I need hardly say how much store was laid by the clergy of Santiago on their possession of the body of the Apostle. Mr. Ford[143] gives only too amusing, if it is, as I fear, only too true, a version of the story of the Saint’s remains. Suffice it here to say, that there no longer seem to be great pilgrimages to his shrine, and that even in Spain the old belief in the miracle-working power of his bones seems now practically to have died out.[144] Nothing could, however, have been stronger than the old faith in their patron, and the extreme wealth brought to the church by the pilgrimages made of old to his shrine from all parts of Europe would no doubt have involved the entire destruction of all remains of the early church, in order to its reconstruction on a far grander scale, had it not been destroyed, so far as possible, in the century after its erection, by the Moors under Almanzor. From the end of the tenth century I find no mention of the cathedral until the episcopate of Diego Gelmirez, in whose time Santiago was made an archbishopric. He was consecrated in the year 1100, and died in A.D. 1130, and the history of his archiepiscopate is given in great detail in the curious contemporary chronicle, the ‘Historia Compostellana.’[145] Here it is recorded that, in A.D. 1128, “forty-six years after the commencement of the new church of St. James,” the bishop, finding that the subordinate buildings were so poor that strangers absolutely “wandered about looking for where the cloisters and offices might be,” called his chapter together, and urged upon them the necessity of remedying so grave a defect, finishing his speech by the offer of a hundred marks of pure silver, thirty at once, and the rest at the end of a year.[146] This would put the commencement of the new cathedral in the year 1082, during the episcopate of Diego Pelaez, though, as will be seen, the same History elsewhere says that the church was commenced in A.D. 1178, a date which occurs also on the south transept door-jamb; and the works must have been carried on during the time of his successors, Pedro II. and Dalmatius (a monk of Cluny), to its completion under Gelmirez.[147] It was in the time of this bishop, in the year 1117, it is recorded in the Chronicle, that during a violent tumult in the city, in which both the bishop and queen hardly escaped alive, the cathedral was set on fire by the mob; but its construction is so nearly fireproof, that doubtless it was the furniture only that was really burnt; for, eleven years later, in A.D. 1128, the bishop, in his speech to the chapter, already mentioned, speaks of the church as being extremely beautiful, and, indeed, renowned for its beauty.[148] In A.D. 1124 two canons of Santiago were collecting money for the works at the cathedral, in Sicily and Apulia,[149] and the cloister, which was commenced in A.D. 1128, seems to have been still unfinished in A.D. 1134.[150] From this date until A.D.