The Forgotten Royal Pantheon: Oña

Oña
Photos in this post 2019 Jessica Knauss  

The area where my castle is, the Merindades, surprises again and again with its exceptional natural beauty and historical value. The same day we visited my castle, my friend and I returned to Burgos via Oña, a place of old glory I'd hardly ever heard about, in spite of how pertinent it turned out to be to my historical and novel-writing interests.

We pulled into a parking lot near the old train station and found a quaint place to have our midday meal before taking a personal guided tour--what a luxury! We got to ask questions about what interested us and look at all the wonders at our own pace. The drawback for this blog is that no photos were allowed. I haven't found anything usable online, either, so we'll have to make do with my exterior and cloister shots and your readerly imagination.

As I mentioned in my castle post, the Merindades area was the forge of the Castilian character, the ancestral home of modern Spain. Oña in particular was staggeringly important throughout the Middle Ages, and for that reason, it's a melting pot of architectural styles that is fun to study and untangle. 

As readers of Seven Noble Knights will know, before Castile was a kingdom, it was a semi-independent county of León, and history honors four Counts of Castile. The third such count, Sancho García (the son of Count García of Seven Noble Knights fame) established the double monastery (both monks and nuns) at Oña in 1011 so that his daughter, Tigridia, could be the abbess. The area was particularly strategic in holding the Castilian border against half-amicable Navarrese encroachment. In 1033 it became a monks-only monastery under the Benedictine rule, and enjoyed prosperity and kept the most records of any medieval monastery in northern Spain until the State seized all Church property to balance the budget. Oña was sold off in two parcels in 1836. The area with the monks' dorms and living areas, library, and fish hatchery has since then been used as a Jesuit school, but now stands empty. We were only able to visit the sanctuary and cloister. 

Looking down on the Plaza Mayor of Oña from the monastery 

Our guide waits for the right moment to start our tour. 

The bell gable was the last element to be added, in the nineteenth century,
after the Romanesque tower fell.  

The gate was part of a defensive city wall

erected in the fourteenth century. The statuettes 

are portraits of the royals buried inside. 

Tigridia became a saint during her time here as abbess. We admired a Baroque altar with her casket, then a recently revealed lineal Gothic mural depicting the entire life of St. Mary the Egyptian, a stunning Romanesque-Gothic transition Crucifixion surrounded by a gorgeous Flemish-Spanish fifteenth-century altar, and two Romanesque capitals up so high I couldn't tell what they represented, complete with original paint. I won't complain anymore about high-up Romanesque capitals because I'm taking a course in Romanesque symbolism. Now I know that height was just as important to Romanesque artists for looking up toward God as it was for Gothic artists. They just went about it in diametrically different ways.

The statuettes make the pantheon the first aspect the visitor encounters at the monastery. 

Another important resident here was Fray Pedro Ponce de León. He arrived in 1536 and took on the education of two noble children who had been deaf from birth. He is credited with creating the precursor of sign language.

The door is Romanesque-Gothic transition, but the windows are fully Romanesque. 

After my friend and I admired a well-preserved Baroque organ and an extraordinary Gothic choir carved from walnut by the monks themselves, we got an eyeful of the main altar and the royal pantheon to either side of it.

The Gothic cloister 

The main altar consists of a tall, frothy Baroque tabernacle of gold curlicues surrounding the sixteenth-century gold, silver, and gemstone (probably glass pieces) casket of Saint Íñigo, one of  the first and strictest abbots of the monastery. My friend thought we could easily buy my castle with the gold and silver in the casket alone, and he may be right.

But the pantheon is where it's at. Oña was always a place of noble burials, and they think the entryway between the gate and the door may have served as the first cemetery. The remains were transferred to the Chapel of the Virgin by order of Sancho IV (son of Alfonso X) in 1285. By the late fifteenth century, even this was deemed inadequate, and the remains were moved to flank the main altar and new tombs constructed.

Tomb of a twelfth-century nobleman of La Bureba in the Gothic cloister 

The "new" royal tombs stand out because they aren't made of stone, but of walnut and boxwood. Their wooden tabernacles are smooth extensions of the Gothic traceries of the choir seating, and luxuriously carved and embossed tombs are surrounded by Flemish-Spanish paintings. On the left, four royal tombs, and on the right, four tombs of counts and other royals. The organization and setting give the impression of utmost respect if not adoration of these historical figures by the people who made the tombs. A sense of plenitude and perfection filled the area.

