CHAPTER IX

_Vanished Palaces_

Coming out from the station, instead of taking the road up to the town, you may cross the fields, and thus into the famous _Huerta del Rey_, where old Arabian splendours and romance once were castled in the legendary palace of Galiana. Now alas! beauty and legend in disgraceful abandonment. All this rich land of the Vega is the property of the ex-Empress of the French, Doña Eugenia de Guzman and Condesa de Teba. To bear a glorious name (beside which the title of French Empress is but a trumpery decoration) and inherit land so crowded with historic interests, inherit above all the ruins of a palace of fairyland, and treat her inheritance as the Empress Eugenie has done, is adequately to explain the reason of Spain's irretrievable decadence and slow death. The palace of legend is let out in miserable tenements to muleteers and peasants, who little heed the damage done to wrought Arabian wall and ceiling by their smoky lamps, wood fires in unventilated chambers, by beasts and meal-bags housed in a princess's boudoir, in a dismantled reception chamber. The Empress Eugenie may receive a few pesetas quarterly for this desecration, and we lose a few hours of inestimable musing, while the entire world is the poorer by a dainty monument the less. Even thirty years ago the palace of Galiana was still a constructable dream. The lovely staircase was half preserved, the lace-work was less and less obliterated, the arches still undegraded. But Mlle. de Montijo, seated afar on a foreign throne, was too busy with intrigues destined to ruin France less permanently than her neglect of property she never visits has ruined an historic poem.

Calderon, in his drama, _Cado uno por se_, speaks of this palace, and its heroine has been immortalised by Moratin in verses forever quoted:

"Galiana de Toledo Muy hermosa y maravilla! La Mora la mas celebrada De toda la Moreria. Boca de claveles rojas, Alto pecho que palpita, Frente eburnea que adorno Oro flamante de Tyras."[20]

The story runs that Galafre, the kingling of Toledo, under the great Khalif of Cordova, Abd-er-Rahman I., built a wonder of human dwelling for his beautiful and bewitching daughter, the infanta Galiana. Part of the palace already existed in the eighth century, and was Visigothic. To this he added the ineffaceable Moorish note, the horse-shoe arches, the ajimez windows, still admirably defined despite decay, the Moorish trickery of brickwood, the arabesques and tiled roofs and the square towers of the East. To-day we can trace the ajimez windows, the horse-shoe arches, and even the beautiful arabesques of the walls are faintly discernible through their deplorable coating of smoke-stain. But within the past thirty years the exquisite tiled roof of the tower has disappeared, along with the lovely staircase. The degradation of the Moorish patio, which must have been a thing divine, leaves us in our vulgar modern days, stupefied by man's indifference to the eternal eloquence of beauty. The mystery of this Arabian genius is forever sealed. Nothing we can strive, nothing we can hope to do, will reveal it to us, will unlock the doors of an enchanted past. Whence it sprung is just as inexplicable to us as how it vanished, but alas! vanished it is like the mysterious city of enchantment and of a civilisation that since has never been equalled--the outlying town of Cordova, built by a mighty Moorish emperor in honour of a loved wife, and but a memory of superlative witchery and delight.

