tradition which are associated with the story of this ancient and royal
city, dates from the invasion of the Goths. Toledo was old when Euric
successfully scaled its seven rocks and stormed its battlements--how
old, cannot be determined. Legend claims that the town was in existence
when God made the sun; less exalted imagination dates its foundation no
further back than the days of Tubal, the grandson of Noah. Alphonsus,
“the Learned,” and Diego Mossem Valera, the historian of Isabel the
Catholic, agree that it was built by Pyrrhus, the son-in-law of King
Hispan, and a captain of the army of Cyrus. Hercules has been claimed as
the father of Toledo by Rufo Festo Avieno, and Ferecio, one of the
companions of Ulysses, is held by some to have retreated to this spot to
escape the blood-vengeance of that little band of Greek adventurers.
Other legends declare the city to be of Jewish origin; and its builders,
the Judians, who fled from Jerusalem before the victorious hosts of
Nebuchadnezzar. Don Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada discovers the founders of
Toledo in Tolemon and Brutus, two Roman consuls in the reign of Ptolemy
Evergetes, and more reasonable supposition favours the theory that it
was first settled by nomadic Celtic shepherds, who forsook their flocks
to erect walls and fortifications on the rocky eminence above the Tagus.
The little that is known of the origin and beginning of Toledo; the
very mystery and obscurity of its earliest days, is accepted by the old
historian, Alcocer, as a proof of its antiquity and nobility. Rais, the
Moorish writer, says that Tago, at Toledo, was one of the eleven
governors of Carpetania. Tago was foully murdered by Hasdrubal, the
successor of Hamilcar, and the assassination of Hasdrubal was followed
by so determined an insurrection that even Hannibal was forced to
retreat before the infuriated Carpetanians. But Hannibal retreated, only
to return with a reinforced army, and break Carpetania beneath the might
of Carthagenian rule. In 191 B.C., after the fall of Carthage, Hilermo
surrendered Toledo to the Roman forces, under Marcus Fulvius Nobilior.
But Toledo held itself sullenly and haughtily aloof from the affairs of
Rome. Viriate and Caius Plancius might cut each other’s throats on the
banks of the Tagus; Sertorius might nurse his hates within the city;
Cæsar and Pompey might be locked in a death struggle--those things
mattered nothing to the contemptuous and independent Toledans. The Goth
was the first real conqueror of Toledo; and the city, outwearing the
scars of Rome, and throwing off the marks of the Moors, is, to-day, as
insistently Gothic as Cordova and Seville are unmistakably Moorish.
One sees Toledo from the distance, from the bridges, and from the heart
of the city, and recognises that it is as it has always been--that it
will go down into the tomb of the centuries unchanged. It grew “out of
the night of ages”--its rocky throne has defied the ravages of time and
the transforming ingenuity of man. Maurice Barrès, who has felt the
majesty and melancholy of this gaunt monument of mediævalism, writes:
“The landscape of Toledo, and the banks of the Tagus, are amongst the
saddest and most ardent things of this world. Whoever lives here has
[Illustration: PLATE XLIII.
Cornice at Springing of Arches in a Window.]
[Illustration: TOLEDO
SANTA MARIA LA BLANCA--INTERIOR, 1100-1156.]
[Illustration: PLATE XLIV.
Panels on Walls.]
no need to consider the grave youth, the ‘Penseroso,’ of the Medicis
Chapel; he may also do without the biography and the ‘Pensées’ of Blaise
Pascal. With the very sentiment realised by these great solitary works
he will be filled, if he but give himself up to the tragic fierceness of
the magnificences in ruins upon these high rocks. Toledo, on its
hillside, with the tiny half circle of the Tagus at its feet, has the
colour, the roughness, the haughty poverty of the sierra on which it is
built, and whose strong articulations from the very first produce an
impression of energy and passion. It is less a town, a noisy affair
yielding to the commodities of life, than a significant spot for the
soul. Beneath a crude illumination, which gives to each line of its
ruins a vigour, a clearness, by which the least energetic characters
acquire backbone, at the same time it is mysterious, with its cathedral
springing towards the sky, its alcazars and palaces, that only take
sight from their invisible patios. Thus, secret and inflexible, in this
harsh, overheated land, Toledo appears like an image of exaltation in
solitude, a cry in the desert.”
