Part 9
Connected with the walls of the ancient castle, and upon a somewhat higher level than the keep, there stands the high round church of the Templars, with buttresses of immense strength reaching to the parapet, and a crumbling square bell tower upon one of its faces. Upon an ancient slab let into the sides of the church an inscription tells how Dom Affonso, first King of Portugal, and Gualdrim Paes, master of the Portuguese Templars, constructed this edifice in 1108. Joined to this ancient structure is one of the most astounding specimens of Manueline architecture in Portugal, built in the early sixteenth century, when all the country was pulsating with new life and eager longings. It is the choir and chapter-house, and behind them is the ruin of the great monastery of the Order of Christ. Words are weak to convey an idea of the capricious splendour of the choir and chapter-house so far as they remain undefaced, for later ages have done their best to spoil the edifice. Eight cloisters have been built around it, and tacked on to it, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its lovely Manueline doorway has been marred, and the east end of the building blocked as high as its upper windows by the “Cloister of the Philips.”
[Illustration: THE CHOIR AND CHAPTER-HOUSE, THOMAR.]
But notwithstanding all the vandalism, enough of the Manueline building remains intact to strike the beholder with reverent wonder at the intricate beauty of the work, and the inexhaustible invention of the design. The doorway stands in a recess reaching to the parapet, and enclosed within an arch of surprising beauty, of which the under curve is lined with an elaborate pendent ornament. Within the recess filling the whole space and over the door itself, figures in niches stand under canopies and upon pillars in which caprice and intricacy surpass themselves. Coiled cables, bossed spirals, floreated pinnacles, armillary spheres, crosses, and intertwined branches, stand out in high relief and under cut, as if the sculptors had purposely sought difficulties in order to overcome them. The arch of the door itself is beyond description, so luxuriant is the design of the chiselled stone which forms the three grooves and two spiral pilasters around it. The parapet of the whole edifice is similarly rich, alternating the cross of the Order with the armillary sphere; and although most of the lower part of the walls is hidden, the view of the east end with its two corner towers, as seen from the roof of the adjoining cloister, is magnificent. The lower window, which lights the interior of the choir, is a massive tangle of outstanding cables; each point being crowned by the cross and the armillary sphere which formed the device of the grand master, the famous Prince Henry the Navigator. Around one of the corner towers a great chain cable, each link carved entire in stone, is braced, and around the other an equally tremendous buckled belt, representing the Order of the Garter, which the Prince, a Plantagenet on his mother’s side, possessed. The upper window which lights the chapter-house is more suggestive still. It is a highly decorated circular light bevilled into the deep thickness of the wall, and represents upon the sloping inner face of the circle a series of bulging staysails, each held down by a rope.
But all this description in detail is incapable of conveying an idea of the richness of effect produced by the whole work. The exuberance of the style and its tricky capriciousness may be, and are, condemned by purists as in questionable taste; but as an outcome of national feeling, and as an example of original inventive ingenuity and patience, this and other notable specimens of the style, to which reference will be made later, are of the highest interest to the student, and a delight to the ordinary observer who can free himself from the straightlaced traditions of the schools.
Inside the grave old round church of the Templars, to which this gorgeous edifice was to serve as a choir for the warrior monks of Christ, a fine Byzantine altar stands in the centre. The interior of the edifice itself is a quaint and curious mixture of Byzantine, Moorish, Romanesque, and Gothic, the pillars being painted and gilt in oriental taste, whilst the splendid canopy over the central altar is pure Gothic, and dated 1500. In four of the eleven arched spaces upon the wall of the circular church there are some ancient pictures of the highest interest, the remaining seven having been stolen by the French invaders in the Napoleonic wars. The paintings are fine enough to be by the hand of Jan Van Eyck himself, and are, as usual, ascribed by Portuguese to the mythical Gran Vasco. It is far more likely, however, that they may be the work of a painter called Jean Dralia of Bruges, who was living in this monastery at the end of the fifteenth century, and is buried here. It is lamentable to see the condition to which these masterpieces have been allowed to fall from sheer want of care; and unless they are promptly rescued, a few years more will complete their ruin.