In those days the waters of the Tagus ran high, and water here was abundant. The Moors, those subtle hydraulists, alone possessed the secret of drawing from river and well their full value, and irrigating plentifully a thirsty land. To this day Valencia is a garden of flowers and an orchard of fruit, because the Moors passed by there. Of all this Toledan Vega they made a paradise of leaf and bloom and rill. It sparkled and scented the air afar, and such was the over-powering beauty of the gardens of Galiana that Lozano, in his _Reyes Nuevos_, forgets that he is writing of the nameless one, and bursts into high-phrased enthusiasm. One would think the learned doctor of the church was describing the conventional heaven of his imagination. The river then flowed further inward than it does now, and ran along one side of the palace, forming a broad moat. The gardens were a spiced and many-hued paradise, and the palace a wonder of terraces and arches, with halls of arabesques and Moorish inscriptions, pillared patios and dainty boudoirs, with broad-beamed ceilings. Imagination easily fills in all the omitted details of silks and couches, and marble and silver and gold, of flowing water and music, of musked solitude and towered reverie, of the glamour of guarded romance peeping through high arched windows over the silence of the flowery Vega, and adown the quiet course of the curved Tagus. No wonder legend makes Charlemagne, from the blighting disasters of Roncevalles, pass down to this magic spot to fall enamoured of the lovely Galiana, _la Mora la mas celebrada de toda la Moreria_, and on her behalf challenge the Moorish prince Bradamante, who persecuted her with his addresses, cut off his head in a single-handed encounter, and carry away to France the exquisite creature, when she was baptised, and reigned picturesquely over a grateful and admiring France. Spanish legend is not awed by Charlemagne's fame. Either it blows his armies to pieces at Roncevalles, or it lures him beyond the Guadarrama, like a mere knight errant in the protection of damsels, caught by ordinary love, and riveted to its chain.

Under Castillian rule, the Palace of Galiana became the property of the Guzmans, whose arms may be seen upon its dismantled front, and who, like most Spaniards, have so ill appreciated a priceless inheritance. One of the most famous attractions of this palace in olden times was the _clepsydras_, or water-clocks, made by the celebrated astronomer, Abou-l'-Casem, Abdo-er-Rahman, better known as Az-Zarcal. In a description of Toledo a curious Arabian document gives us a quaintly vague idea of these clepsydras, or ponds, whose waters rose and fell with the moon. "One of the greatest towns of Spain is Toledo, and Toledo is a large and well-populated city. On all sides it is washed by a splendid river called the Tagus.... Among the rare and notable things of Toledo is that wheat may be kept more than seventy years without rotting, which is a great advantage, as all the land abounds in grain and seed of all kinds. But what is still more marvellous and surprising in Toledo, and what we believe no other inhabited town of all the world has anything to equal, are some clepsydras or water-clocks. It is said that Az-Zarcal, hearing of a certain talisman, which is in the city of Arin, of Eastern India, and which Masudi says shows the hours by means of _aspas_ or hands, from the time the sun rises till it sets, determined to fabricate an artifice by means of which people could know the hour of day or night, and calculate the day of the moon. He made two great ponds in a house on the bank of the Tagus, not far from the gate of the tanners, making them so that they should be filled with water or emptied according to the rise and fall of the moon." We are told that the movements of these clepsydras were thus regulated, that as soon as the moon became visible by means of invisible conducts, the waters began to flow into the ponds, and by day-rise the ponds were filled four-sevenths. At night another seventh was added, so that by day or night the ponds continued to increase in water a seventh every twenty-four hours, and were quite full by the time the moon was full. On the 14th of the month, when the moon began to fall, the ponds fell too in like proportion. On the 21st of the month they were half empty, and on the 29th completely so. King Alfonso the Learned, desiring to master the secret of these clepsydras, sent one of his bungling astronomers to examine them, which he did so well, that he broke the delicate machinery, and the Moors, to comfort their wounded pride in the loss of so unique a Moorish monument, called the bungler a Jew, one Houayn-Ben-Rabia.

Another palace in ruins belonging to the ex-Empress of the French is all that remains to-day of the magnificent _Casa de Vargas_. It was built by the celebrated architect, Juan de Herrera, and Antonio Ponz describes it at length as one of the architectural splendours of Toledo, as late as the War of Independence, when Bonaparte's soldiers laid it waste with shot and shell. "The façade," writes Ponz, "is perfect Doric, of exquisite marble, with fluted columns on either side, and the pedestals have military emblems in bas-relief. The frieze consists of helmets, heads of bulls and goblets. The coat-of-arms above the cornice is most beautiful, and the women's forms seated on each side are life-size. Nothing could be finer than the details as well as the whole of this façade, and for sure it is the most serious, the most lovely, and most finished of all I have seen in Toledo. You enter a spacious courtyard, with lofty galleries running round it, above and below, the lower gallery sustained by Doric pillars, and by the upper Ionic columns. The staircase is truly regal, and likewise the various inner chambers. They contain different chimney-pieces, ornamented with graceful fancies, executed in bas-relief; and thus in the lower quarters as in the principal, are other galleries with columns like those of the courtyard, with delicious views of the meadows and the Tagus." Nothing of all this remains but a mere unsightly ruin called the _Casa de la Direccion_, the property of the Counts of Mora.

