Conquest Blood and Gold: The Making of Spain with Simon Sebag Montefiore

Spain. Al-Andalus. Iberia, Hispania.

Many names for the same country.

Spain has had more diversity

and more manifestations than any other country in western Europe.

It's a peninsula almost surrounded by water.

That's its blessing and its curse.

The road to Spain has always been the sea, from the South.

From 3000 BC onwards, the great traders of the Mediterranean -

the Greeks and Phoenicians came here

attracted by its fertile plains,

and its mines that brought forth gold and silver, tin and copper.

Spain is European, yet it looks to Africa.

Forged by rulers, armies, peoples and faiths

more exotic than elsewhere in the West.

Spain's position at the extremity of Europe has made it the borderland

and the battlefield of the continent's

many different influences.

It's joined to Europe and yet only 14km from Africa.

Everything here reflects its unique meshing

of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures.

That's what makes Spain so unique.

I come both as historian and traveller.

To explore who and what shaped the soul of Spain.

From Paganism, Islam and Catholicism, via dictatorship,

to today's democracy.

I'll tell the story from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

I start in the South.

Cadiz, Spain's oldest living city.

Seville, Andalusia's Catholic capital.

Gibraltar, Spain's gateway.

Cordoba, capital of the Islamic Caliphate.

And Granada, home of the Alhambra.

I'll find the hidden corners, the stories we don't know, the secrets,

the titans who created the nation.

For centuries, this was Europe's Wild West.

Where caliphs and kings created palaces and cities,

where they fought wars of annihilation.

Here, a concubine could become a queen.

Here, a naked princess sparked a decisive invasion.

Blood and gold, beauty and death, persecution and tolerance.

This is the story of the making of Spain.

The Atlantic city of Cadiz is my first stop.

More than 2,000 years ago,

this was a colony of the Phoenician city of Carthage

in today's Tunisia.

In 237 BC, one of history's most famous figures was brought here.

As a ten-year-old boy, the young Hannibal came to Cadiz.

And from here, his father, Hamilcar, would conquer most of Spain

as a new Carthaginian empire.

Now Spain became the battlefield

for one of the great set-piece imperial rivalries

of the ancient world.

The Phoenicians came from the city of Tyre.

They spread out throughout the Mediterranean.

And the greatest city they founded was Carthage.

The Carthaginians started to found an empire and that brought them

into conflict with the other rising power of the Mediterranean.

Rome.

Hannibal was born into a family already at war.

Their name, Barca, meant thunderbolt.

When his father conquered Spain as his next move against Rome,

Hannibal begged to go with him.

He was 19 when his father died.

Gradually, he would assume command of his father's empire.

The coming war needed the blessing of the Gods and I've come to meet one.

Isn't it a breathtaking thought?

That as we look at this,

Hannibal himself once gazed upon this very statue.

This Cadiz museum contains some of the priceless treasures

from Hannibal's time.

And this figurine of the god Melqart

once stood on the Island of Sancti Petri.

And that's where I'm going, a few miles south of Cadiz,

just like Hannibal did.

In 218 BC, Hannibal, now 29, travelled here to Melqart's temple.

He had a plan of astonishing ambition that required Melqart's blessing.

Melqart was the God of Tyre, mother city of the Carthaginians.

And he appears in the Jewish Bible as the god Baal.

It was said that Melqart was unfaithful to his wife,

who castrated him and killed him,

at which he was miraculously brought back to life.

His resurrection made him a symbol of vim, vigour, power and virility.

Temple complexes like this were central to ancient life.

There were human sacrifices.

Priests cut the throats of bulls

and splashed blood on the naked bodies of supplicants.

As you can see, there's nothing here except seagulls

and this deserted 18th-century fort.

But this was once one of the richest, grandest

and most famous temple shrines in the entire ancient world.

It was a critical moment.

Carthaginian Spain challenged Roman mastery of the Mediterranean.

That meant a new Roman war against Carthage.

Here at Sancti Petri, Hannibal consulted the Oracle of Melqart.

Hannibal took an oath to destroy Rome.

He said, "I swear to arrest the destiny of Rome with fire and steel."

