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00:04Spain, Al-Andalus, Iberia, Hispania, many names for the same country.
00:14Spain has had more diversity and more manifestations
00:18than any other country in Western Europe.
00:22It's a peninsula almost surrounded by water.
00:26That's its blessing and its curse.
00:30The road to Spain has always been the sea, from the south.
00:35From 3000 BC onwards, the great traders of the Mediterranean,
00:40the Greeks and Phoenicians came here,
00:42attracted by its fertile plains and its mines
00:45that brought forth gold and silver, tin and copper.
00:51Spain is European, yet it looks to Africa.
00:56Forged by rulers, armies, peoples and faiths, more exotic than elsewhere in the West.
01:05Spain's position at the extremity of Europe has made it the borderland and the battlefield of the continent's many different
01:13influences.
01:14It's joined to Europe, and yet only 14 kilometres from Africa.
01:21Everything here reflects its unique meshing of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures.
01:27That's what makes Spain so unique.
01:35I come both as historian and traveller to explore who and what shaped the soul of Spain.
01:42From paganism, Islam and Catholicism, via dictatorship, to today's democracy.
01:49I'll tell the story from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.
01:54I start in the south.
01:58Cádiz, Spain's oldest living city.
02:02Seville, Andalusia's Catholic capital.
02:06Gibraltar, Spain's gateway.
02:10Cordoba, capital of the Islamic Caliphate.
02:13And Granada, home of the Alhambra.
02:17I'll find the hidden corners, the stories we don't know, the secrets, the titans who created the nation.
02:24For centuries, this was Europe's wild west, where caliphs and kings created palaces and cities, where they fought wars of
02:33annihilation.
02:35Here, a concubine could become a queen.
02:37Here, a naked princess sparked a decisive invasion.
02:43Blood and gold, beauty and death, persecution and tolerance.
02:49This is the story of the making of Spain.
03:10The Atlantic city of Cádiz is my first stop.
03:17More than 2,000 years ago, this was a colony of the Phoenician city of Carthage in today's Tunisia.
03:26In 237 BC, one of history's most famous figures was brought here.
03:32As a ten-year-old boy, the young Hannibal came to Cádiz, and from here, his father, Hamilcar, would conquer
03:41most of Spain as a new Carthaginian Empire.
03:47Now Spain became the battlefield for one of the great set-piece imperial rivalries of the ancient world.
03:55The Phoenicians came from the city of Tyre.
03:58They spread out throughout the Mediterranean, and the greatest city they founded was Carthage.
04:04The Carthaginians started to found an empire, and that brought them into conflict with the other rising power of the
04:10Mediterranean, Rome.
04:20Hannibal was born into a family already at war.
04:23Their name, Barca, meant Thunderbolt.
04:26When his father conquered Spain as his next move against Rome, Hannibal begged to go with him.
04:32He was 19 when his father died. Gradually, he would assume command of his father's empire.
04:40The coming war needed the blessing of the gods, and I've come to meet one.
04:50Isn't it a breathtaking thought that as we look at this, Hannibal himself once gazed upon this very statue?
05:02This Cadiz Museum contains some of the priceless treasures from Hannibal's time, and this figurine of the god Melkart once
05:15stood on the island of Sancti Petri.
05:24And that's where I'm going, a few miles south of Cadiz, just like Hannibal did.
05:34In 218 BC, Hannibal, now 29, travelled here to Melkart's temple.
05:41He had a plan of astonishing ambition that required Melkart's blessing.
05:53Melkart was the god of Tyre, mother city of the Carthaginians, and he appears in the Jewish Bible as the
06:01god Baal.
06:02It was said that Melkart was unfaithful to his wife, who castrated him and killed him, at which he was
06:09miraculously brought back to life.
06:11His resurrection made him a symbol of vim, vigour, power and virility.
06:20Temple complexes like this were central to ancient life.
06:26There were human sacrifices, priests cut the throat of bulls and splashed blood on the naked bodies of supplicants.
06:35As you can see, there's nothing here except seagulls and this deserted 18th century fort.
06:41But this was once one of the richest, grandest and most famous temple shrines in the entire ancient world.
06:56It was a critical moment.
06:58Carthaginian Spain challenged Roman mastery of the Mediterranean.
07:03That meant a new Roman war against Carthage.
07:07Here at Sancti Petri, Hannibal consulted the oracle of Melkart.
07:13Hannibal took an oath to destroy Rome.
07:17He said, I swear to arrest the destiny of Rome with fire and steel.
07:27Rather than waiting for Rome to attack him, Hannibal would take the fight to the enemy.
07:35It would be one of the most audacious military campaigns of antiquity.
07:40Harnessing Spain and Africa, Hannibal would attack Italy.
