Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco "Architectural Politics, Politial Architecture", by Mariam Rosser-Owen

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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco:
“Architectural Politics, Political Architecture”
Mariam Rosser-Owen
Asian Department, Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7 2RL, UK
e-mail: m.rosserowen@vam.ac.uk
Abstract
Traditionally, art historians have viewed the art of medieval Morocco through the lens
of Islamic Iberia, which is regarded as the culturally superior center and model for the
region. However, more recent studies are beginning to show that, rather than Moroccan
patrons and artisans passively absorbing an Andalusi model, the rulers of the Almoravid
and Almohad regimes were adopting aspects of this model in very deliberate ways.
These studies suggest that Andalusi works of art were part of a conscious appropriation
of styles as well as material in a very physical sense, which were imbued by the Moroccan
dynasties with a significance relating to the legitimacy of their rule. This paper focuses
on the way in which Andalusi architectural and other, mainly marble, material was
deployed in Moroccan architecture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Rather than
reusing locally available material, this monumental (and extremely heavy) material was
gathered in al-Andalus, at the ruined monuments of the Andalusi Umayyad caliphs, and
transported over great distances to the imperial capitals at Fez and Marrakesh. Here this
Umayyad spolia was deployed in key locations in the mosques and palaces constructed
as the architectural manifestations of the Almoravids’ and Almohads’ new political
power. Most frequently, this spolia consisted of marble capitals in the distinctive, dynastic style developed by the Andalusi caliphs for their palace at Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ. But
together with other Andalusi imports, such as the magnificent minbars made in
Córdoba for the Qarawiyyīn mosque and Almoravid mosque at Marrakesh, these physical symbols of al-Andalus in Morocco conveyed a clear message that the Almoravids
and, later, the Almohads had taken up the mantle of rule in the Islamic West.
Keywords
Umayyads – Almoravids – Almohads – Iberian Peninsula – Maghrib – religious
architecture – spolia – marble – legitimacy
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
153
Introduction
“It is not in Morocco that the clue to Moroccan art is to be sought.”1 So stated
Edith Wharton (1862-1937), the American novelist and Francophile, who travelled in Morocco for a month in 1917, under the protection of General Hubert
Lyautey (1854-1934), the first Resident-General of the French Protectorate
(1912-1956). Three years later she published her impressions of the country in
the gloriously supercilious In Morocco.2 Though not an art historian, she met
and conversed with many of the specialists employed by the French
Protectorate to rescue and restore the ruinous gems of Moroccan architecture,3
and was therefore reporting a prevailing view that all Morocco’s cultural
achievements were solely the result of external influences. While Wharton is
particularly succinct, this view still holds sway: art historians until today have
viewed the art of the medieval Maghrib through the lens of al-Andalus, which
is seen as the imperial center and thereby cultural model for the region. Studies
of the Almoravids and Almohads—the Berber dynasties which united alAndalus and North Africa from the mid-eleventh to mid-thirteenth centuries—have tended to focus on their impact within the Iberian Peninsula itself;
or, if they have considered North Africa, it has been with an implicit (and occasionally explicit) presumption of the simple exportation from al-Andalus of
artistic styles, even artisans. A recent article on the possible Almoravid sources
for the Cappella Palatina ceiling in Palermo, for example, describes muqarnaṣ
(architectural decoration based on stacked geometric prisms) as the “latest
Hispano-Moresque fashion;”4 but there is no evidence that the use of muqarnaṣ
in al-Andalus pre-dated its appearance in the vaults of the Qarawiyyīn mosque
1 The quote in the title is borrowed from Patrice Cressier and Magdalena Cantero Sosa,
“Diffusion et remploi des chapiteaux omeyyades après la chute du califat de Cordoue.
Politique architecturale et architecture politique,” in 6e Colloque d’Afrique du Nord.
Productions et exportations africaines: actualités archéologiques. L’Afrique du Nord antique et
médiévale, ed. Pol Trousset (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 1995), 159-175.
2 Edith Wharton, In Morocco (New York, NY, 1920; reissued London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks,
2004), 199.
3 Discussing the Marinid madrasas, she wrote, “These exquisite . . . buildings . . . have all fallen
into a state of sordid disrepair. The Moroccan Arab . . . has, like all Orientals, an invincible
repugnance to repairing and restoring, and one after another the frail exposed Arab structures . . . are crumbling into ruin. Happily the French Government has at last been asked to
intervene, and all over Morocco the Medersas are being repaired with skill and discretion.”
Wharton, In Morocco, 33.
4 David Knipp, “Almoravid Sources for the Wooden Ceiling in the Nave of the Cappella Palatina
in Palermo,” in Die Cappella Palatina in Palermo: Geschichte, Kunst, Funktionen, ed. Thomas
Dittelbach (Künzelsau: Swiridorff Verlag, 2011), 571-578 at 573.
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in Fez (1136-1143). It is presented as if the development of this new style and
technique was emanating from al-Andalus rather than the Almoravid imperial
capitals of Morocco.
Such perspectives indicate the tenacity of the approach presented in midtwentieth-century studies of medieval Moroccan art, in particular the works
of Henri Terrasse (1895-1971), the great chronicler of Moroccan architecture,
who operated under the auspices of the French Protectorate. Writing on the
Qarawiyyīn Mosque, for example, he says, “c’est l’art de l’Espagne Musulmane
qui est importé dans son ensemble par des oeuvres de premier plan;”5 elsewhere, he states, “Là [the Qarawiyyīn] . . . l’art andalou atteint aux sommets
de l’art décoratif.”6 Robert Hillenbrand follows in his footsteps when talking
of Morocco’s Marinid madrasas: “In them is preserved faithfully, like a fly in
amber, the spirit of the Islamic tradition in Spain. Nothing could better epitomize the essence of Maghribi architecture.”7 At the same time, the essentially
racist historiographical model in which crude Berber tribesmen found civilization in Europe persists in the recurring topos of the Almoravids’ and especially
the Almohads’ asceticism, which gradually mellowed through contact with the
superior culture of al-Andalus and its luxurious trappings. The reception of
Andalusi art is presented as no more than a passive and inevitable absorption
of a superior culture by an inferior one.
Academic studies today demand a more critical approach. The art history of
medieval North Africa is currently experiencing a revival after long decades of
disinterest, and this complements recent studies in the fields of political and
religious history that are re-evaluating such outdated notions.8 This research
has complicated the way we understand the “reception” of Andalusi culture
by the Berber regimes, by showing that they deliberately constructed Arab
5 “The art of Muslim Spain was imported in its entirety for the most important works.” See
Henri Terrasse, La Mosquée al-Qaraouiyin à Fés: avec une étude de Gaston Deverdun sur les
inscriptions historiques de la mosquée (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1968), 19.
6 “There, Andalusi art achieved the heights of ornamental art”: Henri Terrasse, “La Mosquée
d’Al-Qarawiyin à Fès et l’Art des Almoravides,” Ars Orientalis 2 (1957), 135-147; p. 145.
7 Robert Hillenbrand, “Introduction,” in Islamic Architecture in North Africa, ed. Derek Hill and
Lucien Golvin (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 70.
8 In addition to the specific references given in the following footnotes, an important recent
work on all aspects of Almohad history and culture is Patrice Cressier, Maribel Fierro and
Luis Molina eds., Los almohades: problemas y perspectivas, 2 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior
de Investigaciones Científicas, 2005). The proceedings of the University of Cambridge project
“Political Legitimacy in the Islamic West” are eagerly anticipated: Amira K. Bennison, ed., The
Articulation of Power in Medieval Iberia and the Maghrib (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
forthcoming spring 2014).
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
155
genealogies to legitimize their rule in the Islamic West,9 or adopted particular aspects of Umayyad ceremony and symbolism, such as processions of the
Qurʿān of ʿUthmān,10 royal titles like that adopted by Yūsuf ibn Tāshfīn that
was reminiscent of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III’s caliphal title,11 the staging of power
through ceremonial,12 or the planning of urban space.13 These studies have
important implications for material culture, and this essay is an attempt to set
one aspect of medieval Maghribi art history within this broader, more analytical framework.
I will discuss how Andalusi architectural and other, mainly marble, material was deployed in Moroccan architecture in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries by the rulers of the Almoravid and Almohad regimes. This phenomenon of deliberate reuse is known as “spolia,” and in this paper I follow Dale
Kinney’s definition: “The subject denoted by spolia is materials or artifacts in
reuse . . . Contemporary art historians use the word spolia more loosely, to refer
to any artifact incorporated into a setting culturally or chronologically different from that of its creation.”14 As such, I will not limit myself to architectural
material, but this will provide a starting point for a wider exploration of these
9
10
11
12
13
14
See, for example, Maribel Fierro, “Las genealogías de ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, primer califa almohade,” Al-Qantara 24 (2003), 77-108.
Amira K. Bennison, “The Almohads and the Qurʿān of ʿUthmān: the Legacy of the
Umayyads of Córdoba in the Twelfth Century Maghrib,” Al-Masaq 19, no. 2 (2007), 131-154;
Pascal Buresi, “Une Relique Almohade: l’utilisation du Coran de la Grande Mosquée de
Cordoue (attribué à ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān [644‒656]),” in Lieux de cultes: aires votives, temples, églises, mosquées. IXe colloque international sur l’histoire et l’archéologie de l’Afrique du
Nord antique et médiévale, Tripoli, 19‒25 février 2005 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2008), 273-280;
Travis Zadeh, “From Drops of Blood: Charisma and Political Legitimacy in the translatio
of the ʿUthmānic Codex of al-Andalus,” Journal of Arabic Literature 39 (2008), 321-346.
Évariste Lévi-Provençal, “Le titre souverain des Almoravides et sa légitimation par le califat Abasside,” Arabica 2 (1955), 265-280.
María Jesús Viguera Molins, “Ceremonias y símbolos soberanos en al-Andalus. Notas
sobre la época almohade,” in Casas y Palacios de al-Andalus. Siglos XII y XIII, ed. Julio
Navarro Palazón (Granada: El Legado Andalusí, 1995), 105-115.
Amira K. Bennison, “Power and the City in the Islamic West from the Umayyads to the
Almohads,” in Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World: The Urban Impact of Religion, State
and Society, eds. Amira K. Bennison and Alison L. Gascoigne (London: Routledge, 2007),
65-95.
Dale Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and
Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 233-52; p. 233.
A useful introductory piece by the same author is Dale Kinney, “Spolia in Medieval Art
and Architecture,” in Oxford Art Online, available online at http://wwww.oxfordartonline.
com:80/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2089402 (accessed 7 June 2012).
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regimes’ appropriation of Andalusi styles, forms and objects. I will investigate
the material that was reused, the ways in which it was deployed, and suggest
the messages this reuse was intended to convey. This discussion will show that
contrary to the traditional historiographical model, in which Maghribi patrons
and craftsmen uncritically followed an Andalusi paradigm, Andalusi artistic
modes were part of a conscious appropriation of styles, as well as material in
a very physical sense, which were imbued by the reigning dynasties with messages relating to the legitimacy of their rule.