Grim, austere, and forbidding is the general type of the Gothic
character; the history of their kings in Spain is a long story of
menace, bloodshed, and persecution; and that history covers Toledo as
with a suit of battered mail. Christianity without the practice of the
Christian virtues, valour divorced from mercy, power disjoined from
justice--the religion, the might and majesty of the Gothic sovereigns,
is a record of gloomy and revengeful despotism. Hermengildo, the Gothic
saint, used his religion as an excuse for attempting to wrest the throne
of Toledo from his father, Leovigildo, whom he denounced as a minister
of the devil; Recaredo, who has been painted by historians as a model of
all the Christian virtues, practiced a rigorous system of cruelty and
vindictive bigotry; and his successors were notorious for their queer
morality, and their persecution of the Jews. Yet San Ildephonso, the
most famous archbishop of Toledo under the Goths, has enriched the
history of Spain with many splendid fables of heavenly manifestations;
and the piece he cut from the veil of a visiting saint, and the
chasuble, with which the Virgin invested him with her own hands, are
still displayed among the treasures of Toledo cathedral. The figures of
Wamba and Rodrigo--the warrior king who was offered the alternative of
the crown of Toledo, or the thrust of a Toledan dagger, and “the Last of
the Goths”--stand out with dominating prominence on the stage of Gothic
history, on which warriors and priests are the principal actors.
The doctrine of the Gothic priesthood has been described as the
“hardest, meanest, and brutallest imaginable,” and the Gothic warriors
as men who were never other than savage tyrants, who “aped a culture
which they could not understand, and with whose aims and tendencies
their inmost character was powerless to sympathise.” These are the
people who gave Toledo its character, a character which the art-adoring
Arabs were unable to change or even to greatly modify. It is so
important to understand the influence which was at work in the creation
of the Toledan character, the atmosphere in which it was reared, and the
discipline under which it developed, that I make no excuse for quoting
the following illuminating appreciation of the Gothic nature from Mr.
Leonard Williams’ chapter on Toledo: “Originally barbaric in their
ferocity, the Goths became as their domination approached its inevitable
end, barbaric in their effeminacy. So, too, with their religious
beliefs. Excepting the clergy, who were men of some education and
unlimited unscrupulousness,
[Illustration: PLATE XLV.
From one of the centre arches.
From the entrance to the Divan.
Spandrils of Arches.]
[Illustration: TOLEDO
THE GATE OF BLOOD.]
the Christian Visigoth was every whit as barbaric as the heathen;
barbaric, either in his violent fanaticism, or else in his total lack of
individuality, and idiotic acquiesence in the schemes of a designing
priesthood. An intermediate type was wholly, or almost wholly, wanting,
and there is little to choose between Leovigildo, the ignorant and cruel
desperado, and his meek successor, Recaredo, the unresisting prey of the
ambitious metropolitan of Toledo.... The morals of the Visigoths were on
a par with their refinement and their mode of living. Serfdom was the
distinguishing mark of the commons; arrogance of the nobility; avarice
and ambition of temporal power of the clergy; regicide and tumult of the
Crown. It is clear that a people, disunited in this manner, could never
have exercised a long supremacy in any case; and destiny, or chance,
precipitated their downfall by the arrival of the one-eyed Tarik and his
host, and the defeat of ‘the Last of the Goths,’ beside the
memory-haunted osiers of the Guadalete.”
Arrogance, avarice, ambition, regicide, tumult--here we have the
distinguishing qualities of the nobles, the priests, and the kings of
Toledo under the Gothic rule. The sovereigns and the nobles stamped
their personality upon the city, and were themselves moulded and
dominated by the priests. The priestly influence in Spain has ever been
for austerity and heartless magnificence; it has ever sought to impress
by fear and superstition. In the time of the Goths, Christianity
developed through the increasing power of the bishops. The Church was
terrible and forbidding; the nobility was arrogant and cruel; the
monarchy was tyrannical and despotic. Hallam dismisses the consideration
of the Visigoths in a sentence: “I hold,” he says, “the annals of
barbarians so unworthy of remembrance that I will not detain the reader
by naming one sovereign of that obscure race.” But, under those
sovereigns, and by the hands of that obscure race, Toledo was
established upon its rocky eminence, and it bears its character on its
face to-day, as it did in the opening quarter of the eighth century,
when the one-eyed Tarik entered its melancholy, deserted streets.
The plunder that fell to the Moorish invader is variously reported, but
all accounts are agreed that it was beyond calculation. According to the
learned Mohammedan author, Al-leyth Ibn Said, the spoils were so
abundant that the rank and file of the army all shared in the rewards,
and it was a common thing for the humblest bowmen to be possessed of
costly robes, magnificent gold chains of exquisite workmanship, and
strings of matchless pearls, rubies, and emeralds. So great, in many
instances, was the greed for plunder, and so grossly ignorant were the
Berbers of the value of the spoil, that whenever a party of them
happened upon a rich fabric, they did not hesitate to cut it up between
them, without regard to its worth or workmanship. It is recorded that
two Berbers secured a superb carpet, composed of the most splendid
embroidery, interwoven with gold, and ornamented with filigree work of
the purest gold, with pearls and other gems. The men carried it for
awhile between them, but, finding this method of conveyance cumbersome,
they carved the gem-encrusted fabric in twain with their swords. In this
fashion, masterpieces of art were heedlessly destroyed for the sake of
the raw material of which they were composed.
