The Project Gutenberg eBook of Toledo, by Hannah Lynch.

“Galiana de Toledo
Muy hermosa y maravilla!
La Mora la mas celebrada
De toda la Moreria.
Boca de claveles rojas,
Alto pecho que palpita,
Frente eburnea que adorno
Oro flamante de Tyras.”[20]

The story runs that Galafre, the kingling of Toledo, under the great Khalif of Cordova, Abd-er-Rahman I., built a wonder of human dwelling for his beautiful and bewitching daughter, the infanta Galiana. Part of the palace already existed in the eighth century, and was Visigothic. To this he added the ineffaceable Moorish note, the horse-shoe arches, the ajimez windows, still admirably defined despite decay, the Moorish trickery of brickwood, the arabesques and tiled roofs and the square towers of the East. To-day we can trace the ajimez windows, the horse-shoe arches, and even the beautiful arabesques of the walls are faintly discernible through their deplorable coating of smoke-stain. But within the past thirty years the exquisite tiled roof of the tower has disappeared, along with the lovely staircase. The degradation of the Moorish patio, which must have been a thing divine, leaves us in our vulgar modern days, stupefied by man’s indifference to the eternal eloquence of beauty. The mystery of this Arabian genius is forever sealed. Nothing we can strive, nothing we can hope to do, will reveal it to us, will unlock the doors of an enchanted past. Whence it sprung is just as inexplicable to us as how it vanished, but alas! vanished it is like the mysterious city of enchantment and of a civilisation that since has never been equalled—the outlying town of Cordova, built by a mighty Moorish emperor in honour of a loved wife, and but a memory of superlative witchery and delight.

In those days the waters of the Tagus ran high, and water here was abundant. The Moors, those subtle hydraulists, alone possessed the secret of drawing from river and well their full value, and irrigating plentifully a thirsty land. To this day Valencia is a garden of flowers and an orchard of fruit, because the Moors passed by there. Of all this Toledan Vega they made a paradise of leaf and bloom and rill. It sparkled and scented the air afar, and such was the over-powering beauty of the gardens of Galiana that Lozano, in his Reyes Nuevos, forgets that he is writing of the nameless one, and bursts into high-phrased enthusiasm. One would think the learned doctor of the church was describing the conventional heaven of his imagination. The river then flowed further inward than it does now, and ran along one side of the palace, forming a broad moat. The gardens were a spiced and many-hued paradise, and the palace a wonder of terraces and arches, with halls of arabesques and Moorish inscriptions, pillared patios and dainty boudoirs, with broad-beamed ceilings. Imagination easily fills in all the omitted details of silks and couches, and marble and silver and gold, of flowing water and music, of musked solitude and towered reverie, of the glamour of guarded romance peeping through high arched windows over the silence of the flowery Vega, and adown the quiet course of the curved Tagus. No wonder legend makes Charlemagne, from the blighting disasters of Roncevalles, pass down to this magic spot to fall enamoured of the lovely Galiana, la Mora la mas celebrada de toda la Moreria, and on her behalf challenge the Moorish prince Bradamante, who persecuted her with his addresses, cut off his head in a single-handed encounter, and carry away to France the exquisite creature, when she was baptised, and reigned picturesquely over a grateful and admiring France. Spanish legend is not awed by Charlemagne’s fame. Either it blows his armies to pieces at Roncevalles, or it lures him beyond the Guadarrama, like a mere knight errant in the protection of damsels, caught by ordinary love, and riveted to its chain.

Under Castillian rule, the Palace of Galiana became the property of the Guzmans, whose arms may be seen upon its dismantled front, and who, like most Spaniards, have so ill appreciated a priceless inheritance. One of the most famous attractions of this palace in olden times was the clepsydras, or water-clocks, made by the celebrated astronomer, Abou-l’-Casem, Abdo-er-Rahman, better known as Az-Zarcal. In a description of Toledo a curious Arabian document gives us a quaintly vague idea of these clepsydras, or ponds, whose waters rose and fell with the moon. “One of the greatest towns of Spain is Toledo, and Toledo is a large and well-populated city. On all sides it is washed by a splendid river called the Tagus.... Among the rare and notable things of Toledo is that wheat may be kept more than seventy years without rotting, which is a great advantage, as all the land abounds in grain and seed of all kinds. But what is still more marvellous and surprising in Toledo, and what we believe no other inhabited town of all the world has anything to equal, are some clepsydras or water-clocks. It is said that Az-Zarcal, hearing of a certain talisman, which is in the city of Arin, of Eastern India, and which Masudi says shows the hours by means of aspas or hands, from the time the sun rises till it sets, determined to fabricate an artifice by means of which people could know the hour of day or night, and calculate the day of the moon. He made two great ponds in a house on the bank of the Tagus, not far from the gate of the tanners, making them so that they should be filled with water or emptied according to the rise and fall of the moon.” We are told that the movements of these clepsydras were thus regulated, that as soon as the moon became visible by means of invisible conducts, the waters began to flow into the ponds, and by day-rise the ponds were filled four-sevenths. At night another seventh was added, so that by day or night the ponds continued to increase in water a seventh every twenty-four hours, and were quite full by the time the moon was full. On the 14th of the month, when the moon began to fall, the ponds fell too in like proportion. On the 21st of the month they were half empty, and on the 29th completely so. King Alfonso the Learned, desiring to master the secret of these clepsydras, sent one of his bungling astronomers to examine them, which he did so well, that he broke the delicate machinery, and the Moors, to comfort their wounded pride in the loss of so unique a Moorish monument, called the bungler a Jew, one Houayn-Ben-Rabia.

Another palace in ruins belonging to the ex-Empress of the French is all that remains to-day of the magnificent Casa de Vargas. It was built by the celebrated architect, Juan de Herrera, and Antonio Ponz describes it at length as one of the architectural splendours of Toledo, as late as the War of Independence, when Bonaparte’s soldiers laid it waste with shot and shell. “The façade,” writes Ponz, “is perfect Doric, of exquisite marble, with fluted columns on either side, and the pedestals have military emblems in bas-relief. The frieze consists of helmets, heads of bulls and goblets. The coat-of-arms above the cornice is most beautiful, and the women’s forms seated on each side are life-size. Nothing could be finer than the details as well as the whole of this façade, and for sure it is the most serious, the most lovely, and most finished of all I have seen in Toledo. You enter a spacious courtyard, with lofty galleries running round it, above and below, the lower gallery sustained by Doric pillars, and by the upper Ionic columns. The staircase is truly regal, and likewise the various inner chambers. They contain different chimney-pieces, ornamented with graceful fancies, executed in bas-relief; and thus in the lower quarters as in the principal, are other galleries with columns like those of the courtyard, with delicious views of the meadows and the Tagus.” Nothing of all this remains but a mere unsightly ruin called the Casa de la Direccion, the property of the Counts of Mora.