Under both the Almoravids and Almohads, marble architectural elements—
mainly column shafts and decorated capitals, occasionally column bases—
were deployed in key locations within key monuments. But this reuse did not
follow the frequent pattern of assembling pre-prepared building material from
locally available sources. This spolia was brought all the way from al-Andalus,
from the ruined palaces of the Umayyad caliphs. The capitals are known
mainly from the publications of Henri Terrasse, the mosques themselves being
difficult for non-Muslims to visit and thus inaccessible to many contemporary researchers. Terrasse discussed them purely from a taxonomic perspective, analysing their features in order to date and contextualize them within
Andalusi art.15 He did not even question their presence in Morocco, implicitly
attributing this to a perfectly natural taste for the art of the Umayyad “golden
age.”16 Moreover, according to the Spanish architectural historian Leopoldo
Torres Balbás (1888-1960), the craftsmen of the Almoravid and Almohad period
had lost the ability to carve stone and marble, so in order to obtain capitals—
which their seduction by the Andalusi style dictated that they needed—they
had no option but to bring ready-made pieces from Spain.17
15
16
17
Henri Terrasse, “Chapiteaux omeyyades d’Espagne à la mosquée d’al-Qarawiyyin de Fez,”
Al-Andalus 28 (1963), 211-216. I will not engage here in a detailed art historical study of
these capitals, and refer the reader who is interested in their style and possible chronology to the publications by Terrasse and Cressier cited in the references.
The entirety of what he wrote on the matter can be presented in the following quote:
“Les Almoravides—et après eux les Almohades—ont aimé orner leur monuments
chapiteaux de marbre blanc ramenés d’Espagne” (“The Almoravids—and after them the
Almohads—loved to adorn their monuments with capitals of white marble brought from
Spain”). Terrasse, “Chapiteaux omeyyades,” 211.
“Los artistas de esta época huyeron lo más posible de labrarlos, aprovechando casi
siempre . . . algunos de los que el califato produjo en número extraordinario y con singular riqueza . . . Es indudable que durante el dominio almohade continuó en la Península
la profunda decadencia, olvido casi, de la técnica de la labra de la piedra y del marmól”
(“The artists of this period avoided as much as possible carving them [afresh], almost
always taking advantage of those which the caliphate produced in extraordinary numbers
and with particular richness. There is no doubt that during the period of Almohad domi-
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
157
However, transporting this material was not something done lightly. Córdoba
and Marrakesh are some 800 km apart (Figure 1), and judging from the historical sources, it could take the Almohad caliph up to three months to travel
between the two cities.18 The Almohad court was itinerant, dividing its time
between the capitals of its empire, and these texts describe the caliph travelling in state with all the ceremonial paraphernalia of court and army, often
making long stops en route, at both coasts, and at the Andalusi capital, Seville.19
From Córdoba, the cargo would probably have been shipped by river along the
Guadalquivir, via Seville, to the coast, across the Straits of Gibraltar and along
the Moroccan coastline to one of the country’s Atlantic ports, possibly Salé.20
Here, the cargo would have to proceed overland by pack animal, through the
mountainous terrain of the Middle Atlas, to Marrakesh, located 150 km east of
18
19
20
nation, the profound decadence, loss even, of the technique of carving stone and marble continued”). Leopoldo Torres Balbás, Arte Almohade. Arte Nazarí. Arte Mudéjar. Ars
Hispaniae IV (Madrid: Editorial Plus Ultra, 1949), 51-2. These statements are made in the
context of the development of a new type of engaged column and capital formed from
plaster, which is an innovation in Almoravid architecture of the early twelfth century,
though the technique was fully developed under the Almohads, who used more than 400
of them in the Kutubiyya mosque in Marrakesh (Torres Balbás, Arte Almohade, 51‒52).
Nevertheless, the Almohads did carve fresh capitals from stone, marble and alabaster, as
we know from a few key examples (mainly from contexts within the Iberian Peninsula,
admittedly), such as the Patio de Banderas at the Alcázar in Seville, probably dating from
the 1190s, and the Castillejo de Monteagudo in Murcia, the stronghold of Ibn Mardanīsh
who held out against the Almohad invasion of al-Andalus until 1172; see Rafael Cómez
Ramos, “Capiteles hispanomusulmanes de los siglos XII y XIII en Sevilla,” in El último siglo
de la Sevilla islámica 1147‒1248, ed. Magdalena Valor Piechotta (Seville: Universidad de
Sevilla; Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 1996), 307-319.
On the itinerancy of the Almohad court, see Maribel Fierro, “Algunas reflexiones sobre
el poder itinerante almohade,” e-Spania: Revue interdisciplinaire d’études hispaniques
médiévales et modernes (online journal), 8 (December 2009), available online at http://
e-spania.revues.org/18653 (accessed 15 September 2013).
Ambrosio Huici Miranda, Historia política del imperio almohade, originally published
Tetuan, 1956; facsimile edition with preliminary study by Emilio Molina López and
Vicente Carlos Navarro Oltra, 2 vols. (Granada: University of Granada, 2000), 249-50,
describes the journey of Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf (r. 1163-1184) from Marrakesh to Córdoba in
1171, which took a total of three months and five days.
The most common itinerary for crossing the Straits of Gibraltar seems to have been
departing from Alcázar Seguir/Qaṣr al-Maṣmuda (present-day Ksar el-Seghir) on the
North African side and landing at Tarifa on the Andalusi side (see, for example, Huici
Miranda, Historia política del imperio almohade, 345). However, it was also possible to sail
along the Atlantic coast: after Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb’s official proclamation as caliph in Seville
in 1184, “thirty galleys brought him back to Rabat” (Huici Miranda, Historia política del
imperio almohade, 314-316).
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Rosser-Owen
Figure 1
Map of Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula © Copyright 2004, UNA designers,
Amsterdam. All rights reserved. Taken from: V. Boele, Morocco: 5000 Years of
Culture (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers). © Copyright 2005 by Vincent Boele. This
figure is published in colour in the online edition of this journal, which can be
accessed via http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/15700674.
the Atlantic coast. Bearing in mind that each one of these capitals would have
weighed about 50 kg,21 and each column perhaps three or four times as much,
it would have taken nothing short of a ruler’s fiat to mobilize this activity on
21
The two tenth-century Andalusi capitals on display in the V&A’s Jameel Gallery of Islamic
Art weigh 42 kg (A.55-1925, available online at http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O86588/
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
159
so large a scale as it was practiced. That the Almoravids and Almohad rulers
troubled to bring heavy architectural material all the way from al-Andalus, and
install it in key locations in their mosques and palaces, indicates that these
objects expressed more than a mere desire to adopt an Andalusi style.
The physical appropriation and meaningful reuse of architectural spolia should be considered in the light of the complex gifting and re-gifting of
objects with important pedigrees, such as frequently encountered among
the contents of the Fāṭimid Treasury listed in the Book of Gifts and Rarities.22
Examples also exist from al-Andalus. In the ninth century, the Umayyad amir
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II (r. 822-852) acquired a famous royal necklace known as “the
serpent,” which was said to have belonged to Zubayda, mother of the ʿAbbasid
caliph al-Amīn (r. 809-813), apparently lost during the civil war with his brother
al-Ma⁠ʾmūn (r. 813-833).23 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān gave this necklace to his concubine,
al-Shifāʾ, and it must have remained in the Andalusi royal collection for hundreds of years, since somehow it came into the hands of Isabella, the Catholic
Queen, who is known to have worn it.24 Another example which uniquely
commemorates its genealogy of illustrious royal owners in an inscription is
the “Eleanor Vase,” a Sasanian rock crystal flask from the St Denis Treasury and
now in the Louvre.25 The jewelled mounts added by Abbot Suger bear a cryptic
verse inscription which can be unravelled as a genealogy of gifts, tracing all
the way back to al-Andalus: ʿImād al-Dawla, Taifa ruler of Zaragoza (r. 1110-30)
gave the vase to William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, presumably when the two men
fought together at the Battle of Cutanda in 1120, as allies against the Almoravid
takeover. William was the grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine who inherited
the vase and presented it to her husband, Louis VII of France, as a wedding gift
when they married in 1137; Louis gave it to Suger in the 1140s, who donated it
“to the Saints.” It entered his treasury at St Denis where it remained until the
18th century. It is unknown how the Sasanian vase made its way to al-Andalus
in the first place, but like the necklace of al-Shifāʾ, it probably had an earlier
pedigree of royal associations, which is what made it such an appropriate gift
22
23
24
25
capital-unknown (accessed 10 June 2012)) and 54.5 kg (A.10-1922, available online at
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O86583/capital-unknown (accessed 10 June 2012)).
Ghāda al-Qaddūmī, ed., Book of Gifts and Rarities (Kitāb al-Hadāyā wa al-Tuḥaf ).
Selections Compiled in the Fifteenth Century from an Eleventh-Century Manuscript on Gifts
and Treasures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Amira K. Bennison, “The Necklace of al-Shifa⁠ʾ: ʿAbbasid Borrowings in the Islamic West,”
Occasional Papers, School of ʿAbbasid Studies, Oriens 38 (2010), 251-276.
Mariam Rosser-Owen, Islamic Arts from Spain (London: V&A Publishing, 2010), 75.
George Beech, “The Eleanor of Aquitaine Vase: Its Origin and History to the Early Twelfth
Century,” Ars Orientalis 22 (1992), 69-79; George Beech, “The Eleanor of Aquitaine Vase,
William IX of Aquitaine, and Muslim Spain,” Gesta 32 (1993), 3-10.
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Rosser-Owen
for ʿImād al-Dawla to present to William. Understanding the genealogies that
were attached to physical objects like these has implications for understanding
how the Almoravids and Almohads could also attach meaning to the capitals
and other spolia they brought from Umayyad contexts.
Architectural Spolia in the Islamic West
Until very recently, the study of spolia has concentrated almost exclusively on
the reuse of Roman architectural material, mainly decorative elements carved
from marble or porphyry, in the late antique or early medieval architecture of
Christian Europe.26 Surprisingly, very little critical work has been done on the
use of spolia in Islamic art, though this was widespread from its very beginnings, starting with such important Umayyad monuments as the Dome of the
Rock or the Great Mosque of Damascus.27 In earlier discourses on Islamic art,
such reuse was seen as a triumphalist symbol of Islam’s conquest of formerly
Christian territories. It can also be understood as a practical need for building
materials, to meet the grand scale of construction of identifiably Islamic mon26
27
This is not intended to be a comprehensive bibliography on spolia, but some key studies include: Beat Brenk, “Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics versus
Ideology,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987), 103-109; Jaś Elsner, “From the Culture of Spolia
to the Culture of Relics: the Arch of Constantine and the Genesis of Late Antique Forms,”
Papers of the British School at Rome 68 (2000), 149-184; Michael Greenhalgh, Marble Past,
Monumental Present: Building with Antiquities in the Mediaeval Mediterranean (Leiden:
Brill, 2009); Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Eloquence of Appropriation. Prolegomena to
an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider,
2003); Dale Kinney, “Rape or Restitution of the Past? Interpreting Spolia,” in The Art of
Interpreting, ed. S. C. Scott (Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University,
IX) (University Park, PA, 1995), 53-67; Bryan Ward-Perkins, “Re-using the Architectural
Legacy of the Past, entre idéologie et pragmatisme,” in The Idea and the Ideal of the Town
between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Gian Pietro Brogiolo and Bryan
Ward-Perkins (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 225-244.
