Other churches of this type are Gandara and Boelhe near Penafiel, and Eja not far off—a building of rather later date with a fine pointed chancel arch elaborately carved with foliage—Sao Thiago d'Antas, near Familicao, a slightly larger church with good capitals to the chancel arch, a good south door and another later west door with traceried round window above;



and Sao Torquato, near Guimaraes, rather larger, having once had transepts of which one survives, with square chancel and square chapels to the east; one of the simplest of all having no ornament beyond the corbel table and the small slitlike windows.

South of the Douro, but still built of granite, are a group of three or four small churches at Trancoso. Another close to Guarda has a much richer corbel table with a large ball ornament on the cornice and a round window filled with curiously built-up tracery above the plain, round-arched west door, while further south on the castle hill at Leiria are the ruins of the small church of Sao Pedro built of fine limestone with a good west door.

[Sidenote: Aguas Santas.]

Of the second and rather larger type there are fewer examples still remaining, and of these perhaps the best is the church of Aguas Santas some seven miles north-east of Oporto. Originally the church consisted of a nave with rectangular chancel and a north aisle with an eastern apse roofed with a semi-dome. Later a tower with battlemented top and low square spire was built at the west end of the aisle, and some thirty years ago another aisle was added on the south side. As in most of the smaller churches the chancel is lower than the nave, leaving room above its roof for a large round window, now filled up except for a small traceried circle in the centre. The most highly decorated part is the chancel, which like all the rest of the church has a good corbel table, and about two-thirds of the way up a string course richly covered with billet moulding. Interrupting this on the south side are two round-headed windows, still small but much larger than the slits found in the older churches. In each case, in a round-headed opening there stand two small shafts with bases and elaborately carved capitals but without any abaci, supporting a large roll moulding, and these are all repeated inside at the inner face of a deep splay. In one of these windows not only are the capitals covered with intertwined ribbon-work, but each shaft is covered with interknotted circles enclosing flowers, and there is a band of interlacing work round the head of the actual window opening. Inside the church has been more altered. Formerly the aisle was separated from the nave by two arches, but when the south aisle was built the central pier was taken out and the two arches thrown into one large and elliptical arch, but the capitals of the chancel arch and the few others that remain are all well wrought and well designed. The west door is a good simple example of the first pointed period, with plain moulded arches and shafts which bear simple French-looking capitals. Other churches of the same class are those of Sao Christovao do Rio Mau not far from Villo do Conde, and Sao Pedro de Rates, a little further up the Ave at the birthplace of the first bishop of Braga and earliest martyr of Portugal. Sao Pedro is a little later, as the aisle arches are all pointed, and is a small basilica of nave and aisles with short transepts, chancel and eastern chapels.

[Sidenote: Villar de Frades.]

The two earliest examples of the third and most highly developed type, the church of Villar de Frades and the cathedral of Braga, have unfortunately both suffered so terribly, the one from destruction and the other from rebuilding, that not much has been left to show what they were originally like—barely enough to make it clear that they were much more elaborately decorated, and that their carved work was much better wrought than in any of the smaller churches already mentioned. A short distance to the south of the river Cavado and about half-way between Braga and Barcellos, in a well-watered and well-wooded region, there existed from very early Christian times a monastery called Villar, and later Villar de Frades. During the troubles and disorders which followed the Moslem invasion, this Benedictine monastery had fallen into complete decay and so remained till it was restored in 1070 by Godinho Viegas. Although again deserted some centuries later and refounded in 1425 as the mother house of a new order—the Loyos—the fifteenth-century church was so built as to leave at least a part of the front of the old ruined church standing between itself and the monastic building, as well as the ruins of an apse behind. Probably this old west front was the last part of Godinho's church to be built, but it is certainly more or less contemporary with some portions of the cathedral of Braga.

At some period, which the legend leaves quite uncertain, one of the monks of this monastery was one day in the choir at matins, when they came to that Psalm where it is said that 'a thousand years in the sight of God are but as yesterday when it is gone,' and the old monk wondered greatly and began to think what that could mean. When matins were over he remained praying as was his wont, and begged Our Lord to give him some understanding of that verse. Then there appeared to him a little bird which, singing most sweetly, flew this way and that, and so little by little drew him towards a wood which grew near the monastery, and there rested on a tree while the servant of God stood below to listen. After what seemed to the monk a short time it took flight, to the great sorrow of God's servant, who said, 'Bird of my Soul, where art thou gone so soon?' He waited, and when he saw that it did not return he went back to the monastery thinking it still that same morning on which he had come out after matins. When he arrived he found the door, through which he had come, built up and a new one opened in another place. The porter asked who he was and what he wanted, and he answered, 'I am the sacristan who a few hours ago went out, and now returning find all changed.' He gave too the names of the Abbot and of the Prior, and wondered much that the porter still would not let him in, and seemed not to remember these names. At last he was led to the Abbot, but they did not know one another, so that the good monk was all confused and amazed at so strange an event. Then the Abbot, enlightened of God, sent for the annals and histories of the order, found there the names the old man had given, so making it clear that more than three hundred years had passed since he had gone out. He told them all that had happened to him, was received as a brother; and after praising God for the great marvel which had befallen him, asked for the sacraments and soon passed from this life in great peace.[34]

Whether the ruined west front of the older church be that which existed when the bird flew out through the door or not, it is or has been of very considerable beauty. Built, like everything else in the north, of granite, all that is now left is a high wall of carefully wrought stone. Below is a fine round arched door of considerable size, now roughly blocked up. It has three square orders covered with carving and a plain inner one. First is a wide drip-mould carved on the outer side with a zigzag threefold ribbon, and on the inner with three rows of what looks like a rude attempt to copy the classic bead-moulding; then the first order, of thirteen voussoirs, each with the curious figure of a strangely dressed man or with a distorted monster. This with the drip-mould springs from a billet-moulded abacus resting on broad square piers. Of the two inner carved orders, the outer is covered on both faces with innumerable animals and birds, and the other with a delicate pattern of interlacing bands. These two spring from strange square abaci resting on the carved capitals of round shafts, two on each side. A few feet above the door runs a billet-moulded string course, and two or three feet higher another and slighter course. On this stands a large window of two orders. Of these the outer covered with animals springs from shafts and capitals very like those of the doorway, and the inner has a billet-moulded edge and an almost Celtic ornament on the face. Now whether Villar be older than the smaller buildings in the neighbourhood or not, it is undoubtedly quite different not only in style but in execution. It is not only much larger and higher, but it is better built and the carving is finer and more carefully wrought. (Fig. 13.)

It is known that the great cathedral of Santiago in Galicia was begun in 1078, just about the time Villar must have been building, and Santiago is an almost exact copy in granite of what the great abbey church of S. Sernin at Toulouse was intended to be, so that it may be assumed that Bernardo who built the cathedral was, if not a native of Toulouse, at any rate very well acquainted with what was being done there. If, then, a native of Languedoc was called in to plan so important a church in Galicia, it is not unlikely that other foreigners were also employed in the county of Portugal—at that time still a part of Galicia; and in fact many churches in the south-west of what is now France have doorways and windows whose general design is very like that at Villar de Frades, if allowance be made for the difference of material, granite here, fine limestone there, and for a comparative want of skill in the workmen.[35]

[Sidenote: Se, Braga.]

Probably these foreigners were not invited to Portugal for the sake of the church of a remote abbey like Villar, but to work at the metropolitan cathedral of Braga. The see of Braga is said to have been founded by Sao Pedro de Rates, a disciple of St. James himself, and in consequence of so distinguished an origin its archbishops claim the primacy not only of all Portugal, but even of all the Spains, a claim which is of course disputed by the patriarch of Lisbon, not to speak of the archbishops of Toledo and of Tarragona. However that may be, the cathedral of Braga is not now, and can never have been, quite worthy of such high pretensions. It is now a church with a nave and aisles of six bays, a transept with four square chapels to the east, a chancel projecting beyond the chapels, and at the west two towers with the main door between and a fine porch beyond.