The list of these vanished palaces of Toledo is a long one, and is the subject of most melancholy musing. In the old forsaken quarter once known as the Juderia, the prosperous and magnificent ghetto of mediaeval Toledo, where the Transito, Samuel Levi’s synagogue, stands, was the great palace of the Villenas. Henry of Aragon, lord of Villena, was a famous figure in those remote ages. Of royal blood, uncle of King Juan II., he was an erudite scholar, a mathematician, a man of science in advance of his times, a splendid prince, a collector of books, the possessor of a library as famous as Mendoza’s, a wizard, a man of evil odour, of the black craft, who was gravely charged with putting his enemies alive into bottles, and of holding intercourse with the Evil One. All his valuable library, and in special his own manuscript tomes, for he was an indefatigable writer, were publicly burnt at Madrid by order of Fray Lope Barrientos, a Dominican, on the solemn accusation of witchcraft. Juan de Mena, in his celebrated coplas, protested against ecclesiastical iniquity, and lifted his voice in the learned prince’s glory:

“Aquel que tu ves estar contemplando
En el movimento de tantas estrellas,
La fuerza, la obra, el orden de aquellas
Que mide los cursos de cómo, y de quando,
Y ovo noticia filosofando
Del movedor, 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 Castalo 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 vegada te lloro,
Porque Castilla perdio tal tesoro
No conveido delante la gente.

“Perdio los tus libros sin sea conveidos
Y como en exeginas le 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 armonia mejor se quemaron
Cuando el senado le fueron leidos.”

The quantity of subterranean chambers and passages of this immense palace were supposed to have been used by Don Enrique for his parliaments of witches and wizards, and his awful meetings with the Horned One and his sulphureous satellites. Afterwards the palace fell into the hands of Samuel Levi, Pedro the Cruel’s treasurer, the wealthy Jew who built the Transito close by. Then the Master of Santiago’s haunts of witchcraft were used as Levi’s treasury, until Pedro, in want of money, seized his treasurer’s person, and the town sacked his palace. Henry IV. afterwards gave the palace to his minion, Juan Pacheco, with the titles of Duke of Escalona and Marquis of Villena. Neither title nor palace now exist. In a miserable part of the town, high up above the river, you may see a few broken arches and formless vaults and great blocks of stone. That is all. It was destroyed by fire in the reign of Charles Quint under circumstances of exceptional and romantic interest. Charles appointed the Casa de Villena as the residence of the great Constable of France, the treacherous Bourbon. The second Duke of Escalona, indignant at the thought that the French traitor should cross the threshold of his house, informed his sovereign that a house so polluted should prove the grave of such an insult to his family, and threatened to burn it in the event of the Constable’s visit. Charles never believed in such an extravagant menace, and the Constable arrived. Diego Lopez de Pacheco, with all his family and servants, left Toledo for ever, and in a few days the stained house was burned to the ground as henceforth unworthy the habitation of honest men.

In the little plaza of Santa Isabel there is another, supposed to have been one of the palaces of King Pedro, now the property of the Duke of Frias. One of the half-obliterated Arabian inscriptions has been traced by the late D. Pascual de Gallangos as meaning: “Lasting prosperity and perpetual glory to the master of this edifice.” There are many Moorish

traces about it, the highly decorated wall-work, the horse-shoe arches and fine relief. Of the palace of the Trastarmares little now remains but the door with the big Toledan nails. Somewhere about here was the house Hernan Cortes was married from, when the bride’s page stabbed himself at her feet as the procession left the courtyard for the church. I cannot indicate the precise spot, as I was shown it vaguely one lovely moonlit night, when Toledo takes on its spectral and fantastic aspect of white shadow-worked dream, a thing of elusive radiance, wherein reality is lost in mysterious beauty. One walks knee-deep in the sadness and enchantment of “old, unhappy, far-off things,” and the petulant little page, stabbing himself in the folds of the bride’s white satin, as she crosses the threshold of her father’s house, is just the kind of picture one is prompted to evoke. Alas, and alas! if we were only so fortunate as to possess some clue by which we could hope to evoke the bride’s face, some faint perfumed trace of Toledan dame and damsel of those days. But the Toledan school of painters has only left us an interminable gallery of cavaliers, proud austere heads, with the mild, cold and implacable regard of Spain. Of poetry, of womanhood, of soft sensuous charm, not a hint. The exquisite Maria de Padilla, with her little white visage and passionate, sad eyes, is only a name now; but such was her gentle sorcery that she is still a dominating memory. We cling to her the more as she is the single woman’s form that floats above this past of hard-featured and imperious knights, who ever jostled and fought in these murderous streets and lanes, conspired, rebelled and fashioned the roughest and strangest history written.

Near Santa Ursula is the façade of the famous house of the Toledos. The founder of this great family, since known in history as the Dukes of Alva, was a member of the Imperial house of Paleologus, Pedro, a Byzantine prince of the days of Gothic rule. His immediate descendants were the Illans; Stephen Illan, for whom was built the beautiful Casa de Mesa, and whose portrait on horseback may be seen in the Cathedral, behind the hideous Trasparente, was one of the greatest figures of mediaeval Toledo, great citizen, unruly noble, defender of the town, and lord of the people. It was after his day that the family was honoured with the significant private name of Toledo, the present family name of the house of Alva. The palace of the Toledos was like that of Villena, an immense edifice covering all the square. Now only the façade remains as a triumphal assertion of vanished splendour; a disfigured Gothic porch and a couple of ajimez windows in the north wall in front of Santa Ursula. Time has laid a heavy hand on the arches, the slim columns, the cornices, the shields, the stone sculptures and friezes; but the Latin inscription is still visible:

Dominus custodiat introitum tuum et exitum tuum
Ex hox nunc et usque in sæculum.

We need only look at the single chamber of the Casa de Mesa to reconstruct the interior of this dismantled palace, its exquisite Moorish walls and azulejos or tile-work, its arches, ajimez windows and lofty galleries, its sumptuous artesonado ceilings. The house itself began to decline with the disgrace of the great Duke of Alva, whom Philip struck so brutally on the trivial pretext of his son’s love affairs. Don Fadique, the heir of the house of the Toledos, fell in love with the daughter of the Guzmans, the unfortunate Magdalena. They became engaged without Philip’s permission, and instantly both were imprisoned, Don Fadique at Medina del Campo, Magdalena in the Convent of Santa Fé at Toledo (also known as Santiago). On his release, the Duke of Alva decided to marry Don Fadique to his cousin, Maria de Toledo. The King feigned to approve of the marriage, and afterwards made it a pretext of persecution. Magdalena de Guzman, from her conventual retreat, was summoned to lay her claim to Don Fadique’s hand; the Duke and Duchess of Alva were exiled, and Don Fadique and his bride were literally ruined. The Toledos once humiliated, Magdalena de Guzman was ordered back to her convent and to silence, Philip’s minister advising her to write no more letters to the King. “What would you do at Court?” he asks Philip’s unhappy victim, who, at a king’s extraordinary caprice, had wasted twelve years in the cloisters. “You are too young to be a duenna, too old to be a maid of honour. Since you have spent twelve years in the convent, stay there altogether.” And to the King he writes: “May God give her good sense. One can’t make a step without finding a letter from her.” A melancholy time for youth and romance, when a vicious and sour-tempered old king and his corrupt ministers pulled the strings that made its amiable puppets dance. A man with the care of the two Spains, the Netherlands, and all the intrigues of Europe, finds time to glance down at Toledo, and enter into miserable battle with innocent young hearts, mar and make marriages for their doom!

