Aljafería

The oldest part of the Aljafería is a plain quadrangular tower of five storeys, raised as a watchtower and defensive bastion at the end of the 9th century — though the scholar Bernabé Cabañero Subiza places it in the second half of the 10th — in the reign of Muhammad Alanqur, first of the Banu Tujib, appointed by the Emir Muhammad I of Córdoba. Ringed by a moat, it could be entered only through a small elevated door reached by portable ladder. Centuries later it acquired the name Troubadour Tower, after Antonio García Gutiérrez's 1836 romantic drama The Troubadour, set largely at the palace and turned by Verdi into the opera Il trovatore.

Between 1065 and 1081 al-Muqtadir, "the powerful", second monarch of the Banu Hud dynasty, built a palace incorporating the old tower into its outer north wall, as a symbol of the strength the Taifa of Zaragoza had reached. He called it Qasr al-Surur, the Palace of Joy, and its throne room Maylis al-Dahab, the Golden Hall, and celebrated both in his own verses: "Because of you, I reached the maximum of my wishes." The name Aljafería derives from his pre-name Abu Ya'far, and the earliest text recording it also names his architect, the Slav Al-Halifa Zuhayr.

Laid out on the model of the 8th-century desert castles of Syria and Jordan — a square plan with round towers and a central courtyard flanked by the royal quarters — the Aljafería is the only conserved large example of Spanish Islamic architecture from the age of the taifas, ranked with the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba and the Alhambra among the finest Hispano-Muslim buildings. Its interlocking mixtilinear arches appear here for the first time, and its progressively abstracted plasterwork shaped Almoravid and Almohad art and lies at the basis of the Nasrid art of Granada.

Alfonso I "the Battler" took Zaragoza in 1118, and the Aljafería became the residence of the Christian kings of Aragon — the documented starting point of the route to the Cathedral of the Saviour, where the monarchs were crowned and swore the Fueros of Aragon. The Infanta Elizabeth of Aragon, later queen of Portugal, was born here. Peter IV "the Ceremonious" enlarged the palace from 1336, adding the Chapel of San Martín and roomier Mudéjar halls, the Taifal chambers being too cramped for his use.

In the last years of the 15th century the Catholic Monarchs superimposed a new royal palace on the north wing, built between 1488 and 1495 by Mudéjar masters. Around its Throne Room runs a Gothic inscription of 1492 proclaiming Ferdinand and Isabella "very victorious with the help of Christ, after liberating Andalusia from the Moors".

In 1486 the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition made its headquarters at the Courtyard of San Martín, and the Troubadour Tower became its dungeon — a prison it remained into the 19th century, as its inmates' graffiti still shows. In 1591 Antonio Pérez, the persecuted secretary of Philip II, invoked Aragon's Privilege of Manifestation to elude the royal troops, only to be held in an Inquisition cell here; Zaragoza rose and stormed the Aljafería to free him. The royal army crushed the revolt, and Philip II resolved to make the palace a fortified citadel under his authority. The Sienese military engineer Tibúrcio Spannocchi walled the complex, set a pentagonal bastion at each corner and surrounded the whole with a twenty-metre-wide moat crossed by two drawbridges.

French companies quartered here raised the moat parapets during the War of the Spanish Succession in 1705, and in 1772 Charles III converted the complex into barracks, a parade ground filling the western third of the palace. The building then suffered heavily in the Sieges of Zaragoza during the Peninsular War.

In 1845 Mariano Nougués Secall's report on the castle warned that its Andalusi and Mudéjar remains were deteriorating. Queen Isabella II gave funds for restoration and a commission was created in 1848, but in 1862 the Aljafería passed to the Ministry of War, which halted the work and damaged the structure further, even as four Gothic-Revival towers were added that year. Serious restoration began in 1947 under the architect Francisco Íñiguez. In 1984 the Cortes of Aragon chose the palace as its permanent seat, Zaragoza's city council transferring part of the building for 99 years, and in 2001 the restored structures were included in the Mudéjar Architecture of Aragon World Heritage Site.