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This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: HARRISON, JAMES A TITLE : SPAIN PLACE: BOSTON DA TE : 1881 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT BIBLIOGRAPHIC MirROFORM TARHFT Master Negative it Original Material as FUmed - Existing Bibliographic Record 946 H246 I Harrison, James Albert, 1848-1911. Spain, by James H. ,!, Harrison ... Witli one hundred illus- trations. iJoston, Estes and Lauriat, 1881. ioi [uniovei. ine Library of entertaining history) Restrictions on Use: li^paln— Hist. Library of Congress DI'68.FI2S ISSla .2, 43-J0S2S TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA FILM SIZE: l_3.5j^/!!^ _ IMAGE r ! ACEMENT: lA (UA' DATE F!LMPD:__5-5-^ """ INITIALS 3f ^^^^^^^^ RESEARCH PUBLTcA-TTn-Nl^ ,K,r- ,.,o^^ppfrf^r-^:^— - IB IIB REDUCTION RATIO: /// D Association for Information and image Management 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 mm IIU '"■''■"'""'""'"" Inches iliiiiliiiiliiiililll liiiilmilnMliiiiliiiillllllllll I M I I M I M M I I I I I I I I 2 3 1.0 liiiiliiiiliiiilillllliMliiiiliiiiliiilllliilimliiiilMiiliiiillllllllll I.I 1.25 m 15:0 2.8 JtSA m 1^ 3.6 US us. III 40 1.4 Til 2.5 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.6 TTT T I I MnNUFPCTURED TO PIIIM STfiNDFIRDS BY RPPLIED IMAGE- INC. Columuta 5.4njtif rsitp THE LIBRARIES A ifflaii3^tii'-»_i*^./..*rti*.'v2il..» y-fc, i -.i*i~»**'~1*-%S'J«>^jB*is™™tl«^!. .,M;-«**"«-" «w***J**i^S«,j;f.Sa8iS(« Jdi» j THE PANDERON IN THE SIERRA NEVADA. I. SPAIN BY JAMES H. HARRISON Washington and Lee University WITH ONE HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS ■^xx* » I - PUBLISHED BY ESTES. AND ' LAURIAT 301-305 WASHINGIO-N ' S TREET » • .. » I 88 I* " « « I. THE PANDERON IN THE SIERRA NEVADA. SPAIN BY JAMES H. HARRISON IVasking-ton and Lee University WITH OME HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS ■ooXXc » I L 1 • PUBLISHED BY ESTES. AND LAURIAT 301-305 Washington • Street . • * I 881' •" • ' ^ ^^^.^TpS^S^. J oh a Bates Oiark Oot. 16, IdiO Copyright, 1881, By D. Lothrop & Company. • • • » • , • • ! .*. .' • • • • " ~ • - « • • ■ • • • -I • • • • • • ••• • • •- • • • • ■ • • « « • • • • • • • • • • • • • ••••'• t •• • •••. » • • •• « • I t I I • ,• •• • • I • • • C ( I • • * • • • • I • • PreHH-work /'.y liorkicell tt Churchill. PREFATORY NOTE. In ihe preparation of this sketch of the " History of Spain" the author has endeavored to use only such authorities as are acknowledged by special students to be the best. The popular plan of the series did not admit of exact references, in foot-notes or otherwise; hence the necessity of briefly referring here to the sources from which the narrative is drawn. Twenty-nine authors have contributed to what has been said in the text, making in all between sixty and seventy volumes. Many authors, such as Gibbon, Buckle, O'Shea, Borrow, and others, have been read, either in full when they referred to Spain, or in part on special points connected with the history, and are not included in this list. For the introductory period the narration is chiefly indebted to the Roman Histories of Mommsen and Merivale, Rosseeuw St. Hilaire's " Histoire d'Espagne " (vol. i.), and vol. i. of Dunham's " History of Spain and Portugal " (5 vols. : Harper, 1872). The statistics are taken from Martin's " Statesman's Year-Book " (1879), a well-known work, drawn from official Spanish sources. In his account of the Gothic period the author has followed F. Dahn's "Konige der Germanen, Funfte u Sechste Abthei- lung" (Wurzburg, 1871). Dahn is the great authority on the subject. Lembke and Schafer's " Geschichte von Spanien" (3 vols., 1841-1863) contributed essentially to this part of the work, as did also Dr. E. A. Freeman's article on the " Goths " in the " Encyclopedia Britannica" (9th ed.). The chief authorities on the Mahometan period were Dozy's "Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne" (4 vols., Leyden, 1861), VI Prefatory Note. Prefatory Note. Vll ' - Lembke and Schafer's " Geschichte von Spanien " (vols, i., ii., and iii.), and Rosseeuw St. Hilaire's " Histoire d'Espagne " (vols, ii., iii., iv.). Irving's "Life of Mahomet" and Coppee's " Moor- ish Conquest of Spain" (2 vols., i88r) furnished some valuable hints in connection with this part of the text. The information on Moorish architecture and literature was obtained from Lembke and Schafer's " Geschichte," Fergusson's " History of Architect- ure," Contreras' " Monumentos Arabes " (Seville, 1878), Schack's "Kunst und Poesie der Araber in Spanien und Sicilien (2 vols., Berlin, 1S65), and W. G Palgrave's articles in the " Encyclopedia Britannica " (9th ed.) For the Cid and his period the "Romancero del Cid " (Leip- zig, 187 1 ) and Dozy's important " Recherches sur I'histoire poli- tique et litteraire de I'Espagne pendant le Moyen-Age " (2 vols., Leyden, i86o) have been followed. For the middle period of Christian and Mussulman Spain, Lembke and Schafer, Rosseeuw St. Hilaire (vols, iii., iv., v.), and Froissart have been followed. Prescott's researches on the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and Robertson's and Prescott's on the reign of Charles V., will be found to have been especially followed for the period when Spain first became a great European power. In the chapter on the Spanish Navigators, Irving's " Life of Columbus " and the companion volume on the lesser navigators, Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" and "Conquest of Peru" (4 vols.), and the article on the Spanish-American colonies in the ninth edition of the " Encyclopedia Britannica," have been used. As Prescott's conception of the " Empire " of Montezuma is now proved to be entirely wrong, the author has endeavored to give the results of the most recent research in this department by presenting the views of Messrs. A. F. Bandelier and Dr. L. H. Morgan (" Social Organization and Mode of Government," " Dis- tribution and Tenure of Lands," "Art of War and Mode of War- fare " of the Ancient Mexicans ; "Ancient Society ") as a substi- tute for Prescott's. The work of Dr. G. Briihl on Peru (" Die Culturvolker Alt-Amerikas," 1877) has also been consulted. Prescott's unfinished " Philip II." and Motley's two invaluable Histories cover the period from 1550 to 1600. Llorente's work on the " Inquisition " is the main authority for the workings of the institution popularly ascribed to St Dominic. For the period reaching from the reign of Philip II. to the reign of Isabella II. many works have been consulted, principally Rosseeuw St. Hilaire's " Histoire " and Baumgarten's "Geschichte Spaniens" (Berlin, 1861), with some help from Dunham and others. For contemporary Spanish history, Baumgarten, A. W. Lau- ser's "Geschichte Spaniens" (2 vols., 1877), and Mazade's "Re- volutions de I'Espagne" (i vol., 1854-68), have been used. Numerous books of travel, Spruner's atlases, and extensive personal observation, have contributed to a knowledge of locali- ties. The maps are reduced from Spruner's; the translations of poems are by Lockhart, Scott, Lord Byron, Bishop Percy, and Motley; and the notices of Spanish literature are chiefly given on the authority of Ticknor's " History of Spanish Literature " (3 vols., 1872). The genealogical tables of the kingdoms of Cas- tile and Aragon and the Houses of Habsburg and Bourbon are reprinted here from Mr. H. B. George's " Genealogical Tables " (last edition, Macmillan, 1875), ^^'^^^ ^^^ ^"^^ permission of Mr. George and the Delegates of the Clarendon Press. The list of Visigothic kings is Dahn's ; the list of sultans was compiled by the author from Dozy. The special student — if the author can hope for such for his imperfect and unpretending work — may notice the absence of all reference to the compilations of J. A. Conde, Al-Makkari's " Mu- hammadan Dynasties " translated by Gayangos, and Masdeu's and La Fuente's Histories of Spain. The omission was intentional, and for the reason that Conde's " history " is entirely worthless, and the others have been seriously damaged by the criticisms of distinguished Oriental and Spanish specialists like R. Dozy. While the author cannot hope to have been entirely successful in unravelling the many intricacies and complications of Spanish history, in setting forth clearly the history and growth of Spanish institutions, in tracing without confusion the many separate and independent growths within the Peninsula, till all the lines con- verge on the vast world-empire of Ferdinand and Isabella, VIU Prefatory Note. Charles V., and Philip II., in contributing to the interest of the story by illuminating it here and there with the light of Spanish poetry and romance, or in entirely avoiding the dangers of rhetoric when tempted by the brilliancy, romantic coloring, and marvel- lousness of the '* adventure of Spain," he has yet tried to follow the authorities conscientiously, has weighed, considered, and com- pared much, and presents the results here with all possible diffi- dence, and the sincere wish that the following outline may lead its readers to further study of so fascinating a suoject. In conclusion, the author begs leave to tender his special thanks for essential help rendered by Dr. E. A. Freeman, Prof. T. 11. Ward, and Mr. H. B. George, of Oxford. England, Mr. J. L. Whitney, of the Boston Public Library, whose " Catalogue of the Ticknor Collection " of Spanish books, and assistance privately rendered, were most welcome, Mr. F. W. Putnam, and Profs. Elliott and Adams, of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Lexington, Va., June 17, 1881. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. Page Physical Features. — Statistics. — Ancient Spain . xvii CHAPTER I. Spain under the Visigoths (West Goths) ... 17 CHAPTER II. Spain under the Visigoths (continued) . 37 i . CHAPTER III. The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate 54 CHAPTER IV. The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate (continued) 7 . CHAPTER V. Spain under the Omaiyades . . 98 IX i. h '\ X Contents, CHAPTER VI. ^ Paqk Spain under the Omaiyades (continued) . . .117 CHAPTER VII. Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest . . 139 CHAPTER VIII. Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest (con- tinued) 163 CHAPTER IX. From the Almoravide Conquest to Ferdinand and Isabella . . 185 CHAPTER X. From the Almoravide Conquest to Ferdinand and Isabella (continued) 209 CHAPTER XI. Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella .... 239 CHAPTER XII. Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (continued) . . 255 CHAPTER XIII. Subjugation of the Moors. — Conquest of Granada 271 Contents, xi CHAPTER XIV. Page Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (continued) . .312 CHAPTER XV. Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (continued)^ . . 329 * CHAPTER XVI. The Spanish Navigators 356 CHAPTER XVII. Regency of Ximenes. — Reign of Charles V. and JuANA ... 408 CHAPTER XVIII. Reign of Charles V. and Juana (continued) . . 429 CHAPTER XIX. Spain under Philip II 455 CHAPTER XX. The Struggle in the Netherlands .... 473 CHAPTER XXI. Philip's Character and Policy 494 CHAPTER XXn. End of the Reign of Philip II. . , , . • 515 pi Xll Contents. CHAPTER XXI II Pagk . PHTI.IP II. TO THE ACCESSION OF DEATH OF PHILIP il- FROM THE ...^^" - ji^^ PHILIP THE BOURBONS. — REIGNS O* IV , AND CHARLES H- . 536 CHAPTER XXIV. ^ np THE BOURBONS TO THE FRENCH K.OM THE ACCKSS-O. OK THE B ^ ^ ^^^^^^^^^ Revolution. — KEiGNb VI., AND Charles III. . 569 CHAPTER XXV. T^TTTCNs OF Charles IV. THE French Revolution.- Reigns o ^ ^ AND Ferdinand VII. • • • * CHAPTER XXVI. reign of Ferdinand VII. CHAPTER XXVII. THE RECENCY. -ISABELLA II. -AMADKO. PUBLIC - Alfonso XII. • • CHAPTER XXVIII. 604 . 630 — The Re- , 654 680 Isabel! .A II. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. The Pander Ml in the Sierra Nevada . Ancient Aqueduct at Merida Ruins of the Roman Theatre of Murviedro . Ruins of Italica, near Seville Destruction of Sagunto Map — Kingdom of the West Goths . Interior of Toledo Cathedral King Wamba ..... A Bull Clearing the Barrier Charro of Salamanca .... A Serenata at Cordova Ruins of Ancient Theatre of Merida The Giralda, Seville . , . . Court of Lions, Alhambra Exterior of the Mosque of Cordova . Interior of the Mosque of Cordova Chapel of the Zancarron, Mosque of Cordova General View of the Alhambra Gate of the Torre de las Infantas Coffin of the Cid .... Young Valencians .... The Balcony of Lindaraja . Despoilers of the Azulejos of the Alhambra . The Vase of the Alhambra . Map of Spain and Portugal Don Pedro el Cerem.onious . Grajal, near Leon .... Binding up the Palm- Leaves Page Frontispiece XXV xxix xxviii . xxxvii . 19 25 47 • 55 71 . 87 107 115 125 • 135 143 • 153 161 . 169 J75 • 183 191 • 203 211 . 219 224 . 227 233 nil r ..;:^ XIV List of Illusf rations. Don Alvaro de Luna Bridge of St. Martin, Toledo An Arabian Well, Toledo Forest of Palms at Elche . La Sala de Embaj adores, Alcazar, Seville Ferdinand and Isabella Moorish Arches of the Alcazar, Seville Interior of Seville Cathedral The Cathedral and Port of Malaga Segovia : The Alcazar and Cathedral Prison of the Inquisition at Barcelona Map — Kingdom of Granada An Andalusian Bolera and her Mother Cardinal Zimenes The Generalife at Granada Isabella dictating her Will Gate of the Sala de Justicia, Alhanibra Chart of Sovereigns of Castile Chart of Sovereigns of Aragon The Siejrra de Oca, near Miranda de Ebro Banks of the Darro, at Granada Peasant of the Environs of Granada . Balconies at Granada Students Serenading Tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella, in Cathedral of Landing of Columbus in the New World Ruins of the Castle of Chinchilla Gate of the Sun, Toledo Salamanca ; Town and Roman Bridge . Miranda de Ebro . • • Interior of San Juan de los Reyes, Toledo Peasant of Alcoy Charles V. .... Chart— The Habsburgs and Bourbons Alcazar of Toledo Cattle-Merchant of Cordova General View of Madrid Portuguese Corrida at Seville : the Pegadores Granada Page 23s 241 249 263 273 276 279 291 299 307 315 325 331 333 342 347 35» 353 359 365 Z7Z 379 389 395 401 409 419 427 433 439 447 451 455 463 471 477 483 List of Illustrations. An Aged Mendicant and his Grandchild . Interior of the Armeria, Madrid Cervantes . • • • Battle of Lepanto .... General View of the Escurial The Noria, or W^ater- Wheel used in Irrigating Valencian Laborer . . • • Alicante . • • • • Peasants in the Neighborhood of Madrid . The Rock of Gibraltar . Lope de Vega . . . - Jar-Merchant, Madrid Philip III Wandering Musicians . • . Olivares . . ■ • • Roman Bridge at Ronda Charles II. in the Pantheon of the Escorial A r.Jay at Jaen Philip V. . • • • • Charles III. . • • • Interior of a Country Inn . The Queen's Avenue, Aranjutz Maria Louisa. The Leaning Tower of Saragossa In the Church of Our Lady del Pilar, Saragossa Market at Vittoria Balconies of Vittoria Godoy • • • • * Map of Navarre . • • • Basque Shepherd, Province of Alava . Fountain of the Swan, Madrid . Basque Peasant . . • • Ferdinand VII. . • • • Maria Christina . • • • Two Ladies; Sketch made at Alicante Heroes of the Carlist War . The Palacio Real of Madrid Isabella 11. • • • XV Page 489 495 49S 500 505 511 517 525 533 539 545 547 552 555 557 561 567 573 575 579 581 589 593 597 605 611 617 624 625 633 641 647 650 651 659 663 669 675 !ii ' j Bg o ^! 'A' ' a i!W »ari'!"^j>M w i ' > iii % . m i i,p i« p»wji i {|)l i I IS J |p i I - .imc i XVI List of Illustrations. Cadiz . . - Narvaez .... Library of the Escurial The Navaja . . • . Heads of Montpensier, Serrano, Topete Heads of Ruiz Zorrilla, Prim, Sagasta Heads of Pi y Margall, Castelar Page 677 681 . 683 687 . 696 698 . 700 INTRODUCTION. PHYSICAL 1^ FEATURES. — STATISTICS. SPAIN. ANCIENT I'^HE physical configuration of Spain has been compared with some truth to a truncated pryamid, the top of which is reached by successive terraces rising one above the other. The desolate plateaus of La Mancha and the Castiles crown the summit of the pyramid, which is furrowed by many chains of sierras towering from six thousand to twelve thousand feet above the sea. The noble forests that once clothed the mountains and plains have yielded to Spanish ignorance or superstition: "They infect the air when they are numerous, and attract birds that destroy the harvests when they are scattered in the fields," says the peasant. Hence the aspect of almost universal poverty in these hio-h central plains where the air is as keen as a sword in winter, and the summer has a true Syrian heat. Two Spanish proverbs sum up all that is to be said about the climate of this region ; " At Madrid three months hibernal and nine months infernal "; and " the air is so thin that it will kill a man and not put out a candle." The eastern coast from the Pyrenees to Alicante — * K. St. Ililaire's Hist. d'Espagne, vol. I. Dunham's Hist, of Spain., vol. I. xvii XVlll Introduction, the Mediterranean base of the pyramid — is a paradise, and conducts the observer through a landscape of ex- quisite fruitfulness, from the oUves of France, through the orange-embowered hamlets of Catalonia, to the Huerta or garden of Valencia, where African vegeta- tion is in the ascendant. At Elche, palms in tens of thousands group themselves with Oriental suggestive- ness around low Moorish houses. Catalonia recalls the Cornice road to Genoa ; Valencia is a Sicilian landscape ; Andalusia, with its slender palms, its cactuses used for hedges, its bananas, cotton, and sugar-cane, and its tropical atmosphere so wonder- fully pure and brilliant, is entirely African. In moral no less than in physical aspects Spain is a compound of contrasts. The character of the inhabi- tants of the various provinces differs as sharply as the vegetation. The Catalonian is renowned for thrift, in- dustry, money getting ; the Galician is the porter and water-carrier of Spain ; the keen-witted mountain- loving Biscayan stands, side by side with the proud and tranquil Aragonese ; the bright-tempered Andalu- sian sparkling with infinite pleasantry and wit beside the grave and careless Catalonian, and the Berber- featured Valencian in his cotton drawers. A glance at the map of Spain will explain these differ- ences. Mountains separate nearly every province from its neighbor, and mountains separate the peninsula from the rest of Europe. The story of Greece is repeated both geographically and historically in Spain. The Pyrenees and the sea separate it from Europe and Africa : six distinct mountain chains divide up the in- terior. As against the outside world it is a unit ; as Introduction. XIX against itself, it is a loose aggregation of jarring and inharmonious elements which for ages has had no Con- sciousness of nationality. The mountain chains are the Pyrenean chain, about ten thousand feet high, in the north ; the Iberian chain, twining through the heart of the country east- ward and southward to the Sierra Morena, filled with enormous masses of fossil bones and forming the starting point of the Tagus, on one side, and the Gabriel, Guadalaviar, and Xucar, on the other; the Carpetanian group, running north-east and south-west, with the royal chateaux of the Escurial and La Gran j a clinging to its granite declivities, and ending in Portugal ; the Lusitanian chain {Mons Herminius of the Romans) traversing Portugal, and separating the Tagus from the Guadiana; the Sierra Morena, "a plateau on one side and a mountain on the other," clothed in rosemary, thyme, cystus, lentisc, and arbutus on one side, and with date-palms, aloes, and vines on the other ; and the Sierra Nevada, the snowy chain of Andalusia, the loftiest of the peninsula, — probably a continuation of the Atlas chain, — springing out of smiling vegas, and rising in a series of dazzling summits to a height from ten thou- sand to twelve thousand feet above the sea. The four sides of the pyramid, by a sort of orienta- tion, thus front the four points of the compass. On the north is the humid, chilly, verdurous region of Canta- bria, where the vine will hardly grow, and wine is replaced by cider — *'the Normandy of the Peninsula." The Portuguese slope is far from having so distinct a physiognomy, and is clothed in fine chestnut, sweet- acorned oak, olive, and vine. The Andalusian and XX Introduction, Introduction. XXI li southern reflect, in vegetation and physical peculiarities, the opposite coast. The eastern or Iberian, slope, from Cape Gata to Cape Cruz, is the garden and glory of Spain. Five great rivers, —the Ebro, the Duero, the Tagus, the Guadiana, and the Guadalquivir ; and five smaller ones, — Guadalaviar, Xucar, Segura, Minho, Mondego ; intersect the country. A large number of salt lakes is found, especially in Catalonia and Aragon. Over two thousand mineral springs are to be seen in various parts of the countr}'. Traces of volcanoes, thermal waters, and lava-currents attest a lively volcanic activity, in former times, which culminated in 1755 in the great earthquake of Lisbon. Buckle * attributes the gradually developing superstition of the Spaniards largely to the re- flex action of these and similar physical phenomena. Marble of many colors and great beauty, rock salt and sea salt, mercury from the celebrated mine of Almaden in La Mancha, iron from Biscay, silver from Andalusia, copper, loadstone, gold, pearls and rubies, from various provinces, coal, and oil-wells, make of Spain what it was in antiquity, an inexhaustible storehouse of wealth, now, indeed, but poorly utilized. The peculiar wealth of the country, lies in its flocks and herds. Millions of acres of land are abandoned to the shepherds and their migratory hordes, which for- merly ravaged the country more pitilessly than the Vandals and in their wanderings from province to province were more dreaded than the robbers themselves. A single great company in the i6th century employed from forty thousand to sixty thousand shepherds and owned seven millions of sheep. The wandering flocks are * IJist. Cw. Essay on Spain. distributed in bands of ten thousand, under fifty shep- herds, with fifty dogs, and rove from place to place, though subject to certain laws and restrictions. It is said that when they come to a cultivated field they have the right to break a way through it, narrowing their passage as much as possible, but of course ruthlessly trampling under foot all that they do not devour. The Andalusian horses are famous for their gait, swiftness, and fire ; the Spanish bulls are equally cele- brated for blood and spirit. The bull-light is of unknown antiquity, and, as a national sport, perhaps, is more fiercely applauded and passionately loved now than ever. One of the scourges of the country is found in the countless locusts, wafted by the wind in such multi- tudes that the air is darkened. Their touch is fatal to nearly every vegetable thing with which they come in contact. The population of the country has been almost stationary for a long time. The Moorish wars, the ex- pulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century and of the Moriscoes in the seventeenth, the emigration to the New World, and the grinding imposts, misery, and idle- ness of every kind, have all but paralyzed the resources of the nation. At the last general census of i860* the population of Spain, embracing the Balearic and Canary islands, was sixteen million three hundred and one thousand, eight hundred and fifty-one. The area covered is one hundred and eightv-two thousand seven hundred and fifty-eight English square miles. In 1874 only four of the Span- ish cities contained over one hundred thousand inhab- itants ' * Martin's Yearbook for iSyg^ Art. Spain. XXll Introduction. Introduction. xxm Madrid, 367,284, Valencia, 153,457- Barcelona, 215,965, Seville, 118,878. Malaga, Murcia, Saragossa, Granada, Cadiz, and Valladolid, all fall beneath this estimate. Forty-six per cent, of the kingdom is uncultivated. The total imports in 1868-1877 averaged eighty million dollars; exports, sixty million dollars. The merchant navy in 1877 numbered two thousand nine hundred and fifteen vessels — a falling off of three thousand six hundred vessels since i860. The length of railways in 1877 was three thousand six hundred and seventy-three Eng- lish miles, with one thousand two hundred and sixty- four English miles in construction. These railways are owned by private companies, with, mostly, subventions or guarantees from government. The length of tele- graph lines in January, 1877, was eight thousand five hundred and eighty-three English miles, and of wires, twenty thousand six hundred and twenty English miles. The National debt in June, 1877, was twenty-seven hun- dred millions of dollars. Actual strength of the army in 1878 was one hundred and fifty-one thousand six hundred and sixty-eight, including infantry, artillery, engineers, cavalry, provincial bodies, carbineers, and guardia civil. The navy had nine thousand five hundred and seventy sailors and five thousand five hundred marines, with one captain-general of the fleet, twenty admirals, and three hundred and seventy-eight commissioned officers of various grades. It is recruited, by conscription in the naval districts along the coast. The army is of- ficered by sixty lieutenants-general, one hundred and thirty-one major-generals, and two hundred and thirty- eight brigadier-generals ; and it is composed (i) of a permanent army ; (2) a first, or active reserve ; (3) a second, or sedentary reserve, the scheme for which was not fully developed in 1878. Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippine, and a few Atlantic and Indian islands, comprise the colonial possessions of Spain. The American possessions (Cuba, Porto Rico) embrace an area of forty six thousand seven hundred and seventy square miles; population two million sixty thousand eight hundred and seventy; Asiatic possessions (Philippines, Caroline, and Marian Islands, and Palaos) sixty-six thousand four hundred and twenty-five square miles ; population four million three hundred and fifty-two thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine ; African possessions (Fernado do Po and Annabon) four hundred and eighty-three square miles, population five thousand five hundred and ninety. Total square miles, one hundred and thirteen thousand six hundred and seventy-eight ; total popula- tion, six million four hundred and nineteen thousand three hundred and thirty-nine.* Slavery, abolished in Porto Rico in 1873, still exists in Cuba. The number of slaves in Cuba (1876) was one hundred and ninety- nine thousand. Celts, Iberians, Phenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Suevi, Vandals, and Arabs have all left traces of themselves in Spain. Strabof tells us nearly all that we know of ancient Spain before and after the Roman conquest. According to him the Iberians seem to have been the primitive inhabitants of the country, whose eastern part they occupied. The Celts, the * Latiser, Geschichte Spaniens, vol. II. pp. 257-321. t Hispania, 3, 136-176, et al. MM i ^J-^ ^'i" XXIV Introduction. *'men of the forests/' at an uncertain date invaded the domain of these " men of the river " (Iberi, Ebro). Long struggles ensued, which ended in a final reconcil- iation and a mingling of the two races in the Celtiberian nation. The Iberian element however seems to have preponderated, though the Celts, as usual, gave their names to many places. It is believed with some show of truth that the modern Basques, and their as yet un- classified language, are descendants of the Iberians. The Celtic tribes seem to have embraced the Cantabri- ans, Asturians, Vascones, Galicians, and Lusitanians. The Iberians were more numerous, and extended from Gibraltar through parts of Andalusia, Valencia, Murcia, and Aragon, to the Pyrenees. The blended race of Celtiberians dwelt in the centre of the peninsula, on the border-land between the two nations. As, however, the whole subject is one swarming with uncertainties, surmises, doubtful passages in ancient writers, and conclusions drawn by Diodorus and Strabo from a state of things prevailing in the peninsula after the Phenician, Carthaginian, and Roman conquests had passed over the land, it will be best at once to avoid confusing the reader by reference to unproved state- ments, and to approach a period when the light is not quite so faint. The Phenician navigators seem to have been attracted by the beauty and wealth of the coast, where they formed settlements here and there. The legendary Tyrian Hercules founded Cadiz. The rich metallifer- ous basin of the Guadalquivir seems to have had an early attraction for them, and a temple of Hercules erected on the Isle of Santi Petri, is said to have sig- nalized one of their settlements. The founding of Introduction. xxvn Cadiz, Malaga, Cordova, Seville, and many other im- portant towns was attributed to them, and " Hercules " has been well called the collective name under which a grateful after-generation incarnated the most illustrious of these far-away Phenician navigators who braved un- known seas in their great exploring expeditions and left cities behind them as monuments of their presence. The Rhodian Greeks founded a colony in Catalonia about 900 B. C, and are thought to have settled the Balearic Isles ; the Zantiotes and Phocaeans have con- nected their names traditionally with Saguntum and Emporion as the Phocaeans did with Marseilles ; and Greek names are found in the southwest and north of Spain. The worship of Diana more especially was a legendary accompaniment of these migrations and set- tlements. The real history of Carthaginian Spain, apart from the restlessness of a purely speculative school of his- tory eager to theorize where there are no facts, begins three centuries before Christ, with the arrival of the Barca faction in Baetica (Andalusia). Three hundred years before, the wealth of Cadiz having excited the envy of the aborigines, its Phenician citizens, to pro- tect themselves, called in the aid of Carthage and the Numidians, who soon overran much of the country and made it a dependency of the great south Mediter- ranean city. In 237 B. c. Hamilcar Barca landed at Cadiz with a large army, after having conquered the whole African coast as far as the ocean. In nine years he had over- come the west and south of Spain, but the confeder- ated chiefs of the Vettones succeeded in defeating him, XXVlll Introduction, m «M and he was drowned in the passage of the Guadiana. Hasdrubal, his son-in-law, with a rare union of vigor and humanity, soon greatly extended the dominion of the Carthaginians with his fifty-six' thousand men and two hundred elephants. He built the city of Carthage Nova (Carthagena), which became a-great commercial, maritime, and military outpost, full of fortifications and arsenals. The frightened Greek colonies implored the aid of the Roman senate against the Carthaginian power ; a treaty stipulated the independence of these colonies and fixed a limit to the growing Carthaginian empire ; but Hasdrubal, feeling himself strong in the affections of the people and finding himself firmly in- trenched at Carthagena, resolved to break the treaty, and would have done so, had not the dagger of an assassin put an end to his life. Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, a young man of twenty-five, was chosen by the army to succeed Has- drubal ; and now he saw a chance to show at last the eternal hate which his father had made him swear against the Romans. The admirable portrait left by Livy* is a pregnant individualization of one of the great men of antiquity. In the same lucid and impassioned pages the memorable story of the siege of Saguntum,t the ally and funeral offering of Rome to the vengeance of the Carthaginiai\s, still glows with eloquence after the lapse of twenty centuries. A cry of grief rever- berated through antiquity and found an echo in many historians over this perfidious immolation of a devoted friend on the part of Rome ; " Dum Romae consulitur. Saguntiim expugnatur;' was the scathing proverb that * I.iv. lib. 21, 22, 23, 24 et sqcj. t Ibid, 21 d sqq. Introduction. XXXI embalmed the memory of this humiliating incident at Rome. The great struggle between Rome and Carthage had now begun. During the second Punic war, in 218, Cneius Scipio came over to Spain, and soon got pos- session of the eastern coast from Carthagena to the Pyrenees ; but in 211 he perished, having been pre- ceded by his brother Publius, who underwent the same fate, together with his army. In the brilliant and moving pages of Plutarch, their successor, Publius Cor- nelius Scipio (210), is seen landing in Spain with eleven thousand men, capturing Carthagena, with im- mense boot}^ gaining all hearts by his politic magna- nimity, conquering Cadiz, founding Italica near Seville, and dividing the country into two great provinces, Hither and Further Spain. Cato was sent thither as consul in 195, and that system of minute and merciless plundering was inaugurated by which Spain, the first and richest of all the great Roman colonies, was trans- formed into the market-garden of Rome. The splendid revolt of Viriates, the shepherd-chief- tain of the Lusitanians, who for more than eight years (140-148) defied the whole power of Rome, showed, even more than the innumerable rebellions and out- breaks from decade to decade, how difficult it was to break the free and spirited population to a foreign yoke. Numantia, equally a Celtiberian city, resisted with the energy of despair the encroachments of Rome, and only fell before sixty thousand men and Scipio ^milianus, another of that remarkable family whose names are so gloriously and dismally connected with the subjugation of Spain. Saguntum, Numantia, and XXXll Introduction. Saragossa — three sieges of world-wide celebrity — tes- tify of that impassioned strength and fortitude which, in religion as in war, two thousand years ago as now, have always formed the foundation of the Spanish character. The revolt of Sertorius, a Roman exile dreaming of independent sovereignty in Spain, occurred twenty years after the siege of Numantia and was crushed by Pompey and Metellus after eight years of furious and difficult encounter (71). His portrait hangs in that beautiful gallery which Plutarch ^ has so richly hung with discrowned kings, disappointed ambitions, noble and desperate enterprises, and the pathos of useless death and failure. The most remarkable of all the quarrels espoused by the Peninsula was that of Pompey and Caesar. Caesar triumphed, and has left a record of the contest in his inimitable commentaries.! Under Augustus, Spain was declared a perpetual tributary of the em- pire and for the first time, after two hundred years of sanguinary combat, the dominion of Rome showed itself beneficent and tolerable. A regular administra- tion was introduced ; the country, to facilitate its con- trol and organization, was divided into three provinces (Baetica, Tarraconensis, and Lusitania) ; wise and humane laws were established, protecting the inhab- itants ; magnificent roads, bridges, and aqueducts were built ; and grateful altars smoked in honor of the father and liberator of Spain. Ubi solitudinem faciunt^ pacem appellant^ said Tacitus, * Plut. II. 277-300. t Caes. Bell. Hispaulense. De Bello Civili. Introduction. XXXV painting with a characteristic stroke the policy of most of the Roman conquerors. Tiberius, to whom altars burned and whom medals immortalized, exemplified in Spain the epigram of the great historian. Caligula, Nero, Galba, and Otho, caressed or spurned the penin- sula according to the needs of the moment Under Vespasian the persecution of the Jews broke out, and a colony of the wretched exiles was planted in Spain and settled at Merida : the fountain of that swarming race which afterward filled the history of the country with their intrigues, miseries, and oppressions. Trajan and Hadrian were both Spaniards, born at Italica, and were both loved and honored by the peo- ple for the well-being and tranquillity enjoyed by the land under their vigorous but appreciative administra- tion. Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius (sprung from a noble Spanish family sojourning at Rome) gave Spain the happiness that needed no history ; and under them it reached the culminating point, after which there is a continual decline. A band of Suevi crossed the Pyre- nees in 270 A. D. and ravaged the provinces for some time. The reigns of Diocletian and Constantine were important to Spain, more particularly from a religious point of view. Crushed by imposts, stripped of its communal rights, devoured by the thousand fiscal agents of the new Rome of the Bosphorus, its social system dissolved, its magistrates became almost univer- sally corrupt, and it took refuge, as a last resource, in the arms of the clergy. Christianity seems to have penetrated into Spain about the time of Nero. The Spaniards attribute its introduction to Saint James the greater (Santiago). n XXXVl Introduction. 1 Originally persecuted by the polytheists, the new relig- ion increased step by step until it took its seat on the imperial throne in the person of Constantine. The council of Illiberis in Spain, held about 306, is claimed to be the earliest great western church council on record, and here were fixed, after the fashion of an austere orthodoxy, the rites, ceremonies, and dogmas of the Spanish church, nearly a quarter of a century before the council of Nice (325). Constantine had divided Spain into seven provinces (Lusitania, Baetica, Galicia, Carthaginiensis, Tarraconensis, the Balearic Isles, and Tingitania on the African coast), and with these the ecclesiastical provinces corresponded. The bishops dwelling in the capitals of these provinces — Merida, Seville, Bracara, Carthagena, Saragossa, Palma, and Tangier — took the name of metropolitans. ^ Of these the metropolitan of Toledo, — substituted for Carthagena, — owing to the fact that the celebrated parliament-councils were held there, gradually assumed the pre-eminence, and at length acquired the primacy of Spain. The heresies of Arianism and Priscillian- ism — the former introduced by the Gothic conquest, the latter by an eloquent and voluptuous Spanish priest — agitated the country until Priscillian was put to death (384) and the Goths embraced Catholicism under Recared. Constantine initiated a uniform administration for his whole vast empire. Spain and Gaul formed one of the four dinsions into which the immense agglomera- tion fell. The twenty-five military colonies, formed of citizens and soldiers who enjoyed on foreign soil all the rights of the mother country, kept Spain in sub- n <-i ji ijr XXXVl Introduction, Originally persecuted by the polytheists, the new relig- ion increased step by step until it took its seat on the imperial throne in the person of Constantine. The council of Illiberis in Spain, held about 306, is claimed to be the earliest great western church council on record, and here were fixed, after the fashion of an austere orthodoxy, the rites, ceremonies, and dogmas of the Spanish church, nearly a quarter of a century before the council of Nice (325). Constantine had divided Spain into seven provinces (Lusitania, Baetica, Galicia, Carthaginiensis, Tarraconensis, the Balearic Isles, and Tingitania on the African coast), and with these the ecclesiastical provinces corresponded. The bishops dwelling in the capitals of these provinces — Merida, Seville, Bracara, Carthagena, Saragossa, Palma, and Tangier — took the name of metropolitans. Of these the metropolitan of Toledo, — substituted for Carthagena, — owing to the fact that the celebrated parliament-councils were held there, gradually assumed the pre-eminence, and at length acquired the primacy of Spain. The heresies of Arianism and Priscillian- ism — the former introduced by the Gothic conquest, the latter by an eloquent and voluptuous Spanish priest — agitated the country until Priscillian was put to death (384) and the Goths embraced Catholicism under Recared. Constantine initiated a uniform administration for his whole vast empire. Spain and Gaul formed one of the four divisions into which the immense agglomera- tion fell. The twenty-five military colonies, formed of citizens and soldiers who enjoyed on foreign soil all the rights of the mother country, kept Spain in sub- \^ a ■ n k Introduction. XXXIX jection during the imperial period ; forty-nine municipia, with privilege of self-government, came next in order among the graduated cities \ then the cities of the Latin law, peopled by families from Latium, who, without the right of Roman citizenship, could acquire this right after they had held certain magistracies ; then the six free cities {immunes\ having their own laws and magistrates, and exempt from the usual im- perial burdens; and, last, the allied cities, and the tributary cities (stipendiarice), which were heavily bur- dened with the task of feeding Rome and furnish- ing supplies for carrying on the government. A throng of petty communal republics however, soon arose, — always a characteristic feature of Spanish administra- tive life, — and, by paying the regular imposts, were left free to govern themselves. Under Antoninus all the subjects of the empire were proclaimed Roman citizens. Elegant vestiges of antiquity, chiefly utilitarian, still show the blossoming of art in Spain under the empire. The ruins of the palace of Augustus at Tarragona; the arch of Bara raised by Trajan ; the splendid bridge of Alcantara, believed by the Arabs to have been raised by the genies ; the less celebrated bridges of Evora, Calatrava, and Salamanca ; the aqueducts of Seville, Tarragona, and Evora, and the stupendous aqueduct-bridge one hundred feet high at Segovia ; the wonderfully preserved theatre of Saguntum ; the famous mosaic of Italica ; and the baths, porticoes, and ruins of many sorts, attest the grandeur of the Roman civilization. The country was furrowed by unequalled roads, some of which still exist. Spain, even to-day, is xl Lit ro duct 1071. full of reminiscences of the grandiose scenic displays of ancient times, combats of gladiators, chariot-races, gymnasiums, amphitheatres, bull-fights ; and we are told of Diodes, the Lusitanian charioteer, who was victori- ous two thousand five hundred and twenty-six times in the races. A noble literary efflorescence revived in Spain the waninir lustre of Roman intellectual life. Cicero's fastidious ear misfht revolt at the thick accent of the Cordovan Latin, but posterity can but do honor to the illustrious works of Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Quintilian, Pomponius Mela, Silius Italicus, Florus, and Columella. Many of these may, as a critic suggests, contain the germs of that afTectation which is so perfectly revealed in the modern term concetti — a quaint, prankish, epi- grammatic, whimsically brilliant elaboration of thought and imager}' into dainty pictures, like a carving on an antique gem, unknown to the simple and frank elegance of the writers of the Golden Age ; but in this there is nothing to notice except the inevitable transition from ancient to modern life, nothing to regret saye that our libraries are too scantily supplied with the musical cadences, the lascivce pagince^ of the Foetce mifiores. SPAIN. CHAPTER r. SPAIN UNDER THE VISIGOTHS (West Goths). THE history of the Visigoths, before their separa- tion from the Ostrogoths, is involved in obscurity. Divided into a multitude of groups, each ruled by its own petty chief we find them about a. d. 350, acknowledg- ing the overlordship of the East-Gothic king Ermanaric, of^'the house of the Amali, though a hundred years be- fore they had become virtually independent of the Ostrogothic king. Athanaric (a. d. 366-381) is the first well authen- ticated ruler of most of these multitudinous groups ; and as he succeeded his father Rothestes in the same position, we get a glimpse of a state of things closely approximating an hereditary rulership. We find hnn fighting vigorously against Frithigern, another great chieftain ; and a few years later the attack of the Huns takes place — a horde of Mongol barbarians, who. sweeping down from their Asiatic habitations, gave the finishing blow to the tottering Roman Empire, by forc- ing over its frontiers that source of all its miseries — the scarcely more civilized Germans. For three hun- dred years these fierce, blond-haired, ruddy-cheeked 17 18 - Spain under the Visigoths. : savages had lingered on the outskirts of the empire, along the lower Danube, menacing it with destruction ; and now fleeing in terror before the Huns, they crossed the Danube and sought the protection of the huge or- ganization over which the Emperor Valens ruled. It is a picturesque glimpse that we first get of the Huns, swimming their horses by moonlight over the Dniester, outwitting Athanaric, and sending a tremor through the whole reverberating empire. The Visigoths saw their only salvation from Rome : accordingly, in 376 more than two hundred thousand fighters crossed the Danube, and being assigned to Thrace, as a habitation, were constituted by Valens a bulwark against the for- midable Huns. The Romans, who hated and dreaded the countless starvelings who had now taken up their abode within the empire, exercised their rapacious tendencies by wringing from them all they possessed, even their wives, children, and slaves. Their situation soon became in- tolerable, and bloody outbursts followed, in which Frithigern, taking the lead, and assisted by Goths, Huns, Alans — fugitives, mountaineers, revolutionists of ever}- color — succeeded in annihilating Valens and the Roman army, at the great battle of Adrianople in 378 — " a second Cannae," looked upon as a punishment for the Arianism of the emperor. Athanaric mysteriously withdrew, as it appears, and left behind the commanding figure of Frithigern to ar- range with Theodosius the Great a basis upon which these antagonistic nationalities could live together. His death in 379-80 left the Visigoths again under the control of Athanaric, who concluded with Theodosius L Alaric the Balth, 21 peace and alliance — the Goths were now called foedcrati — was treated by the emperor with extraordi- nary honors, and at his death, we are naively in- formed, was distinguished by a royal funeral and a mortuary column. The former hostile attitude of Athanaric and his Visigoths had suddenly given way before a conscious- ness of the superior culture and civilization of the Romans; instead of combating, they now sought Roman supremacy, and in return for peace and protec- tion began to acknowledge the obligation to bear arms in defence of their protectors. " The emperor was God upon earth," said Athanaric, ''' and he who resisted him would have his blood on his own head." Remaming for a time leaderless, a vast and loosely- organized confederation governed by counts, dukes, and chieftains, the Goths suddenly crystalized around the heroic person of Alaric the Balth, who summed up in himself all that the Goths held dearest, — unbounded freedom, courage, — that is the meaning of Balth, — and splendid military gifts. Born about 370-75, of noble Visigothic blood, his name soon became enclustered by legends and enveloped in a maze of fiction. The death of Theodosius, " the friend of the Gothic nation," left his successor in a peculiarly difficult posi- tion. The " Scythians " — the ** sheepskin-wearing sav- ages," as the Goths were called, — regarded with hate, fear, and contempt by their allies, treated with violence and injustice at every point, egged to desperation by political and race antipathies — lay like a huge thun- der-cloud along the Thracian settlements, waiting the moment and the man under whose influence they should 22 Spain under the Visigoths. Alaric sacks Rome, 23 I redress their long-smouldering wrongs and recover their independence. Both were found in Alaric soon after the death of Theodosius. " Peace with walls," cried he, as, avoiding fortified places, his clouds of rugged Teutons swept down through the flat lands of the neighboring provinces, overran Macedonia, Thessaly, Arcadia, Illyria, to the heart of Greece and Peloponnesus. Escaping from Stilicho, the general of Honorius, Emperor of the West, probably by the treachery of his opponent, Alaric hurried to Byzantium, armed his people out of the im- perial magazines, watched, manipulated, menaced both empires, and at length, allured by the opulence of the Western Empire, broke into Italy in the year 400. There is a striking legend that the king was driven in- cessantly and against his will, by demoniac force, against Rome. " Rumpe omnes, Alarice, moras^'^ whispered the tempter in the verses of Claudian ; and we are told that Rome trembled and strengthened her ancient walls. Receiving a check from Stilicho at Pol- lentia, in 402, he escaped again into Illyria. Roman exultation over the corpses that covered the field of PoUentia was of short duration, for Alaric in 408, again penetrated into Italy, advanced to the very gates of Rome, and at first demanding all the gold and silver in the town, together with the liberation of all slaves of " barbarian " blood, went off to Tuscany content, with five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand silken and three thousand purple garments, and three thousand pounds of spices. The wretched Honorius, the " Christipotens Juvenis " of Pru- dentius, lay walled up in Ravenna, helpless and humili- ated. Restlessly seeking a settlement south of the Alps, somewhere in the beautiful plains of Italy, and as con- tinually thwarted by Honorius, the warlike Balth, scorning the insults of the Romans, — " learn the fear of Rome, idiotic world of barbarians ! " — again marched to Rome and forced the senate, by threats of storming or starvation, to depose Honorius and elevate Attalus to the imperial throne. It is probable that Alaric did not have himself proclaimed emperor because of the gulf existing between the two nationalities, their fundamen- tal differences of conception and polity, and from the fact that as king of the Germans he had the power to command a free people, which, as emperor of the Ro- mans, he would have lost. A genuine German king needed no confirmation of his right to rule his people ; he was no "barbarian adventurer, clad in Roman purple," ascending from dignity to dignity till he had attained the highest. Alaric, therefore, was guilty of no act of renunciation in avoiding the throne. He fol- lowed an ancient German custom, in preferring lawful rule over his own people to dangerous usurpation of the rights of others. Finding Ravenna not to be taken, Alaric sacked Rome, though not so frightfully as the rhetoricians of his and later days are fond of representing to us. " Cum Romanis gessi belliim, ?ton emit apostolis Dei,'' is the le- gend that characterizes Alaric's conduct during the great event. Passing south into Campania, on his way to Africa, — the granary of Rome and Italy, — his ships were scattered by a storm in the strait of Messina.- According to the legend of Olympiodorus, a statue pre- vented the barbarian from crossing to Sicily, "the 25-6 Illus ill «l 24 Spain under the Visigoths. If I ti ancient bridge between Italy and Africa ; " and we have stories of flying Romans pursued from island to island by Goths on swimming horses. In the prime of life Alaric died, — the only invader since Hannibal who had penetrated so far south, — and was buried after ancient Germanic custom — witness the singularly beautiful "Passing of Scyld " in the great Anglo-Saxon poem * — in the waves. He was succeeded by his wife's brother, Athaulf (410-415), who, passing with his followers from Italy to Gaul, over- ran a part of that country in the south, married Pla- cidia, the captive sister of Honorius, held by him as a hostage, and attempted a reconciliation with the em- peror of the west. Famine forced him to seek relief by passing the Pyrenees into Spain, where he occupied Barcelona. The pathetic hungering for a home, which accompanies all these ceaseless migrations of the early Germans, seemed now on the point of being gratified. But the death of Athaulf and the murder of his successor, the usurper Sigric, a week after (41 5), for a moment thwarted this now rooted determination. Wallia (415-419), who was related to neither of the preceding kings, was elected to succeed Sigric, and after attempting to rid Spain, in the interests of the emperor, of the barbarian vermin with which it swarmed, — Suevi, Alani, and Vandals, — passed over into the Rofnan province of Aquitania Secunda (418), on the other side of the Pyrenees, and received by treaty with Rome the magnificent river country of the Ga- ronne, from Toulouse to the ocean. Populous cities abounded in this voluptuous region, — Bordeaux, Agen, Angouleme, Poitiers, and Toulouse, — and at last there *Heyne, Beovulf, i. 2(>-52. ' INTERiOR OF TOLEDO CATHEDRAL. 24 Spain under the Visigoths. \ ancient bridge between Italy and Africa ; " and we have stories of flying Romans pursued from island to island by Goths on swimming horses. In the prime of life Alaric died, — the only invader since Hannibal who had penetrated so far south,— and was buried after ancient Germanic custom — witness the singularly beautiful "Passing of Scyld " in the great Anglo-Saxon poem * — in the waves. He was succeeded by his wife's brother, Athaulf (410-415), who, passing with his followers from Italy to Gaul, over- ran a part of that country in the south, married Pla- cidia, the captive sister of Honorius, held by him as a hostage, and attempted a reconciliation with the em- peror of the west. Famine forced him to seek relief by passing the Pyrenees into Spain, where he occupied Barcelona. The pathetic hungering for a home, which accompanies all these ceaseless migrations of the early Germans, seemed now on the point of being gratified. But the death of Athaulf and the murder of his successor, the usurper Sigric, a week after (415), for a moment thwarted this now rooted determination. Wallia (415-419), who w^as related to neither of the preceding kings, was elected to succeed Sigric, and after attempting to rid Spain, in the interests of the emperor, of the barbarian vermin with which it swarmed, — Suevi, Alani, and Vandals, •— passed over into the Rofnan province of Aquitania Secunda (418), on the other side of the Pyrenees, and received by treaty with Rome the magnificent river country of the Ga- ronne, from Toulouse to the ocean. Populous cities abounded in this voluptuous region, — Bordeaux, Agen, Angouleme, Poitiers, and Toulouse, — and at last there * Heyne, Beoviilf, i. 2t)-.52. INTERIOR OF TOLEDO CATHEDRAL. Ill i ■ Attila the Hun, 27 seemed a resting-place found for this wandering race. The "luxurious land of the golden Garonne," the "pearl of Gaul," as it was called, — an inimitable domain, which was a tangled wilderness of wine, and burnished harvest-fields, and orchards, where glad songs were chanted under the myrtles and plane trees, spark- ling fountains bedewed the gardens, and gliding rivers multiplied the fertility of the soil infinitely, — became the possession of the Visigoths for nearly a century ; and here was founded that kingdom of Toulouse (419- 507), which formed the stepping-stone between Prank- ish Gaul and the great Visigothic monarchy in the Iberian peninsula. Wallia died in the first year after the return from Spain (419), and was followed by Theoderic I. (419- 451), who was elected by popular choice, as was usual with the Germanic nations, and had no family relation- ship with his predecessor. It was during this reign that the movement of Attila, king of the Huns, against the western empire, took place, and that the efforts of " the scourge of God " to separate Romans and Visigoths, or play these races skilfully against each other for his own purposes, were brought to overwhelming defeat at Chiions (451), by Aetius, the Roman general, and the aged Theoderic. The latter died, fighting gloriously on the field of battle. Thorismund, his eldest (?) son, was raised by popular acclaim on the spot to succeed his father ; but he was shortly afterward murdered by his brothers, Theoderic and Fridric (453). Theoderic II. reigned from 453 to 466, when he " paid as he deserved," in the simple 28 Spain under the Visigoths. Clovis the Frank. 