See Finbarr Barry Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an
Umayyad Visual Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Margaret Graves, “Spolia and Islamic
buildings,” Oxford Art Online, available online at http://www.oxfordartonline.com:80/
subscriber/article/grove/art/T2082281 (accessed 7 June 2012). There is increasing interest among art historians in the use of pre-Islamic spolia in Egypt, especially under the
Mamlūks, though there have so far been few published studies dedicated to this. One
exception is Marianne Barrucand, “Les chapiteaux de remploi de la mosquée al-Azhar
et l’émergence d’un type de chapiteau médiévale en Egypte,” Annales Islamologiques 36
(2002), 37-75.
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uments—especially congregational mosques—in a newly-conquered area,
though this in itself was fundamental to Oleg Grabar’s concept of “the symbolic appropriation of the land.”28 Barry Flood has most regularly explored this
phenomenon in print, recently in the context of Islamic India where richly
carved and often figurative architectural material from Hindu temples was
sometimes reused in medieval mosques.29 As Flood notes, the discussion of
spoliated architectural elements in Islamic architecture has not been subject
to critical scrutiny, being
ascribed either to utilitarian opportunism or to a triumphalist impulse
posited (implicitly or explicitly) on the basis of an essentialized notion of
Islam, and often colored by the assumption of a cultural predisposition
towards iconoclasm. Subsumed under the rubrics of convenience or
power, the phenomenon thus lends itself to ahistorical interpretations
that elide the inevitable differences between instances of reuse taken
from different cultural, chronological and regional contexts.30
I will attempt to avoid such “ahistorical interpretations” by focusing my discussion here on the use of spolia in the Islamic West, specifically North Africa and
the Iberian Peninsula, mainly in the ninth and tenth centuries, to explore
whether the Almoravids and Almohads were following a regional pattern.
As in Umayyad Syria, spolia was very common in the monuments erected in
this region during the first centuries of Islamic rule. The formerly Roman colonies of Africa and Hispania were furnished with a huge quantity of late antique
architectural material, all ready-cut and -carved for the buildings erected by
the new Arab rulers. The Great Mosque of Kairouan in modern-day Tunisia
abundantly demonstrates this phenomenon; Georges Marçais described it
as “a museum of pagan and Christian art.”31 Kairouan was a newly-founded
28
29
30
31
Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 43.
Finbarr Barry Flood, “Appropriation as Inscription: Making History in the First Friday
Mosque of Delhi,” in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from
Constantine to Sherrie Levine, ed. Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney (Farnham: Ashgate,
2011), 121-147. Flood has also written on spolia in an early Islamic context, see Finbarr Barry
Flood, “The Medieval Trophy as an Art Historical Trope: Coptic and Byzantine ‘Altars’
in Islamic Contexts,” Muqarnas 18 (2001), 41-72; idem, “Image Against Nature: Spolia as
Apotropaia in Byzantium and the Dar al-Islam,” The Medieval History Journal 9 (2006),
143-166.
Flood, “The Medieval Trophy,” 41.
Georges Marçais, L’Architecture Musulmane d’Occident: Tunisie, Algérie, Maroc, Espagne et
Sicile (Paris: Arts et métiers graphiques, 1954), 8.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
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Rosser-Owen
Islamic town, established in close proximity to extensive Roman and Byzantine
remains, such as Hadrumetum (modern Sousse), Sufetula (modern Sbeïtla),
Djaloula, and not far from Carthage.32 Its congregational mosque was founded
in 724, but extensively remodeled after a devastating earthquake in 862. Nearly
500 columns and associated capitals furnish the prayer hall (Figure 2), far more
than were necessary simply for structural support; moreover, the columns were
doubled up, so as to maximize the number used. They are assembled without
regard to coherent sets of stylistically comparable capitals or colour-matched
columns. A veritable industry seems to have been established to quarry the
ancient sites for the spolia used at Kairouan: two of the columns attest to this,
bearing elegant ninth-century Kufic inscriptions with the phrase li-l-masjid,
“for the mosque.”33
The other important example in this region is the Great Mosque of Córdoba,
founded in 785/6, where the distinctive double-tiered horseshoe arches in
the building’s earliest corner spring from late antique columns and capitals
brought from nearby Cercadilla, the monumental site which may have been
an imperial palace or see of the bishopric of Córdoba, and from more distant
Mérida.34 One capital located at the northwestern entrance to the prayer hall
is even adorned with a lion’s head (Figure 3), unusual in a mosque, but no
doubt intended to have an apotropaic function, placed as it was at a threshold. The low height of the spoliated elements led to the imaginative solution
of doubling up the arcading above the columns, to elevate the building more
prominently in the urban landscape. Later building campaigns at the Córdoba
mosque over the following 300 years respected the appearance of this earliest
section, and in the tenth century, when marble quarries were reopened under
32
33
34
Marçais, L’Architecture Musulmane, 8; Greenhalgh, Marble Past, Monumental Present,
176-181; Corisande Fenwick, “From Africa to Ifrīqiya: Settlement and Society in Early
Medieval North Africa (650-800),” in Forgotten Connections? Medieval Material Culture
and Exchange in the Central and Western Mediterranean, ed. Alex Metcalfe and Mariam
Rosser-Owen, special issue of Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 25 (April
2013), 9-33.
Marçais, L’Architecture Musulmane, 8. On the use of spolia in lime production in early
medieval Tunisia, see Fenwick, “From Africa to Ifrīqiya,” 31.
Pedro Marfil Ruiz, “Córdoba de Teodosio a Abd al-Rahman III,” Anejos de Archivo Español
de Arqueología 23 (2000), 117-141; Spolien im Umkreis der Macht: Akten der Tagung in Toledo
vom 21. bis 22. September 2006 / Spolia en el entorno del poder: actas del coloquio en Toledo
del 21 al 22 de septiembre 2006, eds. Thomas G. Schattner and Fernando Valdés Fernández
(Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 2009).
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
163
Figure 2
The prayer hall at the Great Mosque of Kairouan ( founded 724, remodeled after 862)
(author’s photo). This figure is published in colour in the online edition of this
journal, which can be accessed via http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/
journals/15700674.
Figure 3
Late antique capital with a lion’s head reused at the northwest entrance to the Great
Mosque of Córdoba (built 785-7 AD) (author’s photo). This figure is published in
colour in the online edition of this journal, which can be accessed via http://
booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/15700674.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
164
Rosser-Owen
the first Andalusi caliph, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III (r. from 912, as caliph 929-961),
freshly carved marble capitals imitated the reused late antique units.35
Both these examples of spoliation in the two most important early Islamic
foundations in the Islamic West involved the appropriation of material from
another culture (Roman or early Christian sites), either out of a practical need
for building materials, or to make a visual statement about the supremacy of
the new regime, or both. However, the deployment of Andalusi spolia by the
Almoravids and Almohads cannot really be said to appropriate materials from
an alien culture, nor to be triumphalist in nature. As I will argue, both these
Berber regimes paid homage to their Umayyad forebears, and their use of this
architectural material was inspired by a desire to associate themselves both
physically and visually with the rulers of the western caliphate.
The impetus for the Almoravid and Almohad use of Andalusi spolia is
perhaps more closely related to the “self-spoliating” of the Great Mosque
of Córdoba by the caliph al-Ḥakam II (r. 961-976), when he extended the
mosque to the south in the 960s.36 Rather than destroy the mosque’s courtyard and minaret, which had only recently been completed by his predecessor, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III,37 he chose to move the qibla wall that had been built
between 836 and 848 by his ancestor ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II (r. 818-852).38 However,
al-Ḥakam carefully preserved the decorative elements of the old mihrab and
had them moved to the new. These included the four columns that “supported
the entrance arch,” including such elegantly carved marble capitals that they
were once thought to be Roman.39 Preserving and transporting these columns
35
36
37
38
39
Heather Ecker, The Córdoban Caliphal Experiment: Architectural Patronage and
Development in Tenth-Century Andalusia, unpublished M.Phil. thesis, University of
Oxford, Faculty of Oriental Studies, 1992; Mariam Rosser-Owen, “Roman Ornament in
Umayyad Spain,” in Medieval and Renaissance Art: People and Possessions, Glyn Davies
and Kirstin Kennedy (London: V&A Publishing, 2009), 190-191. For the location of quarries, see Miguel Cisneros Cunchillos, Marmoles hispanos: su empleo en la España Romana
(Zaragoza, 1989); for a study of Roman marble extraction, see Alicia María Canto, “Avances
sobre la explotación del marmol en la España Romana,” Archivo Español de Arqueología
50-51 (1977-1978), 165-187.
See, among many possible references, Leopoldo Torres Balbás, “Arte hispanomusulmán
hasta la caída del califato de Córdoba,” in Historia de España, V: España Musulmana (7111031), Instituciones, sociedad, cultura (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1957; 2nd ed. 1996), 477-569.
Félix Hernández Jiménez, El Alminar de Abd al-Rahman III en la mezquita mayor de
Córdoba: Génesis y Repercusiones (Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra, 1975).
Félix Hernández Jiménez, El codo en la historiografía árabe de la mezquita mayor de
Córdoba: contribución al estudio del monumento (Madrid, 1961).
Torres Balbás, “Arte Hispanomusulmán,” 402.
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
165
and capitals to the new mihrab was an act of respect and continuity, symbolic
of al-Ḥakam’s Umayyad lineage and consequently his right to build in the
dynastic monument. I believe it also holds the key to understanding the practice of the Almoravids and Almohads in later centuries.
It was not until the Andalusi state was organized on a truly imperial scale
under the caliphate of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III that the infrastructure and artisanal
skill existed to quarry and carve fresh marble on a massive scale. This newly
cut stone furnished the official buildings of the palace-city, Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ,
constructed three kilometers outside Córdoba.40 Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that ʿAbd al-Raḥmān also obtained marble columns from far afield, including Ifrīqiya and Byzantium. Some of this marble seems to have been desired
for its particular aesthetic qualities, since Ibn Ḥayyān specifically relates that
the white marble was sourced from Almería, the variegated from Málaga, and
the rose and green from Sfax and Carthage. Later and therefore less reliable
sources, such as Ibn ʿIdhārī and al-Maqqarī, talk of columns being sent as a
gift from the Byzantine Emperor, and number the total imported columns in
the thousands.41 Some of this marble may have been freshly quarried in these
locales, or extracted as spolia; but if the latter, this has not been identified
among the marbles recovered through excavation at Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ over
the last hundred years. An intriguing group of reused Roman objects that has
been recovered, however, include statues and various late antique sarcophagi, reused as fountain basins in the centre of courtyards in the palace zone.
