cannon worked, and the effects it would have if it was used against Santa Fé. Of course he himself had no idea, and his explanations were all the more impressive.
âAs you will have guessed, Hasan my son, this cannon was never used. Abu Khamr had neither bullets nor gunpowder nor artillerymen, and some of his visitors began to snigger. Happily for him, the
muhtasib
, who was responsible for public order, alerted by thecrowds, organized a gang of men to take the object away and drag it to the Alhambra to show it to the sultan. No one ever saw it again. But we continued to hear about it long afterwards, from the doctor himself, naturally enough, who never ceased to say that it was only with the aid of cannons that the Muslims could defeat their enemies, and that as long as they did not agree either to acquire or to make a great number of these machines, their kingdoms would be in danger. For his part Astaghfirullah preached exactly the opposite: it was through the martyrdom of the soldiers of the faith that the besiegers would be overcome.
âThe sultan Boabdil eventually brought them into accord, since he desired neither cannons nor martyrdom. While the shaikh and the doctor quibbled endlessly, and the whole of Granada around them pondered its fate, the master of the city could only think of how to avoid confrontation. He sent message after message to King Ferdinand, in which the only question was that of the date of the surrender of the city, the besieger talking in terms of weeks and the besieged in terms of months, hoping perhaps that the hand of the Most High would wipe out the feeble arrangements of men by some sudden decree, a storm, a cataclysm or a plague, which would decimate the grandees of Spain.â
But Heaven had other destinies for us.
The Year of the Fall
897 A.H.
4 November 1491 â 22 October 1492
âIt was cold that year in Granada, fearfully cold, and the snow was black with freshly dug earth and blood. O, the familiarity of death, the imminence of exile, how the joys of the past were painful to remember!â
A great change came over my mother whenever she used to speak of the fall of our city; for this drama she assumed a particular tone of voice, a look, words, tears, which I never knew in any other circumstances. I myself was less than three years old in those tumultuous days, and I do not know whether the cries that came to my ears at that moment were the memory of what I had actually heard at the time or simply the echo of the thousands of accounts of the story that I had heard since.
These tales did not always begin in the same way. Those of my mother spoke first of hunger and anguish.
âFrom the very beginning of the year,â she used to say, âthe snows had come to cut off the few roads which the besiegers had spared, making Granada completely isolated from the rest of the country, particularly the Vega and the Alpujarras mountains in the south, from which wheat, oats, millet, oil and raisins still used to reach us. People in our neighbourhood were afraid, even the least poor of them; every day they bought anything they could lay their hands on, and instead of being reassured at the sight of the earthenware jars of provisions stacked up along the walls of their rooms they became even more afraid of famine, rats and looters. Everyone said that if the roads opened up again they would leave immediately for somevillage or other where they had relatives. In the first months of the siege it had been the inhabitants of the surrounding villages who sought asylum in Granada, meeting up with the refugees from Guadix and Gibraltar. They accommodated themselves as best they could with their relatives, in the outbuildings of mosques or in deserted houses; during the previous summer they were even living in gardens and on waste ground, under makeshift tents. The streets were choked with beggars of all descriptions, sometimes grouped in whole families, father, mother, children
âAs you will have guessed, Hasan my son, this cannon was never used. Abu Khamr had neither bullets nor gunpowder nor artillerymen, and some of his visitors began to snigger. Happily for him, the
muhtasib
, who was responsible for public order, alerted by thecrowds, organized a gang of men to take the object away and drag it to the Alhambra to show it to the sultan. No one ever saw it again. But we continued to hear about it long afterwards, from the doctor himself, naturally enough, who never ceased to say that it was only with the aid of cannons that the Muslims could defeat their enemies, and that as long as they did not agree either to acquire or to make a great number of these machines, their kingdoms would be in danger. For his part Astaghfirullah preached exactly the opposite: it was through the martyrdom of the soldiers of the faith that the besiegers would be overcome.
âThe sultan Boabdil eventually brought them into accord, since he desired neither cannons nor martyrdom. While the shaikh and the doctor quibbled endlessly, and the whole of Granada around them pondered its fate, the master of the city could only think of how to avoid confrontation. He sent message after message to King Ferdinand, in which the only question was that of the date of the surrender of the city, the besieger talking in terms of weeks and the besieged in terms of months, hoping perhaps that the hand of the Most High would wipe out the feeble arrangements of men by some sudden decree, a storm, a cataclysm or a plague, which would decimate the grandees of Spain.â
But Heaven had other destinies for us.
The Year of the Fall
897 A.H.
4 November 1491 â 22 October 1492
âIt was cold that year in Granada, fearfully cold, and the snow was black with freshly dug earth and blood. O, the familiarity of death, the imminence of exile, how the joys of the past were painful to remember!â
A great change came over my mother whenever she used to speak of the fall of our city; for this drama she assumed a particular tone of voice, a look, words, tears, which I never knew in any other circumstances. I myself was less than three years old in those tumultuous days, and I do not know whether the cries that came to my ears at that moment were the memory of what I had actually heard at the time or simply the echo of the thousands of accounts of the story that I had heard since.
These tales did not always begin in the same way. Those of my mother spoke first of hunger and anguish.
âFrom the very beginning of the year,â she used to say, âthe snows had come to cut off the few roads which the besiegers had spared, making Granada completely isolated from the rest of the country, particularly the Vega and the Alpujarras mountains in the south, from which wheat, oats, millet, oil and raisins still used to reach us. People in our neighbourhood were afraid, even the least poor of them; every day they bought anything they could lay their hands on, and instead of being reassured at the sight of the earthenware jars of provisions stacked up along the walls of their rooms they became even more afraid of famine, rats and looters. Everyone said that if the roads opened up again they would leave immediately for somevillage or other where they had relatives. In the first months of the siege it had been the inhabitants of the surrounding villages who sought asylum in Granada, meeting up with the refugees from Guadix and Gibraltar. They accommodated themselves as best they could with their relatives, in the outbuildings of mosques or in deserted houses; during the previous summer they were even living in gardens and on waste ground, under makeshift tents. The streets were choked with beggars of all descriptions, sometimes grouped in whole families, father, mother, children
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