The love of water

Like all desert people, the Moors of Granada venerated water, an attitude which survives among the modern Andalucians. It’s the rule of life: we adore that which we lack. Shakespeare could write a sonnet comparing his mistress’ eyes to the sun, but what thrilled the Moors was the thought of a cool and inexhaustible spring, as we see in these refined verses, engraved on the fountain bowl which rests on the heads of the courtyard's twelve lions:

Molten silver flows among the pearls,

as beautiful and as pure as they.

Water and marble mingle so perfectly

that no one can be sure

which one races and ripples

and which remains still.

Do you not see how the water

which spills into the bowl,

then vanishes into the channels?

It is an enamoured girl

who struggles to conceal

the tears which well up in her eyes....

two wise kings, two unlucky ones

The history of the Nasrid reign is perfectly reflected in the lives of the four kings to whom it fell, in pairs, to live respectively the kingdom’s periods of glory and ruin: the father and son Yusuf I and Mohammed V, and the father and son Muley Hacen and Boabdil. The first two reigned throughout almost the entire 14th century, which was when the most beautiful palaces of the Alhambra were built. Many even thought, then, that the last remnant of Muslim power had a chance of surviving, thanks to the cleverness of the two sultans. Yusuf and Mohammed played a relentless game of political chess with the forces surrounding them: Castilian crusaders in the North, Aragonese knights and grasping Genoese merchants in the East, and their envious fellow Muslims, particularly the Marinids, just across the water in the South. And as if this were not enough, they also had to fend off the frequent palace coups staged by rival clans, such as the legendary Abencerrajes..

Yusuf I reigned from 1333 to 1354, when he was murdered by a servant while praying in the mosque, a not unusual event in the quicksands of everyday political life in the Alhambra. During his reign, Granada was deprived of its main life line with North Africa, when the Castilians gained control of the Straits of Gibraltar in 1340, leaving the kingdom heavily dependent on the enemy in the north for imports of meat and grain. The wave of bubonic plague which during that period swept across all of Europe only added to the instability. In spite of all this, Yusuf acted with masterful diplomacy to establish a peace with Castile which, in medieval terms, proved to be very durable. The resulting prosperity enabled the Sultan to carry out major works in the city, such as his own palace, the Tower of Comares, the Gate of Justice and the Madraza, or Islamic university..

The long reign of his son Mohammed V, which stretched from 1354 to 1391, had the peculiarity of taking place in two stages, with a “forced holiday” of three years in the middle. Mohammed, like his father, enjoyed a friendly relationship with the Castilians, so friendly that Castile’s traditional rivals, the Aragonese, during a flair-up of animosity between the two kingdoms, used their influence within the Alhambra to have him overthrown and replaced. He fled to Morocco, where he had to wait until the two Christian kings settled their differences and agreed to have him restored.

Mohammed gave us the finest works of Spanish Muslim art: his own palace, Lions, the elegant façade of his father’s palace, Comares, and the vanished hospital or Maristán on the edge of the River Darro, which was also very beautiful, to judge from the drawings which were made before its demolition in the 19th century.

The two last kings of Granada, Muley Hacen and Boabdil, had the bad luck of governing, or struggling to control, a kingdom whose days were clearly numbered. But even this was not enough to make the contentious masters of the Alhambra forget their differences and join hands against the enemy. The second from the last king of Granada, Muley Hacen, deeply resented by his subjects for his serious political errors, since he had slain all the male members of the Abencerraje tribe, “the flower of Granada”, and cast out his wife Aixa in favour of a Christian girl, had to seek refuge in Malaga, leaving his son Boabdil to take the throne. Ungratefully, Boabdil set about fighting to prevent his father from attempting to regain his lost kingdom, and when the old Sultan abdicated in favour of his brother, Boabdil fought against his uncle too.

All of this served the interests of Isabel and Ferdinand so well that on the two occasions when they captured Boabdil they immediately released him so that he could continue fighting against his own relatives, even helping him to win. Boabdil had been the honoured guest of the Castilian court during one of the frequent palace upheavals and they knew he would be easy to use as a puppet, to obtain the final surrender of the Alhambra.

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