THE VISIGOTHS LOSE THE NEIGHBORHOOD TO AL-ANDALUS
In the fifth century, into the Iberian peninsula and eventually to the Albayzín, came the Germanic invasion that extinguished the Roman Empire. The skirmishing tribes that ransacked the Iberian peninsula have names that stick in the mouth like clay—the Siling Vandals, the Alans, the Suevi, the Asdings, the Visigoths. Our neighborhood saw these newcomers hacking away at Romans and one another, as it was dominated first by Visigoths, then by Suevi, then again by Visigoths, until by the sixth century the Visigothic aristocracy supplanted the dominant Roman families, and Roman villas sported Visigothic decoration. Even Granadan bishops took on Visigothic names, which is fascinating, because the Visigoths were not what we have come to call Orthodox Catholics. This being early in the struggles of the young, sprawling church, fundamental ideas were still in play. The Visigoths were Arian Christians. Now, library shelves have been broken by weighty books written about Arianism, and rightfully so. Let us boldly summarize: the Arians believed that Jesus, though a divinely inspired prophet, was not himself divine; and so Jesus is the “Son of God” not in a literal sense, but in an emblematic sense. Think of him as being adopted by God, because of his loving, his goodness, and his understanding. The Christianity of the Arians, then, stood in contradiction to the orthodoxy of the Council of Nicaea, which held Jesus to be divine, literally the Son of God.
The Albayzín, then, was full of Arians, which goes to show some things never change. The neighborhood is freewheeling and rebellious now, and so it was then. It’s something about all the sunlight and music, we think. In any case, throughout the Mediterranean, Christians of the early Middle Ages fought about the nature of Jesus. They battled it out in Iberia, as well, and the story is full of rousing political intrigues, conspiracies, exiles, excommunications, and miraculous reversals of fortune. In Iberia, in 580, Leovigild, the Visigothic king, gathered the Arian bishops of Spain in a synod to set forth a new Arian Christian orthodoxy. Unfortunately for his initiative, Leovigild’s son converted to the Nicene Creed, which held Jesus to be divine. He went to war against his father, only to be captured, imprisoned, and, then, rather conveniently, murdered by his jailer. After all that, Leovigild’s other son, Reccared, assumed the kingship—and then himself converted to the Nicene Creed. Arian bishops revolted. The monarchy threw itself into the arms of Orthodox Catholic Christianity, and the hubbub continued. Reccared’s son was assassinated, and his murderer, Witeric, tried to bring back Arianism; but alas, Witeric was decapitated at a banquet. So went the pacific exchange of ideas that formed Christian theology in Spain.
So our Albayzín, after centuries with the Iberians, Romans, pagans, Jews, early Christians, then pagan Germanic invaders turned Arians, finally cruised into the seventh century full of Catholics who kneeled down and swore to the Nicene Creed in their churches. Their Visigothic rulers went on to distinguish themselves by a habit of internecine slaughter and, just to round things out, a doctrinal hatred of the peninsula’s substantial Jewish population.
When, in 711, Tariq Ibn Ziyad turned up with his seven thousand soldiers, everything changed for the Albayzín, for most of the Iberian peninsula, and for Europe. It was the beginning of Al-Andalus, and we still live with the forms and in the light of those eight hundred years. The Albayzín, in particular, takes from that period the layout of its streets, its architecture, its monuments, its gardens, and myriad elements of its way to life.
The Arabs and Berbers, both bearing Islam to the peninsula, came first as soldiers. But the swift collapse of the Visigoths delivered the entirety of Iberia into their hands, and they stayed on as settlers. Our hillside, with its customs and churches and history of agreeable habitation, yielded itself easily to the newcomers, not least because of the help of the Jewish population of the city. In the years following, we hear of the future Albayzín now and then in the historical record. In 743, a group of Syrians received permission to set up house in the neighborhood. We have excavations of some of their houses from the period, with cannily constructed walls of stone, private baths, and interior patios. In 755, the first emir of Spain, the gardening Abd al-Rahman I we have met, gave his permission to fortify the building on the Sabika hill, on the site that would one day hold the Alcazaba, fortress of the Alhambra. We have a picture, then, of a small community now spread over the hillside of the Albayzín and the Sabika hill, with a small, politically dominant Muslim cohort, a vigorous Christian presence, and a well-established Jewish quarter.
