soliciting the aid of the count of Castile; and in 1009 Sancho paid off
old scores by taking and sacking the proud city of the Khalifas. Never
had so much richness been seen in barren Castile, when her armies
returned laden with booty. ‘He of the good laws,’ as Sancho was styled
by his subjects, died in 1021, and was buried in the church of the
monastery of San Salvador de Oña, which he had founded.
The sisters of his youthful son and successor, Garcia II., were married
to the kings of Leon and Navarre; and Garcia went to Leon to seek the
hand of King Bermudo’s daughter, and to demand recognition of his title
as king of Castile. The poniards of the three sons of the Count de Vela
left him a bleeding corpse at the door of the church of San Isidoro, on
the 13th May 1029, and put an end to the male line of the house of
Fernan González. His destined bride became the wife of Fernando, son of
the king of Navarre, who was proclaimed count of Castile, though he
enjoyed nothing more than the semblance of sovereignty till his father’s
death in 1035. Bermudo of Leon died two years later, and Fernando thus
became king of united Leon and Castile--the former in right of his wife,
the latter in right of his mother.
The newly crowned king was immediately assailed by his elder brother,
Garcia of Navarre, who invaded Castile with an army largely composed of
Mussulmans, and threatened Burgos. After some days passed in fruitless
negotiations between the fraternal enemies, the Navarrese king was
defeated and slain. Eleven years later--in 1065--Fernando I. followed
his brother to the grave. Deeming his dominions too vast to be
administered by one man he divided them, allotting Castile to his
first-born son Sancho, from which it may be inferred that he considered
that province the fairest of his possessions. Not contented with the
lion’s share of the spoils, the king of Castile wrested the kingdom of
Leon from his brother Alfonso, whom he imprisoned in the castle of
Burgos. Sancho next endeavoured to deprive his sister Urraca of her
little principality of Zamora. Before the walls of that town he fell a
victim to the sword of Bellido Dolfos, and to the kingdoms which he had
by dint of violence and treachery reunited, succeeded Alfonso, but
lately a guest of the kindly Moorish Amir of Toledo.
So far the history of Burgos and of Castile generally has been an
involved and tedious record of dynastic arrangements, civil strife, and
desultory warfare with the Moor. The dullness of the panorama is now
relieved by the picturesque and crudely romantic personality of the
Cid--‘he that in a good hour was born’--Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar.
‘Rodrigo is Burgos, Rodrigo is Castile, Rodrigo is Spain,’ says Don
Rodrigo Amador de los Rios. ‘His prowess, his glory, his trials, his
renown, are the renown, the trials, the glory, and the prowess of the
fatherland. His form, which touches the confines of the supernatural,
and stands forth vigorous and powerful in the interesting picture of the
Middle Ages, is the spontaneous creation of a people--is the people
itself--whose marvellous instinct has given it from its own being, heat
and life. His honour is the honour of Castile and Spain; there is
nothing in his personality which does not represent and symbolise with
transcendental expression the national character; he is the splendid
synthesis in which a nation is resumed, the idol of the ages, the
pattern of all perfection, the permanent example of all the virtues, the
true mirror of the Middle Ages, with all that they had of noble and
generous, rude and loyal, warrior and devotee, tradition and history,
legend and fact, petty and great; the manifestation, in short, of the
essential and permanent in the Spanish nationality, which does not vary,
and is transmitted unimpaired from generation to generation, through the
centuries; the spirit which informs and sustains the peoples, in all the
epochs of history.’
I quote _in extenso_ an eminent Spaniard’s appreciation of the national
hero. But accepting even the Cid of the ballads and legends, it does not
seem that a high compliment is paid to Spain by recognising in him her
absolute personification and embodiment. The traditions of less cultured
races have conceived purer heroes. But in Burgos, almost his native
place, we must not approach the memory of the doughty Campeador in any
cold or captious mood. You may visit (though you will derive neither
pleasure nor profit from the journey) the miserable hamlet of Vivar,
five or six miles from Burgos, where he first saw the light somewhere
about the year 1040. For ancestors, tradition credits him with the
famous judges, Lain Calvo and Nuño Rasura, two worthies whose existence
is at least problematical. But that Rodrigo (or Ruy) Diaz was a good
Burgolese, there can be no question. Here he passed his youth at the
court of Fernando I., rising to the high rank of Alferez or
standard-bearer in the service of King Sancho. He was among the
champions selected by his sovereign to decide the fate of the two
kingdoms in a personal conflict with a similar number of Leonese
knights. But whatever luck may have attended Rodrigo individually on
this occasion, the Castilians got the worst of the encounter; whereupon
Sancho refused to stand by his bargain, and by more military and less
chivalrous methods secured his brother’s realms.
