León Cathedral

The year 916 was of great importance for the history of the Cathedral of Leon: King Ordoño II, who a few months earlier had occupied the throne of this city, he defeated the Arabs in the battle of San Esteban de Gormaz. "Grateful to God for the benefit he had just received," says Tudense, gave his royal palace in their classrooms for the first cathedral temple was erected. Everything happened under the episcopate of Fruminio II, who, "with the help of the faithful", transformed those spaces sacred place. Previously the king Ordoño, had been dedicated to thermal baths and other public buildings that Legio VII had built in the middle of the second century, when he set up his camp here, between the Torio and Bernesga rivers. Nothing remains of these primitive buildings, except for some remains of mosaics and ceramics tégulas, now exhibited at the Museum. Others, such as hypocausts, still under the cathedral site.

Following the Christian tradition of burying within the temples authority who embodied the "coming of God", that simple cathedral was enriched soon with the remains of King Ordoño, Zamora died in the year 924. In the epitaph on his grave, carved in the thirteenth century, the pious gratitude of the leonine people is perpetuated by "having given his royal chair episcopal see."

The temple was guarded and governed by monks of St. Benedict, and it is very likely that its structure was very similar to that of many other existing during Mozarabs Leon.Frame_imagen01

We speak the chronicles of step Almanzor for these lands at the end of the first millennium, devastating the city and destroying their temples. However, it appears that the damage to the factory of the Cathedral must be easily compensated, since the year 999 was crowned in it, in an event full of splendor, King Alfonso V. Following a succession of political upheavals and hard warlike companies, to the 1067 state of the Cathedral era of extreme poverty. This shock the King Ferdinand I, who, after transferring the remains of Saint Isidoro Leon, "turned in favor of the same". With this beneficent king and a peaceful era he began, reaping great triumphs in the expansion of the Christian kingdom. It was the time of flowering of Romanesque Isidorian.

With the help of Princess Urraca, sister of the King, the construction of a new building starts, in line with the aspirations of the Roman Christianity, and in its architectural style. He occupied the bishopric Pelayo II. When the architect Demetrio of the Rivers, between 1884 and 1888 excavated the basement of the cathedral to replace the pavement and cement the pillars, he found part of the walls and factory that second cathedral. Through the plane himself up, as we can see all configured in the Gothic: it was brick and masonry, with three ships finished off in semicircular apses, dedicated to St. Mary the center, as in the former church. Although all she be executed within international currents, contemplating what has survived of his statutory, we can figure that had its indigenous character, still used the horseshoe arch, at least as decoratively. It is known that was consecrated on November 10, 1073. It is assumed that it would work stonemasons they were doing in St. Isidore.

This cathedral remained standing until the end of the next century. He accedes to the throne when the last king of Leon, Alfonso IX, are witnessing in the city and in the kingdom to a major social change, of artistic creativity and cultural development.