The Conde de Orgaz, a citizen of Toledo and lord of the town of Orgaz, some twenty miles south of the city, died in 1323, and El Greco painted the legendary miracle of his burial in 1586. The conde had assumed responsibility for enlarging and rebuilding this church of St. Thomas the Apostle at the turn of the century, thus assuring his ultimate burial in the church. In 1312 the conde increased his fund of heavenly gratitude by obtaining from the queen a grant of property in Toledo so that a community of Augustinian friars, formerly located in unhealthful surroundings on the banks of the Tajo, could move within the walls, and by insisting that the new church should be dedicated to St. Stephen, the same as the old one had been. ‘When the priests were preparing to bury him,’ as the tablet below the picture explains, ‘an admirable and unusual thing, St. Stephen and St. Augustine came down from heaven and buried him here with their own hands. Since it would take long to explain what might have motivated these saints, ask about it of the Augustinian friars, who are not far from here, if you have the time. The way is short.’ The plaque then continues with a fascinating bit of local history: ‘You have heard the gratitude of heavenly beings; hear now the inconstancy of mortal men. The same Orgaz bequeathed to the curate and ministers of this church, as well as to the poor of the parish, two sheep, sixteen hens, two wineskins full of wine, two loads of firewood and eight hundred of the coins that we call maravedis, which they were to receive annually from the residents of Orgaz. Since these people refused for two years to pay the pious tribute, in the belief that with the passage of time the matter would be forgotten, they have been forced to pay it by order of the Chancery of Valladolid in the year 1570, the case having been prosecuted energetically by Andrés Núñez de Madrid, curate of this church, and Pedro Ruiz Durón, the administrator.’ It was undoubtedly this successful lawsuit that led to the commissioning a few years later of the painting. I should add that the above inscription is in Latin.
Two of the finest portraits in the standing file belong to this curate Núñez (the golden-robed, iron-faced prelate holding a book at extreme right) and to the administrator Ruiz (the ecstatic figure clothed in white surplice standing nearest the spectator). Among the worthies one finds the grave and bitter-faced old Covarrubias brothers, El Greco’s son and others who may have been well known in Toledo when the painting was done.
The line of standing figures has always bothered me, so I was pleased to come upon the facts relating to its inception, because I believe the sequence of events helps explain how great works of art are sometimes evolved. There had been talk in Toledo of applying to Rome for the sanctification of the Conde de Orgaz, seeing that heaven itself had sent messengers to supervise his burial, but the movement had got nowhere, so Father Núñez proposed that at least the body of the conde be moved to a finer tomb, but his archbishop said, No, it is not proper that sinful hands should move the body that saints themselves have buried. Father Núñez thereupon came up with a third proposal: ‘Mark Orgaz’s humble grave with a painting which will retell the glories of the conde,’ and to this the authorities agreed. So a contract, which still exists, was drawn up between Father Núñez and El Greco, perhaps with Administrator Ruiz looking on, in which the artist outlines his understanding of what he is being required to do:
On the canvas will be painted a procession, showing how the curate and other clergymen were performing the offices for the burial of Don Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, lord of the town of Orgaz, and St. Augustine and St. Stephen descended to bury the body of this caballero, one holding him by the head and the other by the feet, depositing him in the sepulcher, and presenting round about many people looking on, and above all this will be depicted a sky filled with a heavenly scene.
As in many cases of Renaissance masterpieces, it was the client who determined much of the basic design, and El Greco saw to it that the two men who were footing the bill, Núñez and Ruiz, occupied prominent positions when the job was done.
Two sayings sum up all we require to know about this monumental work. One of the Spanish critics responsible for generating world interest in El Greco said of him and of this painting in particular, ‘When he’s good there’s none better and when he’s bad there’s none worse.’ One Englishman, as his group left that day, said of the painting, ‘This is the best thing in Spain and the cheapest.’ To spend an hour or two before this superbly presented picture, lounging in a Renaissance chair, costs eight cents.
On one of my casual wanderings through Toledo, I came to the quiet Plaza de Carmelites, on whose wall appeared this notice:
GLORY TO THE CARMELITE MARTYRS
FOR GOD AND FOR SPAIN
THERE WERE ASSASSINATED IN THIS STREET
IN JULY 1936 BY THE MARXISTS
THE FOLLOWING RELIGIOUS
The names of seventeen friars were listed, and I was once more brought face to face with the Civil War; no city knew worse atrocities than Toledo. In the beginning days it looked as if the Republic were going to win, and since Toledo had always been conservative and the seat of Catholic power—for the Bishop of Toledo is the primate of Spain—men who felt they had old scores to settle with the Church killed wantonly, as this sign testified. Later, when the war in Toledo had settled into a siege-type operation, Republican hotheads imported from Madrid coursed through the streets rounding up all conservatives, whom they herded in large groups to that very precipice from which the Jews had been flung in 1405, and there they slaughtered the prisoners in obscene brutality, sometimes throwing their bodies over the cliff as had been done 531 years before; history in Spain has an ominous way of repeating itself. As might be expected, when the Franco forces triumphed a savage retaliation was launched by the victors, who applied one simple rule: if the man has fought on the Republican side, kill him. And how was the best way to tell if he had fought? Look at the right shoulder of his coat. If it is worn it means that he has been using a gun, so shoot him.
