The Alhambra: What They Tried to Erase (Part 4)

In late 1499, Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros stood in the Bibarrambla plaza of Granada and watched thousands of Arabic manuscripts burn. The Treaty of Granada, signed seven years earlier, had guaranteed the Muslims of the conquered city that this would not happen. The Treaty was now, in practice, dead. In 1526, Charles V arrived on his honeymoon, stayed in the Alhambra, and commissioned a Renaissance palace to be built inside it. In 1568, the Moriscos of the Alpujarras rose in rebellion and crowned a king in a purple robe under the old Nasrid rite. In 1609, Philip III expelled roughly three hundred thousand Moriscos from Spain. In 1812, retreating French troops laid fuses throughout the Alhambra and tried to blow it up on their way out. A Spanish corporal named Jose Garcia sprinted through the complex cutting the cords. Eight towers were destroyed. The Nasrid palaces survived by minutes.This fourth and final episode of a four-part series covers the long afterlife of the Alhambra from 1492 to today. It traces the broken treaty and the forced conversions, the Morisco rebellions and the mass expulsion, the centuries of neglect when the Hall of the Ambassadors was used as a salt warehouse and the Palace of Charles V sat roofless for 330 years, the near-demolition by Napoleonic troops, Washington Irving's 1829 residency in the ruins and the Tales of the Alhambra that followed, the 20th-century restoration under Leopoldo Torres Balbas, and M.C. Escher's tile-pattern sketchbooks that produced a century of infinite-pattern art.The episode closes with Federico Garcia Lorca, born in the Vega of Granada in sight of the red walls, who saw in the Alhambra what most of his contemporaries had forgotten to see, and who was shot by a Nationalist firing squad in August 1936. It ends by circling back to Muhammad I ibn al-Ahmar in his wool cap, climbing the red hill in 1238, and to the motto his descendants carved three thousand times into the walls of the palace he founded. Wa la ghalib illa Allah. Five hundred years of attempted erasure later, 2.7 million people a year still come to read it.Sources drawn on include the Capitulaciones de Granada, Luis del Marmol Carvajal's Historia del Rebelion y Castigo de los Moriscos, L.P. Harvey's Muslims in Spain 1500 to 1614, Barbara Fuchs's Exotic Nation, David Nirenberg's Communities of Violence, Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra, and the archival work of Leopoldo Torres Balbas.Content Warning: This episode describes forced religious conversion, the mass expulsion of a civilian population, and the politically motivated execution of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes.📲 Download the Archives app here🌐 Learn more here 📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.