Part 12

Moorish summit was crowned with four brazen balls, so large that in order to get them into the building it was necessary to remove the keystone of a door called the Gate of the Muezzin, leading from the mosque to the interior of the tower. The iron bar, which supported the balls, weighed about ten cwt., and the whole was cast by a celebrated alchemist, a Sicilian, named Abu Leyth, at a cost of £50,000 sterling. These particulars were set down by a Mohammedan writer of the period, and their accuracy was proved in 1395 (157 years after the overthrow of the Arab dominion), when the earthquake threw the entire mechanism, balls and supports, to the ground, where they were weighed, and the figures were found to be absolutely correct. The figure of La Fé, “The Faith,” which now tops the Giralda, was cast by Bartolomé Morel in 1568. It stands fourteen feet high, and weighs twenty-five cwts., yet so wonderful is the workmanship that it turns with every breath of the wind. The head of the female figure is crowned with a Roman helmet, the right hand bears the Labaro, or banner, of Constantine, and in the left it holds out a palm branch, symbolical of conquest.

But when we return from this “strange composite fane,” with its Christian summit surmounting a Moslem tower, which again has its foundations in a Roman temple, when we re-cross the Court of Oranges, with its Moorish fountain, flanked by a Christian pulpit, and enter the cathedral, the mind is transported at a bound from the fairy-like beauties of Morisco ornamentation to the sombre, awe-inspiring majesty, which prompted Theophile Gautier to the reflection that “the most extravagant and monstrously prodigious Hindoo pagodas are not to be mentioned in the same century as the Cathedral of Seville. It is a mountain scooped out, a valley turned topsy-turvy; Notre Dame, at Paris, might walk erect in the middle nave, which is of frightful height; pillars as large round as towers, and which appear so slender that they make you shudder, rise out of the ground, or descend from the vaulted roof, like stalactites in a giant’s grotto.” Lomas, who finds the exterior of the cathedral “simply beneath criticism,” and deplores that “age after age a great band of glorifiers of self, through self’s handiwork, should have been employed in producing what they determined should be a world’s marvel,” is compelled to admit that “the first view of the interior is one of the supreme moments of a lifetime. The glory and majesty of it are almost terrible. No other building, surely, is so fortunate as this in what may be called its presence.” Even George Borrow, who thought more of his beloved testaments than of Spanish monuments erected to “the spiritual tyranny of the Court of Rome,” was feign to declare that it is impossible to wander through the cathedral of Seville “without experiencing sensations of sacred awe and deep astonishment”; and Caveda describes the general effect as “truly majestic.”

The Italian rhapsodist, Edmondo de Amicis, who always succeeds in conveying a strikingly convincing impression of the spectacles that fascinate his sensitive mind, is at his best in his description of Seville cathedral. “At your first entrance,” he says, “you are bewildered, you feel as if you are wandering in an abyss, and for several moments you do nothing but glance around you in that immense space, almost as if to assure yourself that your eyes are not deceiving you, nor your fancy playing you some trick. Then you approach one of the pillars, measure it, and look at the more distant ones, which, though as large as towers, appear so slender that it makes you tremble to think that the building is resting upon them. You traverse them with

a glance from floor to ceiling, and it seems as if you could almost count the moments it would take for the eye to climb them. There are five aisles, each one of which might form a church. In the centre one, another cathedral, with its cupola and bell tower, could easily stand. All of them together form sixty-eight bold vaulted ceilings, which seem to expand and rise slowly as you look at them. Every thing is enormous in this cathedral. The principal chapel, placed in the centre of the great nave, and almost high enough to touch the ceiling, looks like a chapel built for giant priests, to whose knees the ordinary altars would not reach. The paschal candle seems like the mast of a ship, and the bronze candlestick which holds it, like the pillars of a church. The choir is a museum of sculpture and chiselling. The chapels are worthy of the church, for they contain the masterpieces of sixty-seven sculptors and thirty-eight painters.... The chapel of San Ferdinand, which contains the sepulchres of this king and his wife Beatrice, of Alonso the Wise, the celebrated minister, Florida Blanca, and other illustrious personages, is one of the richest and most beautiful of all. The body of Ferdinand, who redeemed Seville from the dominion of the Arabs, clothed in his uniform, with crown and mantle, rests in a crystal casket, covered with a veil. On one side, is his sword which he carried on the day of his entrance into Seville; on the other, a staff of cane, an emblem of command. In that same chapel is preserved a little ivory Virgin, which the holy king carried to war with him, and other relics of great value.” And here also, although De Amicis makes no mention of them, are the keys of Seville which Abdul Hassan handed to Ferdinand at the surrender of the city. One key is of silver, and bears the inscription, “May Allah grant that Islam may rule for ever in this city.” The other key is made of iron gilt, and is of Mudejar workmanship. It is inscribed, “The King of Kings will open; the King of the Earth will enter.”

