THE INFLUENCE OF THE MOORS
It is now time to turn back for a century and a half and to speak of the
traces left by the Moors of their long occupation of the country.
Although they held what is now the northern half of Portugal for over a
hundred years, and part of the south for about five hundred, there is
hardly a single building anywhere of which we can be sure that it was
built by them before the Christian re-conquest of the country. Perhaps
almost the only exceptions are the fortifications at Cintra, known as
the Castello dos Mouros, the city walls at Silves, and possibly the
church at Mertola. In Spain very many of their buildings still exist,
such as the small mosque, now the church of Christo de la Luz, and the
city walls at Toledo, and of course the mosque at Cordoba and the
Alcazar at Seville, not to speak of the Alhambra. Yet it must not be
forgotten that, while Portugal reached its furthest limits by the
capture of the Algarve under Affonso III. about the middle of the
thirteenth century, in Spain the progress was slower. Toledo indeed fell
in 1085, but Cordoba and Seville were only taken a few years before the
capture of the Algarve, and Granada was able to hold out till 1492.
Besides, in what is now Portugal there had been no great capital like
Cordoba. And yet, though this is so, hardly a town or a village exists
in which some slight trace of their art cannot be found, even if it be
but a tile-lining to the walls of church or house. In such towns as
Toledo, Moorish builders were employed not only in the many parish
churches but even in the cathedral, and in Portugal we find Moors at
Thomar even as late as the beginning of the sixteenth century, when such
names as Omar, Mafamedi, Bugimaa, and Bebedim occur in the list of
workmen.
It is chiefly in three directions that Moorish influence made itself
felt, in actual design, in carpentry, and in tiling, and of these the
last two, and especially tiling, are the most general, and long survived
the disappearance of Arab detail.
[Sidenote: Cintra.]
Some eighteen miles from Lisbon, several sharp granite peaks rise high
above an undulating tableland. Two of these are encircled by the old
Moorish fortification which climbs up and down over huge granite
boulders, and on a projecting spur near their foot, and to the north,
there stands the old palace of Cintra. As long as the Walis ruled at
Lisbon, it was to Cintra that they came in summer for hunting and cool
air, and some part at least of their palace seems to have survived till
to-day.
Cintra was first taken by Alfonso VI. of Castile and Leon in 1093--to be
soon lost and retaken by Count Henry of Burgundy sixteen years later,
but was not permanently held by the Christians till Affonso Henriques
expelled the Moors in 1147. The Palace of the Walis was soon granted by
him to Gualdim Paes, the famous grand master of the Templars, and was
held by his successors till it was given to Dom Diniz's queen, St.
Isabel. She died in 1336, when the palace returned to the Order of
Christ--which had meanwhile been formed out of the suppressed Order of
the Temple--only to be granted to Dona Beatriz, the wife of D. Affonso
IV., in exchange for her possessions at Ega and at Torre de Murta. Dom
Joao I. granted the palace in 1385 to Dom Henrique de Vilhena, but he
soon sided with the Spaniards, for he was of Spanish birth, his
possessions were confiscated and Cintra returned to the Crown. Some of
the previous kings may have done something to the palace, but it was
King Joao who first made it one of the chief royal residences, and who
built a very large part of it.
A few of the walls have been examined by taking off the plaster, and
have been found to be built in the usual Arab manner, courses of rubble
bonded at intervals with bands of thin bricks two or three courses deep.
Such are the back wall of the entrance hall and a thick wall near the
kitchen. Outside all the walls are plastered, all the older windows, of
one or two lights, are enclosed in square frames--for the later windows
of Dom Manoel's time are far more elaborate and fantastic--and most of
the walls end in typical Moorish battlements. High above the dark tile
roofs there tower the two strange kitchen chimneys, huge conical spires
ending in round funnels, now all plastered, but once covered with a
pattern of green and white tiles.
