The establishment of the new monarchy meant for Salamanca, as for so many other cities, the end of liberty and the end of bloodshed. Family quarrels were henceforward to be adjusted by the king’s judges, wrongs avenged by his justice, not by the stiletto and poisoned draught. Outwardly Salamanca made merry over the change, and fêted Charles V. on his state entry in May 1534. His son was married here at the age of sixteen to Maria of Portugal--amid great rejoicings, as we are always told of such events.
Years passed by, and Salamanca partook of the senile decay which seemed to be creeping over Spain. The old feudal fights were recalled by the sanguinary town and gown riots, which filled the streets with dead and dying towards the close of the seventeenth century. Then came bad harvests, inundations, and the earthquake of 1755. It was but a poor and desolate city on which the French levied severe contributions in 1809, and which they sacked from end to end, three years after, in revenge for their disastrous defeat by Wellington before its walls. Salamanca has worshipped Mars and the Muses; but the War-god has turned savagely on his devotees, and from the scene of so many bloody conflicts the Genius of Learning seems at last to have fled shuddering away.
The primitive cathedral of Salamanca is said to have been the church of San Juan el Blanco, in the riverside suburb. Its proportions and situation were not suited to the dignity of the new city founded by Count Raymond, and we find him before long laying the first stone of a new cathedral on one of the three eminences enclosed within the walls. The exact date of the foundation and the names of the architects are unknown. But tradition avers that Bishop Jeronimo consecrated the church, and the master-builders who raised the walls of Avila at Count Raymond’s orders most likely had some share in this, his greater work. They were Cassandro, an Italian, Florin de Southren, a Frenchman, and Alvar Garcia, a Navarrese. Placed at their disposal was a band of five hundred Moslem masons and carpenters, made prisoners by the count.
Bishop Jeronimo died in the year 1120, but the records show privileges conceded to the workmen engaged in the construction of the cathedral in 1152, 1183, and as late as 1285. According to Street, a priest of Medina del Campo, in the year 1178, bequeathed his property to the chapter for the purpose of completing the cloister, from which it may be inferred that not much remained to be done to the church itself at that date. Successive popes and kings showered donations and privileges upon the nascent cathedral, till the chapter, rich in lands and vassals, ranked as a feudal power, and the sacred edifice itself as a formidable stronghold. Massive, simple, vigorous, it well deserves the epithet _fortis Salamantina_, by which it is distinguished in the well-known lines about the cathedrals of Spain, ‘Sancta Ovetensis, dives Toletanas, pulchra Leonina, fortis Salamantina.’