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. 

The Castle of My Dreams

Castle and proprietor. Count on it.
All photos in this post 2019 Jessica Knauss 

In January 2006, I was studying very hard in Salamanca. I was also getting to know the public face of Manolo Garcia as I'd never had the opportunity to before, and loving every new thing I learned, about both Alfonso X el Sabio and Manolo Garcia.

That month, thirteen years ago, I dreamed I lived in a large structure with many staircases and bedrooms. This wonderful dwelling was filled with ten or twelve writers and artists, focusing on their creations and feeling inspired by their distraction-free but gorgeous surroundings. One unassuming but popular guest was Manolo Garcia. He would give impromptu creativity talks in chambers where everyone sat on sumptuous pillows, but mostly he created, like all the other artists. He stopped me on a staircase to thank me for inviting him to my artistically stimulating refuge from the obligations of daily life, saying it had been the best month of his life.

Since then, I've known exactly what I will do with all the money I'll earn from bestselling books and unexpected inheritances. I'm inspired to run an artists' colony where writers and all kinds of creatives can practice their art unencumbered in a spectacular setting.

Fast forward ten years, ten of the best years of my life because they included my marriage to Stanley. Poking around on the internet one day in late 2015, I found a castle for sale. A Spanish castle for sale. The asking price was five million euros, which doesn't seem outlandish to fulfill one's cherished life dream, but was far out out of my prospects.

I showed the listing to my soul mate and he was happy to find out it's in the same region as Frías, a gorgeous medieval wonderland we'd recently seen and where he said many times (jokingly) that we should go and live. The region is called the Merindades, and it's the hardscrabble mountain birth mother of Castile, and thus of Spain as we know it.

Specifically, my castle is located in Lezana de Mena. It's next door to the place where the word "Castile" was written down for the first time (that we know of). The first written notice of the castle is from 1397, and it was built a few years before that for the Angulo family, one of the important landowners in the region. The construction is solid and finished with perfection in every angle. Aside from the tower, which is the only thing visible in my photos here, it has a wall and other towers and some usable one-story buildings. It sits on 22,000 square meters of gardens with fruit trees, a stream, a little forest with three century-old oaks, and a large pond. (Perfect for rhinoceros grazing, but we'll think about that later.)

The price, to me, is further justified because it boasts state-of-the-art central heating; a heated swimming pool with geothermal technology, a wave generator, and spa jets; all new plumbing; double-glazed windows; a centralized vacuum cleaning system; satellite telephone system with Wi-Fi, TV in all rooms, and motion detectors in communal areas; five open fireplaces, three of which have inserted cassettes with hot air impellers with insulated stainless steel flues; solid oak beams and stairways; floors made of oak, chestnut, and northern pine; six bed chambers with on-suite bathrooms, two with walk-in wardrobes; three powder rooms; a library; a large refectory; public rooms; a kitchen; and an elevator!

And now the asking price has been reduced to less than three million euros!

This first week of January 2019, I had the chance to visit my castle for the first time, so of course I seized it! Driving north from Burgos, my friend and I were aghast at the constantly changing countryside. Just looking through the window filled me with gratitude. "If you like Castile," said my friend, "it doesn't get any more authentic than this!"

Passing by innumerable Romanesque churches and other castles I don't currently have plans to buy, weaving through the mountains, we at last came around a bend and my castle presented itself to me like a gift from Spain, the entity I've loved longest and hardest. It was apparent that the castle wasn't open to visits from tourists (But I'm not a tourist! I'm the future owner!) before we even parked.

The town surprised me with its lively atmosphere. It lacked the sense of desolation you get in a lot of towns on the Castilian plain, and felt welcoming. We had tea in the bar across from what looked like the castle's front gate, while I was champing at the bit to get outside and take photos and commune with my castle. The lady who made our tea gave us the low-down: Indeed, no one is allowed in the castle unless they intend to put their visit in a high-visibility publication or have documented ability to buy it. Even so, I didn't feel turned away. I had a strong sense of being in the right place, which is something I haven't felt in my life very often.

The castle passed into the Velasco family in the early fifteenth century, a time full of conflicts between nobles and uprisings at all levels. The Velascos had countless castles all over what is now northern Castile, claiming their territory and warning against any and all transgressions of authority. Wouldn't it be ideal to have an invasion of writers and artists in this beautiful space to encourage the sense of peace that now blankets this valley? 

Generous donations graciously accepted, serious investment queries gladly entertained. 

Cantigas in the Air

Yours truly with a facsimile of the Codice rico of the Cantigas de Santa Maria.
It's an enduring infatuation. 

