Part 16

I was bound for the ancient city of Evora, and I could have gone by train to Pinhal Novo junction, where the train to the south was to receive me. But the plain over which Palmella lords it had captivated me, and I decided to traverse by road the ten miles to the junction. As I drove out of Setubal, with its clean white houses, and gaily decked women in a long kneeling row washing their linen in the river, the glamour of the south was over all. Cactus hedges lined the way, the glistening green of the orange trees with the abundant fruit already showing, the bronzed vines and the grey olive orchards chequered the light red earth; the rolling slopes were thickly wooded to the summits, and nestling amidst the verdure on many hill-tops were glistening white houses, abandoned cloisters, or shrines of pilgrimage. The aspect was Andalusian, as were the traits of the people, and North Portugal seemed very far away. Before us always towered the huge castle of Palmella, with its tremendous stretches of battlements and square towers, seen first from one side and then from another, as we gradually wound round and round the base of the eminence upon which it stands. The way is always upward, and on all sides spread below us, growing more extensive as we round each successive rising turn of the hill, is the fertile plain and the sea beyond. Wheat, maize, olives, and oranges grow here luxuriantly, the lower folds of the sandy hillsides are covered with vines, and the rich brown velvet trunks of the stripped cork-trees are all along the way.

My coachman is one of the talkative type of south Portuguese, almost oriental in the voluble vehemence of his manner, and his eagerness to impart information. Ah! yes Troia, Setubal, and Palmella were all very well in their way: but Evora! That indeed is a place. What a pity his Excellency was not going to see Evora. His Excellency replied that Evora was his present destination, and the patriotic Eborense, for, of course, the voluble coachman came from Evora, broke out into unrestrained panegyric of his native city. Lisbon was nothing, Oporto was nothing, to Evora; why, Evora was a great city and a capital when they were villages: Evora made Portugal what it is—and much more to the same effect the wild-eyed coachman rattled off with much gesticulation, whilst the patient horses, left to themselves, slowly toiled up the winding road to the town of Palmella, now to the right now to the left, and anon straight overhead, apparently inaccessible.

At length we entered the town, a poor squalid looking place upon the steep slope; and whilst the tired horses rested I climbed the top of the hill to the castle. The tremendous outer defences covered with yellow lichen, and the round bastions of the inner circumvallation, are evidently of Moorish origin, whilst the great square battlemented towers inside appear to be mediæval. The whole of the top of the hill is occupied by the fortress; the outer walls following the contour, with corner bastions on the spurs of the summit. The views obtained from the battlements of the salient bastions are tremendous. The central keep, standing high above the rest, is veiled with mist, though where I stand upon the battlements is clear and bright. Over the vast plain spread below me bathed in sunlight dark patches of cloud wander, and, on the south side beyond it, is Setubal and the sea; whilst on the other, towards the north, far away stretches the broad estuary of the Tagus, and the distant mountains loom upon the west. Ancient as the castle is, it shows signs of more recent habitation than is usual, indeed a row of humble dependencies within the walls are still occupied by poor people. The roofs of the principal buildings are everywhere destroyed; and upon the very ancient walls of one portion there rises the ruin of a sixteenth-century palace; whilst by the side of the great mediæval keep is the shell of a beautiful chapel of Romanesque Gothic. The inner gateway of the fortress bears upon it a tablet with the arms of Portugal and the date of 1689; and I was informed by one of the residents in the row of dwellings that the place had only been entirely dismantled in living memory. All is silent and abandoned now; and the great Moorish stronghold which Affonso Henriques captured from the Moors in 1147, the royal fortress of the Commandery of the Order of Santiago, and the seat of the powerful Dukes of Palmella, as the place successively has been, has now become what for all future time it will remain, a worthy compeer with the rest of the proud old Portuguese hill-top fortresses, whose sturdy walls dismantled though they be, refuse to crumble into dust. Long may they rear their noble towers intact from man’s destroying hand, and tell their silent lesson of heroic times to a generation that sorely needs it.

As we wind down the hill again from the poverty-stricken town beneath the castle walls, carts of little black grapes meet us winding up the hill for the belated vintage, and through the open doors of granges we see the wide shallow tubs being filled with grapes trodden under the feet of swarthy lads. The air is soft and close as the sun sets red and orange behind the tree-clad hills, and I pass the hour waiting for the train at Pinhal Novo under a grove of lofty eucalyptus trees, whilst the shrill twittering of millions of cicadas, and the languorous perfume in the air tell me that I have left the strenuous land behind, and am in a clime where to strive is folly.

