Part 14

Most travelers run down to Toledo from Madrid for merely a day, whereas it is eminently a spot for a pause of several days. Not only once but a second and a third time should you cross the Alcántara bridge and climb the silent hills beyond it. From there Toledo stands up in haunting majesty, one of the imperial things in the world. Wild footpaths lead along the hills, so you can follow the immense loop of the river and return to the city by St. Martin's bridge.

The desolate Tagus is as unchanged by the centuries as the hills confining it. Toledo's first mayor, the Cid, looked on much the same scene that we know, nor could it have been very different when, earlier, the last of the Gothic kings, Roderick, saw the fair Florinda bathing by St. Martin's bridge,--which untimely spying the legend says brought the African invasion on Spain; the same as when King Wamba ruled here, and his name is synonymous with "as old as the hills"; the same as when the city's patron, Leocadia, was hurled down from the cliffs in Dacian's persecution.

Once inside the Puerta del Sol (a real gateway, not a plaza where a gate once stood, like its Madrid namesake), we found ourselves in a fretwork of narrow streets where we got lost at every turning. These twisting passages were so built that if the city walls were captured, the people could still offer a stiff resistance. Zig-zag up and down the lanes go, every few yards coming to a small triangle, out of which lead three narrow ways,--which to choose is ever the bewildering question. Push on boldly, the tortuous streets are worth exploring at random, and if you wander long enough you are sure to find yourself before the Cathedral or in the famous Zocodover Square. Morning and afternoon we were out exploring, with a good map to guide us, yet up to the very last day, we lost the way half a dozen times. The constant uncertainty was fascinating; only in such unhurried rambles does the _genius loci_ reveal itself. Now we stumbled on San Cristo de la Luz, in whose diminutive chamber are Visigothic capitals, Moorish arches, and a Christian _retablo_; it was here Alfonso VI heard his first Mass in the conquered city, the Cid Campeador at his side. Now we stopped to see the empty church of El Tránsito, in the Mudéjar style, built originally as a synagogue, and we found there an astonishingly beautiful arabesque frieze. This Mudéjar style (Moorish and Christian architecture mixed) has here what I think is its most perfect example, Santa María la Blanca, also a former synagogue, then a church, and at present national property.

As usual, our first visit after arrival, was to the Cathedral, not so easy to find as in most places, since it is not set on the highest part of the city, and is shut in with cluttering houses. As usual, too, like most Spanish churches, the exterior is meaningless; but the interior is a vigorous, pure Gothic, which is called the most national expression of this style in Spain. Like Seville, the ground plan is a _sala_, or hall; though the aisles here lessen in height so rapidly that they give a far different effect from Seville's lofty nave. The double-aisled ambulatory as at Avila is unique and beautiful in its effect. Spanish Gothic may be less artistically faultless than that of France, but certainly its massive grandeur and even its very extravagance render it many times more picturesque.

The primate of Spanish cathedrals is the richest in tombs, paintings, _rejas_, carvings, vestments, and jewels, even after the French carried away some hundred weight of silver treasure. Unfortunately, it was here we began to feel like tourists and to experience the jaded weariness of the personally conducted. We had wandered freely over the churches of the north, for a slight fee the verger had unlocked the choir and separate chapels, and then had gone off to let us examine them undisturbed. Here the flocking tourist has brought about the pest of tickets for each separate part of the church, and the guide, when one pauses to loiter, impatiently rattles his keys. And one longs to loiter in the most perfect _coro_ of Spain, where Maestro Rodrigo, and Berruguete, and Vignani carved; in the _sala capitular_, or the Alvaro de Luna chapel of florid Gothic, where the beheaded Grand-Constable lies guarded by four stone knights of Santiago.

