demonstrate that the house was built after the Christian Conquest by Moorish builders, but one may ask oneself, was the rest of the mansion in keeping with this glorious chamber? Who designed it, wrought it? What sort of life was lived therein? What the fashion of the garments that swept it, the dreams dreamed within its fabulous walls? Why should this single jewel remain in a sordid setting, and nothing to tell us how the rest came to vanish, why this alone was preserved? All we know is that Cardinal Siliceo turned the house into a college for young ladies in the sixteenth century, and placed his own arms above the exquisite ajimez window between the chamber and the boudoir, and the chamber served the Carmelites as a chapel for many years.
The Taller del Moro is probably earlier by four centuries than the Casa de Mesa. Here we have the influence of the Cordovese-Arabian architecture, of an art less delicate and fairy-like than the Granadine-Arabian. There is every reason to believe that this palace was built after the Gothic downfall for a Saracen magnate. The street was called the Street of the Moor to prove that an illustrious Moor dwelt there, and its resemblance to the Alcázar of Sevilla indicates that the owner was in every probability a ruler of some kind, a governor or viceroy. It may be on this slight ground that it has been hinted it was here all the nobles of Toledo were invited to a banquet to meet the Khalif’s son, and as each one entered the dusky garden, his head, with a single stroke, was sent rolling into the ditch near the gate. There is nothing now about it to bear out this shuddering suggestion. The long Moorish chamber is turned into a vulgar workshop. The wooden door from the street opens into a squalid yard, with carts and wheelbarrows about, and placid Christians, for a couple of pence, receive you without any hint of knife or blood, or lugubrious ditch. Not even the ghost of a turbaned Moor to disturb your musing as you stand in the degraded workshop, where the light is dim, and vex your soul with mutterings against the damp and smoke. The chamber is a hundred feet long by twenty-four. It is of a singularly rich and splendid design, with Moorish inscriptions running along the walls, with delicate friezes, and all the Oriental luxury of red and gold and blue. The artesonado ceiling is superb, and it requires no very violent effort of imagination to evoke a vague picture of this banqueting hall in the days of Moorish revelry, when passion and policy wrapped themselves in the magic charm of colour, and mere civilisation was an inexhaustible enchantment, a pure and indolent delight.
The Corral of Don Diego is an extensive courtyard near the church of the Magdalena, said to have been the property called the Barrio del Rey, which Alfonso, after the Conquest, gave to Don Pedro Paleologus, who came to Toledo to fight the Moor, and remained to found the great house of the Toledos. The arms of the Toledos may still be seen above the gates, and Henry of Trastamare, we are told, bestowed the palace upon his auxiliary, Bertrand de Guesclin, with the title of Trastamare, which has since fallen to the Duke of Montemar. Nothing now remains of the palace but the courtyard, and a magnificent Moorish archway of horse-shoe shape, and arabesques recalling the style of the Alcázar of Seville, but we may gather some notion of its size and importance from the ruin. There are indications miserably faint and buried away under plaster, that the palace was richly ornamented in the mudejar style. Inscriptions, Moorish arches, and ajimez windows are dimly discoverable beneath the broken plaster-work and the primitive roughness of modern repairs. An impression of splendid halls and chambers, of delicately ornamented Moorish alcoves and boudoirs and inscriptions, of artesonado ceilings and emblazoned doors, is seized under the frost of neglect, through the mildew of centuries, the wood-work, design, and gilt of the octagonal ceilings now almost hopelessly obliterated, and the friezes mere shapeless dilapidation.
The Castillo de San Servando or Cervantes, just outside the Bridge of Alcántara, is an impressive looking ruin, that seems mysteriously to have become inter-penetrated with the burnt and arid tones of the landscape. It has no historic or architectural interest whatever, is not even beautiful, but impresses the eye in its decay, with its rough, battlemented, and scarred visage, the ancient note of its barbican and square rude towers. It is indubitably Mozarabe, built by the Moors as a fortress, and employed as such by Alfonso after the Conquest. Calderon makes mention of it in Cado uno por se, and in the civil war of Pedro and Henry of Trastamare, having been abandoned by the Knights Templars, whose property it had become, it resumed its use as a strong place. The Archbishop Tenorio ordered its repair, and many of the arches and vaults date from this period. Tramps now sleep comfortably in its shadow, and scare you in your moonlit walks by midnight.
Though the Alcázar can by no means be described as a vanished palace, since it is the most substantial and dominating feature of the town, as an illusion it may be classed with these. A wide pathway leads to it from the Zocodover. It was twice burnt, and now all that remains of it are the imposing facades, the three towers, the glorious patio, large enough to hold an army, and the magnificent staircase, up which an army might march abreast. It stands upon the ruins of Wamba’s walls, in full command of the city, and in Roman days was the prison where St Leocadia suffered martyrdom. Under Alfonso VI. it was a strong fortress, guarded by the Cid. Don Alvaro de Luna first, and the Catholic kings afterwards, had some hand in adorning it, but Charles Quint, designing to reside in Toledo, may be said to have rebuilt it altogether. He gave the commission to the best Spanish architects of the century—Covarrubias, Vergara, Villalpando, Jaspar de Vega, Gonzalez de Lara, and the great Herrera, with a host
