TOLEDO—ITS FLEAS, LANDLORDS, ANTIQUITIES, AND LUNATICS.
Ignorant of the state of civilization in the ancient city of Toledo, the
capital of Gothic Spain, the glory of the Jews and the Moors when they
lived luxuriously on its airy heights, we had imagined it easy enough to
find lodgings for a night. Unconscious of the fate awaiting us, we put
up at the Hotel Lino, the largest and best in the city; and here we
sought sleep. The search was vain. For the fleas are always going about
seeking whom they may devour. We fell a prey to them and to the
landlords too. Surviving the bloody night, we left a weary, wretched bed
at eight in the morning, and ordered breakfast with coffee. At nine it
was announced as ready. In the room where it was served three waiters
attended us, each one smoking a cigar in our faces, as we sat and they
stood around. The coffee was not on the table. On asking for it we were
told there was none in the house.
“And is there none in Toledo?”
“Perhaps so.”
“Well, we will wait until you bring it. Give us some butter.”
“There is no butter in the house.”
“Is there none in Toledo?”
“None that is fit to eat; it is all rancid.”
[Illustration: TOLEDO.]
After a time some wretched stuff for coffee was brought from a
restaurant, and we made a breakfast, paid as much for it as if we had
been in Paris, and left the house in disgust.
The city stands on a hill; it is up, up, up, in a succession of narrow,
irregular, crooked, clean, and curious streets, showing at every step
the vestiges of successive stages of civilization, and often suddenly
revealing monuments of departed peoples that arrest the attention and
excite wondering interest. The Goths succeeded the Romans. The Moors
drove out the Goths, and, like eagles perched among these rocks, defied
the storms of centuries. Here the master of empires, the great Charles
V., reigned in grandeur, and gave laws to the world. It is a fitting
place for such a history as it has; and no other city has a more
romantic life. Indeed, romance has done so much to embellish the story
of Toledo, it is difficult to be in it, and study it here on its own
rocks, without asking for its enchanted towers, and haunted caves, and
knights, with magic swords and spectre horses, and its 200,000 mighty
men and beautiful women, that once made this castle-crowned crag the
glory of Spain, and as famous in the earth as Babylon or Damascus.
It is more Oriental in its appearance than any city we have yet seen in
Spain. But it is too far north, and too far up in the air, to be adapted
to the life of Orientals. Its houses are usually low; and they have the
court in the midst of them, out of which doors open into the several
apartments. Many of them are very old, five hundred years, at least, and
repetitions of those that stood on the same site before; for this
reproduction of itself, from age to age, is a feature of the peoples and
climes with which Scripture history has made us familiar. Many of these
old houses are fine specimens of the Moorish manner of building; but
with this, perhaps the predominant style, is blended more or less of the
Roman, the Gothic, and the Saracenic, and every style except the modern;
for Toledo is a city of the dead past, and no resurrection is before it.
The Spanish chroniclers claim that Toledo was founded at the same time
with the creation of the world, but who lived in it before the human
race was made they do not help us to understand. Others less ambitious
find that Nebuchadnezzar, and others that Hercules, laid the first
stones.
The last of the Goths who sat on the throne of Toledo was Roderick. And
when weighed down with the guilt of a seducer and a betrayer of his
friend, he went forth from Toledo in his chariot of ivory, and, with his
mailed legions, marched to the banks of the Guadalquiver, and at
Guadalete encountered the flood of Moorish barbarism just then setting
in upon Spain, he disappeared, the city began its downward career, and
no emperors, no bishops, no kings, have since been able to purge it from
the sin and the shame of the perfidious Roderick.
In after centuries, when the Moors were expelled and the cross again
supplanted the crescent, the archbishops of Toledo were more than kings,
and lived here in luxury, and wealth, and grandeur, without a parallel
in the history of the church. Great patrons of art and science, they
founded universities and cultivated the arts of peace, while they were
often plunging the country into war, which they waged with valor and
skill. Under them the city reached a degree of splendor unsurpassed in
the dreamy reign of Oriental voluptuousness and taste. But when it
succumbed, as it did to the great German Czar, and the court was removed
to Valladolid, its sun went down, never to rise again.
