Portuguese Architecture. Walter Crum Watson
top of enormous granite boulders, and enclose an irregular space in which stands the keep. The inhabited part of the castle ran along the north-western wall where it stood highest above the land below, but it has mostly perished, leaving only a few windows which are too large to date from the beginning of the twelfth century. The square keep stands within a few feet of the western wall, rises high above it, and was reached by a drawbridge from the walk on the top of the castle walls. Its wooden floors are gone, its windows are mere slits, and like the rest of the castle it owes its distinctive appearance to the battlements which crown the whole building, and whose merlons are plain blocks of stone brought to a sharp point at the top. This feature, which is found in all the oldest Portuguese castles such as that of Almourol on an island in the Tagus near Abrantes, and even on some churches such as the old cathedral at Coimbra and the later church at Leça de Balio, is one of the most distinct legacies left by the Moors: here the front of each merlon is perpendicular to the top, but more usually it is finished in a small sharp pyramid.
Church.
The other foundation of Mumadona, the monastery of Nossa Senhora and São Salvador in the town of Guimarães, had since her day twice suffered destruction at the hands of the Moors, once in 967 when the castle was taken by Al-Coraxi, emir of Seville, and thirty years later when Almansor[39] in 998 swept northwards towards Galicia, sacking and burning as he went. At the time when Count Henry and Dona Teresa were living in the castle, the double Benedictine monastery for men and women had fallen into decay, and in 1109 Count Henry got a Papal Bull changing the foundation into a royal collegiate church under a Dom Prior, and at once began to rebuild it, a restoration which was not finished till 1172. Since then the church has been wholly and the cloisters partly rebuilt by João i. at the end of the fourteenth century, but some arches of the cloister and the entrance to the chapter-house may very likely date from Count Henry's time. These cloisters occupy a very unusual position. Starting from the north transept they run round the back of the chancel, along the south side of the church outside the transept, and finally join the church again near the west front. The large round arches have chamfered edges; the columns are monoliths of granite about eighteen inches thick; the bases and the abaci all romanesque in form, though many of the capitals, as can be seen from their shape and carving, are of the fourteenth or even fifteenth century, showing how Juan Garcia de Toledo, who rebuilt the church for Dom João i., tried, in restoring the cloister, to copy the already existing features and as usual betrayed the real date by his later details. A few of the old capitals still remain, and are of good romanesque form such as may be seen in any part of southern France or in Spain.[40] To the chapter-house, a plain oblong room with a panelled wood ceiling, there leads, from the east cloister walk, an unaltered archway, flanked as usual by two openings, one on either side. The doorway arch is plain, slightly horseshoe in shape, and is carried by short strong half-columns whose capitals are elaborately carved with animals and twisting branches, the animals, as is often the case,
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being set back to back at the angles so that one head does duty for each pair. Above is a large hollow hood-mould exactly similar to those which enclose the side windows. The two lights of these windows are separated by short coupled shafts whose capitals, derived from the Corinthian or Composite, have stiff leaves covering the change from the round to the square, and between them broad tendrils which end in very carefully cut volutes at the angles. The heads themselves are markedly horseshoe in shape, which at first sight suggests some Moorish influence, but in everything else the details are so thoroughly Western, and by 1109 such a long time, over a hundred years, had passed since the Moors had been permanently expelled from that part of the country, that it were better to see in these horseshoes an unskilled attempt at stilting, rather than the work of some one familiar with Eastern forms. (Fig. 16.)
CHAPTER II
THE EARLY BUILDINGS IN THE SOUTH
In 1057 Fernando, king of Castile, Leon and Galicia crossed the Douro, took Lamego, where the lower part of the tower is all that is left of the romanesque cathedral, and is indeed the only romanesque tower in the country. Vizeu fell soon after, and seven years later he advanced his borders to the Mondego by the capture of Coimbra. The Mondego, the only large river whose source and mouth are both in Portugal, long remained the limit of the Christian dominion, and nearly a hundred years were to pass before any further advance was made. In 1147 Affonso Henriques, who had but lately assumed the title of king, convinced at last that he was wasting his strength in trying to seize part of his cousin's dominions of Galicia, determined to turn south and extend his new kingdom in that direction. Accordingly in March of that year he secretly led his army against Santarem, one of the strongest of the Moorish cities standing high above the Tagus on an isolated hill. The vezir, Abu-Zakariah, was surprised before he could provision the town, so that the garrison were able to offer but a feeble resistance, and the Christians entered after the attack had lasted only a few days. Before starting the king had vowed that if successful he would found a monastery in token of his gratitude, and though its vast domestic buildings are now but barracks and court-houses, the great Cistercian abbey of Alcobaça still stands to show how well his vow was fulfilled.
Although Santarem was taken in 1147, the first stone of Alcobaça was not laid till 1153, and the building was carried out very slowly and in a style, imported directly from France, quite foreign to any previous work in Portugal. It were better, therefore, before coming to this, the largest church and the richest foundation in the whole country, to have done with the other churches which though contemporary with Alcobaça are not the work of French but of native workmen, or at least of such as had not gone further than to Galicia for their models.
Sé, Lisbon.
The same year that saw the fall of Santarem saw also the more important capture of Lisbon. Taken by the Moors in 714, it had long been their capital, and although thrice captured by the Christians had always been recovered. In this enterprise Affonso Henriques was helped by a body of Crusaders, mostly English, who sailing from Dartmouth were persuaded by the bishop of Oporto to begin their Holy War in Portugal, and when Lisbon fell, one of them, Gilbert of Hastings, was rewarded by being made its first bishop. Of the cathedral, begun three years later, in 1150, little but the plan of the nave and transept has survived. Much injured by an earthquake in 1344, the whole choir was rebuilt on a French model by Affonso iv. only to be again destroyed in 1755. The original plan must have been very like that of Braga, an aisleless transept, a nave and aisles of six bays, and two square towers beyond with a porch between. The two towers are now very plain with large belfry windows near the top, but there are traces here and there of old built-up round-headed openings which show that the walls at least are really old. The outer arch of the porch has been rebuilt since the earthquake, but the original door remains inside, with a carved hood-mould, rich abacus, and four orders of mouldings enriched with small balls in their hollows. The eight plain shafts stand on unusually high pedestals and have rather long capitals, some carved with flat acanthus leaves and some with small figures of men and animals.
Like that of the cathedral of Coimbra, which was being built about the same time, the inside is clearly founded on the great cathedral of Santiago, itself a copy of S. Sernin at Toulouse, and quite uninfluenced by the French design of Alcobaça. The piers are square with a half-shaft on each face, the arches are round, and the aisles covered with plain unribbed fourpart vaulting, while the main aisle is roofed with a round barrel. Instead of the large open gallery, which at Santiago allows the quadrant vault supporting the central barrel to be seen, there is here a low blind arcade of small round arches. Unfortunately, when restored after the disaster of 1755 the whole