dates from records,--the northern arm
rose where previously had stood a little chapel and was given by the
Chapter to Dean Blasco Blasquez as an honorable burial place for himself
and his family, while Bishop Blasquez Davila, the tutor of Alfonso IX
and principal notary of Castile, raised the southern arm immediately
afterwards. He occupied the See for almost fifty years, and must have
seen the nave and side aisles and the older portions, including the
northwestern tower, all pretty well constructed. This tower with its
unfinished sister and portions of the west front are curiously enough
late Romanesque work, and must thus have been started before the nave
and side aisles had reached them in their western progress. The original
cloisters belonged to the fourteenth century, as also the northern
portal. Chapels, furnishings, pulpits, trascoro, choir stalls, glazing,
all belong to later times, as well as the sixteenth-century mutilations
of the front and the various exterior Renaissance excrescences.

It is interesting to infer that the main part of the fabric must
virtually have been completed in 1432, when Pope Eugenio IV published a
bull in favor of the work. Here he only speaks of the funds requisite
for its "preservation and repair." We may judge from such wording the
condition of the structure as a whole.

The most extraordinary portion of the building is unquestionably its
"fighting turret" and eastern end. This apse is almost unique in Spanish
architectural history and deeply absorbing as an extensive piece of
Romanesque work, not quite free from Moorish traces and already
employing in its vaulting Gothic expedients. It may be called "barbaric
Gothic" or "decadent Romanesque," but, whatever it is termed, it will be
vitally interesting and fascinating to the student of architectural
history.

Externally the mighty stone tower indicates none of its interior
disposition of chapels or vaulting. The black, weather-stained granite
of its bare walls is alternately broken by slightly projecting pilasters
and slender, columnar shafts. They are crowned by a corbel table and a
high, embattled parapet, that yielded protection to the soldiers
occupying the platform immediately behind, which communicated with the
passage around the city walls. This is again backed by a second wall
similarly crowned. The narrowest slits of windows from the centres of
the radiating, apsidal chapels break the lower surfaces, while double
flying