Chapter III: Salamanca 96 (2)

The Renaissance, which left everywhere in Spain so deep an impress, did not leave untouched this Gothic capital. Beside such triumphs of the Romanesque and pointed styles as San Isidoro and the PULCHRA LEONINA rises the church of San Marcos, an interesting specimen of the newer school. Founded as a chapel of the new order of Santiago in 1170, the church witnessed the election of the first prior, and received in 1184 the ashes of the first grand master, Pedro Fernandez de Fuente Encalada. Fernando the Catholic ordered the church to be rebuilt in 1514, but the work progressed very slowly and was not actually finished till 1715. The most important part of the fabric and the plans, however, we owe to Juan de Badajoz, who was working here about 1550. With the adjoining convent, first a hospice for pilgrims to Compostela, now the Provincial Museum, the building presents a very imposing appearance. The church occupies the eastern side of the block, the portal being contained within a very deep and lofty semicircular arch. On either side, in deep plateresque niches, are fine but damaged reliefs by Crozec. The ‘acroterium’ (to employ an expression used by Spanish writers), surmounting the arch, appears to be unfinished, as also are the towers or large buttresses flanking the portal.

The church is large and cruciform, with some good glass, windows with plateresque traceries, and fine arabesques. The most notable accessories are the choir stalls, the upper row exhibiting admirably carved busts of New Testament worthies; the lower row, of the saints of the Old Dispensation. Grotesque and capricious masks, centaurs, griffins, and so forth, are introduced in great profusion into the decoration; they were the work, for the most part, of one Doncel in 1542, and were mutilated by a pupil of Churriguera in the early part of the eighteenth century.

The work of Juan de Badajoz is to be seen in the Sacristy, a spacious nave of three vaults, richly designed and gilded. Under the windows are medallions with busts in relief, very well done. The retablo in the plateresque style shows the Eternal Father with His angels, and the Vision of Santiago. The inscriptions on the frieze are from the Book of Leviticus.

Much good work is to be seen in the cloisters, begun in the Armada year or thereabouts, but interest here chiefly centres in the Prior’s apartments where the illustrious Quevedo was imprisoned by order of the Count-Duke Olivares, from December 1639 to June 1643,--the penalty for an all too true and biting lampoon.

Quevedo thus describes his prison in one of the letters to his friend Adán de la Parra:--

‘Although at first I was imprisoned in a tower of this sacred
house, as roomy as it was light and warm for this season of the
year, a short time after by superior order (I will not say by
superior disorder) I was taken to another much more uncomfortable
one, where I am now. It is an underground room, as damp as a
spring, so dark that in it it is always night, and so cold that it
is always like January. It is undoubtedly more like a tomb than a
prison.... The latitude of this tomb, in which I am enclosed, is
barely twenty-four feet and the width nineteen. The roof and walls
are in many places fallen owing to the damp, and everything is so
black that it seems more like a hiding-place of fugitive thieves
than the prison of a man of honour. In order to enter it two
equally strong doors have to be passed; one is on the floor of the
convent and the other on the floor of my prison, after twenty-seven
steps designed like a precipice.... This is the life to which I am
doomed by him who, because I would not be his favourite, is now my
enemy.’

The grand façade of the old convent, extending to the river bank, is divided into two stories, the lower characterised by semicircular windows between pilasters in the plateresque style, and separated by niches; the upper by rectangular windows with balconies, disposed between columns, and likewise separated by niches in pairs. The frieze beneath the lower row of windows is adorned by a series of medallions, displaying the heads of mythological and historical worthies, Gentiles and Christians, ancients and moderns, most oddly assorted. With Priam and Hector, Hannibal and Cæsar, we find Charlemagne and the Cid, Charles V. and Philip II., with Lucretia, Judith and Isabel the Catholic. The busts to the left of the doorway are those of the grand masters of the Order of Santiago. The doorway itself is a very unhappy combination of the plateresque and baroque styles, but the statue of Fame surmounting it is not devoid of grace and dignity. The balconies and windows facing the river date from the eighteenth century.

A good deal of building went on in Leon during the sixteenth century. In the Plaza de San Marcelo (before Alfonso XI.’s time, outside the walls) stands the mansion of the illustrious Guzman family, of which Guzman el Bueno, of Tarifa fame, was an illegitimate and the most distinguished member. It was built in the year 1560 by Juan Juiñones y Guzman, Bishop of Calahorra. Its architecture is severe and imposing. Over the main entrance, adjoining a square tower at the corner of the building, are two medallions on which is engraved the motto, ‘Ornanda est dignitas domo--non domo dignitas tota quærenda’--a device which one wishes all the architects of the age had borne in mind. The interior _patio_ is adorned with handsome plateresque reliefs. Next to the Casa Guzman is the residence of the marquesses of Villasinta, in rather similar style. Beneath the sixteenth-century façade of the mansion of the great Luna family was discovered a fine Gothic arch, with another pointed arch supported by columns with Byzantine capitals. This work cannot be later than the thirteenth century. In the _patio_ is a magnificent arch designed with arabesques.

Looking on the Plaza de San Marcelo is one of Leon’s two town halls, finished by Juan de Rivera in 1584. The lower story is of the Doric order, the upper Ionic. In the council-chamber, hung with damask and velvet, may be read the verses proclaiming the excellences of the city:--

‘En argen Leon contemplo
Fuerte, purpureo, triunfal.
De veinte santos ejemplo,
Donde está el unico templo
Real y sacerdotal.

Tuvo veinte y cuatro reyes
Antes que Castilla leyes;
Hizo el fuero sin querellas;
Libertó las cien doncellas
De las infernales greyes.’

