copying córdoba? toledo and beyond

*Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2 0RN. E-mail: [email protected]

Acknowledgements: I am especially grateful to Rose Walker, Matt Woodworth, Paul Crossley and Juan Antonio Souto for their advice during the preparation of this research.

Copying Cordoba? Toledo and Beyond

Tom Nickson*

In recent years scholars have increasingly scrutinised the relationship between medieval Iberia’s material culture and its relatively plural society, one in which Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities lived together—peacefully or otherwise. In this article, I consider the reception of Islamicate architecture forms by focusing on the city of Toledo in central Spain, drawing conclusions of wider relevance for the study of Islamicate art and architecture. Following its conquest by king Alfonso VI of Castile in 1085, the Friday mosque of Toledo (Muslim Tulaytulah) was converted into a cathedral, and then replaced in the thirteenth century by a building long celebrated for its combination of Gothic and Islamicate architectural elements. I reconstruct the appearance of Toledo’s lost mosque and propose possible motivations for the imitation of French and Andalusí buildings in its extant replacement. Building on Richard Krautheimer’s pioneering study of medieval architectural copies, I examine how these designs might have been transmitted in the thirteenth century, and how can they be understood ‘iconographically’. In considering inter-cultural exchange, scholars need, I argue, to take greater account of the available technologies of transmission and the distortions and possibilities they afforded.

And then the venerable Juan, bishop of Burgo de Osma and royal chancellor, together with bishops Gonzalo of Cuenca, Domenico of Baeza, Adam of Plasencia and Sancho of Coria, entered the mosque of Córdoba, which

The Medieval History Journal, 15, 2 (2012): 317–351Sage Publications Los angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DCDOI: 10.1177/097194581201500205

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The Medieval History Journal, 15, 2 (2012): 317–351

surpassed all other Arab mosques in decoration and size (que cunctas mezquitas Arabus ornatu et magnitudine superabat). Once the filth of Muhammad had been removed, and it was sprinkled with the holy water of purification, the aforesaid Juan—sent by Rodrigo, primate of Spain, who was then occupied at the Apostolic Seat—converted it into a church, raised an altar in honour of the Holy Virgin, and celebrated a solemn mass...1

This tale of the conversion of the Great Mosque of Córdoba in July 1236 was penned in the early 1240s by Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo.2 Rodrigo’s celebration of the mosque’s unparalleled splendour and his description of its conversion follow standard literary tropes.3 Indeed, the latter closely echoes Rodrigo’s account of the conversion of Toledo’s own mosque into a cathedral following Alfonso VI of Castile’s conquest of Toledo in 1085, after nearly 300 years of Islamic rule.4 Yet notwithstanding his formulaic language, in the 1240s Rodrigo must have been very conscious of comparisons with Islamicate buildings as he laboured to complete the construction of Toledo cathedral, where work had begun in the 1220s to replace the former mosque with an enormous new Gothic cathedral (Figure 1).5 As head of the Spanish Church, Rodrigo would undoubtedly have consecrated Córdoba’s Great Mosque himself, had he not been pre-occupied in Rome in June 1236, defending himself against accusations that he was flooding the Toledan chapter with foreigners from his native Navarre.6

Toledo, Córdoba, Rome, Navarre: something of Rodrigo’s cosmopolitanism can also be discerned in those parts of Toledo cathedral that were completed in the years following Córdoba’s capture, notably its ambulatory and presbytery elevations (Figures 1–5). Even without its eighteenth-century polychromy, or the standing statues that were displaced there in the late fifteenth century, the triforium that overlooks Toledo’s high

1 Ximénez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie: 299–30. My translation, adapted from Ecker, ‘The Great Mosque of Córdoba’: 118.

2 Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain: 352.3 See Harris, ‘Mosque to Church Conversions in the Spanish Reconquest’; Binski,

‘Reflections on the “Wonderful height and Size” of Gothic Great Churches and the Medieval Sublime’: 131–43.

4 ‘Having removed all vestiges of Mohammedan filth, he [bishop Bernard] raised an altar with a Christian cult’: Ximénez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie: VI, xxiii, 206.

5 Nickson, ‘La Catedral’: 151.6 Hernández and Linehan, The Mozarabic Cardinal: 45.

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altar ranks as one of the most remarkable features of any Gothic church, a mesh-like screen of stone struts, voids and protruding busts (Figure 3). For some nineteenth-century observers, these apparently ‘hybrid’ forms confirmed Sir Christopher Wren’s theories on the ‘Sarracenic’ origins of Gothic architecture.7 For others, descriptions of ‘Islamic influence’ in Toledo’s architecture—often somewhat jejune—were opposed to ‘pure’ Gothic forms.8 But since the 1920s, virtually all scholars have been unanimous in asserting the centrality of Córdoba’s Great Mosque for understanding the Islamicate architecture of Toledo and beyond.9 In this

Figure 1 Toledo cathedral, section of the east end.

7 Wren, Parentalia: 306; Urquhart, The Pillars of Hercules: 442, 451–59. See Raquejo, ‘The Arab Cathedrals’: 198; and Mateo Sevilla, ‘The Making of the Sarracenic Style’.

8 Schnaase, Carl. Geschichte der bildenden Künste, vol. 7: 635; Lambert, L‘Art gothique en Espagne: 208. Street’s reading of Toledo cathedral as ‘a grand protest against Mohammedan architecture’ was surely coloured by his quest for a proper architectural style of his own: Street, Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain: 236; Street, Memoir of George Edmund Street, R.A.: 44.

9 Lambert, L’Art gothique en Espagne: 214–15. For Córdoba’s influence beyond Toledo, see, for instance, Watson, French Romanesque and Islam; Borrás Gualis, Introducción al arte español Dodds, Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain: 95–112; Ruiz Souza, ‘Al-Andalus y Cultura Visual’.

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article I will propose specific Cordoban analogies for Toledo’s design, and explore possible motivations for the imitation of Andalusí buildings. What sort of aesthetic responses did these generate, and might they have particular associations with buildings in Jerusalem? How were architectural designs transmitted across great distances, and how might they be distorted by the available technologies of transmission? The reception of Islamicate architecture belongs, I argue, within a wide-ranging architectural discourse, such that Toledo’s design refers simultaneously to Andalusí models and to contemporary churches in northern Spain and France.

The discussion of models and copies at the core of this article—and central to any examination of Islamic or Islamicate architectural

Figure 2 Toledo cathedral, elevations of the inner ambulatory, after 1238. The glazing in the triforium is modern.



