ging principally to the latter
part, built with the feverish energy, popular enthusiasm, and
unparalleled genius for building which characterizes that period and
stamps it as uniquely glorious to later constructive ages. Though
smaller than most of the immense churches which afterwards rose under
Spanish skies, Leon remained in many respects unsurpassed and unmatched.

"Sevilla en grandeza, Toledo en riqueza,
Compostella en fortaleza, esta en sutileza
Santa Maria de Regla."

In the middle of the thirteenth century, after the consecration of the
new church, a famous council of all the bishops of the realm was held in
the little town of Madrid, and there the faithful were exhorted, and
the lukewarm admonished with threats, to contribute by every means to
the successful erection of Leon's Cathedral. Indulgences, well worth
consideration, were granted to contributors, at the head of whom for a
liberal sum stood the king, Alfonso X.

But Leon, capital of the ancient kingdom, was doomed before long to feel
the bitterness of abandonment. The Castilian kings followed the retreat
southward of the Moorish armies, and the history of the capital of Leon,
which, during the thirteenth century, had been the history of the little
kingdom, soon became confined within the limits of her cathedral walls.
Burgos, a mighty rival, soon overshadowed her. The time came when the
Bishop of Leon was merely a suffragan of the Archbishop of Burgos, and
her kings had moved their court south to Seville. The city of Leon was
lost in the union of the two kingdoms.

The fortunes of the Cathedral have been varied and her reverses great.
Her architects risked a great deal and the disasters entailed were
proportionate. Though belonging preeminently in style to the glorious
thirteenth century, her building continued almost uninterruptedly
throughout the fourteenth. We have in succession Maestro Enrique, Pedro
Cebrian, Simon, Guillen de Rodan, Alonzo Valencia, Pedro de Medina, and
Juan de Badajoz, working on her walls and towers with a magnificent
recklessness which was shortly to meet its punishment. Although Bishop
Gonzalez in 1303 declared the work, "thanks be to God, completed," it
was but started. The south facade was completed in the sixteenth
century, but as early as 1630 the light fabric began to tremble, then
the vaulting of the crossing collapsed and was replaced by a more
magnificent dome. Many years of mutilations and disasters s