Toledo, the Story of an Old Spanish Capital
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Title: Toledo, the Story of an Old Spanish Capital
Author: Hannah Lynch
Illustrator: Helen M. James
Release date: July 16, 2014 [eBook #46301]
Most recently updated: November 28, 2024
Language: English
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_Toledo_
_The Story of an Old Spanish Capital_
_The Mediæval Town Series_
*ASSISI. By LINA DUFF GORDON. [_5th Edition._
+BRUGES. By ERNEST GILLIAT-SMITH. [_3rd Edition._
+BRUSSELS. By ERNEST GILLIAT-SMITH.
+CAIRO. By STANLEY LANE-POOLE. [_2nd Edition._
+CAMBRIDGE. By the Rt. Rev. C. W. STUBBS, D.D. [_2nd
Edition._
+CHARTRES. By CECIL HEADLAM, M.A. [_2nd Edition._
*CONSTANTINOPLE. By WM. H. HUTTON. [_3rd Edition._
+DUBLIN. By D. A. CHART, M.A.
+EDINBURGH. By OLIPHANT SMEATON, M.A.
+FERRARA. By ELLA NOYES.
+FLORENCE. By EDMUND G. GARDNER. [_9th & Revised Edition._
+LONDON. By HENRY B. WHEATLEY. [_2nd Edition._
+MILAN. By ELLA NOYES.
*MOSCOW. By WIRT GERRARE. [_3rd Edition._
*NUREMBERG. By CECIL HEADLAM. M.A. [_5th Edition._
+OXFORD. By CECIL HEADLAM. M.A.
+PADUA. By CESARE FOLIGNO.
+PARIS. By THOMAS OKEY.
*PERUGIA. By M. SYMONDS AND LINA DUFF GORDON. [_6th Edition._
+PISA. By JANET ROSS.
*PRAGUE. By COUNT LÜTZOW. [_2nd Edition._
+ROME. By NORWOOD YOUNG. [_5th Edition._
+ROUEN. By THEODORE A. COOK. [_3rd Edition._
+SEVILLE. By WALTER M. GALLICHAN. [_2nd Edition_
+SIENA. By EDMUND G. GARDNER. [_2nd Edition._
*TOLEDO. By HANNAH LYNCH. [_2nd Edition._
+VENICE. By THOMAS OKEY. [_3rd & Revised Edition._
+VERONA. By ALETHEA WIEL. [_3rd Edition._
_The price of these marked (*) is 3s. 6d. net in cloth, 4s. 6d. net
in leather; +, 4s. 6d. net in cloth, 5s. 6d. net in
leather._
_All rights reserved_
_First Edition_, _August 1898_
_Second Edition_, _July 1903_.
_Third Edition_, _May 1910_.
[Illustration: _Antonio de Covarrubias._]
Toledo. _The Story
of an Old Spanish Capital
by Hannah Lynch Illustrated
by Helen M. James_
[Illustration: colophon]
_London, 1910_
_J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd._
_New York: E. P. Dutton & Co._
"_Anda el tiempo y anda
y todo se acaba._"
ROMANCERO GENERAL.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
_Earliest History of Toledo_ 1
CHAPTER II
_Under Goth Rule_ 26
CHAPTER III
_Under the Moslems_ 64
CHAPTER IV
_Her latest History_ 81
CHAPTER V
_The Old Capital, once and now_ 115
CHAPTER VI
_The Cathedral_ 150
CHAPTER VII
_Domenico Theotocopoulos, "El Greco"_ 193
CHAPTER VIII
_San Juan de los Reyes, Santa Maria la Blanca, El Transito_ 216
CHAPTER IX
_Vanished Palaces_ 243
CHAPTER X
_Minor Churches, Convents, and Hospitals_ 266
CHAPTER XI
_Bridges and Gates_ 292
APPENDIX
_Practical Information_ 305
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
_Portrait of Antonio de Covarrubias,
from the painting by El Greco_ _Frontispiece._
_Puente de Alcántara_ 4
_Puente de Alcántara_ 41
_The Cathedral_ 83
_Puente S. Martino_ 97
_Moorish Arch leading to Zocodover_ 121
_House Cervantes stayed in, Toledo_ 123
_The Zocodover_ 125
_The Tagus_ 135
_Mill on the Tagus_ 137
_Toledo from Left Bank of Tagus_ 141
_Puente S. Martino of Bano de la Cava_ 145
_A Street Corner, Toledo_ 147
_Interior of Cathedral_ 153
_North Transept Door of Cathedral_ 160
_Interior of Cathedral Coro from S. Aisle_ 163
_Detail of Reja to Capilla Mayor, Cathedral, Toledo_ 167
_Detail, Tomb of King, Gospel Side of High Altar, Cathedral, Toledo_ 170
_Tomb of Cardinal Mendoza_ 171
_Capitular Door in Toledo Cathedral_ 177
_Tombs of Count Alvaro de Luna and Wife, the Cathedral, Toledo_ 183
_The Cathedral Tower_ 191
_"The Burial of the Count of Orgaz," from the painting by El Greco_ 202
_Detail of Ornament, Interior of S. Juan de los Reyes_ 221
_Cloister, S. Juan de los Reyes_ 223
_S. Luke Angle of Cloister, S. Juan de los Reyes_ 227
_Detail of Ornament, El Transito_ 233
_Santa Maria la Blanca_ 241
_Remains of Palace, said to be that of Don Pedro el Cruel_ 251
_Casa Fuensalida_ 256
_Moorish Window in Casa de Mesa_ 259
_The Castle of San Servando_ 263
_San Tomé_ 267
_Santiago, Toledo_ 272
_Santo Pablo_ 273
_Cristo de la Luz_ 277
_Door of Santa Cruz_ 285
_Tomb of Cardinal Tavera_ 290
_Puerta Visagra (Antigua)_ 297
_Puerta del Sol_ 300
Toledo
The Story of an Old Spanish Capital
CHAPTER I
_What is Known of Toledo's earliest history_
What more stupefying contrast than that of cheap commonplace Madrid
(cheap alas! only in the artistic sense) and the legendary still visage
of Toledo? The capital you leave abustle with modern movement, glaring,
gesticulating, chattering, animated in its own empty and insignificant
fashion, with its pleasant street of Alcala, so engagingly unhistoric,
its shop-fronts full of expensive and second-rate articles from other
capitals, the vulgar vivacity of the Puerta del Sol thronged with
everlasting gossips in trousers and wide-brimmed hats; with its
swindling hotel-keepers and insolent drivers. The train sweeps you past
the wide empty bed of the Manzanares, covered here and there with a film
you understand by courtesy to represent a river, and the city behind is
a gay compact picture, slightly waving upward from its bridges, white
and flourishing above the broad yellow plain. The tones of the land are
rough and crude, red striking hotly against brown and greyish purple.
Here and there a solitary hill, burnt and defoliaged, with a glimpse of
ruined ramparts, a mule-path along which a file of peasants pass, the
women lost in roomy saddles, with feet dangling in the air, and red or
yellow handkerchiefs tied under their chins. Carts move slowly along the
old diligence road, guided by heavy-browed males.
The swallows' flight reveals the exquisite limpidity of the air and the
height of the unstained heaven, azure in the infinite depths of aërial
sapphire, blue beyond blue, translucent almost to the furthest reach of
vision. And the light shines broadly upon an incomparable mingling in
landscape of insensate ardour and changeless moroseness. So still, so
brilliant, so burnt and empty! revealing the national traits of mournful
hopelessness and unembittered, unregretful resignation. The rays lie in
a luminous quietude upon the red-brown land, while the breath of fresh
day just touches the leaves of the scant olives and shows them silver.
Then midway the desert swims behind, and the eye is mildly refreshed
with little signs of pastoral life, ineffectual efforts at gaiety amid
tyrannous sadness. Imagination leaps at sight of a cheering bit of
verdure, not for the beauty of it, though beauty is not altogether
absent, but for the old familiar eloquence of trees and grassy spaces,
the twinkling brightness of rills and flashing water and wooded fringes,
with a hint of shadow along the horizon. Between the poplared banks of
the river, yellow and waveless as befits a river of dead romance, the
eye lingers on glimpses of emerald islets, with reedy edges against the
fuller foliage of elm. Above, exposed on a rocky throne, belted by the
sombre Tagus, sits Toledo.
"The landscape of Toledo and the banks of the Tagus," writes M. Maurice
Barrès, with singular felicity, "are amongst the saddest and most ardent
things of this world. Whoever lives here has no need to consider the
grave youth, the _Penseroso_, of the Medicis Chapel; he may also do
without the biography and the _Pensées_ of Blaise Pascal. With the very
sentiment realised by these great solitary works, he will be filled, if
he but give himself up to the tragic fierceness of the magnificences in
ruins upon these high rocks.
"Toledo, on its hillside, with the tawny half circle of the Tagus at its
feet, has the colour, the roughness, the haughty poverty of the sierra
on which it is built, and whose strong articulations from the very first
produce an impression of energy and passion. It is less a town, a noisy
affair yielding to the commodities of life, than a significant spot for
the soul. Beneath a crude illumination, which gives to each line of its
ruins a vigour, a clearness by which the least energetic characters
acquire backbone, at the same time it is mysterious, with its cathedral
springing towards the sky, its alcázars and palaces that only take sight
from their invisible patios. Thus secret and inflexible, in this harsh
overheated land, Toledo appears like an image of exaltation in solitude,
a cry in the desert."
The train leaves you at the foot of the town before the quaint
fortressed bridge of Alcántara. In these days of unpretentious exits and
entrances, when we scarcely detect the outskirts of a city from the open
way, or the suburbs from the heart of urban movement, these two
castellated bridges, by which you enter and leave Toledo, have a strange
and insistent air of feudality that at once captures fancy, and
resembles the flourish of trumpets in martial dramas. Civilisation
instantly waves backward, and leaves imagination thrilled upon the
shores of legend. At a bound memory is at the core of troubled Spanish
history, a sad and spectral ghost, in the thrall of wonderment and
admiration. Surely never was town, with all our modern needs of
bread-winning and competition, of commerce and politics, of cheap
ambition and every-day social intercourse, so curiously, magnificently
faithful to its past. So precisely must Toledo have looked, barring the
electric light, when the last page of its intimate history was written.
Just so brown and barren, with its front of unflinching austerity, its
stern wealth of architecture, the air of romantic elegance and charmed
slumber it breathes upon sadness, with its look of legendary musing and
widowed remembrance. So, unchanged, must it have been in its great day
of hieratic glory, of Gothic rule, of Saracen triumph and of feudal
revolt.
[Illustration: PUENTE DE ALCANTARA]
From the bridges, the road winds up the steep rock, upon whose summit
this unique old city is built. The views at every turn of the winding
path are entrancing. There is every strange effect to gratify the eager
eye in search of the picturesque: an unsurpassed boldness of site, from
the wide zone of the Tagus to the point of the Cathedral tower pinnacled
against the upper arch of heaven. Project high rocks upon which odd and
delightful passages, neither street nor lane, full of colour and curve
and varied line, are cut like sharp upward and downward strokes, over
frowning ravines, and swelling by swift ascent from the yellow band of
water below, that imprisons the town like a moat, and along with the
martial bridges, give the impression of being cut off from the big
lively world, a prisoner in a city of dreamland. At once you yield
yourself to the gracious grip of your enchanter and gaoler. The eye
rests in ineffable contentment upon the violent line of empty hills,
yellow and brown and rose, turned violet by the sun's retreat, and you
feel no longing for the vulgar and bustling present you have left
behind. Here to sit awhile and dream, not days but unending months, in
the shadow of a mighty cathedral, in what a Spanish writer with Iberian
imagery, has called "a case of mediæval jewels." It is a fitting note of
environment that the landscape should be stamped by an ardent and
ineffaceable desolation, incessantly exposed to devastating winds, swept
by fierce rains and blinding dust and remorseless sunfire. Nature is
neither instigated by contrast, nor softened by charm. Unsmiling in its
arid austerity, it is grand by the magic of its simplicity. The audacity
with which it reveals its nakedness in the glare of unshaded light that
has burnt its flanks a peculiar reddish-brown hue, sinks all impression
of crudity, and becomes the supreme effect of natural art. It makes no
pretence to shield the peril of its broken precipices with the
beguilement of verdure, but lets them hack their murderous way to the
river-brim without shrub or any vigorous sign of vegetation. Heavy and
still, like the glittering light that fatigues the eye, it has
nevertheless its secret, matchless captivation, such as Venice, its
sister-town in strangeness (though of softer and more alluring beauty,
feminine to its stern masculine), and casts the mind, conquered, into
the mazes of reverie. You may have come by a train into this mausoleum
of petrified memories, you may sit at the usual table d'hôte, but you
cannot feel modern: the present slips away, and forgotten is the march
of centuries.
* * * * *
Of the town's earliest history knowledge is merely the wildest
assumption, and we have no reason to believe any of the legends handed
down to us by historians as tradition. For instance, that obscure if
venerable voice, asserts, that when God made the sun he placed it over
Toledo (previously made, of course) and planted the foot of Adam, first
King, beneath it at that particular spot of the globe. This is at least
a fine testimony of the Spaniard's lofty faith in the antiquity of
Toledo. A less sweeping assertion connects the first light of the town
with Tubal, the grandson of Noah, who is supposed to have come hither
after the deluge, and this view is naïvely supported by the verses of
Gracia Dei, the chronicler of King Pedro:
"Tubal, nieto de Noé,[1]
Alphonsus the Learned, in his _Cronica General_, maintains and is
supported in his no less extravagant opinion by Diego Mossem Valera,
Isabel the Catholic's historian, that Toledo was founded by Pyrrhus,
captain of the army of Cyrus, and son-in-law of King Hispan, father of
Iberia. It is imagined that Iberia, Pyrrhus's wife, was in need of the
freshness and verdure of the leafy banks of the Tagus, and that her
husband brought her hither to taste the air and delights of the gardens
around. But we are not told how there came to be gardens and foliaged
places along the silent Tagus, nor who fashioned them, nor how Pyrrhus
heard of them. The wife, Iberia, and the father-in-law appear as
adequate explanations of the subsequent history of Spain, since both
furnish the names of the land that Europe is familiar with. Once upon
the banks of the Tagus, the gardens did not content Pyrrhus, so he began
to enlarge the spot he had chosen. He discovered two towers, one at San
Roman, and the other at the Alcázar, called _Los Dos Hermanos_, (The Two
Brothers), built, tradition then told him, by the two sons of King Rocas
in defence against the enemies of Rocas and his father Tartus. But
whence came Rocas and Tartus and the two brothers? Why should Alphonso
the Learned choose Pyrrhus and his wife, those remote tourists, as the
founders of Toledo, rather than Rocas and Tartus?
Rufo Festo Avieno regards Hercules as the founder of the Carpetanian
city, and celebrates the achievement in verse:
"Et Carpetanos inter proverbe sub Auras
Toletum labor Alcide præclareque gentes
Metropolis in gente Tajo ses undique iactat
In qua tardi gradus conspectat parte Trionis
Haud Pater Alcides (ut dicunt) condidit urbem,
Mor ubi ter gemina victor gerione perempto,
In latium meditatus iter Dionysii quondam,
Prium dicta fuit de fundatoris honesto
Nomine; Toletum alii dixere coloni."
This version explains the name of Toledo as Ptoliethron, signifying
important race, bestowed by Hercules. Honour is also awarded to a
certain Greek astrologer, Ferecio, who came to Galicia with Teucer,
Ulysses and Diomedes, after the siege of Troy, and having killed one of
his companions, flew from the anger of the others into the heart of the
Peninsula, until the security of the high rocks on which Toledo is
built, tempted him to seek shelter amid these altitudes, which he at
once consecrated to Hercules. As the natives gathered round him, and the
town spread, he initiated them in the mysteries of magic and astrology,
arts until then unknown in Spain, and for this reason called _arta
Toledana_.
Less wild and improbable is the last legend, that the Jews came hither
when Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, and created the town they called
Toledoth, "city of generations." From this period is supposed to date
the synagogue Santa Maria la Blanca. The explanation of the fact that
under Christian rule the Jews of Toledo were permitted to have their
synagogues and worship unmolested according to their rites, is based on
the tradition that the Jews of Jerusalem consulted them before
condemning Christ to death. They withheld their consent, and pronounced
the sentence both heedless and imprudent, but their letter arrived too
late for consideration. The mere belief that this letter had been sent,
however, secured them for some centuries from insult or persecution.[2]
The famous archbishop, Don Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, rejects all these
theories, and goes to Rome in search of founders, which he discovers in
two consuls, Tolemon and Brutus, 108 years before Cæsar's time, when
Ptolemy Evergetes was reigning. But this seems no nearer truth, since
there exists no vestige of any domination anterior to the Roman
Conquest, and there are no data on which to found a definite statement.
The most convenient way of disposing of the question, up to the day of
Livy's emphatic description of Toledo as "parva urbs, sed loco munita,"
is to say with the old-fashioned writers that its beginning is "lost in
the night of ages." For lost it most certainly is, and the ancient
Spanish historians are not to be trusted. It is probable that the first
start of the race was a Celtic group of shepherds, wild and rude, whose
wanderings led them to the leafy and verdant banks of the Tagus, and
here, finding abundance of water, and rich and fertile land between
Aranjuez and Toledo, they agreed to settle. Gradually the little town,
pitched high above the river upon its unattackable rocky seat, spread
itself; the number of huts grew into streets and lanes, the vague and
wandering groups became more dense, and attracted others within their
dominating influence, until the capital of Carpetania was formed. The
shepherds left their flocks to build themselves walls and strong places,
and thus bring upon their little city the imperious and conquering eye
of Rome. Here again we have nothing but untrustworthy generalities to
guide us, and no prehistoric remains on which to base conclusions about
this vanished race. Alcocer, the old historian of Toledo, asserts that
the very mystery and obscurity of the city's earliest days is proof of
its antiquity and nobility, "since a race is all the more ancient by the
less that is known of its origin and beginning." In a pleasing
concession to this naïve statement, we need feel no shame in allowing to
Toledo all the nobility and antiquity our unenlightened ignorance
permits it to claim.
The first dim figure in its history that shows out upon a vague and
discutable background is that of Tago, a governor of the town in the
days of Carthagenian domination. Before the second punic war, the
Carthagenians sought to strengthen their forces by alliance with the
Carpetanians, whom they had already partially subjugated. According to
Rasis, the Moorish writer, there were then eleven governors in
Carpetania, one of whom was Tago, at Toledo. Hasdrubal had succeeded
Hamilcar, and reversing his mild policy, entertained his fancy with
every kind of ferocious injustice and cruelty. The Carpetanians were
handy, half allies, half conquered subjects, and the account of Tago's
assassination, for Hasdrubal's mere pleasure, is one of unmitigable
barbarity, one of those incidents that leave us stunned and stupefied by
the revelation of an inexplicable instinct of cruelty in uncivilised
man. Not content with repeatedly stabbing the unfortunate governor with
his own hand, Hasdrubal ordered the body to be crucified, then drew his
sword across the throat, severing the head, exposed the headless trunk,
and forbade it decent burial. One of Tago's slaves revenged his master
by assassinating Hasdrubal, and the infuriated Carpetanians rose up in
revolt against Carthagenian oppression. They joined neighbouring tribes,
and determined to resist Hannibal. Hannibal marched against them, and
met them near ancient Oresia, eight leagues from Toledo, and here a long
and fierce battle was fought, equal on both sides in losses, endurance,
courage and fury. Night fell before either side had obtained the
slightest advantage, and when day came, the confederates had the wild
joy of forcing the world's greatest general to retreat. This obscure and
miserable little people, a handful of raw Celtiberians, had no means of
measuring the extent of their forgotten glory. Hannibal to them was no
more than Hasdrubal, and they little suspected the kind of hero they had
to do with. So they feasted and shouted and sang in their rash triumph,
while Hannibal, who had folded his tent before their impetuous charge,
grimly looked on, and planned to take advantage of their unbuckled hour.
In the midst of their feasting and pleasuring, he bore down unexpectedly
upon the victors, and all the confederates, struck at their brightest
moment in the full flush of pride, were broken on the remorseless wheel
of Carthagenian rule.
From this onward, light begins to gather over Toledan history, dimly, of
course, and by the very necessity of its vicissitudes, intermittent and
dubious. After the fall of Carthage, we find, 191 years B.C., Marcus
Fulvius Nobilior directing the Roman forces against the capital of
Carpetania, and as besieger occupying the opposite bank of the Tagus.
The reigning king of the Celtiberians was Hilermo. Fulvius defeated him
in the plain, and then laid siege to the town and took it with ease. But
though now subject to Rome, the Romans never appear to have dominated
this stolid and sturdy Celtic race. Under whatever sway, Toledo ever
wears its unwearying face of sullen independence. Rome itself could
stamp no permanent impression on such a wilful and indomitable subject.
Her armies might sweep it off the field of rebellion, but could neither
chain it nor secure its sympathy. It remained obstinately neutral in all
the successive Roman strifes; took no notice whatever of Viriate's
imperious call from the foot of its walls to join him on the bank of the
Tagus below, and wage war with him against the Praetor, Caius Plancius.
