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

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

The Virgin Mary has been pleased to come from heaven to this cathedral, as I have said, and if any one doubts it, he can see the very stone on which she first set foot as she alighted from her aerial excursion. And now the faithful kiss this precious stone, touching with their loving lips the very spot which her foot once pressed. Her image is clad with gold and precious stones and costly raiment, crowns and bracelets and chains, the gifts of royal hands, and the greatest ladies of the kingdom are her maids of honor. On gala-days she is borne in state through the streets, and honors are paid to her at every step, as the Queen of Queens.

A sleepy old porter let us into the Alcazar. Al-casa-czar is the house of Cæsar, or the czar’s house, the king’s house, the palace.

The Alcazar.

The palace, or what was once a palace, crowns the summit of the hill on which the old city of Toledo stands. Around the base of the rock below the Tagus rushes rapidly, and away in every direction stretches the wide plain, gloomy, desolate, and yet grand in its storied past. It is not certain that the Moorish, still less certain that the Gothic kings preceding them, had their royal residence on this bleak height. But the Catholic kings for centuries held their courts on this spot, and the prints of their hands are visible everywhere. The porter who opened the door for us is a model of a Spanish official. Too proud to be a door-keeper, and, with nothing else to do, he would impress even a stranger with the idea that he was born with a higher destiny than to tend a gate. It was a pleasure to him, evidently, to tell us we must not go here, nor there, nor anywhere, except where it was of no use to go; and the scanty information he was willing to impart was extracted with difficulty, and worth nothing then.

We stood in the midst of a spacious square, the patio, or court, and on its four sides rose the walls of the ancient palace. Charles V. and Philip II. rebuilt the most of it on the ruins holding some of the apartments that date as far back as Alonzo X.; and in modern times the hoof of the war demon has trodden the stairways and galleries and gorgeous halls, until what with English and French soldiery, and some of other nations more barbarous still, the Alcazar of Toledo is a more comfortable residence for bats and owls than kings and fair princesses. Two or three proud peacocks were strutting in the warm sunshine of the patio, displaying their gaudy plumes and arching their graceful necks, reminding us of other beauties who had often gone blazing through these doors, with radiant jewels and shining robes, yet, in all their glory, were not arrayed like one of these. This patio shows, on its four sides, two rows of galleries, one over the other, supported each of them by thirty arches, with columns crowned with Corinthian capitals, embellished with the arms of the many kingdoms that Charles V. had conquered. A staircase, designed by Philip II. while he was in England, and built under orders sent by him while there, leads up to the royal apartments, long since deserted, and now worth seeing only because they were once the home of men and women whose names are part of the history of the world.

An English gentleman said to me in the rail-car in Spain one day, “I should be glad to have you tell me what it is that impresses you the most in coming from America and travelling in Europe.” I answered that it required some time to make a fitting reply to so great an inquiry. “Well,” he said, “will you take fifteen minutes to think, and then give me the result?” I replied, “I am ready to answer now: what impresses me more than all else is, that these old countries, having been what they once were, are what I find them now.”

It is the law of the earth, I suppose, and what has been will be, and so on to the end of time.

We left the melancholy palace to its porter, its peacocks, and the bats, and wound our way down and around the corkscrew streets, narrow, close, and dirty, admiring the ancient Moorish gates and doors, studded with iron balls. The older doors have two knockers, one high for a horseman to use without dismounting; and, the gate being opened, he would ride right into the court. We were looking for the Church of San Juan de los Reyes, and soon found it, a church that dates back to the Moorish-Gothic period, or the time when the severity of Gothic grandeur was adorned with the more florid embellishments which Moorish art introduced into Spain. On the outer walls are suspended the massive iron chains which were found on the limbs of the Christian captives when Granada was conquered by Ferdinand and Isabella; and the rescued prisoners hung up their chains on this church as thank-offerings. And still farther down the hill we come to the Bridge of St. Martin, and here are plainly the ruins of the old Moorish castle and palace. A square tower on the water’s edge bears the name, to this day, Florinde, and tradition says it was here that Roderick unluckily saw her while she was bathing. The rest of the story we have hinted at already.

Irving, in his bewitching Spanish tales, gives a marvellous account of the Cave of Hercules, which is said to extend three leagues beyond the river, and is full of chapels and genii and enchanted warriors. To visit it has cost kings their crowns; and the terrible sounds that are heard, and the rushing winds assailing the bold explorer, make the attempt too formidable for modern valor. The entrance is from the Church de San Gines, but is now walled up. In fact, it was never unwalled, except in the fancies of romantic historians.