The great choir, added on to the round church, presents in its interior the same wealth of fancy as that already described on the outside; but the wonderful choir stalls of the Manueline period were stolen or destroyed during the French invasion. As I stood under the exquisitely carved ceiling of this choir, looking towards the Byzantine altar in the round church before me, my mind flew back to a scene enacted here in April 1581, which I had more than once endeavoured to describe in writing without having seen the place. Philip II. had followed in the devastating steps of Alba to wrest from the native Portuguese pretender the crown he coveted. Portugal had sullenly bent its neck to the yoke, and the nobles had either been exiled or bought to the side of the Spaniard. But one thing more was needed to make grim Philip legally King of Portugal as well as King of Spain. The Portuguese Cortes, elected of the people, though in this case elected with Alba’s grip upon its throat, had to swear allegiance to the new monarch, and Philip had to pledge his oath to respect the rights and liberties of his new subjects. The stronghold of the Knights of Christ at Thomar was chosen by the Spaniard for the crowning act of Portuguese national subjection; and here Philip arrived on the 15th March 1581. On the 3rd April, in one of those charming little letters to his orphan daughters, he wrote from Thomar saying that the Cortes would sit soon, for many people were already arriving, and the oaths would be taken as soon as they were met. “You have heard,” he says, “that they insist upon my dressing in brocade, much against my will, but they say it is the custom here.”
On the 16th of April the church of the monastery was aglow with shimmer of gold and gems and rich stuffs. Under a dais at the end of this choir Philip sat in a robe of cloth of gold over a dress of crimson brocade; though his heart was sad for the death of his last wife, and he hated splendour in his broken old age. After mass had been said, the Cortes did homage and swore to keep their faith to him as king; and then stepping down from the throne, he advanced to the high altar and solemnly pledged his word to respect the laws and liberties of Portugal. How little he relished the splendour is seen in a letter he sent to his girls from Thomar a fortnight later, as soon as he could find time to write to those whom he loved more dearly than any other creatures on earth. “How much I wish,” he wrote, “you could have seen the ceremony of taking the oath from a window as my nephew [the Archduke Albert] did, who saw everything excellently. But I send you a full account of it all.... I have given the Golden Fleece to the Duke of Braganza, and he went with me to mass, both of us wearing the collar of the Order; which upon my mourning looked very bad, and I can tell you he looked much smarter than I did, although they say that the day of the oath was the first time he had worn low shoes, though everybody is wearing them here now except myself.” Thomar, for the last time in its existence, was a blaze of splendour for those six feverish weeks; for Spanish and Portuguese nobles, jealous of each other, vied in lavish expenditure; and then the fortress of the Knights was left to its solitude: gradually royal encroachments stripped the Order of its wealth and power, and Thomar lived in memory alone.
The upper chamber of the Manueline building over the choir is the chapter-house of the Order of Christ. A grand, low, pillared hall, with the twisted cables and the repeated cross and sphere, testifying once more to the reigning idea of the period of the Navigator Grand-Master. Here it was that the Portuguese Cortes sat to confirm the religious act of allegiance to Philip, and set the seal of subservience upon the nation for nearly a century. Every carved stone and crocket has a story to tell if we could but hear it. Here in the older monastic building the Navigator himself held his chapters, dwelling in the adjoining palace, in the intervals of his life-task upon his eyrie at Sagres; here in the “cloisters of the Philips,” dull Philip III. held his monastic court upon his one visit to Portugal; and the magnificent cloister of John III. testifies to the classical reaction after the exuberance of the times of his father Dom Manuel.
In the quaint little Gothic cloister around the burial-place of the monks, called the “Cloister of Dom Henrique,” a strange sight is to be seen in the upper ambulatory. Baltasar de Faria was the instrument of Philip II. in forcing the Spanish form of Inquisition ruthlessly upon Portugal, and in cruelty surpassed his master. So bitterly hated was he that the saying ran that earth itself would reject and refuse to assimilate the body of such a monster. In the lid of a stone coffin in the cloister a pane of glass is set, and he who will may gaze and see how Baltasar de Faria looks now. He was a splendid courtier in his time, and doubtless a gallant-looking one too, for it was a sumptuous age; but the poor gentleman’s looks have now little to recommend them, as he lies contorted and mummified but perfect in his narrow home, to be gazed and wondered at by those who list—a scoff for the ribald, a text for the moralist.
