About twenty miles to the east of Madrid lies the one-time glorious university city of Alcalá, famous above all things for having been the cradle of Cervantes, and the hearth, if not the home, of Cardinal Cisneros. Its history and its decadence are of the saddest; the latter serves in many respects as an adequate symbol of Spain's own tremendous downfall. [Illustration: SAN ISIDRO, MADRID] The Romans founded Alcalá; it was their Complutum, of which some few remains have been discovered in the vicinity of the modern city. Yet, notwithstanding this lack of substantial evidence, the inhabitants of the region still proudly call themselves Complutenses. When the West Goths were rulers of the peninsula, the Roman monuments must have been completely destroyed, for all traces of the strategic stronghold were effaced from the map of Spain. The invading Arabs, possessing to a certain degree both Roman military instinct and foresight, built a fortress on the spot where the State Archives Building stands to-day. This castle was used by them as one of Toledo's northern defences against the warlike Christian kings. In the twelfth century the fortress fell into the hands of the Christians; in the succeeding centuries it was strongly rebuilt by the cardinal-archbishops of Toledo, who used it both as their palace and as their stronghold. Outside the bastioned and turreted walls of the castle, the new-born city grew up under its protecting shadows. Known by the Arabic name of its fortress (Al-Kalá), it was successively baptized Alcalá de San Justo, Alcalá de Fenares, and since the sixteenth century, Alcalá de Henares (_heno_, old Spanish _feno_, meaning hay). Protected by such powerful arms as those of the princes of the Church, it grew up to be a second Toledo, a city of church spires and convent walls, but of which only a reduced number stand to-day to point back to the religious fervour of the middle ages. The world-spread fame acquired by Alcalá in the fifteenth century was due to the patronage of Cardinal Cisneros, who built the university, at one time one of the most celebrated in Europe, and to-day a mere skeleton of architectural beauty. The same prelate raised San Justo to a suffragan church; its chapter was composed only of learned professors of the university, as were also its canons; Leon X. gave it the enviable title of La Magistral, the Learned, which points it out as unique in the Christian world. The Polyglot Bible, published in the sixteenth century, and famous in all Europe, was worked out by these scholars under Cisneros's direction, and the favoured city outshone the newly built Madrid twenty miles away, and rivalled Salamanca in learning, and Toledo in worldly and religious splendour.