When Alfonso ascended the throne of Castile, it was the Cid who exacted
from him, at the gate of the church of Santa Gadea, the humiliating oath
that he had had no share in his brother’s murder--an indignity which
Alfonso did not quietly forget. He dissimulated his resentment, however,
and gave his sister Jimena in marriage to the valiant Campeador. Soon
after the threatened quarrel broke out, and the haughty vassal abandoned
all his estates in Castile, and entered the service of the Moorish Amir
of Zaragoza. The chronicles tell how on his visiting Burgos the knight
found, by order of the king, every door shut against him. Only a little
girl nine years of age ventured to address him. From their windows the
citizens beheld him and wept, crying, ‘How good a vassal, if he had only
a good lord!’ Very sadly the Cid passed the night with his followers
without the walls. He visited his wife and daughters at the monastery of
Cardeña, and turned his face from Castile. He was at shifts for money--a
precedent Don Quixote appears to have forgotten--and bethought him of an
ingenious expedient. Filling an enormous coffer with stones and sand, he
offered it, as being laden with gold and treasure, as security to a Jew,
on the understanding that it should not be opened till the money was
repaid. The confiding usurer readily advanced six hundred marks of gold
and silver, and the coffer remains to this day to attest the simplicity
of the Jewish character and the eminently commercial aptitudes of the
Castilian national hero.
With Rodrigo’s wonderful exploits in other parts of Spain we are not
here concerned. When he died at Valencia at a ripe age, he was brought
back to his native place, seated upright on his famous steed Babieca,
and laid to rest beside his wife at Cardeña. There he was suffered to
remain till the year 1842, when his ashes were transported to the town
hall of Burgos. A brave soldier, but one of the sorriest of the nation’s
heroes!
During the lifetime of this worthy and the reign of Alfonso VI., Toledo
was captured from the Moors, and Burgos ranked henceforward only as a
secondary capital of Spain. It may be remarked that till Philip II.
published his decree that ‘_Madrid solo es corte_,’ the kingdom could
not be said in the modern sense of the word ever to have had a capital.
Burgos, Valladolid, Toledo, and Seville had all equal claims to be
considered the seat of government. As the Moorish frontier was pushed
farther and farther south, Burgos lost in military importance. But its
dignity was enhanced in an ecclesiastical sense, for it was raised in
1073 to an archiepiscopal see. Then followed the stormy days of Queen
Urraca, when the city came in for its fair share of turmoil and
bloodshed. Order was temporarily restored under the ‘Emperor’ Alfonso
VII. An important ecclesiastical council was held here in 1136. Alfonso,
at his death in 1157, most unwisely divided his estates, bestowing
Castile upon the eldest, Fernando. The events of 1070 were repeated.
Leon and Castile waged war against each other, and when the infant,
Alfonso VIII., succeeded his father on the Castilian throne in 1158, the
Laras and Castros, rivals for the regency, turned their swords against
each other. Burgos was once more the capital of an independent kingdom,
and witnessed in 1170 the marriage of the young king to Eleanor,
daughter of Henry II. of England--the first of the many happy alliances
between the royal houses of the two countries.
Alfonso’s reign was prosperous and glorious. He was a tolerant monarch,
and showed favour to the Moslems. There seems in his time to have been
an important mosque at Burgos. To propitiate Heaven, after the terrible
defeat of the Christians at Alarcos, Eleanor persuaded her husband to
build the monastery of Las Huelgas, to which act of piety no doubt was
attributed the ‘crowning mercy’ of las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.
During the struggle for the regency, which ensued on the death of
Alfonso, Burgos sided with the boy-king’s suitor Berenguela, who soon
after became queen in her own right. Without hesitation this high-minded
princess abdicated in favour of her son Fernando, the issue of her
marriage with Alfonso of Leon, which had been dissolved by the Pope. The
new king was attacked by his own father and by the arch-rebel of Spain,
Alvar Fanez, but he triumphed over his enemies, and in 1230 succeeded to
his unnatural father’s dominions, thus uniting finally and for ever the
kingdoms of Leon and Castile.