07:48Here in Cadiz, Hannibal mustered a huge army of 60,000,
07:53including Spanish spearmen and African cavalry and 40 war elephants.
07:59The ultimate prestige weapon.
08:05In 2017, Hannibal marched this huge army from Spain across the south of France,
08:12over the Alps, including all his elephants,
08:15and then down into Italy.
08:18He headed for Rome.
08:25Hannibal's campaign would bring Rome to the edge of defeat.
08:29Victory over Rome would change the entire history of Europe.
08:36Knowing what we know now about the invincibility of the future Roman Empire,
08:40Hannibal's adventure looks reckless, if not absurd.
08:45But Hannibal was a child of the Hellenistic or Greek culture in the Mediterranean,
08:49unleashed by his hero, Alexander the Great.
08:52And compared to Alexander's exploits in the East,
08:55this invasion of Italy might be child's play.
09:02It was Rome's supreme crisis.
09:06Hannibal repeatedly defeated the Roman armies, and at Cannae, he routed them.
09:10And yet, even as Hannibal was closing in, Rome did not fall.
09:15The Romans prayed, and then they rallied.
09:19Cato the Elder, one of their statesmen, repeatedly declared,
09:23Carthago de lenda est.
09:26Carthage must be annihilated.
09:29And now they found a general almost as sublime a strategist as Hannibal himself.
09:35And he would take the war to Hannibal's Spain, just as Hannibal had brought the war to Rome.
09:42This was the moment that the Romans became Romans.
09:54A few miles north of Seville, in the heart of Andalusia,
09:58the vicious blood feud of Carthage and Rome would be decided.
10:05In 206 BC, the two sides met right here in a battle.
10:11The winners would rule Europe for the next 700 years.
10:16The Roman commander was Publius Cornelius Scipio.
10:22It was said in Rome that only Scipio would dare to take on the Carthaginian Empire.
10:29Both his father and his uncle had been killed in battle by Hannibal's family.
10:35So for Scipio, it was personal.
10:40Just as Hannibal had vowed to destroy Rome, Scipio vowed to destroy Carthage.
10:46And his plan was as bold as it was simple.
10:48While the brilliant Hannibal fought on in Italy for over a decade,
10:52Spain was defended by his feuding disunited brothers.
10:58Scipio slipped into Spain with his small army.
11:05Military historian Saul David is here to tell me
11:08how Scipio faced the Carthaginians right here at Ilipa.
11:13We're right on the spot of that battle.
11:16Tell me what happened that day.
11:18To give you an idea of numbers, the Romans have about 50,000
11:21and the Carthaginians 75,000.
11:23So they're heavily outnumbered.
11:25And for the two or three days prior to the actual battle itself,
11:27Scipio sets his army up in a very traditional way.
11:29So his strongest forces are in the centre, his Roman and Italian legions,
11:33and his allies, who he can't really rely on, are on the flank.
11:36But on the day of the battle itself, he changes all of that.
11:39He orders the army out very early in the morning.
11:41He gets them into position before the Carthaginians are ready to respond.
11:45And he changes his formation so that his elite forces are actually now on the flanks.
11:49And this allows him to advance in a very unusual way with a concave formation
11:53so that his best troops are on the side.
11:55And in a nutshell, because you could go on about this battle in great detail,
12:00it means that the strongest Carthaginian troops never actually get to fight until late on during the battle.
12:06So how did the elephants, the Carthaginian elephants, perform on the day?
12:10You've got to imagine a scenario where, once the battle starts, the elephants don't see friend or foe.
12:16They've got their guides, as it were, but everyone else is fair game.
12:19And if you get in the way of a war elephant, particularly one who's been stung by a few javelins
12:23being thrown at him,
12:24he's going to trample anyone.
12:25And a four-ton beast treading on you is going to leave a bit of a sticky mess underneath.
12:30So you can see that the use of the Carthaginian war elephant was as much of an own goal as
12:35it was a success.
12:43Scipio was victorious.
12:46Spain became a province of Europe, not Africa, of Rome, not Carthage.
12:54He built this, the city of Italica, next to the battlefield, for the veterans of his victory.
13:03Control of the peninsula gave Scipio a springboard to attack North Africa.
13:11This amazing mosaic here in Italica tells the story of Scipio's wars against Carthage.
13:19In 204, Scipio crossed to Africa, taking the war to Carthage.
13:25As he approached, the Carthaginians recalled Hannibal from Italy.
13:29He rushed back, but Scipio defeated him. The city fell.
13:33Scipio was rewarded with the title Africanus, but his haughtiness won him many enemies.
13:40He was prosecuted and exiled to his estates.
13:44As for Hannibal, he roamed the east, enemy number one, pursued by Roman agents.
13:52Finally, he committed suicide.
13:54As for Carthage, ultimately it was wiped off the map.
14:00Now it was Rome's turn to colonise Spain.
