[127] Until the fifteenth century the dates given in Spanish inscriptions were calculated from the “Spanish era,” which began thirty-eight years before the Christian era. To bring a date to our own reckoning we must therefore subtract thirty-eight.
[128] See Monografía de la Catedral de Santiago, by Fernandez Casanova, 1902, and Historia de la S.A.M. Iglesia de Santiago, vol. iii., by Lopez Ferreiro.
[129] Street wrote of the cathedral of Santiago: “This cathedral is of singular interest, not only on account of its unusual completeness and the general unity of style which marks it, but still more because it is both in plan and design a very curiously exact repetition of the church of St. Sernin at Toulouse. But S. Sernin is earlier in date by several years, having been commenced by S. Raymond in 1060 A.D. and consecrated by Pope Urban II. in 1096” (Gothic Architecture in Spain, 1865). But Lopez Ferreiro writes forty years later that, after comparing the two cathedrals with the minutest care, he has found sufficient divergence in their detail to indicate a different style, a different school, and a different inspiration.
[130] The barrel vault (roof shaped like half a barrel) is peculiar to the architecture of the eleventh century. English architects call this “Earliest Norman.”
[131] Street was the first to draw attention to these buttresses. He wrote in 1866, “The buttresses which appear on the ground-plan are all connected by arches thrown from one to the other, so that the eaves of the roof project in front of their outside face. There is consequently an enormous thickness of wall to resist the weight and thrust of the continuous vault of the triforium, these arches between the buttresses having been contrived in order to render the whole wall as rigid and uniform as possible.”
[132] See Hist. Compost.
[133] See Chapter IX.
[134] It must be remembered that the Cathedral of Santiago stood completed in all its glory more than a hundred years before the foundations of Cologne Cathedral were laid. Amiens Cathedral was not begun till 1220, and not completed until 1288. All the architecture in England dating from the period in which Santiago Cathedral was completed is Early Norman. The chapel in the White Tower, London (1081), is considered to be one of the best and most perfect examples of this period. Part of the west front of Lincoln was built by the bishop of Remi (of Reims) between the years 1085 and 1092. Canterbury Cathedral was not finished till 1184.
[135] Codex of Calixtus II. bk. v.
[136] In ch. ix. of bk. iv. of the Codex of Calixtus II. we read: “Tiene esta Iglesia” (that of Santiago) “tres portadas principales, y siete pequeñas. De las primeras la una mira al Occidente, la otra al Mediodia, y la tercera al Septentrion. Cada una de estas portadas tiene dos entradas, y cada entrada dos puertas.” See chapter on “La Portada de las Platerias,” in Ferreiro’s El Pórtico de Gloria.