Since 1836, Madrid has been a University city. The academy founded at Alcalá was transferred here at that time, and to-day there are about eight thousand students. The Real Academia de Bellas Artes was founded here towards the middle of the eighteenth century. Several fine examples of the art of Murillo are in the gallery of the Academy, and there are also works by Ribera, Rubens, Zurbaran, and Alonso Cano. Besides these institutions there are the Academy of History, the Academy of Science, the Academy of Medicine, and a number of other learned societies.
The Museum of Modern Art contains only a few paintings of importance, but there are some notable pictures by Fortuny, and a few pieces of modern sculpture. The great treasury of art, the Prado Gallery, is fully described in a separate volume of this series. It is the greatest glory of Madrid.
The Naval Museum will recall the past maritime supremacy of Spain. In the National Library there are nearly a million books and a large number of manuscripts, including the beautiful, illuminated Gothic work dating from the tenth century, a thirteenth-century Bible, and the Siete Partidas of Alfonso the Learned. The National Museum of Archæology contains a very interesting collection of Roman, Gothic, and Moorish antiquities.
It would be difficult to find a word which would convey a true impression of a town, but if we were limited to the employment of a single term to describe Madrid, rococo would suggest itself. The capital is elegant, fanciful, and yet stately. It does not smile like Seville, nor frown like Toledo, and yet it is neither sad nor stern. Granada and Cordova sleep. Madrid never seems to slumber; it is one of the most restless places upon the earth. It has the dignity of Castile and the frivolity of Paris; it exhibits the congestion of London in parts within its gates, but it has no dingy, sunless slums, and few signs of an ugly indigence.
There is the luxurious Madrid of the aristocracy and the hidalgo, the Madrid that lives for fashion and pleasure, and there is the Madrid of the shopkeeper and the lower middle class. Beneath these strata are the wage-earners, the mechanics and labourers, a frugal and usually industrious community. There is also the Madrid of a large nondescript class composed of mendicants, thieves, hawkers, and the rabble and derelicts of society.
There is the Madrid of the casinos, some intellectual, others merely social or sporting. The city has its coteries of ardent politicians, military men, financiers, reformers, freethinkers, revolutionaries, and its societies of the scientific, learned, and artistic. There is no specific character which one can point to as typical of Madrid. One passion is, however, manifest throughout all classes—the love of bull-fighting. Seville is the school of the torero; Madrid is the scene of his valour in the arena. The bull-fighter is the idol of the populace. In the cafés of the Puerta del Sol, or in the ring of the Plaza de Toros, his figure is one that arouses the deepest interest and warmest admiration. An eminent jockey in England has his host of admirers, but he cannot command that universal respect which is accorded to the espada in Spain. The great bull-fighter is the pet of Madrid society, the demi-god of the populace, the model of the “sports” of the city.
It is just as easy to lead the studious, contemplative life in Madrid as in London, if one elects to be aloof. On the other hand, there is every opportunity for gaiety, social amenities, and dissipation. Madrid offers almost every kind of life to its inhabitants. Its 540,000 natives, forming Borrow’s “extraordinary vital mass,” are quite as motley as the population of Manchester. Madrid is therefore neither a purely commercial, fashionable, pleasure-seeking, nor cultured centre. Bilbao and Barcelona are the busy marts of Spain; Burgos, Salamanca, and Cordova subsist, as it were, upon the grandeur of the past, and you wonder how the people live. But Madrid throbs with life, and manifests the new ideals and views of the country in the domain of politics, in social reforms, in the arts and sciences, and in the diversions of society. In the realm of thought, the new Spain has its impulse and its centre in Madrid. Barcelona has been called “the life of Spain,” and in the commercial sense this is true. Yet Barcelona boasts of a strong affinity with France, and a great part of its trade is in the hands of foreigners. It is from Madrid that one may expect the impetus of a patriotic, national, and racial advancement, based upon culture and the recognition of the principles of social liberty.
II
THE HISTORY OF THE CITY
The records of Madrid before the tenth century are extremely scanty, and the early history of the city is largely conjectural. There is no doubt that the Moors established a fortress here, and called it Majrît; but the Romans were in possession before the Arab conquest of the Peninsula, as certain tablets, discovered in the city by Fernandez de Oviedo, serve to prove.
Upon the disruption of the Khalifate the town became subject to Toledo. Whether it was reconquered before or after the fall of that city, by Alfonso VI., is a vexed question. The credit of taking the town is assumed by the people of Segovia. At this time (1085) Madrid was encompassed by a strong wall, stretching from the Moorish Alcázar, now the Royal Palace, to the Church of our Lady of the Almudena; thence to the street of Segovia by the Cuesta de los Ciegos to the Puerta de Moros, and through the Calle Mayor and the Plaza de Oriente to the Alcázar.