14:07The Romans loved Hispania, Rome and Spain, because they found it almost more Italian than Italy.
14:14Here, life was good and they could make great fortunes in fish paste, olive oil and wine.
14:22In 98 AD, they chose as emperor a general from around here, Italica.
14:29His name was Trajan, competent and honest.
14:33He was a formidable soldier and an outstanding ruler.
14:37He was actually voted the title Optimus, the best, and he was.
14:42His successor, Hadrian, also from here, Italica,
14:46was probably the most accomplished man ever to rule the Roman Empire.
14:51Everything he did, he did properly.
14:53He created the Pantheon in Rome and here he improved Italica enormously.
15:05He was also from a Spanish-Roman family.
15:10It's ironic, isn't it, that the three greatest Roman emperors at the Empire's zenith were from Roman Spain.
15:22Hispania became the food bowl and the winery of the Empire,
15:26producing the essentials and the delicacies of Roman life.
15:35Spanish olive oil and wine was sent around the Mediterranean in amphorae, just like these.
15:42But there was a problem which neither the Carthaginians nor after them the Romans could solve.
15:48The amphorae could only be used once and after that the pottery was tainted.
15:52At the height of Roman Hispania, so many were being exported to Rome, as many as 54 million,
16:00that their debris formed a heap and the heap became a mountain.
16:05And Mount Testaccio is still there to this day.
16:10The used amphorae, transported from Spain to Rome, were broken into pieces and then sprinkled with lime to neutralise the
16:18smell of rancid olive oil.
16:27The centre of Roman life here in Italica was its amphitheatre, one of the largest and best preserved after Rome's
16:35Colosseum.
16:37It could seat 25,000 people.
16:42In around 50 AD, this arena became the focus for a sport that later became the emblem of a nation.
16:51In a moment of imperial whimsy, the stuttering Emperor Claudius banned all gladiatorial fights in Spain.
17:00And these were replaced with contests of exotic beasts.
17:04The lions and the tigers were all kept down here in these pits.
17:10And amongst them were the local Spanish bulls, which were then sent up into the amphitheatre to be viciously slaughtered
17:18to the crowd's delight.
17:20This was the beginning of Spanish bullfighting.
17:34Rome's traditional gods were often fused with foreign deities who became fashionable.
17:41One blood-saturated fertility cult may link the Carthaginian past with the Spanish future.
17:56Atis, a comely shepherd boy, channelled the story of Melkart before him.
18:03He too was castrated by his jealous lover.
18:07Or, some said, castrated himself and bled to death.
18:11But he bounced back in an unforgettable way as the ultimate symbol of virility for his frenzied cult followers.
18:20They would cavort, spattering themselves with blood,
18:25flagellating themselves, biting each other,
18:27and, as the ultimate gesture of devotion, castrating themselves.
18:32It's said that these traditions may be echoed today in the self-flagellating Catholic brotherhoods that are still going on
18:41in Spain.
18:50Hadrian, the Spanish-born emperor who beautified Italica, unwittingly changed Spain.
18:58When, in 132 AD, his persecution of the Jews in Jerusalem provoked a revolt.
19:09Hadrian rushed troops to Judea to crush the rebellion.
19:13But the Jews, under their commander, the Prince of Israel, Simon Bar Kokhba, managed to wipe out several Roman legions
19:21before they were finally crushed.
19:23Hadrian had 500,000 Jews slaughtered and they were banned in perpetuity from their beloved Jerusalem.
19:31But many of them came to settle here in Spain to found a community named after the Hebrew word for
19:39Spain,
19:39Safarad, hence the Sephardic Jews.
19:43Even today, the Jews in Spain call themselves the exile from Jerusalem in Spain.
19:50In Spain.
20:00Out of the Jewish disaster, a new religion emerged and spread fast.
20:05It would challenge the Roman Empire from within.
20:17I'm leaving Italica and heading a few miles south to Seville to find out what happened when the new faith
20:24of Christianity confronted the old paganism of Rome.
20:34Seville, now dominated by Catholic monuments, was then called Hispallas.
20:40Archaeology reveals it was a typical Roman city.
20:46This is the story of Justa and Rufina, later the patron saints of Seville.
20:52They were sisters, devout Christians and much admired for their work as potters.
21:02In 287 AD, the city prefect, Diogenes, ordered all pots must be offered to Venus.
21:10This edict was almost certainly part of the Emperor Diocletian's policy to reinvigorate Roman religion.
21:18It was also a direct affront to Christianity.
21:22Justa and Rufina made a stand.
21:25Justa and Rufina ran the best pottery in Seville.
21:30But these wholesome Christians refused to let their pottery be used in a pagan festival for the goddess Venus.
21:40So good was their pottery and so essential that the pagan crowd was outraged.