Count Henry of Burgundy married Dona Theresa and received the earldom of Portugal from his father-in-law, Alfonso VI. of Castile and Leon, in 1095, and he and his wife rebuilt the cathedral—where they now lie buried—before the end of the century. By that time it may well have become usual, if the churches were important, to call in a foreigner to oversee its erection. Of the original building little now remains but the plan and two doorways, the chancel having been rebuilt and the porch added in the sixteenth, and the whole interior beplastered and bepainted in the worst possible style in the seventeenth, century. Of the two doors the western has been very like that at Villar. It has only two orders left, of which the outer, though under a deep arch, has a billet-moulded drip-mould, and its voussoirs each carved with a figure on the outer and delicate flutings on the under side, while the inner has on both faces animals and monsters which, better wrought than those at Villar, are even more like so many in the south-west of France. The other doorway, on the south side next the south-west tower, is far better preserved. It has three shafts on each side, all with good capitals and abaci, from which spring two carved and one plain arch. The outer has a rich drip-mould covered with a curious triple arrangement of circles, has flutings on the one face and a twisting ribbon on the other, while the next has leaf flutings on both faces, and both a roll-moulding on the angle. The inner order is quite plain, but the tympanum has in the centre a circle enclosing a cross with expanding arms, the spaces between the arms and the circle being pierced and the whole surrounded with intertwining ribbons.

[Sidenote: Se, Oporto.]

Another foundation of Count Henry's was the cathedral of Oporto, which, judging from its plan, must have been very like that of Braga, but it has been so horribly transformed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that nothing now remains of the original building but part of the walls; for the fine western rose window must have been inserted about the middle of the thirteenth century.

[Sidenote: Paco de Souza.]

Except the tragedy of Inez de Castro, there is no story in Portuguese history more popular or more often represented in the engravings which adorn a country inn dining-room than that of the surrender of Egas Moniz to Alfonso VII. of Castile and Leon, when his pupil Affonso Henriques, beginning to govern for himself, refused to fulfil the agreement[36] whereby Egas had induced Alfonso to raise the siege of the castle of Guimaraes. And it is the fact that the church of Sao Salvador at Paco de Souza contains his tomb, which adds not a little to the interest of the best-preserved of the churches of the third type. Egas Moniz died in 1144, and at least the eastern part of the church may have existed before then. The chancel, where the tomb first stood, is rather long and has as usual a square east end while the two flanking chapels are apsidal. The rest of the church, which may be a little later, as all the larger arches are pointed, consists of a nave and aisles of three bays, a transept, and a later tower standing on the westernmost bay of the south aisle. The constructive scheme of the inside is interesting, though a modern boarded vault has done its best to hide what it formerly was. The piers are cross-shaped with a big semicircular shaft on each face, and a large roll-moulding on each angle which is continued up above the abacus to form an outer order for both the aisle and the main arches, for large arches are carried across the nave and aisles from north to south as if it had been intended to roof the church with an ordinary groined vault. However, it is clear that this was not really the case, and indeed it could hardly have been so as practically no vaults had yet been built in the country except a few small barrels. Indeed, though later the Portuguese became very skilful at vaulting, they were at no time fond of a nave with high groined vault upheld by flying buttresses, and low aisles, for there seems to have been never more than three or four in the country, one of which, the choir of Lisbon Cathedral, fell in 1755. Instead of groined vaults, barrel vaults continued to be used where a stone roof was wanted, even till the middle of the fourteenth century and later, long after they had been given up elsewhere, but usually a roof of wood was thought sufficient, sometimes resting, as was formerly the case here, on transverse arches thrown across the nave and aisles. This was the system adopted in the cathedrals of Braga and of Oporto before they were altered, in this church and in that of Pombeiro not far off, and in that of Bayona near Vigo in Galicia.[37] (Fig. 14.)

All the details are extremely refined—almost Byzantine in their delicacy—especially the capitals, and the abaci against the walls, which are carried along as a beautiful string course from pier to pier. The bases too are all carved, some with animals' heads and some with small seated figures at the angles, while the faces of the square blocks below are covered with beautiful leaf ornament. But the most curious thing in the whole church is the tomb of Egas Moniz himself.[38] (Fig. 15.) Till the eighteenth century it stood in the middle of the chancel, then it was cut in two and put half against the wall of the south aisle, and half against that of the north. It has on it three bands of ornament. Of these the lowest is a rudely carved chevron with what are meant for leaves between, the next, a band of small figures including Egas on his deathbed and what is supposed to be three of his children riding side by side on an elongated horse with a camel-like head, and that on the top, larger figures showing him starting on his fateful journey to the court of Alfonso of Castile and Leon and parting from his weeping wife. Although very rude,—all the horses except that of Egas himself having most unhorselike heads and legs,—some of the figures are carved with a certain not unpleasing vigour, especially that of a spear-bearing attendant who marches with swinging skirts behind his master's horse. Outside the most remarkable feature is the fine west door, with its eight shafts, four on each side, some round and some octagonal, the octagonal being enriched with an ornament like the English dog-tooth, with their finely carved cubical capitals and rich abaci, and with the four orders of mouldings, two of which are enriched with ball ornament. Outside, instead of a drip-mould, runs a broad band covered with plaited ribbon. On the tympanum, which rests on corbels supported on one side by the head of an ox and on the other by that of a man, are a large circle enclosing a modern inscription, and two smaller circles in which are the symbols of the Sun and Moon upheld by curious little half-figures. The two apses east of the transept are of the pattern universal in Southern Europe, being divided into three equal parts by half-shafts with capitals and crowned with an overhanging corbel table.

[Sidenote: Pombeiro.]

The abbey church of Pombeiro, near Guimaraes, must once have been very similar to Sao Salvador at Paco de Souza, except that the nave is a good deal longer, and that it once had a large narthex, destroyed about a hundred and fifty years ago by an abbot who wished to add to the west front the two towers and square spires which still exist. So full was this narthex of tombs that from the arms on them it had become a sort of Heralds' College for the whole of the north of Portugal, but now only two remain in the shallow renaissance porch between the towers. As at Paco de Souza, the oldest part of the church is the east end, where the two apses flanking the square chancel remain unaltered. They are divided as usual by semicircular shafts bearing good romanesque capitals, and crowned by a cornice of three small arches to each division, each cut out of one stone, and resting on corbels and on the capitals. Of the west front only the fine doorway is left unchanged; pointed in shape, but romanesque in detail; having three of the five orders, carved one with grotesque animals and two with leafage. Above the shallow porch is a large round window with renaissance tracery, but retaining its original framing of a round arch resting on tall shafts with romanesque capitals. Everything else has been altered, the inside being covered with elaborate rococo painted and gilt plaster-work, and the outside disfigured by shapeless rococo windows.

Although some, and especially the last two of the buildings described above belong, in part at least, to the time of transition from romanesque to first pointed, and although the group of churches at Coimbra are wholly romanesque, it would be better to have done with all that can be ascribed to a period older than the beginning of the Portuguese monarchy before following Affonso Henriques in his successful efforts to extend his kingdom southwards to the Tagus.

Although Braga was the ecclesiastical capital of their fief,



[Sidenote: Guimaraes, Castle.]

Count Henry and his wife lived usually at Guimaraes, a small town some fifteen miles to the south. Towards the beginning of the tenth century there died D. Hermengildo Goncalves Mendes, count of Tuy and Porto, who by his will left Vimaranes, as it was then called, to his widow, Mumadona. About 927 she there founded a monastery and built a castle for its defence, and this castle, which had twice suffered from Moslem invaders, was restored or rebuilt by Count Henry, and there in 1111 was born his son Affonso Henriques, who was later to become the first king of the new and independent kingdom of Portugal. Henry died soon after, in 1114, at Astorga, perhaps poisoned by his sister-in-law, Urraca, queen of Castile and Leon, and for several years his widow governed his lands as guardian for their son.

Thirteen years after Count Henry's death, in 1127, the castle was the scene of the famous submission of Egas Moniz to the Spanish king, and this, together with the fact that Affonso Henriques was born there, has given it a place in the romantic history of Portugal which is rather higher than what would seem due to a not very important building. The castle stands to the north of the town on a height which commands all the surrounding country. Its walls, defended at intervals by square towers, are built among and on the 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 Leca 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.

