The wards are also beautifully carved into the following legend, distributed in two rows, one superposed upon the other, of two words and of ten letters apiece:—
“Dios abrirá; Rey entrará.”
“God will open; the king shall enter.”
The iron key is purely Moorish, smaller than its fellow, and measures just over six inches. Like the other, it consists of five divisions, and the wards are in the form of an inscription in African Cufic characters, which Gayangos and other Arabists have variously interpreted. Five of the commonest readings are as follows:—
(1) “May Allah permit that the rule (of Islam) last for ever in this city.”
(2) “By the grace of God may (this key) last for ever.”
(3) “May peace be in the King's mansion.”
(4) “May God grant us the boon of the preservation of the city.”
(5) “To God (belongs) all the empire and the power.”
Our earliest tidings of this iron key are from the Jesuit Bernal, who wrote in the seventeenth century. It was not then the property of the cathedral chapter, for Ortiz de Zúñiga says that it belonged, in the same century, to a gentleman of Seville named Don Antonio Lopez de Mesa, who had inherited it from his father. Tradition declares that both this key and its companion were laid at the feet of Ferdinand the Third by Axataf, governor of Seville, when the city capitulated to the Christian prince on November 23rd, 1248. But Ortiz is careful to inform us that he neither countenances nor rejects the popular notion that the iron key was thus delivered as the token of surrender, “although,” he says, “the owners of it are strongly of this judgment.” What we do know is that on June 16th, 1698, the iron key was presented to the cathedral by Doña Catalina Basilia Domonte y Pinto, niece of the Señor Lopez de Mesa aforesaid; and that the chapter forthwith accepted it with solemn gratitude as “one of the keys delivered by the Moors to the Rey Santo on the conquest of the city,” ordering it to be guarded in a special box.
Such is the popular fancy still accepted by the Sevillanos. However, Amador de los Ríos has sifted out a good deal of the truth, showing that the iron and the silver key are wrought in different styles, and were intended for a different purpose. He places the iron instrument among the “keys of conquered cities,” and its silver neighbour among the “keys of honour, or of dedication”; and he declares as certain (although the reasons he adduces do not quite convince me) that this iron key is actually the one which figured in the ceremony of surrender. The other he considers to have been a gift from the Sevillians to the tenth Alfonso, son of Ferdinand the saint and conqueror, as a loyal and a grateful offering in return for his protection of their industries and commerce. However this may be, the decorative aspect of the larger key, together with the choice material of which it is made, appears to prove that it was not associated with the rigours of a siege, but served in some way as a symbol of prosperity and peace. It was a common custom at a later age for Spanish cities to present their sovereign, when he came among them, with a richly ornamented key. Such keys were offered to Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second when, in 1526 and 1570, respectively, they visited Seville; while Riaño reminds us that “even in the present day the ceremony is still kept up of offering a key to the foreign princes who stay at the royal palace of Madrid.” Similarly, as an ordinary form of salutation, does the well-bred Spaniard place his house at your disposal.