29 verdict of the historian. He fell a victim to the ambi- tion of his brilliant and powerful brother Euric, whose eighteen years' reign greatly extended the Gothic power in^Gaul and Spain, who cast off the supremacy of Rome, and lifted the people from a feeble to a com- manding position by his bold, shrewd, and inflexible policy. An admirable statesman as well as an intrepid conqueror, he knew how to draw profit from pre-exist- ing relations with Rome, from the cultivated provincial Roman nobility, from Celts and Suevi. He ravaged the plains of the south of France so terribly that the stags came to wander in herds through the streets of Vienne, while the Roman aristocracy of the country re- solved, in case of extremity, to emigrate or to enter the ministry, — " to leave their homes or their hair," as Apollinaris Sidonius quaintly expressed it. Euric's efforts were crowned with success, and soon the Goths held the whole domain bounded by the two seas, the Rhone, and the Garonne. In 461 there was no longer any Roman army in Spain to oppose the complete disintegration of that vast Roman province ; gradually all the larger towns had been taken from the Suevi and the Roman provincials, until soon the Goths occupied the entire peninsula with the exception of a narrow strip in the extreme northwest, where the Suevi maintained themselves among the inaccessible sierras of Galicia. Euric became so powerful that it is said his palace swanned with ambassadors from the Saxons, Franks, Heruli, Burgundians, Romans, and Persians, seeking his alliance. He was the mightiest prince of the Occi- dent, and his name " struck terror into the hearts of the people beyond the sea." The western empire was at its last gasp, and the Ostrogoths and Franks had not yet risen to importance upon its ruins. An enthusi- astic Arian, like most of his race, the " word Catholic distorted his face and heart like vinegar," says a Roman rhetorician of Euric ; hence the obstinate and dangerous opposition of the Catholic bishops which threatened his life and ended in the destruction of his great work of conquest, consolidation, and reform. He died in his bed in 485, happily before the treason of the Catholic clergy, and the sympathy of the Catho- lic laity, had lost nearly the whole of Gothic Gaul to the Franks, under his son and ^ successor, Alaric H. ("485-507). The Franks, destined of all the German tribes to the noblest future, were now governed by the youthful Clovis, an impersonation, as he has been truly called, of all the national Frankish qualities. . He possessed great rapidity of insight, profound knowledge of his enemy's weak points, swiftness in action, and a nerve that quailed before no enormity. A pagan fatalist, he was almost uninterruptedly lucky, heading a numerous and skilfully-trained people, in a country singularly well situated for the foundation of a great empire : yet a Catholic, gathering about him an unexampled force of natural and national, political and ecclesiastical advan- tages, neither the effeminate civilization of the south, no^'r tiie heathen and Arians in the east and west, could avail against his vigor. Besides this, all Gaul longed to get rid of the Goths. Clovis proclaimed a religious war against the heretics who dared to believe in one Uncreate Spirit and not in three, and with a rare mix- \ III 30 Spain under the Visigoths. Regicides, 31 ii-» ture of fanaticism and shrewdness, superstition and self-trust, deceit and conviction, managed to identify the victory of his nation with the cause of religion in a manner psychologically most interesting. He crushed and slew Alaric, after having sent to the grave of Saint Martin of Tours, to obtain some hint of the issue of the war. His messengers were told to give heed to the psalms that should be sung in their visit to the church, and lo ! they turned out to be Psalms xvii. 39-40, and xviii. 40-41 : " Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies ; that I might destroy them that hate me. )> Armed with this evidence of the smile of Providence, Clovis marched to victory, enveloped in a cloud of miraculous accompaniments ; a hind, dispatched by one of the saints, showed him the ford over the swollen Vienne ; a pillar of fire flashed welcome from the pin- nacle of the Cathedral of Poitiers, as he moved on- ward. Thus the fate of the Visigothic empire in Gaul was decided by a single battle. Internal dissension, the lack of an hereditary succession to the throne, by which a great empire could have been concentrated and supplied with means against a day of trial, the frantic hostility of the Catholic population to their heterodox tyrants, and a loose and rotten organization of the en- tire military and political despotism, did the rest. The bastard Gesalic, son of Alaric, disputed the succession with his half-brother, Amalaric, while the adherents of the latter, accompanied by the five-year-old king him- self, and, according to the legend, by the jewels of Solomon from the temple of Jerusalem, fled pell-mell over the Pyrenees, and found a refuge in the fortified city of Carcasonne. The Prankish successes, however, were soon stemmed by the victorious arms of Theoderic the Great — the greatest of all the Gothic kings — who, warmly espous- ing the cause of his grandson, Amalaric, rapidly over- ran the south of France, and snatched it from the Franks. He soon, however, abandoned these con- quests to his enemy, whose death in 511 relieved the Goths of a dreaded antagonist. Theoderic united * the East and West Goths, remaining as long as he lived the guardian of the Visigothic kingdom. His death in 526 left Amalaric sovereign of the now fully independ- ent kingdom of the Visigoths, though he ceded to the Ostrogoths nearly all of the Gallic possessions of his race, and constituted the Rhone the boundary line be- . tween the kindred, but severed nationalities. Amalaric's death left the throne open to the Ostro- gothic usurper, Theudis (531-548), who resided in the strong frontier fortress of Barcelona, in order to be near the Franks, who ceaselessly strove for possession of the whole of France as well as for the expulsion of the heretics over the Pyrenees. Murdered at Seville, after vain attempts to drive out the Byzantine garrison of Justinian from Africa, he was succeeded by his general, Theudigisel who, reign- ing ingloriously for seventeen months (548-549)' ^^^^ stabbed to death at a nocturnal banquet in Seville when the lights were suddenly extinguished. The Goths were a nation of regicides, and it was well said of them, that they had the " abominable habit * E. A. Freeman, Goths, Encyc. Brit., uinth edition. r I ¥1 32 Spain under the Visigoths, of assassinating any king they did not like," and install- ing another in his place. The historian Marina wrote, that of the thirty-two Gothic kings, eight were usurpers, four were deprived of the crown, and eight were assas- sinated, among whom two were fratricides ; in all, twenty crimes out of thirty-two accessions. The lack of a vigorous hereditary ruler led to misdeeds, despotic violence and caprice, and perpetual revolution. In the reign of Agila (549-554), Theudigisel's suc- cessor Athanagild, his opponent, committed the memo- rable misstep of inviting Justinian to help him against the king. Byzantine garrisons, therefore, soon mastered and held for nearly seventy years, most of the Mediter- ranean seaports and fortresses, from Lucruna to the " Holy Cape," in the Atlantic Ocean, and were wel- comed with delight by the Catholic and Anti-Gothic party. Agila expiated by his blood the feebleness of an unlucky and ignominious reign, and Athanagild, a Gothic noble of influence, was recognized (554-567) in his stead. The position of Athanagild was the more perilous, as, besides the presence of the Greek " patricians," who galled his flanks and girdled his realm to the east and south, the Suevi now adopted the Catholic confes- sion and united with Greeks and Menvings to make common cause against the Visigothic interlopers. But he died before his apprehensions from these sources were realized. After an interregnum of five months, Duke Leova I. was elevated to the vacant dignity by the Gallic prov- ince, and, associating his younger brother Leovigild with him in the government, averted the outbreak of a A Real Hero. 33 '.^ A f^ lincrer uDon a real hero — a ruggea, un Trreeks Franks, Catholics, and Romans, and, wi h- of Greeks, i^ranK ,.r restored the prestige out abjunng '- J^^^^^^^;;":, Used the turbulent °'Z ^' Setwa Toslwho had got the habit of nobles. He slew a ^,^^^„i,ier, Gregory; he ™"f "f tre su^ by wholesale confiscation and in- ' H taxa?on and he was the first of the Gothic r^ril^dre s"ed Z royal purple and sat on a thron. Under him Toledo became the permanent residence o Under him, i o ^^^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^ „j t^ emanX from Euric and Alaric, ajKi he 'Xted to introduce the heredita^ P^^cipje b^ causing the two sons of his first marriage, n ^ and Recared, to be recognized as his associates in the ^Thrcrnveision of Hermenigild to Catliolicism by means of his Frankish wife, Ingunthis, who was also Ss step niece, lighted the flames of civil war anew in t Som Lovigild was, originally, by no means In enemy to Catholicism ; but the course of his son. /thTeternal intrigues of his Catholic subjects, drove Zl taos totale'ss. Hermenigild conspired against hirflher, was beaten in battle and captured, and II S4 Spain under the Visigoths, though assured by his father of his personal safety was put to death in 585 — less, it would seem, for the coarse criminality of his conduct than as an heroic remedy for healing the dissensions of the kingdom and delivering it over intact into the hands of the Arian Recared. For, from a conflict of confessions, it had become a conflict of races. Goths and Romans con- tended desperately for preponderance, and it was only through the infinite tact and patience of Leovigild, aided by a salutary recognition on the part of the nation of his inexorable force, that the complex organ- ization held together at all. The downfall of the Suevian kingdom (583-584) in the northwest, — a stormy neighbor, always awake to every disadvantage and disaster that befell the Goths, — and its incorporation into the kingdom, left Leovigild virtually master of the peninsula. The last king of the Suevi vanished in a cloister. Of the Suevi prior to their migration with the Van- dals and Allemans or Alans to Spain, in 409, we know absolutely nothing. For many years the peninsula lay helpless before their depredations, and their power was enabled to maintain itself for nearly two centuries, owing to the impregnable cliffs and gorges amid which it lived and throve. Wretched Hispania, between these two Germanic peoples — Goths and Suevi — was in- deed "ground to pieces as between two millstones." " The dim twilight of church legends " hangs around the miracle-accompanied conversion of the Suevi to Catholicism, in 560. The final amalgamation of Suevi and Goths under Leovigild in 585, obliterated forever all lines of distinction between the rival establishments, The Last of the Goths. 35 though it has been suggested that the noticeable differ- ences between Portuguese and Spaniard may have arisen from the fact that ancient Lusitania was the abode of the Suevi, while the Goths spread themselves over the rest of the kingdom. As late as Philip IL's day, Suevosos, los sevosos, is said to have been a nick- name given by the Castilians to the Portuguese. At the instance of Philip IL, the great saint-monger, who even asked that the Cid might be niched among the beatified saints, Hermenigild was enrolled among the noble army of martyrs. Leovigild died at Toledo in 586, in the midst of negotiations for peace with the Merwings — " the glor>' of his heroism darkened," says the pious Isidore, " by the error of his misbelief." He was the last of the antique type of Arian Goths, and he battled in the old Gothic way against the old immemorial perils. Catholicism ; a sanguinary nobility *' chain-mailed in complicated intrigue ; " and continual perils from within, were met by him with wonderful sagacity, vanquished, temporarily at least, and set at rest, for the time being. In the next reign, Catholicism is in the ascendant, the Arians are the persecuted, and a homogeneous Spain, henceforth to be ruled by the ecclesiastical parliaments of Toledo, and going slowly to pieces under that rule, becomes ripe and rotten, through every manner of moral corruption, for the Berber conquest. And out of this is to rise the evolution of that beautiful Castilian chivalry, whose achievements, for seven hundred years, rang in the ears of the civilized world, and evoked a matchless min- strelsy precious to the hearts of all lovers of poetry. \\i I I : 36 Spain under the Visigoths. The one hundred and fifteen years from the conver- sion of the Goths to Catholicism, to their utter down- fall before the Arabs, form a period crowded with events. Recared I. Cs86-6oi), Leovigild's son and successor, whether yielding to the superior organization of the church of Rome, its intellectual superiority and culture, its unexampled consistency, amid the shifting phases and time-serving spirit of Arianism ; or whether, — despite his witnessing, and silently approving, the martyrdom of his sainted brother, Hermenigild,— a sin- cere convert to the eloquence and astuteness of the Catholic prelates,— Recared, at length gave way to a faith which was now triumphant in Italy, Gaul, and the Orient, and declared himself, in 586, " moved by heavenly and earthly motives," to adopt Catholicism. CHAPTER II. SPAIN UNDER THE VISIGOTHS (Continued). THE " earthly reasons " doubtless preponderated, and circumstances compelled Recared to fly into the arms of the Holy Church, as a protection against his own nobles, and the misery of an eterna wran-le with the rebellious common people. lie wealth, moral influence, education, system of the Catho ic clergy, alone seemed able to save him from Sttr and^ outer enemies, and to assist him to cope with the difficulties of his situation. The flatte^ of these hallucinations -the salvation of himself and hi. people within the pale of an inexorable machine - proved the ruin of the Visigothic monarchy. Hence- forth it lost its independence, became a chattel of the councils of Toledo, and the horrified barbarians had to witness the spectacle of a king, crawling on his knees, and blubbering penitentially before the despotic metro- politan of the capital. Multitudes, both of the common people and the Gothic grandees, followed the royal example, though a total conversion took place only in the gradual progress of time. Fierce persecution of the Arians immediately ensued ; they were to be excluded from all civil and military employments, to be exterminated root and 37 36 Spain under the Visigoths. The one hundred and fifteen years from the conver- sion of the Goths to Catholicism, to their utter down- fall before the Arabs, form a period crowded with events. Recared I. (586-601), Leovigild's son and successor, whether yielding to the superior organization of the church of Rome, its intellectual superiority and culture, its unexampled consistency, amid the shifting phases and time-serving spirit of Arianism ; or whether, — despite his witnessing, and silently approving, the martyrdom of his sainted brother, Hermenigild, — a sin- cere convert to the eloquence and astuteness of the Catholic prelates,— Recared, at length gave way to a faith which was now triumphant in Italy, Gaul, and the Orient, and declared himself, in 586, " moved by hea\enly and earthly motives," to adopt Catholicism. \ CHAPTER II. SPAIN UNDER THE VISIGOTHS (Continxted). T'HE " earthly reasons " doubtless preponderated, and circumstances compelled Recared to fly into the arms of the Holy Church, as a protect.or> against his own nobles, and the misery of an eterna wran.^le with the rebellious common people. The vealtl moral influence, education, system of the Cat I'ic clergy, alone seemed able to save ..m fro.n his inner and outer enemies, and to -- "" ^ ^"P;^ with the difficulties of his situation. The flatte^^ of h ehallucinations-the salvation of himself and his people within the pale of an inexorable machine - pro 'ed the ruin of the Visigothic '-°"=^"-*y- .^^^^ forth it lost its independence, became a chattel of the councils of Toledo, and the horrified barbarians had to witness the spectacle of a king, crawling on his knees, and blubbering penitentially before the despotic metro- politan of the capital. Multitudes, both of the common people and the Gothic grandees, followed the royal example, though a total conversion took place only in the gradual progress of time. Fierce persecution of the Arians immediately ensued ; they were to be excluded from a 1 civil and military emplovments, to be exterminated root and 37 11 li 38 Spain under the Visigoths. branch, and their books — if necessary, themselves — to be burned. After the overthrow of his Arian step-mother, Godis- wintha (who had formed a league with the Franks for the destruction of her second step-son), and the repulse of the Frankish attack in Septimania, with loss of sixty thousand Franks to three hundred Goths (?), Recared lived in tolerable peace with his people, though fre- quently harassed by Arian, Basque, and Byzantine in- roads. He modified the Gothic state usages extensively, assumed at his solemn coronation the title " Flavins^''' reorganized the internal policy of the kingdom, and by his strict alliance of church with state, against the lay nobility, and the reconciliation between Goths and Romans, which he accomplished, did much to amelio- rate and tranquillize the condition of his people. The Gothic was not a tranquil civilization \ it was tempest- uous, lawless, insubordinate — the prey of passionate religious beliefs, the plaything of any vivid-minded and ambitious leader. Hence the necessity of some univer- sally recognized principle of authority, — a principle happily, as Recared thought, discovered in the Church of Rome. It followed logically, from Recared's point of view, that the third council of Toledo, composed of sixty- two bishops, led by the polished Leander of Seville and Mausona of Merida (589), should become actually an imperial parliament as well as a ghostly convention. And here, for the first time, was acknowledged the supremacy of the church not only over the spiritual and secular aristocracy, but over the crown itself. Goths and Romans blende I harmoniously together after Heeared. 39 the reli-ious breach between them had been filled up. A Romtnization of the Goths, rather than a German- ization of the Romans, followed from the numerical superiority of the latter, as a matter of course Though Roman measures and weights had been used m Spain, the Roman reckoning of time had not, but was now first adopted by the Goths. Recared's code of laws for his people became immensely modified by the Ro- man law ; and the Roman-Byzantine titles, mode of administration, attributes, functions, even court eti- quette, penetrated more and more into Spain. We find the king good-humored, affable, a builder ot churches and monasteries, the ^^ pater patriae " of a le-endary Golden Age. His administration was of sin-ular importance for the whole future of Spain ; and though fundamentally different from^his father, Recared had a gentle and beneficent genius, whose spirit ex- erted no less influence than Leovigild's had done. He died in the odor of sanctity, and was followed by his son, Leova H. (601-603). Leova H. fell a victim to a final rising of the Arians, and being taken prisoner, it is affirmed that his right hand was struck off and he himself slain by Count Witteric, an Arian Goth (603-610). The attempted renaissance of Arianism under this vigorous upstart failed, and he, like Theudigisel, was killed at a banquet Gunthimar (Gundemar), his successor, a stinulacrum of a king, who has scarcely cast a shadow across the page of history, reigned till 612, and is chiefly memor- able for the huge cluster of unverified traditions that have gathered about his supposed church policy. ■ 1 40 Spain under the Vhigoths, The reign of Sisibut, his follower, was distinguished for the final cession by the Byzantines, of all their pos- sessions on the Mediterranean, the sole exception being a small corner of the peninsula on the Atlantic. A whole chain of fortresses and cities thus came into the possession of the Goths (615-616), but there is no proof that this king reconquered in Africa the towns (Tangier and Ceuta) which had been lost under Theu- dis and are found in possession of Roderic when the Berbers crossed into Spain. Great mildness, intelligence, and devotion to science and art are attributed to Sisibut ; he wTote philo- sophical works, built the famous church of St. Leo- cadia at Toledo, distinguished himself by the refine- ment and subtlety of his rhetoric, wrote a chronicle of the Goths, now lost, and was — "guilty of verses," hard to pardon even in a king ! He was a burning fanatic, and under him began that dismal chain of per- secutions of the Jews which links the name of Sisibut, tlirough nearly nine centuries, to that of Ferdinand and Isabella. Political and national motives were of course at the bottom of these persecutions. Undeniably, the wealth won by the Jews by usury roused the envy and religious passions of their con- temporaries. They had been extraordinarily successful in Spain. Apart from this, the church had an interest in the salvation of their souls and — the appropriation of their money chests. Even before the Gothic con- quest, Spain had become celebrated for the passionate- ness of its spiritual beliefs, and we may well be as- sured that the present hierarchy did not let the holy fires slumber or go out. Swintila, father of the Poor. 41 The first notice of the addiction of the Spanish peo- ple to the national sport of bull-fighting, seems to occur in this reign, in a letter of rebuke addressed by the pious king to the bishop Eusebius. Sisibut died in 620, and was succeeded by his son Recared II. (620-621), who reigned for a year. Sis- ibut's brave general, Swintila (621-631) was chosen to succeed Recared, and won great glory by expelhng the last traces of the Byzantines from the kingdom, after they had nested in the sea-ports, and clung to the precipices of the peninsula for seventy years. Sisibut's admirable spirit of conciliation towards the Byzantme intruders, and the threatened invasion of the Eastern empire by the Persians and Avars, had prepared the way for these important acquisitions. He was called the " father of the poor," from his efforts to ameliorate the condition of the serfs, and to keep down the haughty spirit of the church and nobility. Devotedly as the Gothic people loved the principle of free choice in selecting their kings, and opposed as they were consti- tutionally, to recognizing in any of their clans the right to furnish them with hereditary rulers, they yet permit- ted Swintila to associate with himself in the govern- ment, his son Rikimir, as co-regent and successor. He allowed no councils to assemble during the ten years of his reign, for they might only too eloquently have shown the power of the episcopacy, and have led to re- newed troubles. Swintila's character, hence, was sys- tematically blackened by the clergy ; he was declared godless, avaricious, and bloodthirsty ; wholesale mur- der and confiscation were attributed to him ; and the 42 Spain under the Visiyotlis. affection of the people was undermined and alienated by the insinuations of their agents. Sisinant, a Gothic count, rose against him in Gaul, was crowned king, and purchased the help of Dagobert of Neustria by means of the famous golden basin, weighing five hundred pounds, said to have been ex- torted by Thorismund, the conqueror of Attila, from the Romans, as compensation for certain booty sur- rendered. They poured over the Pyrenees with numer- ous troops, penetrated to Saragossa, and succeeded in stripping Swintila of all his dependants. Sisinant (631) was universally recognized king, and Swintila and his son seem to have gone into a cloister.^ Sisinant became the mere tool of the bishops, the restoration of whose power was now complete. The theo- cratic tinge of the Visigothic monarchy became darker and deeper than ever. Amid floods of tears the king fell on his knees before the fathers at the council of Toledo (633), and supplicated them for their interces- sion with God. The characteristic notice of him is that ** Sisinant reigned three years, held a council of the bishops, was patient, and followed the orthodox Catholic rules." This council asserted, more emphatically than ever, the absolute freedom of choice as to rulers, whilst all rebellion against the rightful king, when elected, was menaced with the ban. The bishops controlled, how- ever, the election of the next king, Kindila (636-640) whose '' many synods, and great strengthening of the empire through the faith," are concisely commemorated in a couple of lines. Thunders of excommunication were threatened against insurrection, magical practices. Ecclesiastical Intrigue, 43 and the setting up of a rival king ; the children of the king were protected by special penalties ; and the per- son^of the king himself was sought to be made mviola- ble. Every successor was bound henceforth (638) to avenge his predecessor in case of murder, and to free him- self from the possible suspicion of guilt, by the thorough- ness of this vengeance. The priest-ridden monarch went so far as to say that none but Catholics should live in his kingdom, and by his triumphant orthodoxy won over the bishops to recognize his son Tulga (640-641) as his successor. All the later annals, indeed, of this process of king-manufacture by church councils, are fumigated with incense and resonant with the chant of the kune eleeison. The kings were bits of crowned wax in the fincrers of their unctuous manipulators. Everywhere they're is the reek of ecclesiastical intrigue. Everywhere the bishop's crook is intertwined with the king's sceptre, and it is difficult to distinguish whether it is a mitre or a . crown that the king wears. The alliance between church and state, however, was not so indissoluble but that the secular grandees — the great Gothic princely families — winced under the heel of the clergy. Though the clergy were singularly clear- sighted as to their ultimate object, — opulent, unscrup- ulous, powerfully intrenched in their church organization, and numerous, — they could not absolutely extinguish the martial spirit of the ancient Visigothic chieftains. This was soon shown in the rise of a distinguished Goth, Kindaswint (641-652), who caused himself to be proclaimed king, and the young king to be tonsured, and thrust into a cloister — at once nursery and hos- pital for immature or superannuated kinglets. u I'll 1! » I i 44 Spain under the Visigoths, In Kindaswint, once more — almost for the last time — flashes up the fire of the old Goths. Nearly eighty when he seized the reins of government, his will of iron aimed at no less than the establishment of a strong and concentrated kingdom, the breaking of the back- bone of rebellion, the extirpation of refractory nobles, and the banishment of turbulent intriguers to France or Africa. The clerg\^ was strongly represented among the "emigrants," who found it convenient^to shun the wrath of this fierce octogenarian. He and his son, Rekiswint, established a system of Germanic law in place of the Roman breviary of Alaric, previously in force ; they reformed thoroughly the courts and their procedure ; compelled contumacious bishops and priests to appear before the secular judges ; made provision for the faithful carr}ing-out of verdicts once rendered ; menaced peasant and paladin with the same criminal code, with the same punishment ; and bettered the ledslation that concerned the lower classes. A zealous Christian, Kindaswint lived on excellent terms with all decent ecclesiastics ; he showed literar)- culture ; associated with scholars and poets ; and full of years, and soon to be venerated by the superstitious monks as a saint, died at the age of ninety, in 652. Rekis- wint, who had governed with him for three years, suc- ceeded to the throne (649-672). Again, as in the case of Recared, and Leovigild, we have the sunshine after the storm — the lamb following the lion. Historj' tells of Rekiswint, that his character was irradiated with gentleness, that he delighted in edi- fying conversation, made important concessions to the church, and blamed the rigor of his father in his con- Rekiswint. 45 troversies with the bishops. He purchased conciha- ton however, at the expense of the future welfare and .dependence of his country. Far from consohdatmg, e dissolved existing institutions ; he -bulged .he aggressive aristocracy, pardoned rebels, and tnstttuted umpires to decide cases between king and people. The Sat on of important taxes weakened the means of t government ; it was said of him, that he robbed the m n'rch to enrich the monarchy. Sole- y -d c^ cumstantially recognizing the unhmtted f«edon> o^ choice of the king resting in the nobles, both church fnd lay, numerous church assemblies and renewed p«- ecution of the Jews sealed his orthodoxy as undoubt ed Saint and Virgin make miraculous apparitions during his reign, and a rain of gold, silver, pearls, and tdous stones emanating from the royal hands bedews Tchurches of his kingdom. Bitter b ame howe e is given to his humility - a trait signally out of place in a system founded, like this, on might. Rekiswint passed away near Salamanca, m 672. Ihe God ic grand'ees, obeying the law that the new king must be chosen at the place where the deceased king Tad died, flocked to Salamanca. Wamba, one of the most prominent of them, was chosen to fill the vacancy. Th usual luxuriance of legend, -J-'f -'^tTe t ant in these later times, twines about Wamba s acces In we are told, for example, how Pope Leo proph- esied Z elevatio;. and how, Cincinnatus-like, he was ca^^ed away from the plough to the palace ; how he de ared it as impossible for him to be king, as for the staff with which he was driving his oxen to sprout in Ws h nd ; and how the staff .^ sprout and, moreover. 46 Spaiyi under the Visigoths. blossom. We are dramatically introduced to him in the annals of a contemporar>' biographer, who tells us how grief for the dead king, not ambition, had brought him to Salamanca, although his noble race, his ripe wisdom, his tried virtue, could not but lift him to the throne : hence, unanimity of decision among the gran- dees, obstinate refusal and tears of surprised modesty on Wamba's part, eventually overcome, by one of the grandees seizing a sword and threatening to kill him as a traitor to his native land, if he persisted in jeop- ardizing its welfare by declining. Then we have a dove-like cloud, and, according to another legend, a dove and a bee, ascending skyward from his head, at his coronation in Toledo, in 672. Insurrections north of the Pyrenees and under the Byzantine Duke Paulus in Galicia and Asturias, troubled the eariy years of his reign. Paulus's aspira- tions to the throne ended in total discomfiture and a dunce-cap; for, being besieged in Nimes, celebrated for its splendid amphitheatre, he was captured with the city: the rebels were dragged in chains — with shaven heads and chins (a brand of ignominy), and clad in cam- el's hair — through the streets, and Paulus himself w^as decked as it afterwards became the fashion to deck the martyrs at an auto defe. The Basque guerriUeros, cling- ing to their eagles' nests among the porphyry cliff s of the Pyrenees, were soon brought to terms, and everything tended to the belief that a brilliant and able adminis- tration had begun. Wamba, it is said, vigorously re- formed the navy, and repelled the first invasion of the Arabs under Acba, the general of the Khalif Yezid, though it is thought that the campaign is legendary. King Wamha, 47 Society and the state equally demanded heroic meas- ure Lalvation from within and from without was to be expected. The slaves were called to arms, only a tenth of he whole number being allowed to stay at home for the cu tivation of the fields. The great free middle class, ^e bulwark of the kingdom, had fearfully dimimsh^ either crushed into the rank of serfs or sunk by debt KiNQ Wamba. into that of slaves ; and the very heart of the monarchy, te m^nspring of defence and national independence, wilne T^ere was no longer any enthusiasm to fol- xZ fhe king's summons to arms, and there arose a lux- low the •^ing _ . effeminacy, superstitious, unous anstocracy, steepcu ;,, ^„„„i:pfi the inactive and unintelligent, which but lU-supplied the place oi the middle class. The utmost acnmony de- 48 Spain under the Visigoths. veloped against Wamba on the side of the church, for his unsparing use of its wealth in the defence of the land, and it was probably to church intrigue that he owed his fall. Among all his paladins none was more honored by Wamba than Erwic, a Goth, son of the Greek Arde- bast and a relation of the king. He handed the king a deadly potion, which, instead of killing him, threw him into a death-like stupor, during which he was seized, tonsured, and thrust into a monk's habit (680). Erwic was immediately proclaimed king, though Wam- ba continued to live tranquilly as a monk in a monaste- ry near Burgos. His resignation is attributed to his consciousness of the power of his adversary, and the superstition that even a " moine malgrd lui," as Mon- talambert calls him, could no longer interest himself in the affairs of this world. Erwic's chief support was the powerful archbishop of To- ledo, Julian, whose arrogance soon became unbearable, A palace revolution, whose principal actors were priests, augured ill for this reign, w^hich, in fact, was eight years of disaster, corruption, and concession. The privileges and powers of clergy and nobles, continually increased to the detriment of the crown, prepared the way slowly but surely for the inevitable downfall of a kingdom neariy 300 years old. Tyranny, indecency, contempt of law, frantic party spirit, eternal rebellion, oppression of the slaves, the conversion of whole provinces into the private possessions of an abandoned upper class ; all this was an emphatic preparation for Taric and his hordes. Erwic's laws against the Jews — who, dismal as their fate had been, had exhibited great culture and showed great skill in theological contro- The Exiled Jews, 49 versy with the Christian doctors, - reveal a cruelty and anatidm worthy of the inquisition. Concessions were onebyonemade'onall sides but th- j^ ^-^ ^^^^^^J wLba's policy of defence for the kmgdom fatally Jeatned^ugLes who had forfeited freedom and Ltntdoned ; in short, a period of universal dism- smitten, and tormented by ^-^^^^^^''7;'^^^^^^^ leavincr the throne, as a compensation for the mfamy ot M: conduct, not to his own children, but to Egica, a "?" ? rd'n 'has been well described as one long than the most tyrannical conduct would have done eZ was Erwic's son-in-law, and though devoted to ; coSiracy to assassinate the king and his family. rr factor of great peril to the state now appears formidable shape : the tortured, ^^^J^^ Their Dosition in Africa was far more tolerable than m Lain as he ordinances fulminated against them by the bpain, ab ui^ e„ffered to fall into dis- Byzantine emperors had been uffered ^^ n<;p • and on the conquest of Africa Dy tne lu Mahomet the Hebrews, as belonging to a stnctly It-Th Ist Jfaith which did not recognize image-wor Ip in any form, were allowed full exercise of their I 50 Spain under the Visigothc, faith, and only had to pay the small capitation tax which was exacted by the Mahometans of all subject tribes of other creeds. The comparison between their condition in Africa and in Spain increased their hatred for the op- pressor ; they conspired with the Spanish Jews, and, probably, with the Arabs, with a view to an invasion of Spain by the Arabs, and the liberation of their country- men from the misery of their situation. Their fury reached the highest pitch when, in 694, the council of Toledo- resolved upon their universal enslavement and distribution among the Christian families of the realm. This trumpet-blast of fanaticism rings in our ears as the last authentic act of the great Gothic state. We know next to nothing of the last seventeen years of its existence and we leave the finn ground of history for a battle-ground of innumerable legends, bright, fantastic, beautiful, and misleading. Before his decease, however, the king contrived to get his son W^itica, Duke of Galicia, acknowledged as his successor. That \^'itica was greatly beloved by his people, greatly detested by the priesthood, that he energetically resisted the encroachments of the bishops, that he was dissolute in his conduct, that he recalled those who had been un- justly banished, and restored to them their offices and property, and that he generously destroyed the fraudu- lent acknowledgments of debt extorted by his father from his subjects, is all that we can extract of certain, from the meagre annals of the time. About him, as about his successor, Roderic, — " Don Rodrigo, the last of the Goths," — play the lights of a thousand legends. Spanish romance has enshrined them both in imperish- Roderic, the last of the aoths. 51 able lines, and it is difficult to separate truth from fic- '"witica seems to have died a natural death (710), and Roderk clings to history by the finest o£ gossamer fhreads That he existed at all, is known to us alone Lnte liL of the names of the Gothic Icings that ex- tend down to him. A single doubtful conr wrth h. name on it, and a legendary- grave .nscnpt.on at Vi eu in Portu.ral, attributed to him, cast a moribund lUumina ZlT:r Ws shadowy form. The zeal of the genealo^ lists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centunes has W herto served to vitalize this kingly exhalation, and ^ake t palpitate before us in flesh and blood ; but their Xrt wa's purely political, and their object was to give greater splendor to the Spanish monarchy than to he French kingdom and the German empire, by tracin ?t tints in a straight line, back to the Emperor Theodo- sis tnd to do so a mistake in a spelling, or a blun- Sg reading, led to the insertion of a suppos^Uo kin- Acausa, thrust in between Wit.ca and Roderic, to make the genealogical ».xus complete^ Roderic's name is a peg upon which <=0""'l^^^ JJ^ in. inventions have been hung. Spanish Chnstians • anil Arabian poets, ballad-writers ^^ --;;^ * :^ ". clers historians to whose heads the wine of these delight fT£ons has but too readily mounted, and verse- w iters in search of a graceful and pathetic theme Illve made of " Don Rodrigo " the incarnation of their .''^.^RfdSrrsroTthat brave Duke Theodifred, .homttic'a blinded," says the legend "leaped "PO" the throne after Witica's death, and excluded the kin„ s 52 Spain under ihe Visigoths, sons from the succession. These princes, and the gov- ernor of Africa, Count JuUan, whom the king had pre- viously driven to deadly revenge, by the seduction of his lovely daughter, Dona Cava, or Florinda, called the Arabs secretly into the land. In the decisive battle, wherein the king appeared in a chariot drawn by eight white mules, the traitors, to whom the flanks of the Christian host had been entrusted, went over to the enemy, and battle and realm were lost forever to the Goths. King Roderic vanished. His golden shoes were found in the reeds bv the river." * History simply says, that the decayed Visigothic commonwealth had long been ripe for destruction when the light-footed Arabs, invincibly fierce and potent, crossed the strait and gave it the finishing blow. A kingdom ulcerated with ever}' imaginable evil as this one was — partisanship, contending nobles, clash of church with state, religious persecution, brigandage on a gigantic scale, extirpation of a free middle class, peopling of mountains and forest with thousands of runaway slaves, ready to join any conqueror — was ready for a catastrophe. Well has it been said that the legend has typically attributed the fatal aberrations of the entire nation, its extravagance and its party hate, to the last kings, Witica and Roderic. Roderic had no successor. In the great battle of Xeres de la frontera, the Berbers commanded by Taric the One-eyed, were victorious, and in a few days, says the historian, watered their horses, in their progress from south-west to north-east, in the Guadalquivir, the Guadiana, and the Tagus, — capturing the great cities, of Cordova, Malaga, Granada (Illiberis), and Toledo, Visigothic Kings. 63 ,he venerable capital of the Pe-sula -^^^^^^^ the whole country except the extreme no^th-wes^ %ut out of th.s extreme corner, and rem h^ un^^^^ ampled amalgamation of ^aces --^C^^^^^^^^^^^ mans, Goths, and ^-^-J^^^^^^ beautiful light splendid feudal empire, illustrated by of Christian chivalry and ^-^^^'-''}' l^"' ""'"^^^^ Z ognition of municipal rights, co-tUutic..al hberty, p^wer of faith, and the power of discovery. Chronological Table of Athanaric, Alarlc I., Athaulf, Sigric, Wallia, Theoderic I., Thorismund, Theoderic II., Euric, Alaric II., ^ Gesalic, ( Am alaric, Theudis, Theudigisel Agila Athanagild, ( Leova I., ( Leovigild, 366(?H8i* 395-410 410-415 4i5-4i5t 415-419 4^9-451 451-453 453-466 466-485 485-507 507-511 507-531 531-548 548-549 549-554 554-567 567-572 567-586 the Visigothic Kings. Recared I., Leova II., Witteric, Gunthimar, Sisibut, Recared II., Swintila, Rikimir, \ Sisinant, 1 Kindila, Tulga, ( Kindaswint, 1 Rekiswint, Wamba, Ervvic, ( Egica, 1 Witica, Roderic, 586-601 601-603 603-610 610-612 612-620 620-621 620-631 ?-63i 631-636 636-640 640-641 641-652 649-672 672-680 680-687 687-701 697-710 7 10-7 1 1 * Frithigern? t September. Aiiai CHAPTER III. THE BERBER CONQUEST AND THE KHALfFATE. ;, ; if I: I WITH the great victory of Xeres de la frontera, in 711, tlie history of Spain changes as by a stroke of enchantment. Hitlierto the polislied tyranny of the Caisars, and the rugged autocracy of the Visi- goths, swarming with classic reminiscences and uncouth names, have employed our attention. Now the fabric of three hundred years — the laborious despotism of the followers of Alaric — vanishes like a dream. The conquest of Spain was due to the Berbers, not to the Arabs. The Berbers, while having many peculi- arities in common with the Arabs, were in other re- spects very different from them. A heterogeneous mass, peopling the shores of the Mediterranean, from Egypt to the Atlantic ocean, they were a fierce, warlike, lib- erty-loving race, deeply stained with fanaticism of an eccentric sort. Nomadic, homeless Bohemians in their habits, accustomed to an immemorial independence which the Roman arms had but faintly infringed, hav- ing the same political organization as the Arabs — a " democracy tempered by the influence of noble families " — they became as terrible adversaries to the Arabs of the West, when the latter attempted to reduce them, as the Arabs of the East had become to the Byzantine empire and Persia. " To conquer Africa, is impossible," wrote n Arabs and Berbers Compared. 57 a governor to the Khalif Abdelmelic ; " scarcely is one Berber tribe conquered, when another takes its place." With unequalled obstinacy and admirable courage, however, the Arabs persisted in their purpose to over- run the Berber country, and after seventy years of murderous conflict, they succeeded, though on condi- tion that the Berbers should be treated not as a van- quished nation, but as equals. The sceptical and accomplished Arabs, too, were to the earnest and gloomy Berbers as the cultivated aristocracy of Rome had been to the uncivilized Visigoths. The Arab princes, passionately devoted to poetry, to women, to wine, to spiritual and sprightly conversation, did not disdain, now and then, to put up the Koran as a target, and speed their sacrilegious arrows through the precious volume. The Berber chieftains, on the other hand, profoundly imbued by non-conformist missionaries with the spirit of Mahometanism, followed their priests with blind veneration, became immersed in grovelUng superstitions, paid to their maml?oune^cheYs a devotion unknown to the railing and disillusioned Arabs, and, as has been well said, accomplished great things — the foundation of the vast empires of the Almoravides and Almohades — when set in motion by a priest. Islamism, originally hateful to the Berber race, had become, a hundred years after the death of its famous apostle, their most precious possession. To theni it was no icy religion, half frozen between deism and infi- delity, preached by unimpassioned missionaries, " telling them what they owed the khalif, but never what the khalif owed them." It was the enthusiastic faith preached by bold and persuasive dissenters from orthodox Ma-^ * 58 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. hometanism who, tracked like wild beasts in the Orient, had escaped their persecutors through a thousand dan- gers found an asylum in the glowing deserts of Africa, and' propagated their doctrines with brilliant success along the line of the conquests of Belisarius. " Mus- sulman Calvinism had at length found its Scotland." The irreligious Arab spirit, viewing all things lightl> from the point of view of pleasurable sensation or cyn- ical indifference, looked either with contempt or horror on these uncompromising sectaries ; now treating them with condescending tolerance, now contemplating them with undisguised disgust. Such were the future con- querors of Spain. The situation of the peninsula was indeed deplorable enough, and the date of the misery lay far back in Roman times. Immense territorial possessions in the hands of a few ; multitudes of ruined burghers, serfs, and slaves ; enormous taxation crushing out the life of the poor, and filling the pockets of the rich ; honorary titles and magistracies innumerable, to which no definite duties were attached ; uncurbed luxury disporting itself, at the expense of the people, in gorgeous villas that overhung beautiful rivers, shrouded in olives and vines, hung with Syrian and Persian tapestries, encumbered by slaves, filled with guests stretched out on purple rugs, who improvised verses, listened to musicians, or looked at dancing women ; a starving plebs covered with rags and swarming with vermin ; throngs of pau- pers kept alive by charitable contributions, and rendered unspeakably ignoble by gloating over gross and barba- rous spectacles ; the petty proprietors in the towns re- duced to profound distress by the exactions of the A Tempest of Barbarians, 69 Roman fiscal system ; bankrupt communities ; forests thronged with fugitives from justice; such was the con- dition of things even under the Caesars. A single Christian in Gaul owned five thousand slaves, another ei-ht thousand ; and these slaves were treated with sudi ri-or, that a case is mentioned in which three hun- dred lashes were given because one of their class had failed to bring his lord his warm water punctually. Brigandage springing from this source, even in the time of Diocletian, had assumed such proportions m the Gauls, that an army commanded by a Caesar had to be sent to crush it. It hardly required a tempest of barbarians to over- throw, as by a breath, a society honeycombed by such evils as these. Spain lay paralyzed before the Suevi, the Alans, the Vandals, and the Visigoths. The ap- proach of the barbarians, instead of being signalized by desperate resistance on the part of the Peninsula, was viewed with a serenity that seemed imperturbable. Nothing could be worse than Roman tyranny ; hence, while the sombre invaders were knocking at the gates of the Spanish cities, we are told that the inhabitants, far from rivaling the memories of Saguntum and Numantia, gave themselves up to drunkenness, gluttony, singmg, dancing— threw themselves into the arms of beautiful slaves, ''or rushed to the amphitheatres, where they might glut their sanguinary appetites on the agonies of gladi- ators The Vandtils happily passed into Africa (429), but the Suevi and the Visigoths planted themselves in the land for three centuries, and made the people look back with regret to the tyranny of Rome, insupportable as that had been. Li «t 1 " i Iki 60 TTie Berber Conquest and the KhaVifate, • During this dark period, the light of learning and piety was kept ablaze by the clergy. In the end, many preferred to be penniless and free under the domniion of the Goths, to being wealthy and pillaged under the dominion of Rome. Kings praying before the battle in hair shirts ; victories, recognized as coming straight from the hand of the Eternal, succeeded to the order and civilization, the scepticism and luxury of the earlier and more enlightened pagan time. The condition of the serfs had been viewed with tender solicitude by the Catholic clergy before their advent to power under Re- cared, and they had been promised emancipation ; but the povertv, scorn, oppression, persecution, did not cease when the clerg)' rose to influence, and their promise was forgotten. The middle class remained as it had been, unameliorated, unaided, bankrupt. The persecutions of the Jews broke out under Sisibut in 6i6 and eighty years of suffering were borne in silence, till, seventeen years before the invasion of Spain by the Berbers, they resolved upon a general rising with the help of their co-religionaries in Africa, where several Berber tribes professed Judaism, and many exiled Jews had found a refuge. The plot was discovered, and from a religious persecution of misbelievers the policy of the government changed in an instant to one of ex- tirpation of dangerous conspirators. Consequently, at the moment of the Mussulman conquest of north- western Africa, the Jews were groaning under a savage yoke. They prayed for the hour of deliverance ; they welcomed conquerors, who, for a small tribute, would restore them to liberty and permit them the free exer- cise of their cult. Count Julian, 61 The Jews, serfs, and poverty-stricken burghers of Spain had thus become transformed into so many im- pfacable enemies of a social condition leprous with every imaginable disease, and crumbling to pieces with inner rottenness. And yet slaves and Jews were all the wealthier classes had to oppose to the Berber in- vaders Both Romans and Goths had been obliged to call th^ agricultural laborers to arms, and the army had o be recniited largely from them. From a tenth of their serfs, the proprietors seem to have been obli^^^^^^ to enroll fully one half for military service, so that the number of servile soldiers in the army must have sur- ;Lsed the number of free men. Hence the defence of S.e state had fallen into the hands of those most hostile o it What could be expected of a horde of circum- cised pessimists and mutinous chattels in a conflict for he ve?y life or death of the State ? The germs o dis- solution being thus contained in the system itself, all itrrs neceU to overthrow it ^or.,^.^,^2r army of twelve thousand men under a ^^P^ble leader The limits of the Arabian empire, under the Khalif wlJ tl been extended by Mousa-ibn-No,a^^^^^^^ general in Africa, to the Atlantic ocean. The city ot Ceuta a^^^^^^ opposite Gibraltar, and held for the By^ ^ante empire by Julian, its governor, now remained of all Belisarius's conquests along the coast. Th egend is, that Count Julian had sent his daugh- ter to the court of Toledo, to be educated in accord- See with her birth. But she was dishonored by Ro ^ eric; whereupon Julian, -^S^^' ^^f "f^^^^^ with Mousa, opened the gates of Ceuta to the Arabj r^oke eloquently of the beauty and fascmations of I 62 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifat^. Spain, engaged him to attempt the conquest of the country, and placed vessels at his disposal to cross to the Spanish coast. " Let Spain be explored by light troops, but for the present guard against exposing a great army to the perils of an expedition beyond the sea," replied the Khalif Walid to Mousa, in response to an inquiry- for instructions. A preliminary exploring party, therefore, crossed to Algeziras, the "green isle," (710) under Tarif, reconnoi- tred and pillaged the country, and then returned. The following year, Roderic being away in the North, quelling an insurrection of the Basques, Taric-ibn-Ziyad, one of Mousa's clients and the general of the vanguard, was sent over with seven thousand Mussulmans, nearly all Berbers, accompanied by Julian. The army assem- bled upon the mountain which still bears Taric's name, Gibraltar (Gebal-Taric), but learning that Roderic, at the head of a vast army, from forty thousand to one hundred thousand, was advancing against him, he sent for an additional force of live thousand Berbers. Treason, however, was the most potent ally of the invaders. Though no hereditar>^ succession existed in the Visigothic monarchy, the legend reports that Roderic, supported by many grandees, had dethroned Witica (Witiza) his predecessor, and thus " deprived " the sons and brothers of the late king of their " right " to the succession. Menaced by the approach of Taric, Roderic sum- moned them to his assistance, having previously tried in every way to appease their resentment. They obeyed his commands, but formed the project of delivering him A Fantastic Theatre-Figure, 63 into the hands of the enemy ; not that they thought of delivering their fatherland into barbarian hands, for it was believed that the Berbers had only come on a tem- porary raid, — which was the truth, — and not for the purpose of establishing their dominion permanently in the land ; and, moreover, it was thought that when vic- torious and loaded with plunder, they would return to Africa, leaving the land to the conspirators. A short- sighted and fatal egotism thus blinded them to the con- sequences of their treachery, and laid the foundations of seven hundred years of Saracenic rule. The plan was executed ; the brothers passed over to the enemy. Roderic (in the legend) appears like a ver- itable king of melodrama, in a chariot of ivory, with a crown sparkling with jewels, — a fantastic theatre-figure, fluttering in purple raiment : he is slain by Tiric : he vanishes mysteriously, and all that remains of him is his white charger, who is found sunk in the mire of the river-sedge, while upon the horse's back flashed a sad- dle of gold, radiant with precious stones. Taric had previously, say the Arabian chroniclers, skilfully played upon the imaginations of the impres- sionable Berbers, by telling them of a vision he had had on the sea, as they were coming ; how the prophet and the four Khalifs had appeared to him in a dream, pre- dicted victory, and commanded him to treat the Mussul- mans with gentleness. Like Cortes, he is said to have burnt his ships that there might be no return, and his progress through the land is accompanied by graceful and impressive visions of the supernatural. Rendered thus invincible by a consciousness of the favor of Heaven, Tdric forgot his orders, did not re- 64 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. turn to Africa as Mousa had commanded him, and has- tened like a true general to take advantage of his vic- tory. ' .