CHAPTER VIII.CORDOVA.
A NEW, but old world, a sudden vision of theOrient, rose on the sight, when we reached the city ofCordova. Never did I enter a city that filled me with a deeper sense of the transient, temporal, and fleeting nature of all things material. It is not in ruins. It shows no tokens of decay to the coming traveller. A cleaner city is not in the world. It was the first city in Europe whose streets were paved, and the traditional habits of the people are so well preserved, that although it was a thousand years ago (in 850, under Abdurhaman) that this work was done, it has been done again and again, and the stones in the streets are kept as clean as the floor of a house. The Guadalquiver flows gently by the side of it, and under the shade-trees planted on its banks the idle and the fashionable have their favorite lounge and promenade. The bridge over this widely famed river was first built by Octavius Cæsar and rebuilt by the Moors. Standing on sixteen arches, it is a striking monument of two departed dynasties and forms of civilization. The city itself was great before Christ came into the world, and Julius Cæsar writes of it as it was in his day, when his armies swept over Spain. In the civil wars of Rome, Cordova declared for Pompey, and then Cæsar put 28,000 of its inhabitants to the sword.
After the Moors came over from Africa, and, in the battle of Guadalete, struck down the power of the Goths, this city was governed by the Caliph of Damascus, until itbecame independent and the capital of Moorish Spain. Then began its career of glory. In the tenth century it had 300,000 inhabitants (now 40,000), and for these devout and cleanly and hospitable and learned Mussulmans there were six hundred mosques, and nine hundred baths, and six hundred inns, and eight hundred schools, and a library of 600,000 volumes.
Outside of the city the people had gone in crowds to a rural fête. Men, women, and children, old and young, rich and poor, on foot, on horse, on mules or donkeys, and in carriages,—any way to go,—all had gone to have a jolly time in the country, as the custom is in Spain. It was a gay sight, but rising among the grounds were scattered here and there the remnants of ancient buildings, broken columns, fragments of capitals, and blocks of stone, that lay there silently speaking of departed glory. For here once stood the fairy palace of the Moorish Abdurhama, which that prince built for his favorite sultana, whose name it bore, and whose statue stood above the principal gate. The whole palace was of marbles and precious stones, adorned with the florid architecture which the genius of the East would invent. More than four thousand marble columns did this luxurious monarch bring from France and Italy and Africa to adorn his halls. And when he had spent more than fifty millions of pounds sterling upon it, he brought into his harem four thousand and three hundred women! Guarded by twelve thousand valiant men, he gave himself up to the pleasures of “the life that now is.” The city of Cordova was the city for such a king!
It is Moorish, Oriental, languid, voluptuous, in its decay. Walking along its quiet, almost noiseless streets, we looked in upon the courts that form the centralpatioaround the four sides of which the house is built. In the midst, a fountain springs, and the water falls back into a marble basin. Around it shrubs with blooming flowers fill the airwith fragrance and beauty. In some of them evergreen trees, of unknown age, are growing, and these have been trained so curiously, as to produce surprising effects. Planted at the four corners of a square, their tops are brought over to meet each other, the branches are joined, the redundant leaves and twigs being pruned away, they grow together, the whole four, like one tree of arch over arch, a perpetually verdant bower. The windows of the dwelling look down into this court; and in them, or on its marble pavements in the heat of the day, the women sit with their needle-work, enjoying the fragrant shade and the music of the falling water. The gardens abound in oranges, lemons, and limes, hanging over the walls in clusters of extraordinary size.
The interior of these ancient houses is no less interesting. One, to which we were invited, was said to be the best example of the Moorish domestic architecture extant in Cordova. A few jasper columns were standing under the archway by which we passed from the court. The modern whitewash had covered the most of the arabesque embellishments upon the walls. We ascended a flight of broad, brick steps, with a solid beam of wood at the outer edge of each step, and at the head of the stairs the venerable master of the house met us kindly and made us welcome. We heard a piano as we were coming up the steps, but it suddenly ceased, and a young lady flitted out of view. The house is said to be more than a thousand years old. It may be so, but the Moorish style is so imprinted on the tastes of the people that they build age after age with substantially the same models, and it is not safe to affirm that the hands of the Moors laid any of these stones. The ceilings are very low, the rooms small, the furniture, as in all lands, is according to the taste or means of the owner, but Eastern in its style, and adapted to the quiet, languid type of the modern as well as the ancient inhabitants of this and all such climes.
The wonder of Cordova is also one of the wonders of the world. Its cathedral has been a mosque of the Moors. To see it once is an adequate reward for all one has endured in travelling thus far through the most comfortless country in Europe. To see it often, and study it in the minute details of its extraordinary plan and finish, is to lay up a store of imagery for dreams of memory through the rest of a lifetime. At least so it seems to me now, since entering its magnificent Gate of Pardon, and suddenly standing in the midst of a thousand variously colored columns,—marble, jasper, porphyry, granite,—all surmounted by Corinthian capitals, a forest in a temple, a petrified grove of trunks of majestic trees, enclosed in walls. Perhaps the memory of it will fade, so that a year or two hence the impressions of wonder, of sublimity, of vastness, will not be so strong as they are now. But at the moment when the interior first broke upon my sight, it was as strange to me that the art of mencouldconstruct such an edifice, as that the great Architectshouldbuild the walls over which the Niagara rushes for ever.
