ALCALA DE HENARES

This article appears in Volume V01, Page 517 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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ALCALA DE HENARES , a town of Spain, in the province of Madrid, 17 M. E.N.E, of Madrid, on the river Henares, and the Madrid-

Saragossa

railway. Pop. (1900) 11,206. Alcala de Henares contains a military

academy

ACADEMY, GREEK
ACADEMY, ROYAL

and various public institutions, but its commercial importance is slight and its main

interest

INTEREST

is historical. The town has been identified with the Roman Complutum, which was destroyed about. the year woo, and was rebuilt by the Moors in ro83. In later times it was renowned for its richly endowed university, founded by Cardinal Jimenes de Cisneros in 1510, which at the height of its prosperity numbered 12,000 students, and was second only to that of Salamanca. Here the famous edition of the Bible known as the Complutensian Polyglot was prepared from 1514 to 1517. The college of San Ildefonso, completed in 1583, was the

chief

CHIEF (from Fr. chef, head, Lat. caput)

university building. Its modernized

Gothic

GOTHIC

church, the Colegiata, contains the 16th century marble

monument

MONUMENT (Lat. monumentum or monumentum; from monere, to advise, bring to mind, remind; the German equivalent is Denkmal)

of Jimenes (d. 1517) and a fine reredos. The greatest of Spanish writers, Cervantes, was born at Alcala de Henares, and baptized in the otherwise insignificant church of S. Maria on the 9th of October 1547. A tablet, set up in 184o, marks the

house

HOUSE
HOUSE (O. Eng. hiss, a word common to Teutonic languages, cf. Dut. huis, Ger. Haus; in
Gothic
- GOTHIC
it is only found in gudhiss, a temple; it may be ultimately connected with the root of " hide," conceal)

in which he is said to have been born. Other illustrious natives of the town were the emperor Ferdinand I. (1503-1564) and the Spanish dramatist and historian Antonio de

Solis

SOLIS, ANTONIO DE (1610-16S6)

(1610-1686). After the removal of the university to Madrid in 1836 the town rapidly declined, and the government turned most of the principal buildings erected by Cardinal Jimenes in the 16th century into a depot for the archives of various state departments. Here are'kept very complete and curious documents of the

Inquisition

INQUISITION, THE (Lat. inquisitio, an inquiry)

, showing all its workings from the 15th to the 19th century. One of the principal libraries is the former palace of the archbishops of Toledo.
For a fuller description of Alcala see the Guia del viajero en Alcala de Henares, by L. A. de la Torre (Alcala, 1882). The following works are mainly of historical

interest

INTEREST

:M. de Ayala and F. Sastre, Alcald de Henares (Madrid, 189o) ; J. C. Garcia, Ensayo de una Tipografia Complutense (Madrid, 1889) ; M. Portilla y Esquivel, Historia de la ciudad de Compluto (Alcala, 17251728); and the Annales Cgmplutenses " and " Chronicon Complutense " in Espana Sagrada, by H.

Florez

FLOREZ, ENRIQUE (1701-1773)

and others (Madrid, 17541899).

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