by Jane Johnson
Epilogue
TWO MONTHS LATER
Extracted from a report by Professor Najib Tataoui of Mohammed V University in Rabat:
Paleography does not offer us much help in the dating of this manuscript, as we have no direct comparisons from which to draw parallels, provide context or give us rule of thumb. The fragment is not in the best condition, but once the dirt and cigarette ash were cleaned off it forensic examination and analysis of the paper by radiocarbon dating and microscopy suggest that it may derive from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, from an area that was highly cultivated, given the presence in the fabric of so many pollens, including those of jasmine, orange, myrtle, persimmon, pomegranate and mulberry, to name but six of the forty or so species identified. This in itself is surprising, given that the alphabet in which the text is presented is an old form of Tifinagh, which comes from the desert regions of Saharan North Africa, where it would have been quite impossible to cultivate such species at this time. We will continue to study and debate the fragment, but at this time it remains a fascinating mystery. I have, however, pieced together an attempt at translating the contents, reproduced below. And whereas the previous fragments I examined appeared to be some type of enchantment or spell, this third and longer manuscript is quite clearly a love poem.
It is worth noting, in addition, that we have deduced the inscription to have been written in human blood.
Both man and woman
Is poor/cursed blessings
Made by the djinn
A monster they…[illegible]
…[illegible] sun rises
in the eyes
Of one now diminished
There is beauty in stone
But cold marble has no blood
Let me be the one
To bring sweet joy and…[illegible]
[illegible] to your life
Chieftain [amghrar—the Tuareg have no word for king] of my heart
I your slave
As the peacock drinks
From the fountain pool
So I…[illegible] from you
Two hearts beating
As one
Looking out on to the Patio of the Lions at the Alhambra.
Author’s Note
I first visited the Moorish palace complex in Granada—the Alhambra—over twenty years ago and, like everyone who walks beneath its graceful arches and gazes upon its serene pools and lacy, geometric stonework, fell under its spell.
We all think we know the story of the fall of Granada, that great hinge point in Western history, beginning the momentous year of 1492: how, after handing the keys over to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, the young sultan turned for one last time to look upon the city he loved; how his mother derided him for “weeping like a woman for what you could not hold like a man”; how that spot is called Pass of the Moor’s Sigh. But when I started in on some serious research, I soon discovered that this was largely made up by Antonio de Guevara, Bishop of Guadix, for the benefit of Emperor Charles V when he visited Granada on his honeymoon in 1526, and that history—from both the Christian and Muslim perspectives—had treated that young sultan, Abu Abdullah Mohammed, known as Boabdil, cruelly. So I wanted to tell his personal story, as well as recount the great sweep of events leading up to the fall, which the poet Federico García Lorca described as “a calamity, leading to a new dark age.”
The book was shaping up to be a straightforward historical epic, but one day in 2013 the producer who was interested in making a film of The Sultan’s Wife told me about a discovery by restorers in the Alhambra. While moving one of the great doors, they had come upon a scrap of paper that had been hidden deep in the intricate latticework of the wood. It appeared to be an ancient love letter: but the provenance of the note and the identity of the scribe remain a mystery. The movie deal sadly stalled, but the story was a gift, and I remembered another Lorca quote: “In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead in any other country in the world.” And that got me thinking about how the past and present arc toward each other, and how love is an eternal force. And I thought: What if a series of tiny notes (love letters, maybe; or spells) written in the fifteenth century were to come to light in the twenty-first century? And Court of Lions turned into quite a different book to the one I had originally envisaged.
And so the story of Kate Fordham wrapped itself around and through the tale of the young sultan growing up in the most beautiful palace on earth, yet at the heart of a terribly fractured family, providing echoes and parallels and points of contrast, and a mystery focused on the enigmatic scraps of paper found in the walls.
Who wrote those mysterious fragments? I needed a viewpoint character, one who could wander the fifteenth-century stage, taking us behind the scenes and into enemy territory in a way young Momo simply could not, trapped as he was in his role—as royal heir, pawn in the great game, king and political prisoner. I could have used the vizier, Qasim Abdelmalik, and thus given the novel an even more unreliable narrator: but I wanted the story of the last sultan of the last Moorish kingdom to touch readers’ hearts, and so Blessings came into existence, an abused, enslaved nomad child transported across a continent, given as a companion to a boy of a similar age, thus—I hope—tingeing an already tragic tale with further sadness and frustration—of unrequited love, of yearning and nostalgia for a golden age about to be lost.