What was Viriate to the aloof and self-centred Toledans more than a man
of another country fighting a personal battle with which they had no
concern? Toledo willingly opened its gates to Sylla's victim, Sertorius,
and allowed him to shelter and nourish his hate and burning sense of
injury behind its walls, but it flatly declined to help him in his plan
of vengeance. He might stay there and win, as he did, the people's
esteem and a kind of grudging affection, but war was his own affair, and
if he stayed it should be as one of themselves, content with an inactive
recognition of wrongs. To these wild and independent Celtiberians it
mattered nothing whether Rome ran herself to ruin in her fierce quarrels
and dissensions. So Sertorius stayed on in protected exile, almost as a
ruler adopted by those who sheltered him, who yielded him admiration and
sympathy, while sturdily declining to grant him troops or subsidies, and
would not hear of marching under his leadership against the great
Republic. This same haughty indifference Toledo maintained throughout
the civil wars between Cæsar and Pompey, and showed the same coldness in
the fortunes of Augustus. Her voice was not heard in the chorus of
enthusiasm when the Temple of Janus was closed, and the Augustan peace
affected her as little as had the previous disorders and rivalries and
battles. Silent and sullen vassals Rome ever found these Toledans,
holding themselves persistently aloof from all her interests. The single
Roman ruler they appear to have favoured with some measure of homage was
Marcus Julius Philippicus, who, to win his way with them probably
granted them unrecorded favours or some special privilege. This rare
mood of gratitude to Rome was expressed on a marble slab which Maestro
Alvar Gomez, the chronicler of Cisneros, the great Cardinal, found in
the porch of a door where it served as an ordinary seat:
Imp. Caes.
M. Julio Philippo
Pio Fel. Aug.
Pont. Max. Trib.
Pot. P. P. Consul.
Toletam Devotes
Sini Nuninis
Maestati
Que Eius D. D.
The gratitude was apparently of modified value if we may judge by the
unceremonious treatment of its monument.
Though Toledo must have had a distinct existence under the Romans, since
Pliny calls it the Metropolis of Carpetania, there is not to be found
definite evidence of the precise nature of that existence. The few coins
that have come down to us in various collections, said to belong to that
period, are of dubious origin; the inscriptions are not a whit more
authentic. So little is clear or authentic that Alcover may continue to
delight in the mystery and obscurity of its history as proof, according
to his cherished phrase, of the town's antiquity and nobility. We are
hardly justified in supposing anything, and imagination is barely
assisted in its effort to penetrate its inhospitable walls. For we know
that there were walls in those days, since Viriate is depicted standing
under them, and calling on the citizens to join his forces below and
march behind the standard of civil war. It is pretty certain that the
town was extensive and populous, or Viriate would not have troubled to
clamour for its assistance; and assuredly of some importance, else would
Pliny have described it as the Capital of Carpetania? But what was the
measure and nature of its civilisation, of its customs, dress? Did it
adopt any of the Roman ways? We may assume from its rude and central
position that in progress it was far behind the Mediterranean towns. But
it undoubtedly had its place along the great Roman roads, and was
connected with Tarragona and Carthagena, of which superior and more
notable centres it was a dependency. While Tarragona has remained to
this day pre-eminently an old Roman town, the very physiognomy of the
race a kind of diminished Roman, and Cordova and Granada are as
romantically and faithfully Moorish, Toledo has swept from off its face
nearly every vestige of Roman domination but a few miserable stones, and
is as insistently Gothic. So obscure and unrevealed is this period of
transition that beyond the indication of the _Circo Romano_ and portion
of the Puente de Alcántara outside the town, there are no remains to
prove the passage of the world's conquerors and civilisers, nothing to
suggest their imperishable influence. Of its position under Roman rule
it is difficult to form an exact opinion. Its rank at first was probably
that of a stipendary town, left to the despotic will of centurions
without a responsible governor. It was merely regarded as an
insignificant source of tribute. In this period of partial servitude it
would have contracted the habit of idleness, the most prominent curse of
slavery. Later on it was raised to municipal rank, had its own coin and
commerce, and developed a racial preference for the arts of war rather
than for those of peace. Finally, when Augustus came to reign, he raised
Toledo to the rank of a colony, and transmitted to the town the
privileges of Merida, making the Carpetanian capital the centre for the
collection of tribute. But whatever difference these honours may have
made in the town's private history, whatever amount of added prosperity
they may have brought it, we are not permitted by the historians to
obtain a clearer or more striking figure of Toledo as a colony of Rome
than we had of Toledo in its first stage of stipendary town. Here and
there an inscription exists as testimony of her advanced rank, such as.
L. Terentius
Gn. pomp. F. P. P.
Bassino
Totelano Quaestori
Q. Q. Redidili
Primo Flamini perpetuo Toleti
Et Totius Hispanae
Quod hic Termas et viam.
Of the baths and the Roman way nothing now remains. Cristobal Lozano, in
his _Reyes Nueves de Toledo_, devotes a chapter to the Roman glories of
the town, speaks of the Circo Maximo, the temple of Hercules, the
Naumachia and amphitheatre, and tells us that the bullfights of Spain
date from this period. The temple he describes as being 300 feet in
length and 200 feet in width; it was situated in the Vega, and was an
object of devotion to the entire province of Carpetania. The celebrated
cave of Hercules into which Rodrigo, the last of the Gothic kings, is
supposed to have penetrated before the fatal battle of Guadalete, Lozano
describes at greater length. The cave is as legendary as Rodrigo's
sombre experience therein. It covered the prodigious extent of three
leagues, and was composed of thousands of arches, pillars and columns.
It was said to have been used as a secret treasury, but was built by
Hercules as a royal subterranean palace, and here in prehistoric days
the arts of magic were studied. The Romans enlarged it, and during the
persecutions it served the Christians as church and oratory and
cemetery. Part of it lay under the spell of enchantment by the order of
Hercules, and when Spain was flooded with barbarians, and the Goths
swept the classic Romans out of Toledo, Hercules hermetically sealed the
doors, and tradition asserted that whoever should succeed in bursting
open these doors would learn his doom and wed calamity. No Gothic king,
until Rodrigo, was strong-minded enough to risk such dreadful peril, and
the doors remained sealed. But the unfortunate Rodrigo was as brave as
he was curious. He burst through the magic doorway, on which was written
in Greek letters: _The King who opens this cave and discovers the
wonders it holds, will discover good and evil_. Those who preceded him
into the mysterious palace speedily fell back in a state of shuddering
alarm and fear, shouting that they had seen an awful vision. Instead of
staying to learn the nature of the vision, Rodrigo, angry and impatient,
pushed his way in before his cowardly followers. He encountered an
immense bronze statue in a beautiful frame work, highly sculptured. It
held a wooden hammer, and struck fierce blows with it against the earth,
thus moving the air and causing a terrible noise which bewildered and
frightened Rodrigo's courtiers. It stopped its movements as Rodrigo
approached, and on the wall of a closed arch beside it was written:
_Whoever opens this arch will find wonders_. The King ordered his men to
break open a passage, and instead of the treasures he expected to find,
there was a picture of Arabian troops, some afoot, some on horseback,
turbaned and armed, and underneath written: _Whoever reaches this spot
and opens this arch, will lose Spain, and will be beaten by this race_.
"The King," writes Lozano, "with sorrow in his heart and such sadness as
we can understand, though carefully hiding it, ordered the door to be
closed again." All those present also dissimulated their feelings, not
to increase the affliction of the King. And while they went about
seeking if among so many misfortunes they might find some consolation,
lifting their eyes, they saw on the wall, on the left hand of the
statue, other lines of writing: _Sorry King for thy doom hast thou
entered here_. And on the right lines saying: _For foreign nations wilt
thou be dispossessed, and thy people will be heavily punished_. Behind
the statue they read: _I call upon the Moors_, and on its breast was
written: _I fulfil my task_. That same night in the roar of many voices
and loud battle cries, the earth opened and swallowed up in a clap of
thunder the enchanted palace and every vestige of it. The legend is an
excellent one, and has well served the poets, but unhappily it is only a
legend of no historic value whatever. Rodrigo no more penetrated this
mythical cave than he kissed Florinda, who never existed. Cardinal
Siliceo is said to have explored what remained of the part without the
vanished enchanted part of the palace, and after penetrating half a
league inward, found bronze statues on the altar; and while examining
one of them, the statue fixed him with a grave and austere glance, while
a loud noise was heard, which filled the explorers with terror, and
Lozano naïvely suggests that nothing of the sort possibly happened, for
fear is a great inventor, and "they were filled with fear to the eyes."
They fled without King Rodrigo's courage to go further. Though it was
summer time, most of them died immediately afterwards from cold and
fright, and the "good" archbishop, who had caused this devastation among
his flock, ordered the mouth of the cave to be built up and covered with
mud, 1543. Antonio Ponz, commenting on this prodigious and serious
account given by Lozano of a fabulous cave and an impossible tale, makes
merry over the naïve Spaniard's accuracy of description and facts. "One
would really believe he had seen it all," writes the unenthusiastic
Ponz, "the statue, the bronze, the _admirable_ sculpture, and had
measured the extent of the cave." The same may be said of Lozano's
grandiose description of the Roman buildings of which hardly a vestige
remained in his time, 1666. The Circo Maximo, Gamero asserts, was built
to hold a hundred thousand persons, from which we might infer that
Toledo under the Romans had an important population.
Approaching less apocryphal days, we learn that Toledo was one of the
earliest towns of Spain to embrace Christianity. It is even said that St
Peter and St James passed here, and some add St Paul, preaching the
Gospel and creating bishops. St Eugenius, of Greek or Roman origin, was
the first. The Spanish historians decline to accept the tradition that
St Denis of Paris sent Eugenius to Spain, preferring to keep him in
company with the Apostles. But it allows that he went to Paris to see St
Denis, and here was martyred near the city by the prefect, Fescenino
Sicino, his headless body being flung into a filthy lagoon so that his
disciples and admirers should never be able to find it. Two hundred
years later the lake gave up its dead, uncorrupted. One Ercoldo, being
ill, saw St Denis in sleep, who told him to rise cured, and go to the
lake, where he would find the body of the illustrious martyr awaiting
burial. At the same time he promised for the sake of Eugenius, great
health to the neighbourhood and the honour of many miracles. Pisa
records this tale at some length with unction and faith. Several
centuries later the emperor, Alfonso VII., grandson of the victor of
Toledo, obtained from his son-in-law, Louis of France, the right arm of
Eugenius as a relic, and the arm was brought to Spain in all pomp by the
Abbot of St Denis in person. Later, Philip II. obtained the entire body
from Charles IX., with the consent of the Cardinal, Duke of Lorrain,
Abbot of St Denis. The town prepared a magnificent reception for the
remains of the founder of its cathedral. Antonio de Rivera, the
choir-master, gives a detailed description of the triumphal arches, the
Latin and Castillian poems, the dances and other diversions of the hour.
The King was present as well as his unfortunate son, Don Carlos, the
princes of Hungary and Bohemia, Rodolpho and Hernesto, sons of
Maximilian, the bishops of Cordova, Siguenza, Segovia, Palencia, Cuenca,
Osuna, Lugo and Gerona. Francisco Bayeu painted a fine fresco of the
scene for the cathedral cloisters, representing the entrance of the
remains under the Puerta de Visagra.
The next saint connected with the Christian history of the town, and its
real patron, is St Leocadia. She was of noble birth, beautiful, young
and gifted. She is depicted a kind of Spanish St Elisabeth of Hungary,
succouring the poor and sick, speaking words of wisdom to the weak, of
sympathy to the suffering. Her father, Leocadio, was governor under
Dacian, and her uncle was Melancius the archbishop. While yet a child
she vowed herself to maidenhood and the service of the needy and those
in trouble, and her doors like her compassionate heart were open to all.
On his arrival at Toledo, Dacian heard of the wonderful maid, and
learnt that her influence spread far and wide. He ordered her to appear
before him, and she came surrounded by friends and admirers. The Roman
in the interview is painted as brutal and inexorable, the girl-saint as
mild but firm. She would change neither her faith nor her ways, and
valiantly announced herself as ready for death. We hear of
flagellations, of chains, of torture, of every form of explosion of
Roman fury, till finally unable to invent further atrocities, Dacian
flung her into a dark dungeon, where she died a natural death, some
assert, others preferring the more ghastly version of Dacian in person
ordering her to be flung down a steep rock into the Tagus. But this, I
imagine, has been tacked on to the legend as a more picturesque
conclusion for a martyr than a natural death in a prison. Gamero does
not endorse it, and his history is admitted to be the most accurate of
any that deals with Toledo.
This is how Pisa writes of Dacian:--"Dacian, haughty, famished for
blood, drunk with the blood of French martyrs, came to accomplish a like
butchery in Spain. He inflicted terrible tortures on St Folia and St
Cucufato and St Eulalia at Barcelona, and went like a mad lion through
Zaragoza, with the blood of martyrs ever flowing behind him. This
minister of Satan came to the town of Alcala, where he shed the blood of
the children, Justo and Pastor, so young that their blood was yet partly
milk. Then he came to this famous city of Toledo, where the people
received him with honour. He sat on the tribune to receive recognizance
and vassalage to the Emperor's published edict, and commanded the public
to adore the idols of his gods. He ordered an inquisition among the
Toledan Christians to torture them and then destroy their bodies." Good
Dr Pisa had not humour enough to perceive the irony of Spanish history,
since these are the very proceedings of the Castellian monarchs to
heretics in later centuries. One wonders at the censorious use of the
ominous word "inquisition" from a Spanish pen. "Tell me, young lady,"
Dacian suavely enough addresses Leocadia summoned before him, "for such
is the exceeding beauty of thy face that nobody born has ever beheld one
more fair, and being well-born and of pure and noble lineage, how is it
thou canst so lightly be deceived by such vanities, despising thus the
ancient ceremonies and worship of our gods and preferring to follow the
new sect of the Crucified." Methinks, so might some urbane cardinal have
addressed a pretty heretic some centuries later as much a martyr, albeit
uncanonised, as Leocadia. And such a desperate wrath would the maiden's
answer have provoked as that which sent Leocadia to imprisonment and
death. Certainly the early Christians were not courteous to the Pagans
they defied. The gods Leocadia contemptuously called "miserable," and
the polite and flattering Dacian came in for a share of her impassioned
vituperation with the consequences she naturally desired.
At so early a period dawns the celebrated hieratic fame of Toledo, which
for centuries made it less subject to the sovereign than to the
archbishop. Melancius was raised to the bishopric in the year 283, and
after him, under the domination of Rome, may be said to have reigned
over the Celtic citizens, ten important bishops, whose portraits can be
studied in the Sala Capitular of the Cathedral. Gothic rule in Toledo is
little else but the story and development of Gothic Christianity. More
than on kings and their battles and doings does the town's early fame
rest upon those councils of the church in its midst. They send the name
of Toledo as far as Rome in a warning note of independence and power.
This primitive church had its own rite, its own customs, its
emphatically racial way of viewing matters, and for centuries no
high-handed effort of Rome could smooth the angles of its stubborn
individuality, or Latinise the tone of its worship and faith. It
remained for France and French influence to accomplish what Rome had
vainly striven to achieve, and it is to be deplored that France should
have succeeded in the defacing task.
The first of these councils took place in the year 396, and the second
in 400, to consider the election of Dictinius to the bishopric of
Astorga, one of the sect of Priscilianists. This deliberate battle waged
by Toledo against the Priscilianists took place in September, and its
minutes are preserved intact in the Toledan Collection. Nineteen bishops
assisted at it, and the Bishop of Merida, Patriuno, presided over it, as
the oldest present. The meeting took place in the church of Toledo, the
bishops seated, and the deacons and congregation admitted, standing. In
a long address the president exposed the scandals and vicissitudes of
the times, and then discussed in ten different points various details
connected with the church. Woman seems to have been the victim of
austere episcopal reprobation. She must not presume to chaunt antiphones
whether nun or widow, in the absence of the bishop, neither with her
confessor nor his attendant. Such communion of the sexes under the
banner of religion the Council held as pernicious and a snare. It
fulminated against the _frail_ sex, but for whose existence man were a
sage and a saint. What a pity the Almighty did not consult the Fathers
before casting this fatal and corrupting instrument of misfortune upon
the world! However, woman must not complain. To quote one of the
delightful and ironical sayings of Renan, the Fathers of the Church
increased her power by making her a sin. As a mere woman she is only a
human being, like her feeble and fugitive mate. But as a combustible
engine requiring the reunion of hoary Fathers from time to time to drown
and extinguish her beneath the founts of holy water set to play upon her
wickedness and peril, she really becomes something diabolical and
magnificent, a creature to inspire alarm and excite curiosity. It is not
improbable that the saintly sages and modest deacons, as they issued
from the church into the rocky and tortuous streets of Toledo, on the
September day of the council in the year 400, gazed in a fresh instinct
of fearful wonder and shuddering attraction at the first skirted fiend
that crossed their path. However plain or beautiful she might be, they
would be greatly more preoccupied with the thought of her sex than her
looks. Yet the clergy still might marry, and they had full rights over
their wife except death. They could beat her, tie and lock her up, give
her all "salutary" punishment that was not mortal, deprive her of food,
and forbid her to sit at table. Never mind, she had her revenge. She
felt her power be sure, and was conscious that she was a _sin_.
Before the Council of Nice, Toledo adopted the belief that the Holy
Ghost proceeds from the Father and Son, which doctrine only became
universal several centuries later. This is the Toledan Credo of the
fifth century: "We believe in one sole and true God, Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost, maker of all things visible and invisible, by whom were
created all things in heaven and on earth; that this sole God and this
sole Trinity are of divine substance; that the Father is not the same as
the Son, but has a Son who is not the Father; that, the Son is not the
Father, but is the Son of God from the nature of the Father; that the
Spirit is the Paraclete, and is neither the Father nor the Son, but
proceeds from both. The Father was not engendered but the Son, but not
the Paraclete which proceeds from the Father and Son. The Father is He
who was heard from the heavens, crying: _This is My Son in whom I am
well pleased. Hearken to Him._ The Son is He who said: _I left the
Father and came from God to this world_; and the Paraclete it is of whom
the Son said: _If I went not to the Father, the Paraclete would not come
to you._ That this Trinity is distinct in three persons, and is a
substance united by virtue and indivisible by power and majesty, beyond
this we do not believe there is any divine nature, nor of angel, nor of
spirit, nor of any virtue that believes itself God. This Son of God,
born of God the Father, before all beginning, sanctified the womb of the
Virgin Mary, and became real man in her, _sine virili generatum semine_;
uniting both natures, that is divine and fleshly, in one sole person,
who is our Lord, Jesus Christ; neither was His body imaginary or any
phantasm, but solid and real; He ate, was thirsty, endured pain, wept
and suffered the injuries of the body; ultimately was crucified by the
Jews, and buried, rose again the third day; spoke afterwards with His
disciples, and the day of quadragesimo, after the resurrection ascended
to heaven. This Son of Man also called Himself Son of God, and the Son
of God also called Himself God, Son of Man. We believe in the future
resurrection of human flesh, and maintain that the soul of man is not a
divine substance, or part of God, but a creature formed by divine will."
Among the singular subjects of excommunication of this Toledan Council
are three worthy of notice: Vegetarians are excommunicated, it being
decided by the Fathers that birds and beasts were intended to be eaten
by man. Mathematicians are excommunicated, unfortunately we are not told
why. Those who execrate marriage are excommunicated. Surely this last
sentence is inconsistent with the Fathers' professed execration of the
"frail sex"!
But the triumphs and severities of the Fathers were soon interrupted by
the invasion of the terrible north barbarians. The Goths were pouring
across the Pyrenees, soon to make Toledo their capital and "Royal city."
Fire, ruin, pillage, and death, Lafuente describes as the traces of
their path. Fields, orchards, cities, and woods were swept by their
ferocity. The horrors of famine and pest succeeded, calamity stalked the
earth, and the Toledan sages sat and talked in the desert. The Vandals
were already in the beautiful southern province of Betica, which they
called Vandalusia. Rome had fallen, and the conquering Visigoth,
unsettled in the north since Ataulfo's assassination at Barcelona,
turned his eyes upon the strong-walled city perched up above on its
seven rocks. Toledo had successfully resisted the Vandals; it succumbed
to the Goths, and Euric took it by force. She was momentarily
extinguished after her first little hour of sacerdotal pride and power.
Euric died at Arles, and the Gothic Court for a time drifted to Sevilla.
But a brighter day dawned when Atanagildo was elected king. Married to
Gosuinda, the bishop of Toledo's sister, he had formed a liking for the
place, and brought hither the Court, making Toledo the capital of his
kingdom.
CHAPTER II
_The Gothic Kings of Toledo_
Here may be said to begin the real history of Toledo, from this until
the fatal battle of Guadalete, the capital of Spain, since it was the
heart of Gothic rule. The backward pages of its story are blurred and
insignificant, judged by their traces, though we may imagine, if it were
possible to build up the effaced picture of Toledo under Roman power, we
should find a very superior civilisation. Instead of a flourishing Roman
colony, Atanagildo's choice of this "strong place" was merely the
establishment of a rough barbaric camp. It is doubtful if, until Wamba's
time, the Goths had the art of profiting by such heritage as the
decadent vanquished had left them. As a race they inspire even less
interest than their brethren east and north.