[Illustration:
1. _Entrance Court._
2. _Sala dos Cysnes._
3. _Central Pateo._
4. _Sala das Pegas._
5. " " _Sereias._
5a. " _do Conselho._
6. _Sala da Jantar._
7. _Servery._
8. _Sala dos Arabes._
9. _Chapel._
10. _Kitchen._
11. _Sala dos Brazoes._
12. _Pateo de Diana._
13. _Wing or Dom Manoel._
PLAN OF PACO, CINTRA]
The whole is so extremely complicated that without a plan it would be
almost useless to attempt a description. Speaking roughly, all that lies
to the west of the Porte Cochere which leads from the entrance court
through to the kitchen court and stables beyond is, with certain
alterations and additions, the work of Dom Joao, and all that lies to
the east is the work of Dom Manoel, added during the first years of the
sixteenth century. Entering through a pointed gateway, one finds oneself
in a long and irregular courtyard, having on the right hand a long low
building in which live the various lesser palace officials, and on the
left, first a comparatively modern projecting building in which live the
ladies-in-waiting, then somewhat further back the rooms of the
controller of the palace and his office. From the front wall of this
office, which itself juts out some feet into the courtyard, there runs
eastwards a high balustraded terrace reaching as far as another slightly
projecting wing, and approached by a great flight of steps at its
western end. Not far beyond the east end of the terrace an inclined road
leads to the Porte Cochere, and beyond it are the large additions made
by Dom Manoel. (Fig. 44.)
On this terrace stands the main front of the palace. Below are four
large pointed arches, and above five beautiful windows lighting the
great Sala dos Cysnes or Swan Hall. Originally these four arches were
open and led into a large vaulted hall; now they are all built
up--perhaps by Dona Maria I. after the great earthquake--three having
small two-light windows, and one a large door, the chief entrance to the
palace. In the back wall of this hall may still be seen three windows
which must have existed before it was built, for what is now their inner
side was evidently at first their outer; and this wall is one of those
found to be built in the Arab manner, so that clearly Dom Joao's hall
was built in front of a part of the Walis' palace, a part which has
quite disappeared except for this wall.
From the east end of this lower hall a straight stair, which looks as if
it had once been an outside stair, leads up to a winding stair by which
another hall is reached, whose floor lies at a level of about 26 feet
above the terrace.[94] From this hall, which may be of later date than
Dom Joao's time, a door leads down to the central pateo or courtyard, or
else going up a few steps the way goes through a smaller square room,
once an open verandah, through a wide doorway inserted by Dom Manoel
into the great Swan Hall. This hall, the largest room in the palace,
measuring about 80 feet long by 25 wide, is so called from the swans
painted in the eight-sided panels of its wonderful roof. The story is
that while the palace was still building ambassadors came to the king
from the duke of Burgundy asking for the hand of his daughter Isabel.
Among other presents they brought some swans, which so pleased the young
princess that she made them collars of red velvet and persuaded her
father to build for them a long narrow tank in the central court just
under the north windows of this hall. Here she used to feed them till
she went away to Flanders, and from love of his daughter King Joao had
the swans with their collars painted on the ceiling of the hall. The
swans may still be seen, but not those painted for Dom Joao, for all the
mouldings clearly show that the present ceiling was reconstructed some
centuries later. The hall is lit by five windows looking south across
the entrance court to the Moorish castle on the hill beyond, and by
three looking over the swan tank into the central pateo.
These windows, and indeed all those in Dom Joao's part of the palace,
are very like each other. They are nearly all of two lights--never of
more--and are made of white marble. In every case there is a
square-headed moulded frame enclosing the whole window, the outer
mouldings of this frame resting on small semicircular corbels, and
having Gothic bases. Inside this framework stand three slender shafts,
with simple bases and carved capitals. These capitals are not at all
unlike French capitals of the thirteenth century, but are really of a
common Moorish pattern often found elsewhere, as in the Alhambra. On
them, moulded at the ends, but not in front or behind, rest abaci, from
which spring stilted arches. (Fig. 45.)