The next morning Evora revealed its quaint charms to me, for in the night when I arrived all seemed gloomy and threatening in its narrow tortuous ways. Under a glowing blue sky and the fierce sun the place was charming, and few cities in Portugal, if any, present so many attractions to the archæologist, the antiquarian, or the simple seeker after the picturesque. The long irregular space of the principal praça is lined by ancient arcades like the plazas in Spanish towns, and the people who flock hither and thither under the covered ways are purely Andalusian in appearance, the men wearing sheepskin _zamarras_ over gaudy waistcoats, and upon their heads wide-brimmed velvet _calañeses_ surmount bright-coloured kerchiefs. We have almost lost sight now of the ox as a draught animal, and big mules, drawing a somewhat light waggon, are universal.

At unexpected corners and unlikely angles relics of unfathomed antiquity meet you: a Roman tower built into a sixteenth-century wall, a Moorish arch, a low-browed doorway that may go back to the time of the Goths, though the house to which it gives entrance may be comparatively modern, fragments of palaces and beautiful bits of Manueline are everywhere. For this city of Evora is an epitome of the historical vicissitudes of Portugal, and under each successive régime has played a principal part. Ebora of the Phœnicians and Iberians, Liberalitas Julia of the Romans, seat of government of the patriot rebel Sertorius, who here defied the legions of the Cæsars (80 B.C.), Gothic capital of Lusitania, Yebora of the Moslems for four hundred years, and now chief city of Alemtejo and the south—the walls and towers of its Latin and Gothic masters are still clearly traceable, and the mediæval defences still surround the ancient city.

Its modern Portuguese history dates from its capture from the Moors in 1165 by the freebooter Gerald and his band of desperadoes, who surrendered the place to King Affonso Henriques in exchange for pardon and reward; and from that time its archbishops have vied with those of Braga in the north in wealth and dignity. Infantes of Portugal have often worn its mitre, and one of them, Cardinal Henry, the last of his race, became king. It is difficult to realise, looking at this crumbling old city of fifteen thousand inhabitants, the magnificence of which it was the scene in times when the population must have been much smaller than at present. I have before me as I write an account written at the time by an Italian ecclesiastic in the train of the papal Legate, who came to Portugal in 1571, of the reception of the embassy by the Archbishop of Evora (João de Mello), on which occasion lavishness seems to have outdone itself. The king’s lieutenant, with five hundred followers and ten thousand armed militia of the province, had met the Legate some miles outside the city, and at the gates the governor and magistracy awaited the visitors in full panoply, with several bands of trumpeters dressed in cloth of gold and scarlet caps, many companies of halberdiers smartly garbed in various uniforms, black drummers and cymbal players on velvet-draped mules, the mayor and aldermen and civic officers with their respective armed escorts, followed by—

“Ten boys dressed in green, dancing a Morris-dance to the sound of tambourines, and then ten more dressed in yellow with fife and drum, also dancing, each one carrying an arch which they intertwined and disentangled with great rapidity and dexterity. Then came ten boys dressed as pilgrims dancing round a drum, and singing the praises of the Legate. Then came ten women gipsies dancing their usual dance to the sound of the drum, and performing dexterous tricks with wands and scarfs. Following them came ten gipsy men with a drum, and placing themselves alternately with the women, they made a very pretty chain. Finally at the gate of the city there were ten boys dressed in white with branches in their hands, dancing round a carrying chair of red velvet striped with gold, which was carried by eight little boys with white kilts, and golden haloes round their heads. They bowed low to the Legate as the rest did separately when they danced their measure, and then all together, the dances continuing all the while before the Legate. The archbishop of Evora entertained the Legate and prelates sumptuously at his palace, and the _fidalgos_ splendidly received the rest in their houses. The apartments were lined with the finest Flanders hangings, and the floors were covered with green sprigs and rushes, which is the custom here at weddings and feasts. They usually remain at table two or three hours. Each person has a separate cup, and when dinner is half through the tablecloth is changed. The roast meats are placed upon the table already cut up and covered, and they are wont to put into these dishes and others, eggs, many spices, and sugar. The viands are not sumptuous, but are abundant, and they say most of the dishes are Moorish. They only serve one dish at a time, and this it is that makes their dinners last so long, whilst they pass the time chatting, drinking healths, and helping each other to what is brought to table, they being very gay the while.”[9]

Of this splendour in the Evora of the past little is now apparent to the visitor, though the modern Barahona palace, of which, and its wealthy owner, the Eborenses seem very proud, could probably furnish forth a good twentieth-century equivalent for it; and behind the closed doors and frowning walls of many ancient noble palaces, now mostly in the hands of rich landowners and cultivators of the district, are doubtless luxurious interiors.