Blessings is, of course, fully my own creation, his false leg inspired by an obscure piece of folklore surrounding a golden foot discovered in excavations. Certainly, there would have been companions for the young sultan as he grew up in the Alhambra—sons of nobles and allies sharing his time and education. But they would have given me no angle from which to view Momo, being too similar in background and upbringing. Making Blessings a desert nomad meant the hidden notes could be written in a language no one else could read, thereby adding dramatic tension to the modern tale. The Granadan court would certainly have contained both Tuaregs and Berbers, albeit fewer during this final era of Moorish history in the peninsula.
In truth, the golden age of the Moors in Spain was already long past. It had reached its apogee under the great Abd al-Rahman III in the tenth century, while the rest of Europe was regarded as being in the Dark Ages. Then, Granada truly was the golden realm Momo talks of as he rides into Córdoba, the city that was the fount of all knowledge and the ornament of the world, a place where scholars, merchants and poets from all backgrounds and cultures gathered to trade knowledge, arts and crafts. Power ebbed and flowed, as power will, and the emirate of Granada was nibbled away over the intervening centuries, surrounded as it was on all sides by the ever-increasing kingdom of Castile. But in the latter part of the fifteenth century circumstances conspired to make the long-desired Spanish reconquest of Granada possible.
The accession to the Castilian throne of Isabella—strong-willed, fierce and devout—and her marriage to the martial Ferdinand of Aragón brought renewed determination to the quest to eradicate Islam from Spain, a crusade funded in large part by the pope in Rome. Persuaded of the royal couple’s devotion to the Catholic cause by their establishment of the Inquisition, he donated a tenth of the Church’s revenues to their crusade. The medieval prophecy Woe to the World, which told of the coming of a messianic hero, or “Great Bat,” who would defeat the Antichrist, was enthusiastically espoused by Ferdinand, whose Aragonese heraldic device included a bat. (Although, ironically, the sign of the bat was originally derived from a Muslim Sufi symbol.) The monarchs were also exceptionally lucky to be able to call on the talents of one of the finest soldiers of the time: Gonzalo de Córdoba, the Great Captain.
History—and often fiction, too—has glorified Isabella and Ferdinand as a result of their lauded reunification of Spain, but in truth they were a pair of genocidal religious fanatics whose intolerance of diversity forced vicious persecution upon a mixed population that had lived in reasonable harmony under Muslim rule.
The surrender terms agreed between Isabell
a and Ferdinand and Sultan Abu Abdullah appeared to be fair and equitable. They stipulated that once the sultan gave up the keys to the city all Granadans “great and small, men and women” would be accepted as “vassals and natural subjects” to the Catholic Monarchs and were guaranteed the right to remain in their “houses, estates and hereditaments now and for all time.” The “common people, great and small” would be allowed “to live in their own religion,” and it was promised that their mosques and muezzins would not be taken from them: “nor will they [the Catholic Monarchs] disturb the uses and customs which they observe.”
The sultan negotiated the treaty in good faith: but the Catholic Monarchs had no intention whatsoever of abiding by its terms. As soon as they entered the Alhambra, they began to draft an Edict of Expulsion for the entire Jewish community, which decreed that Jews had three months to leave and that any persons harbouring a Jew would forfeit everything they had, even their lives. All assets that could not be carried had to be sold: but Jews were forbidden to take into exile with them gold, silver, jewels or coin. A perfect double bind. Family houses were exchanged for donkeys or mules or bolts of cloth, and Spanish coffers swelled. The Inquisition swung into cruel, Daesh-like action and the Jewish population of Granada—which had been the most brilliant, talented and erudite in Europe—was destroyed.
When Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, the inquisitor general, took over responsibility for Granada from the considerably more tolerant Count of Tendilla, his first act was to burn every Quran in the city, then the contents of some of the greatest libraries in the world, the culmination of a thousand years of scholarship, in the Plaza Bib-Rambla. There followed massacres in the Alpujarras, including Ferdinand’s slaughter of three thousand prisoners of war (echoing the atrocity of Richard the Lionheart’s massacre of prisoners at Acre) and the blowing up of six hundred men, women and children taking refuge in a mosque near Andarax.
In 1502 the Edict of Conversion was published: all Muslims must convert to Christianity or go into exile, any Muslims remaining in Spain to be enslaved and made subject to the Inquisition. But the Catholic Monarchs were not content with just this. In 1511 Moorish converts were forbidden to carry arms or even knives. Tailors were forbidden from making Moorish-style clothing. Property could no longer be passed from father to child, nor could former Muslims sell their property. And finally, in 1526 came the Edict of Granada, which prohibited all Moorish customs. All bathhouses were closed; Moorish music, dancing, rituals and ceremonies were all forbidden. Any contraventions of these rules were handed over to the Inquisition: between 1492 and 1530 fifteen thousand people were tortured, over two thousand executed.