Each arch is delicately moulded and elaborately cusped, but, though in
some cases--for the shape varies in almost every window--each individual
cusp may have the look of a Gothic trefoil, the arrangement is not
Gothic at all. There are far more than are ever found in a Gothic
window, sometimes as many as eleven, and they usually begin at the
bottom with a whole instead of a half cusp. From the centre of each
abacus, cutting across the arch mouldings, another moulding runs up,
which being returned across the top encloses the upper part of each
light in a smaller square frame. It is this square frame which more than
anything else gives these windows their Eastern look, and it has been
shown how often, and indeed almost universally a square framing was put
round doorways all through the last Gothic
[Illustration: FIG. 44.
PALACE, CINTRA.
ENTRANCE COURT.]
[Illustration: FIG. 45.
PALACE, CINTRA.
WINDOW OF SALA DAS SEREIAS.]
period. In only one instance are the shafts anything but plain, and that
is in the central window overlooking the entrance court, where they are
elaborately twisted, and where also they start at the level of the floor
within instead of standing on a low parapet.
In the room itself the walls up to a certain height are covered with
tiles, diamonds of white and a beautiful olive green which are much
later than Dom Joao's time. There is also near the west end of the north
side a large fireplace projecting slightly from the wall; at either end
stands a shaft with cap and base like those of the windows, bearing a
long flat moulded lintel, while on the hearth there rest two very fine
wrought-iron Gothic fire-dogs.
East of the fireplace a door having a wide flat ogee head leads into a
small porch built in the corner of the pateo to protect the passage to
the Sala das Pegas, the first of the rooms to the south of this pateo.
In the angle formed by the end wall of the Sala dos Cysnes and the side
of the Sala das Pegas there is a small low room now called the Sala de
Dom Sebastiao or do Conselho. It is entered from the west end of the
Swan Hall through a door, which was at first a window just like all the
rest. This Hall of Dom Sebastiao or of the Council is so called from the
tradition that it was there that in 1578 that unhappy king held the
council in which it was decided to invade Morocco, an expedition which
cost the king his life and his country her independence. In reality the
final solemn council was held in Lisbon, but some informal meeting may
well have been held there. Now the room is low and rather dark, being
lit only by two small windows opening above the roof of the controller's
office. It is divided into two unequal parts by an arcade of three
arches, the smaller part between the arches and the south wall being
raised a step above the rest. When first built by Dom Joao this raised
part formed a covered verandah, the rest being, till about the time of
Maria I., open to the sky and forming a charming and cool retreat during
the heat of summer. The floor is of tiles and marble, and all along the
south wall runs a bench entirely covered with beautiful tiles. At the
eastern end is a large seat, rather higher than the bench and provided
with arms, doubtless for the king, and tiled like the rest.
Passing again from the Swan Hall the way leads through the porch into
the Sala das Pegas or of the magpies. The door from the porch to the
room is one of the most beautiful parts of Dom Joao's work. It is framed
as are the windows, and has shafts, capitals, abaci, and bases just like
those already described; but the arch is different. It is beautifully
moulded, but is--if one may so speak--made up of nine reversed cusps,
whose convex sides form the arch: the inner square moulding too is
enriched with ball ornament. Inside the walls are covered to half their
height with exquisite tiles of Moorish pattern, blue, green and brown on
a white ground.
On the north wall is a great white marble chimney-piece, once a present
from Pope Leo X. to Dom Manoel and brought by the great Marques de
Pombal from the ruined palace of Almeirim opposite Santarem. Two other
doors, with simple pointed heads, lead one into the dining-room, and one
into the Sala das Sereias. The Sala das Pegas, like the Swan Hall, is
called after its ceiling, for on it are painted in 136 triangular
compartments, 136 magpies, each holding in one foot a red rose and in
its beak a scroll inscribed 'Por Bem.' Possibly this ceiling, which on
each side slopes up to a flat parallelogram, is more like that painted
for Dom Joao than is that of the Swan Hall, but even here some of the
mouldings are clearly renaissance, and the painting has been touched up,
but anyhow it was already called Camera das Pegas in the time of Dom
Duarte; further, tradition tells that the magpies were painted there by
Dom Joao's orders, and why. It seems that once during the hour of the
midday siesta the king, wandering about his unfinished house, found in
this room one of the maids of honour. Her he kissed, when another maid
immediately went and told the queen, Philippa of Lancaster. She was
angry, but Dom Joao only said 'Por bem,' meaning much what his queen's
grandfather had meant when he said 'Honi soit qui mal y pense,' and to
remind the maids of honour, whose waiting-room this was, that they must
not tell tales, he had the magpies painted on the ceiling.
