The Decline of the City
Toledo, up till then hardly distinguished for its loyalty to the Crown, loved Isabel the Catholic, and on her account, perhaps, rendered obedience to her Aragonese husband. The Catholic sovereigns liked the city, and generally held their Court there. The magnificent Cardinal Mendoza was the prime mover in the expedition against Granada, and planted the Cross on the summit of the Alhambra. The power of the primacy was in no way diminished by the consolidation of the monarchy, and Toledo still looked rather to its archbishop than to its king for guidance and governance. Under Ferdinand and Isabel it prospered exceedingly. The arts of peace were studied, industries flourished, and the more adventurous and restless spirits found an outlet for their energies in colonial enterprises beyond the seas instead of cutting each other’s throats in the byways of the city. Toledo became courtly and urbane. The luckless princess, Juana, was born at the Alcazar in 1479; and here the Infanta Isabel was married on April 29, 1498, to the King of Portugal. Only a few months later her corpse was brought hither from Zaragoza, to be laid in the convent of Santa Isabel.
The death of Queen Isabel, and the proclamation of Juana and Felipe I. on May 22, 1502, put an end to the long spell of peace. Toledo sided at first with Ferdinand against his son-in-law, and was held by the Silvas against the latter’s forces under the Marquis de Villena. In the following year (1506) the Ayalas, supported by the townsmen generally, took possession of the town, and resolved to maintain its liberties against the Flemish favourites and centralising tendencies of the new régime. The Silvas, as a matter of course, ranged themselves on the opposite side, and the streets ran red with blood. Toledo was herself again.
The accession of the Flemish prince, Charles, afterwards emperor, determined the Castilians to make a stand for national independence. What city had so good a claim to be the headquarters of the movement, the focus of anti-foreign agitation, as Toledo the turbulent? In 1520 occurred the outbreak of the Comuneros movement. At its head were four gentlemen of Toledo: Hernando Dávalos, Gonzalo Gaytan, Pedro de Ayala, and (greatest of all) Juan de Padilla. Twenty thousand citizens rallied to the cry of “Padilla y Comunidad!” and the movement spread from the Tagus to Salamanca and westwards to the frontiers of Portugal. To Juana, imprisoned at Tordesillas, herself a Toledan, protestations of loyalty and devotion were addressed. But denounce her son’s fraudulently obtained sovereignty she would not. Meanwhile Charles’s forces were not idle. The Alcaide, Clemente de Aguayo, held the tower of San Martin, and Don Juan de Silva, the Alcazar, against the insurgents. But the townsmen were victorious. Padilla, however, was defeated at Villalar, and executed, with his brave lieutenants, Juan Bravo and Maldonado.
In the Comunero leader’s dauntless wife, Maria de Pacheco, liberty found a new champion and Spain a new heroine. “She was found praying at the foot of the Cross,” says Miss Lynch, “when her servants brought her the news of Padilla’s defeat and death. She rose, robed herself in black, and walked to the Alcazar between her husband’s lieutenants, Dávalos and Acuña, who bore a standard representing Padilla’s execution. They named her captain of the insurgents, and found her implacable and violent, but still a sovereign commander.” For sixteen months under this Castilian Joan of Arc the old city of the Visigoths held out against the armies of Charles V. Routed in a bloody sortie on October 16, 1521, by Zuñiga, prior of San Juan, the Comuneros were obliged, ten days later, to abandon the gates to the besiegers. A truce was agreed to, while the demands of the citizens should be presented to the Emperor. Maria remained in her own house, as in a fortress, guarded by her faithful troops. But on February 3 the murder of a citizen brought on a renewal of the conflict. Desperate battle waged in every street and lane. Maria, assailed and valiantly defended in her stronghold, at last cut her way through, and retired to Portugal, dying at Oporto years afterwards. The townsmen were worsted, and sullenly submitted. Toledo had fought her last fight.