Family love was no strong element in the development of the Royal House,
as the quaintly heartless story of San Hermengildo proves. Leovigildo
was reigning then, and he, an Arian, committed the imprudence of
marrying his eldest son, Hermengildo, to a French Goth, Ingundus, the
niece of Saint Leander of Seville. With such powerful interests on the
side of Rome, it is not surprising that the Arian prince speedily
abjured his heresy, to the anger and dismay of his father.
Unfortunately, his conversion did not imply the practice of any of the
Christian virtues. Religion accomplishes the very thing we should have
thought its mission to forbid: it arms the son against his father. The
two sects, oddly enough representing the doctrine of peace and goodwill
on earth, meet outside the walls of Seville in armed encounter. Hitherto
the spectacle had been war and persecution and their attendant horrors
on the side of Pagan against the noble and martyred Christian. From this
we were to learn that Christian _versus_ Christian could show quite as
pretty a figure in atrocities as ever the persecuting worshipper of the
gods. Here we have an infuriated father and a rebellious son ready to
cut one another's throat, and of the two it can hardly be said that the
Catholic saint shows to better advantage. Indeed, in their
correspondence both reason and dignity are on the side of Leovigildo,
who writes to his son: "I associated you with my power from earliest
years, not that you should arm strangers against me. Thou dost blunt thy
conscience, and cover thyself with the veil of religion," he acutely
adds, while Hermengildo's reply is an inflated and pragmatical attack on
the baseness of his father's creed and the superiority of his own.[3]
Hermengildo is beaten, his forces scattered, and thanks to the
intercession of his brother, Recaredo, instead of the expected death
sentence, his father sentences him to exile at Valencia. As a Christian,
a martyr, and a canonised saint, Hermengildo presents an original
figure. Even the harsh wisdom of Moses condemns him, and the worst Pagan
would hardly condone his unprovoked assault on his father, by way of
converting him to a belief in Christ's divinity; while instead of
quietly enduring the consequences of his abortive rebellion and his
inappropriate expression of faith, he went about the coast, begging the
assistance of the Greeks in another attempt to proselytise by the sword,
and seize his father's throne by the same stroke. The Spanish
historians, to whom this method of conversion is particularly
sympathetic and of unquestionable logic, disregard the side question of
revolt, and delight in weighing upon Hermengildo's lofty efforts in
behalf of truth. His object they accept as the laudable extirpation of
error. Indifferent to his natural relations to the king he desired to
dethrone, Gamero says: "Perhaps, like Alaric, within his breast, a
secret voice had commanded him to go forth and destroy the power of
Arianism in Spain; to establish upon the ruins of paganism and false
sects the immortal throne where the god of Sabahot is worshipped, and on
which shines with eternal splendour the immaculate purity of Mary." And
so he complacently follows the unfilial prince on his bellicose mission
through Estremadura, now occupying Merida, again attempting to take
Seville and his former court, seeking support in France with the hope of
arming his brother-in-law, Sigeric, against his father. All Gamero
laments is his unsuccess. The Arian father did precisely what
Hermengildo would have done in his place; he seized his son, flung him
into a dungeon, first at Toledo, then at Tarragona, where he was
beheaded after stoutly refusing to accept communion from the hands of an
Arian bishop. His form of refusal is proudly recorded by St Gregory of
Tours as an admirable one: "As a minister of the devil, only to hell
couldst thou guide me. Away and go, coward, to the punishment prepared
for thee, and which thou deservest." We hardly detect the influence of
Christian mildness and sweetness in this address. However, all saints
cannot resemble St Francis of Assisi, and even St Fernando of Castille
boiled his enemies alive in great pots of water over huge fires. This is
Gamero's admiring epitaph: "Thus on the 13th April, 584, ended with
glorious martyrdom the life of this hero of the Spanish Church, whose
blood effaced any faults as a man he may have committed, and was a
perennial source of happiness and fortune to our country."
Morality is, after all, like criticism, only a matter of existing
convention and national temperament. Believe the right thing, and one's
vices are a matter of small account. In the mediæval times, with a
proper amount of faith, one might with impunity, boil one's enemies or
roast them before a fire, and be duly canonised and offered to posterity
as a saint and a just man. But be as virtuous and as austere as Marcus
Aurelius, believing the wrong thing, and the orthodox historian will
manage to be blind to your virtues, and offer you for public contumely.
So we have a legend of sanctity centred round this extremely unedifying
prince, who took up arms against a father not convicted of any
particular injustice or enormity, plotted with France to dethrone him,
and after an unnatural career, died furious and unresigned, breathing
curses upon his enemies. Behold him one of the glories of that curious
medley of Pagan qualities and unchristian vices, Mediæval Catholicism.
The historians will not even permit the poor father to grieve and regret
his own harshness in peace. His sorrow and remorse are not accepted as
the natural sentiments of a man whom a just anger had carried beyond the
endurance of nature. We are forced to regard them as the tardy
recognition of his own iniquity and error. We are told in triumph that
the monarch died weeping and repentant in the arms of St Leander of
Seville, the friend and uncle by marriage of his exiled son. Could
anything be more natural than this touching and piteous picture of an
old man, doubtful of himself, turning in his grief to the one great
friend of his son? The action in its simple humanity is worth all the
grandiloquent insolence of the saint and martyr Leovigildo mourned, in
whose story virtue and sanctity are equally unevident.
Recaredo, his son and successor, solemnly abjured Arianism before the
third Toledan Council, as the inscription on his statue outside the
Alcázar records. We may imagine this unhappy son and brother weary for
the moment of bloodshed and strife, and anxious to put an end to
dissension in his kingdom. It would suffice to explain the wise and
eloquent speech he addressed to his subjects, exhorting all to be of one
faith, to enter the bosom of the Church, and accept its dogmas as he had
done. His speech must have been miraculously persuasive, and his
influence over his people almost magnetic, since nearly all to a man
yielded to the earnest prayer of a tired and suffering heart, and
consented to make his religion theirs. And thus it might be hoped, after
the terrible domestic tragedy Recaredo had been obliged to witness,
powerless to prevent it, the reign of violence, persecution, and discord
was over, and the religious power of Toledo permanently established upon
tolerant lines. But this was to count without the spirit of the times.
After the first shock of misery and bereavement had passed, the
turbulent sense of revolt on one side, and determination to crush it on
the other, broke out in all its malignant force. The Arian bishops,
goaded on by Leovigildo's widow, hurled their vote of resistance to the
establishment of Roman influence. Here we have another instance of the
charming inconsistency of the prolix Spanish historians. Leovigildo was
nothing less than a monster, because he punished conspiracy and
rebellion, and his Catholic son, condemned justly by the laws of the day
to death, was a haloed martyr. Recaredo remains a just and magnanimous
sovereign when he cuts off the heads and hands of the Arian
conspirators; and the premature death of the queen dowager, Gosvintha,
is deeply lamented, because her step-son was thus deprived of the duty
of cutting off her rebellious head. Why was she less of a saint, one
asks, than Hermengildo? She, too, rebelled on behalf of principle, and
surely a step-son is a more natural antagonist in the field than a
father! But for the historian conspiracy against a legitimate heretical
sovereign may be an article of faith and duty, whereas the heretic who
conspires against the monarch of the right faith is a fiend. It is this
hopeless lack of logic and sense that renders so dreary and unillumined
a task the reading of Spanish history. The humorists, alas! wrote dramas
and novels, and history was left to the terrible Mariana, the credulous
Masdeu, and the one-sided Gamero.
At the next Toledan Council, Recaredo presided in all pomp, accompanied
by his queen, Baddo. The sovereigns first, then all the converted
Arians, bishops, priests, deacons, and lords and leaders, read aloud
this act of allegiance to Rome. Recaredo was the first to swear: "I,
Recaredo, King, maintaining with my heart, and affirming with my word,
this true and holy confession, which alone the Catholic Church professes
all over the globe, have subscribed with my right hand, God protecting
me." Baddo, his wife, then swore: "I, Baddo, glorious queen, have
subscribed with my hand and all my heart to that faith I believe in and
have admitted." Followed the oath of each bishop and priest; and then
came the turn of the nobles. Imagination readily enough evokes the scene
from such dry details, and pictures one of exceptional solemnity, with a
touch of barbarism, beginning to borrow undreamed of luxury from a
departed civilisation, without taste or tact to render that luxury
beautiful. We have only to visit the Musée de Cluny to form some notion
of Gothic gold-work by inspection of the Gothic votive crowns discovered
in Toledo, and it is easy to picture this rough humanity, from monarch
to knight, in their flowing cloaks, grave, impressed, all in deadly
earnest, and the mitred and mighty prelates forming an inner circle, in
gold and silvered embroideries, bejewelled, and full of glory and
contentment. The importance of the nobles we gather from a list of
Gothic dignitaries. First came the dukes, counts, palatines of the royal
house. Then came the first count, the count of the drinking-cup,
_Escansias_; the chamberlain, Count _Cubiculario_; the chief groom,
Count _Estabulario_; then the major domos, counts of the patrimony, the
counters-in-chief, Count _Numerario_, the count of the viands, Count
_Silonario_; knight of the youths, Count of the _Espartarios_, captain
of the guard; Count of the _Sagrarios_, keeper of sacred things; Count
of the _Sargentarios_, keeper of the treasure. The grandees or _ricos
hombres_ were governors of the territories and kingdoms.
St Isidor has painted Recaredo as a model of all the Christian virtues,
which is decidedly excessive praise in the face of such accentuated
vices against the mild sublimity of that scarce practised creed as an
inflexible spirit of vengeance and cruelty, and a bigotry in his new
religion as hard and determined as that of his Arian fathers, once the
early lesson in adversity had been learnt and forgotten. However, in
spite of defects rather belonging to his barbarous times, few natures
being able to resist the forces of environment and general feeling, than
to the man himself perhaps, he remains unquestionably one of the wisest
and strongest of Gothic kings, and his personality is all the more
marked by contrast with that of his feeble son, Luiva II., who was
dethroned by Viterico, a senseless usurper, shortly afterwards
assassinated at table by his own servants and cast into the street,
where the infuriated populace seized the corpse and dragged it up and
down the hilly streets and lanes of Toledo, eventually flinging it into
a filthy hole as unfit for decent burial.
Gundmar's short reign furnished no reason to doubt his well-meaning
intentions. He quelled a rising among the Vasco Navarrese and the
Imperial troops, and convened a council at Toledo to decide in the
town's favour against the sacerdotal pretensions of Carthagena. But his
successor is a figure worth noting, and in his reign takes place the
first of those unfortunate outbreaks against the Jews, for which
dismantled and impoverished Spain still pays so heavy a price. Before
the Moors came, Toledo's source of prosperity and wealth sprang from her
Hebrew colony, and the anti-Semitic movement, started by Sisebuth, had
probably no other object than the barbarians' desire to appropriate
Jewish gold. Sisebuth himself is spoken of in history as the father of
the poor, and is extolled for his compassionate heart and his
liberality. His horror of suffering and blood was so great that he sent
his own doctors to tend the stricken enemy when he was compelled to go
to war, and paid out of his own purse to his soldiers the ransom of
their captives. Servitude and blood-shedding were equally abhorrent to
him. The annalist Frêdégaire tells of him, as an example of exquisite
sensibility in those rude times, which would be no less rare in our own,
that in the thick of battle with the Imperial army, seeing the Greek
soldiers fall in numbers under the savage blow of his men, he rushed
into their midst, shouting: "Woe to me whose reign should see the
flowing of so much human blood," and frantically drove away his soldiers
from the wounded Byzantines. The pity was such excellent sentiments were
not cultivated on behalf of the Jews. Having twice defeated the
Byzantine army, Cesario only procured a treaty of peace on condition the
Jews were expelled from Spain. And in 616, Sisebuth published his famous
edict against the children of Israel, offering them the harsh
alternative, within the year, of professing the Christian faith, and
accepting baptism, or being publicly flogged a hundred whip-strokes,
shaven and shorn, robbed of their goods, and expelled from the kingdom.
One hardly understands why the shaving and flogging should have been
ordered, since appropriation and expulsion ought to have sufficed. Even
the Fathers of the Church had the grace to protest against the needless
inhumanity of this edict, though the Toledan bishops in a council upheld
it. Yet history accepts him as a mild and upright judge, a magnificent
prince, a valiant and humane captain, the friend of the poor, the
protector of letters. He himself dabbled in literature, wrote in the
swollen and exaggerated Gothic manner, composed several earnest and
dogmatic letters in refutation of Arianism, which he addressed to the
King and Queen of Lombardy, severely reprimanded Bishop Eusebius for the
disorders of his existence, and commanded Bishop Caecilius to return to
his diocese, which he had forsaken for the monastery. Clearly a monarch
not to be trifled with even by the bishops, whom he kept in check, and
whose public and private life he insisted on regulating. He conquered
the Asturians and the Vascons, and overthrew the Byzantine power in
Spain, seizing most of the Imperial towns and weakening the Imperial
forces at Cadiz. At home he built the church of St Leocadia.
But of the growth of the town we learn little. Literature in those days
was more moral than descriptive, and the Gothic kings of Toledo, when
not fighting the Byzantines and Vascons, seem chiefly to have been
engaged in discovering elegant flowers of speech, and cultivating the
very finest obscurity of expression. Suinthila, looking from the seven
rocky hills of his martial town, could tell himself that the kings of
Toledo ruled from Cadiz to the Pyrenees, from Atlantic to Mediterranean
shores, while Chindasvinthe, in his semi-Roman palace, looked peacefully
across the vega and along those foliaged banks of the quiet Tagus that
had beguiled Pyrrhus and his mate from the East, and recreated himself
with the art of letters. St Eugenius and St Braulion of Zaragoza were
the honoured recipients of his royal epistles, in which he writes of "an
eloquence adorned with the most flowery words and girdled with all the
harmonies of fine language," and plunging further into unlucid
intricacies hymns an "eloquence suggesting a royal clemency, an
observation wherein shines the zeal displayed in the travail of literary
composition." When he led his troops to battle, it is to be hoped that
his military addresses to them revealed less fearfully the travail of
literary composition. Surely the harmonies of fine language so admired
by him were never more inappropriately "girdled" against the
encroachments of ordinary sense. He speaks of someone "who will not
succumb from a need of understanding" and "who is not meagre through
poverty of spirit." His successor, Recesvinthus, displayed the same
Gothic tendencies and rhymed in the highest obscurity, in proof of the
"fatness" of his wisdom, which verses he dedicated to the grateful
Fathers of the VIIth Council, who being Gothic, probably understood and
relished them. But Recesvinthus deserves the recognition of
bibliophiles, for he had a passion for collecting old manuscripts, and
was extremely particular about their authenticity and corrections. He
too persecuted the Jews, and his morals were doubtful.
The most famous archbishop of Toledo under Gothic rule was San
Ildephonso. His parents, Stephen and Lucy, were noble Goths of almost
royal blood, distantly related to the King Atanagildo. Ildephonso was
educated by his uncle, St Eugenius III. At an early age he developed a
passion for learning, and was sent to Seville to the care of the famous
Doctor St Isidor. It would be astonishing if breathing so much
sanctified air the young Ildephonso did not become himself a saint, or
the reverse. His saintly master grew so attached to his pupil that when
Ildephonso expressed a wish to return to his parents at Toledo, St
Isidor locked him up. After a considerable while he yielded to his
disciple's prayer, and allowed him to depart. The youth, after a short
stay at his father's house, left it for the monastery of Agalia outside
Toledo. Stephen flew into a violent rage upon the discovery, and
attacked the monastery with armed followers. The monks hid the lad,
while Stephen and his band searched the building from roof to cellars,
and departed swearing profusely. His mother was more reasonable, and
besought St Eugenius to intervene and obtain her son's permission to
follow his vocation. Shortly before his death, St Eladio consecrated him
and gave him holy orders (632). He was first abbot of the monastery of
St Cosmos and St Damian, and on the death of Adeodato, became abbot of
the monastery of Agalia where he had received orders. Inheriting from
his parents, he devoted the inheritance to the foundation of a convent
for nuns, and on his uncle's death, 659, he was raised to the vacant
archbishopric of Toledo. Heretics began to discuss the perpetual
virginity of Our Lady, and Ildephonso wrote his first notable book, _De
Virginitate perpetua Sanctae Mariae adversus tres infideles_, the three
infidels being Elvidio, Theudio, and Eladio, natives of Narbonne. The
saint's triumph in polemics was immediate, and the infidels were
pronounced as completely crushed. The whole court followed the King and
the Archbishop to the church of Saint Leocadia to give loud thanks.
Kneeling at the saint's tomb, suddenly a group of angels appeared
through clouds and sweet scents; the clouds fainting, the young martyr
was revealed in the midst of the group, and smiling graciously upon
Ildephonso, said, _Ildephonse per te vivit domina mea_. The astounded
archbishop, rapidly recovering his bewilderment, held out his hand to
grasp the saint's veil, and the King Recesvinthus, kneeling beside him,
passed him his knife, with which Ildephonso cut off a piece of the veil,
which, together with the knife, is now kept among the Cathedral
treasures. The mass of St Leocadia, composed by the archbishop, was then
solemnly sung, and this was the first inauguration of a feast since
adopted by the Church of Rome, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
Thanks from heaven did not rest with Mary's messenger, St Leocadia. Nine
days after entering the church to recite matins, the archbishop saw a
strange flame upon the wall. Approaching, he discovered the queen of
heaven seated on his own marble chair enveloped in heavenly radiance,
who thus addressed him: _Propera, serva dei charissime, in occursum, et
accipe munusculum de manu mea, quod de thesausus filii sevi attuli_. The
present she brought him from heaven was a splendid chasuble wrought by
angels, in which the Virgin with her own hands vested him, while the
celestial choir chanted around him. The vision faded in a faint smoke,
and only the perfumes and the vague echo of remote music remained, while
St Ildephonso lay prostrate in ecstasy, kissing the spot the Virgin's
feet had touched, _ubi steterum pedes ejus_. He was found in this
attitude by the clergy and multitudes, and his fame, owing to this
second miracle, spread far and wide, till Rome dispatched two legates to
inquire into the legend. Thus it was that the Pope and the King of Spain
came to be canons of the Cathedral of Toledo, which took precedence of
all others in the land. In a few weeks St Ildephonso returned the
Virgin's visit in heaven, and he was buried in all pomp beside the
patron of the city, St Leocadia.
But of all these Gothic sovereigns, the most important for Toledo was
Wamba, the only one now gloriously remembered. Wamba it was who built
the great walls, traces of which to-day remain. Most of the Gothic
inscriptions were in honour of Wamba, though these have nearly all
disappeared. His defaced statue it is that greets you welcome to his
ancient citadel and capital. One of these vanished inscriptions is
preserved in the _Chronique rimée des rois de Tolède_ by the anonymous
writers of Cordova.[4] It was traced on Wamba's famous walls: _Erexit
factore Deo rex inclitus urbem, Wamba suæ celebrem protendedens, gentis
honorem. Vos sancti domini, quorum hic præsentia fulget. Hunc urbem et
golebem solito salvate favore._
For the Toledans, Wamba remains a personage of fabulous virtue and
merit. We first meet him at the funeral of Recesvinthus, when by general
election he was proclaimed king. He was an old warrior, neither
ambitious nor over-confident, it would appear, and he humbly declined an
honour he did not feel fitted to accept. So frantic was the sense of
disappointment that a duke walked up to him angrily and threatened to
kill him on the spot if he persisted in his refusal, and confronted with
a crown and a formidable Toledan blade, the humblest sage that ever drew
breath would naturally choose the crown. Wamba bowed to spontaneous
choice, and made his triumphal entry into the capital, Sep. 20, 672,
nineteen days after his compulsory acceptance of the throne. It was no
easy seat, and all his prowess, his undoubted genius and his popularity
could not keep him thereon unmolested, though Bishop Quiricus had
anointed him amid universal rejoicings. Lope de Vega assumes that this
really remarkable man was of peasant origin, but later historians agree
that he was of good blood, a much more likely fact, as the barbarous
Goths were sticklers for aristocratic prestige, and the law kept very
distinct the _nobiles_ and the _vilidies_. However virtuous the man of
obscure origin might be, it is doubtful if a fierce Gothic duke would
have threatened to murder him if he declined so stupendous an honour as
the right of ruling that duke and his fellow-nobles.
The start of Wamba's brief but glorious reign was marked by treachery
and revolt. His general, of Greek origin, Count Paul, in conspiracy with
the Count of Nîmes and the Bishop of Maguelonne, rose against him in
Narbonese Gaul. Wamba was then fighting the eternal Vascon, the
hereditary enemy of the Kings of Toledo, but he left the Basque country
and marched into Gaul, capturing the Pyrenean fortresses, attacking
Narbonne by land and sea, and seizing Béziers, Agde, Maguelonne, and
then he fell upon Nîmes. Never were French prisoners treated with
greater courtesy and consideration. Not only did he free them but sent
them off with splendid gifts. For Count Paul alone was he adamantine. He
condemned the rebel to walk barefooted between two dukes on horseback,
who led him in leash by the hair of his Greek head through the Gothic
ranks at Nîmes. Then Wamba on horseback coldly surveyed the ignoble
procession, while poor Paul was forced to prostrate himself before his
outraged master. In public the King rebuked him, and then we are sorry
to record of so great a man, publicly kicked him and ordered his head to
be shaved. The shaving and the kick might fittingly have been suppressed
with dignity added to the picture of stern Wamba on horseback. To see
his enemy grovelling at his feet ought to have contented even a Goth.
