CORDOVA.
A NEW, but old world, a sudden vision of the ORIENT, rose on the sight,
when we reached the city of CORDOVA. 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 it became 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 central _patio_ around 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 air
with 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 men _could_ construct such an edifice, as
that the great Architect _should_ build the walls over which the Niagara
rushes for ever.
[Illustration: 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 enjoy the 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 build A. 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 word DEUS, 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.
[Illustration: THE GREAT MOSQUE, CORDOVA.]
The Holy of Holies in the mosque was the Mihrab, and it has been
preserved in the converted temple, with religious care, 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 its thousand 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.