21:46They broke into the pottery and took the pots they needed for their pagan festival.
21:52The two sisters were outraged in their turn.
21:56They smashed a statue of Venus.
21:59Now, sympathetic as I am to these pious young ladies,
22:03this was nothing less than a brazen bid for martyrdom.
22:09And their prayers were indeed answered.
22:11Diogenes arrested them immediately and they were horribly tortured with hooks and fire.
22:18When she was almost dead, Justa was thrown down a hundred foot well where she perished.
22:24As for Rufina, she was saved for the lions.
22:30As the wild beasts were unleashed upon a Rufina, the crowd bayed in anticipation.
22:38But instead of eating her, they licked her wounds.
22:41The Christians saw this as a miracle.
22:45But Diogenes was unimpressed.
22:48He had her strangled, beheaded and then burned.
22:52But the Christians had their first martyr.
23:02Within 30 years, the Roman Empire itself had converted to Christianity.
23:07Yet it was disintegrating.
23:09When Rome fell in 476 AD, Spain was at the mercy of invading tribes of so-called barbarians.
23:17First came the Vandals, who failed to hold the peninsula for long.
23:22They left only one real legacy, their name.
23:26Andalusia, still the name for southern Spain, comes from the Arabic Al-Andalus,
23:31probably meaning the land of the Vandals.
23:38Next, the Byzantine emperor Justinian captured parts of Spain until his garrisons were overrun by the Visigoths.
23:51Ferocious in war, they were creative in peace.
23:57Visigoths usually feature as raping and pillaging ax-men of the dark empire.
24:05But when the Visigoths settled in Spain, they produced sages, scholars, as well as soldiers.
24:12This school, like many others in Spain, is named after St Isidore, Visigothic Bishop of Seville,
24:19who refined and adapted Roman law to create a united Christian Spain.
24:27Much later, Visigothic Spain became the prototype for Catholic monarchy.
24:36Ruling for two centuries, their kingdom would inspire Spanish rulers right up until the 20th century.
24:45Downstream from Seville is the river port of Santa Maria.
24:48This stretch of water is known as the River of the Dead, with good reason.
24:55This river is the place where Visigothic Spain died.
25:00This is where its last king, Roderick, was killed.
25:03And it was a moment that changed the entire destiny of Spain.
25:10The Visigoths matter as much for how they lost Spain as for how they won it.
25:18It all started with a beautiful naked girl.
25:22Roderick, the king, was in the habit of spying upon Florinda, the daughter of his nobleman Julian, while she was
25:30in her bath.
25:30One day, he ravished her.
25:33She ran to her father, Julian.
25:35He rebelled.
25:36And here, on this river, at the River of the Dead, he met Roderick's forces and killed him.
25:43Now, most Visigothic kings were assassinated, so there was no big deal in that.
25:49But what mattered here was how he was killed.
25:52For Julian didn't just rebel.
25:55He looked in this direction, across the sea, to North Africa for help.
26:01Julian summoned Islam.
26:09Far away, in the deserts of Arabia, a new faith, a new revelation, had arisen.
26:16By the time he died in 632, the prophet Muhammad had united Arabia under the banners of Islam.
26:24In the next 50 years, the Arab armies conquered a vast empire, stretching from Iran all the way to Morocco.
26:32All ruled from Damascus by his successors, the commanders of the faithful, the Caliphs.
26:46The spectacular Arab conquests brought Islam to the shores of the Moroccan coast, just 14km from Spain.
26:55Julian called for help from the governor of Tangiers.
26:58This was irresistible to an empire built on the fever of faith and the spoils of war.
27:06This is where Islam arrived.
27:16When we think of Gibraltar, we think of a part of Spain that isn't really Spanish.
27:21A little piece of Britain in the Mediterranean, with red telephone kiosks, post boxes and the Queen on the postage
27:29stamps.
27:29But Gibraltar is also the southern gateway to Spain.
27:34A short boat trip from Africa leads straight here.
27:44I'm standing at the very top of the Rock of Gibraltar.
27:48And I'm looking right over the straits.
27:51Those mountains are the Atlas Mountains.
27:53And Gibraltar itself, the name derives from the Arabic, Jabal al-Tariq, the mountain of Tariq.
28:02And it's named after Tariq bin Zaid, who governed nearby Tangiers in Morocco on behalf of the distant Umayyad Caliph
28:11of Damascus.
28:12In April 711, he raised an army of 7,000 Arabs and Berbers.
28:19And with his favourite beautiful slave girl by his side, they embarked on rafts and crossed the straits to land
28:26in Europe.
28:27Islam had arrived in the west.
28:30They carried all before them.
28:34The divided Visigoths were overwhelmed.
28:37Some converted to Islam, others fled north.
28:41The fate of Julian, said to have invited in the Muslims, is unknown.
