The Alhambra and the Kremlin: The South and the North of Europe

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

After a time some wretched stuff for coffee was brought from a restaurant, and we made a breakfast, paid as much for it as if we had been in Paris, and left the house in disgust.

The city stands on a hill; it is up, up, up, in a succession of narrow, irregular, crooked, clean, and curious streets, showing at every step the vestiges of successive stages of civilization, and often suddenly revealing monuments of departed peoples that arrest the attention and excite wondering interest. The Goths succeeded the Romans. The Moors drove out the Goths, and, like eagles perched among these rocks, defied the storms of centuries. Here the master of empires, the great Charles V., reigned in grandeur, and gave laws to the world. It is a fitting place for such a history as it has; and no other city has a more romantic life. Indeed, romance has done so much to embellish the story of Toledo, it is difficult to be in it, and study it here on its own rocks, without asking for its enchanted towers, and haunted caves, and knights, with magic swords and spectre horses, and its 200,000 mighty men and beautiful women, that once made this castle-crowned crag the glory of Spain, and as famous in the earth as Babylon or Damascus.

It is more Oriental in its appearance than any city we have yet seen in Spain. But it is too far north, and too far up in the air, to be adapted to the life of Orientals. Its houses are usually low; and they have the court in the midst of them, out of which doors open into the several apartments. Many of them are very old, five hundred years, at least, and repetitions of those that stood on the same site before; for this reproduction of itself, from age to age, is a feature of the peoples and climes with which Scripture history has made us familiar. Many of these old houses are fine specimens of the Moorish manner of building; but with this, perhaps the predominant style, is blended more or less of the Roman, the Gothic, and the Saracenic, and every style except the modern; for Toledo is a city of the dead past, and no resurrection is before it. The Spanish chroniclers claim that Toledo was founded at the same time with the creation of the world, but who lived in it before the human race was made they do not help us to understand. Others less ambitious find that Nebuchadnezzar, and others that Hercules, laid the first stones.

The last of the Goths who sat on the throne of Toledo was Roderick. And when weighed down with the guilt of a seducer and a betrayer of his friend, he went forth from Toledo in his chariot of ivory, and, with his mailed legions, marched to the banks of the Guadalquiver, and at Guadalete encountered the flood of Moorish barbarism just then setting in upon Spain, he disappeared, the city began its downward career, and no emperors, no bishops, no kings, have since been able to purge it from the sin and the shame of the perfidious Roderick.

In after centuries, when the Moors were expelled and the cross again supplanted the crescent, the archbishops of Toledo were more than kings, and lived here in luxury, and wealth, and grandeur, without a parallel in the history of the church. Great patrons of art and science, they founded universities and cultivated the arts of peace, while they were often plunging the country into war, which they waged with valor and skill. Under them the city reached a degree of splendor unsurpassed in the dreamy reign of Oriental voluptuousness and taste. But when it succumbed, as it did to the great German Czar, and the court was removed to Valladolid, its sun went down, never to rise again.

The cathedral is a glory, even in Spain, which is richer in cathedrals than any other country. Toledo has always been favored by the Romish Church. It is believed by many that the Virgin Mary came down from heaven, in person, to attend the investiture of one of its archbishops, and there is not to be found a grander and more beautiful Gothic temple than this. As we entered it the dim light that was chasing away the shades from among the vast columns and the lofty arches gradually brightened as we became more accustomed to it, and a sense of majestic proportions and solemn grandeur took possession of the soul. A service was in progress, and we paused till it was concluded, for it matters not what the form of religious worship, and however much our views may differ from those engaged in it, it is unseemly to be gazing at the temple while its ministers are serving at its altar. In the midst of the service a priest was receiving a young woman’s confession. As she put up her lips to his ear to whisper her penitential words, she beat upon her breast with one hand, as if she were in agony of soul. Her tale of sin completed, she rose from her knees, bowed low again, kissed her confessor’s extended hand, and went away.

Toledo and its priesthood have been famous for their devotion to the strictest orders and dogmas of the church, till Rome itself scarcely stands higher for holiness and orthodoxy. In the disputes that have at different times agitated the Romish communion, they have not been afraid to appeal directly to the judgment of God, and to claim his verdict in their favor. In the great contest about the proper form of words in the mass, when the old missals were used in Spain, in spite of the orders to substitute the Gregorian mass, or the Roman improved form, the first appeal to the divine judgment was in favor of Toledo, and the early missals. Again the trial was demanded; and the old and newer missals were brought out, great folio volumes, into one of the public squares, and, in presence of the city, fire was applied to them. The older was burnt to ashes, and the newer survived the ordeal. Toledo was not willing to abide even by this very conclusive test, and finally it was settled by blending the two masses into one.

Their richest and most sacred chapel in the cathedral is the Muzarabe, or Mixed Arabic; so called because it was built to preserve the forms of the old Gothic service, such as was used when the Goths consented to live under the dominion of the Moors while allowed their own religious rites. In this cathedral lie the ashes, and over them are the tombs of some of the early kings of Spain, and several of those grand archbishops whose reign was not less kingly than that of kings. Cardinal Albornoz died in Italy, and the Pope sent his body home to be buried here. To save the expense of transportation, for there was no express company, not even a steamboat then (1364) to bring it,—Urban V. issued a decree granting a plenary indulgence to all who would lend a hand in carrying the dead cardinal on his long journey. Gladly did the poor peasantry bear the body on their shoulders from one town to another till it reached Toledo. In front of one of the chapels I was suddenly arrested by a strange Latin inscription in a brass plate in the pavement. It was in these words:—

“Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, nullus.”

Here lies dust, ashes, nothing else. Over the bones of one of the most powerful cardinals who ever reigned in Spain, and himself called a king maker, the epitaph is eloquent: perhaps an affectation, however, of humility, a virtue for which Fernandez de Portocarrero was not illustrious in his life.