The palace of Fuensalida, the property of the Duke of Frias, never seems to have been an edifice of any particular architectural claim. All history records of it is the fact that Charles Quint’s wife, the Empress Isabel, died here while Charles was building the Alcázar for her reception. The house was built by Lopez de Ayala early in the fifteenth century, whose tomb may be admired in the Church of San Pedro Martir. The origin of the famous Casa de las Tornerias is disputed. Some regard it as an ancient mosque, because of its emphatic mark of Saracen architecture, contemporaneous with that of the little mosque, El Cristo de la Luz. The whole is now too hopelessly built round with vulgar stone and too terribly dilapidated and mutilated for a proper estimate to be formed of its earliest origin and form. It is still, and must always be, mere matter of conjecture whether it was originally built for a mesquita or a Moorish palace.

In the Calle del Barco, which runs from the Cathedral down by a breakneck slant to the river (here you can take the ferry for Our Lady del Valle) is the Casa de Munarriz, so called from a canon who a century ago dwelt there a full hundred years. In the days of Toledo’s greatness it was a fine mansion of some importance with double galleries round the immense courtyard, a handsome staircase of beautifully wrought stone, each storey supported by sixteen arches and thirty-two delicate marble columns with graceful capitals, shields, and sculptured subjects in frieze. The windows are half Arabian, and the emblazoned doorway, between its huge columns, is most imposing. Here and there quantities of beautifully wrought façades speak eloquently of departed days, but it is not possible now to discover the forgotten history of these signs of degraded palaces. The Gothic ornamentation will guide you as to date, or mayhap an exquisitely carven Moorish inscription in the wood-work of a half-ruined wall. Ponz called Toledo the city of fine inscriptions, and Latin and Moorish inscriptions everywhere abound. Here is one still quite distinct in the old House of the Templars, near San Miguel: “Blessings come from God. Let us adore Him. Power is God’s the only one. Abundance, wealth, and perfect security assist the master of this house. Power is God’s. Let God’s blessing complete it. God is eternal. His is power. Blessing.” Round these walls are verses from the Koran.

In close neighbourhood were two historic and important palaces, that of Juan de Padilla, which occupied the whole ugly square to-day of his name, and down the steps which lead to it by a narrow street, the palace of Garcilaso de la Vega. To-day we have no means of forming the faintest notion of what these famous houses were like. Juan de Padilla’s was razed to the ground by order of Charles Quint after the unfortunate hero’s execution. We judge it to have been large from the size of the empty square it stood upon above the Puerta del Cambron, commanding a full view of the Vega and the river; and necessarily splendid from the fact that Isabel and Fernando occupied it as guests at the time of their daughter’s marriage with the King of Portugal. Garcilaso de la Vega’s mansion is now a mere mud wall sheltering several tenement houses. Here the King of Portugal stayed, and with royal guests in such close vicinity, it is easy to imagine the picturesque hum of life in this now silent and insignificant quarter four centuries ago. Alas! not a stone, not a page to help us to reconstrue one bright scene, to relive one vivid hour. Humble walls below the pretty modern little garden of the Miradero, as you approach from the Puente de Alcántara, indicate where Gerardo Lobo, el Capitan Coplero, so nick-named by Philip V. to avenge a satire on the French, lived and wrote El Triunfo de las Mugeres, and in the Calle del Refugo, near the hospital of that name, dwelt the poet Moreto.

I have left for the last the two most important remains of mudejar palaces in Toledo: the Casa de Mesa, the mansion of Estevan de Illan, and the Taller del Moro, supposed to have been the palace where the terrible massacre of the Noche Toledana took place. All that remains of the Casa de Mesa is a single chamber with a charming little boudoir at the top. It is Granadine-Arabian style, highly and marvellously ornamented; quite the most beautiful specimen of mudejar architecture of Toledo. The chamber is sixty feet by twenty-two, and thirty-six in height, and every detail of its delicate and complicated Moorish decoration is a delight. One hardly knows what to marvel most at, the fineness or the extraordinary wealth of relief upon the walls, which is the most enchanting kind of lace-work imaginable. Fairies seem to have wrought it, and its perfection even to-day is nothing less than a mystery and a miracle. And then the arches, the foliage, the inscriptions, the lovely ajimez windows, the friezes and gorgeous artesonado ceilings of chamber and boudoir, stellar-shaped to recall the stars of heaven. Here are points of exclamation and pain enough to think that the secret of so much beauty is lost to us forever. The Christian arms everywhere on the azulejo border

demonstrate that the house was built after the Christian Conquest by Moorish builders, but one may ask oneself, was the rest of the mansion in keeping with this glorious chamber? Who designed it, wrought it? What sort of life was lived therein? What the fashion of the garments that swept it, the dreams dreamed within its fabulous walls? Why should this single jewel remain in a sordid setting, and nothing to tell us how the rest came to vanish, why this alone was preserved? All we know is that Cardinal Siliceo turned the house into a college for young ladies in the sixteenth century, and placed his own arms above the exquisite ajimez window between the chamber and the boudoir, and the chamber served the Carmelites as a chapel for many years.

The Taller del Moro is probably earlier by four centuries than the Casa de Mesa. Here we have the influence of the Cordovese-Arabian architecture, of an art less delicate and fairy-like than the Granadine-Arabian. There is every reason to believe that this palace was built after the Gothic downfall for a Saracen magnate. The street was called the Street of the Moor to prove that an illustrious Moor dwelt there, and its resemblance to the Alcázar of Sevilla indicates that the owner was in every probability a ruler of some kind, a governor or viceroy. It may be on this slight ground that it has been hinted it was here all the nobles of Toledo were invited to a banquet to meet the Khalif’s son, and as each one entered the dusky garden, his head, with a single stroke, was sent rolling into the ditch near the gate. There is nothing now about it to bear out this shuddering suggestion. The long Moorish chamber is turned into a vulgar workshop. The wooden door from the street opens into a squalid yard, with carts and wheelbarrows about, and placid Christians, for a couple of pence, receive you without any hint of knife or blood, or lugubrious ditch. Not even the ghost of a turbaned Moor to disturb your musing as you stand in the degraded workshop, where the light is dim, and vex your soul with mutterings against the damp and smoke. The chamber is a hundred feet long by twenty-four. It is of a singularly rich and splendid design, with Moorish inscriptions running along the walls, with delicate friezes, and all the Oriental luxury of red and gold and blue. The artesonado ceiling is superb, and it requires no very violent effort of imagination to evoke a vague picture of this banqueting hall in the days of Moorish revelry, when passion and policy wrapped themselves in the magic charm of colour, and mere civilisation was an inexhaustible enchantment, a pure and indolent delight.

