Part 13
It was a regal Christian palace long before his time; for his great-grandfather, John the Great and his wife Philippa of Lancaster, had adapted the Moorish alcazar for their summer residence and made it their favourite palace, their grandson and successor Affonso being born here. But it was in the palmy times of Dom Manuel that the palace of Cintra became the centre of culture, wit, and poetry, where gaily-clad courtiers listened to the wondrous tales of Portuguese explorers returned from Africa and the Indies, and poets sang the national epics telling of the opening of the mystic East with its wealth untold to Portuguese commerce and dominion.
Though the outside of the palace is Portuguese Manueline, the interior exhibits at every step portions of the original Moorish edifice unaltered. The vast kitchen, with its enormous champagne-bottle chimneys in the centre, has never ceased to be available for culinary uses from the time of the Arab kings until to-day; whilst the dining-room is pure Moorish, lined with beautiful Arab tiles. Arab tiles, indeed, remain in many rooms, and the chancel of the chapel, once of course a mosque, is exquisitely paved with them. There is a beautiful little Moorish _patio_ too, with its marble fountain and laurels, that might be a portion of a palace at Fez or Mequinez now, so pure and intact is it. The older rooms of the palace generally are dark, for the Moorish architects shut out the sun wherever possible, and the up and down floors on all sorts of queer levels impress upon one the immense antiquity of the place as a dwelling-house.
The finest rooms are the hall of magpies, the hall of swans, and the hall of stags. The first-named is a square apartment with beautiful Moorish tiles, and a coved ceiling covered with paintings of magpies, each one with a motto issuing from its mouth saying, _Por Bem_, “with good intent.” The legend told is that Queen Philippa one day surprised John the Great, who was a gallant lover, kissing a maid of honour and offering her a rose. The Plantagenet queen had a temper of her own, which John probably feared more than the Castilian charge up the slope of Aljubarrota, and the king in exculpation cried to his wife, “Por Bem”; as who should say, _Honi soit qui mal y pense_. The reputation of John was such that his excuse passed from mouth to mouth derisively, the queen’s sycophantic maids repeating it with such significant emphasis, and so frequently, that the king to shame them adopted “Por Bem” as his motto, and had his reception hall at Cintra painted with the chattering birds repeating it.
[Illustration: MANUELINE WINDOWS IN THE OLD PALACE, CINTRA]
Another fine Moorish hall is called the hall of swans, of which the ceiling is painted with those birds, in memory of a pair of them kept in the _patio_ below, and given to King Manuel by his brother-in-law, Charles V., as a very great rarity. Another large apartment, with a conical roof, was constructed by King Manuel himself, who gave to it the name of the hall of stags. Here the king collected the armorial achievements of all the Portuguese nobility. Seventy-four stags are ranged around the room, each one having dependent from its neck the scutcheon of a noble family—except one, that of Tavora, which the great minister Pombal, in the eighteenth century, ordered to be erased—whilst upon a frieze running round the hall is the following verse:—
“Pois com esforços e leaes Servicios, foram ganhados, Com estes e outros taes Devem ser conservados.”
“By prowess stout and loyal fame These honours bright were gained; By others like or eke the same They needs must be retained.”
The small and plain hall of audience or justice has at the end a seat of tiled brick upon which the Sovereigns sat, and here tradition says the Council met, summoned by the rash young King Sebastian in 1578, to sanction the crusading attack upon Morocco upon which he had set his heart. All his fiery zeal and imperiousness were needed to persuade his nobles to agree to an adventure from which many foresaw disaster. But the ambitious youth had his way, and his mysterious fate, never solved when he disappeared for ever from the eyes of men at the battle of Alcacer Kebir, ended the male line of the house of Avis which John I. had begun at Aljubarrota two hundred years before. In this gloomy chamber the die was cast, and with the loss of Sebastian his uncle Philip II. and his descendants became kings of Portugal for a century.
A more modern tragedy was enacted within these ancient walls. The vicious young debauchee, Affonso VI., was deprived of his crown and his wife by his brother Dom Pedro, in 1667; and here in the palace, in a room called after him, the wretched king passed the last twelve years of his imprisonment, shut off entirely from the sight of men. The windows of his prison-chamber still show the sockets wherein the strong bars were set, and a deep groove worn in the brick floor along one side marks the spot where the footsteps of the caged king, as he paced up and down for years before his bars, have worn his enduring epitaph. Up in a little closely barred cell overlooking the choir of the chapel, where Affonso used to hear mass, he died suddenly in 1683.
