The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (20 page)

Or, at least, he believed it was the resting place of one of his forefathers. In 1337, just as the masons were beginning to transform the choir of Gloucester Abbey, King Edward III received a letter from a certain Manuele de Fieschi, a priest in Genoa.

In the name of the Lord, Amen. Those things that I have heard from the confession of your father I have written
with my own hand, and afterwards I have taken care to be made known to your highness.

First, he has said that, feeling England in subversion against him after the threat from your mother, he departed from his followers . . . and he was captured by Lord Henry of Lancaster. And they led him to Kenilworth Castle . . . and there, many people demanding it, he lost his crown. Subsequently, you were crowned at the feast of Candlemas next following.

Finally, they sent him to the castle of Berkeley. Afterwards, the servant who was guarding him, after some time, said to your father: “Sire, Lord Thomas Gurney and Lord Simon Barford, knights, have come with the purpose of killing you. If it pleases you, I shall give you my clothes, that you may be better able to escape.” Then, wearing the said clothes, at twilight, he went out of the prison. And when he had reached the last door without resistance, because he was not recognized, he found the porter sleeping, whom he quickly killed. And, having got the keys out of the door, he opened it and went out with his keeper.

The said knights who had come to kill him, seeing that he had thus fled, and fearing the indignation of the Queen, for fear of their lives, thought to put that aforesaid porter in a chest, his heart having been extracted and maliciously presented to the Queen, as if they were the heart and body of your father; and, as the body of the King, the said porter was buried at Gloucester . . .

Finally, after various deliberations, all things having been considered . . . he went to Paris, and from Paris to Brabant, and from Brabant to Cologne so that, out of devotion, he might see the shrine of the three Kings. And, leaving Cologne, he crossed over Germany and headed for Milan in Lombardy.

In Milan, he entered a certain hermitage in the castle of Milasci; and because war overran the said castle, he moved to the castle of Cecima in another hermitage of the dioceses of Pavia in Lombardy. And he remained in this last hermitage
for two years or thereabouts, always the recluse, doing penance or praying God for you and other sinners.

There is a simple tomb in the mountain hermitage at Cecima, a quiet place where nothing has changed for centuries. And this crude recess in the rock, so they say, is the true resting place of Edward II. Gloucester was a rumor, a cover-up, repeated and elaborated so many times that in the end everyone believed it.

In Which Two Cousins Marry Each Other

A C
ONTRACT OF
A
RCHITECTURAL
M
ARRIAGE
Pedro Machuca, survey plan for the construction of the Palacio
Real of Charles V (lower left) next to the Alhambra
.

The Ottoman mosque on the Acropolis was destroyed in 1687 by a Holy Christian League; but even before that explosion, it exemplified the uneasy three-way relationship between Islam, Christianity, and antiquity. The mihrab of the mosque housed both the throne of Plato and a miraculous mosaic of the Virgin Mary; the headless sculptures that freckled the exterior of the building were at once the cynosure of pagan art and testimony to monotheistic iconoclasm. It is said that Mehmet the Conqueror wept when he saw the Parthenon, so moved was he by its beauty and its spoliation.

Islam and Christianity were both inheritors of classical culture: the Latinity of medieval monks and the Greek learning of Islamic scholars may be traced in parallel through the Middle Ages, as classical authority was handed down, preserved, and transformed, from generation to generation. But, though these traditions were sometimes complementary, they were not identical.
The Architect’s Dream
could not have been painted in the Islamic world; even if it had, it would have had to depict different buildings, standing in very different historical relationships with one another. The classical learning of Western Christianity was twisted by centuries of barbarism, and its fragments were appropriated by the very tribes who had destroyed the Roman Empire. Islam, on the other hand, engaged with the metropolitan culture of the Levant with greater ease and continuity.

With the dawning of the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, these parallel traditions were brought into sharp contrast.
Renaissance
means, literally, “rebirth”; in the eyes of Renaissance scholars, antiquity was a corpse waiting to be resurrected rather than a living body
that had continued to grow. Indeed, the very notion of the Middle Ages was a Renaissance invention, shorthand for the long sleep of civilization between the ancient past and the reawakened present. There is no equivalent sense of discontinuity in the Islamic Mediterranean.

The
Reconquista
of the Alhambra in Granada represents—like Ayasofya in Istanbul, which is its mirror narrative—a meeting of Christendom and Islam at the dawn of the Renaissance. But while Ayasofya is subtly laid over the structure of Hagia Sophia, the Palacio Real of Charles V merely stands next to the Alhambra in a shotgun marriage of sorts. Both palaces in Granada were descended from the palaces of antiquity, but by very different routes, and so they were unable to communicate with each other. The Alhambra remained barren: an exotic oddity, incomprehensible except as an object of delighted reverie.

I
N JANUARY
1492, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon completed the
Reconquista
of Spain from the Moors. They looked up from their encampment of Santa Fe in the plain; they saw the standard of the Cross raised over the Alhambra of Granada; and they set out to take possession of what God had granted them.