Rather than waiting for Rome to attack him,

Hannibal would take the fight to the enemy.

It would be one of the most audacious military campaigns of antiquity.

Harnessing Spain and Africa, Hannibal would attack Italy.

Here in Cadiz, Hannibal mustered a huge army of 60,000.

Including Spanish spearmen and African cavalry.

And 40 war elephants, the ultimate prestige weapon.

In 217, Hannibal marched this huge army, from Spain,

across the south of France, over the Alps - including all his elephants -

and then down into Italy.

He headed for Rome.

Hannibal's campaign would bring Rome to the edge of defeat.

Victory over Rome would change the entire history of Europe.

Knowing what we know now about the invincibility

of the future Roman Empire,

Hannibal's adventure looks reckless, if not absurd.

But Hannibal was a child of the Hellenistic or Greek culture

in the Mediterranean, unleashed by his hero, Alexander the Great.

And compared to Alexander's exploits in the East,

this invasion of Italy might be child's play.

It was Rome's supreme crisis.

Hannibal repeatedly defeated the Roman armies

and at Cannae, he routed them.

And yet, even as Hannibal was closing in, Rome did not fall.

The Romans prayed and then they rallied.

Cato the Elder, one of their statesmen, repeatedly declared,

"Carthago delenda est" - Carthage must be annihilated.

And now, they found a general almost as sublime

a strategist as Hannibal himself.

And he would take the war to Hannibal's Spain,

just as Hannibal had brought the war to Rome.

This was the moment that the Romans became Romans.

A few miles north of Seville in the heart of Andalusia,

the vicious blood feud of Carthage and Rome would be decided.

In 206 BC, the two sides met right here in a battle.

The winners would rule Europe for the next 700 years.

The Roman commander was Publius Cornelius Scipio.

It was said in Rome that only Scipio would dare to take on

the Carthaginian Empire.

Both his father and his uncle had been killed in battle

by Hannibal's family.

So, for Scipio, it was personal.

Just as Hannibal had vowed to destroy Rome,

Scipio vowed to destroy Carthage.

And his plan was as bold as it was simple.

While the brilliant Hannibal fought on in Italy for over a decade,

Spain was defended by his feuding, disunited brothers.

Scipio slipped into Spain with his small army.

Military historian Saul David is here to tell me how Scipio

faced the Carthaginians right here at Ilipa.

We're right on the spot of that battle.

Tell me what happened that day?

To give you an idea of numbers, the Romans have about 50,000

and the Carthaginians 75,000, so they're heavily outnumbered.

And for the two or three days prior to the actual battle itself,

Scipio sets his army up in a very traditional way.

So his strongest forces are in the centre,

his Roman and Italian legions, and his allies,

who he can't really rely on, are on the flank.

But on the day of the battle itself, he changes all of that.

He orders the army out very early in the morning,

he gets them into position before the Carthaginians

are ready to respond and he changes his formation

so that his elite forces are actually now on the flanks.

And this allows him to advance in a very unusual way

with a concave formation, so that his best troops are on the side.

And in a nutshell, cos you could go on about this battle

in great detail, it means that the strongest Carthaginian troops

never actually get to fight until late on during the battle.

So how did the elephants,

the Carthaginian elephants perform on the day?

You've got to imagine a scenario where once the battle starts,

the elephants don't see friend or foe.

They've got their guides, as it were,

but everyone else is fair game.

And if you get in the way of a war elephant,

particularly one who's been stung by a few javelins being thrown at him,

he's going to trample anyone.

And a four-tonne beast treading on you

is going to leave a bit of a sticky mess underneath.

So, you can see that the use of the Carthaginian war elephant

was as much of an own goal as it was a success.

Scipio was victorious.

Spain became a province of Europe, not Africa - of Rome, not Carthage.

He built this, the city of Italica, next to the battlefield,

for the veterans of his victory.

Control of the peninsula gave Scipio a springboard to attack North Africa.

This amazing mosaic here in Italica

tells the story of Scipio's wars against Carthage.

In 204, Scipio crossed to Africa, taking the war to Carthage.

As he approached, the Carthaginians recalled Hannibal from Italy.

He rushed back, but Scipio defeated him. The city fell.

