Convento de Santa Clara la Real, Toledo

The primitive convent of Santa María and San Damián of Toledo

The first Clares who settled in Toledo, even in the life of St. Clare of Assisi herself, were known at that time, as in the rest of Europe, as Dianians, "in memory" or honor of the first place where the San Damiano convent of Assisi had been established, and settled in the outskirts of Toledo, in the district or valley of Santa Susana, where the Seismological Institute of Toledo and the Santa Casilda Asylum are located, since the Toledan jurisdiction ordered that no monastery or convent be established in the interior of the city, due to the scarcity of urban land and the massive agglomeration of its inhabitants.

The Danaanites were ruled in Toledo by the Rule of Saint Benedict and were spiritually directed by the Franciscans of the city, although, as the historian María Luisa Pérez de Tudela pointed out, lived according to the way of life of Saint Clare. In addition, that primitive convent was placed under the invocation of Saint Mary and Saint Damian, and although some authors point out that it was founded around 1250 with the permission of the famous archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, who was present in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, published in 1212, the historian Pérez de Tudela pointed out that in case of having been founded during the mandate of this prelate it would have been in 1247, that was the year in which the archbishop died abroad.^[4]

Saint Clare of Assisi. Fresco made by Simone Martini at the beginning of the 14th century. Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi

The foundation of the convento de Santa María y San Damián of Toledo was confirmed in 1254 by a bull by Pope Innocent IV, and the historian Pérez de Tudela pointed out that the first document in which the convent is mentioned is at the time is in the testament granted in 1248 by the Archbishop Juan de Medina de Pomar, who succeeded Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada at the head of the archdiocese of Toledo, and where, along with some convents located in the interior of the city of Toledo, is referred to another of the minor friars located outside its walls: "et uni quos est extra muris, quod est Ordinis Minorum", which shows according to the historian that in 1248 the Poor Clares were already established in the Valley of Santa Susana, where they lived:

With a life in closure, poverty, prayer, chastity, abstinence and silence. Life that became extremely heroic, especially in the last decade of the period, during which, they were always threatened and in danger; Firstly because of the plague of 1348 and later by the disorders of the civil war (1351-1369), as a result of which, the alfoz of Toledo, was a witness and suffered from fences, galloping warriors and looting.

In 1345, during the last period of the reign of Alfonso XI of Castile, that died by the bubonic plague while beleaguering Gibraltar in 1350, a new Ordinances for the city of Toledo were drafted in which were forbidden for anyone to live outside its walls, but Pérez de Tudela stated that the Toledo claresses could not comply with this provision because of their extreme poverty and their lack of resources to move to the interior of the walled enclosure, and were forced to continue bearing the inconveniences derived from the fact of residing outside the walled. Nuns remained in that place for more than a hundred years.

The convent of Santa Clara of Toledo

Gran dobla o dobla de a diez of Peter of Castile, son and successor of Alfonso XI, minted in Seville in 1360. (National Archaeological Museum, Madrid).

In the middle of the 14th century a lady of the Toledan nobility, María Meléndez, who belonged to a Mozarabic family and was married to Suer Téllez de Meneses, Toledo's chief constable, began to take the first steps towards the foundation of a convent of Poor Clares in Toledo. This lady was the Alfonso Díaz and Teresa López's daughter and Diego Alfonso de Toledo's sister, and June 22 of 1340, year in which according to the historian Pérez de Tudela began to form the foundation of the convent, King Alfonso XI authorized the María Meléndez' brother to untie and exchange with her the "Big Houses" that she had in the collage of San Vicente of Toledo and that she had received from her grandfather Alfonso Díaz by means of majorat, by any other inheritance whose cost of maintenance was less elevated.^[5]

In 1360, Suer Téllez de Meneses, the María Meléndez' husband, died and the historian María Luisa Pérez de Tudela said that the first "legal act" of the foundation of the convent of Santa Clara the Real took place the August 31 of 1368, during the Castilian Civil War, when María Meléndez donated to the Damianites nuns of Toledo and to its abbess Sancha Alfonso the houses of the city of Toledo where the founder lived along with their "inheritances et with cubas and the wineries and tinajas" so that in them they could establish a new convent, and on January 20, 1370, almost two years later, María Meléndez acquired for the convent half of some houses that were next to it and that belonged to "Habibi mora".

In 1370 the existence of the convent of Santa Clara de Toledo in the collage of San Vicente already appears in a document, and that same year the founder, María Meléndez, took the habits and professed like religious in the same, happening to be, as it indicated Pérez de Tudela, "one more" of the nuns of the convent, as it is recorded in several documents issued between 1373 and 1375, the latter year in which the abbess ceased to be mentioned in the same ones.

General view of the city of Toledo.

On June 27, 1371, Pope Gregory XI issued in Avignon the Bull Piis devotorum in the name of Gómez Manrique, archbishop of Toledo, authorizing María Meléndez to found in the city of Toledo a convent of Clarean nuns who should provide everything necessary so that thirty nuns could live in it, although the bull was also demanded that the church of the new monastery had bell tower and bells and that the temple had everything necessary for the cult, and the abbess Sancha Alfonso committed herself before the archbishop of Toledo in her own name and in that of her successors to pay the tribute of the Subsidio and of the parochial tenths.

In 1373 the convent of Santa Clara was canonically established, solemnly, by the deed of foundation granted by María Meléndez on June 13, by which ceded to that convent the houses it owned inside the walled city of Toledo and all its possessions so that the Clarisses could build a convent in that city with the capacity to lodge thirty nuns and a sufficient dowry so that the monastery could be maintained with its own rents. And on August 3 of that same year María Meléndez granted a new deed In Toledo, by which she expanded the foundational dowry she had given to the convent of Santa Clara on June 13.