Don Amados is not alone in his eloquent, if unavailing protest. When Charles V., in 1526, visited Cordova, and observed St. Peter’s (the Coro) rising out of the very centre of the Mosque, he rebuked the Bishop, Alonso Manriquez, who had erected the incongruous edifice, in no measured terms. When the king saw the extent of the mischief, he said: ‘You have built here what you or any one might have built elsewhere; but you have spoilt what was unique in the world.’ Alas! the monarch had forgotten, or did not choose to remember, that the declaration came with a very bad grace from one who, for his never-completed palace at Granada, had torn down whole Courts and Halls of the Alhambra. Like most Moorish buildings, the exterior of the Great Mosque of Cordova has a somewhat forbidding aspect, and rises before one much unlike a house of prayer. The vast interior of the Mosque may be likened to a petrified grove of palm-trees, their stems strangely varied in colour, and in amazing perspective to all points of the compass. Marble columns of every hue, from pure white and translucent alabaster, through the intervening red, the precious verde antique, jasper, porphyry, all shades, to the deepest black; the variety only to be explained by the fact that the great builders Abd-er-Rahman I., together with his son and successor, Hisham I., procured their materials whenever and wherever they could ‘acquire’ them. Many of the columns being too tall, were ‘topped’ to supply a deficiency in the length of another--a process eloquent of the pillage of many a distant city.[1] All historians agree that the great Mosque of Cordova owes its inception to Abd-er-Rahman I., the first sovereign to reign independently over Andalus. Directly the Sultan found himself comparatively free from his turbulent rivals, and firmly established on the throne, he began the building of his royal palace--that of the pleasure-house called Rissafah, and of the great Mosque. The circumstances which led to the erection of the Mosque are thus related:-- When a city surrendered to the Moors by capitulation, it was their custom to divide with the Christians the principal temple of that city. So, for instance, when Damascus was taken, the principal temple was divided, half of it remaining in the hands of the inhabitants for their form of worship, while the other half was appropriated to the use of the Moslems, who forthwith converted their moiety into a Mosque.