[Sidenote: Church.]

The other foundation of Mumadona, the monastery of Nossa Senhora and Sao Salvador in the town of Guimaraes, 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 Joao 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 Joao 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,



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 Alcobaca still stands to show how well his vow was fulfilled.

Although Santarem was taken in 1147, the first stone of Alcobaca 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 Alcobaca 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.

[Sidenote: Se, 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 Alcobaca. 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 inside was plastered, all the capitals both of the main



piers and of the gallery were converted into a semblance of gilt Corinthian capitals, and large skylights were cut through the vault. Only the inside of the low octagonal lantern remains to show that the church must have been at least as interesting, if not more so, than the Se Velha or old cathedral at Coimbra. If the nave has suffered such a transformation the fourteenth-century choir has been even worse treated. The whole upper part, which once was as high as the top of the lantern, fell and was re-roofed in a most miserable manner, having only the ambulatory and its chapels uninjured. But these, the cloister and a rather fine chapel to the north-west of the nave, had better be left for another chapter.[41]

[Sidenote: Se Velha, Coimbra.]



Smaller but much better preserved than Lisbon Cathedral is the Se Velha or old cathedral of Coimbra. According to the local tradition, the cathedral is but a mosque turned into a church after the Christian conquest, and it may well be that in the time of Dom Sesnando, the first governor of Coimbra—a Moor who, becoming a Christian, was made count of Coimbra by King Fernando, and whose tomb, broken open by the French, may still be seen outside the north wall of the church—the chief mosque of the town was used as the cathedral. But although an Arab inscription[42] is built into the outer wall of the nave, there can be no doubt that the present building is as Christian in plan and design as any church can be. If the nave of the cathedral of Lisbon is like Santiago in construction, the nave here is, on a reduced scale, undoubtedly a copy of Santiago not only constructively but also in its general details. The piers are shorter but of the same plan, the great triforium gallery looks towards the nave, as at Santiago and at Toulouse, by a double opening whose arches spring from single shafts at the sides to rest on double shafts in the centre, both being enclosed under one larger arch, while the barrel vault and the supporting vaults of the gallery are exactly similar. Now Santiago was practically finished in 1128, and there still exists a book called the Livro Preto in which is given a list of the gifts made by Dom Miguel, who ruled the see of Coimbra from 1162 to 1176, towards the building and adorning of the church. Nothing is said as to when the church was begun, but we are told that Dom Miguel gave 124 morabitinos to Master Bernardo[43] who had directed the building for ten years; the presents too of bread and wine made to his successor Soeiro are also mentioned, so that it seems probable that the church may have been begun soon after Dom Miguel became bishop, and that it was finished some time before the end of his episcopate.

Though the nave is like that of Santiago, the transepts and choir are much simpler. There the transept is long and has an aisle on each side; here it is short and aisleless. There the choir is deep with a surrounding aisle and radiating chapels, here it is a simple apse flanked by two smaller apses. Indeed throughout the whole of the Peninsula the French east end was seldom used except in churches of a distinctly foreign origin, such as Santiago, Leon or Toledo in Spain, or Alcobaca in Portugal, and so it is natural here to find Bernardo rejecting the elaboration and difficult construction of his model, and returning to the simpler plan which had already been so often used in the north. (Fig. 18.)

Inside the piers are square with four half-shafts, one of which runs up in front to carry the barrel vault, which is about sixty feet high. All the capitals are well carved, and a moulded string which runs along under the gallery is curiously returned against the vaulting shafts as if it had once been carried round them and had afterwards been cut off. Almost the only light in the nave comes from small openings in the galleries, the aisle windows being nearly all blocked up by later altars, and from a large window at the west end. The transept on the other hand is very light, with several windows at either end, and eight in the square lantern, so that the effect is extremely good of the dark nave followed by the brilliant transept and ending in a great carved and gilt reredos. This reredos, reaching up to the blue-and-gold apse vault, was given to the cathedral in 1508 by Bishop D. Jorge d'Almeida, and was the work of 'Master Vlimer a Framengo,' that is, a Fleming, and of his partner, Joao D'ipri, or of Ypres, two of the many foreigners who at that time worked for King D. Manoel. There are several picturesque tombs in the church, especially two in the north-east corner of the transept, whose recesses still retain their original tile decoration. Later tiles still cover the aisle walls and altar recesses, but beautiful examples of the Mozarabe or Moorish style which once covered the piers of the nave, as well as the wooden choir gallery with its finely panelled under side, have been swept away by a recent well-meaning if mistaken restoration. The outside of the church is more unusual than the inside. The two remaining original apses are much hidden by the sacristy, built probably by Bishop Jorge de Castello Branco in 1593, but in their details they are greatly like those of the church of San Isidoro at Leon, and being like it built of fine limestone, are much more delicately ornamented than are those of any of the granite churches further north. The side aisles are but little lower than the central aisle or than the transepts, and are all crowned with battlements very like those on the castle of Guimaraes. The buttresses are only shallow strips, which in the transepts are united by round arches, but in the aisles end among the battlements in a larger merlon. The west front is the most striking and original part of the whole church. Below, at the sides, a perfectly plain window lights the aisles, some feet above it runs a string course, on which stands a small two-light window for the gallery, flanked by larger blind arches, and then many feet of blank walling ending in battlements. Between these two aisle ends there projects about ten feet a large doorway or porch. This doorway is of considerable size; some of its eight shafts are curiously twisted and carved, its capitals are very refined and elaborate, and its arches well moulded with, as at Lisbon, small bosses in the hollows. The abacus is plain, and the broad pilasters which carry the outermost order are beautifully carved on the broader face with a small running pattern of leaves. The same 'black book' which tells of the bishop's gifts to the church, tells how a certain Master Robert came four times from Lisbon to perfect the work of the door, and how each time he received seven morabitinos, besides ten for his expenses, as well as bread, wine and meat for his four apprentices and food for his four asses. It is not often that the name of a man who worked on a mediaeval church has been so preserved, and it is worth noticing that the west door at Lisbon has on it exactly the same ball ornament as that with which Master Robert and his four helpers enriched the archway here. Above the door runs an arched corbel table on which stands the one large window which the church possesses. This window,[44] which is much more like a door than a window, is deeply recessed within four orders of mouldings, resting on shafts and capitals, four on each side, all very like the door below. Above, the whole projection is carried up higher than the battlements in an oblong embattled belfry, having two arched openings in front and one at the side, added in 1837 to take the place of a detached belfry which once stood to the south of the church, and to hold some bells brought from Thomar after that rich convent had been suppressed. (Fig. 19.)

Of the two other doorways, that at the end of the north transept, which has a simple archway on either side, and is surmounted by an arcade of five arches, has been altered in the early sixteenth century with good details of the first French renaissance, while the larger doorway in the third bay of the nave has at the same time been rebuilt as a beautiful three-storied porch, reaching right up to the battlements. To the south lie the cloisters, added about the end of the thirteenth century, but now very much mutilated. They are of the usual Portuguese type of vaulted cloister, a large arch, here pointed, enclosing two round arches below with a circular opening above.

The central lantern—the only romanesque example surviving except that of Lisbon Cathedral—is square, and not as there octagonal. It has two round-headed windows on each side whose sills are but little above the level of the flat roof—for, like almost all vaulted churches in Portugal, the roofs are flat and paved—and is now crowned by a picturesque dome covered with many-coloured tiles.

Somewhat older than the cathedral, but not unlike it, was the church of Sao Christovao now destroyed, while Sao Thiago still has a west door whose shafts are even more elaborately carved and twisted than are those at the Se Velha.[45]

There is more than one building, such as the Templar



church at Thomar, older than the cathedral of Evora, and indeed older than the Se Velha at Coimbra; but Evora, except that its arches are pointed instead of round, is so clearly derived directly from the Se at Lisbon that it must be mentioned next in order.

[Sidenote: Se, Evora.]

