of the same palace, in this enclosure. Traces of his Stucco Palace
(Palacio del Yeso) remain. Pedro looms very large in the history of
Seville. He plays the same part here as Harûn-al-Rashid in the story of
Bagdad. He was fond of the Moors, and affected their costumes and
customs. He also favoured the Jews, and was alleged by his enemies to be
the changeling child of a Jewess. His treasurer and trusted adviser was
an Israelite named Simuel Ben Levi. He served the king long and
faithfully, till one day it was whispered that half the wealth that
should fill the royal coffers had been diverted into his own. Ben Levi
was seized without warning and placed on the rack, whereupon he expired,
not of pain, but of sheer indignation. Under his house--so the story
goes--was found a cavern in which were three piles of gold and silver,
twice as high as a man. Pedro on beholding these was much affected.
‘Had Simuel surrendered a third of the least of these piles,’ he
exclaimed, ‘he should have gone free. Why would he rather die than
speak?’
Stories innumerable are told of this king, a good many, no doubt, being
pure inventions. There is no reason to question the account of his
treatment of Abu Saïd, the Moorish Sultan of Granada. This prince had
usurped his throne, and being solicitous of Pedro’s alliance, came to
visit him at the Alcazar with a magnificent retinue. The costliest
presents were offered to the Castilian king, whose heart, however, was
bent on possessing the superb ruby in the regalia of his guest. Before
many hours had passed, the Moors were seized in their apartments and
stripped of their raiment and valuables. Abu Saïd, ridiculously tricked
out, was mounted on a donkey, and with thirty-six of his courtiers,
hurried to a field outside the town, where they were bound to posts. A
train of horsemen appeared, Don Pedro at their head, and transfixed the
helpless men with darts, the king shouting, as he hurled his missiles at
his luckless guest: ‘This for the treaty you made me conclude with
Aragon! This for the castle you took from me!’ The ruby which had been
the cause of the Moor’s death was presented by his murderer to the
Black Prince, and now adorns the crown of England.
Nor did Pedro confine his fury to the sterner sex. Doña Urraca Osorio,
because her son was concerned in Don Enrique’s uprising, was burned at
the stake on the Alameda. Her faithful servant, Leonor Dávalos, seeing
that the flames had consumed her mistress’s clothing, threw herself into
the pyre to cover her nakedness, and was likewise burnt to ashes. Having
conceived a passion for Doña Maria Coronel, the king caused the husband
to be executed in the Torre del Oro. The widow, far from yielding to his
entreaties and threats, took the veil and destroyed her beauty by means
of vitriol. Pedro at once transferred his attentions to her sister, Doña
Aldonza, and met with more success. If a chronicler is to be believed,
he threw his brother Enrique’s young daughter naked to the lions, like
some Christian virgin martyr. The generous (or possibly overfed) brutes
refused the proffered prey, and the whimsical tyrant ever afterwards
treated the maiden kindly. In memory of her experience, she was known as
‘Leonor de los Leones.’
Crossing the Plaza del Triunfo, which lies between the Cathedral and
the old Moorish walls, we enter the Patio de las Banderas, so called
either because a flag was hoisted here when the royal family was in
residence, or on account of the trophy, composed of the arms of Spain
with crossed flags, displayed over one of the arches. Pedro was
accustomed to administer justice, tempered with ferocity, after the
Oriental fashion, seated on a stone bench in a corner of this square.
The surrounding private houses occupy the site of the old Palace of the
Almohades, and one of the halls--the Sala de Justicia--is still visible.
It is entered from the Patio de la Monteria. Contreras assigns an
earlier date to this room even than the advent of Almohades. It is
square, and measures nine metres across. The stucco ceiling is adorned
with stars and wreaths, and bordered by a painted frieze. The
decorations consist chiefly of inscriptions in Cufic characters. The
right-angled apertures in the walls were closed either by screens of
translucent stucco or by tapestries, ‘which must,’ says Gestoso y Perez,
‘have made the hall appear a miracle of wealth and splendour.’ It was in
this hall, often overlooked by visitors, that Don Pedro overheard four
judges discussing the division of a bribe they had received. The
question was abruptly solved by the division of the disputants’ heads
and bodies. Thanks to its isolation, the Sala de Justicia escaped the
dreadful ‘restoration’ effected in the middle of the nineteenth century
by the Duc de Montpensier. The house No. 3, Patio de las Banderas,
formed part, in the opinion of Gestoso y Perez, of the Palacio del Yeso,
or Stucco Palace, of Don Pedro.
