The Alcázar of Córdoba: the seat of Islamic power in Al-Andalus

Abstract

The palace of the Umayyad dynasty, built in the south-western corner of the medina of Córdoba after the Islamic conquest of the city, has been a building recurrently mentioned in Arabian chronicle sources. Thanks to these written references, we know of its location, its approximate size, the name of its gates, some of the pavilions that form it, and many of the transcendental events that occurred there or behind its walls. However, the material information of this architectural complex is still relatively unknown, unlike the case of another great Umayyad building, the Congregational Mosque to which it was attached, which underwent successive well-known expansions. While the Islamic oratory has preserved a good part of its architectural integrity, with the exception of the construction of the cathedral in the 16th century, the palace complex was broken down and separated into pieces that were assigned by the Castilian monarchs to the conquest’s collaborators (cfr. Escobar Camacho 1989, pp. 127–28; Escobar Camacho 2020, p. 389 ss.), so that the unity of this extensive area was separated into many properties that have undergone an uneven urban evolution, the result being the loss of the complex’s image. This lack of a more evident materiality explains its scarce prominence in publications on Umayyad art and architecture. Another factor to bear in mind is the fact that the urban nature of the area where the Al-Andalus Alcázar is located has undergone far fewer changes than other areas of the city, in which property speculation and building renewal have together led to the completion of various archaeological interventions (Figure 1). The ownership of the Church of an important part of the space occupied by the Alcázar, with buildings identified as having high heritage value (The Episcopal Palace, Seminary of Saint Pelagius, Hospital of Saint Sebastian, etc.), and the transformation of the centre of the palace complex into a large public square (Plaza Campo Santo de los Mártires) have reduced the possibilities of performing preventive archaeological activities until recently. The only exceptions up to the end of the 20th were the discovery and conversion into a museum of the so-called “caliphal baths” in 1903 and in the 1960s, and the activities in the “Bishop’s Gardens” at the beginning of the 1970s (vid. Infra). In addition to the above, other factors have conditioned research on the Al-Andalus architectural complex: on the one hand, the difficulty in identifying material evidence recovered from this space, and on the other, the approach by studies in the framework of a philological tradition that has defined decades of work on the Al-Andalus Umayyad capital (cfr. León-Muñoz 2022, p. 26). This trend has entailed a certain burden for the research, which has restricted the possibilities of archaeological analysis, subject to the documentary information. Fortunately, in recent years, various archaeological interventions integrated in heritage recovery projects in the south-western sector of the city have provided substantial information regarding the architectural origin and evolution of the Alcázar and have allowed for the approach of a new reading of the space occupied by the seat of Al-Andalus power in Córdoba. It is increasingly evident that the way of looking influences our view of things. Accordingly, the change of paradigm and the observation from the optics of archaeology are transforming the means of conceiving this extensive architectural complex towards a mainly material reading with a diachronic suggestion.