Susana Calvo Capilla has linked this phenomenon with deliberate attempts
by the first two caliphs to encourage a palatial culture of studying the ancient
sciences.42 By casting themselves as the sponsors of philosophical knowledge and the transmission of classical texts into Arabic, the Andalusi caliphs
adopted a role that the ʿAbbasids had first promoted, and thereby laid claim to
be legitimate caliphs, in opposition to the Fatimids and their contemporaries
in Iraq. The reuse of Roman art and architecture—perhaps including marble
columns sourced from around the Mediterranean—physically manifested this
40
41
42
See Antonio Vallejo Triano, La Ciudad califal de Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ: arqueología de su excavación (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2010).
Ecker, The Córdoban Caliphal Experiment, 77-81.
Susana Calvo Capilla, “Madīnat al-Zahra’ y la observación del tiempo: el renacer de
la Antigüedad Clásica en la Córdoba del siglo X,” Anales de Historia del Arte 22 (2012),
Núm. Especial (II): V Jornadas Complutenses de Arte Medieval 711: El Arte entre la Hégira
y el Califato Omeya de al-Andalus, 131-160. An English version is forthcoming: “Reuse of
Classical Antiquity in the Palace of Madinat al-Zahra’ and its Role in the Construction of
Caliphal Legitimacy,” Muqarnas 31 (2014).
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
166
Rosser-Owen
claim: by appropriating identifiable elements of a bygone but formerly great
imperial culture, the Andalusi caliphs could present themselves as the heirs
to that culture. As such, they prefigured the ways in which the Almoravid and
Almohad regimes would reuse Umayyad elements centuries later.
Through the Umayyads’ great construction projects of the mid-tenth century, a new style of column capital developed, characterized by deep undercutting of the decoration in the manner of Byzantine capitals (Figure 4). The
form of these new capitals evolved from the Corinthian type, but was identifiably and symbolically different. In this essay, I will refer to these capitals as
the “Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ type.” The new capitals and accompanying bases were
frequently inscribed with the name and titles of the caliph, which thereby
physically marked them as the products of Umayyad imperial construction.
Not surprisingly, this is the type of capital most frequently reused by the
Almoravids and Almohads, being the most visible indicator of a connection
with the Umayyads.
They were not the only regimes to make use of Umayyad architectural spolia. During the civil war that followed the fall of the Umayyad caliphate, their
palace complexes were destroyed and their treasures dispersed. Historical
accounts mention the looting of these palaces and say that their contents
and furnishings were “sold in all parts.”43 The governor of Córdoba in the mideleventh century was apparently still benefiting from selling off materials
from Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ and “other Córdoban qusur.”44 When the geographer
al-Idrīsī (1099-1161) visited in the first half of the twelfth century, he described
Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ as “still visible, with its walls, its remains, and its palaces . . .
But now it is in ruins and in the process of disappearing.”45 Capitals, pilasters
and other decorative elements from Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ and other Umayyad
official buildings became widely dispersed across the Iberian Peninsula, and
were reused in monuments built by Christian kingdoms from Seville to Toledo
43
44
45
Muḥammad ibn ʿIdhārī, Al-Bayān al-mughrib, tome troisìme. Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane au XIe sìcle. Texte arabe publié pour la premìre fois d’apr̀s un manuscrit de F̀s, ed.
É variste Lévi-Provençal (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1930), 61; Muḥammad ibn ʿIdhārī, La Caída
del califato de Córdoba y los Reyes de Taifas (al-Bayān al-Mugrib), translated and annotated by Felipe Maíllo Salgado (Salamanca: Estudios Árabes e Islámicos, Universidad de
Salamanca, 1993), 64.
Jesús Zanón, Topografía de Córdoba almohade a través de las fuentes árabes (Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1989), 22, para. 1.4.4.
Muḥammad al-Idrīsī, Opus Geographicum, fasc. 5, eds. E. Cerulli et al (Napoli: Istituto
Universitario Orientale di Napoli; Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente,
1975), 579-580; Zanón, Topografía, 78.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
Figure 4
167
Capital in the distinctive Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ style, in the Upper Basilical Building,
Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ (author’s photo). This figure is published in colour in the online
edition of this journal, which can be accessed via http://booksandjournals.
brillonline.com/content/journals/15700674.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
168
Rosser-Owen
to Tarragona.46 However, this wider dispersal and the reasons for its reuse are
not the focus of this essay, which is more interested in the less well-explored
case study of medieval Morocco.
Turning then to the North African context, the northwestern region of
Africa had been the Roman province of Mauretania Tingitania, and was thus
abundantly supplied with pre-Islamic monuments from which building materials could be sourced. The most famous Roman site is Volubilis, close to Fez,
which had been the administrative capital of the Roman province until the
third century AD, though it flourished in the first century when it grew to be a
massive city covering an area of forty hectares.47 Its temples, fora and houses
were built from local limestone. But Moroccan mosque architecture did not
develop along the same lines as other early mosques in the Islamic West,
which employed reused late antique columns and capitals arranged in a hypostyle format. Instead, Moroccan mosques employed brick piers rather than
marble columns, more in the manner of the mosques at Samarra or, closer
to the region, the mosque of Ibn Ṭūlūn in Cairo.48 From what can be ascertained through archaeology of the first phase of the Qarawiyyīn mosque in Fez
(founded 857), this also employed piers.49 The use of piers has been attributed
to influence from the Islamic East,50 though I believe this relies too heavily on
an outmoded center/periphery model rather than attempting to explain North
African architectural traditions on their own terms. It may owe more to the fact
that brick was a traditional local building material.51
46
47
48
49
50
51
See Cressier and Cantero Sosa, “Diffusion et remploi.”
Information about the current Anglo-Moroccan research and excavation project at Volubilis, including site reports, can be found at their website: http://www.sitedevolubilis.org
(accessed 17 June 2012).
K.A.C. Creswell, A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture. Revised and supplemented
by James W. Allan (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1989), 391-406.
Terrasse, La Mosquée al-Qaraouiyin à Fés. It will be very interesting to see what current
excavations in this zone, led by Ahmed Ettahiri of the Moroccan Institut National de
Patrimoine, will reveal of the building’s tenth-century phase.
Teresa Pérez Higuera, “El Arte,” in El retroceso territorial de al-Andalus: Almorávides,
Almohades y Nazaríes: siglos XI al XIII. Historia de España Menéndez Pidal 8 (2), ed. María
Jesús Viguera Molins (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1997), 637-699; p. 640.
Jean Devisse, “Trade and Trade Routes in West Africa,” in UNESCO General History of
Africa, volume III: Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, ed. M. el Fasi (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1988), 367-435 at 431, notes that “the art of building in
mud and probably with bricks antedates busy trans-Saharan links . . . It is a safe bet that
the African continent very early mastered this way of making use of an adaptable and
convenient material.”
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
169
Andalusi Spolia under the Almoravids
The first Berber dynasty to engage in the symbolic reuse of Andalusi spolia was
the Almoravids, a confederation of Sanhaja tribes that ruled the western
Maghrib and al-Andalus from 1056 to 1147.52 The phenomenon can be specifically associated with ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf (r. 1106-1143), son of the conqueror Yūsuf ibn
Tāshfīn (r. 1061-1106) and the first to rule over an established Almoravid state.
The modern historiography depicts ʿAlī as more refined than his warrior father,
and more susceptible to artistic influence from al-Andalus: one article describes
him as “Andalusi in heart and spirit.”53 He is said to have been the son of an
Iberian Christian concubine, which was not a norm among the Berbers but
reflected Umayyad practice (all three caliphs of Córdoba had been born of
Christian concubines).54 This was another of the ways in which the Almoravids
followed the Umayyad model of rule when they conquered the Iberian
Peninsula, as a way of establishing their legitimacy to rule the Islamic West.
Their deliberate policy of “Andalusianizing” themselves extended to other
aspects of the material culture that was created at this time, such as an apparently antiquarian taste for Umayyad motifs on the textiles woven under
Almoravid patronage. For example, some motifs employed on silks produced
at Almería in the mid-twelfth century—such as the affronted peacocks on the
cope associated with Robert of Anjou, now in the church of St Sernin in
Toulouse—are so close to the carvings of Umayyad ivories from 200 years
before, that it is tempting to believe that luxury objects from the caliphal
period were owned and prized by the Almoravids, who used them as
models.55
To celebrate the power and extent of Almoravid rule, ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf founded
monuments from Marrakesh to Tlemcen in Algeria, where the Great Mosque
52
53
54
55
The tribes comprising this Sanhaja federation were the Lamtuna, Masufa and Lamta. On
the history of the Almoravids, see for example, María Jesús Viguera Molins, ed. El retroceso territorial de al-Andalus: Almorávides y Almohades: siglos XI al XIII. Historia de España
Menéndez Pidal 8 (2), ed. María Jesús Viguera Molins (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1997);
Viguera Molins, “Al-Andalus and the Maghrib, from the 5th/11th Century to the Fall of the
Almoravids,” in The Western Islamic World Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Maribel
Fierro, New Cambridge History of Islam 2 (2010), 21-47.
Gaston Deverdun and Charles Allain, “Le minaret almoravide de la mosquée Ben Youssef
à Marrakech,” Hespéris-Tamuda 1 (1961), 129-133; p. 129.
D. Fairchild Ruggles, “Mothers of a Hybrid Dynasty: Race, Genealogy and Acculturation in
al-Andalus,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004), 65‒92.
This suggestion is discussed in Rosser-Owen, Islamic Arts from Spain, 36‒7, and deserves
further investigation.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
170
Rosser-Owen
was completed in 1136.56 In the 1120s, he established a new congregational
mosque in the Almoravid capital, Marrakesh: the mosque on this site is still
known as the mosque of Ibn Yūsuf, though it does not survive today in its original form.57 The only Almoravid element which does survive, after extensive
excavation and restoration, is a structure known as the Qubbat al-Baʿdiyyīn,
part of the mosque’s rich ablutions complex (Figure 5).58 During excavations
of this complex in the 1950s, a marble capital was found (Figure 6), badly damaged though identifiably of the Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ type. Clearly not from the
Qubbah itself, whose walls are formed of mud-brick piers without space for
capitals, this example must have come from one of the other structures in the
complex—perhaps the large fountain, paved with local Igilliz limestone, after
which the neighbouring mosque was known in the Almohad period, if not
from ʿAlī’s mosque itself—providing a tantalizing glimpse of its once rich, now
lost decoration.
Probably constructed in 1125,59 the Qubbah has recently been interpreted as
an important element in Yasser Tabbaa’s argument about the “Sunni revival.”60
He argues that its early use of cursive epigraphy combined with the first tentative signs of muqarnaṣ vaulting in the Islamic West constitute the deliberate adoption of new styles which had already developed in official ʿAbbasid
56
57
58
59
60
ʿAlī’s building activity is discussed in Mariam Rosser-Owen, “The Almoravid Religious
Spaces of Marrakesh and Fez,” in The Cambridge History of World Religious Architecture,
ed. R. Etlin et al. (Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, forthcoming), which gives all
relevant bibliography. See also María Marcos Cobaleda, “Los Almorávides: territorio,
arquitectura y artes suntuarias,” unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Granada, 2010.
Gaston Deverdun, Marrakech des origines à 1912, 2 vols. (Rabat: Éditions techniques nordafricaines, 1959), 98-107.
