Never was a town so completely stupefied by a moment’s blow before. Not a single voice was lifted in protest. Toledo, on ordinary occasions, so resentful, proud, rebellious, was simply prostrate from emotion and horror; and in her stunned and terrorised condition the Turk might have done what he willed with her. She was bereft of tears, bereft of reproaches, of will and force. The remaining citizens dared hardly speak of the dreadful occurrence in whispers among themselves, so heavily gripped were they by the nightmare of reality. Now, whether the young prince or the sultan was aware of the Wali’s atrocious design remains for ever a mystery. How far were they accomplices? To what extent did they reprove the action? We are told that Amron took Abderraman into his confidence before the feast, and protested loudly in upholding his design as a justifiable measure, since the Toledans were such a harsh and unmanageable race, and its nobles so insupportable and dangerous, and that the young prince demurred to such ruthlessness of method, and begged the Wali to be prudent and not bring unnecessary odium upon Moslem rule. This precisely would seem the deep design of Amron’s double treason. Did he wish to accumulate fresh odium on his adopted race, or pay off old scores by one fell blow on his forsaken people? Anyhow, we are glad to learn that he was deservedly punished. After a while the town woke up from its stunned resignation. The Toledans shook themselves out of their trance of horror; met once more in the Zocodover, talked fiercely together, and remembered that they too could be ferocious with less provocation than this last outrage, and from the Zocodover the murmur broke out and travelled along the outlying streets and remote little markets, and down by the river among the armourers and silversmiths. The people rose up, and swooped willingly down upon Amron, and burnt him and his castle. And surely never was vengeance more holy.
But in spite of siege, insurrection, and temporary surrender, which were the constant conditions of public life in Toledo, the town increased, and Moorish influence began to show itself triumphantly in architecture and in horticulture. Gardens spread along the Vega, and Arabian palaces brightened the sombre landscape. Both Jews and Christians were becoming enormously rich, and the Wali, Aben Magot ben Ibraham, decided to raise the tribute of the Christian merchants and persons of means. This was quite enough to quicken the slumbering fires of revolt, and a young Toledan, Hacam, nicknamed El Durrete, striker of blows, resolved to expend his great wealth in assisting to fan the flames. Like every other Toledan, he thirsted for an excuse for sedition, and called his fellow-conspirators together in the market-place. There it needed nothing but a judicious use of strong language to induce the people to fling stones and shower blows on the unfortunate palace guard, so handy to the Zocodover, and from blows was only a step to the massacre of all the officials and seizure of the Alcazar. Reprisals naturally followed, and Hacam, routed for the moment, retired to devise a fresh attack. He sent abroad the report that he had gone off to make a raid upon Catalonia, and kept his spies on the look-out for the first signs of relaxed supervision. The instant he found the town-gates unlocked, he poured his men silently into the city at night, and recovered Toledo without a blow, and set fire to the greater part of the upper town. In 834 the sultan sent Omaiga to besiege the seditious town, but the Toledans repulsed him triumphantly, and Hacam was practically the uncrowned king of the city. Skirmishes continued with success, now on one side, now on the other, but always leaving Toledo unsubdued. Maisara, a renegade Spaniard in command of Moslem troops, routed the Toledans outside the walls, and died shortly after his victory, of remorse and shame, when the soldiers, according to a hateful custom, presented him with the heads of the slain.
In 873 discord broke out anew between the renegades and the Christians. A Toledan chief, Ibn Mohâdjir, offered his services to the commander of Calatrava, and Walid, the sultan’s brother, was charged to direct the siege, which lasted a year. An envoy of Walid stole secretly into the town, and discovered the famished and weakened state of the inhabitants, urged capitulation, which advice was rejected. But the envoy’s report of the people’s misery induced Walid to press on a vigorous assault, and once more was Toledo tamed and taken, and Amron’s fatal castle rebuilt.