The old palace of Cintra, indeed, is full of memories, a place to linger in and about, rather than to rush through at the tail of a guide; although it must be confessed that the guardian in this case does take an intelligent interest in the objects under his care. Cintra, in short, is beautiful beyond compare in certain directions; but, as happens in most frequented show-places, the chief beauties can only be enjoyed by the permission of others, and by the use of a silver key. The beautiful villa-gardens are jealously shut in by high walls and forbidden by gates marked private; the palace of the Penha, a royal residence, is approached with bated breath and whispering humbleness, and the palace in the town, though not now inhabited by royalty, is still only shown on special application. But there is one thing in Cintra that may be enjoyed freely and uncontrolled by all, the finest thing that Cintra can show, the view from the town of that stupendous Moorish fortress on its precipitous height. In sylvan beauty, in sweetness and freshness of atmosphere, even in its sublime prospects of mountain, vale, and sea, Bussaco may rival and, in some respects, surpass it; but the long-stretched yellow battlements and massive towers piled upon the eternal granite boulders, sheer up a thousand feet and more over the little pleasure-town and its leafy ravines, would be worth the voyage to Portugal alone to see, even though the gardens of the rich were more reserved and exclusive than they are.
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Footnote 2:
Byron thus speaks of this climb up the hill of Cintra:—
“Then slowly climb the many winding way, And frequent turn to linger as you go, From loftier rocks new loveliness survey, And rest ye at Our Lady’s house of woe.”
This last epithet for the monastery, which is now the royal palace, is an error arising from a misunderstanding, which Byron shares with many other people to the present day. The original name of the venerated image of the Virgin, after which the monastery was named, is “Nossa Senhora da Penha,” “Our Lady of the Rock.” For some reason the place is still often referred to as the “Pena,” which means “sorrow,” and the Saint becomes “Our Lady of Woe,” as Byron called it.
Footnote 3:
Two German ecclesiastics, who in 1450 were sent to Lisbon by the Emperor Frederick III. to ask for the hand of the Portuguese Infanta Leonor, thus mention Cintra in the narrative of their voyage: “Oh! Cintra, most pleasant place and royal garden, with a little river in which there are good trout. Here, too, there are devout brethren in a Jeronomite monastery, who live according to their rule.”—_Historia Desponsationis Frederici III. cum Eleanora Lusitanica._
Footnote 4:
When Byron visited Cintra in 1809, Beckford, whose fame as an author rests upon his curious Eastern tale of “Vathek,” had left his villa at Monserrate for the more pretentious splendours of Fonthill, and the Peninsular war was pending.
“And yonder towers the Prince’s palace fair; There thou, too, Vathek, England’s wealthiest son, Once formed thy paradise, as not aware, When wanton wealth her mightiest deeds hath done, Meek peace voluptuous lures was ever wont to shun. Here didst thou dwell, here schemes of pleasure plan, Beneath yon mountain’s ever beauteous brow; But now, as if a thing unblest by man, Thy fairy dwelling is as lone as thou.”
VIII LISBON
No capital city in Europe, with the exception of Constantinople, can compare with Lisbon in beauty of situation. On approaching the city up the Tagus from the sea the panorama presented is most striking; although the unæsthetic Portuguese have done their best to mar it by fringing the foreshore with possibly profitable, but certainly hideous and offensive, industrial and commercial excrescences, from the noble and historic tower of Belem at the mouth of the river, almost hidden in the midst of defiling gasometers, to where the city merges into the country at Poço do Bispo three miles away. Piled up upon a grand amphitheatre of hills, the city rises tier over tier, the river opening out before it in the form of an extensive bay. Away above Belem the vast square Ajuda palace stands conspicuously upon a hill-top backed afar off by the huge mass of Cintra; whilst at the other end of the panorama towards the east the ancient citadel-palace of St. Jorge looks down from its height upon the busy river-bank and the central valley running inland, in which the rectangular main streets are cramped.[5]
The noble Praça do Comercio, Black Horse Square, as English visitors call it, fronts the river in the foreground, the most imposing public square in Europe, with the exception perhaps of the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Previous to the great earthquake of 1755 a royal palace stood upon a portion of this site, and the valley behind it was a closely crowded congeries of narrow and filthy lanes. In my manuscript already referred to of Lord Strathmore’s travels in the country, an interesting account is given of the condition of things in 1760, when he saw the ruined city; and a quotation from his description of the plans then existing for rebuilding the portion destroyed will give a good idea of the present aspect, since the plans were executed precisely.
