Cathedrals of Spain

by John A. Gade

The Jews and the Moriscoes here, as wherever else their industrious fingers and ingenious minds were at work, did much more than their share towards the prosperity and development of the city. The Jews especially became firmly established in their useful vocations, filling the king's coffers so abundantly that the third of their tribute, which he granted to{71} the Bishop, was not appreciably felt, except in times of armament and war. With the fanatical expulsion of first one, and then the other, race, the city's prosperity departed. Their place was filled by the bloodhounds of the Inquisition, who held their very first, terrible tribunal in the Convent of Saint Thomas, blighting the city and surrounding country with a new and terrible curse. The great rebellion under the Emperor Charles burst from the smouldering wrath of Avila's indignant citizens, and in 1520 she became, for a short time, the seat of the "Junta Santa" of the Comuneros.

It is still easy to discern what a tremendous amount of building must have gone on within the narrow city limits during the early part of its second erection. The streets are still full of bits of Romanesque architecture, palaces, arcades, houses, balconies, towers and windows and one of the finest groups of Romanesque churches in Spain. Of lesser sinew and greater age than San Salvador, they are now breathing their last. San Vicente is almost doomed, while San Pedro and San Segundo are fast falling.

But San Salvador remains still unshaken in her strength,—a fortress within a cathedral, a splendid mailed arm with its closed fist of iron reaching through the outer bastions and threatening the plains. It is a bold cry of Christian defiance to enemies without. If ever there was an embodiment in architecture of the church militant, it is in the Cathedral of Avila. Approaching it by San Pedro, you look in vain for the church, for the great spire that loomed up from the distant hills and was pointed out as the holy edifice. In its place and for the eastern apse,{72} you see only a huge gray bastion, strong and secure, crowned at all points by battlements and galleries for sentinels and fighting men,—inaccessible, grim, and warlike. A fitting abode for the men who rather rode a horse than read a sermon and preferred the breastplate to the cassock, a splendid epitome of that period of Spanish history when the Church fought instead of prying into men's souls. It well represents the unification of the religious and military offices devolving on the Church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Castile,—a bellicose house rather than one of prayer.

Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid

CATHEDRAL OF AVILA
Exterior of the apse turret

All the old documents and histories of the Church state that the great Cathedral was started as soon as the city walls were well under way in 1091 and was completed after sixteen years of hard work. Alvar Garcia from Estrella in Navarre is recorded as the principal original architect, Don Pedro as the Bishop, and Count Raymond as spurring on the 1900 men at work, while the pilgrims and faithful were soliciting alms and subscriptions through Italy, France, and the Christian portions of the Spanish Peninsula.

Of the earliest church very little remains, possibly only the outer walls of the great bastion that encloses the eastern termination of the present edifice. This is much larger than the other towers of defense, and, judging from the excellent character of its masonry, which is totally different from the coarse rubble of the remaining city walls and towers, it must have been built into them at a later date, as well as with much greater care and skill. Many hypotheses have been suggested, as to why the apse of the original church was thus built as a portion of the{73} walls of defense. All seem doubtful. It was possibly that the altar might come directly above the resting-place of some venerated saint, or perhaps to economize time and construction by placing the apse in a most vulnerable point of attack where lofty and impregnable masonry was requisite.

The church grew towards the west and the main entrance,—the transepts themselves, and all work west of them, with the advent of the new style. We thus obtain in Avila, owing to the very early commencement of its apse, a curious and vitally interesting conglomeration of the Romanesque and Gothic. Practically, however, all important portions of the structure were completed in the more vigorous periods of the Gothic style with the resulting felicitous effect.

The building of the apse or the chevet westward must, to judge from its style, have advanced very slowly during the first hundred years, for its general character is rather that of the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries (the reign of Alfonso VIII) than of the pure Romanesque work which was still executed in Castile at the beginning of the twelfth century. A great portion of the early Gothic work is, apart from its artistic merit, historically interesting, as showing the first tentative, and often groping, steps of the masters who wished to employ the new forms of the north, but followed slowly and with a hesitation that betrayed their inexperience. Arches were spanned and windows broken, later to be braced and blocked up in time to avert a catastrophe. The transepts belong to the earliest part of the fourteenth century. We have their definite dates from records,—the northern{74} arm rose where previously had stood a little chapel and was given by the Chapter to Dean Blasco Blasquez as an honorable burial place for himself and his family, while Bishop Blasquez Davila, the tutor of Alfonso IX and principal notary of Castile, raised the southern arm immediately afterwards. He occupied the See for almost fifty years, and must have seen the nave and side aisles and the older portions, including the northwestern tower, all pretty well constructed. This tower with its unfinished sister and portions of the west front are curiously enough late Romanesque work, and must thus have been started before the nave and side aisles had reached them in their western progress. The original cloisters belonged to the fourteenth century, as also the northern portal. Chapels, furnishings, pulpits, trascoro, choir stalls, glazing, all belong to later times, as well as the sixteenth-century mutilations of the front and the various exterior Renaissance excrescences.