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