Part 13

Tarik, who perceived in Musa’s haste to join him in Toledo and take possession of the spoils, an indication of the governor’s envy, decided to conceal one of the feet of

the table against future emergencies. Musa, who met Tarik with savage upbraidings for exceeding his instructions--and some go so far as to say that he supplemented his speech with strokes of his whip--demanded the production of Solomon’s table, and questioned Tarik as to the absence of the missing fourth foot. The wily general declared that he had found it in that condition, and Musa had the missing emerald supplied by a foot of gold. Subsequently Musa had Tarik cast into prison, and, it is said, that he would have encompassed his death but for the prompt intervention of the khalif, who sent peremptory commands that the successful campaigner should be restored to his command of the Moorish army. Thereupon Musa professed to restore Tarik to his confidence and friendship; but he must have regretted that he had not executed his original purpose, when, on the occasion of his presenting the famous table as his own discovery to the khalif at Damascus, Tarik proclaimed himself to be the discoverer, and, as proof of his contention, produced the missing emerald foot.

The Moorish conquerors recognised the importance of Toledo as the capital of the Gothic empire, but these art-adoring, sun-worshipping warriors, who found their Eden in Andalusia, lavished their affection and culture on Cordova and Seville, and, for a time, Toledo became a secondary town. Musa’s son, Abdelasis, or Balacin, as Rasis el Moro calls him, married the widow of King Roderick, who has been variously styled Egilona, Exilona, and Blanche, and insisted upon every noble of the Moorish Court paying her extravagant homage; but the sultan held his Court at Cordova, and the Toledans never forgave this affront to their honour and dignity. They brooded in their stormy sullenness and independence. Their revolutionary instincts were never crushed; their discontent was never appeased through the three and a-half centuries of the Arab occupation of the city. Cassin, the Moorish ruler, became impregnated with the principles of independence, and threw off the yoke of Cordova, only to be betrayed in his turn by the Toledans, who, wearied of his tyranny, welcomed Abd-er-Rahman to the city, and submitted their allegiance to his throne. But throughout his reign the turbulent Toledans proved uncertain and prone to revolution, and his son, Hakam, who succeeded him, sought to conciliate them by appointing as governor a renegade Christian, one Amron, of Huesca. “By a condescension which proves our extreme solicitude for your interests,” the sultan wrote to his disaffected subjects, “instead of sending you one of our own subjects, we have chosen one of your compatriots.” Hakam’s error of judgment resulted in one of the most terrible deeds in the history of Toledo, perhaps the most disgraceful blot on the Moslem domination of Spain. Amron was entrusted with the mission of humbling his fellow countrymen to the rule of the sultan, and he achieved his object by the practice of a fiendish policy of perfidious cunning.

By affecting an aversion to the sultan, and preaching the gospel of the independence of Toledo, he won the confidence of the nobles, and concerted with them in plots to reconquer the city. In furtherance of their plans, the people consented to have soldiers quartered upon them; they welcomed the building of a fortress commanded by a strong guard at the extremity of the city; and it was at their own suggestion that a castle was erected in the middle of the town as a stronghold for the valiant governor. Then, having fortified himself with the trust of the people, and packed the city with troops, Amron secretly advised the sultan that the Toledans were ready for the lesson that was

to be read to them. Abd-er-Rahman, the son of Hakam, advanced towards the city at the head of a great army. The governor proposed that the nobles should go out to meet the young prince, and historians record that these implacable Gothic revolutionists were infatuated by the courtesy and cordiality with which they were received. The future sultan conquered their aversion by his grace and charm, and they loudly applauded Amron’s suggestion that he should be invited to accept the hospitality of the city. Abd-er-Rahman, instated in the castle of the governor, invited the nobles and representative men of Toledo to a great feast. They came in crowds, they were admitted to the castle singly, and not a single invited guest returned to his home. As each man crossed the courtyard of the castle he walked past an executioner, who stood in the shadow with uplifted blade awaiting his approach. No guest passed him. The nobles entered, the blade fell, and ready hands rolled the body into a ditch. In Spanish history that bloody day is known as the “Day of the Foss.”

“Only conceive,” writes Hannah Lynch, “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 forms, 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 remarkably struck down life as ever it advanced with smiling lips 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.”