‘influence’—is indebted to the idea of the medieval architectural ‘copy’ defined by Richard Krautheimer.10 This merits some comment. Krautheimer’s seminal ‘Introduction to an “Iconography of Architecture”’ was published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in 1942, whilst Krautheimer was in exile from Nazi Germany—a condition that arguably underpinned much of his thinking. His emphasis on the subtlety of medieval architectural copies carries a veiled critique of architectural pastiches of the 1930s, the later omitting, in his words,

Figure 3 Toledo cathedral, detail of the triforium of the presbytery, c. 1250s.

10 I follow Krautheimer in describing a ‘copy’ because the term now carries such historiographic freight, but for a thoughtful critique, see Camille, ‘Simulacrum’.

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‘the elements which were important to the Middle Ages: the content and the significance of the building’.11 Exiled in America, Krautheimer was obliged to rely on photos, plans, descriptions and his memories in order to study the buildings from which he was forcibly distanced, a challenge that made him especially alert to problems of architectural transmission in

Figure 4 Toledo cathedral, view from north transept towards the crossing and presbytery.

11 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction to an “Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture”’: 20. See Sauerländer’s obituary of Krautheimer, in which he notes that ‘during the 1930s columns and pediments had once more become part of the language of contemporary architecture’: Sauerländer, ‘Richard Krautheimer (1897–1994)’: 119.



the Middle Ages.12 And his interest in the ‘iconography’ of architecture—clearly indebted to the scholarship of friends and colleagues such as Ernst Panofsky and Adolf Katzenellenbogen—can be understood as part of a much wider project to transform art history from a discipline borne of nationalist agendas to one rooted in intellectual history.13

Figure 5 Toledo cathedral, north transept, outer bay, detail of the upper elevation of the east wall, c. 1250s.

12 See Krautheimer, ‘And Gladly Did He Learn, and Gladly Teach’: 104: ‘the most decisive factor though was the “experience America”: the sheer distance from Europe’.

13 See Crossley, ‘Medieval Architecture and Meaning’: 116; and Carver McCurrach, ‘Renovatio Reconsidered’: 50–51.

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Although formed in a specific historical moment, Krautheimer’s ideas are still helpful in thinking about artistic exchange in transnational or inter-confessional contexts.14 Although the circulation of portable objects may explain the very broad diffusion of many materials and motifs in the Middle Ages, the inherently static nature of the built environment raises particular issues for architectural historians. Discrete architectural motifs might conceivably be transmitted by textiles, ivories, ceramics and other portable objects, but such objects could scarcely convey the complex spatial and decorative characteristics of buildings such as Córdoba’s Great Mosque or Notre-Dame in Paris.15 From the Renaissance onwards, drawings were the most widely used technology of transmission, but hardly any architectural drawings survive from northern Europe or the Islamic world before the thirteenth century.16 Is this a question of preservation, or were architectural drawings simply not used? The complete absence of architectural drawings on paper or parchment from thirteenth-century Iberia should give us pause for thought when considering relationships between buildings that were many hundreds of miles apart.17

Recent studies have emphasised the sophistication of responses to Córdoba’s Great Mosque in a variety of buildings from North Africa

14 For Krautheimer’s ideas in an Islamic context, see Grabar, ‘The Iconography of Islamic Architecture’.

15 See the important study by Hoffman, ‘Pathways of Portability’.16 For Islamic drawing traditions, see Bloom, ‘On the Transmission of Designs in Early

Islamic Architecture’; Necipoğlu, Gülru & Mohammad Al-Asad, ‘The Topkapı scroll’; Ghazarian and Ousterhout, ‘A Muqarnas Drawing from Thirteenth-century Armenia and the Use of Architectural Drawings during the Middle Ages’; Cressier, ‘Los capiteles islámicos de Toledo’: 182. For drawings in northern lodges, see, for example, essays in Recht, Les bâtisseurs de cathédrales gothiques; Idem, ‘La circulation des artistes, des oeuvres, des modèles dans l’Europe médiévale’; Böker, Architektur der Gotik.

17 A growing number of immoveable tracings (monteas) have recently been discovered, however, in the cloister of Burgo de Osma cathedral and in the north transept of Las Huelgas, Burgos: Sobrino González, ‘Técnicas y procesos de la escultura y cantería medievales a través del Monasterio de las Huelgas de Burgos’. For the scratched plan recently discovered in the cimborio of Cuenca cathedral, see http://www.museodeburgos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=342&Itemid=121 (accessed on 16 February 2011). See also Martínez de Aguirre, ‘Investigaciones sobre arquitectos y talleres de construcción en la España medieval cristiana’; Alonso Ruiz and Alfonso Jiménez Martín, La traça de la Iglesia de Sevilla: 92, 104–17; Zaragozá and García, ‘El dibujo de proyecto en época medieval según la documentación archivística’; Montero Tortajada, ‘El sentido y el uso de la “Mostra” en los oficios artísticos. Valencia, 1390–1450’.



and the Iberian Peninsula.18 The combination of horseshoe arches, spolia columns, and red and white voussoirs in the Toledan mosque/oratory of Bāb al-Mardūm (999/1000 CE) or the nearby church of San Román (c. 1221) (Figures 6 and 7) are clearly indebted, for instance, to similar features in Córdoba’s Great Mosque (built 784–786, extended in 833–852,

Figure 6 Toledo, Bāb al-Mardūm, section of the mosque/oratory.

18 Ewert, ‘Tradiciones omeyas en la Arquitectura palatina de la época de los Taifas’; Ewert, Spanisch-islamische Systeme sich kreuzender Bögen: II; Ecker, ‘The Great Mosque of Córdoba’: 115–16.

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961–976 and 987).19 At Bāb al-Mardūm, even the decoration of the nine miniature domes imitates the arrangement of domes in Córdoba’s mosque, replicating its spatial disposition on a much smaller scale.20 Was knowledge of these Cordoban features somehow carried to Toledo, or was there a more local model? It seems very likely that Toledo’s now-destroyed Friday mosque also had Cordoban features, and may have constituted an important intermediary between Córdoba’s Great Mosque and these other Toledan buildings. Its western parts still standing into the fourteenth century, that mosque must, indeed, have made a very striking contrast with the new Gothic cathedral that gradually replaced it from the east.21

Unfortunately we know very little about Toledo’s Friday mosque. Al-Muqtabis of Ibn Hayyān (d. 1076 CE) relates that in 871 CE an

Figure 7 Toledo, Church of San Román, looking southwest, consecrated 1221.

