THE ALCÁNTARA AT TOLEDO, SHOWING THE MOORISH GATEWAY TOWER AT THE TOWN END OF THE BRIDGE
7. The Alcántara at Toledo. From every point of view this bridge makes a good picture, but I like her best when she is seen from a level only a little below the footway. Then I look down at the upward flight of her architecture, and watch how a luminous patterning of shadow enriches the suave yet austere masonry. Somehow I think of a courtly abbess whose half-smile is a discipline feared by everybody. In no other way can I describe the technical inspiration that makes this bridge very uncommon. Looking down again, I see that the Spanish masons—or shall we call them Hispano-Moresque?—were as thrifty as the Frenchmen at Cahors; across the breadth of the bigger arch, and below the springing, there are seven holes, from which the centring was scaffolded. Technically the arches are inferior to those of the Pont Valentré, because their rings are not sufficiently rimmed and extra-dossed, so they lie too close into the body of the spandrils. The pier is designed very well, it has a distinction of its own and forms on each side of the roadway a narrowing shelter-place with four angles. Lower down, near the Moorish adaptation from a Roman triumphal arch, a long recess carried by five brackets varies the line of each parapet, in which there is no pretension, no swagger, no balustraded bombast. On the town side the bridge is guarded by a Moorish gate-tower, while across the river is a gateway dating from the time of Charles the Fifth.
A Roman bridge crossed the Tagus at this great spot, and was repaired in 687 by the Visigoths, but in 871 it disappeared, I know not how or why. Then a bridge was built by Halaf, son of Mahomet Alameri, Alcalde of Toledo, but Halaf obeyed a command from Almansor Aboaarmir Mahomet, son of Abihamir, Alquazil of Amir Almomenin Hixem. I hope you like these names and titles? They are given by George Edmund Street, [123] who quotes from Cean Bermudez; and so with confidence we may add Halaf Alameri to the few early bridge-masters who are known to us by name.
For 340 years no accident seems to have happened to Alameri’s work. Then in 1211 a part of the bridge fell into the river; and six years later, during its restoration, Enrique I had a gate-tower set up by Matheo Paradiso, a military architect with too angelic a name. Forty-one years passed, and then the bridge was renewed once more, this time by the King D. Alonso, who put the following inscription on a piece of marble above the point of the arch: “In the year 1258 from the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ was the great deluge of water, that began before the month of August, and lasted until Thursday the 26th of December; and in most lands the fall of rain did much damage, especially in Spain, where most of the bridges fell; and among them was demolished a great part of that bridge of Toledo which Halaf, son of Mahomet Alameri, ... had made ... in the time of the Moors, 387 years before this time; and now the King D. Alonso, son of the noble King D. Ferrando, and of the Queen Doña Beatriz, who reigned in Castile, has had it repaired and renovated; and it was finished in the eighth year of his reign, in the year of the Incarnation 1258.”
Even then some of Alameri’s work remained, but I fear that it all vanished in 1380, when Archbishop Pedro Tenorio, a kinsman of Don Juan, and a great pontist, became patron of the Toledo bridges and gave to the Alcántara the appearance that we know, apart from the fortified gateways, which were either altered or built by Andres Manrique, A.D. 1484.
8. Brangwyn has sketched the other great bridge at Toledo, the Puente de San Martin, a better work of art than the Alcántara. Here the style is far more masculine, and there is no wide expanse of barren wall such as we find in the Alcántara below the bracketed recesses. The five arches vary much in size, no doubt, but yet they harmonise very well, and the most important one is heroic in scale, being not less than 140 Spanish ft. wide and 95 ft. high. As for the piers, each has a character of its own: they have but one thing in common—bulk enough not only to resist floods, but to be in keeping with a defile of rocks. There are two gateways, and one of them has Moorish ornament and a Moorish battlement.