The list of these vanished palaces of Toledo is a long one, and is the subject of most melancholy musing. In the old forsaken quarter once known as the _Juderia_, the prosperous and magnificent ghetto of mediaeval Toledo, where the Transito, Samuel Levi's synagogue, stands, was the great palace of the Villenas. Henry of Aragon, lord of Villena, was a famous figure in those remote ages. Of royal blood, uncle of King Juan II., he was an erudite scholar, a mathematician, a man of science in advance of his times, a splendid prince, a collector of books, the possessor of a library as famous as Mendoza's, a wizard, a man of evil odour, of the black craft, who was gravely charged with putting his enemies alive into bottles, and of holding intercourse with the Evil One. All his valuable library, and in special his own manuscript tomes, for he was an indefatigable writer, were publicly burnt at Madrid by order of Fray Lope Barrientos, a Dominican, on the solemn accusation of witchcraft. Juan de Mena, in his celebrated _coplas_, protested against ecclesiastical iniquity, and lifted his voice in the learned prince's glory:

"Aquel que tu ves estar contemplando En el movimento de tantas estrellas, La fuerza, la obra, el orden de aquellas Que mide los cursos de cómo, y de quando, Y ovo noticia filosofando Del movedor, y de los comovidos, De fuego, de razos, de son de tronidos, Y supo las causas del mundo velando:

"Aquel claro padre, aquel dulce fuente, Aquel que en el Castalo monte resuena Es don Enrique, Señor de Villena, Honra de España, y del siglo presente. O inclito sabio, autor muy sciente, Otra y aun otra vegada te lloro, Porque Castilla perdio tal tesoro No conveido delante la gente.

"Perdio los tus libros sin sea conveidos Y como en exeginas le fueron ya luego, Unos metidos al avido fuego, Y otros sin orden no bien repartidos. Cierto en Atenas los libros fingidos Que de Protagoras se reprobaron Con armonia mejor se quemaron Cuando el senado le fueron leidos."

The quantity of subterranean chambers and passages of this immense palace were supposed to have been used by Don Enrique for his parliaments of witches and wizards, and his awful meetings with the Horned One and his sulphureous satellites. Afterwards the palace fell into the hands of Samuel Levi, Pedro the Cruel's treasurer, the wealthy Jew who built the Transito close by. Then the Master of Santiago's haunts of witchcraft were used as Levi's treasury, until Pedro, in want of money, seized his treasurer's person, and the town sacked his palace. Henry IV. afterwards gave the palace to his minion, Juan Pacheco, with the titles of Duke of Escalona and Marquis of Villena. Neither title nor palace now exist. In a miserable part of the town, high up above the river, you may see a few broken arches and formless vaults and great blocks of stone. That is all. It was destroyed by fire in the reign of Charles Quint under circumstances of exceptional and romantic interest. Charles appointed the Casa de Villena as the residence of the great Constable of France, the treacherous Bourbon. The second Duke of Escalona, indignant at the thought that the French traitor should cross the threshold of his house, informed his sovereign that a house so polluted should prove the grave of such an insult to his family, and threatened to burn it in the event of the Constable's visit. Charles never believed in such an extravagant menace, and the Constable arrived. Diego Lopez de Pacheco, with all his family and servants, left Toledo for ever, and in a few days the stained house was burned to the ground as henceforth unworthy the habitation of honest men.