But no. When Wamba made his triumphal entry into Toledo, the unfortunate
Paul and his accomplices walked behind--shaven, forlorn, barefooted,
robed in camel's hair, and instead of graceful, superfluous locks, Paul
wore a mock crown of laurel. He was not without a certain grim humour
King Wamba, you perceive, and one would like to have seen his Gothic
visage as his glance fell upon the laurel crown. Not benignant of a
surety, possibly sardonic.
But it is not in connection with Count Paul that Wamba's name reaches us
to-day and like that of the fatal Rodrigo, is permanently attached to
Toledo. Forgotten the long list of Gothic sovereigns, forgotten the
councils they presided over, the battles they lost and won, their
achievements, follies and virtues, their epistolary flowers of speech
and decrees. Only Wamba and Rodrigo remain, one a historic fact, the
other vaguely and unveraciously defined through legend and romance. As I
have said, coming up from the station, the traveller is greeted upon the
dusty curving road by the noseless statue of King Wamba, who built upon
the Roman remains a magnificent wall round the city, raised ramparts,
towers, and chapels, and for eight years was the untiring benefactor of
the city and the people, till treachery rewarded his splendid services
by deposition in the hour of illness and condemned him to claustral
reclusion.
In his days, the Bridge of Alcántara still existed with its marvellous
Roman arch, one of the most finished and graceful Roman monuments of
Spain. For the Goths had the virtue not to destroy any of the Roman
remains, though they were incapable of profiting by what they found.
They it was who, at Wamba's orders, built the walls and palaces of
Toledo, and gave
[Illustration: PUENTE DE ALCANTARA.]
the city its definite note of architecture, a note the Moors were
careful not to efface, all in adding their own ineffaceable stamp, for
the Moors were great artists and had the secret of utilising what they
influenced. If the Spanish Goths began by modelling their architecture
on the Roman remains in their capacity of imitators and not inventors,
the Moors, inventors and assimilators, forced the Goths to modify their
style by the famous mudejar order. Violence must be a rudimentary
instinct of humanity, since the milder and less florid mudejar remains a
single feature in Spanish architecture, while the rough Goths have the
secret of impressing their individuality on all the entire Peninsula,
and so with their flowers of speech, vapid, empty, and void of sincerity
which to this day have entered the language of the country, unaltered by
the march of centuries, ornate and unintelligent, untouched by modern
civilisation, of which the Spaniards take no heed. The ruins of this
dead Gothic art are best studied at Toledo. Here you have it purest, the
fourth century style with its coarse and pointed leafage, its laboured
workmanship, its ornamentation, symbols, and figurative caprices, then
so new and bold, and which are never repeated in the Arabic or Byzantine
architecture later.
Fragments of this art of Wamba's days may be seen in the ruined church
of San Genes, in the bath of the Cava, never a bath, where never the
legendary Florinda bathed, and in the wall of a house in the _calle
Lechuga_, as well as in the façade of the Bridge of Alcántara. In the
beginning of Gothic rule it was chiefly architecture that flourished,
but Wamba's immediate predecessors, we have seen, preferred literature
and libraries, cultivated poetry, the epistolary art, and such research
as the obscure times afforded, which they called science, and founded
colleges. Their costume was half Roman, since they borrowed what they
knew of civilisation from the Romans. They wore silk embroidered cloaks,
let their hair grow long, like their Merovingian brethren, to mark their
superiority to the short-cropped Celt-Iberians they had conquered; the
women wore costly habits and splendid jewels, and all the nobles drank
from golden cups and washed in silver basins. The value and beauty of
their goldsmiths' work are abundantly testified by the nine great votive
crowns in the Musée de Cluny, where the famous treasure of Guarrazar is
preserved. These magnificent gold crowns of the seventh century were
discovered near Toledo in 1858 by a French officer who owned the
property _La Fuente de Guarrazar_ where these historic crowns were
buried. They were probably buried at the time of Tarik's invasion, and
remained nearly eight centuries underground. The most important, as well
as the largest and most beautiful, is the crown which bears the
inscription in letters of gold cloisonné and incrusted, RECCESVINTHUS
REX OFFERET. To show the value of the workmanship of this crown, I
cannot do better than quote here in full its official description in the
catalogue of the Musée Cluny by M. du Sommerard: "King Recesvinthus'
crown is composed of a large and massive golden band. It opens with a
double hinge, and is richly framed by two borders of gold cloisonné, and
incrusted with red Carian stones, those which Anastasius calls _gemmis
alabandinsis_, and in relief has thirty Oriental sapphires of the
greatest beauty set in golden borders, mostly of considerable dimension.
Thirty-five pearls of a no less notable size alternate with the
sapphires on a golden ground incrusted with the same stones, and
twenty-four little gold chains, starting from the lower circle of the
crown, suspend large letters in gold cloisonné and incrusted, whose
disposition form the words:
RECCESVINTHUS REX OFFERET.
Each of these letters ends with a pendant of gold and fine pearls
holding a pear of rose sapphire. The king's crown is suspended by a
quadruple chain of beautiful workmanship which attaches it to a double
gem of massive gold enriched with twelve pendants in sapphire, and this
gem, whose branches are open, is surmounted by a capital in
rock-crystal, finely wrought; then comes a ball of the same material,
and then a golden stem which forms the starting point of the suspension.
The cross which occupies the centre of the crown and is attached to the
gem by a long golden chain, is not less remarkable for its elegance of
form and richness of material. It is in massive gold relieved by six
lovely sapphires and eight big fine pearls, each jewel is set in relief
in open claws, and behind is still the fibula that hooked it to the
royal mantle.
The diadem is of plain gold within, but the exterior, which the
sapphires and fine pearls set in relief ornament, has another particular
decoration, which consists in a set of palm leaves in open cutting whose
leaves are filled with blades of the same red material which looks like
cornelian stone at first sight, of which we have already spoken.
The sapphires which decorate the band, and whose setting is largely
treated, are, we have said, thirty, all of the finest water, and many of
them show traces of a natural crystallisation by facets; the two
principal ones, which are placed in the centre of each face, are not in
diameter less than thirty millimetres. The pearls are also of an
exceptional size, and only a few have been affected by time. The
suspension chains are composed each of five fine gems cut in open work,
and the stem that supports the whole is of massive gold.
The number of sapphires that ornament this crown, the cross and the gem
are not less than seventy, of which thirty are of matchless size, the
pearls the same. The pendants which terminate the letters of the diadem
are, as well, decorated with enamel enchased in golden borders.
So much to prove that the charge of luxury against the Toledan Goths is
not unfounded. A people so enamoured of gold and jewels and embroidered
silks as they at this time were, would naturally be disposed to forget
the rude lessons of war and camp. Wamba had improved their town and made
it a fair and comfortable place to dwell in, and the barbarians without
the gates were quieted now by frequent defeat. And so, the wise and
virtuous Wamba once deposed by trickery and smuggled off the throne in a
cataleptic fit, garbed in the monk's gown of renouncement, the period of
Gothic decadence set in. Its day of triumph and ordered rule had been a
brief if brilliant one, and it had by patient effort evolved its own
rude and unstable civilisation out of rough-shod conquest. From Ataulfo
and his horde of barbarians, pouring, famished and athirst, across the
Pyrenees, to lettered Recesvinthus and austere Wamba, who would make an
effective figure even in our own times, the range in humanity is long,
the dividing sea is wide and deep. But if swift had been the triumph,
swifter still and more inexplicable was the decline. A more unhappy and
reckless descent to oblivion history does not record. Towards the end of
the seventh century, the glory of Toledo had so sensibly diminished that
a haze lies upon its subsequent history to the lurid fame of the doomed
day of Guadalete. We hear dimly of deplorable vices, of a demoralised
clergy, of effaced and degraded sovereigns, of a people given up to
every shameful pleasure and wrapped in effeminacy and indolence.
The private story of King Egica is a curious and an unedifying one, told
at length by Lozana in his _Reyes Nuevos_ and by the Conde de Mora in
his History of Toledo. Egica fell violently in love with his niece, Doña
Luz, who, on her side, loved more passionately than wisely her other
uncle, Don Favila. Favila seems a disreputable enough fellow, since he
took the last advantage of his niece's passion, and left her to face the
most atrocious troubles that might have ceased by manly behaviour on his
part. It is one of those complicated and incomprehensible episodes in
history that leave us aghast. Favila is elsewhere supposed to have
murdered his brother by a blow on the head for the sake of that
brother's wife. At any-rate he pursued Doña Luz and, as Lozana naïvely
asserts, with her permission entered her bedroom one night, and there
kneeling before the statue of the Virgin (exquisite absence of all sense
of the ludicrous revealed even in modern Spanish plays where the same
sort of thing happens), they proclaim themselves man and wife with the
usual results. In a little while the watchful and suspicious king
perceives that his niece, Doña Luz, is _enceinte_. The lady understands
her own and the coming infant's danger, so she has an ark made, and
after a secret delivery, places the infant in it like another Moses,
with quantities of linen, jewellery and money, and her women float it
down the Tagus, where, by a miracle, it is found by her uncle, Grafeses,
who lives at Alcántara. Not knowing whose is the child, Grafeses takes
it home. At Toledo the king suspects what has happened, but can find out
nothing definite, so, still true to biblical tradition, he decides to
tackle the new-born infants. He sends for a list of all the children
born in and without Toledo during the past three months, with the name
of each father, hoping thus to discover an unfathered babe with which to
charge Doña Luz. The number of babies born during the three months in
the city of Toledo reached 10,428, and in the suburbs surpassed 25,000.
What a different story from that of to-day! One wonders where there was
room for the immense population of olden times. Alas for the vindictive
king! All the babies had authentic fathers and mothers, and there was no
reaching Doña Luz by this device. There remained another and less
primitive vengeance. He ordered one of his gentlemen, Melias, to attack
her publicly as "a lost woman." Because she refused to become _his_
mistress, and became somebody else's (his brother's), he decided she
should be burnt for impurity. Excellent logic of man! On Doña Luz's
first appearance at Court Melias charged her with impropriety, and the
king fiercely ordered her to reply to the accusation. "My Lord," said
Luz, with much dignity, "how would you have me reply to such a charge?
God knows, and you, my lord, see that I cannot give him the reply he
merits, since he is a cavalier and yet accuses me, a woman, of evil."
The king, base churl, not touched by this admirable reply, mockingly
assures her that he is uncertain whether to address her as dame or maid,
and defies her to find a defender, having previously forbidden his
courtiers to take up her cause. At all times the picture of a
disappointed lover vindictively pursuing the woman who has refused to
listen to him is particularly hideous, but never more than here, where
the insulted lady is so noble and patient and he such a ruffian. Without
a defender, he adds, she is destined to burn for her lack of chastity.
She asks for a delay, and this is surlily granted. Just as the fire is
being prepared for the unfortunate Doña Luz, Don Favila arrives from the
Asturias. It is not made clear to us why he did not remain and provoke a
duel with Melias at once, but the historians unctuously assure us that
he kissed his wife (in the eyes of God) wept over her, told her to hold
her soul in patience, and returned to the Asturias in search of money.
The delay must have been unendurably long, and one wonders at Egica's
unnatural command of temper, when even now, as I, alas! too well know,
it takes a long time, even with the aid of steam, to get from Toledo to
the Asturias. In hot haste, however, Don Favila returned to Toledo,
challenged Melias, and all the court assembled in the Vega beneath the
archbishop's palace, to watch the fight. Doña Luz remained in her
chamber, full of sorrow and fear for Favila. The king ordered the Duke
of Cabra and Count of Merida with three hundred cavaliers to guard the
Vega, and, under pain of death, prevent anyone from assisting the
combatants. His fierce desire, not even concealed, was that Favila
should be killed, and Doña Luz thus placed more utterly at his mercy.
The knights met with a terrible shock of steel, so that both were
unhorsed and nearly killed. This report reached Doña Luz and prostrated
her. She hurried out to see for herself; and Favila, recovered from his
faint, looked up and gave her a glance of reassurance and love. He was
only dizzy as was proved by his alert spring to his feet and quick rush
upon his lady's enemy, through whose slanderous mouth he thrust his
sword inflicting thus a death wound. He coolly drew out his sword, wiped
it, and advancing to the royal seat, he bowed before the king and queen,
and haughtily hoped that Doña Luz's reputation now was cleared. Not
satisfied, Egica sent another knight, Bristes, (what unutterable cads
those Gothic knights were!), to challenge the lady's innocence, and
Bristes went gaily forth on his base sovereign's behalf to meet Favila
to whom he shouted: "I will kill you and have Doña Luz burnt." Favila
wisely replied: "deeds not words weigh" and ran his sword through the
braggart's body. Much to his grief and disappointment Egica was forced
to admit the lady's vindication, but demanded her lover's sword, which
provoked a fresh onslaught. Grafeses stayed the clash of steel by coming
to court to learn the meaning of all these wild doings, and, on passing
through his niece's room, on his way to the queen's chamber, recognised
a handkerchief which resembled those folded round the infant of the ark
he had picked up on the banks of the Tagus at Alcantara. Questioning his
niece, he discovered the nature of her relations with Favila, and
instantly insisted on their marriage. The king was still bent on another
duel, and sent Longaris to fight Favila about the sword, when a hermit
comes to court and, in the name of heaven, stops the duel by revealing,
as a divine message from above, the secret loves of Doña Luz and Don
Favila. Both the cavaliers were wounded, and Doña Luz flung herself on
her knees before the king and begged for mercy for her lover. After long
hesitation, impelled by the hermit's command from heaven to accept the
inevitable, Egica gives in, signals the end of the third duel against
Doña Luz's happiness, and permits, gracelessly of course, after Favila's
recovery, his public marriage with the thrice unfortunate Doña Luz. He
and the queen were witnesses, and Grafeses, a kind of _deus ex machina_,
proclaimed the infante Childe Pelayo, the future hero and victor of
Covadonga. Egica's other feat was to persecute anew the Jews for an
imaginary conspiracy to convert Spain into a Hebrew kingdom. He
pronounced them slaves, took their children from them, and forebade them
to intermarry.
Two figures stand out in this prolonged and monotonous legend in
exaggerated, it may even be said, in false relief. Witiza and Rodrigo
are charged with the ruin of the Toledan kingdom. No less than four
archbishops, in no moderate language, have recorded the tale of Witiza's
iniquities, Sebastian of Salamanca, Isidor Pacense, Lucas of Tuy, and
Rodrigo of Toledo. None of these writers were contemporaries of Witiza,
and they wrote in days when research was nigh impossible, and when we
may doubt if a premium was put upon accuracy. How much even of our own
history is a matter of hearsay? and does there exist a man so fortressed
by virtue as to live without the range of slander if he be so
unfortunate as to excite enmity or jealousy; above all, if he tread on
the susceptible toes of prejudice? This is what Witiza precisely did.
And the prejudice he wounded was ecclesiastical, and ecclesiastical
rancour we know at all times has proved the bitterest man can provoke.
But we also find the notable figure of the Archbishop of Toledo, Julian,
a fluent and accomplished writer, and a saint. The anonymous chronicler
of Cordova tells us that his origin was Jewish, a fact suppressed by the
anti-semitical Spanish historians. He succeeded Quiricus and wrote the
history of Wamba's reign, all in proving himself a model pastor. His
accomplishments were varied. He was a historian, an orator, theologian,
polemist, poet, and musician. So much genius and sanctity in a Goth was
little short of an impertinence. The list of his writings is vast, but
only a few remain. Some are in Greek, most are in Latin, and their
matter is hardly of general interest. He wrote the _Apology of Real
Faith_ in reply to the heresies of Apollinarius, and sent it to Pope Leo
II. It reached Rome after the pope's death. The succeeding pope,
Benedict, replied to it, and two years later the reply reached the
Archbishop of Toledo. It provoked a learned treatise to prove that the
writer was in accord with Isidor of Seville, Fulgence, Ambrose,
Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria. Three ecclesiastics were dispatched
with the precious document, and it took them fourteen months to reach
Rome. Meanwhile three other popes had succeeded Benedict, and the fourth
called a council to consider the matter. All Spain hung on the decision;
the king was worried and alarmed, not knowing if he should regard his
erudite archbishop as a heretic or one of the faithful. At last the
messengers from Rome arrived, bringing praise and admiration from a pope
to whom the document had not been addressed, while between him and Leo,
the original disputer of Julian's orthodoxy, four popes placidly lay in
their tombs. Julian died three years after this triumph, having ruled
during ten brilliant years of primacy, 690, and was buried with St
Ildefonso in the church of St Leocadia.
This is the incongruous legend of Witiza. During his father's life-time,
he ruled at Tuy in Galicia, and proved himself pious, mild, just and
generous. His morals were unimpeachable, and while humane to all, he was
indulgent to his personal enemies, and freely granted pardon and favours
to malcontents. Such a man seems a fitter subject for canonisation than
San Hermengildo. Then this excellent monarch, in middle life, with
character and habits formed, comes down to Toledo, and without rhyme or
reason, we hear of him suddenly as a blind and bloody-minded scoundrel.
From sage and saint he turns into an historic ogre, not content with
libertinage in himself but constraining his subjects to follow his
example, and for sheer viciousness' sake, commanding an austere and
chaste clergy to marry. No villany, no crime seems too base and
preposterous for the archbishops to lay to his account. For the
benevolence of Tuy we have rank injustice, for the mildness envenomed
cruelty, and every anterior virtue is replaced by its pendant vice. Yet
Witiza's power at Tuy was no less than his power at Toledo. He had his
court and his throne in both towns, and there was no reason on earth why
he should act the wise man in the north, and the unreasoning reprobate
in the south. We suspect his first act of clemency on reaching Toledo,
in annulling Sisebuth's edict against the Jews, had much to do with the
joint vituperation of the archbishops and the subsequent historians. Not
only did he recall them, but, misplaced generosity in mediæval eyes, he
restored to the unfortunates their appropriated property and wealth, and
permitted them to live and earn unmolested in his kingdom.
Witiza's defence has been ingeniously undertaken by the Père Tailhan in
his interesting notes to the rhyming chronicler of Cordova, a
contemporary of Witiza. Here we meet the clement Prince of Tuy, whose
mildness, in spite of a natural impetuosity held in check, was his
greatest crime in the eyes of immediate posterity, unswervingly kind to
all who approached and addressed him, described by his enemies, the
Moors, as the most just and pious of all the Christian kings of his
time, and a man of blameless life. Count Fernando Gonzalez refers to him
as "a powerful king, of indomitable courage and of noble heart." The
anonymous writer of Cordova, who was in a position to judge, writes of
his reign as one of peace and prosperity and universal happiness. Was
the devil incarnate the invention of the four respectable archbishops?
Of course the dull and bigoted Mariana follows in their footsteps. Don
José Godoz Alcantara is of a different opinion:--"Witiza," he writes,
"initiated his reign by the most ample act of generosity. He restored to
the destitute their dignities and wealth, publicly burnt all proofs and
denunciations of conspiracy; wishing to cure a degenerate aristocracy of
the passion of power, and direct their spirit of sedition to the arts of
peace, he knocked down Wamba's famous walls, and according to the
picturesque phrase of the Archbishop Don Rodrigo, 'pretended to turn
arms into spades.'"[5] The only crime the traveller in Spain will find
it difficult to forgive, is this act of vandalism in knocking down
Wamba's walls. He could have exhorted his subjects to practise the arts
of peace, all in leaving these great walls untouched in their monumental
beauty. But this is what the reformers of humanity never will do. They
are never happy until they have sacrificed the picturesque on the altar
of utility. Witiza, we see, was in advance of his age. He was a "modern"
man, a creature of fads and fantasies. This was how he came by his
quaint notion of refining the deplorable morals of Toledo. He could
think of no other way of steming the tide of general sensuality but in
legalising polygamy. So fierce a race fallen into bad habits was hardly
to be sermonised with success. The legal state of polygamy he regarded,
along with Oriental sages, as preferable to indiscriminate and
wide-spread libertinage. It is still a nice question unsolved in
civilised Europe whether several legitimate wives or their unrecognised
substitutes constitute a higher or lower state of morality. Witiza was
only less hypocritical than civilised Europe, that is all. But to
pretend that bigamy is more scandalous than private disorder is absurd.
Witiza's notion of reform may have been primitive and instructive, but
it does not justify the legend of his own evil life. To begin with, if
he had been the degraded sensualist the archbishops and Mariana describe
him, he would not have troubled about reform at all, and he may have had
sound reason for requesting the clergy to marry since historians are
agreed that they had become utterly demoralised.