Scipio was rewarded with a title, Africanus,

but his haughtiness won him many enemies.

He was prosecuted and exiled to his estates.

As for Hannibal, he roamed the East, enemy number one,

pursued by Roman agents.

Finally, he committed suicide.

As for Carthage, ultimately it was wiped off the map.

Now it was Rome's turn to colonise Spain.

The Romans loved Hispania, Roman Spain.

They found it almost more Italian than Italy.

Here, life was good and they could make great fortunes in fish paste,

olive oil and wine.

In 98 AD, they chose as Emperor a general from around here, Italica.

His name was Trajan.

Competent and honest, he was a formidable soldier

and an outstanding ruler.

He was actually voted the title Optimus, the best, and he was.

His successor Hadrian, also from here, Italica,

was probably the most accomplished man ever to rule the Roman Empire.

Everything he did, he did properly. He created the Pantheon in Rome.

And here, he improved Italica enormously.

Marcus Aurelius the Philosopher Emperor,

was also from a Spanish Roman family.

It's ironic, isn't it?

That the three greatest Roman emperors at the Empire's zenith

were from Roman Spain.

Hispania became the food bowl and the winery of the empire.

Producing the essentials and the delicacies of Roman life.

Spanish olive oil and wine were sent around the Mediterranean

in amphorae just like these.

But there was a problem, which neither the Carthaginians

nor after them, the Romans, could solve.

The amphorae could only be used once

and after that, the pottery was tainted.

At the height of Roman Hispania, so many were being exported to Rome -

as many as 54 million - that their debris formed a heap.

And the heap became a mountain.

And Mount Testaccio is still there to this day.

The used amphorae, transported from Spain to Rome,

were broken into pieces

and then sprinkled with lime to neutralise the smell

of rancid olive oil.

The centre of Roman life here in Italica was its amphitheatre.

One of the largest and best preserved after Rome's Colosseum.

It could seat 25,000 people.

In around 50 AD, this arena became the focus for a sport

that later became the emblem of a nation.

In a moment of imperial whimsy, the stuttering Emperor Claudius

banned all gladiatorial fights in Spain.

And these were replaced with contests of exotic beasts.

The lions and the tigers were all kept down here in these pits.

And amongst them were the local Spanish bulls,

which were then sent up into the amphitheatre to be viciously

slaughtered to the crowds' delight.

This was the beginning of Spanish bullfighting.

Rome's traditional Gods were often fused with foreign deities

who became fashionable.

One blood-saturated fertility cult

may link the Carthaginian past with the Spanish future.

Attis, a comely shepherd boy,

channelled the story of Melqart before him.

He too was castrated by his jealous lover,

or some said castrated himself and bled to death.

But he bounced back in an unforgettable way

as the ultimate symbol of virility for his frenzied cult followers.

They would cavort, splattering themselves with blood,

flagellating themselves, biting each other,

and as the ultimate gesture of devotion, castrating themselves.

It's said that these traditions may be echoed today

in the self-flagellating Catholic brotherhoods

that are still going on in Spain.

Hadrian, the Spanish-born emperor who beautified Italica,

unwittingly changed Spain.

When, in 132 AD, his persecution of the Jews in Jerusalem

provoked a revolt.

Hadrian rushed troops to Judea to crush the rebellion.

But the Jews under their commander,

the Prince of Israel, Simon Bar Kokhba, managed to wipe out

several Roman legions before they were finally crushed.

Hadrian had 500,000 Jews slaughtered

and they were banned in perpetuity from their beloved Jerusalem.

But many of them came to settle here in Spain, to found a community

named after the Hebrew word for Spain, Saffarad,

hence the Sephadic Jews.

Even today, the Jews in Spain call themselves

"the exile from Jerusalem in Spain".

Out of the Jewish disaster, a new religion emerged and spread fast.

It would challenge the Roman empire from within.

I'm leaving Italica and heading a few miles south to Seville.

To find out what happened when a new faith of Christianity

confronted the old paganism of Rome.

Seville, now dominated by Catholic monuments,

was then called Hispalis.

Archaeology reveals it was a typical Roman city.

