osperity departed. Their place was filled by the
bloodhounds of the Inquisition, who held their very first, terrible
tribunal in the Convent of Saint Thomas, blighting the city and
surrounding country with a new and terrible curse. The great rebellion
under the Emperor Charles burst from the smouldering wrath of Avila's
indignant citizens, and in 1520 she became, for a short time, the seat
of the "Junta Santa" of the Comuneros.

It is still easy to discern what a tremendous amount of building must
have gone on within the narrow city limits during the early part of its
second erection. The streets are still full of bits of Romanesque
architecture, palaces, arcades, houses, balconies, towers and windows
and one of the finest groups of Romanesque churches in Spain. Of lesser
sinew and greater age than San Salvador, they are now breathing their
last. San Vicente is almost doomed, while San Pedro and San Segundo are
fast falling.

But San Salvador remains still unshaken in her strength,--a fortress
within a cathedral, a splendid mailed arm with its closed fist of iron
reaching through the outer bastions and threatening the plains. It is a
bold cry of Christian defiance to enemies without. If ever there was an
embodiment in architecture of the church militant, it is in the
Cathedral of Avila. Approaching it by San Pedro, you look in vain for
the church, for the great spire that loomed up from the distant hills
and was pointed out as the holy edifice. In its place and for the
eastern apse, you see only a huge gray bastion, strong and secure,
crowned at all points by battlements and galleries for sentinels and
fighting men,--inaccessible, grim, and warlike. A fitting abode for the
men who rather rode a horse than read a sermon and preferred the
breastplate to the cassock, a splendid epitome of that period of Spanish
history when the Church fought instead of prying into men's souls. It
well represents the unification of the religious and military offices
devolving on the Church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in
Castile,--a bellicose house rather than one of prayer.

All the old documents and histories of the Church state that the great
Cathedral was started as soon as the city walls were well under way in
1091 and was completed after sixteen years of hard work. Alvar Garcia
from Estrella in Navarre is recorded as the principal original
architect, Don Pedro as the Bishop, and Count Raymond as spurring on the
1900 men