In the little plaza of Santa Isabel there is another, supposed to have been one of the palaces of King Pedro, now the property of the Duke of Frias. One of the half-obliterated Arabian inscriptions has been traced by the late D. Pascual de Gallangos as meaning: "Lasting prosperity and perpetual glory to the master of this edifice." There are many Moorish

[Illustration: REMAINS OF PALACE SAID TO BE THAT OF DON PEDRO EL CRUEL]

traces about it, the highly decorated wall-work, the horse-shoe arches and fine relief. Of the palace of the Trastarmares little now remains but the door with the big Toledan nails. Somewhere about here was the house Hernan Cortes was married from, when the bride's page stabbed himself at her feet as the procession left the courtyard for the church. I cannot indicate the precise spot, as I was shown it vaguely one lovely moonlit night, when Toledo takes on its spectral and fantastic aspect of white shadow-worked dream, a thing of elusive radiance, wherein reality is lost in mysterious beauty. One walks knee-deep in the sadness and enchantment of "old, unhappy, far-off things," and the petulant little page, stabbing himself in the folds of the bride's white satin, as she crosses the threshold of her father's house, is just the kind of picture one is prompted to evoke. Alas, and alas! if we were only so fortunate as to possess some clue by which we could hope to evoke the bride's face, some faint perfumed trace of Toledan dame and damsel of those days. But the Toledan school of painters has only left us an interminable gallery of cavaliers, proud austere heads, with the mild, cold and implacable regard of Spain. Of poetry, of womanhood, of soft sensuous charm, not a hint. The exquisite Maria de Padilla, with her little white visage and passionate, sad eyes, is only a name now; but such was her gentle sorcery that she is still a dominating memory. We cling to her the more as she is the single woman's form that floats above this past of hard-featured and imperious knights, who ever jostled and fought in these murderous streets and lanes, conspired, rebelled and fashioned the roughest and strangest history written.

Near Santa Ursula is the façade of the famous house of the Toledos. The founder of this great family, since known in history as the Dukes of Alva, was a member of the Imperial house of Paleologus, Pedro, a Byzantine prince of the days of Gothic rule. His immediate descendants were the Illans; Stephen Illan, for whom was built the beautiful Casa de Mesa, and whose portrait on horseback may be seen in the Cathedral, behind the hideous _Trasparente_, was one of the greatest figures of mediaeval Toledo, great citizen, unruly noble, defender of the town, and lord of the people. It was after his day that the family was honoured with the significant private name of Toledo, the present family name of the house of Alva. The palace of the Toledos was like that of Villena, an immense edifice covering all the square. Now only the façade remains as a triumphal assertion of vanished splendour; a disfigured Gothic porch and a couple of ajimez windows in the north wall in front of Santa Ursula. Time has laid a heavy hand on the arches, the slim columns, the cornices, the shields, the stone sculptures and friezes; but the Latin inscription is still visible:

_Dominus custodiat introitum tuum et exitum tuum_ _Ex hox nunc et usque in sæculum._

We need only look at the single chamber of the _Casa de Mesa_ to reconstruct the interior of this dismantled palace, its exquisite Moorish walls and azulejos or tile-work, its arches, ajimez windows and lofty galleries, its sumptuous _artesonado_ ceilings. The house itself began to decline with the disgrace of the great Duke of Alva, whom Philip struck so brutally on the trivial pretext of his son's love affairs. Don Fadique, the heir of the house of the Toledos, fell in love with the daughter of the Guzmans, the unfortunate Magdalena. They became engaged without Philip's permission, and instantly both were imprisoned, Don Fadique at Medina del Campo, Magdalena in the Convent of Santa Fé at Toledo (also known as Santiago). On his release, the Duke of Alva decided to marry Don Fadique to his cousin, Maria de Toledo. The King feigned to approve of the marriage, and afterwards made it a pretext of persecution. Magdalena de Guzman, from her conventual retreat, was summoned to lay her claim to Don Fadique's hand; the Duke and Duchess of Alva were exiled, and Don Fadique and his bride were literally ruined. The Toledos once humiliated, Magdalena de Guzman was ordered back to her convent and to silence, Philip's minister advising her to write no more letters to the King. "What would you do at Court?" he asks Philip's unhappy victim, who, at a king's extraordinary caprice, had wasted twelve years in the cloisters. "You are too young to be a duenna, too old to be a maid of honour. Since you have spent twelve years in the convent, stay there altogether." And to the King he writes: "May God give her good sense. One can't make a step without finding a letter from her." A melancholy time for youth and romance, when a vicious and sour-tempered old king and his corrupt ministers pulled the strings that made its amiable puppets dance. A man with the care of the two Spains, the Netherlands, and all the intrigues of Europe, finds time to glance down at Toledo, and enter into miserable battle with innocent young hearts, mar and make marriages for their doom!

