SANTA CREUS

Santa Creus is the sister foundation of Poblet from which it is distant about five leagues. It was also founded by Ramon Berenguer IV. and belonged to the Cistercian Order. Not so large as Poblet, this abbey of the Holy Crosses is equally severe and chaste, and of the two, is distinguished more by its artistic harmony. The church is one of the most finished works of the age and style. Its front is discovered immediately on entering the monastery, raised on a terrace above the long and spacious court round which are grouped the conventual buildings. The battlements above the façade are a recent and incongruous addition. The west porch is finely moulded and chiselled, and with the rich foliage of the capitals creates a good impression. Another door, symmetrical and elegant, leads into a cloister on the south side of the church and was at one time flanked by the statues of Don Jaime II. and his wife Blanca. The wall on this side bears an inscription to Bernard Ranc, which is assumed to be the name of the architect. The church was begun in the year 1174, and opened to public worship in 1211. It preserves its altar, on which the light falls through a rose-window in the apse. The principal objects of interest in the interior are the noble tomb of Don Pedro the Great (who defeated the French and bound Sicily to the throne of Aragon) and of Jaime II., who conquered Sardinia and harried the Moors of Granada. King Pedro’s tomb consists of a great porphyry urn supported by lions, which is believed to have been taken from the infidels; and on this rests the stone coffin carved with figures in high relief under pinnacled canopies. The tomb is covered by a beautiful stone baldachin, with three traceried circles on each side upheld by slender columns with elaborately carved capitals. The tomb of Don Jaime is on the same plan, but is further adorned by the effigies of the king and queen in the Cistercian habit, placed here, it seems likely, long after the completion of the rest of the work. The tomb was designed by Bertran Riquer, the architect of the royal palace of Barcelona.

The church communicates with a spacious cloister with four sides of seven bays, built at the beginning of the fourteenth century by order of Queen Blanca. The traceries of the windows remaining here and there are late Gothic, and contrast oddly with the severe lines and rude capitals of the shafts. As at Poblet, in a corner of the cloister is a hexagonal chamber said to have been a lavatory. A great number of persons of distinction seem to have been buried in this cloister, in attendance, one might say, upon their lords within the church. Among these was the knight Queralt, who may been seen in effigy in a suit of fine mail, with surcoat and greaves and girt with two-handed sword. Some of the figures of divine persons to be seen over the tombs were evidently carved by late fourteenth-century sculptors.

Here, as at Poblet, the Kings of Aragon had their habitations in life as in death, and the courts of the ruined palaces of Don Pedro and Don Jaime still bear some traces of the glory and culture of the greatest maritime power of the Mediterranean of a bygone age.