Isabel’s own library displayed a catholic taste in literature; the collection ranging from devotional works and treatises on philosophy, grammar, and medicine, to manuscript copies or translations of Latin, Greek, and Italian authors, such as Plutarch, Livy, Virgil, Aristotle, and Boccaccio; together with national chronicles, and collections of contemporary poems. When she and Ferdinand built the Church of San Juan de los Reyes, as a thanksgiving for their victory over the Portuguese at Toro, they also endowed the Convent attached to it with a library; while they took a deep interest in the foundation of the University of Alcalá de Henares, of which Ximenes de Cisneros laid the foundation stone in 1500, the building being finally open to students eight years later. Queen Isabel was then dead; but the glory of Alcalá may be said to radiate from her reign, which had seen a man of Cisneros’s intelligence appointed to the Archbishopric of Toledo, to use its wealthy revenues not like Alfonso Carrillo of old for violence or alchemy but for the furtherance of education and knowledge. Cisneros had been in Italy, and his scheme of endowment showed that for all his austerity he had not remained wholly uninfluenced by the spirit of the classical renaissance. Of the forty-two professorships at Alcalá, six were devoted to the study of Latin grammar, four to ancient languages, and four to rhetoric and philosophy. [Illustration: COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII. ] The Archbishop had once denounced the idea of an Arabic version of the Scriptures to Fra Fernando de Talavera as “pearls cast before swine”; but though he condemned the languages of his own day as a medium for Holy Writ, maintaining that ordinary people would through ignorance misinterpret truths to their souls’ damnation, yet the crowning work of his life was to be an edition of the Bible in the principal languages of the ancient world. Under his criticism and supervision the first Polyglot Bible was printed in 1517 a few months before his death; the Old Testament being printed in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Chaldean; the New Testament in Greek and the Vulgate of Saint Jerome. The errors of such a mighty work in that unscientific age were naturally many; but the mere fact of its production shows that the literary spirit was keenly alive. It was a triumph for Alcalá; and the name of the new university soon became famous in Europe.