The other town hall (Casas Consistoriales) in the Plaza Mayor was built to accommodate the municipal authorities on the occasion of festivities and public functions in the square. It is an elegant building, built in 1677, and is surmounted by a pediment and acroteria, and by weather vanes on its flanking towers.

The modern church of San Marcelo, which gives its name to the square, was founded by Ramiro I. in the ninth century, and was liberally endowed in after years by Alfonso VI. Marcelus is a reputed local martyr, a Roman legionary who refused to adore the divinity of Cæsar, and was beheaded, having blessed his executioners. By another account the martyrdom took place at Tangier, whence, at all events, the saint’s relics were brought here in 1493. The tympanum of a thirteenth-century doorway in the wall at the back of the church is all that remains of the original fabric. A deserted esplanade beyond the walls, to the south-west of the city, marks the site of the once famous shrine of San Claudio, erected first in Constantine’s day on the place of martyrdom of Claudius, Lupercius, and Victoricus. Al Mansûr is said to have been struck with sudden panic when about to attack this church. Successive fanes of great magnificence rose over the spot, the last being destroyed by fire in the sixteenth century.

Santa Maria del Mercado still exhibits much ancient work. Its arching and capitals are Byzantine in style. The suburban church of San Pedro de los Huertos was, it is said, the cathedral, before the time of Ordoño II. In the tenth century we hear of it as a monastery for both sexes. Another extremely old foundation is San Salvador del Nido, founded as a monastery by Queen Urraca. A local guide states that Carlo Alberto, the ex-King of Sardinia, received the last sacraments and expired in this church on April 8, 1849. I confess I have not troubled to verify this, but have hitherto laboured under the impression that the unlucky predecessor of Victor Emmanuel breathed his last at Oporto.

Having noticed this link with the history of our own times, we take leave of Leon, and hasten across the plains to the city which succeeded it as capital of the growing monarchy of Leon and Castile.

II

BURGOS

THE CAPITAL OF CASTILE

Burgos, the red and white city in the broad valley of the Arlanzon, is more mediæval than many an older town. For she was no inheritance from Celts or Romans, but was born in the Dark Ages, waxed prosperous within them, and declined with the Renaissance and the dawn of the modern era. There is nothing that is classical, little that is modern, about this old capital of Castile. All her memories are of Gothic, mediæval, romantic Spain. To her belong knights and barons, shield and helm and lance, tournaments and jousts, soaring Gothic spires, and the quiet of the cloister--all the pageant and panorama of mediævalism.

Burgos was born amid the clash of arms. This dry, desert-like province of Castile, which is now the very heart of, and whose name is almost synonymous with Spain, was a thousand years ago a very debatable ground between Moor and Christian. Leon, to the west, looked fiercely east and south towards the dusky garrisons of Medina Sarakusta (Zaragoza), and Tolaitola (Toledo). In itself the country seemed hardly worth settling in or fighting for. It was the frontier, the ‘marches,’ as we should have called it in olden England. And in the Dark Ages danger ever ran like a hedge along the border of two lands. The valley of the Arlanzon, a veritable oasis in this desert, was early peopled with shepherds and tillers of the soil. To protect these against the forays of the Beni Kasim from Zaragoza, early in the ninth century a fort or advanced post was established here by the kings of Asturias and Leon. Its defence was entrusted by Ordoño I. to a count (850-866), despite whose efforts the post was destroyed by the Moors under Abd-ur-Rahman in the year 865.

Rallying from these disasters, the new king Alfonso III. (866-910) took steps to defend the frontier, and appointed Diego Porcellos count or warden of the marches. This personage--the first whose name is particularly associated with Burgos--found the settlement on the Arlanzon reduced to six groups of houses. He threw together three or four hamlets, including, it is said, the churches of Santa Coloma, Santa Gadea, and San Juan Evangelista, and surrounded the whole with a wall. The dissensions among the Moors themselves favoured the development of the nascent town, and also permitted its governors, like those of the other frontier forts, to turn their attention to domestic politics. Don Gonzalo Fernández, who reigned as count from about 884 to 915, was a party to various conspiracies and intrigues against his sovereign, the net result of which appeared to be to confirm him in his petty sovereignty. Patriotism was an unknown virtue in those days, and the counts of Castile were bent rather upon consolidating their own authority than combining against the Infidel. They are said in fact to have flatly refused to accompany the king on one of his campaigns. Revenge for such treason could in the tenth century take but one form. Ordoño II. summoned four of the rebellious vassals--Abu-l-Mundhir (evidently a Moor), Nuño Fernández, another Diego Porcellos, and Fernando Ansúrez--into his presence, and sent them in chains to Leon, where, after a painful captivity, they were put to death. Spanish writers, who express no particular horror at the atrocities of the Inquisition in after years, appear somewhat unaccountably shocked at such rough and ready justice.

As a stroke of policy this deed of violence was a bad one. The Castilians, as it is now time to call the inhabitants of the marches, conceived a lasting aversion to the government of Leon, and the desire for independence grew stronger. An interregnum seems to have taken place at Burgos after the execution of Nuño Fernández and his colleagues. We hear at this time of two famous but nebulous personages, Nuño Nuñez Rasura and Lain Calvo, who were elected as judges to rule over the little commonwealth. Their reign as actual rulers was brief, for about the year 930 we find all authority in Castile in the strong hands of the greatest Spaniard of that age--Fernan González, the king-maker.

