The Cathedrals of Northern Spain Part 21

Inside there is nothing worthy of interest to be admired except some pictures, one of them painted by the Divino Morales. The nave is light, but the chapels are so dark that almost nothing can be seen in their interior.

This church, until the expulsion of the Jesuits, was the temple of their order, dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul; adjoining it a Jesuit school was erected, which has been incorporated in the government colleges.

_Alcala de Henares_

About twenty miles to the east of Madrid lies the one-time glorious university city of Alcala, famous above all things for having been the cradle of Cervantes, and the hearth, if not the home, of Cardinal Cisneros.

Its history and its decadence are of the saddest; the latter serves in many respects as an adequate symbol of Spain's own tremendous downfall.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAN ISIDRO, MADRID]

The Romans founded Alcala; it was their Complutum, of which some few remains have been discovered in the vicinity of the modern city. Yet, notwithstanding this lack of substantial evidence, the inhabitants of the region still proudly call themselves Complutenses.

When the West Goths were rulers of the peninsula, the Roman monuments must have been completely destroyed, for all traces of the strategic stronghold were effaced from the map of Spain. The invading Arabs, possessing to a certain degree both Roman military instinct and foresight, built a fortress on the spot where the State Archives Building stands to-day. This castle was used by them as one of Toledo's northern defences against the warlike Christian kings.

In the twelfth century the fortress fell into the hands of the Christians; in the succeeding centuries it was strongly rebuilt by the cardinal-archbishops of Toledo, who used it both as their palace and as their stronghold.

Outside the bastioned and turreted walls of the castle, the new-born city grew up under its protecting shadows. Known by the Arabic name of its fortress (Al-Kala), it was successively baptized Alcala de San Justo, Alcala de Fenares, and since the sixteenth century, Alcala de Henares (_heno_, old Spanish _feno_, meaning hay). Protected by such powerful arms as those of the princes of the Church, it grew up to be a second Toledo, a city of church spires and convent walls, but of which only a reduced number stand to-day to point back to the religious fervour of the middle ages.

The world-spread fame acquired by Alcala in the fifteenth century was due to the patronage of Cardinal Cisneros, who built the university, at one time one of the most celebrated in Europe, and to-day a mere skeleton of architectural beauty.

The same prelate raised San Justo to a suffragan church; its chapter was composed only of learned professors of the university, as were also its canons; Leon X. gave it the enviable t.i.tle of La Magistral, the Learned, which points it out as unique in the Christian world. The Polyglot Bible, published in the sixteenth century, and famous in all Europe, was worked out by these scholars under Cisneros's direction, and the favoured city outshone the newly built Madrid twenty miles away, and rivalled Salamanca in learning, and Toledo in worldly and religious splendour.

Madrid grew greater and greater as years went by, and consequently Alcala de Henares dwindled away to the shadow of a name. The university, the just pride of the Complutenses, was removed to the capital; the cathedral, for lack of proper care, became an untimely ruin; the episcopal palace was confiscated by the state, which, besides repairing it, filled its seventy odd halls with rows upon rows of dusty doc.u.ments and governmental papers.

To-day the city drags along a weary, inactive existence: soldiers from the barracks and long-robed priests from the church fill the streets, and are as numerous as the civil inhabitants, if not more so; convents and cloisters of nuns, either gra.s.s-grown ruins or else sombre grated and barred edifices, are to be met with at every step.

Strangers visit the place hurriedly in the morning and return to Madrid in the afternoon; they buy a tin box of sugar almonds (the city's specialty), carelessly examine the university and the archiepiscopal palace, gaze unmoved at some Cervantes relics, and at the facade of the cathedral. Besides, they are told that in such and such a house the immortal author of Don Quixote was born, which is a base, though comprehensible, invention, because no such house exists to-day.

That is all; perchance in crossing the city's only square, the traveller notices that it can boast of no fewer than three names, doubtless with a view to hide its glaring nakedness. These three names are Plaza de Cervantes, Plaza Mayor, and Plaza de la Const.i.tucion, of which the latter is spread out boldly across the town hall and seems to invoke the remembrance of the ephemeral efforts of the republic in 1869.