The Renaissance tomb of Bishop Pedro Gonzalez Manso (d. 1539) in the cloister
is backed with a Romanesque grille. 

On the royal side, we find the tomb of Sancho II, whose body was brought here personally by his devoted vassal, El Cid. This king was famously assassinated in Zamora in 1072. Next to Sancho II, we find Sancho III of Navarra (d. 1035), probably the most important and influential king of that small country. Next to Sancho III rests his wife and queen, Mayor. Finally, we contemplate the tomb of Prince García, son of Alfonso VII of Castile. The lad was studying at the monastery when he passed away at the age of 8.

Cloisters achieve a sense of upward pull by planting trees. 

The count side is full of people I want to write novels about. First, the third Count of Castile, Sancho García. As I mentioned, he's the son of Count García in Seven Noble Knights, and in 1002, Sancho defeated the mighty Almanzor (who also appears in Seven Noble Knights) at Calatañazor, as well as founding this monastery. Sancho will have a few important things to do in the sequel to Seven Noble Knights, if I ever get to write it! Next to him rests his wife, Countess Urraca.

Next to his mother lies Prince García, who was the fourth and last Count of Castile. His story is part of the foundation of the Kingdom of Castile, and I've been dreaming of writing a separate novel about him. I wish I could describe how much it meant to me to be in the presence of the tombs of the people whose stories I want so much to tell. 

The final tomb holds the remains of two of Sancho IV's children. 

The sacristy is a rococo museum with the biggest drawers I believe I will ever see for the monks to put their robes in without folding, and the inestimable treasure of the funeral robes of Sancho García. These consist of linen embroidered with silk and 21-karat gold threads in Muslim Córdoba nearly one hundred years before the count's death. This was the finest fabric money could buy a thousand years ago, and I have to say, modern machines can't do better. 

The chapter house had marvelous Romanesque archways with original paint and a display of column capitals I'm always willing to spend a few minutes with. 

After enjoying the Gothic cloister, we found a lovely book full of photos and history at the gift stand near the exit, only to find out that the author had been our tour guide! As we headed down the steps to the tourism office to get his authorial signature, I realized my watch wasn't attached to my wrist. It's not an expensive watch, but I bought it while I was studying in Salamanca, around the time I dreamed I had an artists' colony in a Spanish castle, and it's been with me every day for thirteen years. I marveled that I should lose such an item in this historical place. 

After our guide signed the book we'd just bought, he called the monastery and told my friend and me they would let us back in to look around. So we got two visits for the price of one! It was hard to look at the floor with so many medieval artistic wonders higher up. We felt strongly that we would've heard the watch hit the hard flooring throughout most of the complex. Only one place lacked the hard floor--the cloister, where the burbling fountain might also have impeded our noticing anything amiss. That's where we found it. The thirteen-year legacy of my Salamancan watch will continue, hopefully for another thirteen years or more. 

I had the clasp tightened at a watch repair store the next day. 

Seeking Queen Violante

Lords of all we survey at the top of Allariz
All photos in this post 2018 Jessica Knauss unless otherwise specified. 

"I didn't even know Alfonso X had a wife," said a Spanish friend of mine the other day.

Of course he had a wife—he was the king and needed legitimate heirs. But while Alfonso X, one of the obsessions of my life, is known to everyone in modern Spain, you don't hear much about his bride, Violante.

While I was studying for my PhD, I heard of a famous scholar of Spanish history who thought of writing Violante's biography. He soon learned why none exists: there just isn't enough information about her to fill a book.

"The Castle," a rocky outcrop at the top of Allariz 

Violante (a modernized version of this name is Yolanda) was a princess of Aragón, daughter of Jaume the Conqueror and Violante of Hungary. Some sources claim that she married Alfonso when she was only ten years old. Papers were drawn up in 1246, and there may even have been a ceremony, but the marriage was probably not consummated until after she had her first menses.

The lack of information about Violante in a court where it seemed everything was written down, and the existence of two or three bastard-providing lovers of the king, have led some scholars to believe that the marriage was not happy. However, Violante and Alfonso had eleven children together, a number that seems above and beyond strict duty.