For the first three centuries of Al-Andalus, much of the action moved to another hillside to the west, farther from the Sierra Nevada, but still with good access to rich agricultural lands. The settlement there, called Medina Elvira, flourished until the beginning of the eleventh century, when the momentous decision was made to move everyone to the better-fortified and tantalizing hill of the future Albayzín. So began the reign of the Zirids, a Berber tribe whose kings, in seventy years, made the fine judgments that formed the neighborhood where we live. They brought power and big plans, but most of all a thoroughgoing practicality. They built the walls we see today, and some of their gates we still have, like the Arco de las Pesas, that gives access to Plaza Larga. They built a mosque, the Almorabitin, whose minaret (now a belltower) still stands, with rough, admirable beauty. Most of all, and best of all, they brought water. It came from a miraculous spring called Aynadamar, across the foothills to the top of the Albayzín, and flowed through the neighborhood, to be collected in twenty-eight cisterns called aljibes. You can still see them in the Albayzín, like stone keys to the heritage of life here. It is worth quoting a description of the water:
The water is most healthful, and a natural medicine against fevers and so helpful to the digestion, that no matter how abundant the food, it passes easily through the stomach; its temperature is that of natural springs, warm in winter and cool in summer, and so clear and delightful to see, for its bounteous quantity and its effervescence, that for it alone Granada would be superb, even if the city did not have so many other excellent qualities.
Even to read about it makes one thirsty. The engineering was so sound, it lasted a thousand years. There are still residents in the Albayzín who remember drinking this water. Such are the virtues of thoughtful engineering—a millennium of daily benefits.
In that same eleventh century, a king by the name of Badis built his palace somewhere around San Miguel Bajo, a plaza today full of restaurants and rollicking children. The settlement expanded, and the walls with it, and neighborhoods radiated out from the central, fortified zone, which remained where it had been for the previous seventeen hundred years. The new barrios took on their wonderful names: there was a Barrio of the Caves, of the Cliffs, of the Potters. There was a Barrio of Delights, of the Solitary Worshippers, and finally, just on the other side of the Arco de las Pesas, the Barrio of the Falconers. It is this last barrio—ar-rabad al-bayyzin—whose name gives us Albayzín. Though men with falcons on their wrists are rarely sighted, at least for now.
Throughout the Iberian peninsula, political power knotted and unknotted whole regions, as armies led by Christian sovereigns advanced from the north, won and lost battles, and the leaders of Al-Andalus, whether Christian or Muslim, made and remade alliances with one other. But Al-Andalus, whatever the governance of its cities and regions, continued to be the same fecund mix of language, faith, and art, with strong Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. And the Albayzín—the core and origin of Granada, was to be for two and a half centuries a place for kings.
After the arrival of the community of Elvira, the Albayzín remade itself into an energetic, well-fortified city. To the provision of sparkling water, successive kings and their talented subjects added a large hospital, new mosques for the increased population, and a bridge across the Darro to permit easy access to the Jewish quarter of the city and to the fortress atop the Sabika hill. Today, one may walk in a matter of minutes from our house to all these sites. The twenty-eight aljibes have been reco
vered. The footings of the bridge across the Darro still stand; in the nineteenth century, they were to give a Romantic frisson to visitors from France and England.
The population grew and changed and strengthened as new skills were demanded, and new prosperity incited a new way of life. The number of people in the Albayzín began a steady climb that would culminate, after four centuries, in a population of around forty thousand people, a nice medieval contrast to the ten thousand who live here today.
During this time, the neighborhood took on the quality that, as we read about it today, impresses us: rambunctious diversity. Already diverse in religious faith, with the agricultural bounty to support them, the community came into its own. Who were these people, what did they know, how did they live?
