'Sovereignty belongs to God': Text, Ornament and Magic in Islamic and Christian Seville.

This essay examines how inscriptions and ornament articulate political, religious and social ideas and customs, focusing on southern Iberia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a period of major transformation from Islamic (Almohad) to Christian (Castilian) power. I first describe some remarkable gold coins produced for Alfonso VIII of Castile, and then turn to a detailed analysis of the early thirteenth-century bronze doors of Seville’s Almohad mosque, still hanging today in Seville cathedral’s Pardon Portal. I consider the specificity of the doors’ inscriptions, their apotropaic power, and their relationship to the doors’ design and production, arguing that the repetition of texts and geometric designs is essential to the doors’ visual and ritual charisma, and their apotropaic potency. I conclude by examining the survival of the doors after Seville’s Christian capture in 1248, understood in the context of the wider preservation of objects, customs and technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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