The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

was a feminist and a lover of ceremony. When she came to Burgos she planned the building of Las Huelgas, which her husband resolved to create near the royal hospital for Jacobean pilgrims, as Alfonso the Wise tells us in one of the Cantigas de Santa María :

    E pois toumous a Castela
    De sí en Burgos moraba
    E un hospital facía
    El, e su moller labraba
    O Monasterio das Olgas.

    Walking up the road which is called ‘the path of the dead’ I reached the walls which enclose the entire monastery with its many buildings, its cloisters, its flower-garden and its wide meadow. The entrance called the Gate of Alfonso XI was created on the occasion of the marriage of that King in 1331 and passes through a tower where it is believed that Pedro I the Cruel was born. In later years, when the Abbess of Las Huelgas possessed civil and criminal jurisdiction, the tower was used as a prison—a grim entrance to an abode of peace, and even inside the open space of the compás the square tower of the church resembles a fortress, in spite of its open belfry. Through the eighteenth-century porch is a vestibule of Romanesque transitional style with pointed arches, which is called the Nave of the Knights, because in it lie the tombs of the Knights of the Ribbon and Cala-trava. Through the vestibule we pass into the church of St. Catherine by a door above which are the three golden seals with the carved image of the King on horseback.
    The transept and chapels and the claustrillos are earlier in style than the rest and were built, according to Miss King, in 1180-1215; and the nave and the great cloister about 1215-30. On the left of the nave lie sixteen royal tombs, some of them polychromed, others bas-relief; some Romanesque, others Mudejar in style. In 1942 and 1943 a commission was appointed by the Spanish Government to open these tombs, with the result that the Museum of Las Huelgas has become one of the richest in all Spain, owing to the jewels, crowns and priceless materials which had adorned the royal mummies. In the centre of the nave is the tomb of Sancho III, the father of Alfonso VIII the founder of the abbey, whose coffin was lined with an Arabian cloth full of inscriptions. Down each side of the nave lie the tombs of Infantes and Infantas belonging to the royal house.
    In the tomb of Alfonso el Sabio’s son, the Infante Don Fernando de la Cerda, the commission discovered a windfall, for it was one of the few not profaned during the Napoleonic invasion. Inside the tomb lay the pinewood coffin, on the lid of which was a cross of silver and several medallions of gold, and over it was spread two magnificent pieces of Persian brocade. The coffin itself was lined with Arabian silk and the mummified body of the Infante was clothed in a light green tunic, over which was draped a rich cloak' decorated with symbolic lions and castles and fastened at the neck by cordons and ribbons. Upon his head he wore a cap embroidered with the arms of Castile and.León in coral, gold and mother-of-pearl; his face was covered with a piece of green brocade and whereas his left arm was folded over his breast, in his right hand he held a mighty broadsword. On the third finger of the right hand he wore an elegant ring set with precious stones. Over his tunic lay the baldric of his sword ornamented from one end to the other with the shields of the Order of the Ribbon and the heraldic leopards of the arms of England. His feet were bare for all vestige of footwear had disappeared, but the spurs remained.
    Thus was the eldest son of Alfonso the Wise, Don Fernando de la Cerda, apparelled when he was buried in the very monastery, where on November 30, 1269, he had been married at thirteen years of age to Blanche, the daughter of St. Louis of France and Margaret of Provence. Only six years, alas, passed before he was laid in his tomb, and by his death the course of Spanish history was changed, for then began one of the great betrayals of history when his brother the Infante Sancho defied his father, turned his family, his friends and prelates against him, and drove the distracted King to seek aid from his enemies, saying with tragic realism in his letter to Alonso Ruiz de Guzmán: ‘If my sons are my enemies, no course is left to me but to make my enemies my friends.’
    After passing through the great cloister, which was built in the reign of Alfonso’s father, St. Ferdinand, and through labyrinthine passages with barrel-vaulted ceilings covered with