In the year 711 the Umayyad Caliphate invaded Spain and occupied the Iberian Peninsula for hundreds of years. They were finally expelled by Isabel and Fernando, the same kings who financed the expeditions of Christopher Columbus, but before that the Muslims had shaped their influence on the architecture and culture of most of the Iberian Peninsula in a very radical way. Probably the most important religious artifact left to us from the Islamic culture of Spain is the Great Mosque of Cordoba, but to understand it, we must first be in context with Islam and how Islamic Architecture works. The history of Islam begins with the life story of Muhammad who is a historical character born in 570 AD, he founded the Islamic religion and had several episodes in his life that involved exile and return to Mecca, and the beginning from the conquest of many territories surrounding their homelands. He died in 632 AD and soon after his death the first caliphate arose. A Caliphate is an institution that governs a territory under Islamic rule, and the person who leads this institution bears the title of Caliph. After Muhammad's death, the caliphates continue to expand territories through jihad or holy war, with territories such as Jerusalem and Damascus being incorporated into the expanded territory of Islam. This is the Kaaba, a large rectilinear volume in the middle of the Great Mosque of Mecca. This cube-shaped object dates back to pre-Islamic times, but is considered one of the holiest things in Islam. Mecca is the holy center of Islam and the Great Mosque of Mecca is a place that many pilgrims pay homage to, but instead of looking specifically at this mosque, we will look at the type of mosque and the variations of the type of mosque. The mosque type is probably the most significant architectural type that we draw from Islamic architecture. The celebrations that take place inside a mosque are different from Christian celebrations. They don't involve the same kind of procession, they don't involve the same kind of rite, it's really more about the gathering of crowds, the gathering of people gathered to pray together. It is a place that serves to gather the faithful, and to help them orient themselves in the direction of Mecca, it is a place that becomes symbolic and capable of organizing prayer and calling for prayer. There are some things that every mosque must have, for example, there must be a mihrab or a niche, this is an element that is attached to this main wall called Qibla that is oriented towards Mecca, and organizes the direction of prayer. Therefore, Islamic architecture is very interested in the development of interior space because it has to provide wide enough spaces for large crowds of people to enter and worship, and it is really interested in emphasizing the direction around which the prayers are arranged. . Other elements would be the minaret or minaret, which is this small tall and thin tower. Someone would climb to the top of the minaret and call for prayer so that people could do their daily prayers on time, and you also need a courtyard for assemblies and a fountain for ritual cleansing. So as we look at various permutations in mosque type, we will begin to see these elements play out in various ways. Probably the origin of the idea of the mosque and of the constituent parts of the mosque goes back to the house of Mohammed. Muhammad's house would have had a courtyard and a oriented wall among other elements, so this very simple enclosure, almost a kind of hypostyle hall, becomes the element that defines the shape of the mosque. With the Umayyad Caliphate from 651 to 750, a great territorial expansion took place. Damascus is the capital, and here you can see the state of the spread of Islam during the Umayyad Caliphate. Among the territories that the Umayyad Empire has taken over are Spain, Portugal and North Africa. Many of these countries had been Christian lands and converted to Islam in the Middle Ages , and the architecture testifies to these new influences. Cordoba is down here, and in fact, the Andalusia area was the last part of Spain to be reconquered by the Christians, and it remained Muslim for about 300 years longer than the rest of Spain. This is the Great Mosque of Córdoba, if you are used to looking at the plans of Christian churches, this is a rather strange plan, because although it is axial like most Christian churches, it seems to have something that could be a corridor, something that it could be a nave but in reality they are not corridors or naves, they are striations of space, they are rows of space, and people do not advance in the long direction of this series of rows of space, but instead organize themselves facing the south wall . It is an amazing plant. You can see the growth of the Great Mosque floor plan from an idealized condition where everything was perfectly symmetrical, on one axis, and as the needs grew to accommodate a larger population, so did the mosque. It was so big and so many extensions were made because the city of Córdoba became one of the most populated in Europe. It is estimated that the city had more than a million inhabitants at the time of the Caliphate. In contrast, the current population of Córdoba is three hundred thousand citizens. Something very interesting about this building is that despite everything being built with the same technique and with the same materials and in the same style, all the extensions and changes it underwent over the centuries can be easily identified. The original mosque built by Abd al Rahman in the 8th century had this shape. The interior space and the courtyard space were quite symmetrical and balanced. There is a part of the pavement