Jacques Meunié, Henri Terrasse and Gaston Deverdun, Recherches archéologiques à
Marrakech (Paris: Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, no. 54, 1952); Meunié, Terrasse
and Deverdun, Nouvelles recherches archéologiques à Marrakech (Paris: Institut des Hautes
Études Marocaines, no. 62, 1957); Yasser Tabbaa, The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Tabbaa, “Andalusian
Roots and Abbasid Homage in the Qubbat al-Barudiyyin in Marrakesh,” Muqarnas 25
(2008), 133-146.
Its foundation inscription in cursive epigraphy is badly mutilated but says that it was
completed on Wednesday 30 Rabīʿ al-Awwal, without preserving the year. On the basis
of calculating in which years the last day of Rabīʿ al-Awwal fell on a Wednesday, the four
options during ʿAlī’s reign are 1109, 1117, 1125 and 1140. Since the mosque was constructed
in the 1120s or 1130s and ablutions fountains are usually built after the foundation of the
mosque with which they are associated, the most likely date for the Qubbah is 1125. See
the “étude épigraphique” in Meunié, Terrasse and Deverdun, Nouvelles Recherches, 49-52.
Tabbaa, “Andalusian roots.”
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
Figure 5
171
Qubbat al-Baʿdiyyīn, Marrakesh, circa 1125, exterior view (author’s photo). This figure
is published in colour in the online edition of this journal, which can be accessed via
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/15700674.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
172
Rosser-Owen
Figure 6
Andalusi capital found during excavations at Qubbat al-Baʿdiyyīn (after Meunié,
Terrasse and Deverdun, Nouvelles Recherches, ph. 90).
architecture in Iraq. The “muqarnaṣ” is most visible in the star-shaped squinches
at each corner of the dome (Figure 7), although this cannot really be described
as muqarnaṣ any more than the rib-vaulted domes at the Great Mosque of
Córdoba, from which they derive. Tabbaa argues that the adoption of these new
decorative modes by the Almoravids at the Qubbat al-Baʿdiyyīn was “intended
as a sign of homage to the ʿAbbasids, and as a means to enhance the legitimacy of the Almoravid state.”61 The Almoravid rulers did indeed recognize the
Sunni ʿAbbasids as the spiritual heads of Islam, including the ʿAbbasid caliph’s
61
Tabbaa, Transformation of Islamic Art, 68.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
Figure 7
173
Qubbat al-Baʿdiyyīn, Marrakesh, circa 1125, interior view of the plaster-decorated
vault (author’s photo). This figure is published in colour in the online edition of this
journal, which can be accessed via http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/
journals/15700674.
name on their coinage and pronouncing it during the Friday khutba. In 1092,
Yūsuf ibn Tāshfīn was formally recognized by the ʿAbbasid caliph as the true
ruler of the Maghrib, and received the title amīr al-muslimīn.62 However, it is
important to understand this acknowledgement of ʿAbbasid suzerainty in the
context of the Almoravids’ bitter opposition to the Ismāʿīlī Fāṭimids, who were
their North African neighbours and rivals; furthermore, by this date, there was
no alternative for the Sunni Muslim ruler, since the institution of the western
caliphate had been abolished in 1031.
An important aspect of the Qubbat al-Baʿdiyyīn’s decoration which Tabbaa
does not mention is its interior vault, constructed on the basis of intersecting
ribs whose interstices are filled with floral ornament in deeply carved plaster (Figure 7). This element owes more to Córdoba than Baghdad, as Christian
Ewert observed: “casi todos los elementos estructurales y decorativos se derivan de la herencia califal cordobesa. La cúpula de nervios refleja un esquema
62
Lévi-Provençal, “Le titre souverain des Almoravides.”
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
174
Rosser-Owen
Figure 8
Plan of the Qarawiyyīn Mosque, Fez, showing the position of spoliated capitals
(numbers) (after Cressier & Cantero Sosa, “Diffusion et remploi,” fig. 2, reproduced
with kind permission).
cordobés puro.”63 The leaf motifs which comprise this floral decoration clearly
derive from the Umayyad and Taifa art of al-Andalus. They are also very close
stylistically to another important Almoravid construction of this period:
between 1134 and 1143, ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf’s artisans remodeled the mihrab zone of
the Qarawiyyīn mosque in Fez. Founded in the mid-ninth century, this was
(and is) the most venerated religious building in Morocco, and was honoured
as such by the patronage of all successive ruling dynasties, including the
Andalusi Umayyads. Echoing the work undertaken by al-Ḥakam II at Córdoba,
ʿAlī ordered the destruction of the old qibla wall, extending the mosque to the
south and creating a new mihrab zone (Figure 8).64 This allowed him to indelibly stamp an Almoravid identity on to this important monument. Following
the Córdoba model, the wider central nave was heightened, and several domes
63
64
“Almost all the structural and decorative elements were derived from the inheritance of
caliphal Córdoba. The ribbed dome reflects a purely Córdoban scheme”: Christian Ewert,
“Precedentes de la arquitectura nazarí: la arquitectura de al-Andalus y su exportación al
Norte de África hasta el siglo XII,” in Arte islámico en Granada: Propuesta para un Museo
de la Alhambra (Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra, 1995), 55-61 at 60.
Terrasse, La Mosquée al-Qaraouiyin à Fés.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
175
were inserted, decorated with muqarnaṣ and elaborate floral designs carved
from plaster. Here the combination is more developed than at the Qubbat
al-Baʿdiyyīn of some twenty years earlier, but even a brief comparison with
the dome in front of the mihrab at Córdoba shows that both Almoravid domes
followed the Córdoban model. The new mihrab at Qarawiyyīn did so too, in
taking the form of a chamber-like room with ancillary spaces including storage space for a minbar on wheels, and surrounded on three sides by bands
of Kufic inscriptions (whose content has, unfortunately, not been recorded to
date). Most significant for the present discussion is the deployment of four
Andalusi capitals on columns supporting the mihrab arch (Figure 9). The two
on the right side of the mihrab are of the Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ type, while the two
on the left may be ninth-century: perhaps accidentally, this evokes the ninthcentury capitals reused by al-Ḥakam II in the Córdoba mihrab. This combination of structural and decorative elements indicates a deliberate remodeling of
the mosque on the Córdoba model, down to the use of columns and capitals
in the mihrab, though in this case they have not been brought from another
location within the mosque, but from an Andalusi building many hundreds of
kilometres away.
These are not the only Andalusi capitals reused at the Qarawiyyīn Mosque:
eight more, together with columns also brought from al-Andalus, are used in
key places in the Jāmīʿ al-Janāʾiz, the oratory in which prayers were said over
the dead as they were prepared for burial. Such structures were not common in
the medieval Islamic West, and it is possible that this was an Almoravid innovation; certainly, the Qarawiyyīn example is the oldest extant such mosque in
Morocco.65 Andalusi capitals are used in three doorways that communicate
with the qibla zone of the Qarawiyyīn mosque (Figures 8 and 10); they are also
seen in the oratory’s small qubbah, a domed space open on three sides and
supported by columns crowned with Andalusi capitals. The Jāmīʿ al-Janāʾiz was
another of ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf’s additions to the Qarawiyyīn. Its decoration is so carefully executed and luxurious, employing so many Andalusi columns and capitals, which were otherwise reserved for the mihrab itself, that the decoration
alone prompted Henri Terrasse to suggest that the Almoravids considered the
prayer for the dead to be the most important of the pious acts enjoined upon
all Muslims, after the five daily prayers.66 The Almoravid way of praying for
65
66
Terrasse, La Mosquée al-Qaraouiyin à Fés, 21-22.
Terrasse, La Mosquée al-Qaraouiyin à Fés, 46.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
176
Figure 9
Rosser-Owen
Andalusi capitals used at the entrance to the mihrab at the Qarawiyyīn Mosque, Fez.
(A) Capitals at left-hand side of mihrab, (B) capitals at right-hand side of mihrab
(author’s photos). This figure is published in colour in the online edition of this
journal, which can be accessed via http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/
journals/15700674.
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
177
Figure 10 Doorway supported by Andalusi columns and capitals, connecting the Mosque of the
Dead with the qibla wall, Qarawiyyīn Mosque (after Terrasse, La Mosquée
al-Qaraouiyin à Fés, pl. 10).
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
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Rosser-Owen
their dead recognized the deceased as a member of their isolated community,
and was a communal act which affirmed and strengthened that community.67
Further examples of Andalusi capitals have been found in Almoravid contexts associated with ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf, though it is not known exactly how these
elements were used as they were recovered through excavation. One of the
most elegant examples, a ninth-century capital, was found in excavations of
the foundations of the Kutubiyya mosque in Marrakesh, in an area near to
where ʿAlī’s palace had been located (Figure 11). Perhaps significantly named
the Dār al-Ḥajar, or “House of Stone,” this palace was occupied by the first two
Almohad caliphs, until al-Manṣūr (r. 1184-1199) ordered the construction of the
Qasbah in 1185.68
Yasser Tabbaa did not address the presence of Andalusi architectural spolia in the key religious and secular monuments founded by ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf in
the important cities of his empire. This would have weakened his argument
about artistic symbols of homage to the ʿAbbasids. Indeed, in connection with
ʿAlī’s work at the Qarawiyyīn, Tabbaa claimed that Córdoba was “completely
shunned.”69 In fact, there was a political message embodied in this architecture, legitimizing the Almoravids’ rule; but it was carried in the capitals, and
claimed that legitimacy derived from the Umayyads of al-Andalus, rather than
the ʿAbbasids of Baghdad. Through the long-distance transport and visible
redeployment of Andalusi columns and capitals in such important locations,
ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf demonstrated that his dynasty had taken up the mantle of rulership in the Islamic West, and cast himself within a recognized local model of
rule. The capitals as visual symbols of the continuity of authority would have a
stronger impact on his subjects, who were more likely to have known the architecture of al-Andalus than that of far-away Iraq. In the same manner, when
Yūsuf ibn Tāshfīn took the title amīr al-muslimīn, he also adopted the throne
name “Naṣīr al-Dīn,” which resonates with the title taken by the Umayyad
caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, “al-Naṣīr li-Dīn Allāh.”70 It is also significant in this
regard that the Almoravids used Córdoba as their capital in al-Andalus.
67
68
69
70
Leon Halevi has discussed how in Islamic law, saying a prayer over someone before
placing them in the grave signifies their inclusion within the religious community, as
the persons conducting the funeral prayer in effect intercede with God on behalf of the
deceased, to seek divine forgiveness when the deceased is judged in the grave. See Leon
Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2006), 186, 226-7.
On which see Christian Ewert and Jens-Peter Wisshak, “Forschungen zu almohadischen
Moschee: III, Die Qasba-Moschee in Marrakesch,” Madrider Mitteilungen 28 (1987), 179-211.
Tabbaa, Transformation of Islamic Art, 118.
Lévi-Provençal, “Le titre souverain des Almoravides.”
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
Figure 11
179
Andalusi capital found during excavations of the Dār al-Ḥajar, the Almoravid palace
in Marrakesh (after Meunié, Terrasse and Deverdun, Recherches Archéologiques,
pl. 52).
