Climbing the walls as a method of conquest, set amongst history and legend. From Damascus to Alhama de Granada
Eva LAPIEDRA
Original title: La escalada a las murallas como método de conquista entre la historia y la leyenda. De Damasco a Alhama de Granada
Published in
Keywords: City of Brass, Conquest, Giraldo sem Pavor, Literary topos, Reconquest, Storming the walls, Transtextuality.
This article brings together and compares different historical literary texts belonging to the chronicle traditions of both Arabic and Islamic writers and to Latin and Christian chroniclers on the Iberian Peninsula. All of them narrate the surprise conquest of a city using the method of storming and climbing its walls. The continuance of that literary topos through time and space appears to indicate that it was carried from the Arab world to the Latin peninsular Romance across the border between the Almohad empire and the emerging Portuguese empire in the 13th Century. That’s why it appears in Portuguese and Castilian Chronicles, but not in those from Catalonia.
The Laude Spaniae of Isidore of Seville in the Iberic Medieval Chronicles (VIIIth-XIVth centuries)
António REI
Original title: A Laude Spaniae de Isidoro de Sevilha na Cronística Medieval Peninsular (séculos VIII-XIV)
Published in Relations between History and Literature in Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: Chronicles, Isidore of Seville, Laude Spaniae, Middle Ages, Reconquest.
The presence of Laude Spaniae (Praise of Hispania) of Isidor, bishop of Seville in the medieval chronicles wrote in the Iberic Peninsula between the VIIIth and the XIVth centuries, by the Christian political powers, as an emotional part of the chronicle text, leading to the effort of military “reconquest” to the muslim powers in the andalusian parts of the Peninsula.