Only a people rebellious by blood, by training, and by every tradition of their implacable race, could have thrown off the prostration that followed this terrible blow, and risen from their stupor with renewed determination to seize their independence. Yet Toledo survived this blow, and many others, which, if not so sudden and appalling, were sufficient to crush the spirit and deaden the aspiration of a more vincible nation. It is impossible to determine whether Abd-er-Rahman was an accessory to this deed of butchery, or to say if Amron planned the massacre in the belief that it was necessary to the maintenance of Moslem rule, to terrorise the Toledans into submission, or if the deed was inspired by the more subtle and diabolical intention of making the Moors more odious in the sight of the unmanageable citizens. When the people were sufficiently recovered from the horror of the atrocity to concoct a scheme of revenge, they acted with ferocious promptness. The cry for vengeance spread from the Zocodover into the surrounding country, and the people, hastily summoned into the city, surrounded the castle of Amron, and burnt the hateful fortress and its inmates to the ground. There, for the time, the insurrectionary movement stopped. An Arab governor was appointed, and the people, Christians and Jews as well as Moors, entered upon a new state of material prosperity. Under Aben Magot ben Ibraham the Moorish artistic influence

began to make itself felt. The architecture bore the imprint of the governing race, beautiful gardens were laid out along the Vega, Arabian palaces sprang into being, and on the ruins of Amron’s castle there was built a new alcazar.

But the respite from open tumult was only temporary. The Wali, finding the merchants increasing in riches, raised their tribute to the state, and smouldering discontent was immediately fanned into a flame. Led by a wealthy young Toledan, named Hacam, who subsequently earned the affix of “El Durrete”--“The Striker of Blows”--the people murdered the Moorish officials and captured the alcazar. The Moslem troops retaliated by recapturing that stronghold and routing the revolutionists. Hacam went into retirement until the Moors, lulled into security, relaxed their vigilance in the guardianship of the city, and then, striking swiftly through the neglected gates, he recovered the city between sunset and morning. The greater part of the upper town was burnt, the troops sent by Abd-er-Rahman II. were repulsed; and, although the Toledans were incidentally routed by the renegade Spaniard, Maisara, Toledo was not then retaken. In 873 the city was besieged for a whole year, and only surrendered when famine had rendered the citizens too weak to further resist the assaults of the Moorish troops.

The next firebrand to project itself into the inflammatory fabric of Toledan discontent was the fanatical martyr, Eulogius. In Cordova this frenzied religionist had fired the Christians into reviling Mohammed, and thereby exasperating the Moslems into persecution. To the tolerant and broad-minded Moors, religious observances were prejudices to be respected. They permitted, to Christians and Jews, the fullest licence in the matter of worship; they only demanded that a similar respect should be observed towards their own faith. The Christians were not asked to reverence the Prophet of Islam, but the Moslems could not allow him to be openly blasphemed by the infidels. It was against the articles of their creed, and it was contrary to human nature. To-day the Christian who rebelled against such a reasonable restriction would be accounted a bigot, undeserving of sympathy; in the days of Eulogius, the revilers of Moorish religious prejudices were regarded as saints. Toledo jumped at their rulers’ resentment of the Christians’ wanton insult to their faith as an excuse for an outburst of religious indignation, and Sindola seized the city and declared war against the khalifate by way of protesting against the execution of Eulogius’s disciples. Ordoño, king of Leon, sent reinforcements to Sindola, and the allied armies were caught in an ambush by the Moors, who struck off 8,000 Christian heads for public exhibition in the various disaffected towns. This reverse had the desired effect, and the Toledans made no further move until the death of Wistremir afforded them an opportunity of exasperating the sultan Mohammed by electing Eulogius to the vacant archbishopric of Toledo. The sultan, who retaliated by investing the city, had the bridge undermined while it was in the occupation of his troops, and, by making a feigned retreat, enticed the impetuous Spaniards to give chase. The depleted structure collapsed beneath the sudden burden of the pursuing army, and hundreds of men met their death in the sullen depths of the Tagus.