‘From the time of St. Ferdinand,’ remarks a recent historian of Spain
(Mr. Ulick Burke), ‘Moors in Castile became as scarce as foxes in
Middlesex.’ An era of prosperity seemed about to dawn for Burgos--_caput
Castellae camera regia_, as she proudly styled herself. There were great
doings within her walls when the son of the king of England (afterwards
Edward I.) came here in October 1254 to espouse Leonor, sister of King
Alfonso the Learned. The English prince was made a knight by his
prospective brother-in-law in the church of Santa Maria, where the
marriage later on took place. In 1269 Edward came again to Burgos to
assist at the nuptials of the Infante Fernando and the Princess Blanche
of France. Among the guests were also the king of Aragon, the sultan of
Granada, the Infantes of Aragon and Castile, ‘and other great
_ricoshombres_ and knights of the kingdom of Castile and Leon, and
counts and dukes of France, and other hidalgos of that country; and the
Marquis of Montferrat, who was wedded to Doña Beatriz, daughter of King
Alfonso.’
The learned king did much to organise and to purify the administration,
and as a natural consequence a sedition was fomented by his brother Don
Felipe and the chiefs of the Lara, Haro, and Castro families. The rebels
appeared in force before Burgos, and the king invited the leader to the
Cortes then in session (1271). This invitation was refused, but a
meeting was arranged at the Hospital del Rey outside the walls. Alfonso
was in a most conciliatory mood, and as the rebels wanted only a
colourable pretext to continue their campaign of rapine and lawlessness,
the more he granted the more they wanted. Finally the ringleaders
retired in utter disgust to Granada.
Burgos was the scene of one of Alfonso’s worst deeds. Suspecting his
brother Don Fadrique of intriguing with his grandchildren, the
disinherited Infantes de la Cerda, he ordered him to be confined in the
castle, where the unfortunate prince was put to death by his ferocious
nephew, the Infante Sancho. After the marriage of the Infantes Don Pedro
and Don Juan with Margaret of Narbonne and Joanna of Montferrat, at
Burgos in 1281, Sancho himself revolted against his father and caused
himself to be proclaimed king. He obtained possession of the city, and,
strangely enough, reinterred with great ceremony in the monastery of La
Trinidad the very uncle he had killed.
Señor Amador de los Rios attributes the rivalry of the two cities of
Valladolid and Burgos to the preference shown the former city by the
wife of Sancho IV., Doña Maria Molina. For all that, it was the old
capital of Castile where Sancho caused his son Fernando to be publicly
declared heir to the throne.
Burgos was now a large and populous town. It owed much of its prosperity
to its considerable Jewish colony, of which Don Todros Abulafia was
Nasi, and Abu-l-Hasan Aben el Harits, physician to the king, one of the
elders. The Israelites contributed over one hundred thousand maravedis
to the revenue in the city alone. With the important part played by the
Jews in the internal policy of Spain I have dealt at greater length in
my work on Toledo in the present series.
During the regency of Doña Maria Molina, Valladolid was the usual seat
of the court. But Burgos continued to be the scene of great functions of
state. The marriage of the Duke of Brittany and the sister of Fernando
IV. was celebrated here in January 1311; and several Cortes and councils
met here. From Fernando the city obtained many privileges and
favours--the town and revenues of Villafranca de Montes de Oca being
granted to the municipality.
We pass over the civil wars and intrigues which distracted the reign of
Alfonso XI., and find Burgos ruled by one born within its walls--Pedro
the Cruel. Seville is more intimately associated with this picturesque
and sinister personality, but here it was that he caused the governor,
Garcilaso de la Vega, to be beaten to death in his presence, and watched
the bulls in the arena without trampling on and tossing the mangled body
of the victim. De la Vega’s remains were then placed in a casket, which
was hung from the castle walls that all might fear the king’s justice.
In 1355, after a busy butchering expedition, Pedro decorated a room in
the castle with the heads he had collected, the slaughtered grandees,
Lope de Bandaña, Gonzalo de Melendez, and Jofre Tenorio, contributing in
this way to the adornment of the chamber and the delight of their lord.