The palace of Fuensalida, the property of the Duke of Frias, never seems to have been an edifice of any particular architectural claim. All history records of it is the fact that Charles Quint's wife, the Empress Isabel, died here while Charles was building the Alcázar for her reception. The house was built by Lopez de Ayala early in the fifteenth century, whose tomb may be admired in the Church of San Pedro Martir. The origin of the famous _Casa de las Tornerias_ is disputed. Some regard it as an ancient mosque, because of its emphatic mark of Saracen architecture, contemporaneous with that of the little mosque, _El Cristo de la Luz_. The whole is now too hopelessly built round with vulgar stone and too terribly dilapidated and mutilated for a proper estimate to be formed of its earliest origin and form. It is still, and must always be, mere matter of conjecture whether it was originally built for a mesquita or a Moorish palace.

[Illustration: CASA FUENSALIDA]

In the Calle del Barco, which runs from the Cathedral down by a breakneck slant to the river (here you can take the ferry for Our Lady _del Valle_) is the Casa de Munarriz, so called from a canon who a century ago dwelt there a full hundred years. In the days of Toledo's greatness it was a fine mansion of some importance with double galleries round the immense courtyard, a handsome staircase of beautifully wrought stone, each storey supported by sixteen arches and thirty-two delicate marble columns with graceful capitals, shields, and sculptured subjects in frieze. The windows are half Arabian, and the emblazoned doorway, between its huge columns, is most imposing. Here and there quantities of beautifully wrought façades speak eloquently of departed days, but it is not possible now to discover the forgotten history of these signs of degraded palaces. The Gothic ornamentation will guide you as to date, or mayhap an exquisitely carven Moorish inscription in the wood-work of a half-ruined wall. Ponz called Toledo the city of fine inscriptions, and Latin and Moorish inscriptions everywhere abound. Here is one still quite distinct in the old House of the Templars, near San Miguel: "Blessings come from God. Let us adore Him. Power is God's the only one. Abundance, wealth, and perfect security assist the master of this house. Power is God's. Let God's blessing complete it. God is eternal. His is power. Blessing." Round these walls are verses from the Koran.

In close neighbourhood were two historic and important palaces, that of Juan de Padilla, which occupied the whole ugly square to-day of his name, and down the steps which lead to it by a narrow street, the palace of Garcilaso de la Vega. To-day we have no means of forming the faintest notion of what these famous houses were like. Juan de Padilla's was razed to the ground by order of Charles Quint after the unfortunate hero's execution. We judge it to have been large from the size of the empty square it stood upon above the Puerta del Cambron, commanding a full view of the Vega and the river; and necessarily splendid from the fact that Isabel and Fernando occupied it as guests at the time of their daughter's marriage with the King of Portugal. Garcilaso de la Vega's mansion is now a mere mud wall sheltering several tenement houses. Here the King of Portugal stayed, and with royal guests in such close vicinity, it is easy to imagine the picturesque hum of life in this now silent and insignificant quarter four centuries ago. Alas! not a stone, not a page to help us to reconstrue one bright scene, to relive one vivid hour. Humble walls below the pretty modern little garden of the Miradero, as you approach from the Puente de Alcántara, indicate where Gerardo Lobo, _el Capitan Coplero_, so nick-named by Philip V. to avenge a satire on the French, lived and wrote _El Triunfo de las Mugeres_, and in the Calle del Refugo, near the hospital of that name, dwelt the poet Moreto.