where it is uneven a few centimeters, that is where the first extension was made to this building by his son Abd al Rahman II in the 9th century, who added about eight additional rows of columns. A century later, his son Abd al Rahman III carried out an extension to the courtyard that rebalanced the size of the exterior space with the interior. In the third extension, carried out a decade later by Al Hakam II, several skylights like this were made, since having the front lattice as the only source of light, the mosque began to darken from the rear. These skylights are large spaces whose roof stands out from the rest of the naves with domes that contain numerous windows to the outside. See how the geometry of the dome structure accommodates the windows in an extremely elegant way. These Arabs were geniuses of geometry, and great architects, they required light in the building, and they solved it by building one of the most beautiful parts of the mosque. This type of structure for the dome is an invention of the Arabs from Cordoba, and they were the inspiration for the Italian Baroque architect Guarino Guarini. The last extension, made by Al Mansur at the end of the 10th century, is easily distinguished by its red brick pavement instead of the marble pavement of the rest of the mosque. The separation between this new part and the old part is also noticeable thanks to this stone wall that was formerly the wall that faced the street. This latest extension does not add anything new, it simply keeps repeating the same module, which allows the building to continue expanding in any direction and increases the feeling of being in an infinite space. When this last modification was made, the builders had no more Roman remains, so they had to make new columns in the same style as the rest of the columns, and the stonemasons who made these new columns signed each one with their name. at the top of the stem. There are so many rows of space that you can get an idea of the spatial quality if you look at the ceiling plan, it almost looks like a train station where you imagine a lot of trains parked underneath, but it's these rows and rows of transparent screens that allow circulation but also define different areas. The interior of the mosque with all its extensions occupies more area than any Christian cathedral and consists of nineteen rows located from north to south, with thirty-three bays in each row. Despite the numerous extensions it underwent, the entire mosque has the same structure. It is made up of a series of columns that were reused from Roman temples and Visigoth basilicas. A cyma was placed on the column, which is a stone block that is part of Byzantine architecture, and a pillar was placed on top of this cyma that supports the the bows themselves. Above these arches there are a series of channels that still drain water from the building, making the arches function as a kind of aqueduct. Here you can see this patio, known as the orange tree patio, which is another of the constituent elements that a mosque must have, it must have a patio where people can gather and also where they can have a cleansing ritual. When you see this courtyard you might think that the weather in Córdoba is really nice because the trees grow very well, but it's actually a very hot climate and you need to water to grow, and one of the really cool things that Islamic architecture does is find a way to incorporate irrigation into the architectural design of projects in a way that does not disrupt the qualities of the space, as a modern sprinkler would, but enhances the qualities of the space. On the ground level, you can see that there is a grid of little cuts in the pavement, through which the water is channeled, so that the whole pavement becomes a kind of fountain with these little narrow channels of about 12 centimeters wide, easy to walk on, but also very convenient to have a very gentle slope gravity feed that brings water to all the trees, and so you get these wonderful oasis-like gardens in places where you would think nothing could grow on its own. Here you can see the arches that overlook the orange tree patio, that's where the minaret is, although today it does not have the typical shape of the medieval minaret, since in the 16th century it was covered in the shape of a Christian bell tower. This bell tower, however, surrounds an original minaret that can still be seen inside. Between the buttresses of the wall that surrounds the mosque there are a series of doors. The mosque did not have a clear main façade, but it has many portals like these. The doors have these shades of bronze, you can see the composition formed by a central horseshoe arch, and above, a gallery of interlocking horseshoe arches, and topped by a series of battlements. All within that refined and elegant style made with patterns. On the sides we find multi-lobed arches over windows with latticework typical of Cordovan Caliphate art. Important to understanding the ornamental patterns and love of surface decoration in Islamic culture is the tradition of prohibiting figurative images. So you will never see statues or frescoes of human figures in a mosque like you would in a Christian church. There is a great deal of interest in geometric ornament, the word aniconic meaning that it does not represent the physiognomy of a person but favors symbolic ways of representing things like numerology or geometry or pattern making. Here are some latticework that you'll find in this church, and you can see that they stem from a very strong geometric structure that overlaps over and over again. The square flipped on top of another square to create an octagon that could be unfolded in a continuous