Hitherto the valley has been wide and open; but now the river begins to reveal itself in its true character,—El Tajo, the Gash,[30]—deep and narrow between its riven walls. Across its path lies the massive granite barrier of the mountains of Toledo. The stream drives squarely into them and recoils{199} away sullenly towards the west. But ere it turns it has bitten deep, and a great outlying bastion is held in the hollow of its curve. The sun at his creation shone first upon that rocky dais! The dignity of Toledo demands no meaner site!
It is indeed an ideal situation for a medieval fortress; in plan a rough approximation to the shape of a rather square D. The curved line is formed by the gorge of the Tagus, whose steep, rocky banks would alone be an adequate defence; the straight by the landward face,—also lofty and precipitous, and crowned with the remnants of Wamba’s ancient walls. And at the two corners the grand fortified medieval bridges of San Martin and Alcántara throw their lofty arches across the stream. The site is very similar to that of Durham: but the Toledo plateau is larger; and the Tagus is all unwooded, and wilder and grander than the Wear.
The founder, of course, was Hercules. All Spanish cities were founded by Hercules, except a few which had been previously founded by Tubal. No doubt a large man with a club was a somewhat recurrent phenomenon; and the tale of his legendary prowess was the sole evidence of identity that an early Phœnician colonist was likely to{200} require. After the Phœnicians came the Romans. But the glory of Toledo first reached its height in the Dark Ages which succeeded the Roman, when the Visigoth dwelled in the land. Toledo was the capital of the Visigothic kingdom; and that kingdom in the day of its power, during the reigns of Leovigild and Wamba, was probably the most potent among all the nations of the West. How dire must have been the consternation of Austrasia and Neustria and Lombardy, when, scarcely a generation later, their protagonist succumbed so utterly before the onset of the Moors!—when the Jews opened the gates of the unwary capital to admit the hordes of Tarik, and the fall of imperial Toledo set the seal on the disaster of Guadalete.
Neither Christian nor Moslem underrated the catastrophe of that fatal Palm Sunday; and the meagre outline of history has been gaudily coloured by romance. Who has not heard the tale of the enchanted Tower of Hercules, wherein the self-willed Roderic sought and learned the secret of his doom? The fascinating Shahrazad won a full night’s respite from her dangerous lord by her catalogue of the loot of the “City of Labtayt”—the hundred and seventy crowns of{201} pearl and jacinth, the magical mirror, and the emerald table of Solomon!