The Corral of Don Diego is an extensive courtyard near the church of the Magdalena, said to have been the property called the Barrio del Rey, which Alfonso, after the Conquest, gave to Don Pedro Paleologus, who came to Toledo to fight the Moor, and remained to found the great house of the Toledos. The arms of the Toledos may still be seen above the gates, and Henry of Trastamare, we are told, bestowed the palace upon his auxiliary, Bertrand de Guesclin, with the title of Trastamare, which has since fallen to the Duke of Montemar. Nothing now remains of the palace but the courtyard, and a magnificent Moorish archway of horse-shoe shape, and arabesques recalling the style of the Alcázar of Seville, but we may gather some notion of its size and importance from the ruin. There are indications miserably faint and buried away under plaster, that the palace was richly ornamented in the mudejar style. Inscriptions, Moorish arches, and ajimez windows are dimly discoverable beneath the broken plaster-work and the primitive roughness of modern repairs. An impression of splendid halls and chambers, of delicately ornamented Moorish alcoves and boudoirs and inscriptions, of artesonado ceilings and emblazoned doors, is seized under the frost of neglect, through the mildew of centuries, the wood-work, design, and gilt of the octagonal ceilings now almost hopelessly obliterated, and the friezes mere shapeless dilapidation.

The Castillo de San Servando or Cervantes, just outside the Bridge of Alcántara, is an impressive looking ruin, that seems mysteriously to have become inter-penetrated with the burnt and arid tones of the landscape. It has no historic or architectural interest whatever, is not even beautiful, but impresses the eye in its decay, with its rough, battlemented, and scarred visage, the ancient note of its barbican and square rude towers. It is indubitably Mozarabe, built by the Moors as a fortress, and employed as such by Alfonso after the Conquest. Calderon makes mention of it in Cado uno por se, and in the civil war of Pedro and Henry of Trastamare, having been abandoned by the Knights Templars, whose property it had become, it resumed its use as a strong place. The Archbishop Tenorio ordered its repair, and many of the arches and vaults date from this period. Tramps now sleep comfortably in its shadow, and scare you in your moonlit walks by midnight.

Though the Alcázar can by no means be described as a vanished palace, since it is the most substantial and dominating feature of the town, as an illusion it may be classed with these. A wide pathway leads to it from the Zocodover. It was twice burnt, and now all that remains of it are the imposing facades, the three towers, the glorious patio, large enough to hold an army, and the magnificent staircase, up which an army might march abreast. It stands upon the ruins of Wamba’s walls, in full command of the city, and in Roman days was the prison where St Leocadia suffered martyrdom. Under Alfonso VI. it was a strong fortress, guarded by the Cid. Don Alvaro de Luna first, and the Catholic kings afterwards, had some hand in adorning it, but Charles Quint, designing to reside in Toledo, may be said to have rebuilt it altogether. He gave the commission to the best Spanish architects of the century—Covarrubias, Vergara, Villalpando, Jaspar de Vega, Gonzalez de Lara, and the great Herrera, with a host

of minor artists. He built it for the empress, who, like himself, died before it was finished. Philip II. sent to Brussels, to London and Italy, in search of other artists to help to complete the colossal edifice, and it stood for long the most splendid palace of Spain. Came Staremberg and his troops in 1710, who turned it into a barrack, burnt the superb woodwork as fuel, broke the windows, tore down the artesonado ceilings, the carved doors, and set fire to the palace on leaving it. Spain has never been fortunate in her allies—English, French, or Austrian; they invariably found their entertainment in spreading ruin among her grandeurs. Carlos III. attempted to restore the Alcázar, but the French then came in 1810 and set fire to it again. The fire lasted three days, and now only the walls remain. The regal staircase, surely the widest of the world, ends in the void. You are shown the window at which the unfortunate Blanche sat in her solitary misery, but there are no walls to indicate the size of the chamber. You can see the lovely view from the window by picking your way across the scaffolding, but there is nothing else to see. For years the restorers have been busy with the roof of the galleries that run round the immense patio, only the artesonado will be reproduced in iron instead of wood, and the imitation is good. It may be completed, at the rate of modern work in Spain, in a couple of hundred years. The façade is plateresca, sober, and cold. Indeed, I cannot say that there is anything about this palace except its immensity calculated to provoke admiration. It towers imperiously above the town, crowded beneath it—a gigantic illusion; substantial without, void within; dreary and featureless in all its futile ostentation of measureless space.

CHAPTER X

Minor Churches, Hospitals, and Convents

are still traces of Arabian architecture in the vaults and stucco ornamentation of the same period. But the general appearance of the edifice is more modern, of a sober Gothic style, less highly decorated, but to my thinking more graceful in form than San Juan de los Reyes. The three long naves appear to be of a more recent date than the transept and capilla major. The pillars that sustain the dome are extremely graceful, and there is a bold freshness about the arches between that give the whole an air of distinction which none of the other minor churches of Toledo possess. The general effect is delightfully harmonious. In each of the chapels of the aisles there is something to examine. The founder of the restored temple, as the long inscription in Gothic letters along the friezes of the transept tells us, was Francisco de Rojas, commendador and ambassador at the court of Maximilian I., buried here in 1523. The high altar is of wrought wood of the sixteenth century, with paintings of that period of some merit. The shafts of the transept are in excellent taste, and on one of the lateral altars, under the retablo of painted wood, is a little sculptured Mater Dolorosa by an unknown artist, exquisitely touching and life-like. It has the beauty of a profound and tremulous sensibility and a vivid sweetness that reminded me of a lovely St Scholastica of painted wood by Pereira I saw at Santiago de Compostello, but the Spanish painter who accompanied me to San Andrès assures me that it is not a Pereira. The hand that wrought this symbol of gracious grief remains unknown to fame like that which sculptured the symbol of divine sweetness in the head of St Francis of Assisi above the cloister door of Burgos Cathedral. There are two Grecos here badly placed. With the aid of a chair and a candle even in the early afternoon you can barely distinguish them, so high do they hang in the dim light. One is St Peter of Alcántara and the other St Francis. Visibly Grecos, but of their merits it would be impossible to write, because of the squinting view you get of them. There is a Calvary of the Genoese painter, Semini, and an Adoration of the Kings by Antonio Vanderpere, with the unedifying legend of Lot and his daughters, a copy of Guido.