The two windows, one looking west and one into the pateo, are exactly
like those already described.
From the Sala das Pegas one door leads up a few steps into the Sala das
Sereias, and another to the dining-room. This Sala das Sereias, so
called from the mermaids painted on the ceiling, is a small room some
eighteen feet square. It is lit by a two-light window opening towards
the courtyard, a window just like those of the Sala das Pegas and of the
Sala dos Cysnes. Some of its walls, especially that between it and the
Sala das Pegas, are very thick and seem to be older than the time of Dom
Joao. As usual, the walls are partly covered with beautiful tiles,
mostly embossed with green vine-leaves, but round the door leading to
the long narrow room, used as a servery, is an interlacing pattern of
green and blue tiles, while the spandrils between this and the pointed
doorhead are filled with a true Arabesque pattern, dark on a light
ground, which is said to belong to the Palace of the Walis. There are
altogether four doors, one leading to the servery, one to the Sala das
Pegas, one to a spiral stair in the corner of the pateo, and one to the
dining-room.
This dining-room projects somewhat to the west so as to leave space for
a window looking south to the mountains, and one looking north across a
small court, as well as one looking west. Of these, the two which look
south and west are like each other, and like the other of Dom Joao's
time except that the arches are not cusped; that the outer frame is
omitted and that the abaci are moulded in front as well as at the ends;
but the third window looking north is rather different. The framing has
regular late Gothic bases, the capitals of the shafts are quite unlike
the rest, having one large curly leaf at each angle, and the moulding
running up the centre between the arches--which are not cusped--is
plaited instead of being plain. Altogether it looks as if it were later
than Dom Joao's time, for it is the only window where the capitals are
not of the usual Arab form, and they are not at all like some in the
castle of Sempre Noiva built about the beginning of the sixteenth
century.
The wall-tiles of the dining-room are like those of the Sala das
Sereias, but end in a splendid cresting. The ceiling is modern and
uninteresting.
Next to the north comes the servery, a room without interest but for its
window which looks west, and is like the two older dining-room windows.
Returning to the Sala das Sereias, a spiral stair leads down to the
central pateo, which can also be reached from the porch in the
south-west corner. All along the south side runs the tank made by Dom
Joao for his daughter's swans, and on three sides are beautiful white
marble windows. At the east end of the north side three open arches lead
to the bathroom. As is the case with the windows, the three arches are
enclosed in a square frame. The capitals, however, are different, having
an eight-sided bell on which rests a square block with a bud carved at
each angle, and above an abacus, moulded all round. The arches are
cusped like the windows, but are stilted and segmental. Inside is a
recess framed in an arch of Dom Manoel's time, and from all over the
tiled walls and the ceiling jets of water squirt out, so that the whole
becomes a great shower-bath, delightful and cooling on a hot day but
rather public. In the middle of the pateo there stands a curious
column--not at all unlike the 'pelourinho'[95] of Cintra--which stands
in a basin just before the entrance gate. This column is formed of three
twisted shafts on whose capitals sit a group of boys holding three
shields charged with the royal arms. All round the court is a dado of
white and green tiles arranged in an Arab pattern.
In the north-west corner and reached by the same spiral stair, but at a
higher level than the Sala das Sereias, is the Sala dos Arabes, so
called because it is commonly believed to be a part of the original
building. The walls may be so, but of the rest, nothing, but perhaps the
shallow round fountain basin in the middle and the square of tiles which
surrounds it, now so worn that little of their glazed surface is left.
