On the south side of the river, in the Calle de la Calera, are two interesting houses which give the neighbourhood a thoroughly sixteenth-century aspect. The portal of the fortress-like Casa de los Angulos or of Iñigo de Angulo is adorned by two lions placed on the pillars flanking the archway, above which is a shield with seven quarterings. A few doors farther on is the more interesting Casa de Miranda, considered the best example of the Renaissance style in Burgos. It now serves the prosaic purposes of a candle factory. It is entered through a noble doorway decorated with heraldic achievements. Between the capitals of the inner court may be deciphered the inscription: Franciscus de Miranda salon abbas de salas et canonicus burgen protonotarius et scriptor aplicus patrie restitutus faciendum curavit anno De MDXLV. The escutcheon of the Mirandas is displayed on the friezes, which are in the usual Renaissance style, relieved with the figures of genii, medallions, etc. The architecture of the staircase exhibits a harmonious blending of late Gothic and early plateresque. Fine workmanship is to be seen in the decoration of the façade of the old Colegio de San Nicolás (1570), where the Provincial Institute has its quarters.
Two more conspicuous monuments of the sixteenth century are the fine arches of Santa Maria and Fernan González. The former occupies the site of the old tower of Santa Maria, where the town council at one time held its sittings, and whence the body of Garcilaso de la Vega was hurled by Pedro the Cruel; it was erected between 1536 and 1540 by the municipality to conciliate Charles V., it is said, for the events of the Comunidad. The arch is of three stories, and flanked by two rounded towers. Over the arch are shown in niches six statues: those of Charles V. and the Castilian worthies, the Cid, Fernan González, Nuño Rasura, Lain Calvo, and Diego Porcellos. The upper part of the structure is battlemented and adorned with statues of the Virgin, of the guardian angel of the city, and of kings-at-arms supporting escutcheons. The probability is that the entrance arch, and indeed the whole lower story, is older by a century than the sculptured parts.
The arch of Fernan González was erected in 1592 to mark the site of the castle of the redoubtable count. It is in the severe and imposing Doric style of Herrera, and was evidently intended to receive a statue of the hero, which an impoverished city is not likely to provide now. Burgos has, however, done its best to keep green the memory of its illustrious sons—an example set by so many continental towns, which we, in England, seem loth to follow.
Of the castle, whose history was so long the history of Castile, little that is ancient, nothing of the earliest structure, remains. The oldest masonry is probably the gate, called the Puerta San Estéban, a brick structure pierced with a horse-shoe arch. Popularly ascribed to the period of the Moorish domination (which practically was never asserted over Burgos), there can be little doubt that it dates from the fourteenth century, and was the work of Mudejar masons, like so many other Spanish buildings of that time. The old citadel of Castile is now a heap of ruins, but it was strong enough as late as a century ago to resist the assaults of Wellington. The next year, however (1813), the French completely dismantled the fortifications and evacuated the city.
The provincial museums of Spain are, as a rule, disappointing, but the Burgos collection, housed in the Puerta Santa Maria, is enriched by the spoils of numerous ancient churches and suppressed convents. The alabaster effigy of Don Juan de Padilla, believed to be by Gil de Siloe, is one of the noblest sepulchral monuments in the kingdom. It was brought here from the ruined monastery of Fres del Val, where the knight was interred in 1491, having met his death at the age of twenty years, before the walls of Granada. He is shown kneeling in an attitude of prayer, beside a prie-Dieu. The face is beautiful and expressive, and probably a portrait. An ample robe of extraordinary richness reveals the shirt of mail, the cuirass, and the plate armour worn by the young warrior. The style reminds one of the statues of Don Juan II. and Prince Alfonso in the Cartuja, and reflects the greatest credit on Spanish sculpture. Hardly less beautiful is the tomb itself, decorated with shields upheld by angels, and an inscription recording the age of the deceased. In the museum is also a very curious and interesting altar-front from the convent of Santo Domingo de Silos, dating from the eleventh century. It is of bronze, with figures of saints in coloured enamels, in a bastard Byzantine style. The Moorish ivory casket from the same monastery and of the same century is profoundly interesting, as exhibiting in relief the Persian theory of the origin of good and evil, like the basin from Medina Az Zahara, preserved in the National Museum of Archæology. The Byzantine reliefs of saints on one side of the casket were evidently carved by the Christians when they became the possessors. Few small provincial collections contain more important antiquities than the Museum of Burgos.