In its churches and its old houses, Seville is rich in Moorish influences, and exhibits abundant traces of Morisco art, which prevailed against the material dominancy of the Christian conquerors. The reconciled Arabs who remained as subjects of Ferdinand became the chief of the most lavishly-remunerated artisans of the city. They pursued their craft in the dwellings of the rich; and in the churches of the “infidel.” Untrammelled by religion and uninspired by faith, they worked for art’s sake, and the substantial pecuniary award that sweetened their labours. The church of San Marco has a beautiful Moorish tower built in imitation of the Giralda, and second only to the minaret tower of the cathedral in point of height; San Gil is a Christianised Mezquita; Santa Catalina reveals the survival of Moorish art in its façade, while its principal chapel is Gothic. In nearly all the sacred edifices of antiquity the combination of Moorish and Renaissance architecture betrays an incongruity of style and sentiment which is only to be found among the Christian churches of Spain. And if the Catholic kings, who were sworn to the extirpation of the Moslems, allowed the Moors to build their churches in the style of temples devoted to Allah, it is not surprising that many of the finest private residences of the city retain a Moorish design, and possess a distinctly Oriental atmosphere.

The Casa de Pilatos, which has been pronounced the fourth great monument of older Seville, was commenced in 1500 by Don Pedro Enriquez, in the then popular decadent Saracenic style, and was completed by his son, Fadrique, in imitation of Pilate’s palace at Jerusalem. In accordance with this scheme, he fashioned a reception-hall, called the

Prætorium, erected an upright column--a gift of Pope Pius V.--copied from the pillar at which Christ was scourged, and made a replica of the basin into which the thirty pieces of silver were counted. When the house came into the possession of the first Duke of Alcalá, he was acting as the Spanish viceroy at Naples, and he filled the rooms and corridors with Roman busts and statuary, gathered from Italy and the ruins of Italica. On every side the art treasures of the Romans adorn the perfect Moorish colonnades, and the shadows of Roman sculptures are thrown upon diapered marble pavements from light that enters through Arab lattices and ajimez windows. It has been described as a great curiosity shop, but to the art lover it is a treasure house of almost infinite beauty and variety.

The Moorish palace of the Duke de Alba, in the Calle de las Dueñas, once consisted of eleven courtyards, nine fountains, and more than a hundred marble pillars, and was surrounded by a garden, which is a forest of orange trees and myrtles. In Seville one wanders through streets which are redolent of Arabia, and peep into countless Oriental patios, cool with fountains, and shaded by palms and Eastern canopies. One “feels the East a-calling”--the colour, the scent, the witchery of it gets into one’s blood--and one recognises the truth that inspired the old Spanish saying: “To whom God loves He gives a house in Seville.”

TOLEDO

Toledan history proper, as distinguished from the mixture of fable and tradition which are associated with the story of this ancient and royal city, dates from the invasion of the Goths. Toledo was old when Euric successfully scaled its seven rocks and stormed its battlements--how old, cannot be determined. Legend claims that the town was in existence when God made the sun; less exalted imagination dates its foundation no further back than the days of Tubal, the grandson of Noah. Alphonsus, “the Learned,” and Diego Mossem Valera, the historian of Isabel the Catholic, agree that it was built by Pyrrhus, the son-in-law of King Hispan, and a captain of the army of Cyrus. Hercules has been claimed as the father of Toledo by Rufo Festo Avieno, and Ferecio, one of the companions of Ulysses, is held by some to have retreated to this spot to escape the blood-vengeance of that little band of Greek adventurers. Other legends declare the city to be of Jewish origin; and its builders, the Judians, who fled from Jerusalem before the victorious hosts of Nebuchadnezzar. Don Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada discovers the founders of Toledo in Tolemon and Brutus, two Roman consuls in the reign of Ptolemy Evergetes, and more reasonable supposition favours the theory that it was first settled by nomadic Celtic shepherds, who forsook their flocks to erect walls and fortifications on the rocky eminence above the Tagus. The little that is known of the origin and beginning of Toledo; the very mystery and obscurity of its earliest days, is accepted by the old historian, Alcocer, as a proof of its antiquity and nobility. Rais, the Moorish writer, says that Tago, at Toledo, was one of the eleven governors of Carpetania. Tago was foully murdered by Hasdrubal, the successor of Hamilcar, and the assassination of Hasdrubal was followed by so determined an insurrection that even Hannibal was forced to retreat before the infuriated Carpetanians. But Hannibal retreated, only to return with a reinforced army, and break Carpetania beneath the might of Carthagenian rule. In 191 B.C., after the fall of Carthage, Hilermo surrendered Toledo to the Roman forces, under Marcus Fulvius Nobilior. But Toledo held itself sullenly and haughtily aloof from the affairs of Rome. Viriate and Caius Plancius might cut each other’s throats on the banks of the Tagus; Sertorius might nurse his hates within the city; Cæsar and Pompey might be locked in a death struggle--those things mattered nothing to the contemptuous and independent Toledans. The Goth was the first real conqueror of Toledo; and the city, outwearing the scars of Rome, and throwing off the marks of the Moors, is, to-day, as insistently Gothic as Cordova and Seville are unmistakably Moorish.

