THE WORLD’S BEST HISTORIES

SPAIN
AND HER COLONIES

COMPILED FROM THE BEST AUTHORITIES
BY ARCHIBALD WILBERFORCE
WITH FRONTISPIECE
THE CO-OPERATIVE PUBLICATION SOCIETY
NEW YORK AND LONDON

SPAIN
AND HER COLONIES

CONTENTS

THE HISTORY OF SPAIN

CHAPTER I
SPAIN IN ANTIQUITY

THE FIRST LAWS AND THE FIRST INVADERS—GREEKS, PHŒNICIANS, ROMANS AND GOTHS

Hispania was the name by which the Romans called the peninsula which is made up of Spain and Portugal. The origin of the name is disputed. To the Greeks the country was known as Hesperia—the Land of the Setting Sun. According to Mariana,[1] Spain is called after its founder, Hispanus, a son or grandson of Hercules. But, for reasons hereinafter related, better authorities derive it from the Phœnician Span.

There is a legend which Mariana recites, to the effect that the primal laws of Spain were written in verse, and framed six thousand years before the beginning of Time. To medieval makers of chronicles, Tubal, fifth son of Japhet, was the first to set foot on its shore. But earlier historians, ignorant of Noah’s descendant, and, it may be, better informed, hold that after the episodes connected with the Golden Fleece, the Argonauts, guided by Hercules, sailed the seas and loitered a while in Spain, where they were joined by refugees escaping from the totter and fall of Troy. Black was their national color. It has been retained in the mantillas of to-day. After the Greek adventurers came the Phœnicians. The latter, a peaceful people, born traders, as are all of Semitic origin, founded a colony at Gaddir (Cadiz). In a remoter era they had established themselves at Canaan, where they built Bylos, Sidon and Tyre. From Tyre emigrants moved to Africa. Their headquarters was Kartha-Hadath, literally Newtown, that Carthage in whose ruins Marius was to weep. The Phœnicians, as has been noted, were a peaceful people. Under a burning sun their younger brothers developed into tigers. They had the storm for ally. They ravaged the coast like whirlwinds. They took Sicily, then Sardinia. Presently there was a quarrel at Gaddir. It was only natural that the Phœnicians should ask aid of their relatives. The Carthaginians responded, and, finding the country to their taste, took possession of it on their own account. To the Romans, with whom already they had crossed swords, they said nothing of this new possession. It seemed wiser to leave it unmentioned than to guard it with protecting, yet disclosive, treaties. More than once they scuttled their triremes—suspicious sails were following them to its shore. From this vigilance the name of Spain is derived. In Punic, Span signifies hidden.

The hiding of Spain was possible when the Romans were still in the nursery. But when the Romans grew up, when they had conquered Greece, and all of Italy was theirs, their enterprises developed. Up to this time the two nations had been almost allies. At once they were open rivals. It was a question between them as to whom the world should belong.

The arguments on this subject, known as the Punic Wars, were three in number. The first resulted in a loss of Sicily and Sardinia. In the second, Spain went. In the third, Carthage was razed to the ground.

It was with the conquest of Sagentum—a conquest not achieved until the surviving inhabitants of that beleaguered city had committed suicide—that annexation began. Then, slowly, at one time advancing, at another retreating, now defeated, now defeating, the Romans promenaded their eagles down the coast. Scipio came and watched the self-destruction of the Numantians, as Hannibal had watched the Sagentums fall. Pompey, boasting that he had made the Republic mistress of a thousand towns, came too; and after him Cæsar, who, long before, as simple quæstor, had wept at Cadiz because of Alexander, who at his age had conquered the world—Cæsar, his face blanched with tireless debauches, came back and gave the land its coup de grace. In this fashion, with an unhealed wound in every province, Spain crawled down to Augustus’s feet. A toga was thrown over her. When it was withdrawn the wounds had healed. She was a Roman province, the most flourishing, perhaps, and surely the most fair.

The fusion of the two peoples was immediate. The native soldiery were sent off to bleed in the four corners of the globe, to that Ultima Thule where the Britons lived and which it took years to reach, or nearer home in Gaul, or else far to the north among the Teuton States; and, in the absence of an element which might have turned ugly, the Romans found it easy work to open school. They had always been partial to Greek learning, and they inculcated it on the slightest pretext. They imported their borrowed Pantheon, their local Hercules, all the metamorphosed and irritable gods, and with becoming liberality added to them those divinities whom their adopted children most revered. It was in this way that the fusion of the two races came about. When Augustus assumed the purple, throughout the entire peninsula Latin was generally in use. It was not of the purest, to be sure. It had been beaten in with the sword, the accent was rough and the construction bristled with barbarisms; but still it was Latin, and needed only a generation of sandpaper to become polished and refined. But perhaps the least recognized factor in the fusion of the two peoples was a growing and common taste for polite literature. Such as the Romans possessed was, like their architecture, their science, philosophy and religion, borrowed outright from the Greeks. They were hungry for new ideas. These the Spaniards undertook to provide. They had descended from a race whose fabulous laws were written in verse, and something of that legendary inspiration must have accompanied them through ages of preceding strife, for suddenly Boetica was peopled with poets. In connection with this it may be noted that, apart from the crop of Augustan rhymsters and essayists, almost everything in the way of literature which Rome subsequently produced is the work of Spaniards. Lucan and the Senecas were Boeticans—Martial, Florus, Quintillian, Pomponius Mila were all of that race. J’en passe et des meilleurs. The Romans, trained by the Greeks, were, it is true, the teachers. Under their heavy hand the young Andalusians lost their way among the clouds of Aristophanes, just as we have done ourselves; they spouted the Tityre tu, and the arma virum, they followed the Odyssey and learned that, in ages as remote to them as they are to us, Ulysses had visited their coast. Indeed the Romans did what they could, and if their pupils surpassed them it was owing to the lack-luster of their own imaginations. But the education of backward Spain was not limited to Greek poets and Augustan bores. Lessons in drawing were given, not as an extra, but as part of the ordinary curriculum. The sciences, too, were taught, the blackboard was brought into use, and Euclid—another Greek—was expounded on the very soil that under newer conquerors was to produce the charms and seductions of Algebra. Added to this, industry was not neglected. The Romans got from them not poets alone, but woolens, calicoes, and barbers too, emperors even. Trajan was an Andalou, so was Hadrian, and so also was that sceptered misanthrope Marcus Aurelius. As for arms, it is written in blood that the Romans would have no others than those which came from Spain. The plebs dressed themselves there. Strabo says that all the ready-made clothing came from Tarragona. From Malaga, which in a fair wind was but six days’ sail from the Tiber’s mouth, came potted herring, fat, black grapes that stained the chin, and wax yellow as amber. From Cadiz came the rarest purple, wine headier than Falernian, honey sweeter than that of Hymettus, and jars of pale, transparent oil. To Iviça the Romans sent their togas; there was a baphia there, a dyeing establishment, which, to be simply charming, needed but the signboard Morituri te salutamus. And from the banks of the Betis there came for the lupanars girls with the Orient in their eyes, and lips that said “Drink me.” In this pleasant fashion Rome, after conquering Spain, sat down to banquet on her products. The Imperial City then was not unlike a professional pugilist who is unable to find a worthy opponent; possible rivals had been slugged into subjection. Perhaps she was weary, too. However great the future of a combatant may be, there comes an hour when contention palls and peace has charms. In any event, Rome at that time was more occupied in assimilating her dominions than in extending the wonders of her sway. And it was during this caprice that Spain found her fifty races fused in one. On the distant throne was a procession of despots, terribly tyrannical, yet doing what good they could. In return for flowers, fruits and pretty girls, they gave roads, aqueducts, arenas, games and vice. Claud introduced new fashions; Nero, the saturnalia. Each of the emperors did what he was able, even to Hadrian, who increased the number of Jews. It was during his reign that were felt the first tremors of that cataclysm in which antiquity was to disappear. Rome was so thoroughly mistress of the world that to master her Nature had to produce new races. The parturitions, as we know, were successful. Already the blue victorious eyes of Vandal and of Goth were peering down at Rome; already they had whispered together, and over the hydromel had drunk to her fall.

The Goths were a wonderful people. When they first appear in history their hair was tossed and tangled by the salt winds of the Baltic. Later, when in tattered furs they issued from the fens of the Danube, they startled the hardiest warriors of the world, the descendants of that nursling of the gaunt she-wolf. Little by little from vagabond herders they consolidated first into tribes, then into a nation, finally into an army that beat at the gates of Rome. There they loitered a moment, a century at most. When they receded again with plunder and with slaves they left an emperor behind. Soon they were more turbulent than ever. They swept over antiquity like a tide, their waves subsiding only to rise anew. And just as the earth was oscillating beneath their weight, from the steppes of Tartary issued cyclones of Huns. Where they passed, the plains remained forever bare. In the shock of their onslaught the empire of the Goths was sundered. Some of them, the Ostrogoths, went back to their cattle, others, the Visigoths, went down to have another word with Rome. It was then that their cousins the Vandals got their fingers on her throat and frightened the world with her cries. In the strain of incessant shrieks the Imperial City fell. From out the ruins a mitered prelate dragged a throne. Paganism had been strangled; antiquity was dead; new creeds and new races were refurbishing the world. Among the latter the Goths still prowled. In the advance through the centuries, in the journey from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, in the friction with the Attic refinement which the Romans had acquired, the Goths left some of their barbarism on the road—not much, however. Historians have it that when they took possession of Spain they manifested a love of art, a desire for culture, and that they affected the manners and usages of polite society. But historians are privileged liars. The majority of those who have treated the subject admired the Goths because they fancied them Christians, and in the admiration they placed them in flattering contrast to their predecessors who were pagans, and to their successors who were Muhammadans. As a matter of fact—one that is amply attested in local chronicles—they were coarse, illiterate and stupid as carps; moreover, they were not Christians, they were Arians, and they were Arians precisely as they were Goths—they were born so. To the dogma of the Trinity and the consubstantiability or non-consubstantiability of Jesus the Christ they were as ignorant as of the formation of the earth. Throughout Europe at that time not a thread of light was discernible. The dark ages had begun. In the general obscurity the Goths were not a bit more brilliant than their neighbors. Under their hand civilization disappeared; in return they gave the Spanish nothing but gutturals and a taste for chicanery. In ninety and nine cases, the specimens of architecture which cheap-trippers admire as due to them are of Saracen workmanship. The monuments which they did erect are not disproportioned perhaps; yet, whatever the casuist may affirm, there is still a margin between the commonplace and the beautiful. In brief, to the Visigoths the world owes less than nothing. They let Andalusia retrograde for three hundred years, and delayed the discovery and development of America. Previous to their coming Cadiz had been a famous seaport. The Romans called it The Ship of Stone. Its sons had been immemorial explorers. The presentiment of another land across the sea was theirs by intuition. They were constantly extending their expeditions. They were in love with the sunset, they sailed as near it as they could, returned for more provisions, and sailed again; nearer, and ever nearer that way. To the Church the theory of the antipodes was an abominable heresy. It was taught that the earth was a flat parallelogram, its extremities walled by mountains that supported the skies. Lactance was particularly vehement on this point, so too was St. Jerome. Vergilius in asserting the contrary threw Christendom into indignant convulsions. It may be remembered that the most serious obstacle which Columbus subsequently encountered lay in the decisions of the Fathers. Now Cadiz had been more or less converted before the advent of the Visigoths, but it had not for that reason put aside its habits and customs. It continued to be essentially maritime; but when the Visigoths came, navigation languished, the Ship of Stone no longer turned to the west, it foundered in a sea of ignorance which was then undiked, and the possible discovery of America was indefinitely postponed. By way of compensation, the Visigoths framed a code of laws the spirit of which still survives, and which is serviceable in showing that the framers possessed two distinct traits, a love of agriculture and a hatred of Jews. Traits which are significant when it is understood that it was through agriculture they were supported and through the Jews they were overthrown. It was the Jews that beckoned the Berbers and their masters the Arabs—the Moors, as those Arabs were called who had deserted the deserts for the African Riviera.

CHAPTER II
THE CALIPHATE OF CORDOVA

THE CRESCENT AND THE CROSS—CORDOVA IN THE MIDDLE AGES—THE GLORIES OF AZ ZAHRA—THE RISE OF ALMANZOR

It was in 712 that Spain, after remaining for nearly three centuries in the possession of the Visigoths, fell under the yoke of the Saracens. For some time past, from a palace at Tandjah (Tangiers), a Mussulman emir had been eyeing the strip of blue water which alone separated him from that Andalusia which, like the other parts of this world and all of the next, had been promised to the followers of Muhammad. The invasion that ensued was singularly pacific. The enthusiasm which distinguished the youthful period of Muhammadism might account for the conquest which followed, even if we could not assign additional causes—the factions into which the Goths had become divided, the resentment of disappointed pretenders to the throne, the provocations of one Count Julian, whose daughter, seduced by Roderic, the last of the Gothic kings, caused him, it is said, to urge the Moors to come over. It is more surprising that a remnant of this ancient monarchy should not only have preserved its national liberty and name in the northern mountains, but waged for some centuries a successful, and generally an offensive, warfare against the conquerors, till the balance was completely turned in its favor and the Moors were compelled to maintain almost as obstinate and protracted a contest for a small portion of the peninsula. But the Arabian monarchs of Cordova found in their success and imagined security a pretext for indolence; even in the cultivation of science and contemplation of the magnificent architecture of their mosques and palaces they forgot their poor but daring enemies in the Asturias; while, according to the nature of despotism, the fruits of wisdom or bravery in one generation were lost in the follies and effeminacy of the next. Their kingdom was dismembered by successful rebels, who formed the states of Toledo, Huesca, Saragossa, and others less eminent; and these, in their own mutual contests, not only relaxed their natural enmity toward the Christian princes, but sometimes sought their alliance.

Be that as it may, of all who had entered Spain, whether Greek, Phœnician, Vandal or Goth, the Moors were the most tolerant. The worship of God was undisturbed. The temples were not only preserved, new ones were built. In every town they entered, presto! a mosque and a school, and mosques and schools that were entrancing as song. On the banks of the Betis, renamed the Great River, Al-Ouad-al-Kebyr (Guadalquivir), twelve hundred villages bloomed like roses in June. From three hundred thousand filigreed pulpits the glory of Allah, and of Muhammad his prophet, was daily proclaimed.

They were superb fellows, these Moors. In earlier ages the restless Bedouins, their ancestors, were rather fierce, and when the degenerate Sabaism they professed was put aside for the lessons of Muhammad, they were not only fierce, they were fanatic as well. A drop of blood shed for Allah, equaled, they were taught, whole months of fasting and of prayer. Thereafter, they preached with the scimiter. But in time, that great emollient, they grew less dogmatic. In the ninth century the court of Haroûn al Raschid was a free academy in which all the arts were cultivated and enjoyed. Under the Moors, Cordova surpassed Bagdad.

In the tenth century it was the most beautiful and most civilized city of Europe. Concerning it Burke, in his “History of Spain”—a work to which we are much indebted—writes as follows:

There was the Caliph’s Palace of Flowers, his Palace of Contentment, his Palace of Lovers, and, most beautiful of all, the Palace of Damascus. Rich and poor met in the Mezquita, the noblest place of worship then standing in Europe, with its twelve hundred marble columns, and its twenty brazen doors; the vast interior resplendent with porphyry and jasper and many-colored precious stones, the walls glittering with harmonious mosaics, the air perfumed with incense, the courtyards leafy with groves of orange trees—showing apples of gold in pictures of silver. Throughout the city, there were fountains, basins, baths, with cold water brought from the neighboring mountains, already carried in the leaden pipes that are the highest triumph of the modern plumber.

But more wonderful even than Cordova itself was the suburb and palace of Az Zahra. For five-and-twenty years the Caliph Abdur Rahman devoted to the building of this royal fancy one-third of the revenues of the State; and the work, on his death, was piously continued by his son, who devoted the first fifteen years of his reign to its completion. For forty years ten thousand workmen are said to have toiled day by day, and the record of the refinement as well as the magnificence of the structure, as it approached completion, almost passes belief. It is said that in a moment of exaltation the Caliph gave orders for the removal of the great mountain at whose foot the fairy city was built, as the dark shade of the forests that covered its sides overshadowed the gilded palace of his creation.

Convinced of the impossibility of his enterprise, An Nasir was content that all the oaks and beech trees that grew on the mountain side should be rooted up; and that fig trees, and almonds, and pomegranates should be planted in their place; and thus the very hills and forests of Az Zahra were decked with blossom and beauty.

Travelers from distant lands, men of all ranks and professions, princes, embassadors, merchants, pilgrims, theologians and poets, all agreed that they had never seen in the course of their travels anything that could be compared with Az Zahra, and that no imagination, however fertile, could have formed an idea of its beauties. Of this marvelous creation of Art and Fancy not one stone remains upon another—not a vestige to mark the spot on which it stood; and it is hard to reconstruct from the dry records of Arab historians the fairy edifice of which we are told no words could paint the magnificence. According to these authors the inclosing wall of the palace was four thousand feet in length from east to west, and two thousand two hundred feet from north to south. The greater part of this space was occupied by gardens, with their marble fountains, kiosks and ornaments of various kinds, not inferior in beauty to the more strictly architectural parts of the building.

Four thousand three hundred columns of the rarest and most precious marbles supported the roof of the palace; of these some were brought from Africa, some from Rome, and many were presented by the Emperor at Constantinople to Abdur Rahman. The halls were paved with marble, disposed in a thousand varied patterns. The walls were of the same material, and ornamented with friezes of the most brilliant colors. The ceilings, constructed of cedar, were enriched with gilding on an azure ground, with damasked work and interlacing designs. Everything, in short, that the wealth and resources of the Caliph could command was lavished on this favorite retreat, and all that the art of Constantinople and Bagdad could contribute to aid the taste and executive skill of the Spanish Arabs was enlisted to make it the most perfect work of its age. Did this palace of Zahra now remain to us, says Mr. Fergusson, we could afford to despise the Alhambra and all the other works of the declining ages of Moorish art.

It was here that Abdur Rahman and Nasir received Sancho the Fat, and Theuda, queen of Navarre, the envoys from Charles the Simple of France, and the embassadors from the Emperor Constantine at Constantinople. The reception of these imperial visitors is said to have been one of the most magnificent ceremonies of that magnificent court. The orator who had been at first intrusted with the speech of ceremonial greeting was actually struck dumb by the grandeur of the scene, and his place was taken by a less impressionable rhetorician.

Nor was it only material splendor that was to be found at Cordova. At a time when Christian Europe was steeped in ignorance and barbarism, in superstition and prejudice, every branch of science was studied under the favor and protection of the Ommeyad Caliphs. Medicine, surgery, botany, chemistry, poetry, the arts, philosophy, literature, all flourished at the court and city of Cordova. Agriculture was cultivated with a perfection, both theoretical and practical, which is apparent from the works of contemporary Arab writers. The Silo, so lately introduced into England as a valuable agricultural novelty, is not only the invention of the Arabs, but the very name is Arabic, as is that of the Azequia and of the Noria of modern Spain. Both the second and the third Abdur Rahman were passionately fond of gardening and tree-planting; and seeds, roots and cuttings were brought from all parts of the world and acclimatized in the gardens at Cordova. A pomegranate of peculiar excellence, the Safari, which was introduced by the second Abdur Rahman from Damascus, still maintains its superiority, and is known in Spain to the present day as the Granada Zafari.

Thus, in small things as in great, the Arabs of Cordova stood immeasurably above every other people or any other government in Europe. Yet their influence unhappily was but small. They surpassed, but they did not lead. The very greatness of their superiority rendered their example fruitless. Medieval chivalry, indeed, was largely the result of their influence in Spain. But chivalry as an institution had itself decayed long before a new-born Europe had attained to the material and moral perfection of the great Emirs of Cordova. Their political organization was unadapted to the needs or the aspirations of Western Europe, and contained within itself the elements, not of development, but of decay. Their civilization perished, and left no heirs behind it—and its place knows it no more.

The reign of Hakam II., the son and successor of the great Caliph, was tranquil, prosperous and honorable, the golden age of Arab literature in Spain. The king was above all things a student, living the life almost of a recluse in his splendid retreat at Az Zahra, and concerning himself rather with the collection of books for his celebrated library at Cordova than with the cares of State and the excitements of war. He sent agents to every city in the East to buy rare manuscripts and bring them back to Cordova. When he could not acquire originals he procured copies, and every book was carefully catalogued and worthily lodged. Hakam not only built libraries, but, unlike many modern collectors, he is said to have read and even to have annotated the books that they contained; but as their number exceeded four hundred thousand, he must have been a remarkably rapid student.

The peaceful disposition of the new Caliph emboldened his Christian neighbors and tributaries to disregard the old treaties and to assert their independence of Cordova. But the armies of Hakam were able to make his rights respected, and the treaties were reaffirmed and observed. Many were the embassies that were received at Cordova from rival Christian chiefs; and Sancho of Leon, Fernan Gonzalez of Castile, Garcia of Navarre, Rodrigo Velasquez of Galicia, and finally Ordoño the Bad, Pretender to the crown of Leon, were all represented at the court of Az Zahra.

The reign of this royal scholar was peaceful and prosperous; but kingly power tends to decline in libraries, and when Hakam ceased to build and to annotate, and his kingdom devolved upon his son, the royal authority passed not into the hands of the young Hisham, who was only nine years of age at the time of his father’s death, but into those of the Sultana Sobeyra and of her favorite, Ibn-abu-amir, who is known to later generations by the proud title of Almanzor.[2]

Ibn-abu-amir began his career as a poor student at the University of Cordova. Of respectable birth and parentage, filled with noble ambition, born for empire and command, the youth became a court scribe, and, attracting the attention of the all-powerful Sobeyra by the charm of his manner and his nobility of bearing, he soon rose to power and distinction in the palace; and as Master of the Mint, and afterward as Commander of the City Guard, he found means to render himself indispensable, as he had always been agreeable, to the harem. Nor was the young courtier less acceptable to the Caliph. Intrusted by him on a critical occasion with the supremely difficult mission of comptrolling the expenditure of the army in Africa, where the general-in-chief had proved over-prodigal or over-rapacious, Ibn-abu-amir acquitted himself with such extraordinary skill and tact that he won the respect and admiration, not only of the Caliph whose treasury he protected, but of the general whose extravagance he checked, and even of the common soldiers of the army, who are not usually drawn to a civilian superintendent, or to a reforming treasury official from headquarters. The expenses were curtailed; but the campaign was successful, and the victorious general and the yet more victorious Cadi shared on equal terms the honor of a triumphal entry into the capital.

On the death of Hakam, in September, 976, Ibn-abu-amir showed no less than his usual tact and vigor in suppressing a palace intrigue and placing the young Hisham on the throne of his father. The Caliph was but twelve years of age, and his powerful guardian, supported by the harem, beloved by the people, and feared by the vanquished conspirators, took upon himself the entire administration of the kingdom, repealed some obnoxious taxes, reformed the organization of the army, and sought to confirm and establish his power by a war against his neighbors in the north. The peace which had so long prevailed between Moor and Christian was thus rudely broken, and the Moslem once more carried his arms across the northern frontier. The campaign was eminently successful. Ibn-abu-amir, who contrived not only to vanquish his enemies but to please his friends, became at once the master of the palace and of the army. The inevitable critic was found to say that the victor was a diplomatist and a lawyer rather than a great general; but he was certainly a great leader of men, and if he was at any time unskilled in the conduct of a battle, he owned from the first that higher skill of knowing whom to trust with command. Nor was he less remarkable for his true military virtue of constant clemency to the vanquished.

In two years after the death of Hakam, Almanzor had attained the position of the greatest of the maires du palais of early France, and he ruled all Muhammadan Spain in the name of young Hisham, whose throne he forbore to occupy and whose person was safe in his custody. But if Almanzor was not a dilettante like Abdur Rahman II., nor a collector of MSS. like Hakam, he was no vulgar fighter like the early kings of Leon or of Navarre. A library of books accompanied him in all his campaigns; literature, science, and the arts were munificently patronized at court; a university or high school was established at Cordova, where the great mosque was enlarged for the accommodation of an increasing number of worshipers. Yet in one thing did he show his weakness. He could afford to have no enemies.

Though the idol of the army, the lover of the queen, the prefect of the city, the guardian of the person of the Caliph, Almanzor yet found it necessary to conciliate the theologians; and the theologians were only conciliated by the delivery of the great library of Hakam into the hands of the Ulema. The shelves were ransacked for works on astrology and magic, on natural philosophy, and the forbidden sciences, and after an inquisition as formal and as thorough and probably no more intelligent than that which was conducted by the curate and the barber in the house of Don Quixote, tens of thousands of priceless volumes were publicly committed to the flames.

Nor did Almanzor neglect the more practical or more direct means of maintaining his power. The army was filled with bold recruits from Africa, and renegades from the Christian provinces of the north. The organization and equipment of the regiments was constantly improved; and the troops were ever loyal to their civilian benefactor. Ghalib, the Commander-in-chief, having sought to overthrow the supreme administrator of the kingdom, was vanquished and slain in battle (981). The Caliph was practically a prisoner in his own palace, and was encouraged by his guardian and his friends, both in the harem and in the mosque, to devote himself entirely to a religious life, and abandon the administration of his kingdom to the Hájib, who now, feeling himself entirely secure at home, turned his arms once more against the Christians on the northern frontiers; and it was on his return to Cordova, after his greeted with the well-known title of Almanzor.

In 984 he compelled Bermudo II. of Leon to become his tributary. In 985 he turned his attention to Catalonia, and after a brief but brilliant campaign he made himself master of Barcelona. Two years later (987), Bermudo having dismissed his Moslem guards and thrown off his allegiance to Cordova, Almanzor marched into the northwest, and after sacking Coimbra, overran Leon, entirely destroyed the capital city, and compelled the Christian king to take refuge in the wild fastnesses of the Asturias.

Meanwhile, at Cordova, the power of Almanzor became year by year more complete. Victorious in Africa as well as in Spain, this heaven-born general was as skillful in the council chamber as be was in the field. The iron hand was ever clad in a silken glove. His ambition was content with the substance of power, and with the gradual assumption

of any external show of supreme authority in the State. In 991 he abandoned the office and title of Hajib to his son, Abdul Malik. In 992 his seal took the place of that of the monarch on all documents of State. In 993 he assumed the royal cognomen of Mowayad. Two years later he arrogated to himself alone the title of Said; and in 996 he ventured a step further, and assumed the title of Malik Karim, or king.

But in 996 Almanzor was at length confronted by a rival. Sobeyra, the Navarrese Sultana, once his mistress, was now his deadly enemy, and she had determined that the queen, and not the minister, should reign supreme in the palace. Almanzor was to be destroyed. Hakam, a feeble and effeminate youth, was easily won over by the harem, who urged him to show the strength that he was so far from possessing, by espousing the cause of his mother against his guardian. The queen was assured of victory. The treasury was at the disposal of the conspirators. A military rival was secretly summoned from Africa. The minister was banished from the royal presence. The palace was already jubilant.

But the palace reckoned without Almanzor. Making his way into Hakam’s chamber, more charming, more persuasive, more resolute than ever, Almanzor prevailed upon the Caliph not only to restore him to his confidence, but to empower him, by a solemn instrument under the royal sign-manual, to assume the government of the kingdom. Sobeyra, defeated but unharmed by her victorious and generous rival, retired to a cloister; and Almanzor, contemptuously leaving to one of his lieutenants the task of vanquishing his subsidized rival in Africa, set forth upon the most memorable of all his many expeditions against Christian Spain (July 3, 997).

Making his way, at the head of an army, through Lusitania into far away Galicia, he took Corunna, and destroyed the great Christian church and city of Santiago de Compostella, the most sacred spot in all Spain, and sent the famous bells which had called so many Christian pilgrims to prayer and praise to be converted into lamps to illuminate the Moslem worshipers in the mosque at Cordova.

Five years later, in 1002, after an uncertain battle, Almanzor died in harness, if not actually in the ranks, bowed down by mortal disease, unhurt by the arm of the enemy. The relief of the Christians at his death was unspeakable; and is well expressed, says Mr. Poole, in the simple comment of the Monkish annalist, “In 1002 died Almanzor, and was buried in Hell.”

In force of character, in power of persuasion, in tact, in vigor, in that capacity for command that is only found in noble natures, Almanzor has no rival among the Regents of Spain. His rise is a romance; his power a marvel; his justice a proverb. He was a brilliant financier; a successful favorite; a liberal patron; a stern disciplinarian; a heaven-born courtier; an accomplished general; and no one of the great commanders of Spain, not Gonsalvo de Aguilar himself, was more uniformly successful in the field than this lawyer’s clerk of Cordova.

Hisham, in confinement at Az Zahra, was still the titular Caliph of the West, but Almanzor was succeeded as commander-in-chief and virtual ruler of the country by his favorite son, his companion-in-arms, and the hero of an African campaign, Abdul Malik Almudaffar, the Hajib of 991. But the glory of Cordova had departed. Abdul Malik indeed ruled in his father’s place for six years. But on his death, in 1008, he was succeeded by his half-brother, Abdur Rahman, who, as the son of a Christian princess, was mistrusted both by the palace and by the people; and the country became a prey to anarchy.

Cordova was sacked. The Caliph was imprisoned; rebellions, poisonings, crucifixions, civil war, bigotry and skepticism, the insolence of wealth, the insolence of power, a Mahdi and a Wahdi, Christian alliance, Berber domination, Slav mutineers, African interference, puppet princes, all these things vexed the Spanish Moslems for thirty disastrous years; while a number of weak but independent sovereignties arose on the ruins of the great Caliphate of the West.

The confused annals of the last thirty years of the rule of the Ommeyades are mere records of blood and of shame, a pitiful story of departed greatness.

On the death of Hisham II., the Romulus Augustulus of Imperial Cordova, Moslem Spain was divided into a number of petty kingdoms, Malaga, Algeciras, Cordova, Seville, Toledo, Badajoz, Saragossa, the Balearic Islands, Valencia, Murcia, Almeria, and Granada. And each of these cities and kingdoms made unceasing war one upon another.

From the death of Hisham, if not from the death of Almanzor, the centre of interest in the history of Spain is shifted from Cordova to Castile.

CHAPTER III
MEDIEVAL SPAIN

THE FOUNDERS OF MODERN SPAIN—THE KINGDOMS OF THE ASTURIAS AND OF LEON—THE DEFEAT AT RONCESVALLES—THE CID CAMPEADOR

The Crescent had conquered, but the Cross endured. The refuge of the latter was in the Asturias, There—eight or ten years after the death of the last of the Gothic kings—Pelayo, one of the early heroes of Spanish history, was reigning over refugees from Moslem rule. It was these refugees who laid the foundation of modern Spain, and it is related that in their fastness at Covadonga, thirty of them, with Pelayo at their head, actually routed, if they did not destroy, an entire army of four hundred thousand Moslem besiegers.

The story is of course mythological, but the good fortune of Pelayo did much to kindle the national spirit by which ultimately Spain was conquered for the Spaniards, and thus the story, if critically false, becomes metaphorically true.

Nor [says Burke] do the Arabs seem to have made any attempt to retrieve or avenge the fortunes of the day. Well satisfied, no doubt, with their unopposed dominion over the rich plains of the genial south country, they were willing to abandon the bleak and inhospitable mountains to their wild inhabitants and the emboldened refugees whom they sheltered. Be the reason what it may, Pelayo seems to have had peace all the days of his life after his victory at Covadonga in 718. Prudently confining his attention to the development of his little kingdom, he reigned, it is said, for nineteen years at Cangas, and, dying in 737, was peacefully succeeded by his son Favila.

Pelayo, no doubt, was but a robber chieftain, a petty mountain prince, and the legends of his royal descent are of later date, and of obviously spurious manufacture; but Pelayo needs no tinsel to adorn his crown. He was the founder of the Spanish monarchy.

Meanwhile, in the recesses of the Pyrenees, a second Christian kingdom, that of Navarre, had been founded by Garcias Iniguez, which, together with Catalonia and Aragon, Charlemagne a little later (778) entered and subdued. In repassing the Pyrenees, however, the Navarrese, led by Fortun Garcias, fell upon the Frankish troops and cut to pieces the rearguard, and even, it is said, the main body of the army.

How far the Spanish Christians were aided, as it has been stated they were, by the Moors, it is impossible to discover. The fact of such an alliance, in itself sufficiently improbable, is quite unnecessary to explain the ever-famous defeat at Roncesvalles.

Nor can we speak with much greater confidence of the prowess or even of the existence of the equally famous Roland, in the ranks of the invading or evading army; or of that of the no less celebrated Bernardo del Carpio in the ranks of the pursuers.

Taillefer, who sang the song of Roland upon the battlefield of Hastings, and Terouldes, whose thirteenth century epic suggested the poems of Pulci, of Boiardo, and of greatest Ariosto, all these have made Roland one of the favorite heroes of the Middle Ages. But in the story, as it is told in the Spanish ballads, it is Bernardo del Carpio, the nephew of the chaste but pusillanimous Alfonso, who is the true hero of Roncesvalles, and who not only repulsed the host of Charlemagne, but caught up the invulnerable Roland in his arms, and squeezed him to death before his army. No carpet knight or courtier was Bernardo, but a true Cantabrian mountaineer.

In 790 Alfonso II., the great-grandson of the great Pelayo, then king of Oviedo, repulsed the Mussulman army with great slaughter, and abolished the ignominious tribute of one hundred virgins, an annual tribute paid to the Muhammadan ruler, fifty virgins being of noble and fifty of base or ignoble birth. From this circumstance is derived, by some historians, his surname of the Chaste; attributed by others to his having made a solemn vow of virginity, and observed it, even in marriage. This vow, and the austere temper in which it probably originated, had considerable influence over Alfonso’s life. He so deeply resented his sister Ximena’s private marriage with a subject, the Count of Saldanha, that he shut her up in a convent; and putting out her husband’s eyes, sentenced him to perpetual imprisonment.

The royal line of Navarre or Sobrarve was at this time extinct, Ximenes Garcias, the grandson of Fortun Garcias, having died without children. The nobles availed themselves of the opportunity to establish the famous code entitled “Los Fueros de Sobrarve”—the laws of Sobrarve—which subsequently became the groundwork of the liberties of Aragon. Navarre was soon afterward recovered by the Moors, and Sobrarve included in the Spanish March.

Alfonso ruled upward of fifty years. Incessant wars now followed between the followers of the Cross and the Crescent, and a frenzy for martyrdom on the part of the Christians had to be repressed by a Christian archbishop at the solemn request of the Cadis.

Garcia of Oviedo died without children shortly after his accession; when his brother Ordoño II. reunited the whole of his father’s dominions. He transferred the seat of government to Leon, and altered the title of King of Oviedo into that of King of Leon.

This Ordoño abandoned the peaceful policy of his greater father, and undertook many expeditions with varying and uncertain success against the Arabs. He plundered Merida in 917, and routed the Berbers in Southern Spain in 918. Yet three years later, at Val de Junqueras (921), near Pamplona, the Christians suffered disastrous defeat. The usual rebellion at home was appeased by the treacherous execution or murder of no less than four counts of Castile in 922, and was followed by the king’s death in 923.

Of Fruela II. (923-925), Alfonso IV. (925-930), and Ramiro II. (930-950), little need be said, but that they lived and reigned as kings of Leon.

To Ramiro, however, is due, at least, the honor of an authentic victory over the Moslem forces of the great Caliph, Abdur Rahman an Nasir (939), at Simancas, and afterward in the same year at Alhandega.

Ramiro, after the usual rebellion, abdicated, in 950, in favor of his son Ordoño—who had married Urraca, daughter of the principal rebel of the day, Fernan Gonzalez, count of Castile—and who succeeded his father as Ordoño III.

But decapitation was a far more certain way of suppressing rebellion than matrimony; and Fernan Gonzalez lived to intrigue against his daughter and her royal husband in favor of Sancho, a younger brother of the king. Ordoño, however, held his own against his brother, and revenged himself on his father-in-law, by repudiating his wife; who, with her personal and family grievances, was promptly acquired by Sancho, who succeeded, on his brother’s death, to the crown of which he had failed to possess himself by force. But even as a legitimate sovereign, Sancho, surnamed the Fat, was not allowed to reign in peace. He was driven from his kingdom by that most versatile rebel, Count Fernan Gonzalez, and sought refuge at the court of his uncle Garcia of Navarre at Pamplona. Thence, in company with Garcia, and his mother Theuda, he journeyed to the court of the Caliph at Cordova, where the distinguished visitors were received with great show of welcome by Abdur Rahman at Az Zahra; and where Hasdai, the Jew, the most celebrated physician of the day, succeeded in completely curing Sancho of the distressing malady—a morbid and painful corpulency—which incapacitated him from the active discharge of his royal duties.

The study and practice of medicine were alike disregarded by the rude dwellers in Leon; but the Cordovan doctor, surpassing in his success, if not in his skill, the most celebrated physicians of the present day, contrived to reduce the king’s overgrown bulk to normal proportions, and restored him to his former activity and vigor, both of body and mind. Nor was the skill of Hasdai confined to the practice of medicine. An accomplished diplomatist, he negotiated a treaty with his Christian patient, by which Sancho bound himself to give up ten frontier fortresses to the Caliph, on his restoration to the crown of Leon, while Don Garcia and Dona Theuda undertook to invade Castile in order to divert the attention of the common foe, the ever-ready Fernan Gonzalez.

In due time Sancho, no longer the fat, but the hale, returned to Leon at the head of a Moslem army, placed at his disposal by his noble host at Cordova, drove out the usurper, Ordoño the Bad, and reigned in peace in his Christian dominions. The visit of this dispossessed Ordoño to the court of the Caliph Hakam at Cordova, in 962, is an interesting specimen of the international politics or policy of his age and country.

As Sancho had recovered his throne, by the aid of Abdur Rahman, so Ordoño sought to dethrone him and make good his own pretensions by the aid of Hakam. The Caliph, already harassed by Fernan Gonzalez, and doubting the honesty of King Sancho, was not ill-pleased to have another pretender in hand, and Ordoño was invited to Cordova, and received by Hakam in the palace at Az Zahra with the utmost pomp and display. The Leonese prince craved in humble language the assistance of the Moslem, and professed himself his devoted friend, ally, and vassal; and he was permitted to remain at the Court of Hakam, to await the issue of events in the north. Some few days afterward a treaty was solemnly signed between the Caliph and the Pretender, and once more the glories of Az Zahra were displayed to the eyes of the astonished barbarian from Leon.

Nor did the fame of these splendid ceremonies fail to reach Sancho in the northwest; and his spirit of independence was considerably cooled by the prospect of a Moslem army, headed by his cousin Ordoño, making its appearance before his ill-defended frontiers. The maneuver was sufficiently familiar; and the reigning monarch lost no time in disassociating himself from the hostile proceedings of Fernan Gonzalez; and sending an important embassy to Hakam at Cordova, to assure him of his unwavering loyalty, he hastened to announce his readiness to carry out to the letter all the provisions of his recent treaty with the Caliph. Hakam was satisfied. Ordoño languished disregarded at Cordova, despised alike by Moslem and Christian, but unharmed and in safety as the guest of the Arab. Sancho reigned in peace until 967, when he was poisoned by the rebel count of the day, Sanchez of Galicia. His son, who was known as Ramiro III., an unwise and incapable monarch, reigned at Leon from 967 to 982, without extending the possessions or the influence of the Christians in Spain; and Bermudo II., who usurped the throne, was no match for the fiery Almanzor, who ravaged his kingdom, took possession of his capital, and compelled the Christian Court to take refuge in the wild mountains of the Asturias, and once more to pay tribute to the Moslem at Cordova.

Bermudo died in 999; and on the death of Almanzor, three years later, the Christian fortunes under the young Alfonso V., who had succeeded his father Bermudo, at the age of only five, began to mend. Cordova was given up to anarchy. The Moslem troops retired from Northern Spain. Leon became once more the abode of the king and his court, and though Alfonso gave his sister in marriage to Mohammed, an Emir or Vali of Toledo, he extended his Christian dominion in more than one foray against the declining power of the Moslem.

Alfonso V., who is known in Spanish history as the Restorer of Leon, sought to consolidate his own power, as he certainly exalted that of his clergy, by the summoning of a Council, after the manner of the Visigothic Councils of Toledo. The Council met at the city of Leon on the 1st of August, 1020, in the Cathedral Church of St. Mary. The king and his queen Elvira presided, and all the bishops and the principal abbots and nobles of the kingdom took their seats in the assembly. And if there was no Leander, nor Isidore, nor Julian to impose his will upon king or council, the interests of the Church were not entirely overlooked. Of the fifty-eight decrees and canons of this Council, the first seventeen relate exclusively to matters ecclesiastical, the next twenty are laws for the government of the kingdom, the remaining thirty-one are municipal ordinances for the city of Leon.

But Alfonso V. was not exempted from the usual rebellions, and marriages, and assassinations, and executions, which constituted the politics of the day. Garcia, the last Count of Castile, was treacherously slain in 1026; and Alfonso was himself more honorably killed in an attack upon a Moslem town in Lusitania in 1027.

The life of Fernan Gonzalez, the Warwick of medieval Spain, is almost as much overlaid with romantic legends as that of Roderic or Roland. The lives and deeds of his ancestors, and the origin of his ever-celebrated County of Castile, are involved in the utmost confusion and obscurity; but Fernan Gonzalez himself is at least a historical personage. He married Sancha, daughter of Sancho Abarca of Navarre, and their son, Garcia Fernandez, succeeded him as hereditary Count of Castile.

As early as the year 905, Sancho, a Christian chief of whose ancestors and predecessors much has been written, much surmised, and nothing is certainly known, was king or ruler of the little border state of Navarre. A prudent as well as a warlike sovereign, he fortified his capital city of Pamplona, and when his son, in alliance with Ordoño II. of Leon, was defeated by the Moslems at Val de Junquera, the Navarrese not only made good their retreat to that celebrated fortress, but succeeded in course of a short time in driving the Moslems out of their country. The grandson of this successful general was Sancho El Mayor—or the Great—the most powerful of the Christian princes in Spain (970-1035). Besides Navarre and Sobrarve he held the lordship of Aragon; in 1026, in right of his wife, Muña Elvira, he became king or count of Castile; while his successful interference in the affairs of Leon made him virtual master of all Christian Spain outside the limits of the quasi Frankish county of Catalonia.

