The views from the walls of Pamplona are eminently lovely; I remember looking across to the east, over the flat which stretches away from them to where the mountains begin to rise boldly beyond; and, as my eyes wandered on, I began to turn my thoughts eagerly homewards, and much as I had enjoyed the Spanish journey which ended at Pamplona, there was perhaps no part of it which I enjoyed more than this, where I was ungrateful enough to Spain to allow everything to be seasoned by the near prospect of home.

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CHAPTER XX.
GENERAL SUMMARY.

IT is time, now that I have described so many Spanish Gothic buildings in detail, to undertake a somewhat more general classification of them, both in regard to their history and their style. Hitherto I have spoken of each building by itself, only endeavouring to give so clear and concise an account of each as was necessary in order that their general character might be understood. But this kind of account would be incomplete and almost useless without a more generalizing and more systematic summary of the whole. And to this I propose to devote this chapter.

There are, indeed, few parts of Europe in which it is more easy to detect the influence of History upon Art than it is in Spain. I dismiss from consideration the period of the Visigothic rule, which lasted from A.D. 417 to 717; for though it is possible that some works of this age still exist, as e.g. part of the walls of Toledo, and the metal votive crowns of Guarrazar, they do not really come within the scope of my subject, inasmuch as there is no kind of evidence that they exercised any influence over the architecture of the Christian parts of the country after the Moorish interregnum.

From the first invasion by the Moors in A.D. 711 down to their expulsion from Granada in A.D. 1492, their whole history is mixed up with that of the Christians; and, as might be expected, so great was the detestation in which the two races held each other, that neither of them borrowed to any great extent from the art of the other, and accordingly we see two streams of art flowing as it were side by side at the same time, and often in the same district,—a circumstance, as I need hardly say, almost, if not quite, unknown at the same period in any other part of Europe. The Mosque at Cordoba in the ninth century, the Alcazar and Giralda at Seville in thirteenth, the Court of Lions in the Alhambra in the fourteenth, some of the houses in Toledo in the fifteenth century, are examples of what the Moors were building during the very period of the Middle Ages in which all the buildings which I have described and illustrated were being erected; the only exception to be made to this general statement being, that when the Christians vanquished the Moors they usually continued to allow them to build somewhat in their own fashion,—as, for example, they did in Toledo,—whilst on the other hand, the Moors seem never to have imitated this example, though they were of course utterly unable to suppress all evidence in their work of any knowledge of Gothic buildings.

The reason of this was, no doubt, that throughout this period any contrast drawn between the Moors and Christians in regard to civilization would generally, if not always, have been in favour of the former. They were accomplished both in art and science: their architectural works would have been impossible except to a very refined people, and their scientific attainments are evidenced even to the present day by the system of artificial irrigation which they everywhere introduced, and which even now remains almost unaltered and unimproved. The Christians, on the contrary, were warlike and hardy, and in the midst of constant wars had but scant time for the pursuit of art; and finally, when they had re-established their supremacy, they wisely allowed the Moors to remain under their rule when they would, and employed them to some extent on the works in which they could not fail to see that they excelled.

Again, the subdivision of the country into several kingdoms, administered under varying laws, owing no common allegiance to any central authority, and inhabited by people of various origin, might well be expected to leave considerable marks on the style of the buildings; though, at the same time, the antipathy which the inhabitants of all of them felt for the Moors rendered this cause less operative than it would otherwise have been. Some portions of the country had never been conquered by the Saracens: such were the regions of the Pyrenees lying betwixt Aragon and Navarre, the Asturias, Biscay, and the northern portion of Galicia.[400] And though it was by degrees that the other states freed themselves from their conquerors, it happened fortunately that the Christian successes generally synchronized as nearly as possible with that great development of Christian art which at the time covered all parts of Europe with the noblest examples of Pointed Architecture. Toledo was recovered by the Christians in A.D. 1085, Tarragona in 1089, Zaragoza in 1118, Lérida in 1149, Valencia in 1239, Seville in 1248, whilst Segovia, Leon, Burgos, Zamora, and Santiago suffered more or less from occasional irruptions of the Moors down to the beginning of the eleventh century, but from that date were practically free from molestation. By the middle of the fifteenth century the number of states into which the country had been divided was reduced to four, Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and the Moorish kingdom of Granada. Of these Aragon and Castile are the two of which I have seen the most, and, I may venture to add, those in which the History of Gothic Architecture in Spain is properly to be studied. For though it is true that Seville was recovered in the thirteenth century, and Cordoba about the same time, it is equally so that most of their buildings are Moorish or modern, the Gothic cathedral in the former not having been commenced until A.D. 1401, and the Moorish mosque in the latter still doing service as the Christian cathedral; and generally throughout the South of Spain, so far as I can learn, there are but few early Gothic buildings to be seen; whilst the late examples of the style were designed by the same architects, and in precisely the same style, as those which were erected in the parts of Spain which I have visited.

Of these two great divisions of the country, Aragon included the province of that name, together with Cataluña and Valencia; and owing to the great political freedom which the Catalans in particular enjoyed at an early period, to the vast amount of trade with Italy, the Mediterranean, and the East carried on along its extensive seaboard, and to its large foreign possessions—which included the Balearic Isles, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia—the kingdom of Aragon possessed great wealth and power, and has left magnificent architectural remains.