There were farmers, laborers, muleteers; millers, bakers, basket-makers. There were tile-makers who were to carry further the rich traditions of arabesque and ingenious geometry; there were potters who adorned vases and plates with lovely blue and green designs. So lovely that when we bought a set of plates for daily use in our new kitchen, the paintings upon them turned out to be copied from a fourteenth-century original. There were wood-carvers who translated the octagons and whirling dodecagons of the tile-makers into ceiling panels of wonderful, sidereal variety. There were the famous orchardkeepers, who produced for the city a promiscuous variety of fruit—peaches, grapes, pomegranates, figs, apples, oranges, dates, lemons, along with pistachios and cashews. Through the Albayzín, and down in the marketplace that developed in the level area just west of the neighborhood, there thrived the specialists—blacksmiths, rope-makers, shoemakers, book-binders, stonecutters, pharmacists, midwives. In the Albayzín itself, the spinners of silk made the silk merchants and sultans of Granada rich with their shimmering production, which was exported all over Europe and the Mediterranean. And all this is a mere sample of the work undertaken in the city. Studies of old records show over five hundred established occupations. It gives the picture of a bounteous, secure, diverse city, blessed with sun, water, and wit.
Where did they live? Along with the floral carmenes built throughout the countryside around Granada, their houses in the Albayzín were small, their rooms set around a courtyard, with a fountain in the center, flowers, or a grapevine. Off the courtyard on the ground floor were closets, a kitchen, and a storehouse with bins for cereals, beans, and fruit, and large jars, sometimes buried in the earth, for water or oil. Above, small bedrooms. It is a simple, beautiful order that asks light and air into the house all year, yet in the hot months holds enough shade to make for cool refuge. Here and there in the Albayzín, such medieval houses are preserved. A door opens, centuries fall away, and we enter a patio flanked by columns, with a small fountain in the center giving water into a channel that leads to a rectangular pool holding water for household use. Such a small space, proportioned sweetly, feels private, and yet at liberty, open to the sky. They are places of singular peace.
Houses had no place to bathe. But each part of the Albayzín offered public bathhouses, with steaming hot water, essential to public health and social concord. The ceilings of these bathhouses had star-shaped openings that brought slanting beams of light across the steamy air within. They were gathering places, places of refuge and tranquility, places to rest, swap tales, reflect. Especially among the Muslims of Granada, they were a cherished part of daily life.
What did they eat? It was, by the standards then and now, an unusually healthy diet. They ate oranges, wheat, dates, artichokes—in fact, the whole suite of fresh fruits and vegetables grown in the vega and on the hillsides around Granada. All this fresh produce, as well as lamb, and animals killed in the hunt, was sold in the humming markets of the city. As to their cooking, we read of simmered vegetable soup with toasted wheat, spiced lamb with onion and coriander, hot pies filled with two kinds of cheeses and coated with cinnamon sugar, chicken with pepper and ginger, and the use of mint, saffron, sesame, anise, mace, citron. The citizenry of all faiths, including Islam, drank wine; sanctions applied only to drunken and disorderly escapades. And for the love of heaven let us not neglect the desserts of the day: sugary quince tarts, pastries of blackberries and elderberries with honey, pomegranate syrups, almond cookies, cakes with rosewater and hazelnuts, cinnamon bread with honey and pistachios.
They dressed in loose clothes that visitors found fantastical and whose mellifluous names still hold their place in Spanish—almalafa (a full-length robe of wool or silk), zaraguelles (wide pleated breeches), pantufla (a soft, colored slipper), marlota (a loose, ornamented gown buttoned down the back). Many of the longer garments were hemmed in cloth of vivid color or, among the affluent, with gold thread to complement a showing of precious gems.
This period, from around 1000 to 1492—an extraordinary span of years—is of legendary accomplishment. For the Iberians, and for the later Roman and Visigothic inhabitants, this settlement had offered a pleasance, a place of safety, a place to work and invent and dream. Now the Albayzín made itself into one the best places in the world to live. It had fine fresh water and sunshine, newly fortified walls, the blessing of religious tolerance, flourishing gardens and fields, a rapturous tradition of poetry and music, and hard-working, exploratory citizens.