Passing through the colonnaded Apeadero, built by Philip III. in 1607,
and once used as an armoury, we reach the Patio del Leon, where
tournaments used to be held, and stand in front of the Palace of the
Alcazar. The façade is gorgeous yet elegant, of a gaudiness that in this
brilliant city of golden sunshine and white walls is not obtrusive. Yet,
despite the Moorish character of the decoration, the Arabic capitals and
pilasters, and the square entrance ‘in the Persian style,’ the front is
not that of an eastern palace; and it is without surprise that we read
over the portal, in quaint Gothic characters, the legend: ‘The most
high, the most noble, the most powerful, and the most victorious Don
Pedro, commanded these Palaces, these Alcazares, and these entrances to
be made in the year (of Cæsar) 1402’ (1364). Elsewhere on the façade are
the oft-repeated Cufic inscriptions: ‘There is no conqueror but Allah,’
‘Glory to our lord the Sultan’ (Don Pedro), ‘Eternal glory to Allah,’
etc., etc.
This is a very different entrance from that of the Alhambra, the
building on the model of which the Alcazar was undoubtedly planned. From
the entrance a passage leads from your left to one extremity of the
Patio de las Doncellas, the central and principal court of the palace.
How this patio came to be so named I have never been able to ascertain.
There is an absurd story to the effect that here were collected the
girls fabled to have been sent by way of annual tribute by Mauregato to
the Khalifa. Had such a transaction taken place, the tribute would have
been payable, of course, at Cordova, not at Seville. Moreover this court
was among the works executed in the fourteenth century.
The Alcazar strikes us (if we have come from Granada) as being on a much
smaller scale than the Alhambra. It is very much better preserved, as it
should be, seeing that it is a century younger; and if it vaguely
strikes one as being fitter for the abode of a court favourite than of a
monarch, it impresses one as being fresher, more elegant--in a word,
more artistic--than the older building.
The Patio de las Doncellas is an oblong, and surrounded by an arcade of
pointed and dentated arches which spring from the capitals of white
marble columns placed in pairs. The middle arch on each side is higher
than the others, and springs from oblong imposts resting on the twin
columns and flanked by the miniature pillars characteristic of the
Grenadine architecture. The spandrels are beautifully adorned with
stucco work of the trellis pattern. On the frieze above runs a flowing
scroll with Arabic inscriptions, among them being ‘Glory to our lord,
the Sultan Don Pedro,’ and this very remarkable text: ‘There is but one
God; He is eternal; He was not begotten and has never begotten, and He
has no equal.’ This inscription, opposed to the tenets of Christianity,
was evidently designed by a Moslem artificer, who relied (and safely
relied) on the ignorance of his employers. The frieze is decorated also,
at intervals, by the escutcheons of Don Pedro and of Ferdinand and
Isabella, and by the well-known devices of Charles V., the Pillars of
Hercules with the motto ‘Plus Oultre.’ The inside of the arcade is
ornamented with a high dado of glazed tile mosaic (_azulejo_),
brilliantly coloured, and with the highly prized metallic glint. The
combinations and variations of the designs are very ingenious and
interesting. This decoration probably dates from Don Pedro’s time.
Behind each central arch is a round-arched doorway, flanked by twin
windows. These are framed in rich conventional ornamental work. Through
little oblong windows above the doors light falls and illumines the
ceilings of the apartments opening into the court. The ceiling of the
arcade dates from the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, but was restored
in 1856. A deep cornice marks the division of the lower part of the
court from the upper story, the front of which, with its white marble
arches, columns and balustrades, was the work of Don Luis de Vega, a
sixteenth-century architect.
Three recesses in the wall to the left of the entrance are pointed out
as the audience closets of King Pedro; but they are much more likely to
be walled-up entrances to formerly existing corridors and chambers
behind.