How many conservatives the Republicans killed in Toledo cannot be calculated, but it was in the thousands; how many liberals the Franco forces slaughtered is not known, but the number was at least as large.
In this vengeful killing and counter-killing occurred one act of incandescent heroism which has come to summarize the Civil War as seen from the Franco side, and the visitor to Toledo can explore the history of this event. On a hill overlooking the Rio Tajo stands an old square fortress on a site originally selected for this purpose by the Romans and used by the Moors when they held Toledo as their northern capital. Rebuilt many times, destroyed repeatedly by mines and fire, it could never have been beautiful, but after the defeat of Napoleon, who burned it, an attempt was made to bring the various parts of its façade into some kind of harmony, and the result, while far from artistic, did have a certain heavy balance. It was a four-story building, very large, with four squat and brutal towers topped by dark metal spires of no quality whatever. It was called the Alcázar (Ahl-kah-thar, with a heavy accent on the second syllable) and more prominently even than the cathedral it dominated the skyline of this old fortress city.
In the summer of 1936 its barracks were practically empty, because a short time before, the cadets living in the Alcázar had been involved in a fracas in the Zocodover, and so Republican leaders of the government, eager to find an excuse for disciplining the army, which they did not trust, had banished the young army men to another barracks some distance from Toledo. This meant that the senior official remaining in the military area was a fifty-eight-year-old colonel of infantry, José Moscardó e Iriarte heavy of face and heavier of bottom. He then held a job he loved, director of the army’s physical education program, for his passion was sports, especially soccer, and he was about to leave Spain to serve as national representative at the Berlin Olympic games.
Sunlight through the window of the synagogue where the friends of El Greco once worshiped.
When his superiors launched their rebellion in Africa against the Republicans, Colonel Moscardó summoned all military personnel in the Toledo district,
plus elements of the Guardia Civil, into the Alcázar, and there, on July 21 assembled 1205 fighting men plus 555 noncombatants, among whom were 211 children. They had ammunition but little food; they did have some horses, and when night fell on that first day they must have felt that they would be in the Alcázar for a week at most. They were to stay, at the point of starvation, for ten weeks.
Outnumbered, outgunned and under constant attack, with only the determination of Colonel Moscardó to provide any kind of military leadership, the defenders of the Alcázar hung on. The Republicans made many sorties against the stout walls but quickly learned that they would not be able to take the fortress by direct assault. However, they had other devices and these were potent.
On July 23, the third day of the siege, according to the modern Spanish legend, a Republican leader called Colonel Moscardó on the telephone and told him he held his sixteen-year-old son prisoner. He threatened to have him shot if Moscardó did not surrender the Alcázar immediately.
Republican: Do you perhaps think my statement is untrue? You are now going to speak with your son.
Luis: Papa!
Moscardó: What’s happening, son?
Luis: They say they’re going to shoot me if you don’t surrender.
Moscardó: Then commend your soul to God, shout ¡Viva España! and ¡Viva Cristo Rey!, and die like a hero.
Luis: A very strong kiss, Papa.
Moscardó: Goodbye, my son, a very strong kiss.
The Alcázar was not surrendered and later the boy was shot. One who underwent the siege reported that it was this event that steeled them to an acceptance of starvation and death, ‘Because who could go to the colonel and complain about what the siege was costing him when the colonel had given his son?’ Today on the wall of the room where Moscardó held this phone conversation hang translations of it in all important languages; the English is a botch job and very un-Spanish, because someone felt that Anglo-Saxons would not understand a father’s sending his sixteen-year-old son a kiss. The English comes out like this:
Moscardó: Then turn your thoughts to God, cry out, ‘Long Live Spain,’ and die as a patriot.
Luis: All my fondest love, father.
Moscardó: All of mine to you.