-in Roderic's defeat and death at once precipitated all the loose and disorganized elements in the kingdom into cr>'stallization round the invaders. "The serfs would not stir for fear they might save their masters with them ;" the Jews sprang to arms, and hurried into the service of the Mussulmans, and an unspeakable confusion prevailed ever>^where. Ecija, Elvira, Cor- dova, Toledo, fell into the hands of the invaders, amid universal dismay of prelate and patrician. But two courses remained for the vanquished: salvation by flight, or negotiation with the victors. The prmces of the house of Witica obtained in return for their treachery, the three thousand " farms ^' belonging to the crown do- main, and Witica's son was named governor of Toledo. A simple raid had thus become a splendid conquest. " God had filled the hearts of the infidels with fear," in- deed, said a Mussulman chronicler. Meanwhile, Mousa on the other side of the strait, foamed with indignation and disappointment: that Taric, his lieutenant, and not he himself, should reap all this glory, seemed intolerable. But, happily, something still remained to be done ; Spain was not all conquered ; so hurr)'ing up his troops, he passed the strait in 712, with eighteen thousand Arabs, took Medina-Sidonia, besieged and took the great city of Seville, then Me- rida (713), and went to Toledo to join Taric. ^ "Why didst thou march forward without my permission ? I gave thee orders only to make a foray and then return The Story of Mousa, 65 to Africa ! " cried he, applying the ignominious whip to Taric's shoulders. . The story of Mousa is full of touching legends in- vented by the romancers long after his time. Named by Abdulaziz, brother of the Khalif, governor of Africa ; a Yemenite of illustrious lineage, the conqueror of Spain • he returned from that country gorged with plun- der was recalled to Syria by the Khalif W^lid, was ac- cused of enormous peculation, stripped of his ill-gotten gains, and even condemned to death, though he es- caped with his life by the payment of an immense fine. The rest of Spain sank under the Arabian rule with- out resistance, with the exception of an inconsiderable part of the north and north-west. Interest urged to a speedy submission, for in this way advantageous treaties could be made, whilst opposition was attended by death and loss of property. The Berber conquest cannot be characterized as a o-reat calamity. The anarchy of its commencement was soon succeeded by a state of things which the enervated population hailed with complacency. The Arab domi- nation was more tolerable than the Gothic. The con- quered people retained their own laws and judges, counts and governors ; their agricultural pursuits were left undisturbed; the serfs were obliged to till the land as before, and to pay the Mussulman proprietor one- fifth of the produce, while the state serfs paid a third of the produce of what had formerly been the crown lands; conquered districts and possessions appertaining to the church or to fugitive patricians, were divided among the conquerors while the serfs remained on them ; the Chris- tian cultivators paid a third of their produce, not to the { ' QQ The Berber Conquest arid the Khalifate. state, but to the Arab feudatories who had been en- feoffed with a part of the state domain ; and special cities, like Merida, Lorca, AUcante, and Orihuella, ob- tained terms of the most honorable kind. In general, the Christians retained most of their property, were per- mitted to alienate it at will, — a right denied them under the Visigoths, — and paid a capitation tax until they embraced Islamism. To the previous intolerance of the Arian and Catho- lic clergy, now succeeded the mild religious sway of the Arabs. ^ Nobody was outraged for his religious beliefs ; the government did not care that the Christians should become Mussulmans,— the treasur}' lost too much by it ! — and the new authority was so much liked by all, that Christian revolts became rare ; even the priesthood be- came reconciled. Nobody seemed scandalized that Egilona, widow of Roderic, should marry (?) Abdulaziz, so'^n of Mousa. The conquest was looked upon as a blessing in some respects ; it was followed by an impor- tant social revolution, and many of the evils under which the country had been groaning for centuries, disap- peared. The power of the privileged classes was, if not an- nihilated, at least greatly lessened ; petty proprietorship sprang up on an extensive scale, out of the confiscated lands which had been divided among great numbers of individuals ; agriculture flourished happily under Ara- bian protection ; the condition of the servile classes was ameliorated ; Islamism was more favorable to the eman- cipation of the slaves than Christianity had been. It was a command of Mahomet, speaking in the name of God, that slaves should be allowed to redeem them- Religious Tyranny. 67 selves and under Mahometanism it was a meritorious act to' free them. The conquest furnished both the slaves and the serfs of the Christians an opportunity of recovering their freedom. Flight to the property of a Mussulman, and the utterance there of the magic for- mula, " There is but one God and Mahomet is his prophet ! " rendered the runaway slave " Allah's freed- man.'* . . , The boundless religious tyranny o£ the Visigoth, seems after all, only to have produced superficial im- pressions. Pagan Spain had slipped into Catholicism with an easy-going conscience. Arian Spam threw off the mantle of heterodoxy with ready universality : and vet even in the time of the Arabs, Paganism and Christ- ianity were still found disputing together, and Christian- ity in many localities, merely floated upon the l.ps rather than dwelt in the hearts of many of its ollowers. Hence it is hardly strange that the serfs fell into the s„are - abjured their elementary and ill-understood Catholicism, and welcomed Mahomet both as spiritual guide and personal liberator. Many patricians did the same. , ^ „^ One undoubted evil resulting from the conquest, was the shameless frivolity with which the Arabian emirs and sultans named the bishops, - often libertines, Jews, Mussulmans, steeped in debauchery, -to the vacancies in the episcopal body. Gradually, too, they came to view the treaties which had been made with less rigor ; a gentle and humane domination passed by degrees into an intolerable despotism. " We must .at the Christians ; and our descendants must eat theirs, as long as Islamism lasts" The advice of the Khalif Omar, became it ^ : ii i 68 The Berber Conquest and the Khali/ate. the guiding principle of the conquerors of the Peninsu- la The renegades^ those who had abjured their relig- ion and turned Mahometans - stigmatized as " concealed Christians," "sons of slaves," "the adopted," -found themselves, in the course of time, in a lamentable pre- dicament: they had lost their religious nationality. Many of them, despite their conventional conversion, were really Christians, but they could no longer return to Christianity ; the barrier of an inexorable law stood between them and their lost faith. Once " converted," a Christian who apostatized suffered death ; and even his posterity were Mussulmans in spite of themselves ; they suffered for the error of their forefathers. Their social position, too, was infamous ; they were ex- cluded ordinarily, from remunerative employment, and from all participation in the state government ; their conversion was discredited ; they were all blighted with the name of " slave." It stands to reason that they could not resign them- selves to being treated in this fashion, especially as many of the converts were among the wealthiest and noblest proprietors of the country, and, as a whole, formed a majority of the population. The constraint, the disdain, the social inferiority, the narrow insolence of their oppressors, converted them into standing rebels, and from time to time, in greater or in less numbers, a mobilization of the whole renegade population against the Mussulmans — a seething cauldron of rebellion bub- bling for a hundred and fifty years, frequently assisted by the Christians — took place. It was only towards the middle of the tenth century that Abderaman III. succeeded in fusing the whole mass, Irreconcilable Elements. 69 — Arab, Spanish, Berber, — into a really united nation, by the rigor of his inflexible administration. A fleeting, not a lingering glance, must now be cast upon the internal condition of Spain, up to the time of the establishment of the independent kingdom of Cordova, (about 755-63) ^"der Abderaman I, the founder of the great Omaiyade dynasty in the West. The country called by the Arabs " Andalusia," was divided up into five provinces, each with its Wali or governor, the chief of whom, after Ayub's time, lived in Cordova, from whence the whole country was governed. Each fortified town had its alcaide, or commandant, and cadi, or Moslem judge. From the time of Mousa to the time of the landing of Abderaman I, (755). emirs, appointed by the gov- ernors of Africa in the name of the Khalif of the East, succeeded one another with great rapidity. Though the Berbers had conquered the country, the Arabs, under Mousa, took immediate possession of the loveliest parts of it, and sent their allies, to starve or plunder, into the arid plains of Estremadura, La Mancha, Castile, and the North. This, together with the arrival of the Syrians, odious to the Arabs on account of their relig- ious differences, brought together a trinity of irrecon- cilable elements, which, added to the Christian moun- taineers of the Asturias, the renegades throughout the Peninsula, and the Christian population within the Mus- sulman jurisdiction, evoked a confusion and conflict that lasted for generations. The Omaiyades were illustrious nobles of Mecca, who, after giving fifteen khalifs to the East, had suc- cumbed at the death of the last of the Oriental line, Mer- wan II, in 750. The Abbaside dynasty, descended from f- 70 The Berber Conquest and the Khafifate, Abbas, uncle of the prophet, likewise a family of the highest rank, had usurped the throne, and endeavored to exterminate utterly the whole race of its predeces- sors. Abderaman, a. tall, vigorous, valiant youth, of noble mien and princely accomplishments, — an ideal Omah yade in the mingled suavity and inflexibility of his tem- per — escaped to Spain, mastered the situation in that faction-ridden country with the instinct of a genuine man of genius, and throwing off his allegiance to the Eastern Khalifate, assumed independent sovereignty. It was not however, till 929, that the title Khali/ and Commander of the Faithful — hitherto out of respect applied to him of Damascus and Bagdad only — was assumed. Before that time. Sultan, emir, or sofi of the Khalif was the title of the sovereign of Spain. Prior to Abderaman's reign, the only event of memo- rable importance that had signalized the Arabic suprem- acy, was the great defeat at Tours in France, in 732, at which Charles Martel profoundly humbled the Arabs, slew their general Abderaman and put an end forever to all permanent Semitic settlements on that side of the Pyrenees. The moon of Islam continued to flicker, from time to time, faintly among the Frankish principalities in the south of France, till the year 793, when it seems to have been darkened completely by *' the yonge sonne " of Charlemagne. It was in 756 that Abderaman was recognized emir of all Spain. Proscribed, tossed about for five years amid all the vicissitudes of an adventurous life, wan- dering from tribe to tribe in the deserts of Africa, he had at length, with the help of his Omaiyade clients be- come master of a great country. But his seat on the throne Uoncesvalles. Tl was an uneasy one, and his reign of thirty-two years was a crladiatorial wrestle, now with the Yemenite sect, to wh'om he had owed his elevation, now with the Berbers, and now with the resdess tribe of Fihrites. Indefati- gably active, at once perfidious and astute, generous and implacable, Abderaman came forth victor m all the wars he had to wage with his subjects, and his success commanded even the admiration of his enemies. t was in his days that the famous disaster, so musically recounted in the Chanson de Roland, occurred, -the de- feat of Roncesvalles. Three Arab chiefs, al-Aribi, governor of Barcelona, Abderaman-ibn-habib, the Slav-^o called on account of his tall and slender figure, his flaxen hair, and his blue eyes, which recalled the type of that race several of whom were then living in Spain - and Abou- 1-Aswad bore such hatred to Abderaman for the wrongs he had done them, that they resolved to implore the hdP oj Charlemagne to avenge themselves on him. 1 he world was then full of the glory of the exploits of this con- queror. The conspirators betook themselves to Pader- Sorn, and proposed an alliance against the emir of Spain, which Charlemagne did not hesitate to accept; a coa ition more formidable than any that had yet im- perilled the dominion of Abderaman. Charlemagne crossed the Pyrenees and laid siege to Saragossa on findin ' that thl inhabitants refused to deliver it mto his Sands but was unexpectedly recalled to the banks o he Rnne on hearing that Wittekind, the dreaded chief of the Saxons, had availed himself of his absence, had r turned from exile, excited insurrection, and was now opp ite Cologne with his rebellious countrymen. ftia^SS^^i«^^p*£Smm«'W««»i»^*5******' / 72 The Berber Conquest and the Khallfate, With all possible speed, Charlemagne hastened back over the Pyrenees through the pass of Roncesvalles : but while the army was defiling through the long and narrow gorge, the Basques, who were bitter foes of the Franks, pounced upon the rear-guard of Charlemagne's army, encumbered as it was with baggage, hurled the soldiers down into the valley, slew them to a man, — even Roland, commander of the frontier of Brittany, — plundered the baggage train, and then vanished into the night as tracelessly as they had come. Eventually Abderaman came to be execrated by Arabs and Berbers alike ; he quarrelled with his followers, and was betrayed by his kinsmen. His solitary walks through the streets of Cordova among his people were interrupted; isolated, gloomy, and inaccessible, he rarely left his palace unless surrounded by a numerous guard. A standing army of forty thousand mercenaries was established, blindly devoted to his person ; and he employed them pitilessly in breaking the backbone of the Arabs and Berbers, teaching them obedience, and compelling them to contract habits of peace and order. His course was in exact parallelism with that of the kings of the fifteenth century in their efforts to triumph over feudalism. A " despotism of the sword " had thus been initiated, which was only too conscientiously imi- tated by his successors. But these people were other- wise ungovernable. Instinct and recollection equally called their inharmonious tribes to independence and the formation of so many republics ; a monarchical gov- ernment was contrary to their nature, and self-govern- ment was impossible. The eight years of the reign of his son and successor, A Cultivated Voluptuary, 73 Hicham (788-796) were specially colored by the rise and spread of a new school of Mahometan theology, held in great veneration by the Sultan : the school of Malic, founder of one of the four orthodox sects of Islamism. Hicham's victories over his rebellious broth- ers, Solaiman and Abdallah, and over his Frankish ene- mies (793) ; his mildness and munificence ; his pious enthusiasm in the building of the great mosque of Cor- dova, begun by his father ; his love of science and suc- cess 'in establishing schools of learning, in which even Christians were made acquainted with the riches of the Arabian intellect ; all this greatly endeared him to his people, and paved the way to their giving ready alle- giance to his son, Hacam. A cultivated voluptuary, "richly organized to enjoy life," bright, joyous, passionately devoted to hunting and wine-drinking, Hacam roused the insolent ire of the faquis of the new school of theology, by refusing to per- mit them so great an influence in the affairs of state as they wished. They calumniated and denounced him, pelted him with stones through their renegade agents who swarmed in the capital, and formed a treacherous league to dethrone him. Much is said of his blooming youth, the brilliance of his glance, his fine form, his careful education, and the energy with which he curbed the volatile revolutionists of his capital. A famous story, too characteristic and too illustrative of the spirit of the times, to be omitted, is told of his procedure against the rebels of Toledo. His fifteen-year old son, Abderaman, gained admittance to the castle, caused elaborate preparations lor a feast to be made, and had invitations sent to from seven hundred to five thousand 74 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. (accounts are conflicting) of the principal inhabitants of the place. The guests, arriving one by one, were admitted and led to a fosse, where their heads, for a series of horrible hours, were struck off one after the other. The people, noticing the disappearance of the guests and their failure to return, thought they must have sallied forth by another door. " It is strange ! " said a physician, " I have been at the other door, and I waited there some time, but I saw nobody come out." Then, noticing attentively vapor rising above the walls, "Wretched creatures!" cried he, "that is not the smoke of a feast they are preparing ; it is the blood of our slain brethren ! " Wearied with perpetual conspiracies and revolutions, Hacam, like his grandfather, shut himself up in his palace, wasted his youth in unworthy voluptuousness and drink, and became such a monster of cruelty that he caused a populous suburb of Cordova to be set in flames, forced thousands to go into exile to Fez and Alexandria, and in his old age, expiated his guilt by profound melancholy and madness. Music and verse alone gave him any solace. He surrounded himself with mamelukes, who were called miUes because they were neo-roes or slaves who could not speak Arabic. These terrible and inexorable fiends, unable even to under- stand the prayer of their victims, throttled the Cordo- vans by hundreds at the moment of the burning of the suburb. A true Arab, Hacam sovereignly hated the people of the country, whereas, towards those of his own caste he was disgracefully partial. His death in 822, rid the land of an Arabian Caligula. ♦ I ». 1 CHAPTER IV. THE BERBER CONQUEST AND THE KHALIFATE. f CONTINUED.] Abderaman II. one of Hacam's forty sons, and his successor, made the court of the sultans of Spain more brilliant than it had ever been. He rivalled the sump- tuousness and prodigality of the Khalifs of Bagdad, embellished the capital, built mosques, bridges, and palaces at vast expense, and constructed magnificent gardens which were irrigated by the mountain streams of the vicinity. A poet himself, like so many of these accomplished princes, he recompensed other poets munificently : gentle and affable, he did not even punish the thefts he saw committed in his palace with his own eyes ; and he is celebrated for the quadruple tyranny exercised over him by a /a^ui, a musician, a woman, and an eunuch. The fa^ui was the Berber Tahya, a fierce, impetuous, and bitter-tempered fanatic, who had instigated the St. Bartholomew of the suburb. He was revered by the monarch, who had delivered up to him the government of the church and the superintendence of the depart- ment of justice. Ziryab, the charming Eastern musician from Bagdad, who had enchanted the ear of Haroun-ar-Rachid, who »l 76 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. heard the genies singing in his sleep — an inimitable improvisatore and connoisseur in all the arts and sci- ences of the day, even astronomy and geography ; who knew 10,000 songs by heart, and whose sparkling con- versation, grace, and elegance were the talk of his time, the model of Arabian " bon ton," supremely distin- guished in manners and knowledge — Ziryab became the social legislator of Spain, introduced innumerable innovations in manners, and lived in the completest in- timacy — signed and sealed by hundreds and thousands of gold pieces in gifts and pensions — with his master. The long-haired Mussulmans with the hair parted in the middle, had to cut their raven locks short ; golden and silver vases and linen tablecloths, gave way to cr}'stal and leather ; the various array of the season was pre- scribed by this dictator; he convinced the Arabian Spaniards of the excellency of asparagus ; dishes of many curious kinds took his name, and the celebrity of the graceful Epicurean lived to the latest Mussulman times, side by side with that of illustrious savants, poets, generals, ministers, and princes. The Sultana Taroub and the Eunuch Na9r completed this singular quartette. Taroub's affections were fixed on bags of silver and necklaces of fabulous price. Nagr was a cruel and pale-hearted apostate, of Spanish birth, who ground the Christians with fiendish gayety, and reigned supreme with his mistress within the palace. Stubborn insurrections broke out in Merida and Toledo ; in 843 the coast of Spain was ravaged by the Norman sea-robbers, probably for the first time, and in CHARRO OF SALAMANCA. Ahderaman. 79 844 they even sailed up the Guadalquivir to Seville, robbed, burned, plundered, and fled. An extraordinary drought scourged the whole land in 846 followed by countless locusts, a famine, and great suffering ; but the people of the capital at least were kept qutet by being employed in constructing numbers of fountains and marble baths, paving the streets, rear- ing the superb palaces of Merwan and Moghais, and bringing the mountain- water to Cordova in leaden pipes. Bitter religious strifes and controversies, precip- itated by the passion of the Christians for martyrdom, and embittered by the intolerance of Tahyl, raged in the capital. The poet, warrior, general, and scholar, Abderaman II. died in 852 in the odor of love and philanthropy. The old monarch, according to Eulogius, had mounted to the terrace of his palace, when his eye fell on the gibbets to which were dangling the mutilated corpses of the last Christian martyrs ; he gave orders for them to be burned, but scarcely had the order been given when an attack of apoplexy seized him, and he expired in the night. Mohammed, one of his forty-five sons, — a frigid and heartless egotist, — succeeded him. " Descendant of the Khalifs," cried his favorite, Hachim, "how beautiful would this world be if there were no death ! " " What an absurd idea ! " replied Mohammed ; " If there were no death, should / be reigning? Death is a good thing ; my predecessor is dead, that is why I reign ! " ^ This prince was universally scorned and hated for his niggardliness ; he even cheated the employees of the treasury out of two pence when he once had to examine 80 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate, Seville, 81 an account running up to one hundred thousand gold pieces. The roads became infested with brigands, so that even the already infrequent communications be- tween the cities had to be kept up by caravans banded together for mutual defence; martyrdoms increased, though the attitude of the enlightened Mahometans towards these misguided fanatics was one of pity, as towards demoniacs bereft of their senses ; the Chris- tians and renegades of the mountains of Regio raised a formidable revolt, echoed all over the peninsula ; the bright almond groves and cherry orchards, the gardens of citron, pomegranate, apples, and pears, — romantic Andalusia, with its fields filled with the gold of wheat and the emerald of hemp, threaded by the silver of innumerable rivulets cleaving the noble mountains and plains of Ronda and Malaga, — became a bloody bat- tle-ground between Saracen and Spaniard. The north was free and in league against the Sultan. In 879 emeutes and insurrections were ablaze in many places, especially in Regio. ,The Christians of Galicia and Navarre, the Normans in sixty ships (866) destroying lighthouses and mosques along the coast; Alfonso III. of the Asturias in his expeditions ; finally the great rebellion of Omar-ibn-Hafgoun, shook the kingdom of Cordova to its foundations, and menaced it with total overthrow. In a short time Omar ceased to be a robber chieftain and gathered about him a sort of effulgence as chief of the whole discontented Spanish population of the South. He became the real king of Andalusia. Mohammed's death in 886 extended Omar's dominion, and the death of his successor and son, Mondhir — said to be one of a hundred sons, — slain by a poisoned lancet (888) two years afterward, brought about a state of things perilous in the extreme. His brother Abdallah— who supremely scorned ''the people that rang bells and adored crosses " — came into possession of a state suffering from almost fatal debility. Already it seemed on the point of ruin and decomposi- tion Ibn-Hafgoun and his insurgent mountaineers were but a part of the evil ; the Arab aristocracy had begun to rise and assert its independence ; a power more dreadful to the monarchical principle than the Spaniards themselves. Secret apostacy from Mahomet- anism had gone on increasing under the reigns of Ab- deraman H. and Mohammed, and added a new element of danger ; counterbalanced to some extent by wholesale *' conversion " in various parts of the land. There was no sympathy between the Arabs of the provinces, mostly descended from the soldiers of Damascus, and Ae " vile canaille " as they termed both Mussulman and Christian Spaniards. The first Alhambra became a majestic ruin in the savage combats between Sanwar and the allies of Ibn-HafQOun. Seville, the seat of Roman science and civilization, the lamp of the Visi- goths, the glory of Spain, surrounded by a delightful circle of figs and olives through which the tranquil Guadalquivir traced a line of inexhaustible fertility, was the scene of an abominable massacre, which few of its Spanish population survived ; and we are told that in the seignorial manors of the neighborhood, the im- provisatores in the evenings long continued to celebrate in solemn chant their remembrances of this sombre drama. Bread had become enormously dear; com- 82 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate, merce was annihilated ; nobody believed in the future ; discouragement was universal. The sultan, seated on a throne which he owed to a fratricide, had found it a bed of thorns. In the fourth year of his reign (891), nearly all of Mussulman Spain had freed itself from his sway; every Arab, Berber, or Spanish lord had appropriated for himself some part of the heritage of the Omaiyades ; the treasury was empty ; Abdallah was pusillanimous ; Ibn-Haf^oun was intriguing with Bag- dad that he might obtain recognition as sultan ; and even after his great defeat at Polei (891), he seemed invincible. This victory and the reconciliation of the sultan with the powerful Sevillian chieftain, Ibn-Hadd- jadj, previously in revolt, proved Abdallah's salvation, and were the beginning of a re-establishment of the royal power. Ibn-Haddjadj was a singularly interesting type of the tributary Arabian prince. Within his own domain his power was unlimited; he had his own army; he named all the officials of Seville, from cadi and chief of police down to the least official ; he kept up royal state ; maintained an aulic council, and a body-guard of five hundred gentlemen ; he wore a mantle of brocade, on which his names and titles were embroidered in letters of gold, and while unsparingly severe towards malefac- tors, maintained order with firmness. A prince and a merchant, a friend of art and literature, he " received, in the same vessels, presents from distant princes and tis- sues from Egypt, scholars from Arabia, and dancing- women from Bagdad." The poets of Spain flocked to his court, and with bitter accent contrasted his magnifi- cence with the meanness of Abdallah. Abderaman. Ill 83 The arms of the sultan, dating from this victory and his reconciliation with Ibn-Haddjadj, were constantly victorious in the south, till his death in 912. As there was no settled succession to the throne, and as it was the custom to fill a vacancy by choosing the eldest son or the ablest relative of the deceased sultan, fears were entertained that the numerous uncles and grand-uncles might dispute the succession with Abdera- man, grand-son of Abdallah and presumptive heir. Abderaman was son of the wretched Mohammed, who was murdered by his own brother, by order of his father, Abdallah. The new king, however, contrary to all expectation, found no opposition to his elevation, and mounted the throne, as the third of the name, amid general joy and satisfaction. Abdallah's own eleven sons were thus excluded. A great, blue-eyed, light-complexioned, nobly-formed youth, as his grandfather had been in his younger days, Abderaman had been educated with particular care ; he was the idol of his grandfather's old age, though his own frank and audacious character was the exact oppo- site of the circumspect and tortuous Abdallah's. To a period of profound demoralization, anarchy, and civil war, now succeeded, under his commanding genius, comparative order and concord. The Arab aris- tocracy had lost its proudest chieftains. A weaker generation, to whom the grievances, pride, passions, and energy of the preceding were unknown, had grown up. Blazing villages and ruined plantations, fantastic cruelties of brigands nested in crenellated towers that kissed the clouds, and the maintenance of a conflict 84 The Berber Conquest and the Khali/ate, which, from national, had narrowed into a mere clash of hostile and mutually repugnant faiths, seemed no longer worth admiring or worth maintaining. The gates of the insurgent cities opened as by magic, before the young and brilliant monarch, the fame of whose clem- ency and intelligence, soon made his people forget the old sultan, — the monstrous misanthrope — who had poi- soned two of his own brothers, caused a third to be ex- ecuted, and slain two of his sons on simple suspicions and without a trial. He conducted himself with the utmost rectitude towards the Christians of his capital, His great antagonist, the Spanish hero Ibn-Haf^oun, after thirty years of warfare against the invaders of his fatherland, died unconquered in 917, two years after a horrible famine when the people of Cordova died of starvation by thousands. By 930, Toledo, which had maintained its independ- ence for eighty years, alone remained to be taken, to complete Abderaman's possession of the heritage of his ancestors. After a two years' siege, it fell ; Arabs, Spaniards, and Berbers bowed the knee before the power of the crown ; and the principle of unlimited monarchy was proclaimed amid universal silence. A period of " administrative despotism " set in ; the ancient traditions of the people — their reminiscences of the absolute dominion of the Romans and Visigoths — were rehabilitated ; class distinctions tended to dis- appear; and Abderaman IH. became the mighty amal- gamator — the Oriental magician — who harmonized the glaring discords of creed and race and proved him- self incontestably the greatest of the Omaiyade Arabian monarchs of Spain. ^'' Everyhody Clean, j> 85 In fact, Abderaman had accomplished wonders ; an empire delivered up to the anarchy of civil war, torn by factions, parcelled out among a throng of lords of vari- ous race, exposed to the continual raids of the Chris- tians of the north, on the eve of being swallowed up by the people of Leon or the Fatimide fanatics of Africa, had been saved both from itself and from foreign dom- ination, had come forth greater than ever, had entered upon a period of prosperity and order, respected alike at home and abroad. The treasury was overflowing ; millions of gold pieces filled the state coffers (951) ; and Abderaman came to pass for one of the richest sover- eigns in the world. Agriculture, commerce, arts, sci- ences, industry, a w^onderful system of irrigation with its co-ordinate branches and industries, flourished as they had never flourished before. A vigilant police made every spot accessible with safety ; fruits and provi- sions were astonishingly low ; " everybody rode, every- body was clean," Such is the account of an Arabian traveller. Cordova in this reign numbered five hundred thou- sand inhabitants, three thousand mosques, one hundred and thirteen thousand houses, and twenty-eight suburbs ; and the beauty and splendor of its appearance rivalled that of Bagdad the noble capital of the Abbasides. It was named and known in the heart of Germany. In 936, the foundations of a splendid city, bearing the name of the favorite concubine, Zahra, were laid near the capital, to be paid for out of money bequeathed by another of the Khalif's women. For twenty-five years, ten thou- sand workmen, assisted by fourteen hundred sumpter- mules and four hundred camels, did everything to ren- 86 The Berber Conquest and the Khali/ate. der it an incomparable dwelling-place ; a premium of four hundred dir/iems was promised to whomsoever should settle there ; the palace of the Khalif, filled with the mar- vels of the east and west, rose in enormous proportions for the maintenance of a harem of six thousand women. An admirable navy permitted Abderaman to dispute with the Fatimides the supremacy of the Mediterranean, and guaranteed to him the possession of the key of Mauritania, Ceuta. A numerous and well-disciplined army gave him a preponderance over the discordant Christians of the North. The emperor of Constanti- nople, the kings of Germany, Italy, and France, sent ambassadors to his court. So many glorious results give evidence of a quiet and powerful intelligence which nothing escaped, which united delicacy of detail with sublimity of conception ; whose power of sagacious centralization was almost unlimited ; whose steady equipoise amid so much tu- mult, whose broad tolerance in calling men of an alien faith to its councils, were equally remarkable. His son, Hacam II., who assumed the sovereignty after the death of Abderaman, was an accomplished savanf. He was possessed by a passion for rare and precious books. Cairo, Bagdad, Damascus, were ransacked to fill his libraries ; he had agents every- where, copying or purchasing for him ancient and mod- em books, at whatever price. His palace was a library and a workshop in which copyists, binders, illuminators abounded. The catalogue alone consisted of forty-four volumes, and the books, according to some, numbered four hundred thousand, all of which Hacam was said to have read and annotated. ! His authority in literary A SERENAIA AT CORDuVA. 86 The Berber Conquest a7id the Khalifate, der it an incomparable dwelling-place ; a premium of four hundred dirhems was promised to whomsoever should settle there ; the palace of the Khalif, filled with the mar- vels of the east and west, rose in enormous proportions for the maintenance of a harem of six thousand women. An admirable navy permitted Abderaman to dispute with the Fatimidesthe supremacy of the Mediterranean, and guaranteed to him the possession of the key of Mauritania, Ceuta. A numerous and well-disciplined army gave him a preponderance over the discordant Christians of the North. The emperor of Constanti- nople, the kings of Germany, Italy, and France, sent ambassadors to his court. So many glorious results give evidence of a quiet and powerful intelligence which nothing escaped, which united delicacy of detail with sublimity of conception ; whose power of sagacious centralization was almost unlimited ; whose steady equipoise amid so much tu- mult, whose broad tolerance in calling men of an alien faith to its councils, were equally remarkable. His son, Hacam II., who assumed the sovereignty after the death of Abderaman, was an accompUshed savant. He was possessed by a passion for rare and precious books. Cairo, Bagdad, Damascus, were ransacked to fill his libraries ; he had agents every- where, copying or purchasing for him ancient and mod- ern books, at whatever price. His palace was a library and a workshop in which copyists, binders, illuminators abounded. The catalogue alone consisted of forty-four volumes, and the books, according to some, numbered four hundred thousand, all of which Hacam was said to have read and annotated. 1 His authority in literary A Literary Monarch, 89 Vr if history was absolute among the Andalusians, and Per- sian and Syrian authors were equally known to him, even long before any one else had seen or read them. Under his auspices, Abou-'l-Farad prepared his mag- nificent work on the Arab poets and singers. ^ His court was the focus of an intense intellectual activity. Primary schools flourished in his capital ; nearly every- body in Andalusia could read or write, when persons even of the highest rank elsewhere in Christian Europe were grossly ignorant. Grammar and rhetoric were taught in the schools ; Hacam himself founded twenty- seven schools in the capital for poor children, who re- ceived their education gratuitously. The great univer- sity of Cordova, frequented by thousands of students had a world-wide celebrity and a host of distinguished teachers discoursed eloquently in the great mosque - used for the lectures -on theology and jurisprudence, on the traditions of Mahometanism and the poetry, proverbs, and language of the Arabians. Hacam's short reign of fifteen years ended unevent- fully in 976, when he expired in the arms of his two chief eunuchs Fayic and Djaudhar, leaving one son Hicham, behind. The remaining years of this century (976-1002), how- ever, are occupied not with Hicham, but with his cele- brated vizier, Almansor, the great adversary of the Christians, the desecrator of the famous mediaeval shrine of Compostella in Galicia, the destroyer of Pam- pelona, Leon, and Barcelona ; an Arab who almost annihilated Christianity in Spain, humbled the pride of the servants of Christ, and scattered the treasures of the church, accumulated for ages, to the winds. Of •A 90 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate, his death, in 1002, a monk chronicles laconically: '*In the year 1002 died Almanzor ; he was buried in hell " The terror of his enemies, he was the idol of his soldiers ; even the horses, says an Arabian author, seemed to understand their duty ; it was seldom they were heard to whinny. \lmansor surpassed even Abderaman in power ; his spirit was luminously practical, and delighted in projects for the amelioration of communications through the country,— bridge-building, opening of highways, and the like. His justice and fortitude — where his ambi- tion was not concerned — were proverbial. During a sitting of the grand council on one occasion, he had his fo^'ot cauterized, while conversing tranquilly with his associates, who perceived the operation only by the odor of the burning flesh. Political considerations forced Almansor not to tolerate philosophers, though he pensioned poets in numbers. A superbly handsome, ambitious, and gifted student, he had risen by the favor of the Sultana Aurora to the highest position, and from the beginning, absorbed in the perusal of the ancient chronicles of his race, he foresaw, with the divination of crenius, that he was to be an illustrious successor to the heroes' they commemorated. He was major-domo of the palace at the time of Hacam's death, and for many years retained his own name Abou-Amir Mohammed, (Ibn-abi-Amir), before the assumption of the one by which he is generally known to history. He became Hadjib, or prime minister, overawed the young Khalif by his commanding abilities, and, it is said, caused him to decay prematurely by encouraging him in unbounded license. A Wretched Figure-Head, 91 Thus Hicham became a wretched figure-head, whose life was a perpetual torment and dread, who was gor- o-eously incarcerated in his own palace, and whose debauched sensibilities seemed at length capable of no emotion but fear. He was taken to the grand viUa-city of Zahira, newly built on the Guadalquivir, where he might be kept from influences alien to Almansor's intef- ests, and where his reading of the Koran, his fasting, prayers, and debaucheries might be uninterrupted. At length it was even forbidden to pronounce his name. We find Almansor reforming the military organiza- tion, calling in hosts of Berbers, and enrolling numbers of impoverished Castilians, Navarrese, and Leonese, whom he treated with infinite tact. He destroyed the ancient tribal division prevalent among his countrymen; at- tacked and slew his father-in-law, Ghalib (981), com- mander-in chief of the forces, who had taken up arms in defence of the Khalif ; was victorious on every side over the king of Navarre, Garcia Fernandez, Count of Castile, and Ramiro HI. of Leon; and at the same time assumed one of those surnames previously borne by Khalifs alone, Almansor biUah, *' aided by God, "victorious by the help of God," by which he was henceforth known. On one of his expeditions against the Christians, in 985, he carried forty poets to chant his victories, and returned covered with the glory of having burned Barcelona. Insatiable of conquest, he darted upon the Christian principalities with the ferocity of a tiger, demolishing, plundering, devastating all before him. Yet he did not scorn himself to ply the trowel, saw, or pick-axe, when he began to extend and beautify the great mosque of 92 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. Cordova ; and did things so nobly and grandly that he excited raptures in his contemporaries. He slew his own son, the brave and brilliant Abdallah, — a sparkling impersonation of Andalusian gayety and Arabian knight- hood, — when he discovered that he was conspiring against him. " Never has an unfortunate implored thy pity in vain," sang a poet of him ; "thy bounties and thy bene- fits are innumerable as the drops of rain." Like others of his race, he doubtless had his slaves with their names derived from jewels, and his concubines, who, Arabian-fashion, delighted in the names of men. Usurping successively the titles of Saiyid (lord) and me/ic cariin (noble king), reigning virtually for twenty years, he now (996), aspired to reign actually. The princes of the blood were either dead, in exile, or in misery; his army, composed of a mosaic of varying blood and kindred, were devoted to him ; Hicham, sur- rounded by the women of his seraglio, or going forth only with his head enveloped in a huge burnous, was a cipher. Everything seemed favorable. Yet the people loved Hicham ; they hung affectionately, and with all the inclining conservatism of the Arabian nature, to the reigning dynasty ; and despite the glor}- and prosperity which he had brought to the country, they murmured ominously at Almansor's arrogance. More powerful and implacable than all, Aurora — his Sultana-mistress, as some called her — turned against him. Alm'ansor could not be Khalif — he could only remain the invin- cible vizier who suspended as lamps in the roof of the mosque of Cordova, the bells taken from the sanctuary of St. James of Compostella (save the eternal city, the A Superstitious Monarch. 93 most renowned of the sanctuaries of the tenth century) ; who overthrew the power of Zirri in Mauritania ; and whose last act almost was the destruction of the shnne of St. Emilian, patron saint of Castile. Suffering with an excruciating malady, he exclaimed, " Twenty thousand soldiers are inscribed upon my roll, but there is not one among them so miserable as I." Becoming superstitious in his old age, he carefully shook off and preserved the dust from the clothes which he used in his expeditions, because the Koran said that God will preserve from fire him whose feet are covered with the dust of the holy wars ; and he gave directions that he should be covered with this dust at his death. His fifty campaigns against the Christians provided him amply with the sacred talisman. Worn to a spectre by suffering, he passed away in August, 1002. Six years after (1008), Modhaffar his son, who ruled the kingdom as his father had done, died ; he was suc- ceeded by his brother Abderaman, hated for the Span- ish blood that flowed in his veins — he was grandson of the count of Castile or the king of Navarre- and sus- pected of having poisoned Modhaffer by offering him half of an apple cut with a knife poisoned on one side. The unpoisoned half he is said to have eaten himself. The desire for the downfall of the Amirides-the family of Almansor, whose representative Abderaman was now -became universal, and the more intense^after Abderaman had prevailed upon the imbecile Hicham to declare him heir to the throne. He even affected the characteristic coiffure of the turban which in Spain belonged exclusively to the lawyers and theologians ; an outrage against religion and its minister'^. } i 94 The Berher Conquest and the Khalifate, His power crumbled at a touch ; Mohammed, great- grandson of Abderaman III., headed a rebellion which, in twenty-four hours, annihilated the power of the Ami- rides. The sumptuous fairy-land of the villa-city of Zahira was set on fire and reduced to ashes, after mil- lions of gold and silver had been rifled from it. Ab- deraman — Sanchal as he is called — horribly expiated his crimes by indignities of every sort. " Behold Sanchal the Lucky ! " shrieked a public crier, pointing to the hideous remains of the usurper nailed to a cross near the palace gate. A period of anarchy ensued. The Berbers and Castilians pillaged Cordova (1009) and Mahdi (Mohammed) was unable to lay the demon of democracy which he had called up in his efforts to ruin Sanchal. Lifted to the throne by a con- spiracy, while Hicham — the everlasting Jew of these never-ending revolutions — was still alive, he lay sword- slain at Hicham's feet by another conspiracy (10 10) instigated by the Slavs — a general name for foreigners of French, German, and Spanish nationality, either captured in war and utilized as soldiers and eunuchs, or sold to the Saracens by the trans-Pyreneean powers who had captured them in their expeditions. The Slavs, who ruled in several provinces, now became all powerful, and the Mussulman empire in their hands, a prey to civil war, went gradually to pieces. Cordova, thronged with thousands of workingmen, filled with inflammable material of every sort, the seat of an ancient aristocracy whose power had now passed away, abounding in wild-haired fanatics. Christians and Jews side by side with whom stood crowds of sceptical and Dissolution of the Khalifate. 95 philosophic Arabs, who believed nothing unless it could be mathematically proved— Cordova gathered as in a burning glass all the uneasy intelligences of the country, all the growling discontent, all the fantasts and dream- ers, who longed for democracy and radiated their revo- lutionary tendencies from its khans throughout the peninsula. The glorious residence of Zahra, whose reputation was European, was razed to the ground ; the glorious library of Hacam H., was sold to fill the exhausted treasure-chests of the state. Massacres at Cordova and elsewhere (1013), followed in the train of the Berbers whom Abderaman III. and Almansor had called into the land. The dissolution of the Khalifate, the splen- did monument of a hundred years of lofty civilization, conquest, and culture, ushered in the new Khalif, the Berber Solaiman, whose sway extended to five cities (Cordova, Seville, Niebla, Ocsonaba, and Beja) alone, while the rest became independent under Slav or Ber- ber chieftains. Whether Hicham II. sdll lived or not was doubtful, but the Slvas continued to fight in his name. The women of his palace asserted that he had escaped to Asia. Solaiman's enjoyment of power was of brief dura- tion, for he was assassinated by the Berberized descend- ant of the prophet's son-in-law, Ali-ibn-Hammoud, governor of Ceuta and Tangier, who, though he scarcely understood the songs of the Arabians sung to him, favored the Andalusians in the beginning, but swore in the end to destroy their capital and extermi- nate its inhabitants. His death in a bath in 1018, at the hands of three I 96 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. slaves, freed the country from the realization of his threats. During the next ten or twelve years, Khalifs and combinations succeeded one another with dizzying rapidity. The Khalifate, accelerating in its downward incline, rushed to its destruction with a velocity that was irresistible, and when it reached the end, shattered into a dozen fragments — republics, at Cordova and Seville, petty sovereignties in the East and South. Abderaman IV. Mortadha, raised to the throne by Mondhir, governor of Saragossa and the Slav Khairan, a former ally of Ali, reestablished for a while, as great- grandson of Abderaman IT I., the ancient dynasty of the Omaiyades. He was soon killed by the emissaries of Khairan, since he was found too proud and spirited for the Slav's manipulation. The Berbers were hence- forth masters of Andalusia. The Cordovans (1023) now chose a son of Abdera- man IV. as Khalif, who took the title of fifth of that name — a Khalif of seven weeks. He fell by the hands of Mohammed (1024), one of the still numerous Omaiyade connection. His brief reign was memorable for his selection of Ibn-Hazin as vizier, the greatest scholar of his time, and the most productive writer Spain has ever produced. A graceful and exquisite poet, full of delicate gallantry and enthusiasm, ^'the chastest and most Christian " of Mussulman singers, an Arabized Spaniard, whose purity, delicacy, and spir- ituality sprinkled, as with a perfume, everything they touched, he fell from his lofty height, a guiltless Lucifer, leaving behind him in the Arabian annals a train of light. The End of the Kingdom of Cordova, 9T Mohammed III., a guilty, vulgar, and inept assassin, was poisoned by an officer, after a short reign full of humiliations, and Cordova was for six months without a monarch. Then the people resolved to give the throne to a brother of Abderaman IV., Hicham III., (1027), a stingy, mumbling, and ridiculous old man, whose deity was a good digestion, who stammered with embarrass- ment at his own receptions, and who crawled out of Cordova, covered with ignominy and shame, when his viziers, loathing his imbecility, published a manifesto to the Cordovans, abolishing the Khalifate in perpetuity. Thus ended the kingdom of Cordova. Wrought out of many heterogeneous elements — snatched from the hand of the emissaries of the Khalif of the East in 755, by Abderaman I., elevated to a Khalifate under Abder- aman HI., in 929, its existence of nearly 300 years had been illustrated by great intellectual brilliance and innumerable vicissitudes. Cordova had become a city of sanctuaries and pilgrimages like Mecca and Medina. On the rude foundations of the Visigoths, whose rule from this distance seemed an incredible episode in Spanish history, so utterly had names, dynasties, and associations changed, had risen a race at once fierce and ethereal-tempered, poetic and sanguinary, polished and unscrupulous, who built fairy Alhambras, filled centuries with their music, and drowned cities in their blood. The Khalifate was a century-plant that bloomed once in a hundred years, and then fell into hopeless decay. Xeres de la frontera was avenged. The Arabian Character. 99 JH CHAPTER V. SPAIN UNDER THE OMAIYADES. IMMOBILITY has been truly said to be the distinct characteristic of the swarming tribes that traverse the arid deserts of Arabia with their tents and flocks. What they were yesterday, — last year, centuries ago — they are to-day, and will be to-morrow. The best com- mentaries on Arabian history' and poetry of the times of Mahomet, are the travellers' stories, — Burckhardt's and Burton's descriptions of the Bedouins of to-day, un- changed in their manners, customs, and modes of thought since the Hegira. Intelligence, energ>', poetic suscepti- bility, abound among these people ; but they do not wish to advance in civilization, to ameliorate their condition, to reform and revolutionize their immemorial code. Why should they ? *' The Bedouin is the freest man on earth ;" he dispenses with government ; his tribe are all broth- ers, free, equal, and sympathetic; and the chief is simply a commoner, exalted to that rank because he is stronger, braver, wealthier than the rest. All wear the same clothing, eat the same food, scorn the same money, live together on the booty of the day, and exemplify a philosophy of unconscious self-abnegation that is full of elements of grandeur. " Wealth comes in the morning and goes in the evening," says an Arab poet. His camels and his horses — no inch of soil enamelled by the many-colored products of a refined agriculture - are his sole possession. Equal among themselves, the Arabs esteem them- selves infinitely superior to the toiler in the field, the artisan in his workshop, or the man of another race. Hospitality, gallantry, courtesy, poetic talent, spoken, eloquence, are with them beyond mere ancestry ; the "kings of the desert," as the Khalif Omar said, are the orators and poets," while the dismal degeneracy of the human race comes out luminously in those who do not practice the Bedouin virtues." " Perfect " was the name formerly given to him who -being a Bedouin- harmonized with the poet's gift the virtues of valor, liberality, knowledge of writing, swimming, and bending the bow. . , A noble origin - the memory of great men enshrined in pathetic and worshipping recollections - holds a great place with these simple folk ; and before the advent of Islamism he was considered especially hon- orable, whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather held successively the chiefship of his tribe.' The Be- douin virtues thus became hereditary in certam families ; these families were full of distinguished men ; and the position they occupied got to be correspondingly lofty. " Son of my brother," is the title which an old Be- douin will give to a young one ; the two will live or die for each other, resent affronts to either as indignities to both, kill the last lamb for the sustenance of a friend, and are filled with a profound and unperishing affection for the men of their tribe. '' Love your tribe," says one of their poets, "for you are attached to it by bonds stronger than those between a husband and a wife ! 1^ 100 Spain under the Omaiyades. The Arabian Character, 101 H Contentment with his lot, hatred of change and amelioration, love of tranquillity, gayety, a careless and reverie-steeped life, such are the traits of the Bedouin as distinguished from our eternal restlessness, our as- piration after the infinite, our feverish and illusion- haunted existence, and progress in the direction of a clear, subtle, and thousand-hued civilization. The sphinx, the unchanging Koran, the immeasurable des- ert, are his symbols; motionless serenity is his ideal; lack of imagination, in its rich and comprehensive sense, is his cardinal defect. Impetuous, fiery in their passions, the Arabs are the least inventive of nations. Mythology they had none, though the Kaaba of Mecca, with its mystical black stone, was filled with hundreds of representations of the heavenly bodies which they worshipped. The monothe- istic religion of Mahomet was simply a compound of the existing systems and habitudes : paganism and Judaism blended in its ceremonial ; reason was deified in its rec- ognition of one God, and its exclusion of the supernat- ural ; plastic art and physical manifestation were equally remote from its purified and colorless syllabus of reli- gious principles. Realism predominates in the unin- ventive literature of the Arabians. Epic and dramatic poems — the great field of the supernatural with other races — are wanting with them , their narrative poetry is very defective ; their descriptive power is confined to themselves and their own experiences ; ideality is entirely banished from their over-heated brains, while an infinite expatiation through lyric and subjective moods, an endless variation on emotional and sensual- istic themes, is the key-note of their voluminous verse. If an imaginative tale of supposed Arabian origin, dis- plays inventive power, this fact points like the needle to an Indian or Persian source. The Arabian Nights — that charming creation of some Bagdad story-teller of the eleventh century, possibly even of Greek origin -- is Arabian only in those parts which reproduce real life and sparkle with anecdotes gathered from it. In science there is the same lack of creative power ; admirable translators and commentators on the ancients, astute observers where they have had a leader, they have done little that is original. Development and progress can- not go hand in hand with so impassioned a yearning after personal independence and reserve as they show ; they have no political spirit, no consciousness of broad, socialistic instinct. They came to Spain, despite the enormous successes of the Mussulman arms, essentially the sons of the desert ; an aggregation of tribes ready to pursue to the death their ancient feuds ; unrefreshed and unenlightened by their vast travels, with the dust of Damascus, Persia, and the Indies on their feet ; a race captive to hereditary prejudices, and ready to fight out, on the soil of Spain, the accumulated hates and grudges of hundreds of years. Such was the character of the multitude of pagan tribes that peopled Arabia before their conversion from Sabae- anism to Mahometanism. Arabia, itself too poor to attract a foreign subjugator, set in motion by a religious fanatic, sent forth an array of generals, who soon planted the green banner of Islam from the Ganges to the Tagus, from the laxartes to the Niger. And nothing is more remarkable than Mahomet's success. A nervous, delicate, impressionable constitu- 102 Spain under the Omalyades. At ah tan Poetry. 