traces about it, the highly decorated wall-work, the horse-shoe arches and fine relief. Of the palace of the Trastarmares little now remains but the door with the big Toledan nails. Somewhere about here was the house Hernan Cortes was married from, when the bride’s page stabbed himself at her feet as the procession left the courtyard for the church. I cannot indicate the precise spot, as I was shown it vaguely one lovely moonlit night, when Toledo takes on its spectral and fantastic aspect of white shadow-worked dream, a thing of elusive radiance, wherein reality is lost in mysterious beauty. One walks knee-deep in the sadness and enchantment of “old, unhappy, far-off things,” and the petulant little page, stabbing himself in the folds of the bride’s white satin, as she crosses the threshold of her father’s house, is just the kind of picture one is prompted to evoke. Alas, and alas! if we were only so fortunate as to possess some clue by which we could hope to evoke the bride’s face, some faint perfumed trace of Toledan dame and damsel of those days. But the Toledan school of painters has only left us an interminable gallery of cavaliers, proud austere heads, with the mild, cold and implacable regard of Spain. Of poetry, of womanhood, of soft sensuous charm, not a hint. The exquisite Maria de Padilla, with her little white visage and passionate, sad eyes, is only a name now; but such was her gentle sorcery that she is still a dominating memory. We cling to her the more as she is the single woman’s form that floats above this past of hard-featured and imperious knights, who ever jostled and fought in these murderous streets and lanes, conspired, rebelled and fashioned the roughest and strangest history written.
Near Santa Ursula is the façade of the famous house of the Toledos. The founder of this great family, since known in history as the Dukes of Alva, was a member of the Imperial house of Paleologus, Pedro, a Byzantine prince of the days of Gothic rule. His immediate descendants were the Illans; Stephen Illan, for whom was built the beautiful Casa de Mesa, and whose portrait on horseback may be seen in the Cathedral, behind the hideous Trasparente, was one of the greatest figures of mediaeval Toledo, great citizen, unruly noble, defender of the town, and lord of the people. It was after his day that the family was honoured with the significant private name of Toledo, the present family name of the house of Alva. The palace of the Toledos was like that of Villena, an immense edifice covering all the square. Now only the façade remains as a triumphal assertion of vanished splendour; a disfigured Gothic porch and a couple of ajimez windows in the north wall in front of Santa Ursula. Time has laid a heavy hand on the arches, the slim columns, the cornices, the shields, the stone sculptures and friezes; but the Latin inscription is still visible:
Dominus custodiat introitum tuum et exitum tuum
Ex hox nunc et usque in sæculum.
We need only look at the single chamber of the Casa de Mesa to reconstruct the interior of this dismantled palace, its exquisite Moorish walls and azulejos or tile-work, its arches, ajimez windows and lofty galleries, its sumptuous artesonado ceilings. The house itself began to decline with the disgrace of the great Duke of Alva, whom Philip struck so brutally on the trivial pretext of his son’s love affairs. Don Fadique, the heir of the house of the Toledos, fell in love with the daughter of the Guzmans, the unfortunate Magdalena. They became engaged without Philip’s permission, and instantly both were imprisoned, Don Fadique at Medina del Campo, Magdalena in the Convent of Santa Fé at Toledo (also known as Santiago). On his release, the Duke of Alva decided to marry Don Fadique to his cousin, Maria de Toledo. The King feigned to approve of the marriage, and afterwards made it a pretext of persecution. Magdalena de Guzman, from her conventual retreat, was summoned to lay her claim to Don Fadique’s hand; the Duke and Duchess of Alva were exiled, and Don Fadique and his bride were literally ruined. The Toledos once humiliated, Magdalena de Guzman was ordered back to her convent and to silence, Philip’s minister advising her to write no more letters to the King. “What would you do at Court?” he asks Philip’s unhappy victim, who, at a king’s extraordinary caprice, had wasted twelve years in the cloisters. “You are too young to be a duenna, too old to be a maid of honour. Since you have spent twelve years in the convent, stay there altogether.” And to the King he writes: “May God give her good sense. One can’t make a step without finding a letter from her.” A melancholy time for youth and romance, when a vicious and sour-tempered old king and his corrupt ministers pulled the strings that made its amiable puppets dance. A man with the care of the two Spains, the Netherlands, and all the intrigues of Europe, finds time to glance down at Toledo, and enter into miserable battle with innocent young hearts, mar and make marriages for their doom!
The palace of Fuensalida, the property of the Duke of Frias, never seems to have been an edifice of any particular architectural claim. All history records of it is the fact that Charles Quint’s wife, the Empress Isabel, died here while Charles was building the Alcázar for her reception. The house was built by Lopez de Ayala early in the fifteenth century, whose tomb may be admired in the Church of San Pedro Martir. The origin of the famous Casa de las Tornerias is disputed. Some regard it as an ancient mosque, because of its emphatic mark of Saracen architecture, contemporaneous with that of the little mosque, El Cristo de la Luz. The whole is now too hopelessly built round with vulgar stone and too terribly dilapidated and mutilated for a proper estimate to be formed of its earliest origin and form. It is still, and must always be, mere matter of conjecture whether it was originally built for a mesquita or a Moorish palace.