The same haze of legends blurs for us the figure of his unfortunate
successor, Roderick of the Chronicle. On one side we hear of him as
ascending the throne an octogenarian, on another as the impassioned
lover of the beautiful Florinda, the brilliant president of a brilliant
court; carried to battle in a litter, and riding thither on a legendary
steed, fulgent and valiant; disappearing from the field and
disgracefully hiding in a monastery; fighting like a hero and falling in
the fray. We are told that he was a coward by the pen that depicts him
valorously and recklessly approaching the unknown terrors of the
enchanted palace of Hercules, though Florinda's charming leg is not more
vaporous upon research than the vanished walls of this palace. It
matters little now whether the archbishop Rodrigo's ivory-carven car
drawn by mules carried his unhappy namesake to the fatal field of
Guadalete or the legendary steed flashing its way through mailed ranks.
However he comported himself, he lost his kingdom, and his resting place
is forever unknown.
But the tale of the great tournament with which he started his
disastrous reign, must be told at length as one of the most resplendent
pages of courtly history. Whatever may have been the end of his reign,
he certainly began it in the most sumptuous spirit of hospitality and
generosity yet recorded. Was ever such a tournament given before?
Princes and lords and their followers came in swarms from all parts of
Europe to high Toledo, upon her seven steep hills. Hearken only to the
names, and say if they do not make a page in themselves as delightful
as any of Froissart's. The lords of Gascony, Elmet de Bragas, with a
hundred cavaliers; Guillamme de Comenge, with a hundred and twenty; the
Duke of Viana, with four hundred cavaliers; the Count of the Marches,
with a hundred and fifty; the duke of Orleans, with three hundred
cavaliers; and four other Dukes of France, with four hundred. Then came
the King of Poland, with a luxurious train, and six hundred gentlemen of
Lombardy; two marquises, four captains, with twelve hundred cavaliers.
Rome sent three governors and five captains, with fifteen hundred
cavaliers. The Emperor of Constantinople, his brother, three counts, and
three hundred cavaliers came, as well as an English prince, with great
lords, and fifteen hundred cavaliers. From Turkey, Syria, and other
parts, nobles and princes to the number of five thousand came, without
counting their followers and servitors, and different parts of Spain
alone furnished an influx of fifty thousand cavaliers. What a poor
affair our modern exhibitions and sights, even the Queen's Jubilee, seem
after reading of such a brilliant and stupendous gathering of guests at
King Roderick's court of Toledo.
He was, as I have said, a King to visit, with nothing of Spanish
inhospitality about him. He ordered all the citizens to sleep without
the city walls in the ten thousand tents he had fixed in the wide Vega,
and give up their houses to his foreign guests. Be sure he paid them for
the sacrifice in princely style, for out of Eastern fable never was such
a prince as Don Rodrigo, the last of the Goths. All the expenses of the
foreigners, including their mounts and armour, were his, for they were
not permitted to use their own lances, swords, armour or horses. Never
were guests entertained with such prodigious splendour. He ordered
palaces to be built for them, and laid injunctions on builders,
furnishers and purveyors to spare neither expense nor luxury. The whole
Peninsula was scoured in search of armourers and iron-workers, and over
fifteen hundred master armourers with their apprentices and under-hands
were hastily gathered together in Toledo in more than a thousand[6]
improvised iron-shops, working for six busy months at shields and lances
and exquisitely wrought damascene armour for every lord and knight, the
guest of their king. Each guest on arriving received, as well as house
and board, his horse, full armour, shield and lance. The tourney opened
on a Sunday, and presented such a scene as imagination alone can depict.
We are not told the precise spot, but we may suppose the quaint
three-cornered, the ever irresistible Zocodover. Rasis el Moro records
each guest's formal reply when asked if he desired to fight? "For this
we have come from our lands; firstly, to serve and honour these feasts;
secondly, to see how they are carried out; thirdly, to prove your body,
your strength, and learn what you are worth in arms."
Hearing of these great feasts, the Duchess of Lorraine, persecuted by
her brother-in-law, Lembrot, came to Toledo to implore Rodrigo's
protection. Rodrigo received her with cordiality, and lodged her in the
royal palace, and as official defender charged Sacarus with her cause.
Lembrot was called to Toledo to meet the Duchess's knight, and came with
a great train. He, too, was generously entertained, and pending the
clash of steel which was to decide the quarrel between Lembrot and the
Duchess, the Queen gave a sarao, which was even a more brilliant and
gorgeous spectacle than the tourney. Fifty ladies danced with fifty of
the greatest lords, and never was such a constellation of European
titles joined in a single diversion. The ladies' names are not recorded,
but there were in the first dance the King of Poland, the French prince,
the Emperor of Constantinople, the son of the King of England (simply
called _el hijo del Rey de Inglaterra_), the Spanish infante, the Duke
of Viana, the Duke of Orleans, the Count of the Marshes, the Marquis of
Lombardy, and Count William of Saxony.
This enchanting moment preceded bloodshed, for on the next day the two
uncles of Lembrot were killed by Sacarus, thus proclaiming the innocence
of the Duchess to whom Lorraine was then restored, and, along with other
fallen knights, lay the King of Africa. The dead were buried with great
pomp at the expense of their splendid host, and thus ended a tournament
surely without equal as a spectacle in history. The chronicle of Don
Rodrigo devotes nearly a hundred pages to this picturesque event.
The most prominent episode in the life of the legendary Rodrigo is his
famous intrigue with Florinda. We are told that Count Julian, Governor
of Ceuta, sent his daughter to be brought up at Court, where she was in
a sense the King's ward. Nothing remains in history to support this
tradition, for it is now asserted it was never the Gothic habit to have
the daughters of absent noblemen brought up at court as the sovereign's
wards. Then we hear of the Cava's baths, where Rodrigo, from his palace
windows, overhanging the river outside the Puenta de San Martin, beheld
her bathing. Inspection proves these ruins to be the old foundation of a
bridge, nothing more. The story of the Cava dates from the fourteenth
century, when an Arabian writer, Aben-en-Noguairi, in a volume called
_El Limita de la prudencia en las reglas de la prudencia_, gives the
legend. The historian Gamero thus defines the word _Cava_ as applied to
Florinda in explanation of her condition of violated maiden. Caba
proceeds from Caat, an Arabian tribe that came to Spain in Wamba's
reign, descended from Heber of Jewish origin. When the Jews at the
seventeenth Council of Toledo, under Egica, were ordered to be
destituted and sold as slaves, while their children were to be taken
from them and forcibly brought up as Christians, the saying was that the
_Caba was violated_, that is, that this entire tribe, forced to become
Christian in preservation of its wealth and property, had prostituted
itself. From the current phrase, the historians applied the word to a
particular woman, and poetically named her Florinda. From Eve downward
all her daughters have had to share her fate in supporting all the blame
of human disasters. Neither war, defeat, nor blunder nor wreckage of
nations or of individuals is accepted by man as properly and adequately
explained, if some woman is not the man's or the nation's evil genius.
Unprompted by woman, man is a serene and prudent animal, and but for
Florinda, who never existed (though the historians gravely reproduce a
touching and eloquent letter of hers to her father recording in fine and
dignified phrases the story of her wrongs, and beseeching her father to
vindicate her outraged honour and punish the unworthy King), the last of
the Toledan sovereigns might have ended his days in his bed, and,
undesirable fate for Spain! the Moors might never have crossed the
narrow strait. As Gamero says: "Ultimately the story of Rodrigo's guilty
love for a lady of the palace was created." A lady's name once
introduced, it followed a fatal and romantic legend should be invented,
and what prettier than conversion of the broken bridge on the enchanting
marge of yellow Tagus into a syren's bath, with Rodrigo, the inflammable
warrior, fresh from his encounter with dethroned gods and their
emissaries in an enchanted palace, looking down on the maiden as she
disported in the water from the windows of his luxurious Gothic palace?
The legend once started, it is inevitable that the traitor should
follow, and hence the elusive and mysterious figure of Count Julian, who
advances into the picture on a mission of paternal vengeance, and
treacherously opens the gates of Spain to the predatory Berbers. The
Turks had entered Spain, and it needed some other explanation than
national pluck, enterprise and determination to account for their almost
unopposed approach towards Toledo; and what so likely an instrument of
misfortune as the mythical father of the fabulous Florinda? So history
was written, in all faith in those naïve days. Don Faustina de Bourbon
remarks that this fable was not heard of before the dominion of the
Asturian monarchs in southern Spain; not until the Cid took Valencia,
and Alonzo basely seized Toledo, the kingdom of his Moorish protector
and host. Such fables accord with the childish, superstitious yearning
and need to associate the land's misfortunes with the personal
iniquities of those who rule it. Roderick may have been no saint, and
small blame to him in those grossly immoral times, but we need not
attach to his shoulders the packet of national sins and disorders.
Because the abuses among the clergy and the nobles had reached a
repulsive depth of infamy, and public morals were in a lamentable state,
is no reason to insist on his violation of Florinda, or refer as the
Viscount Palazuelos does in his modern guide-book of Toledo, in an
excess of unromantic austerity and disdain "to the guilty loves of
Rodrigo and Count Julian's daughter."[7] There is no proof whatever
that Rodrigo was the wretched sensualist the historians delight to
paint. His crime was (and that the Gothic race shares with him) that he
unworthily lost a large kingdom to a small invading force, and his shame
lies in his inexplicable defeat.
But for traitor there was never any need to invent Count Julian (whom
the Père Tailhan insists was a certain Roman Urban who accompanied
Tarik, and whose name was distorted into Julian), nor Florinda.
Treachery existed nearer home in Witiza's family. Rodrigo had deposed
Witiza, and the usurper was repaid by the treachery of Witiza's sons and
his brother, Oppas, foolishly thinking the Berber raid would only prove
a transient panic which would permit them to dispossess the usurper, and
claim Witiza's throne. Instead of a mere raid, the invasion turned out
one of the most astonishing conquests of history.
Rodrigo's army was immense; Tarik's only numbered twelve thousand men.
The battle took place on the banks of the Wadi-becca; it lasted a week,
beginning on July 19th, 711. Two wings of the Spanish army were
commanded by Witiza's worthless sons, chiefly manned by malcontents and
their serfs. So when the commanders ordered their men to give their
backs to the enemy, there was no difficulty on the question of
obedience. The centre, commanded by Rodrigo, stood its ground valiantly,
but unassisted, at length gave way, and the Turks literally hacked the
Christians to pieces. It was an appalling massacre. Rodrigo's fate, as I
have said, remains unknown. Did he fly, was he killed? Did he sink into
the marsh where his embroidered saddle and silken cloak were found? We
hear on one side that Roderick disappeared mysteriously from the
battle-field; on the other, that he fought valiantly and when forced to
retreat, did so, fighting his way step by step, sword in hand, and fell
with his face to the enemy as befits a soldier. He was supposed in this
version to have been buried at Visein, and 160 years later, Alfonso the
Great, in reconstituting that fallen town, discovered the dust of the
defeated monarch with the inscription on a stone--_Hic requiescit
Rudericus (ultimus) rex Gothorem_.[8]
It is idle now to ask what is true in all these conflicting accounts, or
stop to ask which statement is the right one, that Rodrigo was a gallant
prince in the prime of life when he began his short reign of one year,
or, as an Arabian historian has asserted, a sick and feeble old man of
over eighty.
His defection or disappearance completed the catastrophy, the most fatal
and final in the record of any land, and Tarik profited by the
circumstance. Both malcontents and Jews joyfully received him and threw
wide open the gates of Toledo to his advance. Hither he came with fresh
laurels gathered at Ecija, surrounded with the flower of his army, while
he sent around detachments against Cordova, Archidme, and Elvira.
To the Jews he owed his easy conquest of Toledo, and the Goths alone
were to blame for this. It was only natural the unhappy and persecuted
Jews should welcome any foreign invasion that helped to deliver them
and sweep their brutal oppressors into obscurity. Witiza's clemency was
too isolated a fact in Gothic rule to be remembered by them or to
inspire the faintest hope for continued tolerance. The next monarch
might even prove worse than Sisebuth or Egica. It was safer to rely on
the Moor, who would probably remember their good-will, and would hardly
maintain a prejudice against them in favour of the Christians. As for
the nobles and prelates, they lost their heads and flew northward. The
city was speedily emptied of all the Goths who had the means of flight.
Most of the patricians emigrated to Galicià; the archbishop retreated to
Rome, and in payment for their treachery, Witiza's sons claimed land to
the extent of three thousand farms, which Tarik granted them. Oppas,
Witiza's brother, was named governor of Toledo, until Tarik's splendid
victory brought over from Africa Musa, infuriated and jealous. Instead
of thanking his lieutenant, he acknowledged his services by publicly
horsewhipping him when the dismayed victor came submissively to meet him
at the city gates.
CHAPTER III
_Toledo under Moslem Rule_
"It must not be supposed that the Moors," writes Mr Lane Poole in his
"History of the Moors in Spain," "like the barbarian hordes who preceded
them, brought desolation and tyranny in their wake. On the contrary,
never was Andalusia so mildly, justly, and wisely governed as by her
Arab conquerors.... All the administrative talent of Spain had not
sufficed to make the Gothic domination tolerable to its subjects. Under
the Moors, on the other hand, the people were on the whole contented--as
contented as any people can be whose rulers are of a separate race and
creed--and far better pleased than they had been when their sovereigns
belonged to the same religion as that which they nominally professed....
What they wanted was not a creed, but the power to live their lives in
peace and prosperity. This their Moorish masters gave them.... The
Christians were satisfied with the new regime, and openly admitted that
they preferred the rule of the Moors to that of the Franks or the
Goths."
Toledo alone, true to its character of rebel, met the Moors in an
attitude of violent resistance. The Jews had opened her gates to the
invaders, but the exact date of the fall of Toledo into Saracen hands is
unknown. Historians differ, but keep within the dates 712 and 719. The
town capitulated with considerable advantages. She maintained her right
to hold arms and horses, and all the citizens who remained were secured
perfect freedom, but those who left the city forfeited their property
and rights. The citizens were inviolable in their houses, their
orchards, and farms, and the annual tribute levied by the Moors was a
very moderate one. The free exercise of religion was permitted, and the
Christians were allowed seven churches by the State, Santa Justa, Santa
Eulalia, San Sebastian, San Marcos, San Lucas, San Torcuato, and Santa
Maria de Alficin. But they were not allowed to build others without
permission, nor were processions or public ceremonies allowed. They were
left to the observance of their own laws and customs, subject to
sentence at the hands of their own judges, but were exempted of
Christian punishment if they chose to accept their conqueror's creed.
Tarik, entering Toledo, found it almost empty, but for the Jewish
colony. Most of the inhabitants had taken refuge among the steep and
rocky mountain-passes outside the city. Only a few noble families had
decided to remain and make the best of Moslem rule. In the royal palace
Tarik seized twenty-five golden and jewelled crowns, and amongst the
vast Gothic treasure, the psalms of David, written upon gold leaf in
water made of dissolved rubies, and Solomon's emerald table wrought in
burnished silver and gold, which the Arabian chronicler describes as
"the most beautiful thing ever seen, with its golden vases and plates of
a precious green stone, and three collars of rubies, emerald, and
pearls." This sumptuous table is said to have been one of the causes of
quarrel between Tarik and Mûsa, the latter holding his brilliant
lieutenant as responsible for the missing golden leg. Whither have this
emerald table and the psalms of David written in dissolved rubies on
gold leaf been spirited? We have the crowns of the Gothic kings still;
why not the table of Solomon fashioned of material just as enduring?
The first quaint episode after the conquest of Toledo is the marriage of
Mûsa's son, Belacin, with King Roderick's widow, Blanche. Mûsa decided
upon the marriage in his high-handed way, and Doña Blanche bitterly
complained in Belacin's presence of the indignity offered her in this
incongruous union. "Good mistress," said Belacin, in protesting
affability, "do not fret, for by the law we are permitted to have seven
wives. If it can be settled, I would have you for my wife as each one of
these; and all the things that your law commands a man to do to his
wife, will I do unto you. And for this, do not lift your voice in
complaint, for it will be to my honour that all who wish me well shall
serve you well if you will consent to be the lady of all my wives."[9]
The poor wives, we may imagine, had the worst of the bargain. Blanche
naturally could not forget that she had been sole Christian queen, the
president of the greatest tourney of the age, and her first exaction was
that the Moorish Court should kneel to her. Belacin yielded to her every
wish, and bade his nobles cheerfully humble themselves. He went so far
as to order the palace gates to be closed to those who refused to
prostrate themselves before Doña Blanche as she sat in foolish state
awaiting their obedience in a lofty chamber, with a crown on her head
and a royal mantle about her. How wild and strange this must have seemed
to the Moorish wives in their latticed harem, fugitive and hidden
articles of pleasure, and what a preposterous innovation in the eyes of
the astounded courtiers! This haughty attitude on the part of a captive
Christian raised to the Moorish throne by the good nature and affection
of a Moor, who might have condemned her to servitude and indignity, so
angered the Moors that Isyed, the ruler's son-in-law, spread the report
that Belacin had become a Christian, and then murdered the unfortunate
as he knelt to pray in the Mezquita.
For a time, Toledo was a secondary town under the Saracens, infatuated
as they were with Seville and Cordova. The latter town was chosen as the
Khalif's residence and thus became one of the wonders of the world.
Meanwhile Toledo stormily sulked. Abandoned to herself, she grew to be a
thorn in the Moslem side. No sooner conquered by one chief, she rose up
furiously against the next, and in 763, we find Cassim, her Moorish
ruler, so far impregnated with Toledan principles of independence, that
he declined to recognise the sovereignty of Cordova. So that Abderraman,
when he came to rule over the Spanish Arabs, found himself confronted
with the necessity of conquering Toledo anew, and was compelled to send
a fresh army to besiege it. The old city was by this wearied of Cassim's
tyranny and gladly capitulated to the more distant sovereign in 766.
When Abderraman came to visit the town in person, he left behind him as
wali, his son, Suleiman. But his conquest was an unstable one. Toledo's
history at this time is a monotonous tale of broken peace and futile
revolt. She yielded to one Moor only to rise up against the next. An
Arabian chronicler has asserted that no subjects were ever so mutinous
and unruly. But the Moors respected her, not only for her formidable
strength, for her ramparts and fortresses, but also for her renown and
prestige, for the learning of her prelates and the kingly authority of
her great archbishops. And so the old Gothic capital remained for them
"the royal city." The popular poet, Gharbib, kept the new Sultan in awe
and terror, and was careful to maintain the revolutionary fires blazing
in constant menace. As long as he lived, the Sultan did not dare to
complain of the haughty and intolerable Toledans, but when he died Hakam
summoned up courage to address them as their sovereign, and try a
policy of conciliation. He chose for their governor a renegade
Christian, one Amron of Huesca, the worst choice he could have made.
"You alone can help me to punish these rebels who refuse to acknowledge
a Moor for their chief, but who will perhaps submit to one of their own
race," he said to Amron, who was officially recognised as governor of
Toledo in 807. The Sultan wrote to the Toledans: "By a condescension
which proves our extreme solicitude for your interests, instead of
sending you one of our own subjects, we have chosen one of your
compatriots." The Toledans were speedily to receive immortal proof of
the special delicacy of this attention. There exists no more shameless
and inconceivable barbarity in the blood-stained pages of history than
this same Amron's horrible method of cowing a haughty people. He began
with the arts of beguilement, and left nothing undone to win the
confidence and affection of the Toledan nobles. He feigned with them an
implacable hatred of the Sultan and their conquerors, mysteriously
asserted his faith in the national cause--that is Toledo's
independence--and by this was able, without exciting suspicion, to
quarter soldiers in private houses. Without difficulty he obtained the
town's consent to build a strong castle at its extremity as a barrack
for his troops, and then, to show their confidence in him, the nobles
suggested the very thing he wanted, that the castle should be raised in
the middle of the town. When the fortress was built, Amron installed
himself therein with a strong guard, and then sent word to the Sultan,
whose heart by this was well hardened against the sullen and untameable
Toledans. Troops were speedily gathered from other towns, and set
marching upon the royal city. The young prince, Abderraman, commanded
one wing, and the others were commanded by three vizirs. Amron then
persuaded the unfortunate nobles to accompany him to meet the Sultan's
son outside the walls. The nobles plumed themselves on their power and
value, and gaily set out to visit the young prince, who received them
splendidly. After a private consultation with the vizirs, Amron came
back to the nobles, whom he found enchanted with the prince's kindness
and courtesy, and proposed that they should invite Abderraman to honour
the town with his visit. The Toledans applauded the proposition to
entertain a prince with whom they were so satisfied in every way. They
had a governor of their own nationality, they enjoyed perfect freedom,
and Abderraman had personally won them. In their innocence they besought
an honour now desired. Abderraman acted the part of coy visitor,
delicately apprehensive of giving trouble, but finally yielded to the
persuasion of such genial hospitality. He came to the fortified castle,
and ordered a great feast to which all the nobles and wealthy citizens
of Toledo were invited. The guests came in crowds, but they were only
permitted to enter the castle one by one. The order was that they should
enter by one gate, and the carriages should round the fortress to await
them at another. In the courtyard there was a ditch, and beside it stood
the executioners, hatchet in hand, and as each guest advanced, he was
felled and rolled into the ditch. The butchery lasted several hours, and
the fatal day is ever since known in Spanish history as the _Day of the
Foss_. In Toledan legends it has given rise to the proverb _una noche
Toledana_, which is lightly enough now applied to any contrariety that
produces sleeplessness, headache, or heartache. But only conceive the
horrible picture in all its brutal nakedness! The gaily-apparelled
guest, scented, jewelled, smiling, alights from his carriage, looking
forward to pleasure in varied form; brilliant lights, delicate viands,
exquisite wines, lute, song, flowers, sparkling speech. Then the quick
entrance into a dim courtyard, a step forward, perhaps in the act of
unclasping a silken mantle; the soundless movement of a fatal arm in the
shadowy silence, the invisible executioner's form probably hidden by a
profusion of tall plants or an Oriental bush, and body after body, head
upon head, roll into the common grave till the ditch is filled with nigh
upon five thousand corpses. Not even the famous St Bartholomew can
compete with this in horror, in gruesomeness. Compared with it, that
night of Paris was honourable and open warfare. It is the stillness of
the hour, the quickness of doing, the unflinching and awful personality
of the executioners, who so remorselessly struck down life as ever it
advanced with smiling lip and brightly-glancing eye, that lend this
scene its matchless colours of cruelty and savagery. Beside it, few
shocking hours in history will seem deprived of all sense of mitigation
and humanity.