“The prospect,” writes Lord Strathmore, “of this great city rising from its ruins is still distant, as besides ye arsenal there are but three houses built upon the intended plan. The plan of the streets and squares is extremely well imagin’d. There is a pretty broad valley between two hills, running down to ye Tagus in ye part where ye palace stood. Thro’ this they intend to make their principal street, all ye houses regularly built after one model and _tirés au cordon_, terminating in a noble square open in front to ye river, which is of great breadth here, with old Lisbon upon high ground opposite. The other three sides [of the square] will be surrounded by a very handsome, narrow arcade, with public buildings above and an equestrian statue of ye King in ye centre. The other streets will likewise be regular, and will lead at right angles into ye great street from ye hills on each side. Tho’ ye design is extremely noble ye architecture is as bad [_i.e._ as before] except in ye square already described. They seem to consider ye front of a house only as a high wall with holes larger or smaller to admit light as occasion requires.”
This exactly pictures Lisbon as it stands to-day. From Black Horse Square on the Tagus bank run the Rua Augusta and two other parallel streets, called respectively the streets of “gold” and “silver,” straight as a line to the busy centre of Lisbon, the fine parallelogram, called the Praça de Dom Pedro, or the Rocio, paved with its inevitable mosaic of black and white waves, at the end of which is the theatre of Donna Maria, the central railway station, and the entrance to the handsome Avenida da Libertade, a garden and tree-shaded drive of good houses occupying the whole of the narrow valley for nearly two miles into the suburbs. On either side of the Avenida and the principal rectangular streets in the valley the hills rise precipitously, and when the tops of these have been surmounted a series of sudden dips and rapid ascents succeed east and west. The city is, therefore, a most fatiguing one to explore, as to go anywhere away from the river-bank, which with the exception of Black Horse Square is irretrievably ugly and squalid, and from the streets “_tirés au cordon_” in the central valley, formidable hills have to be faced. This of late years has been much relieved by a complete system of electric trams, which practically cover the city, and by the instalment of funicular railways and lifts up some of the more difficult ascents.
The city, on the whole, is decidedly disappointing at close quarters. The straight principal streets and rectangular cross thoroughfares, with their flat, prosaic architecture, the high white houses all alike, are the antipodes of picturesqueness, whilst the authorities seem perversely to have done their utmost to make the river-side as ugly as Rotherhithe or Wapping. This is the more to be regretted, as since I first knew the city many years ago, great tracts of land have been reclaimed from the sludge and ooze of the foreshore which might well have been treated with some regard for public amenity. The large strip reclaimed from the river, however, almost as far as Belem, has for the most part been turned into untidy deserts of dust, shabby-looking docks, and dumping-places for débris. The utter lack of æsthetic taste is observable on all hands. The terrace before the king’s residence, the palace of the Necesidades, for instance, is upon the brow of a low hill, and commands a splendid view of the river and the opposite shore for many miles on either hand; and yet even here, between the palace and the river factory chimneys belch black smoke day and night, hopelessly ugly industrial buildings block the prospect, and the reclaimed foreshore and docks are as desolate as elsewhere.
Of the pure picturesque, indeed, little remains in Lisbon; but what still exists must be sought amongst the fisher folk on the river-side, and especially in the markets that have been built on the reclaimed land of the Ribeira Nova, not far from the centre of the city and close to the Hotel Central. It was pleasant to turn into the cool, spacious, covered fish-market out of the brilliant sunlight, which even quite early in the day drove people to welcome shade. The air was clear, crisp, and elastic, and every object seemed to sparkle with light and colour. Inside the market hundreds of people were bargaining quietly, for even here the absence of vociferation was remarkable; servants buying their stocks of provisions for the day, housewives of the humbler class doing their own marketing, baskets on their arms, and women fish hawkers by the score laying in their stocks. They were all shoeless, as usual, wearing under their vast head burden black pork-pie hats over red or yellow kerchiefs, and they have girdles below the hips into which the upper portion of their pleated skirts is drawn to relieve the waist of their weight. Upon the ground, spread around the women sellers, were great heaps of glistening fish; cod, dory, skate, whiting, and large quantities of squids or cuttlefish, which are much liked by the Portuguese poor.
[Illustration: ON THE QUAY, LISBON.]
The male fish-sellers of Lisbon are for a wonder even more picturesque than the women; for here on the Tagus the seafarers of the south are first noticeable, quite distinct in racial characteristics as they are from those of the north. These Lisbon fishermen go barefooted, which the poorest men of the north never do, they wear breeches only to the knee, girt by a crimson sash, and the hanging tasselled bag-cap falls and waves over their shoulder as they loup along with a peculiar springing gait under a long flexible pole balanced transversely across the shoulders, at each end of which a flat, shallow basket of fish is suspended. The vegetable market adjoining that devoted to fish is a brilliant sight in this favoured land. Heaps of scarlet pimentos and tomatoes are flanked by enormous yellow gourds, and mountains of purple grapes incredibly cheap, pomegranates, and big luscious pears jostle piles of humbler vegetables of the kitchen, and some of the groups of bright-coloured produce seem to reproduce the old pictures of the mythical cornucopia overflowing with all the best fruits of the earth.