This is the story of Justa and Rufina,

later the patron saints of Seville.

They were sisters, devout Christians,

and much admired for their work as potters.

In 287 AD, the city prefect Diogenianus ordered all pots

must be offered to Venus.

This edict was almost certainly part of Emperor Diocletian's policy

to reinvigorate Roman religion.

It was also a direct affront to Christianity.

Justa and Rufina made a stand.

Justa and Rufina ran the best pottery in Seville.

But these wholesome Christians refused to let their pottery

be used in a pagan festival for the goddess Venus.

So good was their pottery,

and so essential, that the pagan crowd was outraged.

They broke into the pottery

and took the pots they needed for their pagan festival.

The two sisters were outraged in their turn.

They smashed a statue of Venus.

Now, sympathetic as I am to these pious young ladies,

this was nothing less than a brazen bid for martyrdom.

And their prayers were indeed answered.

Diogenianus arrested them immediately

and they were horribly tortured with hooks and fire.

When she was almost dead, Justa was thrown down a 100ft well,

where she perished.

As for Rufina, she was saved for the lions.

As the wild beasts were unleashed upon Rufina,

the crowd bayed in anticipation.

But instead of eating her, they licked her wounds.

The Christians saw this as a miracle but Diogenianus was unimpressed.

He had her strangled, beheaded and then burned.

But the Christians had their first martyr.

Within 30 years, the Roman Empire itself had converted to Christianity.

Yet it was disintegrating.

When Rome fell in 476 AD,

Spain was at the mercy of invading tribes of so-called Barbarians.

First came the Vandals, who failed to hold the Peninsula for long.

They left only one real legacy, their name.

Andalusia, still the name for Southern Spain,

comes from the Arabic Al-Andalus,

probably meaning "The land of the Vandals."

Next, the Byzantine emperor Justinian captured parts of Spain

until his garrisons were overrun by the Visigoths.

Ferocious in war, they were creative in peace.

Visigoths usually feature as raping and pillaging axe men

of the Dark Ages.

But when the Visigoths settled in Spain, they produced sages,

scholars as well as soldiers.

This school, like many others in Spain,

is named after St Isidore, Visigothic Bishop of Seville,

who refined and adapted Roman law

to create a united, Christian Spain.

Much later, Visigothic Spain became the prototype for Catholic monarchy.

Ruling for two centuries, their kingdom would inspire Spanish rulers

right up until the 20th century.

Downstream from Seville is the river port of Santa Maria.

This stretch of water is known as the River of the Dead. With good reason.

This river is the place where Visigothic Spain died.

This is where its last king, Roderick, was killed.

And it was a moment that changed the entire destiny of Spain.

The Visigoths matter as much for how they lost Spain

as for how they won it.

It all started with a beautiful naked girl.

Roderick, the King, was in the habit of spying upon Florinda,

the daughter of his nobleman Julian, while she was in her bath.

One day, he ravished her.

She ran to her father, Julian, he rebelled.

And here, on this river, at the River of the Dead,

he met Roderick's forces and killed him.

Now, most Visigothic kings were assassinated.

So there was no big deal in that.

But what mattered here was how he was killed.

For Julian didn't just rebel,

he looked in this direction,

across the sea to North Africa for help.

Julian summoned Islam.

Far away in the deserts of Arabia,

a new faith, a new revelation had arisen.

By the time he died in 632,

the Prophet Mohammed had united Arabia under the banners of Islam.

In the next 50 years, the Arab armies conquered a vast empire,

stretching from Iran all the way to Morocco, all ruled from Damascus

by his successors, the commanders of the faithful, the Caliphs.

The spectacular Arab conquests

brought Islam to the shores of the Moroccan coast,

just 14km from Spain.

Julian called for help from the Governor of Tangiers.

This was irresistible to an empire built on the fever of faith

and the spoils of war.

This is where Islam arrived.

When we think of Gibraltar,

we think of a part of Spain that isn't really Spanish.

A little piece of Britain in the Mediterranean,

with red telephone kiosks, postboxes and the Queen on the postage stamps.

But Gibraltar is also the southern gateway to Spain.

A short boat trip from Africa leads straight here.

I'm standing at the very top of the rock of Gibraltar.

