In The Palmy Days Of The Absolute Theocracy This
Narrow Space Contained More Than A Hundred Churches And Chapels.
The
province was gnawed by the cancer of sixteen monasteries of monks and
twice as many convents of nuns, all crowded within these city walls.
Fully one half the ground of the city was covered by religious buildings
and mortmain property.
In that age, when money meant ten times what it
signifies now, the rent-roll of the Church in Toledo was forty millions
of reals. There are even yet portions of the town where you find nothing
but churches and convents. The grass grows green in the silent streets.
You hear nothing but the chime of bells and the faint echoes of masses.
You see on every side bolted doors and barred windows, and, gliding over
the mossy pavements, the stealthy-stepping, long-robed priests.
I will only mention two more churches, and both of these converts from
heathendom; both of them dedicated to San Cristo, for in the democracy
of the calendar the Saviour is merely a saint, and reduced to the level
of the rest. One is the old pretorian temple of the Romans, which was
converted by King Sizebuto into a Christian church in the seventh
century. It is a curious structure in brick and mortar, with an apsis
and an odd arrangement of round arches sunken in the outer wall and
still deeper pointed ones. It is famed as the resting-place of Saints
Ildefonso and Leocadia, whom we have met before.
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