It was another expression of the Catholic Monarchs’ fundamentalism that launched the expeditions to the New World. Not content with driving the infidel out of Iberia, they wished to launch a crusade to take back the Holy Land from the Muslims, and in this fervent wish were joined by Columbus, who stated in his diaries that he intended to find gold and spices “in such quantity that the sovereigns…will be able to undertake and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulchre and…spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem,” the only city that exists twice: “in heaven and on earth.”
And so we come back to that other earthly paradise: the Alhambra, the expression in the divine symmetries of stone and water, light and shade, pillar and tree of a sacred paean to Allah, the architect of all things. The Catholic Monarchs made their royal court in the palaces and converted the mosque to a church. They are buried in the Capilla Real, adjoining the Cathedral of Granada, according to their decree: “We ordain that in the Cathedral Church in the city of Granada a worthy Chapel shall be built where, when it pleases Our Lord to call us, our bodies shall be placed.”
Isabella may have loved the beauty of the Alhambra palaces, but no matter how hard her engineers tried to figure out the mechanism of the fountain in the Court of Lions it never worked again.
Abu Abdullah Mohammed lived to old age in Fez, a dependant of the Merenid sultan, concentrating all his efforts and what little money he could beg or borrow on recreating the palace in which he had grown up. He died in 1534 and was buried in the city in a musalla, a mausoleum. Some sources claim he died in battle during the war between the Merenids and Saadians; others that he died peacefully in his bed. Some sources say he was dark; others that he was light skinned. Some that his sons outlived him; others that they predeceased him. Almost every historical chronicle refers to him as “weak,” “hapless,” “foolish” or “unfortunate.” My view is that he was a man raised in the most beautiful place made by human hands in a family riven by jealousy and hatred, and that he wished for nothing more than a peaceful life for himself and his subjects under the best terms he could possibly negotiate. That all his efforts came to nothing and his people were betrayed and persecuted makes him for me neither a fool nor a coward but a tragic figure.
Jane Johnson
Cornwall, May 2017
Further Reading for Court of Lions
Brenan, Gerald. South from Granada. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957.
Dodds, Jerrilynn D., ed. Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992.
Downey, Kristen. Isabella: The Warrior Queen. New York: Anchor Books, 2015.
Facaros, Dana, and Michael Pauls. Cadogen Guides: Granada Seville Córdoba. New York: New Holland Publishers, 2011.
Grabar, Oleg. The Alhambra. London: Penguin Books, 1978.
Harris, Katie A. From Muslim to Granada: Inventing a City’s Past in Early Modern Spain. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Harvey, L.P. Islamic Spain: 1250–1500. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Irving, Washington. Tales of the Alhambra. New York: Lea and Carey, 1832.
Irwin, Robert. The Alhambra. London: Profile Books, 2004.
Lane-Poole, Stanley. The Story of the Moors in Spain. New York: G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1896.
McGilvray, Donald. Granada: The Seizure of the Sultanate. Leicester: Matador, 2012.
Morris, Jan. Spain. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1964.
Nicholl, David, and Angus McBride. Granada 1492: The Twilight of Moorish Spain. London: Osprey, 1998.
Nightingale, Steven. Granada: The Light of Andalucía. London: Nicholas Brealey, 2015.
Núñez, J. Agustin, and Aurelio Cid Acedo. The Alhambra and Granada: In Focus. Granada: Edilux S.L., 2006.
O’Callaghan, Joseph F. The Last Crusade in the West: Castile and the Conquest of Granada. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Reston, Jr., James. Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors. New York: Doubleday, 2005.
Rubin, Miri, ed. Medieval Christianity in Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Tremlett, Giles. Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.
Acknowledgements
Thanks first of all must go to Susan Cherian, for that long-ago conversation that sparked to life a magical chain of ideas; and to Abdel Bakrim, whose help with the Arabic source material, support and encouragement throughout the writing of the novel was invaluable. Warm thanks and gratitude also to professors Gabra and Fotopoulou, to Philippa McEwan, Lucy Vanderbilt and my agent, Danny Baror. To the guides, gardeners and conservators at the Alhambra who put up with my many curious questions; to Claire and Tony Morpeth, Lizzie and Chris Hopkins, and Lucy and Nick Howe for their serendipitous company in Seville and beyond.
But a manuscript has a long road to travel before it becomes a published book, and for her insight and guidance and cheerleading along the route I must thank my marvellous editor Zoe Maslow and all her colleagues, particularly Kristin Cochrane, Amy Black, Val Gow, Kelly Hill, Jessica Cooney and Melanie Tutino at Doubleday Canada.
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