Granada

by Steven Nightingale

  The poverty, crime, hunger, and hopelessness of the Albayzín led slowly to rebellion. Groups of anarchists took root in the barrio as early as the 1870s; radical wings of unions found good recruiting grounds there. Taken together, we know them by the mouth-filling name of anarcho-syndicalists. With the founding of the Second Republic in Spain in 1930, with its democracy, civil rights, and commitment to an open society, such groups came out into the open.

  In the short life of the Second Republic, from 1930 to 1936, Granada suffered tumultuous years. The government moved swiftly to organize a modern state, with liberty of worship, separation of church and state, the elimination of mandatory religious instruction, and the like; such actions discomfited the church, which showed its contempt of the new democracy. The church was understood to be allied with reactionary military and political forces in Spain, which included the Falangists, a fascist political group; and this alliance deepened the hostility of those loyal to the Republic. In the Albayzín, the church’s scornful treatment of the barrio set the stage for a bitter upheaval.

  After an attempted military coup in Madrid in August of 1932, the city suffered a slow-motion explosion. Demonstrators marched on the house of a local right-wing count implicated in the coup. Snipers guarding the house of the count shot and killed two demonstrators. In the aftermath of the two murders, the demonstrations turned to street fighting, and the conflict grew in hatred and hopelessness. The anarcho-syndicalists felt themselves, rightfully, under attack from the armed security of conservative families, and from the Falangists, already organized in Granada; the propertied class felt themselves, rightfully, under siege and took refuge in military dreams and the declarations of the ecclesiastical bulletin of the local Catholic church, which declared private property “sacred.”

  In the Albayzín, the anarchists wanted a soft target, where they could show their rage but not be killed. There were two available: churches and convents, mostly unprotected. The barrio was full of them, since in the years after 1499 Cardinal Cisneros had forcibly converted the mosques into churches, and thereafter the kings of Spain had made large grants of land to found convents and monasteries so as to replace the Nasrid palaces, the Moorish hospital, and ruined houses. The Albayzín was full of monks, priests, and nuns, in part because no one else but the poor could be persuaded to live there.

  Over the next four years, through 1936, marauding bands pulled down crosses in plazas, set upon church doors with hatchets, and broke into one church after another. Now and again they gathered the pews, tables, altars, doors, cabinets from the sacristy—anything flammable—all in a heap, soaked them in gasoline, and set the whole on fire. If the flames rose high and hot enough, the roof of the church caught fire and brought down most of the building.

  In our rambles around the Albayzín, we sometimes passed the church of San Luis, which was burnt to the ground during those years. The destruction was so complete, it was never rebuilt. Just two walls stand, full of weeds, and the bell tower is full of bats. The present-day Church of the Savior (once the central Mosque of Granada) still has posted within photos of the fire that devastated the building.

  The military insurrection against the Spanish democracy began July 17, 1936, with a speech by Francisco Franco from Spanish Morocco. The military garrison in Granada was one of the first to betray the Second Republic, taking over the city just three days later. Soldiers shot the mayor—García Lorca’s brother-in-law—and the new government formed death squads.

  Nobody likes to see history run the same tape over and over, but here we go: to subdue the Albayzín during the insurrection of 1568–70, the Spanish military bombarded the Albayzín with catapults and cannon placed by the church of San Gregorio Alto and on the terrace of the Alhambra. In 1936, the fascist rebels placed artillery in exactly the same places, to fire on what they called the “red barrio.” For good measure, military planes bombed the Albayzín. As in 1570, troops surrounded and invaded the barrio. As in 1570, the military used the churches to imprison the residents. Examined there, the authorities led away those thought to be dangerous agitators, took them up behind the Alhambra, and shot them.

  One more parallel: beginning in 1499, Archbishop Cisneros, Ferdinand, and Isabel had turned loose the Catholic Church and its Inquisition, backed with military force, to remake the barrio. And then in the years from 1936 through 1939, the leading newspaper of Granada wrote about how the fascist program of “rechristianisation” of the Albayzín would take up once again the historic efforts of Ferdinand, Isabel, and their noble successors. By the time 1939 rolled around, the archbishop of Granada set forth incisively his understanding of the task at hand:

  We must redeem the Albayzín from Godless Marxism and its detestable work, which has laid waste to our spirit and forgotten the most exalted aspirations of the soul. We must detoxify the Albayzín of this venom ingested over so many years, as a result of a preposterous, stupid, destructive communism. We need to raise up the Albayzín culturally, morally, and spiritually.