The cathedral is a glory, even in Spain, which is richer in cathedrals
than any other country. Toledo has always been favored by the Romish
Church. It is believed by many that the Virgin Mary came down from
heaven, in person, to attend the investiture of one of its archbishops,
and there is not to be found a grander and more beautiful Gothic temple
than this. As we entered it the dim light that was chasing away the
shades from among the vast columns and the lofty arches gradually
brightened as we became more accustomed to it, and a sense of majestic
proportions and solemn grandeur took possession of the soul. A service
was in progress, and we paused till it was concluded, for it matters not
what the form of religious worship, and however much our views may
differ from those engaged in it, it is unseemly to be gazing at the
temple while its ministers are serving at its altar. In the midst of the
service a priest was receiving a young woman’s confession. As she put up
her lips to his ear to whisper her penitential words, she beat upon her
breast with one hand, as if she were in agony of soul. Her tale of sin
completed, she rose from her knees, bowed low again, kissed her
confessor’s extended hand, and went away.
Toledo and its priesthood have been famous for their devotion to the
strictest orders and dogmas of the church, till Rome itself scarcely
stands higher for holiness and orthodoxy. In the disputes that have at
different times agitated the Romish communion, they have not been afraid
to appeal directly to the judgment of God, and to claim his verdict in
their favor. In the great contest about the proper form of words in the
mass, when the old missals were used in Spain, in spite of the orders to
substitute the Gregorian mass, or the Roman improved form, the first
appeal to the divine judgment was in favor of Toledo, and the early
missals. Again the trial was demanded; and the old and newer missals
were brought out, great folio volumes, into one of the public squares,
and, in presence of the city, fire was applied to them. The older was
burnt to ashes, and the newer survived the ordeal. Toledo was not
willing to abide even by this very conclusive test, and finally it was
settled by blending the two masses into one.
Their richest and most sacred chapel in the cathedral is the Muzarabe,
or Mixed Arabic; so called because it was built to preserve the forms of
the old Gothic service, such as was used when the Goths consented to
live under the dominion of the Moors while allowed their own religious
rites. In this cathedral lie the ashes, and over them are the tombs of
some of the early kings of Spain, and several of those grand archbishops
whose reign was not less kingly than that of kings. Cardinal Albornoz
died in Italy, and the Pope sent his body home to be buried here. To
save the expense of transportation, for there was no express company,
not even a steamboat then (1364) to bring it,—Urban V. issued a decree
granting a plenary indulgence to all who would lend a hand in carrying
the dead cardinal on his long journey. Gladly did the poor peasantry
bear the body on their shoulders from one town to another till it
reached Toledo. In front of one of the chapels I was suddenly arrested
by a strange Latin inscription in a brass plate in the pavement. It was
in these words:—
“HIC JACET PULVIS, CINIS, NULLUS.”
_Here lies dust, ashes, nothing else._ Over the bones of one of the most
powerful cardinals who ever reigned in Spain, and himself called a king
maker, the epitaph is eloquent: perhaps an affectation, however, of
humility, a virtue for which Fernandez de Portocarrero was not
illustrious in his life.
The Virgin Mary has been pleased to come from heaven to this cathedral,
as I have said, and if any one doubts it, he can see the very stone on
which she first set foot as she alighted from her aerial excursion. And
now the faithful kiss this precious stone, touching with their loving
lips the very spot which her foot once pressed. Her image is clad with
gold and precious stones and costly raiment, crowns and bracelets and
chains, the gifts of royal hands, and the greatest ladies of the kingdom
are her maids of honor. On gala-days she is borne in state through the
streets, and honors are paid to her at every step, as the Queen of
Queens.
A sleepy old porter let us into the ALCAZAR. Al-casa-czar is the house
of Cæsar, or the czar’s house, the king’s house, the palace.
[Illustration: THE ALCAZAR.]
The palace, or what was once a palace, crowns the summit of the hill on
which the old city of Toledo stands. Around the base of the rock below
the Tagus rushes rapidly, and away in every direction stretches the wide
plain, gloomy, desolate, and yet grand in its storied past. It is not
certain that the Moorish, still less certain that the Gothic kings
preceding them, had their royal residence on this bleak height. But the
Catholic kings for centuries held their courts on this spot, and the
prints of their hands are visible everywhere. The porter who opened the
door for us is a model of a Spanish official. Too proud to be a
door-keeper, and, with nothing else to do, he would impress even a
stranger with the idea that he was born with a higher destiny than to
tend a gate. It was a pleasure to him, evidently, to tell us we must not
go here, nor there, nor anywhere, except where it was of no use to go;
and the scanty information he was willing to impart was extracted with
difficulty, and worth nothing then.