The fame of the good _Conde Castellano_, as González is lovingly called by the annalists, is overshadowed in the song and story of Spain only by that of the Cid himself. His heroic exploits against Moor and Christian are magnified and set forth in popular ballads and legends, dating mostly, it is true, from the thirteenth century. The real Fernan González is a difficult person to understand and appraise, when we have cleared away as much as possible the clouds of tradition and romance which obscure his features. Like the Cid, we find him repeatedly revolting against his sovereign, and striving very much harder for the independence of Castile than for the interests of the whole kingdom. But unlike the greater Spanish hero, he never seems to have been in the pay of the Moslems, or to have in concert with them turned his sword against his fellow Christians. Judged by the standard of that day, Fernan González was a great man. He was a good lord to his immediate vassals, a valiant and determined enemy of the Moor, a patriot in a very parochial sense, and a strong man.

Ramiro the king, jealous of Fernan González’s power and influence, dispossessed him of his countship, and released him from prison only when he had sworn fidelity and obedience anew. His daughter Urraca was given in marriage to the king’s son, Ordoño, by whom, however, she was afterwards repudiated. Till the death of Ramiro the count was not suffered to return to Burgos, which was meanwhile governed by the Infante Don Sancho. Meanwhile the Moors ravaged the country, destroying the monastery of Cardeña without the walls of Burgos, and greatly profiting by the internal disorders of Leon.

On the abdication of Ramiro in 950, González was reinstated in his fiefs, and henceforward played the part of king-maker in northern Spain, changing sides more than once, establishing every day more firmly his own authority, and warring unceasingly against the Moor. His policy often met with severe rebuffs, and he sustained not a few disastrous reverses; but his death in 970 was felt as a deadly blow to Christian Spain and to the Castilians in particular, whose national aspirations undoubtedly coincided with his own ambitions.

He had succeeded so far as to establish a dynasty; and his son Garcia Fernández became the next count of Castile as of right. The defects of the hereditary system became at once apparent, for while inheriting his father’s rank, Garcia inherited little of his ability. Unluckily for him, he was the contemporary of the terrible Al Mansûr, the greatest and most formidable of the Moorish race. Castile was ravaged from the Sierra Guadarrama to the sea. Don Sancho, supported by the Moors, revolted against his father, who died from wounds received in battle on the banks of the Douro, in May 995. The unfilial Sancho was at once acknowledged sovereign Count of Castile, but was compelled to pay an annual tribute to the Khalifa of Cordoba. But we find Al Mansûr waging war against him seven years later. It was the great Mohammedan’s last campaign, and Sancho profited by the dismay into which their leader’s mortal sickness plunged the Moslems to expel them from his dominions.

Two or three years later we find the envoys of rival Moorish monarchs soliciting the aid of the count of Castile; and in 1009 Sancho paid off old scores by taking and sacking the proud city of the Khalifas. Never had so much richness been seen in barren Castile, when her armies returned laden with booty. ‘He of the good laws,’ as Sancho was styled by his subjects, died in 1021, and was buried in the church of the monastery of San Salvador de Oña, which he had founded.

The sisters of his youthful son and successor, Garcia II., were married to the kings of Leon and Navarre; and Garcia went to Leon to seek the hand of King Bermudo’s daughter, and to demand recognition of his title as king of Castile. The poniards of the three sons of the Count de Vela left him a bleeding corpse at the door of the church of San Isidoro, on the 13th May 1029, and put an end to the male line of the house of Fernan González. His destined bride became the wife of Fernando, son of the king of Navarre, who was proclaimed count of Castile, though he enjoyed nothing more than the semblance of sovereignty till his father’s death in 1035. Bermudo of Leon died two years later, and Fernando thus became king of united Leon and Castile--the former in right of his wife, the latter in right of his mother.

The newly crowned king was immediately assailed by his elder brother, Garcia of Navarre, who invaded Castile with an army largely composed of Mussulmans, and threatened Burgos. After some days passed in fruitless negotiations between the fraternal enemies, the Navarrese king was defeated and slain. Eleven years later--in 1065--Fernando I. followed his brother to the grave. Deeming his dominions too vast to be administered by one man he divided them, allotting Castile to his first-born son Sancho, from which it may be inferred that he considered that province the fairest of his possessions. Not contented with the lion’s share of the spoils, the king of Castile wrested the kingdom of Leon from his brother Alfonso, whom he imprisoned in the castle of Burgos. Sancho next endeavoured to deprive his sister Urraca of her little principality of Zamora. Before the walls of that town he fell a victim to the sword of Bellido Dolfos, and to the kingdoms which he had by dint of violence and treachery reunited, succeeded Alfonso, but lately a guest of the kindly Moorish Amir of Toledo.

So far the history of Burgos and of Castile generally has been an involved and tedious record of dynastic arrangements, civil strife, and desultory warfare with the Moor. The dullness of the panorama is now relieved by the picturesque and crudely romantic personality of the Cid--‘he that in a good hour was born’--Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar.

‘Rodrigo is Burgos, Rodrigo is Castile, Rodrigo is Spain,’ says Don Rodrigo Amador de los Rios. ‘His prowess, his glory, his trials, his renown, are the renown, the trials, the glory, and the prowess of the fatherland. His form, which touches the confines of the supernatural, and stands forth vigorous and powerful in the interesting picture of the Middle Ages, is the spontaneous creation of a people--is the people itself--whose marvellous instinct has given it from its own being, heat and life. His honour is the honour of Castile and Spain; there is nothing in his personality which does not represent and symbolise with transcendental expression the national character; he is the splendid synthesis in which a nation is resumed, the idol of the ages, the pattern of all perfection, the permanent example of all the virtues, the true mirror of the Middle Ages, with all that they had of noble and generous, rude and loyal, warrior and devotee, tradition and history, legend and fact, petty and great; the manifestation, in short, of the essential and permanent in the Spanish nationality, which does not vary, and is transmitted unimpaired from generation to generation, through the centuries; the spirit which informs and sustains the peoples, in all the epochs of history.’

