However, the chapels are not very interesting, but the tombs in the Cathedral are. Of all these that of Ordoño II., behind the chancel, is certainly the finest. The king lies at full length with a herald at his head and a monk at his feet holding a scroll inscribed "aspice." He wears his crown and carries the royal emblems. This tomb was erected five hundred years after the king's death, and is guarded by a quaint iron grille.
The cloisters, entered from a door in the north transept, are a jumble of Gothic and Renaissance, with a Romanesque arcade and a good deal of plateresque work as well. Some of the earliest frescoes in Spain are fast disappearing from the walls. They illustrate events in the Life of Christ, and are in an early Italian style that places their origin in doubt. From the western spires to the angular exterior of the chevet, a good idea is obtained of the beauty of the Cathedral as one stands in these cloisters, and when they, too, are restored the great work begun in 1860 will be finished.
Next to the Cathedral, and perhaps in a way more interesting, is the convent of San Isidoro el Real. This, the Escorial of Leon and Castile, is a building which Soult's soldiers desecrated in a most abominable manner; next to the lower or Roman portion of the city walls it is the most ancient building in Leon. The body of San Isidoro was brought hither in the reign of Ferdinand I. who obtained it from the Emir of Seville, and the present church was erected to receive it. This was in 1063, the original convent being a hundred years older. San Isidoro was declared by the Council of Toledo to be the Egregious Doctor of Spain, and in his capacity of titular saint fought with cross and sword at the battle of Baeza against the Moors.
The church is Romanesque and dark with a lofty clerestory but no triforium. The High Altar shares with that at Lugo in Galicia the privilege of having the host always manifestado.
In the Panteon, a small low chapel at the west end, lie buried the Kings and Queens and other royalties of Leon. The columns are very massive with heavy capitals; the ceiling is adorned with early frescoes which happily escaped the depredations of the French, they are crude, but the colour adds to the impressiveness of this gloomy abode of the Dead. Representing scenes from the Lives of our Lord and His Apostles, with signs of the Zodiac and months of the year, they date from 1180. The whole convent is replete with mural paintings, and before Soult sacked it contained many extremely interesting and rare missals of the seventh and eighth centuries.
Unique is another convent, that of San Marcos, which stands on the river bank outside the city on the road to Astorga. Founded as a chapel in 1168 for the knights of Santiago, it was rebuilt in 1514-49 by Juan de Badajos, and is certainly his masterpiece. It would be difficult to find a façade of greater beauty than this marvel of plateresque work. The remarkable pink and golden colour of the stone, intensified against the background of a deep blue sky, the delicacy of the carving in which angels and cherubs, griffons and monsters intermingle with floral wreaths and branches of fruit in orderly confusion, the elegant pillars and pilasters, all so truly Spanish under the blazing sun, fascinated me immensely as time after time I returned to wonder and admire.
Here again I could conjure up the past, the romance of Spain's greatest Order; well housed were those knights of old in their glorious Hospice, and now—the river still runs under the walls of what afterwards became a convent, its banks are lined with tall poplars, far away rise the mountains of the north in rugged outline just as they did of yore—and San Marcos? Alas! half is a museum and the rest a barrack. A forlorn air pervades the place, the old garden wants tending, and despite the life of the military, I could not help sighing once again, as I have so often sighed in Spain—"How are the mighty fallen!"