The Cathedrals of Northern Spain Part 5

Slowly, but surely, the Arabs moved southwards, followed by the implacable line of Christian fortresses. At one time Valladolid, Palencia, Toro, and Zamora formed this line. When Toledo was conquered it was subst.i.tuted by Coria, Plasencia, Siguenza, and, slightly to the north, by Madrid, Avila, Segovia, and Salamanca. At the same time Siguenza, Segovia, Soria, and Logrono formed another strategic line of fortifications against Aragon, whilst in the west Plasencia, Coria, Toro and Zamora, Tuy, Orense, and Astorga kept the Portuguese from Castilian soil. In the extreme southwest Cuenca, impregnable and highly strategical, looked eastwards and southwards against the Moor, and northwards against the Aragonese.

In all these links of the immense strategical chain which protected Castile from her enemies, the monarchs were cunning enough to erect sees and appoint warrior-bishops. They even donated the new fortress-cities with special privileges or _fueros_, in virtue of which settlers came from all parts of the country to inhabit and const.i.tute the new munic.i.p.ality.

Such--in gigantic strides--is the story of most of Castile's world-famed cities. In each chapter, dates, anecdotes, and more details are given, with a view to enable the reader to become acquainted not only with the ecclesiastical history of cities like Burgos and Valladolid, but also with the causes which produced the growing importance of each see, as well as its decadence within the last few centuries.

_PART II_

_Galicia_

I

SANTIAGO DE CAMPOSTELA

When the Christian religion was still young, St. James the Apostle--he whom Christ called his brother--landed in Galicia and roamed across the northern half of the Iberian peninsula dressed in a pilgrim's modest garb and leaning upon a pilgrim's humble staff. After years of wandering from place to place, he returned to Galicia and was beheaded by the Romans, his enemies.

This legend--or truth--has been poetically interwoven with other legends of Celtic origin, until the whole story forms what Brunetiere would call a _cycle chevaleresque_ with St. James--or Santiago--as the central hero.

According to one of these legends, it would appear that the apostle was persecuted by his great enemy Lupa, a woman of singular beauty whom the ascetic pilgrim had mortally offended. Thanks to certain accessory details, it is possible to a.s.sume that Lupa is the symbol of the "G.o.d without a name" of Celtic mythology, and it is she who finally venges herself by decapitating the pilgrim saint.

The disciples of St. James laid his corpse in a cart, together with the executioner's axe and the pilgrim's staff. Two wild bulls were then harnessed to the vehicle, and away went cart and saint. As night fell and the moon rose over the vales of Galicia, the weary animals stopped on the summit of a wooded hill in an unknown vale, surrounded by other hillocks likewise covered with foliage and verdure.

The disciples buried the saint, together with axe and staff, and there they left him with the secret of his burial-ground.

This must have happened in the first or second century of the Christian era. Six hundred years later, and one hundred years after the Moors had landed in Andalusia, one Theodosio, Bishop of Iria (Galicia), took a walk one day in his wide domains accompanied by a monk. Together they lost their way and roamed about till night-fall, when they found themselves far from home.

Stars twinkled in the heavens as they do to this day. Being tired, the bishop and his companion dreamt as they walked along--at least it appears so from what followed--and the stars were so many miraculous lights which led the wanderers on and on. At last the stars remained motionless above a wooded hill standing isolated in a beautiful vale.

The prelate stopped also, and it occurred to him to dig, for he attributed his dreams to a supernatural miracle. Digging, a coffin was revealed to him, and therein the saintly remains of St. James or Santiago.

Giving thanks to Him who guides all steps, Theodosio returned to Iria, and, by his orders, a primitive basilica was erected some years later on the very spot where the saint had been buried, and in such a manner as to place the high altar just above the coffin. A crypt was then dug out and lined with mosaic, and the coffin, either repaired or renewed, was laid therein,--some say it was visible to the hordes of pilgrims in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The shrine was then called Santiago de Campostela.--Santiago, which means St. James, and Campostela, field of stars, in memory of the miraculous lights the Bishop of Iria and his companion had perceived whilst sweetly dreaming.

The news of the discovery spread abroad with wonderful rapidity.

Monasteries, churches, and inns soon surrounded the basilica, and within a few years a village and then a city (the bishop's see was created previous to 842 A. D.) filled the vale, which barely fifty years earlier had been an undiscovered and savage region.