Although the great province of Alemtejo, which reaches from the south bank of the Tagus to within about twenty-five or thirty miles of the Southern Sea, had more than once been entered by the victorious Portuguese king Affonso Henriques, it was not till after his death in 1185, indeed not till the beginning of the thirteenth century, that it could be called a part of Portugal. As early as 1139 Affonso Henriques had met and defeated five kings at Ourique not far from Beja, a victory which was long supposed to have secured his country's independence, and which was therefore believed to have been much greater and more important than was really the case.[46] Evora, the Roman capital of the district, did not fall into the hands of the Christians till 1166, when it is said to have been taken by stratagem by Giraldo Sem Pavor, or 'the Fearless,' an outlaw who by this capture regained the favour of the king. But soon the Moors returned, first in 1174 when they won back the whole of the province, and again in 1184 when Dom Sancho, Affonso's son, utterly defeated and killed their leader, Yusuf. Yusuf's son, Yakub, returned to meet defeat in 1188 and 1190 when he was repulsed from Thomar, but when he led a third army across the Straits in 1192 he found that the Crusaders who had formerly helped Dom Sancho had sailed on to Palestine, and with his huge army was able to drive the Christians back beyond the Tagus and compel the king to come to terms, nor did the Christian borders advance again for several years. It is said that the cathedral begun in 1185 or 1186[47] was dedicated in 1204, so it must have been still incomplete when Yakub's successful invasion took place, and only finished after the Christians had again recovered the town, though it is difficult to see how the church can have been dedicated in that year as the town remained in Moorish power till after Dom Sancho's death in 1211. Except the Se Velha at Coimbra, Evora is the best-preserved of all the older Portuguese cathedrals, and must always have been one of the largest. The plan is evidently founded on those of the cathedrals of Lisbon and Braga; a nave of eight bays 155 feet long by 75 wide, leads to an aisleless transept 125 by 30, with lantern at the crossing, to the east of which were five chapels. Unfortunately in 1718 the Capella Mor or main chancel was pulled down as being too small for the dignity of an archiepiscopal see, and a new one of many-coloured marbles built in its stead, measuring 75 feet by 30.[48]



To the west are two large square towers; to the south a cloister added in 1376; and at the end of the north transept a chapel built at the end of the fifteenth century and entered by a large archway well carved with rich early renaissance ornament. If there is no advance from the romanesque plan of older churches, there is none in construction. All the arches are pointed, but that is the only direction in which any change has been made. The piers are all cross-shaped with a large half-shaft on each of the four main faces and a smaller round shaft in each angle. The capitals have square moulded abaci, and are rather rudely carved with budlike curled leaves; the pointed arches of the arcade are well moulded, and above them runs a continuous triforium gallery like that in the nave at Lisbon, but with small pointed arches. The main vault is a pointed barrel with bold ribs; it is held up by a half-barrel over the aisles, which have groined vaults with very large transverse arches. The galleries over the aisles are lit by small pointed windows of two lights with a cusped circle between, but except in the lantern which has similar windows, in the transept ends and the west front, these are the only original openings which survive. (Fig. 20.) Both transepts have large rose windows, the northern filled with tracery, like that, common in Champagne, radiating towards and not from the centre. The southern is more interesting. The whole, well moulded, is enclosed in a curious square framing. In the centre a doubly cusped circle is surrounded by twelve radiating openings, whose trefoiled heads abut against twelve other broad trefoils, which are rather curiously run into the mouldings of the containing circle. Over the west porch is a curious eight-light window. There are four equal two-light openings below; on the two in the centre rests a large plain circle, and the space between it and the enclosing arch is very clumsily filled by a rib which, springing from the apex of either light, runs concentrically with the enclosing arch till it meets the larger circle. The whole building is surmounted by brick battlements, everything else being of granite, resting on a good trefoil corbel table, and, as the roofs are perfectly flat, there are no gables.

The two western towers are very picturesque. The northern, without buttresses, has its several windows arranged without any regard to symmetry, and finishes in a round spire covered with green and white glazed tiles. In the southern plain buttresses run up to the belfry stage which has round-headed openings, and above it is a low octagonal spire set diagonally and surrounded by eight pinnacles.

The most unusual feature of the whole cathedral is the fine octagonal lantern at the crossing. Each face has a two-light window, pointed outside, with a round-headed arch within, leaving a passage between the two walls. At each angle are plain buttresses, weathered back a few feet below the corbel table, above which stand eight octagonal pinnacles each with eight smaller pinnacles surrounding a conical stone spire. The whole lantern is covered by a steep stone roof which, passing imperceptibly from the octagonal to the round, is covered, as are all the other pinnacles, with scales carved in imitation of tiles. Inside the well-moulded vaulting ribs do not rise higher than the windows, leaving therefore a large space between the vault and the outer stone capping. (Fig. 21.)

Lanterns, especially octagonal lanterns, are particularly common in Spain, and at Salamanca and its neighbourhood were very early developed and attained to a remarkable degree of perfection before the end of the twelfth century. It is strange, therefore, that they should be so rare in Portugal where there seem now to be only three: one, square, at Coimbra, an octagonal at Lisbon, and one here, where however there is nothing of the internal dome which is so striking at Salamanca. Probably this lantern was one of the enrichments added to the church by Bishop Durando who died in 1283, for the capitals of the west door look considerably later.

This door is built entirely of white marble with shafts which look, as do those of the south transept door, almost like Cipollino, taken perhaps from some Roman building. It has well-moulded arches and abaci; capitals richly carved with realistic foliage, and on each side six of the apostles, all very like each other, large-headed, long-bearded, and long-haired, with rather good drapery but bodies and legs which look far too short. St. Peter alone, with short curly hair and beard, has any individuality, but is even less prepossessing than his companions. They are, however, among the earliest specimens of large figure sculpture which survive, and by their want of grace make it easier to understand why Dom Manoel employed so many foreign artists in the early years of the sixteenth century.



The large cloister to the south must once have been one of the best in the country. Here the main arches alone survive, having lost whatever subsidiary arches or tracery they may once have contained, but higher up under the corbel table are large open circles, not as everywhere else enclosed under the large arch, but quite independent of it. Many of these circles are still filled with thin slabs of granite all pierced with most beautiful patterns, some quite Gothic, but the majority almost Moorish in design, not unlike the slabs in the circles over the cloister arcades at Alcobaca, but though this is probably only a coincidence, still more like those at Tarragona in Cataluna. (Fig. 22.)

[Sidenote: Templar Church, Thomar.]

Like the cathedral at Evora, some of the arches in the Templar Church at Thomar are pointed, yet like it again, it is entirely romanesque both in construction and in detail.

The Knights Templars were already established in Portugal in 1126. With their headquarters at Soure, a little to the south of Coimbra, they had been foremost in helping Affonso Henriques in his attacks on the Moors, and when Santerem was taken in 1147 they were given the ecclesiastical superiority of the town. This led to a quarrel with Dom Gilberto, the English bishop of Lisbon, which was settled in 1150, when Dom Gualdim Paes, the most famous member the order ever produced in Portugal, was chosen to be Grand Master. He at once gave up all Santarem to the bishop, except the church of Sao Thiago, and received instead the territory of Ceras some forty or fifty miles to the north-east. There on the banks of the river Nabao, on a site famous for the martyrdom under Roman rule of Sant' Iria or Irene, Dom Gualdim built a church, and began a castle which was soon abandoned for a far stronger position on a steep hill some few hundred yards to the west across the river. This second castle, begun in 1160, still survives in part but in a very ruinous condition; the walls and the keep alike have lost their battlements and their original openings, though a little further west, and once forming part of the fortified enclosure, the church, begun in 1162, still remains as a high tower-like bastion crowned with battlements. Dom Gualdim had the laudable habit of carving inscriptions telling of any striking event, so that we may still read, not only how the castle was founded, but how 'In the year of the Era of Caesar, 1228 (that is 1190 A.D., on the 3rd of July), came the King of Morocco, leading four hundred thousand horsemen and five hundred thousand foot and besieged this castle for six days, destroying everything he found outside the walls. God delivered from his hands the castle, the aforesaid Master and his brethren. The same king returned to his country with innumerable loss of men and of animals.'[49] Doubtless the size of Yakub the Almohade leader's army is here much exaggerated, but that he was forced to retire from Thomar, and by pestilence from Santarem is certain, and though he made a more successful invasion two years later the Moors never again gained a footing to the north of the Tagus.