pattern is something you see again and again. This distrust of the figurative representation of people in favor of the creation of geometric patterns, and this detail from the Great Mosque of Córdoba begins to show you how that affects the qualities of the architecture, all the possible colors that you can imagine are happening. The use of many colors in architecture is called polychromy. In Greek poly (πολυ) means many, chromos (χρομος) means colour, and Islamic architecture is highly polychromatic. We also see that the arches, the voussoirs of the arches are polychrome, the two colors of the arches are neither paint nor pigmentation, the color is due to the alternation of red bricks with stone blocks, in this way the tones remain intense . Although the Muslims elaborated it when building this wonder, this technique was originally developed by the Romans and a precedent can be seen in the aqueduct of the nearby city of Mérida, one of the most important cities of ancient Rome in Spain, where it was also alternate red brick with stone blocks. So the quality of the space inside the Great Mosque of Cordoba is just spectacular, you have these red and white polychrome arches, row after row, with that unidirectional quality. These are also different from the Roman arches, they are called horseshoe arches, and these do not have a semi-circular shape, but rise higher creating the shape of a horseshoe, so they are more vertical. Something like this sounds crazy, but in fact this is structurally better than a Roman arch, because you're transferring the loads down and you're going up. Notice how the voussoirs are thicker at the top and thinner at the bottom, allowing loads to transfer and the natural catenary of the arch to fit better within the structure. The double arches function as an aqueduct, the upper arch serves to transmit the loads from the ceiling to the ground, and the lower arch functions as a buttress, supporting the next arch. These arcades are repeated over and over again ad infinitum to create that sensation of a forest of columns. This idea of overlapping arches has a precedent in Roman architecture, and can be seen especially in the Roman aqueducts of the Iberian Peninsula such as those of Mérida, Tarragona or Segovia. This way of making arches, this way of conceiving structure, this way of making a kind of diaphanous screen at this early time in Islamic architecture is something that inspired the condition of dematerialization in Gothic architecture in later years. Here we have a view of the Mihrab, the niche in the wall that organizes the interior space for prayer. And on top of that is a series of domes, the geometry of these domes is quite different to the domes we've seen in Byzantine and Roman architecture , they're sort of rotated squares whose perimeters are jointed with ribs, and it gives you an octagonal star. And just like in the wall ornament, there is this game of geometric figures. The Mihrab displays a profusion of different colors such as blue, red, black, white and gold, all made from small Byzantine mosaics like those in the Basilica of Saint Sophia in Constantinople. And at the top of the arch there are verses from the Koran in the Arabic language. Mosques are usually oriented towards Mecca, but this one is facing south. Abd al Raman hailed from Damascus, one of the most important Islamic cities of the time, and the mosque in Damascus also faces south, since Mecca itself is to the south from there. He wanted to create a new Damascus in Córdoba and evoke the Umayyad past that he had left behind in his youth. Right in the center of the building is a cathedral that was built in the 16th century. When the Moors were expelled from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs, the mosque became a Christian church. The mosque evokes a sense of horizontality with all its rows of arches and shadows with its small domes and skylights, however this cathedral breaks the scale and rhythm of the mosque to give you a sense of verticality and light. Thanks to the construction of this cathedral and its merger with the Muslim mosque, the mosque was saved from being destroyed in the same way that the mosques of other Spanish cities such as Seville or Malaga were destroyed, where today there are no remains of the great mosques of the period of Islamic Spain. The Cordoba Mosque is very well preserved and, apart from the gothic cathedral extruded in the middle of the building, the mosque still looks the same as it probably did in the 10th century. It is a pity that some columns and vaults in the church were demolished, King Carlos V signed the approval of the demolition before visiting Córdoba, and when he went there after the church was finished, he recognized that it had been a big mistake, because, in his own words, “he demolished what is not seen by any side to build what is seen everywhere”. But part of the historical value is the coexistence between these two cultures. The cathedral was built and modified over hundreds of years, so we can see in its structure Gothic elements such as the vaults and buttresses, Renaissance elements such as the semicircular arches and classical columns, Mannerist elements such as the elliptical dome and baroque elements such as the altarpiece and the pulpits. After all the modifications suffered, today the mosque consists of 610 columns. If you're interested in Spain, I have a playlist on my channel with videos from Spain, and I also have a playlist with pure Spanish videos for you to go check out. Thank you very much, I hope you have learned, I hope you have enjoyed this video, please like, subscribe to my channel, and see you very soon in a new episode. Until next time!
