Queen Eleanor and the biscuits of Dulcinea
You can still see two stoles (the scarf-like part of a priest’s vestments), embroidered by Queen Eleanor of Castile in 1197 and 1198. They are on show at the royal foundation of St Isidore in Leon, Spain. They bear a pattern of castles (with windows and doors in blue or red), the emblems of Castile, to which Eleanor, known as Eleanor of England, had come on her marriage to Alfonso VIII.
Eleanor, born about 1161, was the daughter of the strong-willed, long-lived Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had married the future Henry II in 1152. As a girl of two she crossed the Channel from the Normandy of her birth, and in her childhood Eleanor saw Marlborough and Winchester, Sherborne and Westminster. Spain must have felt different.
Heaven knows how these transplanted queens coped, but Eleanor seemed to have had a happy marriage. Seven of her children survived infancy, some to marry the kings of France, Leon and Portugal. Queen Eleanor and King Alfonso are shown in an enamel-like medieval miniature presenting the castle of Uclés to the Knights of Santiago.
This links up to a strange experience I had last week on visiting the village of El Toboso in the middle of nowhere in La Mancha. As even those who haven’t read every word of Don Quixote know, El Toboso was the village of Dulcinea, the courtly ideal beloved of the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in reality quite an earthy woman.
When I arrived, El Toboso was empty. The Aldonza Lorenzo baker’s shop (which shares Dulcinea’s real name) was locked. Calle Rocinante was deserted. Not a bar was open, no one was about but for two men in the distance with a trombone and tuba.
I should have realised it was the National Day, and the 2,219 inhabitants were taking the holiday seriously.
The church was locked, too, but on each side of the portico was an emblem like a dagger with a fleur-de-lis handle. It can be seen on the breast of Diego Velázquez in his painting Las Meninas, and is the device of the Knights of Santiago, the military and religious order favoured by Eleanor and Alfonso. This was familiar to Cervantes, who makes Don Quixote explain to Sancho the patronage of St James, or Santiago: “God gave that great knight of the Red Cross to Spain as her patron saint and protector, especially in those hard struggles the Spaniards had with the Moors.” So it had been when El Toboso was reconquered in 1278 and the Order built a church, dedicated to St Antony Abbot. This church remained under the Order’s jurisdiction until 1931 when the military orders were abolished by the Republic.
On my second lap, I found the church open and crowded with villagers at Mass. St Antony with his little pig were depicted above the altar, and surmounting the altarpiece Santiago himself, on a galloping white horse, his sword aloft. The big church, with fine Gothic vaulting, would have been familiar to Cervantes, who was baptised in the nearest town, Alcázar de San Juan, 20 miles away. El Toboso was in his day a prosperous settlement.
He’d also have known, from outside, the convent of the contemplative Poor Clares – Clarisas in Spanish. In El Toboso they’d started as a community of pious women who followed the Rule of St Francis. In 1835 their fields of vines, whose rents paid for the convent’s upkeep, were confiscated by the Liberal government. In the Civil War the nuns were carted off to prison. The survivors returned and continue their life of prayer, supporting themselves by making biscuits called pelusas, “fluff ”, and others called caprichos de Dulcinea.