But it is not in connection with Count Paul that Wamba’s name reaches us to-day and like that of the fatal Rodrigo, is permanently attached to Toledo. Forgotten the long list of Gothic sovereigns, forgotten the councils they presided over, the battles they lost and won, their achievements, follies and virtues, their epistolary flowers of speech and decrees. Only Wamba and Rodrigo remain, one a historic fact, the other vaguely and unveraciously defined through legend and romance. As I have said, coming up from the station, the traveller is greeted upon the dusty curving road by the noseless statue of King Wamba, who built upon the Roman remains a magnificent wall round the city, raised ramparts, towers, and chapels, and for eight years was the untiring benefactor of the city and the people, till treachery rewarded his splendid services by deposition in the hour of illness and condemned him to claustral reclusion.
In his days, the Bridge of Alcántara still existed with its marvellous Roman arch, one of the most finished and graceful Roman monuments of Spain. For the Goths had the virtue not to destroy any of the Roman remains, though they were incapable of profiting by what they found. They it was who, at Wamba’s orders, built the walls and palaces of Toledo, and gave
the city its definite note of architecture, a note the Moors were careful not to efface, all in adding their own ineffaceable stamp, for the Moors were great artists and had the secret of utilising what they influenced. If the Spanish Goths began by modelling their architecture on the Roman remains in their capacity of imitators and not inventors, the Moors, inventors and assimilators, forced the Goths to modify their style by the famous mudejar order. Violence must be a rudimentary instinct of humanity, since the milder and less florid mudejar remains a single feature in Spanish architecture, while the rough Goths have the secret of impressing their individuality on all the entire Peninsula, and so with their flowers of speech, vapid, empty, and void of sincerity which to this day have entered the language of the country, unaltered by the march of centuries, ornate and unintelligent, untouched by modern civilisation, of which the Spaniards take no heed. The ruins of this dead Gothic art are best studied at Toledo. Here you have it purest, the fourth century style with its coarse and pointed leafage, its laboured workmanship, its ornamentation, symbols, and figurative caprices, then so new and bold, and which are never repeated in the Arabic or Byzantine architecture later.
Fragments of this art of Wamba’s days may be seen in the ruined church of San Genes, in the bath of the Cava, never a bath, where never the legendary Florinda bathed, and in the wall of a house in the calle Lechuga, as well as in the façade of the Bridge of Alcántara. In the beginning of Gothic rule it was chiefly architecture that flourished, but Wamba’s immediate predecessors, we have seen, preferred literature and libraries, cultivated poetry, the epistolary art, and such research as the obscure times afforded, which they called science, and founded colleges. Their costume was half Roman, since they borrowed what they knew of civilisation from the Romans. They wore silk embroidered cloaks, let their hair grow long, like their Merovingian brethren, to mark their superiority to the short-cropped Celt-Iberians they had conquered; the women wore costly habits and splendid jewels, and all the nobles drank from golden cups and washed in silver basins. The value and beauty of their goldsmiths’ work are abundantly testified by the nine great votive crowns in the Musée de Cluny, where the famous treasure of Guarrazar is preserved. These magnificent gold crowns of the seventh century were discovered near Toledo in 1858 by a French officer who owned the property La Fuente de Guarrazar where these historic crowns were buried. They were probably buried at the time of Tarik’s invasion, and remained nearly eight centuries underground. The most important, as well as the largest and most beautiful, is the crown which bears the inscription in letters of gold cloisonné and incrusted, Reccesvinthus Rex offeret. To show the value of the workmanship of this crown, I cannot do better than quote here in full its official description in the catalogue of the Musée Cluny by M. du Sommerard: “King Recesvinthus’ crown is composed of a large and massive golden band. It opens with a double hinge, and is richly framed by two borders of gold cloisonné, and incrusted with red Carian stones, those which Anastasius calls gemmis alabandinsis, and in relief has thirty Oriental sapphires of the greatest beauty set in golden borders, mostly of considerable dimension. Thirty-five pearls of a no less notable size alternate with the sapphires on a golden ground incrusted with the same stones, and twenty-four little gold chains, starting from the lower circle of the crown, suspend large letters in gold cloisonné and incrusted, whose disposition form the words: