]

To the rear of the building the remains of the Romanesque Church of
Santa Maria la Mayor are still to be seen; what a difference between
the rigid, anti-artistic conception of Herrero, ridiculized by
Churriguera, and left but half-completed by successive generations of
moneyless believers, and the simple but elegant features of the old
collegiate church, with its tower still standing, a Byzantine _recuerdo_
of the thirteenth century.

II

AVILA

To the west of Madrid, in the very heart of the Sierra de Gredos, lies
Avila, another of the interesting cities of Castile, whose time-old
mansions and palaces, built of a gray granite, lend a solemn and almost
repulsively melancholic air to the city.

Perhaps more than any other town, Avila is characteristic of the middle
ages, of the continual strife between the noblemen, the Church, and the
common people. The houses of the aristocrats are castles rather than
palaces, with no artistic decoration to hide their bare nakedness; the
cathedral is really a fortress, and not only apparently so, as in
Salamanca and Toro, for its very apse is embedded in the city walls, of
which it forms a part, a battlemented, turreted, and warlike projection,
sure of having to bear the brunt of an attack in case of a siege.

Like the general aspect of the city is also the character of the
inhabitant, and it is but drawing it mildly to state that Avila's sons
were ever foremost in battle and strife. Kings in their minority were
brought hither by prudent mothers who relied more upon the city's walls
than upon the promises of noblemen in Valladolid and Burgos; this trust
was never misplaced. In the conquest of Extremadura and of Andalusia,
also, the Avilese troops, headed by daring warrior-prelates, played a
most important part, and, as a frontier fortress, together with Segovia,
against Aragon to the east, it managed to keep away from Castilian
territory the ambitions of the monarchs of the rival kingdom.

Avela of the Romans was a garrison town, the walls of which were partly
thrown down by the Western Goths upon their arrival in the peninsula.
Previously, San Segundo, one of the disciples of the Apostles who had
visited Betica (Andalusia), preached the True Word in Avila, and was
created its first bishop--in the first century. During the terrible
persecution of the Christians under the reign of Trajanus, one San
Vicente and his two sisters, Sabina and Cristeta, escaped from Portuga