III
SEGOVIA
The ancient and beautiful city of Segovia occupies one of those sites which men would have chosen for the building of towns as soon as towns ever came to be built. We may therefore be sure that the roots of the city’s life lie very far back in the past—an assurance confirmed by the name, which bespeaks an Iberian origin. Mediæval writers mentioned this as among the towns built by the fabulous King Hispan, whose name, with those of his relatives, Iberia and Pyrrhus, is always introduced to explain a mystery or to adorn a tale. To the Romans the place was known as Segobriga; and that it was a flourishing and important colony the great aqueduct, the most famous of its monuments, remains to this day to attest. We may assume the town under the Roman yoke was happy, for it had no history—at least, nothing of it has reached us. There were bishops on these barren heights in early times, for they are referred to by name as attending councils at Toledo in the sixth and seventh centuries. At the time of the Mohammedan conquest, a hermit called Fruto rallied the Christians in the fastnesses of the mountains and kept alive in them the Christian faith and traditions. This holy person was the brother of the martyrs Valentin and Engracia, whom the Moors put to death. This the hardened infidels did, the chroniclers assure us, in spite of miracles which might have converted Mohammed himself; for the Segovian saints cleft mountains asunder with the stroke of a knife, and produced fountains from the solid rock with the touch of a wand; while a mare, to whom the Eucharist had been offered as food, dropped on her knees in adoration. It is clear that in after years the Christians of Segovia enjoyed the liberty of worship that the Muslims of Spain everywhere conceded to their subjects; for we hear of a bishop, Ildered, governing his flock here in the year 940. In the following century it was included within the dominions of the Amir of Toledo, and on the downfall of that monarchy was annexed to the growing kingdom of Castile.
Like Salamanca and Avila, Segovia was repeopled at the instance of Count Raymond of Burgundy, chiefly by Gallegos from the north-west. It received its first charter from Alfonso VI. in 1108. Thereafter its citizens were always to be found in the fighting line. Tradition avers that Madrid was recovered from the Moors by the Segovians; and their chiefs on that glorious occasion were Dia Sanz and Fernán Garcia, whose descendants for many years after divided the government of the city between them. But the chronicles register a very black stain on the city’s fame: the assassination by the townsfolk of Alvar Fañez, the illustrious brother-in-arms of Alfonso VI., at Easter, 1114. Four years later, the Segovians took the side of Alfonso VII. against his mother, Queen Urraca, and were rewarded by the reconstitution of their town into a bishopric.
The history of Segovia differs little from that of other Castilian towns. Its citizens shared the glories and the hardships of the ceaseless campaigns against the Moors, and did not hold aloof from the equally numerous civil wars that distracted the kingdom. In 1295 they refused submission to the young king, Fernando IV., and his mother, Maria de Molina. The brave queen forced her way into the town, and found the gates shut behind her. Undismayed, she harangued the stubborn townsmen. ‘Open your gates,’ she cried, ‘and I will go with my son to more grateful and obedient towns; where vassals are less easily deceived by intriguers, and where mother and son are not separated!’ The people were moved by her reproaches, and, admitting the king, escorted both in triumph to the Alcazar.
The minority of Alfonso XI. (1320) was attended by sanguinary disorders in the streets of Segovia. Every church and house became a fortress, and the rival factions stormed and laid siege to each other’s strongholds within the narrow compass of the city walls. In 1368 the nobility held the Alcazar for Enrique of Trastamara, whilst the commons held the town for Pedro the Cruel; but the Gracious King, after the death of his half-brother at Montiel, visited Segovia and won all hearts. A hundred years later the town was distinguished by its loyalty to the wretched Enrique IV., who here betrayed his own daughter, Juana, by a reconciliation with his sister, Isabel. Not content with this, he appeared in the streets, leading by the bridle the palfrey of the woman who denied his own child’s legitimacy.
The townsfolk, at the beginning of the reign of Charles V., threw in their lot with the Comuneros; but the Alcazar throughout the rising was held by the royal forces. The King-Emperor and his successor, like their predecessors, frequently sojourned in the old palace-fortress. Later on, it was often used as a state prison. The famous Ripperdá, the Dutch adventurer, passed a portion of his captivity here; and the Marquis of Ayamonte was confined here prior to his execution in 1648. The establishment of the court permanently at Madrid, and the building of La Granja by Philip V. in 1721, diminished the importance of Segovia as a royal residence. In few countries have the larger provincial towns loomed more conspicuously in the past than in Spain, and in few are they nowadays more decayed and bloodless. Segovia remains, as Antonio Gallenga described it, ‘an unmatched picture of the Middle Ages. You read its history on the old city walls with their eighty-three towers; in the domes and belfries of its churches; in the bare and blank ruins of its deserted monasteries; in the battlemented towers of its noble mansions.’
The town stands high and bravely on the mountains, its flanks washed by two clear streams, Eresma and Clamores. The towers and domes rise sharply against the clear sky, high above the surrounding hills; an island of the air Segovia seems as you catch sight of her from the dusty plains of Old Castile. Even as clouds in their fantastic formations take the semblance of far-away cities, so at certain hours from afar off you might take this to be just such a cloud-town. And when you draw nearer you find the valleys are cool and green, and that the tall trees flourish here and do not wither as in the plains round Burgos and Valladolid.
Coming from La Granja, the first you see of Segovia’s wonders is fittingly by far the oldest. The aqueduct dates, it is believed, from Trajan’s reign, and is the most considerable of the Roman remains of Spain. In the Middle Ages, like most other classical works, it was attributed to diabolical agency, and is still often called El Puente del Diablo. Beginning at the Fuente Fria in the Sierra Guadarrama, ten miles away, with many zigzags it passes over hill and dale, and at last spans the deep valley before the city, and is carried across the streets to the Alcazar. It is built of granite with black veins, hewn in great blocks, which are pieced together without mortar or clamps. Every block is visible on one side or another. For the distance of nine hundred yards the aqueduct is carried on one hundred and nineteen arches, varying in height from twenty-three to ninety-four feet. For a third of this length the arches are in two tiers. The work is devoid of ornamentation, except for the remains of a cornice. All is not Roman work. The aqueduct was partially demolished in the eleventh century during a siege by the Moors, and when Queen Isabel the Catholic determined to restore it, thirty-six arches between the convents of La Concepcion and San Francisco had fallen in. The restoration of these was intrusted, on the recommendation of the Prior of El Parral, to a young monk of that house, named Fray Juan Escovedo, who performed his difficult task with remarkable skill. Indeed, it is not easy to distinguish the Spaniard’s work from the Roman’s. Escovedo died in 1489. The only reward he received for his labours was the timber of the scaffoldings.
Some of the arches have been for centuries embedded in the city walls. The work, though severe and imposing, is not perhaps equal to the Pont de Gard, or even to certain other Roman remains in Spain. Yet nothing could be more curious, or, in a sense, more picturesque, than the views of the quaint old houses framed by its arches, or grander than these as seen from San Juan, or towering above the Plaza Mayor. Their height is, of course, magnified by the hovels clustering at their bases, in comparison with which the aqueduct appears rather the work of Cyclopes than of men. And through these arches, as through a gate of triumph, we pass into the mediæval city.
Yet this is not the only monument of classical antiquity in Segovia. The rude figure of Hercules about to slay the Erymanthine Boar was discovered in the interior of the tower of Santo Domingo el Real, which became the property of the Dominican nuns in 1513. The demigod, to whom the foundation of so many Spanish cities has been ascribed, was no doubt worshipped here.