19 See Dodds, ‘Rodrigo, Reconquest, and San Román’. For studies of Toledo’s most Islamicate buildings, see Pavón Maldonado, Arte toledano.

20 Ewert, ‘La mezquita de Bāb al-Mardūm de Toledo (Cristo de la Luz)’.21 Nickson, ‘La Catedral’: 158.



appeal was made to Muhammad I to expand the mosque and subsume a neighbouring church.22 In 1980, a gravimetric survey revealed the mosque’s foundations below the nave of the present cathedral, and these suggest a typical Andalusí plan, oriented to the south, with 11 aisles.23 North of the cathedral, Islamic wells have recently been discovered under the cloister, so the latter is presumably located over the patio of the old mosque. A well-head also survives, dated by inscription to 1032 CE.24 A caliphal capital now embedded in a wall of the cathedral’s St Lucy chapel, together with the 54 marble columns now attached to the cathedral’s late fourteenth-century choir screen, is usually thought to be spolia from the mosque.25 Just 1.8 metres high, these columns are too small to constitute the principal supports of a hypostyle mosque, but may have been originally attached to brick piers, as in several North African mosques and Toledan parish churches.26 Another distinctive feature of many of these Toledan churches is the false galleries above their nave arcades (Figure 7). If these derive from Toledo’s Friday Mosque, as seems likely, then their ultimate source cannot have been Córdoba’s Great Mosque, but rather the Great Mosque of Damascus—an important model for Córdoba’s mosque—where such galleries feature prominently.27 It is significant for later discussion, however, that free-standing intersecting polylobed arches—a distinctive element of Hakam II’s tenth-century additions to Córdoba’s Great Mosque—do not feature prominently at Bāb al-Mardūm or San Román (Figures 6–8).28 This may reflect a comparable absence in Toledo’s

22 Souto, ‘Obras constructivas en al-Andalus durante el emirato de Muhammad I según el volumen II del Muqtabis de Ibn Hayyan’: 354.

23 Konradsheim, ‘Exploration géophysique des soubassements de la cathédrale de Tolède’.

24 Passini and Yuste Galan, ‘Una noria gótica en el claustro de la catedral de Toledo’; and Passini and Yuste Galan, ‘El inicio de la construcción del claustro gótico de la catedral de Toledo’.

25 Delgado Valero, Toledo Islámico: 268–73.26 Pérez Higuera, ‘Toledo’: 19–21; Cressier, ‘Los capiteles islámicos de Toledo’: 178. 27 Dodds, Menocal and Krasner, The Arts of Intimacy:141. For Toledan parish churches,

see Cerro Malagón, Arquitecturas de Toledo: 227–42, 233–42, 259–62, 369–82. Pascual Martínez Sopena has kindly drawn my attention to related church designs in northern Spain: see Duque Herrero, ‘Génesis e influencia de dos templos mudéjares nobiliarios en el entorno terracampino’. For Damascus, see Calvo Capilla, ‘Analogies entre les grandes mosquées de Damas et Cordoue’.

28 See Ewert, Spanisch-islamische Systeme sich kreuzender Bögen I: 15–34.

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Friday mosque, whose original ninth-century construction predates the introduction of polylobed intersecting arches at Córdoba.29

Reappropriation of buildings represents one path by which Islamicate traditions may have been absorbed into a more northern European architectural vocabulary. Islamicate elements in new buildings in Christian domains have traditionally been attributed to Muslim craftsmen, the so-called Mudéjares.30 It is now clear, however, that the roles of Mudéjar craftsmen varied considerably across the peninsula,

Figure 8 Córdoba cathedral (former mosque), detail of the mihrāb and maq¡ūra, 960s.

29 See discussion in Ewert, Spanisch-islamische Systeme sich kreuzender Bögen I: 49–67; Ettinghausen, Grabar and Jenkins, Islamic Art and Architecture 650–1250: 137.

30 For a recent survey, see Feliciano and Rouhi, ‘Introduction: Interrogating Iberian Frontiers’.



and changed over time.31 In Córdoba, a royal decree of 1263 required all Mudéjares to assist with the upkeep of the converted Great Mosque.32 But in Toledo itself, only a modest proportion of the relatively small Mudéjar community worked in the building trade, and this largely with brick (Figure 9).33 Toledo cathedral is built almost exclusively of stone,

31 See especially Ruiz Souza, ‘Architectural Languages, Functions, and Spaces’; and other essays in this special edition.

32 Ecker, ‘The Great Mosque of Córdoba’: 123.33 Molénat, ‘Les mudéjares de Tolède’: 430–34. See also Araguas, Brique et Architecture

dans l’Espagne médiévale XIIe–XVe siècles. For a recent survey of Toledan building, see Ruiz Souza, ‘Toledo entre Europa y al-Andalus’.

Figure 9 Toledo, Parish church of Santa Leocadia, main entrance, twelfth or thirteenth century (?).

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however, and it is probable that the regular workers and masters of Toledo cathedral would have identified themselves as Christians.34

This is certainly the case for ‘Maestro Martin de la Obra de Sancta Maria de Toledo’, who is documented as the cathedral’s first master mason between 1227 and 1234.35 Martin probably remained in Toledo until 1244, when a series of major disasters brought the first construction campaign to a halt.36 By this stage, the semi-circular outer ambulatory and its ring of chapels must have been almost complete. In July 1238 archbishop Rodrigo had endowed 20 new prebends for ‘the cathedral, [which] has shed the appearance of a mosque and gained one of a church’, 14 of them deputed to the ‘altars of the new work’.37 The earliest phases of Maestro Martin’s designs for Toledo are indebted, not to local or Andalusí models, but to Gothic churches north of the Pyrenees. Indeed, he must have trained in France, for nothing in the peninsula could have prepared a local architect for the structural challenges presented by Toledo cathedral’s double aisles, which—as at Bourges, Cluny and the Constantinian basilicas in Rome—are ‘staggered’ so that the inner aisles rise higher than the outer aisles, with the central vessel still higher (Figure 1).38 Martin devised something even more ambitious for Toledo. Not only did he build staggered double aisles in the semi-circular east end, but he also turned them into the transepts, so that they too have staggered double aisles—like a second church, oriented north to south (Figure 4). The tricky challenge of joining a staggered nave to staggered transepts had been attempted in only one other building: Beauvais cathedral, in northern France. So it is no coincidence that in Beauvais’ transept aisles Christopher Wilson identified the model for the inner ambulatory elevations of Toledo cathedral—specifically the combination of a low triforium of multiple, polylobed openings with an oculus above, filled

34 The 30,000 tiles and 30,000 bricks ordered from Alfonso García in March 1349 were presumably for the vaults: Archivo de la Catedral de Toledo (ACT) O.10.A.2.17.