Since Spanish cathedrals were gradual growths, here is to be found, in a mass of violent sculpture called the _Transparente_, the bad taste of the eighteenth century. The bishop who erected the _Transparente_ lies buried near by, covered by a mammoth slab of brass, on which, in bold letters, you read, "Here lies dust, ashes, nothing," an epitaph whose ironic, fatigued simplicity does not ring true; very different from that genuinely humble epitaph in Worcester Cathedral, that one impressive word "Miserrimus." _Transparente_ and tombstone are subtly allied, not inappropriate memorials of one who was instrumental in bringing the academic Bourbons to the Spanish throne in 1700.

In the sacristy is a beautiful picture, the _Expolio_, "Stripping Our Lord before the Crucifixion," by El Greco, the strange Byzantine Greek who drifted to Toledo and in his forty years there because more Spanish than the Spaniards. In his case the accident of birth was nothing; though born in Crete of Greek parents, refugees from Constantinople, El Greco was a true Castilian soul. He had known Venice in the days of Tintoret and Titian, but it was only when he came to Toledo that he found the atmosphere, mystic and chivalrous, in which his genius could develop. His was the spiritualized mysticism of a Teresa or a John of the Cross, with little of the conventional piety of Murillo. And he has rendered the Spanish hidalgo as has none other, on his canvas "they live an inner life, indifferent to the world; sad with the nostalgia for a higher existence, their melancholy eyes look at you with memories of a fairer past age that will not return. They are the dignified images of the last warrior ascetics."[24]

There is no denying that some of El Greco's pictures are aberrations; when I first saw him in the Escorial gallery, I thought him eccentric to madness. Thanks to Professor Raphael Domenech of the Prado School of Art, I looked a second time and learned to appreciate him. "What he did ill, no one did worse, but what he did well, no one did better." Toledo has many of his masterpieces. In the Church of Santo Domingo is his "Ascension" and the two Saint Johns; in Santo Tomé, his splendid "Burial of Count Orgaz." The chapel of San José and the churches of San Vicente and San Nicolás have some good examples of his, and the Provincial Museum has a remarkable series of the apostles with a truly noble representation of their Master. El Greco--by the way, his real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos--lived with princely magnificence, his friendship sought by the cultivated society round him, and on his death he was buried in San Bartolomé, regretted by the whole city. His sumptuous way of life was continued by his son, who built the cupola that covers the Mozarabic Chapel of the Cathedral.

This brings us to perhaps the most interesting survival of the past that exists in Spain, the Mozarabic Mass, said every morning in the western end of Toledo Cathedral. Mozarabic means Mixt-Arab, and is the name applied to the Christians who were under Moorish rule. Living isolated from their fellow-believers they kept to the old Gothic ritual. In the eleventh century the Christian conqueror of Toledo, Alfonso VI, after an artless trial by fire of the rival books, introduced the Gregorian liturgy, used by the rest of Europe. The learned Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Ximenez, thought the Gothic ritual too interesting a national memorial to be lost, so he endowed a chapel with its own chapter of canons.

The morning after our arrival, I hastened down to the Cathedral to hear a Mozarabic Mass. It puzzles me how Ford, the traveler, could have written of it as he did, as if its simplicity put to shame the later rite, for a Catholic could to-day attend the Mozarabic service with no striking feeling of difference. In some respects it is simpler than the Gregorian Mass, in others more elaborate; thus, for instance, the Host is divided into nine parts, to represent the Incarnation, Epiphany, Nativity, Circumcision, Passion, Death, Redemption, Ascension, and Eternal Kingdom. The kiss of peace is given before the Consecration; the Credo is recited after the offertory.