28:47The Muslim invaders would build a culture that outshone its European neighbours in wealth and magnificence.
28:55Their legacy infuses everything in southern Spain.
28:59And modern Spanish is still full of Arab words.
29:04For example, the Spanish word for oil, afeti, is based on the Arabic al-zayt, for olive juice.
29:13Many words the Spanish think of as their own today are in fact Arabic.
29:23The Arabic name for the river that runs north through Andalusia, the al-Wadi al-Kabir, or Great River, has
29:31not changed much.
29:33The Guadal-Kabir.
29:43Remember those amphorae that had to be thrown away after being used just once or twice?
29:49Well, now the Arabs, with their typical cultural sophistication, would crack the problem of the domestic receptacle.
29:56They glazed the inside of their vases.
30:00Now they could be used again and again, an early case of domestic recycling.
30:08The Muslim conquerors wanted to keep Spain for themselves, yet they owed their allegiance to a far-off master.
30:17The Umayyad caliphs ruled more like magnificent Roman emperors than ascetic Islamists.
30:24In 750 AD, they were challenged by descendants of Muhammad's uncle.
30:30The Umayyads, caliphs ruling from Damascus, were overthrown by the more rigorous and severe fundamentalists, led by the Abbasid family.
30:42All the Umayyads were invited to a dinner in Damascus.
30:46In the middle of the banquet, all of them were massacred, and their bodies preserved and stored in an underground
30:53chamber,
30:54with each one labelled on their toes with their names.
30:59Only one escaped.
31:01His name was Prince Abdul Rahman.
31:03He was 19, tall, handsome, red-haired.
31:07In a story really worthy of a Hollywood action movie, he escaped, the most wanted man in the Islamic world,
31:16hunted by Abbasid assassins all the way across North Africa.
31:20At one point, the assassins got so close that he had to hide under the skirts of an attractive female
31:27cousin.
31:32The Abbasids moved the capital from Damascus to their new city of Baghdad,
31:38which was even further from their most distant province, Spain.
31:44For six years, Abdul Rahman, or Rahman, travelled westwards, amassing supporters, convinced he could use his charisma to found his
31:54own kingdom.
31:58In September 755, he landed near Malaga.
32:02His followers awaited him there, a retinue of just 300.
32:08He headed north towards Cordoba, once the Roman capital, to face the Abbasids and their supporters.
32:15This Damascene prince swept all before him with just a handful of horsemen.
32:25The final showdown was on the Guadalquivir River.
32:29Abdul Rahman, with just 700 men, smashed the forces of his enemies.
32:34And he then devised a special gift for the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad, who'd murdered his entire family.
32:43He sealed a basket and sent it to the Caliph.
32:47When the monarch there in Baghdad opened it in front of his court, he shrieked in horror.
32:53It was a basket of severed heads.
32:59Abdul Rahman was a true Umayyad, a tolerant Muslim and a magnificent builder,
33:05who would now create a paradise in Spain, a kingdom of prosperity, culture, harmony.
33:17Abdul Rahman made his capital here in Cordoba, where he created a great city of noble buildings,
33:27lush gardens to remind him of Damascus.
33:30But he never forgot, never ceased missing, his home city, his Syria.
33:37And he wrote a poignant poem to a palm tree of Cordoba.
33:45He said, you too are a stranger here, sprung from foreign soil.
33:53And he added, I too am far from home.
34:02But he was now a monarch, yet he never forgot that he'd been a fugitive on the run for so
34:08many years.
34:09And he had a wonderfully earthy sense of humour.
34:12He was visited by his attractive female cousin, up whose skirt he'd hidden from Abbasid assassins.
34:20She used to tease him, you hid under my skirt, she'd say.
34:25And he'd replied, fragrant as you are, it was very stifling and stuffy up there.
34:38One of the wonders of the Western world lies behind this golden doorway.
34:47This was the royal entrance, reached by a covered passageway from the palace, sealed up for centuries.
34:55Today, the way in is round the corner.
34:59In 786, Abd al-Rahman started to build Cordoba's Great Mosque, or Mesquita.
35:06This would be his masterpiece.
35:11As more and more converted to Islam, the Mesquita was expanded again and again over the centuries.
35:25It's Mirab, or Praia niche, traditionally faces Mecca.
35:34The Mesquita has 850 columns made of granite and marble.
35:39A system of two-tiered pillars has been created, a forest of supports, using Visigothic columns as a base.
35:48The conquering faith commandeering the ruins of the old to build the new.
35:56Even the horseshoe arch, adopted by Islam, may have been of Visigothic design.
36:06Now Cordoba became a cosmopolitan metropolis.
36:11Arab scientists, true heirs to the ancient Greeks, made astounding advances unknown to the brutish West.
