IV Madrid-Alcalá
Though Madrid was proclaimed the capital of Spain in the sixteenth century, it was not until 1850 that its collegiate church of San Isidro was raised to an episcopal see.
The appointment met with a storm of disapproval in the neighbouring town of Alcalá de Henares, the citizens claiming the erection of the ecclesiastical throne in their own collegiate, instead of in Madrid. Their reasons were purely historical, as will be seen later on, whereas the capital lacked both history and ecclesiastical significance.
To pacify the inhabitants of Alcalá, and at the same time to raise Madrid to the rank of a city, the following arrangement was made: the newly created see was to be called Madrid-Alcalá; the bishop was to possess two cathedral churches, and both towns were to be cities.
Such is the state of affairs at present. The recent governmental closure of the old cathedral in Alcalá has deprived the partisans of the double see of one of their chief arguments, namely, the possession of a worthy temple, unique in the world as regards its organization. Consequently, it is generally stated that the title of Madrid-Alcalá will die out with the present bishop, and that the next will simply be the Bishop of Madrid.
Madrid
The city of Madrid is new and uninteresting; it is an overgrown village, with no buildings worthy of the capital of a kingdom. From an architectural point of view, the royal palace, majestic and imposing, though decidedly poor in style, is about the only edifice that can be admired.
In history, Madrid plays a most unimportant part until the times of Philip II., the black-browed monarch who, intent upon erecting his mausoleum in the Escorial, proclaimed Madrid to be the only capital. That was in 1560; previously Magerit had been an Arab fortress to the north of Toledo, and the first in the region now called Castilla la Nueva (New Castile), to distinguish it from Old Castile, which lies to the north of the mountain chain.
Most likely Magerit had been founded by the Moors, though, as soon as it had become the capital of Spain, its inhabitants, who were only too eager to lend their town a history it did not possess, invented a series of traditions and legends more ridiculous than veracious.
On the slopes of the last hill, descending to the Manzanares, and beside the present royal palace, the Christian conquerors of the Arab fortress in the twelfth century discovered an effigy of the Virgin, in an almudena or storehouse. This was the starting-point for the traditions of the twelfth-century monks who discovered (?) that this effigy had been placed where it was found by St. James, according to some, and by the Virgin herself, according to others; what is more, they even established a series of bishops in Magerit previous to the Arab invasion.
No foundations are of course at hand for such fabulous inventions, and if the effigy really were found in the almudena, it must have been placed there by the Moors themselves, who most likely had taken it as their booty when sacking a church or convent to the north.
The patron saint of Madrid is one Isidro, not to be confounded with San Isidoro of Leon. The former was a farmer or labourer, who, with his wife, lived a quiet and unpretentious life in the vicinity of Madrid, on the opposite banks of the Manzanares, where a chapel was erected to his memory sometime in the seventeenth century. Of the many miracles this saint is supposed to have wrought, not one differs from the usual deeds attributed to holy individuals. Being a farmer, his voice called forth water from the parched land, and angels helped his oxen to plough the fields.
Save the effigy of the Virgin de la Almudena, and the life of San Isidro, Madrid has no ecclesiastical history,—the Virgin de la Atocha has been forgotten, but she is only a duplicate of her sister virgin. Convents and monasteries are of course as numerous as elsewhere in Spain; brick parish churches of a decided Spanish-Oriental appearance rear their cupolas skyward in almost every street, the largest among them being San Francisco el Grande, which, with San Antonio de la Florida (containing several handsome paintings by Goya), is the only temple worth visiting.
As regards a cathedral building, there is, in the lower part of the city, a large stone church dedicated to San Isidro; it serves the stead of a cathedral church until a new building, begun about 1885, will have been completed.
This new building, the cathedral properly speaking, is to be a tenth wonder; it is to be constructed in granite, and its foundations stand beside the royal palace in the very spot where the Virgin de la Almudena was found, and where, until 1869, a church enclosed the sacred effigy; the new building is to be dedicated to the same deity.
Unluckily, the erection of the new cathedral proceeds but slowly; so far only the basement stones have been laid and the crypt finished. The funds for its erection are entirely dependent upon alms, but, as the religious fervour which incited the inhabitants of Segovia in the sixteenth century is almost dead to-day, it is an open question whether the cathedral of Madrid will ever be finished.
The temporary cathedral of San Isidro was erected in the seventeenth century; its two clumsy towers are unfinished, its western front, between the towers, is severe; four columns support the balcony, behind which the cupola, which crowns the croisée, peeps forth.
