V Sigüenza
The origin of the fortress admirably situated to the north of Guadalajara was doubtless Moorish, though in the vicinity is Villavieja, where the Romans had established a town on the transverse road from Cadiz to Tarragon, and called by them Seguncia, or Segoncia.
When the Christian religion first appeared in Spain, it is believed that Sigüenza, or Segoncia, possessed an episcopal see; nothing is positively known, however, of the early bishops, until Protogenes signed the third Council of Toledo in 589.
It is believed that in the reign of Alfonso VI., he who conquered Toledo and the region to the south of Valladolid and as far east as Aragon, Sigüenza was repopulated, though no mention is made of the place in the earlier chronicles of the time. All that is known is that a bishop was immediately appointed by Alfonso VII. to the vacancy which had lasted for over two hundred years, during which Sigüenza had been one of the provincial capitals of the Kingdom of Toledo. The first known bishop was Don Bernardo.
The history of the town was never of the most brilliant. In the times of Alfonso VII. and his immediate successors it gained certain importance as a frontier stronghold, as a check to the growing ambitions of the royal house of Aragon. But after the union of Castile and Aragon, its importance gradually dwindled; to-day, if it were not for the bishopric, it would be one historic village more on the map of Spain.
In the reign of Peter the Cruel, its castle—considered with that of Segovia to be the strongest in Castile—was used for some time as the prison palace for that most unhappy princess, Doña Blanca, who, married to his Catholic Majesty, had been deposed on the third day of the wedding by the heartless and passionate lover of the Padilla. She was at first shut up in Toledo, but the king did not consider the Alcázar strong enough. So she was sent off to Sigüenza, where it is popularly believed, though documents deny it, that she died, or was put to death.
The city belonged to the bishop; it was his feudal property, and passed down to his successors in the see. Of the doings of these prelate-warriors, the first, Don Bernardo, was doubtless the most striking personality, lord of a thousand armed vassals and of three hundred horse, who fought with the emperor in almost all the great battles in Andalusia. It is even believed he died wielding the naked sword, and that his remains were brought back to the town of which he had been the first and undisputed lord.
The strong castle which crowns the city did not possess, as was generally the case, an alcalde, or governor; it was the episcopal palace or residence, a circumstance which proves beyond a doubt the double significance of the bishop: a spiritual leader and military personage, more influential and wealthy than any prelate in Spain, excepting the Archbishops of Toledo and Santiago.
During the French invasion in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Sigüenza had already lost its political significance. The invaders occupied the castle, and, as was their custom, threw documents and archives into the fire, to make room for themselves, and to spend the winter comfortably.
Consequently, the notices we have of the cathedral church are but scarce. The fourth bishop was Jocelyn, an Englishman who had come over with Eleanor, Henry II.’s daughter, and married to the King of Castile. He (the bishop) was not a whit less warlike than his predecessors had been; he helped the king to win the town of Cuenca, and when he died on the battle-field, only his right arm was carried back to the see, to the chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury, which the dead prelate had founded in the new cathedral, and it was buried beneath a stone which bears the following inscription:
“Hic est inclusa Jocelini præsulis ulna.”
From the above we can conclude that the cathedral must have been begun previous to the Englishman’s coming to Spain, that is, in the beginning of the twelfth century. Doubtless the vaulting was not closed until at least one hundred years later; nevertheless, it is one of the unique and at the same time one of the handsomest Spanish monuments of the Transition period.
The city of Sigüenza, situated on the slopes of a hill crowned by the castle, is a village rather than a town; there are, however, fewer spots in Spain that are more picturesque in their old age, and there is a certain uniformity in the architecture that reminds one of German towns; this is not at all characteristic of Spain, where so many styles mix and mingle until hardly distinguishable from each other.
The Transition style—between the strong Romanesque and the airy ogival—is the city’s cachet, printed with particular care on the handsome cathedral which stands on the slope of the hill to the north of the castle.
Two massive square towers, crenelated at the top and pierced by a few round-headed windows, flank the western front. The three portals are massive Romanesque without floral or sculptural decoration of any kind; the central door is larger and surmounted by a large though primitive rosace. The height of the aisles and nave is indicated by three ogival arches cut in relief on the façade; here already the mixture of both styles, of the round-arched Romanesque and the pointed Gothic, is clearly visible—as it is also in the windows of the aisles, which are Romanesque, and of the nave, which are ogival—in the buttresses, which are leaning on the lower body, and flying in the upper story, uniting the exterior of the clerestory with that of the aisles. (Compare with apse of the cathedral of Lugo.)
The portal of the southern arm of the transept is an ugly addition, more modern and completely out of harmony with the rest. The rosace above the door is one of the handsomest of the Transition period in Spain, and the stained glass is both rich and mellow.
The interior shows the same harmonious mixture of the stronger and more solemn old style, and the graceful lightness of the newer. But the hesitancy in the mind of the architect is also evident, especially in the vaulting, which is timidly arched.
The original plan of the church was, doubtless, purely Romanesque: Roman cruciform with a three-lobed apse, the central one much longer so as to contain the high altar.
In the sixteenth century, however, an ambulatory was constructed behind the high altar, joining the two aisles, and the high altar was removed to the east of the transept.
What a pity that the huge choir, placed in the centre of the church, should so completely obstruct the view of the ensemble of the nave and aisles, separated by massive Byzantine arches between the solid pillars, which, in their turn, support the nascent ogival vaulting of the high nave! Were it, as well as the grotesque trascoro—of the unhappiest artistic taste—anywhere but in the centre of the church, what a splendid view would be obtained of the long, narrow, and high aisles and nave in which the old and the new were moulded together in perfect harmony, instead of fighting each other and clashing together, as happened in so many Spanish cathedral churches!
One of the most richly decorated parts of the church is the sacristy, a small room entirely covered with medallions and sculptural designs of the greatest variety of subjects. Though of Arabian taste (Mudejar), no Moorish elements have entered into the composition, and consequently it is one of the very finest, if not the very best specimen, of Christian Arab decoration.