36:19Scholars, architects, poets, astrologers gathered at the glittering Umayyad court.
36:26One man stood out. His name was Ali Ibn Nafi.
36:33Ibn Nafi was a star, a famous singer-songwriter, who became an international trendsetter and dandy,
36:40an aficionado of style and pleasure.
36:43There's something very modern about him, nothing like a rock star.
36:46A sort of cross between Beau Brummel and Mick Jagger.
36:49Born in Baghdad, he was half Kurdish, half African.
36:54Hence his nickname, the Blackbird.
36:56He had sung for the Caliphs in Baghdad.
36:59But when he came here to Cordoba, he really became famous.
37:03He was best friends with the Crown Prince.
37:06He promoted asparagus from a weed to a delicacy.
37:10He invented the modern free course meal.
37:13Everyone wanted to look like him, dress like him, sound like him.
37:19Everyone wanted to be like Ibn Nafi.
37:31I've come to watch a flamenco show.
37:34This most Spanish of art forms can trace its roots back to Ibn Nafi's musical vision.
37:40And its heart is a special technique for playing the guitar.
38:02Juan Antonio Martinez is professor of guitar at the Ibn Nafi Conservatory in Cordoba.
38:19So, what was Ibn Nafi's influence?
38:23So, what was Ibn Nafi's influence?
38:28So, what was Ibn Nafi's influence?
38:39So, is there a direct line from Ibn Nafi's oud all the way to the modern Spanish flamenco guitar?
38:48Yes.
38:49It's mainly in the modes, in the scale, and perhaps the most important technique in the right hand technique,
38:55which once it was released from the plectro, from the plume of Faisal,
39:00this technique is called the arzapua, the use of the thumb to play up and down.
39:09This is very current.
39:11So, now will you show us on the actual guitar?
39:16Yes.
39:17That's good.
39:23The guitarists always do this.
39:32They can pull it out and they're doing a falsetto.
39:45The culture of Andalus is deeply buried in what became Spanish culture.
39:51Yet Islamic tolerance can be a little exaggerated.
39:54Islam was supreme.
39:57Jews and Christians were only free to worship if they paid a special tax
40:01and always recognised Muslim mastery.
40:06And yet there were those, of course, who resented the supremacy of Islam.
40:12Eulogius of Cordoba led a movement of radical Christians
40:16who actually sought martyrdom by publicly insulting the prophet Muhammad.
40:22Eulogius was duly arrested and tried and then beheaded.
40:27The headless trunk of his body was tossed onto the riverbank
40:32to be feasted upon by dogs.
40:40In the writings he left behind, Eulogius quoted the Bible
40:44and he left an ominous message.
40:46Follow my example, he said, because I follow the example of Christ.
40:54Religious coexistence would prove to be a challenging idea for Spain.
41:06In 912, Abd al-Rahman III, aged just 21, succeeded to the throne of Cordoba.
41:15Cordoba, the greatest of the Umayyads, he created paved streets,
41:19public lighting and collected a library of half a million books.
41:25Cordoba, under Abd al-Rahman, was one of the biggest, richest
41:29and most diverse cities in all of Europe.
41:32Only Constantinople was its equal,
41:35and it may have had several hundred thousand people living in it.
41:39At the same time, London and Paris had just 10,000 to 15,000 inhabitants.
41:44They were just glorified villages.
41:56Just outside Cordoba, these ruins display Abd al-Rahman's ambition.
42:03In 929, he declared himself the Caliph.
42:07Islam was divided between the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad
42:11and a new Fatimid Caliph in North Africa.
42:14It was time for the Umayyads to show their power.
42:20To project his authority as commander of the faithful,
42:24as political and religious ruler,
42:26the Caliph of the West created this long-forgotten paradise
42:32of power and faith.
42:34It lay hidden for 900 years.
42:41Abd al-Rahman moved his court to this vast hillside complex.
42:47Its grandeur was the architectural version
42:50of his own status as Caliph and Conqueror.
42:54Only one thing really mattered to him,
42:57the plenitude and the panoply of his own power.
43:02And that's why he built this amazing complex,
43:06the Medinat al-Zahara, the dazzling palace.
43:10And it really does dazzle.
43:12This was political headquarters, military command centre,
43:17spectacular showpiece and pleasure palace.
43:26The palace wasn't only intimidating to those inside.
43:30It commanded views for miles around along the river valley.
43:35The ideal majestic fortress for a vigilant, paranoid monarch
43:40like Abd al-Rahman.
43:43At heart, this man was a ferocious and thin-skinned tyrant.
43:50He was stout, blond, stunted,
43:54and his legs were so short that he had to have special stirrups made.
43:59And he didn't take kindly to rejection.
44:02He kept two harems here, one of boys and one of girls.
44:07When a girl resisted his advances, he had her face burnt off.
