Cártama

Cártama is the fortress where Abindarráez is raised after his family’s expulsion from Granada, and the setting of his formative years with Jarifa. There, a childhood bond mistaken for sibling affection becomes a love that the lovers intend to seal in marriage; the king’s order moving Jarifa’s father to Coín then turns the fortress into the point of departure for their separation and the events that follow.

The Fortress and Abindarráez’s Upbringing

Cártama enters the narrative through Abindarráez’s account of his family’s misfortune. After the purge of the Abencerrajes in the Kingdom of Granada, his father and uncle were spared because they had not taken part in the alleged conspiracy. The king nevertheless forbade the family to live in Granada: male children were to be sent away to be raised elsewhere, while daughters were to be married outside the kingdom. Abindarráez was accordingly sent as a child to Cártama, a fortress formerly held by Christians, and entrusted to its governor, an old friend of his father whom Abindarráez describes as a man of high standing, integrity, and wealth.

The governor’s daughter, Jarifa, was also a child. Her father raised them together, and both young people believed they were brother and sister because they were treated as children of the same household and called siblings by those around them. Cártama is therefore more than a place of enforced displacement: within the fortress household, it becomes the sheltered setting in which Abindarráez and Jarifa grow close before understanding the nature of their attachment.

The Garden and the Discovery of Love

One of the story’s defining scenes takes place in a garden at Cártama, beside a fountain surrounded by jasmine. Abindarráez recalls seeing Jarifa there as she arranged her hair. His admiration unsettles the assumption that she is his sister, and he begins to ask whether they truly share a parentage. Their conversation does not resolve the question at once, but it exposes the difference between the family relationship they have been taught to believe in and the desire Abindarráez has begun to feel.

In the same garden, he gathers jasmine and myrtle into a garland and places it on his own head. Jarifa takes it and wears it herself, a gesture that intensifies the scene’s courtship-like significance even while they still misunderstand their kinship. Only later do they learn that they are not related. The revelation allows their affection to take its acknowledged form as romantic love; Abindarráez says that their former attachment then settled into its true character.

The Transfer to Coín and the Lovers’ Separation

Cártama’s role changes when the king orders Jarifa’s father to leave the fortress and take up a post in Coín, leaving Abindarráez at Cártama under the authority of the incoming governor. The order separates the young people just as they have come to understand their love. Jarifa and Abindarráez meet privately to grieve the impending parting, and she promises to send for him when an opportunity arises. He remains at Cártama, sustaining himself with that expectation while revisiting the places associated with her presence, including her windows, room, garden, and bathing places.

When Jarifa later sends for him, Abindarráez sets out from Cártama toward Coín, expecting to see her and marry her. He is intercepted on the road by Rodrigo de Narváez and, after fighting bravely, is taken prisoner. Thus the capture does not occur in Cártama itself: the fortress is the place from which the journey begins, while the transfer to Coín creates the circumstances that bring the lovers’ private story into contact with Narváez’s military patrol.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The account of Cártama is embedded in the larger pastoral narrative. At Felicia’s house, after dinner, Felismena tells the company the story of Rodrigo de Narváez and Abindarráez. Within that tale, Cártama links political punishment to intimate experience: the decree against the Abencerrajes determines where Abindarráez is raised, and a later royal order relocates Jarifa’s father and divides the lovers’ household.

The fortress also gives the love story its distinctive progression. A family arrangement makes Abindarráez and Jarifa believe themselves siblings; shared upbringing fosters their closeness; discovery of their true relationship changes how that closeness can be understood; and a royal transfer forces them apart. Cártama is consequently both refuge and threshold: it shelters the lovers’ early life, but their departure from it begins the chain of separation, capture, and appeal for mercy that carries their story forward.