Tudela

(TUTELÆ, TUTELENSIS).

Diocese in Spain. The episcopal city has a population of 9213. Tudela was taken from the Moors by Alfonso el Batallador (the Fighter) in March, 1115, and in 1117 he obtained the Fuero de Sobrarbe. In 1121 the king gave the mosque and the tithes of several towns to the prior and ecclesiastical chapter of Tudela and built the Church of Santa María, where a community of Canons Regular of St. Augustine was established, the ecclesiastical authority of Tudela being vested in its abbot and prior. In 1238 the priory was raised to the dignity of a deanery, the first dean being D. Pedro Jiménez and the second D. Lope Arcez de Alcoz. The latter obtained from Alexander IV in 1258 the ring and mitre. In the sixteenth century the deans of Tudela obtained the use of "pontificalia", a favour granted by Julius II to the dean D. Pedro Villalón de Calcena who had been his chamberlain and who held the deanship for twenty-seven years. The rivalry between the deans of Tudela and the bishops of Tarazona and the dissatisfaction of the kings owing to the fact that until 1749 the appointment of the dean was not subject to the royal patronage, a fact finally accomplished in 1749, induced the Council and the Royal Chamber to petition for the erection of Tudela into a diocese, which was done by Pius VI in the Bull of 27 March, 1783. The first bishop was D. Francisco Ramón de Larumbe (1784). He was succeeded (1797) by D. Simón de Casaviella López del Castillo, who during the war of independence saved Tudela from severe measures of retaliation ordered by the French general Lefèvre. The third bishop was D. Juan Ramon Santos de Larumbe y Larrayoz (1817), and the fourth and last D. Ramón María Azpetitia Saenz de Santa María (1819), who founded the Seminary of Santa Ana in a former house of the Jesuits. The seminary was re-established in 1846 in a former Carmelite convent. The last bishop died at Viana on 30 June, 1844.

The Concordat of 1851 suppressed this diocese, since which time it has been administered by the bishops of Tarazona on whom the title of Administrator Apostolic of Tudela has been conferred. The cathedral dedicated to Nuestra Señora de la Blanca dates from the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. It has a very notable façade. There are in Tudela a college of the Jesuits, charitable institutions conducted by the Sisters of Charity: the hospital of Nuestra Señora de Gracia, founded in the sixteenth century by D. Miguel de Eza; the Real Casa de Misericordia founded by Doña María Hugarte in 1771 and the "Hospitalillo" for orphan children founded in 1596 by D. Pedro Ortiz.

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