On their way, they met a group of Moors heading down the hill. Among them was the deposed emir of Granada, Abu Abdallah Muhammad, whom they called Boabdil. The two parties stopped briefly, but negotiations were no longer necessary. Boabdil had already handed over the keys to his fortress. In return the Christian party now produced his young son, who had been their hostage, and they gave him back to his people. And then the two parties continued in their opposite directions.

Isabella and Ferdinand made their way up into the Alhambra. They purified the castle mosque with holy water and proceeded into the Hall of the Kings in the Court of the Lions, where a Mass was sung to the accompaniment of a tinkling fountain. Then they donned Moorish robes, and they set up their thrones in the Hall of the Ambassadors in the Court of the Myrtles. Within a month, they would send Christopher Columbus to find a western passage to the Indies that bypassed the Moorish shipping lanes. Within six, he would return to tell them that he had planted the standard of the Cross in an entirely new world.

Abu Abdallah Muhammad’s train trudged on into the mountains. It is said that he looked back at the fortress that had been the seat of his ancestors and burst into tears. His mother rebuked him, saying, “You do well to weep like a woman for what you would not defend like a man”; and having sighed the Moor’s last sigh, he went on his way. The hill where this happened is still known as El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro.

Muhammad had been granted land in the hills above Granada, but he did not stay to witness the conversion of what had once been Moorish Al Andalus into Spanish Andalucia. Instead he crossed the sea and
went to serve the kings and chieftains of the Maghreb. It is said that inhabitants of that part of Ifriqiya kept their keys and title deeds in expectation of the day when they would be restored to their houses and their estates in Al Andalus. They are still waiting.

I
N
1526,
TWO
of the grandchildren of Isabella and Ferdinand were married to each other. Keiser Karel was the Holy Roman Emperor; king of the Romans; emperor of Constantinople; duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Limburg, Lothier, and Luxembourg; count of Artois, Flanders, Hainault, Holland, Namur, Zeeland, and Zutphen; king of Aragon, Majorca, Valencia, Navarre, and Sardinia; count of Barcelona; king of Naples and Sicily; king of Castile and Leon; archduke of Austria; duke of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola; and count of Tyrol. His bride was his first cousin Ysabel, the Infanta of Portugal, heiress to the fabulous wealth of the Portuguese empire. Since Vasco da Gama had sailed east to follow the Moors, and Columbus west to avoid them, the sun never set upon the dominions of Portugal, which stretched from Brazil to the coasts of Africa, India, Ceylon, Cathay, and Cipango.

Advantageous unions were an old tradition in Keiser Karel’s family, the Habsburgs. Once upon a time, they had been stewards of a small castle in a small valley in upper Austria, but they were masters of the marriage contract, and Karel’s bewildering array of titles had been acquired not by conquest but by heredity. His father was Philip the Fair, whose father was the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, and through that line he inherited his northern titles in Burgundy, Austria, and the Netherlands. His mother was Juana the Mad, whose parents had been Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, whose marriage and whose conquest of Granada had united all of Spain—and now the whole New World—under one family and one faith.

Keiser Karel’s titles also had heredities of their own, which stretched back far beyond the beginnings of his own family. The imperial throne of Constantinople had existed in name only ever since the Muslim sack of that city in 1453 (for which the conquest of Granada may be seen as the Western counteroffensive), but it was a
title that could be traced all the way back to ancient Rome.
Holy Roman Emperor
, meanwhile, was a title invented by Charlemagne in the year 800, when he extended his rule over almost all the domains of the old Roman Empire. Karel wore the laurel on his brow; in the Netherlands his subjects called him
keiser
, in Germany
kaiser
, in Italy
cesare
, in Spain
césar
, all in emulation of the caesars of old.

Karel had been born in the castle of Ghent, but it would be impossible to describe him as Flemish. With possessions stretching to the farthest reaches of Christendom and beyond, the keiser belonged to no one place and to no one language. “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse,” he once said, in which of those languages we do not know.

When his grandfather King Ferdinand died in 1516, Karel traveled south to claim the crowns of Spain. The
cortes
of Aragon and Castile were suspicious of him, and they demanded that he take up residence in their country and learn to speak the Castilian language. He complied only in part, for crisis after crisis in his unmanageable empire called him north, from Martin Luther’s proclamation of his ninety-nine theses in Wittenberg in 1516 to the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 and the Council of Trent in 1545.

But Keiser Karel did agree to marry an Iberian bride, and in order to confirm his grip on the recently reconquered regions of the Moors it was decided that the marriage should take place in Andalucia. On his way to the wedding, Karel visited the ancient mosque of Cordoba, in the middle of which a new cathedral had been built in his honor. He progressed to Seville, where he was married under a bell tower that had once been a minaret; and he and his new wife spent their wedding night in the palace of their ancestor Pedro the Cruel, who had taken Seville from the Moors.