The church of San Pedro Martir, attached to the monastery of that order, and affiliated to St John of Latran in Rome since 1773, is as black and chill as a colossal vault. Señor Parro in Toledo en la Mano writes of this dull and unbeautiful edifice in terms of flatulent praise, several pages long. He calls it the Pantheon of Toledan glory. It is certainly an excellent tomb if nothing else. The coldest churches I have ever set foot in are this and San Benito of Valladolid, both warranted to provoke pneumonia on a summer’s day. In winter I should imagine the rash traveller would remain therein embalmed in ice. The architecture is of the Greco-Roman style, bewilderingly spacious without any majesty of effect in its immense proportions. Señor Parro tells us that the façade is “most lovely.” My expectations were not realised. I found the corinthian columns, the cornices, the “grandiose” central arch, the pilasters perfectly insignificant, but there are two marble statues on either side, sometimes mistakenly attributed to Berruguete, extremely fine, and also a life-size statue of St Peter effective in a lesser degree. The frescoes have disappeared, and the high altar is now defaced with commonplace modern pictures of no value whatever. But the gilt wood and sculpture remain. Once the degraded squares were filled with paintings of Fray Bautista Maino, the distinguished master of Felipe IV., Velasquez’s friend and patron. These vanished pictures were excellent imitations of Paul Veronese, so good that they were seized for the Musée of Madrid, and to fill up the horrid vacancy modern monstrosities, mere daubs, were ordered, which to-day grotesquely offend the eye. The celebrated Virgen del Rosario, an object of special devotion to the Toledans, may be seen in one of the chapels. The plateresca iron-railing of the sanctuary would be remarkable in any other land, but the railings of Spain are so sumptuous that one hardly notices this one. Still it is worth inspection, being a rich and profusely gilt specimen of that special work, with a fine centre cross and a rich frieze. Attached to the cross is the standard of the great Cardinal of Spain, Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, pale blue damask, with four Jerusalem crosses in each corner, and in the centre an oval figure of St Helena holding the cross, before which kneels the great Cardinals. At the foot of the middle nave, below the choir, are a group of wooden statues representing the saints of the preaching orders and a scarce distinguishable fresco of Maino. The choir is large and free, with a fine reading-desk and sculptured seats, an inferior imitation of those of the Cathedral. Off the sacristy, a large but insignificant chamber, with an imposing marble table worthy a nobler setting, there is a little Gothic chapel dedicated to St Agnes, part of the primitive building, and here you may see an ancient retablo of extreme interest. Alonzo Carrillo of Toledo and Don Alvaro de Guzman were buried here as early as 1303, as the half-effaced Gothic characters tell us.

Among the great men of Toledo buried in the church are the Counts of Cifuentes, above whose arms Fray Maino painted a fresco. In the chapel of the Virgin of the Rosary is buried the famous poet Garcilaso de la Vega, whose statue, life-size in marble kneeling, is encased in armour, interesting rather as an historic figure than for any intrinsic merit of art. The Fiscal of Holy Office and Prior of Santillana, Pedro Soto Cameno, has also his statue as founder of the chapel; he was buried in 1583. In this same chapel is the impressive Gothic tomb of the Malograda, a surpassingly beautiful young woman, magnificently apparelled, lying upon a marble couch above the funeral urn that contains her ashes. Historians disagree as to the identity of this romantic figure. Some say she was Doña Maria, the bride of Don Lorenzo Suarez de Figueroa, Master of Santiago in 1389, whose despair on losing a loved young wife is thus immortalised. Others identify the Malograda with Doña Estefania de Castro, mysteriously done to death in the days of Alonso the Emperor. The tomb rests on superb marble lions, and angels as usual hold the shields, in Gothic fashion. The ample folds of the dead girl’s garments are charmingly graceful, and to the beauty of art is added the mystery of romance. Bride or mistress, this fair girl, asleep for six centuries, holds in the stillness of her delicate sculptured visage the enigma of her broken destiny. Sorrow or remorse built her splendid monument.

The tombs of the Fuensalidas in the transept are notable works of art. The statues representing the mighty and turbulent Ayalas and their wives are of alabaster, and close by, brought from ruins of the Augustine Convent, is a double tomb of plateresca style, highly sculptured and divided by two arches on delicate pillars, crowned with an intricate frieze in really fine relief, belonging to Diego de Mendoza, a great figure in the sixteenth century, and his wife, Ana de la Cerda. A niece of St Theresa also is buried here, Doña Marina de Rivadeneira y Cepeda.

The purest mudejar steeple of Toledo is that of San Roman. This Moorish steeple, with its arcaded windows and ingenious brickwork, was erected by the famous Esteban de Illan, chief of the Toledos. Formerly the church was a mosque remodelled from the original Gothic chapel, as the remains of Arabic inscriptions indicate. After the Conquest it was refashioned again into a Christian temple, and has since undergone frequent restoration. Here St Ildefonso, after St Leocadia, the patron of Toledo, was baptised in remoter centuries. In the sixteenth century the plateresca capilla major was built. Four wide arches, the two in front of the central nave open, and the others wrought into the lateral walls, with their graceful pillars and reliefs are extremely effective, and are regarded, with the florid sculpture and half-orange cupola, as constituting one of the finest specimens of plateresca architecture of Toledo. The light, however, is imperfect for full inspection. The retablo belongs to the same debased form of renaissance, an excess in sculpture, legends in relief and medallion, every kind of architectural fancy a combination of Gothic and classic could suggest. Nearly all evidence of its earlier form has vanished, but for a defaced Arabian inscription and a few horse-shoe arches, and a line of blocked arcades with the cusped arches above, bold and large, while a simple ceiling covers the primitive artesonado. In a little chapel on the Epistle side, are a few forsaken specimens of old Spanish painting, before it blossomed out into our European school. They are stiff and dull enough, and their subject the conventional scenes from the New Testament, but interesting as a development of Spanish art.

From the Moorish windows of its tower the flag of Castille waved in 1166, while the little king downstairs, in the safe keeping of the mighty Illans was proclaimed, Toledo, Toledo, Toledo por el rey Don Alonso VIII., and the town, in one of its customary phases of turbulent revolt, was divided between the followers of the great families of the Illans, the Laras, and the Castros. The tower is of plain reddish-brown stone, the brick-work rough and unmoulded of a supremely singular and distinguished effect, in perfect keeping with the rude, strange aspect of the city. Among the smaller mudejar steeples is a good example in that of Santa Magdalena. This is rougher and simpler than the rest. It has only two arched windows above, while the lower part is perfectly plain and solid. The bells hang in the window, adding thus to the picturesque rudeness of the general effect, so unfamiliar to the northern eye, so quaintly barbaric, so distinguished in its freedom from the curse of modern banality or vulgarity.