Later fresh troubles hailed from Cordova, whither came Eulogius burning for martyrdom, and exciting the Christians to exasperate the Moslems into persecution. We know that left alone the Spanish Arabs were not in the least given to religious persecution. The Christians were free to practice their religion, and in Toledo lived tranquilly under Mozarabe law. Only the condemned Christian might always appeal from the Mozarabe tribunal to the Moslem Judge, who could grant him immunity. This was no very great hardship, for in general mediæval law made it too easy to kill and too difficult to reprieve. No masters have ever been more tolerant than the Moors, and it needed all the blind and unreasoning fanaticism of Eulogius to discover persecution and a means of forcing martyrdom. The surest method naturally was to revile the False Prophet in public, and insult every instinct and prejudice of the conquerors. This was to prove oneself a saint in those far-off days, while now we should pronounce a distinctly different opinion on such proceedings. So Eulogius, with his lamentable tales, fresh from his romantic parting with the martyred Flora, fired the Toledans with indignation, and again they took up arms under Sindola, arrested their Moorish governors, and sent word to the Sultan at Cordova that his life would answer for that of their fellow-Christians. They declared war, took Calatrava, which the Sultan retook in 757, filed through the Sierra Morena, and defeated the Moors at Andujar. Mohammed assembled his troops and marched against Toledo in June 854, when Sindola turned to Ordoño, king of Leon, for help. The Christian king sent a large army to Toledo under Gaton, Count Bierzo. The Moors, by a false assault and retreat, drew Gaton and the Toledan troops into an ambush, where girdled by Moslem forces, they were massacred to a single man. Over 8000 Christian heads were stuck on the walls of different towns, and for a time was Toledo again cowed. But she took her revenge in electing as archbishop, on Wistremir’s death, the Sultan’s impassioned enemy, Eulogius, and this time to punish the rebels the Sultan resorted to a stratagem worthy of Amron of the Foss renown. He began to undermine their bridge while his own troops occupied it, and before the operation was completed, he withdrew his men, thus inveigling after them the rash Toledans. The bridge split, and the unfortunate rebels were drowned in a heap in the deep and sullen Tagus. An Arabian poet triumphantly sings the infamy: “The Eternal could not allow a bridge to exist built for the squadrons of miscreants. Deprived of her citizens, Toledo is mournful and desolate as a grave.”
But a people that could shake off the nightmare stun of the day of the Foss could rise above this blow. Toledo had resisted for twenty years, and she was not yet conquered. Leon was at her back, and its king was her proclaimed knight. In 873 she forced from the Sultan a treaty acknowledging her as an independent Republic under annual tribute, and concluded an alliance with the famous Beni Casi of Aragon, a great Visigoth family converted to Islamism, who sent Lope, the chief’s son, to Toledo as consul.
Then came to the throne of Cordova the great Khalif, Abd-ar-Rahman III., and Toledo was to discover that here was a very different enemy from the incapable generals that had hitherto striven in vain to subdue her. Here was a mighty commander who was not to be daunted by her frowns and her wild spirit, and whose patience and dogged determination she was to find the match of her own. Genius alone could quell her, and genius came in the handsome and valiant young monarch who would win her or die. First he sent a royal order, commanding her to surrender to him her rights as a free and independent Republic, and humbly acknowledge him as liege lord. This Toledo roughly and proudly declined to do. Her reply was couched in terms of evasive menace, for eighty-four years of freedom, under the protection of the Beni Casi of Aragon and the King of Leon, had taught her to regard herself as an enemy to be duly reckoned with. Then the Sultan sent his general vizier, Said-ibn-Moudhir in May 930 to open the siege, and in June he joined him with the flower of his army, and encamped on the banks of Algodor near the Castle of Mora. Here he forced the commander to evacuate, and placed his own garrison in the fortress before advancing on Toledo. He began by camping in the cemetery and burning the outlying villages, and then, in order to show the Toledans the kind of man they had to deal with, he proceeded to build a town on the opposite bank of the Tagus, exactly fronting the royal city, on a mountain side as high as hers. Here he and his troops dwelt for eight years, persistent and unswerving, calling the town he built “Victory” in anticipation of the inevitable result. A siege of eight years! what a tale of magnificent determination and stupendous force of will and endurance on both sides. Which to praise most, wonder most at, the Toledans or Abd-ar-Rahman? What a town, what a Sultan! With such a watchful power outside the walls, the marvel is that famine so long delayed its fatal presence; but it came at last, and stalked the gaunt dim streets and humbled the city of the Goths as no other force or persuasion could have done, and after years of accumulated sufferings and privations, bereft of pride and strength and dignity, she yielded her haggard front to the Sultan’s swift assault, as soon as he knew her power undermined, her patience at bay, and by nightfall the heads of her insurgent chiefs were grinning lividly over the Puerta de Visagra.
After the great Khalif’s death, the town recovered a partial independence, and remained, until the Christian Conquest, a kingdom apart under the rule of tolerated Arabian princes, independent of Cordova. Successive feeble efforts to win her prove ever unavailing, and she continues to glower above the river in unquiet and mutinous temper, while the princes make believe to rule and do but obey, proud but fearful of so uneasy a charge. Her rulers during the unsatisfactory eleventh century were: Yaîch-ibn-Mohammed-ibn Yaîch, till 1036; Ismail Dhafir, till 1038; Abou-I-Hassan Yah[^y]r Mamon, till 1075; and Yah[^y]a ibn Ismaïl ibn Yah[^y]a Câdir, till the conquest.