I quote _in extenso_ an eminent Spaniard’s appreciation of the national hero. But accepting even the Cid of the ballads and legends, it does not seem that a high compliment is paid to Spain by recognising in him her absolute personification and embodiment. The traditions of less cultured races have conceived purer heroes. But in Burgos, almost his native place, we must not approach the memory of the doughty Campeador in any cold or captious mood. You may visit (though you will derive neither pleasure nor profit from the journey) the miserable hamlet of Vivar, five or six miles from Burgos, where he first saw the light somewhere about the year 1040. For ancestors, tradition credits him with the famous judges, Lain Calvo and Nuño Rasura, two worthies whose existence is at least problematical. But that Rodrigo (or Ruy) Diaz was a good Burgolese, there can be no question. Here he passed his youth at the court of Fernando I., rising to the high rank of Alferez or standard-bearer in the service of King Sancho. He was among the champions selected by his sovereign to decide the fate of the two kingdoms in a personal conflict with a similar number of Leonese knights. But whatever luck may have attended Rodrigo individually on this occasion, the Castilians got the worst of the encounter; whereupon Sancho refused to stand by his bargain, and by more military and less chivalrous methods secured his brother’s realms.

When Alfonso ascended the throne of Castile, it was the Cid who exacted from him, at the gate of the church of Santa Gadea, the humiliating oath that he had had no share in his brother’s murder--an indignity which Alfonso did not quietly forget. He dissimulated his resentment, however, and gave his sister Jimena in marriage to the valiant Campeador. Soon after the threatened quarrel broke out, and the haughty vassal abandoned all his estates in Castile, and entered the service of the Moorish Amir of Zaragoza. The chronicles tell how on his visiting Burgos the knight found, by order of the king, every door shut against him. Only a little girl nine years of age ventured to address him. From their windows the citizens beheld him and wept, crying, ‘How good a vassal, if he had only a good lord!’ Very sadly the Cid passed the night with his followers without the walls. He visited his wife and daughters at the monastery of Cardeña, and turned his face from Castile. He was at shifts for money--a precedent Don Quixote appears to have forgotten--and bethought him of an ingenious expedient. Filling an enormous coffer with stones and sand, he offered it, as being laden with gold and treasure, as security to a Jew, on the understanding that it should not be opened till the money was repaid. The confiding usurer readily advanced six hundred marks of gold and silver, and the coffer remains to this day to attest the simplicity of the Jewish character and the eminently commercial aptitudes of the Castilian national hero.

With Rodrigo’s wonderful exploits in other parts of Spain we are not here concerned. When he died at Valencia at a ripe age, he was brought back to his native place, seated upright on his famous steed Babieca, and laid to rest beside his wife at Cardeña. There he was suffered to remain till the year 1842, when his ashes were transported to the town hall of Burgos. A brave soldier, but one of the sorriest of the nation’s heroes!

During the lifetime of this worthy and the reign of Alfonso VI., Toledo was captured from the Moors, and Burgos ranked henceforward only as a secondary capital of Spain. It may be remarked that till Philip II. published his decree that ‘_Madrid solo es corte_,’ the kingdom could not be said in the modern sense of the word ever to have had a capital. Burgos, Valladolid, Toledo, and Seville had all equal claims to be considered the seat of government. As the Moorish frontier was pushed farther and farther south, Burgos lost in military importance. But its dignity was enhanced in an ecclesiastical sense, for it was raised in 1073 to an archiepiscopal see. Then followed the stormy days of Queen Urraca, when the city came in for its fair share of turmoil and bloodshed. Order was temporarily restored under the ‘Emperor’ Alfonso VII. An important ecclesiastical council was held here in 1136. Alfonso, at his death in 1157, most unwisely divided his estates, bestowing Castile upon the eldest, Fernando. The events of 1070 were repeated. Leon and Castile waged war against each other, and when the infant, Alfonso VIII., succeeded his father on the Castilian throne in 1158, the Laras and Castros, rivals for the regency, turned their swords against each other. Burgos was once more the capital of an independent kingdom, and witnessed in 1170 the marriage of the young king to Eleanor, daughter of Henry II. of England--the first of the many happy alliances between the royal houses of the two countries.

Alfonso’s reign was prosperous and glorious. He was a tolerant monarch, and showed favour to the Moslems. There seems in his time to have been an important mosque at Burgos. To propitiate Heaven, after the terrible defeat of the Christians at Alarcos, Eleanor persuaded her husband to build the monastery of Las Huelgas, to which act of piety no doubt was attributed the ‘crowning mercy’ of las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.

During the struggle for the regency, which ensued on the death of Alfonso, Burgos sided with the boy-king’s suitor Berenguela, who soon after became queen in her own right. Without hesitation this high-minded princess abdicated in favour of her son Fernando, the issue of her marriage with Alfonso of Leon, which had been dissolved by the Pope. The new king was attacked by his own father and by the arch-rebel of Spain, Alvar Fanez, but he triumphed over his enemies, and in 1230 succeeded to his unnatural father’s dominions, thus uniting finally and for ever the kingdoms of Leon and Castile.

‘From the time of St. Ferdinand,’ remarks a recent historian of Spain (Mr. Ulick Burke), ‘Moors in Castile became as scarce as foxes in Middlesex.’ An era of prosperity seemed about to dawn for Burgos--_caput Castellae camera regia_, as she proudly styled herself. There were great doings within her walls when the son of the king of England (afterwards Edward I.) came here in October 1254 to espouse Leonor, sister of King Alfonso the Learned. The English prince was made a knight by his prospective brother-in-law in the church of Santa Maria, where the marriage later on took place. In 1269 Edward came again to Burgos to assist at the nuptials of the Infante Fernando and the Princess Blanche of France. Among the guests were also the king of Aragon, the sultan of Granada, the Infantes of Aragon and Castile, ‘and other great _ricoshombres_ and knights of the kingdom of Castile and Leon, and counts and dukes of France, and other hidalgos of that country; and the Marquis of Montferrat, who was wedded to Doña Beatriz, daughter of King Alfonso.’

