Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco: “Architectural Politics, Political Architecture”
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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.
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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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7
Robert Hillenbrand, “Introduction,” in Islamic Architecture in North Africa, ed. Derek Hill and Lucien Golvin (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 70.
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9
See, for example, Maribel Fierro, “Las genealogías de ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, primer califa almohade,” Al-Qantara 24 (2003), 77-108.
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10
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.
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12
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.
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13
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.
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14
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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15
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.
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24
Mariam Rosser-Owen, Islamic Arts from Spain (London: V&A Publishing, 2010), 75.
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25
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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27
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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29
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.
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31
Georges Marçais, L’Architecture Musulmane d’Occident: Tunisie, Algérie, Maroc, Espagne et Sicile (Paris: Arts et métiers graphiques, 1954), 8.
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32
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.
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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.
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34
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).
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40
See Antonio Vallejo Triano, La Ciudad califal de Madīnat al-Zaḥrāʾ: arqueología de su excavación (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2010).
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42
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).
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44
Jesús Zanón, Topografía de Córdoba almohade a través de las fuentes árabes (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1989), 22, para. 1.4.4.
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50
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.
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51
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.”
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53
Gaston Deverdun and Charles Allain, “Le minaret almoravide de la mosquée Ben Youssef à Marrakech,” Hespéris-Tamuda 1 (1961), 129-133; p. 129.
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54
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.
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72
Jonathan M. Bloom ed., The Minbar from the Kutubiyya Mosque (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 3.
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73
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.
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82
Huici Miranda, Historia política del imperio almohade, 144-5.
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88
Huici Miranda, Historia política del imperio almohade, 334-335.
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89
Heather Ecker, “The Great Mosque of Córdoba in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Muqarnas 20 (2003), 113-141 at 117.
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92
Deverdun, Marrakech, 99-102; Deverdun and Allain, “Le minaret almoravide,” 131.
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97
Ambrosio Huici Miranda, Colección de crónicas árabes de la reconquista, vol. II. Al-Bayan al-mugrib fi ijtisar 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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100
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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107
Cristina Partearroyo, “Tejidos andalusíes,” Artigrama 22 (2007), 371-419; 387-388, fig. 6.
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Andalusi Spolia in Medieval Morocco: “Architectural Politics, Political Architecture”
In: Medieval EncountersSearch for other papers by Mariam Rosser-Owen in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
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.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1707 | 362 | 24 |
| Full Text Views | 556 | 50 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 623 | 107 | 0 |