The most picturesque episode is that which leads to the downfall of the demoralised Moslems. Alphonso of Leon, escaping from the monastery of Sagahun, fled to Toledo and besought the hospitality and protection of the Moorish King Almamon. The generous and courteous Moor gave him considerably more than shelter; affection and all the outward show of his rank. Persecuted by a Christian brother, he was nobly befriended by a loyal enemy, whose generosity he ill repaid by treachery and ingratitude. Almamon gave him the Castle of Brihuega, and constituted him the chief of the Mozarabes, that is the Christians of Toledo under Moorish rule. Furthermore, he bestowed on him farms and orchards outside the town on the bank of the Tagus, and a residence within the walls near his own Alcazar. At the Moorish court of Tolaitola, as the Arabs called Toledo, the proscribed prince was granted all the honours of his rank. Alcocer tells us that in return Alphonso swore to be loyal, not to leave Toledo without permission, and to fight all men of the world for the Moorish king. Almamon, on his side, swore to treat Alfonso well and faithfully; to pay him and all his people. Alcocer, with quaint garrulity, describes the king’s fondness for hunting, and his delight in fresh green places and luxuriant foliage, and his great sadness in looking across from Brihuega to Toledo, and contemplating the possibility of such a strong and beautiful town falling once more into the hands of the Christians. The story runs that one day Almamon visited his guest at Brihuega, and in the gardens the courtiers began to discuss the marvels and attractions of Tolaitola, “that pearl placed in the middle of the necklace, that highest tower of the empire.”[10] From this the talk fell upon the probabilities of its being attacked, and at this point Alphonso, lounging beneath a tree, feigned sleep. The Moorish prince described at length the only way of taking the town, and his plan of siege was well remembered by his treacherous guest. The courtiers glancing anxiously at the sleeping prince asked themselves if his sleep were real, and to try him began to pierce one of his hands with shot. Still unconvinced, they begged the king to order him to be killed, but, says Alcocer naively: “Our lord kept him for his greater good, and would not hear of this.” When Sancho was murdered by Bellido Dolphos at the foot of the walls of Zamora, Alphonso left this friendly court with the blessings of its sovereign, who offered him money, arms, and horses, and escorted him part of the way as far as Monuela, separating with embraces and vows of eternal friendship on both sides. Both swore never under any circumstances to war on opposite sides, but each to assist the other in all difficulties with hostile powers. Alfonso returned to Toledo, and sent messengers to invite his former host to dinner. The king came, and found himself surrounded by armed men. Demanding the reason of such a strange reception, Alfonso replied, “When you held me in your power you made me swear to assist you against all men, and be your loyal friend.” The Moorish king assented, whereupon Alfonso sent for the gospels, and swore upon them again, with Almanon in his power, never to fight against him or his son, and to assist him against all the world. Alfonso’s word, it will be seen, was strangely flexible. This spontaneous and solemn promise to a friend and ally could, with honour, be broken, while elsewhere his word, compromised by wife and friend, demanded their instant death by fire. Shortly after Almamon died, and Toledo returned to its normal condition of disquiet. Flying kings, invading powers, rivalries and skirmishes, overtures between Moor and Moor, and between Moor and Christian, all terminated by Alphonso’s deliberate baseness in laying siege to the town ruled incapably by the incapable son, Yahya, of his late friend and guest, who should have been sacred to him. He followed the plan of siege so unguardedly suggested by Almanon in the gardens of Brihuega, and took the town on the 20th May 1085. Yahya and his court left Toledo, their hardly won and deeply loved Tolaitola, with their treasure, and went towards Cuenca, mournful and silent, eaten by regrets and humiliation.
So Toledo, after three and a half centuries of roughly and persistently disputed Moslem sovereignty, returned to Christian rule. True, she was always less of a Moorish centre than Cordova, Sevilla, Valencia and Granada, and glowed less than these in the bloom of its brilliant civilisation. Her temper was too obstinate and harsh for such flowery development. But she had so far profited as to gather charm to her austere beauty. The aspect of her walls had suffered modification and improvement, and the Moors had built handsome bridges, which alas! have since disappeared, both the bridge near Santa Leocadia, and that across the old Roman waterway. In Dozy, a quotation from the Arabian chronicle, Abou-l-Hasan, tells us how “Alphonso, the tyrant of the Galicians, that infidel people (that God may cut it in pieces!), seized the town of Toledo, that pearl of the necklace, that highest tower of the Empire in this peninsula.” He describes Toledo as “a softbed” for Alphonso, and the people “henceforth resembling docile camels.” For docility the people were not more remarkable than before, and as for the softness of Toledo as a royal bed, its quality of ease and security never wavered, whoever wore the crown and wielded the sceptre. Alphonso residing “up among her high walls,” had his own troubles to face, just as had Cadir, Yahya ibn-Dzin, who gave her up to him. “May God renew her past splendour,” cries the Arabian chronicler, “and write her name again on the register of Mussulman towns!”
The weak and unfortunate Yahya accepted Valencia in exchange, which he was not destined long to keep, thanks to that magnificent hero, el mio Cid, the Campeador.