The door facing this wall gives access to the Hall of the Ambassadors
(Salon de los Embajadores), the finest apartment in this fairy palace.
The doors are magnificent examples of inlay work, and were, according to
the inscription on them, made by Moorish carpenters from Toledo in the
year 1364. The hall is about thirty-three feet square, and exhibits a
splendid combination of the various styles with the Gothic and
Renaissance. The ornamentation is rich and elaborate almost beyond the
possibility of description. The magnificent ‘half-orange’ ceiling of
carved wood rests on a frieze decorated with the Tower and Lion. Then
come Cufic inscriptions on a blue ground and ugly female heads of the
sixteenth century. Then, below another band of decoration, is a row of
fifty-six busts of the Kings of Spain, from Receswinto the Goth to
Philip III. These date, at earliest, from the sixteenth century. The
wrought-iron balconies were made by Francisco Lopez in 1592. The
decoration of this splendid chamber is completed by a high dado of blue,
white, and green ‘azulejos.’ It was in this hall that Abu Saïd is said
to have been received by his treacherous host.
The Hall of the Ambassadors communicates on each side with the patio and
adjoining halls by entrances composed of three horseshoe arches,
supported by graceful pillars and enclosed in a circular arch.
Through the arch facing the entrance from the patio we pass into a long
narrow apartment, known as the Comedor, where the late Comtesse de Paris
was born in 1848. To the north of the salon is a small square chamber,
called the ‘Cuarto del Techo de Felipe Segundo,’ with a coffered ceiling
dating from the time of that king. North of this room is the exquisite
little Patio de las Muñecas (Court of the Dolls) purely Grenadine in
treatment. The rounded arches are separated by cylindrical pillars--I
call them so for want of a better word--which rest on slender columns of
different colours, reminding one of the early or Cordovan style. The
capitals are rich, the pillars they uphold decorated with vertical lines
of Cufic inscriptions, many of which, says Contreras, are placed upside
down. The walls and spandrels are tastefully adorned with stucco work of
the trellis pattern, tiling and mosaic. This court, though still
harmonious and beautiful, suffered rather than benefited by its
restoration in 1843; but the architecture has been not unsuccessfully
reproduced in the upper story.
This charming spot is by no means suggestive of deeds of blood and
violence; yet, just as they point out the Salon de los Embajadores as
the scene of the arrest of the Red Sultan by Don Pedro, so here do the
guides place the scene of the murder of Don Fadrique by the truculent
monarch--a fratricide to be avenged by another fratricide at Montiel.
The Master of Santiago, to give the Don his usual title, after a
successful campaign in Murcia, had been graciously received by his
brother the king, and presently went to pay his respects in another part
of the palace to the royal favourite, Maria de Padilla. It is said that
she warned him of his impending fate; perhaps by her manner, if not by
words, she tried to arouse in him a sense of danger, but the soldier
prince returned to the king’s presence. With a shout, Pedro gave the
fatal signal. ‘Kill the Master of Santiago!’ he cried. Guards fell upon
the prince. His sword was entangled in his scarf, and he was butchered
without mercy. His retainers fled in all directions, pursued by Pedro’s
guards. One took refuge in Maria de Padilla’s own apartment, and tried
to screen himself by holding her little daughter, Doña Beatriz, before
him. Pedro tore the child away, and dispatched the unfortunate man with
his own hand. The murder took place on May 19, 1358.
To the west of the court is a little room, elegantly decorated, and
named after the Catholic Sovereigns, by whom it was restored. Their
well-known devices appear, together with the Towers and Lions, among
the decorations, which reveal the influence of the plateresque style.
The north side of the patio is occupied by the Cuarto de los Principes,
not to be confounded with a similarly named apartment on the floor
above. At either end of this room is an arch, adorned with stucco work,
admitting to a cabinet or alcove. That to the right has a fine
artesonado ceiling, and that to the left is decorated in a species of
Moorish plateresque style. An inscription states that the frieze was
made in the year 1543 by Juan de Simancas, master carpenter.