Sancho the Great died in 1035, when his territories were divided, according to his will, among his four sons; and from this time forth the history of Navarre, so far as it is not included in the history of Aragon, of Castile, and of France, is a confused and dreary record of family quarrels, of plots and assassinations, of uncertain alliances, of broken treaties. The marriage of the Princess Berengaria with Richard I. of England, in 1191, failed to secure for Sancho V. the influence that he had hoped to secure: and with Sancho VI., who died in 1234, the male line of the house of Sancho Iniguez or Inigo, the founder of Navarre, was extinct. A French prince was chosen by the Navarrese to rule over them. And from the death of Sancho VI., in 1234, to the death of Charles the Bad, in 1387—one hundred and fifty years—the history of Navarre is that of France.

Bermudo III., who succeeded, on the death of his father, Alfonso V., in 1027, as king of Leon, was at once attacked by his powerful neighbors, and the little States were distracted by family quarrels and civil war until the death of Bermudo in battle, in 1037, when the male line of the house of Leon became extinct.

On the death of Bermudo III. in 1037, Ferdinand I., king of Castile, the second son of Sancho the Great, succeeded to the kingdom of Leon, and became, after over twenty years of civil war (1058), the most powerful monarch in all Spain. The Moslems offered but an uncertain and half-hearted resistance to his arms. For while the Christians were growing strong, the Moslem empire was already declining to its fall. And the decay of the Caliphate of Cordova, and the internal dissensions of the Arabs, enabled Ferdinand not only to recover all the territory that had been conquered by Almanzor, but to pursue the disheartened Moslem as far as Valencia, Toledo, and Coimbra. Ferdinand confirmed the Fueros of Alfonso V., and summoned a council at Coyanza (Valencia de Don Juan), over which, with his Queen Sancha, he presided in 1050. All the bishops and abbots, together with a certain number of lay nobles thus assembled ad restaurationem nostræ Christianitatis, proceeded to make decrees or canons, after the manner of the Councils of Toledo, of which the first seven were devoted to matters ecclesiastical, and the remainder connected with the civil government of the country. With territories thus recovered and augmented, with cities restored and fortified, Ferdinand determined to excel all his Christian predecessors, and to emulate the noble example of the Arab, by enriching his dominion, not with treasures of art or literature, with schools, with palaces, with manuscripts—but with the bones of as many martyrs as he could collect.

An army was raised for this sacred purpose, and the country of the Moors was once more invaded and harried by the Christian arms. Ibn Obeid of Seville, learning the objects of the invasion, offered Ferdinand every facility for research in his city; and a solemn commission of bishops and nobles were admitted within the walls to seek the body of Justus, one of the martyrs of Diocletian. But in spite of all the diligence of the Christians, and all the goodwill of the Arabs, the sacred remains could nowhere be found. At length the spirit of Saint Isidore removed the difficulty by appearing miraculously before the Commission, and offering his own bones in the place of those of Justus, which were destined, said he, to remain untouched at Seville. The Commission was satisfied. And the body of the great Metropolitan, “fragrant with balsamic odors,” was immediately removed to the Church of St. John the Baptist at Leon—to the great satisfaction of both Christians and Moors, in 1063.

It was on the occasion of the return of these blessed relics to the Christian capital that Ferdinand proclaimed the future division of his kingdom. For after all the success that had attended the Union of the dominions of Leon and Castile under the sole authority of Ferdinand, who rather perhaps for his sanctity than for his wisdom had earned the title of the Great, the king made the same grievous mistake that his father had done before him, in dividing his united territories at his death (1065) among his sons and daughters. To Sancho, the eldest son, he left the kingdom of Castile; to Alfonso, Leon and the Asturias; to Garcia, Galicia; to his younger daughter, Elvira, the town and district of Toro, and to her elder sister Urraca the famous border city of Zamora, the most debatable land in all Spain, and a strange heritage for a young lady. Thus Castile and Leon were once more separated; and the usual civil wars and family intrigues naturally followed. Alfonso, though not at first the most successful, survived all his rivals, and was at length proclaimed king of Leon and Castile.

But the successes and glories of Alfonso VI., such as they were, are overshadowed by the prowess of a Castilian hero, whose exploits form one of the most favorite chapters in the national history of Spain—the Christian knight with the Moslem title—Ruy Diaz, The Cid.

Two years before William of Normandy landed at Hastings, a Castilian knight, a youth who had already won for himself the proud title of The Challenger, from his reckless bravery and his success in single combat, is found leading the royal armies of Sancho of Castile against the enemy. The knight was Ruy Diaz de Bivar. The enemy was Alfonso VI. of Leon, the brother of Sancho, who was endeavoring to reunite the inheritance divided by his father, in the good old medieval fashion in Spain.

Of noble birth and parentage, a Castilian of the Castilians, Roderic or Ruy Diaz was born at Bivar, near Burgos, about the year 1040. His position in the army of Sancho was that of Alferez, in title the Standard-bearer, in effect the major-general or second in command, if not commander-in-chief of the king’s army.

For seven years Alfonso of Leon and Sancho of Castile had been at war, each seeking to destroy the other; and at length at Golpejara, near Carrion, on the eve of what promised to be a decisive battle, a solemn engagement was entered into by the brothers that whichever of the two was worsted in the encounter should resign his kingdom to the other without further bloodshed. The Castilians, in spite of Sancho and his famous Champion, were defeated at Golpejara; and Alfonso of Leon, foolishly trusting his brother’s word, took no heed to improve his victory, and his unsuspecting army was overwhelmed the next day by the Castilian troops under Ruy Diaz de Bivar, the author of this exceedingly characteristic, if not entirely authentic piece of treachery.

It is scarcely surprising that the Cid was not trusted by Alfonso of Leon, when he, in his turn, succeeded to the crown of Castile. But for the moment Alfonso was not only deprived of his throne and of his liberty by his more successful brother, but he was compelled to purchase his life by a promise to enter the monastery of Sahagun. Disregarding this vow, and making good his escape to Toledo, the royal refugee was received with the usual hospitality of the Arab by El Mamun, the Moslem ruler of the city, who sheltered and entertained him, as he himself admitted, “like a son.”

Sancho meanwhile had turned his arms against his brother Garcia, whom he dispossessed of his territories; against his sister Elvira, who met with a similar fate, and, lastly, against his sister Urraca, who withstood him boldly in her city of Zamora. And not only did this time-honored fortress resist the attack of Sancho and his wily major-general, but the king was slain outside the walls of the city by one of his sister’s knights. Alfonso thus not only recovered his own kingdom of Leon, but, swearing perpetual friendship with El Mamun of Toledo, he was elected king of Castile by the Commons assembled at Burgos; and the defeated refugee of 1071 found himself, in less than two years, the greatest prince in Christian Spain; Alfonso the Sixth of Leon and of Castile.

Yet the legend runs that Alfonso was compelled to undergo the indignity of a public examination, and a triple oath before the knights and nobles assembled at Burgos, to the effect that he had had no share in the murder of King Sancho; and the oath was administered by Ruy Diaz of Bivar, the companion in arms of the Castilian king, sometime the faithless enemy of Carrion, but now the acknowledged leader of the Castilian nobility.

Alfonso of Leon may have forgiven the treachery in the field, but he never forgot the insult in the Council. He restrained his indignation, however, and was even induced by reasons of State to grant to the bold Castilian lord the hand of his cousin Ximena in marriage, and to intrust him with the command of an expedition into Andalusia. But the royal favor was of brief duration; and in 1081 we find that Roderic, partly owing to the intrigues of Garcia Ordonez, and partly to the enduring enmity of the king, was banished from the Christian dominions.

Of all the petty sovereignties that came into existence on the breaking up of the Ommeyad Caliphate of Cordova, that of Moctadir, the chief of the Ben-i-hud of Saragossa, was the most powerful in Northern or Central Spain; and at the Moslem court of Saragossa, Ruy Diaz, with his fame and his followers, was warmly welcomed (1081) by Moctadir as a Said or Cid—a lord or leader of the Arabs. He had been driven out of Castile by Alfonso. He found a home and honorable command at Saragossa. So long as he could make war upon his neighbors, all countries were alike to Roderic of Bivar. Nor was it long before his prowess brought honor and profit to Moctadir, or, rather, to his son and successor, Motamin.

Ramon Berenguer III., count of Barcelona, was engaged, like other Christian princes of his time, in chronic warfare with his Moslem neighbors; and Motamin, with his Castilian Cid, marching against the Catalans, defeated the Christians with great slaughter at Almenara, near Lerida, and brought Ramon Berenguer a prisoner to Saragossa (1081), where the victorious Cid was loaded with presents by the grateful Motamin, and invested with an authority in the kingdom subordinate only to that of the king himself. Two years later (1083) an expedition was undertaken by the Moslems, under Roderic, against their Christian neighbors in Aragon. King Sancho Ramirez was completely defeated by the Castilian champion, who returned once more to Saragossa loaded with booty and renown. In 1084 the Cid seems to have paid a friendly visit to the court of Alfonso VI. But although he was apparently well received, he suspected treachery, and, returning to the court of the Moslem, once more took service under the delighted Motamin. His next campaign, undertaken in the following year, was not against any Christian power, but against the hostile Moslems of northern Valencia, and was crowned with the usual success. Motamin died in 1085, but the Cid remained in the service of his son and successor, Mostain, fighting against Christian and Moslem as occasion offered, partly for the King of Saragossa, but chiefly for the personal advantage of Ruy Diaz of Bivar. A stranger national hero it is hard to imagine! Nor were his subsequent proceedings in any degree less strange.

Al Mamun, the host and protector of Alfonso VI., had died in 1075, leaving, his grandson, Cadir, to succeed him as sovereign of Toledo. Abdulaziz, the viceroy of the subject city of Valencia, took advantage of the weakness of the young prince to declare himself independent, and placing himself under the protection of the Christians, undertook to pay a large subsidy to Alfonso VI. in return for his recognition and support. The subsidy was punctually paid, and, in spite of a present of no less than a hundred thousand pieces of gold handed over by Moctadir of Saragossa to Alfonso as the price of Valencia, Abdulaziz retained his hold of the city until his death in 1085. On this, numerous pretenders to the government immediately arose, including Moctadir of Saragossa, a purchaser for value, and the two sons of Abdulaziz; while Alfonso took advantage of the confusion that ensued to persuade Cadir to surrender Toledo, much coveted by the Christian king, and to accept, or, more exactly, to retain, for himself the sovereignty of Valencia, under the humiliating protection of Castile. Alfonso cared nothing that Toledo was the inheritance of his youthful ally, the home of his old protector, when he himself was a hunted refugee. He cared nothing that the Valencians were hostile to Cadir, and that powerful neighbors were prepared to dispute his possession. He cared nothing that Moctadir, who had actually purchased the city from Alfonso himself, was on the way to make good his claim. A treaty was forced upon Cadir by which Toledo was surrendered to Alfonso VI. (1085), and the Christian king was bound to place and maintain the unhappy prince in possession of his own subordinate city of Valencia.

Toledo thus became the capital of Christian Spain; and the evicted sovereign, escorted by a large force of Castilian troops under Alvar Fanez, made his sad and solemn entry into Valencia, despised at once by the citizens of Toledo, whom he had abandoned to the Christian sovereign, and by the citizens of Valencia, where his power was maintained by Christian lances. And costly indeed was this Christian maintenance. Six hundred pieces of gold is said to have been the daily allowance of the army of Castilian mercenaries; and the taxes that were necessitated by their presence only added to the unpopularity of the government. Many of Cadir’s Moslem subjects fled from the city; and their place was taken by his Christian supporters or pensioners, whose rapacity was, if possible, exceeded by their cruelty. But the coming of the Almoravides gave a new turn to the fortunes of the city. Alvar Fanez and his knights were recalled by Alfonso, and after the defeat of the Christians at Zalaca, in October, 1086, Cadir found himself threatened with immediate expulsion by his own citizens, supported by Mondhir of Lerida, the uncle of Mostain of Saragossa. In this difficulty he once more sought the protection of Christian lances, and applied for aid to the Cid, who immediately advanced on Valencia.

An intriguer, at all times and places, Roderic promised his support to Cadir in return for admission within the walls. He entered into a formal treaty with Mostain that the city should be his, if all the booty were handed over to the Campeador; and he sent envoys to Alfonso to assure him that in all these forays and alliances he thought only of the advantage of Christendom and the honor of Castile. Mondhir, overawed by the appearance of the allied army from Saragossa, hastily retired from before Valencia, where Mostain and his Christian Said were welcomed as deliverers by Cadir.

But although the Cid imposed a tribute upon the unhappy Valencians, he failed to give over the city to Mostain, and assuring Cadir of his constant support, as long as a monthly allowance of ten thousand golden dinars was punctually paid, he withdrew himself from the remonstrances of the disappointed Mostain—to whom he continued to protest his continued devotion—on the plea of a necessary visit to his Christian sovereign in Castile, to explain or excuse his position, and to engage some Castilian troops for his army. Mostain, during his absence, perceiving that he could not count upon so versatile and so ambitious a Said in the matter of the handing over of Valencia, entered into an alliance with his old enemy, Ramon Berenguer, of Barcelona; and the Catalans had actually laid siege to the city when the return of the Cid induced them to abandon their trenches and retire to Barcelona.

If the Cid was a hero of romance, he did not wield his sword without the most magnificent remuneration. At this period of his career (1089-92), in addition to the eighty thousand golden pieces received from Ramon Berenguer, he is said to have drawn fifty thousand from the son of Mondhir, one hundred and twenty thousand from Cadir of Valencia, ten thousand from Albarracin, ten thousand from Alpuente, six thousand from Murviedro, six thousand from Segorbe, four thousand from Jerica, and three thousand from Almenara.

With such an amount of personal tribute, the Cid cannot, says Lafuente, have been greatly inconvenienced by the action of Alfonso VI. in despoiling him of his estates. Supporting his army of seven thousand chosen followers on the rich booty acquired in his daily forays upon Eastern Spain, from Saragossa to Alicante; regardless of Christian rights, but the special scourge of the Moslems; no longer a Saragossan general, but a private adventurer, the Cid could afford to quarrel at once with Mostain and with Alfonso, and to defy the combined forces of Mondhir and Ramon Berenguer.

The rivalry between the Cid and the Catalan was ever fierce in Eastern Spain. The opposing armies met at Tebar del Pinar in 1090, and although the Cid was wounded in the battle, his army was completely successful. Mondhir fled from the field; and Ramon Berenguer was once more a prisoner in the hands of Roderic. Nor was the Christian count released from a confinement more harsh than was generous or necessary until he had given good security for the payment of the enormous ransom of eighty thousand marks of gold.

It is not easy, nor would it be fruitful, to follow the various movements of the Cid at this period of his career. His quarrels and his intrigues with Alfonso of Castile, with Cadir of Valencia, with the various parties at the court of Saragossa, with Ramon Berenguer at Barcelona, and even with the Genoese and Pisans, are neither easy nor interesting to follow. But his principal objective was the rich city of Valencia. Alfonso of Leon, ever jealous of his great and most independent subject, resolved to thwart him in his design; and having secured the co-operation of the Pisans and Genoese, who had arrived with a fleet of four hundred vessels to assist the Cid, the king took advantage of the absence of his rival on some foray to the north of Saragossa to advance upon Valencia, and to push forward his operations to the very walls of the city. Ruy Diaz riposted after his fashion.

Leaving the Valencians to make good the defense of their own city, he carried fire and sword into Alfonso’s peaceful dominions of Najera and Calahorra, destroying all the towns, burning all the crops, slaughtering the Christian inhabitants; and razing the important city of Logrono to the ground. This savagery was completely successful, and met with no reproach. The Cid is one of those fortunate heroes to whom all things are permitted. His excesses are forgotten; his independence admired; his boldness and his success are alone remembered. Alfonso, thus rudely summoned to the north of the Peninsula, abruptly raised the siege of Valencia.

Nor was the king’s action at Valencia without a favorable influence upon the fortunes of the Cid. Far from wresting the city from the grasp of Roderic, Alfonso had rather precipitated the crisis which was ultimately to lead to his triumphal entry as the independent ruler of the city. Cadir was murdered by a hostile faction within the walls; and the Cid, advancing with his usual prudence, spent some time in possessing himself of the suburbs and the approaches to the city, before the siege was commenced in good earnest, in July, 1093.

The operations were carried on in the most ferocious fashion by the attacking force. Roderic burned his prisoners alive from day to day within the sight of the walls, or caused them to be torn in pieces by his dogs under the very eyes of their fellow-townsmen.

The blockaded city was soon a prey to the utmost horrors of famine. Negotiation was fruitless. Succor came not. Neither Christian nor Moslem, neither Alfonso the Castilian, nor Yusuf the Almoravide, nor Mostain of Saragossa, appearing to defend or to relieve the city, Valencia capitulated on the 15th of June, 1094.

The Moslem commander, Ibn Jahaf, was burned alive. The Moslem inhabitants were treated with scant consideration, and the Cid, as might have been supposed, proclaimed himself sovereign of Valencia, independent of either Christian Alfonso or Moorish Mostain; and at Valencia he lived and reigned until the day of his death, but five years afterward, in 1099. His rule was often threatened by the Almoravides; but as long as the champion lived they could effect no entry within the walls of his city.

For full three years after his death, moreover, his widow Ximena, and his cousin Alvar Fanez, maintained a precarious sovereignty at Valencia. At length, unsupported by Alfonso of Leon, and unable to stand alone in the midst of the Moslems, they retired to Burgos, carrying with them the body of the Cid embalmed in precious spices, borne, as of old, on his faithful steed Babieca, to its last resting place in Castile. Valencia was immediately occupied by the Almoravides, and became once more a Moslem stronghold; nor did it finally pass into Christian hands until it was taken by James the First of Aragon in 1238. The Cid was buried in the Monastery of Cardena, near Burgos; and the body of his heroic wife, Dona Ximena, who died in 1104, was laid by his side in the tomb.

The legend of the marriage of the Cid’s daughters with the Infantes of Carrion, of their desertion, and of the vengeance of the Cid upon their unworthy husbands, is undoubtedly an invention of the Castilian minstrels.

The legend of the death of the Cid’s son at the battle of Consuegra is certainly fallacious. There is no evidence that a son was ever born to him at all. But he had undoubtedly two daughters, one of whom, Christina, married Ramiro, Infante of Navarre, and the other, Maria, became the countess of Ramon Berenguer III. of Barcelona. The issue of Ramon Berenguer III. was a daughter who died childless, but a granddaughter of Ramiro of Navarre married Sancho III. of Castile, whose son, Alfonso VIII., was the grandfather both of St. Ferdinand and of St. Louis. And thus in a double stream, through the royal houses of Spain and of France, the blood of the Cid is found to flow in the veins of his Majesty Alfonso XIII., the reigning king of Spain.

To understand or appreciate the position that is occupied by the Cid in Spanish history is at the present day supremely difficult. A medieval condottiere in the service of the Moslem, when he was not fighting to fill his own coffers with perfect impartiality against Moor or Christian: banished as a traitor by his Castilian sovereign, and constantly leading the forces of the Infidel against Aragon, against Catalonia, and even against Castile, he has become the national hero of Spain. Warring against the Moslem of Valencia, whom he pitilessly despoiled, with the aid of the Moslem of Saragossa, whose cause he cynically betrayed, while he yet owned a nominal allegiance to Alfonso of Castile, whose territories he was pitilessly ravaging; retaining conquered Valencia for his personal and private advantage, in despite of Moslem or Christian kings, he has become the type of Christian loyalty and Christian chivalry in Europe. Avaricious, faithless, cruel and bold, a true soldier of fortune, the Cid still maintains a reputation which is one of the enigmas of history.

The three favorites of medieval Spanish romance, says Senor Lafuente, Bernardo del Carpio, Fernan Gonzalez, and the Cid, have this at least in common, that they were all at war with their lawful sovereigns, and fought their battles independently of the crown. Hence their popularity in Spain. The Castilians of the Middle Ages were so devoted to their independence, so proud of their Fueros, such admirers of personal prowess, that they were disposed to welcome with national admiration those heroes who sprang from the people, who defied and were ill-treated by their kings.

The theory is both ingenious and just, yet it by no means solves the difficulty. Ruy Diaz of Bivar, who was one of the proudest nobles of Castile, can scarcely be said to have sprung from the people, nor do we clearly perceive why his long service under Moslem kings, even though he was a rebel against his own sovereign, should have endeared him to the Christian Spaniards, however independent or however democratic. Yet we may learn at least from the character of the hero, ideal though it be, that the medieval Castilians were no bigots, and that they were slaves neither to their kings nor to their clergy.

The people of Aragon no doubt held their king in a more distinctly constitutional subjection. No Castilian chief-justice was found to call the sovereign to order: no Privilege of Union legalized a popular war in defense of popular liberties. But Roderic took the place of the justiciary in legend, if not in history, when he administered the oath to Alfonso at Burgos; and he invested himself with the privilege of warring against an aggressive king, when he routed Alfonso’s forces, and burned his cities, to requite him for his attack upon Valencia.