It is a long and tiring walk from here to Belem, but two lines of electric trams go thither, one along the river-bank and the other by the parallel route past Alcantara, and either will serve our turn. Belem is now but a suburb of Lisbon, continuous lines of houses covering the two miles of the route. There still remains, however, something of distinction in this royal village, full of memories as it is of Portugal’s great day of power and wealth. For here it was that at length the dream came true, and those long vigils of the Fortunate King on the savage peak of Cintra were rewarded by the coming of Vasco da Gama to the squat, sturdy old tower of Belem, that had been in his yearning thoughts through so many trials and dangers. King Manuel greeted his great subject, who had brought to his native land the potentiality of wealth illimitable, here in the village of Belem, at the mouth of the Tagus; and as the explorer stepped ashore, the king, overjoyed at his coming, swore to build upon that very spot a Jeronomite monastery splendid enough to be worthy even of that great occasion. And he kept his word; for two years afterwards, in 1500, the first course was laid of a building which surpasses all others in its particular style, and in some respects is one of the most remarkable ecclesiastical structures in the world.
A long line of church and monastery adjoining runs parallel with the sea, the conventual portion partly in ruins but now in course of reconstruction, and the eye is at first perfectly bewildered by the richness of the details of the doors and windows of the edifice. Here Manueline architecture is at its earliest and best, before extravagance like that of the unfinished chapels at Batalha overwhelmed it. Here the orthodox florid Gothic and Renaissance styles are leavened, but not obliterated, by the new spirit of expansion and aspiration that found its national expression in what is called Manueline. The west door of the church, where the monastic buildings join it, is extremely beautiful. On each side are rich canopies under which kneel the king and queen with their patron saints, and smaller figures exquisitely carved surround the rest of the door, which is surmounted by flamboyant pinnacles in the Manueline taste. The general idea of the windows, which are very large and high, is of a round-topped arch three or four courses or orders deep, each course being set with bosses of a different, but always elaborate, pattern, an outer moulding representing a twisted cable or twined branches in infinite variety, ending in a series of pinnacles, surrounding the window on the surface of the wall.
The great south doorway facing the road and the Tagus, the principal door of entrance, almost defies description by its richness and complexity of ornament, this and the cloisters of the church being perhaps the best specimen of Gothic Manueline in Portugal. Between the two doorways into which the entrance is divided there is a pillar or column, upon which, under a rich Gothic canopy, stands a large figure of a man wearing a tabard. The scheme of decoration is carried up by a series of flamboyant pinnacles and canopied figures beautifully interlaced to the top of the aisle wall. The two great windows flanking this gorgeous doorway match it in magnificence, and one feels on turning away from this monument of human skill and ingenuity that here the short-lived art of the Portuguese Renaissance has reached its highest flight.
[Illustration: THE SOUTH DOOR AT BELEM]
The impression, however, hardly survives the moment when you cross the threshold and enter the church itself; for here you see an interior unlike any other great temple. The first impression is one of immense unencumbered spaciousness. The ordinary arrangement of nave and aisles does not exist, but from the floor there spring straight up to a height that seems prodigious six slender isolated marble pillars, three on each side. They form no continued arcade, although, of course, they are aligned, and each pillar is decorated lavishly in high relief with Renaissance ornamentation in panels, with canopied niches half-way up their height. From the top of each column spring a series of branches like the fronds of a palm-leaf, which, meeting in beautiful graceful curves, form the intricate series of bossed groins which compose the vaulted marble roof. At the west end of the church three low-pointed Manueline arches support the choir-loft, and along the north wall twelve Manueline doorways are ranged, with rich canopied niches above them, whilst the magnificent transept, with its gorgeous ceiling and royal chapels and tombs, and its vast Manueline chancel arch of twisted cables and cordage supporting rich canopied pulpits, altogether produce an effect of overpowering majesty.
Here in the chancel repose, in splendid tombs, the ashes of the king, Manuel the Fortunate, and his son, John III., the two great builders of the fane; and here too lie, in a transept chapel, Vasco da Gama himself, and Camões, who enshrined in deathless epic the spirit of exalted enterprise of which the great explorer was the personification, and the Infante, Prince Henry, the prophetic inspirer. Kings, queens, princes, and princesses lie around in fretted sepulchres—that ill-used Catharine of Braganza, Queen-Consort of England, amongst them, here where she passed the long years of her widowhood—but their very names are for the most part forgotten now; and this memorable church of Belem, whilst its daring beauty stands, will remain the shrine of the two greatest figures of Portugal’s golden age, and of the “Fortunate Monarch,” Manuel, in whose reign the vision of the Infante was realised.