From the Hotel Eborense, with its sixteenth-century outside staircase and trellised balcony-landing, looking upon a quaint, tree-shaded, little praça, I descend through narrow streets, that remind me of Toledo—streets that for the most part still bear historic names, though of course the inevitable “Serpa Pinto” has modernised one of them. Peace and stillness reign over all, for the sun stings shrewdly; and those who are obliged to be out linger drowsily under white walls and the frequent shade of acacias, cork-trees, and vine-trellises. A ruined church and a vast monastery attached, and now used as a barrack, first attract my attention, for the edifice shows signs of past magnificence, and the white, roofless walls and façade against the indigo sky form a beautiful picture even in their decay. An Augustinian monastery-church, that of Our Lady of Grace, I am told it is; and over the broken portico I read that it was built “_sub imp. Divi Joannis III., Patris Patriæ._” This John III. was the son of the “Fortunate” Manuel, and was one of the principal builders of Belem; so that we are justified in expecting something good from him in architecture. The expectation is not disappointed, for the work is a gem in its uncommon way. It is, indeed, but little touched with the Manueline taste of the time it was built (1524); and has more affinity with the fine cloister of John III. at Thomar, built by the same monarch. It is, in fact, almost the only specimen I have seen in Portugal of the pure Italian Renaissance in the style of Michael Angelo. Columns, trophies, shields, and decorative statuary, all tell the same story of direct Florentine influence, as apart from the less virile Raphaelesque tendency of the French Renaissance, which is much more common in Portugal, and, indeed, elsewhere. Even in the later decorations of this very church of Graça the graved medallions, festoons, and delicate panel carving in low relief, show that, even a few years after the church was built, the French style was preferred.

It is but a step from the Graça to a splendid church which is deservedly one of the boasts of Evora, and, for skilful solidity of construction, one of the most extraordinary churches in Portugal, if not in Europe. Situated in a wide praça, and flanked on one side by shady groves of cork-trees, stands the great square church of S. Francisco, all that remains intact of an important Franciscan monastery of immense antiquity. Adjoining it, until recent times, stood a royal palace, of which this church and monastery were privileged to form a part; and the Franciscans of Evora were altogether very lordly monks indeed. Without a tower, as is usual with monastery churches, the big square building, with its rows of battlemented roof ridges, looks more like a fortress than a church; and from the peculiarity of its construction, it is safe to say that, unless the hand of man or some great natural convulsion destroys it, the next four centuries will have as little effect upon it as the last four have had since its construction at the end of the fifteenth century.

The great west porch extends the whole width of the building in fine Romanesque-Gothic. The arches of this porch are almost Moorish in form, with elaborated twisted-cord capitals; and the peculiar arrangement of supports noticed in the nave at Alcobaça is also seen here, where the great inner supports of the arches do not reach the ground, but start suddenly three-quarters up the pillar, producing the effect of the lower portion having been cut away. The double doorway itself is fine early Manueline marble, surmounted by the pelican and young, the device of John II., and the armillary sphere, which was that of his son, King Manuel the Fortunate. The inside of the church is very striking. The immense width of nave (42 feet) is unbroken by pillars or aisles, the side chapels being apparently embedded in the walls and separated from each other by fine pure Gothic pillars on the wall surface, each pillar being carried right up to the spring of the roof and its uninterrupted arch carried over to the corresponding pillar on the other side, the effect being one of great width and spaciousness, as the length of the nave to the chancel arch is no less than eighty-eight feet.

The chapels, some of which are very beautiful with carved figures of the good sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish period, are separated from the nave by a handsome black and white marble balustrade of the same period. The transepts are exceptionally majestic, and, like the nave, of good unadorned Romanesque-Gothic, but the tiled walls and overloaded altars—the latter still greatly venerated by the faithful—sadly mar the simple grandeur of their main plan. The chancel is magnificent, with its elaborately bossed and groined roof, and fine carved choir-stalls, the work of the Fleming, Oliver of Ghent, who carved the now plundered stalls for the Templars’ church at Thomar; and over the noble chancel arch again the devices of John II. and Manuel, with the arms of Portugal, are carved.

In the chapels, and especially in one of the transepts, are some paintings of the highest interest; but the light is so bad that it is impossible to inspect them carefully. They can, however, be seen sufficiently well—notwithstanding their deplorable condition—to prove that some of the great mysterious Flemish-Portuguese masters of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries must have painted them. One representing St. Anthony preaching to the fishes is perfectly exquisite in its minute conscientiousness. I was informed that in the bishop’s palace twelve fine paintings of the same school, attributed to the brothers Van Eyck, are kept in similar semi-darkness and neglect; but these I could not see. It is a thousand pities that these art treasures and others of the same sort which I have mentioned,[10] should not be rescued and reverently kept.