We stood in the midst of a spacious square, the patio, or court, and on
its four sides rose the walls of the ancient palace. Charles V. and
Philip II. rebuilt the most of it on the ruins holding some of the
apartments that date as far back as Alonzo X.; and in modern times the
hoof of the war demon has trodden the stairways and galleries and
gorgeous halls, until what with English and French soldiery, and some of
other nations more barbarous still, the Alcazar of Toledo is a more
comfortable residence for bats and owls than kings and fair princesses.
Two or three proud peacocks were strutting in the warm sunshine of the
patio, displaying their gaudy plumes and arching their graceful necks,
reminding us of other beauties who had often gone blazing through these
doors, with radiant jewels and shining robes, yet, in all their glory,
were not arrayed like one of these. This patio shows, on its four sides,
two rows of galleries, one over the other, supported each of them by
thirty arches, with columns crowned with Corinthian capitals,
embellished with the arms of the many kingdoms that Charles V. had
conquered. A staircase, designed by Philip II. while he was in England,
and built under orders sent by him while there, leads up to the royal
apartments, long since deserted, and now worth seeing only because they
were once the home of men and women whose names are part of the history
of the world.
An English gentleman said to me in the rail-car in Spain one day, “I
should be glad to have you tell me what it is that impresses you the
most in coming from America and travelling in Europe.” I answered that
it required some time to make a fitting reply to so great an inquiry.
“Well,” he said, “will you take fifteen minutes to think, and then give
me the result?” I replied, “I am ready to answer now: what impresses me
more than all else is, that these old countries, having been what they
once were, are _what I find them now_.”
It is the law of the earth, I suppose, and what has been will be, and so
on to the end of time.
We left the melancholy palace to its porter, its peacocks, and the bats,
and wound our way down and around the corkscrew streets, narrow, close,
and dirty, admiring the ancient Moorish gates and doors, studded with
iron balls. The older doors have two knockers, one high for a horseman
to use without dismounting; and, the gate being opened, he would ride
right into the court. We were looking for the Church of San Juan de los
Reyes, and soon found it, a church that dates back to the Moorish-Gothic
period, or the time when the severity of Gothic grandeur was adorned
with the more florid embellishments which Moorish art introduced into
Spain. On the outer walls are suspended the massive iron chains which
were found on the limbs of the Christian captives when Granada was
conquered by Ferdinand and Isabella; and the rescued prisoners hung up
their chains on this church as thank-offerings. And still farther down
the hill we come to the Bridge of St. Martin, and here are plainly the
ruins of the old Moorish castle and palace. A square tower on the
water’s edge bears the name, to this day, _Florinde_, and tradition says
it was here that Roderick unluckily saw her while she was bathing. The
rest of the story we have hinted at already.
Irving, in his bewitching Spanish tales, gives a marvellous account of
the Cave of Hercules, which is said to extend three leagues beyond the
river, and is full of chapels and genii and enchanted warriors. To visit
it has cost kings their crowns; and the terrible sounds that are heard,
and the rushing winds assailing the bold explorer, make the attempt too
formidable for modern valor. The entrance is from the Church de San
Gines, but is now walled up. In fact, it was never unwalled, except in
the fancies of romantic historians.
One day, long time ago, as the Cid was riding through Toledo, his horse
stopped suddenly, and knelt before a wall built against a bank of earth.
The hill was opened, and within was found a niche, and in the niche an
image of the Saviour, with the same lamps burning in it which the Goths
had put there long centuries agone. A Moorish mosque is standing
opposite, which has been converted into a Christian church, and in it
the first mass was celebrated in 1085. It takes its name from the legend
of the Cid, and is called Christo de la Luz. It is perhaps the smallest
church in Toledo, only twenty-two feet square, yet the quaintest and
most curious thing to be found in the city; short columns support arches
in the shape of a horse-shoe, and three narrow naves, crossing each
other, cut up the church into nine vaults. There is nothing in it worth
seeing.
It took us half an hour to find the sacristan to open the door of Santo
Tome, or St. Thomas, where we went to see a famous picture by El Grecco,
a burial scene, of considerable power, and were it not that Spain has
hundreds of finer pictures than this, it would be worth the time it cost
us to see it.