I have left for the last the two most important remains of mudejar palaces in Toledo: the Casa de Mesa, the mansion of Estevan de Illan, and the _Taller del Moro_, supposed to have been the palace where the terrible massacre of the _Noche Toledana_ took place. All that remains of the Casa de Mesa is a single chamber with a charming little boudoir at the top. It is Granadine-Arabian style, highly and marvellously ornamented; quite the most beautiful specimen of mudejar architecture of Toledo. The chamber is sixty feet by twenty-two, and thirty-six in height, and every detail of its delicate and complicated Moorish decoration is a delight. One hardly knows what to marvel most at, the fineness or the extraordinary wealth of relief upon the walls, which is the most enchanting kind of lace-work imaginable. Fairies seem to have wrought it, and its perfection even to-day is nothing less than a mystery and a miracle. And then the arches, the foliage, the inscriptions, the lovely ajimez windows, the friezes and gorgeous _artesonado_ ceilings of chamber and boudoir, stellar-shaped to recall the stars of heaven. Here are points of exclamation and pain enough to think that the secret of so much beauty is lost to us forever. The Christian arms everywhere on the azulejo border

[Illustration: MOORISH WINDOW IN CASA DE MESA]

demonstrate that the house was built after the Christian Conquest by Moorish builders, but one may ask oneself, was the rest of the mansion in keeping with this glorious chamber? Who designed it, wrought it? What sort of life was lived therein? What the fashion of the garments that swept it, the dreams dreamed within its fabulous walls? Why should this single jewel remain in a sordid setting, and nothing to tell us how the rest came to vanish, why this alone was preserved? All we know is that Cardinal Siliceo turned the house into a college for young ladies in the sixteenth century, and placed his own arms above the exquisite ajimez window between the chamber and the boudoir, and the chamber served the Carmelites as a chapel for many years.

The _Taller del Moro_ is probably earlier by four centuries than the _Casa de Mesa_. Here we have the influence of the Cordovese-Arabian architecture, of an art less delicate and fairy-like than the Granadine-Arabian. There is every reason to believe that this palace was built after the Gothic downfall for a Saracen magnate. The street was called the Street of the Moor to prove that an illustrious Moor dwelt there, and its resemblance to the Alcázar of Sevilla indicates that the owner was in every probability a ruler of some kind, a governor or viceroy. It may be on this slight ground that it has been hinted it was here all the nobles of Toledo were invited to a banquet to meet the Khalif's son, and as each one entered the dusky garden, his head, with a single stroke, was sent rolling into the ditch near the gate. There is nothing now about it to bear out this shuddering suggestion. The long Moorish chamber is turned into a vulgar workshop. The wooden door from the street opens into a squalid yard, with carts and wheelbarrows about, and placid Christians, for a couple of pence, receive you without any hint of knife or blood, or lugubrious ditch. Not even the ghost of a turbaned Moor to disturb your musing as you stand in the degraded workshop, where the light is dim, and vex your soul with mutterings against the damp and smoke. The chamber is a hundred feet long by twenty-four. It is of a singularly rich and splendid design, with Moorish inscriptions running along the walls, with delicate friezes, and all the Oriental luxury of red and gold and blue. The artesonado ceiling is superb, and it requires no very violent effort of imagination to evoke a vague picture of this banqueting hall in the days of Moorish revelry, when passion and policy wrapped themselves in the magic charm of colour, and mere civilisation was an inexhaustible enchantment, a pure and indolent delight.

