Part V — Eastern Castile
I Valladolid
The origin of Valladolid is lost in the shadows of the distant past. As it was the capital of a vast kingdom, it was thought necessary, as in the case of Madrid, to place its foundation prior to the Roman invasion; the attempt failed, however, and though Roman ruins have been found in the vicinity, nothing is positively known about the city’s history prior to the eleventh century.
When Sancho II. fought against his sister locked up in Zamora, he offered her Vallisoletum in exchange for the powerful fortress she had inherited from her father. In vain, and the town seated on the Pisuerga is not mentioned again in historical documents until 1074, when Alfonso VI. handed it over, with several other villages, to Pedro Ansurez, who made it his capital, raised the church (Santa Maria la Mayor) to a suffragan of Palencia, and laid the first foundations of its future greatness. In 1208 the family of Ansurez died out, and the villa reverted to the crown; from then until the reign of Philip IV. Valladolid was doubtless one of the most important cities in Castile, and the capital of all the Spains, from the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel to that of Philip III.
Consequently, the history of Valladolid from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century is that of Spain.
In Valladolid, Peter the Cruel, after three days’ marriage, forsook his bride, Doña Blanca de Bourbon, and returned to the arms of his mistress Maria; several years later he committed most of his terrible crimes within the limits of the town. Here Maria de Molina upheld her son’s right to the throne during his minority, and in Valladolid also, after her son’s death, the same widow fought for her grandson against the intrigues of uncles and cousins.
Isabel and Alfonso fought in Valladolid against the proclamation of their niece, Juana, the illegitimate daughter of Henry IV., as heiress to the throne; the citizens upheld the Catholic princess’s claims, and it is not surprising that when the princess became queen—the greatest Spain ever had—she made Valladolid her capital, in gratitude to the loyalty of its inhabitants.
In Valladolid, Columbus obtained the royal permission to sail westwards in 1492, and, upon his last return from America, he died in the selfsame city in 1506; here also Berruguete, the sculptor, created many of his chefs-d’œuvres and the immortal Cervantes appeared before the law courts and wrote the second part of his “Quixote.”
Unlucky Juana la Loca (Jane the Mad) and her husband Felipe el Hermoso (Philip the Handsome) reigned here after the death of Isabel the Catholic, and fifty years later, when Philip II. returned from England to ascend the Spanish throne, he settled in Valladolid, until his religious fanaticism or craze obliged him to move to a city nearer the Escorial. Then he fixed upon Madrid as his court. Being a religious man, nevertheless, and conscious of a certain love for Valladolid, his natal town, he had the suffragan church erected to a cathedral in 1595, appointing Don Bartolomé de la Plaza to be its first bishop. At the same time, he ordered Juan de Herrero, the severe architect of the Escorial, to draw the plans and commence the building of the new edifice.
The growing importance of Madrid, and the final establishment in the last named city of all the honours which belonged to Valladolid, threw the city seated on the Pisuerga into the shade, and its star of fortune slowly waned. But not to such a degree as that of Salamanca or Burgos, for to-day, of all the old cities of Castile, the only one which has a life of its own, and a commercial and industrial personality, is Valladolid, the one-time capital of all the Spains, and now the seat of an archbishopric. It began by usurping the dignity of Burgos; then it rose to greater heights of fame than its rival, thanks to the discovery of America, and finally it lost its prestige when Madrid was crowned the unica villa.
The general appearance of the city is peculiarly Spanish, especially as regards the prolific use of brick in the construction of churches and edifices in general. It is presumable that the Arabs were possessors of the town before the Christian conquest, though no documental proofs are at hand. The etymology of the city’s name, Medinat-el-Walid, is purely Arabic, Walid being the name of a Moorish general.
If the cathedral church was erected as late as the sixteenth century, it must not be supposed that the town lacked parish churches. On the contrary, there is barely a city in Spain with more religious edifices of all kinds, and the greater part of them of far more architectural merit than the cathedral itself. The astonishing number of convents is remarkable; many of them date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and are, consequently, Romanesque with a good deal of Byzantine taste about them, or else they belong to the period of Transition. Taken all in all, they are really the only architectural attractions to be discovered in the city to-day. The traditions which explain the foundation of some of these are among the most characteristic in Valladolid, and a thread of Oriental romance is more predominant among them than elsewhere. A good example of one of these explains the foundation of the large convent of the Mercedes.
Doña Leonor was the wife of one Acuña, a fearless (?) knight. The King of Portugal unluckily fell in love with Doña Leonor, and, wishing to marry her, had her previous marriage annulled and placed her on his throne. Acuña fled from Portugal and came to Valladolid, where, with unparalleled sarcasm, he wore a badge on his hat proclaiming his dishonour.
Both Acuña and the King of Portugal died, and Doña Leonor, whose morals were none too edifying, fell in love with a certain Zuñiguez; the daughter of these two was handed over to the care of a knight, Fernan by name, and Doña Leonor ordered him to found a convent, upon her death, and lock up her daughter within its walls; the mother was doubtless only too anxious to have her daughter escape the ills of this life. Unluckily she counted without the person principally concerned, namely, the daughter, for the latter fell secretly in love with her keeper’s nephew. She thought he was her cousin, however, for it appears she was passed off as Fernan’s daughter. Upon her mother’s death she learnt her real origin, and wedded her lover. In gratitude for her non-relationship with her husband, she founded the convent her mother had ordered, but she herself remained without its walls!
The least that can be said about the cathedral of Valladolid, the better. Doubtless there are many people who consider the building a marvel of beauty. As a specimen of Juan de Herrero’s severe and majestic style, it is second to no other building excepting only that great masterwork, the Escorial, and perhaps parts of the Pillar at Saragosse. But as an art monument, where beauty and not Greco-Roman effects are sought, it is a failure.
The original plan of the building was a rectangle, 411 feet long by 204 wide, divided in its length by a nave and two aisles, and in its width by a broad transept situated exactly half-way between the apse and the foot of the church. The form was thus that of a Greek cross; each angle of the building was to be surmounted by a tower, and the croisée by an immense cupola or dome. (Compare with the new cathedral in Salamanca.) The lateral walls of the aisles were to contain symmetrical chapels, as was also the apse.
From the foregoing it will be seen that symmetry and the Greco-Roman straight horizontal line were to replace the ogival arch and the generally vertical, soaring effect of Gothic buildings.
The architect died before his monument was completed, and Churriguera, the most anti-artistic artist that ever breathed,—according to the author’s personal opinion,—was called upon to finish the edifice: his trade-mark covers almost the entire western front, where the second body shows the defects into which Herrero’s severe style degenerated soon after his death.
Of the four towers and the cupola which were to render the capitol of Valladolid “second in grandeur to none excepting St. Peter’s at Rome,” only one tower was erected: it fell down in 1841, and is being reërected at the present time.
In the interior the same disparity is everywhere visible, as well as in the unfinished state of the temple. Greek columns are prevalent, and, contrasting with their simplicity, the high altar, as grotesque a body as ever was placed in a holy cathedral, attracts the eye of the vulgar with something of the same feeling as a blood-and-thunder melodrama. Needless to say, the art connoisseur flees therefrom.
To the rear of the building the remains of the Romanesque Church of Santa Maria la Mayor are still to be seen; what a difference between the rigid, anti-artistic conception of Herrero, ridiculized by Churriguera, and left but half-completed by successive generations of moneyless believers, and the simple but elegant features of the old collegiate church, with its tower still standing, a Byzantine recuerdo of the thirteenth century.