Among the precious objects seized in the palace and church of Toledo
were twenty-five golden and jewelled crowns--the crowns of the different
Gothic kings who had reigned in Spain--the psalms of David, written upon
gold leaf in water made of dissolved rubies, vases filled with precious
stones, quantities of robes of cloth of gold and
[Illustration: PLATE XLVI.
Spandrils of Arches.]
tissue, tunics of every variety of costly skirts and satins, magnificent
suits of chain armour and mail inlaid with jewels, and jewel-studded
swords and daggers, weapons of every description, and Solomon’s emerald
table, wrought in burnished silver and gold. “This table,” says the
Arabian chronicler, “was the most beautiful thing ever seen, with its
golden vases and plates of a precious green stone, and three collars of
rubies, emeralds, and pearls.” Other Arabian historians have claimed
that it was composed of a solid emerald, and they are practically agreed
that it was brought to Toledo after the sacking of Jerusalem, and that
it was valued in Damascus at a hundred thousand dinars--about £50,000.
Washington Irving, who invariably goes the whole hog when dealing with
legendary history, says that this “inestimable table” was composed “of
one single and entire emerald, and possessed talismanic powers; for
tradition affirms that it was the work of genii, and had been wrought by
them for King Solomon the Wise, the son of David. This marvellous relic
was carefully preserved by Tarik, as the most precious of all his
spoils, being intended by him as a present to the khalif; and, in
commemoration of it, the city was called by the Arabs, Medina Almeyda;
that is to say, ‘The City of the Table.’”
But the historian, Ibnu Hayyau, the greatly trusted authority of
El-Makkari, gives, in the translation of Don Pascual de Gayangos, the
following account of the origin of this article of virtue: “The
celebrated table which Tarik found at Toledo, although attributed to
Solomon, and named after him, never belonged to the poet-king. According
to the barbarian authors, it was customary for the nobles and men in
estimation of the Gothic Court, to bequeath a portion of their property
to the Church. From the money so amassed the priests caused tables to be
made of pure gold and silver, gorgeous thrones and stands on which to
carry the gospels in public processions, or to ornament the altars on
great festivals. The so-called Solomon’s table was originally wrought
with money derived from this source, and was subsequently emulously
increased and embellished by successive kings of Toledo, the latest
always anxious to surpass his predecessors in magnificence, until it
became the most splendid and costly gem ever made for such a purpose.
The fabric was of pure gold, set with the most precious pearls, rubies,
and emeralds. Its circumference was encrusted with three rows of these
valuable stones, and the whole table displayed jewels so large and
refulgent that never did human eye behold anything comparable with
it.... When the Moslems entered Toledo it was found on the great altar
of the Christian church, and the fact of such a treasure having been
discovered soon became public and notorious.”
The history here assigned to the table is, it must be confessed,
somewhat less improbable than the supposition of Gibbon, who is under
the impression that if it ever existed it may have been carried away by
Titus at the sacking of Jerusalem, and, later, to have fallen into the
hands of the Goths at the taking of Rome by Alaric. Don Pascual,
however, asks, very pertinently, whether it is likely that Bishop
Sindered, and those who accompanied him in his flight, would have left
behind them so valuable an object. And the conundrum still remains as to
the present whereabouts of the table. It has been asserted that it forms
part of the inestimable treasures of the Vatican, but as the devout
Moslem would say, “Allah alone knoweth.”
Tarik, who perceived in Musa’s haste to join him in Toledo and take
possession of the spoils, an indication of the governor’s envy, decided
to conceal one of the feet of
[Illustration: TOLEDO
INTERIOR OF SANTA MARIA LA BLANCA.]
[Illustration: PLATE XLVII.
Spandrils of Arches.]
the table against future emergencies. Musa, who met Tarik with savage
upbraidings for exceeding his instructions--and some go so far as to say
that he supplemented his speech with strokes of his whip--demanded the
production of Solomon’s table, and questioned Tarik as to the absence of
the missing fourth foot. The wily general declared that he had found it
in that condition, and Musa had the missing emerald supplied by a foot
of gold. Subsequently Musa had Tarik cast into prison, and, it is said,
that he would have encompassed his death but for the prompt intervention
of the khalif, who sent peremptory commands that the successful
campaigner should be restored to his command of the Moorish army.
