My notice of these various works has been, as it were, only the preface to the real glory of Toledo; for interesting and unique as some of them, and strange and novel as all of them are, there is a higher value and a greater charm about the noble metropolitan church of Spain than about any of them: a charm not due only to its religious and historical associations, but resulting just as much from its own intrinsic beauty as an example of the pure vigorous Gothic of the thirteenth century, such as when I left France on my first Spanish journey I supposed I should not see again till my eyes rested once more on Chartres, Notre Dame, Paris, or Amiens! Here, however, we have a church which is the equal in some respects of any of the great French churches; and I hardly know how to express my astonishment that such a building should be so little known, and that it should have been so insufficiently if not wrongly described whenever any attempt at a description has been made by English travellers who have visited it. The cathedral is said to have occupied the present site before the capture of the city by the Moors.[225] They converted it into a mosque, and in course of time enlarged and adorned it greatly. At the capitulation to Alonso VI., in 1085, it was agreed that the Moors should still retain it; but this agreement was respected for a few months only, when the Christians, without the consent of the king, took it forcibly from them and had it consecrated as their cathedral.[226] Of this building nothing remains. The first stone of the new cathedral was laid with great ceremony by the king Don Fernando III., assisted by the Archbishop, on the 14th of August, A.D. 1227;[227] and from that time to the end of the seventeenth century additions to and alterations of the original fabric seem to have been constantly in hand. The cathedral is built east and west, “according to the universal tradition of the Church,” says Blas Ortiz, forgetting apparently that this is no tradition of the Roman Church. I think it is always attended to in Spain, save in cities like Barcelona, where the commercial intercourse with Italy perhaps introduced the Italian tradition. The feeling about the Orientation of churches was stronger among the English and Germans than anywhere else, and possibly the Spanish tradition dates from the time of the Visigothic kings. It was the same king who laid the first stone of Burgos Cathedral in 1221, and it will be remembered that Maurice, the then Bishop of Burgos, is said to have been an Englishman, and had been Archdeacon of Toledo. Ferdinand’s first wife was a daughter of the Duke of Suabia, his second a Frenchwoman. The name of the architect was preserved on his epitaph, which I copy from Blas Ortiz:--