35 See Hernández, ‘La hora de don Rodrigo’: 33.36 Nickson, ‘La Catedral’: 149.37 Fita, ‘La Guardia, villa del partido de Lillo, provincia de Toledo’: 407–11; Hernández,

‘La hora de don Rodrigo’: Appendix VIa. See my forthcoming book for an extensive discussion of these foundations: Toledo Cathedral: Art & Belief in Medieval Castile.

38 See especially Konradsheim, ‘La famille monumentale de la cathédrale de Tolède et l’architecture gothique contemporaine’.



with intersecting petal tracery (Figures 2 and 10).39 Begun c. 1225, work at Beauvais was stalled in 1232/3, at which point some of its masons may have headed to Toledo in search of work, confident of their relevant skills and perhaps carrying drawings that were subsequently kept in the Toledan workshop.40 Alternatively, Martin may have gone on a fact-finding

Figure 10 Beauvais cathedral, elevation of the north aisle of the north transept, c. 1225-32/33.

39 Wilson, The Gothic Cathedral: 158; Bork, ‘Holy Toledo’. The glazing in Toledo’s triforium is modern.

40 See Murray, Beauvais Cathedral, Sculptors from Amiens also arrived in Burgos in the 1230s: Karge, La Catedral de Burgos: 153–57; Branner, ‘The Movement of Gothic Architects between France and Spain in the Early Thirteenth Century’.

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mission to Beauvais, of the kind sponsored, for instance, by the chapter of Tortosa cathedral in the 1340s.41

Toledo is far from an exact copy of Beauvais, however. The exquisitely carved heads in Toledo’s ambulatory triforium, for instance, are not found at Beauvais, but recall those in the choir triforium in the cathedral of Burgos (1221–30), with which the Toledan chapter enjoyed strong institutional links (Figure 11).42 Nor are Toledo’s paired marble columns and cinquelobed arches derived directly from Beauvais, where trilobed arches rest on single colonettes. They are closer, thought Lambert, to the

41 Almuni Balada, ‘La construcción medieval de la catedral de Tortosa’: 145–46.42 These in turn derive from the aisle triforia at Bourges: Deknatel, ‘The Thirteenth-century

Gothic Sculpture of the Cathedrals of Burgos and León’: 293.

Figure 11 Burgos cathedral, upper elevations of the choir, c. 1221-1230.



blind arcades of the Toledan synagogue of Santa Maria la Blanca, which he suspected reflect a feature found in Toledo’s Friday mosque.43 They might even be compared with the blind arcades over the mih rāb of Córdoba’s Great Mosque, which are surmounted by semi oculi filled with delicate stone screens (transennae) (Figure 8).44 Should these Toledan designs thus be understood as Gothic ‘translations’ or ‘copies’ of features of Toledo’s Friday mosque, gradually being replaced by the new cathedral? Or do they refer directly to the Great Mosque of Córdoba, perhaps prompted by its conversion in 1236?45 These questions are best answered by turning to consider Toledo’s presbytery triforium.

Toledo Cathedral’s Presbytery and Transepts

It is likely that maestro Martin had either died or left Toledo by the early 1250s, when a revival in the city’s political and economic fortunes meant that building of its cathedral could recommence.46 Construction in this new campaign logically focused on the cathedral’s still-unfinished presbytery, which I will argue was largely built by the 1260s, and was certainly complete by 1289 (Figures 1 and 3). Two local chronicles record that in November 1289, king Sancho IV translated the bodies of kings Alfonso VII and Sancho III of Castile, together with the body of king Sancho II of Portugal, from the cathedral’s Holy Spirit chapel to the retrochapel of the Holy Cross, behind the high altar in the presbytery’s eastern bay.47

Typically used to date the presbytery’s completion, the timing of this translation should be understood in the context of Sancho IV’s ongoing campaigns to rebury his ancestors: it is a terminus ante quem, nothing more.48 In fact, in the boom years of the 1250s, construction proceeded

43 Lambert, L‘Art gothique en Espagne: 215, following Escosura and Pérez de Villa-Amil, España artistica y monumental, vistas y descripcion de los sitios y monumentos mas notables de España, vol. 3: 11.

44 See especially Nieto Cumplido, La catedral de Córdoba: 221–22.45 For translation as a useful paradigm in such contexts, see especially Rodríguez Porto,

‘Courtliness and its Trujamanes’. 46 Nickson, ‘La Catedral’: 153–54.47 Catalán and Menéndez Pidal (eds), Primera crónica general de España: 74, n. 9 and

106–07; Floriano, ‘Anales Toledanos III’: 177; Jerez Cabrero, Enrique. 2004. ‘El oficio historiográfico’: 153–54.

48 For Sancho IV’s patronage, see Gutiérrez Baños, Las empresas artísticas de Sancho IV El Bravo; and Bautista, La Estoria de España en época de Sancho IV: 48–56.

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sufficiently quickly for the archbishop-infante Sancho I of Castile to be buried behind the high altar at his death in 1261—followed 14 years later by his successor, another princely archbishop (and yet another Sancho!), the infante Sancho II of Aragón.49 It is usually assumed that these two Sanchos were buried first in the Holy Spirit chapel and only later moved to the retrochapel, but the detailed records of the translations of 1289 do not refer to their bodies, and it seems more likely that they were never moved, and that the presbytery was completed much earlier than is usually thought.50 As in other Castilian cathedrals, this retrochapel may have initially doubled as a sacristy, and was divided from the high altar by some sort of screen (destroyed in the late fifteenth century).51 Its association with the Holy Cross was also probably established with the translations of 1289, for Louis IX of France had donated a prestigious relic of the Cross to Toledo as early as 1248, and archbishop Sancho I was especially dedicated to the Cross.52 An inventory of 1257 records the True Cross relic in the cathedral’s sacristy.53

A series of crises in Toledo in the 1260s and 1270s once again caused construction on the cathedral to pause, before it resumed in the early 1280s under master Petrus Petri, whose death in 1291 is recorded on an epitaph still preserved in the cathedral.54 The master mason responsible for completing Toledo’s presbytery c. 1250 to c. 1263—including its remarkable triforium—thus remains unknown. His triforium design suggests, however, that he was very aware of contemporary work on Burgos cathedral, so it is helpful to detour briefly and consider this. At Burgos, plate tracery and bar tracery are found in the same elevations, both

49 Archbishop Sancho II’s burial is recorded in the Holy Cross chapel in the cathedral’s fourteenth-century necrology, Biblioteca Capitular de Toledo 42-31, ff. 62v; 80r. His coffin was discovered under the presbytery floor during reforms to the area in 1503: Gutiérrez Baños, Las empresas artísticas de Sancho IV El Bravo: 183.