East of the Patio de las Muñecas, and occupying the north side of the
Patio de las Doncellas, is the long room called the Dormitorio de los
Reyes Moros. All the apartments in the Alcazar are fancifully named, but
the designation of none is quite so stupid and misleading as this. The
columns of the twin windows on either side of the door appear to date
from the time of the Khalifate. The doors themselves are richly inlaid
and painted with geometrical patterns. The three horseshoe arches
leading to the _al hami_, or alcove, also seem to belong to the early
period of Spanish-Arabic art. The room is so richly decorated that
scarce a handbreadth of the surface is free from ornament.
On the opposite side of the central court is the sumptuous Salon de
Carlos V., the ceiling of which was constructed by order of the emperor,
and is adorned with classical heads. The tile and stucco work is the
finest in the palace. There is a legend to the effect that St. Ferdinand
died in this room--on his knees, with a cord round his neck and a taper
in his hand--but it is unlikely that this part of the palace existed in
his time. The guide pointed out the room to the west of this salon as
the chamber of Maria de Padilla, but this again is, to put it mildly,
doubtful.
The upper chambers of the Alcazar, which are not accessible to the
general public, are very handsome. The floor overlooking the Patio del
Leon is occupied by the Sala del Principe, with its beautiful spring
windows, polychrome tiling, and columns brought from the old Moorish
Palace at Valencia. Adjacent is the Oratory, built by order of Ferdinand
and Isabella in 1504. The tile work is of extraordinary beauty, and
shows that the Moors had not a monopoly of talent in this kind of
decoration. The fine Visitation over the altar is signed by Francesco
Nicoloso the Italian. On the same floor is the reputed bed-chamber of
Don Pedro. Over the door may be seen four death’s-heads, and over
another entrance the curious figure of a man who looks back over his
shoulder at a grinning skull. These gruesome designs commemorate the
summary execution by the king of four judges whom he overheard
discussing the division of a bribe. The royal apartments on this floor
contain some precious works of art; but I abstain from mentioning the
most remarkable of these, as pictures are so often transferred in Spain
from one royal residence to another that such indications are often out
of date before they are printed.
The gardens are really the most pleasing spot within the Alcazares. They
form a delicious pleasaunce, where the orange and citron diffuse their
fragrance, and magic fountains spring up suddenly beneath the
passenger’s feet, sprinkling him with a cooling dew. I noticed some
flower beds shaped like curiously formed crosses, which the gardener
told me were the crosses of the orders of Calatrava, Santiago,
Alcantara, and Montesa. You are also shown the baths of Maria de
Padilla, which are approached through a gloomy arched entrance. In the
favourite’s time they had no other roof than the sky, and no further
protection from prying eyes than that afforded by a screen of orange
and lemon trees. In Mohammedan times the baths were probably used by the
ladies of the harem.
The Alcazar, I think, disappoints most foreigners. The architectural and
decorative work of the Spanish Moors and their descendants pleases
people quite inexperienced in the arts by its mere prettiness, its
brilliance, its originality, and its colour; and it delights still more
those who are able to appreciate its marvellous combinations of
geometrical forms, its exquisite epigraphy, and all its subtle details.
But the average traveller stands between these two classes of observers.
He looks for grandeur where he should expect only beauty, and his eye is
wearied by the wealth of conventional ornamentation. What I think is
conspicuously lacking in the Alcazar, and to a much less extent in the
Alhambra, is atmosphere. Memories do not haunt you in these gilded
halls. There is nothing about them to suggest that anything ever
happened here. The legends tell us the contrary; but assuredly no one
was ever less successful in impressing his personality on his abode than
were the founders and inhabitants of the Alcazar.
VII
ROYAL PALACE
MADRID
The Palacio Real, which towers high above the ‘most noble, loyal,
imperial, crowned and heroic city’ of Madrid, dominating the bleak
table-land, and reflecting in the rays of southern sunshine the gleaming
whiteness of the distant, snow-capped Guadarramas, occupies a site which
has been royal since the eleventh century. In 1466 an earthquake
partially destroyed the Moorish Alcazar, and on the ruins Henry IV.
constructed a palace of mediæval splendour, which was enlarged by
Charles V., embellished by Philip II. and completed by Philip III., who
added a façade--the joint work of Toledos, Herrera, Moras, Luis and
Gaspar de Vega--which was acclaimed as a masterpiece of architecture. In
the time of Philip II., the palace is described as having five hundred
rooms. On the ground-floor was the grand reception-room, an apartment
170 feet long, in which the ten state councillors held their meetings.