44:11When a boy did the same, he was dismembered.
44:14He was Pelagius of Cordoba, who was later canonised.
44:18And somewhere here in his palace, he kept a menagerie, a zoo, of lions.
44:24And if he didn't like you, he fed you to them.
44:38The hanging gardens were legendary.
44:41Water for the sunken pools was pumped all the way from the Guadalquivir River.
44:46These waterways even supplied one of the world's first water closets.
44:52Here, in an obscure corner of the Medina al-Zahara,
44:56is an impressive piece of modern Arab technology.
45:00It's down here.
45:02Now, let me show you this.
45:04This is an early, rather primitive bidet.
45:08You can see there's running water.
45:10What we're looking at here is, in fact,
45:13one of the first examples of a European flushing lavatory.
45:17The courtiers of the Caliph lived here in comfort and hygiene
45:23at a time when Londoners and Parisians
45:26were mired in a miasma of stinking filth.
45:35The complex was sacked in the early part of the 11th century,
45:39so completely that, for many centuries,
45:42people doubted that the Medina al-Zahara had ever existed.
45:45It was only rediscovered in 1911,
45:48and Abdul Rahman's buried secrets
45:51are still being revealed to the modern world.
45:54It's said that he named it after his favourite concubine,
45:58but he doesn't really strike me as much of a romantic.
46:01Besides, he wasn't spoilt for choice.
46:04He had 6,000 girls here in his Harim.
46:18Historian Simon Barton has written a book
46:21about the practice of taking concubines.
46:24It was all about good looks,
46:26and apparently it was said that the Umayyad caliphs
46:30were predisposed by nature to prefer blondes.
46:33That's interesting. Where did those blondes come from?
46:35There were markets in northern France,
46:39in the Mediterranean.
46:40We have Muslim slave merchants,
46:43but also Jews heavily involved in trafficking,
46:46particularly women and children, across Europe.
46:49And if one of these concubines,
46:51who had been bought as powerless slaves,
46:54became the mother of a future monarch, a future caliph,
46:58they could become vastly powerful.
47:00That's absolutely true.
47:02In fact, all the emirs and caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty
47:05were born to slave concubines.
47:08They were said to have, likewise, blond hair, blue eyes.
47:12The advantage of a concubine is that it functions
47:16as a dynastic defence mechanism.
47:19It means that unlike a wife's family,
47:22which can get involved in the politics of a dynasty,
47:25the concubine as a slave who's been uprooted from her homeland,
47:30will have no vested interest in the dynasty itself.
47:35It was a way of keeping the dynasty secure.
47:38So, actually, it's much more about power than sex.
47:41Yes, absolutely.
47:49The system required a strong caliph at the top.
47:53And when the rules were broken, the caliphate fell apart.
48:11In 976, the succession of a child, Caliph Hisham II,
48:16revealed its fragility.
48:18He was still a boy, growing up under the tutelage
48:21of his mother, Soob, a former concubine.
48:25She sidelined Hisham, her own son,
48:28and opened the doors of power
48:29to forces outside the Umayyad dynasty.
48:33She appointed her new lover as Grand Vizier, Prime Minister.
48:39His name was Al-Mansur, the Victorious,
48:42and he was one of the most brilliant, ruthless
48:45and extraordinary characters of the entire caliphate.
48:48He launched 57 raids of holy war against the Christian north,
48:52burning and pillaging and looting.
48:55Here in Córdoba, he burned the civilised,
48:59cultured libraries of the Umayyad caliphs before him.
49:02In his raids in the north, he destroyed all he found,
49:06in order to fund the building of mosques and palaces here.
49:10In 997, his raids reached their climax,
49:13when he sacked Santiago de Compostela.
49:17The doors and the bells of its churches
49:19were brought back in triumph to Córdoba
49:22on the backs of Christian slaves.
49:31Ironically, Al-Mansur was too successful.
49:35His triumphs hollowed out and undermined the caliphate.
49:43He promoted himself as a quasi-caliph and founded his own semi-royal dynasty
49:49by marrying a Christian princess.
49:54Al-Mansur's sons lacked his irrepressible drive,
49:58his talent and his restraint.
50:00When they undermined the legitimacy of the caliph,
50:04the regime disintegrated.
50:06First, he was succeeded by one son.
50:09Then he was assassinated.
50:11But then came the preposterous popenjay, Sanchuelo,
50:15who tried to make himself a caliph.
50:18The entire kingdom fell apart.
50:21There died the glory of Al-Andalus.
50:29In 1031, 30 years after Al-Mansur's death, the caliphate collapsed.
50:36Al-Andalus broke down into little city-states ruled by their princes
50:40like medieval barons in the west.
50:46The great mosque of Córdoba, built by the first Abd al-Rahman
50:50and expanded by Al-Mansur, still exists.