  Unfortunately for the reasoning of the archbishop, there was little communist influence in the Albayzín, but plentiful poverty, sickness, and despair. But communism was one of the preferred demons featured in the militant dreams and homicidal rhetoric of newly victorious fascist Spain, whose flag, of course, was adorned by the emblems of Ferdinand and Isabel. General Franco himself saw his power and his country directly in relation to the Catholic monarchs:

  The glory of Spain coincides always with the unity of our faith and our nation; and our decadence with their separation.

  In this way, the national unity forged by the Catholic Monarchs was connected directly to the spread of our faith, and our military went forth with their flags held close to the Holy Cross.

  Spain is the nation chosen by God …

  The dictatorship of Franco, in league with their Catholic allies, rebuilt slowly most of the burnt churches. And over the next decades, brave investors, or families looking for dirt-cheap real estate, took up residence again in the Albayzín. The municipal government proposed valiant plans, wrote long reports, assessed the historical legacy before them. Yet aside from some private investment in the barrio, the reports and plans and studies yielded pathetically little to people trying to make a life in the barrio. The population, which had risen to almost twenty-eight thousand by 1970, again commenced a precipitous fall as new suburbs opened up, offering apartments with running water, plumbing, heat, walls sealed against the weather, and other persuasive advantages. People bolted from the Albayzín. By 1990, we hear this refrain, as though sung in a bizarre echo chamber of the centuries:

  In fact, the Albayzín has arrived at the present day nearly at the limit of survival, with a social and physical degradation practically absolute.

  THE REAWAKENING

  The establishment of the Albayzín as a World Heritage Site in 1994 was not the culmination of a program of care, action, investment, and recognition of a cultural and artistic heritage unique in Europe. It was a last-minute end-run around catastrophe, led by a brave, small group of savvy Spaniards whose judgment was honored by UNESCO. Democratic Spain awoke. The European Union sent tens of millions of investment dollars to help in the recovery of the barrio. Residents got money for renovation; families rediscovered its powerful beauties, moved in, reconstructed gardens, and restored ancient houses. In our few years here, the effort has gathered momentum: no fewer than eight old houses, immediately around us, are being renovated. And there are hundreds more throughout the barrio.

  Such is the activity that one afternoon, when I asked my little daughter what she wanted for her third birthday, she replied immediately, “A jackhammer.”

  WHAT CAN WE make of this tempestuous history, so full of sweetness and anguish? After our reading through the history of the Albayzín, we walked through its streets with a sense of miracle. It’s not just that it survived; it’s that, after such extremes of exaltation and ruin, it survived with such irrepressible gift-giving power. To do so, it n
eeded, like all of us, a healthy dose of luck. It makes us think of the unlikelihood of every blessing in our lives—the random meeting that reconstructs a life; a poem in a tattered book that rocks the heart.

  I have never known a place of such concentrated joy. This is where walking is like flying. It is ordinary and offers a fantastification of daily life. It is simple but holds a spirit decanted over centuries. The pleasures are common but leave us in thankfulness and wonderment.

  More and more, walking through the crisscrossing, tilted, banking, serendipitous streets, it felt like something more than being in a neighborhood. It was like being in a mind, where history is musing a secret way forward and, despite everything, offering to everyone whispered and hopeful overtures.

  In love with this place, we kept trying to understand. First, our own garden, then, the history of the barrio. Finally, we knew that to see the place in its savory detail, we needed to make a journey into the mystery of Al-Andalus.

  Al-Andalus: Notes on a Hidden, Lustrous, Indispensable Era

  IN THE ALBAYZÍN, we lived face-to-face with the Middle Ages. The Alhambra, soaring on its promontory, had its beginning in the early 1200s. And our whole barrio had kept, through its thriving and catastrophe, the basic street pattern of a medieval village.

  Gabriella and I used to go whimsically about the lanes, sure that some of the ancient doors opened into another century. Sometimes we sat together before a wall of white plaster, where, as though watching a movie, we conjured the daily life of another epoch. Such fun gave us many laughs, as we rambled and whispered our way through the afternoon. But all these antics did not undo my wretched ignorance of the period.