50 See Gutiérrez Baños, Las empresas artísticas de Sancho IV El Bravo: 164; Nickson, ‘La Catedral’: 154.

51 Gutiérrez Baños, Las empresas artísticas de Sancho IV El Bravo: 173–74; Carrero Santamaría, ‘La sacristía catedralicia en los reinos hispanos’.

52 Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain: 453; Hernández and Linehan, The Mozarabic Cardinal: 60.

53 Hernández, Los cartularios de Toledo: 473. An inventory of the sacristy from 1277 also records the ‘very noble cross which the king of Aragón gave to his son, [archbishop] don Sancho [II of Aragón], with the lignum domini in its base’: ACT X.12.B.1.134.

54 Nickson, ‘La Catedral’: 155.



in the choir, complete by 1230, and in the nave and transepts, complete by c. 1260 (Figure 11). The large triforium openings are partially screened by thin sections of walling, seemingly punched through by trefoils and quatrefoils (plate tracery). But in the window openings above, there are no residual sections of walling, and the interstices between the chunky, chamfered stone struts are glazed to let in the maximum amount of light.55 By the 1250s, when construction had progressed to Burgos’ western nave bays, a new tendency can be discerned, whereby the front surface of those stone struts is defined by rounded tubes of stone—the hallmark of bar tracery in thirteenth-century northern French churches.56 Combining elements of both plate and bar tracery, the stone mesh screening the triforium openings in Toledo’s presbytery is clearly related to the work at Burgos, especially as its front surface is cut to simulate tracery tubes (Figure 3). Yet despite this Gothic vocabulary and structure, the formal configuration of Toledo’s triforium design seems to refer to other traditions too.

Elie Lambert specifically located the design’s origins in the arches screening the privileged area near the mih rāb (maqsūra) of the Great Mosque in Córdoba—a symptom, seemingly, of what Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza has termed a ‘neocaliphal’ trend in thirteenth-century Toledan architecture (Figures 3 and 8).57 Much recommends this line of argument, which interprets Toledo’s presbytery triforium as a series of intersecting arches of three, five or seven lobes. But need we look as far as Córdoba for models, when Toledo itself preserves many monuments from its Islamic past? The search for alternatives to Córdoba dates back to at least the 1920s, when Lambert and Torres Balbás suggested that many apparent imitations of the domes of Córdoba’s Great Mosque are actually closer to the domes of Bāb al-Mardūm in Toledo (Figure 6).58 This former mosque/oratory was ceded to the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in 1183 and

55 Karge, La Catedral de Burgos: 147. 56 Branner, ‘Paris and the Origins of Rayonnant Gothic Architecture down to 1240’: 44;

Karge, La Catedral de Burgos: 175–77.57 Lambert, L’Art gothique en Espagne: 214; Ruiz Souza, ‘Toledo entre Europa y al-

Andalus’: 243.58 Torres Balbás, ‘Nota’; Lambert, ‘Les voûtes nervées hispano-musulmanes du XIe

siècle et leur influence possible sur l‘art chrétien’. Other richly decorated domes in Christian buildings may refer to funerary qubba. See Ruiz Souza, ‘La planta centralizada en la Castilla bajomedieval’.

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then consecrated in 1186 as the church of Santa Cruz, the Holy Cross.59 And as Javier Martínez de Aguirre has recently argued, its dedication to the Cross and Islamicate forms—perhaps evocative of monuments in Jerusalem—may have made Santa Cruz a particularly suitable model for other churches associated with crusading orders and devotion to the Cross.60 These include, suggests Martínez de Aguirre, the famous church of the Holy Sepulchre in Torres del Río in Navarre, normally associated with Córdoba, but closer in formal terms to Santa Cruz. Such examples draw attention to the potential—recognised by Krautheimer—for ‘copies’ to multiply without necessarily referring back to the original model.61 Hence the ‘Cordoban’ domes of San Miguel de Almazán, Sainte-Croix in Oloron and the Hôpital Saint-Blaise near Oloron may refer to nearby buildings in Torres del Río or the Aljafería in Zaragoza, rather than directly to buildings further away in Toledo or Córdoba.62

Are there, then, models for Toledo’s presbytery triforium in Toledo itself? We cannot be certain whether the old converted mosque contained intersecting polylobed arches, nor how prominent these might have been. They are certainly not conspicuous in San Román or Bāb al-Mardūm. But intersecting polylobed arches still survive in a number of Toledan buildings, all loosely dated between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries: on the exteriors of the churches of Santiago del Arrabal, Santa Ursula, la Concepción and Santa Leocadia (Figure 9); on the interior of the apse of the extramural church commonly known as Cristo de la Vega; on the Puerta del Sol; and on an exposed fragment of the archiepiscopal palace.63 These examples—their decoration reminiscent of Seville cathedral’s Giralda, formerly a minaret and much-praised by Christian writers—suggest that Toledan craftsmen were familiar with the kind of complex geometry required to create the intersecting polylobed arches of the cathedral’s

59 Calvo Capilla, ‘La Mezquita de Bāb al-Mardūm y el proceso de consagración de pequeñas mezquitas en Toledo (s. XII–XIII)’: 300.

60 Martínez de Aguirre, ‘La iglesia del Santo Sepulcro’. 61 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction to an “Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture”’: 3.62 Martínez de Aguirre, ‘La iglesia del Santo Sepulcro’: 163; Borrás Gualis, ‘El Palacio

mudéjar’: 180–03. Recent studies of the baroque domes of Guarino Guarini, which have startling formal similarities with Córdoba’s maqs ūra domes, have similarly emphasised the importance of indirect copies: Morrogh, ‘Alcune fonti per le cupole di Guarini’.