A double interest is attached to the little church between the Puerta del Sol and the Puerta Bisagra, the Cristo de la Luz. It remains still a perfect mosque, where to-day a Mohammedan might pray and proclaim Allah the only God and Mohammed his prophet, and here the conquering Castillian, entering the city, stopped and ordered mass to be said, hanging up his shield upon the wall in memory of the first mass celebrated after the defeat of the Moors, 1035. There are traces of anterior occupation in Visi-Gothic days, and nothing more quaint, more curious, exists in Toledo. Legends are naturally attached to it. In the time of Atanagildo, there hung over the door a crucifix much venerated by the Toledanos, and it entered the minds of two foolish Jews, Sacao and Abisain, to outrage it. They pricked a lancet hole in the side, and instantly blood gushed forth. In consternation they carried off the cross to hide it in their dwelling, and the Christians, hunting everywhere for their stolen crucifix, traced it by the blood-marks to the house of these stupid Jews. The Jews were torn to pieces, of course, and a solemn procession led back the insulted image to its revered spot. Then the incorrigible Jews, to avenge the deaths of Sacao and Abisain, are said to have poisoned the feet of the statue, so that the Christians prompted to kiss them should be destroyed. A woman knelt to perform this pious action, when to her surprise and terror, the statue withdrew its foot from her kiss. The name Christ of the light comes from Moorish days. When the Moors took Toledo, the sacred image was hidden by an outer wall, with space enough to permit of a burning lamp being placed before it. This lamp, unreplenished, burnt the entire 370 years of Moorish dominion, and was discovered still aflame on May 25th, when Alonso VI. entered the town. Passing the hidden spot as he rode along the Valmardones, the king’s horse suddenly knelt, some say; some say it was the Cid’s. A warrior’s horse that performed such an action nowadays would receive the whip. In those days, everyone seems to have been on the look-out for miracles as natural events. The king and the Cid dismounted, the wall was instantly broken down, and discovered the crucifix and the burning lamp fixed in the wall of a Moorish mosque. Mass was said on the spot by the Archbishop Bernardo, and there being no cross above the altar, the king offered his shield, on which a large cross was painted, and there it hangs to-day, a fine martial offering. At that time the church lay beyond the town walls, at the vanished gate of Valmardon, whereas now the town entrance from the Vega begins at the Puerta Bisagra. The architecture is Moorish-Byzantine, quite the oldest and most perfect specimen of Moorish architecture in Spain, and, for that reason, one of the most interesting monuments of the Peninsula. The body of the church is 22 feet by 25, while the outside is 22 by 19 only. The whole building is white-washed, and gives an amazing impression of strength for so limited a space. It looks so small and simple, and yet is so fantastic, of an Oriental art so complete and finished. The six short naves cross each other under nine vaults, and in the middle are four strong low columns with sculptured capitals and twelve heavy horse-shoe arches. The walls above are pierced with arcades cusped in Moorish fashion and supported on shafts, each division crowned with a little vault. The forest of naves and arches of the mosque of Cordova is an enlarged and magnificent reproduction of this Oriental style. Above are smaller semicircular arches, some double resting on smaller pillars. Varied little cupolas complete the design, with the centre inevitable half-orange, and above the central arch is the shield of Don Alfonso (which may or may not be authentic) a white cross on a crimson ground with the inscription below: Esto es el escudo que dejo en esta ermita el Rey Don Alonso VI. cuando ganó à Toledo y se dijo aqui la primera misa. The Cristo de la Luz makes an admirable contrast with the later Arabian work, the more decorative period of the brilliant Morisco Granadian architecture of which it is a foil.

Another notable church is the oldest and most celebrated of Toledo, the basilica of Santa Leocadia, now called the Cristo de la Vega. Before King Sisebuth’s days it was a prætorian temple, and this monarch converted it into a Christian chapel in the sixteenth century. Here prelates and monarchs met to hold the earlier of the famous Councils of Toledo. It is said, I know not if upon authentic fact, that some of the wealth of this ancient church has been carried off to adorn the Cathedral choir, some to the School of Infantry which now oddly desecrates the Hospital of Santa Cruz. As early as the eleventh Council, an abbot of Santa Leocadia was named, which proves its early importance; and consecration for ever came with the apparition of the saint, in the reign of Recesvinthus. Juana le loca carried part of the body of the saint to Flanders, to a monastery in Hainault. The Archbishop of Sevilla paid 1000 ducats to the Flemish monastery for the return of these relics, which, in an explosion of universal joy, occurred in 1583. Philip II. sent troops to Cambrai under Miguel Hernandez, where they were met by a procession of abbesses and holy persons. Letters went between Cardinal Quiroga and Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, on the subject, and the matter was almost one of European importance. The relics were said to have been stolen by the Count of Hainault when he came to Spain to

help the Castillians against the Moors; but Ambrosio de Morales is of opinion that they were taken to Oviedo, which would have been at the date of the Moorish conquest, when Favila and Pelayo, with their Asturian followers, were at Rodrigo’s court. For their reception at Toledo, all the town went out in procession under triumphal arches, banners flying, trumpets blowing. A throne was erected at the Puerta Bisagra, and a chapel, where eight dignitaries and canons received the relics; and the procession turned back, with music, singing and dancing. Every parish had its banner wrought for the occasion, and each child carried a flag. More than a thousand monks walked behind; and, as well as fifteen hundred priests of the town, there were all the canons, the Brotherhood of the Hermandad, foreign priests, and every order of the Catholic Church was present. Then came all the officers and ministry of the Inquisition, more than seven hundred and forty doctors and masters, fifty-five juries, thirty-three magistrates, the mayor, the Duke of Maqueda, the Count of Fuensalida and Pedro de Silva, the city standard-bearer. All the grandees of Castille followed—six dukes, nine marquises, six counts, quantities of minor noblemen, and a regiment of cavaliers and lords. The procession went by all the principal streets from the Puerta Bisagra to the Cathedral. All were gaily decorated with tapestries and silks, and arches were built everywhere, with Latin inscriptions and elegant verses among their bright flowers. At the Cathedral doors, Philip II., his two children, Don Carlos and Doña Ysabel Clara, his sister, Doña Maria de Austria, and the Princes Rodolph and Ernest of Hapsburg stood in the porch to receive the relics. The majesty of the ceremony here becomes so dazzling that our prolix friend, Dr Pisa, lays down his pen and weeps from emotion. He cannot hope to trace such a picture, nor can we. But we strive to imagine the splendour of Cardinal Quiroga in his sumptuous pontifical robes, a blaze of gold, brocade and jewels, such as not to be beheld out of Eastern legend; the dignitaries with their jewelled mitres; the King, infantas and princes, all hardly less resplendent, and the laity rivalling them as far as possible, in the gemmed lights of Toledo’s glorious cathedral. A picture one would gladly have seen, if it could be seen at a price less terrible than that of Philip’s contemporary or subject.

The church is situated under the ruins of the old city walls, below the Puerta del Cambron. It is rough and simple enough, and derives its name from the wooden crucifix over the altar, to which legend attaches a romantic interest. Becquer and Zorilla have told the tale in thin and sentimental prose, and in thinner and more sentimental verse. A gallant pledged his word to marry a maid within sight of this crucifix: afterwards he forgot his promise and denied the pledge, on which the broken-hearted maid flung herself at the foot of the crucifix, and addressed it as the witness of violated vows. The crucified held out a wooden arm, and a voice from above exclaimed, “I testify.” There is one lovely thing in this quaint old basilica, the statue of St Leocadia by Berruguete, originally sculptured for the gate of Cambron. Nothing more sweet and delicate was ever wrought by that famous hand; no more fitting expression of brave and beautiful maidenhood was ever conceived in stone; and Italian influence in its best form is here visible, and Berruguete’s strength is subtilised by an exquisite and penetrative charm. As well as St Leocadia and St Ildefonso, an Arabian inscription in relief tells us that the first Moorish King of Toledo, Mahomad Ben-Raman, was buried here.