Her day was over. Charles V. forgave her, and would come at times to live in the Alcazar. She was still the capital of Spain. But her haughty temper and the arrogance of her clergy matched ill with the policy of Philip II. In 1560 Madrid—upstart, provincial Madrid—was proclaimed the única corte. Less important than under the Khalifate, Toledo became a mere provincial town. But the Church did not desert her. She is still the metropolitan see of Spain.
Let us see what the monarchs of United Spain did for the old city, and what monuments remain of the days when it was Court and capital.
The church of San Juan de los Reyes, near the Puente de San Martin, was built in 1476 by Ferdinand and Isabel, in thanksgiving for the victory of Toro gained over the Portuguese allies of Juana, nicknamed “la Beltraneja.” The first architect was a Fleming, Juan Guas, one of the builders of the cathedral. The church was intended to receive the ashes of the royal founders, but after the capture of Granada it was decided to establish the mausoleum in that city, and the completion of San Juan de los Reyes was delayed till the seventeenth century. In consequence, the architecture exhibits the transition from the Late Gothic to the Late Renaissance style. “Nothing,” remarks Street, “can be more elaborate than much of the detail of this church, yet I have seen few buildings less pleasing or harmonious.” The exterior is unpromising, and is decorated, if we can use the word in such a connection, with festoons of rusty chains which fettered the limbs of the Christians in Moorish prisons. The chief entrance, to the north, was completed by Covarrubias in 1610, and is in the decadent style of architecture. It is adorned with inferior statuary, and the arms and initials of the Catholic sovereigns.
The interior is composed of a single nave, two hundred feet long and from forty-three to seventy feet wide. There are four chapels on one side and three on the other. At the east end of the church is a shallow five-sided apse, forming the Capilla Mayor. Over the junction of the nave and transept is an octagonal cupola, resting on four fine pillars, with a pointed dome and a window in each face. At the west end of the church is a deep gallery, containing the choir. The altar dates from the Renaissance period, and is brought well forward into the nave. It came from the suppressed church of Santa Cruz. Above it is a blue velvet canopy, embroidered with the eagle, the symbol of St. John. The whole fabric is enriched with statuary, tracery, carving, and heraldic devices in almost reckless profusion. The yoke and the arrows—the devices of the Catholic sovereigns—and their coats of arms are repeated again and again. Among the inscriptions is one commemorating the foundation of the church. It runs: “Este monasterio é églesia mandaron hacer los muy esclarecidos Principes é señores D. Hernando é Doña Isabel, Rey y Reina de Castilla, de Leon, de Aragon, de Sicilia, los cuales señores por bienaventurado matrimonio y uñaron los dichos Reinos, seyendo el dicho rey y señor natural de los reinos de Aragon y Sicilia, y seyendo la dicha señora Reina y señora natural de los Reinos de Castilla y Leon; el cual fundaron á gloria de nuestro señor Dios, y de la bienaventurada Madre suya, nuestra Señora la Virgén Maria, y por especial devocion que le ovieron.”
Admirable as is the church in its general structure, and in the detail and execution of its ornamentation, it is garish and ostentatious. There is a superabundance of light and luxury. Here there is no dim religious light, no suggestion of mystery or devotion. Prayer would seem incompatible with the whole character of the edifice. More favourable was the opinion of Théophile Gautier, who declared that “Gothic art never produced anything more suave, more elegant, or more fine.”
Attached to the church is the convent, bestowed on the Franciscans, and pillaged by the French in 1808. It has been converted into a museum, which does not contain much of great interest. The most important exhibits are fragments of Visigothic inscriptions and Moorish tile-work.
The cloister of San Juan de los Reyes is a gem of florid Gothic, and the finest part of the whole fabric. There are two galleries, one above the other, the lower with traceried openings, the upper with large open arches. As in the church, there is here an excess of decoration, hardly a square inch on pillar, arch, and vaulting being free from sculptured ornamentation. There is a bewildering profusion of statues of angels, men, and animals, of scroll-work and foliage, heraldic devices and inscriptions. The whole is dazzlingly white—more like a temple of the Sun than a shrine of “the pale Galilean.” The original effect, perhaps, was less crude, for the church and cloisters have been recently restored, and, it must be confessed, not too skilfully.