  Let us define what we mean by Al-Andalus: it is the period of history spanning almost eight hundred years, from 711 to 1492, on the Iberian peninsula, under the administration of either Islamic emirs or caliphs, or Christian kings and queens. Whatever the faith of the powerful in whatever region of Iberia, Al-Andalus is a distinctive cultural space. When we arrived in Spain, I had studied the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel, their triumphant unification of Spain, and the explorations of Columbus. But I knew little about the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish leaders and even less about the scholars of the period.

  But the conjured movies and magic doors led me to shelves of books, and to the houses of our neighbors, and to the history of gardens and of our cherished neighborhood. And thence to the history of Al-Andalus.

  Just as the Albayzín is a study in unlikelihood, so the history of Al-Andalus is itself improbable; so improbable that, until recently, it hardly existed at all. Most of us learn something about medieval European history, but in general, the material covers in more depth the history of countries other than Spain. There is a simple reason for this: to study Christian Europe of the Middle Ages, you needed, principally, Latin, probably Greek, and the vernacular language of the region you studied. To study Al-Andalus, you needed not only Latin and medieval Spanish, but a mastery of Hebrew and Arabic, plus a willingness to understand the contributions of Arabic and Jewish culture. But scholars with such a sweep of languages and interests were rarely to be found, except in concept, like the saber-toothed tiger.

  There was another problem, an old-fashioned one: the venom of propaganda and the energy of hatred. Over hundreds of years, the influential medieval chronicles, in combination with religious prophecy, came potently together with political make-believe, military glamor, and righteous conviction, to ensure the virtual erasure of Al-Andalus. Literacy in Christian Spain was for centuries concentrated among the politically influential, and above all among the clergy, who were central and powerful political players.

  A medieval chronicle is just an account of historical events, without any real effort to state the facts. It’s a wondrous form, full of ideological gusto and narrative invention, just because of the liberty of interpretation allowed. When we read them, we learn a lot about the writer, and about the power and politics of the time. But usually we learn almost nothing about what actually happened. So it was in Spain, where the chronicles tended to be traditional. That is, they took their origins to be the Chronicles of the Old Testament, and they sought to fit the events of their period into a Christian framework. So we get a lot of prophecy and apocalyptic obsessions, simmered with a desire to see their own faith triumphant in Spain and worldwide.

  In Spanish chronicles, this desire heated into craving, and history is cooked up before our eyes. So we have, nine centuries after the death of Jesus, the story of James, his brother, bringing the faith to Spain. Of course, James was martyred in Jerusalem a few decades after Jesus, but no matter. The chroniclers whipped up another version, in which his corpse floated preposterously in a marble boat all the way to northern Iberia, then to be dragged onshore by divinely commanded wild bulls, only to be discovered later by one Pelayo, a peasant who saw the heavenly light streaming from a field. This wild version stood for a while. Then a later chronicle upped the ante by declaring boldly that it was Charlemagne himself (or rather, a comic-book fantasy of Charlemagne, fluent in Arabic) who had found the tomb of James. But that was not the end of it. This new version, penned by a mysterious cleric impersonating a French archbishop named Turpin, was itself modified by another cleric, one with more financial acumen. He added on his own admonitions, in which he was delighted to report that the world’s Christians were instructed to visit and to offer some portion of their wealth to the Cathedral of Santiago, the home of the cult of St. James. Thus the tale makes a neat compound of serial forgery in hot pursuit of power and money.

  As if this were not enough, St. James soon metamorphosed into St. James the Moorslayer, who would on occasion gallop wildly down from the heavens on a white horse to fight for the armies of the True Faith.

  It all worked marvelously. Based on such fluffy inventions, the town of Santiago de Compostela—heart of the cult of St. James—became then and has remained an important place of pilgrimage.

  Yet the chronicles that created Santiago de Compostela made, as it turned out, relatively modest claims. Other, more far-reaching texts took on crucial weight in the centuries that preceded the fall of Granada. Many of these texts have a frothy mix of prophecy and apocalyptic fever, yet they provided a narrative foundation for the royal house of Ferdinand and Isabel, as they came to conquer and dominate Spain.