Violante in a thirteenth-century manuscript, Tumbo de Touxos Outos.
Another presumed portrait, from the Libro de ajedrez, is in this blog's banner.
Wikimedia Commons 

The most lovely evidence that the marriage had tenderness and strength appears in the Cantigas de Santa Maria. Cantiga 345 is full of politics and war, but in the pertinent lines, King Alfonso has a dream that wakes him up. He turns to Queen Violante, who is in the bed next to him, exactly where a beloved spouse should be. Would the Cantigas composers mention this detail if it were false? What reason could they have to make up something like that? What's more, when Alfonso describes his dream to his bedmate, she responds that she's had the same dream. The same dream! That kind of thing is soulmate territory. The king and queen stay together, taking necessary action and celebrating the happy results together, through to the end of the song.

I knew only two other facts about Queen Violante.

One, during the emotionally taxing confusion over who should inherit the kingdom when Alfonso's and Violante's firstborn son was killed in battle in 1275, the queen fled back to Aragón with her two young grandchildren, who stood to gain under Alfonso X's new laws. She eventually returned to court and must've made some kind of peace with her husband and second son, although nothing much more is said about her.

Typical Galician grain storage at the entrance to Allariz

Second, she survived Alfonso X by many years. He died in 1284 and Violante passed away in 1300. The main event recorded about her widowhood was that she founded a convent in the town of Allariz in what is now the province of Ourense in the region of Galicia.

I imagined Violante living out her days in the rainy gray weather of Celtic Galicia. For my birthday this year, I wanted to see the place where my fellow widow lived in constant sorrow after the love of her life left her all alone in the world.

Allariz's Praza Maior features the Romanesque
Church of Santiago, which Violante probably visited. 

I've had help and company for many of my travels over the past year, for which I'm keenly grateful. But this trip had to be solo. All told, I spent more than two hours my first day in the capital of Ourense researching how to get to Allariz and back without my own car and what to see once I got there. I mention this because the character of any travel is influenced not by the destination, but by the journey.

I imagined Violante felt lonely even surrounded by a royal retinue when coming to settle in this green land. Although I was taking taxis, city buses, and intercity buses just as alone, I did it with a sense of accomplishment I could never have achieved from my shotgun position in a friend's car. Those bus rides were, in a way, the culmination of all my years of studying the Spanish language and the history of Spain.

The Galician flag blends in with the Galician sky at the top of Allariz 

I arrived in Allariz—a big spa town, as it happened—before the convent museum was open, so I headed to what the locals call "The Castle." It was a huge rocky mound with no man-made structures except for a white and blue flag of the region of Galicia that waved stiffly in the strong breezes.

I felt like a queen at the top of that rock, looking down at valleys, so many green trees, and roads and houses. Would this have been enough after thirty-two years as the queen of an entire dynamic country? I inhaled the clear air, cool the way August mornings can be with their powerful gusts, and thought that yes, it could be plenty. I recognized the influence of my departed husband in that assessment, and wondered if Violante would ever have agreed.

Convent of Santa Clara, Allariz 

That's why I made this trip: to learn more about Violante. The convent museum was just opening as I got there. It's enormous... and not very medieval.

Violante founded the convent in 1286 with her son, King Sancho IV, and decided to be buried here, but precisely because it was a royal convent, it had plenty of money to do complete overhauls with changing architectural tastes, and almost nothing of the original convent survives. A fire in the eighteenth century obliterated most of what would've been recognizably Gothic. This convent has the largest cloister in Galicia, but no visits are allowed.

Santa Clara with the Church of San Benito 

I scoured the convent museum in search of what I'd come looking for. Many reliquaries and liturgical items were of fine artistic quality, but Baroque. Even the Gothic artwork on display was from after Violante's time. Then, in a room all by itself, this:

The Virgen Abridera (opening Virgin) was made in the thirteenth century from a single elephant tusk (not okay to do today—don't even think about it), at the behest of Queen Violante. When closed, it looks like a finely carved ivory of a Virgin and Child in the cheerful Gothic style of the thirteenth century.

Opened, it becomes a triptych showing Jesus's birth, his Ascension to Heaven, and how Mary was made the Queen of Heaven by her son.

The Nativity scene is flanked by an Annunciation in two parts, with Gabriel on the left and the Virgin on the right. On the left of the Ascension, the angel announces Jesus's Resurrection at the tomb, and on the right, Jesus appears as the Holy Spirit to the Apostles. Mary's coronation is flanked by angels holding candles.

The fine details, the remains of medieval paint, and the craftsmanship in the hingework display the highest quality and remind me of my favorite Gothic art, the illustrations of the Cantigas de Santa Maria.

