africa, India, Ceylon, Cathay, and Cipango.

  Advantageous unions were an old tradition in Keiser Karel’s family, the Habsburgs. Once upon a time, they had been stewards of a small castle in a small valley in upper Austria, but they were masters of the marriage contract, and Karel’s bewildering array of titles had been acquired not by conquest but by heredity. His father was Philip the Fair, whose father was the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, and through that line he inherited his northern titles in Burgundy, Austria, and the Netherlands. His mother was Juana the Mad, whose parents had been Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, whose marriage and whose conquest of Granada had united all of Spain—and now the whole New World—under one family and one faith.

  Keiser Karel’s titles also had heredities of their own, which stretched back far beyond the beginnings of his own family. The imperial throne of Constantinople had existed in name only ever since the Muslim sack of that city in 1453 (for which the conquest of Granada may be seen as the Western counteroffensive), but it was a title that could be traced all the way back to ancient Rome. Holy Roman Emperor, meanwhile, was a title invented by Charlemagne in the year 800, when he extended his rule over almost all the domains of the old Roman Empire. Karel wore the laurel on his brow; in the Netherlands his subjects called him keiser, in Germany kaiser, in Italy cesare, in Spain césar, all in emulation of the caesars of old.

  Karel had been born in the castle of Ghent, but it would be impossible to describe him as Flemish. With possessions stretching to the farthest reaches of Christendom and beyond, the keiser belonged to no one place and to no one language. “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse,” he once said, in which of those languages we do not know.

  When his grandfather King Ferdinand died in 1516, Karel traveled south to claim the crowns of Spain. The cortes of Aragon and Castile were suspicious of him, and they demanded that he take up residence in their country and learn to speak the Castilian language. He complied only in part, for crisis after crisis in his unmanageable empire called him north, from Martin Luther’s proclamation of his ninety-nine theses in Wittenberg in 1516 to the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 and the Council of Trent in 1545.

  But Keiser Karel did agree to marry an Iberian bride, and in order to confirm his grip on the recently reconquered regions of the Moors it was decided that the marriage should take place in Andalucia. On his way to the wedding, Karel visited the ancient mosque of Cordoba, in the middle of which a new cathedral had been built in his honor. He progressed to Seville, where he
was married under a bell tower that had once been a minaret; and he and his new wife spent their wedding night in the palace of their ancestor Pedro the Cruel, who had taken Seville from the Moors.

  And Karel and Ysabel were astonished to discover that not only had they made an advantageous match but they actually loved each other. The ambassador of Venice, who attended the royal couple at this time, wrote that the two of them had eyes and words only for each other, and behaved as if there was no one else in the room. The imperial couple scandalized the court by failing to get out of bed before ten or even eleven o’clock in the morning. So in love were they that when the emperor left on imperial business, the empress would refuse to rise at all. He even, it is said, gave up his many mistresses for her.

  AFTER THE CELEBRATIONS were over, the honeymoon was due, in which an heir was to be conceived, and Karel and Ysabel came to the Alhambra of Granada. They were met at the gate by a band of Moorish musicians dressed in turbans and flowing garments, who, sitting on the floor, played for the royal couple a strange and beautiful music, and sang to them in a language they did not understand. Keiser Karel was so impressed that he invited the musicians to the palace to play for him in his private apartments. Many nights the emperor sat stiffly with his court, in their ruffs and corsets, while the Moorish musicians played their haunting melodies punctuated with wild cries.

  Then Keiser Karel proceeded to explore the fantastic habitation of his honeymoon, and he fell in love all over again. The Alhambra he discovered was a castle in the air, a parade of towers and battlements perched on a wooded precipice high above the white painted city of Granada. It was said that the children of the Alhambra used to sit on these battlements with fishing lines, catching the birds that swooped and fluttered below them.

  But the Alhambra was much more than a castle. Hidden behind the battlements Karel found an intricate lattice of gardens and colonnades: a patchwork of light and shade, of scents and sounds. Everywhere, water tinkled from spouts, slid over the edge of marble basins, and ran silently in carved rills. Everywhere, plants filled the small courtyards with heavy scents. Each court led to a vaulted mirador, a belvedere from which the view might be enjoyed through fretted screens. Everywhere, there was ornament: geometric figures, vegetal designs, and sometimes something that looked like incomprehensible writing. It covered surfaces so completely and densely that it seemed as if the walls of the palace had been spun, embroidered, and then hung out in the brilliant sunshine.

  Of the many courts of the Alhambra, the largest was the Court of the Myrtles, which contained a pool of water lined with myrtle bushes. At the northern end, an arched loggia opened into a sequence of anterooms, and ultimately into a gloomy chamber—the Hall of the Ambassadors. This hall and the antechambers that led to it were covered with domes assembled from hundreds of timber facets, each cut into the shape of a star.

  Next to the Court of the Myrtles Karel found a court so richly decorated that it was called by those who saw it the Court of Gold, and this is where the new empress elected to reside. One side of this court was formed by a richly ornamented colonnade; another gave access to a grand hall whose roof was supported on four great columns and beams, intricately carved. The third wall of the Court of Gold was entirely covered with adornment, so tightly woven that it seemed as if the whole wall was a carpet—a carpet so gigantic that it had been given a roof, had grown doors and windows, and had become a building.