103 tion inherited from his mother, cast over his life the veil of a morbid and over-laden religious consciousness. A coward, a dreamer, a weeper of womanish tears from pure excess of nervous organization, tormented by vague inquietudes and epileptic seizures, unhealthy and un-Arabic to the last degree, his ascendency over the brave, irreligious, unimaginative, and positive Arabs, is a subject of great interest. "Instead of praying five times a day, they never pray," says a traveller, even of the Bedouins of to-day. Their land, in Mahomet's time, was divided up between the followers of Moses, Christ, and polytheism. The Christians had learned from Christianity little more than the habit of drinking wine. The idolaters admitted one supreme God, Allah, — with whom the other divinities were intercessors, — and delighted in cheating their idols by sacrificing to them a gazelle instead of a sheep. The Jews, intensely intol- erant and full of the spirit of persecution, were, perhaps, the only sincere and consistent sect of the peninsula. Wine, combat, play, and love, held the chief part in the life of the Arab, though he was far from being incapable of being wrought up, by religious enthusiasm, by a fine poem, or the recital of a noble deed, to passionate emotion. Mahomet's mission was to transform, metamorphose, spiritualize a sensual, sceptical, and mocking race. Though reviled, treated with every infamy as a diviner, magician, fool, he succeeded in cleansing the Arabian pantheon of its three hundred and sixty divinities, insti- tuting the worship of the true God, founding a great Khalifate which shone with serene glory at Damascus and Bagdad, while Europe was in night, and convincing countless thousands if not of the truth of Islamism, at least of the irresistible might of its armies. We see the peculiar administration of Islam firmly founded in the ten years' reign of the second Khalif, Omar ; and the n.ilitary system developed by his fol- lower Osman, who caused all copies of the Koran, ex- cept those in the handwriting of Mahomefs wife to be destroyed. Then we see Moawia, the fifth Khal.f, and founder of the Omaiyade dynasty, strengthening the internal administration, and transforming the elective, into an hereditary, Klialifate ; his son Yezid desecrating the court of the Khalifs by hordes of singers and wine- bibbers;Abdelmelic, extending Islim from Carthage to tire Indus, striking the first coins, and assimi.at.ng his administration more and more to Persian and Byzantine models ; Walid, the mightiest and most glorious of the Omaiyade Khalifs, building the incomparable mosque of Damascus, and ennobling his reign by ^e noblest tributes to architecture, music, and poetry ; and finally the long line of Abbaside Khalifs bringing the glory of Moslem science, conquest, and experiment to its culmi- nation in the figures of Almansor (753-775). Harun-ar- Rachid (786-808). and Al-Mamoun (813-833)- Spain became a new forcing-house for Arabian poetry, art, and science, especially when it became independent of the Eastern Khalifate in 755- ""''^r Abderaman I The Khalifs of Cordova illumined the west as those ot Bagdad did the east. Both Abderaman and his son Hicham I., were gifted poets. Three hundred orphan children were educated by Abderaman II., in tne mosque of Cordova, and the stories told of his powers of improvisation, his passion for music, and for con- 104 Spain under the Omaiyades. structing mosques, fountains, baths, and aqueducts, attest a versatile genius. The times of Abderaman III., and his son Hacam, were, however, the golden age of Arabian culture in Spain. Scientific and artistic activity, refinement of manners, the essentials of a polite and comprehensive education, w^ere then all but universal. The grandees imitated the example of their brilliant princes, and east and west were ransacked for teachers skilled in all the sciences of the day, in which their sons were to be trained. " If a fly buzzed over their heads," says an Arabian writer of the Khalifs of Bagdad, " they asked the advice of the famous scholar Ismael-ben-Casim," called to Spain by the alluring offers of Abderaman III.; and all were said to have been enchanted with Casim's striking gifts, his compositions, the nobility of his mind, and the grace of his deportment. Under his guidance, Hacam devoted twenty years to the accumula- tion of his inestimable collection. The Omaiyade prince was a George III. in genealogies, and had the family tree of all the Arabs of the Spanish provinces at his fingers' ends. The wealthier scholars of the day assembled in winter in rooms perfumed with musk and amber, the floors covered with silken and woollen car- pets, and sprinkled with rose-water, while groups of grave Mussulmans gathered around a cylinder of glow- ing coals in the centre, and discussed with Oriental subtlety, passages and verses from the Koran. Multi- tudinous meats, fruits, dates, and daintily prepared dishes of every sort were handed round, and fortified the strength of the company for new intellectual combats. Poetry and the Aral's Life. 105 Such were the house and the social habitudes of Said, ^fagui in Toledo, in the reign of Hacam. Poetry was the quintessence of the Arab's life ; ven- geance, love, ambition, hospitality, all found their echo and idealization in that. The desert, the storm, the skirmish, the camel, gazelle, and barb ; the praise of the sword and lance ; the charms of the beloved, are mirrored in it in a series of minute but exquisite pictures artificially interwoven in verse of a singularly compli- cated structure. The gatherings at the sanctuary of Mecca, stimulated the rival poets ; the " divine prose " of Mahomet, through the widely disseminated Koran, found numerous imitators, and the poetry of the Arabi- ans began more and more to sing the praise of the prophet and his followers. The gorgeous court of Bagdad, with its Persian dances, pantomimes, and sports, its musical instruments and songs, its voluptuous life, and manifold intellectual energy, influenced these poets ; they became tcrhnigne-cXnw^rs, learned metrical grammarians; astronomers and jurisconsults. With physical slavery, the bondage of the soul went hand in hand. The poetry of nature congealed into a court poetry, then into a poetry of the schools. The Moslem West was the " nerve " of these " else unfelt oppressions," and vibrated faithfully to the tunes • struck in the East. The Spanish Arabs produced some of the most beautiful specimens of the poetic art, though the two most distinguished poets of the court were Spaniards. Abderaman's harem contained, also, three or four celebrated poetesses. We find the Spanish Arabians delighting in poetic encyclopaedias, '^ knots of jewels," "garlands of song," ii 106 Spain under the Omaiyades, many-voliimed works named after flowers and precious stones. The Bedouins were supreme purists ; they were connoisseurs in matters of accent, purity of diction, and faultless rhythm ; and their descendants in Spain culti- vated the same virtues. History was neglected among the Arabs, both Span- ish and Oriental. Genealogists, compilers of anecdotes, anthologists, gleaners of celebrated events here and there, chroniclers of famines, pestilences, and droughts, men 'who enumerated the hours of a prince's life or reic^n while passing over the most important transac- tions in silence, abounded in Spain, and continued writ- ing those moonlight rhapsodies characteristic of the de'^sert, when, assembling his people about him, the Arab Sheik fascinated their simple minds by telling them the traditions and memories of the race, in a tone of mystic and rhythmic enthusiasm. Al-Makkari in Spain, Abul-Feda, Makrizi, Ibn-Katib, and Siyooti, in Syria and Africa, made voluminous com- pilations and chronicles, all of which were destitute of critical spirit. The Arab book-cases always swarmed with theologi- cal works, glossaries, commentaries, and legai treatises. The reign of Al-Mamoun (813-833), showed a rapid evolution of the science of astronomy out of the fancies of astrolog\'; the precession of the equinoxes, the diameter of \he earth, the obliquity of the ecliptic, were approximately determined in his reign, and the unsur- passed serenity of the Spanish and Arabian skies con- duced peculiarly to observations of the stars. The first astronomical observatory on record, rose in 1196 at Seville, erected by Geber; but the conceptions of Arab ^ V ''•. .i '.^\ i 1 K -^ A' j' k '■' 1^ Ilk J illl!" ill!,' • .i'lili;; I- '. ; ' i. .-'I,;- -I. M!i ilfMi^" . ) "'<'■■'■ ■'■'■■■ill I Scientific Progress. 109 astronomers were hampered by their adhesion to the system of Ptolemy. ^ Translations of the Greek geometers, of Euchd, Archimedes and Apollonius, for a time satisfied their craving for mathematics, but by the tenth century, they had begun to solve quadratic and cubic equations, and to investigate profoundly the laws of spherical trigo- nometry Their skill in hydraulics is attested by the marvellous system of irrigation which they introduced into Spain, and which survives there to-day ; and even optics and hydrostatics were studied by them. They were famous physicians, and, later on, became deeply versed in the writings of Galen and Hippocrates. Medi- cal treatises like those of Avicenna, Er-Razi, and Ali- ibn-Abbas, attained great celebrity, and but for a super- stitious horror of dissection, surgery, as shown by their improvements in the lancet and the couching-needle, would have been successfully cultivated at their hands. Their knowledge of chemistry, obvious in the many terms which the Europeans have borrowed from them, — alkali, alcohol, alembic, and the like. — and in the apothecary's symbols, extended to many preparations of mercury, arsenic, metallic sulphates, and healing herbs. Their skill in metallurgy, in enamelling, in delicate manipulation of gold, silver, copper, and porcelain, is seen in the well-known Damascus blades, the wonderful vase of the Alhambra, and the jewelled dagger-hilts of the Khalifs. Writing paper is said to have been known at Mecca early in the eighth century ; the invention of gun-powder, which afterwards played so effective a part in Ferdinand and Isabella's campaigns against the Moors, is attributed by some to them. The pendulum 110 Spaiyi under the Omaiyadec, Arabian Philosophy. Ill and a species of telegraph were claimed to have been introduced by the Arabs into Europe, with the silk co- coon, the sugar-cane, the date-palm, and the cotton-plant • and to them the invention of the mariner's compass is attributed. Cordova became so celebrated for its prep- arations of leather, tanned by means of the bitter rind of the pomegranate, that it gave its name (Cordwain,) to the industry : and the name of Morocco no less is commemorated co the book-lover, in the binding of his books. Their knowledge of music, save such crude instru- mentation as they could draw out of their primitive tabor, harp, guitar, and flute, they derived from Persia, more especially after the foundation of Bagdad. Even the names of the majority of their musical instruments are Persian. A generous rivalry soon produced accom- plished musicians and singers. Ziryab built up a school of thorough musical artists at Cordova, whose renown equalled that of the Syrian masters. Music was scien- tifically treated, too; the principles of the art, the modes of composition, and musical notation, with the notes indicated by letters, were investigated and dis- cussed, and startling effects were produced on the sus- ceptible Arabs by the songs and melodies of their maestrL The development of their worship out of Sabaeanism and star-worship, their original disinclination, under Omar, to literature, then the sudden dawning of the Arabian golden age at Bagdad, from the reign of Al- mansor (755), through that of his grandson, Harun-ar- Rachid, and great-grandson, Almamoun (the former of whom never travelled, said Elmacin, without a hundred scholars in his suite, and attached a school for poor children to every- mosque) ; all these things showed, to a certain extent, a transformation of the flinty immobility originally characteristic of the Bedouin, and a capability of progress, if not in law and religion, at least in the less rigidly circumscribed sphere of intellectual effort. The'' Nestorian Christians profoundly influenced the beginnings of Arabian civilization. The Jews of the Orient were celebrated for their academies and labors, initiating the Arabs into the profane sciences of an- tiquity The director of the schools of the empire, under the cruel but enlightened Harun-ar-Rachid was a Christian, deeply versed in Greek literature. " It is well known," said Almamoun, the Moslem Augustus, to his father, " that the most learned men are found only among the Jews and Christians." Caravans returned to Bagdad laden with precious manuscripts gathered by his command, and translation was pursued with such ardor that it became hereditary in certain families, even women busying themselves with it. Once translated, the originals were destroyed, to be replaced by new ones exacted of the Greeks by Almamoun as a sort of tribute. Six thousand pupils studied in the university of Bagdad. The eminently assimilative spirit of the Arabs borrowed alchemy from Egypt, geometry and astronomy from Greece, medicine and algebra from India, and philosophy and natural science, from the writings of Aristotle. Meagre as the Arabian chronicles of Spain are, they are superior to the contemporary Christian chronicles, and fancifully-named as their " Golden Meadows " and " Full Moons " of history may be, cut up into an infinity of biographic details, they yet throw great light on an otherwise hopelessly obscure epoch. *^ 112 Spain under the Omaiyades, In their poetry, "Night dialogues with Dawn," "Cy- press with Zephyr," the " Nightingale with the Rose," there is boundless allegory; — an exquisite physical organization renders their poets easily intoxicated with harmonious sounds. " I thought of thee," cried one of their warrior-poets to his mistress, " while the lances were quenching their thirst in my sides, and the Indian swolrds were bathing in my blood ; passionately I longed to kiss the swords whose sparkling flash recalled to me thy teeth when thou smilest." The Arabian philosophers were truly "vassals of Aristotle;" they could disport themselves within his inflexible syllogisms when they could not apprehend the light and spiritual intelligence of Plato. A mania for argumentation, therefore, sprang up among them, often degenerating into a mere click-clack of meaning- less words. The naked Koran was too plain ; it must be encircled with a halo of fantastic allegories ; its words, under the influence of the frivolous cabalistic studies of the Jewish philosophers reacting upon the Arabian, were commented upon with curious care ; magic influences were extorted from the innumerable names of God and the angels contained in the sacred volume, and Arabian magic grew out of religion as astrology out of astronomy. Averroes of Cordova (1198), Alfarabi (950), who was said to know seventy languages, Avicenna, and Alkhindi, were the most famous commentators on Aristotle. The search for the philosopher's stone and the transmutation of metals grew out of these studies. The Arabs really revolutionized medicine by substituting emollient reme- dies for the drastic purges of the Greeks ; they knew Arabian Music. 113 the applications of the moxa and treated small-pox intelligently ; and their botanists and geographers made immense collections of plants and observations. Ihe purity and price of drugs were carefully looked into ; na/>ma, camphor, syrup, jalap, etc., are claimed to sug- gest the intimacy of modern medicine with the works of the Arabian pharmaceutists. The Arabic numerals substituted for the clumsy Roman ciphers, were said to have been brought from Cordova by pope Sylvester II. while studying at the university. The circumference of the earth was fixed under Almamoun at about twenty-four thousand miles, and eclipses were studied with care. Frequent severe exam- inations held in public, took place at the Spanish uni- versities. " The doctor's ink is as good as the martyr s blood," is a popular Arabian proverb showing the im- portance, later on, attached to learning. To the brutal supremacy of a purely militant religion we thus see succeeding the calmer arts of peace and enlightenment. Cairo, Cairwan and Fez disputed with Cordova and Bagdad in the noble rivalry of letters, and the shores of the southern Mediterranean became an illuminated horizon to the dwellers in darkness and the shadow of death on the northern. ^^ As "an appendix to this picture of civilization, came architecture and the kindred arts. Calligraphy, with its colored inks and brilliantly tinted parch- ments which reflected objects like a mirror, music sug- gested by the harmonious language itself, recitative in cadenced verse, the lute and mandolin with their musical airs written in circles, all showed the mathe- matical genius of the Arabs etherealized to a fine art. •J * 114 Spain under the Omaiyades. 3 Music is said to have reconciled Ar-Rachid with his favorite odalisque ; Alfarabi the Arabian Orpheus, exe- cuted before the sultan of Syria a piece of music whose first chords cast the sultan and his court into a flood of laughter, then made them burst into tears, and growing faint and fainter, plunged the whole assembly into a sweet and ecstatic slumber ! The people of Cordova were called to prayer from more than four thousand minarets; long living together with Christians came gradually to soften the ferocity of manners ; the Christian church-bells rang their congrega- tions to divine worship, and priests, nuns, and monks were allowed to appear in the streets in the dresses of their orders. Cursing Mahomet, and abusing his doc- trine were alone forbidden under pain of death. THK, GIBALDA, SEVILLi-. {\\ii: r i k> i .;,,^rrv\Mv r. , ., CHAPTER VI. |l HI ^ \ i ! ■I SPAIX UNDER THE OMAIYADES. [continued.] THE rapid conquests of Isldm soon brought the Arabs to a knowledge of other lands, and along with these conquests went the building of great cities, the establishment of fixed abodes, and the cultivation of architecture. Immeasurable wealth resulted from these expeditions, which was employed largely in rebuilding the ruined dwelling-places of the conquered, under the superintendence of Greek, Persian, and Syrian engineers and architects. The sight of the noble structures of cheir enemies, roused emulation in the Arabs. The storm of conquest over, and permanent abodes having become necessary for the Khalif and his many govern- ors, the simplicity and severity of the earlier followers of Mahomet yielded to the luxurious tastes of the later conquerors ; splendid mosques and palaces sprung up ; Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina gave evidence of the development of Moslem art; and the sumptuous mosque of Damascus — the glory of the Omaiyade dynasty — rose as if by enchantment, in the early capi- tal of the Eastern Khalifate. The grave of Mahomet at Medina, and his sanctuary at Mecca were embel- lished. But above all, the Damascus mosque (705-7 15X with its three aisles, its rows of red granit.^ columns, 117 \ i \ \ m 118 Spain under the Omalyadei>. and red and green marble pillars, its dome of the eagle, its six hundred lamps of silver swinging by gilded chains, its golden-lettered suras, running on a ground of azure round the walls within, its triple minarets whence the muezzins called to prayer, and its four doors point- ing to the four quarters of the world, served to show the dawning glory of Mahometan architecture. The founding of Bagdad on the Tigris in 762, by Alman- sor, — with its six hundred canals, its one hundred and five bridges, its ten thousand mosques and baths, itsfour- and-twenty thousand municipal divisions, its glorious green-domed palace, and the palace built by Almansor (through whose seven courts the Greek ambassadors were led in the first of which were a hundred lions, in the second a hundred giraffes, in the third and fourth, as many elephants and Arabian horses), — enormously stim- ulated the growth of architecture and all its co-ordinate branches. The translations of the mathematical writ- ings of the Greeks at the same time gave the Arabs the key to many architectural and mechanical principles. The founding of the Omaiyade dynasty in the West, the favorable conditions by which it was accompanied, the beautiful land and climate of Spain, and the great caravans perpetually passing to and fro along the Med- iterranean countries, bringing rumors of the splendors of the Abbiside dynasty of Bagdad ; all this^ awoke keen interest and competition on both sides. Cordova became a second Bagdad ; its noble monuments rivalled those of the east; its great mosque competed with Almansor's and its sprightly and mobile population became adepts in a picturesque and subtle refinement. Abderaman I. is said to have laid the foundation of The Cordova Mezquita. 119 the Cordova -Mezquita," about the year 786. It was intended to excel that of Bagdad in elegance, as those of Medina and Jerusalem excelled it in repute for holi- ness • and it was to be the memorial of the Omaiyades in the peninsula. Abderaman worked an hour on it daily with his own hand, and expended more than one hundred thousand gold pieces in its construction bu he died before its completion. Succeeding sultans se aside special taxes and spoils to maintain its associated schools and hospitals ; its exquisite chapel is said to be due to-Hacam, and "the glory of the Evemng Land" was completed by the terrible Almansor The interior of the mosque is divided into forty- eight aisles, nineteen running from north to south and twenty-nine from east to west. Nineteen great doors now walled up, with one exception, opened from the lovely fountained court-yard in the direction o Mecca ; from a thousand to fourteen hundred columns of precious marble, porphyry, jasper, and W anf^.ue, supported the horseshoe arches within ; plates of bronze richly wrought, covered the doors; mouldings m gold, orna- mented the main entrance; three gilded globes, sur- mounted by a golden pomegranate, rose f^ve the sum- mit of the cupola ; four thousand seven hundred lamps illumined the glowing darkness of the great sanctuary and one hundred and twenty pounds of aloe and ambe daily perfumed its spaces. Glass mosaic of curious deliLcy and b.auty, was used with effect in the embla - oning of the walls and arches, and peAaps the most exqJsite thing of its kind in th^. --^^' .^Vltue! seven-sided chapel of Hacam, with its blinding marbles and its incomparable al/iamis and mosaic. l^ 120 Spain under the Omaiyades, The Palace of Zahr&. 121 The palace of Zahra, built at enormous expense, five miles below Cordova, during the reign of Abderaman III., had no such lucky fate as the mosque. It was said to be rather a city than a palace if we can credit the statement that it was two thousand seven hundred ells in length and one thousand five hundred in width, while Africa, Greece, Spain, and France contributed to the thousands of marble columns, of every color, em- ployed in its construction. The floors were laid with variegated stone, the walls clothed with marble, the hues of the rainbow played about the skilfully-wrought flagstones, the ceilings sparkled with gold and azure inlaid work, and the rafters were of larch-wood, delicately chiselled. Marble urns and shells filled with cr)^stal water, cooled the larger apartments ; a magnifi- cent fountain of jasper from Constantinople, adorned the centre of the Khalif's hall, over which hung the matchless pearl presented by the Greek emperor to Abderaman. The mint and the mosque attached to the palace were celebrated. Immense gardens and orchards surrounded the palace, with groves of myrtle and laurel, and there were lakes overhung by pleasure-houses. The Khalif's pavilion of white marble, upheld by columns with gilded capitals, rose on an elevation of the garden, and in the centre was a porphyry fountain-shell, filled with quicksilver, of blinding brightness when moon or sun shone upon it, so that, ** if he wished to surprise or terrify any one in his company, the Khalif.would make a sign to one of his Slavonians to put the quicksilver in motion ; the glare from which would strike the eye of the spectator like flashes of lightning, and alarm all present with the idea that the room was in motion, as long as the agitation of the quicksilver continued." Marble baths of great solidity and elegance were found in the gardens, in which curtains, covers, and carpets of gold and silver stuff, artistically wrought with foliage, flowers, and animals, ministered to the pleasure and seclusion of the bathers. Travellers from the far East came to visit Zahra and declared that it was unique in its kind. The accounts left by the Arabian historians of the mosque of Cordova, which is so perfect to-day, are so accurate, that it would not be stretching credulity to an extreme to put faith in their descriptions of Zahra, the - Flower and Blossom " of palaces, which has utterly vanished from the face of the earth. The shadows of palms and pomegranates overhung innumerable fountains erected by Abderaman II. and III. ; a great aqueduct brought water to Cordova, and discharged it in a mighty reservoir guarded by colossal lions covered with pure gold and with jewels for eyes — " among the most astonishing performances of kings of any age." Love of water, of overshadowing verdure, of sec^'recy, of a reserved and intimate life, characterizes the Mussulman wherever he may be. The domestic architecture was simple and graceful ; enclosed and colonnaded courts, with a fountain in the middle ; gayly-colored tiles, shadow-filled rooms, mosaic ornamentation, trellises of daintily-wrought iron, flow- ers, murmuring water. The exterior -for fear of the evil eye — was plain and unostentatious ; echoes were avoided by careful construction ; light percolated from above through lattices often filled with colored glass ; and the houses in winter were heated by iron or burnt- clay pipes. N' 122 Spain under the Omaiyades, Art and Architecture. 123 The Arabian style of architecture underwent a grad- ual development out of what might be called Arabo-By- zantine, through the Arabo-Moorish, to the quaint and fanciful Moorish proper. The simplicity of the Greek and Byzantine styles was too austere for the luxury- lovins: Arab : he added new forms and new wealth of adornment, with obvious reminiscences of Palmyra and Heliopolis ; in fact his religion compelled him to make essential changes. The round arch in his hands became horseshoe- shaped, now semi-circular, now pointed, symbolizing, according to Hartwell, the inverted crescent of Islam ; short, slender columns, placed singly or grouped on a common base, were introduced ; arches resting on the capitals of the columns, and forming a projection over the impost, built over by a second series of narrower arches ; flat doors almost unornamented, semi-circular or horseshoe-shaped windows of small size, walls em- bellished with mosaic and stucco, low roofs, especially to the dome-covered mosques, and slender minarets ; such are some of the main features of the system. The need of elaborate embellishment in the interior of their palaces and mosques soon showed itself; hence the evolution of that eccentric compound of mathematically formed foliage, flowers, geometric fig- ures, hexagons and octagons, flower-stalks and brilliant colors intertwined and meandering to infinity, called Arabesques^ so that the palace walls came to look like a " Cashmere shawl illuminated." In the first period, Byzantine influence was dominant from the eighth to the tenth centuries ; in the second, this influence vanishes imperceptibly : rich and peculiar ornamentation invades the unimpassioned and symmet- rical architecture of Greece and Rome with a torrent of imagery; and in the third, buildings seemed con- structed solely for the arabesques. Arabian baths in Gerona, Barcelona, and other places, and the mosque of Cordova, are the most perfect types of the first period, when the Moslems constructed their public buildings largely at the expense of antiquity, utilized their materials awkwardly, and aimed at sen- sational effects, produced by the sudden presentation of a multiplicity of columns — as in the mosque of Cor- dova — to the observer as he entered. The mihrab, or chapel of this mosque, crowned by its perfect dome, and decorated with an ethereal ele- gance elsewhere unrivalled, is the best type of the second period, in its transition from the mosque of Cordova to the Moorish Alhambra. The horse-shoe arch vanishes more and more into the ogive ; the Byzantine ornaments give way to costly decorations of more recherche form. Glass mosaic, or mosaic of colored paste, and sculptured marble, are withdrawn from the walls and half-orange domes ; new combinations of regular figures made of enamelled /^/>«r^ take their place ; Arabic inscriptions in marble or mosaic meander around the domes. Such are features of the Giralda tower, and the ancient mosque at Seville, the Alcazar at Se- ville in its older parts, the mihrab of Cordova, and the architecture of Tunis and Morocco. The contact of the Spanish and African Moslems, under Abderaman III., and during the following cen- turies, after the dissolution of the Khalifate ; the arrival of the fierce Morabites, under Yusouf, and their con- ir 124 Spain under the Omaiyades, flict with Alfonso VI., converted Arabian and Syrian Spain into a Moorish or African kingdom. The taste in art and architecture seems to have gone hand in hand with the poUtical vicissitudes of the times. The hills of Granada became the centre of a fan- tastic, but wonderfully original development in archi- tecture, after the glory of Cordova had passed away. Extravagant pomp of adornment, vaulted roofs glistening with stalactitic pendents, walls cased in a dazzling armor of many-colored faience, arched galleries hung between pillars like stucco draperies and blossom-garlands, courts filled with slender-throated pillars that arrange them- selves in multifold combinations before the eyes of the beholder, geometric ceilings, star-shaped, blazing with representations of the heavens in gold and tint, domes and cupolas uplifted on airy pillars, too slight for their burdens ; in short, an architecture whose object seems to be to realize a hasheesh dream, and build over great spaces of golden sunlight, wherein voluptuaries, en- shrined as it were in the irradiation, might dream away a life-time of fantastic reverie, and have but to look above to see their visions incarnated. The Arab architecture literally blossomed itself to death, and the Vermilion towers of the Alhambra, with their walls eighteen feet thick, were its burial place. — The basis of the Mussulman legislation is the Koran, and it is due to the immutability of this volume that this legislation has not changed in 1200 years. What strikes an observer in the system, is the omnipotence of a code that embraces everything, from health to the houris of Paradise ; its absolutism, and the predomi- nance of the religious principle in it. Proselytism was I '-\ L l\J UH, i^Ui i-iilW^M^.O ^V^Vy V^ IN. •». ^ i- -L-ilv /^x . ■;, ^-ii^ii.-Vi.iiJi-t-i. The Laws of the Koran, 127 the essence of the endless migrations and conquests of the Arabs, and though other religions were tolerated under the shadow of Isldm, it did not borrow even the slightest ceremonial from any of them after it had once hardened into the inflexible organization left by Ma- homet High-priests, sovereigns, legislators, judges, and generals, in one, his followers during the Khalifate, con- centrated powers of every sort in a single hand, and that hand wielded the sceptre of God's vicegerent. A perpetual confusion hence arose between their religion and their law, the changelessness of the one affected the other, and, while the people themselves developed, not a syllable of the Koran changed from the foundation of the earliest Khalifate. The text of the Koran itself, and the sunnas, or traditions, are the two-fold pillars upon which the Mussulman law rests. The sunnas supplement the Koran, consist of precepts gathered by tradition from the mouth of the prophet, and have been overlaid by the countless commentaries of the four great orthodox Mussulman doctors, Haneefah, Melee, Shafei, and Hannbal. It is said of Haneefah, that while in prison he read the Koran seven thousand times ! Turkey, Tartary, and Hindostan, are the present seats of his doctrine more especially ; Melee's doctrine ruled in Spain; Shafei's in Arabia and Egypt; and Hannbal's in certain corners of Arabia. The Mahometan heretics are more numerous than the true believers ; the four orthodoxies are combated by as many heterodoxies : those who deny the eternity of God's attributes as incompatible with the unity of God, predestination, eternal punishment, and the Koran ; the stubborn defenders of these doctrines as essential 128 Spain under the Omaiyades. Moslem G-overnment. 129 fr ! to the divine essence : the rebek .^r .i rafArl fi,« 1 . reoeis, or those who sem- Adoration and P-^^,/ a/^^^<. .^^ ,L , , '^ '"'''''''^• ions of the law; but Z^r.Ir ^™''=>«'«"f=>l divis- nite and it will ^"'."'^"^ *"b-duis.ons are almost infi- deSil t1 , ™P°'''''''^ '° f°"°^^ them out in sanctioned n tt «r"l" concubinage, already allotted an "f iorpo: S t'l " '^'""'^'" ^P^^^' '' assicrned Pvf« °'P°''"°" "^ ^^omen, permitted divorce assigned extensive po^ver to the father hhr., u was not a //im as m the Roman law and h.-o i;<- "ot inhisfntfiPr'c I,, i\ ■ ' "'*^' ana nis life was the Christian Tnti. t? • ^' ^^^ Roman or to iciny neitner tor the Mos em nor for hk tr-;u ^ since all was the Khalifs and the K rf T"^' lieutenant But Utt]. k r , '^^'^ '"^^^ ^^^^'^ the Arab chiefs t"'eo„; :::;/? ^^f '""'^^^ "^ tary, and property " b lonjn, 1 p'h ' !,'""' '"^''- was freely transnLd;rfo;:rSn^tpo'i:,!n;: name Allah of the fortunes and lives of his subjects, and thus instability and uncertainty, resulting from vague generalizations, kept the whole of Moslem society in continual uneasiness. The law tolerated retaliation, blood-vengeance, and commutation by fine ; eternal vengeance pursued mur- derers • suicide was made infamous ; theft was pun- ished by mutilation, though by degrees this horrible retaliation was converted into imprisonment or the bastinado. " The rod," says the Koran, " is an instru- ment descended from heaven." Adulterers were stoned to death, though this happens but rarely now ; infanti- cide recognized in the codes of Sparta, the laws of Solon at Rome, and under the empire, was an abomina- tion to Mahomet, who insisted on the sacredness of human life. Eighty lashes reminded the wine-bibber of his guilt, if his breath betrayed him. The organization of the Moslem judiciary was in out- line as follows : The dignity mdi or judge was of spe- cial sacredness in the eyes of Mahomet. The cadi must be distinguished by purity, impartiality, rectitude, and knowledge of the law and theology. He was without re-ular salary ; his decisions were irrevocable and with- ou°t appeal ; simony or bribery in him were punishable with removal ; receiving of presents, communication with the parties, influencing of witnesses, and decision in favor of his own relations, were forbidden. A supreme tribunal, called the Mdi of ^dis, consti- tuted a court of highest instance which in doubtful cases judged the process, the sentence and the judge. Appeal was in certain cases allowed to the sovereign. The tes- timony of slaves or infidels against Mussulmans was J nKl i ' ."WM i HH WPI i 130 Spain under the Omaiyades. fi tatlr'L ?' "'" "" ^"'^'^'^ •'y ^ -« °f consul- tatue jury who were present at trials and <.ave their adv:ce when asked. The numerous descendant of the prophe -agnation within a nation "- en loved cer ta.n prnuleges supervised by a nakit, or protector i^uch are some of the cardinal points of the Mussul man law as laid down in the commentators, Iho hTv e developed a complicated organism out of the girms co„ anedmthe Koran. Reminiscences of it su^Xe "" Chnsnan Spain even to-day, and the language is full if words denved from the Arabic designations."^ ° rhe regular revenues of the state under the Omai- yades, seem to have been equal to about forty miZ dollars from which are excluded extraordinary leWe in case of war or for public buildin<.s The wealth and prosperity of'the country under thi. dynasty have been called fabulous a^h<^ n^ . creased flnilv ti . " _ ''""'°"s. i he population n- for slk CO ton l, /"f °'" ""' '"" °^ nianufactories tor silk cotton, and cloth ; the cultivation of indijro and he cochineal, the production of beautiful fakZ t ,e ntroduction of paper into Spain in the twelfth cmuit he substitution of linen for cotton in the d ess of tJS stidious Arabs, the working of the mines of ^J'd sdver^ and mercury, the sifting of the auriferous sand of tl^e Darro in the Vega of Granada, the discovery of coast ot Andalusia, of nearlQ nf ^^ "JHzation of the wonde^LT ^^ ^-;i;- which produced the finest salt in Europe brou^h he counto' to a high state of prosperity ^ *' Agriculture had made immense progress • exotir plants were introduced in numbers; the 'balm; flZs Moslem Agriculture, 131 of the Orient, as much prized for their beauty of form and color as for their perfume, spiced the air. Abde- raman wrote an exquisite poem on the palm, which he introduced, and which came to grow in tens of thou- sands near Elche. The Spanish rice and saffron are memorials of Arabian care for foreign products. Val- encia, the picturesque Vega of Granada, — thirty leagues of orange and olive gardens, watered by five rivers, — and the basin of the Guadalquivir, with its thousands of villages, became lovely oases endowed with a match- less fertility. Under Hacam the most illustrious sheiks gloried in cultivating their own gardens ; the cadis and faquis de- lighted in the shadow of their own vines. In the spring and autumn the country seats were filled with brilliant figures — merchants, townspeople, students — leaving the towns and cities, to pass a few months in the sylvan solitude of the sierras. Vast herds of cattle and sheep kept up the recollections of the desert, by their wander- ings from province to province in search of pasture as the seasons changed. The shepherds thus kept up an errant manner of life, which, from unknowm antiquity, had been peculiar to Irac, Chaldaea, and Egypt, and at the same time maintained the reputation of the Spanish fleeces as the best in the world. Arabian conquest had been rendered easy by means of the roads already traced out by the innumerable car- avans crossing and re-crossing the peninsula to India, Persia, and the Sahara ; and these conquests necessi- tated the establishment of fleets, to maintain the Mus- sulman power in the southern Mediterranean. The establishment of rival dynasties of Abbasides 132 I Spain under the Omaiyades. and Omaiyades, in the East and the West, much as their khalifs despised each other, could not crush out the strong commercial instincts of the people. Silk, wool, oil, sugar, amber, cochineal, iron, and the finely-tempered arms of Toledo and Cordova, were exchanged for the luxuries, slaves, and spices of Syria and the Indies Great mercantile ports like Barcelona, Valencia, and Almeria, became the mediums of communication with Europe and Africa, uninterrupted even after the fall of the khalifate. A thousand merchant vessels, it is said, sprinkled the sea with the countless yield of the new conquests. Beautiful Greek slaves, skilled in music and dancing, peopled the harems of the Orient and were a source of wealth to the Andalusian merchants. Eunuchs to guard the harems — chiefly Europeans and negroes — were manufactured in hundreds at Verdun and sent to Cor- dova to form part of the Khalifs guard. The prodigious fertility of the country is said to have supported a population at this time correspondingly great. Under Augustus the population of Spain was claimed to be seventy millions, and Spain itself was called "the countr}^ of the thousand cities." The cities were numerous, especially along the eastern and southern coasts, nearest to Carthage and Rome. Moslem super- stition objected to a census ; hence we cannot determine more than approximately what the population was at the height of the Omaiyade dynasty. The Almoravide Yusouf boasted that the chotbah was recited for him from nineteen thousand pulpits. The frequent famines go to prove indirectly the populousness of the land. The vassal population was very large; Christians Moslem Chivalry and Religion, 133 abounded at Toledo, Cordova, Merida, and Barcelona, and Jews in great numbers were settled in Spain, and are found interested in all the seditions against the the Khalifate. Perpetual war against the Christians — the "holy war" — was considered eminently praiseworthy in the sight of Allah. The usual tolerance of the Mussulmans here snapped violently asunder, and religious hate, ac- companied by frightful devastations, led to sanguinary encounters through seven centuries. Both slaves and Christians, however, were numerous in the Mussulman armies. The Khalifs body guard, twelve thousand strong, for the most part foreigners, were the only pro- fessional soldiers ; a corps blazing with costly arms and gold, instituted for the personal defence of the sovereign alone and devoted to his interests. The institutions of chivalry were peculiar to Christian Europe, and hardly appeared among the Mussulmans till the downfall of the Omaiyades ; jousts, tourneys, tilts of reeds, were favorite sports of the Arabs; broad- sword, lance, bow, and mace, were the arms of the Andalusians. Groups of turbaned warriors, seated on high, richly-mounted saddles, with distinguishing colors for each tribe, and clad in fluttering mantles, dashed gallantly on the heavy Christian cavalry and often put it to rout. The Arabian horsemanship was famous. In 1 02 2, a sort of national guard, composed of burgher militia, was formed for the protection of the cities, streets, and quarters. Isldm^ " perfect resignation of soul and body to the will of God," is the quintessence of Mahometan fatal- ism, and its atmosphere pervades the whole system, from 134 Spain under the Omaiyades, \ S one end of it to the other. The Mahometans form a vast family despotically ruled by God's deputy, the Khalif ; in him religious and political chiefship alike are centred, and a pure and absolute despotism is the re- sult. Blind submission belongs to the sovereign, and his power cannot be divided with another sovereign. "The prophet's scabbard," said Mahomet, "might as well have contained two swords, as his empire two kings." The prime minister, oxhMjib, was the most direct dep- uty of the Khalif, and that his power could become great and terrible we see in the case of Almansor, had- jib of Hicham II. He was the first subject of the kingdom and owed his elevation entirely to the caprice of the sovereign. The principal dignitaries after the hadjib were the lieutenants of the provinces, who held in their hands all civil and military functions. Emir or Amil^ was the name given to them; they had under them twelve gov- ernors of the twelve principal cities, and twenty-four viziers (burden-bearers). Then came the chiefship' of the Khalif's guard, ordinarily entrusted to some mem- ber of his family ; the commanders of the cavalry and infantry; the alcaides, or governors of fortresses, and the sheiks, or tribal chieftains, who still maintained the patriarchal empire and classifications of the desert. The chief civil magistrates, in a system in which the functions of citizen and soldier were but confusedly perceived and discriminated, were the cadi or judge, the mufti ox counsellor, the ulemas (scientific body), and the faquis or jurisconsults (both of which last classes were charged with the religious and judicial instruction of V The Khalifas Power. 137 youth); and the market inspectors, tax-gatherers, and tax-distributors. The divan or council of state of the Khalifs, was a purely consultative body ; but under the Andalusian Omaiyades it took cognizance of the army, of imposts, and of the administration of the finances. A civil and religious police growing out of the con- tinual confusion between law and religion existed side by side ; the first a body who watched over the public security, weights and measures, the professions, com- merce, roads, and markets ; the other, more or less inquisitorial, and devoted to the domain of conscience. All power is thus seen to emanate directly from the Khalif, through a complicated hierarchj^ of delegated servants ; all rights descend from, none ascend to, the Khalif, who is the apex of the pyramid. There is no regular clergy, for the head of the state is equally the head of the faith and its supreme interpreter, and those beneath him hold merely spiritual lieutenancies. All functions are temporary, revocable at his will ; there is no notion of representation on the side of \\\e people^ though the Khalif is minutely and omnipresently rep- resented. Chronological Table froj?t the Berber Conquest to the Fall of the Omaiyades. Kingdom of Cordova. 711-755. Spain governed by Emirs dependent on Damascus. 755-788. Abderaman I. 788-796. Hicham 1 138 796-822. 822-852. 852-886. 886-888. 888-912. Chronological Table. Hacam I. Abderamaii II. Mohammed I. Mondhir. Abdallah. Khalifate of Cordova. 912-961. Abderaman III. 961-976. Hacam II. 976-1009 (.?) Hicham II. (Almansor — Modjaffar — Abderaman hddjibs) 1 009-1 010. Mohammed II. Mahdi. ioio(.^)-ioi6. Solaiman. 1016-1018. Ali-ibn-Hammoud, ) Alcasim- ioi8(?)-io23. Abderaman IV., ) Yahia, Ed ri side dynasty. 1 023-1 023. Abderaman V. 1 024-1 025. Mohammed III. 1025-1026. Yahia (second time Khalif). 1027-1031. Hicham III. (Last of the Omaiyades.) 1085-1109. Ahiioravide Conquest. (Battle of Zallaca.) 1 106. Death of the Ahnoravide Emir Yoiisof. 1130-1163. 1162. 1163-1184. 1195- 1199-1213. 1213-1236. 1247-1492. Almohade Conquest. Death of Abdehnoumen. Almohade lEmir Yousofi. (Battle of Marcos.) Emir Yacoub. Emir Mohammed. (Battle of Las Navas.) Decline and fall of the Almohade Empire. Emirate of Granada as vassal to Castile. CHAPTER VII. CHRISTIAN SPAIN TO THE ALMORAVIDE CON- QUEST. THE first hundred years after the Berber conquest have a three-fold importance, and were filled with events which controlled and moulded the destinies of the country, down to the reign of Ferdinand and Isa- bella. Such were the founding of a new Christian kingdom in the Asturias, the founding of an independent Arabian power at Cordova, and the establishment of the Frankish March in the north-east of the peninsula. The fatal battle of the Guadalete, in 711, which legend has illuminated with the glitter of Roderic's golden sandals and at which the last of the Goths laid down his crown and life, opened the peninsula to the Moslem hordes, who penetrated and conquered every part of it except the narrow strip of the Asturias. The Asturian and Cantabrian mountains had always been a barrier insurmountable to conquest. Phenicians and Carthaginians had failed in their attempts to subjugate the invincible mountaineers of that region \ it cost Rome two hundred years to break their spirit ; and the Goths succeeded, only after repeated attempts, in establishing themselves in those districts. To this inaccessible nook the Christians fled, betrayed by their own people and scandalously routed by a handful of barbarians. 139 i 4 I 140 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest, ill this case ex septentrione lux ; for out of this germ developed the principaHties of Christian Spain which spread along the Pyrenees to Barcelona, extended west- ward to Galicia and Portugal, and in little more than a hundred years covered the whole north of Spain. Intimately connected with the beginning of this new power is the legend of Pelagius, the Don Pelayo of Spanish stor>^ reputed son of the Fafila, Duke of Cantabria, who, banished from court by Egica, was slain in Galicia by Witica. Pelayo fled to the mountains of Cantabria, then returned from banishment, served Rod- eric as sword-bearer, survived the disaster of the Gua- dalete, and retreated, with a remnant of his followers, to Asturias. Here he founds a little kingdom close upon the confines of the Moslem power ; he hides in caves, bursts from time to time victoriously forth on the hosts of Alchama, the Moslem governor, fills the river Deva with the arms and bodies of the misbelievers, is pro- claimed king by the enthusiastic Asturians, reigns nine- teen years, and is buried in Cangas by the side of his queen Gaudiosa. Such is but one of the countless legends that hang, thick as vines, about Pelayo and his doughty deeds. It is perhaps hopeless to attempt a reconciliation of the contradictions existing between the statements of the Arabian and Christian chronicles concerning him. All we know is that, for whatever reason, Pelayo 's name be- came celebrated among his immediate successors as the heroic founder of the new Asturian kingdom, and his memory glorious as the first national champion of re- generated Spain. The two yearL' reign of Fafila, his son, was tragi- Alfonso the Catholic. 141 cally closed in an encounter jvith a bear. He was suc- ceeded by his brother-in-law, Alfonso I., who united the whole sea-coast of Cantabria, as far as the Basque country, with the realm to which he had been newly elected, and triumphantly maintained the reputation of the Christian arms. We find him building churches and cloisters, laying out new towns, winning the love of his people by his wisdom and valor, acquiring the sur- name of " the Catholic " by his piety, reigning eighteen years with skill and conscientiousness, and even after death in possession of a wonder-working body. His reign emerges from the general obscurity of the rise of the kingdom of Leon and Asturias as one of sin- gular importance. The kingdom under him showed a sudden growth, attributed by the Latin chronicles to Alfonso himself, who with his speck of a principality, miraculously beat the Mussulmans, captured numbers of cities, and pushed back the enemy over the Duero, Mondego, and Tagus. The Arabian chronicles, with greater probability, attribute the sudden growth of Al- fonso's power to two very intelligible causes ; a civil war among the Mussulmans themselves, and a frightful famine. The conquerors settled in the provinces adjacent to Asturias were not Arabs but Berbers, who were solidly established in every town in Galicia, and were the true conquerors of the peninsula. The Arabs, however, their bitter foes, had appropriated the choicest portion of the booty, kept the lovely and opulent fields of Andalusia for themselves, and banished Taric and his Berbers to the sterile plains of La Mancha, Estremadura, and the precipices of Leon, Asturias, and Galicia. The Arabs I' f » a 142 Christian Spaiyi to the Almoravide Conquest, themselves treated their Berber allies with the greatest cruelty ; scourged and tortured them when they had ransomed Christians, and cast them into filthy dun- geons swarming with animalcules, there to linger and languish. Hence the intense irritation of the Berbers of Spain against the Arabs, which was envenomed still further by a religious and political insurrection that broke out in Africa, now ferociously oppressed by the Arabs. The insurrection spread to Spain, broke out in Galicia, communicated itself to the whole of the north except Saragossa, where the Arabs were in the ascendant, and ended in the temporary defeat and expulsion of the Arabs. Then the Berbers of Galicia, Merida, Coria, and Talavera marched against the south, w^here they were beaten ; a five-years' famine (750) decimated their ranks, and the majority resolved to emigrate from Spain. Their embarkation took place from the river Barbato; hence these disastrous years are called by them '' the years of the Barbato." Tyranny, religious persecution, and hunger, therefore, were Alfonso's ablest allies in these early struggles. The Galicians profited by the emigration to rise against the remnant of their oppressors in 751, and recognized Alfonso as their kmg. The traces of the Mussulmans vanished from the regions they had so lately inhabited ; the apostate Christians returned eagerly within the pale of the church, and in 753 the retiring barbarians evacu- ated Braga, Porto, and Viseu, leaving the whole coast beyond the mouth of the Duero, liberated from their yoke. Unable to maintam themselves in Astorga, Leon, Zamora, Ledesma, and Salamanca, they retreated on 1 INTERIOR Ui^ iriE MOSQUE OF CORDOVA. Mussulman .Dominion narrowed. 