Dom Gualdim's church, since then enlarged by the addition of a nave to the west, was originally a polygon of sixteen sides with a circular barrel-vaulted aisle surrounding a small octagon, which with its two stories of slightly pointed arches contains the high altar.[50] (Fig. 23.)

The round-headed windows come up high, and till it was so richly adorned by Dom Manoel during his grand mastership of the Order of Christ more than three hundred years later, the church must have been extremely simple. Outside the most noticeable feature is the picturesque grouping of the bell-towers and gable, added probably in the seventeenth century, which now rise on the eastern side of the polygon, and which, seen above the orange and medlar trees of a garden reaching eastwards towards the castle, forms one of the most pleasing views in the whole country.

[Sidenote: Sao Joao de Alporao, Santarem.]

If Evora and the Templar church at Thomar show one form of transition, where the arches are pointed, but the construction and detail is romanseque, Sao Joao de Alporao at Santarem shows another, where the construction is Gothic but the arches are still all round.



This church is said to stand on the site of a mosque and to have been at first called Al Koran, since corrupted into Alporao, but the present building can hardly have been begun till the early years of the thirteenth century. The church consists of an aisleless nave with good groined vaulting and a five-sided apsidal chancel. The round-arched west door stands under a pointed gable, but seems to have lost by decay and consequent restoration whatever ornament its rather flat mouldings may once have had. Above is a good wheel window, with a cusped circle in the centre, surrounded by eight radiating two-arched lights separated by eight radiating columns. The two arches of each light spring from a detached capital which seems to have lost its shaft, but as there is no trace of bases for these missing shafts on the central circle they probably never existed. All the other nave windows are mere slits; and above them runs a rich corbel table of slightly stilted arches with their edges covered with ball ornament resting on projecting corbels. In the apse the five windows are tall and narrow with square heads, and the corbel table of a form common in Portugal but rare elsewhere, where each corbel is something like the bows of a boat.[51]

The inside, now turned into a museum, is much more interesting. The chancel is entered, under a circular cusped window, by a wide round arch, whose outer moulding is curiously carried by shafts with capitals set across the angle as if to carry a vaulting rib; in the chancel itself the walls are double, the outer having the plain square-headed windows seen outside, and the inner very elegant two-light round-headed openings resting on very thin and delicate shafts, with a doubly cusped circle above. The vault, whose wall arches are stilted and slightly pointed, has strong well-moulded ribs springing from the well-wrought capitals of tall angle shafts. It will be seen that this is a very great advance on any older vaulting, since previously, except in the French Church at Alcobaca, groined vaults had only been attempted over square spaces. The finest of the many objects preserved in the museum is the tomb of Dom Duarte de Menezes, who was killed in Africa in 1464 and buried in the church of Sao Francisco, whence, Sao Francisco having become a cavalry stable, it was brought here not many years ago. (Fig. 24.)

Such are, except for the church at Idanha a Velha and that of Castro de Avelans near Braganza, nearly all the early buildings in the country. Castro de Avelans is interesting and unique as having on the outside brick arcades, like those on the many Mozarabic churches at Toledo, a form of decoration not found elsewhere in Portugal. The church of Alcobaca is of course, in part, a good deal older than are some of those mentioned above; but the whole, the romanesque choir as well as the early pointed nave, is so unlike anything that has come before or anything that has come after, that it seemed better to take it by itself without regard to strict chronological order.



[Sidenote: Alcobaca.]

The first stone was laid in 1158, but the church was barely finished when King Sancho I. died in 1211 and was not dedicated till 1220, while the monastic buildings were not ready till 1223, when the monks migrated from Sta. Maria a Velha, their temporary home. The abbey was immensely wealthy: it had complete jurisdiction over fourteen villages whose inhabitants were in fact its serfs: it or its abbot was visitor to all Benedictine abbeys in the country and was, for over three hundred years, till the reign of Cardinal King Henry, the superior of the great military Order of Christ. It early became one of the first centres of learning in Portugal, having begun to teach in 1269. It helped Dom Diniz to found the University of Lisbon, now finally settled at Coimbra, with presents of books and of money, and it only acknowledged the king in so far as to give him a pair of boots or shoes when he chanced to come to Alcobaca. All these possessions and privileges of the monks were confirmed by Dom Joao IV. (1640-56) after the supremacy of the Spaniards had come to an end, and were still theirs when Beckford paid them his memorable visit near the end of the eighteenth century and was so splendidly entertained with feastings and even with plays and operas performed by some of the younger brothers. Much harm was of course done by the French invasion, and at last in 1834 the brothers were turned out, their house made into barracks, and their church and cloister left to fall into decay—a decay from which they are only being slowly rescued at the present time.

The first abbot, Ranulph, was sent by St. Bernard of Clairvaux himself at the king's special request, and he must have brought with him the plan of the abbey or at least of the church. Nearly all Cistercian churches, which have not been altered, are of two types which resemble each other in being very simple, having no towers and very little ornament of any kind. In the simpler of these forms, the one which prevailed in England, the transept is aisleless, with five or more chapels, usually square, to the east, of which the largest, in the centre, contains the main altar. Such are Fontenay near Monbart and Furness in Lancashire, and even Melrose, though there the church has been rebuilt more or less on the old plan but with a wealth of detail and size of window quite foreign to the original rule. In the other, a more complex type, the transept may have a western aisle, and instead of a plain square chancel there is an apse with surrounding aisle and beyond it a series of four-sided chapels. Pontigny, famous for the shelter it gave to Thomas-a-Becket, and begun in 1114, is of this type, and so was Clairvaux itself, begun in 1115 and rebuilt in the eighteenth century. Now this is the type followed by Alcobaca, and it is worthy of notice that, as far as the plan of choir and transept goes, Alcobaca and Clairvaux are practically identical. Pontigny has a choir of three bays between the transept and the apse and seven encircling chapels; Clairvaux had, and Alcobaca still has, a choir of but one bay and nine instead of seven chapels. Both had long naves, Clairvaux of eleven and Alcobaca of thirteen bays, but at the west end there is a change, due probably to the length of time which passed before it was reached, for there is no trace of the large porch or narthex found in most early Cistercian churches.

The church is by far the largest in Portugal. It is altogether about 365 feet long, the nave alone being about 250 feet by 75, while the transept measures about 155 feet from north to south. Except in the choir all the aisles are of the same height, about 68 feet.

The east end is naturally the oldest part and most closely resembled its French original; the eight round columns of the apse have good plain capitals like those found in so many early Cistercian churches, even in Italy;[52] the round-headed clerestory windows are high and narrow, and there are well-developed flying buttresses. Unfortunately all else has been changed: in the apse itself everything up to the clerestory level has been hidden by two rows of classic columns and a huge reredos, and all the choir chapels have been filled with rococo woodwork and gilding, the work of an Englishman, William Elsden, who was employed to beautify the church in 1770.[53] Why except for the choir aisle, and the chapels in choir and transept, the whole church should be of the same height, it is difficult to say, for such a method of building was unknown in France and equally unknown in Spain or Portugal. Possibly by the time the nave was reached the Frenchmen who had planned the church were dead, and the native workmen, being quite unused to such a method of construction, for all the older vaulted churches have their central barrel upheld by the half-barrel vault of the galleries, could think of no other way of supporting the groining of the main aisle. They had of course the flying buttresses of the choir apse to guide them, but there the points of support come so much closer together, and the weight to be upheld is consequently so much less than could be the case in the nave, that they may well have thought that to copy them was too dangerous an experiment as well as being too foreign to their traditional manner of construction.[54] Whatever may be the reason, the west aisle of the transept and the side aisles of the nave rise to the full height of the building. Their arches are naturally very much stilted, and with the main vault rest on piers of quite unusual size and strength. The transverse arches are so large as almost to hide the diagonal ribs and to give the impression that the nave has, after all, a pointed barrel vault. The piers are throughout cross-shaped with a half-shaft on each cardinal face: at the crossing there is also a shaft in the angle, but elsewhere this shaft is replaced by a kind of corbel capital[55] at the very top which carries the diagonal ribs—another proof, as is the size of the transverse arches, that such a ribbed vault was still a half-understood novelty. The most peculiar point about nave piers is the way in which not only the front vaulting shafts but even that portion of the piers to which they are attached is, except in the two western bays, cut off at varying heights from the ground. In the six eastern bays, where the corbels are all at the same level, this was done to leave room for the monks' stalls,[56] but it is difficult to see why, in the case of the following five piers, against which, as at Clairvaux, stood the stalls of the lay brothers, the level of the corbels should vary so much. Now all stalls are gone and the church is very bare and desolate, with nothing but the horrible reredos to detract from that severity and sternness which was what St. Bernard wished to see in all churches of the Order. (Fig. 25.)

