Andalusia Not Being Gothic Had Never Been Aryan, And It
Was One Of Her Kings Who Carried His Orthodoxy To Castile And
Established It Inexpugnably At Toledo After He Succeeded His Heretical
Father There.
When four or five hundred years later it became a
political necessity of the Catholic Kings to expel their Jewish and
Moorish subjects and convert their wealth to pious and patriotic uses,
Andalusia was one of the most zealous provinces in the cause.
When
presently the inquisitions of the Holy Office began, some five hundred
heretics were burned alive at Seville before the year was out; many
others, who were dead and buried, paid the penalty of their heresy in
effigy; in all more than two thousand suffered in the region round
about. Before he was in Valladolid, Torquemada was in Seville, and
there he drew up the rules that governed the procedure of the
Inquisition throughout Spain. A magnificent _quemadero,_ or crematory,
second only to that of Madrid, was built: a square stone platform where
almost every day the smoke of human sacrifice ascended. This crematory
for the living was in the meadow of San Sebastian, now a part of the
city park system which we left on the right that first evening when we
drove to the Delicias. I do not know why I should now regret not having
visited the place of this dreadful altar and offered my unavailing pity
there to the memory of those scores of thousands of hapless martyrs who
suffered there to no end, not even to the end of confirming Spain in the
faith one and indivisible, for there are now, after so many generations
of torment, two Protestant churches in Seville. For one thing I did not
know where the place of the _quemadero_ was; and I do not yet know where
those Protestant churches are.
II
If I went again to Seville I should try to visit them - but, as it was,
we gave our second day to the Alcazar, which is merely the first in the
series of palaces and gardens once stretching from the flank of the
cathedral to the Tower of Gold beside the Guadalquivir. A rich
sufficiency is left in the actual Alcazar to suggest the splendor of the
series, and more than enough in the gardens to invite our fatigue, day
after day, to the sun and shade of its quiet paths and seats when we
came spent with the glories and the bustling piety of the cathedral. In
our first visit we had the guidance of a patriotic young Granadan whose
zeal for the Alhambra would not admit the Alcazar to any comparison, but
I myself still prefer it after seeing the Alhambra. It is as purely
Moorish as that and it is in better repair if not better taste. The
taste in fact is the same, and the Castilian kings consulted it as
eagerly as their Arabic predecessors in the talent of the Moslem
architects whom they had not yet begun to drive into exile.
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