And I'm looking right over the straits.

Those mountains are the Atlas Mountains.

And Gibraltar itself, the name derives from the Arabic,

Jabal Al-Tariq, the Mountain of Tariq.

And it's named after Tariq Bin-Ziyad,

who governed nearby Tangiers in Morocco

on behalf of the distant Umayyad Caliph of Damascus.

In April 711, he raised an army of 7,000 Arabs and Berbers.

And with his favourite beautiful slave girl by his side,

they embarked on rafts and crossed the straits to land in Europe.

Islam had arrived in the West. They carried all before them.

The divided Visigoths were overwhelmed.

Some converted to Islam, others fled North.

The fate of Julian, said to have invited in the Muslims, is unknown.

The Muslim invaders would build a culture

that outshone its European neighbours in wealth and magnificence.

Their legacy infuses everything in Southern Spain.

And modern Spanish is still full of Arab words.

For example, the Spanish word for oil, aceite,

is based on the Arabic al-zayt for olive juice.

Many words the Spanish think of as their own today are in fact Arabic.

The Arabic name for the river that runs north through Andalusia,

the al-wadi al-kabir, or great river, has not changed much.

The Guadalquivir.

Remember those amphorae

that had to be thrown away after being used just once or twice?

Well now, the Arabs with their typical cultural sophistication,

would crack the problem of the domestic receptacle.

They glazed the inside of their vases.

Now they could be used again and again.

An early case of domestic re-cycling.

The Muslim conquerors wanted to keep Spain for themselves.

Yet they owed allegiance to a far-off master.

The Umayyad Caliphs ruled more like magnificent Roman Emperors

than ascetic Islamists.

In 750 AD, they were challenged by descendents of Mohammed's uncle.

The Umayyads, Caliphs ruling from Damascus,

were overthrown by the more rigorous and severe fundamentalists

led by the Abbasid family.

All the Umayyads were invited to a dinner in Damascus.

In the middle of the banquet, all of them were massacred

and their bodies preserved and stored in an underground chamber.

With each one labelled on their toes with their names.

Only one escaped.

His name was Prince Abd Al-Rahman.

He was 19, tall, handsome, red-haired.

In a story really worthy of a Hollywood action movie, he escaped.

The most wanted man in the Islamic world hunted by Abassid assassins

all the way across North Africa.

At one point, the assassins got so close, that he had to hide

under the skirts of an attractive female cousin.

The Abbasids moved the capital from Damascus

to their new city of Baghdad,

which was even further from their most distant province, Spain.

For six years, Abd Al-Rahman - or Rach man - travelled westwards,

amassing supporters,

convinced he could use his charisma to found his own kingdom.

In September 755, he landed near Malaga.

His followers awaited him there, a retinue of just 300.

He headed north, towards Cordoba -

once the Roman capital - to face the Abbasids and their supporters.

This Damascene Prince swept all before him

with just a handful of horsemen.

The final showdown was on the Guadalquivir River.

Abd Al-Rahman, with just 700 men, smashed the forces of his enemies.

And he then devised a special gift for the Abassid Caliph in Baghdad

who'd murdered his entire family.

He sealed a basket and sent it to the Caliph.

When the monarch there in Baghdad opened it in front of his court,

he shrieked in horror.

It was a basket of severed heads.

Abd Al-Rahman was a true Umayyad.

A tolerant Muslim and a magnificent builder,

who would now create a paradise in Spain.

A kingdom of prosperity, culture, harmony.

Abd Al-Rahman made his capital here in Cordoba,

where he created a great city of noble buildings

and lush gardens to remind him of Damascus.

But he never forgot, never ceased missing his home city, his Syria.

And he wrote a poignant poem to a palm tree of Cordoba.

He said, "You too are a stranger here, sprung from foreign soil."

And he added, "I too am far from home."

But he was now a monarch, yet he never forgot

that he'd been a fugitive on the run for so many years.

And he had a wonderfully earthy sense of humour.

He was visited by his attractive female cousin,

up whose skirt he'd hidden from Abassid assassins.

She used to tease him. "You hid under my skirt," she'd say.