  It was a foundation many hundreds of years in the making. It used chronicles, myths, hagiographic texts, political puff pieces, apocalyptic essays, and collected speculation from all over Europe, yet made a consistent, emotionally potent story all about Spain. Scholars have gotten to the heart of the story by sifting through the whole wilderness of texts and looking for the narrative core, which is extraordinary. We will sketch it in a few paragraphs, and it is my solemn duty to assure the reader that I am not making anything up.

  Here we go: certain prophecies originally from a sibyl or from Merlin himself foretold the life of a king of Castile that would be called the Lion King, or the Hidden One, or the Bat. This king would conquer all of Spain, and his son would go on to conquer Africa, Asia, and Jerusalem. So would it be that the Lion King would bring all history home to Spain, because it was Spain, and no other country, that had been chosen by God to carry out His will. It was the Spanish Christians who were God’s chosen people, and they must take the leading roles in God’s drama on earth as he brought humankind to the end of time, with all its terror and salvation.

  Why was a king of Spain right for this task? Because after the fall of Troy, Hercules had come to Spain, conquered the country, and ruled it as a great and just prince. Hercules made his nephew the first king of Spain, and all the royalty of Spain were of his blood. And it was blood of Biblical worth, since Hercules was himself descended from Noah. Not only that, but Isabel herself was of the line of the Old Testament King David, the family line from which, as everyone knew very well indeed, would come the Messiah. As to Ferdinand, he occasionally styled himself “King of Jerusalem.”

  So there we have it
: a Spanish King and Queen identified by God to lead their chosen people in the conquest of Spain, and destined to begin the final triumph of Christian culture with the capture of Jerusalem. These victories would commence a golden age, governed by Spanish royalty of messianic destiny. And so would all of human history come home to its fateful and blessed conclusion.

  The Spanish pope of the day endorsed this rapt fantasy, writing after the fall of Granada about being in the eleventh hour, the approach to the last days. And of course this vision had little use for Jews or Muslims, who had both suffered the inevitable defeat of a debased, inferior culture and faith. The Christian church was declared to be the new Israel, and the Jewish Messiah was unmasked: he was the Antichrist. All this phantasmagoria and grandeur came together splendidly in the conquest of Granada: it was the decisive moment in which the future came into view, as Satan, the Jews, the Muslims, and the Antichrist all suffered a defeat that would lead history to its culmination. Ferdinand and Isabel were not just the saviors of Spain. They were the great-souled rulers, finally in place, who were fit to confront the fabulous days at the end of history.

  In coordination with the story, the ignorant and bellicose Visigoths were recast as exalted ancestors, virile and fierce in spirit, who had established a Christian kingdom in Spain and then lost it to the infidel, only to wait eight hundred years for redemption.

  It is not easy, so many centuries later, to credit this story that Spain told to itself, for itself, about itself. However feverish and ornate, to them it was more than a story. It was the wisdom of deeply spiritual men who looked into history and wanted to clarify for all the course of God’s work on earth and in their own time. In fact it proved to be the story whose power would all but erase from the narrative of Spanish history the accomplishments, the culture, the science, the music, and the literature of Al-Andalus. It was the Big Lie, in a medieval version breathtaking for its scope, ambition, and success. The effort stands, even today, as a classically obnoxious example of how religion and politics, in league together, can with consummate political artistry set out to replace real history with a new, fraudulent version. After the taking of Granada in 1492, the expulsion of the Jews, the punishments of the Inquisition, and the ethnic cleansing and final expulsion of the Moriscos, the history of the Middle Ages in Spain was reconceived as a vulgar martial and religious epic, an ancient and fateful holy work: the redemption of Iberia. Even through the twentieth century, we can follow the remarkable, feline activity of academics who have tried to keep in place a modest version of this historical fantasy, in which barbarous Muslims invaded Spain in 711 but did not alter its fundamental Catholic character and destiny, which came roaring back in 1492 to rightful prominence. In fact, with some few exceptions, some version of this story seems to have dominated teaching in Spain and held sway in the public imagination until the fall of Spanish fascism and the death of General Franco—he of the “National Catholicism”—in 1975. And beyond. As late as 2004, the prime minister of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar, could with a straight face declare how in the eighth century, “Spain was invaded by the Moors, and refused to become just another piece of the Islamic world.”