It is this rebellious boldness which contributed no doubt very largely to endear the Cid to his contemporaries. It is one of the most constant characteristics of his career; one of the features that is portrayed with equal clearness by the chroniclers and the ballad-makers of Spain. For the Cid is essentially a popular hero. His legendary presentment is a kind of poetic protest against arbitrary regal power. The Cid ballads are a pæan of triumphant democracy. The ideal Cid no doubt was evolved in the course of the twelfth century; and by the end of the fifteenth century, when the rule of kings and priests had become harder and heavier in Spain, an enslaved people looked back with an envious national pride to the Castilian hero who personified the freedom of bygone days.

The Cid is the only knight-errant that has survived the polished satire of Cervantes. For his fame was neither literary nor aristocratic; but, like the early Spanish proverbs, in which it is said he took so great a delight, it was embedded deep in the hearts of the people.[3] And although the memory of his religious indifference may not have added to his popularity in the sixteenth century in Spain, it is a part of his character which must be taken into account in gauging the public opinion of earlier days.

From the close of the eighth century to the close of the fifteenth, the Spanish people, Castilians and Aragonese, were, if anything, less bigoted than the rest of Europe. The influence of their neighbors the Moors, and of their Arab toleration, could not be without its effect upon a people naturally free, independent, and self-reliant, and the Cid, who was certainly troubled with no religious scruples in the course of his varied career, and who, according to a popular legend, affronted and threatened the Pope on his throne in St Peter’s, on account of some fancied slight,[4] could never have been the hero of a nation of bigots. The degenerate Visigoths from the time of Reccared the Catholic to the time of Roderic the Vanquished could never have produced a Cid. Yet, even in the dark days of Erwig and Egica, there was found a Julian, who boldly maintained the national independence against the pretensions of the Pope of Rome. For a thousand years after the landing of St. Paul—if, indeed, he ever landed upon the coast—the Spanish Church was, perhaps, the most independent in Europe. The royal submission to the Papal authority, first by Sancho I. of Aragon, in 1071, and afterward by Alfonso VI. of Leon, in 1085, in the matter of the Romish Ritual, was distinctly unpopular. Peter II. found no lack of recruits for the army that he led against the Papal troops in Languedoc, and King James I., the most popular of the kings of Aragon, cut out the tongue of a meddlesome bishop who had presumed to interfere in his private affairs (1246). It was not until the Inquisition was forced upon United Spain by Isabella the Catholic, and the national lust for the plunder of strangers was aroused by the destruction of Granada, that the Spaniard became a destroyer of heretics. It was not until the spoliation and the banishment of Jews and Moriscos, and the opening of a new world of heathen treasure on the discovery of America, that the Castilian, who had always been independent himself, became intolerant of the independence of others. Then, indeed, he added the cruelty of the priest to the cruelty of the soldier, and wrapping himself in the cloak of a proud and uncompromising national orthodoxy, became the most ferocious bigot in two unhappy worlds.

But in the beginning it was not so. And if the Cid could possibly have been annoyed by Torquemada, his knights would have hanged the Inquisitor upon the nearest tree. No priests’ man, in good sooth, was Roderic of Bivar, nor, save in that he was a brave and determined soldier, had the great Castilian Free Lance anything in common with the more conventional heroes of United Spain.

If history affords no reasonable explanation of his unrivaled renown beyond that which has already been suggested, we find but little in the early poetry to assist us. The Cid ballads impress us “more by their number than their light.” They are neither very interesting in themselves, nor are they even very suggestive. Only thirty-seven ballads are considered by Huber to be older than the sixteenth century. “La plupart de ces romances,” says M. Dozy, “accusent leur origine moderne”; and, according to Mr. Ormsby, they do but little toward the illustration of the Cid, either as a picturesque hero of romance or as a characteristic feature of medieval history.

The great French dramatist scarcely touches the true history of his hero. The scene of the play is laid at Seville, where no Christian king set his foot for a hundred and fifty years after the death of Roderic. The title which he accepted from his employer, Mostain of Saragossa, is said to have been granted by Alfonso of Leon, after the capture of two imaginary Moorish kings, unknown to history, in an impossible battle on the banks of the Guadalquivir, which was never seen by the Cid. The whole action of the play turns upon the moral and psychological difficulties arising from the purely legendary incident of the killing of Chimene’s father by her lover, avenging an insult offered to his own sire, and of the somewhat artificial indignation of the lady, until she is appeased by a slaughter of Moors. Corneille’s drama abounds in noble sentiments expressed in most admirable verse; but it does not assist us to understand the character of the Cid, nor the reasons of his popularity in his own or in any other country. But certain at least it is that from the earliest times the story of his life and his career took a strong hold upon the popular imagination in Spain, and his virtues and his vices, little as they may seem to us to warrant the popular admiration, were understood and appreciated in the age in which he lived, an age of force and fraud, of domestic treason and foreign treachery, when religion preached little but battle and murder, and patriotism was but a pretext for plunder and rapine. Admired thus, even in his lifetime, as a gallant soldier, an independent chieftain, and an ever successful general, fearless, dexterous, and strong, his free career became a favorite theme with the jongleurs and troubadours of the next generation; and from the Cid of history was evolved a Cid of legendary song.

It is most difficult at the present day to know exactly where serious history ends and where poetry and legend begin. Yet the Cid as represented to us by M. Dozy, one of the most acute of modern investigators of historic truth, is not so very different from the Cid represented by Southey, or even by earlier and less critical poets, but that we may form a reasonable estimate, from what is common to both history and tradition, of what manner of man he was. The Cid of the twelfth century legends, indeed, though he may be more marvelous, is by no means more moral than the Cid of history. It was reserved for the superior refinement of succeeding generations, and more especially for the anonymous author of the poem of the thirteenth century to evolve a hero of a gentler and nobler mold; a creature conforming to a higher ideal of knightly perfection. From this time forward we have a glorified Cid, whose adventures are no more historically false, perhaps, than those of the unscrupulous and magnificent Paladin of the legends and romances of the twelfth century, but whose character possesses all the dignity and all the glory with which he could be invested by a generous medieval imagination. And it is this refined and idealized hero; idealized, yet most real; refined, yet eminently human, that has been worshiped by nineteen generations of Spaniards as the national hero of Spain.

Ruy Diaz—as he lived and died—was probably no worse a man than any of his neighbors. Far better than many of them he was, and undoubtedly bolder and stronger, more capable, more adroit, and more successful.

Seven of the Christian princes of Spain at this period fell in battle warring against their own near relations, or were murdered by their hands in cold blood. Garcia of Castile was slain by the sword of the Velas. Bermudo III. of Leon and Garcia Sanchez of Navarre died fighting against their brother, Ferdinand of Castile. Sancho II. of Castile was assassinated by order of his sister Urraca, besieged by him in her city of Zamora. Among the Christian kings of the century immediately before him, Garcia of Galicia was strangled in prison by the hands of his brothers, Sancho and Alfonso; Sancho Garcia of Navarre was assassinated by his brother Ramon, at Peñalva; Ramon Berenguer II. of Barcelona died by the dagger of his brother Berenguer Ramon; Sancho the Fat, in 967, was poisoned at a friendly repast by Gonzalo Sanchez; Ruy Velasquez of Castile, in 986, murdered his seven nephews, the unfortunate Infantes de Lara; Sancho of Castile, in 1010, poisoned his mother, who had endeavored to poison him. At the wedding festivities at Leon, in 1026, Garcia, Count of Castile, was assassinated at the church door, and the murderers were promptly burned alive by his friends; Garcia of Navarre, in 1030, as an incident in a family dispute about a horse, accused his mother of adultery. Such was the standard of the eleventh century in the north of the Peninsula.

To judge the Cid, even as we now know him, according to any code of modern ethics, is supremely unreasonable. To be sure, even now, that we know him as he was, is supremely presumptuous. But that Ruy Diaz was a great man, and a great leader of men, a knight who would have shocked modern poets, and a free lance who would have laughed at modern heroes, we can have no manner of doubt. That he satisfied his contemporaries and himself; that he slew Moors and Christians as occasion required, with equal vigor and absolute impartiality; that he bearded the King of Leon in his Christian council, and that he cozened the King of Saragossa at the head of his Moslem army; that he rode the best horse and brandished the best blade in Spain; that his armies never wanted for valiant soldiers, nor his coffers for gold pieces; that he lived my Lord the Challenger, the terror of every foe, and that he died rich and respected in the noble city that had fallen to his knightly spear—of all this at least we are certain; and, if the tale is displeasing to our nineteenth century refinement, we must be content to believe that it satisfied the aspirations of medieval Spain.

CHAPTER IV
MOORISH SPAIN

THE LAST OF THE CALIPHS—THE RISE AND FALL OF GRANADA—FERDINAND AND ISABELLA—THE GREAT CAPTAIN

Moslem rule in Spain may be conveniently summarized as consisting—first, in the Caliphs of Cordova; second, in the dynasty of the Almoravides; third, in that of the Almohades; and, finally, the kings of Granada.

Concerning the first it may be noted that in the long reign of the last Abdur Rahman were the seeds of its dissolution. Brooking no rival during his lifetime, at his death he found no successor. Then upon the ruins of the great Caliphate twenty independent and hostile dynasties surged. Meanwhile Alfonso was eyeing them from his citadel. At the gates of Valencia was the Cid. For common safety the Moslem rivals looked for a common defender. In Africa that defender was found in Yusuf, the Berber chief of a tribe of religious soldiers known as the Almoravides.

Invited to Spain, he crossed over, and, meeting Alfonso at Zalaca, near Badajoz, on the 23d of October, 1086, he routed him with great and historic slaughter.

Yusuf [says Burke] had come as a Moslem defender, but he remained as a Moslem master. And once more in Spanish history, the over-powerful ally turned his victorious arms against those who had welcomed him to their shores. Yet Yusuf was no vulgar traitor. He had sworn to the envoys of the Spanish Moslems that he would return to Africa, in the event of victory, without the annexation to his African empire of a field or a city to the north of the Straits. And his vow was religiously kept. Retiring empty-handed to Mauritania, after the great battle at Zalaca, he returned once more to Spain, unfettered on this new expedition by any vow, and set to work with his usual vigor to make himself master of the Peninsula. Tarifa fell in December. The next year saw the capture of Seville, and of all of the principal cities of Andalusia. An army sent by Alfonso VI., under his famous captain, Alvar Fanez, was completely defeated, and all Southern Spain lay at the feet of the Berber, save only Valencia, which remained impregnable so long as the Cid lived to direct the defense. In 1102, after the hero’s death, Valencia succumbed, and all Spain to the south of the Tagus became a province of the great African empire of the Almoravides.

The rule of these hardy bigots was entirely unlike that of the Ommeyad Caliphs of the West. Moslem Spain had no longer even an independent existence. The sovereign resided not at Cordova, but at Morocco. The poets and musicians were banished from court. The beauties of Az Zahra were forgotten. Jews and Christians were alike persecuted. The kingdom was governed with an iron hand. But if the rule of the stranger was not generous, it was just, and for the moment it possessed the crowning merit that it was efficient. The laws were once more respected. The people once more dreamed of wealth and happiness. But it was little more than a dream.

On the death of Yusuf in 1107 the scepter passed into the hands of his son Ali, a more sympathetic but a far less powerful ruler. In 1118 the great city of Saragossa, the last bulwark of Islam in the north of the Peninsula, was taken by Alfonso I. of Aragon, who carried his victorious arms into Southern Spain, and fulfilled a rash vow by eating a dinner of fresh fish on the coast of Granada.

Yet it was by no Christian hand that the empire of the Almoravides was to be overthrown.

Mohammed Ibn Abdullah, a lamplighter in the mosque at Cordova, had made his way to remote Bagdad to study at the feet of Abu Hamid Algazali, a celebrated doctor of Moslem law. The strange adventures, so characteristic of his age and nation, by which the lowly student became a religious reformer—a Mahdi—and a conqueror in Africa, and at length overthrew the Almoravides, both to the north and the south of the Straits of Gibraltar, forms a most curious chapter in the history of Islam; but in a brief sketch of the fortunes of medieval Spain, it must suffice to say that having established his religious and military power among the Berber tribes of Africa, Ibn Abdullah, the Mahdi, landed at Algeciras in 1145, and possessed himself in less than four years of Malaga, Seville, Granada, and Cordova. The empire of the Almoravides was completely destroyed; and, before the close of the year 1149, all Moslem Spain acknowledged the supremacy of the Almohades.

These more sturdy fanatics were still African rather than Spanish sovereigns. Moslem Spain was administered by a Vali deputed from Morocco; and Cordova, shorn of much of its former splendor, was the occasional abode of a royal visitor from Barbary. For seventy years the Almohades retained their position in Spain. But their rule was not of glory but of decay. One high feat of arms indeed shed a dying luster on the name of the Berber prince who reigned for fifteen years (1184-99) under the auspicious title of Almanzor, and his great Moslem victory over Alfonso II. at Alarcon in 1195 revived for the time the drooping fortunes of the Almohades. But their empire was already doomed, decaying, disintegrated, wasting away. And at length the terrible defeat of the Moslem forces by the united armies of the three Christian kings at the Navas do Tolosa in 1212, at once the most crushing and the most authentic of all the Christian victories of medieval Spain, gave a final and deadly blow to the Moslem dominion of the Peninsula. Within a few years of that celebrated battle, Granada alone was subject to the rule of Islam.

It was in the year 1228 that a descendant of the old Moorish kings of Saragossa rebelled against the Almohades and succeeded in making himself master not merely of Granada, but of Cordova, Seville, Algeciras, and even of Ceuta, and, obtaining a confirmation of his rights from Bagdad, assumed the title of Amir ul Moslemin—Commander of the Moslems—and Al Mutawakal—the Protected of God.

But a rival was not slow to appear. Mohammed Al Ahmar, the Fair or the Ruddy, defeated, dethroned, and slew Al Mutawakal, and reigned in his stead in Andalusia. Despoiled in his turn of most of his possessions by St. Ferdinand of Castile, Al Ahmar was fain at length to content himself with the rich districts in the extreme south of the Peninsula, which are known to fame, wherever the Spanish or the English language is spoken, as the Kingdom of Granada. And thus it came to pass that the city on the banks of the Darro, the home of the proud and highly cultivated Syrians of Damascus, the flower of the early Arab invaders of Spain, became also the abiding place of the later Arab civilization, overmastered year after year, and destroyed, by the Christian armies ever pressing on to the southern sea. Yet, in the middle of the thirteenth century, the flood tide of reconquest had for the moment fairly spent itself. The Christians were not strong enough to conquer, and above all they were not numerous enough to occupy, the districts that were still peopled by the Moor; and for once a wise and highly cultivated Christian shared the supreme power in the Peninsula with a generous and honorable Moslem. Alfonso X. sought not to extend his frontiers, but to educate his people, not to slaughter his neighbors, but to give laws to his subjects, not to plunder frontier cities, but to make Castile into a kingdom, with a history, a civilization, and a language of her own. If the reputation of Alfonso is by no means commensurate with his true greatness, the statesmanship of Mohammed Al Ahmar, the founder of the ever famous Kingdom of Granada, is overshadowed by his undying fame as an architect. Yet is Al Ahmar worthy of remembrance as a king and the parent of kings in Spain. The loyal friend and ally of his Christian neighbor, the prudent administrator of his own dominions, he collected at his Arab court a great part of the wealth, the science, and the intelligence of Spain. His empire has long ago been broken up; the Moslem has been driven out; there is no king nor kingdom of Granada. But their memory lives in the great palace fortress whose red towers still rise over the sparkling Darro, and whose fairy chambers are still to be seen in what is, perhaps, the most celebrated of the wonder works of the master builders of the world.

After his long and glorious reign of forty-two years, Mohammed the Fair was killed by a fall from his horse near Granada, and was succeeded by his son, Mohammed II., in the last days of the year 1272. Al Ahmar had ever remained at peace with Alfonso X., but his son, taking advantage of the king’s absence in quest of an empire in Germany, sought the assistance of Yusuf, the sovereign or emperor of Morocco, and invaded the Christian frontiers.

Victory was for some time on the side of the Moors. The Castilians were defeated at Ecija in 1275, and their leader, the Viceroy Don Nunez de Lara, was killed in battle, as was also Don Sancho, Infante of Aragon and Archbishop of Toledo, after the rout of his army at Martos, near Jaen, on the 21st of October, 1275; and the victorious Yusuf ravaged Christian Spain to the very gates of Seville.

In the next year, 1276, the Castilian armies were again twice defeated, in February at Alcoy and in the following July at Lucena. To add to their troubles, King James of Aragon died at Valencia in 1276. Sancho of Castile sought to depose his father Alfonso, at Valladolid. All was in confusion among the Christians; and had it not been for the defection of Yusuf of Morocco, the tide of fortune might have turned in favor of Islam. As it was, the African monarch not only abandoned his cousin of Granada, but he was actually persuaded to send one hundred thousand ducats to his Christian rival at Seville in 1280.

The value of this assistance was soon felt. Tarifa was taken in 1292, and the progress of the Moor was checked forever in Southern Spain. Mohammed II. died in 1302, and was succeeded by his son, Mohammed III., who was usually considered by the Moslem historians to have been the ablest monarch of his house. But he reigned for only seven years, and he was unable to defend Gibraltar from the assaults of his Christian rivals.

From this time the court of Granada became a sort of city of refuge for the disaffected lords and princes of Castile, who sometimes, but rarely, prevailed upon their Moslem hosts to assist them in expeditions into Christian Spain, but who were always welcomed with true Arab hospitality at the Moslem capital. To record their various intrigues would be a vain and unpleasing task. The general course of history was hardly affected by passing alliances. The Christian pressed on—with ever-increasing territory behind him—on his road to the southern sea.

In 1319, Abdul Walid or Ismail I. of Granada defeated and slew Don Pedro and Don Juan, Infantes of Castile, at a place near Granada, still known as the Sierra de los Infantes. But no important consequences followed the victory.

In the reign of Yusuf (1333-54) was fought the great battle of the Salado (1340), when the Christians, under Alfonso XI., were completely successful; and the capitulation of Algeciras three years later deprived the Moslems of an important harbor and seaport. Day by day—almost hour by hour—the Christians encroached upon Granada, even while cultivating the political friendship and accepting the private hospitality of the Moslem. Their treacherous intervention reached its climax in 1362, when Peter the Cruel decoyed the King Abu Said, under his royal safe-conduct, to the palace at Seville, and slew him with his own hand.

With Mohammed or Maulai al Aisar, or the Left-handed, the affairs of Granada became more intimately connected with the serious history of Spain. Al Hayzari, proclaimed king in 1423, and dethroned soon after by his cousin, another Mohammed, in 1427 sought and found refuge at the court of John II., by whose instrumentality he was restored to his throne at the Alhambra in 1429. Yet within four years a rival sovereign, Yusuf, had secured the support of the fickle Christian, and Muley the Left-handed was forced a second time to fly from his capital. Once again, by the sudden death of the new usurper, he returned to reign at Granada, and once again for the third time he was supplanted by a more fortunate rival, who reigned as Mohammed IX. for nearly ten years (1445-54). At the end of this period, however, another pretender was dispatched from the Christian court, and after much fighting and intrigue, Mohammed Ibn Ismail, a nephew of Maulai or Muley the Left-handed, drove out the reigning sovereign and succeeded him as Mohammed X.

Yet were the dominions of this Christian ally unceasingly ravaged by his Christian neighbors. Gibraltar, Archidona, and much surrounding territory were taken by the forces of Henry IV. and his nobles; and a treaty was at length concluded in 1464, in which it was agreed that Mohammed of Granada should hold his kingdom under the protection of Castile, and should pay an annual subsidy or tribute of twelve thousand gold ducats. It was thus, on the death, in 1466, of this Mohammed Ismail of Granada, that a vexed and harassed throne was inherited by his son Muley Abul Hassan, ever famous in history and romance as “The old king”—the last independent sovereign of Granada.

Meanwhile, Henry’s only daughter Joanna being regarded as the fruit of the queen’s adultery, he was deposed, but restored after acknowledging as his heiress his sister Isabella, who subsequently, through her marriage with Ferdinand of Aragon, joined the two most powerful of Spanish kingdoms into one yet more powerful State.

To return now to Muley Abul Hassan.[5] For many years after his accession he observed with his Christian neighbors the treaties that had been made, nor did he take advantage of the civil war which arose by reason of Joanna’s pretensions to add to the difficulties already existing, and in the spring of 1476 sought a formal renewal of the old Treaty of Peace.

Ferdinand, however, made his acceptance of the king’s proposal contingent upon the grant of an annual tribute; and he sent an envoy to the Moslem court to negotiate the terms of payment. But the reply of Abul Hassan was decisive. “Steel,” said he, “not gold, was what Ferdinand should have from Granada!” Disappointed of their subsidy, and unprepared for war, the Christian sovereigns were content to renew the treaty, with a mental reservation that as soon as a favorable opportunity should present itself they would drive every Moslem not only out of Granada, but out of Spain.

