Legends accuse Toledo of having been mysteriously founded long before the birth of Rome on her seven hills. To us, however, it first appears in history as a Roman stronghold, capital of one of Hispania's provinces.
St. James, as has been seen, roamed across this peninsula; he came to Toledo. So delighted was he with the site and the people—saith the tradition—that he ordained that the city on the Tago should contain the primate church of all the Spains.
The vanquished Romans withdrew, leaving to posterity but feeble ruins to the north of the city; the West Goths built the threatening city walls which still are standing, and, having turned Christians, their King Recaredo[{354}] was baptized in the river's waters, and Toledo became the flourishing capital of the Visigothic kingdom (512 A.D.).
The Moors, in their northward march, conquered both the Church and the state. Legends hover around the sudden apparition of Berber hordes in Andalusia, and accuse Rodrigo, the last King of the Goths, of having outraged Florinda, a beautiful girl whom he saw, from his palace window, bathing herself in a marble bath near the Tago,—the bath is still shown to this day,—and with whom he fell in love. The father, Count Julian, Governor of Ceuta, called in the Moors to aid him in his righteous work of vengeance, and, as often happens in similar cases, the allies lost no time in becoming the masters and the conquerors.
Nearly four hundred years did the Arabs remain in their beloved Tolaitola; the traces of their occupancy are everywhere visible: in the streets and in the patios, in fanciful arabesques, and above all in Santa Maria la Blanca.
The Spaniards returned and brought Christianity back with them. They erected an immense cathedral and turned mosques[{355}] into chapels without altering the Oriental form.
Jews, Arabs, and Christians lived peacefully together during the four following centuries. Together they created the Mudejar style tower of San Tomas and the Puerta de Sol. Pure Gothic was transformed, rendered even more insubstantial and lighter, thanks to Oriental decorative motives. In San Juan de los Reyes, the Mudejar style left a unique specimen of what it might have developed into had it not been murdered by the Renaissance fresh from Italy, where Aragonese troops had conquered the kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
With the first Philips—and even earlier—foreign workmen came over to Toledo in shoals from Germany, France, Flanders, and Italy. They also had their way, more so than in any other Spanish city, and their tastes helped to weld together that incongruous mass of architectural styles which is Toledo's alone of all cities. Granada may have its Alhambra, and Cordoba its mosque; Leon its cathedral and Segovia its Alcázar, but none of them is so luxuriously rich in complex grandeur and in the excellent—and yet frequently grotesque—confusion of[{356}] all those art waves which flooded Spain. In this respect Toledo is unique in Spain, unique in the world. Can we wonder at her being called a museum?
The Alcázar, which overlooks the rushing Tago, is a symbol of Toledo's past. It was successively burnt and rebuilt; its four façades, here stern and forbidding, there grotesque and worthless, differ from each other as much as the centuries in which they were built. The eastern façade dates from the eleventh, the western from the fifteenth, and the other two from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
But other arts than those purely architectural are richly represented in Toledo. For Spain's capital in the days following upon the fall of Granada was a centre of industrial arts, where both foreign and national workmen, heathen, Jews, and Christians mixed, wrought such wonders as have forced their way into museums the world over; besides, Tolesian sculptors are among Spain's most famous.