And he'd reply, "Fragrant as you are, it was very stifling

"and stuffy up there."

One of the wonders of the Western world

lies behind this golden doorway.

This was the royal entrance,

reached by a covered passageway from the palace.

Sealed up for centuries, today, the way in is round the corner.

In 786, Abd Al-Rahman started to build Cordoba's Great Mosque

or Mezquita.

This would be his masterpiece.

As more and more converted to Islam,

the Mezquita was expanded again and again over the centuries.

Its mihrab, or prayer niche, traditionally faces Mecca.

The Mezquita has 850 columns made of granite and marble.

A system of two-tiered pillars has been created,

a forest of supports using Visigothic columns as a base.

The conquering faith commandeering the ruins of the old

to build the new.

Even the horseshoe arch adopted by Islam

may have been of Visigothic design.

Now Cordoba became a cosmopolitan metropolis.

Arab scientists, true heirs to the Ancient Greeks,

made astounding advances unknown to the brutish West.

Scholars, architects, poets,

astrologers gathered at the glittering Umayyad court.

One man stood out. His name was Ali Ibn Nafi.

Ibn Nafi was a star, a famous singer-songwriter

who became an international trendsetter and dandy,

an aficionado of style and pleasure.

There's something very modern about him, not unlike a rock star.

A sort of cross between Beau Brummell and Mick Jagger.

Born in Baghdad, he was half Kurdish, half African.

Hence his nickname, the Blackbird.

He had sung for the Caliphs in Baghdad.

But when he came here to Cordoba, he really became famous.

He was best friends with the Crown Prince.

He promoted asparagus from a weed to a delicacy.

He invented the modern three-course meal.

Everyone wanted to look like him, dress like him, sound like him.

Everyone wanted to be like Ibn Nafi.

MAN SINGS

I've come to watch a flamenco show.

This most Spanish of art forms can trace its roots

back to Ibn Nafi's musical vision.

At its heart is a special technique for playing the guitar.

HE PLAYS LEYENDA BY ALBENIZ

Juan Antonio Martinez is professor of guitar

at the Ibn Nafi Conservatory in Cordoba.

So what was Ibn Nafi's influence?

IN SPANISH:

So, is there a direct line from Ibn Nafi's oud

all the way to the modern Spanish Flamenco guitar?

So, now will you show us on the actual guitar?

Si. Thank you.

The culture of Al-Andalus is deeply buried

in what became Spanish culture.

Yet Islamic tolerance can be a little exaggerated. Islam was supreme.

Jews and Christians were only free to worship if they paid a special tax

and always recognised Muslim mastery.

And yet there were those, of course, who resented the supremacy of Islam.

Eulogius of Cordoba led a movement of radical Christians

who actually sought martyrdom

by publicly insulting the Prophet Mohammed.

Eulogious was duly arrested and tried and then beheaded.

The headless trunk of his body was tossed onto the river bank

to be feasted upon by dogs.

In the writings he left behind, Eulogius quoted the Bible

and he left an ominous message.

"Follow my example," he said,

"because I follow the example of Christ."

Religious co-existence would prove to be a challenging idea for Spain.

In 912, Abd Al-Rahman III, aged just 21,

succeeded to the throne of Cordoba.

The greatest of the Umayyads,

he created paved streets, public lighting,

and collected a library of half a million books.

Cordoba under Abd Al-Rahman was one of the biggest, richest

and most diverse cities in all of Europe.

Only Constantinople was its equal

and it may have had several hundred thousand people living in it.

At the same time, London and Paris had just 10-15,000 inhabitants.

They were just glorified villages.

Just outside Cordoba, these ruins display Abd Al-Rahman's ambition.

In 929, he declared himself The Caliph.

Islam was divided between the Abassid Caliph in Baghdad

and a new Fatimid Caliph in North Africa.

It was time for the Umayyads to show their power.

To project his authority as commander of the faithful,

as political and religious ruler,

the Caliph of the West created this long-forgotten paradise

of power and faith.

It lay hidden for 900 years.

Abd Al-Rahman moved his court to this vast hillside complex.

Its grandeur was the architectural version of his own status

as Caliph and conqueror.