For five years there was peace between Abul Hassan and the Catholic sovereigns. The commencement of hostilities was the capture of Zahara by the Moslems at the close of the year 1481; which was followed early in next year, 1482, by the conquest of the far more important Moorish stronghold of Alhama, not by the troops of Ferdinand and Isabella, but by the followers of Ponce de Leon, the celebrated Marquis of Cadiz. Alhama was not merely a fortress. It was a treasure-house and a magazine; and it was but five or six leagues from Granada. The town was sacked with the usual horrors. The Marquis of Cadiz, having made good his position within the walls, defied all the attacks of Abul Hassan, and at the same time sent messengers to every Christian lord in Andalusia to come to his assistance—to all save one, his hereditary enemy, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, chief of the great family of the Guzmans. Yet it was this generous rival, who, assembling all his chivalry and retainers, was the first to appear before the walls of Alhama, and relieve the Christians from the threatened assault of the Moslem. The days of civil discord had passed away in Castile; and against united Christendom, Islam could not long exist in Spain.

Meanwhile, Ferdinand, seeing that war had finally broken out, started from Medina del Campo, and marched with all speed to Cordova, where he was joined by Isabella early in April, 1482. The Inquisition had now been for over a year in full blast at Seville. The fires of persecution had been fairly lighted. The reign of bigotry had begun, and the king and queen were encouraged to proceed from the plunder of the Jews or New Christians to the plunder of the Moslems. Ferdinand accordingly repaired in person to Alhama, with a large train of prelates and ecclesiastics of lower degree. The city was solemnly purified. Three mosques were consecrated by the Cardinal of Spain for Christian worship. Bells, crosses, plate, altar cloths were furnished without stint; and Alhama having been thus restored to civilization, Ferdinand descended upon the fruitful valley or Vega of Granada, destroyed the crops, cut down the fruit trees, uprooted the vines, and, without having encountered a single armed enemy in the course of his crusade, returned in triumph to Cordova. A more arduous enterprise in the following July was not attended with the same success, when Ferdinand attacked the important town of Loja, and was repulsed with great loss of Christian life. An expedition against Malaga, later in the year, undertaken by Alfonso de Cardenas, Grand Master of Santiago, and the Marquis of Cadiz, was even more disastrous, for a small body of Moors in the mountain defiles of the Axarquia fell upon the Christian marauders, and no less than four hundred “persons of quality” are said to have perished in the retreat, including thirty commanders of the great military order of Santiago. The Grand Master, the Marquis of Cadiz, and Don Alfonso de Aguilar escaped as by a miracle, and the survivors straggled into Loja and Antequera and Malaga, leaving Abul Hassan and his brother Al Zagal, or the Valiant, with all the honors of war.

But the successes of the Moor in the field were more than counterbalanced by treason in the palace. By Zoraya, a lady of Christian ancestry, Muley Abul Hassan had a son, Abu Abdallah, who has earned a sad notoriety under the more familiar name of Boabdil. Jealous of some rival, or ambitious of greater power, the Sultana and her son intrigued against their sovereign, and having escaped from the State prison, in which they were at first prudently confined, raised the standard of revolt, and compelled Abul Hassan, who was thenceforth more usually spoken of as the Old King, to seek refuge on the sea-coast at Malaga.

Boabdil, jealous of the success of his father and his undo at Loja and in the Axarquia, and anxious to confirm his power by some striking victory over the Christians, took the field and confronted the forces of the Count of Cabra, near Lucena. The battle was hotly contested, but victory remained with the Christians. Ali Atar, the bravest of the Moorish generals, was slain by the hand of Alfonso de Aguilar, and Boabdil himself was taken prisoner by a common soldier, Hurtado by name, and fell into the hands of the victorious Count of Cabra.

The captivity of Boabdil, the Little King, el Rey Chico, as he was called by the Castilians, was the turning point in the history of the Moorish dominion in Spain. Released on payment of a magnificent ransom provided by his mother Zoraya, and bound to his Christian captors by a humiliating treaty, he returned to Granada, disgraced and dishonored, as the ally of the enemies of his country. Driven out of the capital by the forces of his father, who had returned to occupy the great palace-fortress of Alhambra, Boabdil and his mother retired to Almeria, the second city in the kingdom; and the whole country was distracted by civil war.

Yet for four years the Castilians refrained from any important expedition against Granada. Their tactics were rather those of Scipio at Numantia. For Delay was all in favor of Disintegration.

Yet the merciless devastation of fields and crops was carried on with systematic and dreadful completeness. Thirty thousand destroyers of peaceful homesteads, granaries, farmhouses, and mills were constantly at work, and ere long there was scarce a vineyard or an oliveyard, scarce an orchard or an orange-grove existing within reach of the Christian borders. Under cover of the treaty with Boabdil, this devilish enginery of destruction was steadily pushed forward, while the old king and his more vigorous brother El Zagal were prevented by domestic treason from making any effectual defense of their fatherland. Some of the border towns, moreover, fell into the hands of the Christians, and many forays were undertaken which produced rich booty for the marauders. Ferdinand in the meantime occupied himself rather with the affairs of the Inquisition and of foreign policy, while Isabella was personally superintending the enormous preparations for a final attack on Granada. Artillery was cast in large quantities, and artificers imported from France and Italy; large stores of ammunition were procured from Flanders. Nothing was hurried; nothing was spared; nothing was forgotten by Isabella. A camp hospital, the first, it is said, in the history of warfare, was instituted by the queen, whose energy was indefatigable, whose powers of organization were boundless, and whose determination was inflexible. To represent her as a tender and a timid princess is to turn her true greatness into ridicule. But her vigor, her prudence, and her perseverance are beyond the vulgar praise of history.

Meanwhile, Granada was gradually withering away. The “pomegranate,” as Ferdinand had foreseen and foretold, was losing one by one the seeds of which the rich and lovely fruit had once been all compact. The old king, defeated but not disgraced, blind, infirm, and unfortunate, was succeeded too late by his more capable brother, El Zagal, a gallant warrior, a skillful commander, and a resolute ruler. But if “the valiant one” might hardly have held his own against the enormous resources of the Christians in Europe, he was powerless against the combination of foreign vigor and domestic treachery. The true conqueror of Granada is Boabdil, the rebel and the traitor, who has been euphemistically surnamed the Unlucky (El Zogoibi). Innocent, perchance, of the massacre of the brave Abencerrages, he is guilty of the blood of his country.

The capture of Velez Malaga by Ferdinand, already well supplied with a powerful train of artillery, in April, 1487—while El Zagal was fighting for his life against Boabdil in Granada—was soon followed by the reduction, after a most heroic defense, of the far more important city of Malaga in August, 1487. But the heroism of the Moslem woke no generous echo in the hearts of either Ferdinand or Isabella. The entire population of the captured city, men, women, and children—some fifteen thousand souls—was reduced to slavery, and distributed not only over Spain, but over Europe.

A hundred choice warriors were sent as a gift to the Pope. Fifty of the most beautiful girls were presented to the Queen of Naples, thirty more to the Queen of Portugal, others to the ladies of her court, and the residue of both sexes were portioned off among the nobles, the knights, and the common soldiers of the army, according to their rank and influence.

For the Jews and renegades a more dreadful doom was reserved; and the flames in which they perished were, in the words of a contemporary ecclesiastic, “the illuminations most grateful to the Catholic piety of Ferdinand and Isabella.” The town was repeopled by Christian immigrants, to whom the lands and houses of the Moslem owners were granted with royal liberality by the victors. The fall of Malaga, the second seaport and the third city of the kingdom of Granada, was a grievous loss to the Moors; and the Christian blockade was drawn closer both by land and by sea. Yet an invasion of the eastern provinces, undertaken by Ferdinand himself in 1488, was repulsed by El Zagal; and the Christian army was disbanded as usual at the close of the year, without having extended the Christian dominions.

But in the spring of 1489 greater efforts were made. The Castilians sat down before the town of Baza, not far from Jaen, and after a siege which lasted until the following December, the city surrendered, not, as in the case of Malaga, without conditions, but upon honorable terms of capitulation, which the assailants, who had only been prevented by the arrival of Isabella from raising the siege, were heartily glad to accept. The fall of Baza was of more than passing importance, for it was followed by the capitulation of Almeria, the second city in the kingdom, and by the submission of El Zagal, who renounced as hopeless the double task of fighting against his nephew at the Alhambra, and resisting the Christian sovereigns who had already overrun his borders. The fallen monarch passed over to Africa, where he died in indigence and misery, the last of the great Moslem rulers of Spain.

In the spring of 1490, Ferdinand, already master of the greater part of the Moorish kingdom, sent a formal summons to his bondman, Boabdil, to surrender to him the city of Granada; and that wretched and most foolish traitor, who had refrained from action when action might have saved his country, now defied the victorious Christians, when his defiance could only lead to further suffering and greater disaster.

Throughout the summer of 1490, Ferdinand, in person, devoted himself to the odious task of the devastation of the entire Vega of Granada, and the depopulation of the town of Guadix. But in the spring of the next year, Isabella, who was ever the life and soul of the war, took up her position within six miles of the city, and pitched her camp at Ojos de Huescar at the very gate of Granada.

And here was found assembled, not only all the best blood of Castile, but volunteers and mercenary troops from various countries in Europe. France, England, Italy, and even Germany, each provided their contingent; and a body of Swiss soldiers of fortune showed the gallant cavaliers of the Christian army the power and the value of a well disciplined infantry. Among the foreigners who had come over to Spain in 1486 was an English lord, the Earl of Rivers, known by the Spaniards as El Conde de Escalas, from his family name of Scales, whose magnificence attracted the admiration of all, even at the magnificent court of Isabella.

But the destruction of Granada was not brought about by these gilded strangers, nor even by the brilliant knights and nobles of Spain. It was not due to skillful engineers nor to irresistible commanders. The gates were opened by no victory. The walls were scaled by no assault. The Christian success was due to the patient determination of Isabella, to the decay and disintegration of the Moorish Commonwealth, and, to some extent, to the skillful negotiation and diplomatic astuteness of a young soldier whose early influence upon the fortunes of Spain has been overshadowed by the greatness of his later achievements.

For among all the splendid knights and nobles who assembled in the camp of Isabella, the chroniclers wellnigh overlooked a gay cavalier of modest fortune, the younger brother of Alfonso de Aguilar, distinguished rather as a fop than a warrior—Gonsalvo Hernandez of Cordova, whose fame was destined to eclipse that of all his companions in arms, and who has earned an undying reputation in the history of three countries as “The Great Captain.”

The life of Gonsalvo de Cordova is interesting as being the history of a brave soldier and an accomplished general, who flourished at a very important period of the history of Europe. But it is further and much more interesting as being the history of a man who united in himself many of the characteristics of ancient and of modern times. His bravery was the bravery of an old Castilian knight, and although he had many splendid rivals, he was pronounced by common consent to be their superior. Yet his individual courage was the least remarkable of his qualities. He was a general such as the Western world had not known for a thousand years, and he was the first diplomatist of modern Europe. In personal valor, in knightly courtesy, in brave display, he was of his own time. In astute generalship, and in still more astute diplomacy, he may be said to have inaugurated a new era; and although greater commanders have existed after him, as well as before him, he will always be known as “The Great Captain.”

The conquest of Granada marks an epoch, not only in the history of Spain, but in the history of Europe; and Gonsalvo was the hero of Granada. The expedition of Charles VIII. into Italy is a subject of almost romantic interest, very nearly preferred by Gibbon to his own immortal theme; and Gonsalvo in Italy was the admired of all French and Italian admirers. The succeeding expedition of Louis XII. was scarcely less interesting, and the part played by Gonsalvo was even more remarkable. At his birth artillery was almost unknown. At his death it had become the most formidable arm of offense; it had revolutionized the rules and manner of warfare; and it was employed by The Great Captain in both his Italian campaigns with marked skill and success.

Gonsalvo Hernandez was born at Montilla, near Cordova, in 1453, of the noble and ancient family of the Aguilars. After a boyhood and youth devoted, not only to every manly sport and pursuit, and to the practice of arms, but to the study of letters, and more especially of the Arabic language, he made his first appearance in serious warfare on the field of Olmedo, fighting under the banner of the Marquis of Villena. On the death of Prince Alfonso, Gonsalvo returned to Cordova. His father had already died; and according to the Spanish law of primogeniture the whole of the rich estates of the family of Aguilar passed, on the death of Don Pedro, to his eldest son Alfonso, while nothing but a little personal property, a great name, a fine person, and “the hope of what he might gain by his good fortune or his valor” was inherited by Alfonso’s younger brother.

Cordova was obviously too small a field for Gonsalvo de Aguilar; and in the course of the eventful year 1474, having just arrived at man’s estate, he proceeded to Segovia, and distinguished himself among the young nobles who crowded to the Court of Isabella, by his prowess at tournaments and all warlike games and exercises; and he soon became celebrated for his personal beauty as well as for his valor, distinguished for his fascinating manners, and, above all, by an eloquence rarely found in a young soldier of two-and-twenty. He was generally known as “the Prince of the Youth”; and he supported the character by an almost royal liberality and ostentatious expenditure entirely incompatible with his modest fortune.

In the war of succession between Isabella and her niece, Gonsalvo served under Alfonso de Cardenas, Grand Master of Santiago, in command of a troop of one hundred and twenty horsemen; and he particularly distinguished himself at the battle of Albuera.

And now, in the camp before Granada, he was well pleased once more to sun himself in the smiles of his queen and patroness, whose presence in the camp inspired every soldier with enthusiasm. Isabella appeared on the field superbly mounted and dressed in complete armor, and continually visited the different quarters, and held reviews of the troops. On one occasion she expressed a desire to have a nearer view of the city, and a picked body of men, among whom was Gonsalvo de Cordova, commanded by the Marquis Duke of Cadiz, escorted her to the little village of Zubia, within a short distance of Granada. The citizens, indignant at the near approach of so small a force, sallied out and attacked them. The Christians, however, stood their ground so bravely, and performed such prodigies of valor under the very eyes of Isabella herself, that no less than two thousand Moslems are said to have fallen in that memorable affray.

It happened one night, about the middle of July, that the drapery of the tent or pavilion in which Isabella was lodged took fire, and the conflagration was not extinguished until several of the neighboring tents had been consumed. The queen and her attendants escaped unhurt, but a general consternation prevailed throughout the camp, until it was discovered that no more serious loss had been experienced than that of the queen’s wardrobe.

Gonsalvo, however, who on more than one occasion showed himself at least as practical a courtier as Sir Walter Raleigh, immediately sent an express to Illora, and obtained such a supply of fine clothes from his wife, Doña Maria Manrique, that the queen herself was amazed, as much at their magnificence as at the rapidity with which they had been obtained.

But this incident led to even more important results than the amiable pillage of Doña Maria’s wardrobe; for in order to guard against a similar disaster, as well as to provide comfortable winter quarters for the troops, Isabella determined to construct a sufficient number of houses of solid masonry to provide quarters for the besieging army, a design which was carried out in less than three months. This martial and Christian town, which received the appropriate name of Santa Fe, may be still seen by the traveler in the Vega of Granada, and is pointed out by good Catholics as the only town in Andalusia that has never been contaminated by the Moslem.

But in spite of the attractions of all these feats of arms and exhibitions of magnificence, and of all the personal display and rash adventure which savors so much more of medieval chivalry than of modern warfare, Gonsalvo was more seriously engaged in the schemes and negotiations which contributed almost as much as the prowess of the Christian arms to the fall of Granada. He had spies everywhere. He knew what was going on in Granada better than Boabdil. He knew what was going on in the camp better than Ferdinand. His familiarity with Arabic enabled him to maintain secret communications with recreant Moors, without the dangerous intervention of an interpreter. He kept up constant communications with Illora, and having obtained the allegiance or friendship of the Moorish chief, Ali Atar, he gained possession of the neighboring fortress of Mondejar. He sent presents, in truly Oriental style, to many of the Moorish leaders in Granada who favored the party of Boabdil, and he was at length chosen by Isabella as the most proper person to conduct the negotiations that led to the treaty of capitulation, which was signed on the 25th of November, 1491.

The nature and the effect of this Convention are well known. The triumphal entry of the Christians into the old Moslem capital; “the last sigh of the Moor,” and the setting up of the Cross in the palace-citadel of Alhambra, not only form one of the most glowing pages in the romance of history, but they mark an epoch in the annals of the world.

CHAPTER V
THE INQUISITION

TORQUEMADA AND ISABELLA—THE NEW TRIBUNAL—THE PENALTY OF UNSOUND OPINIONS—THREE CENTURIES OF SHAME

The history of Spain assumed a new phase when, at the fall of Granada, the attention of potentates and people ceased to be absorbed by the excitement of a great religious war. Then the past and the romance of it ended and the history of modern Spain began.

Before proceeding with the latter, a name and a tribunal detain attention. The one is Torquemada. The other is the Inquisition. Burke has described them both, as follows:

The Inquisition, established in Italy by Honorius III. in 1231, and in France by St. Louis in 1233, was formally introduced into Spain by Gregory IX. in 1235, by a Rescript of April 30th, addressed to Mongriu, Archbishop-Administrator of Tarragona, confirming and explaining previous Briefs and Bulls upon the subject of the repression of heresy; and prescribing the issue of certain Instructions which had been prepared at the desire of his holiness by a Spanish saint, the Dominican Raymond of Penafort. From this time forward, Bulls on the subject of the Inquisition into heresy were frequently issued; and the followers of Dominic were ever the trusted agents of the Holy See.

The first suggestion of the serious introduction of the Tribunal of the Holy Office into Castile, at the end of the fifteenth century, is said to have come from Sicily. An Italian friar bearing the suggestive name of Dei Barberi, Inquisitor-general at Messina, paid a visit to his sovereign Ferdinand at Seville in 1477, in order to procure the confirmation of a privilege accorded to the Sicilian Dominicans by the Emperor Frederic II., in 1233, by virtue of which the Inquisitors entered into possession of one-third of the goods of the heretic whom they condemned. This dangerous charter was confirmed in due course by Ferdinand on the 2d of September, 1477, and by Isabella on the 18th of October; and very little argument was required on the part of the gratified envoy to convince his sovereign of the various temporal and spiritual advantages that would follow the introduction of the Tribunal, that had so long existed in an undeveloped form in Sicily and in Aragon, into the dominions of his pious consort, Isabella of Castile.

In the middle of the year 1480 there was as yet no court of the Holy Inquisition established in Spain. At length, pressed by the Papal Nuncio, by the Dominicans, by her confessor, most of all by her husband, Isabella gave her consent; and at length, in August, 1483, the Inquisition was established as a permanent tribunal. Tomas de Torquemada was appointed Inquisitor-general of both Castile and Aragon. Subordinate tribunals were constituted; new and more stringent regulations were made; the victims smoked from day to day on the great stone altar of the Quemadero.

The life of Tomas de Torquemada is the history of contemporary Spain. Born of a noble family, already distinguished in the Church by the reputation of the cardinal his uncle, Tomas early assumed the habit of a Dominican, and was in course of time appointed prior of an important monastery at Segovia, and confessor to the young Princess Isabella. His influence upon that royal lady was naturally great; his piety pleased her; his austerity affected her; and his powerful will directed, if it could not subdue, a will as powerful as his own. Brought up far away from a court whose frivolities had no charm for her, and where, under any circumstances, she would have been considered as a rival if not a pretender, the counsels of her confessor, both sacred and secular, were the most authoritative that she could expect to obtain. It has been constantly asserted that the friar obtained from the princess a promise that, in the event of her elevation to the throne of Castile, she would devote herself to the destruction of heretics and the increase of the power of the Church. Such a promise would have been but one of many which such a confessor would have obtained from such a penitent, and would have been but the natural result of his teaching. Nor is it surprising that in the intrigues that preceded the death of Henry IV., and the War of Succession that immediately followed it, the whole influence of the priesthood should have been cast on the side of Isabella and against her niece Joanna. For ten years, says the biographer of his Order, the skillful hand of Torquemada cultivated the intellect of Isabella; and in due course the propitious marriage with Ferdinand of Aragon, far from removing his pupil from his sacerdotal influence, brought him a new and an equally illustrious penitent. Torquemada became the confessor of the king as well as of the queen.

If the establishment of the Inquisition was the fulfillment of Isabella’s vow, and the realization of the aspirations of her tutor, his appointment as Inquisitor-general, although it necessitated the choice of another confessor, did not by any means withdraw him from his old sphere of influence. He ceased not to preach the destruction of the Moslem, even as he was employed about the destruction of the Jew; and if Isabella was the active patroness of the war in Granada, there was a darker spirit behind the throne, ever preaching the sacred duty of the slaughter of the infidel and the heretic of every race and nation.

Torquemada was at once a politician and an enthusiast; rigid, austere, uncompromising; unbounded in his ambition, yet content to sacrifice himself to the cause that made him what he was. His moral superiority to the Innocents and Alexanders at Rome, his intellectual superiority to the Carrillos and the fighting bishops of Spain, gave him that enormous influence over both queen and king which his consuming bigotry and his relentless tenacity of purpose induced him to use with such dreadful effect. Aggressive even in his profession of humility, Torquemada was insolent, not only to his unhappy victims, but to his colleagues, to his sovereigns, to his Holy Father at Rome. He was, perhaps, the only man in Europe who was more masterful than Isabella, more bloodthirsty than Alexander; and he was able to impose his own will on both queen and pope. Rejecting in his proud humility every offer of the miter, he asserted and maintained his ecclesiastical supremacy even over the Primate of Spain. Attended by a body-guard of noble youths who were glad to secure at once the favor of the queen and immunity from ecclesiastical censure by assuming the habit of the Familiars of the Holy Office, the great destroyer lived in daily dread of the hand of the assassin.

