PALMA OF MAJORCA

The reconquered towns are of two kinds.

There are those in which the Mohammedan swept over the Roman fabric, submerged it, and either destroyed it or transformed it into an Arabian thing; using, indeed, the stones of Rome and preserving a barbaric memory of Roman forms, but wholly changing the spirit of Roman building and leaving its constructions steeped in the Oriental air; degraded, also, and much lessened; with plaster, chipped, taking the place of carven marble; hovels, the place of houses; a few Eastern and secret palaces, the place of great public buildings; innumerable coloured detail, the place of simplicity and grandeur. Of this sort are Sousse, and all the ancient towns yet surviving between Tunis and the Atlantic.

The other half of them are the ruined skeletons of Roman things like Timgad or Volubilis.

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These, the African cities, a modern conquest has violently affected. Some it has turned into French cities like Algiers; some, like Tunis, it has half changed; but everywhere the influence of Islam has strongly survived. The second sort is made up of those forms of which the recovery came quite early, during the Dark, or very early Middle Ages, before the Saracen had had time to take root fully, and while the conflict between the great Arabian heresy and Western Christendom was still a war of life and death—as it may be again. Of this kind is Cefalu, in Sicily, of which I have just written, and of this kind are Leon and Huesca and Burgos and in general the towns of northern Spain; if we exclude Saragossa, which stood out much longer than the rest, through the skilful alliances and concessions of its Emirs. In these towns Christendom came back with violence; all, or nearly all, the relics of the Eastern alien were wiped out, and everything was remade in Western fashion.

Palma of Majorca is a bridge between these two kinds. It was recovered long after the tide had turned, and in a generation long familiar with Eastern things. Toledo had been firmly held for two long lifetimes. The whole epic of the three first Crusades had been worked out, and Jerusalem taken and lost again, after a hundred years. The crisis of the Albigensian peril—in which the northern French expelled an Asiatic horror from the south—had passed; the decisive battle of Navas de Tolosa had already given back the great bulk of the Peninsula to our culture; the decisive battle of Muret had already saved our religion. The high medieval civilisation (of which that thirteenth century was the flower) was in its full vigour—when the fleet sailed out from Catalonia in 1229 for the reconquest of the Balearic Islands.

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A very young man, James of Aragon, a King in his twentieth year, led them; a crowd of vessels, with 20,000 armed men aboard, 4000 of them knights. On the last day of the year, Palma was stormed, and within twelve months the last Moorish remnant in the mountains had surrendered.

The restoration of an European city in the place of a Mohammedan pirate port began at once. The emir’s great house became the king’s palace: on its garden terrace, boldly above and against the shore which looks to Africa, was immediately founded that astonishing cathedral of which, as one comes in from the south overseas, one can not say at first whether it is a church or a fortress; which is, and was built for, a challenge. On the western hill which dominates the harbour, the city and the bay, the castle of Bellver rose—feudal: a cousin to all the others of France and Spain and the Holy Land: to Château Gaillard as to Kerak, or Conway. In the streets of the town the mosques disappeared, stone Christian houses replaced the packed, whitewashed hives of Barbary, and open markets the strange dark tunnels of Eastern merchandise.

Yet something of that long Islamic past remained. You will not find that past in a skyline or in a horseshoe arch, nor even in details—save in one place, the little Moorish baths which still stand, half ruinous in a lovely garden. But an effect of Barbary is on the place. The tower of St. Cean is modern enough—of the last few centuries, I suppose; yet at no great distance you might take it for a minaret. The main houses have the great inner courtyard which the Mohammedans had themselves inherited from Rome, and they turn their life inwards after the Eastern fashion, not outwards to the street.