The walls half-way up are lined with tiles, squares and parallelograms,
blue, white and green. The doors are framed in different tiles, and all
are finished with an elaborate cresting. The most interesting thing in
the room is the circular basin in the middle--a basin which gives it a
truly Eastern look. Inside a round shallow hollow there stands a
many-sided block of marble about six inches high. The sides are concave
as in a small section of a Doric column, and within it is hollowed into
a beautiful cup, shaped somewhat like a flower of many petals. In the
middle there now is a strange object of gilt metal through which the
water once poured. On a short stem stands a carefully modelled dish on
which rest first leaves, like long acanthus leaves, then between them
birds on whose backs sit small figures of boys. Between the boys and
above the leaves are more figures exactly like seated Indian gods, and
the whole ends in a cone. It is so completely Indian in appearance that
there can be little doubt but that it is really of Indian origin, and
perhaps it is not too much to see in it part of the spoils brought to
Dom Manoel by Vasco da Gama after he had in 1498 made his way round
Africa to Calicut and back.
Returning to the Sala das Sereias and passing through the servery and
another room an open court is reached called the Pateo de Diana, from a
fountain over which Diana presides, and on to which one of the
dining-room windows looks. A beautifully tiled stair--these tiles are
embossed like those of the dining-room, but besides vine-leaves some
have on them bunches of grapes--goes down from the Court of Diana to the
Court of the Lion, the Pateo do Leao, where a lion spouts into a long
tank. But the chief beauty of these two courts is a small window which
overlooks them. This window is only of one light, and like the
dining-room window near it its framing has Gothic bases. The capitals
are smaller than in the other windows, and the framing partly covers the
outer moulding of the window arch, making it look like a segment of a
circle. But the cusps are the most curious part. They form four more or
less trefoiled spaces with wavy outlines, and two of them--not the
remaining one at the top--end in large well-carved vine-leaves, very
like those at the ends of the cusps on the arches in the Capella do
Fundador at Batalha. To add to the charm of the window, the space
between the top of the arch and the framing is filled in with those
beautiful tiles embossed with vine-leaves.
Going up again to the Sala dos Arabes, a door in the northern wall leads
to a passage running northwards to the chapel. About half-way along the
passage another branches off to the right towards the great kitchen.
The chapel stands at the northern edge of the palace buildings, having
beyond it a terrace called the Terreiro da Meca or of Mecca; partly from
this name, and partly from the tiles which still cover the middle of the
floor it is believed that the chapel stands exactly on the site of the
Walis' private mosque, with perhaps the chancel added.
The middle of the nave--the chapel consists of a nave and chancel, two
small transeptal recesses, and two galleries one above the other at the
west end--is paved with tiles once glazed and of varying colours, but
now nearly all worn down till the natural red shows through. The pattern
has been elaborate; a broad border of diagonal checks surrounding a
narrow oblong in which the checks are crossed by darker lines so as to
form octagons, and between the outer border and the octagons a band of
lighter ground down which in the middle runs a coloured line having on
each side cones of the common Arab pattern exactly like the palace
battlements.
Now the walls are bare and white, but were once covered with frescoes of
the fifteenth century; the reredos is a clumsy addition of the
eighteenth century.
The cornice and the long pilasters at the entrance to the chancel seem
to have been added at the same time, but the windows and ceiling are
still those of Dom Joao's time. The windows--there are now three, a
fourth in the chancel having been turned into a royal pew--are of two or
three lights, have commonplace tracery, and are only interesting as
being one of the few wholly Gothic features in the palace.
Far more interesting is the ceiling, which is entirely Arab in
construction and in design. In the nave it is an irregular polygon in
section, and in the chancel is nearly a semicircle, having nine equal
sides. The whole of the boarded surface is entirely covered with an
intricate design formed of strips of wood crossing each other in every
direction so as to form stars, triangles, octagons, and figures of every
conceivable shape. The whole still retains its original colouring. At
the centres of the main figures are gilt bosses--the one over the high
altar being a shield with the royal arms--the wooden strips are black
with a white groove down the centre of each, and the ground is either
dark red or light blue. (Fig. 46.)