145 Coria and Merida. In the east they abandoned Sal- dana, Simancas, Segovia, Avila, Miranda on the Ebro, and Oca ; so that Coimbra in Portugal, Talavera and Toledo on the Tagus, and Guadalaxara, Tudela, and Pampelona became their principal frontier cities, run- ning from west to east. This was the manner in which the Mussulman domi- nation, after an occupation of forty years, narrowed more and more, and concentrated itself in the fertile and beautiful regions of the south and east. Alfonso did not conquer these numerous and strong cities: they were abandoned, and welcomed the Christian champion with open arms. He even profited little by all these advantages ; put the remaining Mussulmans to the sword ; carried off the Christian populations to re-people the devastated north ; and occupied, of all the abandoned territory, only old Castile (then called Bardulid), the coast of Galicia, and perhaps the city of Leon. The rest was left a desert which formed an admirable natural barrier between the Christians of the north and the infidels of the south. Even large cities like Astorga and Tuy waited a century (850) before they were repeopled under Ordono I. In the neighborhood of Astorga and Leon, neverthe- less, the Berbers maintained themselves for nearly a century. The country they inhabited, which formed part of the Campi Gothici, was baptized by Christian horror with the name of Malacoiitia (Mala Gothia), " servants of the devil and sons of perdition." Their Christianization was always suspicious, and after a thousand years their stammering Spanish, shaven crowns, customs, dress, and accent, show these Marago- afeflbaaMgijw^£«itai:aii^.ihflat*.i>i«i 146 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest, tas (malagoutas) muleteers, to the southeast of Astorga, to have the narrowest of affinities with their Berber brethren in Africa. The conquest of Narbonne from the Arabs, by Pippin, in 759, made an end to, Arabian influence on the other side of the Pyrenees, and opened the penin- sula to his mighty son, Charlemagne. Charlemagne crossed the mountains by way of Aquitania and Na- varre, overwhelmed Pampelona, whose walls he levelled on his return, received the homage of the Arabian gov- ernor of Oca, and when on the point of capturing Sara- gossa, was recalled by a new insurrection of the Saxons. In the narrow pass of Roncesvalles the Basques, headed apparently by Duke Lupus of Aquitania, cut the rear guard of the withdrawing army to pieces. Eggihard, the presider over the royal table, Anselm the Palgrave,' and Roland of the Wonder-Horn, Margrave of Brittany,' fell in this celebrated conflict, immortalized in song and legend. The absence of the Franks soon caused Abderaman to reoccupy the land between the Ebro and the Pyrenees. Connected with the same episode, whose success was attributed to him, is the musical and romantic legend of Bernardo del Carpio, the bastard son of Dona xlme- na, sister of Alfonso the Chaste, and Sancho Diaz, Count of Saldana ; a legend filled with improbabilities, reck- less of dates, and yet replete with the delicate grace of the Spanish ballad. "The Count Don Sancho Diaz, the Signior of Saldane, Lies weeping in his prison, for he cannot refrain. King Alfonso and his sister, of both doth he complain, But most of bold Bernardo, the champion of Spain ! " ' Bernardo del Carpio, 147 According to the chronicle (pursues the chronicler of one of the episodes of his life), Bernardo, being at last wearied out of all patience by the cruelty of which his father was the victim, determined to quit the court of his king and seek an alliance among the Moors. Having fortified himself in the castle of Carpio, he made continual incursions into the territory of Leon, pillaging and plundering wherever he came. The king at length besieged him in his stronghold, but the de- fence was so gallant that there appeared no prospect of success ; whereupon many of the gentlemen of Alfon- so's camp entreated the king to ofTer Bernardo imme- diate possession of his father's person, if he would surrender his castle. Bernardo at once consented, but the king gave orders to have Count Sancho Diaz taken off instantly in his prison. When he was dead, they clothed him in splendid attire, mounted him on horse- back, and so led him towards Salamanca, where his son was expecting his arrival. As they drew nigh the city the king and Bernardo rode out to meet them ; and when Bernardo saw his father approaching, he ex- claimed, " O God ! is the Count of Saldana indeed coming?" "Look where he is," replied the cruel king, " and now go and greet him whom you so long desired to see." Bernardo went forward, took his father's hand to kiss it; but when he felt the dead weight of the hand, and saw the livid face of the corpse, he cried aloud, and said, " Ah, Don' San Diaz, in an evil hour didst thou beget me 1 Thou art dead and I have given my stronghold for thee, and now I have lost all ! " Froila L ascended the throne on the death of his 148 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest, father Alfonso I. He is said to have founded Oviedo and to have been a successful and valiant captain against the Arabs, fifty-four thousand (?) of whom suc- cumbed to him at Pontumium in Galicia. The murder of his own brother Vimaran, brought about his assassi- nation at the hands of the grandees, in 768. They chose in his stead Aurelio, son of Froila, Alfonso I 's brother who reigned six years, and left few traces be- hind Silo husband of Adosinda, daughter of Alfonso I., followed with a peaceful reign of nine years, and died without issue in 783. Alfonso II., son of Alfonso the Catholic, was now proclaimed king, though for six years pushed aside by his half-brother, Maurecat, an Illegitimate son of Alfonso the Catholic, who died in 789. Alfonso was then proclaimed king for the second time, the first time having been at the instigation of his aunt, Adosinda, who, instead of taking the veil as the widow of Silo, according to an ancient custom sanctioned by a council, hoped, by establishing her young nephew on the throne, to rule herself. After a two years' rei-n he was dethroned by the church-deacon Bermudo I one of his relations, and incarcerated in a cloister The monk was everywhere defeated by the victorious troops of Hicham I. Alfonso was drawn out of his retreat and Bermudo suddenly remembered that he could not be king as he had taken orders. The Mussulmans pil- ^ged and destroyed Alfonso's capital (794),- probably Oviedo, though Silo and Maurecat had resided else- where - undertook another successful raid in 795 under Abd-al-carim, ~ who destroyed the capital again and in- flicted enormous losses on the " polytheists " (Chris- tians},-and were brilliantly repaid by Alfonso's capture Sto James of Compostella. 149 and pillaging of Lisbon in 796, and the dread which he inspired by his alliance with the formidable Charle- magne. Charlemagne's death in 814 left the imperial throne vacant. It was filled by his son Louis, who caused his second son. Pippin, to be crowned king of Aquitania, which included Aquitania proper, Vasconia, Toulouse, Carcasone in Septimania, and Autun, Ava- lon, and Nevers in Burgundy. The Spanish March, founded in the northeast of the peninsula by the Franks, was separated from this nwe kingdom and erected into an independent duchy whose capital was Barcelona. The count of Barcelona under the Prank- ish administration became also duke of Septimania, and recognized only the emperor and his eldest son as his lords. Alfonso II., called the Chaste, after a reign of half a century, during which he distinguished himself by his piety and vigor, died in the repute of having been the founder of the great Spanish sanctuary of Santiago, at Compostella, in 829. In his day was discovered the burial place of the Apostle James (lago), whose body, after his martyrdom in Palestine, was believed to have been brought by his devoted followers to Spain and buried on the coast of Galicia. Wondrous radiance and visions of angels over the consecrated spot revealed the tomb to the Bishop Theodomir, who hastened to the king with the joyful intelligence; and the exemplary monarch forthwith built a church for the reception of the relics, richly endowed it with lands, and removed the episcopal see of Iria to the new foundation. The building up of church and state thus went on slowly and laboriously, from decade to decade, in the 1 M ! < 150 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest, infant kingdom. 'J'he overthrown cross was set up again ; iron priest and dauntless warrior fought side by side against the common foe ; the destroyed temple was rebuilt; the devastated field recultivated ; the ruined town rehabilitated. Thus it continued in the brief but stirring reign of Alfonso II.'s cousin and successor, Ra- miro (842-50), who quelled many conspiracies against himself ; defeated and burnt seventy ships, belonging to the Norman pirates, on the coast of Galicia; consigned wizards to the flames, put out the eyes of robbers, built monasteries, contended successfully against Abdera- man's armies, and won for himself the name of " the Rod of Justice." " A cry went through the mountains when the proud Moor drew near, And trooping to Ramiro came every Christian spear ; The blessed Saint lago, they called upon his name : — That day began our freedom, and wiped away our shame." Such is the concluding verse of the ballad in which Ramiro's memor}^ is gratefully enshrined. " The reign of King Ramiro was short but glorious. He had not been many months seated on the throne when Abdera- man, the second of that name, sent a formal embassy to demand payment of an odious and ignominious tribute, which had been agreed to in the days of former and weaker princes, but which, it would seem, had not been exacted by the Moors, while such men as Bernardo del Carpio and Alfonso the Great headed the forces of the Christians. This tribute was a hundred virgins />er annum. King Ramiro refused compliance and marched to meet the army of Abderaman. The battle was The Maiden Tribute. 151 fought near Alboyda (or Alveida), and lasted for two entire days. On the first day the superior discipline of the Saracen chivalry had nearly accomplished a com- plete victory, when the approach of night separated the combatants. During the night, Saint lago stood in a vision before the king, and promised to be with him next morning in the field. Accordingly, the warlike apostle made his appearance, mounted on a milk-white charger, and armed cap-a-pie in radiant mail, like a true knight. The Moors sustained a signal defeat, and the " Maiden Tribute '' was never afterwards paid, al- though often enough demanded." Ramiro was succeeded by his son, Ordoiio I., in 850, who devoted his chief care to the restoration and re- peopling of the cities abandoned by Alfonso I., defeated the rebellious Basques and the Norman pirates (859), and died, leaving a pleasant memory to his famous son and follower, Alfonso III. Alfonso had been associated with his father for four years in the government, so that he was not unpre- pared to take control of affairs on the death of Ordono. He pressed further into the dominions of the Moors than any previous Christian prince. Burgos, the bul- wark of Spain against the infidels on the east side, rose into prominence during his reign, and he strengthened his possessions by the building of numerous fortresses and castles. A marriage with Ximene, daughter of Garcias Iniguez, brought him into intimate association with the reigning house of Navarre. He crossed the Duero and conquered the chief towns of Lusitania, pushing his conquests to the vicinity of Merida and the Sierra Morena. Contending with continual conspiracies u H ^n 152 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. instigated by Count Froila and his own brothers, he suffered the further mortification of seeing his son Garcias and his wife weaving plots against him, and finally abdicated in favor of Garcias. The younger brother, Ordono, received Galicia ; Froila (Fruella), As- turias ; and Garcias, Leon. Alfonso retired to Santiago to hide his wounded feelings in devotion, but came forth once more and battled triumphantly against the Moors of Toledo, dying, after a reign of forty-four years, in 910. With Alfonso III. closes the series of ^wx^Xy Asturiati kings, and Garcias, who took up his residence in Leon, was the first king of LeoJi, as the Christian kings north of the Duero thenceforth named themselves. The ori- gin of the name of the town dates from the establish- ment of the seventh Roman /<^/^ (Legio VIL Gcviina) there, and the town remained stubbornly Roman till taken by Leovigild in 585. The Arabs held Leon but a short time, and its walls of great and massive strength admirably adapted it for being the stronghold of Span- ish Christendom as it had been of the Romans. The conquests of Alfonso IIL had gradually but surely moved forward the centre of the Christian power toward the centre of the peninsula, and incalculable might have been the results, had not, as so often in Spanish history, the slowly evolving kingdom been torn by dissensions resulting from a division of its resources among the three brothers. The consequence was three short and tumultuous reigns — Garcias (910-14), Ordono IL (914-924), and Froila IL (924-925) — the first of whom died childless, the second campaigned success- fully against the great Khalif Abderaman III., and the CARROX, MOSCiUE OF CORDOVA. ' t I i 152 ChriMlan Spain to the Almoravide Conquest, instigated by Count Froila and his own brothers, he suffered the further mortification of seeing his son Garcias and his wife weaving plots against him, and finally -abdicated in favor of Garcias. The younger brother, Ordono, received Galicia ; Froila (Fruella), As- turias ; and Garcias, Leon. Alfonso retired to Santiago to hide his wounded feelings in devotion, but came forth once more and battled triumphantly against the Moors of Toledo, dying, after a reign of forty-four years, in 910. With Alfonso III. closes the series of purely Asfur/a/i kings, and Garcias, who took up his residence in Leon, was the first king of Zeo//, as the Christian kings north of the Duero thenceforth named themselves. The ori- gin of the name of the town dates from the establish- ment of the seventh Roman A;^/^ (Legio VI L Gcminn) there, and the town remained stubbornly Roman till taken by Leovigild in 585. The Arabs held Leon but a short time, and its walls of great and massive strength admirably adapted it for being the stronghold of Span- ish Christendom as it had been of the Romans. The conquests of Alfonso III. had gradually but surely moved forward the centre of the Christian power toward the centre of the peninsula, and incalculable might have been the results, had not, as so often in Spanish history, the slowly evolving kingdom been torn by dissensions resulting from a division of its resources among the three brothers. The consequence was three short and tumultuous reigns — Garcias (910-14), Ordono II. (914-924), and Froila II. (924-925) — the first of whom died childless, tlie second campaigned success- fully against the great Khalif Abderaman III., and the niE ZA.NCAKKON, MOSQUE OF CORDOVA. Ramiro IL 155 :? third, supplanting his brother Ordono's children, died of leprosy, says the chronicle, after a reign of fourteen months. Alfonso IV., the Blind, or the monk, a son of Ordono II., grasped the sceptre with weak and vacillating hand, between 925 and 930. Devoted to pious exercises, he abdicated in favor of his brother Ramiro II. (93i-95o)» retired to the convent of Sahagun (Domnos Sanctos), repented of his abdication, flew to arms while Ramiro was fighting the Saracens, was defeated and blinded, and died, leaving a memory compounded of bigotry, irresolution, and duplicity. The chroniclers pass over the nineteen years of the reign of Ramiro II. in almost absolute silence. The count of Castile, Fernan Gonzalez, and the Castilian grandee, Diego Munoz, revolted against Ramiro, were defeated and imprisoned, and released under oath of alle- giance to the king of Leon. Ordono married his eldest son Ordono to Urraca, Gonzalez' daughter, won a bril- liant victory over the infidels at Talavera, left numerous monastic establishments as memorials of his religious faith, and died in 950, leaving the throne to his eldest son Ordono III., a prince of distinguished resolution, caution, valor, and experience. His brother Sancho, aided by the refractory count of Castile, rebelled against him; but the proclamation of the "holy war" against the Christians by Abderaman united the Span- iards, and gave them a glorious success on the banks of the Duero. Sancho I. (the Fat), followed his brother in 957, but was soon driven into exile by the ambitious and unmanageable Fernan Gonzalez, who was bent on securing the independence of Castile. Sancho took I ii I 156 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest, refuge with the noble-minded Khalif of Cordova, .was cured of his excessive corpulency by the skill of the Arabian physicians, and, assisted by Abderaman's troops, expelled the pretender, Ordono the Bad, from Leon, forced him into exile among the Moslems, and finally succumbed himself to a poisoned apple sent him by count Gonzalo Sanchez of Galicia, in 966. Dona Elvira, aunt of the five-year-old heir to the crown, Ram- iro III. (966-982), a woman of great wisdom and ability, managed the kingdom during the minority of her nephew, and destroyed a Norman fleet of one hundred vessels, w^hich had ravaged Galicia and the sea-coast. A nar- row-minded, mendacious, and arrogant stripling, Ramiro III. totally estranged die affections of his people; the grandees rebelled and offered the crown to Bermudo II., the Gouty (982-999), — a vigorous though physi- cally ailing spirit, celebrated for the misfortunes which his government underwent at the hands of the terrible Almansor. His own nobles called the Moors into the land, stole and divided his treasures, caused the de- struction of his capital and innumerable villages, churches, and cloisters, the desecration of the great sanctuary of Santiago by the Moors, and a state of pitiable ruin and disaster throughout Christian Spain. The destruction and misery were partially obliterated by his son, Alfonso V. (999-1028), who rebuilt the walls, churches, and convents of Leon, and held there the famous council of prelates and grandees in 1020, so epoch-making for the legislation of this part of Spain. He was slain by an arrow during the siege of Viseu, on the Mondego, in 1028. The curse of mediaeval Spain perpetually recurs, — long Bermiido's Minority. 157 H minorities of her princes, during which the countr}^ is delivered over to the heartless intrigues of the nobles. Bermudo HI. (1028-1037) had this hapless experience, saw his capital taken away from him by the ambitious and powerful Sancho Mayor, king of Navarre,— who reigned from the summit of the Pyrenees to the bounda- ries of Galicia,— and only after the latter's death in 1035, re-appeared as king of Leon. Sancho had conquered Castile, and left his kingdom in such a way that his son Garcias held possession of Navarre with Alava; Ferdinand, Castile, with prospective rights to Leon, Galicia, and Asturias, in case Bermudo died without children ; and the bastard Ramiro, Aragon. The two combined against Bermudo ; a bloody battle ensued, and Bermudo, rushing impetuously forward to measure lances with his princely enemies, was killed. With him the male line of the kings of Leon expired, and, as his only son had died soon after birth, Ferdinand therefore succeeded to the crown of Leon. Whilst a kingdom thus painfully and piece-meal rose in the west of the peninsula, a little state, or confed- eracy of states, began a similar line of development in the east. The spirit of the eastern population of Spain had always been singularly fresh and stirring. The climate, the situation of the land, and the intimate association with France, stimulated these small countyships and prin- cipalities wonderfully. Thus between the protecting Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, in Catalonia, rose s. nationality whose fundamental tone was Gothic and Spanish, yet whose constituent elements were so com- r III lb6 Christiaji Spain to the Almoravide Cofiquest. plex, owing to foreign influence, and wide-extended commercial relations abroad and at home, that the nationality as a whole came to form an easy transition between sharply individualized Spain and the more cos- mopolitan spirit of Italy, France, and Germany. The earliest history of the province of Barcelona is closely bound up with that of the south of France, l^ie " Spanish March " separated, with Septimania, from the kingdom given by the Emperor Louis to his son Pippin, in the south of France, embraced the four dioceses of Barce- lona, Gerona, Urgel, and Ausona. It extended beyond the limits of Vasconia and embraced counties belonging later to Aragon. Barcelona was the capital, and the counts of Barcelona, called by their contemporaries also dukes of Barcelona, were at once counts of the March of Spain, and dukes of Septimania. 71ieir task was to watch and protect this important borderland (hence march, or marl:) against the menacing growth of the Saracens. Their remoteness from the central authority and their power were so great that they soon coveted and effected their independence. About 865 Septimania was separated from the county of Barcelona. Wifrid the Hair>^ is the first count after the separation that offers any certain point about which to group his- torical facts. It is not, however, till the great name of the Berenguers is reached, in the eleventh century, that Catalonia, so-called by a Pisan chronicler in '11 14, assumes decided importance in the affairs of the country. Raymond Berenguer I. was grandson of Raymond, whose reign, with that of his brother, extended from 977 to 1017, a period filled with the splendid achievements LawH of Barcelona, 159 of Almansor and marked by the acme and decline of the Mahometan Khalifate of Cordova. Under the princes of this name, both Raymonds and Raymond Berenguers, the county swiftly progressed in internal development and external extent (1076). Under Ray- mond Berenguer 1., were promulgated those remarkable usages or laws of Barcelona which, for seven hundred years, formed the foundation of the civil administration of Catalonia. In thus giving his land its peculiar leg- islation, P.aymond was equally intent upon insuring its independence within and without. It is said that he acquired such supremacy over the Moslems that twelve kings (emirs and walls) of Spain paid annual tribute to him as to their lord. He sullied the brightness of his honor, however, by accepting gold from the infidels, exciting Christians against Christians, shedding the blood of his people in the cause of fugitive and shameless Mos- lems, and playing the allies of the infidels in their civil wars against one another, for the aggrandizement of him self. He died in 1076 (as did his son Raymond Beren- guer II. in 1092), while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The third of the name' extended the territory and re- sources of his land more than either of his predecessors, and united, by inheritance, with Barcelona the counties of Cerdagne, Berga, and Conflant, Capcir, and a part of Rasez (1111-1117). Marriage with Dolce, countess of Aries or Provence, in 11 12, brought him other extensive possessions north of the Pyrenees ; and he assumed the title of count of Barcelona and Spain, Besalu, and Provence. His conquest of Majorca in union with the Pisan fleet, in 1114-1115, resulted in the liberation of thirty 160 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest, thousand captive Christians on one day ; but the con- quest was soon lost. Throwing off ecclesiastical alle- giance to the archbishop of Narbonne, on the other side of the Pyrenees, he erected Tarragona into an arch- bishopric, and made of it the metropolitan see, after the conquest of Saragossa from the Moslems in 1118. En- tering the order of the Templars, he dedicated himself indefatigably to knightly encounters with the " accursed sons of Mahoun." On his death, in ii3i,he left the Spanish March, with all its belongings, to his eldest son, Raymond Berenguer IV., and to the youngest, Beren- guer Raymond, Provence and his possessions in Ro- vergne, Gevaudan, and Carlad. In 1137 the Spanish March was united with Aragon, and began at once a new and interesting period.* * As the accounts of the early history of Barcelona, Na- varre, Castile, Aragon, and the Asturias are conflicting, I have preferred to follow Lembke I., Schdfer II., and Dozy, Kechcrches, I. andU. J^ M i If CHAPTER VIII. CHRISTIAN SPAIN TO THE ALMOEAYIDE CONQUEST. [continued.] ONLY once, hitherto, under Sancho the Great, was it permitted to Navarre to play a striking part in the affairs of Spain. Its precipice-guarded mountain- land was favorable to independence, though eyed with covetousness by the foreigner, as a borderland and en- trance into the peninsula. Navarre had been the gate- way of the Saracens into France, and became the guide of France into Spain. The early and marvellous ex- pansion of Leon and Castile had, however, prevented Navarre from becoming a great power, Fortunate cir- cumstances had enabled Sancho the Great to exercise an evanescent lordship from Pampelona down over almost the wliole of Catholic Spain. But his short- sighted division of his kingdom among his sons, put the finishing blow to a lasting preponderance of his kingdom, and in the bosom of the Pyrenees created Aragon, which soon overshadowed the motherland. Pampelona and Navarre were ruled by counts, or dukes dependent upon the Prankish kings until they cast off the yoke, aided by their difficult position and the weakness and neglect of the Prankish overlords. The hardy and warlike Basques were perpetually in revolt against their own rulers and the kings of Asturias 163 *. < 164 Christian Spain to the Ahnoravide ConqueH, and Leon. The marriage of Alfonso III. (866-910) with Ximene, a daughter of Garcias Iniguez, who de- duced his origin from Peter, duke of Cantabria, of the Visigothic royal house, shows at least the existence of an important independent reigning house in Navarre, and a land sundered both from the Frankish and the Asturian kingdom in the latter part of the ninth century. Though Garcias Iniguez does not seem to have been a king, his daughter married a king, and his son, Sancho Garcias {-sox-z is a patronymic ending of descent), took the kingly title in 905. He conquered Pampelona and the whole domain of Aragon, with its castles ; snatched all the fortified places, from Naxera to Tudela on the Cantabrian side, from the Saracens ; and at his death, in 925, left his kingdom clean of the misbelievers. His son Garcias reigned from 925 to 970, and "fought many battles with the Saracens," laconically register the chronicles. Of his two sons, Sancho and Ramiro, the first, as king of Navarre, through conquest, mar- riage, and skilful utilization of favorable circumstances, gave his realm an extent and importance unrivalled in the annals of Navarre by predecessor or successor. After the murder of the Castilian count Garcias, the king of Navarre, as son-in-law of count Sancho, got possession of Castile, and occupied in Leon, the region between the rivers Pisuerga and Cea. His division of the kingdom before his death in 1035, has already been mentioned. Garcias, the first-born, got Navarre, with Viscaya, hitherto united with Catalonia ; Ferdinand, Castile an- 1 the land between the Cea and the Pisuerga ; and Ramiro, a natural son, the countyship of Aragon. The little countyship of Aragon, originally such a Rise of Aragon, 165 speck on the map of Spain, possesses an interest in political history second only to that of Catalonia. The situation and nature of the two lands are not more different than the psychological peculiarities of their inhabitants. The vivid-minded Catalonian, absorbed in municipal life and industrial pursuits, turned towards the brilliant and animated Mediterranean, and thence wafted to every part of the world, devoted to sea-faring and sea-trade, lively, poetic, and chivalrous, forms the most utter contrast with the Aragonese, bred m his lonely mountains and valleys, everlastingly and fiercely fight- incr with the Moors, strange to culture and refinement, proudly and stoically secluded, and yet developing, in his savage solitude, a code which, in its singularly broad and enlightened views of civil liberty, constitutional government, and the limitations of power, is rivalled only by the great charter wrung from King John of England, at Runnymede. Darkness shrouds the rise of Aragon as it does tha of Leon, the Asturias, Castile, and Navarre. The small extent of the county, its inaccessible position, and its primitive unimportance, make it suffer at the hands o the chroniclers. Count Bernard, one of the sons of Vaudregisel, a descendant of Eudes, duke of Aquitania, was one of the earliest Aragonese "watchers of the borderland," in virtue of his marriage with Theuda, daughter of Galindo, the count of Aragon. Galindo was the second 'count, and is expressly called the Count of Aragon. Originally conquered, with the aid of the Franks, by Count Bernard, it was united with Navarre by King Sancho Garcias, and fell to the bastard son of Sancho the Great, Ramiro, who assumed the title ot «§' \ ■ 166 christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest, king, and increased his realm by wars with the Moors, and by steady endowment and building up of the great mediaeval church organization of Spain. Civil war broke out between the three brothers. Garcias fell in battle in 1054; his whole territory down to the Ebro came into the hands of Ferdinand ; and Ramiro died at the siege of Grados in 1063, leaving a son, Sancho Ramirez, who completely expelled all the Moors from the mountains of Aragon, and from Sobrarbe, Ribagorza, and Barbastro, in the plains (1065). The murder of King Sancho of Navarre in 1076, by his brother Ray- mond, enabled the kings of Castile and Aragon to occupy the now confused and headless kingdom. Sancho Ramirez therefore gained Pampelona, and Alfonso VI. of Castile and Leon occupied Rioja and Calahorra, and the provinces Alava, Guipuzcoa, and Biscay. The murderer fled to the court of the Emir of Saragossa, whose central position, almost in the midst of the Chris- tian principalities, enabled him long to hold the balance of power in his hands, and become equally formidable as foe or ally of his neighbors. Navarre, to the Ebro, remained bound up with Aragon till its separation again, in 1 134. We find an intensely active guerrilla warfare against the Mussulmans carried on all this time, and the king, Sancho Ramirez, spread with restless energy his conquests further and further to the south, fortify- ing his frontier as he went. In 1093 the Christians poured like a devastating stream into the Moslem domain; forty thousand armed and unarmed persons were slaughtered in the captured towns, and innumer- able women and children dragged into captivity. The heroic monarch died of a poisoned arrow at the siege of Huesca, in 1094. Castile. 167 The capture of Huesca became the persevering task of Pedro I., his successor on the throne — a city which was the bulwark of the Mahometan power in eastern Spain. It surrendered in 1096. The possession of so important a place lightened the task of the capture of Saragossa, which was accomplished by his successor. Pedro died in 11 04 in great repute for justice, ortho- doxy, and knightliness. About the middle of the eighth century, in the time of Alfonso I., what, a century later, was called Castile, was called Bardulia. Castile, as a name, was already familiar in the days of Alfonso III. A few decades after, the domain of Castile had so extended that it came to be called " Old " Castile in contra-distinction to the ever-widening conquests to the south ; the same name was applied to the territory of Toledo, afterwards acquired by the kings of Leon and Castile, though with the designation " New " Castile. The whole land down to the "Puertos de Guadarrama," or ''gates of the Guadarrama " mountains, was called Old Castile \ south- wards from this point. New Castile. At one time, how- ever, the term "Old" Castile was applied more partic- ularly to that domain which constituted the primitive seat of the " county of Castile," and within this domain formed the inerindad of Villarcayo, as distinguished from the territory of Burgos, which was preferably called " Castile." Alfonso I. and his successors, as kings of Asturias, undoubtedly installed governors over the first conquests made in the north of Castile. But the first knowledge 168 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Canquest. ■■I we have of " counts " of Castile is of Rodrigo and Diego, father and son, the former of whom founded Amaya in 860 as the capital, at that time, of the prov- ince, and the latter peopled Burgos, twenty-four years later (884). There were numerous counts in the differ- ent districts of the countr}^ several of whom Ordono caused to be apprehended and put to death for rebel- lion in 923, a fact which speaks eloquently for the dependence of Castile at that time. From the year 935 Fernan Gonzalez, one of the most famous and cap- tivating of Spanish ballad-figures, appears as single count of Castile, striving though unsuccessfully for independence against Ramiro II. Ramiro courted his friendship, however, by marrying his son to the power- ful count's daughter, thinking thus to have woven an in- extricable woof of dependence for him. Gonzalez, how- ever, — a treacherous and ungovernable grandee,— struggled unceasingly in the succeeding reigns ' of Ordono III. and the weak Sancho I., but without avail. Castile remained obedient to Leon. It was a vast step towards independence, however, that his son, Garcia Fernandez, followed him immedi- ately in the administration of the province. The Count Fernan Gonzalez is the centre of a thou- sand radiations of delicate and fantastic poetry, They have carried afar into Navarre the great count of Castile, And they have bound him sorely, they have bound him hand and heel ; The tidings up the mountains, and down among the valleys, " To the rescue ! to the rescue, ho ! - they have ta'en Fernan Gonzalez 1 " \-j.-» i i^ _RRE DE LAS INFANTAS, Fernan Gonzalez. 171 • ^ iJnP*^ of one of these charming Such are the opening lines or one u bucn are L f ^^.^^i.^ed bv Lockhart, who con- legends so musically rendered b> i. .^^ tinues • " The story of Fernan Gonzalez circumstances, that certain modern cnt.cs h ^ be n inclined to think it entirely fabulous O/^^e mam facts recorded, there seems, l----^ *° ^? "°f ^t reason to doubt; and it is quite certam *at from he earliest times the name of Fernan Gonzalez ha bee held in the highest honor by the Spaniards themsel es of every decree. He lived at the begmnnrg of the Itrdntur;. It was under his rule, according to the rroiicles, that Castile first become an m ependen Christian state, and ^^^^^ :;::r:^X foundations were laid of that system ot j which the Moorish power in Spam was at last o^er ''Te was so fortunate as to have a wife as hero^ - himself, and both in the chronicles and m the ballads, abundant justice is done to her merits. "She twice rescued Fernan Gonzalez from confine^ ,.ent at he risk of her own life. He asked, or designed Task her hand in marriage of her father, Garcias, king of Na'va re and was on his way to that prince's court, when he was seized and cast into a dungeon, m conse- :"of the machinations of Ms enemy, the queen o Leon sister to the king of Navarre. Sancha the young princess, to whose alliance he had aspired, being 172 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Coiiquest, informed of the cause of his journey, and of the suffer- ings to which it had exposed him, determined at all hazards to effect his liberation ; and having done so, by bribing his jailer, she accompanied his flight to Castile. Many years after, he fell into an ambush prepared for him by the same implacable enemy, and was again a fast prisoner in Leon. His countess, feigning a pil- grimage to Compostella, obtained leave, in the first place, to pass through the hostile territory, and after- wards in the course of her progress, to spend one night in the castle where her husband was confined. She exchanged clothes with him ; and he was so fortunate as to pass in his disguise through the guards who attended on him." Under Count Sancho, grandson of Fernan Gonzalez, the foundation was laid for the complete independence of Castile, by the marriage of his daughter to Sancho of Navarre. On the murder of his son and heir, Garcias, by the Vela brothers at the church door (1026), the Castilian male line became extinct, and the king of Navarre claimed Castile in virtue of his beins: the brother-in-law of the deceased. Then Bermudo III., king of Castile and Leon, gave his sister Sancha in marriage to Ferdinand, second son of the king of Navarre, with cession of the land between the Cea and Pisuerga. After that time Castile began to grow up into an independent kingdom. Ferdinand became count of Castile, which fell to him as hereditary posses- sion on Sancho's division of the three kingdoms at his death. After Ferdinand I.'s coronation as king of Leon and Castile, he ruled over lands extending from the coast Ferdinand of Leon and Castile. 173 of Galicia to the borders of Navarre - a po^ver whtch roused ^reat apprehensions among the Moslems. To vTover^he Leonese,.he resorted to the favorUe mean o reconciliation of the early Spanish ktngs- a means out of which grew the whole" marvellous fabnc of early spa sh UbertL and prerogatives.-confirmedthetrown flros or laws, and added new ones to these^ The Ireat assembly of Coyanza held in .050, was of stnk- i',. si<^nificance for the subsequent civil and ecclesiasti- cs" legislation at Castile. Ferdinand devoted special attenti;,! to the education of his sons, had them in- structed in the sciences, in arms, riding, and the chase and his daughters grew up with all the ornaments of ilanhood.^ His states flourished under his sagaaous administration and he triumphed over h.s u„na - i- • . ^f M^virre in io;4, when Garcias ten hrother Garcias oi rMa\arrc, ui a'^^h-? 1 al ; wounded in battle. The usual intermmable war against the Moslems was religiously maintained. M the assembly held in Leon about 1063-4 he com- mitted the fatal error, oblirious of the evil effects of his father-s example, of parcelling out his realm among his three sons and two daughters. Alfonso, whom he loved best, was to have Leon and Asturias ; Sancho the eldest Castile ; Garcias, the youngest, Galicia ; and the daughters, Urraca, and Elvira the cities of Zamora and Toro, with the patronage of all the convents in the kingdom, on condition of remaining unwedded. (Both died about I loi). The most notable achievement of his late old age was the siege and capture of the populous city of Coimbra ; and he lived to see the Emirs of To- ledo, Seville, Badajoz, and Saragossa in a certain dependence on him. Feeling his end. approaching, he Hi 174 Christian Spain to the AJmoravide Co7iquest, put on the royal vestments, had himself borne to the church of San Juan, prayed aloud humbly before the assembled dignitaries, removed the royal insignia, and putting on the penitential garment died in the arms of the priest, in 1065. Love for his children had thus caused Ferdinand to sow seeds of discord which did not fail to bring forth an hundred fold. An ignoble strife broke out between Alfonso and Sancho ; Sancho seized his brother's dominions, banished Alfonso to Toledo, and drove Gar- cias into exile. Only a single town and a single woman ventured to withstand his resistless arms — the Lady Urraca of Zamora, the elder sister — a quaint and in- finitely attractive profile, as she peeps out of the old ballads and throws her delicate body athwart all this stormy tumult. Sancho besieged Zamora and was mur- dered there by one of the knights of the town (1072) ; whereupon his ready-witted sister sent post-haste to Alfonso in Toledo, where he had been entertained with boundless hospitality by the Emir. Alfonso recovered his estates as expeditiously as he had lost them, granted privileges to his people, — among them the abolition of the burdensome way-toll exacted of all pilgrims jour- neying to the shrine of Santiago de Compostella, — cast his brother Garcias into lifelong imprisonment, and thus secured to himself control over Galicia. It was partly in his days— a hundred years after all Spain had rung with the romantic story of the "seven most noble brothers called the infants of Lara" — that the celebrated Cid, champion cf Spain, did those wonder- ful deeds whose echoes die away with the century as they mingle with the on-coming shout of the soldiers of the fir'^t crusade. '^^X^l.m * ^-■^ I! I I 11' * «-i£>«^ - \ WmM:?i •'J ■ ;^^4i^ i ' '■ '-\ '<^c^ YOUNG VALENCIANS. 4V1. CHAPTER IX. FROM THE ALMORAVIDE CONQUEST TO FERDI- NAND AND ISABELLA. THE task of unravelling the complicated threads of the Spanish dynasties and then twining them to-ether in a clear and harmonious whole, is one of some difficulty ; and it is hard to fix the reader's atten- tion on so many radiating lines of development until they all converge and coalesce in the persons of Ferdi- nand and Isabella. The numerous Alfonsos, the con- fusing Sanchos, the series of Ferdinands, Juans, and Pedros often contemporaries though reigning over dif- ferent kingdoms ; the five-fold, almost simultaneous development of Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, Astunas with Leon and Castile, and, later on, the western king- dom of Portugal ; together with the perpetual dissolv- ing and recombining panorama of Saracenic Spam, with its Khalifate, kingdoms, and short-lived republics ; tend to bewilder and overwhelm the student. Fortu- nately, however, the history of Spain is full of illumina- ted points, to which, in the general darkness the eye may turn, and around which cluster the true destinies of the country. These are great battles and illustrious reigns — Xeres de la frontera, Zallaca, Las Navas de 185 186 To Ferdinand and Isabella, Tolosa, Marcos — events epoch-making in their far- reaching consequences, which both reader and writer welcome as lighthouses and lode-stars. Such, at present, was the battle of Zallaca, fought in 1086, between Yousof, king of Morocco, and Alfonso VI., *' emperor of Castile," and his allies, Sancho Ram- irez of Aragon and Navarre, and Raymond Berenguer of Barcelona. Alfonso's army, the noblest that Spain had ever seen, was cut to pieces, and the " emperor " himself barely escaped with five hundred cavaliers out of a reputed strength of one hundred thousand. The conquest of Seville by Yousof in 109 1, followed by that of the Balearic Isles, gave the whole of Mussulman Spain to the Almoravides. In three years the barba- rous hordes of Africa, called in by a fatal oversight to oppose the great and admirable genius of Alfonso, extirpated the " rootless sovereignties " of the south,' and re-established a Mahometan empire like that of the Omaiyades, only on a broader basis. Alfonso's inac- tivity was ascribed to his expeditions against Lisbon and Santarem, which he gave in feoff to his son-in-law, Count Henry of Besan9on, Burgundian founder of the kingdom of Portugal. The year 1099, famous for the capture of Jerusalem by the crusaders, was locally celebrated in Spain as the death-year of the Cid. The death of Yousof, in his hundredth year (i 106),— the great general who mingled cruelty, perfidy, ingrati- tude, and iron insensibility with the strange virtues of religious enthusiasm and humility,— whom two-thirds of Spam and half of Africa obeyed as sole sovereign; whose realms reached from Fraga to Cadiz, and from " Give me my Son! '' 187 Tunis and Tangier to the golden mountains of the negroes ; whom thirteen emirs saluted as '' Prince of the Faithful," and for whom prayers were said in nineteen thousands pulpits — the death of Yousof for a moment shook the Almoravide supremacy ; but it speedily set- tled in the quiet possession of Ali, Yousof's son, like Abderaman III., the son of a Christian woman. Alfonso VI. died in 11 09, broken hearted at the death of his only son, Sancho, son of a daughter of the emir of Seville by an illegitimate union. He had no male heir by his six lawful wives, the first of whom was Agathe, daughter of William the Conqueror. Don San- ch'o was killed at the disaster of Uccles, twenty-two years after the defeat of Zallaca. The story of his death, and of his aged father's grief, is infinitely touching. " Alas, my son ! " — we translate from the Galician le- gend of Sandoval — " alas, my son ! joy of my heart and light of my eyes, solace of my old age ! alas, my mirror, in whom I was wont to see myself, and in whom I took very great delight ! O, my heir ! — cavaliers, where have ye left him? Give me my son, counts!" And he went on repeating, " Give me my son, counts ! " It is from the reign of Alfonso VI. that dates the true greatness of Castile, which, from his time on, as- cended steadily to the first rank of the peninsular states. Twice vanquished, and thirly-nine times victor, Alfonso was called the " Buckler of Faith," and named himself " Imperator Hesperiae." At his death, the water flowed for three days from the foot of the altar of Saint Isi- dore of Leon, as if the stones themselves had to shed tears ! The death of Pedro 1. in 1104, left the crown of Ara- 188 To Ferdinand and Isabella. gon vacant to his brother, Alfonso I., the real source of the power of Aragon. Alfonso had married the eldest daughter of Alfonso VI. of Castile, Dona Urraca — a sanguinary termagant, whose licentious amours, violence, and recklessness place her upon the most unenviable pedestal of historic viragoes. The Latin of the chron- icles becomes piquantly ungrammatical in its naive de- lineations of this " sceleratissima vipera," as it calls her, and her whole reign — she died in 1126 — is con- densed by one of them in these words: **Tyrannice et muliebriter regnavit ! " she reigned like a woman and a tyrant. It took all the virtues of Isabel the Catholic to wipe out the memory of the vices of Urraca. The in- terminable feuds of the great houses of the Laras and the Castros added to the horrors of the minority of Al- fonso VII., the Emperor, for whom Urraca, as his mother, held the kingdom in trust. Meanwhile the knell of the Alm.oravide dynasty had rung. Out of the depths of Africa, that seething caul- dron of religious ideas and revolutions, arose the Ma- hadi, Abdallah-ibn-Toumert, " whose father lighted the lamps in a mosque," and who himself was to light the funeral pyre of the Almoravides. He called himself the Messiah, announced for ages as the saviour of men, and in 1120, began to propagate his doctrine of a puri- fied Islamism restored to its primitive simplicity. His sect called the Almohades (Unitarians), spread with won- derful rapidity in the fierce and easily fecundated air of x^frica. Abdallah associated with himself a man of noble mien and commanding presence, Abdelmoumen, whose business it was to fight the battles of the Almo- hades while Abdallah, with flashing eyes and strange Abdelmoumen' s End. 189 eloquence promulgated the gospel of his belief. Abdel- moumen, by his remarkable talents as a general, routed the troops of Ali and became Emir of Africa. The fortune of the Almoravides declined, also, in the penin- sula, under Tachfin, All's son ; for the Almoravides had become odious to the Andalusian Mussulmans and Spain was ripe for a revolt. The fate of Tachfin was to die by falling over a precipice in Africa, m ii45- Purchasing the neutrality of Alfonso, the redoubtable enemy of their faith, the Andalusians shook off the yoke of the Almoravides. Thirty thousand Almohades, how- ever sent by Abdelmoumen to pave the way to the con- quest of Spain, disembarked at Algesiras, in 1146 j the Almoravides sought a last refuge in the island of Ma- iorca (II 57) ; and the Almohades triumphed definitively over their foes in Andalusia in the same year, ever mem- orable for the death of Abdelmoumen's renowned rival in fortune and glory, the Emperor Alfonso VII., which took place in a last enterprise against the Saracens. His death contributed more than anything else to estab- lish the domination of the Almohades, accomplished, it would seem, without the presence of their chief ; but the death of Abdelmoumen in 1162, gave a great shock to the recently established kingdom. The last years of Abdelmoumen's life were consecrated to the administra- tion of his vast dominions, now stretching from the Nile to the ocean ; and in them he introduced an order rare- ly known under the purely personal sovereignty of the Commanders of the Faithful. He had his possessions skilfully surveyed, as a basis for an exact taxation, founded manufactories of arms, and built an immense fleet. The empire founded by him was one of the most ii 190 To Ferd'nmid and IsahcUcu m powerful that ever dominated the world of Islam, and its character in Spain was less brutal than that of the Almoravide supremacy had been. The Emir himself was a singular mixture of grandeur and pettiness • sub- tle, bloodthirsty, pitiless, the Arab historians celebrate his liberality, eloquence, equity, and learning; his step was full of dignity, and he scorned the sensual luxuries of life. An illustrative feature of the character of the times IS shown by the conduct of the ferocious grandee, Rod- ngo of Lara, one of the strangest types of the indomi- table race of Castilian ricos omes. He had his prisoners harnessed with oxen to the plough, forced them to eat grass in the fields and straw in the stables, and drink water out of the marshes ; and when he was tired of this pastime sent them home naked and despoiled of ever}'thing they had. Alfonso the Fighter, first of the great kings of Aragon seems to have fallen on the champ dolent of Fraga fightinc^ against the Mussulmans. His passion for the fray won him the title of EI Batallador, and but for the c^vil wars that desolated his reign, - if Alfonso of Castile and Alfonso of Aragon had united their forces, — Spain might have been freed, three hundred years before it was, from the odious minions of Islam. The Ara-on- ese hero greatly extended his realm at the expense"* of the Moors, conquered Saragossa, and, on the other side of the Pyrenees, had as vassals nearly all the French and Basque lords of the frontier. He bequeathed his kingdom, for lack of immediate heirs, to the orders of St. John, of Jerusalem, and the Holy Sepulchre The cartes refused to execute the king's will, and gave the The Lex Vixujothorum. 193 crown to the monk, Ramiro 11., brother of the king. Navarre seized the opportunity to throw off the Ara- eonese voke, and elected as its king, Garcia Ramirez, called tlL Restorer, grandson of Sancho III. and the ^ We cannot pass over the close of the Castilian mon- arch's long and glorious career without a concluding word! He'died, under an oak by the roadside at Puerto de Muradal, in 1 157, having reigned over Galicia, in the person of Urraca and himself, forty-seven years, forty over Leon and Castile, and twenty-two, as Emperor, over all Christian and a part of Mussulman Spain. He had during his lifetime given to his son Sancho the Well-beloved, Castile and Biscay, and to Ferdinand, Leon, Galicia, Estremadura, and the right of suzerainty over Portugal. One of his daughters had married the young king of Navarre, another, the son of Raymond of Aragon, and a third, Louis the Young, king of France. At the close of his life he was a mediator among tne rival princes of Spain, and endeavored to combine all the forces of Christianity against its eternal enemy. Though he did not give his country monarchical uni y, he gave it feudal unity, defended the faith zealously, enriched the clergy with his gifts without stooping too low under their inflexible yoke, and, by his successes over the Saracens, opened the way to the speedy con- quest of Seville and Cordova. As, however, the history of a people is to be found much more in its institutions than in the sterile cata- Toguing of its kings ; asthe Gothic realm reflects itself in the Z... Visigothorum, and the Arabic in the Koran so it will be well to glance at the civil and political or- 194 To Ferdinand and Isabella, ganization of Christian Spain as mirrored in \X.?>fiieros or charters. The term ///^/^x is here narrowly restricted to the char- ters granted by the kings to the cities founded by them, or to those whose privileges they wished to confirm or ex- tend as an inducement to keep them settled. Unwritten fueros, or bodies of customs and usages, existed in Spain long before written ones. The first of the written ///^r^j seems to have been that of Leon, granted by Alfonso V. in 1 020. This is the most ancient monument of Spanish jurisprudence. Then came that of Naxera, granted by Sancho the Great, of Navarre; then that of Burgos, about 1039 ; but it is especially to Alfonso VI., the conqueror of Toledo, that is due the majority of the fueros of this golden age of Spanish municipal legisla- tion. The famous fuero viejo of Castile was conceded by Count Sancho (995-1015) — incontestably the oldest of the customary codes, though whether the first writ- ten or not is controverted. It reappears, under mani- fold forms, all through the municipal history of the peninsula. Most of these municipal codes were entirely local and derived from custom, and the forum jiidi- cum of the Goths. A wonderful spirit of liberty and conciliation prevails through them all, and out of them grew that jealous pride of independence so character- istic of Mediaeval Spain. They encouraged by special concessions the growth of communities, restricted the authority of the great lords, augmented the power of the throne, recognized the sanctity of the household, established equality before the law for all members of a community, gave right of asylum and citizenship to Jews, carefully regulated taxation, encouraged the growth Eternal Dissensions, 195 of population by branding bachelorhood with igno- miny, founded a rigorous penal code for crimes of every description ; and thus, under their influence, in the ad- vanced and desolate plains of La Mancha and Estre- madura, close to the ever-menacing Mussulman, sprang up a series of poblaciones, or communities, clustered about castles and fortresses, which became permeated with the spirit of freedom, — still in bonds to feudal ob- servance, to be sure, but possessed of a power which of- fered the surest guarantees against the encroachments of the nobles. The only thing that held the Christian sovereignties of Spain together, the only thing which, after religion, they had in common, was the war against the Moors. The regularity of this hundreds-of-years-old crusade gave to their military habitudes a fixity and prominence which it will be well for a moment to examine. Spain, divided by eternal dissensions, would have sunk beneath the Mussulman yoke, had not certain per- manent military organizations been constituted whose profession it was to war to the death against the com- mon foe. Hence the origin of the three military orders of Calatrava, Alcantara, and Santiago, dating from the twelfth century, which were suggested, probably, either by the Eastern crusades, or by the religious and military system of the Rahhit, or guardians of the frontier, under the Omaiyade empire. Such organizations be- came a military necessity, and were encouraged in 1122, by Alfonso the Fighter, who bequeathed his kingdom to the Hospitallers of St. John, and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. They settled in orreat numbers in Ara2:on. about 1 143, whence they spread to Castile. The order 196 To Ferdinand ajid Isabella. of Santiago grew out of a band of penitent robbers in 1 1 60, who wished in this way by implacable warfare against the infidels, to expiate their crimes ; and this was preceded and followed by others. An auxiliary system of Almogavares or scouts, Ada- lides or guides, and Alfaqueqnes or dragomans, used in interpreting and the redemption cf prisoners, assisted the armies in their campaigns. Thus Spain distin- guished itself from feudal Europe, no less by its pecu- liar military organization than by its free growth of the individual and the community, each more or less sub- ject to the feudal classifications, but both modifying their inflexible character by an elective principle, a conscious- ness of individual worth, a Germanic sense of manhood unknown to contemporary Europe. We find the Span- ish comunero soldier and citizen at once ; electing his counsellors in the community and his chiefs on the field of battle ; and the kinship between him and the free Gothic warrior is strong enough. The division of his kingdom by the emperor, between his sons Sancho of Castile and Ferdinand of Leon, greatly enfeebled the ascendency which the first of these states had begun to exercise over Christian Spain. Sancho's death in 11 58 delivered Castile over to a mi- nority of ten years, in the person of his young son, Al- fonso VIII., called the Little King — a period of anarchy and intrigue, fortunately closed in 1 170 by a truce with Navarre, and a closer alliance with Aragon, against Al- fonso's uncle, Ferdinand II. Eighteen years after, Ferdinand II. of Leon died, bequeathing his crown to his son, Alfonso IX. Portugal was elevated, by a bull of Pope Alexander III., into a kingdom under Sancho L(ii79). A .Su'perannuatecl Voluptu».r^r^^ against the royal encroachments, Don Pedro gave them satisfaction in an act (1283) known as the Privilegio General, the magna charta of Aragon, "a basis of civil liberty,'' says Hall am, "perhaps even more satisfactory than ours," granted to " rebels on 209 210 To Ferdinayid and Isabella, li' their knees." The act exhibits a striking harmony between the character and institutions of the English and the Aragonese ; the love of freedom, of law, of independence of the individual, of private and political rights, and the restoration of ancient franchises, rather than the conquest of new. Pedro bequeathed Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, to his eldest son, Alfonso, with the suzerainty of Majorca, Cerdagne, and Roussillon, and to Don Jayme, his second son, the kingdom of Sicily, and the Italian conquests. From 1284 to 1295 Sancho IV. exercised vigorous sway over Castile; *' immediately," says the chronicle, " all the wars ceased as if by enchantment, as- soon as men knew Sancho was king!" He drove the emir of Morocco, in 1291, back into Africa, and closed his too brief life in 1295, leaving his kingdom to his son, the minor, Ferdinand IV., (called T/ie Put-off^ with his mother, Dona Maria, as guardian. Sancho recon- structed the power which Alfonso X. had let drop to pieces, and effaced by the vigor of his government, the crime of having killed his father of grief. Ferdinand died, affected by a sort of superstitious terror, in 13 12. It seems that the king had caused two gentlemen, accused of murder, to be put to death without judicial inquiry. They protested their innocence, and sum- moned the king to appear in thirty days, before the tribunal of God. Ferdinand's health, already under- mined, rapidly gave way, and he expired at the very hour when the thirty days ran out. During his reign was begun in Aragon and Castile the well known process against the Templars, — initiated in THE VASE OF THE ALHAMBRA (jfl 210 To Ferdinand and Isabella, their knees." The act exhibits a striking hannony between the character and institutions of the Enjrlish and the Aragonese ; the love of freedom, of law, of independence of the individual, of private and political rights, and the restoration of ancient franchises, rather than the conquest of new. Pedro bequeathed Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, to his eldest son, Alfonso, with the suzerainty of Majorca, Cerdagne, and Roussillon, and to Don Jayme, his second son, the kingdom of Sicily, and the Italian conquests. From 1284 to 1295 Sancho IV. exercised vigorous sway over Castile; "immediately," says the chronicle, " all the wars ceased as if by enchantment, as soon as men knew Sancho was king ! " He drove the emii of Morocco, in 1291, back into Africa, and closed his too brief life in 1295, leaving his kingdom to his son, the minor, Ferdinand IV., (called yy/^f/^///-^?