From Battlefield to Paradise: A Reassessment of Heinrich Heine’s Tragedy Almansor, its Sources and their Significance for his Later Poetry and Thought

From July to August 1820 Heinrich Heine made an intensive study of the Spanish Reconquista of Moorish Granada in the late fifteenth century. Records from Bonn University Library list the many histories written in German and French that he borrowed at this time. ¹ Nor was this research disrupted by his move to Göttingen University in the early autumn. On 13 November 1820 he borrowed from the library of that university A. M. Sané’s 1809 translation of Ginés Pérez de Hita’s history of the Moors in Granada, originally published in Zaragoza in 1595. ²