A most beautiful specimen of azulejo work has been built into the north-west wall. It comes from the suppressed monastery of the Calced Augustines, and is said to have been a part of the ornamentation of the ancient palace of Don Rodrigo—wherever that may have been situated.
Before the finishing touches had been put to San Juan de los Reyes, the last important Gothic work of Toledo, the erection of one of the two earliest examples of the Renaissance style in Spain had been begun. The hospital of Santa Cruz was built between the years 1494 and 1514 by Enrique de Egas, of Brussels, some ten years after he had completed the college of the same name at Valladolid. The hospital was designed by the founder, the mighty Cardinal Mendoza, as an asylum for foundlings. He died in 1495, and left 75,000 ducats to the queen for the completion of the work. Isabel it was who chose the site overlooking the bridge of Alcantara, where formerly the palace of the legendary King Galafre is fabled to have stood. Among other stories connected with the spot is that of a Leonese princess wedded against her will to a Moorish prince, her union with whom was prevented by the intervention of an angel. As in all the early specimens of Spanish Renaissance architecture, the groundwork of the building approximates to the Gothic, the new ideas manifesting themselves in the decoration and carving. The portal is superb. The reliefs represent the Adoration of the Cross by St. Helena, St. Peter, St. Paul, and the founder, Cardinal Mendoza, two pages also appearing, bearing mitre and helmet. Other reliefs, exquisitely chiselled, have for subjects the espousals of St. Joachim and St. Anne, and Charity. The four cardinal virtues are shown, and everywhere, amidst a maze of ornamentation, occur Mendoza’s arms and device. The plateresque windows, with their rejas in the local style, are deserving of admiration. Entering, we find a vast patio, enclosed by a double arcaded gallery of marble, and, crossing it, ascend a grand staircase with a fine ceiling of the artesonado kind. The chapel, in the form of a Maltese cross, has also a fine ceiling, and Gothic pillars, beautifully carved, that attest the splendid appearance once presented by this dismantled building. Some of the columns adorning Santa Cruz were brought from the Visigothic church of Santa Leocadia.
To the same period belongs the Franciscan convent and church of San Juan de la Penitencia, begun by order of Cisneros in 1514, and finished by his secretary, Fray Francisco Ruiz, Bishop of Avila. The semi-Moorish palace of the Pantojas was utilised in its construction, and the whole building bears traces of Arabic, or rather Mudejar, workmanship. Entering the chapel by a porch adorned with the great Cardinal’s arms and foliations in the Gothic style, we find ourselves in a sombre edifice of a single nave, revealing a curious medley of styles. The roof is a fine example of the artesonado. Over the transept, which is divided from the nave by a plateresque reja, is a cupola with a stalactite roof of the Moorish pattern. The principal retablo is early Renaissance, and several of the altars may be classed as Baroque. The most interesting feature of the church is the tomb of the Bishop of Avila, who died in 1528. It is in the Renaissance style, and was the work of a Lombard artist. It is wrought in Sicilian marble, and is thus described by Ponz: “Above a large stone divided by three pilasters to form three pedestals there are an equal number of statues seated, representing Faith, Hope, and Charity. Between the pilasters are the arms of the Bishop—five castles. In a framed recess are the urn, couch, and recumbent figure. In front of the urn are seen two weeping children, and within the recess four angels draw aside the curtains. On either side are two Doric pillars supporting the frieze, which is inscribed, ‘Beati mortui qui in Domino moriantur.’ On the edge are two antique columns admirably executed. Between these columns and pilasters are statues, St. James and St. Andrew, and above, the figures of children. Over all is a bas-relief of the Annunciation, with the statues of St. John the Divine and St. John Baptist, one-half the size of the Virtues below.”
