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Detail of Ornament, Interior of S. Juan de los Reyes 221 Cloister, S. Juan de los Reyes 223 S. Luke Angle of Cloister, S. Juan de los Reyes 227 Detail of Ornament, El Transito 233 Santa Maria la Blanca 241 Remains of Palace, said to be that of Don Pedro el Cruel 251 Casa Fuensalida 256 Moorish Window in Casa de Mesa 259 The Castle of San Servando 263 San Tomé 267 Santiago, Toledo 272 Santo Pablo 273 Cristo de la Luz 277 Door of Santa Cruz 285 Tomb of Cardinal Tavera 290 Puerta Visagra (Antigua) 297 Puerta del Sol 300

Toledo

The Story of an Old Spanish Capital

CHAPTER I

What is Known of Toledo’s earliest history

WHAT more stupefying contrast than that of cheap commonplace Madrid (cheap alas! only in the artistic sense) and the legendary still visage of Toledo? The capital you leave abustle with modern movement, glaring, gesticulating, chattering, animated in its own empty and insignificant fashion, with its pleasant street of Alcala, so engagingly unhistoric, its shop-fronts full of expensive and second-rate articles from other capitals, the vulgar vivacity of the Puerta del Sol thronged with everlasting gossips in trousers and wide-brimmed hats; with its swindling hotel-keepers and insolent drivers. The train sweeps you past the wide empty bed of the Manzanares, covered here and there with a film you understand by courtesy to represent a river, and the city behind is a gay compact picture, slightly waving upward from its bridges, white and flourishing above the broad yellow plain. The tones of the land are rough and crude, red striking hotly against brown and greyish purple. Here and there a solitary hill, burnt and defoliaged, with a glimpse of ruined ramparts, a mule-path along which a file of peasants pass, the women lost in roomy saddles, with feet dangling in the air, and red or yellow handkerchiefs tied under their chins. Carts move slowly along the old diligence road, guided by heavy-browed males.

The swallows’ flight reveals the exquisite limpidity of the air and the height of the unstained heaven, azure in the infinite depths of aërial sapphire, blue beyond blue, translucent almost to the furthest reach of vision. And the light shines broadly upon an incomparable mingling in landscape of insensate ardour and changeless moroseness. So still, so brilliant, so burnt and empty! revealing the national traits of mournful hopelessness and unembittered, unregretful resignation. The rays lie in a luminous quietude upon the red-brown land, while the breath of fresh day just touches the leaves of the scant olives and shows them silver. Then midway the desert swims behind, and the eye is mildly refreshed with little signs of pastoral life, ineffectual efforts at gaiety amid tyrannous sadness. Imagination leaps at sight of a cheering bit of verdure, not for the beauty of it, though beauty is not altogether absent, but for the old familiar eloquence of trees and grassy spaces, the twinkling brightness of rills and flashing water and wooded fringes, with a hint of shadow along the horizon. Between the poplared banks of the river, yellow and waveless as befits a river of dead romance, the eye lingers on glimpses of emerald islets, with reedy edges against the fuller foliage of elm. Above, exposed on a rocky throne, belted by the sombre Tagus, sits Toledo.

“The landscape of Toledo and the banks of the Tagus,” writes M. Maurice Barrès, with singular felicity, “are amongst the saddest and most ardent things of this world. Whoever lives here has 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 tawny half circle of the Tagus at its feet, has the colour, the roughness, the haughty poverty of the sierra