The fierce passions of the Salamancans were inflamed throughout the fifteenth century not only by private but political animosities. In the reign of Juan II. the city was alternately the prey of the partisans and the opponents of the royal favourite, Alvaro de Luna. When the king visited the town in 1440, the Archdeacon Juan Gómez, son of the late bishop, Don Diego de Anaya, a furious adversary of the Constable, garrisoned the alcazar of San Juan and the tower of the cathedral, and compelled his sovereign to take refuge in the house of one Acevedo. The fortress was again garrisoned against the king (Enrique IV.) six years later by Pedro de Gutiveros, but this time the bishop was on the royal side, and, with the help of Suero de Solis, expelled the rebel from the town. In gratitude for this and his friendly reception by the citizens in 1465, the unfortunate king ordered a fair or open market to be held every year from the 8th to the 21st of September, and to the delight of the townsmen decreed the demolition of the alcazar.
The disputed succession on the death of Enrique again plunged the city into civil war; both claimants, Juana and Isabel, finding partisans within its walls. Hoping to profit by these disorders, the Conde de Alba de Tormes entered the town at the head of his vassals and endeavoured to obtain possession of it. After much fighting he was expelled by the citizens, headed by Don Alfonso Maldonado and Suero de Solis. Upon the triumph of Isabel’s faction, the Portuguese quarter was promptly sacked in revenge for the assistance given by that nation to Juana. Another Maldonado was seized by King Fernando and ordered to deliver up his castle of Monleon under pain of death. The captive lord gave the necessary orders to his wife, commanding the garrison, who, at first, obstinately refused to obey them. It was only when the headsman was about to strike off her husband’s head in view of the ramparts that she relented and admitted the king’s troops.
The Salamancans were assuredly of stern stuff. The Catholic Sovereigns amused them with tournaments and pageants, and found employment for their swords before the walls of Granada. In the year 1497 Fernando, returning defeated from the Portuguese frontier, found his only son, Prince Juan, at the point of death. He expired on the 4th of October, after thirteen days’ sickness, at the age of nineteen, his mother arriving too late to see him alive. It is related that Fernando caused the queen to be informed that he also was dead, that her joy on finding him alive should somewhat soften the blow. Isabel never returned to the scene of her greatest bereavement; but we find Fernando, now a widower, here in the winter of 1505-1506.
The failure of the harvest about this time caused so much distress that the university was closed, and the ecclesiastical authorities had to leave the city. Hard upon these dark days came the rising of the Comuneros, into which the Salamancans threw themselves with all their hearts. Even the nobility espoused the popular cause, as also did the dean of the cathedral, various professors of the university, and the more prominent merchants. The leaders of the movement in Salamanca were young Maldonado Pimentel, and a skinner called Valloria, who was the idol of the populace, and by them hailed as ‘pope and king.’ But neither Valloria’s popularity nor Maldonado’s valour and rank availed to save them from the scaffold to which, with so many illustrious Castilians, they were doomed after the crushing defeat of the Comuneros at Villalar.
The establishment of the new monarchy meant for Salamanca, as for so many other cities, the end of liberty and the end of bloodshed. Family quarrels were henceforward to be adjusted by the king’s judges, wrongs avenged by his justice, not by the stiletto and poisoned draught. Outwardly Salamanca made merry over the change, and fêted Charles V. on his state entry in May 1534. His son was married here at the age of sixteen to Maria of Portugal—amid great rejoicings, as we are always told of such events.
Years passed by, and Salamanca partook of the senile decay which seemed to be creeping over Spain. The old feudal fights were recalled by the sanguinary town and gown riots, which filled the streets with dead and dying towards the close of the seventeenth century. Then came bad harvests, inundations, and the earthquake of 1755. It was but a poor and desolate city on which the French levied severe contributions in 1809, and which they sacked from end to end, three years after, in revenge for their disastrous defeat by Wellington before its walls. Salamanca has worshipped Mars and the Muses; but the War-god has turned savagely on his devotees, and from the scene of so many bloody conflicts the Genius of Learning seems at last to have fled shuddering away.
The Old Cathedral
The primitive cathedral of Salamanca is said to have been the church of San Juan el Blanco, in the riverside suburb. Its proportions and situation were not suited to the dignity of the new city founded by Count Raymond, and we find him before long laying the first stone of a new cathedral on one of the three eminences enclosed within the walls. The exact date of the foundation and the names of the architects are unknown. But tradition avers that Bishop Jeronimo consecrated the church, and the master-builders who raised the walls of Avila at Count Raymond’s orders most likely had some share in this, his greater work. They were Cassandro, an Italian, Florin de Southren, a Frenchman, and Alvar Garcia, a Navarrese. Placed at their disposal was a band of five hundred Moslem masons and carpenters, made prisoners by the count.
Bishop Jeronimo died in the year 1120, but the records show privileges conceded to the workmen engaged in the construction of the cathedral in 1152, 1183, and as late as 1285. According to Street, a priest of Medina del Campo, in the year 1178, bequeathed his property to the chapter for the purpose of completing the cloister, from which it may be inferred that not much remained to be done to the church itself at that date. Successive popes and kings showered donations and privileges upon the nascent cathedral, till the chapter, rich in lands and vassals, ranked as a feudal power, and the sacred edifice itself as a formidable stronghold. Massive, simple, vigorous, it well deserves the epithet fortis Salamantina, by which it is distinguished in the well-known lines about the cathedrals of Spain, ‘Sancta Ovetensis, dives Toletanas, pulchra Leonina, fortis Salamantina.’
A building so long in course of construction is sure to present certain varieties of style, and though the old cathedral of Salamanca has undergone very little alteration since its completion, its original Romanesque character is seen to have been modified by Gothic influence. The Byzantine pillars, remarks Don Jose Quadrado, carry graceful pointed arches, and the Romanesque capitals of the clustered columns exhibit an elegance very rare in works of that style.