The year is 1492. Christopher Columbus is about to embark on his world-shattering voyage to the Americas and on his way to the coast he stops off here at Granada. He's the honored guest of a ceremony hosted by the King and Queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. They are celebrating a grand victory.
Up until this day, Granada had been ruled by Muslims. But Isabella has managed to wrestle control from them. Ferdinand's and Isabella's victory marks a turning point for Spain and for Europe.
The Middle Ages are over and the West is about to fall. embark on a new epoch of power and discovery. We tend to think of this as the beginning of an era.
In fact, it's the climax of a forgotten chapter in European history. The rise and fall of Islam in the world. It was Rudyard Kipling who wrote, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.
And it's a worldview that still has currency today. Islam and Christianity seem to have become ideological monoliths, citadels whose gates are firmly closed to one another. But they haven't always lived such separate lives. In the year 711 AD, Muslim forces invaded Spain and created a society so rich and so powerful it was the envy of the known world. This wasn't the rigid, ferocious Islam of our imaginations, but a progressive, sensuous, intellectually curious culture that for a number of spine-tingling years looks set to sweep through the whole of the world.
of Europe. It is an incredible story, but one that has been systematically written out of history. After the Catholic monarchs took over the city of Granada, they began to destroy all evidence that the Muslims had ever been in Spain. In the following century, the Spanish authorities persecuted and expelled 300,000 Muslims and burned as many as a million Arabic books. This was an astonishing act of ethnic cleansing.
It put an end to a civilization which had flourished in Spain for 700 years. These people have become known as the Moors. Propaganda sparked by the Crusades has given us an enduring image.
The diabolical Moor. A dark-skinned, savage, alien enemy. But this character is a complete invention and tells us nothing about who these people really were.
Now archaeologists and historians are starting to piece together the real story of the Moors in Spain. They're uncovering the remains of hidden cities, discovering the role of Muslims in the revival of the classics, and decoding the meaning of Islamic buildings. A fascinating picture has emerged.
I'm going to use this new research to explore what happened when East met West in Europe. If there is one place which challenges the stereotype of the treacherous, bloodthirsty mall, it's here, the Alhambra Palace in Granada. The Alhambra is one of the most complete medieval Islamic palaces in the whole world. It was built by the Muslim kings of Granada in the 14th century at the height of their power.
Its name means the red one because the dark surrounding soil has given its stones an earthy reddish hue. The marvel of the Alhambra is its mystery. Not a single account of life here survives. All its archives were incinerated in the fires of the Inquisition.
But the Catholics couldn't bring themselves to destroy this place. The Alhambra is one of the wonders of the medieval world. And by preserving it, they've kept a box of secrets that we can use to decode the civilisation that built it.
Inside the palace walls, the architecture is breathtaking. Although the aesthetic of this courtyard is quite cool and minimal now, in its heyday it would have been a riot of colour. Granada was very famous for producing silks.
We've had silk hangings billowing in the breeze, and silk cushions and silk rugs, where people laid out to eat their dinner and to listen to music. In fact, it's only when you get down to rug level that you appreciate one of the bits of magic of the place. Because from down here, this pool acts like a kind of infinity mirror. And the whole of the palace just looks as if it's suspended in water. Every detail of the palace decoration seems to be part of a scheme.
Row upon row of intricate geometric patterns are carved into the woodwork of the walls and windows. This is the throne room. It was the symbolic centre of the palace and here the sultan had a kind of psychological advantage over his subjects.
Whereas he'd have stood here in an eerie silhouette, they'd have been blinded by the light that came streaming in through these brightly coloured stained glass windows. The 19th century writer, Washington Irving, observed, It's impossible to contemplate this abode of oriental manners without feeling the early association of Arabian romance. One almost expects to see some dark eye sparkling through the lattice.
The abode of beauty is here, as if it had been inhabited but yesterday. But this is far more than just a beautiful building. There's a specific reason why it feels so harmonious. The men who built it had a knowledge of complex geometry which had originated in the ancient world.
The first man to set down these mathematical principles was the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. Pythagoras saw numbers everywhere in the universe. but his brilliance was to understand the importance of the ratio between them. Professor Antonio Fernandez-Puertas has spent his life studying the Alhambra. He's discovered that the whole of the building, from the ground plan to the wall decoration, is based around one single ratio.
I think everything is so perfect because everything is under control of proportion. And very, very simple. You notice that there is something magic about these buildings.
There is something marvelous in your surroundings. It's very, very simple. It's the relation between the ground and the elevations of the buildings. It's as simple as that.
The king ordered a new palace. He has a limited area to build the palace. To west, east and south he was limited. Then he did something genius, ingenious and beautiful. The King of Granada asked his architects to harmonize each and every space within the palace according to a single set of proportions, a family of rectangles, each related to the other.
If you want to get proportional rectangle, you have the same base. Take the diagonal, put it up. Yes. And you've got successive rectangle, proportional rectangle. The key to the Alhambra's design is the simple relationship between the side of a square