In the third century after the birth of Christ, two infants, Justo and Pastor, preached the True Word to the unbelieving Roman rulers of Complutum. The result was not in the least surprising: the two infants lost their baby heads for the trouble they had taken in trying to trouble warriors.

But the Vatican remembered them, and canonized Pastor and Justo.

Hundreds of churches, sown by the blood of martyrs, grew up in all corners of the peninsula to commemorate pagan cruelty, and to induce all men to follow the examples set by the two babes.

No one knew, however, where the mortal remains of Justo and Pastor were lying. In the fourth century their resting-place was miraculously revealed to one Austurio, Archbishop of Toledo, who had them removed to his cathedral. They did not stay long in the primate city, for the invasion of the Moors obliged all True Believers to hide Church relics.

Thus, Justo and Pastor wandered forth again from village to village, running away from the infidels until they reposed temporarily in the cathedral of Huesca in the north of Aragon.

In Alcala their memory was kept alive in the parish church dedicated to them. But as the city grew, it was deemed preferable to build a solid temple worthy of the saintly pair, and Carillo, Archbishop of Toledo, had the old church pulled down and began the erection of a larger edifice. This took place in the middle of the fifteenth century, when Ximenez de Cisneros, who ruled the fate of Spain and its church, gave it the ecclesiastical const.i.tution previously mentioned.

Fifty years later the weary bodies of the two infants were brought back in triumph to their native town amid the rejoicings and admiration of the people, and were placed in the cathedral of San Justo, then a collegiate church of Toledo.

A few years ago the cathedral church of San Justo was denounced by the state architect and closed. To-day it is a dreary ruin, with tufts of gra.s.s growing among the battlements. The chapter, depriving the h.o.a.ry building of its high altar, its precious relics and paintings, its stalls and other accessories, installed the cathedral in the Jesuit temple, an insignificant building in the other extremity of the town.

Recently the abandoned ruin has been declared a national monument, which means that the state is obliged to undertake its restoration.

La Magistral is a brick building of imposing simplicity and severity in its general outlines. Its decorative elements are ogival, but of true Spanish nakedness and lack of elegance. Though Renaissance principles have not entered into the composition, as might have been supposed, considering the date of the erection, nevertheless, the lack of flying b.u.t.tresses, the scarcity of windows, the undecorated angles of the western front, the barren walls, and flat-topped, though slightly sloping, roofs prove that the "simple and severe style" is latent in the minds of artists.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALCALa DE HENARES CATHEDRAL]

The apse is well developed, and the _croisee_ surmounted by a cupola; the tower which flanks the western front is ma.s.sive; it is decorated with blind arches and ogival arabesques.

The ground plan of the building is Latin Cruciform; the aisles are but slightly lower than the nave and join in the apse behind the high altar in an ambulatory walk. The crypt, reached by two Renaissance doors in the _trasaltar_, is s.p.a.cious, and contains the bodies of San Justo and San Pastor.

The general impression produced on the mind of the tourist is sadness.

The severity of the structure is heightened by the absence of any distracting decorative elements, excepting the fine _Mudejar_ ceiling to the left upon entering.

In the reigning shadows of this deserted temple, two magnificent tombs stand in solitude and silence. They are those of Carillo and Cardinal Cisneros, the latter one of the greatest sons of Spain and one of her most contradictory geniuses. His sepulchre is a gorgeous marble monument of Renaissance style, surrounded by a ma.s.sive bronze grille of excellent workmanship, a marvel of Spanish metal art of the sixteenth century.

The other sepulchre is simple in its ogival decorations, and the prostrate effigy of Carillo is among the best to be admired by the tourist in Iberia.

Carillo's life was that of a restless, ambitious, and worldly man. When he died, he was buried in the Convent of San Juan de Dios, where his illegitimate son had been buried before him, "for," said the archbishop-father, "if in life my robes separated me from my son, in death we shall be united."

