The only other great Gothic work in the city, after the cathedral, seems to be the church of San Juan de los Reyes,[249] which was erected by order of Ferdinand and Isabella, in A.D. 1476, to commemorate their victory in the battle of Toro over the King of Portugal. Nothing can be much more elaborate than much of the detail of this church, yet I have seen few buildings less pleasing or harmonious. It was erected in the age of heraldic achievements, and angels with coats of arms are crowded over the walls. There is a nave of four bays, a Cimborio or raised lantern at the Crossing, roofed with an octagonal vault with groined pendentives, quasi-transepts (they are in fact mere shallow square recesses), and a very short apsidal choir of five unequal sides. The western bay of the nave has a deep groined gallery, of the same age as the church, and in which are the stalls and organs, with two small ambons in its western balustrade: chapels are formed between the nave buttresses. Other ambons are placed at some height from the floor against the north-west and south-west piers of the Cimborio. The lantern on the outside is octagonal with pinnacles at the angles and a pierced parapet. The bald panelling of the external wall of the south transept is furnished with a ghastly kind of adornment in the chains with which Christians are said to have been confined by the Moors in Granada. The ruling idea of the interior of this church is evidently that which, unfortunately I think, is somewhat fashionable at the present day--the bringing of the altar forward among the people without reserve or protection. The removal of the Coro to the western gallery, the shallow recess in which the altar is placed, and the broad, unbroken area of the nave, are all evidences of this, and could only have been adopted when all desire to interest the people in any but the altar services had been given up, and with it that wholesome reverence which, in earlier days, had jealously guarded, fenced around, and screened these the holiest parts of holy buildings. A blue velvet canopy still hangs above the altar; it is a square tester, with hangings at the back and on either side. The velvet is marked with vertical lines of gold lace, and the eagle of St. John--the crest of Ferdinand and Isabella--is introduced in the embroidery. The pulpit was against one of the piers on the south side of the nave; the door into it is now stopped up, and another pulpit has been erected below the Gospel ambon. There is a gallery corbelled out from the clerestory, in front of one of the south windows, the use of which did not seem to be at all clear, unless, indeed, it was similar in object to such an example as the minstrels’ gallery at Exeter Cathedral.