50:54We can still admire its scale and beauty.
51:02When it later fell to the Christians, they didn't destroy it.
51:05They built a cathedral amidst the mesquite.
51:17Even today, people in Córdoba talk of going to mass in the mosque.
51:37I'm travelling to Granada now for my last stop.
51:44I'm following the story of one man who, despite not being a Muslim,
51:48rose to the top in 11th-century Islamic Spain
51:52and who did so at a moment
51:54when Islamic Spain itself was in the grip of change.
52:02The city of Granada owes its name
52:04to both its Jewish and Muslim roots.
52:07The Jews called it the city of pomegranates.
52:11And the Arab word for pomegranate is Granada.
52:22The Emirate of Granada was one of the smaller principalities
52:26that came after the caliphate.
52:29This, its most celebrated attraction,
52:32is part of its later history.
52:36I'll be coming back here in the next episode
52:41to explore its splendour
52:43and see some of its lesser-known gems.
52:49This amazing building is now famous
52:52as the Alhambra Palace of Granada.
52:55But 300 years before it was built,
52:57this was the site of the palace
52:59of one of the most extraordinary Jewish leaders
53:02in Spanish history.
53:04In fact, one of the most extraordinary statesmen
53:06in all the peninsula's story.
53:09His name was Samuel Ibn Nagarela.
53:12He started off as a spice merchant in Cordoba.
53:16He moved here and became the advisor
53:18to the Berber rulers of the principality of Granada.
53:24When he backed the right candidate for the throne,
53:27Samuel became not only the leader of the Jewish community,
53:30but the Grand Vizier, the Prime Minister,
53:32and the commander-in-chief of the Granadan army.
53:36In war, he commanded and won victories.
53:40In peace, he was leader of the Jewish community.
53:42He wrote works of Jewish philosophy.
53:45He was a rabbi.
53:46And above all, he was a poet.
53:49His poetry is astonishing even in English translation,
53:52but he wrote in Hebrew and in Arabic.
53:55He wrote love poems.
53:57Love poems to beautiful girls, to wine, to boys,
54:01and to the excitement of victory in war.
54:10Here in Granada, a group of Nagarela enthusiasts
54:13are gathering to hear some of his poetry.
54:18Our narrator is called Mirokel over theyiniser in the Jewish community.
54:33Mirage was revered as the priest of the 65th-ri Г sinánh institute
54:36When it was passer Ding� 270-50,
54:38In the beginning of tic vizier and events
54:41Where your Messiah could live in light,
54:43And death were penguins and alive.
54:44Between mine andIGHs
54:44выглядит the night of the day.
55:06In this poem, Nagrila describes how wisdom comes from the knowledge we are not here forever.
55:40In 1056, Samuel Nagrila died, but he was succeeded by his son,
55:45Joseph, as Grand Vizier of Granada.
55:48Joseph was only 20, but he can't have been a fool because he ruled for 10 years.
55:54It was quite traditional for Grand Viziers to be succeeded by their sons and even to found little mini-dynasties.
56:00But there was a problem. The Nagrila's were Jews.
56:11Now this Jewish potentate seemed an enemy within, from a dynasty of interlopers.
56:27In 1066, a date as resonant for the Jews of Granada as it was for King Harold, the Saxon King
56:35of England, something snapped.
56:37A mob came to Joseph's palace, close to the Alhambra, and dragged him out.
56:42They chased him through the streets. He was unable to escape.
56:49When the mob finally caught up with Joseph Nagrila, it was right here.
56:53They lynched him and then went on a killing spree, massacring 4,000 Jews.
56:59As for Joseph, they crucified him right here, beside this magnificent city gate.
57:12The crucifixion of Joseph Nagrila in Granada marked the beginning of the end of religious pluralism in Muslim Spain.
57:22The Nagrila's were not the first Jewish Grand Viziers in the Islamic world.
57:26Yet the confidence of the Caliphate, necessary for such broad-mindedness, was passed.
57:32Over 400 years, Spain would tear itself apart.
57:42Next time, how the Christian kings of the north struck back, conquering all of Spain for the cross.
57:50How Spain purified its blood in a vicious inquisition, catching even some of my own family in its net.
57:59Oh, my God.
58:00So this is his death sentence.
58:02It's just heartbreaking.
58:04And how Christopher Columbus set sail to discover a rich American empire.
58:16If this story has inspired you and you'd like to find out more, go to the address given on screen
58:24and follow the links to the Open University.
58:31Coming up here on BBC Four, Dan Cruikshank traces the destruction and devastation of the Second World War from the
58:38city where he lived as a child.
58:40Resurrecting history, Warsaw is next, and then we're building Burma's death railway in an hour.
58:46Part 4
58:47The marcin'
58:47The marcin'
58:48The marcin'
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