The small chapel to the west of the south transept is the only part of the church, except the later sixteenth-century sacristy, where there is any richness of detail, and there it is confined to the tombs of some of the earlier kings and queens, and especially to those of D. Pedro and the unfortunate Inez de Castro which belongs of course to a much later date.

The windows which are high up the aisle walls are large, round-headed, and perfectly plain. At the transept ends are large round windows filled with plain uncusped circles, and there is another over the west door filled with a rococo attempt at Gothic tracery, which agrees well with the two domed western towers whose details are not even good rococo. Between these towers still opens the huge west door, a very plainly moulded pointed arch of seven orders, resting on the simple capitals of sixteen shafts: a form of door which became very common throughout the fourteenth century. The great cloister was rebuilt later in the time of Dom Diniz, leaving only the chapter-house entrance, which seems even older than the nave. As usual there is one door in the centre, with a large two-light opening on each side: all the arches are round and well moulded, and the capitals simply carved with stiff foliage showing a gradual transition from the earlier romanesque. In the monastery itself, now a barrack, there are still a few vaulted passages which must belong to the original building, but nearly all else has been rebuilt, the main cloister in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and the greater part of the domestic buildings in the eighteenth, so that except for the cloister and sacristy, which will be spoken of later on, there is little worthy of attention.[57]

Now none of these buildings may show any very great originality or differ to any marked degree from contemporary buildings in Spain or even in the south of France, yet to a great extent they fixed a type which in many ways was followed down to the end of the Gothic period. The plan of Braga, Pombeiro, Evora or Coimbra is reproduced with but little change at Guarda, and if the western towers be omitted, at Batalha, some two hundred years later, and the flat paved roofs of Evora occur again at Batalha and at Guarda. The barrel-vaulted nave also long survived, being found as late as the beginning of the fourteenth century in the church of Santa Clara at Coimbra, and even about seventy years later in the church of the Knights of Sao Thiago at Palmella.

The battlements also of the castle at Guimaraes are found not only at Coimbra, but as late as 1336 in the church of Leca do Balio near Oporto, and, modified in shape by the renaissance even in the sixteenth-century churches of Villa do Conde and of Azurara.

Although the distinctively French features of Alcobaca seem to have had but little influence on the further development of building in Portugal, a few peculiarities are found there which are repeated again. For example, the unusually large transverse arches of the nave occur at Batalha, and the large plain western door is clearly related to such later doors as those at Leca do Balio or of Sao Francisco at Oporto. Again the vaulting of the apse in Sao Joao de Alporao is arranged very much in the way which was almost universal during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the chancels and side chapels of many a church, such as Santa Maria do Olival at Thomar, or the Graca at Santarem itself, and the curious boat-like corbels of Sao Joao are found more than once, as in the choir of the old church, formerly the cathedral of Silves, far south in the Algarve. The large round windows at Evora do not seem to be related to the window at Sao Joao, but to be of some independent origin; probably, like the similar windows at Leca and at Oporto, they too belong to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.



CHAPTER III

THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES DOWN TO THE BATTLE OF ALJUBARROTA

In Portugal the twelfth century is marked by a very considerable activity in building, but the thirteenth, which in France and England saw Gothic architecture rise to a height of perfection both in construction and in ornament which was never afterwards excelled, when more great churches and cathedrals were built than almost ever before or since, seems here to have been the least productive period in the whole history of the country. In the thirteenth century, indeed, Portugal reached its widest European limits, but the energies, alike of the kings and of the people, seem to have been expended rather in consolidating their conquests and in cultivating and inhabiting the large regions of land left waste by the long-continued struggle. Although Dom Sancho's kingdom only extended from the Minho to the Tagus, in the early years of the thirteenth century the rich provinces of Beira, and still more of Estremadura, were very thinly peopled: the inhabitants lived only in walled towns, and their one occupation was fighting, and plunder almost their only way of gaining a living. It is natural then that so few buildings should remain which date from the reigns of Dom Sancho's successors, Affonso II. (1211-1223), Sancho II. (1223-1248), and Affonso III. (1248-1279): the necessary churches and castles had been built at once after the conquest, and the people had neither the leisure nor the means to replace them by larger and more refined structures as was being done elsewhere. Of course some churches described in the last chapter may be actually of that period though belonging artistically and constructionally to an earlier time, as for instance a large part of the cathedral of Evora or the church of Sao Joao at Santarem.

[Sidenote: Sao Francisco, Guimaraes.]

The Franciscans had been introduced into Portugal by Dona Sancha, the daughter of Dom Sancho I., and houses were built for them by Dona Urraca, the wife of Dom Affonso II., at Lisbon and at Guimaraes. Their church at Guimaraes has been very much altered at different times, mostly in the eighteenth century, but the west door may very well belong to Dona Urraca's building. It has a drip-mould covered with closely set balls, and four orders of mouldings of which the second is a broad chamfer with a row of flat four-leaved flowers; the abacus is well moulded, but the capitals, which are somewhat bell-shaped, have the bell covered with rude animals or foliage which are still very romanesque in design. The entrance to the chapter-house is probably not much later in date: from the south walk of the simple but picturesque renaissance cloister a plain pointed doorway leads into the chapter-house, with, on either side, an opening of about equal size and shape. In these openings there stand three pairs of round coupled shafts with plain bases, rudely carved capitals and large square overhanging abaci, from which spring two pointed arches moulded only on the under side: resting on these, but connected with them or with the enclosing arch by no moulding or fillet, is a small circle, moulded like the arches only on one side and containing a small quatrefoil.[58] This is one of the earliest attempts at window tracery in the country, for the west window at Evora seems later, but like it, it shows that tracery was not really understood in the country, and that the Portuguese builders were not yet able so to unite the different parts as to make such a window one complete and beautiful whole. Indeed so unsuccessful are their attempts throughout that whenever, as at Batalha, a better result is seen, it may be put down to foreign influence. Much better as a rule are the round windows, mostly of the fourteenth century, but they are all very like one another, and are probably mostly derived from the same source, perhaps from one of the transept windows at Evora, or from the now empty circle over the west door at Lisbon.

[Sidenote: Sao Francisco, Santarem.]

Much more refined than this granite church at Guimaraes has been Sao Francisco at Santarem, now unfortunately degraded into being the stable of a cavalry barracks. There the best-preserved and most interesting part is the west door, which does not lead directly into the church but into a low porch or narthex. The narthex itself has central and side aisles, all of the same height, is two bays in length and is covered by a fine strong vault resting on short clustered piers.[59] The doorway itself, which is not acutely pointed, stands under a gable which reaches up to the plain battlemented parapet of the flat narthex roof. There are four shafts on each side with a ring-moulding rather less than half-way up, which at once distinguishes them from any romanesque predecessors; the capitals are round with a projecting moulding half-way up and another one at the top with a curious projection or claw to unite the round cap and the square moulded abacus. Of the different orders of the arch, all well moulded, the outer has a hood with billet-mould; the second a well-developed chevron or zigzag; and the innermost a series of small horseshoes, which like the chevron stretch across the hollow so as to hold in the large roll at the angle.[60] (Fig. 26.)

[Sidenote: Santa Maria dos Olivaes, Thomar.]