There were setbacks. One of them was so terrible, we must give it notice. In 1091, the city suffered the conquest of the Almoravids, a powerful tribe of new converts to Islam who originated in the area where we now find Mali and Mauretania. The Almoravids had risen to power in North Africa by astute, fanatic military aggression and had gone on to make their capital the city of Marrakesh. The rulers of the cities of Al-Andalus, militarily weak and threatened by the invasions of Christian kings from Northern Spain, appealed to the Almoravids for help. And help they did, doing battle with the invaders from the north, and even invading territory where Christians ruled over citizens of the three faiths. After their success, they turned viciously on their supplicants. Worst of all, in Granada, their persecution of Christians in the name of Islamic fundamentalism reached such an extreme that several thousand of them emigrated, under protection of a Christian army, to northern Spain. Such was the severity of the Almoravids that they even turned on the popular mystics of the day, the Sufis, and suppressed their schools and burned their books.
The population revolted at these oppressions, and a rival power, more tolerant and constructive, was invited in from North Africa. Called the Almohads, they possessed a formidable military prowess and were builders in their own right. Welcomed by the populace, they put an end to the depredations of the Almoravids, whose rule in Al-Andalus lasted only fifty-six years.
Here in the Albayzín, just below our house, rises a strong, lovely Almohad minaret, the bell tower of the church of Saint John of the Kings, even now being restored as the Albayzín, building by building, reclaims its heritage.
In 1238, the Almohads gave way to the first of the Nasrid kings, one Yusuf Nasr, of Granada. His quarters were in the Albayzín, and he and his descendants, through their political suppleness, improvisational diplomacy, and the sheer talent of their subjects, would keep Al-Andalus alive in the south of Spain for another two hundred and fifty years—longer than the United States of America has existed. The same year Nasr took power in the Albayzín, he began the last phase of building in Granada, the one known worldwide today. For across the way stood the Sabika hill, and upon that hill, Nasr determined he would build an entirely new barrio of the city. It would be full of gardens, and in the center would rise a new palace, the Alhambra.
It was an opportune time for the construction of a palace. During these centuries, as Christian armies slowly dismembered the reign of Islamic emirs and reconstituted Al-Andalus under Christian rule, gifted craftsman and scholars sought their place in society in one or another city. Some were welcomed and valued in Christian Spain; others were persecuted. And some traveled to southern Spain, to Granada or to its surrounding territories, to begin new lives. After five hundred years of progressive development in gard
ening, agronomy, architecture, poetry, philosophy, the natural sciences, and design, Al-Andalus had a preponderance of talent, whomever ruled the city in which they lived.
With its population and prosperity increasing, the city had grown. The Albayzín for many centuries was Granada. Over decades and centuries, from the early 1200s, the city spilled down the slope to fill the area between the Albayzín and the Genil River. And as the Alhambra and its environs rose on the Sabika hill, Granada and its surrounding countryside, full of carmenes, took on an iridescent beauty. We have travelers’ accounts, from a German traveler, Jacobo Munzer, in 1494, and from the Italian Andrea Navagiero, in 1526. It is worth the while listening to their voices.
First, Munzer:
At the foot of the mountains, on the good plain, Granada has, for almost a mile, many orchards and leafy spots irrigable by water channels; orchards, I repeat, full of houses and towers, occupied during the summer, which, seen together and from afar, you would take to be a populous and fantastic city … there is nothing more wonderful. The Saracens like orchards very much, and are very ingenious in planting and irrigating them to a degree that nothing surpasses.
And Navagiero:
All the slope … and equally the area on the opposite side, is most beautiful, filled with numerous houses and gardens, all with their fountains, myrtles, and trees, and in some there are large and very beautiful fountains. And even though this part surpasses the rest in beauty the other environs of Granada are the same, as much the hills as the plain they call the Vega. All of it is lovely, extraordinarily pleasant to behold, all abounding in water, water that could not be more abundant; all full of fruit trees, like plums of every variety, peaches, figs, quinces … apricots, sour cherries and so many other fruits that one can barely glimpse the sky for the density of the trees … There are also pomegranate trees, so attractive and of such good quality that they could not be more so, and incomparable grapes, of many kinds, and seedless grapes for raisins. Nor are wanting olive trees so dense they resemble forests of oaks.
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