Passing through the Zodocover, the largest public square in the city,
where in the “good old times” of torture for the church, the poor
unbelievers in papal faith have been made spectacles before the world, I
met a boy with a pop-gun, anxious to show his skill in shooting with
that formidable weapon. Yielding to his urgent desires, I set up a bit
of money which he was to hit and take. A dense crowd, a hundred
certainly, were the idle gazers on this ridiculous scene, forming a ring
around me and the boy! I confess to a sense of great amusement when I
stood where cardinals and bishops and priests, with armed soldiers and
executioners, had burnt heretics in sight of kings, and multitudes
thronging the tiers of balconies that look down into this square. It was
certainly more human, not to say Christian, for me to divert this idle
crowd by setting up coppers for a boy to shoot at with a pop-gun, than
for my illustrious predecessors to entertain the populace of Toledo with
the sight of martyrs burning at a stake.
Tired of walking, for Toledo is so up-and-down, that you might as well
ride on a ladder, we entered a café for refreshments. In the wide, open
court was a deep well sunk into the solid rock on which the city stands,
and the water thereof was as cool and sparkling and delicious as that
which the woman of Samaria gave to him who told her all things that ever
she did. The saloon was fifty feet long or more, filled with marble-top
tables, and men were eating and drinking, playing dominoes, and smoking.
It was toward the close of the day. Of all the people there, none called
for spirits, scarcely any asked for wine. Coffee and chocolate were the
principal drinks. There was no noise, no gambling. It was chilly, and
the servant brought in a brazier filled with live coals, and set it near
us. Others drew around it, as they did in the high priest’s court-yard
when Peter denied his Lord. Many Oriental customs brought in by the
Moors are still retained in Spain. I made an excuse for wandering up to
the house-top, and found the houses so closely built against each other,
with no intervening spaces, that you could easily look into your
neighbor’s, and sometimes see what was quite as well not seen.
While here we looked about for some specimens of the famous blades,
which have made Toledo as celebrated as Damascus itself in this line.
But we found nothing worth seeing. The manufactory of arms is outside of
the town, and has no reputation beyond that of others in Spain. England
or Connecticut will furnish as perfect a sword to-day as Toledo. Yet
this is only another, and a very striking illustration of what Spain is,
compared with what Spain was. As far back as under the Romans, Toledo
had a character for the perfection of its weapons of steel. The Toledo
blade has been a proverb for temper ever since.
The idea has prevailed, and the workers in metals in Toledo have not
been unwilling to encourage it, that the waters of the river Tagus have
virtues to impart peculiar firmness to the steel that is cooled in them.
The manufacturers, of course, have long been constituted into a guild,
or corporation, and the secrets of the trade preserved with care. So
long ago as in the ninth century Abdur-rhaman II. gave a great impulse
to the art in Toledo, and its fame was spread still wider. A thousand
years have rolled away since that time, and now, in the nineteenth
century, they do not make as good weapons as they did then.
In the museum at Madrid we saw the splendid swords which the famous
warriors of Spain have worn, and, in the saloon of the Director of the
Generaliffe, in Granada, the identical sword of Boabdil, the last of the
Moorish kings; but they make no such steel now. Indeed, the steel they
use is imported from England, just as they keep up the stock of horses
and cattle and sheep, by importations from other countries. It is very
probable that long, thin blades, that may be curled up like a ribbon,
can be produced in China, or Persia, or Sheffield, as well as here. The
men of Milan and Florence made as good swords as these. The use of
fire-arms naturally diminishes the value of a sword as a weapon of war.
Spanish people do not go CRAZY! Now and then there is a lunatic in
Spain, but, as compared with the United States, or England, or France,
the Spanish people manage to keep what wits they have. Just outside of
Toledo there is a lunatic asylum. It is the successor of the one that
Don Quixote ought to have been kept in, and which is mentioned in that
knight-errant’s biography, the first work of fiction that I ever
perused, and which then, in childhood, fired me with a desire to visit
Spain. Don Quixote was crazy; and there may be thousands crazy whom the
world do not reckon so.
In London the latest tables show that one person in every 200 is insane.
In Paris one in every 222 is in a lunatic asylum, or ought to be. In
Madrid, the capital of Spain, only one in every 3,350. In the year 1860
there were 2,384 lunatics in Spain, when the population was 15,673,481;
and this would show one insane person to 6,566 inhabitants. In 1864
there were 3,818 persons in houses for the insane, but they do not
regulate these institutions with the same strictness that prevails in
some other countries, and they confine in them many of those criminals
who would otherwise be let loose on the community to pursue their career
of crime under the cloak of monomania. It would therefore appear, and
there is no good reason to doubt the fact, that comparatively little
insanity exists in Spain. One report of 1861 gives the following as the
percentage of the cases, when pathologically classified: “Maniac
exaltation, 31.91; monomaniacs, 11; melancholy, 6; derangement of mental
faculties, 20.53; imbecility, 6.15; epileptic madness, 11; undetermined,
10.41.”
