Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib was the vizier, the historian, the plague-treatise writer, and the court polymath of Nasrid Granada in its golden age. Ibn Zamrak was his student, the brilliant young poet whose verses are carved on the Fountain of the Lions, the Hall of the Two Sisters, and the Comares throne. In 1374, Ibn al-Khatib was strangled in his cell in Fez on charges of heresy. His former student helped organize the trial. His body was exhumed and burned.

This second episode of a four-part series walks through the Alhambra at its height, under the patronage of Muhammad V, the sultan who survived exile and came back to reign for 29 years. It covers the Court of the Lions and its hydraulic engineering, the eight-thousand-piece cedar ceiling of the Hall of the Ambassadors mapping the seven heavens, the five thousand muqarnas cells of the dome above the Hall of the Two Sisters, and the seventeen mathematical symmetry groups that M.C. Escher later copied into his sketchbooks. It also covers Ibn Khaldun's diplomatic mission to Pedro the Cruel of Castile, his refusal of an offer to recover his family's ancestral estates, and the chain of mentorship and betrayal among the three generations of poets whose verses speak from every wall.

The episode sits with the question most Alhambra writing avoids. The palace is one of the most beautiful human-made objects that exists. It was built by a court where the politics ran on assassination. The beauty and the betrayal are carved into the same plaster. Neither can be separated from the other.

Sources drawn on include Ibn al-Khatib's al-Ihata fi Akhbar Gharnata, Ibn Zamrak's Diwan as translated by Emilio Garcia Gomez and Christopher Middleton, Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah and Ta'rif, al-Maqqari's Nafh al-Tib, Robert Irwin's The Alhambra, Oleg Grabar's monograph, and the epigraphic corpus of Juan Castilla Brazales.

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