Such is Toledo, the famous, the wonderful, the legend-spun primate city of all the Spains, the former wealthy capital of the Spanish Empire!
Madrid usurped all her civic honours under the reign of Philip II., he who lost the Armada and built the Escorial. Since then Toledo, like Alcalá de Henares, Segovia, and Burgos, has dragged along a forlorn existence, frozen in winter and scorched in summer, and visited at all times of the year by gaping tourists of all nationalities.[{350}]
Even the approach to the city from the mile distant station is peculiarly characteristic. Seated in an old and shaky omnibus, pulled by four thrashed mules, and followed along the dusty road by racing beggars, who whine their would-be French, "Un p'it sou, mouchieur," with surprising alacrity and a melancholy smile in their big black eyes, the visitor is driven sharply around a bluff, when suddenly Toledo, the mysterious, comes into sight, crowning the opposite hill.
At a canter the mules cross the bridge of Alcántara and pass beneath the gateway of the same name, a ponderous structure still guarding the time-rusty city as it did centuries ago when Toledo was the Gothic metropolis. Up the winding road, beneath the solemn and fire-devastated walls of the Alcázar, the visitor is hurriedly driven along; he disappears from the burning sunlight into a gloomy labyrinth of ill-paved streets to emerge a few minutes later in the principal square.
A shoal of yelling, gesticulating interpreters literally grab at the tourist, and in ten seconds exhaust their vocabulary of foreign words. At last one walks triumphantly off beside the newcomer, while the others, with[{351}] a depreciative shrug of the shoulders and extinguishing their volcanic outburst of energy, loiter around the square smoking cigarettes.
It does not take the visitor long to notice that he is in a great archæological museum. The streets are crooked and narrow, so narrow that the tiny patch of sky above seems more brilliant than ever and farther away, while on each side are gloomy houses with but few windows, and monstrous, nail-studded doors. At every turn a church rears its head, and the cheerless spirit of a palace glares with a sadly vacant stare from behind wrought-iron rejas and a complicated stone-carved blazon. Rarely is the door opened; when it is, the passer catches a glimpse of a sun-bathed courtyard, gorgeously alive with light and many flowers. The effect produced by the sudden contrast between the joyless street and the sunny garden, whose existence was never dreamt of, is delightful and never to be forgotten; from Théophile Gautier, who had been in Northern Africa, land of Mohammedan harems, it wrung the piquant exclamation: "The Moors have been here!"
Every stick, stone, mound, house, lantern,[{352}] and what not has its legend. In this humble posada, Cervantes, whose ancestral castle is on yonder bluff overlooking the Tago, wrote his "Ilustre Fregona." The family history of yonder fortress-palace inspired Zorilla's romantic pen, and a thousand and one other objects recall the past,—the past that is Toledo's present and doubtless will have to be her future.
Gone are the days when Tolaitola was a peerless jewel, for which Moors and Christians fought, until at last the Believers of the True Faith drove back the Arabs who fled southward from whence they had emerged. Long closed are also the famous smithies, where swords—Tolesian blades they were then called—were hammered so supple that they could bend like a watchspring, so strong they could cleave an anvil, and so sharp they could cut an eiderdown pillow in twain without displacing a feather.
Distant, moreover, are the nights of capa y espada and of miracles wrought by the Virgin; dwindled away to a meagre shadow is the princely magnificence of the primate prelates of all the Spains, of those spiritual princes who neither asked the Pope's advice nor received orders from St. Peter at Rome.[{353}] Besides, of the two hundred thousand souls proud to be called sons of Toledo in the days of Charles-Quint, but seventeen thousand inhabitants remain to-day to guard the nation's great city-museum, unsullied as yet by progress and modern civilization, by immense advertisements and those other necessities of daily life in other climes.
The city's history explains the mixture of architectural styles and the bizarre modifications introduced in Gothic, Byzantine, or Arab structures.