More there was, much more, to describe in this wonderful monastery, but I have said more than enough to prove that the visitor to Portugal who misses Thomar has failed to see a relic, which, in its way, has hardly an equal in Europe. The drives around Thomar are exquisitely beautiful, the view from the hill across the river embracing the monastery and the great white sanctuary of the Misericordia, with its long _scala sacra_, upon the twin hill, being one never to be forgotten. Just outside the town, hard by an ancient pillar marking the junction place of the armies which won for a second time the independence of Portugal from Spain (at Aljubarrota, 1385), there stands the beautiful old church of Santa Maria, a perfect Gothic fane; and close to its west end a strong tower built as a place of refuge for its constructors against the constant attacks of the Moors. Much I should like to linger upon Thomar: upon the quaint garb of the peasants, the picturesque bits of the old Manueline church of St. João in the praça, upon the lovely private gardens by the side of the stream, upon the noble aqueduct, and upon the sweet tranquillity of the acacia-shaded walks; but I dare not delay further, for the carriage is at the door of the humble though hospitable, Hotel União, to carry me on this brilliant morning the twenty-five miles to Leiria, where I must pass the night. As we drove clear of the town the loveliness of its situation came home to one with more intensity than ever. The peaceful stream winding through the plain, its course marked by a continuous line of poplars, the pine-clad hills all around—miles away but in this clear air seeming within touching distance of the hand—the cluster of white and pink houses with red roofs, and, almost sheer above them, the two hills, one crowned by its never-to-be-forgotten monastery-castle with its long battlemented walls, its high keep, and, most striking of all, its gaunt bell tower, with its guard of tall cypresses; whilst climbing up the gentler green slope of the other hill is the snow-white _scala sacra_ of twenty-five flights of steps leading to the gleaming sanctuary of the Misericordia. Above all a sky of deep luminous blue, and pervading all the soft warm air, sweet with the scent of thyme, basil, cistus, and pines.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. JOÃO IN THE PRAÇA, THOMAR.]
Thus, for two hours or more, I drove over a good road, winding round the foot of rising hills, and following the sinuosity of fertile valleys, above me grey boulders, around me pines, olives, and sweeps of flowering heather on the red earth. At length, afar off, there loomed a bolder hill than the rest, rising abruptly and crowned by another great fortress, as it seemed at an unscalable height, with a cluster of ancient houses nestled just beneath it. Patience and a scarped road on the hillside, however, enabled us to reach without apparent difficulty half up the hill to the modern village of Ourem, where a rest for the horses and a meal for myself had been agreed upon. The place was dead, basking in the hot sunshine, all the village, as it seemed, baked to the uniform yellowish-white colour of the soil of the hill upon which it stood. The gaunt yellow castle above[1] softened only by the verdure of a crown of pines, and just below its walls the ancient town and a great monastery of long ago.
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE AT THOMAR.]
The hostelry was humble enough, but a chatty, shrewd-looking, old lady provided an excellent luncheon for me in an upper room, and became charmingly friendly when I praised her wine, of which she was very proud, and with reason, grown, as she told me, in the vineyard at the back of the house, and as good a wine of its sort as I care to drink. She was equally pleased with the approval of her quince marmalade, and pressed no end of home-made confections upon her passing guest, whilst she kept repeating that “_os senhores ingleses que veem sempre alabão muito o nosso vinho_;” for the approval of Englishmen in this country is always taken as fixing the final seal of excellence upon anything.
Outside in the main street of the town complete quiet reigned in the fierce sunshine of midday. Against the indigo sky the immense castle on its peak showed clear, as nothing is ever seen in our mist-laden atmosphere. A man passes, bearing a great boat-shaped basket piled with big black grapes, the bloom upon them still undisturbed; four cronies in black nightcaps and with long staves in their hands gossip in the parallelogram of black shadow thrown athwart the road by the church tower; and, by-and-by, three lithe damsels with bright yellow head-kerchiefs flowing as they walk, swing by joyously; then comes, painfully hobbling beneath a heavy burden of yellow gourds, a barefooted old woman, and anon a man riding _à la gineta_, a pacing nag with brass-embossed harness, and great box stirrups. Then silence again for another half-hour, and this is life at Ourem.
Still through a land of pine and heather with beautiful little valleys full of vines, figs, and olives, we drove for two hours more, and, just as the black shadows began to lengthen, we drove into the town of Leiria, the Calippo of the Romans, and for long the stronghold whence the Moors harried the advancing Christians to the north. It is a lovely place on the banks of the Liz, set in the midst of pine-clad hills, and the centre of a great agricultural district. Here, again, the two abrupt eminences that loom over the town are crowned respectively by the enormous mediæval stronghold and the religious house that for ever seems to keep it company—the sword and the cross, twin instruments of soldier and priest, to keep the people in subjection, both alike happily now superseded, in Portugal at least, by more enlightened means.
[Illustration: IN THE MAIN STREET OF OUREM.]