It was at the old capital of Castile that he was residing when Enrique
de Trastamara with Bertrand du Guesclin and the White Company crossed
the border. Pedro fled, and his brother was crowned at Las Huelgas. When
the tide had temporarily set in Pedro’s favour, it was in the cathedral
of Burgos that he and the Black Prince swore to the terms of their
alliance. But in the following year (1368) Enrique’s star was once more
in the ascendant, and a king, innately almost as vicious as our Henry
VIII., had gone to join his hosts of victims on the other side of the
tomb.
Burgos, under the Trastamara dynasty, resumed for a time the rank of
capital of Spain. Like his father, Don Juan I. was crowned here, at Las
Huelgas, in 1379, amid great festivities and rejoicings. His son,
afterwards Enrique III., was born here, probably in the great castle,
founded by Diego Porcellos, which perhaps gave its name to the whole
kingdom. Few traces exist to-day of the original building, which was the
habitual residence of the sovereign. Enrique III., however, ‘decreed a
stately palace dome’ at Miraflores, on the left bank of the Arlanzon,
at some distance from the city, but he died before its completion. A
strange monarch was this Enrique. Tired of living in poverty while his
nobles wallowed in luxury, he invited them to a banquet at the castle.
On their arrival they found no well-spread table, but the executioner
with his axe and block. It was only by liberal disbursements and
advances that they escaped this functionary’s professional attentions.
Thus did the needy monarch of Castile, who it is said had to pawn his
coat to get a dinner, replenish his exchequer.
During the reign of Juan II. the castle of Burgos was held by Don Pedro
de Estuñiga, the implacable foe of the great Constable, Alvaro de Luna.
The king on one occasion actually found the gates of his own castle
closed against him by this arrogant vassal, who at last compassed de
Luna’s downfall and death at Valladolid. In atonement for this brutal
sacrifice of his favourite, Juan converted the palace built by his
father into a Carthusian monastery--to the disgust, we are told, of the
local ecclesiastical authorities.
During the reign of Enrique IV. the castle of Burgos was a focus of
rebellion and conspiracy. On the king’s death the castle was held by
the Estuñigas for the Princess Juana, called by her enemies la
Beltraneja, while the town espoused the cause of Isabel and her
Aragonese husband. The bishop, who had retired to the castle of Rabe,
joined forces with the Estuñigas, and the townsfolk, thus placed between
two fires, implored the assistance of the court at Valladolid. Meanwhile
the Portuguese allies of Juana were implored to succour the castle.
Fernando of Aragon appeared at Burgos in June 1475 and invested the
Estuñigas’ stronghold. An attack on the church of Santa Maria la Blanca
was beaten off with loss, but the garrison, losing heart, ultimately
surrendered to the besiegers. The king of Portugal, instead of hurrying
on with all speed to Burgos, went into winter quarters at Zamora, while
Fernando prosecuted the siege with his accustomed vigour. The garrison
held out bravely, and seem to have at last capitulated, more out of
disgust at the inaction of their ally than from any inability to defend
themselves further. The commandant treated with Isabel in person, and
surrendered on obtaining a free and unconditional pardon for himself and
all his followers.
The union of Spain, consequent on the marriage of Isabel of Castile
with Fernando of Aragon, tended to diminish the importance of Burgos.
Nor was its prosperity augmented by the expulsion of the Jews--after
they had been decimated by repeated massacres--the act of two sovereigns
whose wisdom, greatness, and virtue English writers, as well as Spanish,
never tire of extolling.
The Burgolese joined the Comunidad in 1520, allying themselves with
Toledo and Segovia, Zamora, Toro, Madrid, Avila, Guadalajara, Cuenca,
Alcala, and Soria. The citizens seized the castle and murdered an
unpopular official, Garcia Jofre, afterwards sacking the episcopal
palace. They surrounded the palace of the Constable of Castile, Don
Iñigo Fernandez de Velasco, and were deterred from burning it to the
ground only by the intercession of the clergy, who exposed the Sacrament
over the doorway. The Constable fled to Briviesca, but some months after
returned in triumph to the now pacified city. Sixteen years later we
find the townsfolk welcoming Charles V. with enthusiasm, and erecting in
his honour the graceful arch of Santa Maria. Burgos had accepted the new
monarchy and the new era. The product of another age, she found herself
unfitted to play a distinguished part in this. Not without dignity she
passes into the background, and history knows her no more.