  Keiser Karel chose the last of the three courts of the Alhambra for his own habitation. The Court of the Lions was so called because in the middle of it twelve carved beasts supported a basin, their mouths spouting water into channels that spread the cooling liquid throughout the court and into the surrounding rooms and pavilions. To the south of this court was the Hall of the Abencerrajes, stained, it was rumored, with the blood of that overmighty family, spilled on the orders of Boabdil. On the other side there was the Hall of the Two Sisters, which had once been, it was supposed, the harem of the emir. Keiser Karel appropriated this hall as his dining room, because it contained a mirador of extraordinary delicacy from which he hoped to survey his new domains.

  The Court of the Lions was so cunningly wrought that it appeared to reverse the very laws of gravity. The marble columns that supported the arches seemed to hang down from them like tassels, and the walls were like screens of petrified lace, through which light could be seen. The rooms that opened off the court were vaulted with domes composed of thousands of tiny stalactites that scattered the sun in constellations of light; they seemed to drip down from the heavens, rather than rest upon the walls.

  Beyond these three courts, more pleasures revealed themselves to the lovers. There was a heated bath lit from above by glass stars set into the vaults. There was a garden palace within which, legend had it, a young Moorish prince had been confined alone lest he discover the joys (and pains) of love; in the end he made his escape with the aid of a turtle dove and found happiness with a Christian princess in a foreign land. There was a staircase whose balustrade ran with cooling water in the summer heat; and there were towers along the battlements that, military in external appearance, contained exquisite interiors like jewels in plain caskets. Keiser Karel heard the tale of three princesses who, although they were locked in one of these towers, contrived to conduct an affair with three Christian knights by singing to them and listening to their ballads. Two of them eventually eloped with their lovers over the battlements, while the third, too afraid to jump, stayed behind and saw out her days in her luxurious prison.

  THE ALHAMBRA THAT Keiser Karel explored was a labyrinth of exotic and incomprehensible delights, and so too was his new wife. Karel and Ysabel had never met before their marriage and did not speak the same languages. Karel tried to address Ysabel in all the tongues of his empire: his guttural Flemish rasping through the soft z’s and j’s of her native Portuguese, his German grammar tripping over sentences in Latin and French, his Italian wrecked on the numerous Spanish words of Arabic derivation. But while he loved his wife, Karel missed the easy informality and familiarity of his mistresses: childhood friends or serving women, whom he could meet with behind a curtain or in a garden. The imperial bride and groom were required by court etiquette to live at opposite ends of their palace, surrounded by entourages of servants and courtiers. So it was that Keiser Karel, not wishing to be unfaithful to his wife, found himself a new sort of mistress in the Alhambra, whose exotic charms and intimate sensuality beguiled him.

  But just as the northern caesar struggled to woo his Latin bride, so he also struggled to woo his other new love. Keiser Karel still missed many aspects of the flat, cold lands of his youth. He missed beer, which his doctors advised him not to drink in the heat of Andalucia, and he longed to sit by a fire on a cold winter’s night. He yearned for fresh herring pulled from the North Sea, and milk, and butter, and soft cheese, and all of those other delights that turned and stank in the southern heat.

  To the private refuge of the Alhambra, he brought with him as many northern comforts as his entourage could carry. There were not only Flemish chamberlains, cooks, and pages of the bedchamber, but also two Flemish choirs, so that Karel could hear the music of his homeland in the chapel royal. He brought his charts of the heavens, the orreries, astrolabes, and telescopes with which he observed the wandering planets and tried to divine his fate. He brought his maps of the earth, with which he tried to understand and rule his unwieldy empire. His library was stocked with the lives of the caesars who had gone before him and of the saints who had advised them. It contained the martial chronicles of France and the Netherlands, of the Crusades and the Reconquista.

  Keiser Karel filled the halls and galleries of the Alhambra with heavy northern furniture. There were high tables and high-backed chairs, carved from oak, softened with tooled leather, and draped with thick Turkey carpet. There were tall cabinets, brass candelabra, and tapestries that depicted the virgin and the unicorn. His rooms became crowded Wunderkammern. Shut off from the blazing
light and the scented breezes of the gardens outside, they felt more like chambers in a tower in a Teutonic forest than the pleasure dome of the Moors of Al Andalus.

  Keiser Karel had inherited from his Habsburg family a protuberant lower jaw and a sharp chin. He could not close his mouth when he ate, and his food sloshed around and dribbled down the bottom of his face. For this reason, Keiser Karel preferred to eat alone. In fact, he preferred to spend as much of his time as possible cloistered in his private apartments. Dining by himself amid his clutter in the old harem of the Alhambra, Keiser Karel never did quite work out how to consummate his love for his new mistress.

  KAREL, THE SHY and clumsy lover with the ugly chin who adored spending time with his new wife in their Moorish palace, was very different from the keiser who strode the world stage. His affection for the Alhambra was balanced by a sense of divine duty that compelled him to spurn its private luxuries for the pomp of his court. While he was on his honeymoon, he was free to drift from mirador to mirador, and trail his hand through trickling fountains; but if Keiser Karel ever returned to the Alhambra in the future, he would have to preside over tournaments, masques, bullfights, autos-da-fé, meetings of the cortes and the grandees, and all the other splendors of his rank. The intimate gardens of the Alhambra would be unable to house these occasions, which gathered vast numbers of men and horses in mighty array before their emperor.

  So just as kings always did for their mistresses, Keiser Karel decided to make the Alhambra respectable by giving her a husband: a palace fit for a caesar. A master plan was made in preparation for the marriage, in which the Alhambra was closely surveyed and documented like a bride and her dowry. Next door to her, the lineaments of her husband, the Palacio Real, were introduced and laid down. The drawing, like a detailed marriage contract, laid out the formal joining of the two.