(Facts concerning the Alcázar are so confused and open to challenge that I have relied upon one principal source, The Siege of the Alcázar by Cecil D. Eby [1965], which is in the main pro-Franco. Many important data used by Eby have been controverted by anti-Franco sources, often with good reason, as in Herbert Rutledge South worth’s The Myth of the Crusade of Franco [1964], which cites many sources to prove that the famous telephone conversation was either apocryphal or—if it did happen—without the inflated significance it has been accorded. The Moscardó son, who was sixteen at the time, is now living happily in Madrid at Calle Castelló, 48. There was an older son who was shot, but under much different circumstances.)
When the Republicans could not take the Alcázar either by frontal assault or by pressure on Moscardó, they wheeled up heavy artillery which fired point-blank into the fort, and when this failed they summoned airplanes which dumped tons of bombs to knock the old walls apart. The walls did collapse, but the men inside did not, so the attackers resorted to a sensible device: they brought miners down from the Asturias coal fields to dig a tunnel under one of the towers. There they piled a vast charge of high explosive and warned Moscardó that they were going to blow the Alcázar to bits. They even summoned newsmen from Madrid to watch the end of the siege. The explosion came at 0631 in the morning of September 18, the sixtieth day, and true to prediction, it annihilated the southwest tower in a blast that could be heard forty miles away in Madrid The Alcázar had fallen, and the news was sent around the world.
But inside the building the stubborn old colonel recoiled from the shock, assembled his assistants and through the smoke inspected the damage. The tower was gone, the small was breached, but for the Republicans to take advantage of the blast they would still have to climb the hill, cross the rubble and take the building at bayonet point. Moscardó doubted that they were willing to pay the price.
He was right. In the days that followed, the siege degenerated into a bloody, ruthless struggle of many Republicans trying to overcome a few Franco men holed up in the ruins. Day by day artillery shells and airplane bombs proceeded with the destruction of the walls until the Alcázar seemed a good two-thirds gone. The patio was filled with rubble and the upper rooms were no more. How the ruins, which appeared to offer no hiding places, could hold out was a mystery.
Many of the defenders were killed in the fighting; others died of causes relating to starvation. Among the greatest heroes were the women, who not only helped the men but looked after the children as well. And day after day Colonel Moscardó sent out the radio report which would become the catchword of the siege, ‘Sin novedad en el Alcázar’ (Nothing new in the Alcázar, or, as some translate it: All quiet in the Alcázar).
When it seemed that one more push from the Republicans must wipe out the defenders, word came that a column of General Franco’s troops had reached Talavera de la Reina and would shortly arrive to lift the siege. A race between Franco’s oncoming troops and the Republican besiegers then developed, with odds in favor of the latter, but the iron-willed men in the Alcázar held out against all pressures, and on September 28, the seventieth day of the siege, when the defenders had become matchsticks through hunger, General Franco’s troops arrived. The first contingent to enter the Alcázar was a unit of black Moors from Africa. Their ancestors had been thrown out of this city in 1085. Now, 851 years later, they were returning. It was then that the dreadful reprisals began.
The newsmen who accompanied Franco’s forces into the city were eager to make of Colonel Moscardó, now a general, the hero of new Spain, but they found him a stolid, unimaginative old man whose main concern was still soccer. The awful realization dawned on them that when Moscardó had said, ‘nothing new in the Alcázar,’ he had not been uttering a heroic statement but the simple truth as he saw it. His job, as senior officer present, had been to hold the command he found himself with, and he had done so.
The somewhat doddering old fellow was a source of embarrassment to the Franco government, for he was unquestionably the salient hero of the war, but when he was assigned to a military command commensurate with his fame, he fumbled it and continued to send in reports: ‘Nothing new at the front.’ Finally, with the coming of world peace, the perfect job was found for him: he put on his general’s uniform and as Conde del Alcázar de Toledo, represented Spain at the London Olympic Games of 1948 and the Helsinki ones of 1952. That he enjoyed.
I wanted to see what the Alcázar was like, so on a warm September day I left the Zocodover and walked down into the valley where the Republicans had had the command post for shelling the fort. Above me loomed the Alcázar, newly rebuilt but as brutal and ugly as ever, and I shuddered at the thought of being a soldier required to scramble up that hill and assault that fort. Later, when I had climbed to the plaza at the east end of the building, I saw the grandiloquent monument erected to the men of the Alcázar, and for a strange moment I thought I was in another century. Victory, whose garments flowed behind her wings, held aloft a golden sword while two women knelt in grieving position. Behind Victory stood two well-carved friezes in white marble featuring workers and women mourners. On the front of the monument was carved the word Faith, represented by a man with shield and sword; on the right Valor, a blindfolded woman holding a cross; and on the left Sacrifice, a man offering a lamb. On the back I saw a good pietà in which a shrouded woman bent over a fallen man, while far away on either end rose three tall metal shafts topped by the fasces, the eagle and a third symbol I could not decipher: it looked like a large cross with studded edges.