Catalonia & the Balearic Islands: an historical and desciptive account

by Albert Frederick Calvert

The church communicates with a spacious cloister with four sides of seven bays, built at the beginning of the fourteenth century by order of Queen Blanca. The traceries of the windows remaining here and there are late Gothic, and contrast oddly with the severe lines and rude capitals of the shafts. As at Poblet, in a corner of the cloister is a hexagonal chamber said to have been a lavatory. A great number of persons of distinction seem to have been buried in this cloister, in attendance, one might say, upon their lords within the church. Among these was the knight Queralt, who may been seen in effigy in a suit of fine mail, with surcoat and greaves and girt with two-handed sword. Some of the figures of divine persons to be seen over the tombs were evidently carved by late fourteenth-century sculptors.

Here, as at Poblet, the Kings of Aragon had their habitations in life as in death, and the courts of the ruined palaces of Don Pedro and Don Jaime still bear some traces of the glory and culture of the greatest maritime power of the Mediterranean of a bygone age.

VALLBONA

Vallbona, the third great royal abbey of Cataluña, is situated in the province of Lerida, but on the borders of Tarragona, in a singularly wild and remote district. Like Poblet, it is named after a hermit who in the year 1157 founded here and at Colobres, monasteries for both sexes. Twenty years later, both houses were formed into a single community of Cistercian nuns, under the headship of Doña Oria de Ramiro. The pious Anglesola of Vallbona is buried before the high altar in the company of James the Conqueror. The church is gloomy, silent and severe. It is entered through a Romanesque porch in the north transept, the west front presenting an unbroken wall. Vallbona has also a noble cloister, with a fine gallery in the Pointed style; on the north and the remaining galleries in the Romanesque. In Piferrer’s time, pictures and monuments relieved the excessive severity of the royal nunnery of Aragon, but now there reigns a desolation and poverty which might have affrighted even the hermit founder.

MONTSERRAT

Montserrat, easily accessible from Barcelona, is one of the four or five renowned shrines of Christendom. The legend of its institution is one of the quaintest and at the same time silliest in the annals of hagiology. In the time, it seems, of Count Wilfred, the Henry of Barcelona, there dwelt on the mountain a hermit named Guarin whose sanctity was famed even to the ends of the earth. Church bells rang of their own accord when he passed, and the forces of nature were at his beck and call. This being so, when Richildis, the Count’s daughter (she was beautiful, of course), became possessed of a devil, Guarin was at once called in to turn him out. Such a task was a mere matter of an Ave and an invocation on the part of the holy man; but the devil thus incontinently expelled from the person of Richildis appears to have passed into the body of the hermit. He conceived an unlawful passion for the maiden, who remained with him after her cure, to learn the arts of sanctity. He succumbed to temptation and consummated his crime by murdering the girl, cutting off her head and burying her in his cave.

Stricken with remorse immediately after, the erstwhile holy man hurried to Rome and confessed his crime. The Pope ordered him to return to Montserrat on his hands and knees and never to resume an erect posture till his pardon should be miraculously announced.

So faithfully did Guarin carry out the penance imposed that he crawled for seven years about the mountain that he had once illumined with his sanctity, living on grubs and roots and becoming to all intents and purposes a wild animal. One day Count Wilfred, while out hunting, noticed this strange beast and had him taken to his stables at Barcelona. There Guarin abode some months, saying never a word but pleasing his captors by his docility. One day he was led into the castle to amuse the Count and his Court. But before he could perform any tricks, the infant son of the Count, a baby but three months old, cried out, “Arise Guarin, for God has pardoned you.” Whereupon the strange beast rose up on his hind legs, praising God, and confessing his enormous crimes.

In these days men were very much alive, and thrilled to the passions of love and hate. But, touched by the miracle, the Count forgave the murderer of his daughter, and set out with him for Montserrat to disinter the body buried seven years before. But lo, when the fair form was revealed, it throbbed with life, and a red line only showed where her head had been severed from her neck.

Richildis was so grateful for her restoration to life that she determined to devote the rest of it to the service of God. The Count founded a monastery for both sexes, of which his daughter was abbess and Guarin became a humble lay-brother.