The place of this monstrous episode is said to have been the famous
_Taller del Mora_, now a degraded ruin. Suspicion was first aroused by a
doctor, who had strolled out to watch the arrival of all these
distinguished citizens come to the feast of the Moorish prince. Having
time to kill, he decided to stay and see the departure, but as the hours
went by, and no one came out by the door so many had gone in by, while
report carried him the fact that the other door had not yet opened for
the exit of a single guest, he began to express his fears to the
loungers gathered round him to watch for the end of the entertainment.
Alarm was quickly spread. Who, after all, were these brilliant strangers
but the enemy armed, unscrupulous and powerful? Apprehension was
strained to its utmost tension, when the doctor shouted, as all began to
perceive the rising of a heavy vapour: "Unfortunates, I swear to you
that that vapour is never the smoke of a feast, but that of the blood of
our butchered brethren."
Never was a town so completely stupefied by a moment's blow before. Not
a single voice was lifted in protest. Toledo, on ordinary occasions, so
resentful, proud, rebellious, was simply prostrate from emotion and
horror; and in her stunned and terrorised condition the Turk might have
done what he willed with her. She was bereft of tears, bereft of
reproaches, of will and force. The remaining citizens dared hardly speak
of the dreadful occurrence in whispers among themselves, so heavily
gripped were they by the nightmare of reality. Now, whether the young
prince or the sultan was aware of the Wali's atrocious design remains
for ever a mystery. How far were they accomplices? To what extent did
they reprove the action? We are told that Amron took Abderraman into his
confidence before the feast, and protested loudly in upholding his
design as a justifiable measure, since the Toledans were such a harsh
and unmanageable race, and its nobles so insupportable and dangerous,
and that the young prince demurred to such ruthlessness of method, and
begged the Wali to be prudent and not bring unnecessary odium upon
Moslem rule. This precisely would seem the deep design of Amron's double
treason. Did he wish to accumulate fresh odium on his adopted race, or
pay off old scores by one fell blow on his forsaken people? Anyhow, we
are glad to learn that he was deservedly punished. After a while the
town woke up from its stunned resignation. The Toledans shook themselves
out of their trance of horror; met once more in the Zocodover, talked
fiercely together, and remembered that they too could be ferocious with
less provocation than this last outrage, and from the Zocodover the
murmur broke out and travelled along the outlying streets and remote
little markets, and down by the river among the armourers and
silversmiths. The people rose up, and swooped willingly down upon Amron,
and burnt him and his castle. And surely never was vengeance more holy.
But in spite of siege, insurrection, and temporary surrender, which were
the constant conditions of public life in Toledo, the town increased,
and Moorish influence began to show itself triumphantly in architecture
and in horticulture. Gardens spread along the Vega, and Arabian palaces
brightened the sombre landscape. Both Jews and Christians were becoming
enormously rich, and the Wali, Aben Magot ben Ibraham, decided to raise
the tribute of the Christian merchants and persons of means. This was
quite enough to quicken the slumbering fires of revolt, and a young
Toledan, Hacam, nicknamed _El Durrete_, striker of blows, resolved to
expend his great wealth in assisting to fan the flames. Like every other
Toledan, he thirsted for an excuse for sedition, and called his
fellow-conspirators together in the market-place. There it needed
nothing but a judicious use of strong language to induce the people to
fling stones and shower blows on the unfortunate palace guard, so handy
to the Zocodover, and from blows was only a step to the massacre of all
the officials and seizure of the Alcazar. Reprisals naturally followed,
and Hacam, routed for the moment, retired to devise a fresh attack. He
sent abroad the report that he had gone off to make a raid upon
Catalonia, and kept his spies on the look-out for the first signs of
relaxed supervision. The instant he found the town-gates unlocked, he
poured his men silently into the city at night, and recovered Toledo
without a blow, and set fire to the greater part of the upper town. In
834 the sultan sent Omaiga to besiege the seditious town, but the
Toledans repulsed him triumphantly, and Hacam was practically the
uncrowned king of the city. Skirmishes continued with success, now on
one side, now on the other, but always leaving Toledo unsubdued.
Maisara, a renegade Spaniard in command of Moslem troops, routed the
Toledans outside the walls, and died shortly after his victory, of
remorse and shame, when the soldiers, according to a hateful custom,
presented him with the heads of the slain.
In 873 discord broke out anew between the renegades and the Christians.
A Toledan chief, Ibn Mohâdjir, offered his services to the commander of
Calatrava, and Walid, the sultan's brother, was charged to direct the
siege, which lasted a year. An envoy of Walid stole secretly into the
town, and discovered the famished and weakened state of the inhabitants,
urged capitulation, which advice was rejected. But the envoy's report of
the people's misery induced Walid to press on a vigorous assault, and
once more was Toledo tamed and taken, and Amron's fatal castle rebuilt.
Later fresh troubles hailed from Cordova, whither came Eulogius burning
for martyrdom, and exciting the Christians to exasperate the Moslems
into persecution. We know that left alone the Spanish Arabs were not in
the least given to religious persecution. The Christians were free to
practice their religion, and in Toledo lived tranquilly under Mozarabe
law. Only the condemned Christian might always appeal from the Mozarabe
tribunal to the Moslem Judge, who could grant him immunity. This was no
very great hardship, for in general mediæval law made it too easy to
kill and too difficult to reprieve. No masters have ever been more
tolerant than the Moors, and it needed all the blind and unreasoning
fanaticism of Eulogius to discover persecution and a means of forcing
martyrdom. The surest method naturally was to revile the False Prophet
in public, and insult every instinct and prejudice of the conquerors.
This was to prove oneself a saint in those far-off days, while now we
should pronounce a distinctly different opinion on such proceedings. So
Eulogius, with his lamentable tales, fresh from his romantic parting
with the martyred Flora, fired the Toledans with indignation, and again
they took up arms under Sindola, arrested their Moorish governors, and
sent word to the Sultan at Cordova that his life would answer for that
of their fellow-Christians. They declared war, took Calatrava, which the
Sultan retook in 757, filed through the Sierra Morena, and defeated the
Moors at Andujar. Mohammed assembled his troops and marched against
Toledo in June 854, when Sindola turned to Ordoño, king of Leon, for
help. The Christian king sent a large army to Toledo under Gaton, Count
Bierzo. The Moors, by a false assault and retreat, drew Gaton and the
Toledan troops into an ambush, where girdled by Moslem forces, they were
massacred to a single man. Over 8000 Christian heads were stuck on the
walls of different towns, and for a time was Toledo again cowed. But she
took her revenge in electing as archbishop, on Wistremir's death, the
Sultan's impassioned enemy, Eulogius, and this time to punish the rebels
the Sultan resorted to a stratagem worthy of Amron of the Foss renown.
He began to undermine their bridge while his own troops occupied it, and
before the operation was completed, he withdrew his men, thus inveigling
after them the rash Toledans. The bridge split, and the unfortunate
rebels were drowned in a heap in the deep and sullen Tagus. An Arabian
poet triumphantly sings the infamy: "The Eternal could not allow a
bridge to exist built for the squadrons of miscreants. Deprived of her
citizens, Toledo is mournful and desolate as a grave."
But a people that could shake off the nightmare stun of the day of the
Foss could rise above this blow. Toledo had resisted for twenty years,
and she was not yet conquered. Leon was at her back, and its king was
her proclaimed knight. In 873 she forced from the Sultan a treaty
acknowledging her as an independent Republic under annual tribute, and
concluded an alliance with the famous Beni Casi of Aragon, a great
Visigoth family converted to Islamism, who sent Lope, the chief's son,
to Toledo as consul.
Then came to the throne of Cordova the great Khalif, Abd-ar-Rahman III.,
and Toledo was to discover that here was a very different enemy from the
incapable generals that had hitherto striven in vain to subdue her. Here
was a mighty commander who was not to be daunted by her frowns and her
wild spirit, and whose patience and dogged determination she was to find
the match of her own. Genius alone could quell her, and genius came in
the handsome and valiant young monarch who would win her or die. First
he sent a royal order, commanding her to surrender to him her rights as
a free and independent Republic, and humbly acknowledge him as liege
lord. This Toledo roughly and proudly declined to do. Her reply was
couched in terms of evasive menace, for eighty-four years of freedom,
under the protection of the Beni Casi of Aragon and the King of Leon,
had taught her to regard herself as an enemy to be duly reckoned with.
Then the Sultan sent his general vizier, Said-ibn-Moudhir in May 930 to
open the siege, and in June he joined him with the flower of his army,
and encamped on the banks of Algodor near the Castle of Mora. Here he
forced the commander to evacuate, and placed his own garrison in the
fortress before advancing on Toledo. He began by camping in the cemetery
and burning the outlying villages, and then, in order to show the
Toledans the kind of man they had to deal with, he proceeded to build a
town on the opposite bank of the Tagus, exactly fronting the royal city,
on a mountain side as high as hers. Here he and his troops dwelt for
eight years, persistent and unswerving, calling the town he built
"Victory" in anticipation of the inevitable result. A siege of eight
years! what a tale of magnificent determination and stupendous force of
will and endurance on both sides. Which to praise most, wonder most at,
the Toledans or Abd-ar-Rahman? What a town, what a Sultan! With such a
watchful power outside the walls, the marvel is that famine so long
delayed its fatal presence; but it came at last, and stalked the gaunt
dim streets and humbled the city of the Goths as no other force or
persuasion could have done, and after years of accumulated sufferings
and privations, bereft of pride and strength and dignity, she yielded
her haggard front to the Sultan's swift assault, as soon as he knew her
power undermined, her patience at bay, and by nightfall the heads of her
insurgent chiefs were grinning lividly over the Puerta de Visagra.
After the great Khalif's death, the town recovered a partial
independence, and remained, until the Christian Conquest, a kingdom
apart under the rule of tolerated Arabian princes, independent of
Cordova. Successive feeble efforts to win her prove ever unavailing, and
she continues to glower above the river in unquiet and mutinous temper,
while the princes make believe to rule and do but obey, proud but
fearful of so uneasy a charge. Her rulers during the unsatisfactory
eleventh century were: Yaîch-ibn-Mohammed-ibn Yaîch, till 1036; Ismail
Dhafir, till 1038; Abou-I-Hassan Yah[^y]r Mamon, till 1075; and Yah[^y]a
ibn Ismaïl ibn Yah[^y]a Câdir, till the conquest.
The most picturesque episode is that which leads to the downfall of the
demoralised Moslems. Alphonso of Leon, escaping from the monastery of
Sagahun, fled to Toledo and besought the hospitality and protection of
the Moorish King Almamon. The generous and courteous Moor gave him
considerably more than shelter; affection and all the outward show of
his rank. Persecuted by a Christian brother, he was nobly befriended by
a loyal enemy, whose generosity he ill repaid by treachery and
ingratitude. Almamon gave him the Castle of Brihuega, and constituted
him the chief of the Mozarabes, that is the Christians of Toledo under
Moorish rule. Furthermore, he bestowed on him farms and orchards outside
the town on the bank of the Tagus, and a residence within the walls near
his own Alcazar. At the Moorish court of Tolaitola, as the Arabs called
Toledo, the proscribed prince was granted all the honours of his rank.
Alcocer tells us that in return Alphonso swore to be loyal, not to leave
Toledo without permission, and to fight all men of the world for the
Moorish king. Almamon, on his side, swore to treat Alfonso well and
faithfully; to pay him and all his people. Alcocer, with quaint
garrulity, describes the king's fondness for hunting, and his delight in
fresh green places and luxuriant foliage, and his great sadness in
looking across from Brihuega to Toledo, and contemplating the
possibility of such a strong and beautiful town falling once more into
the hands of the Christians. The story runs that one day Almamon visited
his guest at Brihuega, and in the gardens the courtiers began to
discuss the marvels and attractions of Tolaitola, "that pearl placed in
the middle of the necklace, that highest tower of the empire."[10] From
this the talk fell upon the probabilities of its being attacked, and at
this point Alphonso, lounging beneath a tree, feigned sleep. The Moorish
prince described at length the only way of taking the town, and his plan
of siege was well remembered by his treacherous guest. The courtiers
glancing anxiously at the sleeping prince asked themselves if his sleep
were real, and to try him began to pierce one of his hands with shot.
Still unconvinced, they begged the king to order him to be killed, but,
says Alcocer naively: "Our lord kept him for his greater good, and would
not hear of this." When Sancho was murdered by Bellido Dolphos at the
foot of the walls of Zamora, Alphonso left this friendly court with the
blessings of its sovereign, who offered him money, arms, and horses, and
escorted him part of the way as far as Monuela, separating with embraces
and vows of eternal friendship on both sides. Both swore never under any
circumstances to war on opposite sides, but each to assist the other in
all difficulties with hostile powers. Alfonso returned to Toledo, and
sent messengers to invite his former host to dinner. The king came, and
found himself surrounded by armed men. Demanding the reason of such a
strange reception, Alfonso replied, "When you held me in your power you
made me swear to assist you against all men, and be your loyal friend."
The Moorish king assented, whereupon Alfonso sent for the gospels, and
swore upon them again, with Almanon in his power, never to fight against
him _or his son_, and to assist him against all the world. Alfonso's
word, it will be seen, was strangely flexible. This spontaneous and
solemn promise to a friend and ally could, with honour, be broken, while
elsewhere his word, compromised by wife and friend, demanded their
instant death by fire. Shortly after Almamon died, and Toledo returned
to its normal condition of disquiet. Flying kings, invading powers,
rivalries and skirmishes, overtures between Moor and Moor, and between
Moor and Christian, all terminated by Alphonso's deliberate baseness in
laying siege to the town ruled incapably by the incapable son, Yahya, of
his late friend and guest, who should have been sacred to him. He
followed the plan of siege so unguardedly suggested by Almanon in the
gardens of Brihuega, and took the town on the 20th May 1085. Yahya and
his court left Toledo, their hardly won and deeply loved Tolaitola, with
their treasure, and went towards Cuenca, mournful and silent, eaten by
regrets and humiliation.
So Toledo, after three and a half centuries of roughly and persistently
disputed Moslem sovereignty, returned to Christian rule. True, she was
always less of a Moorish centre than Cordova, Sevilla, Valencia and
Granada, and glowed less than these in the bloom of its brilliant
civilisation. Her temper was too obstinate and harsh for such flowery
development. But she had so far profited as to gather charm to her
austere beauty. The aspect of her walls had suffered modification and
improvement, and the Moors had built handsome bridges, which alas! have
since disappeared, both the bridge near Santa Leocadia, and that across
the old Roman waterway. In Dozy, a quotation from the Arabian chronicle,
Abou-l-Hasan, tells us how "Alphonso, the tyrant of the Galicians, that
infidel people (that God may cut it in pieces!), seized the town of
Toledo, that pearl of the necklace, that highest tower of the Empire in
this peninsula." He describes Toledo as "a softbed" for Alphonso, and
the people "henceforth resembling docile camels." For docility the
people were not more remarkable than before, and as for the softness of
Toledo as a royal bed, its quality of ease and security never wavered,
whoever wore the crown and wielded the sceptre. Alphonso residing "up
among her high walls," had his own troubles to face, just as had Cadir,
Yahya ibn-Dzin, who gave her up to him. "May God renew her past
splendour," cries the Arabian chronicler, "and write her name again on
the register of Mussulman towns!"
The weak and unfortunate Yahya accepted Valencia in exchange, which he
was not destined long to keep, thanks to that magnificent hero, el mio
Cid, the Campeador.
CHAPTER IV
_The Last Period of Toledo's Story_
The start of Spanish rule in Toledo was clouded and stormy. The Cid was
named the first Alcalde, and the Castillians expressed their
dissatisfaction with Mozarabe law, which was the Gothic law of Toledo.
They clamoured for Castillian Judges and the Castillian _fueros_ or
privileges. The King granted their request in all civil cases, but in
criminal cases decided that every citizen should be subject to the
Mozarabe Alcalde, and in case of death the first application for burial
had to be made to the Mozarabe authorities, who gave permission to the
Castillians to consult their own. But slowly the word Castillian came to
be employed in Toledo in place of the more picturesque designation
Mozarabe.
After the conquest, Alfonso left his French wife, Constance and the
French archbishop, Bernard of Cluny, as regents in Toledo, and hurried
off on the usual business of war to Leon. Now one of the conditions on
Yahya's surrender of the city was that the Mezquita, formerly the
Christian Cathedral, should remain in the hands of the Moors, as their
place of worship. But neither the queen nor the archbishop approved of
this clause, and could not conceive that a promise given to the
reprobate Moslem should be held as binding. So the King once gone, the
queen gave orders, and the archbishop headed his followers, and took
the mosque by force. Great, naturally, were Moorish outcries against
Christian perfidy, and word of the atrocious deed was instantly conveyed
to Alfonso, who hurried back from Leon, sending word before him that his
intention was nothing less than to burn alive the queen and the
archbishop. For a King who had scandalously broken the laws of
hospitality, and who had no intention of helping to maintain Yahya on
his throne in Valencia, according to his solemn engagement, this was
making a mighty mountain of a smaller offence, and placing a
disproportionate price on so fragile and fugitive a thing as his honour.
The Moors were so dismayed by this assurance, that their indignation
evaporated and gave way to pity and terror for the delinquents. The
Alfaqui went out beyond the city walls to meet the irate monarch, and
plead their cause. Seeing him from afar, Alfonso, misinterpreting his
purpose, cried out: "Friends, this injury is not done to you but to me,
since my word is compromised, which I have ever guarded with all my
power. But I will so act that neither she nor others will again dare to
commit such audacities." The Alfaqui, kneeling to the Spaniard,
exclaimed in the name of his co-religionists: "My lord, we well know
that the queen is your wife, and if she should die for our cause, we
should be abhorred of all men. And the same should the archbishop die,
who is the prince of your law. We of our will beseech you to forgive
them both, and we freely relieve you of the oath by which we hold you,
so that in all things else you are true to it." Thanks to Moorish
generosity, neither the queen nor the French archbishop was burnt alive,
and the Mezquita became the Christian Cathedral we may see to-day. As a
mark of gratitude, "the good Alfaqui's" statue was ordered to be placed
in the _Capilla Major_, an honour
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL]
shared with the mysterious pastor _de las Navas_, a shepherd, supposed
to be the instrument of that victory. The Church was solemnly
consecrated in 1087, and then it was that Toledo had the misfortune to
fall completely under French influence. To Bernard of Cluny's ill-judged
introduction of the Roman liturgy may be traced the Inquisition. The
quaint old Gothic rite was ordered to be abolished in favour of the
Roman Breviary. Aragon and Navarre yielded at once, but Castille held
out for the Isidorian ritual, and excitement ran high in Toledo, the
very heart and head of the Gothic rite. Nothing could make her willingly
faithless to the severe and simple Mozarabe service, inherited from the
early Christians. Hers was the primitive form of worship of Christians
when Christianity was still fresh and unformed, before Rome had
introduced its dazzling magnificences of ceremony. Both the clergy and
the people ignored the decree forbidding the Mozarabe ritual, and
steadily rejected the Latin. Then the French archbishop resolved to put
the matter to the test of the sword, and if that did not settle it, to
that of fire. He called these tests "the Judgment of God." A duel was
fought consequently, under the eyes of all Toledo, which left the
Judgment of God on the side of the Mozarabe ritual. This did not satisfy
the archbishop, who found that the Almighty had erred, so he lit a big
fire on the public place, the precursor of the terrible fires that were
to follow, in which Spain was to burn out all her glory and greatness.
The historians do not agree in their reports. The Archbishop Rodrigo
says, "_exustus ibi fuit liber Gallicus; rumansitque ibi toletanus
illæsus_." Alfonso the learned says: "both books were cast into the
flames, and the French office struggled with the fire that endeavoured
to devour it, and then gave a leap over all the flames, and jumped out
of the bonfire, seeing which, all gave praise to God for the great
miracle He had deigned to work; and the Toledan office fell into the
flames without any harm, so that no part of it was touched by the
flames, and no injury was done to any part of it." This appears to have
settled the dispute: the Toledans were allowed to preserve their ritual
in six parishes reduced now to two. Cisneros, a century later, founded
the Mozarabe Chapel of the Cathedral, and ordered the printing of the
ancient office with its queer primitive chaunt, and in the eighteenth
century, Cardinal Lorenzana had another edition of the text printed. The
traveller curious to know how the old Goths prayed in the days of
Recesvinthus and Wamba, of St Isidor and St Ildefonso, may hear the old
service any morning in the Mozarabe Chapel. The rite was probably more
impressive in the days of the great councils of Toledo than in ours.