What a year it's been! One of the most surprising accomplishments I can count in 2018 is that I took part in my second radio interview. Dr. Debra J. Bolton interviewed me about the beloved Cantigas de Santa Maria for her music-filled Christmas-day broadcast. As well as introducing me and my cantigas work in a flattering fashion, Dr. Bolton managed to make my responses to her questions seem coherent even though I was suffering from the vestiges of a cold and overwhelmed with the enthusiasm of thinking about these stories and their art and music.

Mostly it's a lovely show because of the variety of cantigas recordings you get to hear. I'm honored to have been a part of this celebration of multicultural wisdom and joy.

The show will be rebroadcast on December 30 at 9 a.m. United States Central Time. You can listen from anywhere via the High Plains Public Radio site.

If time zones are an issue for you like they are for me, check out the handy dandy Time Zone Converter. Tune into hppr.org at 9 a.m. on December 30 for hours of cantiga enjoyment.

Galician Romanesque, or Santiago and His Pilgrimage in La Coruña

The Church of Santiago under a typically cloudy La Coruña sky
All photos in this post 2018 Jessica Knauss 

I recently had the opportunity to visit La Coruña. I faced wind and rain (What did you expect? It's the coast of Galicia.) to investigate the Romanesque style at what was, in the European Middle Ages, the edge of the known world.

While in this seaworthy and fascinating corner of Spain, I learned about a Renaissance episode that drastically affected how we can appreciate La Coruña's medieval art. In 1589, the English besieged the city as a revenge for the Invincible Armada's attack in 1588. (Sore feelings even after soundly trouncing the Spanish navy and starting a long period of historical decline? How much reinforcement do you need, England?) The soldiers of La Coruña and its local citizens turned the English away, but before the siege, the city boasted five Romanesque churches and a monastery; when it was over, only two Romanesque churches remained in the city proper. (You can guess how I feel about his instance of history obliterating history.)

Santiago (Saint James the Apostle) is the oldest of the surviving church buildings, having been first constructed in the second half of the twelfth century in the same "Mateo" style as the Romanesque Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. The ground on which it stands has been hallowed for a very long time, perhaps as early as the tenth century.

This church was established as the beginning of the walking Camino (Santiago pilgrimage) for English pilgrims arriving in Galicia by sea. It was restored multiple times in the medieval era because of fire damage, which makes the structure a historical record in itself. Fortunately, the original apse area, as we see here, survived to display the particularities of Galician Romanesque for visitors today.

The outside of the apse has many delightful corbels. Here, a bearded man and a man pulling at his mouth. 

Here, many different realistic animals, a miniature bestiary.

This building embodied the bond between the medieval Church and State. As late as 1521, this church had two towers: the surviving one here (this version constructed in 1607) with the bells and clock, and a second one that held munitions, archives, and other city government items the town hall didn't have room for. For more than one hundred years from the fourteenth century, the temple also served as the city council's meeting place.

The shortest street in La Coruña is found between Santiago's tower and the old consulate building, which has a Renaissance coat of arms and interesting Romanesque Resurrection, both taken from other, unknown sites. 

The first thing I noticed about this lovely north doorway is that the door itself is square, as in other churches, but the door jamb has extra symmetrical decorative elements, giving the top an indented look I found repeated in the other two Romanesque churches I saw in La Coruña. The indentations are oxen heads, which in close proximity to the Lamb of God in the archway, represent the triumph of Good over Evil. The archway is better preserved than most other areas of this church and features many attractive flowers as well as the Lamb, both much in the "Mateo" style.

The front entrance displays features from different medieval styles, as well as evidence of where the other tower used to be. The pointed main arch and rose window are from the end of the fourteenth century, but still copy the much venerated "Mateo" style. Christ shows his wounds at the arch's apex, and the interior of the arch and the rain ledge are resplendent with seated angels.

It's only natural that the church of Santiago should sport an image of that saint at its entrance. However, the vast empty space around the horseman and the modern look of his boots are sure signs that something else originally occupied the space where Santiago now gallops in search of Moors to slay. This figure is indeed later than anything else we've seen so far, from the sixteenth century. His metal sword has had time to turn green in the Galician weather, giving him a lightsaber-y pizzazz.

A Gothic-style tomb has been cut out of the front wall.

On this side, the magnificent although eroded column capitals show twisting dragons (the Devil), an angel, and a scene that was popular in Romanesque times, Daniel in the lions' den. Although Daniel himself is mostly missing, four lions and the figure of Habakkuk accompanied by an angel make it unmistakable.

