All kinds of robberies and pilferings have thus been perpetrated with the once abundant wealth of Santiago.[23] The jealous care which keeps the copious archives inaccessible to all the outside world is in itself of sinister significance. It has transpired, furthermore, that many of the bishops have “exchanged,” or simply stolen, portions of the holy property. Besides these clerical dilapidations, a cartload, weighing half a ton, was carried off by Marshal Ney, though some was subsequently handed back, “because the spoilers feared the hostility of the Plateros, the silversmiths who live close to the cathedral, and by whom many workmen were employed in making little graven images, teraphims and lares, as well as medallions of Santiago, which pilgrims purchase.”[24]

SAINT JAMES IN PILGRIM'S DRESS
(Silver-gilt statuette; 15th Century.
Santiago Cathedral)

Among the gifts of value which this temple yet preserves are the ancient processional cross presented by the third Alfonso in the year of grace 874,[25] and the hideous fourteenth-century reliquary shaped to represent the head of James Alfeo, and containing (as it is believed) this very relic (Pl. [viii].). I make a reservation here, because the Chapter have forbidden the reliquary to be opened. In either case, whether the head be there or not, heads of the same apostle are affirmed to be at Chartres, Toulouse, and other places. Similarly, discussing these Hydra-headed beings of the Bible and the hagiology, Villa-amil y Castro (El Tesoro de la Catedral de Santiago, published in the Museo Español de Antigüedades) recalls to us the ten authenticated and indubitable mazzards of Saint John the Baptist.

The head-shaped reliquary is of beaten silver with enamelled visage, and the hair and beard gilt.[26] The workmanship is French. The cross, which hung till recently above the altar of the Relicario, but which now requires to be placed upon the lengthy list of stolen wealth, was not unlike the Cross of Angels in the Camara Santa at Oviedo, and had a wooden body covered with gold plates in finely executed filigree, studded with precious stones and cameos. Not many days ago, the wooden core, divested of the precious metal and the precious stones, was found abandoned in a field.

Visitors to the shrine of Santiago seldom fail to have their curiosity excited by the monster “smoke-thrower” (bota-fumeiro) or incensory, lowered (much like the deadly sword in Poe's exciting tale) on each fiesta by a batch of vigorous Gallegos from an iron frame fixed into the pendentives of the dome. “The calmest heart,” says Villa-amil, “grows agitated to behold this giant vessel descending from the apex of the nave until it almost sweeps the ground, wreathed in dense smoke and spewing flame.” Ford seems to have been unaware that the real purpose of this metal monster was not to simply scent the holy precincts, but to cover up the pestilential atmosphere created by a horde of verminous, diseased, and evil-smelling pilgrims, who, by a usage which is now suppressed, were authorized to pass the night before the services within the actual cathedral wall.

The original bota-fumeiro, resembling, in Oxea's words, “a silver boiler of gigantic bulk,” was lost or stolen in the War of Spanish Independence. It was replaced by another of iron, and this, in 1851, by the present apparatus of white metal.

Striking objects of ecclesiastical orfebrería were produced in Spain throughout the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. Among the finest are the triptych-reliquary of Seville cathedral known as the Alfonsine Tables; the retablo and baldaquino of the cathedral of Gerona; the silver throne, preserved in Barcelona cathedral, of Don Martin of Aragon; and the guión, at Toledo, of Cardinal Mendoza.