_Vanished Palaces_
Coming out from the station, instead of taking the road up to the town,
you may cross the fields, and thus into the famous _Huerta del Rey_,
where old Arabian splendours and romance once were castled in the
legendary palace of Galiana. Now alas! beauty and legend in disgraceful
abandonment. All this rich land of the Vega is the property of the
ex-Empress of the French, Doña Eugenia de Guzman and Condesa de Teba. To
bear a glorious name (beside which the title of French Empress is but a
trumpery decoration) and inherit land so crowded with historic
interests, inherit above all the ruins of a palace of fairyland, and
treat her inheritance as the Empress Eugenie has done, is adequately to
explain the reason of Spain's irretrievable decadence and slow death.
The palace of legend is let out in miserable tenements to muleteers and
peasants, who little heed the damage done to wrought Arabian wall and
ceiling by their smoky lamps, wood fires in unventilated chambers, by
beasts and meal-bags housed in a princess's boudoir, in a dismantled
reception chamber. The Empress Eugenie may receive a few pesetas
quarterly for this desecration, and we lose a few hours of inestimable
musing, while the entire world is the poorer by a dainty monument the
less. Even thirty years ago the palace of Galiana was still a
constructable dream. The lovely staircase was half preserved, the
lace-work was less and less obliterated, the arches still undegraded.
But Mlle. de Montijo, seated afar on a foreign throne, was too busy with
intrigues destined to ruin France less permanently than her neglect of
property she never visits has ruined an historic poem.
Calderon, in his drama, _Cado uno por se_, speaks of this palace, and
its heroine has been immortalised by Moratin in verses forever quoted:
"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
[Illustration: REMAINS OF PALACE SAID TO BE THAT OF DON PEDRO EL
CRUEL]
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.
[Illustration: CASA FUENSALIDA]
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
[Illustration: MOORISH WINDOW IN CASA DE MESA]
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
[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF SAN SERVANDO]
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.