63 See Cerro Malagón, Arquitecturas de Toledo: 146–51, 199, 207, 270–73, 292, 480–81.



triforium.64 Yet the cathedral’s triforium design differs from all these examples in three fundamental respects (Figures 3 and 9).65 First, the cathedral triforium is a free-standing screen, whereas the interesting arches on the local examples or Seville’s Giralda are mortared to the wall behind them. Second, the cathedral triforium is built of stone, whilst the Giralda and local examples are made of brick. Third, like the intersecting arches in the portico of San Juan de Duero (Soria), the Toledan triforium is built with specially-shaped blocks of stone, whereas in the other local examples of intersecting polylobed arches the bricks are conceived as voussoirs, and placed perpendicular to the curve of the arch.66

Perhaps, after all, Córdoba’s Great Mosque is the best model. Yet it should be stressed that despite their current splendour, Córdoba’s maqs ūra and mih rāb were never singled out for praise by contemporary Christian writers, and were simply converted into a side chapel and sacristy following the mosque’s conversion in 1236.67 Instead, the devotional focus of Córdoba’s new cathedral switched to the high altar, installed 10 bays north of the old mih rāb, at the entrance to al-Hakim’s tenth-century extension to the Great Mosque (Figure 12).68 It is often overlooked that this space (now known as the Villaviciosa chapel, after the high altar was moved to a new location in 1607) must have been one of the most spectacular high altar areas in all of Europe, surrounded by richly carved architectural features of extraordinary complexity, and roofed by elegant

64 The polylobed arch scratched on one of the (late tenth-/early eleventh-century?) wooden panels of the Arca Santa in Oviedo reveals some of the difficulties of creating these arches: Camps Cazorla, Módulo, proporciones y composición en la arquitectura califal cordobesa: 93–99. On the Giralda and its admirers, see Ecker, Caliphs and Kings: 6; Ruiz Souza, ‘Architectural Languages, Functions, and Spaces’: 373; Jiménez Martín, ‘Notas sobre la mezquita mayor de la Sevilla almohade’;Ruiz Souza, ‘Toledo entre Europa y al-Andalus’: 246.

65 See especially Karge, ‘Die Kathedrale von Toledo, oder’.66 Compare the twelfth-century cloister of San Juan de Duero (Soria): Ewert, ‘Sistemas

hispano-islámicos de arcos entrecruzados de San Juan de Duero en Soria’: Figure 3.67 Ecker, ‘The Great Mosque of Córdoba’: 126, has discussed the ‘re-islamicisation’

of Córdoba’s mosque in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the fate of Córdoba’s maqs ūra and mih rāb, see Nieto Cumplido, La catedral de Córdoba: 366–67; and for a similar process at Seville: Laguna Paúl, ‘La aljama cristianizada’: 53–54; Jiménez Martín, ‘Las Fechas de las Formas’: 32–33, 55.

68 See Nieto Cumplido, La catedral de Córdoba: 449–53.

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domes resting on eight great interlocking ribs.69 The intersecting polylobed arches behind the high altar are actually closer to Toledo’s presbytery triforium than those screening the maqs ūra, for the horseshoe arches in the latter are not suggested in Toledo’s triforium design. On competitive grounds alone, Toledo’s patrons and architects must have felt that the primatial cathedral’s new presbytery should surpass Córdoba’s magnificent high altar area in formal terms.70 But the burials of archbishop Sancho I’s half-brother, the infante Juan, and of his father, Fernando III, near the high altars of Córdoba and Seville cathedrals in 1246 and 1252, respectively, also raised the game for Toledo at another level.71 Burial of patrons and clergy near high altars was common elsewhere in Europe, but was virtually without precedent in the Iberian Peninsula.72 Conferment of such a prestigious burial location at Córdoba and Seville is, thus, an index of the growing status of the Castilian monarchy, and of the concessions that cathedral chapters were increasingly prepared to make as they vied with one another for ever-shifting royal favour and patronage. Toledo soon made the most of its own royal connections, with the burials in 1261 and 1275 of the infante-archbishops behind Toledo’s high altar, and then in 1289 the translation there of the bodies of kings Alfonso VII, Sancho III and Sancho II of Portugal. Indeed, the arrangement at Toledo—high altar, screen and then funerary retrochapel/sacristy behind it—is markedly similar to that at Córdoba, where a screened off space east of the high altar—the royal chapel from 1312, probably a sacristy before this—was joined to the high altar by two small doors in its western wall (Figure 12).73

For all its magnificence, at its conversion in 1236 Córdoba’s Great Mosque lacked one important feature that was virtually a prerequisite for

69 This area must have been especially impressive when it still had its original complement of domes: Ruiz Souza, ‘La fachada luminosa de al-Hakam II en la mezquita de Córdoba’.

70 For Toledan concerns about the revived sees, see, for instance, Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain: 368–80, 450–54.

71 Juan: Catalán and Menéndez Pidal (eds), Primera crónica general de España: vol. 2, mxlviii, 735; Nieto Cumplido, La catedral de Córdoba: 450–51. Fernando III: González Jiménez, Alfonso X El Sabio: 45.

72 Sancho VII of Navarre seems to have been buried in a similar location in Pamplona cathedral at his death in 1234. See Dectot, ‘Las sepulturas de Sancho III y sus herederos’: Burials: Gutiérrez Baños, Las empresas artísticas de Sancho IV El Bravo: 150–63; Alonso Álvarez, ‘Los enterramientos de los reyes de León y Castilla hasta Sancho IV’. For precedents, see, for example, Wilson, ‘The Medieval Monuments’: 454–56.

73 Nieto Cumplido, La catedral de Córdoba: 460–66; Ruiz Souza, ‘Capillas Reales funerarias catedralicias de Castilla y León’: 20.



74 For these issues in a Toledan context, see Tolan, Saracens: 183–84.

a great Gothic cathedral: sculpture. The reverse was true of Toledo’s new Gothic cathedral, where the small heads of prophets and young men and women that protrude from the ambulatory and presbytery triforia form part of the original design. This integration of sculpture and architecture—somewhat unusual in a Gothic church—can be understood, in part, as an endorsement of figural sculpture in the Christian church and a riposte to Córdoba.74 Moreover, although the figures that stand in the presbytery triforium were only moved there in the late fifteenth century, the standing angels in the spandrels of Toledo’s presbytery arcade were clearly carved by the workshop that carved the busts, and must also belong to the original

Figure 12 Córdoba cathedral (former mosque), Villaviciosa chapel, formerly the high altar area.