The Almoravids’ deliberate association with the Umayyads and with Córdoba
as their dynastic capital may have been enhanced by the employment of
Andalusi craftsmen on ʿAlī’s architectural projects; however, the evidence for
this is largely circumstantial, based on style and the fact that some craftsmen’s
signatures in the Qarawiyyīn domes appear to be Andalusi names.71 However,
one group of objects that indisputably involved Andalusi craftsmen were the
two wooden minbars that ʿAlī commissioned for the key monuments he
founded or aggrandized in Morocco’s political and spiritual capitals: the congregational mosque of Marrakesh, and the Qarawiyyīn mosque at Fez. The
more famous of the two is that now known as the “Kutubiyya minbar,” whose
71
Terrasse, La Mosquée al-Qaraouiyin à Fés, 78.
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180
Rosser-Owen
inscription records that it was made in Córdoba and begun in the year 1137.72
It must have been installed in ʿAlī’s mosque before 1147, when Marrakesh fell to
the Almohads and the mosque shut up and abandoned.73 As the Ḥulal alMawshiya informs us, the Almohad general, ʿAbd al-Muʾmin (r. 1130-1163), moved
the “monumental minbar, that was made in al-Andalus, of extreme perfection,”
to the regime’s newly-founded congregational mosque, the Kutubiyya.74 After
the mosque itself, the minbar is the most important physical symbol of the
presence of Islam, since the leader of the local community stands there to proclaim his allegiance to God, the Prophet and his caliph, to preach to the assembled congregation every Friday, and to make political proclamations. As such,
the seizure of ʿAlī’s minbar in this way made it a genuine spoil of war, and
symbol of Almohad victory over the Almoravids. Significantly, though, the text
privileges the fact that it was made in al-Andalus over anything else.
The less well-known minbar still in situ in the Qarawiyyīn mosque must
have been made as a pair to the “Kutubiyya minbar,” since they were constructed at the same time and there are close stylistic comparisons between
the two.75 An inscription on the Qarawiyyīn minbar tells us it was completed
in Shaʿbān 538/February 1144. It would therefore have been installed in the
mosque soon after the Almoravids completed remodeling the mihrab zone
in 1143. Contemporary historians compared both minbars to that commissioned for the Great Mosque of Córdoba by the caliph al-Ḥakam II in 965.76
This indicates that contemporary viewers associated these impressive items
of furniture with Umayyad al-Andalus, and that their deployment achieved a
conceptual and visual association of the Almoravids with their Umayyad forebears. In the fourteenth-century, the Algerian preacher and statesman, Shams
al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Marzūq (1310/12-1379), even mentioned that “a number
of fragments from the Córdoba minbar have appeared [in the Maghrib],” a tantalizing suggestion that parts of that famous object had actually been brought
to Morocco by the Almoravids or Almohads.77
72
73
74
75
76
77
Jonathan M. Bloom ed., The Minbar from the Kutubiyya Mosque (New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1998), 3.
Ambrosio Huici Miranda, Colección de crónicas árabes de la reconquista, vol. I. Al-Hulal
al-mawshiyya: Crónica árabe de las dinastías almoravide, almohade y benimerín (traducción española) (Tetuan: Editora Marroquí, 1951), 171.
Huici Miranda, Al-Hulal al-Mawshiyya, 171.
Terrasse, “La Mosquée d’Al-Qarawiyin à Fès,” figs. 21-22.
Stefano Carboni, “The Historical and Artistic Significance of the Minbar from the
Kutubiyya Mosque,” in Bloom, The Minbar, 50.
Bloom, The Minbar, 4, n. 10. Nevertheless, Ambrosio de Morales (1513‒1591) stated that the
minbar survived in the Córdoba Mosque until the late sixteenth century: “There was [in
the cathedral] . . . a carriage on four wheels, made of wood, exquisitely ornamented, and
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
181
Figure 12 Marble basin made for the ʿĀmirid regent of al-Andalus, ‘Abd al-Malik ibn
al-Manṣūr, datable 1004-1007, now in the Musée Dar Si Sa‘id, Marrakesh (photo
courtesy of Sharon Talmor Sall). This figure is published in colour in the online
edition of this journal, which can be accessed via http://booksandjournals.
brillonline.com/content/journals/15700674.
It is likely that at the same time as the minbars were transported, another piece
of Andalusi spolia was moved to Morocco (Figure 12). This was a large marble
basin, weighing an estimated 1200 kg,78 which belongs to a group of basins that
were made for the ʿĀmirid dynasty, the regents who ruled al-Andalus at the
78
provided with seven steps. It was destroyed a few years ago—I do not know why—and
this was the fate of such a monument of antiquity.” Its wooden carcass was seen in 1615
by Martín de Roa: “Only the empty structure remains while most of the rest is lost due
to shameful negligence.” Perhaps the minbar—650 years old by then—had already been
partially fragmented at an earlier date, so that Ibn Marzūq’s anecdote may be true. See
Carboni, “The Historical and Artistic Significance,” 50, citing Félix Hernández Jiménez, “El
almimbar móvil del siglo X de la Mezquita de Córdoba,” Al-Andalus 24 (1959), 381-399; pp.
387-388.
Marble weighs 2500 kg per m3. My thanks to Charlotte Hubbard of the Victoria and Albert
Museum’s Sculpture Conservation studio for supplying this formula. The basin’s published dimensions are 1.55 m (L) × 84 cm (W) × 71 cm (H): see Jean Gallotti, “Sur un cuve de
marbre datant du Khalifat de Cordoue (991-1008 J.C.),” Hespéris 3 (1923), 363-391; Mariam
Rosser-Owen, “Poems in Stone: the Iconography of ‘Amirid Poetry and its ‘Petrification’ on
‘Amirid Art,” in Revisiting Al-Andalus: Perspectives on the Material Culture of Islamic Iberia
and Beyond, ed. Glaire D. Anderson and Mariam Rosser-Owen (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 83-98.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
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Rosser-Owen
turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries.79 The basin’s inscription contains the
information that it was made for the second regent of the dynasty, ʿAbd alMalik, and it can be dated by his titulature to 1004-1007. The basins probably
furnished courtyards or gardens at the ʿĀmirid palace-city, al-Madīnat
al-Zāhira, outside Córdoba. However, this basin was found in Marrakesh. It was
discovered in 1923, serving as the trough of a fountain and half-built into a wall
of the ablutions hall of the Ibn Yūsuf madrasa.80 Only the floral side was visible, and on excavation the eagles on the proper left side and the decoration of
the original front of the basin were found to have been mutilated. The Ibn
Yūsuf madrasa was established in the fourteenth century by the Marinids (the
rulers of Morocco from 1217 to 1465), though it was built in its present state in
1564. So how did this basin, made in Córdoba in the early eleventh century,
turn up in Marrakesh five hundred years later? Although considerably younger,
the Ibn Yūsuf madrasa was founded adjacent to the mosque built by ʿAlī ibn
Yūsuf in the 1120s. It seems likely, therefore, that ʿAlī brought the basin from the
ruined palaces of Córdoba, in a shipment with the minbars and the marble
columns and capitals that he used to adorn his mosques and palaces. Given its
proximity to his mosque, perhaps he even used the basin in his ablutions complex, along with the Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ style capital that was found during excavations there. As Gallotti noted, the original figural decoration on two of the
basin’s sides was deliberately erased, presumably to render it acceptable for use
in a religious space. Hundreds of years later, long after ʿAlī’s mosque had fallen
into neglect and ruin, the basin was spoliated again, by the Marinids or Saadians,
perhaps this time because of its perceived association with ʿAlī himself.
Andalusi Spolia under the Almohads
Like the Almoravids before them, the Almohads used association with the
Andalusi Umayyads and their model of rule to assert their legitimacy as the
true rulers of the Islamic West.81 After the Almohad conquest of Marrakesh in
1147, their leader ʿAbd al-Muʾmin (r. 1130-1163) immediately began a “reform of
the mosques,” demolishing the Almoravid mosques which he considered to
be incorrectly oriented towards Mecca—as well as symbolic of their deviant
79
80
81
Rosser-Owen, “Poems in Stone.”
Gallotti, “Sur un cuve de marbre,” 363-365.
As shown in the studies of their appropriation, both material and ceremonial, of the
Qurʾān of ʿUthmān: see n. 10, above, for references.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
183
practice of Islam—and building new ones.82 Some sources state that ʿAbd
al-Muʾmin also demolished the Almoravid palace, the Dār al-Ḥajar, and built
the Kutubiyya mosque on top of it,83 though other authors state that he and his
successor Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf (r. 1163-1184) took the Dār al-Ḥajar as their royal
residence. Certainly it was located next to the Kutubiyya mosque, for it could
be connected to it via a covered passageway, or sābāṭ,84 as had—again—been
the model at Córdoba: a sābāṭ was built to link the Great Mosque with the
Umayyad palace by the amir ʿAbd Allāh (r. 888-912).
At the Kutubiyya mosque, ʿAbd al-Muʾmin continued the practice of using
Andalusi columns and capitals in the mihrab (Figure 13). It is possible that
he took these from destroyed Almoravid buildings, though as we shall see
the Almohads also had a taste for Umayyad cultural heritage. Moreover, the
Almohads adopted a new arrangement for the capitals, of two on each interior side of the mihrab (as before), with an additional capital flanking either
side at the front (Figure 14), so that a total of six columns and capitals were
used to decorate each mihrab. This arrangement was also used at the Qasbah
mosque in Marrakesh, built between 1185 and 1188 under the caliphate of Abū
Yūsuf Yaʿqūb al-Manṣūr (r. 1184-1199).85 These extra columns and capitals have
no structural function, and it seems to be an innovation purely in order to use
more spoliated elements. At the Qasbah mosque, Andalusi column bases are
also used in the mihrab; these are not known from other Almoravid or Almohad
examples, where the columns simply contact with the floor, and may therefore
have been brought from al-Andalus specifically for the purpose.86
The Almohads were great builders, especially during the period 1150-1200
when they were establishing their rule. Ideology motivated their building
activity, as a means of promoting the supremacy of their new regime. The
Almohads used large amounts of stone in their constructions, so as to build
for perpetuity; this is still dramatically clear in the city gates they constructed
at Marrakesh and Rabat, which survive to this day. The historian al-Marrakūshī
(b. 1185) said of the caliph al-Manṣūr that “he was always concerned with
82
83
84
85
86
Huici Miranda, Historia política del imperio almohade, 144-5.
Huici Miranda, Al-Hulal al-Mawshiyya, 171.
Huici Miranda, Al-Hulal al-Mawshiyya, 171.
Ewert and Wisshak, “Die Qasba-Mosquee in Marrakech”; Henri Basset and Henri Terrasse,
Sanctuaires et forteresses almohades (Paris: Larose, 1932), fig. 108, pl. 38.