The plant-themed column capitals on the other side are finished off with a story that's not often seen in Galicia, but this blog's readers have seen before, also closely associated with Daniel in the lions' den: the sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham wields a sword, which an angel takes hold of to stop him turning toward Isaac, crouched and tied up behind him. Between the angel and Abraham, the sacrificial lamb ready to replace Isaac on the altar saves his life. 

On both sides of the door, angels with scrolls create that signature Coruñan shape. Below them, we have additional figures, elongating the indentations. These have both been carved in a Gothic style that harks back to "Mateo" to beautiful effect. The figure on the left is Santiago, bearded and with a pilgrim's walking stick. The younger beardless man on the right is probably Saint John, pointing to the gospel he wrote. A closer look reveals that his head has been replaced, as the angle is slightly uncomfortable and the stone a different color. As it still successfully copies the "Mateo" style, albeit with Gothic waves in his hair, it was probably replaced no later than the fifteenth century. 

From the inside, Santiago and John appear to float over the street even as they guard the entrance. 

Gazing toward the main altar, Santiago reminded me of San Cipriano in my Zamora. Like that temple, it used to have three parallel naves that were turned into a single large nave in Gothic times to create the sense of spaciousness so favored in that artistic period. 

The church features many seventeenth-century burials, of which this is the most striking example. This noble lady and her husband are portrayed as praying figures, both with their heads turned drastically to face the altar of their devotion. 

This life-sized Saint James survived the medieval fires in the apse and has been moved to the foot of the church, where I stand for perspective. I'd seen a photo of this image before I arrived, and was pleasantly surprised by the presence it exuded because of its size. 

The stained glass in the rose windows was placed at the turn of the twentieth century but blends in harmoniously with the medieval architecture.

In the well-preserved side chapel, a figure of the Virgin Mary, pregnant with the Son of God, is venerated. Such figures are often called Our Lady of the O, because of the surprised reaction they illicit. 

Lest we forget the whole point of this building, these column capitals remind us of Santiago and his pilgrimage with the symbolic shell.

Santiago is a well-lit place to hang out in the evening. 

The blogs Galicia Pueblo a Pueblo and Aquivoltas.com were essential resources for this post.

Seven Noble Knights in Search of a Home, Again

Seven Noble Knights will always belong in Salas de los Infantes... 

The steps between completing an excellent novel and becoming a published author can be painful and confusing, and frankly, most authors would rather skip them and get to "the good parts." The ones I'm thinking of include researching and querying agents and publishers, receiving multitudes of unhelpful rejections or brushoffs, wading through contracts, and waiting, waiting, waiting.

In the case of my Seven Noble Knights, I experienced all of the above plus an evisceration that ended up vastly helpful to the complete rewrite of the beginning of the novel.

When Seven Noble Knights was accepted for publication, it felt like my writerly dream come true--with all of the trepidation something like that can cause. (I read somewhere that writing long fiction is the most cognitively complex task known to brain researchers. Input from all directions! Is it any wonder that every moment of a writer's life is fraught with mixed feelings? This is not a profession for wimps.)

It turned out to be a long journey from acceptance to publication. I'm thinking about this now because this week, my contract with Bagwyn Books has been terminated and I've received the publishing rights back. Which is to say, Seven Noble Knights is again an unpublished manuscript.

The contract came to an amicable end based on mutually recognized issues at Bagwyn that have nothing to do with my novel. I'm pleased to have the rights back under auspicious circumstances. All the options are open, which is ideal and also scary.

It also feels like starting over, but it's really not. Seven Noble Knights has already debuted to critical praise from the Historical Novel Review and thrilled at least two book clubs. I fulfilled my dream of giving a reading and doing a signing at the Harvard Book Store. Seven Noble Knights has rubbed elbows with the Book Doctors, countless luminaries at the Historical Novel Society Conference and the Tin House Summer Workshop, and was the focal point of a lightning-fast radio interview.

My options include researching and approaching more agents and/or publishers, or redoing the launch and publishing myself, or letting it rest for a while until the time is right. I'll definitely consult with a few of my writer friends who have gone through something similar (rights reversion is not uncommon in the volatile publishing industry) before I make a final decision.

So there you have it. Seven Noble Knights will soon be unavailable for purchase. It's an end that promises an even brighter beginning.

Hold onto your bloody cucumbers! Great things are on their way!

UPDATE: Seven Noble Knights will be available wherever fine books are sold (particularly here) from Encircle Publications December 11, 2020!