Some of the convents of Toledo have been famous. That of San Pedro de las Dueñas, in the reign of Henry the Impotent, created quite a scandalous interest. Tired of his mistress, Doña Catalina de Sandoval, he insisted on naming her abbess of this convent, and with this object ordered the public expulsion of the abbess, the Marquesa de Guzman. In his pretence lies the humour of the situation: he found the convent needed a purifying influence, and that the ladies were not sufficiently scrupulous in the maintenance of their vows. Spanish convents, before St Theresa’s time, were not harsh abodes. Indeed, I fancy they were freer and pleasanter dwellings than the home of father or husband. Cavaliers thronged the parlours, and there was much thrumming of lute and guitar, much singing of soft sequidilla between belted knights and veiled ladies, who only left off these gentle recreations when the bell summoned them to meal or prayer. However, St Pedro so exceeded the limit of ecclesiastical tolerance that the Archbishop Alonzo of Carrillo placed it under interdict, and forbade any priest to cross its threshold. The scandal only ended with the austere and lofty presence of Queen Isabel upon the scene.

Santa Fé was originally a royal Moorish palace beautifully situated on the north edge of the Zocodover, which Alonso VI., the conqueror, at the instance of his French queen Constance, bestowed upon a French order for noble ladies. A charming and perfect suggestion of its antique moresque beauty may be had from the view of its wall in an old garden above the river where you see the Moorish apse and brick arcading. The ground covered by the palace must have been enormous, since in the time of Alfonso VIII. the priory of the Knights of Calatrara was established here. Nothing now remains but the Moorish choir and arcaded wall, and the best of it is to be seen from the wild patch of garden outside the convent walls. It is another case of senseless destruction, a monument we are only permitted to rebuild in imagination with the help of a few Moorish arches and brown brickwork half-hidden by exuberant foliage. A stately dream, if mournful and evanescent, San Juan de la Penitencia ineffectively situated below the Cathedral in a broken and dilapidated quarter, is a Franciscan convent founded by Cisneros for poor girls, where after six years’ free schooling they may remain as nuns, and if they prefer marriage the convent dowers them with about £15, with a life-seat in the choir. The church is one of the minor sights of Toledo. It was finished by the secretary of Cisneros, who lies buried here, Francisco Ruiz, Bishop of Avila. About the convent halls and corridors are still traces of Moorish ornamentation in which the Castillian conquerors delighted quite as much as the Moslem. The chapel ceiling is a good specimen of artesonado in terrible decay alas, and the architecture is a medley of Gothic, Moorish, and renaissance. Above the porch are the arms of Cisneros. Within it is of a gloomy and depressing simplicity: a single nave, a high altar, a tribune. True the plateresca frieze of the tribune is graceful, and the iron railing of the high altar is quite the best of the minor churches, and admirably decorative, while the tomb of the Bishop of Avila brought from Palermo is a most beautiful work of art. Writing of it, Ponz says:—“Above a large stone divided by three pilasters to form three pedestals, there are an equal number of statues seated, almost life-size, representing Faith, Hope, and Charity. Between the pilasters are the arms of the Bishop, five castles. In a framed niche are contained the urn, couch, and recumbent statue. In front of the urn there are two weeping children, and in the depths of the niche four angels hold up the curtains. On either side are two Doric pillars sustaining the architecture, frieze, and cornices, and along the frieze runs: Beato mortui, qui in Domino moriuntur. On the edge are two wrought columns of a very antique taste, excellently executed.... Between these columns and pilasters on either side is a statue, St James and St Andrew, and above the figures of children. Over the whole is a bas-relief of the Annunciation, with the statues of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist, half the size of the Virtues below.” Ponz is of opinion that this magnificent work of art is of two distinct periods, the frame work having been wrought later by Toledan sculptures after the tomb within had been brought from Palermo, and revealing the delicacy, the finish and unerring taste of the finer Italian school. Nothing could be more graceful, more effective than the curtains held apart by the angels, or more delightfully touching than the slight shadow thus cast upon the recumbent statue, lending it something of the immediate stillness and impressiveness of recent death.

Santa Isabel is worth a visit. Some good azulejo and the artesonado ceiling testify to Moorish influences and a queen and a royal princess, daughter of Isabel the Glorious, were buried here, and the whole forms an agreeable note of quaintness and dimness without however any special attraction in architecture or decoration or art. Not so San Clemente. The façade is what my Spanish friends call una preciosidad, the strong and beautiful work of Berruguete. The architecture rests on two Ionic pillars, and above is the statue of the titular saint. The reliefs of the porch are exquisite, and the frieze abounds in all the wild and exuberant fancies of the Spanish renaissance, every caprice in figure, in leafage, in image, and phantasmal suggestion. Like Santa Fé the convent prides itself upon aristocratic traditions. In the church is buried the infante, Don Fernando, son of the founder, Alonso VII., the emperor, the tomb a restoration by order of Felipe II. in 1570. The interior is pleasing with an air of sober wealth, but has nothing to show in the way of art that can compare with the noble façade. It is stated that the archives contain 500 Arabian manuscripts, but these statements the intelligent foreigner must take on trust.

Santo Domingo el Real is another aristocratic convent of historical interest. It was founded by an illegitimate daughter of Pedro the Cruel, Doña Maria de Castilla, who was its first abbess. Two sons of Pedro were buried here, results of the thousand vagabond caprices of this crowned Blue-Beard; the infanta of Aragon, Queen of Portugal, hence the qualification, St Dominick the Royal, the Guzmans, the Silvas, and Ayalas reconciled first by marriage and then by death. There is a fine retablo if there were only light enough to see it by.

Of the many hospitals of Toledo, two alone are famous, one what the Spanish guides very properly call “a sumptuous work of art.” Descending the steps through the Moorish archway of the Zocodover, you leave Cervantes’ inn on the right, and a little lower down on the left is the Hospital of Santa Cruz, the hospital of Mendoza, “The Cardinal of Spain,” now incongruously enough a school of infantry. The traveller, enamoured of the picturesque, in awed surrender to the charm of noble ruins, grows to loathe the military all over Europe. They take up their quarters so profanely in monuments one hardly dares to lift one’s voice in. They sprawl in their motley uniforms over the loveliest homes of romance and memories, and burthen the silence with their futile miseries, labours, and tyrannies. In times of war the army makes a gallant figure. Then each man is a hero, and we willingly tend his wounds. But in times of

peace the soldier is frankly an anachronism and a nuisance. He desecrates ruins and spoils the view; he vulgarises the atmosphere of legend, and cheapens the majesty of dismantled walls. There is, of course, no reason but a sentimental one why the sabred heroes of Spain should not sleep within the walls of a magnificent monument, and exercise their muscles in the lovely chapel of Mendoza, now their gymnasium, but what will you?—a traveller is necessarily sentimental.