Inside there is nothing worthy of interest to be admired except some pictures, one of them painted by the Divino Morales. The nave is light, but the chapels are so dark that almost nothing can be seen in their interior.
This church, until the expulsion of the Jesuits, was the temple of their order, dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul; adjoining it a Jesuit school was erected, which has been incorporated in the government colleges.
Alcalá de Henares
About twenty miles to the east of Madrid lies the one-time glorious university city of Alcalá, famous above all things for having been the cradle of Cervantes, and the hearth, if not the home, of Cardinal Cisneros.
Its history and its decadence are of the saddest; the latter serves in many respects as an adequate symbol of Spain’s own tremendous downfall.
The Romans founded Alcalá; it was their Complutum, of which some few remains have been discovered in the vicinity of the modern city. Yet, notwithstanding this lack of substantial evidence, the inhabitants of the region still proudly call themselves Complutenses.
When the West Goths were rulers of the peninsula, the Roman monuments must have been completely destroyed, for all traces of the strategic stronghold were effaced from the map of Spain. The invading Arabs, possessing to a certain degree both Roman military instinct and foresight, built a fortress on the spot where the State Archives Building stands to-day. This castle was used by them as one of Toledo’s northern defences against the warlike Christian kings.
In the twelfth century the fortress fell into the hands of the Christians; in the succeeding centuries it was strongly rebuilt by the cardinal-archbishops of Toledo, who used it both as their palace and as their stronghold.
Outside the bastioned and turreted walls of the castle, the new-born city grew up under its protecting shadows. Known by the Arabic name of its fortress (Al-Kalá), it was successively baptized Alcalá de San Justo, Alcalá de Fenares, and since the sixteenth century, Alcalá de Henares (heno, old Spanish feno, meaning hay). Protected by such powerful arms as those of the princes of the Church, it grew up to be a second Toledo, a city of church spires and convent walls, but of which only a reduced number stand to-day to point back to the religious fervour of the middle ages.
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 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 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.
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.
Fifty years later the weary bodies of the two infants were brought back in triumph to their native town amid the rejoicings and admiration of the people, and were placed in the cathedral of San Justo, then a collegiate church of Toledo.
A few years ago the cathedral church of San Justo was denounced by the state architect and closed. To-day it is a dreary ruin, with tufts of grass growing among the battlements. The chapter, depriving the hoary building of its high altar, its precious relics and paintings, its stalls and other accessories, installed the cathedral in the Jesuit temple, an insignificant building in the other extremity of the town. Recently the abandoned ruin has been declared a national monument, which means that the state is obliged to undertake its restoration.
La Magistral is a brick building of imposing simplicity and severity in its general outlines. Its decorative elements are ogival, but of true Spanish nakedness and lack of elegance. Though Renaissance principles have not entered into the composition, as might have been supposed, considering the date of the erection, nevertheless, the lack of flying buttresses, the scarcity of windows, the undecorated angles of the western front, the barren walls, and flat-topped, though slightly sloping, roofs prove that the “simple and severe style” is latent in the minds of artists.
The apse is well developed, and the croisée surmounted by a cupola; the tower which flanks the western front is massive; it is decorated with blind arches and ogival arabesques.
The ground plan of the building is Latin Cruciform; the aisles are but slightly lower than the nave and join in the apse behind the high altar in an ambulatory walk. The crypt, reached by two Renaissance doors in the trasaltar, is spacious, and contains the bodies of San Justo and San Pastor.
The general impression produced on the mind of the tourist is sadness. The severity of the structure is heightened by the absence of any distracting decorative elements, excepting the fine Mudejar ceiling to the left upon entering.
In the reigning shadows of this deserted temple, two magnificent tombs stand in solitude and silence. They are those of Carillo and Cardinal Cisneros, the latter one of the greatest sons of Spain and one of her most contradictory geniuses. His sepulchre is a gorgeous marble monument of Renaissance style, surrounded by a massive bronze grille of excellent workmanship, a marvel of Spanish metal art of the sixteenth century. The other sepulchre is simple in its ogival decorations, and the prostrate effigy of Carillo is among the best to be admired by the tourist in Iberia.
Carillo’s life was that of a restless, ambitious, and worldly man. When he died, he was buried in the Convent of San Juan de Dios, where his illegitimate son had been buried before him, “for,” said the archbishop-father, “if in life my robes separated me from my son, in death we shall be united.”
But he reckoned without his host, or rather his successor, the man whose remains now lie beside his own in the shadows of the great ruin. “For,” said Cisneros, “the Church must separate man from his sin even in death.” So he ordered the son to be left in the convent, and the father to be brought to the temple he had begun to erect.