Note 75 — Appendices
Reading edition
The treatment of distinguished craftsmen by the Spanish church was often sheerly villainous. A document, inserted by Zarco del Valle among his collection of Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de las Bellas Artes en España, p. 362, and in the handwriting of “Maestre” Domingo (see Vol. I., pp. 148, 149), states that after making the choir-reja for Toledo cathedral, “so richly wrought, that in the elegance and rarity thereof it far surpasseth all that has been witnessed in our time, whether in his majesty's dominions or abroad,” and expending on it “all the money I had earned in my youth,” this eminent rejero found himself by now “owing a great quantity of maravedis, seeing that I am utterly without resources,” concluding by an appeal to the archbishop to “take heed how that I shall not perish through such poverty, and my wife and children in the hospital.”
In another document the same artificer complains that in producing the aforesaid reja, he had sacrificed “not only my labour, but my property to boot, having been compelled to sell my house and my inheritance to compensate me for my losses,” adding that the cathedral authorities had violated their engagement with him.
In answer to a series of petitions such as this, the archbishop tardily gave orders for the payment to Domingo of a lump sum of fifteen thousand maravedis and a pension for the rest of his life of two silver reales of Castilian money, “to aid him to support himself.” This was in a.d. 1563. By 1565 death had ended the miseries of the master-craftsman, and again we find his widow and children knocking at the archbishop's door, pleading that “extreme is our necessity,” and declaring that Domingo had succumbed overburdened with debt, affirming on his deathbed that the cathedral owed him three thousand ducats, being half the value of a reja he had made.
In answer to this terrible appeal, the thrifty prelate ordered that since it was found to be true that Master Domingo had lost his maravedis in making the rejas of the choir, his widow and children should receive a daily pension of one real, and that a suit of clothes should be given to each of his sons and his two daughters.