Cisneros. The Founding Prelate of Civita Sapientiae

Abstract

Evangelina Muñoz Santos

Throughout the late medieval centuries, Alcalá de Henares, since its conquest from the Muslim domain of the peninsula by Alfonso VII (1018), was handed over as a town to the Archbishopric of Toledo, as a fief or manor with the title of town and its own laws. But the irruption of the city as a modern city and a university function was an endeavor of the Cardinal of Toledo, Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros, whose essential objective was to convert his "vicariate" of Alcalá de Henares into a complete Civita Dei, essentially dedicated to higher education and the formation of cadres of the Spanish Church.

With this goal, Cisneros reconverted the city inherited from predecessor archbishops into a model or city reference: programmed for that university and ecclesial function, from its local organization to the proposal of a rational urban model, which also responded to the cultural demands of humanism. Renaissance. The historical itinerary that the text proposes is a journey through the figure of exceptional stature of Cisneros as a Toledo cardinal, but also as a reformer and ruler, capable of imprinting his personal stamp on the city, directing its work and supervising the organization of teachings, administering and foresee their income and financial bases; to turn Alcalá into a key intellectual and patrimonial center (in which the Court and the center of Castilian monarchical power were located twice).

The Itinerary thus proposes key places and buildings of the Cisnerian, reformist, university, communication and government designs, which would extend and perfect the demonstrative function of Civita Sapientiae: without renouncing the advances and instrumentalities provided by the new currents such as that of the Humanism and its extensions to make Alcalá a new City of Knowledge. In his university and ecclesiastical city, he deposited his legacy and encrypted its symbology, which the students of his Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso would be in charge of perpetuating in various enclaves and ornamentation, resorting to effective urban messages and continuity of his memory that the Cisnerian Itinerary includes. in the common book of Complutense Itineraries.