In a previous chapter the building of a church at Thomar by Dom Gualdim Paes, Grand Master of the Templars, has been mentioned. Of this church and the castle built at the same time, both of which stood on the east or flat bank of the river Nabao, nothing now remains except perhaps the lower part of the detached bell-tower. This church, Santa Maria dos Olivaes, was the Matriz or mother church of all those held, first by the Templars and later by their successors, the Order of Christ, not only in Portugal but even in Africa, Brazil, and in India. Of so high a dignity it is scarcely worthy, being but a very simple building neither large nor richly ornamented. A nave and aisles of five bays, three polygonal apses to the east and later square chapels beyond the aisles, make up the whole building. The roofs are all of panelled wood of the sixteenth century except in the three vaulted apses, of which the central is entered by an arch, which, rising no higher than the aisle arches, leaves room for a large window under the roof. All the arches of the aisle arcade spring from the simple moulded capitals of piers whose section is that of four half-octagons placed together. In the



clerestory are windows of one small light, in the aisles of two larger lights, and in the apses single lancets. The great simplicity of the building notwithstanding it can scarcely be as old as the thirteenth century: the curious way in which the two lancet lights of the aisle windows are enclosed under one larger trefoiled arch recalls the similar windows in the church at Leca do Balio near Oporto begun in 1336, though there the elliptical head of the enclosing arch is much less satisfactory than the trefoiled head here used. The only part of the church which can possibly have been built in the thirteenth century is the central part of the west front. The pointed door below stands under a projecting gable like that at Sao Francisco Santarem, except that there is a five-foiled circle above the arch containing a pentalpha, put there perhaps to keep out witches. The door itself has three large shafts on each side with good but much-decayed capitals of foliage, and a moulded jamb next the door. The arch itself is terribly decayed, but one of its orders still has the remains of a series of large cusps, arranged like the horseshoe cusps at Santarem but much larger. Above the door gable is a circular window of almost disproportionate size. It has twelve trefoil-headed lights radiating from a small circle, and curiously crossing a larger circle some distance from the smaller. Unfortunately the spaces between the trefoils and the outer mouldings have been filled up with plaster and the lights themselves subdivided with meaningless wood tracery to hold the horrible blue-and-red glass now so popular in Portugal. Though Santa Maria dos Olivaes cannot be nearly as old as has usually been believed, it is one of the earliest churches built on the plan derived perhaps first from Braga Cathedral or from the Franciscan and Dominican churches in Galicia, of a wooden roofed basilica with or without transept, and with three or more apses to the east; a form which to the end of the Gothic period was the most common and which is found even in cathedrals as at Silves or at Funchal in Madeira.

Dom Sancho II., whose reign had begun with brilliant attacks on the Moors, had, because of his connection with Dona Mencia de Haro, the widow of a Castilian nobleman, and his consequent inactivity, become extremely unpopular, so was supplanted in 1246 by his brother Dom Affonso III. The first care of the new king was to carry on the conquest

[Sidenote: Silves.]

of the Algarve, which his brother had given up when he fell under the evil influence of Dona Mencia, and by about 1260 he had overrun the whole country. At first Alfonso x., the Wise, king of Castile and Leon, was much displeased at this extension of Portuguese power, but on Dom Affonso agreeing to marry his daughter Beatriz de Guzman, the Spanish king allowed his son-in-law to retain his conquests and to assume the title of King of the Algarve, a title which his descendants still bear. The countess of Boulogne, Affonso's first wife, was indeed still alive, but that seems to have troubled neither Dona Beatriz nor her father. At Silves or Chelb, for so the Moorish capital had been called, a bishopric was soon founded, but the cathedral,[61] though many of its details seem to proclaim an early origin, was probably not begun till the early, and certainly not finished till near the later, years of the fourteenth century. It is a church of the same type as Santa Maria at Thomar but with a transept. The west door, a smaller edition of that at Alcobaca, leads to a nave and aisles of four bays, with plain octagonal columns, whose bases exactly resemble the capitals reversed—an octagon brought to a square by a curved chamfer. The nave has a wooden roof, transepts a pointed barrel vault, and the crossing and chancel with its side chapels a ribbed vault. Though some of the capitals at the east end look almost romanesque, the really late date is shown by the cusped fringing of the chancel arch, a feature very common at Batalha, which was begun at the end of the fourteenth century, and by the window tracery, where in the two-light windows the head is filled by a flat pierced slab. Outside, the chancel has good buttresses at the angles, and is crowned by that curious boat-like corbel table seen at Santarem and by a row of pyramidal battlements. The church is only about 150 feet long, but with its two picturesque and dilapidated towers, and the wonderful deep purple of its sandstone walls rising above the whitewashed houses and palms of the older Silves and backed by the Moorish citadel, it makes a most picturesque and even striking centre to the town, which, standing high above the river, preserves the memory of its Moslem builders in its remarkable and many-towered city walls.[62] (Fig. 27.)

[Sidenote: Beja.]

King Diniz the Labourer, so called for his energy in settling and reclaiming the land and in fixing the moving sands along the west coast by plantations of pine-trees, and the son of Dom Affonso and Dona Beatriz, was a more active builder than any of his immediate predecessors. Of the many castles built by him the best preserved is that of Beja, the second town of Alemtejo and the Pax Julia of Roman times. The keep, built about 1310, is a great square tower over a hundred feet high. Some distance from the top it becomes octagonal, with the square fortified by corbelled balconies projecting far out over the corners. Inside are several stories of square halls finely vaulted with massive octagonal vaults; below, the windows are little more than slits, but on one floor there are larger two-light pointed openings.[63]

[Sidenote: Leiria.]

Far finer and larger has been the castle of Leiria, some fifty miles south of Coimbra: it or the keep was begun by Dom Diniz in 1324.[64] The rock on which it stands, in steepness and in height recalls that of Edinburgh Castle, but without the long slope of the old town leading nearly to the summit: towering high above Leiria it is further defended on the only accessible quarter by the river Lis which runs round two sides not far from the bottom of the steep descent. Unfortunately all is ruined, only enough remaining to show that on the steepest edge of the rock there stood a palace with large pointed windows looking out over the town to the green wooded hills beyond. On the highest part stands what is left of the keep, and a little lower the castle-church whose bell-tower, built over the gate, served to defend the only access to the inner fortification. This church, built about the same time, with a now roofless nave which was never vaulted, is entered by a door on the south, and has a polygonal vaulted apse. The mouldings of the door as well as the apse vault and its tall two-light windows show a greater delicacy and refinement than is seen in almost any earlier building, and some of the carving has once been of great beauty, especially of the boss at the centre of the apse.[65]

But besides those two castles there is another building of this period which had a greater and more lasting effect on the work of this fourteenth century. In England the arrival of the Cistercians and the new style introduced or rather developed by them seems almost more than anything else to have determined the direction of the change from what is usually, perhaps wrongly,[66] called Norman to Early English, but in Portugal the great foundation of Alcobaca was apparently powerless to have any such marked effect except in the one case of cloisters. Now with the exception of the anomalous and much later Claustro Real at Batalha, all cloisters in Portugal, before the renaissance, follow two types: one, which is clearly only a modification of the continuous romanesque arcades resting on coupled shafts, has usually a wooden roof, and consists of a row of coupled shafts bearing pointed arches, and sometimes interrupted at intervals by square piers; this form of cloister is found at Santo Thyrso near Guimaraes, at Sao Domingos in Guimaraes itself, and in the Cemetery cloister built by Prince Henry the Navigator at Thomar in the fifteenth century.

[Sidenote: Cloister, Cellas.]

The most remarkable of all the cloisters of the first type is that of the nunnery of Cellas near Coimbra. Founded in 1210 by Dona Sancha, daughter of Sancho I., the nunnery is now a blind asylum. The cloister, with round arches and coupled columns, seems thoroughly romanesque in character, as are also the capitals. It is only on looking closer that the real date is seen, for the figures on the capitals, which are carved with scenes such as the beheading of St. John the Baptist, are all dressed in the fashion that prevailed under Dom Diniz—about 1300—while the foliage on others, though still romanesque in arrangement, is much later in detail. More than half of the arcades were rebuilt in the seventeenth century, but enough remains to make the cloister of Cellas one of the most striking examples of the survival of old forms and methods of building which in less remote countries had been given up more than a hundred years before.

