The world-spread fame acquired by Alcalá in the fifteenth century was due to the patronage of Cardinal Cisneros, who built the university, at one time one of the most celebrated in Europe, and to-day a mere skeleton of architectural beauty.
The same prelate raised San Justo to a suffragan church; its chapter was composed only of learned professors of the university, as were also its canons; Leon X. gave it the enviable title of La Magistral, the Learned, which points it out as unique in the Christian world. The Polyglot Bible, published in the sixteenth century, and famous in all Europe, was worked out by these scholars under Cisneros's direction, and the favoured city outshone the newly built Madrid twenty miles away, and rivalled[{329}] Salamanca in learning, and Toledo in worldly and religious splendour.
Madrid grew greater and greater as years went by, and consequently Alcalá de Henares dwindled away to the shadow of a name. The university, the just pride of the Complutenses, was removed to the capital; the cathedral, for lack of proper care, became an untimely ruin; the episcopal palace was confiscated by the state, which, besides repairing it, filled its seventy odd halls with rows upon rows of dusty documents and governmental papers.
To-day the city drags along a weary, inactive existence: soldiers from the barracks and long-robed priests from the church fill the streets, and are as numerous as the civil inhabitants, if not more so; convents and cloisters of nuns, either grass-grown ruins or else sombre grated and barred edifices, are to be met with at every step.
Strangers visit the place hurriedly in the morning and return to Madrid in the afternoon; they buy a tin box of sugar almonds (the city's specialty), carelessly examine the university and the archiepiscopal palace, gaze unmoved at some Cervantes relics, and at the façade of the cathedral. Besides, they are[{330}] told that in such and such a house the immortal author of Don Quixote was born, which is a base, though comprehensible, invention, because no such house exists to-day.
That is all; perchance in crossing the city's only square, the traveller notices that it can boast of no fewer than three names, doubtless with a view to hide its glaring nakedness. These three names are Plaza de Cervantes, Plaza Mayor, and Plaza de la Constitución, of which the latter is spread out boldly across the town hall and seems to invoke the remembrance of the ephemeral efforts of the republic in 1869.
In the third century after the birth of Christ, two infants, Justo and Pastor, preached the True Word to the unbelieving Roman rulers of Complutum. The result was not in the least surprising: the two infants lost their baby heads for the trouble they had taken in trying to trouble warriors.
But the Vatican remembered them, and canonized Pastor and Justo. Hundreds of churches, sown by the blood of martyrs, grew up in all corners of the peninsula to commemorate pagan cruelty, and to induce all men to follow the examples set by the two babes.[{331}]
No one knew, however, where the mortal remains of Justo and Pastor were lying. In the fourth century their resting-place was miraculously revealed to one Austurio, Archbishop of Toledo, who had them removed to his cathedral. They did not stay long in the primate city, for the invasion of the Moors obliged all True Believers to hide Church relics. Thus, Justo and Pastor wandered forth again from village to village, running away from the infidels until they reposed temporarily in the cathedral of Huesca in the north of Aragon.
In Alcalá their memory was kept alive in the parish church dedicated to them. But as the city grew, it was deemed preferable to build a solid temple worthy of the saintly pair, and Carillo, Archbishop of Toledo, had the old church pulled down and began the erection of a larger edifice. This took place in the middle of the fifteenth century, when Ximenez de Cisneros, who ruled the fate of Spain and its church, gave it the ecclesiastical constitution previously mentioned.