One sees Toledo from the distance, from the bridges, and from the heart of the city, and recognises that it is as it has always been--that it will go down into the tomb of the centuries unchanged. It grew “out of the night of ages”--its rocky throne has defied the ravages of time and the transforming ingenuity of man. Maurice Barrès, who has felt the majesty and melancholy of this gaunt monument of mediævalism, writes: “The landscape of Toledo, and the banks of the Tagus, 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 tiny 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 alcazars 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.”

Grim, austere, and forbidding is the general type of the Gothic character; the history of their kings in Spain is a long story of menace, bloodshed, and persecution; and that history covers Toledo as with a suit of battered mail. Christianity without the practice of the Christian virtues, valour divorced from mercy, power disjoined from justice--the religion, the might and majesty of the Gothic sovereigns, is a record of gloomy and revengeful despotism. Hermengildo, the Gothic saint, used his religion as an excuse for attempting to wrest the throne of Toledo from his father, Leovigildo, whom he denounced as a minister of the devil; Recaredo, who has been painted by historians as a model of all the Christian virtues, practiced a rigorous system of cruelty and vindictive bigotry; and his successors were notorious for their queer morality, and their persecution of the Jews. Yet San Ildephonso, the most famous archbishop of Toledo under the Goths, has enriched the history of Spain with many splendid fables of heavenly manifestations; and the piece he cut from the veil of a visiting saint, and the chasuble, with which the Virgin invested him with her own hands, are still displayed among the treasures of Toledo cathedral. The figures of Wamba and Rodrigo--the warrior king who was offered the alternative of the crown of Toledo, or the thrust of a Toledan dagger, and “the Last of the Goths”--stand out with dominating prominence on the stage of Gothic history, on which warriors and priests are the principal actors.

The doctrine of the Gothic priesthood has been described as the “hardest, meanest, and brutallest imaginable,” and the Gothic warriors as men who were never other than savage tyrants, who “aped a culture which they could not understand, and with whose aims and tendencies their inmost character was powerless to sympathise.” These are the people who gave Toledo its character, a character which the art-adoring Arabs were unable to change or even to greatly modify. It is so important to understand the influence which was at work in the creation of the Toledan character, the atmosphere in which it was reared, and the discipline under which it developed, that I make no excuse for quoting the following illuminating appreciation of the Gothic nature from Mr. Leonard Williams’ chapter on Toledo: “Originally barbaric in their ferocity, the Goths became as their domination approached its inevitable end, barbaric in their effeminacy. So, too, with their religious beliefs. Excepting the clergy, who were men of some education and unlimited unscrupulousness,

the Christian Visigoth was every whit as barbaric as the heathen; barbaric, either in his violent fanaticism, or else in his total lack of individuality, and idiotic acquiesence in the schemes of a designing priesthood. An intermediate type was wholly, or almost wholly, wanting, and there is little to choose between Leovigildo, the ignorant and cruel desperado, and his meek successor, Recaredo, the unresisting prey of the ambitious metropolitan of Toledo.... The morals of the Visigoths were on a par with their refinement and their mode of living. Serfdom was the distinguishing mark of the commons; arrogance of the nobility; avarice and ambition of temporal power of the clergy; regicide and tumult of the Crown. It is clear that a people, disunited in this manner, could never have exercised a long supremacy in any case; and destiny, or chance, precipitated their downfall by the arrival of the one-eyed Tarik and his host, and the defeat of ‘the Last of the Goths,’ beside the memory-haunted osiers of the Guadalete.”