Court of Oranges, Cordova.
Court of Oranges, Cordova.
Court of Oranges, Cordova.
Stepping out of the street through a gate in a solid wall, we are in the midst of a court-yard some 400 feet long: an orange grove, venerable trees that have been bearing fruit, as now, a century or more; and three fountains send up jets of waters that fall back into large marble basins filled with goldfish which groups of children are feeding. Near the gate, on benches, elderly men are sitting, smoking, and enjoying the sunshine. The elders sat in the gate in the Scripture times, and do now in Eastern towns, and here also, where Oriental manners still obtain. In former years this court became a great resort for the people who made a mart, or exchange, as in all ages men have been tempted to make the house of prayer a market-place, and so it often becomes a den of thieves. Now, this Court of Oranges, as it is called, is the resort of old men and children, who enjoythe warmth and shade and waters of the holy precincts. Passing through this court we come to the sacred edifice itself. Its history is as eventful as that of Spain. It was built by the Moors as a mosque, and when the Christians conquered Cordova, they converted the mosque into a church, though they could not convert the Moors into Christians. And this now-called cathedral is the one that Abdurhaman began to buildA. D.786, and his son completed in 796, pushing on the work with such tremendous energy that in ten years he constructed one of the most remarkable edifices in the world. His father’s idea was to surpass every temple on earth in extent and strength and splendor. It was to be the Mecca in Europe; and when the Western world was subdued to Islam, as he and all the believers believed it would be, the holy place to which pilgrimages from all these lands would be made was Cordova.It is, therefore, the finest example that Spain possesses of that peculiar style of architecture and ornamentation which the Moors introduced, and which have been gradually disappearing with the lapse of centuries. It doubtless has a symbolism behind its material forms, and the student of art and religious thought will read in the plan and a thousand details, a meaning that does not meet the unanointed eye of the simple traveller.
The Gate of Pardon is so called because, under the Roman Catholic dispensation, indulgences were granted to those who entered by it into the temple. There is one gate of the same name in each of the cathedrals that I have visited in this country. The bronze ornaments upon the doors are very curious, the royal arms are displayed, and while the Christian inscription, in Gothic letters, of the wordDeus, proclaims the true God, the Arabic letters also testify that the Mahometans worshipped him, for they write, “The empire belongs to God.”
Within the temple there is at first a sense of gloom, almost of oppression, arising from the vastness of the area and the want of height. The roof cannot be more than 40 or 50 feet high, while the floor stretches away 640 feet in length and 460 feet in breadth. A thousand columns in long lines, like trees planted in the garden of the Lord, are each of one single stone,—the spoils of temples in the East and the West, and some of them imperial gifts, and hence a variety of colors and size, showing all sorts of marbles, the green and red jasper, black, white and rose, emerald and porphyry. Crossing each other, at right angles, these rows of pillars form nineteen naves one way and twenty-nine the other; long-drawn aisles, over which the horse-shoe-shaped arches, standing one upon the other and supporting the roof, produce a marvellous effect.
THE GREAT MOSQUE, CORDOVA.
THE GREAT MOSQUE, CORDOVA.
THE GREAT MOSQUE, CORDOVA.
The Holy of Holies in the mosque was the Mihrab, and it has been preserved in the converted temple, with religiouscare, as at once a curiosity and a memorial that the Mahometan has ceased to defile these courts. It is a recess in the wall of the temple, in which the Koran was kept, and where the Kalif came to say his prayers, looking out of a little window toward Mecca. It is a small six-sided room, about twelve feet across, the floor one piece of marble, and the roof, in the shape of a shell, is also, we were assured, of a single block, and up the six sides rise marble pilasters, the whole adorned with strange Arabic art and mysterious inscriptions. When Hakem was Caliph of Cordova, he sent messengers into the East to ask for skilful artificers in painting glass and giving this strange effect to tracery in metals and stone; for there is in mosaic work, when well done, something superior to the softest painting, and quite incomprehensible. The workers in mosaic came, and their skill now shines in this miracle of Oriental art, which has been here since 965, and is as fresh and beautiful as when it shone at the feast of the Rhamadhan, in the light of a thousand lamps. In the marble floor is worn a deep groove, by the knees of devout Mussulmans, who have thus gone around it while at their devotions.
On the sides of the cathedral are many chapels, each with its altar, its pictures, its relics, and its history. By one of them, once a Moorish sanctuary paved with silver, is a rude painting of a crucifixion, and an inscription in Spanish which tells us that that—
“While the Mahometans celebrated their orgies in this temple, a Christian captive uttered the name of Christ, whom he held in his heart, and he engraved this image with his nails on the hard stone of this pillar, for which his death has purchased this aureole.”
On the stone column is etched a crucifixion which tradition says the prisoner scratched in with his finger nails. The stone is very hard, and the story harder.
Come again and again, and this strange pile, with itsthousand columns and its thousand years of history, grows on you with every visit. We come from a land where all is fresh and new, and these old temples fill us with awe. But if we are impressed with a ruin as in Rome, where Paganism built its temples to become the sites of Christian churches, which themselves have been buried and again dug up to be the wonder of the present age, how much more impressive is a building still fresh and unbroken by the march of centuries, where the pomp and ceremony of a religion, corrupt indeed, yet recognizing God the Father as the only true God, are perpetuated year after year till their number becomes a thousand years.