^) with his mother. Dona Maria, as guardian. Sancho recon- structed the power which Alfonso X. had let drop to pieces, and effaced by the vigor of his government, the crime of having killed his father of grief. Ferdinand died, affected by a sort of superstitious terror, in 13 12. It seems that the king had caused two gentlemen, accused of murder, to be put to death without judicial inquir>\ They protested their innocence, and sum- moned the king to appear in thirty days, before the tribunal of God. Ferdinand's health, already under- mined, rapidly gave way, and he expired at the very hour Avhen the thirtv davs ran out. During his reign was begun in Aragon and Castile the well known process against the Templars, — initiated in IHE VASE OF THE ALHAMBRA The Ricot Omes. 213 I France by Philip the Fair,-whose order was d.sso ved m xlia after a duration of one hundred and eighty-four vears In Aragon, Castile, and Portugal, however, S to the eternal crusade against the Moors, .t was allowed to exist. The imputed crime seems to nave been enormous wealth, idolatry, and the envy, mingled with dread, which a vast and opulent organization inspired Th; most salient result of the reign of Alfonso III. of Aragon (1.85-1291) was the immense increase of the power of the rkos omes, or great vassals, and of the communities at the expense of the royal prerogative Alfonso's single claim to immortality rests perhaps in three lines of Dante. " E se re dopo lui fosse rimaso Lo giovinetto, che retro a lui sicde, Bene andava il valor di vaso in vaso. (St. HUaire.) The surname of the Magnificent applied to him will .ive an idea of the main feature of his character. Jayme trjustice, second of the name and brother of Al^nso succeeded him, and ruled till 13^: -a reign filled with u cess abroad and peace at home. "It is as ard to separate the Aragonese as it is to unite the Cast.lians, aWF rdinand tte Catholic of these very distinct prov- n es Tayme's Aragonese people aided him patriotical y i: his eiterprises ; he was invested with the sover^gnty of Corsica and Sardinia by the pope ; S.c.ly was aban- doned ; the high nobility were continually struggled a-ainst; the franchises of the people protected the }i, t'hat characteristic institution of Aragon, care u y guarded in his rights and procedure, and a universal respect for law inculcated. On the death of Jeanne, Queen of France and Na- m 214 To Ferdinand and Isabella, Alfonso XL 215 I, I, varre, in 1307, her son, Louis-le-Hutin became king of Navarre anfl swore to maintain the fueros of the coun- try. Two years before, Clement V. had abandoned Rome and estabUshed himself at Avignon, thus put- ting the pontificate into the hands of Philip the Fair. The coronation-feast of Jeanne of Navarre, daughter of Louis-le-Hutin, and her husband, the Comte d'Evreux, in 1329, was enlivened by the episode of the massacre of ten thousand Jews in the city of Estella. The series of great princes that succeeded one another in Aragon continued through Jayme II. and Alfonso IV. the Befiign, to Pedro IV., son of the last. The noble figure of Pedro IV. already, in his father's life- time, overshadowed his parent's. The furious wars between Aragon and Genoa — the great commercial competitors of the Mediterranean — assumed a charac- ter of ferocity under Alfonso, which recalls the struggle between Rome and Carthage, on a sea where the blood- thirsty rivals, in their passion for commerce, were doomed to meet at ever)- point. '' Castile has just lost one of its noblest kings," cried the Emir of Granada at the death of Alfonso XI. in 1350, and the Emir and his chieftains wore mourning for the deceased king and let his body pass undisturbed. He died of the Black Death, near Gibraltar, — a pestilence then devastating Europe. The cortes of Alcala in 1348, is celebrated for the proclamation of the Partidas as national laws, " in as far as they were not contrary to the laws of the king- dom, to God, and to reason." The serms of ultramontanism and monarchical abso- lutism contained in Alfonso X.'s code, bore abundant fruit in the following reigns. About 1330, Alfonso Xi. began the liaison with Leonora de Guzman, who be- came the mother of Don Enrique of Trastamara, slayer of his brother, Don Pedro, king of Castile. Her beauty and charms had fascinated the inconstant monarch. Inflexibly just, Alfonso did all he could to reduce the brawling grandees to obedience ; he razed their castles, summoned them to lay down their arms and resort to legal means to terminate their feuds; and utilized their newly harmonized strength in the great battle of Rw Salado, against the Moors, in 1340. Here infidels fel in miraculous abundance - two hundred thousand out of five hundred thousand ; and Christians in miraculous paucity -twenty Castilians ! And from this day for- ward Africa was pushed back forever beyond the strait ; the emirate of Granada, abandoned to itself, sank more and more in the face of the Christian monarchies per- petually on the alert to seek out its ruin ; and the way was opened for the Catholic kings to fulfil their vows of putting the misbelievers from the land. The battle was fought near Algeziras, opposite Gibraltar, against the almost countless hosts of the two allied Emirs of Morocco and Granada. This is the last of the Alfonsos of Castile, until the coronation of Alfonso XH. in our days. Don Pedro of Castile, first of the name, left behind, in his sobriquet of Cruel, the memory of a Tiberius. His cruelty was constitutional ; he had an instinctive thirst for blood ; he was an unmanageable voluptuary ; and he murdered right and left within the limits of his own family until he had nearly extirpated it. He died, stabbed to the heart in a fierce struggle with his half- 216 To Ferdinand and Isabella. brother Don Enrique, in 1369, leaving enormous wealth in diamonds, gold and silver, and precious stuffs, and became ever memorable for his illegitimate union with Dona Maria de Padilla, a noble Spanish lady ; for the murder of his unfortunate wife, Blanche of France, of the lineage of the fletir de lys ; for his implacable rigor towards the nobles ; and his base covetousness, perfidy, and vulgarity. A Jew, Samuel Levi, as usual with the Castilian kings, was his treasurer, and Pedro's base treachery to him is historical. He was contemporary with that Don Pedro of Portugal whose amours with Inez de Castro have gained such tragic celebrity. The pope launched the interdict against him " as an adulterer and bigamist, the enemy of God and the church." His rupture with Aragon in 1356 brought the Castilian flag under the walls of one of the Aragonese capitals and cost the king of Aragon his crown and life. He slew the grandmaster of Santiago (his half-brother) ; the Ad- elantado of Castile (Garcilaso de la Vega) ; the mother of his half-brothers ; the Infant Don Juan of Aragon ; his own aunt Dona Leonora of Aragon ; Don Juan and Don Pedro (his half brothers) ; and a long list of other relations and friends. The death of Dona Maria de Padilla — pure-hearted, good, and charitable as she was — filled him with a frenzy of love and despair. The emir of Granada with fifty of his noblest sheikhs, who had sought the hospitality of Pedro, had their throats cut in Seville by his order (1362). In his bitter war against Aragon and France, he allied himself with Edward III. of England and the Black Prince, with Navarre and Granada, whilst Pedro of Aragon recog- nized Don Enrique of Castile as sole king of that land. A Barefooted King. 217 and strengthened himself by the project of a double marriage between the houses of France and Aragon. Pedro's superstition was at least equal to his ferocity and impurity ; for, escaping from imminent danger in 1365, he ran to church barefooted, in his shirt, with a rope'round his neck, to thank "Madame Sainte Marie" for saving his life. Unfortunately for him, France was then scourged by the host of Breton adventurers called the Great Companies ; men habituated to live on plunder, reduced to inactivity by the peace just concluded with England, and threatening universal disorder to the realm of Charles V. Headed by the illustrious chief Ber- trand Du Guesclin, they were engaged by Don Enrique and the king of Aragon to drive out Pedro the Cruel (who had just been excommunicated by Urban), and avenge the death of Blanche. They arrived thirty thousand in number, — Gascons, English, and Bretons, — in Barcelona, in 1365. Pedro fled the kingdom, after murdering the archbishop of Santiago to procure means for a new campaign for the restoration of his rights, and was received with chivalric courtesy by the Black prince "in the name of God and St. George." The Black Prince put at Pedro's service the forces of England and of half of France. Froissart, in his in- imitable narrative, tells the story of the contest ; and the war-cries " Guyenne and St. George ! " " Castile and Santiago ! " echo lustily through his pages. Pedro and the English were at first victorious ; but the fruit, the heat, the air d'Espaigne, ruined the health of the Eng- lish auxiliaries and caused them to withdraw. Pedro, after a brief restoration to power, was shut up in the chateau of Montiel so closely that " a bird could not 218 To Ferdinand and Isabella, have left the castle without being seen." Du Guesclin besieged him, and treacherously delivered him over to Don Enrique. In the savage struggle that ensued be- tween the brothers, the poniard of Don Enrique put an end to the life of the miserable barbarian. Cries of "Castile and Enrique II.," now floated exultingly on the air, while the execrated corpse of the master lay for three days on the earth exposed to the maledictions of the Spaniards. « Much grieved the bowman for her tears, and for her beauty's sake, While thus Queen Blanche of Bourbon her last complaint did make: O France my noble country ! O blood of high Bourbon I Not eighteen years have I seen out before my life is gone. The king hath never known me. A virgin true I die. Whate'er I've done, to proud Castile no treason e'er did I." " The Queen Blanche had been banished to the castle of Medina-Sidonia, — the adjoining territory being as- signed to her for her maintenance. One of her vassals, a Jew, presumed to do his homage in the usual fashion, that is, by kissing Blanche on the cheek, ere his true character was suspected either by her or her attendants. No sooner was the man known to be a Jew, than he was driven from the presence of the queen with every mark of insult ; and this sunk so deeply into his mind, that he determined to revenge himself, if possible, by the death of Blanche. He told his story to Maria de Padilla, who prevailed on the king to suffer him to take his own measures ; and he accordingly surprised the castle by night, at the head of a troop of his country- men, and butchered the unhappy lady." Such is the legend of the death of Queen Blanche, as told in the old French memoirs of Du Guesclin, quoted by Lockhart. Death of Bon Pedro. 221 The story of Don Pedro's death is told m Froissart : Ihe story Enrique was apprised that ?'' ''\ZrJZ^^^loLoi his followers to he was taken, ana cam „,hprp his unfortunate the tent of Allan de la "-^f;^;; ^ ' L e-'-^^' brother had been p aced On enten g ^_^^^^^ "T;; OsS pX aT i and fearless as he ^:? irtpea — — an re^. - Here I stand, the lawful ^^^^^fj^l^ , ^he rival and it is thou that art but a false bastard brethren instantly grappled jf ^J-J J^'^^ Enrique Unights and Du <^^^^:^:Z! V^l the face, but drew his poniard and wounde ^ ^ .^^^^^ bis body was f^'^^^^l^J^oss a bench, and his struggle ensued. Enr^ue te ^^^^^^^^^^ ^.^^_ brother, >^einyPPe- ,^ ^^„ ,^,,, , when one of Em q^e^ ^^^^^ ^h^^ at length the leg, turned h.m over, ai ^^^ ^^ gaining the upper hand, instantly the heart. ^rthart " was cut off, and » Pedro's head" says ^o^l^art, ^^^^ ^.^ his remains meanly buried They vvere ^^ interred by his daughter „d.;fe o^ our o^^^^^ .^ ^^ Gaunt, ' time-honored La"^^ '[' ^^^j, " ville, with the honors due to his rank. , • ,..i,;iP the blood n bubbles ..Thus with mortal gasp and qmver, «h.le the welled, . ri,,:=tian bosom dwelled." Fled the fiercest soul that ever m a Christian ^^^^_ . nf the oeculiar institutions of feudal A glance at some of the pecuii ^^ Spain is necessary to understand the the country. 222 To Ferdinand and Isabella, II » The feudal system arrived at its complete develop- ment in the fourteenth centur}% but in Castile it was variously modified by the character of the people. The slave was gradually replaced in the middle ages by the serf, an immense step towards freedom. Up to the eleventh century- the mass of the servile population, so enormous under the Gothic supremacy, does not seem to have diminished. The permanent w^ar against the Arabs, while recruiting the servile population, must however have contributed to the emancipation of the Christian slaves, who became more and more rare as the feudal organization develops. Yet the slave trade continued vigorously till the fourteenth centuty; Chris- tians sold one another, and Jew slaves existed down to the times of Philip II. Captivity in war, birth, and voluntary servitude were the three great sources of slavery- recognized by Alfonso X ; and countless minute regulations existed as to the relations between masters and slaves, manumission, and the like, which show a steady advance over the t/iing, as the slave was regarded, of the Gothic code. The Spanish serf, superior to his European brethren, could change his lord at will, and quit the glebe which he cultivated. The source of serf- age in the peninsula lay in the Roman system of Coloni, a class intermediate between the slave and free man, and the Gothic system of client and patron, which im- posed the obligation to bear arms in defence of the patron. The class of serfs increased out of the debris of slavery, the emancipated Christian slaves, Saracen captives, tributary Mussulmans, and petty proprietors who voluntarily became "liege men." This lower order of the feudal hierarchy constituted the foundation for Castilian Feudalism, 223 the higher members of the system : the high barons, direct vassals of the sovereign, and the vassals of these, who yielded military service to their suzerain in ex- change for their feoffs. Early Spanish history shows us on one side, the spectacle of the kings, communes, and clergy in league, supporting themselves upon the Gothic code and the municipal fueros which proceeded from the king ; and, on the other, the nobility, surrounded by its numerous vassals, opposing to the written monar- chical or municipal law its seignorial fueros, as seen in the Fuero Viejo wrung from Alfonso X. The salient feature of Castilian feudalism is that the vassalage it entailed was but temporary, and not fixed, and the free will of the vassal was his inalienable pos- session. It will be impossible to enter into the details, as shown by the Fuero Viejo and the Fartidas, of the nature of the feoff, and the laws that regulate it ; the relations between the suzerain and his vassals ; the dif- ferent forms of feudal property ; the different classes of serfs attached to it ; the burdens resting on these serfs • and the gradual growth and establishment of heredity in the holding of the feoffs. We shall simply call attention to the prominence of individual will throughout the system, resulting in the factious inde- pendence of the nobles, and the progress of the com- munities in power and freedom, peopled as they were largely from the serf class escaped from the nobiliary o-lebe. The emancipation of the territory from the Moors went hand in hand with the progress of the vas- sals of the crown, and the vassals of the nobles towards independence and comfort. Political fran- chises followed local franchises ; representative gov- mUL 224 To Ferdinand and habella. Castile and Aragon. 225 t ernment sprang up out of the embarrassments of the royal authority ; and the emancipated communities soon began a struggle of two centuries with the nobility, only to end in fatal disaster in the reigns of Charles and Philip. Pedro IV. of Aragon, the Ceremonious, in his reign of DON PEDRO THE CEREMONIOUS. more than half a century (1336-1387). was constantly harassed by foreign and domestic wars. Pursued from infancy by the hatred of his step-mother, Leonor, sister of Alfonso XI. of Castile, and queen dowager of Ara- gon ; passing his life in everlasting struggle, and van- quishing in the end by means of a duplicity as patient as it was untiring ; shedding the blood of his own brother, and employing the sword or pr.son agamst those whom he hated ; his icy rigor was in chiUmg con- trast with the ferocious passionateness and ability of his contemporary, Pedro of Castile, Vengeance for him was a means, never an end ; he could both punish and pardon when necessary ; he liked to surround him- self like Louis XI. and J'hilip the Fair, with men of the 'law, and admitted them into his councils; and in peace and war he was always followed by two legists Ld two gentlemen as representatives of the two nv_a orders of Aragon, equally at dagger's point with the high nobility. A frail and sickly body enshrmed this punctilious and inflexible soul ; Pedro was a devotee o alchemy and astronomy ; his morality was a worship o conventionalities, and yet he may be called the greatest of the kings of Aragon before Ferdinand the Catholic In 1344 he dispossessed Jayme II., and incorporated the kingdom of Majorca with Aragon. A great prince and politician after the model of Machiavelli, he drank gracefully the chalice of humiliation put to his lips by the rebellious nobles of the Union, who extorted from him a confirmation of their privileges, so dear to the Aragonese. But he had his revenge on the battle-field of Epila in 1348, when the party of the Union -em- bracing the capital and chief cities of Aragon, headed bv the Infant Don' Ferdinand - was utterly routed, the ancient privilege allowing the Aragonese to umte for the defence of their laws, abolished, and the fatal as- cendency of the aristocracy broken. Pedro however strengthened the authority of the Justice and avenged himself nobly by extending rather than curtailing the 226 To Ferdinand and Isabella, *| privileges and franchises of his people at the great cortes of Saragossa. He prudently took little part in the great Sc/i/sm of the West (1378-1417) which gave to the church two rival popes, Urban VI. at Rome, and Clement VII. at Avignon, and renounced the crown of Sicily in favor of Don Martin, his son. " Law first, kings afterwards," is the proud device of Aragon, and in casting a retrospective glance on the origin of its special institutions we are struck with this ever-present love and preponderance of legality over force. A kingdom dating from the eleventh century, Aragon differs from Castile in extorting its franchises one by one from its rulers, rather than in holding them by the investiture of its rulers. While Castile is a truer representative of the Spanish genius, Aragon is its noblest product. The Frankish or Germanic ele- ment in its manners and legislation contributed no little to that passion for freedom which is the most marked feature of Aragon. Its ricos omes, or great vassals, planted themselves on their Privilegio General ; \\i€\x feoffs became hereditary from the twelfth century ; they transmitted them as in Castile without observing the law of primogeniture ; and their caste interest made them watch vigilantly over the liberties of the country. The various orders of inferior nobility — the mesiiadero, his sons the i?ifanzones, who corresponded to the Cas- tilian hidalgo, and the caballeros, — all had their special rights and immunities, more or less colored by the same freedom-loving spirit. While in Castile the clergy was nearly all-powerful, from the times of the Goths to Al- fonso X., it is only in 1301 that they obtained a seat m the Cortes of Aragon, as the last come and least influen- 226 To Ferdinand and Isahella. M 1 . privileges and franchises of his people at the great cortes of Saragossa. He prudently took little part in the great Sr/i/sm of the West (1378-1417) which gave to the church two rival popes, Urban VI. at Rome, and Clement VII. at Avignon, and renounced the crown of Sicily in favor of Don Martin, his son. " Law first, kings afterwards," is the proud device of Aragon, and in casting a retrospective glance on the origin of its special institutions we are struck with this ever-present love and preponderance of legality over force. A kingdom dating from the eleventh century, Arac^on differs from Castile in extorting its franchises one by one from its rulers, rather than in holding them by the investiture of its rulers. While Castile is a truer representative of the Spanish genius, Aragon is its noblest product. The Frankish or Germanic ele- ment in its manners and legislation contributed no little to that passion for freedom which is the most marked feature of Aragon. Its ricos onies, or great vassals, planted themselves on their Privikgio General; their feoffs became hereditary from the twelfth century ; they transmitted them as in Castile without observing the law of primogeniture ; and their caste interest made them watch vigilantly over the liberties of the country. The various orders of inferior nobility— the mesitadero, his sons the ififanzo7ies, who corresponded to the Cas- tilian hidalgo, and the cahalleros, — 2\\ had their special rights and immunities, more or less colored by the same freedom-loving spirit. While in Castile the clergy was nearly all-powerful, from the times of the Goths to Al- fonso X., it is only in 1301 that they obtained a seat m the Cortes of Aragon, as the last come and least influen- T/te Justices of Aragon. 229 tial of the orders of the state. The communa' fuero o It country originated, as in Castile, f ron, the necessity of neoSg a netvly acquired territory by liberal immuni- ses like that of Saragossa wrested from the rnfidels .n 8 by Alfonso I. Aristocratic is the word which be describes the institutions of Arago". monarchical, those of Castile, and democratic those of Catalonia^ In Ara .on, distrust of the royal power is as old as the rojal "pow'er itself; the king was " the first among equal . and up to the thirteenth century he was not crowned. ana up lo i ,.,.:K„ted to iht ricos omes ol Ara- ::: 'z:t:^^^^^ZX h- - w. each of Torn it as good'as you and who all together are mo Itr::;c::tray:nwasin an attitude of pe nent suspicion in the eyes of the country. The position of the justice of Aragon, at first a mere mouthiJece of the decisions of king bishops and .^ omes, becomes independent on the ^bolmon of the /«. ikzes of the Union by Pedro IV. in 1348 ; h.s office was SLng ; he was chosen from among the gentry, and his tol w^s so great that even Philip II. was compelled power was = 6 tutelary- genius and to plead before him. He ^as the tuteia > , guardian of the liberties of the country. »- ^^'^^ ^ las to remain at court within the "^'^^^^^'^^"^ce examine cases and hear pleas in the k^g s absence and pronounce without personal responsibility the dec. siol reached by the assembled grandees, clergy, and overe " His 'authority continually increased at he expen e of the royal prerogative, and he became, finally .supreme legal protector of the oppressed against all '.-.%urY» .# < \i w 2.10 To Ferdinand and Isabella. injustice. A secret commission of -^"-'f-; " *J>; were called, watched over his decisions. Ihe bloodx Jeath of the forty-ninth and last of the Justices, in under Philip' IL, drew with it the -^-d f J- men of all the liberties of the people, and left a free ™arelr for the Austrian and Bourbon despotisms en- "'Sween the commercial Catalonians and the agricn^ tural \ragonese there were many differences. Family names, lavage, literature, dignities manners laws and coins, connect Catalonia intimately with the south o Franc! For a century and a half the counts of Barcelona were, as has been said, aM <>" ^'^ ^ ^ nees and belonged as much to France as to Span The Frankish domination is faithfully reflected m the Catalonian Usages, the basis of the Catalonian evil CO tLtion and one of the oldest of the custo.nary codes of Spain (.068). Catalonia was emancipated in he tenth century from the yoke of the Carolingian uL ; its union with Aragon doubled its power so tZt finally the troubadours of Provence sang he ex- pl ts of Ihe ../..... of Barcelona. Me-n^ e -n^ Jnest-furious competition with Genoa and Venice I the watchword of Catalonia; the -''f f ^^ "J/; ". lona could sit down with their hats »" before the king - a democratic spirit pervaded the whole ---I^^; -' stitution of the province, and they guarded th«r liber ties without a Justice. Their maritime code was famous; the vast naval expeditions of Pedro II. and his successors, against Sicily and ^ardima ga e he r marine an immense impulse. In its Book of G.W were inscribed the names of the merchant aristocracy of Bar- Battk of Aljtiharota. 231 celona. Aragon is Spanish in idiom, m tenacity of purpose, and in narrow and exclusive patriotism Cata- lonia is French in dialect and habitudes, and is French, Italian, or Spanish, according to the interests and alli- ances of the moment. The decade of the reign of Enrique II.. the Cavalier, ended in 1379 ^'th his sudden death, attributed to poi- son emanating from a pair of boots sent to him by the Emir of Granada. Though a usurper Enrique was worthy of the throne which he had gained by the life of his brother, and opposed successfully the duke of Lan- caster and the king of Portugal, who pretended to the crown of Castile, the former through his wife, daughter of Pedro the Cruel. In 139°, Do" J^^n I., Enrique s son, perished in an accident, his horse having fallen on him He had claimed the succession and arms of his father-in-law, the king of Portugal, whose daughter Bea- trix he had married. A bloody contest ensued with the bastard Joa I., whom the Portuguese had proclaimed king The celebrated battle of Aljubarota, described with such animation and picturesqueness by Froissart, was fought in 1385, "au nom de Dieu et de Monse.gn- eur Saint Jacques," and lost by the Castilians The disastrous English invasion ensued ; Santiago fell and the duke of Lancaster assumed the title of king, with the arms of Castile, Leon, and France. The death of Chailes the Bad, of Navarre, in 1386 rid Spain of an indefati- gable discord-breeder ; and the withdrawal of the Eng- lish, devoured by ill-health and failure, left Gahc.a once more free. From 1388, the heir-apparent of Castile as- sumed the title of prince of the Astunas. The cortes of Guadalajara, held in 139°. left "^ '"*'■'' .L To Ferdinand and Isabella^ M f i n 232 on the legislation of the country by extensive increase °^SrnrttSr., a boy o; eleven s.eed- his father, but was soon bewailed for h,s early death he vounc. king into their power. The Lnnrs of Gran- ia C meanwhile cautiously cultivated the good w 1 of Castile and endeavored to live at peace w th the Christ ans Frontier wars, however, broke out rntermt- t!:;;^ and never absolutely ceased till the conquest of "^Znthe Careless of Aragon (r387-.395), A-t of tl.e nan'an indolent voluptuary, lived -7-*^ "^t ".: 'father Pedro the Ceremonious, and, '^e Ins Ca j tilian contemporary and r^amesake. was kdled by a 'Tel'a^atirof morals and a dissipated court resulted ----farie^Hrrs brother disembarked in Barcelona in 1396, and sue «eded in default of male heirs to the kmg to the h one He had been absent in Sicily, engaged m con- ■uerin: a kingdom for his son. The kingdom of Ar- 'g^n whose cradle had been an obscure -r-^r of • e Ivrenees had come gradually to spread itself o^tx Pyrenees, u^u h _ Corsica, Sardmia, thp three sreat islands of Italy, v.-"''' the three g Mediterranean and its BINDING UP THE PALM-LEAVES. Alvaro de Luna. 235 ,„_whose heir, the infant ^'^^^ !>'^fl-'^;^^l of Athens and Neopatria, was earned off by the pestit e ous air of Sardinia-the Italian wars wen on unend- ngK with the House of Anjou. Martm d,ed w.thou^ mall heirs in 1410, tormented by an unmanageable leJity, and with him expired the direct race of the counts of Barcelona who for three hundred years had ALVARO DE LUNA. .iven to Aragon a series of kings such as are rarely seen in histor)'. An interregnum of two years ensued, which rang with the conflicts of the five contestants fo the throne. Chief among these were the Infant of Castile, Don Ferdinand, and the count of Urgel, great- grandson of Jayme II. Don Ferdinand was brother o Enrique III. and nephew of Martin, as son of his sister Leonor, who had married King Juan of Castile The case was at length decided by arbitration in favor of 236 To Ferdinand and Isabella. Ferdinand (1412). the matter having been put into the hands of nine arbiters, three from Aragon, three from Catalonia, and three from Valencia The reign of Ferdinand I., the Just, lasted but two years, and he left the repute of a simple-hearted, h,gh- mind d, and irreproachable king behind htm. He w.Uv drew his support from Benedict XIII., who had taken up his residence in a fort in Aragon, and appealed to the decrees of the council of Constance, then s.tt^,ng "at the centre of Christendom," with the aim of resWr- ing unity and peace to the dismembered cht.rch. His early death prevented the accomplishment of h.s great nuat'll. of Castile died in .454, regretting "not having been born in the hut of an obscure artisan rather than on the throne of Castile." His minonj had been conscientiously watched over by h.s uncle Ferdinand I. of Aragon, Alvar de Luna, the bastard constable of Castile,-so famous for his enormous power nd ignominious death on the -affold, when Juan ad become tired of him, -was his prime minister. A sing in^ dancin- weak-minded king, Juan's sole ment in So^Tthat of being the ^-her of the illustru^u^ Isa- bella (born in 1451)- He married the Infanta Maria daughter of the late King Ferdinand of Aragon, and then Isabel of Portugal who brought about the ruin o Luna At the death of Charles the Noble, king of Navarre (387-435). the latter's son-in-law, Don Juan of Aragon, was proclaimed king; and thus the bouse o S'came to occupy three of the thrones of the peninsula, prophetic of their near union under Ferdi A Dancing King. 237 nand and Isabella. Navarre, from 1284 to 1328, had been virtually ruled by French viceroys The Emirate of Granada meanwhile (1423) remained ■n neacetul dependence on Castile, interrupted in 143° by ulal raids ; and Juan, instead of taking Grana a al he might have done, amused himself holding Alvar de Luna's children over the baptismal font, or m desul- tory wars with Navarre and Aragon Araaon from 1416 to 145^ ^^^^ ^"^^" ^ ^ , . .vho died at Naples in 1458. and left Aragon to his brother Man, king of Navarre, and the kingdom oNa- nles and Sicily to his natural son Ferdinand. Alfonso 'passed Inost of his life in his beautiful Italian domm^ fons-a sort of royal emigre -^nd through him the ool tics of Aragon gravitated more and more towards Ualls a precursor of the reign of his nephew, Ferdi- S the catholic. His Italian conquests were . uated too far from his hereditary possessions to add much to heir force. Surrounded by poets and scholars he oved literature, delighted in reading Qu.ntus Curtms "nd C^lL-s Coi'mueiuaries, and dismissed his musicians ..because their harmony would never ^q- that of the divine Tully." Defeated and captured by the Genoese, •rrJe naval battle in x 435, he bore his captivity ke r king, being treated and released wU true ma j nanimity by his foe, the duke of Milan. In i443 again entered Naples in triumph The sway of Enrique IV. of Castile, called the Im potent was a long disgrace and failure of one-and- E ' y ars. Gentle and benevolent, his weaknesses iToL from kindness of heart. A lule-player lover of Td songs, founder of churches and monasteries, alms- 238 To Ferdinand and Isabella. giver, brought up in unrestrained luxury, and with vo- luptuous tastes, he fell under the influence of the favor- ite Villena, as his father had done under that of Alvar de Luna, and left his country plunged in uncertainty as to the succession. CHAPTER XI. REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. WE have now reached a point in the history of Spain when the numerous petty kingdoms fill- ing the northern, southern, and central portions of the peninsula — Castile, Aragon, Navarre and the Moorish kingdom of Granada, — different as they were in charac- ter race, and institutions,— were gradually amalgamated into one comprehensive nationality, about to enter on the arena of European politics and prepared to exercise the mighty influence which made Spain all-powerful under Charles V. and Philip II. Navarre protected by its mountainous situation, was still independent. Aragon, embracing the provinces of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, possessed of free institutions and great moral and intellectual energy, commanded a wealthy and extensive commerce in the Mediterranean. Leon, Biscay, Galicia, Old and New Castile the Asturias, Andalusia, Murcia and Estrema- dura, belonged to the crown of Castile, a circumstance Which, on the consolidation of the provinces under one head, gave its capital, language, and literature the pre- eminence. . ,11 A spirit of liberty, law, and wise legislation had been imprinted on the inhabitants of Spain by the Visigoths 239 240 Reign of Ferdhiavd and Isabella. in the fifth centur}-, and this spirit of free and noble development was greatly favored by the Saracen con- quest of the eighth century ; for, though entirely dissim- ilar in political and religious institutions, the Arabs were tolerant, liberal, and enlightened, and insensibly inspired their enemies with the same principles. The lax morals of the clergy, under the enjoyment of long uninterrupted prosperity, and the luxurious habits of the nobles, were entirely reformed by this sudden and overwhelming invasion. The necessity of maintaining what little ground was left to them, compelled the Spaniards to lay the foundations of a bold and temper- ate character. The re-conquest was a matter of centu- ries. Intestine discords cost rivers of blood. Nearly four hundred and fifty years passed before the Span- iards had even advanced their line of conquest to the Tagus and though ultimately successful in recovering the lost territory, it was only after the abandonment of voluptuous habits and the awakening of a burning reli- gious enthusiasm, sullied as it was by ferocious bigotry and fierce fanaticism, that the Crescent of Islam began to wane and waver, and eventually sink, before the soldiers of the Cross. Romance, poetry, chivalry, knightly accomplishments of every sort, distinguished these wars. The Arabian minstrels sang the strange melodies of the Semitic race, rich in sensuous glow, hyperbole, and imagery; the Spaniards were fired by the magnificent ballads of the Cid, while both sides were characterized by more or less of Quixotic gal- lantrv. The exposed position of Castile necessitated great vigilance, strongly fortified towns, immense levies of > -rc;!?-^.*: Associated Cities. 248 I citizens for home defence ; and along with all this came many extraordinary privileges relating to municipal self-government, protection of life, liberty, and property, rights of jurisdiction, election of judicial officers, and col- lections and commutations of tallages and taxes, m sm- gular contrast with the feudal servitude of the rest of Europe at that day. The first Cortes was summoned m 1 1 69, composed of one deputy from each city. The sanc- tion of the nobility and clergy was not deemed essential to the validity of legislative acts, while the popular branch would impose no tax without the consent of its own members, collected the revenue carefully, watched over appropriations and expenditures, vigilantly in- spected the administration of justice, entered into nego- tiations for alliances, voted supplies for the maintenance of the army, nominated regencies, insisted on their right to recognize the validity of a title of the crown, and occa- sionally even set aside the direct will of a sovereign as expressed in his testament. This boldness and wisdom seems to have characterized the Castilian corporations from the beginning. Another peculiar institution of Castile was the Ber- mandad or Brotherhood, an association of the cities leagued together for the defence of their liberties in times of anarchy ; which was formed of deputies meet- ing at stated periods, transacted business under its own seal, and transmitted to the nobles and even the sover- eign the laws enacted by it. Its measures were some- times carried out by force. Agriculture, mechanical arts, manufactures, architect- ure, grew gradually to considerable perfection. Many of the' cities became immensely wealthy, and despite ■• ".■ 'in 24-4 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, sumptuary laws, expensive pleasures and luxurious tastes rapidly developed through the commonwealth. Castile, so called from the innumerable cas//es which everywhere dotted its surface, possessed a powerful and warlike nobility, the higher class of which was called rkos hombres, who acted in war and peace like so many independent sovereigns, were exempt from taxation, torture, or imprisonment for debt, could renounce alle- giance to the sovereign, appeal to private arms, monop- olized all the higher offices of the state, accumulated huge estates, and from boyhood on lived lives of turbu- lence, self-aggrandizement, and martial exercise. The hidalgos and cabaUeros, inferior in dignity to the ricos hombres, likewise had great privileges and immuni- ties, and formed a brilliant and chivalric body, ready for the tilt and tourney, for warlike pageantry, or for attendance on the king. The vast influence of ecclesiastics in Spain must not be overlooked, more especially as they vigorously co- operated in the wars against the infidel, led the soldiers to battle, sometimes crucifix in hand, and from the beginning exercised a marked ascendency over the minds of the people. Illiberal, licentious, often shame- lessly insensible even to the simplest rules of a moral and decent life, abounding in revenues, religious estab- lishments, and privileges, they powerfully affected all classes of Spanish society ; while the primacy of Spain, exercised by the archbishop of Toledo, was, after the papacy, the most splendid gift in the possession of the church. Along with the wonderfully liberal organization of the popular institutions went a singular limitation of Development of National Character. 245 royal prerogative. Though the crown, different from the Iten' esta'bUshed by the Vis.goths, w- now - ^^^^^^^^^^^ elective the cortes could recognize or not, as it pleased certain amount, or nomniate to vacant «« out its consent ; legislative P-^ ^y, ^ 'poters M. in union -'•-- ^^^ ;> ^ en^U sai'd that, were circumscribed. Hence it nas Castilian at the beginning of the fifteenth «"^"'7' *^^,f ^ J';; sovereign was possessed of less power, and the people sovereign was y Furooean monarchy at :Lf;:::irfrct3rr:/etoo^ Uept^n mind. Nobod>Mmag nes o.e^-- ^.a-l. sys^ tern was perfecc or worked P" ^^^l^; ^^,^ ^ , ^aw; cultivated a spirit similar to the "°^'^"\ { jealousies existed between the orders; " --;^"^ J^^, Option, lack of co-operation, -P°f °f .°^^]*X strength, dissension, and perpetual dread of preponder anceof one order over the other, exised "-J ^^ ^ degree Yet, on the whole, the Castilian people were aegrec. ici, Je alcilnt privillges of the realm and making salutary ::rssions here and there, protecting the court of the /«Xwhich interposed a barrier oetween tyranny and -£r;opular license, and adjudicating causes by means of this tribunal rather than by resort to arms, Pedro W was virtually the founder of the constitutional lib- ny of Aragon the cortes came gradually to exercise beneficent sway over the land ; and Aragon ente ed on a per od of' uninterrupted tranquillity unexampled amon.^ the nations of Europe at the time. Ihe nco, hoSres, the knights and inferior nofnlity, the clergy and the commons, composed the fourfold branches of the Aragonese Cortes, and here, as in Castile, high consideration was given to the commons. Popular rep^ resentation in Aragon dates back to 1133- A prec^e parliamentary etiquette prevailed ; the crown officers were excluded from the deliberations of the cortes ; great scrupulousness in maintaining rights, forms, and 248 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, dignities was preserved ; subjects under deliberation were referred to committees ; a single formally regis- tered veto from any member could defeat the passage of a bill, and the highest deliberative, judicial, and leg- islative functions, questions of war and peace, taxes, application of revenues to their specific purposes, the succession of the crown, removal of obnoxious minis- ters, imposition of sumptuary regulations, and granting or withholding of supplies, rested in their hands. The General Privilege, granted by Pedro the Great in 1283, is the broadest basis of Aragonese liberties, and is distinguished by the equitable protection afforded to all classes ; it scrutinizes the administration of jus- tice, investigates the powers of Cortes, preserves legal immunities, and secures property against crown exac- tions. The Justice — an institution peculiar to Aragon — had supreme control in matters judicial ; he was the king's counsellor ; he administered the coronation oath; he interposed authority between subject and sovereign, pronounced on the validity of royal ordinances, con- curred with Cortes in suits against the crown, consti- tuted a tribunal of appeal from territorial and royal judges, could remove prisoners from the jurisdiction of an inferior court into that of his own, and secure a de- fendant from molestation on his giving surety for his appearance. Such is an outline of the extraordinary prerogatives of this supreme court, contained within the personality of a single individual. The purity and integrity of the court were maintained by a long line of illustrious incumbents, who checked AN ARABIAN WELL, TOLEDO. » Catalonia and VaUncia. 251 .• o ^f the crown, exerted a benign influ- r .• • thc^t thev do not demand separate discussion, ^tbeluti u, u/of Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, was Ir V cSituished for municipal privileges, unnvalled early ^isUngu s ^^^^ manufactures of commercial prosperity, i^^'- benienitv .nstimtions of he tow Catalan, song, the illustrious iSurfof cilnia, beautiful and poetic devotion trouDdu ^^^ usages, ri- « f r* tVif Vircrin. love, ariUb, any^ ^^ o r j.l.« V lied if hey did not surpass, the reputation of the neighboring Jrovence, with which Catalonia was long ""sl is a condensed outline oi ^^^^^^^f^^^g^^ Aragon and Castile, previous to the bir h o Ferdinand and'isabella- events occurring respectively, Ap J ., X40 (birth of Isabella, at Madnga), and March lo, ilL (birth of Ferdinand, at Sos in Aragon). 1452 ^o""-" "■■ . KJttor foreign wars, and a After long intestine feuds, b'ter^orei n , disputed succession, the tranquillity of Castile seeme a Lgth secured by the marriage of Enrique III with Ca haSne of Lancaster. But the premature death o EnlSque at the age of twenty-eight ^^-J^^l^^^Z of the House of Trastamara, which had succeedea 252 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. the throne in 1368, and left the government in the hand of his son, Juan II., a minor, during whose reign the greatest disasters befell Castile. Admirably gov- erned during Juan's minority, the kingdom was at length delivered into his hands, when his incapacity for governing, his love of pleasure, and his blind sub- jection to favorites, soon became obvious. Alvaro de Luna, a bastard of the house of Aragon, distinguished for the brilliancy of his talents and accomplishments — a skilful rider, dancer, fencer, musician, poet, — fear- less, ambitious, and finished in the arts of dissimula- tion, — soon exercised unbounded influence over the pleasure-loving king. A miser, spendthrift, embezzler, epicure, Luna aggrandized himself and his kindred at the expense of the kingdom, affected royal magnifi- cence in his expenditures and retinue, won the blind partiality of the king, and so disgusted the nobles by his haughtiness and intolerance that they soon organized confederacies to hurl him from his exalted station. Even Juan's own son Enrique took sides with the aris- tocracy against the favorite, and a prolonged period of anarchy and civil war set in. The commons began to lose all their hard-earned constitutional rights, and many iniquitous schemes of oppression, utterly repug- nant to the acknowledged law of the land, were intro- duced and carried out by the favorite. The Cortes was reduced to deputations from seventeen or eighteen cities, while the non- represented cities transmitted their instructions through the deputies of the privileged ones, the interests of the whole country were no longer rep- resented, and an insidious system, calculated to under- Literature. 253 mine the political system completely, threatened the absolute subversion of the ancient>^r.^ of Castile. S ngularly enough, during this epoch ^^erature throv. Juan mmself was an accomplished L^j-.-^;^- ^j Let. The marquis of Villena devoted his hfe to let- ters translated Dante and the ^neid, and refined and c Sized the tastes of his countrymen by numerou . works on poetry, the gay science, and astronomy. The Lrquis o'f Santillana wrote moral poems and ^J- dillas with grace. Juan de Mena, a genius of the high ef order, composed his "Laberinto " after the model of he DivL cLmedia. and combined in it a simp hcity vigor, beauty, and energy which frequently recall he great Italian. Alfonso de Baena, a inverted Jew, wrote with elegance, and compiled an antholo^, o--; cionero of the fugitive pieces of many of the smaller luminaries. The very clash of arms proved propitious of Aragon, Alvaro de Luna, the all-powerful minister opposing Juan's desire for a union with a daughter of I'king if France, succeeded in bringing about a match with Isabella, granddaughter of Joa I. of Portu- gal • but his conduct becoming offensive to the queen, L'succeeded in ruining him with the king ; possession was obtained of his person by a violation of the royal safe-conduct; he was sentenced to death; and clad in sable, deserted by friends, and conducted ignominiously to the scaffold, he was miserably executed The wretched king died, lamenting his misspent life, July 21, 1454, having reigned forty-eight years and leaving toeechldren, Enrique, who succeeded him, Alfonso, I 11 254 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. and Isabella. The town of Cuellar, with its territories and a considerable sum of money were left to the Infanta Isabella. Ferdinand the Catholic was the son of Juan II. of Aragon and the bold and versatile Juana, daughter of Don Federigo Henriquez, admiral of Castile. Ferdi- nand I. was elected to the vacant throne of Aragon in 1 410, when it had become vacant by the demise of Martin. Alfonso V., the conqueror of Naples, suc- ceeded his father Ferdinand, but resided so continually in that delightful and intellectual kingdom that Aragon was really ruled by his brother Juan, lieutenant-general of Aragon. This prince married twice ; first Blanche, daughter of Charles III. of Navarre, and widow of Mar- tin of Sicily, leaving three children, Carlos, prince of Viana, Blanche, repudiated wife of Enrique IV. of Cas- tile, and Eleanor, wife of Gaston de Foix ; afterwards (1447), Juana of Castile as before described. Carlos was heir of the kingdom of Navarre by right of inher- itance through his mother, the elder Blanche, but per- ceiving probably that his father did not care to relinquish the title of king of Navarre, he permitted him to retain the title, provided he himself should be left the actual sovereignty. Juana, the new queen, attempted by her husband's authority to divide the administration of the government with Carlos, when civil war burst forth, revealing the wretched spectacle of father and son arrayed against each other. The party of Prince Carlos were entirely defeated in 1452. CHAPTER XII. REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. [continued.] THE birth of Ferdinand the Catholic, in 1452, was welcomed with a delight in strange contrast with the suspicion and dislike with which the kmg regarded 1- ff r^rmp- of his former marriage. The frank and affable Carlos retired to Naples whose .Mr=n died in 1458, bequeathing his heredi- king, Alfonso, d>ed ^" « ; "^ ^^^^.^.^^ ^^ ^.^ tary possessions m Spam y illegitimate son brother i-^-'-^fJ^^ f reconciliation with his Ferdinand. Carios ato a ^^^^ ^^ ,^,,.,pp„ent father m '46o. .magmed . ^^^,.^^,, ,,^,,,,. to the crown ot Aragon wuu edled' but in this he was grossly deceived. His con edged , Dur m perfidiously arrested Hurt was misconstrued, ne wcia p j duct was ^^^ ^^^ devotion rrc^otial -re- . him that they brok t Spt'ember 33, u6. having bequeathed Navarre to h>s sister Blanche and her descendants conformably to the riarr age contract of his parents. Blanche falhng ..to Te hands of her inhuman sister, Eleanor de Foix, died the hanas perdinand was acknowledged by rrgleL" d'putaS; heir-apparent of Aragon, but 256 Reign of Ferdinand mid Isabella. Catalonia, passionately devoted to the memory of the lamented Carlos, refused allegiance, and offered its crown first to Don Pedro of Portugal, and then to Rene' the Good of Aragon, famous froin the fiction of Sir Walter Scott. The long and terrible civil war ended in 1472, after the surrender of Barcelona, when the Cata- lans returned to their allegiance and sturdily main- tained that despite what they had done they should be proclaimed throughout the kingdom, good, faithful, and loyal subjects ; which, says the historian, was accord- ingly done. The profligate brother of Isabella, Enrique IV. of Castile, though full of a certain sort of graciousness, condescension, and munificence, and at one time ex- tremely popular for his chivalrous aspirations and his romantic expeditions against the Moors of Granada, gradually lost his popularity, fell into habits of de- bauchery, repudiated his wife, Blanche of Aragon, after a union of twelve years, and in 1455 completed his dis- grace by espousing the sparkling and reckless Juana of Portugal, sister of the reigning sovereign Alfonso V. In this reign the clergy became scandalously unfaithful to their duties, the coin of the realm was shamelessly adulterated, the king abandoned himself to unworthy favorites : these favorites themselves, after being lifted to the skies, fell from their high estate, and organized a powerful confederation of the nobles to oppose the arbitrary doings of the king. Enrique was publicly deposed by this confederation at Avila, in 1465, and the young prince Alfonso was seated on the vacant throne ; but an accommodation ultimately took place Isabella and her Suitors. 257 between the conflicting parties and tranquillity was for a short time restored. , The operations of the confederates agamst the au- thority of Enrique were totally disconcerted by tl^ death of Alfonso, their young leader, m 1468. As there is little evidence to prove that Enrique's deposition was ever confirmed by act of cortes, Alfonso's so-called reign may be regarded as a usurpation and dismissed as such The crown was now offered to Isabella, who had continued with Enrique's family during these dis- turbances; but she unhesitatingly refused it as long as her brother Enrique lived. A negotiation was then becun between the combatants, which resulted m a general amnesty and the recognition of Isabella as heiress of the crown of Castile and Leon The prin- cess immediately became the object of a brilhant mat- rimonial competition -a brother of Edward IV o England; the duke of Guienne, brother of Loms XI of France, and heir presumptive of the French monarchy; Alfonso, king of Portugal, and Ferdinand, of Aragon, were among the suitors for her hand. All others were rejected in favor of the lucky Ferdinand, to the great delight of Ferdinand's father, who was most keenly alive to the importance of consolidating the scattered monarchies of Spain under one head. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella had always been his darling scheme, and the marriage articles were signed and sworn to by Ferdinand at Cervera, January 7, 1469- As these articles are important, it will be well to enumerate them in outline. Ferdinand promised faith- fully to respect the laws and usages of Castile ; to fix his residence in Castile and not quit it without Isa- 258 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, bella's consent ; to prefer no foreigners to municipal or military offices without her approbation ; to alienate none of the crown property ; to resign to her the exclu- sive right of nomination to ecclesiastical benefices ; to subscribe all ordinances of a public character jointly with her ; to prosecute the Moorish war, respect King Enrique, leave the nobles unmolested in the possession of their dignities and emoluments, and not demand restitution of the domains formerly owned by his father in Castile. All the essential rights of sovereignty rested in Isa- bella's hands. Owing to the difficulties and dangers of the times, the critical situation of Isabella, who was vigilantly watched by Villena and his spies, and even in peril of being seized by him with the intent of defeating the mar- riage, Ferdinand stole off in disguise, accompanied by half a dozen attendants, and managed, with great secrecy, expedition, and hardship, to reach Valladolid, where Isabella had now taken refuge. Their marriage was pub- licly celebrated October 19, 1469, in the palace of Juan de Vivero, the temporary residence of the princess, but subsequently appropriated to the chancery of Valladolid. The fair-complexioned, quick-eyed, cheerful, and chiv- alrous Ferdinand was celebrated for his horsemanship, his eloquence, his courteous and insinuating manners, and the temperance, activity, and simplicity of his hab- its ; and his presence made a sensible impression on the blue-eyed and chestnut-haired Isabella. Her beauty, intelligence, and sensibility, the grace of her manners, the symmetry and serenity of her features and temper, her fine intellectual and moral gifts, the elegance with Isabellas Charms, 259 which she spoke the Castilian, her modesty and the simple beauty of her demeanor, charmed her contem- poraries and have made them hand her down to us d.s- linguished by every excellence that can adorn and beautify a beloved sovereign. Grace, benignity, serene magnanimity, devotion,- such were her characteristics ; whUe with These were combined acute intellectual po^. ers great administrative abilities and homely household virmes but rarely found united in one and the same ^'Sn'the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, a con- spiracy of the nobles determined to oppose to Isabella s claims those of her niece Juana, then -- >'-- ^^^^ and supposed to be the illegitimate daughter of the queen, second wife of Enrique. A faction, made for- midable by the powerful names and interests of the P checos, Mendo'zas, Zumgas, Yelascos, and Punentels, who had so recently sworn adhesion to Isabella, now Lnaced her with destruction and plunged the ream into another of those "spells" of anarchy which pri- odically seized it. Savagery of every description, brig- andage, feuds between the blood-thirsty noble mal- admi;i;tration in every shape and form, oathsom details of wretchedness, famine, devastation, lust, make a picture upon which the mind does not willingly dwell. It would be futile to pursue the threads of brutality, chicane, and insincerity pervading the involved negoti- ations, the furious discords, the pitiless wars going on both i'n Aragon and Castile, till the illness and death o Enrique, in i474, extinguished the male -^ ^^^^^ house of Trastamara and gave a short breathing space to the nation. Squandered revenues, worthless para- 260 Reign of Ferdinand and Z^aheUa. sites, justice unredressed, treasury bankrupt, Castile dismembered, hypocrisy, audacity, and faithlessness in public and private engagements rampant ; such is the epitaph of Enrique IV. of Castile and Leon. At Segovia, December 13, 147 4, in the public square of the quaint old Castilian city, surrounded by gorgeously clad functionaries and invoking the benediction of heaven on her ensuing reign — a tableau heightened by the exquisite Spanish sunshine, the fantastic old colonnaded houses, the singularly beautiful situation of the city with its grouped and castellated hills, the lofty presence of the majestic and slender-columned cathe- dral, and the countless variegation of clanging bells, floating standards, te Deums, and brilliant costumery — Isabella was solemnly proclaimed queen. A herald cried with a loud voice : *' Castile, Castile, for the king Don Ferdinand and his consort Dona Isabel, queen proprietor of these kingdoms ! " The most popular and opulent cities of the realm followed the example of Segovia in acknowledging the accession of Isabella, and constitutional sanction to these proceedings was given by an assembly of the estates, in Februar>^ On Ferdinand's arrival from Ara- gon where he had been detained by the French war, a question arose as to whether the exclusion of females from the succession did not hold in Castile and Leon as in Aragon ; but the difficulty was removed and a setdement made on the basis of the original marriage con- tract. Isabella's great tact and good sense enabled her to reconcile the dissatisfied Ferdinand without compro- mising the prerogatives of her crown ; and though Alfon- so V.'of Portugal attempted to vindicate the title of his War of the Succession. 261 niece Juana (whom he afterward married) to the throne of Castile, these difficulties —known as the War of the Succession— were terminated by the total rout of the Portuguese, at the battle of Toro, and the submission of the entire Christian kingdom to the victorious arms of Ferdinand and Isabella. Peace was concluded in 1478 between the plenipotentiaries of Castile and France in which a principal article was that Louis XL, who had been supporting Portugal in the War of the Succession, should abandon this policy and give no further support to the pretensions of Juana. At length, a peace was brought about, in 1479. between the united monarchies and Portugal, through the instrumentality of Dona Beatrix of Portugal (sister-in-law of Alfonso and mater- nal aunt of Isabella) and Isabella herself. Aragon, with all its dependencies, passed to Ferdi- nand on the death of his father in 1479. and by a fortu- nate conjuncture formed with the other principalities the foundation of that huge sovereignty, which stretched its wings from Indies to Indies and had Spain as its imperial centre. A glance at the internal administration of Castile, after the consolidation of the monarchies, will probably make more intelligible to us the gradual development of our narrative. The thorough administration of jus- tice the codificadon of the laws, the undermming of the 'power of the nobles, the vindication of the ecclesi- astical rights belonging to the crown from the usurpa- tion of the see of Rome, the regulation of trade, and the thorough establishment of the royal authority, sum up the slow but sure achievements of this reign, and throw a luminous significance around the figures of Ferdinand and Isabella. 262 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1476 Isabella, seeing no other way to check the license of the time,— the plundering, sanctuary-profan- ing, brigandage, and personal violation, — effected, with the' aid of cortes and the jimfa of deputies from the various cities of the kingdom, a reorganization of the ancient institution of the Hermandad, though on an essentially different basis. The new code was adminis- tered with unsparing vigor ; was to be universal in its effort to maintain public order ; was to have cognizance of, and summary penalties for, highway robbery, house- breaking, rape, and resistance to justice ; was to exact eighteen thousand maravedis annually from every hun- dr^ed households in order to equip and subsist a mounted policeman whose duty it was to arrest and punish offenders ; was to cause tocsins to be sounded for the apprehension of escaped criminals ; and was to establish a court of two alcaldes in every town of thirty families for the trial of crimes within the jurisdiction of the Hermandad. Affairs were regulated by an annually convened general Junta, The penalties for theft were written in ink of blood ; criminals when punished cap- itally were shot to death by arrows ; and though the restivp aristocracy made determined resistance to being drawn within its jurisdiction, their resistance was inef- fectual, and the whole kingdom soon acknowledged the supremacv of the Santa Hermandad. The country thus swarmed with an invaluable police which, though far from possessing the discipline, co-ordination and thoroughness of modern organizations, speedily rid it of its dens of robbers and assassins. Isabella was famed for the rectitude and impartiality with which she administered justice ; wherever she went the Cas- Loyalty to Isabella, 265 tilian chivalry flocked about her, gave her splendid receptions, tournaments, and tilts of reeds, and were eager to confess their admiration of her course for ridding the country of malefactors, by their loyal and sumptuous welcomes. The higher tribunals were also reformed and reorganized ; the encroachments of the Privy Council on the superior courts of law carefully limited and checked ; the chancery, or supreme court of appeal in civil causes, entirely remodelled ; the mter- ference of the crown with its jurisdiction stopped, and magistrates of wisdom, learning and integrity placed upon its benches for the lucid and faithful interpreta- tion of the law. , ^ The ancient and obsolete practice of the sovereign s personally presiding in the tribunals was revived, so that the age was enthusiastically called the golden age of justice, when the sovereign was seen every Friday in the Alcazar of Madrid dispensing justice to all such, great and small, as came to seek it. Order was thus re- established, judiciary reform initiated, the excesses of banditti lessened, and strongholds of violence and intimidation thrown down. The system of jurisprudence, made up fundamentally of the ancient Visigothic code, the fueros or charters of the Castilian princes as far back as the eleventh cen- tury, and the famous '' Siete Partidas " or Seven Parts of Alfonso X, (principally a digest of the maxims of the civil law), was simplified and freed from the contra- dictory and embarrassing discrepancies, uncertainties, and complexities arising from this amalgamation of codes. Dr. Diaz de Montalvo was in 1480 charged with the revision of the Castilian code and the compil- 266 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, ation of a code universally applicable to the subjects of the dominion. The "Ordenangas Reales," the result of his labors, for four years, were printed in 1485. This code continued valid to Philip ll.'s time, and is regarded as forming the foundation of the comprehen- sive work " La Nueva Recopilacion," which is at the basis of modern Spanish continental and colonial juris- prudence. Measures to repress the intolerant spirit of the nobles were the revival of the Hermandad, the prefer- ence of personal merit over rank in official preferment, and a revocation of the royal grants, which unconstitu- tionally alienated the public money to such an extent that, in the reign of Enrique IV., the clear annual reve- nue of the kingdom amounted to only thirty thousand ducats, so that he was contemptuously called " king of the highways " only. Pensions without corresponding services were forfeited ; purchased annuities were re- turned for due reimbursement, and the remaining cred- itors were permitted to retain such a proportion of their pensions as were deemed commensurate with their ser- vices to the state. Thirty millions of maravedis were thus annually saved to the crown : literary and chant- able establishments were permitted to enjoy their in- comes. In the end, we are told, by these sagacious economic reforms the revenues of the realm were aug- mented nearly twelve-fold. Hitherto the nobility had monopolized nearly all the remunerative posts, obtained possession of the greater part of the crown estates, coined money in their own mints like sovereign princes, filled the country with fortified castles, and desolated the land with their interminable vemMa. Now they The G-reat Military Orders. 267 were forbidden to erect new fortresses, restrained from duels under penalty of treason, and prohibited from being attended by a mace-bearer, from quartering the royal arms on their escutcheons, and imitating the style of address used by the sovereign in his correspondence. The popular branch of the cortes was treated with great deference and it was through its cooperation prin- cipally that the jealous and refractory nobles were brought to terms. The grand-masterships of the great military orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara, were annexed to the crown, and the orders themselves reformed. Found- ed originally, it is supposed, in imitation of the monastic orders of the Holy Land, the Spanish orders rose to great, power and splendor, and figure largely in the chronicles and legendary lore of the realm. The order of Santiago, named after St. James, the patron saint of Spain, was founded in the twelfth century (nys)' ^"d distinguished by a sword-shaped, blood-red cross em- broidered on a snowy mantle; obedience, community of property, and conjugal chastity were their governing rules ; and perpetual warfare against the infidel, defence of travellers, and relief to the poor, were likewise char- acteristic points, characteristically enforced by the fervor of the age. The order of Calatrava (1164) romantic- ally originated from a confederation of knights and ecclesiastics, formed to hold the town of Calatrava, on the frontier of Andalusia, against the Moors. The Templars being unable to hold this town, Sancho the Beloved offered it to whatever good knights would undertake its defence. Perpetual celibacy, — which, however, was ** perpetuated " only to the sixteenth cen- 268 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. tury^ _ plain diet, silence at meals, continual readiness day and night for action : such were their rules. The order of Alcantara (1177) was held in nominal subordi- nation to the knights of Calatrava, but was relieved by Tulius II., and rose to independent importance. The wealth of these orders was immeasurable ; they had unlimited rights over their conquests ; they could bring into the field hundreds of belted knights and thousands of lances ; their towns, castles, and convents covered the country; the grand-masterships became posts of vast influence ; and soon so much intrigue, danger, and bad blood developed when a vacancy occurred that, in 1476, the queen succeeded in secur- ing the administration of one of the grand-masterships (that of Santiago) for Ferdinand; that of Calatrava followed in 1487, and of Alcantara in 1494. In the reign of Charles V., his old teacher, Adrian VI., granted a bull annexing the orders in perpetuity to the Castilian crown; so that soon these famous relics of religious chivalr}' lapsed into insignificalice, more particularly as their great life-work, the subjugation of the Moors, had been accomplished. The encroachments of the ecclesiastical on the lay tribunals— especially after the permanent establishment of the canon law, due to the promulgation of the "Siete Partidas'' in the thirteenth century— were re- sisted. Here, as elsewhere in its institutions, mediaeval Spain was singularly independent. It is said that even the Romish ritual was not admitted into its churches till long after it had been adapted in the rest of Europe. Ferdinand and Isabella even proclaimed their intention of inviting the princes of Christendom to unite with Salutary Changes, 269 them in convoking an oecumenical council for the re or- mation of the abuses of the church. Sixtus J V. reluc- tantly yielded to Isabella's demand that the higher Spanish benefices should be filled with native Castil- ians; and thus the queen proceeded, as occasion per- mitted, to place persons eminent ^or virtue piety, and learning, in the conspicuous strongholds of Catholicism. Famines, pestilences, languishing agriculture, rumeo commercial and financial credit, debasement of the coin, were a few of the memories and legacies be- queathed the Catholic kings by their immediate prede- cessors; a state of things bettered, as far as might be, on the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella. Salutary changes of every description were introduced ; internal communications facilitated ; foreign trade protected ; the public credit re-established by the punctuality with which the government met its engagements; arbitrary imposts were repealed ; different denominations of coin had a legal standard value affixed ; and royal mints were established to infuse life and vigor into the cur- rency In five years the revenues increased five-fold ; agriculture and architecture began to flourish again, and capital to flow into the country; "what many men," says old Pulgar, " and grand lords were unable to do in many years, a solitary woman, with her own toil and talents, did in a little while." The sober msdom, noble demeanor, liberality, and affectionate solicitude of the queen ; the resolution self-restraint, and scrupulous economy of the king ; and the harmonious and elevated character of the relations existing between these eminent sovereigns, tended to establish the royal authority on a rock impregnable, ^i.U>H! J. iJ l 'M ^-TI W 268 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, tury -plain diet, silence at meals, continual readiness day and night for action: such were their rules The order of Alcantara (1177) ^vas held in nom ma subordi- nation to the knights of Calatrava, but was relieved by Julius II., and rose to independent importance. The wealth of these orders was immeasurable ; they had unlimited rights over their conquests ; they could bring into the field hundreds of belted knights and thousands of lances ; their towns, castles, and convents covered the country ; the grand-masterships became posts of vast influence ; and soon so much intrigue, danger and bad blood developed when a vacancy occurred that, in 1476, the queen succeeded in secur- ing the administration of one of the grana-masterships (that of Santiago) for Ferdinand; that of Calatrava followed in 1487, and of Alcantara in 1494. In the reicrn of Charles V., his old teacher, Adrian VI., granted a bull annexing the orders in perpetuity to the Castilian crown • so that soon these famous relics of religious chivalry lapsed into insignifica^ice, more particularly as their great life-work, the subjugation of the Moors, had been accomplished. The encroachments of the ecclesiastical on the lay tribunals-especially after the permanent establishment of the canon law, due to the promulgation of the -Siete Partidas" in the thirteenth century -were re- sisted Here, as elsewhere in its institutions, mediaeval Spain was singularly independent. It is said that even the Romish ritual was not admitted into its churches till long after it had been adapted in the rest of Europe. Ferdinand and Isabella even proclaimed their intention of inviting the princes of Christendom to unite with Salutary Changes. 269 them in convoking an oecumenical council for the refor- mation of the abuses of the church. Sixtus IV. reluc- tantly yielded to Isabella's demand that the higher Spanish benefices should be filled with native Castil- ians ; and thus the queen proceeded, as occasion per- mitted, to place persons eminent for virtue, piety, and learning, in the conspicuous strongholds of Catholicism. Famines, pestilences, languishing agriculture, ruined commercial and financial credit, debasement of the coin, were a few of the memories and legacies be- queathed the Catholic kings by their immediate prede- cessors ; a state of things bettered, as far as might be, on the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella. Salutary changes of every description were introduced ; internal communications facilitated; foreign trade protected; the public credit re-established by the punctuality with which the government met its engagements; arbitrary imposts were repealed ; different denominations of coin had a legal standard value affixed ; and royal mints were established to infuse life and vigor into the cur- rency. In five years the revenues increased five-fold ; agriculture and architecture began to flourish again, and capital to flow into the country; "what many men," says old Pulgar, " and grand lords were unable to do in many years, a solitary woman, with her own toil and talents, did in a little while." The sober wisdom, noble demeanor, liberality, and affectionate solicitude of the queen; the resolution, self-restraint, and scrupulous economy of the king ; and the harmonious and elevated character of the relations existing between these eminent sovereigns, tended to establish the royal authority on a rock impregnable, 270 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. and make it undisputed alike at court and throughout the provinces. The permanent establishment of the Spanish Inqui- sition took place in the reign of Ferdinand and Isa- bella ; and the conquest of Granada (1481-92), with all its romantic and pathetic associations, filled more than ten years of its middle period. Beginning in 1481, and carried on with an infinity of surprises, expeditions, storming-parties, sieges, capitulations, and evolutions, conducted under great difficulties, from lack of funds on the part of the Spaniards, and with courage and obstinacy on the part of the Moors, this war lasted till January, 1492, involved much slaughter on both sides, and was finally brought to a triumphant conclusion after incessant hostilities. A special chapter has been reserved for the achieve- ments of the Spanish navigators who so gloriously illus- trated this memorable reign, and carried the name of Ferdinand and Isabella, of Spain, and of the Catholic religion, across the dim and undiscovered seas. CHAPTER XIII. SUBJUGATION OF THE MOORS. -CONQUEST OF GRANADA. THE time had now come when two independent nationalities — the Spanish and the Moorish — could no longer exist side by side in the peninsula. For eight centuries Spain had been the battle-ground of alien races. After its almost total subjugation by Taric the One-eyed and Mousa, the Christians had gradually, one by one, century by century, reconquered ■ and recovered the lost territories. The west, the east, and the north again owned the sovereignty of Catholic kings. But the south, more beautiful and fertile than any part of Spain, was filled with Moslem cities, Mos- lem civilization, the grace and elegance of Moslem art and architecture, the renown of Moslem scholars, the beauty and chivalry of Moslem knighthood. Worse than all, the Crescent blazed triumphantly over against the Crucifix, and hatreds engendered by irreconcilable creeds were rife, to stimulate men to chivalrous encoun- ter, and make them vanquish or die in the glorious con- flict pf Infidel and Believer. A momentous struggle — long foreseen, long inevitable — now broke out, involv- ing many-sided interests— ambition, religion, desire for 271 272 Subjugation of the Moors. ascendency, personal revenge, avarice, envy, new fields for the Inquisition, new opportunities for glory and selt- aggrandizement. A struggle so important in its influ- ence on Spanish development, and so passionate and long-continued in the obstinacy with which it was fought out, demands more than a cursory consideration, even apart from the fact that it is the most gorgeous and dra- matic episode of Spanish history. With a preliminary glance at the theatre of these wonderful scenes, the de- scription of the ten years' war may be resumed. Andalusia, the fierra dc Maria Santisima, as it is poet- ically called, — the land specially favored by the Most Holy Virgin, — is the most delectable of all the Spanish provinces. In the time of the Moors it corresponded to the four kingdoms of Seville, Cordova, Jaen, and Gran- ada, now however (1881), eight in number, known as the provinces of Seville, Huelva, Cadiz, Jaen, Cordova, Granada, Almeria, and Malaga. The etymology of the . word — according to^ Dozy a corruption of Vandalusia, from the Vandals, who overran the south of Spain after the disintegration of the Roman empire ; according to others from the Moorish term Andalosh, Land of the West— need not detain us long. The singular geo- graphical features of its thirty-three thousand square miles give the clue to the rugged and stubborn resis- tance of the Moors of the fifteenth century to the arms of the most Catholic Ferdinand and Isabella. In the loveliest atmosphere in the worid rise vast ranges of serrated, ruddy-peaked mountains, within which are interleaved delicious valleys, sometimes opening on an azure estuary of the purple-watered Mediterranean, sometimes locked in by inaccessible 1 272 Subjugation of the Moors, ascendency, personal revenge, avarice, envy, new fields for the Inquisition, new opportunities for glory and selt- ao-o-randizement. A struggle so important ni its nifiu- ence on Spanish development, and so passionate and long-continued in the obstinacy with which it was fought out demands more than a cursory consideration, even apa'rt from the fact that it is the most gorgeous and dra- matic episode of Spanish histor)-. With a preliminary glance at the theatre of these wonderful scenes, the de- scription of the ten years' war may be resumed. ^ Andalusia, the fkrra de Maria Santisima, as it is poet- ically called, — the land specially favored by the Most Holy Virgin, — is the most delectable of all the Spanish provinces'! In the time of the Moors it corresponded to the four kingdoms of Seville, Cordova, Jaen, and Gran- ada, now however (1881), eight in number, known as the provinces of Seville, Huelva, Cadiz, Jaen, Cordova, Granada, Almeria, and Malaga. The etymology of the . word — according ta Dozy a corruption of Vandalusia, from the Vandals, who overran the south of Spain after the disintegration of the Roman empire ; according to others from the Moorish term Andalosh, Land of the West— need not detain us long. The singular geo- graphical features of its thirty-three thousand square miles give the clue to the rugged and stubborn resis- tance of the Moors of the fifteenth century to the arms of the most Catholic Ferdinand and Isabella. In the loveliest atmosphere in the world rise vast ranges of serrated, ruddy-peaked mountains, within which are interleaved delicious valleys, sometimes opening on an azure estuary of the purple-watered Mediteaanean, sometimes locked in by inaccessible I Andalusian Scenery, 275 precipices. Gigantic mountain domes loom up to the height of nearly twelve thousand feet and pierce the air with a penetrating and perennial coolness. The mountains of the Sun and Air, the Sierra of Snow, of Vermilion, of Gador, of Arsohe, of Morena, of Susana, break and intersect the face of the country into a thou- sand slopes, glens, dales, eagles' eyries, and undulating plains. Eight or ten rivers with their affluents send sluggish or silvery torrents, according to the season, through the country, which now expands into pictur- esque vegas overflowing with the wild olive, the citron, the caper-bush, the aloe, the cactus, the palm, lemon, and orange, the evergreen oak, the silk-festooned mul- berry, the snowy cotton and bending cane, now shoots up into cliffs of dazzling height surmounted by dragon- like castles. These mountains are richly variegated with threads of silver, gold, lead, copper, iron, coal, and precious marbles ; the land is golden with autumnal wheat ; the landscape is populous with cities of great interest to artist, antiquary, and ecclesiologist ; the plantations are famous for their bulls, horses, sheep, and swine ; and the ready wit, versatility, genius, and good humor of the inhabitants have passed into a prov- erb. The sparkling beauty of the Andalusian women, with their dark complexions, small figures, and pleasant Castilian dialect ; the handsome, lazy, boastful men ; the ever-sounding song, the ever-living dance; the superstition and sensuality of all classes ; the illiteracy, munificence, and carelessness so characteristic of the Andalusians; all these details and dispositions were favored and developed by a voluptuous climate and 276 Subjugation of the Moor a. are still, to-day, equally with five centuries ago, peculiar to the population. In this paradise of the south of Spain broke out one of the most sanguinary conflicts known to history. From the nature of the country as well as from the character of the combatants, the contest was bound to be protracted. In its length, picturesqueness, and epi- sodic character it has frequently been compared to the Trojan war ; and it is even more than singular that this swan-song of the crusades did not breathe itself elo- quently forth in the melting verse of some Spanish Tasso. As it is, it is evpn richer in poetry and romance FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. than the wars of the Holy Land and though commem- orated in no grand epical "Lay of the Saracens," is em- balmed in innumerable ballads fraught with the tender- est pathos and music. As early as 1466, Muley Abul Ilacen, son of the Ahul Ilacen and Granada. 277 Aben Ismail who ruled in Granada in the reign of Juan II. and Enrique IV., had succeeded his father and was prompted by an impetuous disposition to violate the truce which his father had established between the Moors and the Spaniards. On Ferdinand's demanding, in 1476, payment of the annual tribute levied by his predecessors, Abul Haoen insolently retorted that " the mints of Granada coined no longer gold, but steel." Crouching like a lion in his noble city of Granada — the city of seventy thousand houses, of walls three leagues in circuit, furnished with twelve gates and 1030 towers, of the commanding palace of the Alhambra, capable of containing a garrison of forty thousand men, of the incomparable Vega thirty-seven leagues in cir- cumference, of orchards and gardens, and silver wind- ings of the Xenil infinite — Abul Hacen might well think himself invincible. Few cities, indeed, if we may put faith in the eulogies of Spanish and Arabian writ- ers, ever surpassed Granada in luxury, refinement, and prodigality. We read of girdles and bracelets and anklets of gold and silver for the women, wrought with exquisite art and delicacy, studded with jacinths, emer- alds, and chrysolites ; of braided and beautifully deco- rated hair confined in links of sparkling jewels; of garments of wool, silk or cotton of the finest texture for the men, beautifully variegated. Linen of spotless whiteness for the summer, armor chased and inlaid with gold, enamelled scimitars, blades, and daggers of Da- mascus and Fez, decorated with Koranic texts, sump- tuously caparisoned horses, lances of matchless temper, legions of Andalusian barbs, are said to have been the commonplaces of these most serene principalities. A 278 Subjugation of the Moors. brilliant chivalry filled the city ; the most generous rivalry existed between the Moslem and Christian cavaliers. Owing to the singular reservations of the truce made between the rival races, hostilities had been but partially suspended. The Moorish frontier towards Jaen was not included in it, and was left open as.the play-ground of the contending bands. Provision was even found in the truce for sudden forays, unex- pected attacks on castles and towns undertaken without trumpet or banner, or investments of towns within a period of three days. The truce required twelve thou- sand doblas of gold to be annually paid the Christians, or in default thereof the liberation of six hundred Christian captives. If captives were not to be got, the same number of Moors were to be delivered up at the city of Cordova. When Don Juan de Vera was sent in 1476 to demand the payment of arrearages and the fulfilment of the treaty stipulations, the haughty answer already cited was returned. A report was made to the Castilian sov- ereigns of the condition of things in Granada, and it waslEound that Abul Hacen's kingdom now contained fourteen cities, ninety-seven -fortified places, and many formidable castles. Deferring hostilities for the present, Ferdinand with characteristic caution determined to re- duce the kingdom by inches, plucking out hair by hair, subjugating fortress by fortress, garnering grain by grain into his granar>', until, ^s an historian reports, " he had picked out the seeds of this pomegranate one by one." Fortunately for the Christians their cause was aided by the implacable rivalries existing among the Moors themselves, and rending their ranks into those who fa- MOORISH ARCHES OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE. 278 Subjugation of the Moors, brilliant chivalry filled the city ; the most generous rivalry existed between the Moslem and Christian cavaliers. Owing to the singular reservations of the truce made between the rival races, hostilities had been but partially suspended. The Moorish frontier towards Jaen was not included in it, and was left open as the play-ground of the contending bands. Provision was even found in the truce for sudden forays, unex- pected attacks on castles and towns undertaken without trumpet or banner, or investments of towns within a period of three days. The truce required twelve thou- sand doblas of gold to be annually paid the Christians, or in default thereof the liberation of six hundred Christian captives. If captives were not to be got, the same number of Moors were to be delivered up at the city of Cordova. When Don Juan de Vera was sent in 1476 to demand the payment of arrearages and the fulfilment of the treaty 'stipulations, the haughty answer already cited was returned. A report was made to the Castilian sov- ereigns of the condition of things in Granada, and it waslfound that Abul Hacen's kingdom now contained fourteen cities, ninety-seven -fortified places, and many formidable castles. Deferring hostilities for the present, Ferdinand with characteristic caution determined to re- duce the kingdom by inches, plucking out hair by hair, subjugating fortress by fortress, garnering grain by grain into his granary, until, us an historian reports, " he had picked out the seeds of this pomegranate one by one." Fortunately for the Christians their cause was aided by the implacable rivalries existing among the Moors themselves, and rending their ranks into those who fa- MOORISH ARCHES OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE. A Ro7nantic Episode, 281 vored the cause of the Sultana Ay5ca the Chaste — the first wife of Abul Hacen, daughter of Mohammed VII. (surnamed the Left-handed), mother of Boabdil — and those who favored the cause of Zoraya, Maid of the Morning Star, originally a Christian slave, but deli- cately nurtured and brought up in the Mahometan faith, the favorite sultana of Abul Hacen. The pres- ence of these women throws a strange and romantic glamour over this memorable war and lightens its ferocity with many a detail of graceful and tender pa- thos. Ambitious, beautiful, passionate, intriguing, Zo- raya swayed the amorous Abul Hacen despotically, and was anxious that one or the other of her two sons should eventually reign over the kingdom. Surrounded by an influential faction headed by the vizier Abul Ca- cem Vanegas, Zoraya had good hope that her expecta- tions should be gratified. Ayxa, on the contrary, was upheld by the powerful family of the Abencerrages and by Aben Comixer, Alcayde of the Alhambra. The beauteous palace resounded with their controversies and recriminations, and the noise of the scandal was spread abroad through the kingdom, constituting a source of fruitful apprehension to the graver and more reflecting Moslems. Close upon the heels of these dissensions followed the capture of Zahara in 1481, a Christian fortress which proved an irresistible lure to the enterprising mind of Abul Hacen, and led the way to all the subse- quent disasters of the Moors. The garrison was put to the sword and Hacen returned in triumph to Granada where, instead of being received with acclaim for his valiant deed, he was welcomed by lamentations, dismal 282 Subjugation of the Moors, prophecies, and the outcries of a religious enthusiast, who predicted the speedy downfall of Granada for this unprovoked massacre. The capture of Zahara roused infinite indignation among the Christian cavaliers, already renowned for the irascibility of their tempers, the boundless zeal with which they fought for the faith, and the turbulence and independence of their spirit. Preparations were there- fore at once made to carry the war with fire and sword into the heart of the territories of the Moors. The estates of the marquis of Cadiz lay adjacent to these territories — a fact which was speedily signalized by a brilliant achievement, serving as a prologue to the war. Illustrious in lineage, distinguished as a champion of the faith, well known for vigor, valor, munificence to friend, magnanimity to foe, — a slight, ruddy-faced, blonde- haired, intrepid figure, — Roderigo Ponce de Leon, marquis of Cadiz, became the cynosure of all eyes in this war and did deeds and achieved glory comparable to the knightly and half-mythical actions of the Tan- creds, the Baldwins, Bernardo del Carpio, and the Cid. Learning that Alhama, a wealthy and populous place a few leagues from Granada, was but slightly garrisoned, he determined to surprise it one moonless night, and make its capture counterbalance the capture of Zahara. Setting out noiselessly to the number of four thousand foot and three thousand cavalry, and winding as stealth- ily as tigers over the rugged and dangerous mountain- roads, the marquis and his men succeeded in surprising Alhama two hours before daybreak. Boundless was the satisfaction of the Spaniards when they heard of this victory, and boundless the grief and " Woe is me, Alhama,'^ 283 6 i anger of the people of Granada. The agitation caused by this memorable event has been mirrored for us in a plaintive Spanish romance delicately rendered by Lord Byron, who in his translation has combined two ballads, one with the refrain, " Ay de mi, Alhama 1 " The Moorish King rides up and down Through Granada's royal town ; From Elvira's gates to those Of Bivarambla on he goes. Woe is me, Alhama! Letters to the monarch tell How Alhama's city fell : In the fire the scroll he threw, And the messenger he slew. Woe is me, Alhama! He quits his mule and mounts his horse, And through the street directs his course : Through the street of Zacatin, To the Alhambra spurring in. Woe is me, Alhama! When the Alhambra walls he gained, On the moment he ordained That the trumpet straight should sound With the silver clarion round. Woe is me, Alhama ! And when the hollow drums of war Beat the loud alarm afar, That the Moors of town and plain Might answer to the martial strain. Woe is me, Alhama! Then the Moors by this aware. That bloody Mars recalled them there One by one, and two by two, To a mighty squadron grew. Woe is me, Alhama ! 284 Subjugation of the Moors. Out then spake an aged Moor In these words the king before : " Wherefore call on us, O King ? What may mean this gathering?" Woe is me, Alhamal " Friends, ye have alas to know Of a most disastrous blow ; That the Christians, stern and bold. Have obtained Alhama's hold." Woe is me, Alhama ! And from the windows o'er the walls The sable web of mourning falls; The king weeps as a woman o'er His loss, for it is much and sore. Woe is me, Alhama! It is said that many of the people of Granada made their way to the Alhambra weeping, and " Accursed," cried they to Abul Hacen, '' be the day that thou hast Ut the fiame of war in our land. May the holy prophet bear witness before Allah that we and our children are innocent of this act ! Upon thy head, and upon the heads of thy posterity, until the end of the world, rest the sin of the desolation of Zahara ! " Abul Hacen, however, was no sentimentalist. With astonishing speed he gathered together an army of three thousand horse and fifty thousand foot, and swept forih from the gates of Granada to exterminate the handful of Christians at Alhama. Don Alonzo de Aguilar, elder brother of the famous Gonsalvo de Cordova, made vain efforts to succor his besieged countrymen. He was compelled to withdraw and retire into the moun- tains. The Moslems, when they came in sight of the mangled bodies of their kinsmen strewn broadcast over li. I Unexpected Help. 285 the earth, or the revolting repast of troops of hunger- pinched dogs, were lashed into fury. They sprang like ravenous animals on the walls, scaled the battlements, and were dashed headlong down the precipices by the intrepid defenders. The lack of artillery to batter down the fortifications proved death to the Moslems and salvation to the Christians. Like myriads of wolves, the Infidels howled tempestuously round the ramparts, glared with bloodshot eyes at the impregnable defences which they themselves had reared, made de- spairing onslaughts in the face of blinding fire from the besiegers, and, foiled, incensed, breathless, battle- scarred, Hacen and his army lay writhing among the hills below in futile anguish and disappointment. Ill, however, might it have fared with the Christians, had not speedy succor come from an unexpected quar- ter. Alhama was destitute of cisterns and fountains so that the Christians had to descend for water to the river below under the withering fire of the Moors. The river was diverted by the almost superhuman efforts of the Moorish engineers, and the garrison, the inhabitants, and the wounded soon suffered extremities of thirst. Many, it is said, died raving mad, fancying themselves swimming in boundless seas, yet unable to assuage their thirst. In the midst of this perilous condition of things, the duke of Medina-Sidonia, formerly an implacable foe of the marquis of Cadiz, but now softened by the suffer- ings of his gallant enemy and by the entreaties of the marchioness of Cadiz, arrived with five thousand horse and fifty thousand foot, accompanied by a splendid retinue of Andalusian chivalry. Though King Ferdi- 286 Subjugation of the Moors. i vTV nand, hearing of the alarming necessity of Alhama, was himself hurrying to the scene of conflict, the duke of Medina-Sidonia forestalled him and had the glorious privilege of saving his hereditary foe. One powerful effort more was made by Abul Hacen, which was foiled, and the sovereign of Granada, fearing to be hemmed in between two armies, retired to Granada, tearing his beard with humiliation. Few scenes recorded by the historian are more exqui- site than the scene which ensued upon the arrival of the succoring army. Hostility, vengeance, hereditary feud, were forgotten in the delicate and princely magnanimity of the duke of Medina-Sidonia. The chiefs and their rival armies threw down their weapons and rushed with gratitude and tears into one another's arms ; eternal friendship was sworn by the recent enemies ; the mar- quis and the duke marched off together like brothers and were sumptuously entertained in Marchena by the marquis of Cadiz ; and ceasing from this time, the ancient hostility was obliterated, and a new and sacred friendship sprang up, sealed and cemented by the bap- tism of blood and tears. Such is a typical episode of this romantic war. Siege succeeded siege, foray followed on foray, army annihilated army, camp vanished before camp with swift and dizzying multiplicity. The historian is caught up as in a hurrying whirlwind, and borne on from battle to battle and sierra to sierra. It was a holy war, a crusade, a passionate clash between Cross and Koran, a grand spectacular display of tilting knights and tour- neying infidels. It would, therefore, be useless to pur- sue a microscopic chronicle of its ever-shifting vicissi- Civil War in Granada, 287 • tudes. Let us chisel the potent outlines of the subju- gation of the Moors and the conquest of Gfanada on bur memories, and leave the myriad details to works of greater compass and richer elaboration. Civil war had meanwhile been raging in Granada. With a population of unprecedented instability, Granada beheld during this war a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions, plots and counterplots unparalleled in her history. Boabdil, threatened by his father Abul Hacen, had fled to Guadix, not far from the capital city, where a host of adherents gathered around him. Abul Hacen, received with groans and execrations by his people after his return from the campaign of Alhama, had retired for a day to a delicious country-seat, situated on the mountain of the Sun near Granada, where, wrapped in luxury and lulled by the blandishments of Zoraya and her women, he was endeavoring to drown the remembrance of his defeat in Oriental reveries. Suddenly, in the midst of this unwarlike dalliance, news was brought him that Granada was in arms, that Boab- dil had broken into the city, and that a tempest of rev- olution had swooped upon the town. Flying thither, Abel Hacen resisted Boabdil, but was defeated and driven out of the Alhambra, and Boabdil, ''El Rey Chiquito,'' the Little King as he was called by the Span- iards, reigned over the city, — the Paris of the Spanish Middle ages ; paradise one moment, pandemonium the next. One week the Vermilion Towers of the Alhambra rose enveloped in light, in perfume, in aromatic gardens, in fountained and filagreed courts, in sparkling arabes- ques, in precious tranquillity, wherein the golden voice of Arabian verse breathed forth its plaintive and mock- 288 Subjugation of the Moors. ' in battering down castles that he immediately multi- plied the number of the lombards in his possession, and henceforth dealt on terms of easy superiority with his foes. Coin and Cartama soon fell into the hands of Ferdi- nand, and the monarch then captured Ronda, an al- most impregnable stronghold cresting a towering rock 296 Subjugation of the Moors, Boahdil at Loxa. 297 bathed beneath by the crystal waters of the Rio Verde, so exquisitely commemorated by the bishop of Dro- more in his translation from the Spanish. Rio Verde, Rio Verde, Many a corpse is bathed in thee Both of Moors and else of Christians, Slain with swords most cruelly. And thy pure and crystals waters Dappled are with crimson gore; For between the Moors and Christians Long has been the fight and sore. Dukes and counts fell bleeding near thee, Lords of high renown were slain, Perished many a brave hidalgo Of the noblemen of Spain. Seventy-two places fell into the hands of the Chris- tians during this expedition, showing both the enormous populousness of the neighborhood and the energy of the king. Innumerable encounters, exasperated by difficulty of situation, religious intolerance, bitter recol- lections and boundless aspirations, ensanguined the sierras and kept both sides in continual wakefulness. El Zagal, Boabdil's uncle, invited to take command in Granada, proved a powerful and vindictive opponent. The history of the war now becomes an infinite flicker of light and shade, success and humiliation, anarchy and organization. The ebbing tide is on the side of the Moors, while Ferdinand with stealthy but indomitable persistence gradually gathers in town after town. Among his many failures there were many vic- tories, and though often discouraged, he pushed for- ward with a serene self-possession and hope that inspired all and accomplished all. Just after the conquest of Zalea by the knights of Calatrava, in 1485, the queen gave birth to Catharine of Aragon (Dec. 16, 1485), afterward wife of Henry VI IL of England. The death of old Abul Hacen about this time, resulted in a partial restoration of Boabdil to shadowy power in Murcia. A splendid army assembled at Cordova in i486 for the further prosecution of the war, and elo- quent are the descriptions of the vari-colored pavilions, the silken hangings, the gold and silver services, the sumpter mules and Andalusian jennets with silken hal- ters and embroidered housings, the feasts and revels and midnight cavalcades, the plumed helmets, the pol- ished armor blazing by torchlight, the pomp and pageantry of pages and lackeys, accompanying the assembly. Twelve thousand cavalry, forty thousand foot, and six thousand pioneers sallied forth against Loxa, with the king at their head. The historian here indulges in an imaginative outburst, and we are told that " the gay chansons of the Frenchman, singing of his amours on the pleasant banks of the Loire or the sunny regions of the Garonne ; the broad guttural tones of the German, chanting some doughty krieger-Ued^ or extolling the vintage of the Rhine ; the wild romance of the Spaniard reciting the achievements of the Cid, and many a famous passage of the Moorish wars ; and the long and melancholy ditty of the Englishman," re- sounded around the Castilian camp-fires. Loxa unable to hold out against this host, capitulated after a vigorous resistance, and among the captives, the unlucky Boab- dil, who had hastened to defend Loxa, in violation of his arrangement with Ferdinand, was found. 298 Subjugation of the Moors, The capture of Illora and Moclin ensued, the latter a town on the frontier of Jaen. The part which Isabella took in these flying pursuits and sieges is thus quaintly glossed by a chronicler : '* While the king marched in front, laying waste the lands of the Philistines, Queen Isabella followed his traces, as the binder follows the reaper, gathering and garnering the rich harvest that has fallen beneath his sickle. In this she was greatly assisted by the counsels of that cloud of bishops, friars, and other saintly men, which continually surrounded her, garnering the first fruits of this infidel land into the granaries of the church." The episodic character of the war gradually changed and was now concentrated on one of its crowning achievements — the siege of Malaga. Malaga was called "the hand and mouth of Granada." from its being a great seaport town and keeping open communication with the other Mahometan powers of Turkey, Eg>pt, and the Barbary states. In a situation of surpassing loveliness, and commanding a plain that opens like a fan on the Mediterranean, rich as some antique-figured tapestry, with groves of orange, olive, and pomegranate, the golden grain-fields of Malaga yel- low in an air ambered by the most passionate sunshine, while the perfume-sprinkled atmosphere, confined by lofty mountains as in a mighty transparent basin, has a delicacy and voluptuousness unknown elsewhere in Andalusia. In this epicurean abode rose the thronging battlements and fortresses of the Alcazaba, Gibralfaro, and Malaga itself, scowling defiance at the enemy, and serene in the consciousness of almost impregnable sites. The Picturesque Slegj of Malaga, ^01 No sooner had Ferdinand, after the conquest of the neighboring town of Fe/ez Malaga, appeared and in- vested the place, than the wealthy mercantile popula- tion, enervated by luxury, and dreading the horrors of a lingering siege, were desirous of surrendernig. But Hamet El Zegri ; who commanded the crag-built castle of Gibralfaro opposite the city, despised the weakness of the population, and determined, come what would, to hold the place. An infinitely picturesque siege, embellished by every imaginable romantic incident, — sallies, storming parties, thunderings of ponderous artillery, attempts at assassi- nation of the king and queen by a Moorish fanatic, mines and counter-mines, embassies and stratagems, single combats and impassioned engagements,— varied the'' monotony of many months. Groves of spark- ling lances, legions of helms and cuirasses, battalions of cross-bowmen and arequebusiers, took their places under the walls ; and summons after summons to surrender, on favorable and on unfavorable terms, was sent in, to be rejected with scorn, by Hamet and his followers. Headlong fights, mutual discomfitures, going and coming of emissaries, vast preparations of carpenters and engineers, bursting of meteor-like masses of combustibles over the devoted city, furious resistances, carrying and counter-carrying of ditches, palisadoes and bridges, courtly grace and beauty — for Isabella was there — intermingled with the hideous shock, confusion, ferocity and havoc of war ; such was the unrivalled scene before Malaga. But Malaga fell. Boabdil, by another of the kaleidoscopic vicissitudes of this ever-changing war, had now succeeded in driving 302 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. El Zagal from Granada, and ensconced in his royal palace of the Alhambra, sent gratulation to the Catho- lic sovereigns for their success, accompanied by rich gifts of Arabian perfumes, silks, magnificently capari- soned steeds, embroidered robes, richly mounted arms, and costly burnouses. Eventually Hunger, Discord, Despair — those mighty magicians that have converted so many sieges into cap- itulations, so many heroes into cowards — prevailed ; and unhappy Malaga, led by Ali Dordux, an opulent merchant, came to terms. The Moorish inhabitants were ransomed individually at thirty golden dob/as each, man, woman, and child. All their jewels and coin had to be surrendered to the government as part payment of the ransom, and the rest was to be paid in eight months ; even ransoms had to be paid for those who had died meantime. Slavery was the doom awaiting those unable to pay. The poli- tic Ferdinand took care that the majority of the cap- tives should not meet these stipulations, and some say that from eleven thousand to fifteen thousand of them became slaves and were scattered throughout Spain. A Catholic chronicler preserves to us the legend of the passionate lament of the people of Malaga over their lost city, their vanished liberty, and their profound desolation. ''• Oh Malaga, city so renowned and beautiful, where now is the strength of thy castle ? where the grandeur of thy towers? Of what' avail have been thy mighty walls for the protection of thy children .? Behold them driven from thy pleasant abodes, doomed to drag out a life of bondage in a foreign land, and to die far from G-ranada Demanded, 303 the home of their infancy ! What will become of thy old men and matrons, vvrhen their gray hairs shall be no longer reverenced .? What will become of thy maidens, so delicately reared and tenderly cherished, when re- duced to. hard and menial servitude? Behold thy once happy families scattered asunder, never again to be united; sons separated from their fathers, husbands from their wives, and tender children from their moth- ers ; they will bewail each other in foreign lands, but their lamentations will be the scoff of the stranger. Oh Malaga, city of our birth, who can behold thy desola- tion, and not shed tears of bitterness ? " Ferdinand at once proceeded against the remaining dominions of Abdallah El Zagal — dominions now a mere fragment of densely-populated sierra and sea- coast. This was in 1488. The populous cities of Baza, Guadix, and Almeria (an important sea-port), with numerous small towns which were sprinkled about these dominions, from the frontiers of Jaen, along the border of Murcia, to the Mediterranean, the Alpujarra range, and the perennial fountains of the Sierra Nevada soon fell. Boabdil was now reminded of a treaty which had been made between him and Ferdinand; this treaty stipulated that in case the Catholic sovereigns should gain the cities of Guadix, Baza, and Almeria, Boabdil should surrender Granada, and accept in exchange sev- eral Moorish towns, to be held by him as vassal. Being called upon to fulfil his engagements Boabdil faltered, hesitated, temporized, and finally, by the influence of Muza Abul Gazan, a cavalier of royal lineage, great beauty, and chivalrous feeling,, sent in a negative to Fer- 304 Ileign of Ferdinand and hahdla, dinand's demand for the surrender of Granada. King Ferdinand then turned his hostilities against this city. ^ Here then, amid the luxuriance and beauty of the vega of Granada, encircled by the silvery crests of the Sierra Nevada, overhung by the delightful groves and towers of the Alhambra, surrounded by the poetic asso- • ciations and passionate souvenirs of the expiring Kha- lifate — here, in this second Damascus, this city of cun- ning artificers, dextrous horsemen, and graceful civiliza- tion—here where the Darro and the Xenil came down from the mountains of the myrtles, and, according to Moorish legend, ran grains of gold and silver as they united and meandered through the heavenly plain of Granada; in this spot, sacred to stormy and tumultuous sensuality, to revolution, to Arabian poetry, to the Kha- lifs and sultanas, to religious fanaticism, tolerance, cul- ture, bloodshed, to every paradox in short, the Moors were to make their last stand and vanquish or die in the holy battle of the faith. Astonished and bewildered, the Moslems saw their empire departing from them by inches, until now, Gran- ada alone — Granada the incomparable — remained. Both sides made preparations for desperate measures. King Ferdinand, after a winter of preparation, took the field in April, with forty thousand foot, and ten thousand horse, resolved to sit down before Granada and never to quit its walls until the great banner of the cross waved from the mocking bastions of the Alhambra. Ponce de Leon, marquis of Cadiz, Alonzo de Aguilar, the master of Santiago, and the counts of Cabra,' Urena, Cifuentes, and Tendilla, were among the valiant captains most conspicuous in this campaign. The The Siege of Granada, 805 Moorish chivalry within the gates of the doomed city, swore eternal vengeance, constancy, and fidelity, and were led on by Muza, Nairn Reduan, Mohamad Aben- Zayde, Abdel Kerim Zegri, and the alcaydes of the Al- cazaba and the palace. A spirit of contempt, of flam- ing zeal, of exultant enthusiasm, of passionate despair, fired and animated the twenty thousand young men of the city. The beginning of the siege was more like a stately tournament; and gallantry, rich armor, and skilfully manipulated steeds were the order of the day. Soon Ferdinand forbade the acceptance of individual chal- lenges, from the loss they occasioned, and with grim resolution went to work to build a fortified camp sup- plied with every necessary for a long-continued in- vestment. The gallant Hernan Perez del Pulgar succeeded in entering Granada and affixing a parchment containing Ave Maria in large letters to the door of the principal mosque. This was done in retaliation for the defiance of Tarfe the Moor, who, dashing through the Christian camp, hurled his lance, with a message for the queen attached, at the pavilion of the sovereigns. Charles V. perpetuated Pulgar's exploit by permitting him and his descendants to sit during high mass, in the choir of the church built on the spot, and assigned as burial place for Pulgar himself, the identical ground where he had kneeled to nail the sacred legend. The despairing valor of the Moors now shot up in one culminating blaze ; an impetuous sally toward the close was made by Muza and Boabdil, but was utterly frustrated by the enemy's overwhelming force. The 806 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Moors retired broken-hearted within their beautiful, blood-stained city, never more to come forth save to shame and degradation. "Their obstinate resistance," says Abarca. in his chronicles of the kings of Aragon, '* shows the grief with which they yielded up the vega, which was to them a paradise and heaven. Exerting all the strength of their arms, they embraced, as it were, that most beloved soil, from which neither wounds, nor defeats, nor death itself, could part them. They stood firm, battling for it with the united force of love and grief, never drawing back the foot while they had hand to fight or fortune to befriend them." After a fire originating in the royal pavilion, which swept away an immense quantity of plate, jewels, costly stuffs, and armor, the wary Ferdinand resolved, as well to protect himself against a second contingency of the kind, as against the rigors of the approaching winter, to build a substantial camp ; so that it was said that where lately nothing but airy tents and fluttering drap- eries were seenj now rose as if by miracle, mighty towers, powerful walls, and solid edifices — the cruci- form camp-city of Santa Fe, as it was christened by the devout Isabella. Hopeless at the sight of such preparations, tortured by famine, faction, suffering, and the terror of death, the people of Granada capitulated on the 2nd of Jan- uar}', 1492. Muza made his escape and mysteriously disappeared, never to be heard of again. That there should be unconditional liberation of all Christian captives ; that Boabdil and his cavaliers should do homage and swear fealty to the Castilian sov- ereigns ; that the Moors of Granada should become SEQOVIA: TilE ALCAZAli -^\u (jAJ-iiEDRAL. The Oapitulat'ion. 809 subjects of the crown, be protected in their reUgious observances, be governed by their own cadis, be ex- empted from tribute for three years, and then should pay the same they had been wont to pay to their own rulers ; that those so desiring should depart to Africa with their effects and be given passage thither ; such are the main outlines of the stipulations affecting the vanquislied. Boabdil had estates provided in perpetuity for him and his descendants within and without Granada, to- gether witli whatever had formed the royal patrimony before the surre.ider : and towns and lands in the Alpu- j arras were set aside as a sort of miniature sovereignty for him. He was to receive also on the day of sur- render, thirty thousand doblas of gold. The sad ceremonies of the capitulation took place in the presence of a countless multitude. Three minute guns thundered out the dying liberties of Morisma, and Boabdil, sallying forth from the Portal of the Seven Floors, delivered the keys of the city to Ferdinand in token of submission. "These keys," said he, "are the last relics of the Arabian empire in Spain ; thine, O king, are our trophies, our kingdom, and our person. Such is the will of God ! Receive them with the clem- ency thou hast promised, and which we look for at thy hands." Presenting the count of Tendilla, who was to be gov- ernor of the city, with a costly ring, " With this ring," said he, "Granada has been governed; take it and govern with it, and God make you more fortunate than me. ?