Thereupon Musa professed to restore Tarik to his confidence and
friendship; but he must have regretted that he had not executed his
original purpose, when, on the occasion of his presenting the famous
table as his own discovery to the khalif at Damascus, Tarik proclaimed
himself to be the discoverer, and, as proof of his contention, produced
the missing emerald foot.
The Moorish conquerors recognised the importance of Toledo as the
capital of the Gothic empire, but these art-adoring, sun-worshipping
warriors, who found their Eden in Andalusia, lavished their affection
and culture on Cordova and Seville, and, for a time, Toledo became a
secondary town. Musa’s son, Abdelasis, or Balacin, as Rasis el Moro
calls him, married the widow of King Roderick, who has been variously
styled Egilona, Exilona, and Blanche, and insisted upon every noble of
the Moorish Court paying her extravagant homage; but the sultan held his
Court at Cordova, and the Toledans never forgave this affront to their
honour and dignity. They brooded in their stormy sullenness and
independence. Their revolutionary instincts were never crushed; their
discontent was never appeased through the three and a-half centuries of
the Arab occupation of the city. Cassin, the Moorish ruler, became
impregnated with the principles of independence, and threw off the yoke
of Cordova, only to be betrayed in his turn by the Toledans, who,
wearied of his tyranny, welcomed Abd-er-Rahman to the city, and
submitted their allegiance to his throne. But throughout his reign the
turbulent Toledans proved uncertain and prone to revolution, and his
son, Hakam, who succeeded him, sought to conciliate them by appointing
as governor a renegade Christian, one Amron, of Huesca. “By a
condescension which proves our extreme solicitude for your interests,”
the sultan wrote to his disaffected subjects, “instead of sending you
one of our own subjects, we have chosen one of your compatriots.”
Hakam’s error of judgment resulted in one of the most terrible deeds in
the history of Toledo, perhaps the most disgraceful blot on the Moslem
domination of Spain. Amron was entrusted with the mission of humbling
his fellow countrymen to the rule of the sultan, and he achieved his
object by the practice of a fiendish policy of perfidious cunning.
By affecting an aversion to the sultan, and preaching the gospel of the
independence of Toledo, he won the confidence of the nobles, and
concerted with them in plots to reconquer the city. In furtherance of
their plans, the people consented to have soldiers quartered upon them;
they welcomed the building of a fortress commanded by a strong guard at
the extremity of the city; and it was at their own suggestion that a
castle was erected in the middle of the town as a stronghold for the
valiant governor. Then, having fortified himself with the trust of the
people, and packed the city with troops, Amron secretly advised the
sultan that the Toledans were ready for the lesson that was
[Illustration: TOLEDO
GATE OF THE SUN.]
to be read to them. Abd-er-Rahman, the son of Hakam, advanced towards
the city at the head of a great army. The governor proposed that the
nobles should go out to meet the young prince, and historians record
that these implacable Gothic revolutionists were infatuated by the
courtesy and cordiality with which they were received. The future sultan
conquered their aversion by his grace and charm, and they loudly
applauded Amron’s suggestion that he should be invited to accept the
hospitality of the city. Abd-er-Rahman, instated in the castle of the
governor, invited the nobles and representative men of Toledo to a great
feast. They came in crowds, they were admitted to the castle singly, and
not a single invited guest returned to his home. As each man crossed the
courtyard of the castle he walked past an executioner, who stood in the
shadow with uplifted blade awaiting his approach. No guest passed him.
The nobles entered, the blade fell, and ready hands rolled the body into
a ditch. In Spanish history that bloody day is known as the “Day of the
Foss.”
“Only conceive,” writes Hannah Lynch, “the horrible picture in all its
brutal nakedness! The gaily-apparelled guest, scented, jewelled,
smiling, alights from his carriage, looking forward to pleasure in
varied forms, brilliant lights, delicate viands, exquisite wines, lute,
song, flowers, sparkling speech. Then the quick entrance into a dim
courtyard, a step forward, perhaps in the act of unclasping a silken
mantle, the soundless movement of a fatal arm in the shadowy silence,
the invisible executioner’s form probably hidden by a profusion of tall
plants or an Oriental bush, and body after body, head upon head, roll
into the common grave till the ditch is filled with nigh upon five
thousand corpses. Not even the famous St. Bartholomew can compete with
this, in horror, in gruesomeness. Compared with it, that night of Paris
was honourable and open warfare. It is the stillness of the hour, the
quickness of doing, the unflinching and awful personality of the
executioners, who so remarkably struck down life as ever it advanced
with smiling lips and brightly-glancing eye, that lend this scene its
matchless colours of cruelty and savagery. Beside it, few shocking hours
in history will seem deprived of all sense of mitigation and humanity.”