The back of the sculpture shows how Mary's body adjusts to the curve of the tusk out of which she was carved.

This closeup of the right side shows its 3-D, wedge shape.

This sculpture had incredible presence. It told all its stories with joy and loving care. Through the ages, anyone who really looked at this ivory has probably been moved in a positive way. In the absence of many facts about Violante's life, I got a visceral feeling for her personality by appreciating one of her possessions.

The opening Virgin also seemed to me an apt metaphor for where I am with widowhood: It rips you open. What you find inside determines the quality of the rest of your life.

Neoclassical fountain in the convent plaza, Allariz 

Most importantly, in Allariz I learned that the widowed queen did not stay at this convent for the rest of her life, the way I'd assumed. She lived where she was likely happiest, her home in Aragón. She was returning from a pilgrimage to Rome when she died in the Pyrenees mountain pass of Roncesvalles.

Good for her. Not shutting herself away, but going where she wanted and living in a way that brought her happiness? That's a widowhood example to follow.

Oviedo: Medieval Paint and Alfonso II's Religio-Political Statement

San Julián de los Prados, Oviedo
All photos in this post 2017 Jessica Knauss 

Oviedo was a hugely important urban center in the early Middle Ages, a focal point for the largely rural Kingdom of Asturias, which was the first area to be "reconquered" after Moorish domination began in 711. I was thrilled to visit it for the first time last November.

San Julián de los Prados is a pre-Romanesque gem of a church one kilometer from Oviedo's urban center. I trudged through the traffic and the rain in the cold of the early morning, suffering with my first cold of the season but determined to make my trip to Oviedo all about the early Middle Ages.

On the side of a highway, nothing much distinguishes San Julián from this side, but if you look closely, you can see the messy-looking but super skilled bricklaying technique and the archway characteristic of the first half of the ninth century, the reign of Alfonso II.

Alfonso II, known as the Chaste, also founded Oviedo Cathedral and was the first to make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela from here.

On the side closest to the highway, this gorgeous stone jalousie window let in latticed sunlight in a very particular spot we'll glimpse below.

The back of San Julián, with its surprising view back to Oviedo's cathedral tower, is obviously pre-Romanesque, with its three-part window and the smaller, lovely jalousies.

The architects and artists of the ninth century didn't value uniformity. If someone ordered three windows, the craftsmen made each one beautifully different.

They don't let you take pictures inside, but I risked who knows what kind of admonishment or banishment with my silent, flash-free camera because this interior must be seen. They said it had original painting in it, but I was not prepared for the floor-to-ceiling glory of what was inside. Geometric shapes and a celestial cityscape, complete with chambers and bed linens, and color, color, color! They found these paintings underneath layers of lime-and-chalk (later centuries' hygiene methods, they said). My photos aren't exactly professional, but when you're in San Julián, you only have to use a little imagination to place yourself back in the ninth century, in contrast to most other medieval sites, where you have to use all your imagination and still can't picture it.

Here we see the side of the largest part of the church, where the less noble folk would've gathered to hear mass--basically the peanut gallery. It's not the most impressive spot, but it's still an eyeful. 

This is the other side of the large window we see from the outside above. It's to the right side of the main altar. I wish the pictures did it more justice. I stood there dumbfounded, looked and looked, and found myself incapable of taking it all in. Is that the same impression ninth-century worshippers would've had as they stood there smelling incense and listening to Latin speech and song? 

This gallery is to the left side of the main altar. The archway in front separates this area from the main congregation area, and nobles would've had spaces reserved for them here.

See the indentations in the wall above the bench and doorway? That's where the king's box would've been. It's across from the large jalousie window, which is placed exactly so that during mass, the sun shines through it with full brightness. (That's partially why there's less paint surviving on this wall.)

After all the people were settled and ready for mass, Alfonso II would appear on this balcony in his finest robes, embroidered with cloth of gold and decked out in all the jewels of the realm, surrounded by images of the celestial city, and the sun would create a spectacular scene of jaw-dropping splendor.

This was Alfonso II's public service announcement, a proclamation that he was indeed the chosen intermediary between God and the people.

I staggered out of San Julián, overwhelmed with the aliveness of history. I later learned that the three-part window in back is the only hint of a secret chamber destined for who knows what purpose.

This was only the beginning of the mind-blowing experiences for a medievalist in Oviedo.