Fifty horsemen and two hundred foot-guards always attended him. Nor was it deemed inconsistent with the purity of his own religious faith that he should carry about with him a talisman, in the shape of the horn of some strange animal, invested with the mysterious power of preventing the action of poison.

On the death of Torquemada in September, 1498, Don Diego Deza was promoted to the office of Inquisitor-general of Spain. Yet the activity of the Ecclesiastical Tribunal was rather increased than diminished by the change of masters, and an attempt was made soon afterward to extend its operations to Naples. But Gonsalvo de Cordova, who was then acting as viceroy, took upon himself to disregard not only the demands of the Inquisitors, but the orders of Ferdinand (June 30, 1504), and to postpone the introduction of the new tribunal into the country that he so wisely and so liberally governed. After the recall of his great representative, some six years later, Ferdinand himself made another attempt to establish the hated Tribunal in Italy in 1510. But even Ferdinand did not prevail; and Naples retained the happy immunity which it owed to the Great Captain.

If no error is more gross than to suppose that the establishment of the Inquisition was due to popular feeling in Spain, it is almost equally false to assert that it was the work of the contemporary popes. Rome was bad enough at the end of the fifteenth century; but her vast load of wickedness need not be increased by the burden of sins that are not her own. The everlasting shame of the Spanish Inquisition is that of the Catholic kings. It is not difficult to understand why the poor and rapacious Ferdinand of Aragon should welcome the establishment of an instrument of extortion which placed at his disposal the accumulated savings of the richest citizens of Castile. It is yet easier to comprehend that Isabella, who was not of a temper to brook resistance to authority in Church or State, should have consented to what her husband so earnestly desired. The queen, moreover, was at least sincerely religious, after the fashion of the day; and was constrained to follow the dictates of her confessor in matters judged by him to be within his spiritual jurisdiction, even while she was, as a civil ruler, withstanding the Pope himself on matters of temporal sovereignty.

It is the height of folly to brand Isabella as a hypocrite, because we are unable to follow the workings of a medieval mind, or to appreciate the curious religious temper—by no means confined to the men and women of the fifteenth century—that can permit or compel the same person to be devoted to Popery and to be at war with the Pope, and find in the punctilious observance of ceremonial duty excuse or encouragement for the gratification of any vice and the commission of any crime. But that the nobility and people of Castile should have permitted the crown to impose upon them a foreign and an ecclesiastical despotism, is at first sight much harder to understand. No one reason, but an unhappy combination of causes, may perhaps be found to explain it.

The influence of the queen was great. Respected as well as feared by the nobles, she was long admired and beloved by the mass of the people.[6] The great success of her administration, which was apparent even by the end of 1480; her repression of the nobility; her studied respect for the Cortes; all these things predisposed the Castilians, who had so long suffered under weak and unworthy sovereigns, to trust themselves not only to the justice but to the wisdom of the queen. The influence of the clergy, if not so great as it was in France or Italy, was no doubt considerable, and, as a rule, though not always, it was cast on the side of the Inquisition. Last and most unhappy reason of all, the nobility and the people were divided; and, if not actually hostile, were at least ever at variance in Castile.

The first efforts of the new tribunal, too, were directed either against the converted Jews, of whose prosperity the Christians were already jealous, and for whose interested tergiversations no one could feel any respect; or against the more or less converted Moslems, toward whom their neighbors still maintained a certain hereditary antipathy. The New Christians alone were to be haled before the new tribunal. The Old Christians might trust in the queen, if not in their own irreproachable lineage, to protect them from hurt or harm.

The number of subordinate or subsidiary tribunals of the Holy Office was at first only four; established at Seville, Cordova, Jaen, and Ciudad Real. The number was gradually increased, during the reign of the Catholic kings, to thirteen; and over all these Ferdinand erected, in 1483, a court of supervision under the name of the Council of the Supreme, consisting of the Grand Inquisitor as President, and three other subordinate ecclesiastics, well disposed to the crown, and ready to guard the royal interests in confiscated property.

One of the first duties of this tremendous Council was the preparation of a code of rules or Instructions, based upon the Inquisitor’s Manual of Eymeric, which had been promulgated in Aragon in the fourteenth century. The new work was promptly and thoroughly done; and twenty-eight comprehensive sections left but little to be provided for in the future.

The prosecution of unorthodox Spanish bishops by Torquemada on the ground of the supposed backslidings of their respective fathers is sufficiently characteristic of the methods of the Inquisition to be worthy of a passing notice. Davila, bishop of Segovia, and Aranda, bishop of Calahorra, were the sons of Jews who had been converted and baptized by St. Vincent Ferrer. No suspicion existed as to the orthodoxy of the prelates, both of whom were men distinguished for their learning and their piety. But it was suggested that their fathers had relapsed into Judaism before they died. They had each, indeed, left considerable fortunes behind them: and it was sought to exhume and burn their mortal remains, and to declare the property—long in the enjoyment of their heirs and successors—forfeited to the crown; and, in spite of a brief of Innocent VIII., of the 25th of September, 1487, the attempt was made by the Spanish Inquisitors. Both prelates sought refuge and protection by personal recourse to Rome (1490). Bishop Davila, in spite of the urgent remonstrances of Isabella herself, ultimately secured the protection of Alexander VI. and was invested with additional dignities and honors. Bishop Aranda was less fortunate. He was stripped of his office and possessions, and died a prisoner in the castle of St. Angelo in 1497.

It was not only living or dying heretics who paid the penalty of their unsound opinions. Men long dead, if they were represented by rich descendants, were cited before the Tribunal, judged, condemned, and the lands and goods that had descended to their heirs passed into the coffers of the Catholic kings. The scandal was so great that Isabella actually wrote to the Bishop of Segovia to defend herself against an accusation that no one had ever presumed to formulate. “I have,” said the queen, “caused great calamities, I have depopulated towns and provinces and kingdoms, for the love of Christ and of His Holy Mother, but I have never touched a maravedi of confiscated property; and I have employed the money in educating and dowering the children of the condemned.”

This strange apology, which seems to have to some extent imposed upon Prescott, is shown, by more recent examination of the State papers to be a most deliberate and daring falsehood, and would go far to justify the suggestion of Bergenroth that if Ferdinand never scrupled to tell direct untruths and make false promises whenever he thought it expedient, Queen Isabella excelled her husband in “disregard of veracity.”

If the Holy Office had existed in Aragon in an undeveloped state from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, and if it was actually introduced into Castile at the suggestion of an Inquisitor of the Aragonese island of Sicily, the old independence of the inhabitants once more asserted itself when the time arrived for the introduction of the brand-new Castilian Tribunal into the old kingdom that is watered by the Ebro. Saragossa, indeed, may be nearer to Rome than Toledo; but the Catalan has ever been less submissive than his brother or cousin in Castile; less obedient to authority; more impatient of royal and ecclesiastical oppression. Yet Aragon, which had defied Innocent at Muret, and vanquished Martin at Gerona, was no match for the inquisitors of Ferdinand the Catholic.

The Inquisition, as we have seen, had once before been established in Aragon; but in one most important particular the new institution differed from the old. In former days, even in the rare cases when the heretic paid the penalty of his heterodoxy with his life, his property passed to his heirs. The ecclesiastical tribunal of Ferdinand was not only more efficient in the matter of burning or otherwise disposing of accused persons; but the property of all doubtful Catholics, even of those who were graciously permitted to live after their trial, was absolutely forfeit to the crown. And the number of rich men, not only converted Jews but prosperous Christians, whose orthodoxy failed to come up to the new standard, was even in those days considered remarkable.

Ferdinand at all times hated popular assemblies. He spent the greater part of his time in Castile; and he saw as little as possible of the people of Aragon. But in April, 1484, he summoned a Cortes at Saragossa, and decreed by royal ordinance the establishment of the new tribunal. The old constitutional spirit of the Aragonese seems to have evaporated; and a degenerate justiciary was found to swear to support the jurisdiction of the Inquisitors. Yet envoys and delegates of the Commons of Aragon were dispatched to Castile, whither Ferdinand had promptly retired, and also to Rome, to remonstrate against the new Institution, and more especially against the new provisions for the forfeiture of the property of the convicted. If these provisions, contrary to the laws of Aragon, were repealed or suspended, the deputies “were persuaded,” and there was a grim humor in the suggestion, “that the Tribunal itself would soon cease to exist.”

But the repression of heresy was far too profitable an undertaking to be lightly abandoned; nor was Ferdinand of Aragon the man to abandon it; and the envoys returned from an unsuccessful mission to Valladolid to find a Quemadero already blazing at Saragossa.

Yet the Aragonese were not at once reduced to subjection. A popular conspiracy led to the assassination of the Inquisitor-general, Pedro de Arbues, in spite of his steel cap and coat of mail, as he stood one day at matins in the Cathedral of Saragossa (15th September, 1457); but this daring crime served only to enrage Ferdinand and to strengthen the power of the Inquisition. A most rigorous and indefatigable inquiry, which was extended from Saragossa into every part of Aragon, was at once undertaken; and an immense number of victims, chosen not only from among the people, but from almost every noble family in Aragon, if it did not appease the vengeance of the Inquisitors, gratified at least the avarice of Ferdinand. Among the accused, indeed, was Don Jayme of Navarre, a nephew of the King of Aragon—a son of Eleanor, queen of Navarre, and her husband, Gaston de Foix—who was actually arrested and imprisoned by the Holy Office; and discharged only after having done public penance, as convicted of having in some way sympathized with the assassination of Arbues. But it may be noted that the young prince was anything but a favorite with his uncle, to whom this bit of ecclesiastical discipline was no doubt very gratifying.

But it was not only at Saragossa that opposition was offered to the establishment of the new Tribunal. In every part of Aragon and of Valencia; at Lerida, at Teruel, at Barcelona, the people rose against this new exhibition of royal and priestly tyranny. And it was not for fully two years, and after the adoption of the most savage measures of repression both royal and ecclesiastical, that the Inquisition was finally accepted in the kingdom of Aragon, and that Torquemada, fortified by no less than two special Bulls, made his triumphal entry as Inquisitor-general into Barcelona on the 27th of October, 1488.

Among all the tens of thousands of innocent persons who were tortured and done to death by the Inquisition in Spain, it is instructive to turn to the record of one man at least who broke through the meshes of the ecclesiastical net that was spread abroad in the country; for the mode of his escape is sufficiently instructive. Ready money at command, but not exposed to seizure, was the sole shield and safeguard against the assaults of Church and State. Don Alfonso de la Caballeria was a Jew by race, and a man who was actually concerned in the murder of the Inquisitor Arbues; but his great wealth enabled him to purchase not only one but two Briefs from Rome, and to secure the further favor of Ferdinand. He was accused and prosecuted in vain by the Holy Office of Aragon. He not only escaped with his life, but he rose to a high position in the State, and eventually mingled his Jewish and heretic blood with that of royalty itself.

Various attempts were made by the Commons of Aragon to abate the powers of the Inquisition; and at the Cortes of Monzon, in 1510, so vigorous a remonstrance was addressed to Ferdinand that he was unable to do more than avoid a decision by a postponement on the ground of desiring fuller information; and two years later, at the same place, he was compelled to sanction a declaration or ordinance, by which the authority assumed by the Holy Office, in defiance of the Constitution of Aragon, was specifically declared to be illegal; and the king swore to abolish the privileges and jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Within a few months, however, he caused himself to be absolved from this oath by a Papal Brief; and the Inquisition remained unreformed and triumphant. But the Aragonese had not yet entirely lost their independence, and a popular rising compelled the king not only to renounce the Brief, so lately received, but to solicit from the Pope a Bull (May 12, 1515), exonerating him from so doing, and calling upon all men, lay and ecclesiastical, to maintain the authority of the Cortes. Aragon was satisfied. And the people enjoyed for a season the blessings of comparative immunity from persecution.

To recall the manifold horrors of the actual working of the Inquisition in Spain would be a painful and an odious task. To record them in any detail is surely superfluous; even though they are entirely denied by such eminent modern writers as Hefele, in Germany, or Menendez Pelayo, in Spain. The hidden enemy, the secret denunciation, the sudden arrest, the unknown dungeon, the prolonged interrogatory, the hideous torture, the pitiless judge, the certain sentence, the cruel execution, the public display of sacerdotal vengeance, the plunder of the survivors, innocent even of ecclesiastical offense—all these things are known to every reader of every history. All other considerations apart, it is an abuse of language to speak of the proceedings before the Inquisition as a trial, for the tribunal was nothing but a Board of Conviction. One acquittal in two thousand accusations was, according to Llorente, who had access to all the records of the Holy Office in Spain, about the proportion that was observed in their judicial findings.

Statistics, as a rule, are not convincing, and figures are rarely impressive; yet it may be added that, according to Llorente’s cautious estimate, over ten thousand persons were burned alive during the eighteen years of Torquemada’s supremacy alone; that over six thousand more were burned in effigy either in their absence or after their death, and their property acquired by the Holy Office; while the number of those whose goods were confiscated, after undergoing less rigorous punishments, is variously computed at somewhat more or somewhat less than one hundred thousand. But it is obvious that even these terrible figures give but a very feeble idea of the vast sum of human suffering that followed the steps of this dreadful institution. For they tell no tale of the thousands who died, and the tens of thousands who suffered, in the torture chamber. They hardly suggest the anguish of the widow and the orphan of the principal victims, who were left, bereaved and plundered, to struggle with a hard and unsympathetic world, desolate, poor, and disgraced.

Nor does the most exaggerated presentment of human suffering tell of the disastrous effects of the entire system upon religion, upon morals, upon civil society at large. The terrorism, the espionage, the daily and hourly dread of denunciation, in which every honest man and woman must have lived, the boundless opportunities for extortion and for the gratification of private vengeance and worldly hatred, must have poisoned the whole social life of Spain. The work of the Inquisition, while it tended, no doubt, to make men orthodox, tended also to make them false, and suspicious, and cruel. Before the middle of the sixteenth century, the Holy Office had profoundly affected the national character; and the Spaniard, who had been celebrated in Europe during countless centuries for every manly virtue, became, in the new world that had been given to him, no less notorious for a cruelty beyond the imagination of a Roman emperor, and a rapacity beyond the dreams of a republican proconsul.

Torquemada and Ferdinand may have burned their thousands and plundered their ten thousands in Spain. Their disciples put to death millions of the gentlest races of the earth, and ravaged without scruple or pity the fairest and most fertile regions of the new Continent which had been given to them to possess.

As long as the Inquisition confined its operations to the Jews and the Moors, the Old Christians were injured and depraved by the development of those tendencies to cruelty and rapacity that lie dormant in the heart of every man. But this was not the end. For when Spain at length sheltered no more aliens to be persecuted and plundered in the name of religion, and murder and extortion were forced to seek their easy prey in the new world beyond the Atlantic Ocean, the Holy Office turned its attention to domestic heresy; and the character of the Spaniard in Europe became still further demoralized and perverted. Every man was suspected. Every man became suspicious. The lightest word might lead to the heaviest accusation. The nation became somber and silent. Religious life was but a step removed from heresy. Religion died. Original thought was above all things dangerous. The Spaniard took refuge in Routine. Social intercourse was obviously full of peril. A prudent man kept himself to himself, and was glad to escape the observation of his neighbors. Castile became a spiritual desert. The Castilian wrapped himself in his cloak, and sought safety in dignified abstraction.

The Holy Office has done its work in Spain. A rapacious government, an enslaved people, a hollow religion, a corrupt Church, a century of blood, three centuries of shame, all these things followed in its wake. And the country of Viriatus and Seneca, of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, where Ruy Diaz fought, and Alfonso studied, and where two warrior kings in two successive centuries defied Rome temporal and Rome spiritual, and all the crusaders of Europe—Spain, hardly conquered by Scipio or by Cæsar, was enslaved by the dead hand of Dominic.

CHAPTER VI
THEIR CATHOLIC MAJESTIES

THE BANISHMENT OF THE JEWS—INTERNATIONAL NEGOTIATIONS—THE SPANIARDS IN ITALY—THE VICTORIES OF GONSALVO—THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA

The fall of Granada left the Catholic sovereigns free to turn their attention more completely to the domestic affairs of the kingdom; and it seems moreover to have increased the bigotry both of the Church and of the Court, and to have added new zeal to the fury of the Inquisition.

The conquest of the Moorish kingdom was said by pious ecclesiastics to be a special sign or manifestation of the approval by Heaven of the recent institution of the Holy Office. The knights and nobles, proud of their military successes, may have attributed the victory to causes more flattering to their valor, their skill, and their perseverance. The common people, as yet not demoralized, but gorged with plunder, and invited to occupy without purchase the fairest province in the Peninsula, were little disposed to quarrel with the policy of Ferdinand; and far from feeling any pity for the sufferings of the vanquished Moors, they sighed for new infidels to pillage. And new infidels were promptly found.

The Inquisition so far had troubled itself but little with Christian heretics. The early Spanish Protestantism of the thirteenth century had died away. The later Spanish Protestantism of the sixteenth century had not yet come into existence. Few men had done more than Averroes of Cordova and Ramon Lull of Palma to awaken religious thought in Medieval Europe; yet speculative theology has never been popular among the Spanish people. It was against the Jews, renegade or relapsed, even more than the avowedly unconverted, that the Holy Office directed all its exertions until the end of the fifteenth century. By April, 1492, although a great number of the unfortunate Hebrews had already found their way to the Quemadero, there was still a very large Jewish population in Spain, the most industrious, the most intelligent, the most orderly, but, unhappily for themselves, the most wealthy of all the inhabitants of the Peninsula.

The Spanish Jews, as we have seen, were treated on the arrival of the Arab conquerors not only with consideration, but with an amount of favor that was not extended to them under any other government in the world; nor was this wise liberality, as time went on, displayed only by the Moslem in Spain. At the Christian courts of Leon, of Castile, and of Catalonia, the Jews were welcomed as lenders of money and as healers of diseases, and as men skilled in many industrial arts; and they supplied what little science was required in northern Spain, while their brethren shared in the magnificent culture and extended studies of Cordova. When the rule of the Arab declined, and Alfonso el Sabio held his court at southern Seville, the learned Jews were his chosen companions. They certainly assisted him in the preparation of his great astronomical tables. They probably assisted him in his translation of the Bible.

Nor does this court favor appear to have caused any serious jealousy among Christian Spaniards. The fellow-student of Alfonso X., the trusted treasurer of Peter the Cruel, the accommodating banker of many a king and many a noble—the Jew was for some time a personage of importance rather than a refugee in the Peninsula. And during the whole of the thirteenth century, while the Jews were exposed throughout western Europe to the most dreadful and systematic persecutions, they enjoyed in Spain not only immunity, but protection, not only religious freedom, but political consideration.

Under Alfonso XI. they were particularly regarded, and even under Peter the Cruel, who, though he tortured and robbed his Hebrew treasurer, did not at any time display his natural ferocity in any form of religious persecution. Yet, as we are told that his rival and successor, Henry of Trastamara, sought popular favor by molesting the Jews, it would seem that already by the end of the fourteenth century they were becoming unpopular in Castile. But on the whole, throughout the Peninsula, from the time of James I. of Aragon, who is said to have studied ethics under a Jewish professor, to the time of John II. of Castile, who employed a Jewish secretary in the compilation of a national “Cancionero,” or ballad book, the Jews were not only distinguished, but encouraged, in literature and abstract science, as they had always been in the more practical pursuits of medicine and of commerce.

But in less than a century after the death of Alfonso X. the tide of fortune had turned. Their riches increased overmuch in a disturbed and impoverished commonwealth, and public indignation began to be displayed, rather at their un-Christian opulence than at their Jewish faith. Inquisition was made rather into their strongboxes than into their theology; and it was their debtors and their rivals, rather than any religious purists, who, toward the end of the fourteenth century, and more especially in Aragon, stirred up those popular risings against their race that led to the massacres and the wholesale conversions of 1391. The first attack that was made upon the persons and property of the Jews was in 1388, and it was no doubt provoked by the preaching of the fanatic archdeacon Hernando Martinez at Seville. But it was in nowise religious in its character, and was aimed chiefly at the acquisition and destruction of the property of the rich and prosperous Hebrews. The outbreaks which took place almost simultaneously in all parts of Spain were disapproved both by kings and councils. Special judges were sent to the disturbed cities, and a considerable amount of real protection was extended to the plundered people. No one said a word about conversion; or at least the conversion was that of ancient Pistol, the conversion of the property of the Jews into the possession of the Christians. When the Jewish quarter of Barcelona was sacked by the populace, and an immense number of Hebrews were despoiled and massacred throughout the country, John of Aragon, indolent though he was, used his utmost endeavors to check the slaughter. He punished the aggressors, and he even caused a restitution of goods to be made to such of the victims as survived.