These open inner courts of the houses of Palma are a special mark of the town: they have a character of their own, quite distinct, which does not recall Cordova or Seville, though there, also, this influence of North Africa is present. The line which stamps them is that of the very broad and flattened arch supported on short pillars, simple in capital and base. Everywhere you find that same form, and nowhere is it more striking than when it is combined, in the greatest of the old merchant palaces, with broad, noble staircases behind, half open to the court and covered by great roofs of dark wood, carved over all their surface and supported upon figured beams. Their number is as remarkable as is their individuality. I know not how many there may be, but scores, certainly, and perhaps, small and great, more than a hundred of these _patios_, all in the same spirit of grandeur and fulness, all recalling the merchant wealth of so central a point in the western Mediterranean, and all indefinably touched with something of the eastern past, far less than Africa, but more than Sicily.

Only the cathedral shows nothing of this slight, permanent Moorish tradition, though it stands side by side with the Islamic Palace, the old court of the Emirate. It is wholly of Europe; even more northern than its peers in the other great Sees of Spain. For though it is cubic and of great breadth for its height—which is the Iberian tradition in shrines—yet it is not a cavern of darkness like Barcelona or Tarragona, and it even lacks that enclosed choir, blocking the centre of the nave, which, in continental Spain, is universal; the high altar is in full view of every part, and what is chanted there is heard resonant, but without echo, everywhere.

The fortress-character of the cathedral, of which I have spoken, is most evident from the sea. It is on the seaward, southern side of the large building that enormous stone buttresses arise, so plain, so wide, so square-hewn that they suggest a high castle wall of prodigious thickness rather than a temple. They were intended to give that effect. They were set up as a symbol against the corsairs from the coast beyond, only a day’s fair sail away, who continued right into our own time—till the twenties of the nineteenth century—to harry those seas; coming chiefly from Algiers. In connection with which cutthroats, how many people know that as late as Charles II.’s reign the Algerine sea-robbers ran up north as far as the mouth of the channel, showed the lateen sails and the long banks of rowers in the Irish seas, and gave the call to prayer over Cork harbour?

A modern restoration, ill-conceived and modelled on Burgos, has spoiled the west end of this great church; but the rest is triumphant. It is the building in which can best be seized the struggle for the recapture of the Mediterranean. Looking at its northern wall from the sea (as the Algerian pirates saw it when they hovered round the coasts their people had lost) one might wonder what light, or if any light, reached to the nave within. It looks like one mass of unbroken stone, flanked with square towers in which no solution is apparent. It is all strength. There is only one other thing to compare with it, and that is the solid fragment of Narbonne which reproduces the same effect of sheer (and blank) mass, resisting attack and immovable under it.

The Moorish bath, in its tiny scale, its darkness, its imperfection and weakness of execution, its use of old Roman material, its isolation—all it has—is characteristic of the thing which the young Conqueror who re-established us in the Balearics set out to destroy.

The tiny arches are supported upon shafts which the Roman order had left behind it, but these columns had been picked up in the ruins, for they are set up at random, without choice—one of them upside down! Upon the summit of each the Oriental has attempted some faint memory of the Corinthian capital. He has rudely carved half-a-score of rough knobs, which barely hint at the old acanthus-leaves, and he had some memory of the central moulding in the abacus—but he only hinted at it. The arch of small brick above—Roman also in tradition—he pinched at the base into that re-entering curve which is, in our eyes, the special mark of Mohammedan building, but which will, I think, like the dome and the minaret, be found to derive from Byzantium. For Islam creates nothing.

And now, what will another lifetime do to Palma? It is not a century since George Sand brought Chopin here to Majorca, and killed him by the experiment. The island was unknown; it was a daring journey. Steam and still more the modern chaos in things of the mind began, twenty years later, to destroy what they could of proportion, personality and beauty here as everywhere. I have heard for these thirty years past that the special soul of Palma can not survive, that it is with every day more visited and becoming from a thing, a name. I expected when I revisited it to find it half ruined. It was not so. Twenty-one years and more had passed since I had last sailed into that bay from the Barbary coast, and seen the square rock of the cathedral under the dusk of a winter dawn. In that long space of time Palma has lost less than any other of the towns I know.

I think it will endure. It has the Catalonian tenacity and vigour in its blood, and it should resist decay. It is to be hoped that it will, and it is even to be prayed for; there are not many cities left in which tradition is alive and beauty preserved without effort, without archaism, without affectation; but as part of a continued life.