The learned king did much to organise and to purify the administration, and as a natural consequence a sedition was fomented by his brother Don Felipe and the chiefs of the Lara, Haro, and Castro families. The rebels appeared in force before Burgos, and the king invited the leader to the Cortes then in session (1271). This invitation was refused, but a meeting was arranged at the Hospital del Rey outside the walls. Alfonso was in a most conciliatory mood, and as the rebels wanted only a colourable pretext to continue their campaign of rapine and lawlessness, the more he granted the more they wanted. Finally the ringleaders retired in utter disgust to Granada.

Burgos was the scene of one of Alfonso’s worst deeds. Suspecting his brother Don Fadrique of intriguing with his grandchildren, the disinherited Infantes de la Cerda, he ordered him to be confined in the castle, where the unfortunate prince was put to death by his ferocious nephew, the Infante Sancho. After the marriage of the Infantes Don Pedro and Don Juan with Margaret of Narbonne and Joanna of Montferrat, at Burgos in 1281, Sancho himself revolted against his father and caused himself to be proclaimed king. He obtained possession of the city, and, strangely enough, reinterred with great ceremony in the monastery of La Trinidad the very uncle he had killed.

Señor Amador de los Rios attributes the rivalry of the two cities of Valladolid and Burgos to the preference shown the former city by the wife of Sancho IV., Doña Maria Molina. For all that, it was the old capital of Castile where Sancho caused his son Fernando to be publicly declared heir to the throne.

Burgos was now a large and populous town. It owed much of its prosperity to its considerable Jewish colony, of which Don Todros Abulafia was Nasi, and Abu-l-Hasan Aben el Harits, physician to the king, one of the elders. The Israelites contributed over one hundred thousand maravedis to the revenue in the city alone. With the important part played by the Jews in the internal policy of Spain I have dealt at greater length in my work on Toledo in the present series.

During the regency of Doña Maria Molina, Valladolid was the usual seat of the court. But Burgos continued to be the scene of great functions of state. The marriage of the Duke of Brittany and the sister of Fernando IV. was celebrated here in January 1311; and several Cortes and councils met here. From Fernando the city obtained many privileges and favours--the town and revenues of Villafranca de Montes de Oca being granted to the municipality.

We pass over the civil wars and intrigues which distracted the reign of Alfonso XI., and find Burgos ruled by one born within its walls--Pedro the Cruel. Seville is more intimately associated with this picturesque and sinister personality, but here it was that he caused the governor, Garcilaso de la Vega, to be beaten to death in his presence, and watched the bulls in the arena without trampling on and tossing the mangled body of the victim. De la Vega’s remains were then placed in a casket, which was hung from the castle walls that all might fear the king’s justice. In 1355, after a busy butchering expedition, Pedro decorated a room in the castle with the heads he had collected, the slaughtered grandees, Lope de Bandaña, Gonzalo de Melendez, and Jofre Tenorio, contributing in this way to the adornment of the chamber and the delight of their lord. It was at the old capital of Castile that he was residing when Enrique de Trastamara with Bertrand du Guesclin and the White Company crossed the border. Pedro fled, and his brother was crowned at Las Huelgas. When the tide had temporarily set in Pedro’s favour, it was in the cathedral of Burgos that he and the Black Prince swore to the terms of their alliance. But in the following year (1368) Enrique’s star was once more in the ascendant, and a king, innately almost as vicious as our Henry VIII., had gone to join his hosts of victims on the other side of the tomb.

Burgos, under the Trastamara dynasty, resumed for a time the rank of capital of Spain. Like his father, Don Juan I. was crowned here, at Las Huelgas, in 1379, amid great festivities and rejoicings. His son, afterwards Enrique III., was born here, probably in the great castle, founded by Diego Porcellos, which perhaps gave its name to the whole kingdom. Few traces exist to-day of the original building, which was the habitual residence of the sovereign. Enrique III., however, ‘decreed a stately palace dome’ at Miraflores, on the left bank of the Arlanzon, at some distance from the city, but he died before its completion. A strange monarch was this Enrique. Tired of living in poverty while his nobles wallowed in luxury, he invited them to a banquet at the castle. On their arrival they found no well-spread table, but the executioner with his axe and block. It was only by liberal disbursements and advances that they escaped this functionary’s professional attentions. Thus did the needy monarch of Castile, who it is said had to pawn his coat to get a dinner, replenish his exchequer.

During the reign of Juan II. the castle of Burgos was held by Don Pedro de Estuñiga, the implacable foe of the great Constable, Alvaro de Luna. The king on one occasion actually found the gates of his own castle closed against him by this arrogant vassal, who at last compassed de Luna’s downfall and death at Valladolid. In atonement for this brutal sacrifice of his favourite, Juan converted the palace built by his father into a Carthusian monastery--to the disgust, we are told, of the local ecclesiastical authorities.