The preaching of St. Vincent Ferrer, during the early part of the fifteenth century, was addressed largely to the Jews in Spain, but little or no religious persecution seems to have been directed against them in consequence of his harangues. On the contrary, we read of friendly conferences or public disputations between Jewish and Christian doctors in Aragon, where the Inquisition was, at least, nominally established. Such conferences could hardly be expected to convince or convert the advocates of either faith, but they tell at least of an amount of toleration on the part of the Christian authorities of the day that was certainly not to be found in Spain at the close of the century; and there is no doubt that they were followed by a very large number of conversions of the more malleable members of the Hebrew community. But it is a far cry from St. Vincent Ferrer to the uncanonized Tomas de Torquemada.

Yet, even in outward conformity to the established religion, the Jews, as time went on, found no permanent safety from persecution and plunder. John II. indeed had little of the bigot in his composition; it was Politics and not Persecution that, under his successor, engrossed the attention of clergy and laity in Castile; but, as soon as the power of Isabella was formally established, the destruction of all that was not orthodox, Catholic, and Spanish became the keynote of the domestic policy of the new government of Spain.

The earliest efforts of the Spanish Inquisition were directed, as we have seen, almost exclusively against those converted Jews, or the sons and daughters of converts, who were known by the expressive name of New Christians, a title applied also to Christianized Moslems, and which distinguished both classes from the Old Christians or Cristianos Viejos, who could boast of a pure Castilian ancestry. These New Christians, as a whole, at the end of the fifteenth century, were among the richest, the most industrious, and the most intelligent of the population, and they were regarded with considerable envy by their poorer neighbors, whose blue blood did not always bring with it either wealth or fortune. The Rules and Regulations for the guidance of the Inquisitors were therefore specially framed to include every possible act or thought that might bring the members of the classes specially aimed at within the deadly category of the Relapsed. If the “New Christian” wore a clean shirt, or spread clean table-linen on a Saturday (Art. 4), if he ate meat in Lent (7), observed any of the Jewish fasts (8-17), or sat at table with any Jew of his acquaintance (19); if he recited one of the Psalms of David without the addition of the Doxology (20), if he caused his child to be baptized under a Hebrew name (23), he was to be treated as a renegade and condemned to the flames.

With every act of his life thus at the mercy of spies and informers, his last end was not unobserved by the Dominicans and the Familiars of the Holy Office. If in the article of death he turned his weary face (31) to the wall of his chamber, he was adjudged relapsed, and all his possessions were forfeit; or if the sorrowing children of even the most unexceptionable convert had washed his dead body with warm water (32) they were to be treated as apostates and heretics, and were at least liable to suffer death by fire, after their goods had been appropriated by the Holy Office or by the Crown.

In the sentences which condemned to the stake, to confiscation, and to penances which were punishments of the severest description, we find enumerated such offenses as the avoiding the use of fat, and especially of lard; preparing amive, a kind of broth much appreciated by the Jews; or eating “Passover bread”; reading, or even possessing, a Hebrew Bible; ignorance of the Pater noster and the Creed; saying that a good Jew could be saved, and a thousand other equally harmless deeds or words.

But with the professed and avowed Jew, unpopular as he may have been with his neighbors, and exposed at times to various forms of civil and religious outrage, the Holy Office did not directly concern itself. The Hebrew, like the Moslem, was outside the pale even of Christian inquiry.

There is no doubt that it was the success of the operations against the Moors of Granada that suggested to Ferdinand and Isabella the undertaking of a campaign, easier by far, and scarcely less lucrative, against the unhappy descendants of Abraham who had made their home in Spain.

The annual revenue that was derived by the Catholic sovereigns from the confiscations of the Inquisition amounted to a considerable income; and the source as yet showed no signs of drying up. Yet cupidity, marching hand in hand with intolerance—the Devil, as the Spanish proverb has it, ever lurking behind the Cross—the sovereigns resolved upon the perpetration of an act of State more dreadful than the most comprehensive of the Autos da Fe.

The work of the Holy Office was too slow. The limits of the Quemadero were too small. Half a million Jews yet lived unbaptized in Spain. They should be destroyed at a single blow. The Inquisition might be left to reckon with the New Christians whose conversion was unsatisfactory.

As soon as the Spanish Jews obtained an intimation of what was contemplated against them, they took steps to propitiate the sovereigns by the tender of a donative of thirty thousand ducats, toward defraying the expenses of the Moorish war; and an influential Jewish leader is said to have waited upon Ferdinand and Isabella, in their quarters at Santa Fe, to urge the acceptance of the bribe. The negotiations, however, were suddenly interrupted by Torquemada, who burst into the apartment where the sovereigns were giving audience to the Jewish deputy, and drawing forth a crucifix from beneath his mantle, held it up, exclaiming, “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver; Your Highnesses would sell him anew for thirty thousand; here he is, take him and barter him away.” The extravagant presumption of the Inquisitor-general would not perhaps have been as successful as it was had it not been obvious to the rapacious Ferdinand that thirty thousand ducats was a trifle compared with the plunder of the entire body of Jews in Spain. Yet the action of Torquemada was no doubt calculated to affect the superstitious mind of Isabella, and even the colder spirit of Ferdinand.

Whatever may have been the scruples of the Spanish sovereigns, the fanaticism of the Spanish people had been at this critical juncture stirred up to an unusual pitch of fury by the proceedings and reports of the Holy Office in a case which has attracted an amount of attention so entirely disproportionate to its apparent importance that it merits something more than a passing notice.

In June, 1490, a converted Jew of the name of Benito Garcia, on his way back from a pilgrimage to Compostella, was waylaid and robbed near Astorga, by some of the Christian inhabitants. A Jew, converted or otherwise, was a legitimate object of plunder. The contents of his knapsack not being entirely satisfactory, and the ecclesiastical authorities sniffing sacrilege in what was supposed to be a piece of the consecrated wafer, Garcia, and not the robbers, was arrested, subjected to incredible tortures, and finally handed over to the local inquisitors.

His case was heard with that of other Conversos; first at Segovia and afterward at Avila. Tortures were repeated. Spies were introduced in various guises and disguises, but no confession could be extorted.

At length, after a year and a half of such practices, the endurance of one of the accused gave way—the dreadful story affords some slight notion of the methods of the Inquisition—and the unhappy man invented a tale in accordance with what was demanded of him; the crucifixion of a Christian child; the tearing out of his heart, the theft of the Host from a Christian Church, and a magical incantation over the dreadful elements, directed against Christianity, and more particularly against the Holy Office. The Tribunal having been thus satisfied of the guilt of the accused, a solemn Auto da Fe was held at Avila, on the 16th of November, 1491, when two of the convicts were torn to death with red-hot pincers; three who had been more mercifully permitted to die under the preliminary tortures were burned in effigy; while the remaining prisoners were visited only with the slight punishment of strangulation before their consignment to the inevitable fire. That no boy, with or without a heart, could be found or invented, by the most rigorous examination; that no Christian child had disappeared from the neighborhood of the unhappy Jews at the time of their arrest—this surprised no one. In matters of Faith such evidences were wholly superfluous. Secura judícat Ecclesia.

That these poor Hebrews should have suffered torture and death for an imaginary sacrilege upon the person of an imaginary boy was indeed a thing by no means unexampled in the history of religious fanaticism. But the sequel is certainly extraordinary. With a view of exciting the indignation of the sovereigns and of the people against the Jews at an important moment, Torquemada devoted much attention to the publication throughout Spain of the dreadful story of the murdered boy, the Niño of La Guardia, the village where the crime is supposed to have taken place. As to the name of the victim, the authorities did not agree. Some maintained that it was Christopher, while others declared for John. But the recital of the awful wickedness of the Jews lost none of its force by adverse criticism. The legend spread from altar to altar throughout the country. The Niño de la Guardia at once became a popular hero, in course of time a popular saint; miracles were freely worked upon the spot where his remains had not been found, and something over a century later (1613) his canonization was demanded at Rome.

His remains, it was asserted by Francisco de Quevedo, could not be found on earth, only because his body as well as his soul had been miraculously carried up to heaven, where it was the most powerful advocate and protector of the Spanish monarchy. The story, moreover, has been twice dramatized—once by Lope de Vega—and no less than three admiring biographies of this imaginary martyr have been published in Spain within the last forty years of this nineteenth century.

At length from conquered Granada, on the 30th of March, 1492, the dreadful edict went forth. By the 30th of July not a Jew was to be left alive in Spain. Sisenand, indeed, nine hundred years before, had promulgated such an edict. But the Visigoth had been too tender-hearted to enforce it. Isabella, whose gentleness and goodness historians are never tired of applauding, was influenced by no such considerations, and the sentence was carried out to the letter. With a cruel irony, the banished people were permitted to sell their property, yet forbidden to carry the money out of the kingdom, a provision which has obtained the warm approval of more than one modern Spanish historian, by whom it is accepted as a conclusive proof that this wholesale depopulation did not and could not diminish the wealth of Spain!

Thus two hundred thousand Spaniards, men, women, and children of tender years, rich and poor, men of refinement and of position, ladies reared in luxury, the aged, the sick, the infirm, all were included in one common destruction, and were driven, stripped of everything, from their peaceful homes, to die on their way to some less savage country. For the sentence was carried out with the most relentless ferocity. Every road to the coast, we read, was thronged with the unhappy fugitives, struggling to carry off some shred of their ruined homes. To succor them was death; to pillage them was piety. At every seaport, rapacious shipmasters exacted from the defenseless travelers the greater part of their remaining possessions, as the price of a passage to some neighboring coast; and in many cases the passenger was tossed overboard ere the voyage was completed, and his goods confiscated to the crew. A rumor having got abroad that the fugitives were in the habit of swallowing jewels and gold pieces in order to evade the royal decree, thousands of unhappy beings were ripped up by the greedy knife of the enemy, on land or sea, on the chance of discovering in their mutilated remains some little store of treasure.

And thus, north, south, east, and west, the Jews straggled and struggled over Spain; and undeterred by the manifold terrors of the sea, a vast multitude of exiles, whose homes in Spain once lay in sunny Andalusia, sought and found an uncertain abiding place in neighboring Africa.

Of all Christian countries, it was in neighboring Portugal that the greatest number of the exiles found refuge and shelter; until, after five brief years of peace and comparative prosperity, the heavy hand of Castilian intolerance once more descended upon them, and they were driven out of the country, at the bidding of Isabella and her too dutiful daughter, the hope of Portugal and of Castile.

But to every country in Europe the footsteps of some of the sufferers were directed. Not a few were permitted to abide in Italy and Southern France; some of the most distinguished found a haven in England; many were fortunate enough to reach the Ottoman dominions, where, under the tolerant government of the Turk, they lived and prospered, and where their descendants, at many of the more important seaports of the Levant, are still found to speak the Castilian of their forefathers.

That the edict of banishment was meant to be, as it so constantly was, a doom of death, and not merely a removal of heretics, is clear from the action of the Spanish sovereigns, who, at the instigation of Torquemada, procured from the pliant Innocent VIII. a Bull enjoining the authorities of every country in Christian Europe to arrest and send back to Spain all fugitive Jews under penalty of the Greater Excommunication.

More than once, indeed, the demand for extradition was made. But save in the case of the Portuguese Jews, on the second marriage of the Princess Isabella to the reigning sovereign of that country, no foreign prince appears to have paid any heed to this savage edict. Nor was it, as a rule, of any material advantage, either at Rome or at Seville, that it should be put in force.

Avarice was perhaps the besetting sin of Rome in the fifteenth century; nor was bigotry unknown throughout Western Europe. But in Spain, as the century drew to a close, avarice and bigotry joined hand in hand, and flourished under royal and noble patronage, preached by religion, practiced by policy, and applauded by patriotism. It was not strange that, under such teaching, the people of Castile should have rapidly become demoralized, and that the great race should have begun to develop that sordid and self-satisfied savagery which disgraced the name of the Spaniard, in the heartless and short-sighted plunder of the new world that lay before him.

Yet in all human affairs there is something that too often escapes our observation, to explain, if not to excuse, what may seem the most dreadful aberrations of the better nature of man. And it may be that the uncompromising religious spirit, which has had so enormous an influence for evil and for good upon the Spanish people, is to some extent the result of their Semitic environment of eight hundred years.

Religious controversy indeed, between rival branches of the Christian Church in the days of the Visigoths, developed religious animosities before the first Moslem landed at Tarifa; yet the Arab and the Moor, fired with the enthusiasm of a new and living faith, brought into their daily life in Spain, in peace and in war, a deep and all-pervading religious spirit—an active recognition of the constant presence of one true God—unknown to the Roman or the Visigoth, which must have had an enormous influence upon the grave and serious Spaniards who lived under the rule of the Arab.

Nor was the Moslem the only factor in this medieval development. In no other country in Europe was the Jew, as we have seen, more largely represented, and more powerful, for the first fifteen centuries of our era, than in Spain, whether under Christian or Moslem masters. But the direct and simple monotheism of the Hebrew and the Arab, while it had so great a direct influence upon Spanish Christianity, provoked as part of the natural antagonism to the methods of the rival and the enemy, the counter development of an excessive Hagiolatry, Mariolatry, and Sacerdotalism.

It would be strange enough if the religious fervor which doomed to death and torment so many tens of thousands of Semites in Spain should be itself of Semitic suggestion. It is hardly less strange that the Greek Renaissance, which revolutionized the Christian world, and whose anti-Semitic influence to the present day is nowhere more marked than in every department of religious thought, should by the irony of fate have been forestalled by a writer, at once Spanish and Semitic; and when, by the sixteenth century, the rest of modern Europe had been led by the teaching of Averroes to accept the philosophy of Aristotle, Spain, the earliest home of Hellenism, new born in Europe, had already turned again to a religious Philistinism or Phariseeism of the hardest and most uncompromising type, Semitic in its thoroughness, Greek only in its elaborate accessories, and Spanish in its uncompromising rigor.

Thus it was that the Arab and the Jew, parents, in some sense, of the religious spirit of Ximenez and of Torquemada, became themselves the objects of persecution more bitter than is to be found in the annals of any other European nation. The rigors of the Spanish Inquisition, and the policy that inspired and justified it, are not to be fully explained by the rapacity of Ferdinand, the bigotry of Isabella, the ambition of Ximenez, or the cruelty of Torquemada. They were in a manner the rebellion or outbreak of the old Semitic spirit against the Semite, the ignorant jealousy of the wayward disciple against the master whose teaching has been but imperfectly and unintelligently assimilated—perverted, distorted, and depraved by the human or devilish element which is to be found in all religions, and which seems ever striving to destroy the better, and to develop the worser part of the spiritual nature of man.

We now enter upon a period of European history which is but feebly characterized by the term interesting, and which has been too accurately chronicled and too severely investigated to be called romantic; when a well-founded jealousy, or fear of the growing power of France, alone supplies the key to the ever-changing foreign policy of the sovereigns of Spain. Genuine State papers of the fifteenth century are by no means numerous. In such of them, however, as are still extant, we find the fear expressed over and over again that the kings of France would render themselves “masters of the world,” would “establish a universal empire,” or “subject the whole of Christendom to their dictation.” The best means to avert such a danger appeared to contemporary statesmen to be the foundation of another European State as a counterpoise. Ferdinand the Catholic, ambitious, diplomatic, and capable, was the first prince who undertook the enterprise.

Within less than three years after the Inquisition had been established at Seville, Louis XI. of France, the old rival and colleague of John II. of Aragon, had died in Paris, August 30, 1483. He was succeeded by his son Charles VIII., a young prince whose ignorance was only equaled by his vanity, and was if possible exceeded by his presumption. With such an antagonist, Ferdinand of Aragon was well fitted to deal, with advantage to himself and to Spain. To win over the Duchess of Bourbon, who had virtually succeeded to the government of France on the death of Louis XI., and to marry his eldest daughter Isabella to the young King Charles VIII., were accordingly the first objects of his negotiations. But in spite of all the flattery lavished on the duchess, Ferdinand did not succeed in obtaining the crown for the Infanta. A more richly dowered bride was destined for the King of France, to whom the acquisition of the province of Brittany was of far greater importance than the doubtful friendship of Spain; and after much public and private negotiation, the Spanish embassador was reluctantly withdrawn from Paris in the summer of 1487 (29th of July).

Disappointed in his dealing with the court of France, the ever-watchful and persistent Ferdinand turned his eyes to England; and in the last days of the year 1487 an embassador from the Spanish sovereigns, Roderigo de Puebla, doctor of canon and civil law, arrived at the court of London. Henry VII., who greatly desired to establish a closer alliance with Spain, succeeded in flattering the new envoy, and rendering him almost from the first subservient to his personal interests. Yet the King of England and the Spanish embassador together were no match for Ferdinand of Aragon. The negotiations between the sovereigns were prolonged for two years, and in the end Henry was worsted at every point. He had signed a treaty of offensive alliance with Spain against France, with which power he wisely desired to maintain friendly relations, and he had been prevailed upon to send some English troops into Brittany to co-operate with a Spanish contingent which never arrived, in the expulsion of the French from that country. He had concluded further treaties of friendship and alliance with the King of the Romans, who was actually encouraging Perkin Warbeck to assert his claim to the crown of England, and with the Archduke Philip, whom he personally and independently hated. And he had been forced to content himself with the promise of a very modest dowry with the Spanish princess who was affianced to his son Arthur, Prince of Wales.

Relatively too, as well as positively, he had been falsely borne in hand. Maximilian, who had been no less ready than Henry with his promises to Ferdinand, did not send a single soldier into Brittany, but endeavored to overreach Henry, Charles, and Ferdinand by a hasty marriage—by proxy—with the young duchess, without the consent or knowledge of either England or Spain. Yet this diplomatic victory over the very astute Englishman did not satisfy Ferdinand and Isabella, who, fearful lest they should “become the victims of their honesty” if they permitted Maximilian to surpass them in political perfidy, immediately renewed secret negotiations with France, and declared themselves ready to abandon the king, the duchess, and the emperor. Charles, they promised, should obtain what he wished, without risking the life of a single soldier, if only he would marry a Spanish Infanta. And they offered him, not Isabella, their eldest born, but their second daughter, Joanna.

Charles, however, had other views, and finding no cohesion or certainty in Ferdinand’s league against him, strengthened his cause and his kingdom by marrying the Duchess Anne of Brittany himself, and uniting her hereditary dominions forever to the crown of France, a fair stroke of policy for a foolish sovereign in the midst of crafty and unscrupulous adversaries. (December 13, 1491.)

Ferdinand replied by calling on Henry VII. to fulfill his engagements and invade France. Henry accordingly, on the 1st of October, 1492, landed an army at Calais, and marched on Boulogne; while Ferdinand, without striking a blow either for Spain or for England, took advantage of the English expedition to extort from the fears and folly of Charles VIII. the favorable conditions of peace and alliance that were embodied in the celebrated Convention which was signed at Barcelona on the 19th of January, 1493. By this instrument it was provided that each of the high contracting parties should mutually aid each other against all enemies, the Vicar of Christ alone excepted, that the Spanish sovereigns should not enter into an alliance with any other power, to the prejudice of the interests of France, and finally, that the coveted provinces of Roussillon and Cerdagne, whose recovery had long been one of the chief objects of Ferdinand’s ambition, should be immediately handed over to Spain.

The services of England being no longer needed by the peninsular sovereigns, Ferdinand abruptly broke off all further negotiations with Henry VII.; the signatures of Ferdinand and Isabella to the treaty which had already been ratified were disposed of by the simple but effective expedient of cutting them out of the parchment with a pair of scissors; and the contract of marriage between Arthur, Prince of Wales, and the Infanta Catharine—having served its immediate diplomatic purpose—was removed, for the time being,[7] from the sphere of practical politics.

It is sufficiently characteristic of both parties, that in the treaty of Barcelona, between Charles and Ferdinand, Naples, the true objective of the young king of France, was not even mentioned. Ferdinand, well content with the immediate advantages obtained by the treaty, was by no means imposed upon by such vain reticence, while Charles, pluming himself upon the success of his diplomacy in his treaties with England, with Spain, and with the empire, looked forward to establishing himself without opposition on the throne of Naples, on his way to assume the Imperial purple at Constantinople.

The kingdom of Naples, on the death of Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon, had passed, we have already seen, to his illegitimate son Ferdinand, who proved to be a tyrant of the worst Italian type, worthless, contemptible and uninteresting. To expel this hated monarch, for whom not one of his Neapolitan subjects would have been found to strike a blow in anger, seemed but a chivalrous and agreeable pastime to the vain and ignorant youth who had succeeded Louis XI. upon the throne of France. His more experienced neighbors indeed smiled with some satisfaction at his presumption. Yet, strange to say, the judgment of the vain and ignorant youth was just; and the wise men, who ridiculed his statesmanship, and scoffed at his military ineptitude, were doomed to great and astounding disappointment.

Before the French preparations for the invasion of Italy were fairly completed, in the early spring of 1494, Ferdinand of Naples died, and was succeeded by his son Alfonso I., the cousin-german of Ferdinand of Aragon. This change of rulers altered in no way the wild schemes of Charles of France, nor, although the new king of Naples was far less odious than his father had been in his own dominions, did it make any important change in the condition of Italian politics. By the month of June, 1494, the French preparations were so far advanced that Charles judged it opportune to acquaint his Spanish allies with his designs on Naples, and to solicit their active co-operation in his undertaking.