The medical faculty will understand this classification, but I do not
know the difference between some of the sections into which the victims
are thus divided. But when we come to the proximate causes of insanity,
we are in a region level to the uninstructed mind, and here we find that
moral and mental excitements growing out of love, such as jealousy and
disappointment, are prolific causes: that physical ailments badly
attended or wholly neglected frequently result in derangement; and the
political turmoils of the State are followed by the same effects. But,
on the other hand, there are at least three common causes of insanity in
the United States, and probably in England also, that have a limited, if
any, influence in Spain. These are religious excitements, haste to be
rich, and intemperance in drinking. In Spain they take things easily.
The people do not work the brain unduly in matters of religion or trade.
The church takes care of the souls of the people: the law or the
government excludes all disturbing elements that might come from the
efforts of others to proselyte the people, and in their ignorance of any
other way of getting to heaven than the church teaches them, they are
quiet on that subject. Religion never made any one crazy; on the
contrary, it has soothed the madness and healed the malady of many a
crazed brain and distracted soul. But the wild and unenlightened
excitement, begotten of blind fanaticism and erroneous teaching, has
often driven men and women mad, as statistics of American insanity
fearfully show. And in Spain there is not energy enough, not life
enough, to make speculation dangerous in philosophy, morals, or even in
money. I think it very unlikely that they will ever go wild after
tulips, or mulberries, or petroleum. They are making railroads, but the
French and English furnish the capital and send the engineers. And the
great safety-valve, or rather the great preserver of the people’s
intellects, is found in the fact that they are never in a hurry about
any thing. The old Romans had a good motto, _Festina lente_, hasten
slowly; but the Spaniards never _hasten at all_. They despise
punctuality. An hour after the time when a positive appointment had been
made with me, a man in Seville said, when I told him I had been waiting,
“Why, the Queen never comes till an hour after the time announced for
her arrival.” And this utter indifference to the value of time, which is
money all the world over, begets, or is begotten, for it is hard to say
if it be the cause or the effect, of that perfect sense of ease, content
with one’s condition, idle carelessness, that dismisses all anxiety for
the future. Such people do not go crazy.
And far above all other immediate causes of insanity in northern climes,
is the use of spirituous liquors. The scholar drinks to keep up his
mental fire, and when he becomes insane his malady is marked “excessive
study.” The banker or merchant drinks too much, and when he is put into
an asylum his madness is ascribed to his devotion to his business. The
millions of our people drink, drink, drink,—and this vice of the north
of Europe and of America yields thousands on thousands of cases of
insanity every year. But in those countries where cheap wines, with
little alcohol in them, are the common drink of the people, intemperance
is comparatively rare. An English engineer, employing hundreds of men in
building and repairing Spanish railways, assured me that intemperance is
wholly unknown among them. The class of men who would be the most
addicted to the vice with us in the United States, are here more
temperate than any class of people in England or America. It is not to
be supposed that this temperance is the result solely of the culture of
the vine and the abundance of weak wine. It would be a false conclusion,
from very inadequate premises, to infer such an idea. It is due in most
part to the climate itself, which is at once favorable to the vine, and
unfavorable to that elevation or excitement which strong drink begets.
And in this delightful clime, where to live and breathe is a luxury, and
to keep cool is at once a virtue and a joy, the heating stimulus of
ardent spirits would not be sought as one of the pleasurable vices of
the land.
Therefore, and to this conclusion we are easily led, the people here in
Spain are not likely to be, as a general thing, insane. And if we of
colder climes could be so humble as to take a lesson from poor, old,
decrepit Spain, we might learn from these facts to moderate our desires,
to pursue the good we seek with less haste and more speed, to use the
world as not abusing it, and resting now and then, avoid the lunatic
asylum on our journey to the grave.
At dusk we went to the station to take our departure from Toledo. In the
train going up to Madrid was a large party of young men. Noisy,
boisterous, rude, they cheered every lady who came to the cars, calling
out to the good-looking ones to come to their apartment, and making
sport of others; and all this with a freedom and indecorum that would
not be tolerated even in our land of universal liberty. I was surprised
both at their impudence and its impunity, and asked who the fellows
were.
“Oh,” said Antanazio, “they are college boys: the same all the world
over!”
Even so, I do believe.