In my eagerness to be in time, I arrived half an hour too early, so I whiled away the minutes watching the altar boys prepare for the ceremony. It was easy to read, in their air of proprietorship that their duties were an achieved ambition, the reward of good conduct. One of the lads climbed up on the big brass eagle of the lectern and gave it an affectionate polish; then, having partly illuminated the altar,--during the ceremony more candles were lighted,--they whipped out their smart red cassocks, and stood side by side in severe precision, to salute the eight canons, "_Buenos Días!_" altar boys and dignitaries bowed with leisurely Spanish courtesy. In their preparations the small acolytes had found the supply of altar wine somewhat short, so more was sent for. During the solemn moments of the Mass, a messenger arrived with an offensive flask. With rustling dignity in his trailing red gown, the majordomo of ten swept across the chapel to thrust out the tactless blunderer, and the look of apologetic confusion on his cherub face, as he returned to his post of honor, was adorable.

Some German tourists noisily came into the chapel, and refusing to kneel at the moment of the elevation, the verger, in a spirit the founder would have applauded, pointed with his silver wand, a silent but inflexible dismissal. This first morning of my visit, too, a group of hardy countrymen came to the Mozarabic Mass; with cap in hand and cloak flung toga-like over their muscular shoulders, they knelt on one knee, as instinctively graceful as the shepherds in Murillo's "Nativity." When the service was over, in respectful quiet despite their arrogant carriage, these unlettered men rose and passed out to loiter in the Cathedral for a half hour. "The rank is but the guinea's stamp, the man's the gold for a' that," rings often in the ear in Castile.

Cardinal Ximenez, founder of the Chapel, was Castilian to the core, and Toledo for him, just as for El Greco, was fittest home. He was born in 1436 in the province of Madrid of an old family that had fallen in his day on moderate circumstances. In Spain, Ximenez is often called Cisneros, for there two surnames are used; the first following the Christian name is the patronymic name of the father, the second that of the mother. Sometimes a man uses his paternal surname alone, more seldom his mother's family name alone, as in the case of Velasquez, whose father was a de Silva.

A studious disposition early destined Ximenez to the priesthood, and following a few years' study in Alcalá, which he was to raise to a world-known university, he went to Salamanca. After a long stay in Rome, on his return to Spain he wasted some precious years in an unfortunate ecclesiastic dispute. His true worth was not discovered till he went, when over forty, to serve in the Cathedral of Sigüenza, where Cardinal Mendoza, the future "Rex Tertius," was then bishop. Recognizing the new chaplain's remarkable powers, he made him his vicar-general. But Ximenez, in the face of every chance of rapid advancement in the Church, felt within him a longing for the retired life of prayer. He chose the strictest order of his day, and entered the Franciscan monastery of San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo. All who know Toledo will remember it, built in the bizarre, flamboyant, often overladen but always grandiose style of Isabella and Ferdinand. On its outer walls hang iron chains, the votive offerings of Christian captives ransomed from the Moors in Africa, and one cannot help thinking that the concentrated mind of the new novice received an indelible impression from these souvenirs of Moslem barbarity, a bias that found later expression in his stern treatment of the Moors of Granada and his crusading siege of Oran.

Ximenez had sought a life of prayer in San Juan de los Reyes, but a personality such as his could not help but rise in acknowledged supremacy above those around him. The fame of his intellect and holiness soon drew to his confessional the leading minds of Toledo, and he found himself, to his distress, again in touch with the world. He retired to a more isolated Franciscan monastery, and gave himself up to years of study and prayer. Men seemed then to find time for the long spaces of tranquil thought that solidify character; holding the highest posts that ambition could achieve, they seemed to know themselves as dust before the wind. The key-note of to-day is breadth not intensity, and it sometimes seems as if our scattered knowledge leads to a more superficial outlook on the elemental and eternal verities, that universal education tends to universal mediocrity. Why have so few to-day the old-time spaciousness of vision? Is it because education then meant the development of the soul as well as of the intellect, because in acknowledging that there are an infinite number of things beyond reason they attained what Pascal calls the highest point of reason? "Ever learning and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth" we seem indeed. Wholly-rounded opportunities were given in that age. Poets and novelists then were soldiers in the roving wars of Europe,[25]--Garcilaso, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, these last two priests as well, and Garcilaso making a holy end helped by a grandee who was a saint, and Cervantes dying in the habit of the Assisian. But I suppose this carping comparison is just the never-ending tendency to look on a previous day as better than one's own. Jorge Manrique felt the same way:

"á nuestro parecer Cualquiera tiempo pasado Fué mejor"

and he wrote his immortal "Coplas" in the golden age of Isabella herself.