But he reckoned without his host, or rather his successor, the man whose remains now lie beside his own in the shadows of the great ruin. "For,"

said Cisneros, "the Church must separate man from his sin even in death." So he ordered the son to be left in the convent, and the father to be brought to the temple he had begun to erect.

V

SIGuENZA

The origin of the fortress admirably situated to the north of Guadalajara was doubtless Moorish, though in the vicinity is Villavieja, where the Romans had established a town on the transverse road from Cadiz to Tarragon, and called by them Seguncia, or Segoncia.

When the Christian religion first appeared in Spain, it is believed that Siguenza, or Segoncia, possessed an episcopal see; nothing is positively known, however, of the early bishops, until Protogenes signed the third Council of Toledo in 589.

It is believed that in the reign of Alfonso VI., he who conquered Toledo and the region to the south of Valladolid and as far east as Aragon, Siguenza was repopulated, though no mention is made of the place in the earlier chronicles of the time. All that is known is that a bishop was immediately appointed by Alfonso VII. to the vacancy which had lasted for over two hundred years, during which Siguenza had been one of the provincial capitals of the Kingdom of Toledo. The first known bishop was Don Bernardo.

The history of the town was never of the most brilliant. In the times of Alfonso VII. and his immediate successors it gained certain importance as a frontier stronghold, as a check to the growing ambitions of the royal house of Aragon. But after the union of Castile and Aragon, its importance gradually dwindled; to-day, if it were not for the bishopric, it would be one historic village more on the map of Spain.

In the reign of Peter the Cruel, its castle--considered with that of Segovia to be the strongest in Castile--was used for some time as the prison palace for that most unhappy princess, Dona Blanca, who, married to his Catholic Majesty, had been deposed on the third day of the wedding by the heartless and pa.s.sionate lover of the Padilla. She was at first shut up in Toledo, but the king did not consider the Alcazar strong enough. So she was sent off to Siguenza, where it is popularly believed, though doc.u.ments deny it, that she died, or was put to death.

The city belonged to the bishop; it was his feudal property, and pa.s.sed down to his successors in the see. Of the doings of these prelate-warriors, the first, Don Bernardo, was doubtless the most striking personality, lord of a thousand armed va.s.sals and of three hundred horse, who fought with the emperor in almost all the great battles in Andalusia. It is even believed he died wielding the naked sword, and that his remains were brought back to the town of which he had been the first and undisputed lord.

The strong castle which crowns the city did not possess, as was generally the case, an _alcalde_, or governor; it was the episcopal palace or residence, a circ.u.mstance which proves beyond a doubt the double significance of the bishop: a spiritual leader and military personage, more influential and wealthy than any prelate in Spain, excepting the Archbishops of Toledo and Santiago.

During the French invasion in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Siguenza had already lost its political significance. The invaders occupied the castle, and, as was their custom, threw doc.u.ments and archives into the fire, to make room for themselves, and to spend the winter comfortably.

Consequently, the notices we have of the cathedral church are but scarce. The fourth bishop was Jocelyn, an Englishman who had come over with Eleanor, Henry II.'s daughter, and married to the King of Castile.

He (the bishop) was not a whit less warlike than his predecessors had been; he helped the king to win the town of Cuenca, and when he died on the battle-field, only his right arm was carried back to the see, to the chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury, which the dead prelate had founded in the new cathedral, and it was buried beneath a stone which bears the following inscription:

"_Hic est inclusa Jocelini praesulis ulna._"

From the above we can conclude that the cathedral must have been begun previous to the Englishman's coming to Spain, that is, in the beginning of the twelfth century. Doubtless the vaulting was not closed until at least one hundred years later; nevertheless, it is one of the unique and at the same time one of the handsomest Spanish monuments of the Transition period.

The city of Siguenza, situated on the slopes of a hill crowned by the castle, is a village rather than a town; there are, however, fewer spots in Spain that are more picturesque in their old age, and there is a certain uniformity in the architecture that reminds one of German towns; this is not at all characteristic of Spain, where so many styles mix and mingle until hardly distinguishable from each other.