That Ferdinand should, under any possible circumstances, have been found to spend the blood and treasure of Spain in assisting any neighbor, stranger, or ally, in any enterprise, without direct advantage to himself, was a supposition entirely extravagant. But that he should assist a feather-headed Frenchman to dispossess a son of Aragon of a kingdom from which his own ancestors had thrice driven a French pretender, and where, if any change were to be made in the sovereignty, his own rights of succession were far superior to the shadowy claims derived from the hated Angevins: this was a thing so grotesquely preposterous that it is hard to suppose that even Charles of France should have regarded it as being within the bounds of possibility. Ferdinand contented himself for the moment with expressions of astonishment and offers of good advice, while Charles pushed forward his preparations for the invasion of Italy. Don Alfonso de Silva, dispatched by the court of Spain as a special envoy, came up with the French army at Vienne, on the Rhone, toward the end of June, 1494. But he was instructed rather to seek, than to convey, intelligence of any sort; nor was it to be supposed that his grave remonstrances or his diplomatic warnings should have had much effect upon the movements of an army that was already on the march.

In August, 1494, thirty thousand men, hastily equipped, yet well provided with the new and dreadful weapon that was then first spoken of as a cannon, crossed the Alps, and prepared to fight their way to Naples. But no enemy appeared to oppose their progress. The various States of Italy, jealous of one another, if not actually at war, were unable or unwilling to combine against the invader; the roads were undefended; the troops fled; the citizens of the isolated cities opened their gates, one after the other, at the approach of the strange and foreign invader. The French army, in fine, after a leisurely promenade militaire through the heart of Italy, marched unopposed into Rome on the last day of the year 1494.

Ferdinand and Isabella had, in the first instance, offered no serious opposition to the French enterprise, which appeared to them to be completely impracticable; and they had awaited with diplomatic equanimity the apparently inevitable disaster, which, without the loss of a single Spanish soldier or the expenditure of a single maravedi, would at once have served all the purposes of Ferdinand, and permitted him to maintain his reputation for goodwill toward Charles, which might have been useful in future negotiations. The astonishing success of the French invasion took the Spanish sovereigns completely by surprise, and it became necessary for Ferdinand to adopt, without haste, but with prudent promptitude, a new policy at once toward France and toward the various parties in Italy.

The boldest and the most capable of all the sovereigns of Italy, in these trying times, was the Spanish Pontiff, who by a singular fate has been made, as it were, the whipping boy for the wickedness of nineteen centuries of popes at Rome, and who is known to every schoolboy and every scribbler as the infamous Alexander VI. Roderic Lenzuoli, or Llançol, was the son of a wealthy Valencian gentleman, by Juana, a sister of the more distinguished Alfonso Borja, bishop of his native city of Valencia.

Born at Valencia about 1431, Roderic gave evidence from his earliest years of a remarkable strength of character, and of uncommon intellectual powers. While still a youth, he won fame and fortune as an advocate. But his impatient nature chafed at the moderate restraint of a lawyer’s gown; and he was on the point of adopting a military career, when the election of his uncle to the Supreme Pontificate as Calixtus III. in 1455 opened for him the way to a more glorious future. At the instance of the new Pope, Roderic adopted his mother’s name, in the Italian form already so well known and distinguished at the court of Rome, and taking with him his beautiful mistress, Rosa Vanozza, whose mother he had formerly seduced, he turned his back upon his native Valencia, and sought the fortune that awaited him at the capital of the world.

Unusually handsome in person, vigorous in mind and body, masterful, clever, eloquent, unscrupulous, absolutely regardless of all laws, human or divine, in the gratification of his passions and the accomplishment of his designs, Roderic, the Pope’s nephew, was a man made for success in the society in which he was to find himself at Rome. On his arrival at the Papal court in 1456 he was received with great kindness by his uncle, and was soon created Archbishop of Valencia, Cardinal of St. Nicholas in Carcere Tulliano, and Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church. On the death of Calixtus in 1458, the Cardinal Roderic Borgia sank into comparative insignificance; and during the reigns of Pius II., Paul II., Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII. we hear little of him but that he was distinguished for his amours, for his liberality in the disposal of his fortune, and for his attention to public business. Having thus secured the goodwill of many of the cardinals and the affection of the Roman people, he had no difficulty, on the death of Innocent VIII. in July, 1492, in making a bargain with a majority of the members of the Sacred College, in accordance with which he was elected Pope, and took the title of Alexander VI. on the 26th of August, 1492.

His election was received by the Roman people with the utmost satisfaction, and celebrated with all possible demonstrations of joy. His transcendent abilities and his reckless methods could not fail to render him obnoxious to his companions and his rivals in Italy; but it is due rather to his foreign origin, his Valencian independence of character, and above all his insolent avoidance of hypocrisy in the affairs of his private life, that he has been made a kind of ecclesiastical and Papal scapegoat, a Churchman upon whose enormous vices Protestant controversialists are never tired of dilating, and whose private wickedness is ingenuously admitted by Catholic apologists as valuable for the purposes of casuistic illustration, as the one instance of a divinely infallible judge whose human nature yet remained mysteriously impure, and whose personal or individual actions may be admitted to have been objectively blamable.

To measure the relative depths of human infamy is an impossible as well as an ungrateful task. It is not given to mortals to know the secrets of the heart. But bad as Alexander undoubtedly was, he was possibly no worse than many of his contemporaries in the Consistory, less wicked than some of his predecessors at the Vatican. The guilt of greater and more vigorous natures passes for superlative infamy with the crowd; but when dispassionately compared with that of his immediate predecessors, Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII., the character of Alexander VI. is in almost every respect less flagitious and more admirable.

So unblushing was the venality of the Holy See in the fourteenth century that sacred dialecticians and jurists of high authority were found seriously to argue that the Pope was not subjectively capable of committing the offense of Simony. It might have been contended with equal justice that in every other respect he was at once above, or without, the scope of the entire moral law. Nor can it be said that the fifteenth century brought any serious amendment.

From the death of Benedict XI., in 1303, to the death of Alexander VI., in 1503, the night was dark before the inevitable dawn; and in every phase of human depravity, in every development of human turpitude, in arrogance, in venality, in cruelty, in licentiousness, medieval Popes may be found pre-eminent among contemporary potentates. Thus, if the wickedness of Alexander was extravagant, it was by no means unparalleled, even among the Popes of a single century. His cruelty was no greater than that of Urban VI., or of Clement VII., or of John XXII. His immorality was, at least, more human than that of Paul II. and of Sixtus IV., nor were his amours more scandalous than those of Innocent VIII. His sacrilege was less dreadful than that of Sixtus IV. His covetousness could hardly have exceeded that of Boniface IX.; his arrogance was less offensive than that of Boniface VIII. If he was unduly subservient to Ferdinand and Isabella in his toleration of the enormities of Torquemada, his necessities as an Italian sovereign rendered the Spanish alliance a matter of capital importance. As a civil potentate and as a politician, he was not only wiser, but far less corrupt than Sforza, less rapacious than Ferdinand, more constant than Maximilian of Germany, less reckless than Charles of France. His administrative ability, his financial enlightenment, his energy as regards public works, were no less remarkable than his personal liberality, his affability, and his courage. His division of the New World by a stroke of the pen was an assumption of imperial power which was at least justified by the magnitude of its success. As he sat in his palace on the Mons Vaticanus, he was the successor, not of Caligula, but of Tiberius—not of Commodus, but of Diocletian.

Of the misfortunes of his eldest son, created by Ferdinand Duke of Gandia; of the wickedness of his second son, the fifteenth century Cæsar, who succeeded his father as Cardinal Archbishop of Valencia; of the profligacy of his daughter, so unhappily named Lucretia; of the marriage of his youngest son Geoffrey to a daughter of Alfonso of Naples, as a part of the treaty of alliance between the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the States of the Church, in 1494; of the alliance between Alexander and Bajazet, and the poisoning of the Sultan’s brother, Zem, after thirteen years’ captivity, on receipt of an appropriate fee; of the elevation of a facile envoy to the full rank of Cardinal, to please the Grand Turk; of all these things nothing need be said in this place.

We are more immediately concerned to know that on New Year’s Day, 1495, Pope Alexander VI., a refugee, if not actually a prisoner, in the Castle of St. Angelo, was fain to accept the terms that were imposed upon him by the victorious Frenchmen—masters for the nonce of Italy and of Rome.

As Charles VIII. was marching through Italy, and was approaching, all unopposed, the sacred city of Rome, Alexander VI., anxious at all hazards to obtain the assistance of his countrymen in the hour of danger, had sent an envoy to the Spanish court representing the critical state of affairs in Italy, assuring the king and queen of his constant goodwill, in spite of certain disputes as to the Papal authority in Spain, and conveying to them, with other less substantial favors, the grant of the Tercias, or two-ninths of the tithes throughout all the dominions of Castile, an impost which, until the middle of the present century, formed a part of the revenues of the Spanish monarchy. He also conceded to the Spanish crown the right of dominion over the whole of northern Africa, except Fez, which had been given to the King of Portugal.

A projected marriage between the Duke of Calabria, eldest son of the King of Naples, and the Infanta Maria, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, served to give the King of Spain an opportunity for negotiating with the Neapolitan court; and Ferdinand at the same time dispatched the celebrated Garcilaso de la Vega as his embassador, with instructions to return the most comforting assurances to the Pope at Rome. Yet he refrained from making any definite promises, or from committing himself to any definite policy. He was not a man to do anything rashly; and he preferred to await the course of events. Meanwhile, having sent a second mission from Guadalajara to the French court or camp, with good advice for his young friend and ally Charles VIII., Ferdinand betook himself with Isabella to Madrid, where the Spanish sovereigns devoted themselves to the preparation and equipment of an army to be dispatched at an opportune moment to any part of Italy where subsequent events might render its presence necessary. As, for various reasons, it was impossible that either Ferdinand or Isabella should accompany their army abroad, it became necessary to select a general. Among all the skillful leaders and gallant knights who had signalized themselves in the wars of Granada, it was somewhat difficult to decide upon a commander. But Isabella had never lost sight of Gonsalvo de Cordova, in whom she discerned traces of rare military talent; and from the moment the Sicilian expedition was planned she determined that he should be captain-general of the royal forces. The greater experience and apparently superior claims of many who had distinguished themselves in battle against the Moors were urged by Ferdinand without avail. The command was given to Gonsalvo de Cordova.

But while the Spanish fleet, under the gallant Count of Trivento, was riding at anchor at Alicante, and Gonsalvo was preparing to embark his army on board the ships in that harbor, the Spanish sovereigns dispatched a final embassy to Charles in Italy. On the 28th of January, 1495, as the king was leaving Rome on his way toward Naples, the embassadors, Juan de Albion and Antonio de Fonseca, arrived at the Vatican. They found Pope Alexander smarting under the humiliation of his recent treaty with the invader, and willing to assist them in any scheme for his discomfiture. They accordingly followed the French army with all speed, overtook it within a few miles of Rome, and immediately demanded an audience of Charles, even before his troops had come to a halt. They delivered up to him their credentials as he was riding along, and peremptorily required him to proceed no further toward Naples. The haughty tone of the Spaniards, as may be supposed, excited the greatest indignation in the breast of Charles and those who surrounded him; high words arose on both sides, and finally Fonseca, giving way to a simulated transport of rage, produced a copy of the once prized treaty of Barcelona, tore it to pieces, and threw down the fragments at Charles’s feet. Paul Jove seems to think that this violent and unjustifiable conduct on the part of the Spanish embassador was entirely unpremeditated; but it is certain that the whole scene had been preconcerted with either Ferdinand or the Pope. Zurita and the other chroniclers are silent on the point, but Peter Martyr in one of his letters affirms that the mutilation of the treaty in Charles’s presence was included in the secret instructions given to Fonseca by Ferdinand.

The envoys, as was expected, were promptly ordered to quit the French camp; and retiring with all speed to Rome, they hastened to transmit to Spain the earliest intelligence of the success of their mission. They were also permitted to inform their sovereigns of the new honor that had been conferred upon them by his Holiness Alexander VI., in the shape of the grant to them and to their heirs forever on the throne of Spain of the title of “Catholic Kings.”

Meanwhile Charles VIII. had reached Naples, which had at once opened its gates to the invaders, and the Castel Nuovo and the Castel d’Uovo were reduced to submission by their well-served artillery. King Alfonso abdicated the crown, and Fabricio Colonna ravaged the whole kingdom of Naples to the very gates of Brindisi, dispersing the little band of troops that had been collected by Don Cæsar of Aragon, illegitimate brother of the king; while Perron dei Baschi and Stuart d’Aubigny overran the whole country almost without striking a blow; and the greater part of the Neapolitan nobility gave their adhesion to the French. Nothing, however, could be more impolitic or more ungrateful than the manner in which Charles made use of his unexpectedly acquired authority, and it soon became evident that the new state of affairs in Naples would not be of very long duration. The moment for the judicious interference of Ferdinand of Aragon had not been long in arriving.

The conduct of the French at Naples showed pretty clearly to the Italian States the mistake they had made in permitting Charles to enter the country, and they were not slow to accept the suggestions of the Spanish embassador, Don Lorenzo Suarez de Mendoza y Figueras, that they should form a league with the object of expelling the French from Italy. The attitude of the Duke of Orleans, who had remained at Asti, toward the duchy of Milan, and the favorable reception accorded by Charles to Giovanni Trivulzio, Cardinal Fregosi, and Hybletto dei Fieschi, the chiefs of the banished nobles, and the sworn enemies of Ludovico Sforza, showed that prince how little he had to expect from the French alliance; and the conduct of Charles toward the Florentines, and indeed toward every government whose dominion he had traversed throughout Italy, terrified and enraged every statesman from Milan to Syracuse.

The envoys of the various states assembled at Venice. The deliberations in the council chamber were brief and decisive; and such was the secrecy with which the negotiations were conducted that the astute statesman and historian Philip de Commines, who then represented France at the court of Venice, remained ignorant that any league or convention was even contemplated by the various powers, until he was informed by the Doge Agostino Barberigo, on the morning of the 1st of April, 1495, that the treaty had been signed on the previous day. The avowed objects of this Most Holy League, which was entered into by Spain, Austria, Venice, Milan and the Court of Rome, were the recovery of Constantinople from the Turks, and the protection of the interests of the Church; but the secret articles of the treaty, as may be supposed, went much further, and provided that Ferdinand should employ the Spanish armament, now on its way to Sicily, in re-establishing his kinsman on the throne of Naples; that a Venetian fleet of forty galleys should attack the French positions on the Neapolitan coasts, that the Duke of Milan, the original summoner, should expel the French from Asti, and blockade the passage of the Alps, so as to prevent the arrival of further re-enforcements, and that the Emperor and the King of Spain should invade France on their respective frontiers, while the expense of all these warlike operations should be defrayed by subsidies from the allies. The Sultan Bajazet II., though not included in the League, offered, and was permitted, to assist the Venetians both by sea and land against the French. Thus we see the strange spectacle of the Pope and the Grand Turk—the Prince of Christendom and the Prince of Islam—united against the first Christian Power of Europe, under the leadership of The Most Christian King.

Within six weeks of the signature of this important treaty, Charles VIII. of France had caused himself to be crowned at Naples, with extraordinary pomp, not only as king, but as emperor; and, having thus gratified his puerile vanity, he abandoned his fantastic empire, and flying from the dangers that threatened him in Italy he returned to Paris. His army in Naples was intrusted to his cousin, Gilbert de Bourbon, Duc de Montpensier, who was invested with the title of viceroy, and instructed by the fugitive king to maintain his position in the country against all opponents.

It is not within the scope of this history to give any detailed account of the retreat of the French through Italy, of the wonderful passage of the Apennines at Pontremoli, and the still more wonderful victory of Fornovo on the Taro, when the French, whose entire force did not exceed ten thousand soldiers, completely routed the Italian army of thirty-five thousand men, under the command of Gonzago, marquis of Mantua. The French forces that remained in southern Italy were doomed to a very different fate. The command of the French army had been intrusted to the celebrated Stuart d’Aubigny, a knight of Scottish ancestry, who had been invested by Charles VIII. with the dignity of Constable of France, and who was accounted one of the most capable officers in Europe. But a greater captain than D’Aubigny was already on his way from Castile, who was in a single campaign to restore the reputation of the Spanish infantry to the proud position which they had once occupied in the armies of ancient Rome.

Landing at Reggio in Calabria, on the 26th of May, 1495, with a force of all arms not exceeding five thousand fighting men, Gonsalvo de Cordova speedily possessed himself of that important base of operations, established himself on the coast, captured several inland towns, was victorious in many skirmishes, and would soon have overrun the whole of Calabria, had not the rashness of Frederic, the young king of Naples, who had succeeded but a few months before to the crown which Alfonso had abdicated after a reign of less than one year, led to a disastrous check at Seminara. But Gonsalvo rapidly reorganized his army, and showing himself, like a great general, no less admirable in repairing a defeat than in taking advantage of a victory, he had kept D’Aubigny so completely in check that he had been unable even to go to the assistance of Montpensier, who was in sore straits in Naples. The citizens soon opened their gates to their lawful sovereign, and Montpensier retreated with his remaining forces to Avella, on the banks of the Lagni, twenty miles northeast of the city of Naples, whither Gonsalvo promptly marched to besiege him. Having received intelligence in the course of his march—Gonsalvo was ever well informed—that a strong body of French, with some Angevin knights and nobles, were on their way to effect a junction with D’Aubigny, he surprised them by a night attack in the fortified town of Lino, where he captured every one of the Angevin lords, no less than twenty in number, and immediately marching off to Avella with his spoils and prisoners, and an immense booty, he arrived at Frederic’s camp early in July, just thirteen months after their separation on the disastrous field of Seminara.

On hearing of Gonsalvo’s approach, the king marched out to meet him, accompanied by Cæsar Borgia, the Papal Legate, and many of the principal Neapolitan nobles and commanders, who greeted the victorious Castilian with the proud title of “The Great Captain,” by which he was already known to some of his contemporaries, and by which he has ever since been distinguished by posterity. At Avella he found a re-enforcement of five hundred Spanish soldiers, a welcome addition to his small force, which amounted on his arrival to only two thousand one hundred men, of whom six hundred were cavalry. With such an army, less numerous than a modern German regiment, did Gonsalvo overrun Calabria, out-general the most renowned French commanders, and defeat their gallant and well-disciplined forces, emboldened by uninterrupted success.

The siege operations at Avella, which had been conducted without energy by the Neapolitans, received a new impetus from the presence of the Spaniard, who displayed such skill and vigor that in a few days the French, defeated at every point, were glad to sue for terms, and on the 21st of July, 1496, signed a capitulation which virtually put an end to the war. It was meet that Gonsalvo should now pay a visit to his countryman at the Vatican, and having, on his way to Rome, delivered the town of Ostia from the dictatorship of a Basque adventurer of the name of Guerri, the last remaining hope of the French in Italy, he was received by Alexander VI. with such splendor that his entry into the city is said to have resembled rather the triumph of a victorious general into ancient Rome than the visit of a modern grandee.

The streets were lined with enthusiastic crowds, the windows were filled with admiring spectators, the very tops of the houses were covered with lookers-on, as Gonsalvo marched into and through the city, preceded by bands of music, and accompanied by his victorious army. The entire garrison of Ostia, with Manuel Guerri at their head, mounted on a wretched horse, was led captive to the Vatican, where Roderic Borgia, in the full splendor of his tiara and pontifical robes, and surrounded by his cardinals, sat on his throne awaiting the coming of his victorious countryman. When Gonsalvo reached the foot of the throne, he knelt down to receive the pontifical benediction, but Alexander raised him in his arms, and presented to him the Golden Rose, the highest and most distinguished honor that a layman could receive from the hands of the sovereign Pontiff.

The Great Captain now returned to Naples, into which city he made an entry scarcely less splendid than that into Rome; and he received at the hands of Frederic more substantial honors than those of a golden rose, in the shape of the dukedom of Santangelo, with a fief of two towns and seven dependent villages in the Abruzzo. From Naples the new duke sailed for Sicily, which was then in a state of open insurrection, in consequence of the oppressive rule of Giovanni di Nuccia, the Neapolitan viceroy. By the intervention of Gonsalvo, the inhabitants were satisfied to return to their allegiance; and order was restored without the shedding of a single drop of blood. After some further services to the state, and to the cause of peace, services both diplomatic and military, in Naples, in Sicily and in Calabria, adding in every case to his reputation as a soldier and a statesman, and above all as a great Castilian gentleman, Gonsalvo returned to his native Spain, where he was received with the applause and respect that is not always granted to great men by their own sovereigns, or even by their own countrymen.

His last service to King Frederic and his people, ere he quitted the country, was no less honorable than wise. Frederic was engaged in the siege of the last city in the kingdom of Naples that refused to recognize the dominion of Aragon, the ancient and noble city of Diano, whose inhabitants, vassals of that Prince of Salerno who was attached to the Angevin cause, refused to listen to the terms which were proposed. Gonsalvo took charge of the operations; and the citizens, convinced of the hopelessness of holding out any longer against so vigorous a commander, surrendered a few days afterward at discretion. Gonsalvo, whether touched at their bravery and their forlorn condition, or merely being adverse from severity for which he saw no reason, obtained from the king favorable terms for the garrison.