Behind the tapestry hangings the walls were lined with marble, and
guards were stationed at the outer and inner portals. There was a
theatre in the building, in which some of the great comedies of Philip’s
reign were first produced, and in an adjoining saloon was held, in 1622,
the famous Poetic Tournament of which Lope de Vega has left us such a
sprightly account. The rooms were hung with the richest Flemish
tapestries, the picture gallery was filled with priceless works of art,
and the treasury of the king’s, the _Guarda Joyas_--that store of untold
gold and silver, of jewels and precious stones--was contained in a
carefully guarded suite of apartments. Gil Gonzalez Davila in his
_Teatro de las Grandezas de Madrid_ tells us that included in the royal
treasure were a diamond valued at 200,000 ducats, a pearl as large as a
nut--which is impressive but indefinite--called _La Huerfana_ (the
Orphan), because of its unique size, and a golden lily, which was
recovered from the French by Charles V., who made its return a condition
in the agreement by which they obtained the deliverance of Francis I. A
maze of subterranean passages was constructed beneath the old palace,
some of which exist beneath the present building.
On Christmas night, 1734, the Royal Palace of the Alcazar was on fire,
and the building and all its treasures were utterly destroyed. This
disaster afforded Philip V. the opportunity to display his powers as a
master builder. He had already created the Palace of San Ildefonso at La
Granja, he had rebuilt the palace at Aranjuez, he had tinkered at the
Alcazar at Seville. Now he would create a marble monument that should
surpass the magnitude and magnificence of Philip the Second’s Escorial
and outstrip in splendour the Versailles palace of Louis XIV. Such a
work was beyond the art of the followers of Churriguera: he sent to the
Court of Turin for the Abbé Felipe de Juvara, the Sicilian, and confided
to him the scheme of the palace that he would raise on the heights of
San Bernardino. It was to be a square edifice of the composite order,
having four façades, each 1700 feet long, it was to contain twenty-three
courts, approached by thirty-four entrances from the exterior, and be
completed with gardens, churches, public offices, and a theatre. It was
to be a collection of palaces under one roof, and the colossal model of
the building, which is preserved in the Galeria Topografica of the
Madrid Museum, conveys some idea of the marvel of architecture which the
king and his designer had conceived between them. But the palace on the
San Bernardino hill was never begun. The ruling ambition of the
masterful Elizabeth Farnese was to advance the interests of her
children, and she begrudged the expense which the colossal building
would entail. She raised so many difficulties and delayed so long the
adoption of the plans that Juvara died of hope deferred, and Giovanoni
Battista Saccheti came from Turin to carry on the work. The queen by
this time had exhausted Philip’s resistance to her will, and Sacchetti’s
less pretentious design, traced among the still smouldering ruins of the
ancient Alcazar, was adopted on 7th April 1737.
A year later the first stone of the present palace was laid. The
foundation-stone bore a commemorative description and enclosed a leaden
casket, containing gold, silver, and copper coins from the mints of
Madrid, Seville, Mexico, and Peru. The work of ensuring the solidity of
the foundations by moulding them into the western slope of the hill cost
an enormous sum of money, entailed an immense amount of labour, and
occupied a proportionately extensive period of time. In 1808 the palace
had cost 75,000,000 pesetas, and the subsequent alterations, which
included the enclosing of the Campo del Moro with a wall and gilded
railing, brought up the sum total to the enormous sum of over
100,000,000 pesetas. Philip died in 1746, long before the palace he had
projected was near completion. The work went on through the thirteen
years’ reign of Philip VI., and when Charles III. came to Madrid in 1759
he recognised that unless the rate of progress was accelerated he would
have to occupy the building at the Buen Retiro for the rest of his life.
Under his resolute authority the work was pushed on with more vigour,
and it was ready for his occupation on 1st December 1764. It had taken
over a quarter of a century to build, it had cost Spain three millions
sterling, but it gained the place that Philip V. anticipated for it
among the palaces of the world.