Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This ebook was produced from scanned images of public domain material at Internet Archive.) _THE_ CATHEDRALS OF NORTHERN SPAIN [Illustration: Bookcover] [Illustration: inside cover] _The Cathedral Series_ _The following, each 1 vol., library 12mo, cloth, gilt top, profusely illustrated. $2.50_ _The Cathedrals of Northern France BY FRANCIS MILTOUN_ _The Cathedrals of Southern France BY FRANCIS MILTOUN_ _The Cathedrals of England BY MARY J. TABER_ The following, each 1 vol., library 12mo, cloth, gilt top, profusely illustrated. Net, $2.00 _The Cathedrals and Churches of the Rhine BY FRANCIS MILTOUN_ _The Cathedrals of Northern Spain BY CHARLES RUDY_ _L. C. PAGE & COMPANY New England Building, Boston, Mass._ [Illustration: LEON CATHEDRAL (_See page 154_)] The Cathedrals of Northern Spain THEIR HISTORY AND THEIR ARCHITECTURE; TOGETHER WITH MUCH OF INTEREST CONCERNING THE BISHOPS, RULERS, AND OTHER PERSONAGES IDENTIFIED WITH THEM BY CHARLES RUDY Illustrated BOSTON L. C. PAGE & COMPANY MDCCCCVI _Copyright, 1905_ BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY (INCORPORATED) _All rights reserved_ Published October, 1905 _COLONIAL PRESS Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. Boston, U. S. A._ _TO ALL TRUE LOVERS OF SPAIN, OTHERWISE CALLED HISPANÓFILOS_ PREFACE It is _à la mode_ to write prefaces. Some of us write good ones, others bad, and most of us write neither good nor bad ones. The chapter entitled "General Remarks" is the real introduction to the book, so in these lines I shall pen a few words of self-introduction to such readers as belong to the class to whom I have dedicated this volume. My love for Spain is unbounded. As great as is my love for the people, so great also is my depreciation for those who have wronged her, being her sons. Who are they? They know that best themselves. Spain's architecture is both agreeable and disagreeable, but it is all of it peculiarly Spanish. A foreigner, dropping as by accident across the Pyrenees from France, can do nothing better than criticize all architectural monuments he meets with in a five days' journey across Spain with a Cook's ticket in his pocketbook. It is natural he should do so. Everything is so totally different from the pure (_sic_) styles he has learned to admire in France! But we who have lived years in Spain grow to like and admire just such complex compositions as the cathedrals of Toledo, of Santiago, and La Seo in Saragosse; we lose our narrow-mindedness, and fail to see why a pure Gothic or an Italian Renaissance should be better than an Iberian cathedral. As long as harmony exists between the different parts, all is well. The moment this harmony does not exist, our sense of the artistically beautiful is shocked--and the building is a bad one.