Only one thing really mattered to him,

the plenitude and panoply of his own power.

And that's why he built this amazing complex.

The Medinat Al-Zahara, the dazzling palace.

And it really does dazzle.

This was political headquarters, military command centre,

spectacular showpiece and pleasure palace.

The palace wasn't only intimidating to those inside.

It commanded views for miles around along the river valley.

The ideal majestic fortress for a vigilant, paranoid monarch

like Abd Al-Rahman.

At heart, this man was a ferocious and thin-skinned tyrant.

He was stout, blonde, stunted,

and his legs were so short, that he had to have special stirrups made.

And he didn't take kindly to rejection.

He kept two harems here, one of boys and one of girls.

When a girl resisted his advances, he had her face burnt off.

When a boy did the same, he was dismembered.

He was Pelagius of Cordoba, who was later canonised.

And somewhere here in this palace he kept a menagerie, a zoo of lions.

And if he didn't like you, he fed you to them.

The hanging gardens were legendary.

Water for the sunken pools was pumped all the way

from the Guadalquivir river.

These waterways even supplied one of the world's first water closets.

Here in an obscure corner of the Medinat Al-Zahara

is an impressive piece of modern Arab technology.

It's down here.

Now let me show you this.

This is an early, rather primitive bidet.

You can see there's running water.

What we're looking at here is in fact one of the first examples

of a European flushing lavatory.

The courtiers of the Caliph lived here in comfort and hygiene at a time

when Londoners and Parisians were mired in a miasma of stinking filth.

The complex was sacked in the early part of the 11th century,

so completely, that for many centuries, people doubted

that the Medinat Al-Zahara had ever existed.

It was only rediscovered in 1911.

And Abd Al-Rahman's buried secrets are still being revealed

to the modern world.

It's said that he named it after his favourite concubine

but he doesn't really strike me as much of a romantic.

Besides, he wasn't spoilt for choice.

He had 6,000 girls here in his harem.

Historian Simon Barton has written a book about the practice

of taking concubines.

It was all about good looks and apparently it was said

that the Umayyad Caliphs were predisposed by nature

to prefer blondes.

Now that's interesting. Where did these blondes come from?

There were markets in Northern France, in the Mediterranean.

We have Muslim slave merchants but also Jews heavily involved

in trafficking, particularly women and children across Europe.

And if one of these concubines,

who had been bought as powerless slaves,

became the mother of a future monarch, a future caliph,

they could become vastly powerful.

That's absolutely true.

In fact, all the emirs and caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty

were born to slave concubines.

And they were said to have likewise blonde hair, blue eyes.

The advantage of a concubine is that it functions

as a dynastic defence mechanism.

It means that unlike a wife's family, which can get involved

in the politics of a dynasty, the concubine as a slave

who's been uprooted from her home land, will have no vested interest

in the dynasty itself.

It was a way of keeping the dynasty secure.

-So, actually, it's much more about power than sex?

-Absolutely.

The system required a strong Caliph at the top.

And when the rules were broken, the Caliphate fell apart.

In 976, the succession of a child, Caliph Hisham II,

revealed its fragility.

He was still a boy growing up under the tutelage of his mother,

Subh, a former concubine.

She sidelined Hisham, her own son,

and opened the doors of power to forces outside the Umayyad dynasty.

She appointed her new lover as Grand Vizier, prime minister.

His name was Al-Mansur, the Victorious,

and he was one of the most brilliant, ruthless

and extraordinary characters of the entire Caliphate.

He launched 57 raids of holy war against the Christian North,

burning and pillaging and looting.

Here in Cordoba, he burned the civilised cultured libraries

of the Umayyad Caliphs before him.

In his raids in the North, he destroyed all he found

in order to fund the building of mosques and palaces here.

In 997, his raids reached their climax

when he sacked Santiago de Compostela.

The doors and the bells of its churches were brought back

in triumph to Cordoba, on the backs of Christian slaves.

Ironically, Al-Mansur was too successful.

His triumphs hollowed out and undermined the Caliphate.

He promoted himself as a quasi-Caliph

and founded his own semi-royal dynasty

by marrying a Christian princess.

Al-Mansur's sons lacked his irrepressible drive,

his talent and his restraint.