Though first Castillian Alcalde of Toledo, the Cid is not associated
with the town by any picturesque or splendid deed. His great
achievements belong to the story of other towns. Here is only recorded
of him a sordid domestic quarrel. Alfonso convened the Cortes to
consider the Challenger's differences with his miserable sons-in-law,
the infantes of Carrion, and the meeting took place in the beautiful
palace of Galiana--
"La mora mas celebrada
De toda la moreria."
The Cid came with his kinsmen, Alvar Fañez, and twelve hundred
cavaliers. The king rode two leagues beyond the city gates to meet him,
and when the Cid had kissed his hand, embraced him. When informed that
he was to dwell in the royal palace, the Cid protested against the
excessive honour, and asked for himself and his suite the castle of San
Servando. The king and the Cid together rested at the posada, and then
rode on to the palace. Here carpets and gold brocade lay along the
walls, and in the middle of the great chamber the splendid and
richly-wrought throne; close by it was the Cid's celebrated marble bench
brought from Valencia, and round it a hundred shields of hidalgos. Day
and night, while the case lasted, this bench was guarded, and in the
_Cronica del Cid_, it is described as "a very noble and subtle work."
It was covered with the richest of gold cloth. When the king, followed
by the Infantes of Carrion, and all the court, entered the palace
chamber, the uncle of the Infantes began to cast ridicule upon the Cid's
famous bench, whereupon the king sternly rebuked him: "You who are
jeering, when have you ever sent me such a present?" Instead of wasting
their time in jealousy of the Challenger, why did not the rest of his
subjects accomplish such noble deeds as his, he wondered. The Cid was
then called, and when he entered the chamber, the king rose up and
welcomed him. Amidst profound attention, the Cid solemnly pleaded his
case. He demanded that the Infantes should give up to him their
dishonoured swords, Tolada and Tizona. This the Infantas haughtily
refused to do, upon which the king ordered the swords to be taken from
them, and given to the Cid. The Cid kissed the king's hand, and both sat
down, the king on his throne, and the Cid on his marble bench. The Cid
then, a passionate father, eloquently told the roll of his wrongs and
his daughters' injuries. He reminded the king that he it was who had
made these lamentable marriages. "It was you, señor, who married my
daughters, and not I, because I could not say you nay. But you did it
for their good, not for their doom." He demanded the return of his money
from the Infantes and an explanation of their evil conduct to his
daughters. He became so violent from grief and indignation that the king
thought fit to interfere, and while recognising the justice of his most
bitter complaints, urged him to respect his children in their husbands,
and, in a word, be less personal in public. He then commanded the
Infantes to salute their father-in-law, and the court to pronounce
sentence. The Infantes, worthless scamps, stood and insolently
proclaimed themselves the social superiors of their wives, whom the
choice of princes had inordinately honoured. "Then why," sensibly asks
the king, "did you press me to obtain for you their hands in marriage?"
and proceeds to give the ladies' pedigree to the affronted Cid's
delight. The wretched Infantes were very properly disgraced, when their
discomfort was accentuated by the appropriate arrival of hot messengers
from the kings of Aragon and Navarre, begging in marriage Doña Elvira
and Doña Sol for their sons, Don Sancho and Don Ramiro. In those odd and
delightful times, divorce seems to have been a matter of royal judgment
or caprice. Spanish sovereigns, unlike Henry VIII., never had any
difficulty in arranging those little affairs without scandal, or war, or
revolution, either in their own case or in that of their vassals.
Alfonso stoutly advised the Cid to accept proposals that gave his
outraged and forsaken daughters kingdoms instead of obscure retreats,
and bestowed the last affront on the miscreants who had offended him and
them. So the scandal terminated, and the chronicler tells us that "the
Infantes left the palace very sorrowful, and hastened with all speed
back to Carrion."
Alfonso's reign was no quiet one. He had to contend with the fierce
Yussuf and his son, and grief pierced him through his young son, Sancho,
whom he sent to war with Count Garcia of Cabra, when only eleven. Twenty
thousand Christians, along with the brave little prince, lay dead on the
battlefield, and the king's anguish, when the news reached Toledo, was
overpowering. He died soon afterwards, and his body was exposed for
twenty days, for the towns-people to come and gaze upon the remains of
the Christian monarch.
Toledo still remained the centre of Castillian rule. Here the Cortes
was held; here was each Christian monarch proclaimed in a quaint
ceremony that merits description, said to have been transmitted to the
Castillians by the Goths. As soon as the municipality received the new
king's letter, they announced that the royal standard would be raised,
and opened all the rooms of the town hall. Soon the building was crowded
with magistrates, jurors, pleaders, cavaliers and citizens. The streets
and the plazas overflowed with the people in holiday array, all laughing
and excited. The buildings were decorated, hung with beautiful silks and
stuffs, and illuminated pretty much as in our own days. Balconies were
covered with brocade, and from each window fell pieces of rare tapestry.
At eight o'clock in the morning the town was gathered near the
Ayuntamiento to hear the chief scriviner read the deposition, and watch
the lifting of the royal Standard and the new king's banner. The city
then named four commissioners, two officers and two juries, and
despatched them to the Ensign's house, telling him to bring instantly
the royal standard to the town hall. The Ensign took the standard and
went forth, followed by a large crowd of cavaliers, of archers and of
troops, all in full uniform, while the bells rang, and music played, and
the populace shouted. A joyous moment hugely enjoyed by this fierce,
excitable race of Toledans. At the town hall the standard was placed on
an altar, and the commissioners and jurors took their places. Then the
order of the day was read, and all swore allegiance to the new king as
loyal and faithful vassals, and in the kingdom's name the banners were
lifted. The magistrate then kissed the paper and put it on his head,
likewise the rest present, and all shouted response in a single voice.
The bells rang anew, the trumpets blew, and deafening roars of applause
rent the air. Then the chief magistrate thus addressed the citizens:
"Imperial and most illustrious city, kingdom of Toledo, seated at the
head of the monarchy of Spain, would that my brief eloquence could match
my desire--not to repeat your obligations to the king, our lord, since
you are better aware of them than I, which compels us to recognise in
him his most high father and grandfather, of eternal memory, most worthy
kings and our lords, whom your highness always canonised with your
tongue, and forced the remotest nations to obey, fearing your sword of
iron, which is the head of this spotless city, whose arts and letters
are of the first class, and whose cathedral is above all others. But to
be able to weigh and tell your highness on this occasion, that as thus,
by direct succession come to and remain with the king our lord, these
kingdoms and seigneuries, so by the same are due to him, and constitute
part of his heritage, obedience for being as he is, a prince of the best
promise any kingdom has ever had; affable, benign, generous, upright,
Catholic, and gifted with many other virtues. That all this your
highness deserves, and that you may enjoy much happiness, with all
prosperity. Such a king deserves such a kingdom, and such a city
deserves such a king. May his majesty live a thousand years and may your
highness live them with exceeding multiplication." When one remembers
such amiable sovereigns of Castille as Pedro the Cruel, who happily died
in the thirties, this hope of Toledo's chief magistrate seems a
peculiarly grim one. A thousand years of Pedro's reign would have
decimated the entire Spanish kingdom, and left none to-day to tell the
tale. The Alferez (ensign) then replied in the name of Toledo, and the
standard was lifted and carried to the Alferez, who received it
standing, while every head was uncovered. Then the Alferez carried the
standard, followed by a group of officers, and swung it flying from the
balcony, crying in a loud voice: "Hear, hear, hear! Know, know, know;
that this pendant and royal is raised for the king, Don ----, whom God
preserve many and happy years. Amen. Spain, Spain, Spain; Toledo,
Toledo, Toledo, for the king, Don ----, our lord, whom God keep many and
happy years. Amen." The populace shouted 'Amen'; the trumpets blew, and
shrill rough music rent the air. Three times was this address repeated,
the citizens each time shrieking 'Amen' with intervals of triumphant
music, and the banners remained waving until sunset, the Alferez and the
municipality all those long hours mounted guard over the royal and civic
colours. At sunset the standard was solemnly carried to the cathedral to
be blessed, and the entire city walked behind the Alferez and the
magistrates. Trumpeters, minstrels and archers went before, and awaited
the colours at the gate of Pardon, where all the dignitaries of the
church were gathered to receive them. The archbishop, the canons, the
dean, the chaplains and priests, in their richest brocades and lace
surplices, and all the representatives of the town parishes, were there
in state. The dean advanced outside the cathedral gates, surrounded by
deacons, and in a circle behind stood the chaplains and canons with
precious relics. After ceremonious salutations exchanged, the Alferez
followed the dean into the church, and then began the procession of the
chapter and the parishes up the immense central nave to the chapel of
Our Lady of the Star, while the organs rolled their thunderous sound and
the choir solemnly chanted. At the High Altar the dignitaries passed
inside, and Toledo, with the chief magistrate, remained in the wide
space between the altar and the choir, only the standard-bearer entering
the choir with the prelates. Here a chaplain offered him a brocaded
cushion, on which he knelt, while the choir chanted the psalm _Deus
Judicium tuum Regi da_. The standard was blessed, and then the Te Deum
was sung. With the same brilliancy and impressiveness of ceremony, the
standard was afterwards borne down to the brightly hung and festive
Zocodover, and then up the narrow hilly street to the imposing Alcazar.
All the balconies and windows were filled with lace-wreathed women's
heads, and the excitement and enthusiasm were intense. At the gates of
the Alcazar the standard-bearer knocked thrice loudly, and called out:
"Alcalde, Alcalde, Alcalde! are you there? Hear, hear, hear!" Within a
voice as loudly demanded: "Who calls without the gates of the royal
Alcazar?" To which the standard-bearer haughtily replied: "The king."
The gates were opened, revealing an immense and picturesque concourse of
splendidly apparelled knights and men in gleaming armour, a blaze of
brocade and damascene. The standard-bearer cried again: "Alcalde,
Alcalde, Alcalde; hear, hear, hear; Toledo to-day has lifted this royal
pennon for the king, Don ----, our lord, whom God preserve for many and
happy years. And, accompanied by its municipality, it has sent me, its
standard-bearer, to bring it to you as the Alcalde of those royal
palaces, that you may receive it in his majesty's name, and place it in
the tower, which is called the tower of the Atambor." The palace doors
were then closed, and as soon as the pennon floated above the high tower
wall, the Alcalde shouted thrice the same formula as that of the
standard-bearer when he raised the standard above the balcony of the
town hall, and the people below each time responded 'Amen.' The
procession returned to the town hall, and this ended the picturesque
ceremony.
The greatest Toledan figure of this period is the mitred figure of the
conqueror of the battle that virtually demolished the Moor in Spain, Las
Navas de la Tolosa. Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada was more than an
illustrious archbishop at a time when archbishops were rulers of men,
and when the archbishop of Toledo might be said to be the practical
sovereign of Spain. He was a valiant soldier, a commander of genius on
the battlefield, a zealous prelate and an erudite man of letters and
historian. Conqueror of _Las Navas de Tolosa_, no mean victory, since
the Moors were in tremendous excess, conqueror of Quezada, of Cazuola
and Cordova, the honoured friend and adviser of two kings, first of his
day in all things by right of genius, industry and merit, Toledo owes
him something more than Christian victory over the Moor, something far
more immortal and magnificent than that dull and prejudiced monument his
history, so often quoted--La Historia de España--which he wrote in 1215.
It owes him her great, her unique, her matchless cathedral. To have won
the most glorious of Spanish battles--a victory so stupendous,
considering the odds and the results that the great archbishop himself
insisted it was nothing less than due to the intervention of heaven--and
to have built the cathedral of Toledo! What epitaph needs a man who
accomplished two such deeds in a single life? His epitaph, as befits so
illustrious a personage, is simplicity itself:
_Mater Navarra, metrix Castilla Tolatum_
_Sedes Parisius studium, mons Rhodams Horta,_
_Mausoleum, coelum requies, nomen Rodericus._
What a dazzling achievement the lives of these Toledan archbishops,
martial, learned, literary, eloquent, and artistic; every facet of
multiple genius. Now they build ships, then cathedrals, colleges or
palaces. They print rare editions, collect rare MSS., debate in
councils, rule the land, vociferate magnificently from the pulpit,
decide on all questions of education and civil law, advise their
sovereign, guide foreign politics, voyage in foreign lands, win
glorious battles, and write histories and verse! What modern life can
match theirs? Even Mr Gladstone has neither built a great cathedral nor
won a great battle! This Archbishop of Toledo, a mighty chancellor of
Castille, was as charitable a pastor as Victor Hugo's bishop. Indeed,
nothing remains to his discredit as a great and simple nature, but the
unavoidable bigotry and injustice of his history. He died on his last
voyage back from Rome, and was buried, as his quoted epitaph indicates,
in the monastery of Huesta, June 10th, 1247.
Alfonso's crusade against the Moors was followed by dreadful dearth, by
famine and sickness, and the entire ruin of villages and farms. Public
misfortune habitually forges fresh unexpected miseries for man, and
bands of armed robbers and assassins, called _golfines_, descended in
hordes from the mountains of Toledo, of Ciudad Real and Talavera. They
pitched their tents in the outlying woods, and in self-defence the
Toledans formed their celebrated _Hermandad_, a brotherhood of citizens
sworn to persecute robbers and assassins. This brotherhood was so
successful that in 1223 it was qualified as "holy," and was conceded as
a right one head of every flock and cattle that crossed the mountains.
The Society held its feast on St Pedro Advinada's day, 1st August, and
consisted of sixty Toledan proprietors and hidalgoes, whose sons
inherited their office; two governors, a squadron, archers and minor
subalterns elected by the two alcaldes. The uniform was green, with
collar and cuffs of vivid scarlet trimmed with gold, and pointed caps.
The inferior officers wore a loose green garment suitable for the road,
and capes and bonnets of green, without the bright touch of scarlet and
gold, and their uniform may still be seen on a stone station above a
sixteenth century porch in a laneway opposite the Calle de la Tripería,
where the ancient prison of the Hermandad is. They rode in procession,
preceded by timbrals and clarinets, and carried a green banner with the
arms of Castille. It was this brotherhood that Philip II. presented with
a magnificent camp of green cloth which to-day may be seen in the Museum
of Artillery in Madrid, and here the Hermandad received their sovereigns
when they visited Toledo. The success of this brotherhood provoked the
creation of minor fraternities and another Toledan order was started
against robbers, _San Martin de la Montiña_, with similar privileges
granted by royal decree as those of the more famous _Hermandad_. Later,
the Catholic kings instituted the _Hermandad nueva_, of disastrous
memory, formed of one thousand horse and foot with a captain, general,
and a supreme council, whose duties and functions were multiplied and
extended beyond the province all over the unhappy Peninsula. This
brotherhood we know, alas! played a terrible part in the terrible
Inquisition, and hunted down bigger and more historic game than mere
robbers and assassins.
The hum of the Moorish wars ever accompanied the interior war of discord
and turbulent dissensions. When St Fernando entered Toledo as the new
sovereign, he found the town groaning under the tyranny of the wicked
governor, Fernandez Gonzalo. Two girls, one a young lady and the other a
girl of the people, flung themselves before the saintly young monarch to
complain of seduction under promise of marriage. San Fernando, who did
not trifle in these matters, expressed his horror and demanded the name
of the seducer. The instant the governor, Fernandez Gonzalo, was
mentioned, he turned furiously to his men and cried, "Cut me off that
rascal's head this very moment." Within an hour the gallant governor's
livid features were fixed above the Puerta del Sol. Here was a man
without any of the freemasonry of his sex. Death itself was the penalty
he unhesitatingly meted out without debate for wrong done to women. Not
a word of blame for the girls, no compliance to the conventional theory
of gallantry. The man who betrays a woman is a blackguard; then off with
his head, and space for cleaner souls. A little drastic, perhaps, but
conceive our civilised world in the eyes of a San Fernando. Conceive him
presiding over one of our Courts of Justice for the settlement of
breaches of promises! So wise his judgment in the esteem of Toledo that
to-day the historic scene is in relief on the glorious Puerta del Sol.
Under Castillian rule Toledo's supremacy could not continue without
rivalry. First, Santiago had disputed her right to hold her celebrated
councils, and a furious quarrel raged between the Pope, Calixtus, and
the King, Alfonso, as to whether the councils should be held at Toledo
or at Santiago in the north. The pope took the part of Diego the
Galician archbishop, and, for a while, Santiago was regarded as the
primacy of Spain. But, under Honorius, Toledo and her archbishop,
Raymond, recovered their prestige with this time the king against them.
In 1129 a council was held at Palencia. Here Toledo sat at the feet of
Compostella. Charlemagne, himself, is said to have broken a lance in
favour of Santiago which, one knows not by what right, he proclaimed the
head of Spain. Beside the question of the primacy, Burgos put in her
claim for the Cortes, which she held should meet within her walls, and
not on the banks of the Tagus. Here the king was the stout defender of
Toledo. At the great meeting convened to discuss this rivalry, the king
entered the Council Chamber, and haughtily cried: "Let Burgos speak, I
will reply for Toledo." The rivalry of the great families of the Castros
and Laras nearly became a civil war, Toledo fighting on the side of the
Laras, whose chief, Don Manrique, was a character after her heart:
intrepid, dominating and fierce, unequalled in war, untameable in peace.
The little king's uncle settled the dispute by killing Don Manrique de
Lara, and to avenge him Toledo violently conspired through her great
citizen, Stephen Illan, a descendant of the illustrious Byzantine
family, the Paleologos. These animosities were quieted for a while by
the terrible plague and famine that followed quick upon the heels of
victory, and avenged the defeated Moors of Las Navas de Tolosa. Misery
implacably stalked Castille. Seeds bore no fruit for one entire year;
trees were dead and leafless, the land was sterile and the people, wild
with hunger, forsook their dead, their orchards and meadowland.
Of Toledo's private story we get no glimpse. The thunder of battle and
strife roars ever down the pages of her history in the succeeding
centuries, and we continually hear of new breaches in her magnificent
walls, while the trumpets blow their noisy defiance from her mutinous
ramparts. That Toledo was no comfortable place to dwell in then (or now)
we gather from the acrid description of the streets, rivers of mud in
winter, and in summer, waves of dust, full of filth, evil odours, foul
sights and breathing mortal disease. Alfonso the Learned in 1278 ordered
the streets to be cleansed and the plazas to be kept free of dead
beasts. The chapter gave ten thousand ducats for paving the street, but
this was not done until Fernando the Catholic ordered the work in 1502.
Alas! these sanitary improvements heralded the hour of her decline. She
bartered her prestige for improved paths down to the river, and lost the
greater part of her greatness along with her rugged incivility. And for
all her progress she never shook off the old sway of Goth and Moor. She
built churches, but persistently gave them a quaint Moorish aspect, and
when she adopted printing, it was to print the Isidorian office. True,
she exhaled her martial contempt of women in her first profane print,
_El Tratado contra las mujeres_, by Alfonso Martinez de Toledo in 1499.
[Illustration: PUENTO S. MARTINO]
Nobody contributed more than the magnificent Cardinal Tenorio,
Commendador and Master of Santiago, to beautify the town. He built the
cathedral cloisters, and the chapel of St Blas, liberally endowed the
church, built the bridge of St Martin and the castle of San Servando as
well as several convents, the archbishop's bridge, the Hospital of St
Catherine, and a splendid palace at Talavera, which he gave to the monks
of St Hieronymo. He constructed several fortresses along the Moorish
frontiers. Of him is told the legend that once at Burgos he gave such a
princely feast to the nobles of that town, that when the king returned
from the chase there was nothing to be had to eat but a few quail and
bread and wine. The great Tenorio had cleared Burgos of all its
provisions for his banquet.
Toledan laws, which were stringent, were based upon the _fueros_, a
Castillian modification of the Gothic code. Nothing could be more
precise, more minute, more searching in detail of offence and
punishment of all that relates to private and civic life. The very dress
of women, Mozarabe and Castillian, was regulated according to their
social status, the expenses of marriages, baptisms, and funerals
regulated; the expenses of fathers and husbands limited by their income
to prevent injury to the family. The Moors and Jews had their own judges
unless Christian interests were at stake, when they were judged before
Mozarabe tribunals. The Mayor's jury consisted of five nobles and five
citizens. Each court had its magistrate and official staff, and the
municipality met twice a week, Tuesday and Friday, to judge the
decisions in block. The people might assist, but could not vote or
question. The magistrates were salaried, and could not leave the city
unless sent for by royal command. The municipal constitution was
composed of two bodies: _cabildo de regidores_, cavaliers and citizens,
to deliberate; the other, _cabildo de jurados_, sworn to observe the
_fueros_, and to administer justice. The privileges of nobles and
plebeians were distinctly defined and maintained. The _regidores_ were
paid annually 1000 maravedis, and the _jurados_ 1500. Assistance at the
councils was voluntary for the former, obligatory for the latter; a fine
of 20 maravedis being imposed in case of absence, which fines were at
the end of the year divided between the rest of the jurados who had not
once been fined. A juror could not be imprisoned for debt, nor forced to
lend his mules for public service, and his widow and children partook of
his privileges if he died in office. Toledo was always strongly
garrisoned, but its military decline began with the reign of Pedro the
Cruel.