The church, though small, is not without interest. It has a round nave of Dom Manoel's time with a nuns' choir to the west and a chancel to the east, and is entered by a picturesque door of the later sixteenth century.

[Sidenote: Cloister, Coimbra.]

[Sidenote: Cloister, Alcobaca.]

More interesting is the second type which was commonly used when a cloister with a vault was wanted; and of it there are still examples to be seen at the Se Velha Coimbra, at Alcobaca, Lisbon Cathedral, Evora, and Oporto. None of these five examples are exactly alike, but they resemble each other sufficiently to make it probable that they are all, ultimately at least, derived from one common source, and there can be no doubt that that source was Cistercian. In France what was perhaps its very first beginnings may be seen in the Cistercian abbey of Fontenay near Monbart, where in each bay there are two round arches enclosed under one larger round arch. This was further developed at Fontfroide near Narbonne, where an arcade of four small round arches under a large pointed arch carries a thin wall pierced by a large round circle. Of the different Portuguese examples the oldest may very well be that at Coimbra which differs only from Fontfroide in having an arcade of two arches in each bay instead of one of four, but even though it may be a little older than the large cloister of Alcobaca, it must have been due to Cistercian influence. The great Claustro do Silencio at Alcobaca was, as an inscription tells, begun in the year 1310,[67] when on April 13th the first stone was laid by the abbot in the presence of the master builder Domingo Domingues.[68] In this case each bay has an arcade of two or three pointed arches resting on coupled columns with strong buttresses between each bay, but the enclosing arch is not pointed as at Coimbra or Fontfroide but segmental and springs from square jambs at the level of the top of the buttresses, and the circles have been all filled with pierced slabs, some of which have ordinary quatrefoils and some much more intricate patterns, though in no case do they show the Moorish influence which is so noticeable at Evora. On the north side projects the lavatory, an apsidal building with two stories of windows and with what in France would be regarded as details of the thirteenth century and not, as is really the case, of the fourteenth. A few bays on the west walk seem rather later than the rest, as the arches of the arcade are trefoil-headed, while the upper part of a small projection on the south side which now contains a stair, as well as the upper cloister to which it leads, were added by Joao de Castilho for Cardinal Prince Henry, son of Dom Manoel, and commendator of the abbey in 1518. (Fig. 28.)

[Sidenote: Cloister, Lisbon.]

In the cloister at Lisbon which seems to be of about the same date, and which, owing to the nature of the site, runs round the back of the choir, there is no outer containing arch, and in some bays there are two large circles instead of one, but in every other respect, except that some of the round openings are adorned with a ring of dog-tooth moulding, the details are very similar, the capitals and bases being all of good thirteenth-century French form.[69] (Fig. 29.)

[Sidenote: Cloister, Oporto.]

If the cloister at Evora, which was built in 1376 and has already been described, is the one which departs furthest from the original type, retaining only the round opening, that of the cathedral of Oporto, built in 1385, comes nearer to Fontfroide than any of the others. Here each bay is designed exactly like the French example except that the small arches are pointed, that the large openings are chamfered instead of moulded, and that there are buttresses between each bay. The capitals which are rather tall are carved with rather shallow leaves, but the most noticeable features are the huge square moulded abaci which are so large as to be more like those of the romanesque cloisters at Moissac or of Sta. Maria del Sar at Santiago than any fourteenth-century work.

[Sidenote: Sta. Clara, Coimbra.]

The most important church of the time of Dom Diniz is, or rather was, that of the convent of Poor Clares founded at Coimbra by his wife St. Isabel. Although a good king, Diniz had not been a good husband, and the queen's sorrows had been still further increased by the rebellion of



her son, afterwards Affonso IV., a rebellion to which Isabel was able to put an end by interposing between her husband and her son. When St. Isabel died in 1327, two years after her husband, the church was not yet quite finished, but it must have been so soon after. Unfortunately the annual floods of the Mondego and the sands which they bring down led to the abandonment of the church in the seventeenth century, and have so buried it that the floor of the barn—for that is the use to which it is now put—is almost level with the springing of the aisle arches, but enough is left to show what the church was like, and were not its date well assured no one would believe it to be later than the end of the twelfth century. The chancel, which was aisleless and lower than the rest of the church, is gone, but the nave and its aisles are still in a tolerable state of preservation, though outside all the detail has been destroyed except one round window on the south side filled in with white marble tracery of a distinctly Italian type, and the corbel table of the boat-keel shape. The inside is most unusual for a church of the fourteenth century. The central aisle has a pointed barrel vault springing from a little above the aisle arches, while the aisles themselves have an ordinary cross vault. All the capitals too look early, and the buttresses broad and rather shallow. (Fig. 30.)

[Sidenote: Leca do Balio.]

A few miles north of Oporto on the banks of the clear stream of the Leca a monastery for men and women had been founded in 986. In the course of the next hundred years it had several times fallen into decay and been restored, till about the year 1115 when it was handed over to the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem and so became their headquarters in Portugal. The church had been rebuilt by Abbot Guntino some years before the transfer took place, and had in time become ruinous, so that in 1336 it was rebuilt by Dom Frei Estevao Vasques Pimentel, the head of the Order. This church still stands but little altered since the fourteenth century, and though not a large or splendid building it is the most complete and unaltered example of that thoroughly national plan and style which, developed in the previous century, was seen at Thomar and will be seen again in many later examples. The church consists of a nave and aisles of four bays, transepts higher than the side but lower than the centre aisle of the nave, three vaulted apses to the east, and at the south-west corner a square tower. Like many Portuguese buildings Sta. Maria de Leca do Balio looks at first sight a good deal earlier than is really the case. The west and the south doors, which are almost exactly alike, except that the south door is surmounted by a gable, have three shafts on each side with early-looking capitals and plain moulded archivolts, and within these, jambs moulded at the angles bearing an inner order whose flat face is carved with a series of circles enclosing four and five-leaved flowers. Above the west door runs a projecting gallery whose parapet, like all the other parapets of the church, is defended by a close-set row of pointed battlements. Above the gallery is a large rose-window in which twelve spokes radiate from a cusped circle in the middle to the circumference, where the lights so formed are further enriched by cusped semicircles. The aisle and clerestory windows show an unusual attempt to include two lancets into one window by carrying on the outer framing of the window till it meets above the mullion in a kind of pendant arch.[70]

The square tower is exceedingly plain, without string course or buttress to mitigate its severity. Half-way up on the west side is a small window with a battlemented balcony in front projecting out on three great corbels; higher up are plain belfry windows. At the top, square balconies or bartizans project diagonally from the corners; the whole, though there are but three pyramidal battlements on each side, being even more strongly fortified than the rest of the church. Now in the fourteenth century such fortification of a church can hardly have been necessary, and they were probably built rather to show that the church belonged to a military order than with any idea of defence. The inside is less interesting, the pointed arches are rather thin and the capitals poor, the only thing much worthy of notice being the font, belonging to the time of change from Gothic to Renaissance, and given in 1512.[71]

[Sidenote: Chancel, Se, Lisbon.]

Of the other buildings of the time of Dom Affonso IV. who succeeded his father Diniz in 1328 the most important



has been the choir of the cathedral at Lisbon; the church had been much injured by an earthquake in 1344 and the whole east end was at once rebuilt on the French plan, otherwise unexampled in Portugal except by the twelfth-century choir at Alcobaca. Unfortunately the later and more terrible earthquake of 1755 so ruined the whole building that of Dom Affonso's work only the surrounding aisle and its chapels remain. The only point which calls for notice is that the chapels are considerably lower than the aisle so as to admit of a window between the chapel arch and the aisle vault. All the chapels have good vaulting and simple two-light windows, and capitals well carved with naturalistic foliage. In one chapel, that of SS. Cosmo and Damiao, screened off by a very good early wrought-iron grill, are the tombs of Lopo Fernandes Pacheco and of his second wife Maria Rodrigues. Dona Maria, lying on a stone sarcophagus, which stands on four short columns, and whose sides are adorned with four shields with the arms of her father, Ruy di Villa Lobos, has her head protected by a carved canopy and holds up in her hands an open book which, from her position, she could scarcely hope to read.[72]