340 Tom Nickson


design (Figure 3).75 Like the angels in the spandrels at Westminster Abbey, Toledo’s angels carry candles, censers and other instruments of mass, and represent heavenly counterparts to what takes place at the altar below them.76 Meanwhile, the busts that overlook the high altar hold books, scrolls or their hands in prayer as though exempla of proper conduct at mass—a theme frequently treated by Toledan archbishops.77

If the iconography of Toledo’s presbytery elevations can thus be understood in relation to the high altar, it must also be asked if their design owes anything to the presence of the Holy Cross chapel behind that altar. Again, chronology is key here. The Cross had long occupied an important position in Toledan devotion and in the ideology of crusade and (re)conquest, and from the moment the new relics were received from Louis IX in 1248—well before construction resumed on the presbytery’s upper elevations—it is likely that they were intended for a prominent position behind Toledo’s high altar.78 This, after all, is where the relics of St James at Compostela were venerated, and this was also the location of the principal relics at the Sainte-Chapelle and at Westminster Abbey, visited by the Toledan archbishops Juan de Medina and Sancho I of Castile in 1248 and 1255 respectively.79 So if the upper elevations of Toledo’s presbytery were designed with the relics of the True Cross in mind, then the triforium’s design may thus be intended to signal the proximity of those relics: not because the triforium recalls the nearby church of Santa Cruz, but because, like Santa Cruz, its Islamicate forms might have been associated with Jerusalem, whence those relics originated.80 Similar resonances have been

75 See Gutiérrez Baños, Las empresas artísticas de Sancho IV El Bravo: 173–77.76 See Binski, Westminster Abbey: 47.77 See Hernández and Linehan, The Mozarabic Cardinal: 286–87. These seem not to be

associated with the figures of Sts Peter and Paul painted behind the high altar of Córdoba cathedral in the 1360s, but see Laguna Paúl, ‘Dos fragmentos en busca de autor y una fecha equívoca’: 83.

78 On Toledan devotion to the Cross, see, for instance, Szövérffy, Iberian Hymnody: 45, 126–27. A set of Toledan constitutions from 1357 (Biblioteca Capitular de Toledo, 23-17, ff. 23r-25r) claims that archbishop Rodrigo (d. 1247) had founded a chaplaincy at an altar dedicated to the Cross, but this is not corroborated by any other evidence.

79 Carrero Santamaría, ‘Le sanctuaire de la cathédrale de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle à l‘épreuve de la liturgie’: 297; Branner, ‘The Grande Chasse of the Sainte-Chapelle’; Binski, Westminster Abbey: 149–50; Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain: 448, n. 16, 500.

80 Martínez de Aguirre, ‘San Juan de Duero y el Sepulcrum Domini de Jerusalén’.



discerned in the pseudo Kufic epigraphy on Oviedo’s Arca Santa, which was reputedly made in Jerusalem before reaching Oviedo via Toledo.81 And at Toledo, associations with Jerusalem were made even more explicit in the late fifteenth century when a new crypt chapel was built below the high altar, dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre.82

This iconographic reading does not, of course, preclude other layers of meaning. The triforium might have had a retrospective quality, an evocation of the ‘forma mesquite’ of the building that had served as Toledo’s cathedral since the eleventh century.83 It might reflect ‘neo-caliphal’ tastes, which were doubtless strengthened by encounters with the Andalusí cities conquered in the 1230s and 1240s, and by the conversion of their spectacular mosques.84 The use of Islamicate forms could also be read as a gesture of triumphalism, akin to the taste for objects captured as booty. But like burial in Andalusí or pseudo-Andalusí textiles, the adoption of Islamicate architectural forms also implied wide-reaching authority, esteem for Andalusí culture, and even what we might call ‘aesthetic’ admiration.85 Indeed, while the emulation of ‘Islamic’ forms might seem unusual from a northern European perspective, from the viewpoint of thirteenth-century Toledo it is the architecture of northern Europe that may have been more extraordinary.

It is thus doubly significant that Toledo cathedral also occupies an important position in the peninsular reception of new forms of Gothic architecture associated with the court of Louis IX (so-called ‘Rayonnant’). This can be seen most clearly in the design of the triforium in the east walls of Toledo’s transept, where there are two triforium openings per bay, each screened by slender, rounded tubes of stone in the form of two

81 Harris, ‘Redating the Arca Santa of Oviedo’: 89.82 Gutiérrez Baños, Las empresas artísticas de Sancho IV El Bravo: 169–72, persuasively

refutes overly Solomonic readings of the original design, though see Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘El testamento de Alfonso X y la Catedral de Toledo’. This is not the occasion to consider the complex question of the dating and significance of the unusually rich vault that covers Toledo’s presbytery, but it should here be noted that, if installed by 1289, it would predate the earliest known lierne vaults in England. See Nickson, ‘Toledo Cathedral’: Chapter 2; Bony, The English Decorated Style: 47.

83 Lambert, L’Art gothique en Espagne: 215; Ruiz Souza, ‘Architectural Languages, Functions, and Spaces’: 373. ‘Forma mesquite’, see Hernández, ‘La hora de don Rodrigo’: 57; Ximénez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie: 294.

84 Ruiz Souza, ‘Toledo entre Europa y al-Andalus’: 247.85 See Feliciano, ‘Muslim Shrouds for Christian Kings?’

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trefoiled lancets, with an inverted trilobe in the spandrels and a simple hood moulding above (Figure 5). On first glance this triforium design scarcely resembles that of the presbytery just to its east, but in fact the same paired dark marble columns and leafy capitals are employed in both, and it is likely that variations in design owe as much to differences in function as to differences in time or masons. Indeed, the upper sections of Toledo’s presbytery could not have been built without the buttressing provided by the transept walls, so both must be close in date.

The rounded tubes of stone that screen Toledo’s transept triforium represent a form of bar tracery already well established in northern France, but not employed in the Iberian Peninsula until the 1250s. It appears for the first time in Castile in the western bays of Burgos cathedral (late 1250s), in the nave clearstorey of Cuenca cathedral (complete by 1257?), and in the tomb of Dean Martín Fernández in León cathedral, who died in 1250, but whose tomb is usually dated c. 1255–60.86 The sandwiching of an inverted trilobe between two trefoiled lancets at Toledo has no parallels in these Castilian examples, however. Indeed, it represents a rather rare and specific combination that in the 1250s featured only in the triforia of the cathedrals of Troyes and Amiens in northern France, as well as in the upper arcades of the west façade of Notre-Dame in Paris, built c. 1235–45 (Figure 13).87 Toledo’s transept triforium is certainly not a precise copy of any of these examples, but given the novelty of bar tracery in Castile in the 1250s—evident in the rather tentative design of the clearstorey in Toledo’s transepts—it seems unlikely that Toledo’s architect would have invented this combination himself. He must, somehow, have known about one of these French examples, but simplified them for his Toledan masons. And of these three precedents, by far the most prominent are the towers at Paris. Scaffolding may have still obscured Notre-Dame’s west façade when the infante Sancho I of Castile studied in Paris between 1245 and 1247, but when he returned to Paris as archbishop-elect in 1255, Sancho would have had ample opportunity to admire these towers, where the latest fashion for slender, diaphanous architectural forms could be seen to best effect.88 In this instance it seems improbable that Sancho would have recruited a Parisian mason and taken him back to Toledo: there was