But neither massacre nor misfortune could shake the dogged Toledans from their purpose. With the king of Leon at their back, they put forth new efforts, and in 873 they forced Mohammed to acknowledge their independence as a Republic in return for the payment of an annual tribute. The treaty made with Mohammed was ratified by his successors, Mundhir and Abdallah. Even the Great Khalif, Abd-er-Rahman, was at first content to send from Cordova a royal proclamation, commanding Toledo to surrender her independence to the khalifate, and acknowledge him as liege lord, and it was not until 930, or eighteen years after he had ascended the throne, that he went up with his army against the arrogant and rebellious city. The siege of Toledo by Abd-er-Rahman lasted for eight years. The Moorish king built the city, which he called “Victory,” on a mountain commanding Toledo, and here he quartered his troops until famine and privation should open the gates for him. The long years of waiting culminated in a swift assault, and, at the close of a day’s fighting, the emaciated heads of the insurgent chiefs were impaled on spears to keep their last sightless watch from the walls of the city they had defended with such heroic fortitude.

After the death of the Great Khalif, and, thenceforth until the Christian conquest, Toledo maintained a partial independence, tolerating the rule of Moslem princes, but paying no allegiance to Cordova. And in the end she was recovered to the Christians by a piece of picturesque treachery. Alfonso of Leon (Alfonso VI.) had fled from the monastery of Sagahun, and sought the protection of King Almamon of Toledo, from whom he received the most generous hospitality, including gifts of palaces, farms, and orchards, and the government of the Christian section of the inhabitants. The Moorish king demanded only the subscription of his guest’s allegiance, and, in return, he gave a sincere affection, and promises of faithful protection. Almamon, whose one vague but ever present concern was the possibility of Toledo ever falling again into the hands of the Christians, was discussing the subject one day with his courtiers in the garden of Alfonso’s palace, and engrossed in the consideration of the possible misfortune, he described minutely the only plan by which, in his opinion, the city might be taken. Alfonso, who was one of the company, affected to be asleep while this dissertation was in progress, and the courtiers, who were unable to restrain the eloquence of the king, endeavoured to obtain Almamon’s consent to the execution of his Christian guest. But the king refused to listen to this inhospitable proposition, and on the death of Sancho of Castile (who was murdered by Bellido, under the walls of Zamora), his brother, Alfonso of Leon, returned to his own kingdom, loaded with honours, and carrying with him the secret of Toledo’s vincibility. Before he departed the two kings swore eternal amity, and entered into an offensive and defensive alliance against the enemies of either, and the enemies of Almamon’s son, Yahya. But after the death of Almamon, Alfonso, forgetting his oath to his friend, and remembering only the plan of siege he had overheard in the garden of Toledo, adopted the principles invented by the Moorish theorist, and, in 1085, entered the city as its conqueror.

What has Toledo to show to-day for the three and a-half centuries of the artistic influence of Morisco culture and influence? Surprisingly little! And yet it would be an even greater surprise if she had more to show. The village that climbs the bosom of a mountain does not alter the contour of its impassive resting-place; the etchings traced upon a Toledo blade does not affect the temper of the steel. The city is still “Moorish in appearance,” to employ the guide-book phrase, but it is gradually divesting itself of the marks which at one time, and then only in part, disguised its Gothic ancestry. Since Alfonso, the tyrant of the Galicians, seized the town of Toledo, “that pearl of the necklace, that highest tower of the empire in this Peninsula”

(to quote Abon I Hasan), the Moorish bridge, near Santa Leocadia, and the other, which crossed the old Roman waterway, have disappeared, and the legendary Palace of Galiana is let out in miserable tenements to the lowest class of peasants.

Moratin has immortalised Galiana de Toledo, “most beautiful and marvellous,” and Calderon has written of the palace built for her by her father, Galafre, who ruled over Toledo for Abd-er-Rahman I. Galafre took the old Visigoth shell, and transformed the edifice, by the witchery of Moorish windows and arches and staircases, into a palace of delight. He devoted his knowledge of hydraulics to the unkempt Toledan Vega, and made of it a paradise of leaf and bloom and rill. In the fairy garden, Charlemagne, according to tradition, found the “most beautiful and marvellous” Galiana, and carried her away from the unwelcome addresses of her Moorish admirer, Prince Bradamante, to reign over France as his queen. The arms of the Guzmans, into whose possession the palace passed under Castillian rule, may still be descried upon its dismantled front.