Throughout the middle ages, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, Santiago de Campostela was the scene of pilgrimages--not to say crusades--to the tomb of St. James. From France, Italy, Germany, and England hundreds and thousands of men, women, and children wandered to the Galician valley, then one of the foci of ecclesiastical significance and industrial activity. The city, despite its local character, wore an international garb, much to the benefit of Galician, even Spanish, arts and literature. It is a pity that so little research has been made concerning these pilgrimages and the influences they brought to bear on the history of the country. A book treating of this subject would be a highly interesting account of one of the most important movements of the middle ages.

The Moors under Almanzor pillaged the city of Santiago in 999; then they retreated southwards, as was their wont. The Norman vikings also visited the sacred vale, attracted thither by the reports of its wealth; but they also retreated, like the waves of the sea when the tide goes out.

After the last Arab invasion, an extemporaneous edifice was erected in place of the shrine which had been demolished. It did not stand long, however, for the Christian kings of Spain, whose dominions were limited to Asturias, Leon, and Galicia, ordered the construction of a building worthy of St. James, who was looked upon as the G.o.d of battles, much like St. George in England.

So in 1078 the new cathedral, the present building, was commenced, and, as the story runs, it was built around the then existing basilica, which was left standing until after the vault of the new edifice had been closed.

The history of Spain at this moment helped to increase the religious importance of Santiago. The kingdom of Asturias (Oviedo) had stretched out beyond its limits and died; the Christian nuclei were Galicia, Leon, and Navarra. In these three the power of the n.o.blemen, and consequently of the bishops and archbishops, was greater than it had ever been before. Each was lord or sovereign in his own domains, and fought against his enemies with or without the aid of the infidel Arab armies, which he had no compunction in inviting to help him against his Christian brothers. Now and again a king managed to subdue these aristocratic lords and ecclesiastical prelates, but only for a short time. Besides, nowhere was the independent spirit of the n.o.blemen more accentuated than in Galicia; nowhere were the prelates so rebellious as in Santiago, the Sacred City, and none attained a greater height of personal power and wealth than Diego Galmirez, the first archbishop of Santiago, and one of the most striking and interesting personalities of Spanish history in the twelfth century, to whom Santiago owes much of her glory, and Spain not little of her future history.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were thus the period of Santiago's greatest fame and renown. Little by little the central power of the monarchs went southwards to Castile and Andalusia, and little by little Santiago declined and dwindled in importance, until to-day it is one city more of those that have been and are no longer.

For the city's history is that of its cathedral, of its shrine. With the birth of Protestantism and the death of feudal power, both city and cathedral lost their previous importance: they had sprung into life together, and the existence of the one was intricately interwoven with that of the other.

The stranger who visits Santiago to-day does not approach it fervently by the Mount of Joys as did the footsore pilgrims in the middle ages. On the contrary, he steps out of the train and hurries to the cathedral church, which sadly seems to repeat the thoughts of the city itself, or the words of Senor Muguira:

"To-day, what am I? An echo of the joys and pains of hundreds of generations; a distant rumour both confused and undefinable, a last sunbeam fading at evening and dying on the gla.s.sy surface of sleeping waters. Never will man learn my secrets, never will he be able to open my granite lips and oblige them to reveal the mysterious past."

As is generally known, the cathedral is a Romanesque building of the eleventh and twelfth centuries mutilated by posterior additions and recent ameliorations (_sic_). It was begun in 1078, and, though finished about 150 years later, no ogival elements drifted into the construction until long after its completion. As will be seen later on, it served as the model for most of Galicia's cathedrals. On the other hand, it is generally believed to be an imitation--as regards the general disposition--of St. Saturnin in Toulouse: a combatable theory, however, as the churches were contemporaneous.

Seen from the outside, the Cathedral of Santiago lacks harmony; few remains of the primitive structure are to be discovered among the many later-date additions and reforms. The base of the towers and some fine blinded windows, with nave low reliefs in the semicircular tympanum, will have to be excepted.

The Holy Door--a peculiarly placed apsidal portal on the eastern front--is built up of decorative elements saved from the northern and western facades when they were torn down.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SANTIAGO AND ITS CATHEDRAL]

The best portal is the Puerta de la Plateria, opening into the southern arm of the transept. It is, unluckily, depressed and thrown into the background by the cloister walls on the left, and by the Trinity Tower on the right. Nevertheless, both handsome and sober, it can be counted among the finest examples of its kind--pure Romanesque--in Spain, and is rendered even more attractive by the peculiar Galician poetry which inspired its sculptors.