When they undermined the legitimacy of the Caliph,

the regime disintegrated.

First, he was succeeded by one son, then he was assassinated.

But then came the preposterous popinjay Sanchuelo,

who tried to make himself a Caliph.

The entire kingdom fell apart.

There died the glory of Al-Andalus.

In 1031, 30 years after Al-Mansur's death, the Caliphate collapsed.

Al-Andalus broke down into little city states,

ruled by their princes, like medieval barons in the West.

The Great Mosque of Cordoba, built by the first Abd Al-Rahman

and expanded by Al-Mansur, still exists.

We can still admire its scale and beauty.

When it later fell to the Christians, they didn't destroy it.

They built a cathedral amidst the Mezquita.

Even today, people in Cordoba talk of going to mass in the Mosque.

I'm travelling to Granada now for my last stop.

I'm following the story of one man, who despite not being a Muslim,

rose to the top in 11th-century Islamic Spain.

And who did so at a moment

when Islamic Spain itself was in the grip of change.

The city of Granada owes its name to both its Jewish and Muslim roots.

The Jews called it the City of Pomegranates.

And the Arab word for pomegranate is gr'nata.

The Emirate of Granada was one of the smaller principalities

that came after the Caliphate.

This, its most celebrated attraction, is part of its later history.

I'll be coming back here in the next episode.

To explore its splendour

and see some of its lesser-known gems.

This amazing building is now famous as the Alhambra Palace of Granada.

But 300 years before it was built, this was the site of the palace

of one of the most extraordinary Jewish leaders in Spanish history

and in fact, one of the most extraordinary statesmen

in all of the peninsula's story.

His name was Samuel Ibn Naghrillah.

He started off as a spice merchant in Cordoba.

He moved here and became the advisor to the Berber rulers

of the principality of Granada.

When he backed the right candidate for the throne,

Samuel became not only the leader of the Jewish Community

but the Grand Vizier, the prime minister,

and the Commander in Chief of the Granadan army.

In war, he commanded and won victories.

In peace, he was leader of the Jewish community,

he wrote works of Jewish philosophy,

he was a rabbi, and above all, he was a poet.

His poetry is astonishing even in English translation.

But he wrote in Hebrew and in Arabic. He wrote love poems.

Love poems to beautiful girls, to wine,

to boys and to the excitement of victory in war.

Here in Granada, a group of Naghrillah enthusiasts

are gathering to hear some of his poetry.

In this poem, Naghrillah describes how wisdom

comes from the knowledge we're not here forever.

In 1056, Samuel Naghrillah died

but he was succeeded by his son Joseph as Grand Vizier of Granada.

Joseph was only 20 but he can't have been a fool

because he ruled for ten years.

It was quite traditional for Grand Viziers to be succeeded

by their sons and even to found little mini-dynasties.

But there was a problem. The Naghrillahs were Jews.

Now this Jewish potentate seemed an enemy within

from a dynasty of interlopers.

In 1066, a date as resonant for the Jews of Granada

as it was for King Harold, the Saxon King of England, something snapped.

A mob came to Joseph's palace, close to the Alhambra, and dragged him out.

They chased him through the streets. He was unable to escape.

When the mob finally caught up with Joseph Naghrillah, it was right here.

They lynched him and then went on a killing spree,

massacring 4,000 Jews.

As for Joseph, they crucified him

right here beside this magnificent city gate.

The crucifixion of Joseph Naghrillah in Granada marked

the beginning of the end of religious pluralism in Muslim Spain.

The Naghrillahs were not the first Jewish Grand Viziers

in the Islamic world.

Yet the confidence of the Caliphate,

necessary for such broad-mindedness, was past.

Over 400 years, Spain would tear itself apart.

Next time, how the Christian Kings of the North struck back,

conquering all of Spain for the cross.

How Spain purified its blood in a vicious Inquisition,

catching even some of my own family in its net.

Oh, my God! So this is his death sentence?

It's just heartbreaking.

And how Christopher Columbus set sail

to discover a rich American empire.

If this story has inspired you

and you'd like to find out more,

go to the address given on screen

and follow the links to The Open University.