Arrogance, avarice, ambition, regicide, tumult--here we have the distinguishing qualities of the nobles, the priests, and the kings of Toledo under the Gothic rule. The sovereigns and the nobles stamped their personality upon the city, and were themselves moulded and dominated by the priests. The priestly influence in Spain has ever been for austerity and heartless magnificence; it has ever sought to impress by fear and superstition. In the time of the Goths, Christianity developed through the increasing power of the bishops. The Church was terrible and forbidding; the nobility was arrogant and cruel; the monarchy was tyrannical and despotic. Hallam dismisses the consideration of the Visigoths in a sentence: “I hold,” he says, “the annals of barbarians so unworthy of remembrance that I will not detain the reader by naming one sovereign of that obscure race.” But, under those sovereigns, and by the hands of that obscure race, Toledo was established upon its rocky eminence, and it bears its character on its face to-day, as it did in the opening quarter of the eighth century, when the one-eyed Tarik entered its melancholy, deserted streets.

The plunder that fell to the Moorish invader is variously reported, but all accounts are agreed that it was beyond calculation. According to the learned Mohammedan author, Al-leyth Ibn Said, the spoils were so abundant that the rank and file of the army all shared in the rewards, and it was a common thing for the humblest bowmen to be possessed of costly robes, magnificent gold chains of exquisite workmanship, and strings of matchless pearls, rubies, and emeralds. So great, in many instances, was the greed for plunder, and so grossly ignorant were the Berbers of the value of the spoil, that whenever a party of them happened upon a rich fabric, they did not hesitate to cut it up between them, without regard to its worth or workmanship. It is recorded that two Berbers secured a superb carpet, composed of the most splendid embroidery, interwoven with gold, and ornamented with filigree work of the purest gold, with pearls and other gems. The men carried it for awhile between them, but, finding this method of conveyance cumbersome, they carved the gem-encrusted fabric in twain with their swords. In this fashion, masterpieces of art were heedlessly destroyed for the sake of the raw material of which they were composed.

Among the precious objects seized in the palace and church of Toledo were twenty-five golden and jewelled crowns--the crowns of the different Gothic kings who had reigned in Spain--the psalms of David, written upon gold leaf in water made of dissolved rubies, vases filled with precious stones, quantities of robes of cloth of gold and

tissue, tunics of every variety of costly skirts and satins, magnificent suits of chain armour and mail inlaid with jewels, and jewel-studded swords and daggers, weapons of every description, and Solomon’s emerald table, wrought in burnished silver and gold. “This table,” says the Arabian chronicler, “was the most beautiful thing ever seen, with its golden vases and plates of a precious green stone, and three collars of rubies, emeralds, and pearls.” Other Arabian historians have claimed that it was composed of a solid emerald, and they are practically agreed that it was brought to Toledo after the sacking of Jerusalem, and that it was valued in Damascus at a hundred thousand dinars--about £50,000. Washington Irving, who invariably goes the whole hog when dealing with legendary history, says that this “inestimable table” was composed “of one single and entire emerald, and possessed talismanic powers; for tradition affirms that it was the work of genii, and had been wrought by them for King Solomon the Wise, the son of David. This marvellous relic was carefully preserved by Tarik, as the most precious of all his spoils, being intended by him as a present to the khalif; and, in commemoration of it, the city was called by the Arabs, Medina Almeyda; that is to say, ‘The City of the Table.’”

But the historian, Ibnu Hayyau, the greatly trusted authority of El-Makkari, gives, in the translation of Don Pascual de Gayangos, the following account of the origin of this article of virtue: “The celebrated table which Tarik found at Toledo, although attributed to Solomon, and named after him, never belonged to the poet-king. According to the barbarian authors, it was customary for the nobles and men in estimation of the Gothic Court, to bequeath a portion of their property to the Church. From the money so amassed the priests caused tables to be made of pure gold and silver, gorgeous thrones and stands on which to carry the gospels in public processions, or to ornament the altars on great festivals. The so-called Solomon’s table was originally wrought with money derived from this source, and was subsequently emulously increased and embellished by successive kings of Toledo, the latest always anxious to surpass his predecessors in magnificence, until it became the most splendid and costly gem ever made for such a purpose. The fabric was of pure gold, set with the most precious pearls, rubies, and emeralds. Its circumference was encrusted with three rows of these valuable stones, and the whole table displayed jewels so large and refulgent that never did human eye behold anything comparable with it.... When the Moslems entered Toledo it was found on the great altar of the Christian church, and the fact of such a treasure having been discovered soon became public and notorious.”

The history here assigned to the table is, it must be confessed, somewhat less improbable than the supposition of Gibbon, who is under the impression that if it ever existed it may have been carried away by Titus at the sacking of Jerusalem, and, later, to have fallen into the hands of the Goths at the taking of Rome by Alaric. Don Pascual, however, asks, very pertinently, whether it is likely that Bishop Sindered, and those who accompanied him in his flight, would have left behind them so valuable an object. And the conundrum still remains as to the present whereabouts of the table. It has been asserted that it forms part of the inestimable treasures of the Vatican, but as the devout Moslem would say, “Allah alone knoweth.”