The great cardinal of Spain designed to build an hospital for foundlings, and had engaged the architect, Enrique Egas, and with him traced the plan, when death overtook him at Guadalajara in 1495, and he bequeathed his idea, with over 75,000 ducats for its completion, to Queen Isabel and his relative the Duke of Infantado. The Queen chose the spot on account of the wide view of the hills rolling upward from the opposite river banks, and the hospital was called Santa Cruz because of the founder’s devotion to the Holy Cross. It was originally a royal Gothic palace, converted later into a Moorish palace, it is said, the town residence of Galiana’s father, Galafré. Possibly here may have dwelt Casilda, the King’s daughter, who from her earliest years, loved the Christians and pitied them, and carried food to the Christian prisoners. She vowed to devote herself to the poor and live a maid, to King Almenor’s dismay, who proposed one after another brilliant match to her in vain. Standing at the palace gate one day he found her carrying a basket of provisions to the prisoners, and asked her what the basket contained. “Roses,” said Casilda like St Elisabeth of Hungary, and opening the basket, to her surprise discovered it full of red and white roses. There, too, may have taken place that strange bridal of Doña Theresa, sister of the King of Leon and the Moorish king Abdallah, when, it is said, an angel interposed to prevent the union of Christian princess and Moorish monarch, and the King thus convinced of the sacrilege, sent his bride away with camels loaded with gold and silver and jewels, which she carried to the convent of St Pelayo, where she became abbess. When Alfonso reigned over Toledo, he gave the property to the nuns of San Pedro de las Dueñas, and in 1504 the building of the cardinal’s hospital was begun. It is the first sample of plateresque architecture then introduced into Spain by Covarrubias. The façade is superb, one of the many glories of Toledo. Impossible to conceive anything more charming than all this wonder of chiselled stone, with its delicate arches and most exquisite reliefs. One represents St Helena holding the cross, and kneeling in front of her, Cardinal Mendoza; behind the cardinal is St Peter, and behind the empress is St Paul; a suite of pages hold mitre and hat. The decoration of leafage, flower and cross is rich and fanciful. One particularly lovely relief represents Charity, with statues on either side, while the architecture, the friezes and cornices are elaborately wrought in every Gothic fancy, bucklers, arms, and armour mingling with flower and foliage, and the cardinal’s arms held reverently by little angels. Between the magnificent columns are the four cardinal virtues, and above are other reliefs whose general effect is beautiful enough, but whose details it is difficult to follow at such a height (one is supposed to represent St Joachim and St Anne embracing, and is somewhat crudely defined by the Spanish guidebooks), while the whole is surmounted by the cardinal’s favourite Jerusalem cross. The large windows are extremely harmonious, with their Toledan railings so grimly artistic, with all the sombre beauty of a taste more largely decorative than prettily fanciful. On entering you face three sculptured doors leading to the chapel, now the gymnasium, and to the splendid patios, to-day fallen into a scandalous state of neglect and decay. The superb staircase, despite the fact that all the wealth of its beautiful ornamentation is half defaced, gives some indication of what a work of art it once was in its mingling of arabesque and plateresque note, and something of the delicate finish of details may still be seized. The chapel forms a Greek cross, degraded, too, like the rest of the edifice, showing remains of what was once a singularly fine specimen of the artesonado ceiling. The heavy Gothic pillars are richly wrought in an incredible variety of reliefs, and we have no difficulty in believing that this was once one of the architectural gems of the Gothic capital. But what is still more impressive, as unique as the great staircase, is the immense empty patio, with its long galleries and pillars of Italian marble, its reliefs and armorial bearings. I know nothing in Toledo that seizes the imagination so vividly with the tragic sensation of vanished magnificence as this great courtyard. Not a courtyard surely, but an esplanade enclosed within arcaded marble galleries, where a prince might hold a review for his private satisfaction.

The Hospital of San Juan Bautista or Afuera is another remarkable building it behoves us to mention. This was founded by one of the noblest of Toledo’s archbishops, Tavera, who died after his journey to Valladolid to baptise the infant, Prince Carlos, of unfortunate renown, and to bury the queen, and was buried here. Berruguete wrought his tomb in the chapel, a monument as noble as the cardinal it honours. The hospital lies beyond the Puerta de Bisagra in the Covachuelas, with a little public garden in front, and a view of all the Vega on either side. The spot takes its name, Plazuela de Marchan, from one of the earliest Corregidors, Pedro de Navarra, marshal and marques de Cortes, who owned it. The Emperor Charles Quint bestowed it on Tavera for his hospital in 1540. The primitive plan was Bustamente’s, but the building was concluded by the two Vergaras. Many grandees and bishops were connected with the work before its termination in 1599, while the outer portal dates from the eighteenth century. The two patios are superb, and the general effect of the building is imposing. In one of the south rooms, under the big clock, Berruguete died in 1561, after having finished Cardinal Tavera’s tomb, his last work, the fitting termination of a fruitful and laborious existence. Not a Spanish town, hardly a church, but has something from the hand of this stupendous worker, who seems to have crowded as much production into a single lifetime as might easily have supported an entire century. His death is dryly recorded, without any details, and of the man himself we are not permitted to gather any impression. We obtain no glimpse of him at work, or abroad taking his pleasures. Like El Greco, he is a name without any distinct personality for us, attached to Toledo in glowing evidence.

If there were nothing else in Toledo but this monument of Cardinal Tavera in the hospital chapel, it would be worth while to travel from remote parts to see it. The church is fine, composed of a single large and lofty nave, paved with white and black marble, and the impression it makes is one of seizing quietude. Here you may examine El Greco at his worst and best: the appalling eccentricities of vision and manner revealed in the St John the Baptist, lurid, livid, with gnarled limbs and swollen muscles, and the noble and dignified portrait of Cardinal Tavera,

one of the most beautiful portraits El Greco ever painted. But all your admiration is claimed by Berruguete’s monument before the altar. As the work of an old and dying man, it confounds minute and modern talent. It has the virility, the freshness, the superb strength of youth; it has the serenity, the stillness, the awful majesty of death. Mount the steps beside this marble tomb, and you will look on such a picture of death in all its restful sublimity as the hand, the imagination of man have rarely seized. Nothing like that old man’s head under the mitre has Berruguete himself ever done. It is the supreme attainment of genius on the eve of eternal night, the culmination of a magnificent art, when the great strong hand is about to lay down the chisel forever, and gathers in a supreme moment all that is best in a life’s work, to give it a noble ending. You should examine all the splendid details, the large gracious statues at either corner, the shields, the eagles, the urns and masterly mouldings, before looking at the dead cardinal’s visage, for after that you will have no mind left for any emotion but awe. Here so cheap a thing as praise melts into stupefied silence. The aged sculptor began this monument in 1559 and finished it in 1561, the year of his death, and it was his sons who received the payment due to him, 993,764 maravedis. It seems extraordinary that anyone should dare to put a price on such work, or even offer vulgar coin for it. There are things that lie without the radius of commerce and competition, and this is surely one of them. One is almost content to think that Berruguete was never actually paid for such an inspiration, but dropped into immortality before the revolting 993,764 maravedis unworthily touched a hand so honoured.

CHAPTER X Minor Churches, Hospitals, and Convents

CHAPTER X

Minor Churches, Hospitals, and Convents