86 Nickson, ‘La Catedral’: 155.87 See Bruzelius, ‘The Construction of Notre-Dame in Paris’: 566–67.88 Hernández and Linehan, The Mozarabic Cardinal: 49; Kimpel and Suckale, L’

architecture gothique en France: 334–38.



plenty of work for masons in Paris in the 1250s and little incentive for them to leave. It is also unlikely that a mason with that kind of training would have sanctioned the design of Toledo’s transept triforium, where the intersection of trilobes and lancets is oddly carved from the perspective of contemporary French bar tracery. Sancho may, however, have managed to acquire a drawing that showed the Parisian design, especially given that many of the earliest Gothic drawings show west façades and towers.89

It seems plausible, then, that a drawing from Paris might have been available in the Toledan workshop in the 1250s, just as drawings from Beauvais probably were in the 1230s. Neither, of course, survives, but similar kinds of drawings are known from other sites. Further speculation also raises some interesting questions. Is it conceivable that drawings from

89 See, for instance, Murray, ‘The Gothic Facade Drawings in the “Reims Palimpsest”’; Hearn, ‘Villard de Honnecourt’s Perception of Gothic Architecture’: 132–36.

Figure 13 Notre-Dame, Paris, detail of the arcading of the north tower, c. 1235-45.

344 Tom Nickson


Paris might have inspired Toledo’s presbytery triforium as well? After all, both designs could be read as series of trefoiled arches enclosed within polylobed superarches, with further openings in the spandrels (Figures 3 and 13). Could the triforium designs of Toledo’s presbytery and transepts represent two very different attempts to reconstruct three-dimensional forms from the same (two-dimensional) drawing, attempts that depended on a technology (drawing) with which Toledo’s architect was relatively unfamiliar, and that showed architectural forms (bar tracery) that he had never seen before?90 Might aspects of a drawing’s geometric construction explain curious features of the presbytery triforium, such as the horizontal struts in the lowest trefoiled openings, or the foliate paterae at the intersection of the arches, which seem to correspond to compass points on a drawing?

In the end, our only evidence is common sense. Architectural drawings would have served little purpose if aspects of their production or interpretation distorted information beyond recognition, and any resemblances between Toledo’s presbytery triforium and the towers at Paris are probably coincidental. It seems even less likely, moreover, that the presbytery triforium derives from a drawing from Córdoba. Next to nothing is known about the circulation of Islamicate designs amongst Christian patrons and builders, but it seems to have been a post-medieval phenomenon. The earliest accurate ground plan of an Islamicate building in the peninsula is probably Pedro Machuca’s drawing of 1528, in which the plan of the Alhambra palace in Granada is shown in relation to the new palace of Charles V.91 I know of no accurate elevation of an Islamicate building before the late eighteenth century, when the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid sponsored production of the Antigüedades árabes de España.92 So pending any chance discoveries, it must be assumed that drawings of Islamicate buildings did not circulate in Gothic masons’ workshops: there is only so much that can be blamed on poor survival.

In the absence of drawings, it is probable that the design of Toledo’s presbytery triforium was based on the memory of another building.93 Such a building is unlikely to have been in Toledo itself, as such proximity

90 For a comparable case of a mason misreading drawings of cusping, see Wilson, ‘The Chapter House of Westminster Abbey’: 52.

91 Rosenthal, The palace of Charles V in Granada: plate 17.92 Schulz, ‘The Porcelain of the Moors’: 400–01.93 Krautheimer implies as much in his description of travelling architects: ‘Introduction

to an “Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture”’: 19.



94 See, for instance, Pick, Conflict and Coexistence.95 See especially Karge, ‘La arquitectura de la catedral de León en el contexto del gótico

europeo’.

would permit Toledo’s master mason regularly to check and correct his design against the original. It is more likely that it was somewhere distant, perhaps in Córdoba, or even further away in Paris. To speculate very freely, we might imagine two possibilities. First, that a mason familiar with Burgos cathedral—and perhaps aware of changing architectural fashions in Paris—attempted to match the magnificent high altar area of Córdoba’s converted mosque, replicating in stone what he carried only in his memory. Alternatively, a locally-trained mason may have visited Paris, but translated the French design into something more familiar in Toledo. Either explanation implies a complex trajectory: from the ambulatory elevations, derived from Beauvais, but not without resonance in the local/Andalusí tradition; to the presbytery triforium, with stronger debts to the Andalusí tradition, but not unrelated to contemporary Gothic structures; to the triforium of the east walls of the transepts, a ‘simplified’ version of northern French models.

This architectural hybridity both reflects and asserts the cosmopolitanism of Toledo and other reconquered cities in southern Iberia, and shows that, away from the traditional centres, northern European and Islamicate tastes and traditions could sometimes coincide. Archbishop Rodrigo’s own life exemplifies this cosmopolitanism: born in Navarre and educated in Paris, Rodrigo travelled frequently to Rome, portrayed himself as a hero of crusades against Islam, wrote a history of the Arab peoples, and was buried in Andalusí textiles woven with Arabic blessings.94 That breadth of outlook was shared, to differing degrees, by many who would have seen the new cathedral that Rodrigo founded, be it the Arabic-speaking canons who sang Latin chants there every day, or king Alfonso X, travelling constantly between the old cities of northern Castile and those in newly-conquered territories in the south. Located at the crossroads between Gothic France and Islamic al-Andalus, and built at a moment of architectural transformation in both Paris and Córdoba, the east end of Toledo cathedral is a unicum, a bold experiment never really copied in another church. Instead, when construction began in the 1250s on a new cathedral in León, the first great church to be (re)built in the peninsula after Toledo, it was built to a determinedly French Rayonnant design. A brilliant and glittering riposte to Toledo, it was León, and not the primatial church, that established the model for church building over the next century.95

346 Tom Nickson


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copying córdoba? toledo and beyond

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