To return to Ximenez. After a long period of retirement he was made, against his will, confessor to the Queen at Valladolid. There exists an account by a witness of the sensation his thin, ascetic face caused in the court, as if an early Syrian anchorite had wandered thither. Three years later, on the death of Mendoza, the Queen's influence in Rome had Ximenez named his successor in Toledo. So angry was her confessor that he left the court. Isabella, gallant woman of heart and brain, who so enthusiastically perceived greatness in others, appealed to the Pope to order Cisneros to accept his see.

Up to this the Archbishops of Toledo had been men of great lineage who lived with splendor. And a striking succession of master minds they make, lying ready for an historian to group in a remarkable record; scholars, statesmen, founders of hospitals and schools, now a prelate of saintly life, now a leader of armies like Archbishop Rodrigo, who having borne the standard of the Cross in the thick of the fight at Las Navas de Tolosa, chanted the Te Deum of victory on that memorable field, the first Christian foothold in Andalusia. Of all the primates of Toledo, Mendoza, "Tertius Rex," had been highest in rank and power. The monk who succeeded this prince of the church dropped all pomp and lived like a humble Franciscan. Again the undaunted Isabella appealed to her friend the Pope to advise the new Archbishop to keep up the dignity of his see before the people. Cisneros yielded outwardly, but under the veneer of display he led the ascetic life.

The Queen's insight into character had judged right. Mystic contemplator though he was, Ximenez was a born ruler: prudent, courageous, and firm. He straightened difficulties and reformed abuses. As his own moral character was stainless and his disinterestedness well proven, there was happily no inconsistency in his preaching. Gomez tells that the moral tone of society, lay and ecclesiastic, was so improved by the energetic bishop that "men seemed to have been born again."

As to Ximenez' much criticised attitude toward the Moors, it was at one with its age. To reproach him with it is as unreasonable as to condemn Marcus Aurelius for having persecuted the Christians, or George Washington for having silently accepted negro slavery. A man, no matter how great his character, is limited somewhere by the standards of his period. The fifteenth century was far from being radical in the privileges it extended to free opinion. Even some generations later we find, in the Palatinate, when the Elector Frederick III turned from Lutheranism to Calvinism, in 1563, he forced all his subjects under pain of banishment, to turn with him. Within a few years his son changed them back to Lutheranism, only to have them, under the next ruler, constrained with severe punishments to again accept the Heidelberg catechism. The religious history of most of the states of Europe prove that the same theory was held: "cujus regio, ejus religio." Ximenez can plead more excuse for his attitude since in Spain was the problem of the more radical difference of Christianity and Islam. He felt, and the constant later revolts somewhat justified the idea, that a newly conquered people is not likely to remain loyal, when they are bound together against their ruler in an antagonistic creed. So he went to Granada in 1499 to labor for the conversion of the people.

At first he used much the same methods that prevail to-day in some of our cities, what we may call the soup-kitchen missionary system to evangelize the emigrant. Ximenez instructed the Mohammedan in doctrine, and he also gave presents to impress the oriental mind. So effectively did the method work that immense numbers of citizens embraced the faith. On one day four thousand were baptized. So far the treaty of the Conquest was not violated, since the conversions were voluntary. When, however, there was a revolt of those Moors who were angered by seeing the rapid spread of Christianity, harsher methods than persuasion were resorted to. The letter of the treaty was kept but its spirit, that reflected Isabella's magnanimous tolerance, was stretched indeed. The first uprising turned to open rebellion, and when this was put down, the majority of the citizens let themselves be baptized to avoid exile and confiscation. Though the two great prelates, the gentle Talavera and the indomitable Ximenez, burning with zeal, went about the city catechising and instructing the poorest, there were many thousands of Mohammedans who hated the religion to which outwardly they conformed. A child to-day can understand the futility of such conversions. No one denies that Ximenez was stern. He who loved learning with the passionate devotion of a Bede or an Erasmus, (we all know the remark of Francis I when confined at Alcalá, "one Spanish monk has done what it would take a line of kings in France to accomplish"), this same humanist scholar burned in public bonfire the Moslem books, only reserving the medical ones for Alcalá: surely this is proof of his grim sincerity.