Basset and Terrasse, Sanctuaires et forteresses almohades, fig. 111. At the same time, they
may also have brought a late antique or Visigothic capital, which was later reused in the
passage connecting the Qasbah mosque to the Saadian tombs: see Cressier and Cantero
Sosa, “Diffusion et remploi,” 165.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
184
Rosser-Owen
Figure 13 Andalusi capitals in the mihrab zone of the Kutubiyya Mosque, Marrakesh (after
Basset and Terrasse, Sanctuaires et forteresses almohades, pl. xxvif ).
construction, and during his whole life did not refrain from restoring a palace or founding a city.”87 Other anecdotes suggest that he was something of
an antiquarian: while campaigning against the Normans in Ifrīqiya in 1187, he
visited the mosque of Kairouan, and lamented the poor condition in which he
found it. He wrote to his governors in al-Andalus, and “ordered them to send
urgently carpets and ornamentation to redecorate it as new.”88 It is also known
that ʿAbd al-Muʾmin himself had great respect for the old Umayyad capital,
and ordered in 1162 that the capital of al-Andalus be moved back to Córdoba.
His two sons, then governors of al-Andalus, installed themselves there and
ordered the restoration of the city’s palaces and official buildings, including
the Great Mosque, under the supervision of the architect Aḥmad ibn Baso,
who later worked on the Almohad mosque in Seville.89 Nevertheless, when
87
88
89
Ambrosio Huici Miranda, Colección de crónicas árabes de la reconquista, vol. IV: Kitab
al-mu‘jib fi talkhīs akhbar al-Maghrib (Lo admirable en el resumen de las noticias del
magrib) [al-Marrakushi] (Tetuan: Editora Marroquí, 1955), 243.
Huici Miranda, Historia política del imperio almohade, 334-335.
Heather Ecker, “The Great Mosque of Córdoba in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,”
Muqarnas 20 (2003), 113-141 at 117.
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
Figure 14 Arrangement of Andalusi spolia in the mihrab zone at the Qasbah mosque,
Marrakesh (after Basset and Terrasse, Sanctuaires et forteresses almohades,
fig. 108).
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
185
186
Rosser-Owen
ʿAbd al-Muʾmin died only a few months later, his successor Yūsuf moved the
Andalusi capital to Seville.
The most famous extant Almohad monuments are their minarets (Figure 15).
Their square tower form was consciously adopted in homage to the pair of
Umayyad minarets constructed by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III in the 950s, at the Great
Mosque of Córdoba and the Qarawiyyīn Mosque in Fez; in both cases, these
were markers of Umayyad supremacy in the western Maghrib.90 Almohad
minarets are extremely tall and splendid and as such were potent symbols of
the victory of the new regime. The Kutubiyya minaret was the earliest, completed by ʿAbd al-Muʾmin’s death in 1163, when work on the mosque ceased.91
As well as its form, its decoration—including its crown of golden orbs, to which
I shall return—alludes to Córdoba, though the Kutubiyya minaret was about
twice the height of the Umayyad towers. Likewise, ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf’s mosque at
Marrakesh was graced with a minaret that has been estimated to have stood
about 40 m high, though it does not survive above the level of its foundations,
and may have been deliberately dismantled at some point in history.92 At 77 m
high, the Kutubiyya minaret would have towered above ʿAlī’s minaret, and may
have been built so tall specifically to outdo the Almoravid tower. As we will see,
Almohad minarets were understood in their own day as victory towers, and
they were chosen as “sites of spolia,” where large numbers of Andalusi capitals
were employed to further enhance their symbolic power.
The Kutubiyya minaret set the model for all later Almohad minarets, which
led some Arab historians to confuse the chronology and attribute them all
to the reign of the third Almohad caliph, al-Manṣūr. The historian, Ibn Abī
Zarʿ (d.1340/41), writing from the perspective of 150 years later, under the
Marinids, says in his Rawḍ al-Qirṭās, “Before travelling to al-Andalus to begin
the expedition of Alarcos, [al-Manṣūr] ordered the construction of the Qasbah
of Marrakesh and the mosque adjacent to it with its minaret, the minaret of
the Kutubiyya mosque, the city of Ribat al-Fath, in the land of Salé, and the
mosque of Hassan . . .”.93 Such texts set the foundation of the city of Rabat
and the key Moroccan minarets firmly within the context of al-Manṣūr’s
crushing victory over the Castilian king Alfonso VIII (r. 1158-1214) at Alarcos
in 1195: though the chronology is inaccurate when compared to other more
90
91
92
93
Hernández Jiménez, El Alminar; Terrasse, La Mosquée al-Qaraouiyin à Fés, fig. 8.
Jonathan M. Bloom, Minaret: Symbol of Islam. Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, vol. 7 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 120. I have not yet had time to consult the new edition of
this book, entitled simply The Minaret (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Deverdun, Marrakech, 99-102; Deverdun and Allain, “Le minaret almoravide,” 131.
Huici Miranda, Historia política del imperio almohade, 320.
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
187
Figure 15 The Giralda, completed 1198, originally the minaret of the Almohad mosque in Seville
(author’s photo). This figure is published in colour in the online edition of this
journal, which can be accessed via http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/
journals/15700674.
medieval encounters 20 (2014) 152-198
188
Rosser-Owen
contemporary sources, the symbolism of the Almohad minarets as victory towers was clearly recognized.
The minaret of the enormous mosque founded at Rabat by al-Manṣūr
would have been the tallest of all the Almohad towers had it not been left
unfinished on the ruler’s death in 1199. Though the city had been founded
by ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, al-Manṣūr had been declared caliph in Rabat and apparently thought to transfer his court there from Marrakesh, perhaps because it
was better located for regularly crossing the Straits of Gibraltar to al-Andalus.
Al-Manṣūr undertook to construct an enormous mosque, worthy of a capital,
of which the historian al-Marrakūshī said, “I do not know among the mosques
of the Maghrib another bigger than it.”94 Interestingly this mosque was conceived with columns rather than piers, as evidenced by the 348 purpose-built
stone columns that still stand at the site. This marked a departure from the
Moroccan architectural tradition, and may have been another feature appropriated from Andalusi mosque architecture. The mosque’s gigantic minaret
was designed with engaged columns and capitals, built out of the same brick
as the minaret itself; but even despite its unfinished state, one lone Andalusi
marble capital has been recorded in the minaret’s southern face (Figure 16).95
The most famous of the Almohad towers is the Giralda in Seville, the minaret constructed by the Almohads to adorn the new congregational mosque at
their Andalusi capital (Figure 15). The mosque was founded in 1172 by Yūsuf,
the second Almohad caliph, since the city’s old ninth-century mosque of Ibn
ʿAdabbas had become too small and decrepit for the population, now swelled
by the Almohad court, troops, and delegations constantly visiting from other
regions of the empire. Yūsuf took a personal interest in the mosque’s construction, which he visited almost daily during the four years he spent in Seville
at this period.96 The first khutba was preached in the new mosque in 1182,
and when Yūsuf arrived in Seville two years later for a new military campaign
against the Christians, he ordered the construction of its minaret. Only a
month and a half later the overseer of the works died, followed a short time
later by the death of the caliph himself, so the construction of the minaret
took place during the reign and under the supervision of his son, al-Manṣūr.
94
95
96
Huici Miranda, Kitab al-muʿjib, 219.
Jacques Caillé, La mosquée de Hassan à Rabat, 2 vols. (Paris: Arts et métiers graphiques,
1954), pl. 48a.
ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Sāḥib al-Ṣalat, Tārīkh al-mann bi-l-imāma, ed. Abdelhadi Tazi (Beirut:
Dar al-Andalus, 1964), 474-84. I am extremely grateful to Amira Bennison for sharing with
me her translation of this textual description of the construction of the Almohad Great
Mosque of Seville (October 2007), on which I draw extensively in this section.
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
189
Figure 16 Andalusi capital in the south façade of the Hassan Mosque, Rabat, 1191-1199 (after
Caillé, La mosquée de Hassan, pl. 48a).
It seems that soon after receiving the bay‘a in Seville in 1184, al-Manṣūr ordered
work to proceed on the minaret, though it stalled again shortly afterwards, to
recommence in 1188/9.
In 1190, al-Manṣūr returned to al-Andalus, and during his stay he visited
Córdoba.97 Most significantly, we learn from Ibn ʿIdhārī (d. circa 1295) that he
also visited the site of the Umayyad palace-city, Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ, already a
crumbling ruin, “with the intention of meditating on the monuments of past
97
Ambrosio Huici Miranda, Colección de crónicas árabes de la reconquista, vol. II. Al-Bayan
al-mugrib fi jtisar ajbar muluk al-andalus wa al-magrib por Ibn ʿIdari al-Marrakushi: Los
Almohades, tomo I (traducción Española) (Tetuan: Editora Marroquí, 1953), 158-159.
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centuries and of former peoples.”98 Significantly, al-Manṣūr visited these ruins
to indulge in ubi sunt nostalgia for the lost glory of the Umayyads, but in so
doing he was associating himself and his rule with this former palace, as if to
claim inheritance from it. Ibn ʿIdhārī then tells us,
[al-Manṣūr] ordered the removal of the statue (which stood) above its
gate, and it so happened that a hurricane started to blow at dusk of that
same day, causing some damage to the campaign tent . . . The ignorant
people of Córdoba spread the rumour that this [wind] was due to the
statue from al-Zaḥrāʾ, since it was a talisman against breakages.
It is likely that the statue mentioned in this passage was itself a reused Roman
sculpture of Venus, like that which is known to have stood above the entrance
gate to the bridge across the Guadalquivir at Córdoba, where it would have had
a similar apotropaic function.99 Following the hitherto accepted discourse of
the Almohads’ puritanism and iconoclasm, it may be possible that al-Manṣūr
found such a figural, not to mention semi-nude female, statue offensive to his
strict religious observance. Alternatively, we might speculate that al-Manṣūr
could have ordered the statue to be taken down because he wanted it as a souvenir of his visit to Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ. And if he ordered the statue to be
removed, how many columns and capitals might he and his entourage also
have come away with?
Immediately after this visit to al-Zaḥrāʾ, al-Manṣūr returned to Seville, where
his minaret was still being constructed, though it was not actually completed
for another eight years. According to Torres Balbás, ninety-two Umayyad marble capitals were reused in the Giralda’s façade.100 The minaret’s internal ramp
is lit by windows on all four sides, which are flanked by blind arches, all of whose
decoration springs from Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ-style capitals on top of reused marble columns, also brought from Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ or Umayyad monuments in
or around Seville. At the same period—the 1190s—the Almohads were remod-
98
99
100
Huici Miranda, Al-Bayan al-mugrib, 158-159.
É variste Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l’Espagne Musulmane, 3 vols. (Paris: Maisonneuve and
Larose, 1950, 2nd ed., 1999), vol. 1, 352; vol. 2, 135-136.
Torres Balbás, Arte Almohade, 51. Intriguingly, these are not the only examples of spolia employed in the Giralda. Roman material was used at the minaret’s foundation level,
including fragments of inscriptions and altars. These provided large well-cut stones, contributing to a solid foundation for such a tall tower. However, it is not possible to know
how visible this material originally was, or if some kind of cladding and decoration rendered these Roman stones invisible.
