In the year 873, we find the independence of Toledo, subject to his suzerainty, nominally acknowledged by the Amir, who was probably glad to make any terms that promised peace with vassals so turbulent. In the reign of the Amir Al Mundhir even this faint shadow of outside authority was shaken off by the city, which again asserted its complete independence, in 886, under Ibn Hafsûn. The town was besieged by the royal forces under the Wizir Haksim. The wily Ibn Hafsûn, seeing that the stronghold must fall, proposed to the opposing general that he should allow him to evacuate the place and transport his army to the frontier of Valencia, on a train of beasts of burden to be provided by the besiegers. Haksim joyfully assented to this capitulation, and on the day appointed, what was supposed to be the entire army of the rebel chief issued from the gates of the city and wended their way, with the train of packhorses, eastwards. Leaving what he considered a sufficient garrison in Toledo, Haksim drew off the greater part of his forces and went to Cordoba. Meanwhile the crafty Hafsûn swiftly retraced his steps, and with the aid of the considerable detachment he had left concealed in the town, put the garrison to the sword, and once more hurled defiance at the Amir. Great was Al Mundhir’s wrath on the receipt of this intelligence, and before nightfall, the head of Haksim lay severed from his body.
Ibn Hafsûn proved a formidable antagonist. The Amir lead an army against him in 888 and was defeated and killed. Twenty years later Hafsûn died, bequeathing what was practically an independent sovereignty to his son. The great Khalifa, Abd-ur-Rahman III., now sat on the throne of Cordoba. He determined to put an end to the arrogant pretensions of the unruly, untameable city. His summons to capitulate being contemptuously rejected, he took the field in 930. For eight years the siege went on, varied by exploits and incidents, which might prove matter for a Moorish Iliad. Famine stalked abroad in the obstinate city, but the Hafsûns would not hear of surrender. When at last it became plain that the people would yield, the leaders and their partisans, to the number of four thousand, made a last desperate sortie. Two thousand cavaliers, with a foot-soldier clutching firmly hold of each horse’s girth, they broke through Abd-ur-Rahman’s camp, and got clean away. Almost joyfully the townsmen opened their gates to the great Amir—to be firmly bitted and bridled during the remainder of his reign.
That the town was still subject to the central authority in the year 979, we gather from this incident. The Governor, Abd-ul-Malik Ibn Merwân having some difference with the Wali of Medina Selim (Medinaceli), challenged him to single combat and slew him. For this, without more ado, he was removed from office by orders from Cordoba.
In the first quarter of the eleventh century, Toledo recovered her freedom, on the break-up of the Umeyyah empire. Under her sultan, Ismail, in 1023, she was able to boast that she knew no other lord or ruler under the blue heavens. After Ismail came Abu-l-Hasan Yahya al Ramân who reigned till 1075, and was then succeeded by Yahya Kadir, who lost his throne in 1085.
Before relating the incidents of the reconquest of Toledo by the Christians and its incorporation in the steadily expanding kingdom of Leon, we will take a glance at the city as it was under its Mohammedan rulers. Of its affluence, importance, and strength, the foregoing cursory sketch of its history has afforded us some idea. It ranked as the metropolis of the Christian element in the Amir’s dominions, and its prelates early obtained recognition from their Paynim sovereigns as dignitaries of the highest standing. Among them were such notable men as Wistremir and Eulogius. One of the archbishops of Toledo, Elipando, embraced the heresy of Nestorius, and went the length of excommunicating his fellow bishops. Upon his death, however, an orthodox successor was chosen. The Christians were wealthy and arrogant. They were classed in congregations, dependent on their various churches, each division including certain families irrespective of their domiciles. Toledo, during the three and a half centuries of Mohammedan dominion, never seems to have lost the outward character of a Christian town. Moorish influence she felt, and it served to soften and chasten her rough features, but Moorish she never became as did Seville and Cordoba. Yet in every corner of the old city the guides are prone to point out the buildings and remains that they fondly believe to be of Arabic workmanship. In reality, very few monuments of the Mohammedan period have survived. It is not by what we see but by what we read that we can form an idea of the city as it was in those days.