Immediately above the panels of the door, which are covered with twelfth-century metal reliefs, there is a stone plaque or low relief, representing the Pa.s.sion scene; to the left of it is to be seen a kneeling woman holding a skull in her hand. Evidently it is a weeping, penitent Magdalene. The popular tongue has invented a legend--perhaps a true one--concerning this woman, who is believed to symbolize the adulteress. It appears that a certain hidalgo, discovering his wife's sins, killed her lover by cutting off his head; he then obliged her to kiss and adore the skull twice daily throughout her life,--a rather cruel punishment and a slow torture, quite in accordance with the mystic spirit of the Celts.

The apse of the church, circular in the interior, is squared off on the outside by the addition of chapels. As regards the plateresque northern and western facades, they are out of place, though the former might have pa.s.sed off elsewhere as a fairly good example of the severe sixteenth-century style.

The general plan of the building is Roman cruciform; the princ.i.p.al nave is high, and contains both choir and high altar; the two aisles are much lower and darker, and terminate behind the high altar in an ambulatory walk. The width of the transept is enormous, and is composed of a nave and two aisles similar in size to those of the body of the church. The _croisee_ is surmounted by a dome, which, though not Romanesque, is certainly an advantageous addition.

Excepting the high altar with its _retablo_, the choir with its none too beautiful stalls, and the various chapels of little interest and less taste, the general view of the interior is impressively beautiful. The height of the central nave, rendered more elegant by the addition of a handsome Romanesque triforium of round-headed arches, contrasts harmoniously with the sombre aisles, whereas the bareness of the walls--for all mural paintings were washed away by a bigoted prelate somewhere in the fifteenth century--helps to show off to better advantage the rich sculptural decorations, leaf and floral designs on capitals and friezes.

The real wonder of the cathedral is the far-famed Portico de la Gloria, the vestibule or narthex behind the western entrance of the church, and as renowned as its sculptural value is meritorious.

So much has already been written concerning this work of art that really little need be mentioned here. Street, who persuaded the British Government to send a body of artists to take a plaster copy of this strange work, could not help declaring that: "I p.r.o.nounce this effort of Master Mathews at Santiago to be one of the greatest glories of Christian art."

And so it is. Executed in the true Romanesque period, each column and square inch of surface covered with exquisite decorative designs, elaborated with care and not hastily, as was the habit of later-day artists, the three-vaulted rectangular vestibule between the body of the church and the western extremity where the light streams in through the rose window, is an immense allegory of the Christian religion, of human life, and above all of the mystic, melancholy poetry of Celtic Galicia.

Buried in half-lights, this song of stone with the statue of the Trinity and St. James, with the angels blowing their trumpets from the walls, and the virtues and vices of this world symbolized by groups and by persons, is of a sincere poetry that leaves a lasting impression upon the spectator. Life, Faith, and Death, Judgment and Purgatory, h.e.l.l and Paradise or Glory, are the motives carved out in stone in this unique narthex, so masterful in the execution, and so vivid in the tale it tells, that we can compare its author to Dante, and call the Portico de la Gloria the "Divina Commedia" of architecture.

At one end there is the figure of a kneeling man, the head almost touching the ground in the body's fervent prostration in front of the group representing Glory, Trinity, and St. James. Is it a twelfth-century pilgrim whom the artist in a moment of realistic enthusiasm has portrayed here, in the act of praying to his Creator and invoking his mercy? Or is it the portrait of the artist, who, even after death, wished to live in the midst of the wonders of his creation? It is not positively known, though it is generally supposed to be Maestro Mateo himself, kneeling in front of his Glory, admiring it as do all visitors, and watching over it as would a mother over her son.

If the chapels which surround the building have been omitted on account of their artistic worthlessness, not the same fate awaits the cloister.

Of a much later date than the cathedral itself, having been constructed in the sixteenth century, it is a late Gothic monument betraying Renaissance additions and mixtures; consequently it is entirely out of place and time here, and does not harmonize with the cathedral. Examined as a detached edifice, it impresses favourably as regards the height and length of the galleries, which show it to be one of the largest cloisters in Spain.

The cathedral's crypt is one of its most peculiar features, and certainly well worth examining better than has been heretofore done. It is reached by a small door behind the high altar (evidently used when the saint's coffin was placed on grand occasions on the altar-table) or by a subterranean gallery leading down from the Portico de la Gloria, a gallery as rich in sculptural decorations as the vestibule itself.

The popular belief in Galicia is that in this crypt the cathedral reflects itself, towers and all, as it would in the limpid surface of a lake. Hardly; and yet the crypt is a nude copy of the ground floor above, with the corresponding naves and aisles and apsidal chapels. The height of the crypt is surprising, the architectural construction is pure Romanesque,--more so than that of the building itself,--and just beneath the high altar the shrine of St. James is situated where it was found in the ninth century.