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eling the palace adjacent to the mosque, of which only scant remains survive
today in their original appearance, mainly the so-called Patio del Yeso, named
after the openwork plaster decoration above the arches.101 These arches are
again supported on Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ-type columns and capitals. There are
clear stylistic connections between the Alcázar and the Giralda, especially in
the lace-like designs seen above the columns in both, a pattern known as sebka.
These stylistic similarities paired with reused Umayyad columns and capitals
at both sites suggests a coherent artistic program in the official structures built
at Seville under al-Manṣūr’s patronage, and which significantly occurred soon
after his nostalgic visit to the site of Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ itself.
Al-Manṣūr remained at Seville for nearly three years after his victory
at Alarcos, and only left for Marrakesh a few weeks after the minaret was
completed—it is tempting to think that he deliberately waited in Seville until
it was finished.102 In March 1198, he and various Almohad dignitaries attended
the ceremonial crowning of the Giralda with a great pole of iron on which
were mounted enormous golden orbs, in the style of the minarets at the
Córdoba and Kutubiyya mosques. This was clearly an event of some significance, as Ibn Ṣāḥib al-Ṣalāt (fl. circa 1194) dedicates a detailed description to
the raising of these orbs, including details of the dignitaries who attended the
ceremony.103 These golden globes, glinting in the sunshine, at the summit of
this enormous minaret would have rendered it visible for miles around, illuminating the Almohad capital like a beacon. Indeed, Ibn Ṣāḥib al-Ṣalāt says that
the minaret “soared into the air and towered in the sky and could be seen by
the naked eye a day’s journey from Seville.”104 It was also al-Manṣūr’s ultimate
victory monument, not only memorializing his crushing defeat of the Christians
at Alarcos—which he also commemorated by taking a throne name meaning
“the Victorious”—but also symbolizing the supremacy of the Almohads in the
Islamic West. The extent of their victory was emphasized both by the scale of
his construction and the quantity of spolia brought from Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ.
This made a visual connection with the golden age of the Umayyad caliphate,
but also signified that it was past glory, and that the Almohads were its inheritors. As statements of power, the appropriation of Umayyad spolia had a
101
102
103
104
For a recent study of some of the Almohad spaces in the Alcázar in Seville, which are
increasingly being revealed through ongoing excavations, see Ignacio González Cavero,
“La Sala de la Justicia en el Alcázar de Sevilla. Un ámbito protocolario islámico y su transformación bajo dominio cristiano,” Goya: Revista de Arte 337 (Oct.-Dec. 2011), 279-293.
Huici Miranda, Historia política del imperio almohade, 379.
Ibn Sāḥib al-Ṣalat, Tārīkh al-mann, 484.
Ibn Sāḥib al-Ṣalat, Tārīkh al-mann, 480.
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resounding impact on later dynasties: under the Marinids, al-Manṣūr was still
considered “the most illustrious of all the Almohad kings.”105
Conclusion
Both the Almoravid and Almohad rulers deployed Andalusi spolia in key locations in their religious and secular architecture, in order to visualize the “continuity of [their] caliphate with that of the Umayyads,”106 and thereby to
legitimize their rule over both al-Andalus and the Maghrib. As Berbers rather
than Arabs, this was part of a deliberate strategy that also included elements
such as the titulature adopted by Yūsuf ibn Tāshfīn or the kinship ties to Iberian
Christian women, which created an immediate connection between the
Almoravid rulers and the Andalusi Umayyad caliphs. Under ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf,
Andalusi architectural spolia were collected from the ruined caliphal monuments of Córdoba and Seville, and brought to Fez and Marrakesh where they
were placed in symbolic and visible locations in the imperial monuments that
he founded between the 1120s and 1140s. The congregational mosque at Fez, the
Qarawiyyīn, was remodeled in evocation of the extension added to the Great
Mosque of Córdoba by the Umayyad caliph, al-Ḥakam II. Alongside the heavy
marble columns and capitals traveled at least one marble basin, which was
perhaps adapted by having the figurative elements of its decoration removed,
and was then installed in the ablutions complex of ʿAlī’s mosque at Marrakesh.
At the same time, ʿAlī commissioned works of luxury art from al-Andalus: silk
textiles were woven in Almería with his names and titles,107 and two lavishly
decorated wooden minbars were carved in Córdoba for the congregational
mosques of his two imperial capitals. The minbars were understood in their
own day and in subsequent periods to pay homage to the famous minbar that
al-Ḥakam II had commissioned for the Great Mosque of Córdoba. Physically
and stylistically connected to Córdoba and the Umayyads, these minbars, textiles and marble spolia were part of an Andalusianizing trend, by which the
Almoravids consciously appropriated elements of the Umayyads’ construction
of power, and used them as legitimating devices.
Following this precedent, the Almohads intensified the use of Andalusi spolia in their mosque constructions, adopting it as another tool in their ideo105
106
107
Ambrosio Huici Miranda, El Cartás. Noticia de los reyes del Mogreb e historia de la ciudad
de Fez (Valencia, 1918), 297.
Cressier and Cantero Sosa, “Diffusion et remploi,” 174.
Cristina Partearroyo, “Tejidos andalusíes,” Artigrama 22 (2007), 371-419; 387-388, fig. 6.
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193
logically motivated architecture. Some of this spolia may have been taken by
the Almohads as booty from Almoravid mosques which they destroyed, in
the same way as they transferred the minbar from ʿAlī’s mosque in Marrakesh
to the Kutubiyya mosque, making it an authentic “spoil” of war. But they
must also have been aware of the Córdoban origins of this material, due to
ʿAbd al-Muʾmin’s great respect for the Umayyad capital, and the “collecting
tendency” of his successors, revealed through al-Manṣūr’s nostalgic visit to
Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ and the huge number of caliphal capitals which stud the
façade of his minaret in Seville. Again, the physical material parallels the
appropriation of Umayyad symbols and ceremonial (the Qurʾān of ʿUthmān),
and the construction of an Arab genealogy that associated ʿAbd al-Muʾmin
with the Prophet Muḥammad by claiming to descend from the tribe of Qays
ʿAylān.108 These messages of power clearly worked, as contemporary and later
writers continued to see Almohad minarets as victory towers, symbolic of their
military successes over the Christians in Spain, another facet of their claim to
be the legitimate inheritors of the Umayyad caliphate.
I have not attempted to make this paper an exhaustive study of all the examples of appropriation and reuse of Andalusi cultural heritage in which the
Almoravid and Almohad rulers engaged. Another example which could have
been included here are the bronze bells brought from churches in Christian
Iberia and converted into lamps to adorn key Moroccan mosques:109 more
work is needed on this phenomenon, as on many other aspects of the material
culture of the medieval Maghrib. Rather, my aim has been to use the intriguing phenomenon of Andalusi spolia in Moroccan architecture as a means to
explore an aspect of the way the Berber regimes looked to Umayyad Córdoba
to legitimize their rule in the Islamic West, complementing the work of other
scholars who have focused on the political and religious histories of these
regimes. This is offered as one case study within a broader framework in which
Islamic art historians are encouraged to develop a more critical approach to
the study of the art and architecture of medieval North Africa.
As a final note, it is interesting to point out that this phenomenon did not
stop with the Almohads: we have already noted how the ʿĀmirid marble basin
from ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf’s ablutions complex at Marrakesh was removed by the
108
109
Fierro, “Las genealogías de ʿAbd al-Muʾmin.” As Fierro points out, the Qaysi genealogy
included the Quraysh, the tribe to which the Prophet Muḥammad belonged, and according to the political theory of the time, to be a legitimate caliph necessitated being a
Qurayshi.
On which see Jerrilynn D. Dodds, ed., Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain (New York, NY:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), cat. nos. 55 and 58.
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Marinids or the Saadians to the site of the Ibn Yūsuf madrasa. But another
intriguing example exists from the Marinid period (Figure 17): a funerary stele
commemorating the Marinid sultan Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf (d. 1307) is carved on
a piece of marble whose other face preserves part of a Latin inscription dating from the third or fourth century AD, in the name of one Aulus Caecina
Tacitus, likely to have been the governor of Baetica—the fertile Roman
province in the south of Hispania, which the Muslims made their capital
(Figure 18).110 However, the narrow sides of the stele also bear traces of decoration: though one side is badly damaged, the other shows that this slab was
clearly once part of an Umayyad fountain basin, stylistically related to the
group of basins made for the ʿĀmirid regents (Figure 19). A large block of marble carved with an official Roman inscription must have been reused in the
tenth century to create another fountain basin for palatial gardens in or near
Córdoba. This basin was later brought to Morocco, perhaps at the same time
as that from the Ibn Yūsuf madrasa—though, since the stele was installed in
the Chella, the Marinid necropolis outside Rabat, it is tempting to associate
this second basin with the Almohad al-Manṣūr’s aggrandizement of Rabat
and his symbolic visit to Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ. In the fourteenth century, a piece
of marble perhaps associated with al-Manṣūr—or still, conceivably, with his
Umayyad antecedents—was chosen to create a fittingly royal memorial for
one of the Marinid sultans.111
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper has been ongoing for several years, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present it at different stages: at the conference “Intermediaries: Translating Cultures in the Medieval and Early Modern
Hispanic World,” King’s College, London, in March 2006, where I am very grateful to the late and much lamented María Rosa Menocal for her comments and
all subsequent help; as lectures to the Royal Asiatic Society, London, in
December 2006, and the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies,
110
111
Vincent Boele, ed., Morocco: 5000 Years of Culture (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2005), 63.
Another example of “self-spoliating”—that is, by later Moroccan regimes of the luxurious architectural furnishings of an earlier Moroccan building—is explored in the article by Nadia Erzini and Stephen Vernoit, “The Marble Spolia from the Badi‘ Palace in
Marrakesh,” in Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World: Art, Craft and Text.
Essays Presented to James W. Allan, ed. Venetia Porter and Mariam Rosser-Owen (London:
IB Tauris, 2012), 317-334.
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Figure 17 Funerary stele commemorating the Marinid sultan, Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf (d. 1307),
Archaeological Museum in Rabat (author’s photo). This figure is published in colour
in the online edition of this journal, which can be accessed via http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/15700674.
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Figure 18 Latin inscription in the name of Aulus Caecina Tacitus on the reverse side of the
Marinid stele (author’s photo). This figure is published in colour in the online edition
of this journal, which can be accessed via http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/
content/journals/15700674.
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco
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Figure 19 One of the narrow sides of the Marinid stele, showing remains of Umayyad carving
(photo courtesy of Glaire Anderson). This figure is published in colour in the online
edition of this journal, which can be accessed via http://booksandjournals.
brillonline.com/content/journals/15700674.
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University of Cambridge, in November 2007; and most recently at the conference “Constructing Memory in Medieval Spain,” at the Centre for Medieval
Studies, University of York, July 2011. I also presented some thoughts on spolia
in Islamic art in the class on spolia organized by Richard Checketts as part of
the RCA/V&A History of Design MA course, in February 2011. I am grateful to the
participants at all these meetings for the interesting points they raised, as well
as to those colleagues who read earlier versions of this paper and gave valuable
comments and feedback. Finally, sincere thanks to those colleagues who have
generously allowed me to reproduce their images in this article.
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