A peculiarity of this church of St. Francisco, as of the cathedral of Evora, which I shall mention presently, is that the brown granite blocks of which it is constructed are clearly marked out with staring white divisions of cement, either real or simulated. The effect is one of very questionable taste, but the peculiarity is not a modern innovation, and the series of white transverse lines traced upon the brown background has some attraction from its very strangeness. The story goes that this monastery-church, founded originally in 1224, twice fell down, and when, after the second disaster late in the fifteenth century, the famous architect, Martin Lourenço, was commissioned to construct a new church, he swore that his building, at least, should never share the fate of its predecessors. Instead of a single main outer wall he built two on each side of the church, all of similar height, the space between the inner and outer walls being about five feet or less, and in the lower portion of this space the side chapels are accommodated. The two walls were tied together by transverse walls of similar strength and height between the chapels, and upon each of these transverse walls, which are carried over the roof to the opposite pair of walls, similarly constructed, the roof arches rest. The roof is, therefore, divided into six independent sections, each one supported by its own separate walls and arch. As if this were not enough, a similar arrangement was made below the ground, where corresponding sets of transverse walls were carried across to the other side, and thus the whole nave consisted of six complete and self-supporting bodies joined together. Even this did not satisfy Martin Lourenço. He built yet another wall longitudinally along the central ridge of the roof, and a similar one underground along the same axis binding together both above and below the transverse sections from end to end, and increasing the stability of the building by the added weight. All this it is, of course, impossible to see from the inside, but from the praça the top battlements of the four long lines of wall and the roof-ridge are discernible, and the skeleton of the church, so to speak, can be understood.

A door in the transept leads to an extraordinary chapel of considerable size (58 feet long by 34 broad), divided into a nave and two aisles, the whole of the walls, pillars, and ceiling of which are lined or constructed of skulls and other human bones, arranged in symmetrical patterns. The remains of many thousands of human beings are contained in this ghastly chamber, probably constructed by the monks in the seventeenth century from the contents of ancient crypts and charnel-houses. The specially venerated figure of our Lord, of which this was formerly the chapel, has now been transferred to an adjoining apartment better adapted for modern worship.

Evora stands upon a gentle eminence in the midst of a vast fertile plain, surrounded by distant mountains, and upon the very summit of the hill, hidden away between narrow, winding streets leading up from the main arcaded praça, stands the venerable Sé—the cathedral of the archbishopric. In a quiet little open space it rears its two solid, square, granite Romanesque towers of the twelfth century, flanked by the whitewashed, monastic-looking palace of the archbishop, the two towers being united by a pure Gothic doorway porch which fills the space between them. The inner doorway pillars are adorned by early Gothic statues of the disciples, all so direct and vivid as to put to shame the affected elaborations of a later time. Slabs in the porch over ancient sarcophagi in Gothic niches tell that all this has been restored in recent years; but it is easy to see that here, at least, the restorer has been reverent and has spoilt nothing.

Like most of the Portuguese cathedrals of the period the first effect produced by the interior is that of grave massiveness. The narrow nave and aisles separated by clustered Romanesque pillars, supporting early Gothic arches, very slightly pointed, and a graceful triforium, have all the beauty of serene severity.[11] Here again, the clustered pillars shoot sheer up to the spring of the roof, and carry an arch over to the other side, and the cimborio or lantern at the intersection of the transepts and the nave is especially striking. The pillars that support it on four sides, chancel, nave, and two transepts, are as bold and aspiring as those of Ely, and seem to cry out aloud in exalted triumphant devotion. To gaze up at this cimborio with its lovely groining and its graceful spandrils carried to a prodigious height at one sweep is a sensation worth coming from England to experience.

High up on the wall of the nave there is roughly sculptured the life-sized figure of a man, bearing upon his breast a cartouche with the Gothic letters C. C. E. cut upon it, representing, as local antiquarians insist, the figure of the twelfth-century architect of the building, Martin Dominguez, and the coats-of-arms and sepulchral figures in chapels and on walls are many. One florid Gothic sarcophagus in the south transept is that of André de Resende, a relative of Garcia de Resende, the earliest Portuguese historian, whose house, with its beautiful Manueline windows, still stands in Evora. The chapels on each side of the cathedral are much disfigured by tawdry decorations and curly gilt wood carvings, but several have finely painted altar-pieces, badly lit and uncared for; and one altar, Our Lady of the Angel, against a pillar in the nave, evidently much venerated, for it is hung all over with votive offerings, is grotesquely hideous, with its ill-carved, big, staring doll upon a gilt monstrosity of a stand.