During the reign of Enrique IV. the castle of Burgos was a focus of rebellion and conspiracy. On the king’s death the castle was held by the Estuñigas for the Princess Juana, called by her enemies la Beltraneja, while the town espoused the cause of Isabel and her Aragonese husband. The bishop, who had retired to the castle of Rabe, joined forces with the Estuñigas, and the townsfolk, thus placed between two fires, implored the assistance of the court at Valladolid. Meanwhile the Portuguese allies of Juana were implored to succour the castle. Fernando of Aragon appeared at Burgos in June 1475 and invested the Estuñigas’ stronghold. An attack on the church of Santa Maria la Blanca was beaten off with loss, but the garrison, losing heart, ultimately surrendered to the besiegers. The king of Portugal, instead of hurrying on with all speed to Burgos, went into winter quarters at Zamora, while Fernando prosecuted the siege with his accustomed vigour. The garrison held out bravely, and seem to have at last capitulated, more out of disgust at the inaction of their ally than from any inability to defend themselves further. The commandant treated with Isabel in person, and surrendered on obtaining a free and unconditional pardon for himself and all his followers.

The union of Spain, consequent on the marriage of Isabel of Castile with Fernando of Aragon, tended to diminish the importance of Burgos. Nor was its prosperity augmented by the expulsion of the Jews--after they had been decimated by repeated massacres--the act of two sovereigns whose wisdom, greatness, and virtue English writers, as well as Spanish, never tire of extolling.

The Burgolese joined the Comunidad in 1520, allying themselves with Toledo and Segovia, Zamora, Toro, Madrid, Avila, Guadalajara, Cuenca, Alcala, and Soria. The citizens seized the castle and murdered an unpopular official, Garcia Jofre, afterwards sacking the episcopal palace. They surrounded the palace of the Constable of Castile, Don Iñigo Fernandez de Velasco, and were deterred from burning it to the ground only by the intercession of the clergy, who exposed the Sacrament over the doorway. The Constable fled to Briviesca, but some months after returned in triumph to the now pacified city. Sixteen years later we find the townsfolk welcoming Charles V. with enthusiasm, and erecting in his honour the graceful arch of Santa Maria. Burgos had accepted the new monarchy and the new era. The product of another age, she found herself unfitted to play a distinguished part in this. Not without dignity she passes into the background, and history knows her no more.

THE CATHEDRAL

Built at the instance of an English bishop and, like all the cathedrals of northern Spain, on a French model, the church of Santa Maria la Mayor is conspicuously more Spanish than that of either Leon or Toledo. This more national character may be due to later additions and alterations--alterations and additions which have neither obscured nor impaired that wonderful unity and harmony of design apparent in this, the ideal Gothic church.

The cathedral occupies the site of a church built in 1075, where a summer palace of Fernan González had till then stood. The first stone was laid on July 20, 1221, by Bishop Maurice, an Englishman who had come over to Castile in the train of Henry II.’s daughter Eleanor. The saintly King Fernando took a lively interest in the great work, which progressed so rapidly that the cathedral appears to have been ready for the reception of the faithful in November 1230. The nationality of the bishop and his share in the building of the fabric are, however, matters of dispute between historical writers.

The cathedral is built on very uneven ground, a circumstance which rather enhances than detracts from its picturesqueness. O’Shea calls attention to a remarkable trait in the exterior, rarely possessed by buildings otherwise of equal merit: ‘We mean that the forms should be bold projections or reproductions in relief of the internal parts, as in embossing. Thus, in this cathedral, the eye embraces the inward distribution at one glance from the shape of the parts outside.’ From a distance the most conspicuous parts of the edifice are the steeples surmounting the west front and the lantern over the crossing. The delicacy and nobility of the spires, pinnacles, and open-work adorning the glorious fabric tempt one to rhapsody. But so much beauty can be adequately portrayed only by the brush, not by the pen.

The lowest stage of the western or main front is pierced by the three doors corresponding to the nave and aisles within. Formerly rich in sculpture, this part of the façade was rebuilt in the latter part of the eighteenth century, in accordance with the pseudo-classical ideas of the time, and robbed of nearly all its statuary. The ‘restorers’ spared the statues of Alfonso VI., San Fernando, and the Bishops Maurice and Astorio at the side of the Puerta Real (Central Door), and the sculptures of the Coronation and Immaculate Conception of the Virgin over the lateral entrances. This lowest stage of the west front in its extreme plainness and severity presents an incomplete appearance when contrasted with the much more elaborate and ancient work above. Over the middle door, within a noble and gracefully moulded ogival arch, is a large, finely traceried rose-window, lighting the nave. Above this again are two windows, each of four lights, and their upper parts filled with beautiful tracery. Before each light stands the statue of a youth crowned. Over this highest stage of the middle division of the west front is the inscription _Pulchra est et decora_ carved in stone, and forming a balustrade, which is adorned by statues of the Redeemer, the Madonna, and the Baptist.

Over the side doors rise the towers, surmounted with steeples, built for Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena (1435-1456) by the artist, probably a German, called Juan de Colonia, or John of Cologne. These steeples rise to a height of three hundred feet, and, except at the lowest story, are detached from the rest of the edifice. They are adorned with tall pointed windows, the space for two of these on the second stage of the north tower being covered, however, by the seventeenth-century clock. The pinnacles themselves are wonderful examples of delicate fretted stone-work. Street saw little beauty, however, in Juan de Colonia’s work, adding that the bells in the spires were the most misshapen he had ever seen.

The entrance to the north transept was known in the time of Alfonso X. as the Gate of the Twelve Apostles. It stands on a higher level than the floor of the church and is hence called Puerta Alta, or more often the Puerta de la Coroneria. The lower portion certainly, the whole probably, belongs to the thirteenth century. There is a great profusion of sculpture. On either side of the door are seen the figures of the twelve Apostles. The portal is enclosed within an ogival arch, on the archivolt of which are shown, successively, seraphim, cherubim, and the souls of the just rising from their graves. The upper part of the tympanum is adorned with the figures of Christ seated and attended by the Virgin and St. John. Below this is a composition of doubtful interpretation, the figures on one side seeming to illustrate the judgment of the wicked, those on the other side the establishment of the Dominicans and Franciscans in Castile. Higher up, the façade is pierced with two high pointed windows, and above these again by windows of several lights, with statues in niches.