Only a people rebellious by blood, by training, and by every tradition
of their implacable race, could have thrown off the prostration that
followed this terrible blow, and risen from their stupor with renewed
determination to seize their independence. Yet Toledo survived this
blow, and many others, which, if not so sudden and appalling, were
sufficient to crush the spirit and deaden the aspiration of a more
vincible nation. It is impossible to determine whether Abd-er-Rahman was
an accessory to this deed of butchery, or to say if Amron planned the
massacre in the belief that it was necessary to the maintenance of
Moslem rule, to terrorise the Toledans into submission, or if the deed
was inspired by the more subtle and diabolical intention of making the
Moors more odious in the sight of the unmanageable citizens. When the
people were sufficiently recovered from the horror of the atrocity to
concoct a scheme of revenge, they acted with ferocious promptness. The
cry for vengeance spread from the Zocodover into the surrounding
country, and the people, hastily summoned into the city, surrounded the
castle of Amron, and burnt the hateful fortress and its inmates to the
ground. There, for the time, the insurrectionary movement stopped. An
Arab governor was appointed, and the people, Christians and Jews as well
as Moors, entered upon a new state of material prosperity. Under Aben
Magot ben Ibraham the Moorish artistic influence
[Illustration: TOLEDO
DOOR OF THE HALL OF MESA.]
[Illustration: EXTERIOR OF THE CHAPEL OF CRISTO DE LA VEGA.]
began to make itself felt. The architecture bore the imprint of the
governing race, beautiful gardens were laid out along the Vega, Arabian
palaces sprang into being, and on the ruins of Amron’s castle there was
built a new alcazar.
But the respite from open tumult was only temporary. The Wali, finding
the merchants increasing in riches, raised their tribute to the state,
and smouldering discontent was immediately fanned into a flame. Led by a
wealthy young Toledan, named Hacam, who subsequently earned the affix of
“El Durrete”--“The Striker of Blows”--the people murdered the Moorish
officials and captured the alcazar. The Moslem troops retaliated by
recapturing that stronghold and routing the revolutionists. Hacam went
into retirement until the Moors, lulled into security, relaxed their
vigilance in the guardianship of the city, and then, striking swiftly
through the neglected gates, he recovered the city between sunset and
morning. The greater part of the upper town was burnt, the troops sent
by Abd-er-Rahman II. were repulsed; and, although the Toledans were
incidentally routed by the renegade Spaniard, Maisara, Toledo was not
then retaken. In 873 the city was besieged for a whole year, and only
surrendered when famine had rendered the citizens too weak to further
resist the assaults of the Moorish troops.
The next firebrand to project itself into the inflammatory fabric of
Toledan discontent was the fanatical martyr, Eulogius. In Cordova this
frenzied religionist had fired the Christians into reviling Mohammed,
and thereby exasperating the Moslems into persecution. To the tolerant
and broad-minded Moors, religious observances were prejudices to be
respected. They permitted, to Christians and Jews, the fullest licence
in the matter of worship; they only demanded that a similar respect
should be observed towards their own faith. The Christians were not
asked to reverence the Prophet of Islam, but the Moslems could not allow
him to be openly blasphemed by the infidels. It was against the articles
of their creed, and it was contrary to human nature. To-day the
Christian who rebelled against such a reasonable restriction would be
accounted a bigot, undeserving of sympathy; in the days of Eulogius, the
revilers of Moorish religious prejudices were regarded as saints. Toledo
jumped at their rulers’ resentment of the Christians’ wanton insult to
their faith as an excuse for an outburst of religious indignation, and
Sindola seized the city and declared war against the khalifate by way of
protesting against the execution of Eulogius’s disciples. Ordoño, king
of Leon, sent reinforcements to Sindola, and the allied armies were
caught in an ambush by the Moors, who struck off 8,000 Christian heads
for public exhibition in the various disaffected towns. This reverse had
the desired effect, and the Toledans made no further move until the
death of Wistremir afforded them an opportunity of exasperating the
sultan Mohammed by electing Eulogius to the vacant archbishopric of
Toledo. The sultan, who retaliated by investing the city, had the bridge
undermined while it was in the occupation of his troops, and, by making
a feigned retreat, enticed the impetuous Spaniards to give chase. The
depleted structure collapsed beneath the sudden burden of the pursuing
army, and hundreds of men met their death in the sullen depths of the
Tagus.