The whole is of great interest not only for its own sake, but because it
is the only ceiling in the palace which has remained unchanged since the
end of the fourteenth century, and because it is, as it were, the parent
of the splendid roofs in the Sala dos Cysnes and of the still more
wonderful one in the Sala dos Escudos.
The kitchen lies at the back of the chapel and at right angles to it. It
is a building about 58 feet long by 25 wide, and is divided into two
equal parts by a large arch. Each of these two parts is covered by a
huge conical chimney so that the inside is more like the nave of St.
Ours at Loches than anything else, while outside these chimneys rise
high above all the rest of the palace. It is lit by small two-light
Gothic windows, and has lately been lined with white tiles. Now the
[Illustration: FIG. 46.
PALACE CHAPEL ROOF.
CINTRA.]
chimneys serve only as ventilators, as ordinary iron ranges have been
put in. There seems to be nothing in the country at all like these
chimneys--for the kitchen at Alcobaca, although it has a stream running
through it, is but a poor affair compared with this one, nor is its
chimney in any way remarkable outside.[96]
The rest of the palace towards the west, between the west end of the
chapel and the great square tower in which is the Sala dos Escudos, was
probably also built about the time of Dom Joao I., but except for a few
windows there is little of interest left which belongs to his time.
The great tower of the Sala dos Escudos was built by Dom Manoel on the
top of an older building then called the Casa da Meca, in which Affonso
V. was born in 1432--the year before his grandfather Dom Joao died--and
where he himself died forty-nine years later. In another room on a
higher floor--where his feet, as he walked up and down day after day,
have quite worn away the tiles--Affonso VI. was imprisoned. Affonso had
by his wildness proved himself quite unable to govern, and had also made
himself hated by his queen, a French princess. She fell in love with his
brother, so Affonso was deposed, divorced, and banished to the Azores.
After some years it was found that he was there trying to form a party,
so he was brought to Cintra and imprisoned in this room from 1674 till
his death in 1683. These worn-out tiles are worthy of notice for their
own sake since tiles with Moorish patterns, as are these here and those
in the chapel, are very seldom used for flooring, and they are probably
among the oldest in the palace.
[Sidenote: Castles, Guimaraes and Barcellos.]
Such was the palace from the time of Joao I. to that of Dom Manoel, a
building thoroughly Eastern in plan as in detail, and absolutely unlike
such contemporary buildings as the palaces of the dukes of Braganza at
Guimaraes or at Barcellos, or the castle at Villa da Feira between
Oporto and Aveiro. The Braganza palaces are both in ruins, but their
details are all such as might be found almost anywhere in Christian
Europe. Large pointed doors, traceried windows and tall chimneys--these
last round and of brick--differ only from similar features found
elsewhere, as one dialect may differ from another, whereas Cintra is, as
it were, built in a
[Sidenote: Villa da Feira.]
totally different language. The castle at Villa da Feira is even more
unlike anything at Cintra. A huge keep of granite, the square turrets
projecting slightly from the corners give it the look of a Norman
castle, for the curious spires of brick now on those turrets were added
later, perhaps under Dom Manoel. Inside there is now but one vast hall
with pointed barrel roof, for all the wooden floors are gone, leaving
only the beam holes in the walls, the Gothic fireplaces, and the small
windows to show where they once were.
It is then no wonder that Cintra has been called the Alhambra of
Portugal, and it is curious that the same names are found given to
different parts of the two buildings. The Alhambra has a Mirador de
Lindaraxa, Cintra a Jardim de Lindaraya; the Alhambra a Torre de las dos
Hermanas, Cintra a Sala das Irmas or of the Sisters--the part under the
Sala dos Escudos where Affonso V. was born; while both at the Alhambra
and here there is a garden called de las or das Damas.