When Isabella died, Ximenez took Ferdinand's side against his impertinent Austrian son-in-law. Philip I did not live long enough to involve Spain in an internecine war, her curse for ages; and it was the great statesman's hold on the government, at the time of the young king's sudden death, that saved the country from a revolution. Ferdinand had the man to whom he owed Castile, created a Cardinal, and he also appointed him Grand-Inquisitor.

Many hold the erroneous opinion that Ximenez was one of the founders of the Holy Office in Spain. It was established ten years before he came to court as Isabella's confessor, and it was only now, in his sixty-first year that he had control in it. True to his reforming character he set about changing what abuses had crept in. He fostered the better religious instruction of the newly converted; and he prosecuted the inquisitor Lucero, who had been guilty of injustice.

The great Cardinal-Archbishop was over threescore and ten when he undertook the expedition to Northern Africa. He had long burned to plant the Church again where it had flourished under St. Cyprian and St. Augustine. As the pirates of Oran were a terror in the Mediterranean, it was against that city he set out in the year 1509. His address to the troops before the battle, encouraging them against an enemy who had ravaged their coasts, dragged their children into slavery, and insulted the Christian name, roused the men to an heroic charge up the hill of Oran with Spain's battle cry _Santiago!_ on their lips. Of the vast treasure found in the city, Ximenez who had spent a fortune to fit out the expedition, only reserved the Moslem books for his University of Alcalá. For it must not be forgotten that in the midst of state questions, this remarkable man was carrying on the building and endowing of an University to whose halls the learned minds of Spain and Europe were invited. He was printing at his own expense the well-known Polyglot Bible, the first edition in their original texts of the Christian Scriptures. From his early years a close student of the Bible, he had learned Chaldaic and Hebrew for its better study; every day on his knees he read a chapter of the Holy Word. Besides these interests he found time to build various hospitals, libraries, and churches, to organize summer retreats for the health of his professors, to print and distribute free works on agriculture, to give dowries to distressed women, to visit the sick in person, and to feed daily thirty poor in his palace.

Ferdinand, a good ruler, but suspicious and ungrateful, never had much love for the Cardinal. Yet on his deathbed he left him Regent of Castile, saying that a better leader on account of his virtues and love of justice could not be found to reëstablish order and morality, and only wishing he were a little more pliable. Some idea of Ximenez' genius may be gathered from a hasty review of his Regency, which covered the last two years of his life. It stands an astonishing feat of noble

## activity. He brought order into the finances and paid the crown debts.

He introduced the militia system into the army, proving that men fight better when they defend their own homes. He strengthened the navy to help break the Moorish pirate Barbarossa who controlled the sea. He restored the dockyards of Seville. He crushed a French invasion in Navarre, and put down local disorders in Málaga and other places, for the nobles took this opportunity to again assert themselves. He adjusted troubles with both the ex-queens, Juana la Loca and Germaine de Foix. It was just four months before his death that the Polyglot Bible was finished. When the young son of the printer, dressed in his best attire, ran with the last sheets to the Cardinal, Ximenez exclaimed fervently: "I thank thee, O most high God, that thou hast brought this work to its longed-for end!" To-day the more scientific methods of philology have put the Complutensian Polyglot in the shade, but none deny that for its period it was a notable work.