I looked out long and anxiously for the first view of Toledo, but the hills, which nearly surround it, conceal it altogether until one has arrived within about two or three miles distance; and here, with the Tagus meandering through its vega in the foreground, the great mass of the hospital outside and below the city to the right hand, and the wall-encircled rock on which the city is perched, crowned by the vast mass of the Alcazar to the left, the view is certainly fine and impressive.

From most points of view, both within and without the city, the cathedral is seldom well, and sometimes not at all, seen, standing as it does on much lower ground on the side of the rock which slopes towards the least accessible part of the river gorge, and much surrounded by other buildings, whilst the Alcazar, which occupies the highest ground in the whole city, is so vast and square a block of prodigiously lofty walls (old in plan, but modern in most of their details), as to command attention everywhere. The other side of the river is edged by bold hills, and all along its banks are to be seen water-wheels so placed as to raise the water for the irrigation of the land on either side. It is not, however, until after more intimate knowledge of the city has been gained, that its extreme picturesqueness and interest are discovered. The situation is, indeed, most wild and striking. The Tagus, winding almost all round the city, confines it much in the fashion in which the Wear surrounds Durham. But here the town is far larger, the river banks are more rocky, precipitous, and wild than at Durham: whilst the space enclosed within them is a confused heap of rough and uneven ground, well covered with houses, churches, and monasteries, and intersected everywhere by narrow, Eastern, and Moorish-looking streets and alleys, most of which afford no passage-room for any kind of carriage, and but scanty room for foot passengers. It is, consequently, without exception, the most difficult city to find one’s way in that I have ever seen, and the only one in which I have ever found myself obliged to confess a commissionaire[202] or guide of some sort to be an absolute necessity, if one would not waste half one’s time in trying to find the way from one place to another.

The railway station is outside the city, which is entered from it by the famous bridge of Alcantara, which has a single wide and lofty arch above the stream, guarded on the further side by a gateway of the time of Charles V., and on the town side by one of semi-Moorish character. Above it are seen, as one enters, the picturesque apses of the old church of Santiago, and the tolerably perfect remains of the double enceinte of the city walls; whilst on the opposite side of the river, as a further guard to the well-protected city, was the Castle of San Cervantes[203] (properly San Servando), of which nothing now remains but a few rugged towers and walls crowning the equally rugged rocks.[204]

The road from the bridge, passing under the gateway which guards it into a small walled courtyard, turns sharply to the right under another archway, and then rises slowly below the walls until, with another sharp turn, it passes under the magnificent Moorish Puerta del Sol, and so on into the heart of the city.

The Alcazar is the only important building seen in entering on this side; but from the other side of the city where the bridge of San Martin crosses the Tagus, the cathedral is a feature in the view, though it never seems to be so prominent as might be expected with a church of its grand scale. From both these points of view, indeed, it must be remembered that the effect is not produced by the beauty or grandeur of any one building; it is the desolate sublimity of the dark rocks that bound the river; the serried phalanx of wall, and town, and house, that line the cliffs; the tropical colour of sky, and earth, and masonry; and, finally, the forlorn decaying and deserted aspect of the whole, that makes the views so impressive and so unusual. Looking away from the city walls towards the north, the view is much more riant, for there the Tagus, escaping from its rocky defile, meanders across a fertile vega, and long lines of trees, with here a ruined castle, and there the apse of the curious church of the Cristo de la Vega, and there again the famous factory of arms, give colour and incident to a view which would anywhere be thought beautiful, but is doubly grateful by comparison with the sad dignity of the forlorn old city.

The buildings to be studied here are of singular interest, inasmuch as they reflect in a great degree the striking history of the city itself, as well as of the kingdom of which it was so long the capital. There is no doubt that there was a cathedral, as well as some churches,[205] here before the conquest of this part of Spain, in A.D. 711, by the Moors; and in the course of the long period of nearly four centuries during which the Mahomedan rule lasted, many buildings were erected, and a Moorish population was firmly planted, which, when Alonso VI. regained the city in 1085, was still protected, and continued to live in it as before. The Moors had, indeed, set an example of toleration[206] worthy of imitation by their Christian conquerors; for though it is true that they converted the old cathedral into their principal mosque, they still allowed the Christians to celebrate their services in some other churches[207] which existed at the time of the Conquest; and during the greater part of the Christian rule, their tolerant example was so far followed, that the Moors seem to have enjoyed the same freedom, and to have lived there unmolested, whilst they built everywhere, and acted, in fact, as architects, in the old city, not only for themselves, but also for the Christians and the Jews, down to the establishment of the Inquisition. It is a very remarkable fact, indeed, that with one grand exception nearly all the buildings of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, which are to be seen here, are more or less Moorish in their character;[208] and though the cathedral, which is the one exception, is an example of thoroughly pure Gothic work almost from first to last, there never seems to have been any other attempt to imitate the Christian architectural idea of which it was so grand an exponent. I have purposely avoided going to those parts of Spain in which the Moors were undisputed masters during the middle ages; but here it is impossible to dismiss what they did without proper notice, seeing that, after Granada and Cordoba, perhaps nowhere is there so much to be seen of their work as in Toledo.

The buildings to be examined will be best described under certain heads, reserving the cathedral for the last, because some of the Moorish buildings are the oldest in the city, and these lead naturally on to the in which I shall attempt to take them will be therefore as follows:—

I.The Moorish mosque;
II.The Jewish synagogues;
III.The Moorish houses;
IV.The Moorish work in churches;
V.The gateways, walls, and bridges;
VI.The cathedral and other examples of Christian art.

There are, indeed, some works anterior to the rule of the Moors, for below the walls, in the vega, are said to be some slight remains of a Roman amphitheatre;[209] in addition to which there are still some fragments of work possibly Visigothic, and anterior therefore to the Moorish Conquest of 711. These are confined to a few capitals which have some appearance of having been re-used by the Moors in their own constructions, such e.g. as the capitals of the Mosque now called the “Cristo de la Luz,” and those of the arcades on either side of the church of San Roman, together with some fragments preserved in the court of the hospital of Sta. Cruz. They are very rudely sculptured, and bear so slight a resemblance to the early Romanesque work of the same period, that it is difficult, I think, to decide positively as to their age. It is certain, however, that the earliest distinctly Moorish capitals are entirely unlike them in their character, and quite original in their conception; and it is, of course, very possible that the Moors, pressed by the necessity of the case, would, after their conquest, not only have retained some of the existing buildings, but also have re-used the best of their materials in their new works.