The inexplicable and monstrous tale of Pedro's cruelties need not be
told here. He has become one of the legends of universal history, one of
the nursery terrors of civilisation. That such a monster ever lived out
of a fairy tale, where giants for pure pleasure spend their days
consuming human flesh and marrying wives for the gratification of
decorating secret chambers with hanging corpses, seems incredible. His
palace at Toledo is now a miserable ruin, near the ruin of the
Trastamare palace, of which now only remains the door with the huge
Toledan iron nails, so charming and distinctive a feature along the city
streets. Here was the theatre of many of his stupefying iniquities, as
well as of the single redeeming sentiment of a senseless life, his love
for the unfortunate and beautiful Maria de Padilla, the one pale flower
of romance in a stony and stormy period. Kings' mistresses are not
usually admirable or sympathetic figures, and their mission is not
infrequently fraught with direst results. But this pale little Maria,
with lovely hands and large sad eyes, is the one ray of light and
sweetness amidst violence, cruelty, and perfidy. Such good as love could
work amidst such elements she wrought. When she could she interposed
between Pedro and his victims, and even the outraged wife reveals no
traces of vindictiveness towards her. At the other side of the town, in
the big Alcázar, was imprisoned Blanche of Bourbon, under the care of
Maria's uncle, Juan Fernandez de Hinestrosa, and all that now remains of
her high chamber is the window overlooking a superb landscape. It is to
the credit of Toledo that the citizens were the first to rise up against
Pedro's iniquities. The queen, accompanied by Hinestrosa, entered the
cathedral to pray, and to the dismay of everyone called out "Sanctuary,"
and refused to leave it. Word flew round the town, and all the ladies
and women of the people gathered round the unhappy woman. The knights
and hidalgoes could do no less than follow the lead of their courageous
women folk. They drew their swords, made a circle round her, and walking
thus escorted the queen to the palace gates. The flag of revolt was
instantly raised, and the people called the infante, Don Fadique, to
come and take command. He came with 700 men, and Doña Blanca was
proclaimed free and sovereign. Toledo then sent a commission to the
king, bearing the town's orders: that Maria de Padilla and her relatives
should be banished, and the queen occupy her rightful place. The king
made short work of the commission, and laughed in the face of his
rebellious town. His morals were his own affair, and if they did not
suit his people they must hold their tongues until he had time to cut
off their heads. Meanwhile Henry of Trastamare and Don Fadique had taken
the town by the bridge of St Martin. They sacked and pillaged, robbed
Samuel Levi, Pedro's great and wealthy treasurer, and murdered 1200
Jews. Then came Pedro, and the Trastamares fled, leaving what remained
of the town to the mercies of the ruthless royal troops. Toledo paid a
heavy price for her chivalrous defence of the discarded queen. The
unhappy woman was again locked up in the Alcázar, and like the wicked
ogre of story, Pedro, entertained himself by hacking off the heads of
those around him. Twenty men were decapitated in a single day by this
mild monarch, whom Philip II. called _El justiciero_, and of whom the
_Cronica_ writes:
"El gran rey, Don Pedro, que el vulgo reprueva,
Pos serle enemigo quien hizo su historia,
Fue digno de clara y muy digna memoria."
These verses quotes the prelate of Jaen, Juan of Castro, who
rehabilitated Pedro, by asserting that he only "wrought justice upon
rebels," and who laments the baseness of his assassination at the hand
of the worthless Trastamare, a vile termination of a vile life, in
which one regrets to see as accomplice one of the old heroes of our
youth, Du Guesclin. The list of Pedro's cruelties and assassinations is
stupendous. He married women and cast them aside at will, without even
the troubles of our English Henry. Shortly after his marriage with the
unfortunate Blanche of France, he married Juana de Castro, sister of the
Portuguese King, yet neither France nor Portugal went to war, and the
Church did not interfere. He instantly abandoned Juana, and returned to
Maria de Padilla, whom he always acknowledged as his sole wife, and
whose children he named his heirs. There can be no doubt that he
passionately loved these little girls of Maria, taking them with him as
his most precious treasure when he travelled, and leaving in their
behalf a will, so tender and precise, so burthened with anxiety for
their welfare, that his life becomes a greater enigma than ever after
reading it. Beatrice he named queen, to the detriment of his legitimate
son by Juana de Castro. His love for Maria de Padilla was no less deep
and lasting. She was buried with royal honours, and at the Cortes
convened after her death, he publicly, and it must be admitted with a
manly devotion and courage that does him credit, acknowledged her as his
wife. Here his wilfulness becomes a virtue, and we are touched by his
unswerving love for the woman, of whom the churchman, Lozano, writes,
"in her little body heaven had placed great qualities and merits of the
highest order." His real love for Maria is all the more extraordinary,
since he was one of the vilest libertines, who burnt women alive for
refusing his addresses, and in his conduct to his unfortunate French
wife, he showed himself nothing less than insane. The hero of Mr
Meredith's modern novel, "The Amazing Marriage," is a model of
conventional behaviour to a bride beside Don Pedro the Cruel. After
torturing her he murdered her, which explains the attitude of France
towards him, and the sorry figure of the great Du Guesclin at the
tragedy of Montiel.
Toledo only roused herself out of stupor in the first gaieties of Juan
II.'s reign. This prince preferred song and dance to bloodshed. He heard
of the people of Toledo as insupportable, haughty and rebellious, and
came to conquer them by luth and feast. Never was Toledo so gay before.
The great Alvaro de Luna, the Constable of Castille, was beside him, and
the city danced and sang, and feasted itself into oblivion of terror and
disaster. Even a war with the Moors was an added and pleasurable
excitement. King John prayed and watched in the cathedral all night like
a knight, and there was a solemn ceremony next day, when Vasco de
Guzman, before the magnificently apparelled king and constable, kissed
the royal standard and banners. Still grander feasts on their return
fresh from conquests at Granada and Cordova; there was the great Te Deum
in the cathedral, and the bullfights by torchlight on the Zocodover, and
by day feasts and tourneys in the brilliant Vega. Here begins the
rivalry of the celebrated Toledan families, the Ayalas and the Silvas,
and the quarrels of the Constable of Castille and Pedro Sarmiento, in
which the meaner figure wins. The Jews, too, were persecuted in a
monstrous crusade provoked by the bigoted and atrociously unchristian
eloquence of that most unsympathetic of saints, Vicente Ferrer. Under
his lead, the Christians seized the beautiful little synagogue, Santa
Maria La Blanca, an act of injustice it would be difficult to explain by
any pronouncement of Christ, himself a Jew. But all was not black at
this period, despite perfidy, cowardice, betrayal and persecution. Juan
II. was fond of rivalry and bright apparel, and his splendid victim,
Alvaro de Luna, remains one of the finest figures of Castillian
history. John himself dabbled in poetry, and patronised letters. He
instituted a kind of Provençal Court, and one of his contemporaries was
the celebrated Marquis of Villena, Henry, the man in advance of his
time, man of science and scholar, mathematician and reader of the stars.
Later, alas, his valuable library and his writings, treasures of
erudition and memory, were publicly burnt at Madrid, by order of Fray
Lope Barriento, a Dominican, who accused him of witchcraft, and Juan de
Mena wrote his famous "Coplas" to the memory of the great and learned
marquis:
"Aquel que te ves estar contemplando
En el movimiento de tantas estrellas,
La fuerza, la bra, el orden de aquellas,
Que mide los cursos de cómo y de cuando,
Y ovo noticia filosofando
Del movedos, y de los comovidos
De fuego, de razos, de son de tronidos,
Y supo las causas del mundo velando:
Aquel claro padre, aquel dulce fuente,
Aquel que en el Cástalo monte resuena.
Es Don Enrique, Señor de Villena,
Honra de España y del siglo presente.
O inclito sabio, autor muy sciente!
Otra y aun otra vegado te lloro,
Porque Castillo perdio tal tesoro
No conveido delante la gente
Perdio los tus libros sin sea conveidos
Y como en exequias te fueron ya luego
Unos metidos al avido fuego,
Y otros sin orden no bien repartidos.
Cierto en Atenas los libros fingidos
Que de Protagoras se reprobaron
Con armenia mejor se quemaron
Cuando al senado le fueron leidos."
Here as elsewhere the nobles and people of Toledo were constantly at
loggerheads, though it would be difficult to say on which side reason
preponderated. Now it was the Silvas who sided with the rebels, then
the Ayalas who opened the city gates to them. One Ayala, mayor of the
town, rode to meet an invading infante; the infante reproached him
insolently, on which Ayala flung back his words, and turning rode into
Toledo to shut the gates in his face. They were not to be trifled with,
these haughty Toledans. In a measure their prince was their valet, and
was subject to insult upon provocation.
The same may be said of the artisans. There exists a Toledan proverb:
"Soplaré el odrero alborazarse ha Toledo." Let the ironmonger (or
pot-maker) blow and Toledo will rise up. This proverb dates from the
time of John II., who begged the Toledans to supply him with a certain
amount of maravedis towards the expenses of his wars with Aragon and
Navarre. The people indignantly refused, and the first to hiss the
Toledan note of revolt was a maker of iron pots. Previously someone had
discovered a Gothic inscription which proved that the ironmongers of
Gothic days were the centre of urban revolution, hence the proverb
proving their traditional contumelious disposition.
King John's love of poetry produced two Toledan poets, praised by Dr
Pisa, Antonio de Heredia, a poet who "added rare glory to the Castillian
muse" (probably an ancestor of the French academician, Jose Maria de
Heredia) and a woman, Aloysia de Sigea, whose portrait may be seen in
the Biblioteca provincial de Toledo. The fame of her erudition travelled
to Portugal, and she is said to have written fluently in Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabian, though with so inconceivable a lack of
decency that her muse to-day is not translateable in modern tongue. Doña
Luisa Sigea of Toledo, and her witty daughter Doña Angela, were called
"women philosophers," and their depraved works are supposed to be
founded on the traditions of a mysterious association discovered under
John II. at Sevilla, "a bizarre school whose immorality is understood by
the terms of the law that prescribes it."[11]
Alvaro de Luna found the Toledans no easy subjects to deal with. Pedro
Sarmiento constituted himself chief of the revolution against the mighty
Constable, and instead of a great lord the people had to do with a mean
and avaricious hound. Don Alvaro appointed captains his sons, Pedro de
Luna and Fernando de Rivadeneira, and ordered them to cross the river
and besiege the town by the Puente de Alcantara. Sarmiento sent 50
horses and 500 foot out by the Puerta del Cambron under his son to
surprise the Constable's forces near the river. A fierce battle ensued,
and the King himself had to make conditions for the Constable with the
violent and haughty citizens. Sarmiento demanded that the Constable
should be given up or the King resign, and roundly accused his sovereign
of weakness and favouritism. The King demurred, upon which Sarmiento
invited his son to come and reign, but Henry soon found that he was only
a tool in Sarmiento's hands, and left the city in dudgeon, to return
speedily at the head of an army to crush the too powerful Sarmiento.
Ordered to leave Toledo, Sarmiento loaded two hundred beasts with gold,
silver, jewels, carpets, brocade, silk, and linen he had robbed of the
citizens he oppressed, and to the prince's shame the impudent thief was
permitted to carry off his treasure unmolested. The execution of the
great Constable, infamously abandoned by his friend and sovereign, did
not secure peace and content to rebel Toledo.
The state of the town in the succeeding years was so terrible that the
citizens sent the Bachelor Fernan Sanchez Calderon to supplicate the
king's interference, and enable them to possess in security their goods
and products of those who had beaten, robbed, and ruined the town. The
King declined to interfere himself, and expressed surprise that a man of
such marvellous learning and science as the bachelor should come on such
an errand. To the King's rebuke, the bachelor replied: "God forfend,
illustrious lord, that I should hold as worthy of your majesty's
attention such things, but I accepted this embassy to make manifest to
your excellency the evil things that are being done." The King retorted:
"It is my duty to punish evil, not to reward it."
Temporary peace came with the union of the two powerful houses of Ayala
and Silva, in the marriage of Doña Maria de Silva and Pero Lopez de
Ayala. But King Henry's entry into Toledo aroused the old lion. The
alarm bells rung, and the citizens rushed armed to the bishop's palace,
where the King was. Fearing bloodshed, a squadron of cavaliers rode hot
haste to the palace and begged the King to leave the city, and he went
forth surrounded by the reconciled Ayalas and Silvas. To all the
troubles that followed between Isabel and Henry, Toledo added more than
her share. One moment the nobles held the town, and then the people,
both parties ever opposed in interests, allegiance, and both in reality
caring greatly more for their own archbishop, their real sovereign, than
the throned king who ruled all Castille. With two parties contending for
the crown of Castille, Isabel and the _Beltranaje_, Henry's acknowledged
heiress, his wife's but not his own daughter, sympathy ran high in
Toledo on both sides. The Marquis of Villena attempted to capture the
Princess Isabel, but was defeated by the vigilant archbishop, who
collected a body of horse, and carried her off to Valladolid. Never were
betrothal and marriage solemnised under more romantic and thrilling
circumstances than were those of Isabel, Shakespeare's "queen of earthly
queens," the sole majestic and perfect sovereign of Spain, and Ferdinand
her unworthy husband, whose single virtue lay in the admirable way
during her lifetime in which he seconded her rule. In gratitude for
Toledo's sympathy, the great queen visited the town immediately after
her marriage, but the scenes of her triumphs and glory lie elsewhere.
There is but one blot on them, due to her husband and the terrible
Torquemado, the introduction of the Inquisition into Castille. This was
shortly before the great Cortes held at Toledo, 1480, where the salutary
measures of reform instituted by her were such to leave her subjects
awestruck in admiration of her genius. But there were the Portuguese and
the Moors calling her attention, with blare of trumpet and shock of
steel, while Toledo's true sovereign was the great Cardinal, the
Cardinal of Spain, Mendoza. Gallant, learned and liberal, a _grand
seigneur_, he was in every way in contrast with his austere successor,
Cisneros. He was not unfamiliar with illicit love and its complications,
and acknowledged two sons, Iñigo de Mendoza, and Diego, Count of Melito.
His gifts to various cities in the shape of palaces, churches, colleges,
jewels and rich church ornaments, were incredible, while Toledo
possesses his most beautiful Hospital of Santa Cruz. He left all his
wealth to this hospital, appointing Queen Isabel his executor. He it was
who waved the royal standard from the highest tower of the Alhambra
after the taking of Granada, and, better still, counselled Isabel to
lend a friendly and helpful hearing to Columbus. His library was the
most magnificent of mediæval Spain. Philip II. was in treaty to purchase
this rare collection for the Escorial, and a correspondence exists
between his secretary and the vicar of Toledo, Maese Alvar Gomez. It
afterwards fell into the hands of Cardinal Loaysa, and was valued at
twenty thousand ducats. Mendoza employed a staff of writers in copying
and transcribing rare MSS., the chief of whom was a Greek, Calosynas, a
pupil of Darmarius.
We approach the last hours of Toledan history. The great queen's death
revealed the worthlessness of her husband, and the unfortunate Juana
became the victim of the vilest conspiracy between the three men to whom
she should have been most sacred. First her father, not willing to step
down from the throne of Castille to make way for his daughter, decided
to proclaim her mad. Then her husband, won over by promises of Fernando,
consented to accept the situation, but was cut off suddenly, after the
agreement, poisoned it is said, by Fernando's orders. Then the heartless
young prince, her son, resolved to carry on the infamous persecution, in
order to reign in her stead, and kept the poor woman nearly fifty years
in a dark comfortless chamber, ill-treated by her keepers, the Marquis
and Marchioness of Denia, with no communication with the outer world.
The story of Juana _la Loca_, to whose perfect sanity Cisneros and her
confessor, Juan de Avila, testify, is one of the saddest of history.
In 1505, the Marquis of Villena received orders to place Toledo under
Flemish rule. The town murmured rebelliously, and as soon as Philip died
at Burgos, declared itself independent. The nobles, headed by Silva and
Ayala, met and swore that under no consideration should the sword or any
artillery be employed to keep the peace. The Silvas held the gates and
bridges, but the Ayalas, exasperated by the dominance of their old
rivals, talked the townspeople into a rising, and bloodshed ensued. The
Silvas conquered, flung the magistrate and his party out of the city,
and the streets were strewn with wounded and dead. On Fernando's death,
Cisneros became the regent of Castille, with Adriano of Utrecht and
Armestoff. Cisneros filled the town with militia, and the ramparts
glittered with steel. Now Toledo's pet aversion was a uniform. She liked
to fight, but in her own rough, free-lance style. So she rose up against
the cardinals, and after a futile rebellion, in which neighbouring towns
engaged, was speedily quelled. But the insurgents within her gates kept
muttering of treachery on Charles' side and of his unhappy mother. So
Toledo, "the crown of Spain and light of the whole world, ever free
since the high reign of the Goths," decided to fight for the queen, and
depose the tyrannical young Charles. Insolent verses rang round the
town, jeering at Xebres the favourite:--
"Doblon de à dos horabuena estedes,
Que con vos no topó Xebres."
"Señor ducado de à dos
No topó Xebres con vos."
"Salveos Dios, ducado de à dos
Que Monsieur de Xebres no topó con vos."
The favourite had to fly from the city, and when his nephew, William of
Croy, was appointed to the great see of Toledo, there was a frantic
explosion. Everything combined to excite indignation. Austrian fashions
were adopted to please Charles, goods were imported from every foreign
port to the detriment of home productions, and Toledo, that employed
over ten thousand workmen in silk factories, was nearly ruined by the
royal decree limiting the use of silk, and forbidding the use of Spanish
embroideries of gold, and silver, and rich brocade. This tyranny brought
about the famous rising of the _Comuneros_, under Juan de Padilla.
Padilla is the greatest figure of mediæval Toledo. Historians delight
in him as a true hero, brave, gallant, honourable, wise, a perfect
hidalgo, as romance paints him, punctillious, unaffected and pious. The
worst his bitterest enemies ever said of him was, that he played second
fiddle to his heroic wife, Maria de Pacheco, and coveted the mantle of
Master of Santiago. His influence over the citizens and people was
immense. For a single word of his, 20,000 workmen armed themselves, and
stood round him. They named him captain-general of the combined forces
of the _Comuneros_, with Francisco Maldonado in command at Salamanca,
and Juan Bravo in command at Segovia. Toledo seized all the outlying
towns and villages, and her voice of command reached to the Portuguese
frontier and as far north as Valladolid. The cruelty and treachery
practised by the Imperial army, with the prince of perfidy at its head,
were such to send all Castille vigorously marching behind the heroic
Padilla. War once set a-going, Padilla went down to Tordesillas to see
the queen. Toledo remembered that the outraged sovereign had been born
within her walls, and despatched her gallantest son with words of
sympathy and allegiance. At a sign from Juana, he was ready to translate
the junta from Toledo to Tordesillas, and make a rampart of his men for
her protection. He forced the gates, and learnt the miserable tale of
the queen's compulsory detention and sufferings, and found that "she was
in her right senses, and quite as capable of governing as her mother,
Isabel." To every urgent prayer to sign the decree proclaiming her
inviolable rights, and her son's base usurpation, she answered "that all
that she has is her son's." "The queen," wrote Hurtado de Mendoza to
Charles, "spoke nobly to the rebels," and adds that he regards her as
"perfectly sane."
While Padilla was being worshipped as a popular idol at Valladolid,
jealousy and disunion were working against him at Toledo. Great men had
joined the people and Padilla, the Duke of Infantado, the Marquis of
Villena, Juan de Avila, and many prelates and knights. They had
imprisoned the King's messengers and ministers in the Chapel of St Blas,
and forced the governor to swear fealty to the _Commindad_. The mayor
defending the Bridge of St Martin had fallen, and the Silvas, guarding
the Alcázar against 4000 men, were forced to evacuate when the
insurgents burnt down the gates and walls, and were masters of all the
fortifications. They made canons of the church bells, stopped up every
entrance by the river, and defied the Imperial army. Such a proud and
congenial hour for Toledo. All the citizens went about puffed up with
glory and addressed one another as "Brutus," swaggering abroad, and
ready to ring the bells as soon as word came from Tordesillas that the
queen had signed.[12] Padilla hurried back, hearing his wife was ill,
and in his absence the Imperial army sacked Tordesillas. Jealousy as
usual had weakened the force of the Comuneros, though Padilla's gallant
presence impelled them to some brilliant skirmishing. But their fate was
sealed at Villalar, where the Conde de Haro defeated them, and took
prisoners to the Castle of Villalar, the infamous Ulloa's property,
three noble gentlemen of old Castille, Padilla, Maldonado and Bravo,
whose names are writ upon the walls of the parliament house of Madrid,
and printed large upon the hideous page of Charles Quint's early reign.
Padilla's noble letters of farewell to his wife, Maria de Pacheco, and
to Toledo, may be seen in the archives
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