The wonderful clepsydras, or water clocks of Toledo, the invention of Abou-l’-Casem, Abdo-er-Rahman, or Az-Zarcal, as he is more usually styled, are quaintly and vaguely described in the following Moorish document: “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 the 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.”

In Babylonia, India, and Egypt, the clepsydra was used from before the dawn of history, especially in astronomical observations, and Latin and Greek writers refer to a type which resembled the modern sand glass, and was used in the courts of law to limit the length of the pleadings. The general form of the clepsydra, which Pliny ascribed to Scipio Nasica, consisted essentially of a float, which slowly rose by the tricklings of water from above through a small hole in a plate of metal. As the float rose it pointed to a scale of hours at the side of the water vessel; or, in the more elaborate forms, moved a wheel by means of a ratchet, and thus turned a hand on a dial.

The Moorish recounter of the wonders of the water clocks of Toledo tells us that its movements were regulated by the moon. As soon as the moon became visible by means of invisible conducts, the water began to flow into the ponds, and, by day rise, the ponds were four-sevenths full. 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 also fell in like proportion. On the 21st of the month they were half empty, and on the 29th

completely so. The exact working of those clepsydras, however, is lost, as a bungling astronomer, who was deputed by Alfonso “the Learned” to examine them and discover the secret, broke the delicate machinery, and was forthwith dubbed a Jew by the indignant and exasperated Moors.

Beyond the walls of the city is a stretch of fertile land beside the Tagus, which is called the Garden of the King; and at the further end of it is the country palace of Galiana. This pleasure house is of a later date than the palace of the same name within the city; but, like that debased edifice, it is a ruin, its walls of extreme thickness, flanked with two massive towers, only remaining to represent what was once

“A palace lifting to eternal summer Its marble walls, from out a glossy bower Of coolest foliage, musical with birds.”

In the War of Independence the French soldiers made a ruin of the one-time magnificent Casa de Vargas, which was built by Juan de Herrera, and has been described by Antonio Ponz as one of the architectural splendours of Toledo. Ponz tells us that “the façade 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.”

In the most miserable quarter of the town, far up above the river, the visitor may see some huge blocks of stone, and a few broken arches--all that remains of the once magnificent Moorish palace of Henry of Aragon, lord of Villena. Henry of Aragon was an enlightened prince and erudite scholar, and the possessor of a superb collection of books, which were publicly burnt on the plea that their owner had intercourse with the devil. Don Enrique is said to have used the subterranean chambers and passages of the palace as a meeting-place for witches, and here he is supposed to have entertained his Satanic majesty. Samuel Levi, Pedro the Cruel’s treasurer, turned the palace vault into a strong-room, but the prince, in a needy moment, proved stronger; and the Toledans, following the example of their king, completed the sacking of the mansion. The Duke of Escalona, in the reign of Charles Quint, burnt the palace to the ground, and fled the city with his family, rather than give house-room to the treacherous Bourbon, the Constable of France, at the bidding of his royal master.

There is in the little plaza of Santa Isabel, a half-obliterated Arabian inscription, wishing “Lasting prosperity and perpetual glory to the master of this edifice.” This inscription identifies the ruin as the palace of King Pedro. The beautiful Casa de Mesa bears scarcely a trace of the exquisite Moorish workmanship which characterised the palace of the Dukes of Alva; it is impossible to determine from the dilapidated Casa de las Tormerias whether it was originally built for a Moorish palace or a mezquita; while

some few scraps of Moorish inscription in the wood-work of a ruined wall still testify to the origin of the Casa de Munarriz. The alcazar, which was twice destroyed by fire, is represented by the façades, the three towers, the patio, and the enormous staircase--perhaps the only parts of the building that were not rebuilt by Charles Quint. The edifice commenced by that monarch, and completed by Philip II., was for long the most splendid and colossal palace in Spain. Staremberg’s troops destroyed the building by fire in 1710; and, a century later, the French troops fired the structure which Carlos III. had recomposed out of the ashes of Charles V.’s alcazar. The Casa de Mesa, the palace of Estevan de Illan, is reduced to a single chamber of exquisite Moorish workmanship; the remaining Moorish part of the Taller del Moro is used as a common workshop; the regal staircase of the alcazar, so wide that a whole army might march up its noble steps, ends in space.