The Emperor-King Charles V. had, as we have seen, small reason to love Toledo, but he did something for the permanent embellishment of the city, and the last architectural monuments reared on its craggy peninsula belong to his era.
It is difficult to ascribe the Alcazar, to which reference has so often been made, to any one epoch. It has undergone so many vicissitudes, so many reconstructions, that the name, as we have employed it, must be understood to represent a site rather than the actual palace. A stronghold of some sort has always been here—possibly, in Roman times, the Arx, where tradition avers the martyr Leocadia suffered death. The Arabian geographer, Jerif al Edris, writing in 1154, describes Toledo as “a town great in extent and population, extremely strong, with fine ramparts, and an Alcazaba, fortified and impregnable.” This citadel was doubtless the Alcazar, which was strengthened and rebuilt by successive Castilian kings, and is said to have been the residence of the Cid, the first Christian Alcaide. Added to, reconstructed, partially demolished and repeatedly restored, it must have presented an aspect rude and heterogeneous enough when, in 1538, Charles V. ordered Alonso de Covarrubias and Luis de Vega to rebuild the palace entirely on the lines of the new Alcazar of Granada. The Flemish Emperor may, then, fairly be considered the founder of the present fortress-palace, though it has since his time undergone radical transformations. It was burnt down during the War of Succession in 1710, restored sixty years later, destroyed again by the French in 1810, and devastated by a third conflagration as late as 1887. Since 1882 it has been the seat of the Royal Military Academy.
The northern façade was constructed after the designs of Covarrubias, and looks on the square created by Ferdinand and Isabel in 1502. The reconstruction was so complete that probably no stone of the older façade was left in its place. The façade is severe and majestic, revealing classical influence, though not without important traces of the plateresque. It is flanked by towers, and adorned with a handsome portal—the work of Enrique de Egas, brother-in-law of Covarrubias. Over the door are the Imperial arms, supported by the figures of two heralds or mace-bearers. The fortress-like eastern façade is believed to be a part of the original Alcazar as restored by Alfonso X.; the western side of the building dates from the reign of the Catholic sovereigns, and the southern, with massive Doric pillars and square turrets, was built after designs by Juan de Herrera.
The inner court, or patio, is described by a Spanish writer as “solemn, grandiose, full of majesty... constructed for the dwelling-place of the August Cæsar.” It forms a spacious parallelogram and is enclosed by an arcade in two storeys with columns of the Corinthian order. Above the capitals are displayed the escutcheons of the various kingdoms ruled over by Charles. The modern restorers of the palace have adorned the court with a statue of the Emperor in the Roman costume in which he was so fond of being represented.
The finest feature of the palace must have been the staircase, designed by Villalpando and Herrera, which has been to some extent restored after its destruction by Stahremberg in 1710. One of the widest staircases in the world, “it ends,” says Miss Hannah Lynch “in the void!” In truth, the Alcazar is not to-day a very interesting building. It is, in reality, quite impossible to identify the scenes of the romantic and historical episodes which we know occurred in one or other of the successive Alcazars. But the room in which Alfonso VI. died and the window at which the hapless Blanche de Bourbon wept, pace the local guides, must have disappeared to the last stone and fragment ages ago. All that can be said of the palace to-day is that it forms an imposing landmark, and affords from its northern terrace one of the finest views of Toledo.
