ning joy at her spouse's death, the widow
invited the murderers to her house to a banquet, when, "_despues de
opipara cena_ (after an excellent dinner), they passed from the lethargy
of drunkenness to the sleep of eternity, assassinated by hidden
servants." The following morning their bodies hung from the windows of
the palace, and provoked not anger but silent dread and shivers among
the terror-stricken inhabitants.

With the Inquisition, the siege by the English in 1706, the invasion of
the French in 1808, Cuenca rapidly lost all importance and even
political significance. To-day it is one of the many picturesque ruins
that offer but little interest to the art traveller, for even its old
age is degenerated, and the monuments of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and
fifteenth centuries have one and all been spoilt by the hand of time,
and by the less grasping hand of _restauradores_--or
architect-repairers.

The Byzantine character, the Arab taste of the primitive inhabitants,
has also been lost. Who would think, upon examining the cathedral, that
it had served once upon a time as the principal Arab mosque? Entirely
rebuilt, as were most of the primitive Arab houses, it has lost all
traces of the early founders, more so than in other cities where the
Arabs remained but a few years.

The patron saint of Cuenca is San Julian, one of the cathedral's first
bishops, who led a saintly life, giving all he had and taking nothing
that was not his, and who retired from his see to live the humble life
of a basket-maker, seated with willow branches beneath the arches of the
high bridge, and preaching saintly words to teamsters and mule-drivers
as they approached the city, until his death in 1207.

In the same century the Arab mosque was torn down and the new cathedral
begun. It is a primitive ogival (Spanish) temple of the thirteenth
century, with smatterings of Romanesque-Byzantine. Unlike the cathedral
of Sigueenza, it is neither elegant, harmonious, nor of great
architectural value; its wealth lies chiefly in the chapels, in the
doors which lead to the cloister, in the sacristy, and in the elegant
high altar.

The cloister door is perhaps one of the finest details of the cathedral
church: decorated in the plateresque style general in Spain in the
sixteenth century, it offers one of the finest examples of said style to
be found anywhere, and though utterly different in ornamentation to the
sacristy of Sigueenza, it nevertheless