Andalusi Defensive Architecture through Martín de Ximena Jurado’s Drawings (Mid-17th Century)

Abstract

The antiquarian Martín de Ximena Jurado was a pioneer in the historical cartography of the old Kingdom of Jaén (Andalusia, Spain), where he tried to represent emblematic areas with their military defences with his particular graphic language. Not surprisingly, this territory has a high concentration of medieval fortifications. The data and drawings that he made of castles, towers, and defensive enclosures show a special interest in the militarisation of sites and places. He went beyond a simple toponymic study aimed only at finding a correspondence between the ancient name and the location of a settlement based on the evidence provided by coins and inscriptions. The medieval fortifications that he mapped were not drawn in ruins as one would expect they would be in the mid-17th century, but with their most characteristic construction elements. This fact gives it great relevance, as it represents the idealised hypothesis of the state of these constructions at the time of the Castilian conquest in the decades following the Almohad debacle in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212).