To the age of Charles V. (or Carlos I. as in Spain he would properly be called) belongs the Hospital de San Juan Bautista, styled the Hospital de Afuera (outside) in the suburb of Covachuelas. The building was begun in 1541 by order of Archbishop Juan de Tavera, who died on his return from the baptism of Prince Carlos at Valladolid. The building was carried on after Bustamente’s death by the two Vergaras, and completed about 1600. The façade dates from the eighteenth century and is still unfinished. The courtyard, spacious and imposing, is divided into two and enclosed by colonnades. A fine Renaissance portal by Berruguete leads into the large chapel, which is in the form of a cross and surmounted by a dome. The pavement is of black and white marble. Before the altar is the tomb of Archbishop Tavera by Berruguete. This is one of the finest monuments in Spain. It was finished by Berruguete when he was over eighty years old, in 1561, his death taking place the same year in one of the rooms under the great clock. His sons received nearly a million maravedis for the work. “The Cardinal,” says Théophile Gautier, “is stretched out upon his tomb in his pontifical habit. Death has pinched his nose with its strong fingers, and the last contraction of the muscles, in their endeavour to retain the soul about to leave the body for ever, puckers up the corners of the mouth and lengthens the chin; never was there a cast taken after death more horribly true; and yet the beauty of the work is such, that you forget any amount of repulsiveness that the subject may possess. Little children in attitudes of grief support the plinth and the Cardinal’s coat of arms. The most supple and softest clay could not be more easy or more pliant; it is not carved, it is kneaded!”
The hospital contains some of El Greco’s most notable work, which will be noticed in the chapter on that master.
To Charles V. Toledo also owes the grand New Gate of Visagra, built in 1550, and restored in 1575. It consists of two separate structures, or gateways, enclosing a patio. On the exterior of the north gate is shown the double eagle with the Spanish arms and a Latin inscription—all in sculptured granite. On the inside is a fine statue of St. Eugenio, variously attributed to Berruguete and Monegro. The statues of Gothic kings, a life-sized angel with unsheathed sword, elegant capitals and balconies, combine to make this gateway one of the finest approaches possessed by any city in the world.
The Ayuntamiento, or town hall, of Toledo was erected in the time of Ferdinand and Isabel by the corregidor Gomez Manrique, and enlarged and restored between 1576 and 1618 by the corregidor Juan Tello, under the supervision of El Greco. The façade is composed of two storeys, the first consisting of nine arches with Doric columns which spring from massive pillars, the second of as many arches with Ionic columns. The edifice is surmounted by two towers, crowned with steeples and weather-vanes. On the fine staircase may be read in letters of gold on a blue ground this admonition to the civic dignitaries of Toledo:
Nobles, discretes varones,
Que gobernais á Toledo,
En aquellas escalones,
Desechad las aficiones,
Codicio temor, y miedo,
For los comunes provechos,
Dejad los particulares;
Pues vos fizo Dios pilares
De tan riquisimos techos,
Estad firmes y derechos.
The Summer Council Chamber is handsomely decorated with azulejos, and contains some battle pictures. The portraits of Carlos II. and his wife are the work of Carreño.
The celebrated Bridge of Alcantara, of which mention has so often been made in these pages, belongs indifferently to all the epochs of Toledo’s history, so no apology is needed for mentioning it here. “It constitutes to-day as in the past,” writes Amador de los Rios, “the principal entrance to the city, and, constructed very wisely on one of the narrowest parts of the river, it is formed of a great central arch of more than twenty-eight metres in breadth, resting on the right on a solid pile, often demolished, behind which is a smaller semicircular arch, which is, in turn, sustained by the bridge head, founded on the rock and pierced by a still smaller arch or passage, where several Visigothic remains have been discovered.” At the outer or country end of the historic bridge formerly stood a fortified tower, which was in 1787 replaced by the existing structure. This is in a pretentious style, and is decorated with various inscriptions, among them one commemorating the building by order of Philip V. The majestic hexagonal tower on the town side, with its picturesque turrets, dates probably from 1259. Above it is a statue of St. Ildefonso, by Berruguete. Over the archway are sculptured the badges of Ferdinand and Isabel (the yoke and bundle of arrows), commemorating the restoration of the tower, in 1489, by Gomez Manrique. A noble bridge is this of Alcantara; old—old as the city—the work of all Toledo’s rulers, and like Toledo, grim, stern, rude, destined, it would seem, to endure for ever. Romans, Visigoths, Moors and Castilians have lingered on it, triumphed on it, fled across it, fought upon it, and across it to-day must walk every traveller entering with reverence this great temple of the mediæval and bygone.