It was renowned for its clepsydras or water-clocks, invented by Abu-l-Kasim. These are described as follows in an Arabic document: “But what is marvellous and surprising in Toledo, and what we believe no other town in all the world has anything to equal, are its water-clocks. It is said that Az-Zagral [Abu-l-Kasim] hearing of a certain talisman which is in the city of Arin, of Eastern India, and which shows the hours by means of aspas or hands, from the time the sun rises till it sets, determined to fabricate an artifice by means of which the people could know the hour of day or night, and calculate the day of the moon. He made two great ponds in a house on the bank of the Tagus, near the Gate of the Tanners, making them so that they should be filled with water or emptied according to the rise and fall of the moon.” The water began to flow into the ponds as soon as the moon became visible, and at dawn they were four-sevenths full. The water rose by one-seventh every twenty-four hours, and were full at full moon. As the luminary waned, the water fell in exact proportion. The exact working of these contrivances was lost when an astronomer, deputed by Alfonso el Sabio to examine them, broke parts of the intricate machinery.
The chroniclers relate wonders of the palace of An Naôra, so called from its celebrated noria or hydraulic apparatus. The apartments were so splendid as to rival those of the palace of the Amir himself, and “were resplendent as the sun at noonday, and the moon at the full.” In the luxurious gardens was the lake or albuhera, in the centre of which rose a pavilion of glass, where Al Ramân-bil-Lah, the last sovereign of Toledo, used to pass the night. “The clever architects”—we quote from the “Monumentos Arquitectónicos”—who made the lake, not only raised the waters from the river in order to fill it, but raised them above the cupola of the pavilion, over and around which they flowed incessantly, forming around it a diaphanous and crystalline mantle. Not a drop could penetrate the structure or touch the persons within. With the sonorous murmur of these waters mingled that produced by the fountains that gushed forth from the mouths of the lions in metal guarding this wonderful pavilion. Illumined inside with lamps of various colours, without it presented a fantastic appearance, which was reflected back from the waters of the lake, and which the people of Toledo contemplated with admiration through the dense foliage.”
Of this exquisite pleasaunce, no trace remains. Nor is anything left of the other palace of Al Hizem, built by Ismaîl, the first admittedly independent Sultan of Toledo—afterwards inhabited by the Christian kings. The principal building in Moorish times was, of course, the Aljama, or Chief Mosque. This seems to have been erected at the same time as the great Mezquita at Cordoba, in the reign of Abd-ur-Rahman II., and to have been richly embellished and enlarged under the third and greatest Khalifa of that name. We read that in the fourth century of the Hegira, the architect Fatho ben Ibrahim el Caxevi built two sumptuous mosques, called, the one, Adabejin, the other Gebel Berida; but where these were situated, or what was the real Arabic spelling of the names, we have no means of knowing.
Happily a few specimens of the local architecture of that epoch remain. Of these one of the learned compilers of the “Monumentos Arquitectónicos” writes: “In spite of their varying degrees of integrity, and although greatly damaged and changed by later restorations, these works possess an extreme importance, and suffice to manifest the peculiar physiognomy of the secondary religious edifices of this part of the Peninsula at the most glorious epoch of the Khalifate—a physiognomy strikingly different from that of the principal religious structures, or Aljamas, equivalent to our cathedrals, and different also from that of the same buildings in the south. They show, furthermore, decorative processes believed to have been unknown in Spain at that epoch.”
The most complete and remarkable of these buildings is the Mosque of Bib-el-Mardom, now known as the Cristo de la Luz. It is situated to the north of the city, between the Puerta del Sol and the Puerta Bisagra. Here Alfonso VI., on entering Toledo on May 25, 1085, halted and caused Mass to be celebrated, leaving his shield behind him as a memento of the incident.