THE CATHEDRAL
Built at the instance of an English bishop and, like all the cathedrals
of northern Spain, on a French model, the church of Santa Maria la Mayor
is conspicuously more Spanish than that of either Leon or Toledo. This
more national character may be due to later additions and
alterations--alterations and additions which have neither obscured nor
impaired that wonderful unity and harmony of design apparent in this,
the ideal Gothic church.
The cathedral occupies the site of a church built in 1075, where a
summer palace of Fernan González had till then stood. The first stone
was laid on July 20, 1221, by Bishop Maurice, an Englishman who had come
over to Castile in the train of Henry II.’s daughter Eleanor. The
saintly King Fernando took a lively interest in the great work, which
progressed so rapidly that the cathedral appears to have been ready for
the reception of the faithful in November 1230. The nationality of the
bishop and his share in the building of the fabric are, however, matters
of dispute between historical writers.
The cathedral is built on very uneven ground, a circumstance which
rather enhances than detracts from its picturesqueness. O’Shea calls
attention to a remarkable trait in the exterior, rarely possessed by
buildings otherwise of equal merit: ‘We mean that the forms should be
bold projections or reproductions in relief of the internal parts, as in
embossing. Thus, in this cathedral, the eye embraces the inward
distribution at one glance from the shape of the parts outside.’ From a
distance the most conspicuous parts of the edifice are the steeples
surmounting the west front and the lantern over the crossing. The
delicacy and nobility of the spires, pinnacles, and open-work adorning
the glorious fabric tempt one to rhapsody. But so much beauty can be
adequately portrayed only by the brush, not by the pen.
The lowest stage of the western or main front is pierced by the three
doors corresponding to the nave and aisles within. Formerly rich in
sculpture, this part of the façade was rebuilt in the latter part of the
eighteenth century, in accordance with the pseudo-classical ideas of the
time, and robbed of nearly all its statuary. The ‘restorers’ spared the
statues of Alfonso VI., San Fernando, and the Bishops Maurice and
Astorio at the side of the Puerta Real (Central Door), and the
sculptures of the Coronation and Immaculate Conception of the Virgin
over the lateral entrances. This lowest stage of the west front in its
extreme plainness and severity presents an incomplete appearance when
contrasted with the much more elaborate and ancient work above. Over the
middle door, within a noble and gracefully moulded ogival arch, is a
large, finely traceried rose-window, lighting the nave. Above this again
are two windows, each of four lights, and their upper parts filled with
beautiful tracery. Before each light stands the statue of a youth
crowned. Over this highest stage of the middle division of the west
front is the inscription _Pulchra est et decora_ carved in stone, and
forming a balustrade, which is adorned by statues of the Redeemer, the
Madonna, and the Baptist.
Over the side doors rise the towers, surmounted with steeples, built for
Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena (1435-1456) by the artist, probably a
German, called Juan de Colonia, or John of Cologne. These steeples rise
to a height of three hundred feet, and, except at the lowest story, are
detached from the rest of the edifice. They are adorned with tall
pointed windows, the space for two of these on the second stage of the
north tower being covered, however, by the seventeenth-century clock.
The pinnacles themselves are wonderful examples of delicate fretted
stone-work. Street saw little beauty, however, in Juan de Colonia’s
work, adding that the bells in the spires were the most misshapen he had
ever seen.
The entrance to the north transept was known in the time of Alfonso X.
as the Gate of the Twelve Apostles. It stands on a higher level than the
floor of the church and is hence called Puerta Alta, or more often the
Puerta de la Coroneria. The lower portion certainly, the whole probably,
belongs to the thirteenth century. There is a great profusion of
sculpture. On either side of the door are seen the figures of the twelve
Apostles. The portal is enclosed within an ogival arch, on the archivolt
of which are shown, successively, seraphim, cherubim, and the souls of
the just rising from their graves. The upper part of the tympanum is
adorned with the figures of Christ seated and attended by the Virgin and
St. John. Below this is a composition of doubtful interpretation, the
figures on one side seeming to illustrate the judgment of the wicked,
those on the other side the establishment of the Dominicans and
Franciscans in Castile. Higher up, the façade is pierced with two high
pointed windows, and above these again by windows of several lights,
with statues in niches.