The Alhambra

Emperor Rudolf II prided himself on possessing one of the wine jars used at the wedding at Cana on the occasion when Jesus turned water into wine. Rudolf kept it in his cabinet of curiosities, but actually his jar was one of the Alhambra vases.

references to Muslims swimming for pleasure are almost unknown in medieval times

The sweet orange originated in the Far East and was introduced to Europe and the Middle East by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.

Once rulers have achieved power, they seek to relax: ‘They plant gardens and enjoy life.’

in his masterpiece on the philosophy of history, the Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldun wrote of orange trees as a sign of social decadence: ‘This is the meaning of the statement by certain knowing people, that if orange trees are much grown in a town, the town invites its own ruin.’ Not, Ibn Khaldun hastened to add, that orange trees are a bad omen or anything like that, but they are, like cypress trees, a sign of a sedentary culture. Such trees produce no edible fruit, but are planted only for the sake of their appearance.

The Mexuar resembles the axe of George Washington, which is legendarily preserved in some American museum. Although the wooden haft rotted and was replaced and subsequently the iron axe-head rusted away and was also replaced, it is still displayed as the axe ‘as used by George Washington’.

Like Ferdinand and Isabella’s onslaught against the last remaining Muslim strongholds in Spain, Columbus’s mission was seen by him and his royal patrons as part of a global Crusade against Islam. He hoped that in crossing the Atlantic, he would be able to make direct contact with the Mongol Great Khan, to allow missionaries to preach the Christian faith in India and to secure access to the spices of the Far East without having to deal with Mameluke or Ottoman intermediaries.

All books refer to the Mexuar, at the western end of this palace complex, as the Mexuar. The name is supposed to be a Spanish deformation of the Arabic mashawar, meaning place of counsel, and this seems entirely plausible, though I cannot find the precise Arabic word in my dictionaries. I did find mashawir, which means ‘an instrument for collecting honey’, mishwar meaning ‘a horse-show’ and mashawara, meaning ‘to walk to and fro’.

Umayyads, who claimed to rule as successors of the Prophet Muhammad. In 750 they were overthrown by a rival clan known as the Abbasids. From 750 until 1258 the Abbasid caliphs either ruled or at least pretended to rule over the Muslim heartlands of the Middle East. The Abbasid capital in Baghdad was also for centuries Islam’s chief centre of culture. However, ‘Abd al-Rahman, a member of the defeated Umayyad clan, succeeded in escaping the Abbasid purge of the Umayyads and their supporters. He fled to Spain and from 755 onwards ‘Abd al-Rahman and his Umayyad successors ruled there.