Ingress to the north transept is now obtained by a side entrance called the Puerta de la Pellejeria, a plateresque structure facing east, dating from the year 1516. Somewhat of the Gothic spirit may be detected in this sumptuous but not over-decorated portal. The detail is excellent, and the execution vigorous. With the figures of the Virgin, the Apostles, Saints, and Bishops are associated genii, _amorini_, and heraldic achievements in the true Renaissance style. Above the doorway is a group representing the martyrdom of the two Saints John; and over this a prelate, probably Rodriguez de Fonseca, is kneeling at the feet of the Madonna. The composition is flanked by the fine statues of Saints Peter and Paul; and on the sides of this façade are placed in niches the statues of St. John the Baptist and St. James, and St. John the Divine and St. Andrew.

The Puerta del Sarmental gives access to the south transept. It has the finest of the cathedral fronts. It is approached by a broad flight of steps, flanked by the walls of the episcopal palace and cloisters, and by some interesting fourteenth-century tombs of bishops. The architecture of the portal is on the same plan as that of the Puerta Alta. In the tympanum Christ is shown with the Evangelists and the beasts symbolical of them; below are the seated figures of the twelve Apostles. The three orders of the archivolt are adorned with angels and with crowned figures playing various instruments. Above all this is a magnificent rose-window filled with beautiful glass of the fourteenth century. The third stage of the front shows three Gothic windows, elaborately traceried, and each divided into four lights by mullions, supported by large figures of angels. ‘The angles of the transepts,’ says Street, ‘are flanked by crocketed pinnacles, the crockets here, as elsewhere throughout the early work, being simple in form and design, but as perfect in effect as it is possible for crockets to be.’

The eastern front of the cathedral is formed by the Capilla del Condestable and its adjoining chapels. The exterior of the famous octagonal chapel mentioned is very fine. On the uppermost stage on one of the sides two lions, standing upright, are seen supporting laurel crowns--one containing the cross, the other the monogram of Christ. On a lower stage the escutcheon of the Velascos and Mendozas is displayed between two knights armed _cap-à-pie_. The stages are flanked by effigies under canopies. The angles of the façade are surmounted by elegant spires and pinnacles.

The plan of the cathedral--a Latin cross, with nave, aisles, and transept--has been obscured by the chapels built on the north, south, and east sides, as may be seen by a glance at the plan included among the illustrations. The nave is of six bays, and fifty-eight metres long. Though the view is spoilt, as in all Spanish churches, by the choir, it remains picturesque, pure, and devotional in the highest degree. The dim religious light of our northern churches, it is true, is lacking, for the interior is white throughout, and the stained glass, which in earlier times would have mellowed the strong sunlight, was unhappily shattered during the war of Independence. The aisles are lower than the nave, from which they are separated by twenty columns, each with eight engaged shafts. The triforium is somewhat in the nature of an architectural curiosity, and certainly has been altered since the thirteenth century; it consists of wide bays of five or six lights each, with trefoil and quatrefoil traceries above, enclosed within a semicircular arch or ‘label,’ which is decorated with sculptured heads. Street declares that he has seen nothing like this elsewhere, and supposes it to be the work of a native artist. Above the triforium is the original clerestory--‘Simple, but good and vigorous in style.’

The High Altar, or Altar Mayor, occupying the centre of the apse, is approached by a flight of steps of white, red, and black marble. It is railed off from the ambulatory by _rejas_ or bronze screens fixed on pedestals of jasper between the pillars of the nave; the backs of these latter are adorned with life-size statues. Behind the altar rises the Renaissance retablo, an elaborate and gorgeous work of walnut wood, heavily gilded and each of its stages in a different order of architecture. The symmetrical division of these altar-pieces into compartments, each filled with its own statue, does not strike the layman as artistic or pleasing. Indeed, there is something faintly suggestive of pigeon-holes about it. Street, quoting Ponz, states that the sculptures were the work of Rodrigo and Martin de la Aya (1577), who were paid forty thousand ducats; and that for the painting and gilding Juan de Urbino of Madrid and Martinez of Valladolid received, in 1573, eleven thousand ducats. At the back of the sanctuary, between the arches, may be seen the spirited reliefs of the celebrated Juan Vigarni or ‘Borgoña,’ executed in 1540, and representing the Agony in the Garden, Christ bearing the Cross, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. The first and last are stated by Ford to have been executed by one Alonso de los Rios in 1679. To the Renaissance period also belong the handsome silver lamp and candlesticks. To an earlier age belong the tombs on the north side of the sanctuary--two concealed by the retablo; they contain the remains of Don Juan, the rebellious son of Alfonso X., Don Sancho, brother of Enrique II. of Trastamara, and his wife, Doña Beatriz. Over the altar is the copy of the banner borne before Alfonso VIII. at the Navas de Tolosa, made by the De la Aya brothers and others about 1570.

Over the crossing or intersection of nave and transept rises the gorgeous lantern or octagonal dome, which Philip II. said seemed like the work of angels rather than of men. It replaced the earlier dome which collapsed in March 1537, and was completed in December 1567. Felipe Vigarni (de Borgoña) and Juan de Vallejo are mentioned as the architects. The Gothic and Renaissance styles are curiously but not inharmoniously blended in this beautiful lantern, which rises to a height of one hundred and seventy-three feet, and is profusely adorned with sculpture.