III
SALAMANCA
‘Sword never blunted pen,’ says a Spanish proverb, ‘nor pen sword.’ The history of Salamanca illustrated this truth. Its people were doughty warriors and learned scholars. The name of Salamanca was feared by Moor and Portuguese, as much as it was respected in all the halls of learning of the mediæval world. The seat of a university which all but successfully competed for pre-eminence with Oxford and Paris, it was at the same time the permanent camp of as fierce a race of fighting men as ever marched beneath the banners of Spain. The pen has made the city famous in every land, but it was by her sword that she came to be better known in her own country. Decayed and ruined, she has yet made herself illustrious in the two great fields of human activity, and has a twofold claim on the respect and interest of men of every European tongue.
The city, far older than Leon and Burgos, existed prior to the Roman conquest. It is identified by some with the Elmantica of Polybius, in which others recognise the neighbouring town of Alba de Tormes. Plutarch speaks of it as Salmatica, ‘a great town of Spain,’ and relates the heroic exploits of its womenfolk. Besieged by the Carthaginians under Hannibal, the inhabitants were forced to surrender. They were ordered to evacuate the town, leaving behind them all their arms and property as spoils for the victors. They were then placed under a guard of Massilians, while the rest of the Punic host hastened to plunder the forsaken city. But the women, who had accompanied the prisoners and whom no one had thought of searching, produced weapons which they had concealed about them, and armed their husbands, who fell upon their guards and cut them to pieces. The Carthaginian army was thrown into dismay by this unexpected attack, and the brave Salamantians were enabled to make good their escape to the hills. Hannibal is stated by Plutarch to have graciously pardoned the enemy that had eluded his vengeance.
Salamanca, with the rest of the province of Lusitania, passed under the sway of Rome, and seems to have been a place of some importance. Money was coined here in the reign of Tiberius, and the town was governed by duumvirs. Christianity must have early taken root here, for when the Goths conquered Spain they found an episcopal see already established at Salamanca. It had already been for a time the seat of a Vandal governor, Genseric, brother of King Huneric. Money was struck bearing the names of the city and of the kings Erwig and Egica. Certain bishops are mentioned as assisting at the councils of Toledo: Eleutherius at the third; Hiccila at the fourth and fifth; Egered at the seventh, eighth, and tenth; Providentius at the twelfth; Holemund at the thirteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth. When in 715 Salamanca was submerged by the Moorish invasion, her bishop sought refuge with Pelayo in the glens of Asturias, and we read that Alfonso the Chaste assigned the basilica of San Salvador at Oviedo, to Quindulfo, the occupant of the see then in partibus infidelium. The city did not long remain in the undisturbed possession of the Moor. It was taken by Alfonso I. in 750, and again in 858 by Ordoño I., who made captive the Moorish amir, and released him only after extorting better terms for his Christian subjects. But this promise did not tempt back the bishops from their safe retreat in the north. Sebastian, who wore the mitre about the year 880, occupied himself with writing a chronicle of Spain from the reign of Wamba to his own day. His patron, Alfonso el Magno, succeeded in expelling the Mohammedans from Salamanca, and thought to annex it definitely to his kingdom; but it was recaptured by Abd-ur-Rahman, the Khalifa, five years later, the Christian inhabitants, including priests, to the number of two hundred, being put to the sword.
The city continued to change hands according to the varying fortunes of war till the conquest of Toledo by Alfonso VI. (1085). The country between the Douro and the Tagus, desolated by three centuries of unintermittent warfare, had become almost denuded of inhabitants. Alfonso appointed his son-in-law, Count Raymond of Burgundy, governor of Salamanca, with a mandate to repeople the town and surrounding district, and to repair the ravages of war. The count drew his colonists mainly from Castile, from the neighbouring towns of Toro and Braganza, from other parts of Portugal, from Galicia, from the ‘Sierra,’ and from his native province of Burgundy. These, together with the Mozarabes or original inhabitants, constituted the seven classes into which the population was divided, each with its separate quarter and local authorities. The whole community was subject to a code of laws framed by Count Raymond, and later amalgamated with the code preserved in the municipal archives, dating from the thirteenth century. From this document it would appear that an important part was taken in the work of colonisation by the Benedictine monastery of San Vicente, a foundation already some two or three centuries old.