The _Corral_ of Don Diego is an extensive courtyard near the church of the Magdalena, said to have been the property called the _Barrio del Rey_, which Alfonso, after the Conquest, gave to Don Pedro Paleologus, who came to Toledo to fight the Moor, and remained to found the great house of the Toledos. The arms of the Toledos may still be seen above the gates, and Henry of Trastamare, we are told, bestowed the palace upon his auxiliary, Bertrand de Guesclin, with the title of Trastamare, which has since fallen to the Duke of Montemar. Nothing now remains of the palace but the courtyard, and a magnificent Moorish archway of horse-shoe shape, and arabesques recalling the style of the Alcázar of Seville, but we may gather some notion of its size and importance from the ruin. There are indications miserably faint and buried away under plaster, that the palace was richly ornamented in the mudejar style. Inscriptions, Moorish arches, and ajimez windows are dimly discoverable beneath the broken plaster-work and the primitive roughness of modern repairs. An impression of splendid halls and chambers, of delicately ornamented Moorish alcoves and boudoirs and inscriptions, of artesonado ceilings and emblazoned doors, is seized under the frost of neglect, through the mildew of centuries, the wood-work, design, and gilt of the octagonal ceilings now almost hopelessly obliterated, and the friezes mere shapeless dilapidation.

The Castillo de San Servando or Cervantes, just outside the Bridge of Alcántara, is an impressive looking ruin, that seems mysteriously to have become inter-penetrated with the burnt and arid tones of the landscape. It has no historic or architectural interest whatever, is not even beautiful, but impresses the eye in its decay, with its rough, battlemented, and scarred visage, the ancient note of its barbican and square rude towers. It is indubitably Mozarabe, built by the Moors as a fortress, and employed as such by Alfonso after the Conquest. Calderon makes mention of it in _Cado uno por se_, and in the civil war of Pedro and Henry of Trastamare, having been abandoned by the Knights Templars, whose property it had become, it resumed its use as a strong place. The Archbishop Tenorio ordered its repair, and many of the arches and vaults date from this period. Tramps now sleep comfortably in its shadow, and scare you in your moonlit walks by midnight.

Though the Alcázar can by no means be described as a _vanished_ palace, since it is the most substantial and dominating feature of the town, as an illusion it may be classed with these. A wide pathway leads to it from the Zocodover. It was twice burnt, and now all that remains of it are the imposing facades, the three towers, the glorious patio, large enough to hold an army, and the magnificent staircase, up which an army might march abreast. It stands upon the ruins of Wamba's walls, in full command of the city, and in Roman days was the prison where St Leocadia suffered martyrdom. Under Alfonso VI. it was a strong fortress, guarded by the Cid. Don Alvaro de Luna first, and the Catholic kings afterwards, had some hand in adorning it, but Charles Quint, designing to reside in Toledo, may be said to have rebuilt it altogether. He gave the commission to the best Spanish architects of the century--Covarrubias, Vergara, Villalpando, Jaspar de Vega, Gonzalez de Lara, and the great Herrera, with a host

[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF SAN SERVANDO]

of minor artists. He built it for the empress, who, like himself, died before it was finished. Philip II. sent to Brussels, to London and Italy, in search of other artists to help to complete the colossal edifice, and it stood for long the most splendid palace of Spain. Came Staremberg and his troops in 1710, who turned it into a barrack, burnt the superb woodwork as fuel, broke the windows, tore down the _artesonado_ ceilings, the carved doors, and set fire to the palace on leaving it. Spain has never been fortunate in her allies--English, French, or Austrian; they invariably found their entertainment in spreading ruin among her grandeurs. Carlos III. attempted to restore the Alcázar, but the French then came in 1810 and set fire to it again. The fire lasted three days, and now only the walls remain. The regal staircase, surely the widest of the world, ends in the void. You are shown the window at which the unfortunate Blanche sat in her solitary misery, but there are no walls to indicate the size of the chamber. You can see the lovely view from the window by picking your way across the scaffolding, but there is nothing else to see. For years the restorers have been busy with the roof of the galleries that run round the immense patio, only the _artesonado_ will be reproduced in iron instead of wood, and the imitation is good. It may be completed, at the rate of modern work in Spain, in a couple of hundred years. The façade is _plateresca_, sober, and cold. Indeed, I cannot say that there is anything about this palace except its immensity calculated to provoke admiration. It towers imperiously above the town, crowded beneath it--a gigantic illusion; substantial without, void within; dreary and featureless in all its futile ostentation of measureless space.