I started soon after my arrival at the inn, where there was no
## particular temptation to remain, to scale the hill from which the castle
frowned down upon the town. The townspeople seemed to care nothing for the vast ruin that to me was the one attraction of the place. No one cared to guide me up the steep. It was easy, they said, to find the way by following the path, and the castle ruins were open to all. So I started alone, and wound round the lower ascent, finding myself at last on the side of the hill farthest from the town, and at a point from which the castle was apparently quite inaccessible, as the ascent was almost a sheer precipice. A couple of women and some children were in a field by the wayside, and from them I learnt that I should have taken another path, and have ascended on the opposite face of the hill. It was annoying, for the day was already declining, and I had other things to do on the morrow. Just then an officious urchin of twelve volunteered to show me a way he knew of by the side I was on, and rather than lose my opportunity I followed him across a ploughed field to the foot of the steep.
A rocky path aslant the hill amidst the undergrowth seemed to offer no great difficulty at first, and I began the climb. The path, if it can so be called, was continued by other slanting ascents more difficult than the first, but still intent only upon each next step, I scrambled on by the aid of tufts of esparto grass, until I became aware that the track had ended altogether, and that the farther ascent was apparently impossible. Not until then had I looked down, but when I did so I understood in a moment the peril in which I was. I stood at a height of some five hundred feet above the level, and descent by the way I had come was absolutely impossible. For the last hundred feet I had only scrambled up by the aid of occasional stones that afforded a momentary lodgment for the toe and by clutching tufts of grass, but these would not help me to descend. The pine-needles that lay thick underfoot made the slope as slippery as ice, and I knew that if I attempted to retrace my steps I should certainly be dashed to pieces. The poor women below knew it too; for one was wringing her hands in horror, and had thrown her apron over her face to hide from her the coming catastrophe, whilst the other was loudly bewailing, whilst she belaboured the head of the urchin who had been the cause of the trouble. For one moment panic seized me, but it was succeeded immediately by a cool wave of critical, speculative interest, as if another person’s life and not mine were at stake, as to the sporting chance of my ever being able to negotiate the hundred feet of sheer precipice that lay between me and the top. Each step achieved was a triumph, and my whole soul was concentrated upon the chances of the next being successful. Of course, the ascent had to be made by long zigzags on the face of the precipice, and again and again, as a stone slipped from beneath my foot or a frond of bracken yielded to my grasp, I gave myself up for lost. But I never glanced below, and the jagged and frowning battlements above me gradually drew nearer and nearer, until at last, I know not how, I stood beneath them, panting but safe, and then, looking from the giddy height to the field below, I saw quite a large group of peasants now, waving their black nightcaps, and shouting in token of rejoicing at my safety.
The great castle around me, built by King Diniz the Farmer, in the thirteenth century, upon the site of the Moorish stronghold, was of immense extent, and included ruins of residential edifices of later mediæval times. As I saw it now it was a dream of beauty. The setting sun falling athwart its lichen-covered stones dyed them as red as blood. Within the vast crenellated walls two distinct castles stood, one the cyclopean early structure, and the other a lovely Gothic palace, whose ogival windows, pointed arches, and slender pillars were still graceful in decay. The dismantled chapel is exquisite, and if light had served or any intelligent guidance had been obtainable, the inscriptions in it would have been interesting. But the twilight was falling, and the magnificent view from the battlements over the town, the plain, and the mountains called to me.
[Illustration: THE CASTLE, LEIRIA.]
It was a feast of loveliness to the eye. The golden light of the setting sun glorified the vast plain below me, with its silver river fringed by poplars winding through it for many a mile, and the hills in the distance clothed to the crests with lofty pines, black and solemn now in the fading light. On a hill adjoining that upon which I stood the great white Convent and Sanctuary of the Incarnation looks across at the crumbling castle that it has outlived; and, just below me, between the inner and outer defences of the stronghold, on a green grassy slope, some children are playing joyously. As I wander down the way, safe and easy on this side, through mighty donjons, and thick, tunnelled walls which have seen so many bloody sights and echoed so many dismal sounds, the very spirit of peace seems to pervade the place. Half-way down, leaning over one of the grim walls, was a beautiful peasant girl talking to her young lover, who stood at the foot, and cascading masses of purple flowers fell across the jagged stones here and there, giving the just touch of colour needed to perfect the scene. Past a quaint old desecrated church and the enormous monastery of St. Peter, now, like most of such places, a barrack, I tread the picturesque praça of the town again, and stroll along the fine avenue of planes and eucalyptus by the side of the river as the after-glow lights up the cliff and the castle with a pearly reflected glamour. The hill from below is like that of Edinburgh, but apparently double as high, and the vast extent of the battlements is more evident than when seen on the summit. Huge buttresses of rock seem to sustain the curtain that connects the keep of the fortress with the Gothic palace, and everywhere the grey of the granite is covered with a patina of yellow lichen, and the crevices filled with yew, aloes, and olives.
[Illustration: ON THE ALAMEDA, LEIRIA.]