Crossing the wide transept we reach the choir, which occupies three bays of the nave. Under the eastern lectern lies the effigy--of wood cased in bronze--of the English Bishop Maurice, a fine work believed to date from 1260. The stalls, one hundred and three in number, were executed between 1497 and 1512 by Felipe Vigarni, and bestowed on the cathedral by Bishop Pascual de Fuensanta. They are of walnut wood, and in two tiers--all most richly carved in fine Renaissance style, the pillars between being moulded in similar fashion. The lower seats are, on the whole, the finer work, and are inlaid in boxwood. The subjects of the reliefs are taken from the acts of the saints and life of the Virgin. Scenes from Genesis form the subject of the reliefs on the fronts of the upper stalls, the backs illustrating the New Testament. The trascoro, or screen at the west end of the choir, cost ten thousand ducats. The _reja_ displays the arms of Cardinal Zapata, whose gift it was; the pillars which support it rise from pedestals of jasper, and on brackets are placed two white marble statues of Saints Peter and Paul. These statues, columns, reliefs, etc., were executed at the expense of Archbishop Manso de Zuñiga, in the first half of the seventeenth century, by Fray Juan de Rici of the Order of St. Benedict.

The grand chapel of the Constable (Capilla del Condestable), behind the high altar at the east end of the church, was built about 1487 by Don Pedro Fernandez de Velasco, Conde de Haro, and Lord High Constable of Castile, the property of whose descendant, the Duque de Frias, it remains to-day. The architect was Juan de Colonia (John of Cologne) or, as some will have it, his son Simon. Street sees much that is German in the style of the chapel, but also features which may be fairly attributed to the Spaniards who worked under the architect’s orders, or to his own efforts to consult native tastes. While the chapel may be described as florid Gothic, the splendid entrance arch, with its marvellous lacelike tracery, tapering pinnacles, and railing, the masterpiece of Andino, belongs to the Renaissance. The chapel is lighted by fourteen stained-glass windows, displaying the arms of the Velascos, which are repeated on four large stone escutcheons on the walls. The retablo of the high altar, believed to be by Juan de Borgoña, has, in its lower stage, a spirited sculpture of the Purification. Before the altar are the noble tombs of the Constable and his wife, Doña Mencia de Mendoza, Condesa de Haro. The effigies are of Carrara marble, the tombs of jasper. The Constable is shown in complete armour, the details of which are admirably rendered and merit close study. At the feet of the Countess is crouched a dog, the emblem of fidelity. This great seigneur of old Spain and his consort are interred in the vault beneath their monuments. Close to the monument is a huge oblong slab of polished jasper from the quarries of Atapuerca, weighing thirty-three tons, and intended presumably to cover a tomb. The chapel contains many other objects of interest. The side altars display some good sculpture, the one in the Gothic, the other in the Renaissance style. There is a fine Flemish triptych, and a good statue of St. Jerome by Becerra. In the sacristy is shown the little portable ivory altar which the Constable carried about with him, and a ‘Magdalene,’ attributed by some to Da Vinci, by others to Luini. The plate, of the same age as the chapel, includes a chalice of silver-gilt, enamelled in red and white and richly jewelled; a pax in ivory and enamel, a thurible shaped like a ship; a splendid silver-gilt cross; an oval alabaster relief of the Madonna; and other treasures, some of which are not readily shown.

The two chapels next to that of the Constable on the north side of the apse are earlier than the others and are of good middle-pointed style. The chapel of San Gregorio seems to be the only one belonging to the thirteenth-century church. It contains the tomb of Bishop Fontecha. The adjoining chapel of San Nicolás was built in 1268 by Bishop Villahoz, whose tomb and effigy are placed upright against the wall. Close by is one of the finest sepulchres in the cathedral--that of the Archdeacon Fernando Villegas, an early translator of Dante. Opposite the door of the Nacimiento chapel is a notable picture of San Juan de Ortega by Cuadra.

At the northern end of the transept is the grand staircase of thirty-eight steps, leading to the Puerta Alta. It is one of the finest examples of the art of Diego de Siloe, who was at his best when handling such intricate and profuse decoration as this. The splendid iron balustrade was the work of Cristobal Andino.

Opening on to the north aisle are the large chapels of Santa Ana and Santa Tecla. The former was founded in 1474 by Bishop Luis Osorio Acuña, whose tomb is here. A much finer altar and monument in the Gothic style is that of the Archdeacon Fernando Diez de Fuente Pelayo, who died in the memorable year 1492; it is in white marble and adorned with sculpture with New Testament subjects, a good deal damaged. There are a few good pictures in this chapel, one attributed to Andrea del Sarto, and a sculptured genealogy of the Virgin. Of the chapel of Santa Tecla, perhaps not much else need be said than that it is in the Churrigueresque style and was founded in 1734. Its best feature is its ‘half-orange’ dome. O’Shea says that there formerly existed on the side of the baptistry a small chapel dedicated to Santiago, wherein Alfonso XI. instituted the order of knighthood of La Vanda or the Badge, of which the kings of Castile were members.

Opening on to the southern aisle, opposite the Capilla de Santa Tecla, is the cruciform chapel of the Santisimo Cristo de la Agonia, containing a very ancient, curious, and (it is alleged) miraculous image of Christ. It is supposed to have been carved by the fearful Nicodemus, and to have been afterwards found floating in a boat on the sea. It is a grotesque and yet a weird and impressive object, dressed up after the ridiculous custom in Spain.

The chapel of the Presentation was founded in 1519 by the Canon Gonzalo de Lerma, whose noble tomb in the centre of the chapel was executed during his lifetime by Vigarni. Another fine tomb is here--that of Canon Jacubo de Bilbao. This chapel possesses a beautiful Virgin and Child painted on a panel, probably by Sebastiano del Piombo, and sculptures by Berruguete. The railing is another example of Andino’s craftsmanship.