> When Boabdil, in his setting forth, reached an emi 810 Reign of FerdiJiand and Isabella. The Flight from G-ranada. 311 nence which commanded the last view of Granada, and looking back saw the great crucifix sparkling in the sunbeams that gave a pathetic loveliness to the Alham- bra, it is said that, over-charged with grief, he could con- tain himself no longer, but bursting into tears, ex- claimed, " Allah Achbah ! God is great ! " " You do well," exclaimed the wrathful Ayxa, "to weep like a woman for what you failed to defend like a man." Down to late generations, the spot where the Moor turned back and beheld the illumined minarets of the Alhambra for the last time, was called " the Last Sigh of the Moor." THE FLIGHT FROM GRANADA. There was crying in Granada when the sun was going down ; Some calling on the Trinity, some calling on Mahoun. Here passed away the Koran there in the Cross was borne, — And here was heard the Christian bell, and there the Moorish horn ; Te Deimi LauJamns, was up the Ale ala sung; Down from the Alhambra's minarets were all the crescents flung : The arms thereon of Aragon they with Castile's display ; One king comes in in triumph, — one weeping goes away. Thus cried the weeper, while his hands his old white beard did tear ; " Farewell, farewell, Granada ! thou city v;ithout peer ! Woe, woe, thou pride of heathendom ! seven hundred years and more Have gone since tirst the faithful thy royal sceptre bore. ** Thou wert the happy mother of a high renowned race ; Within thee dwelt a haughty line, that now go from their place; Within thee fearless knights did dwell, who fought with mickle glee,— The enemies of proud Castile, — the bane of Christentie! '• The mother of fair dames wert thou, of truth and beauty rare. Into whose arms did courteous knights for solace sweet repair; For whose dear sakes the gallants of Afric made display Of might in joust and battle on many a bloody day. " Here gallants held it little thing for ladies' sake to die, Or for the prophet's honor, and pride of Soldanry ; For here did valor flourish, and deeds of warlike might Ennobled lordly palaces in which was our delight. "The gardens of thy Vega, its fields and blooming bowers,— Woe, woe ! I see their beauty gone, and scattered all their flowers ! No reverence can he claim, — the king that such a land hath lost,— On charger never can he ride, nor be heard among the host ; Bat in some dark and dismal place, where none his face may see, There, weeping and lamenting, alone that King should be." Lock HA KT. CHAPTER XIV. REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. [continued.] WHILE, says an accomplished historian, the Spanish sovereigns were detained before Granada, they pubUshed their memorable and most disastrous edict against the Jews ; inscribing it, as it were, with the same pen that drew up the capitulation of Granada and the treaty with Columbus. Throughout the peninsula the Jews had attained an enviable degree of prosperity and wealth ; sufficient excuse for the action of the Inquisition. Though three of the queen's private secretaries, Alvarez, Avila, and Pulgar were converted Jews, the great mass of the Jewish subjects passionately adhered to the ancient ritual. This of itself was a scandal to Spanish Chris- tendom ; but now, since proselytism met with stubborn opposition on their part, the Jews were accused of kid- napping and circumcising Christian children or cruci- fying them on Good Friday in derision of Christ, while indiscriminate charges of poisoning were brought against the Jewish apothecaries and physicians, and conversion of Catholics to the Jewish rite was alleged. It was asserted by the inquisitors that the only method of extirpating Israelitish practices absolutely, was expul- 312 Toj'quemaday the Inquisitor, 313 sion of the race, allied though it might be by blood and marriage with some of the best stock of the realm ; and the immediate and final banishment of every unbaptized Israelite from the kingdom was insisted on. While certain prominent Jews were trying to propitiate the sovereigns, in their sore pecuniary distress, by offers of thirty thousand ducats towards defraying the expenses of the Moorish war, Torquemada, the grand inquisitor, burst into the palace of the sovereigns, 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 again for thirty thousand ; here he is ; take him and barter him away." Dashing the crucifix on the table, he rushed out of the apartment. The unparalleled im- pudence of this outburst had as its result the loss of the most skilful and ingenious portion of the popula- tion. The queen, overawed by the Dominican Torque- mada, and accustomed to almost total obedience in matters of faith, yielded, contrary to her own humane and noble instincts, to the fierce suggestions of her confessor. Torquemada triumphed, and the edict for the expulsion of the Jews was signed March 30, 1492. It is infinitely pathetic to read of the effect of this instrument in the homes of the exiled Israelites. Many of them, reared in elegance, highly educated, unaccus- tomed to privations of any sort, full of patriotism, loy- alty, and self-sacrifice, intimately associated with all the glories and all the humiliations of Spain, now branded with infamy, were cast out helpless and defenceless, forbidden even to take their gold and silver with them, compelled in some cases to exchange a house for an 314 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, ass, and a vineyard for a suit of clothes, but pathetically constant and full of a sublime fortitude to the last. The highways were thronged with delicate women, gray-haired old men, and weeping children, on their way to unknown and inhospitable lands, perhaps to slavery and death ; eighty thousand passed into Portugal ; many wandered hopeless to Cadiz and Santa Maria, and took passage for Africa, where they were plundered or slain by the robbers of Barbary. Agonizing details of hunger, violation, and cruelty reach us from this time. Some managed to secrete a little money in their garments or saddles ; or, having been suspected of swallowing gold and silver coins, were ripped open with unspeakable torments and searched for the imagined wealth. Num- bers, unable to endure the sorrows and hardships of wandering, staggered back to the beloved fatherland and were forced to the indignity of baptism, and that in such multitudes, that they could not be individually baptized but had to submit to sprinkling with a mop or a hyssop-branch ; " thus," (forsooth) " renouncing their ancient heresies, they became faithful followers of the Cross." At Naples, great numbers of them were swept off by a malignant disease ; in Genoa, indescribable suffering accompanied those who had taken refuge there; the Levant and Turkey were filled with them, and their descendants still cling to the Castilian as their home vernacular. England, France, and Holland harbored a multitude, and it is said that even to-day the Spanish is heard in some of the London synagogues. The whole number of exiles is computed to be between one hun- dred and sixty thousand and eight hundred thousand ^'^SSSiS^ PRISON OF THE INQUISITION AT BARCELONA. Expulsion of the Jews, 317 thousand ; the more cautious historians incline to the smaller estimate. The loss of the Jews, soon to be followed by that of the Moors, was irretrievable. The humiliation, ferocity, violation of all law and justice, and monstrous impiety involved in such a deed cannot be described in words; and though the subject of lavish encomiums from en- lightened contemporaries and of exultation as a great victory of the cross, the expulsion of the Jews must ever leave a stain on the otherwise spotless memory of Isabella. The attempted assassination of Ferdinand while on a visit to Catalonia in 1492, after the conclusion of hos- tilities at Granada, spread general consternation through the country. While Isabella's genius devoted itself with serene and lucid intelligence to the interior administration and organization of Spain, Ferdinand's temper and ambi- tion signalized themselves by characteristic devotion to the foreign interests of the land. This leads us to an outline of the Italian wars. The great cause of these complications was the claim of Charles VIII. to the crown of Naples, which had been in the possession of the Aragonese family for more than half a century, and had been solemnly so recognized by repeated sanctions of pope and people. Charles's claim was derived originally from a bequest of Rene, count of Provence, who excluded his own grandson, the rightful heir of the house of Anjou, in favor of the French king. At the time a misunder- standing existed between Charles and Spain ; he was at war with Germany and England, and little benefit could 818 Jlp-lg7i of Ferdinand arid Isabella. be expected even if he succeeded in establishing his claim. But seeing the necessity of adopting a concilia- tory policy, he proceeded to make peace with Henry VII. of England at Etaples, with Maximilian, emperor of Germany, at Sesnli, and with Ferdinand at Barcelona, By the treaty with P'erdinand the provinces of Cerdagne and Roussillon, originally mortgaged by Ferdinand's father, Juan II., to Louis XL of France, for three hun- dred thousand crowns, were restored. Louis was to furnish aid agrainst Ferdinand's rebellious Catalonian subjects. Both sides, Iwwever, failed in their engagements. Ferdinand with the dogged perseverance characteristic of his spirit, pursued his determination to recover these fair provinces by fair means or by foul, by negotiation, bribery, or arms, if necessary. Louis's successor, Charles, fortunately being impatient to prosecute his designs for the expulsion of Ferdinand II., son of Alfonso, from Naples, yielded with all imaginable speed to the king of Spain's solicitations and representations, and a treatv was siiincd" bv Charles at Tours and by Ferdinand at Barcelona, January 19, 1493. The prin- cipal stipulations of this treaty, rendered of great im- portance by what followed, were : mutual aid in war between the contracting parties ; each should prefer the other's alliance, the popes excepted ; Spain should enter into no understanding with any power prejudicial to the interests of France, the pope excepted ; Roussillon and Cerdagne should be restored to Aragon. But as doubts existed as to whom these provinces rightfully appertained, it was stipulated that arbitrators, named by the Spanish sovereigns, should be appointed, if re- Italian Wars. 319 quested by Charles, with plenary powers to decide; and that both sides should abide by their decision. The approaching conflict between Charles and Al- fonso, successor of Ferdinand his father (i494)» was highly interesting to Ferdinand, because he feared the formidable preparations of Charles would result in the subversion of the Neapolitan branch of his house, and the overthrow of his own dominions in Sicily. Charles, surrounded by the youthful chivalry of his court, appears to us, in the garrulous chronicles of Comines, as burning for an opportunity to distinguish himself. He crossed the Alps in August, 1494, overran the country with wonderful alacrity, treated friends and allies alike with the utmost perfidy, and in December victoriously entered the gates of Rome. Meanwhile Ferdinand, by means of his ambassador Alonzo de Silva had come to an explicit understanding with Charles, who, under pretext of a crusade against the Turks, had introduced this army into Italy where he intended to linger just long enough to make gopd his claims to Naples. Ferdinand, after some prelim- inary compliments and generalities, cautioned him against forming any designs against Naples, which was aleoff of the church, expressly excepted by the treaty of Barcelona which recognized the claims and authority of the church as paramount to every other obligation. The chagrin of Charles, at what he called the perfidy of the Spanish court, in so broadly interpreting the com- pact of Barcelona, is difficult to describe. He had hoped for Ferdinand's non-interference, or even for his co-operation in the conquest of Naples, and he was greatly astounded that the rights of the church, perpet- fi 320 Reli/n of Ferdinand and h> Then champion on champion high, and count on count doth look ; And faltering is the tongue of lord, and pale the cheek of duke ; Till starts up brave Alonzo, the knight of Aguilar, The lowrnost at the royal board, but foremost still in war. Alonzo, the Knight of Aguilar. 335 And thus he speaks : " I pray, my lord, that none but I ma) go , For I made promise to the Queen, your consort, long ago, Tha e- " should have an end, I, for her royal charms, Ind for my duty to her grace, would show some feat of arms. - Much joyed the king these words to hear -he bids Alonzo • And lon'g btf7re their revel 's o'er, the knight is on his steed ^ A onzo'f on his milk-white steed, ^^^ ^--"^,,' ^^^^^ A thousand horse, a chosen band, ere dawn the hills to gam. Thev ride along the darkling ways, they gallop at the night ; Thev each Nevado ere the cock hath harbingered the ight, B?ere ive climbed that steep ravine, the east -^ go -^^^^ And the Moors their lances bright have seen, and Christian ban ners spread. Beyond the sands, between the rocks, where the old cork trees The paThTsVough, and monnted n,en must singly march and slow ; rter o'e the path the heathen range their ambuscade's hne, High up they wait for Aguilar. as the day begms to shu,e. There' nought avails the eagle-eye, the guardian of Castile The Le of wisdom, nor the heart that fear m.ght never feel, The arm of Tength that wielded well the strong mace „. the fray Nor thrbrold pLe, from whence the edge of falch.on glanced away. Down -down like driving hail they come, and horse and horse- Like ca^, those despair is dumb when the fierce lightnings fiy. Alonzo, with a handful more, escapes into ^e field. There like a lion stands at bay, in vam besought to yield , I th u'a^d foes around are seen, but none d-;-- '^f S" " Afar with bolt and javelin they pierce the steadfast kmght. 836 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. A hundred and a hundred darts are hissing round his head ; Had Aguilar a thousand hearts, their blood had all been shed ; Faint and more faint he staggers, upon the slippery sod, At last his back is to the earth, he gives his soul to God. With that the Moors plucked up their hearts to gaze upon his face, And caitiff's mangled where he lay the scourge of Afric's race ; To woody Oxijera then the gallant corpse they drew. And there upon the village-green they laid him out to view. Upon the village-green he lay as the moon was shining clear, And all the village damsels to look on him drew near; They stood around him all a-gaze, beside the big oak tree And much his beauty they did praise, though mangled sore was he. Now, so it fell, a Christian dame that knew Alonzo well, Not far from Oxijera did as a captive dwell. And hearing all the marvels, across the woods came she, To look upon this Christian corpse, and wash it decently. She looked upon him, and she knew the face of Aguilar, Although his beauty was disgraced with many a ghastly scar. She knew him, and she cursed the dogs that pierced him from afar. And mangled him when he was slain — the Moors of Alpuxar. The Moorish maidens, while she spake, around her silence kept. But her master dragged the dame away — then loud and long they wept; They washed the blood, with many a tear, from dint of dart and arrow. And buried him near the waters clear of the brook of Alpuxarra. After this brief and furious storm, profound tran- quillity visited the length and breadth of the kingdom of Granada. An edict was published in 1501, which prohibited intercourse between obdurate Mahometans and the orthodox (.?) kingdom of Granada, followed by another in 1502, closely modelled after that against the >' II THE GENERALiFE. (GRANADA.) Italian WarB. 339 Tews, baptizing or banishing all Moors twelve and four- teen years of age. Penalties of death and confiscation were affixed if any carried gold or silver out of the country or emigrated to the dominions of the Grand Turk or to hostile parts of Africa. Thus a dominion eight hundred years old was over- thrown in twenty years. At this point in our narrative we are again confronted with the Italian wars which, far from being put to ever- Tasting sleep as they deserved to be, by the death o Charles VIII., broke out afresh on the accession of his miccessor, Louis Xii. . . . m November, .500, took place the equal partition of the kingdom of Naples between France and Spam. Frederic II. was excluded as having called m the assis- tance of the Turks,, bitter enemies of Christianit>'. Apulia and Calabria in the south, fell to Spain ; Lavoro and Abruzzo in the north, fell to France. Ferdinand tried to justify his part of this astoundmg proceeding by laying emphasis on the illegitimacy of L branch of the Aragonese house to whom Alfonso his uncle, had left the kingdom, and the necessity of bringing these important possessions agam wrthin the control of the legitimate branch. Kept "S'dly seer t for a while, the terms of the treaty became known to Alexander Vl. as soon as the Sire d'Aubigny crossed the papal borders at the head of the French army. He confiriLd the partition, and in July the French entered the Neapolitan frontier. It was soon seen, however, that the pretensions of the two parties to the partition were irreconcilable. The ■ 340 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. central portion, between the southern and northern por- tions, embracing the Capitanate, the Basilicate, and Principality, formed a debatable ground not mentioned in the treaty, which soon brought both kings to an open rupture. The French began hostilities, and soon the war raged unequivocally on both sides. ^ Gonsalvo triumphed. D'Aubigny, with the wreck of his forces surrendered ; Naples was entered with pomp by the great captain. May 14, 1503; and every consid- erable place in the kingdom except Gaeta tendered its submission. During the progress of the war Charles V., son of Philip I. of the Netherlands and Juana, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, was born in Ghent, February 24, 1500 — an event of moment, as, by the death of Prince Miguel, Charles was now heir of the united monarchies of Castile, Aragon, Sicily, Naples, and the Netherlands, and on the death of his father, Philip the Pfandsome, he was to become emperor of Germany. Philip I. abhorred the punctilious Spaniards and shortly after the ceremony of his son's recognition by the Cortes, the archduke, despite the critical condition of his queen, whom he intended to leave in Spain, an- nounced his intention of an immediate return to the Netherlands, which he carried out by traversing France. At this point, Juana, approaching the period of the birth of her second son, Ferdinand (March 10, 1503), began to show symptoms of the eccentricity which afterwards developed into the most fantastic aberration. Despondency at the absence of the gay and sparkling Philip, seized her, and she refused to be comforted. Insanity was hereditary in the family ; it had tainted Contrasted Civilization. 341 the intellect of Isabella's mother, it took the form of religious enthusiasm in several of Isabella's daughters, it sent Charles, her grandson, to the cloister, made a gloomy bigot of his son, Philip IL, and probably urged the wretched Don Carlos, son of Philip, to an igno- minious death. The French invasion of Spain by way of Roussillon in 1503, proved utterly futile. Here the philosophic historian pauses to recount the strange contrast presented by the civilization of Italy and the utter wretchedness contemporary with it. The golden age of ftalian literature, architecture, and art was at hand ; Florence, Venice, and Rome were the busy scene of an intellectual and aesthetic activity which threw its conceptions into the most sumptuous forms. Palaces, paintings, poems innumerable, came flowing in a rich stream from the fingers of artist, archi- tect, and poet. Luxurious refinement pervaded the upper classes of society. The revival of classical learning after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, spread a general and eloquent enthusiasm for the mas- terpieces of Greek art and Roman antiquity. A splen- did assemblage of genius graced the petty courts of Italy. At a period nearly contemporary with this, Ariosto was singing his immortal song ; Rafaelle was blazoning the walls of the Vatican with incomparable frescoes ; Michael Angelo was rearing his mighty dome ; Leonardo with exhaustless versatility was scattering his powers over the varied fields of music, engineering, painting, and geology ; and Machiavelli began to pub- lish, through his Prince, those subtle and insidious po litical maxims which became incarnate in the princes of 342 Tleign of Ferdinand and Isabella. his native land and totally excluded politics from the range of the the moral sciences. With all this beauteous outburst of human genius and intelligence was associated, as in dismal and endless undertone, the ghastly threnody of the Italian wars. Pitiless fury, debased patriotic sentiment, cruelty not to be described, a bestialized papacy, butchery, bloodshed, and the upas-shadow of the Inquisition, distinguished ISABELLA DICTATINCx HER WILL. these fantastic times equally with exquisite culture, love of art, and consummate civilization. The success of the Spaniards in Italy (1504) was due to the innovations in their arms introduced by Gonsalvo, the obedience and subordination of the soldiery, and the invincible energy of the great captain himself. With an absurdly small force he annihilated the gener- .Death of Isabella. 343 als and armies of France, conquered the kingdom of Naples, and educated his troops to a system of tactics and military mining — brought by him to unprece- dented perfection in the course of the war— which after- wards made the Spanish troops the finest in Europe. On November 26, 1504, died the ever-glorious and memorable Isabella I., in the fifty-fourth year of her age, and thirtieth of her reign. To say that she was loved and lamented by her people, would be hardly describing the adoration they paid her — their mother, their friend, their queen, their protector. Universal homage was paid to her virtues. Her grace, tact, and courage, the sweetness and symmetry of her features, her abstemiousness, piety, and abhorrence of ostentation: her bigotry, excused and softened by the tenor of the times, her unbending principle, hatred of duplicity, prac- tical good sense, and tender sensibility; her distaste for extravagance in dress, her skilful selection of agents to accomplish her plans, her contempt of physical pain and fatigue, and her benevolence, first among the sov- ereigns of Europe to institute camp hospitals for the help of her poor sick soldiers; the remembrance of all this threw a halo around her memory. By her will, executed October 12, 1504, she left the crown of Castile to the Infanta Juana as "queen pro- prietor," and the archduke Philip, her husband. In the absence or incapacity, of Juana, Ferdinand was ap- pointed sole regent of Castile until the majority of her grandson, Charles. The king and Ximenes were the chief executors. She left also specific directions as to the codification of the laws, injunctions characterized by the utmost tenderness concerning the conversion, 342 Uelgn of Ferdlnancl and Isabella. Death of Isabella. 348 his native land and totally excluded politics from the range of the the moral sciences. With all this beauteous outburst of human genius and intelligence was associated, as in dismal and endless undertone, the ghastly threnody of the Italian wars. Pitiless fury, debased patriotic sentiment, cruelty not to be described, a bestialized papacy, butchery, bloodshed, and the upas-shadow of the Inquisition, distinguished ISABELLA DICTATING HER WILL. these fantastic times equally with exquisite culture, love of art, and consummate civilization. The success of the Spaniards in Italy (1504) was due to the innovations in their arms introduced by Gonsalvo, the obedience and subordination of the soldiery, and the invincible energy of the great captain himself. With an absurdly small force he annihilated the gener- als and armies of France, conquered the kingdom of Naples, and educated his troops to a system of tactics and military mining — brought by him to unprece- dented perfection in the course of the war— which after- wards made the Spanish troops the finest in Europe. On November 26, 1504, died the ever-glorious and memorable Isabella I., in the fifty-fourth year of her age, and thirtieth of her reign. To say that she was loved and lamented by her people, would be hardly describing the adoration they paid her — their mother, their friend, their queen, their protector. Universal homage was paid to her virtues. Her grace, tact, and courage, the sweetness and symmetry of her features, her abstemiousness, piety, and abhorrence of ostentation: her bigotry, excused and softened by the tenor of the times, her unbending principle, hatred of duplicity, prac- tical good sense, and tender sensibility; her distaste for extravagance in dress, her skilful selection of agents to accomplish her plans, her contempt of physical pain and fatigue, and her benevolence, first among the sov- ereigns of Europe to institute camp hospitals for the help of her poor sick soldiers; the remembrance of all this threw a halo around her memory. By her will, executed October 12, 1504, she left the crown of Castile to the Infanta Juana as " queen pro- prietor," and the archduke Philip, her husband. In the absence or incapacity, of Juana, Ferdinand was ap- pointed sole regent of Castile until the majority of her grandson, Charles. The king and Ximenes were the chief executors. She left also specilic directions as to the codification of the laws, injunctions characterized by the utmost tenderness concerning the conversion, !1 1 .1 *l 'V.-B 344 Reign of Ferdinatid and Isabella. civilizing, and gentle treatment of the Indians of the New World, and commands that the sources of the crown income derived from the Alcavalas 'should be investigated and put upon a pure and correct basis. Ferdinand having resigned the crown of Castile, which he had so successfully held for thirty years, as- sumed the title of administrator or governor of Castile. The cortes and grandees acknowledged Juana as queen and lady proprietor; but in consideration of her mental state, tendered their homage to Ferdinand in her name, as the lawful governor of the realm. A season of uneasiness and perplexity ensued, owing to the pretensions of Philip, who wrote requiring his father- in-law, to resign the government at once, and retire to Aragon. Philip attempted to tamper with Gonsalvo de Cordova in the endeavor to secure Naples. Ferdinand, at his wit's end owing to his growing unpopularity and the discontent of the grandees, who had always looked upon him as an alien and interloper, resolved to seek the alliance of France by a marriage with Germaine, niece of Louis XII., which was confirmed by the disgraceful treaty of Blois in 1505. If he had male issue, Aragon and its dependencies must be totally severed from Castile. If he did not, he was to share the splendid Italian con- quests with his unsuccessful competitor in these con- quests. An arrangement so incompatible with the customary sagacity of the Catholic king roused the ridicule and astonishment of Europe. By the concord of Salamanca in November, 1505, made between Philip and Ferdinand, Castile was to be governed jointly by Ferdinand, Philip, and Juana— an arrangement intended by Philip to lull the suspicions Marriage of Ferdinand and G-ermaine. 345 of his father-in-law until he could effect a landing in Spain, when he meant to take matters into his own hands. In 1506, Ferdinand married the volatile Germaine, and in the same year Philip and Juana arrived at Coruna, after their embarkation from the Netherlands. The personal beauty, generosity, and openness of disposi- tion peculiar to the archduke, soon won for him a num- erous and powerful 'following. Though Ferdinand re- ceived him courteously, he soon saw the hopelessness of a conflict with so general a favorite, and on the 27th of June, resigned the entire sovereignty of Castile to Philip and jfuana, reserving to himself only the grand- masterships of the military orders and the revenues left him by Isabella's testament. With monstrous dissimu- lation he protested in private that this concession was wrung from him by force, and that he should take the first opportunity in spite of his solemn oath, of recov- ering his imagined possessions and releasing his daugh- ter from what he called her captivity. Between 1504 and 1506 occurred the last voyage, illness, and death of the illustrious Columbus. Philip, after a short and inglorious reign, character- ized by reckless extravagance, gross favoritism toward his Flemish courtiers, and arbitrary government, died suddenly in 1506 while Ferdinand was on his way to Naples. In 1507 Ferdinand returned to Spain and was greeted with universal satisfaction ; and as the condi- tion of Juana — wild, haggard, emaciated, and squalid as she was, refusing peremptorily ever to sign a state- paper and, lingering, in the end, for forty-seven years, without ever quitting her palace at Tordesillas — seemed J t 346 Reign of Ferdinayid and Isabella SO desperate, Ferdinand began to exercise an authority nearly as undisputed as, and far less clearly defined than, during the life-time of his noble consort. " Crazy Jane," as she was now called, remained plunged in pro- found melancholy j she would not let the remains of Philip be buried ; she journeyed by night, saying " that a widow, who had lost the sun of her own soul, should never expose herself to the light of day;" she had con- tinual funeral ceremonies perfoumed wherever she halted ; and jealously excluded every female from even approaching the perambulating corpse. Her grotesque horror, on once discovering that Philip's remains had been deposited in a nunnery, is more easity conceived than pictured in words. Gleams of intelligence visited her every now and then, nor does she seem by any means to have been so absolutely incapable as is usually said. Ximenes, who had lately received a cardinal's hat from Julius II. and had succeeded Deza as inquisitor- general of Castile, now conceived a bold and extraor- dinary enterprise. This was no less than the capture of the opulent city of Oran, on the African coast — an enterprise led, equipped, and achieved by himself per- sonally out of his own revenues as primate of Spain. This was in 1509. His genius overcame the almost in- superable obstacles put in his way by the jealousy of the nobles, the coolness of the king, and the magnitude of the preparations necessary to equip his ten thousand foot, four thousand horse, and eighty galleys ; while " a monk fighting the battles of Spain, whereas the great captain was left to stay at home, and count his beads like a hermit," gave rise to sneers. The troops, how- ever, after an impassioned harangue from the primate. ■fl ■ii 11 GATE OF THE SALA DE JUSTICIA. (ALHAiMBRA. Cardinal Ximenes. 349 rushed to victory, shouting " Santiago and Ximenes," while superstition said that the stupendous miracle of Joshua staying the sun in its course, was repeated for the venerable archbishop. Perhaps the illustrious prelate's chief claim to recog- nition, however, lies in his founding the university of Alcala and his Polyglot translation of the bible. The university was founded with solemn ceremonies in 1500 and grew up a beautiful mass of picturesque and ele- gant architecture, furnished completely with everything requisite for the comfort and accommodation of a vast number of students. The famous Complutensian Poly- glot, entrusted to nine scholars renowned for skill and erudition in the ancient tongues, was fifteen years exe- cuting, being finished in 1517, after great difficulties in printing, and by the aid of artists imported from Ger- many. Nearly four centuries after it was found that the precious manuscripts used in the translation had all been disposed of to a rocket-maker of Alcala who soon used them up as waste paper. On October 4, 15 11, the Holy League was formed between Ferdinand, Julius II. and Venice (afterwards joined by Henry VIII. of England) with the object of driving the French out of Italy. In this the Spaniards were again victorious. In 15 12, Navarre, which, allied with France, had refused the passage of some English troops coming to co-operate with Ferdinand in his de- scent on Guienne, was reduced to submission by the duke of Alva, grandfather of him of the Netherlands. Jean d'Albret, its letters-loving and amiable sovereign, took refuge in France. A truce in 15 13, put an end to the wars in the territories west of the Alps, for two o 50 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. years, during which Navarre, by solemn act of cortes was incorporated (15 15), with the kingdom of Castile, rather than with the more intimately connected and contiguous Aragon. Whether regarded as an unblushing usurpation, a measure of expediency, or as the restor- ation of its ancient liistorical union with Castile, the conquest of Navarre, with the general levelling of its fortresses and fortified places ended forever the exis- tence of an independent and aggressive monarchy in the heart of the great political net-work of Spain. The "Gran Capitan," now distrusted by Ferdinand, became morbid, irritable, and melancholy, and finally, consumed by inward fever and infirmities, breathed his last at his palace in Granada, December, 15 15. On the morning of January 23, 15 16, Ferdinand him- self, yielding to a distressing heart disease, died in a small house belonging to the friars of Guadaloupe. "In so wretched a tenement did this lord of so many lands close his eyes upon the world ! " exclaimed the pious Peter Martyr. By his will he settled the succession of Aragon and Naples on Juana and her heirs. Ximenes was entrusted with the administration of Castile during Charles's ab- sence in the Netherlands, and Aragon to the king's nat- ural son, the archbishop of Saragossa. He had reigned forty-one years over Castile, and thirty-seven over Aragon, and died in his sixty-fourth year. His body, at first laid beside Isabella's in the monastery of the Alhambra, was removed with hers the next year, to the Cathedral church of Granada, where Charles V. afterward erected the mausoleum of exqui- sitely carved marble still visible to-day. , heiress of 1, 1065-1109; '72. URRA^ f Raimond B rcelona. ] •:kdi>'AND E 1157-1188. •2)ALF0NS( 1252; (1) = I3 (2)== J ^ A>XHO I of Portugal I tLFONSO 1 1. hen! 1390- ^rs = (1) JC b. 1498 (2) Emanuel, 6 CASTILE. (•) Rival of Richard of Cornwall as nominal Emperor, (t; Unsuccessful comi>etitor for the throne agauist Sancho IV. (+) Through this marriage Spain was united into one mon- archy. FERDINAND I, second son of Sancho the Great, 1033-1065. = Sancia heiress of Leon. SANCHO II, 1065-1072, ob. s. p. ALFONSO VI. Leom, 1065-1109; = Constance, dan. of Robert, Castile K '12. Theresa = Henry, grandson of Robert, D. of Burgundy. Berengaria, dau. o URRACA 1109-1126. (l) = Raimond, son of William, C. of Burgundy. - (2) = ALFONSO I. of Aragon, VII. of Castile and Leon. ' Mmond Berenger III. _ (UlFON;SO VIII. (2) _ (1) Richilda of Poland. (f-^S^-'i^^-J-fJ-J^-f ''-«""«• of Barcelona Sancia = Sancho VI. of Navarre. ALFONSO I'x. 1158-1214. =r Eleanor, dau. of Henry II of England. SANCHO III., 1157-1158. = Blanche, dau. of Garcia IT I of Navarre. Constance = Louis VII. of France. Fi AlfonsoII of Portu^l = 4. Urrica. 2. H^NRYL 3. Blmlche = Louis VIIL of France. 5. Elea;ior = (l) James I. of Aragon. 1. Beren^ria AUV.USU . o 1214-1217, ob. s. p. D. of Burgundy. Leon. 1126-1157. ) -:hdi>"Axd II. == Urraca, dau. of Urraca = Garcia IV. of Navarre Sancia = (2) Alfonso II. of Aragon. 1157-1188. Alfonso I of Portugal. (2) ALFONSO IX. 1188-1230. (1) = Tlieresa, dau. of Sancho I. of Portugal. Louis IX. FERDINAND II.' Castile, 1217- Leori 1230. 1252; (1) = Beatrix, dau of Emp. Philip. 1^1)= Joanna, dau. of C. of Aumale and Ponthieu. (1) ALFONSO X*, 1252-1284. == lolande, dau. of James I. of Aragon. Blanche = Ferdinand de la Cerda, ob. 1275. Berengaria (Mary) = (2) John de Brienne, Eastern Emp. (2) S ANCHO I^^., 1284-1295. I Eleanor = Edward I. of England. Beatrix = Alfonso IIL of Portugal. (Denis 2. Alfonso, t 1. Ferdinand. I FERDINAND IV., 129&-1312. =j=Const of Portugal.) I ance. Charles C. of = 2. Mary. Alencon 1. Blanche = John Manual, Ld.ofVillena. Alfonso IV., of (2) = Eleanor. Aragon. Alfonso IV. = Beatrix. /XFONSO XL, 1312-1350. \ Mary. Joanna = HENRY II. of Trastamare, 13G8-1379. PETER the Cruel, 1330-1368. = Blanche, dau. of Peter I. of Bourbon. Eleanor = Charles III. of Navarre. i Eleanor, dau. of Peter IV. of Aragon. =(1) JOHN l'.. 1379-1390. (2) -Beatrix, dau. of Ferdinand of Portugal. \ \ (Edward III. of England.) Constance = John of Gamit. Edmund, Duke of York. = Isabella. 2. Ferdinand, K. of Aragon and Sicily. a. HENkv III., =T Catharine. 1390-140G. John IT. of Aragon. ]yiary = (1) JOHN II., 1406-1454. (2) = Isabella of Portugal. (2) (1) I ) Ferdinand, ob. 1516+ =2. Isabella, 1474-1504. 3. Alfonso, ob. 1468. 1. HENRY IV., 1454-1474, (1) = Blanche of Navarre. ob. s. p. (2) = Joanna, dau of Edward of Portugal (Emp, Maximilian I.") I 2. John = Margaret, ob. 1530. ob. e p. 141'7. PHILIP, ob. 1506. T 3. JOANNA, ob. 1555. CHARLES I. of Spain, Emp. Charles V. Alfonso, P. of Portugal. =- (1) 1. Isabella ob. 1 W8 (2) j (1) Emanuel of Portugal. (2) = 4. Mary. Emanuel, ob, s p 1500. Catherine (1) = Arthur, F, of Wales. (2) = Henry VIII. of England, ARAGON. ii Indudin^Z Aras'oncsc Frinces in Provence^ Majorca^ and Sicily. HAMIKF.Z I., fourth son of SanclU) HI, of Navarre, lOoo- 1(103. I SA>'CH<) RAMIREZ, Barcelona. Kaimoxd Berenger II. == Matilda, dau. of ob. 1082. Robert (iuiscurd. Dolce, heiress ~ (2)Raimond Bkhengkr III.,(1) = " of rrovence. PEDRO I. 1004-llC^, ob. s. p ALF» »NSO I., = (.2) Urraca, Quee:'. of Castile. 11U4-1134, ub. s. i». RA^UREZ II.. 1134-1137, res.; ob. 1147. I * ob. 1130. Provence. PETRONILLA, 1137-1172. R.AIMONP Rekkngeu IV ob. 11G2. Derenger Raymom>, ob. 1144. Rereiigaria = Alfonso VIII, of Castile. * By this marriafre Catalonia was united to Aragon. t Alfonso II. interfered in Provence iioniinally in behalf of the heiress of Rainiond Berenger II., but kept it for himself, and gave it to his brothers and son in succession. :}: Hence the Aragonese claim to Naples and Sicily. II With her, Provence went to the House of Anjou in Naples. \ Succeeded to Sicily on death of his son. ** Elected to Aragon and Sicily on death of Martin the Elder. Henceforth Aragon and Sicily remain united. f+King of Naples also, in succession to Joanna II. 55 King of Navarre also, in right of his first wife. Mat i of rilda dau of -m ALFONSO I I.f (2; t SiH'^^l'^'- '■:!"• f>f R aim. .NT. Beuenger II I. Sanch<> of Provence, \fonI!>l 11G2-11DG. Alto„suVin. of Pn.vence, deprive 1, llbo. t Portugal. uf Castile. ob.s.p. 1181. Dolce =Sancho I. of I'ortuual. llAi.Mo.M) l>EnENGER II. = Richilda, wldow of ob. IIGG. Provence. Alfonso VI 11. of Castile. Dolce, PEDRO II.. 110<-r.l3 killed at Muret. Constance il) = Emeric ol" Hungarv. (2) = (1) Enip. Frederick li'. Eleanor = (5) Rainiond VI. of Toulouse. Eleanor dau. of Alfonso IX. =(1) JAYME I., theConqueror,(2)=Iolande. dan. of Andrew II. ot Castile, divorced 1-229. | 1213-127G. of liu.^ary. Majorca. Alfonso, ob. 1200. Aleonso II. 111K'.-1209. R.VIMOXn lir.R .NGER IV. 1209-l:.'45. Sancha = Rainiond V 1 1. c!eprived by Alfonso II. of Toulouse. Beatrix, dan. of Thomas. C. uf Savoy Margaret, = St. Louis. Eleanor = Henry III. of England. "^ JkYM- I 1. PEDRi* 111.. 1270-1285; = Constance,t dau. of 3. lolante = Alfonso N. of "ob. loll' *' " J. of Sicily, 1282-12>.j. j Manfred. Castile. 4. Isabella (1) Philip III. of France. Sancha = Richard of Cornwall. Sicily. Beatrix |; = Charles of Anjou. S\xrno.--Marv.dau.of Ferdinand. ALFON>(> II' , ob. s. p. Charles 1 ! . ob. 1318. ob. s. p. 1285-1291. of Naples. Elizabeth == Deni;. of Portugal. lolande = Rol.ert of Naples. 1324. AY ME IL, K. of Sicilv. 12S.'V-1201. K. of Aragoi', 1291-1327. -.= Blanche, dau. of Charles IL of Naples. Fkederick I., = Eleanor, dau. of Charles II 1296-1337. Theresa d'Ei teoa = (1) ALFONSO IV.. 2) Eleanor, dau. of Ferdinand IV. ! 1327-1330. of Castile. of Naples. Pepho II. 1337-iai2. Jayme IL ob. 1349. = 3, Constance. Joanna I. C'f Naples (3) = Jav^ie, ob. s. p. 1375. I 2. Jayme, C. of l'r:^el. Pedro, t Marv, dan. ( f rbili;> of L.vreux, = (1) 1. PEDROIV., (2) = EUuMor, dau. of Alfonso IV. of Portugal. K of Nav'irre 1330-138 ». i i Martha, =(4) (^3) = Eleanor. Beatrix = Robert I L, Elector Palatine, (4) (:) (3) (3) Lewt-", 1342-1355 ob. s. p. Frederick II, = Constance dau. of (3) 1355-1377. Jayme, C. of X^-<.el = Isabella. Frederick IL of Sicily-Constance. Juan L of Castile. = 3. EUanor. claimant of crowUj'^Hio, . ^^•^•I'-"^- ... Lr ^<....:i. FERDINAND I. *«= Eleanor of ENRIQUE III. of Castile. 1. JUAN I.. 1387-1395. I lolande = Louis 1 1, of Anjou and Provence. 2. MARTIN Li> of Aragon, 1395-1410; IL of Sicilv, 1409-1410. Pedro IV. of Aragon. 1412-1410. .\lbu(iuer(iue. Blanche, dau. of iV\ = 1 :-.iartix l.of Sicily, (2) = Mary, Charles Ul. of Navarre. 1391-1409, ob. s. p. ] 377-1402. ALFONSO XAr tlie Matrnanimous, ub. s. p. 1. lilO-1456. ,,, , r ^- -1 *• AT„..+u, T /^>f ^.'-.Jv -- rn JUAN II.lt 1458-1479 (2; = Joanna Henri.iuez. Blanche of Niivarre, widow of Martui 1. ot ftiOii>. . (^j; «j i-.j.^'< ^ .++ \ Mary = Juan 1 1, of Castile. Eleanor = Edward of Portuga^ Charles, ©b. s. p, 1401, Blanche = Enrique IV. of Castile. Eleanor, Q. of Navarre. Joanna = Ferdinand I. of Naples. Germaii'e(l) =(2) FERDINAND, (1)= Isabella of Castile, de Foix. 1479-1510. ob. 1504, Character of Ferdinand. 355 we V 'i!. t' I- 1 Ferdinand was a bigot ; he was not free from the taint of perfidy tossed to and fro so freely in that age j he was parsimonious, subtle and insincere ; he utterly lacked geniality, and never threw off the gravity which he thought becoming the Spanish grandee ; he indulged in vicious gallantries, in egotistic designs, in an ill- assorted second marriage ; he was suspicious, vulgar, and uneducated ; all this one is willing to grant, and vet concede that there were elements of true grandeur in his character. In the judgment of many of his con- temporaries, he was the most renowned and glorious monarch i^i Christendom. Impartial, economical, inde- fatigable in his application to business, he was neither epicure nor ostentatious ; he loved history, horseman- ship, the rites and ritual of a splendid church ceremo- nial, knightly virtues and chivalrous undertakings ; and with unusual control over his temper, undaunted per- sonal courage, and a far-seeing political sagacity, he made few bad mistakes, and, by wonderful good fortune, raised Spain, jointly wdth his magnanimous queen, from a conglomeration of reciprocally hostile states into a spacious and concentrated European empire. h^ » : - f" .1 t \ \ Two Helpful Instruments. 367 CHAPTER XVI. THE SPANISH NAVIGATORS. COLUMBUS, starting out with letters for the Grand Khan of Tartary, is a type of the Spanish navi- igators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ignor- ance, superstition, romanticism, boundless pluck, quaint pertinacity of purpose, love of gold, imaginative schemes for the re-conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, the hope of prefixing Don (up to that time allowed only to persons of rank) to their names, the hope of immortality and of immensely extending the Castilian arms ; such were a few of the motives impelling the men of that age and producing the intellectual fermentation which char- acterized these famous centuries. Silks, gems, precious stones, luxurious commodities perfumes, wealth of all sorts, played hide-and-seek before the credulous imaginations of the age, temptincr men on vague report to venture their frail barks out on unknown waters, stimulating commercial intercourse between nations, making men ransack dusty libraries for old copies of Strabo, Pliny, Mela, Plato, and Ptol- emy, that they might see what the ancients had said about elysiums beyond the seas, and filling the univer- sities and Mediterranean towns with throngs of men, 356 eager to test by actual experiment the existence of the New Atlantis, the shadowy Cipango, and the glittering principalities of the remote Indies. A rapid and universal advance in culture ensued on the invention of printing. Men no longer won their sole education by campaigning in Palestine, Germany or Italy, and wresting from Guelph or Infidel a labori- ous subsistence. The scholar, the recluse, the brood- ing ecclesiastic, the conventual hermit, the burgher and the nobleman alike, could stay at home, read of the remarkable achievements of men, pursue speculative and experimental science to advantage, and gradually attain that point whence discovery of every sort followed •as a matter of course. Even " the Ocean Sea," gloomy and immeasurable as it spread out from the western shores of Europe, came at length to be timidly trav- ersed ; the girdling equatorial fires crossed ; the fantas- tically brilliant sunlight of the poles penetrated ; the scented spice islands, so alluring to the early navigators, tracked and revealed ; whilst the sparkling archipela- goes of India and Mexico, where men were said to catch gold in nets and festoon themselves with pearls, opened like some fairy-land before their gaze. Two simple instruments — the Compass and the Astrolabe — helped to do all these wonders for man- kind. The Chinese, it is said, had groped about their yellow seas with a southward-pointing needle, to which polarity had been communicated by means of the load- stone, as early as the third or fourth century of the Christian era; but the use of the needle in Europe, though probably of considerable antiquity, is not men- tioned before iioo. The loves of the needle and the w wwArfWg ac- sres 368 Spanish Navigators. North star, the steadfastness with which the metallic thread po.nted to the bright apparition of the star Alpha, -were a mystery and a wonder to the simple navigators as they began to utilize the discovery- and pass through the Pillars of Hercules out into tfte unknown sea. Then Martin Behem invented for the Portuguese a huge ,ron ring three feet in circumference, - the Astro- labe, -by which latitude could be taken. Arabian sages had meanwhile been measuring a degree of lati- tude, and calculating the circumference of the globe Pnnce Heniy of Portugal, in whose veins flowed the blood of Philippa of Lancaster, gave a wonderful im- petus to discovery, before his death in 1473, by endoW ng a naval college and observatory, and accomplishin-^ the exploration of the African coast from Cape Blanco to Cape de Verde, unravelling the darkness of the occi- dental seas for fifteen hundred miles, and plucking from them as U were, the Azores with their myriads of hawks, the wes't °"'°"-*°"''''''"g Cape de Verde islands, far to It is delightful to read of the Portuguese navigators- of L,sbon ,n the fifteenth century, marvelling and mar- vellous wth ever-recurring tales of new lancfs and con- sents .n the Antartic south ; of new expeditions stead. ly putting forth from the ports of the liitle ki„g- of Af L"""f " r'""°' '^«"'^"^^^>' ---navigatio'n of Africa; of squadrons returning with sun-burntLusi- taman tars, whose lips waxed as eloquent as Maunde- and suflfered „i those seas ; of Vasco de Gama, a little later on, performing his dazzling tour deforce oi doul TUh. blERRA DE OCA, NEAK MlKA.NDA DE EliRU. *1 3,^8 Spanish Navigators. North star, the steadfastness with which the metallic thread potnted to the bright apparition of the star Alpha, -were a mystery and a wonder to the sin,ple navtgators as they began to utilise the disco^•erv and pass through the Pillars of Herct.les out into the unknown sea. Then Martin Beheni invented for the Portuguese a huge iron ring three feet in circumference. - the" -Astro- labe, - by which latitude could be taken. Arabian sages had meanwhile been measuring a degree of lati- nide, and calculating the circumference of the <.lobe Pnnce Henry of Portugal, in whose veins flowed the blood of Phdippa of Lancaster, gave a wonderful im- pe us to discovery, before his death in r473, bv endow- ng a naval college and observatory, and accomplishin<. he exploration of the African coast front Cape Blanco to tape de Verde, unravelling the darkness of the occi- dental seas for fifteen hundred miles, and plucking from ttem as u were, the Azores with their myriads of hawks, the w^^t °''"°"""'"'-"'""- ^"••»P« ''e Verde islands, far to It is delightful to read of the Portuguese navigators; of Lisbon ,n the fifteenth century, marvelling and mar- ellous with ever-recurring tales of new lands and con- t ments ,n the Antartic south : of new expe.li.ions jead, y putting forth from the ports of the li Lie kin^t don, to re-achieve Hanno's legendary circumnavigatio; °anh ;;- °f -^q"- -ns returning with sun-burnt^ Lusi- I isuff. 'f-'^.'-'^V "''°^"""-' ""%- they had seen and suffered ,n those seas ; of A'asco de Gama. a little later on, performing his da.zling /..../.>,, of do b •IHE SIERRA DE OCA, NEAR MIRANDA DE EHRO. Poetical Adventures, 36] ling the cape of Good Hope and passing on to the diamonds and pagodas of the Orient ; of papal bulls granting the Portuguese sovereign authority over all the lands his people might discover in the Atlantic to India inclusive, and threatening disaster to all who should interfere with these discoveries. Though love of money was largely at the bottom of these astonishing deeds, there \s hardly one of the primitive navigators, from Columbus in his diaries to Cortes in his commentaries; from Vespucius, dimly trav- elling in Columbus's track to Orellana, floating down the mighty Amazon, who was not a poet. Setting forth in their crazy caravels, without logarithms, dead reck- oning lines, or means of determining the variations of the magnetic needle ; without decks to their ships ; ex- posed to the icy chili ot the Atlantic night and the blaze of the equatorial day; with mouldy provisions, drenched skins, and comfortless quarters, month in month out, they went on with unconquerable gladness, ship after ship full of smiling argonauts, — a-search for the golden fleece, reminding us of the rowers of the Odyssey, steadfast as stars to find land in these illimit- able waters and guided to it in the end with an instinct truly infallible. The old saga-tellers of Iceland have left us in Eirik the Red's saga, a charming account, vividly portrayed, of the southward sailings of the Icelanders; of their meeting with the elf-locked Esquimaux ; of their pas- sage to the St. Lawrence, and of the white buffalo robes, long spears, war-whoop, feather-decked garments, and weapons of the red Indians they met ; but we have no account prior to Columbus of the great oceanic em- 362 Spanish Navlijators, Christopher Cohimhus. 363 I I \ |( it pire in the South wherein Columbus hung his pear- shaped paradise, wherein he expected to hear the pagoda-bells of China, where his exquisite poetic sense gave a mysterious intelligence to everything, and where everything was pregnant with scriptural allusion or prophecy for him. Columbus's probable birthplace was Genoa, and the date of his birth has been approximately determined as having occurred about the year 1435. ^i^ early knowl- edge of geography, astronomy, geometry, and navigation was acquired at the university of Pavia. At fourteen he was before the mast, peering into dim seas and pic- turing to himself undiscovered mountains with the ardent imagination of one precociously ripened and already conscious of a destiny awaiting him. His Mediterranean and Levant voyages are beclouded with doubt; but in 1470 we clearly find him at Lisbon — a man of light-gray, kindling eyes, hair of snow at thirty, irritable though affable, blond as any Teuton, simple- mannered yet authoritative in speech, a religious en- thusiast who supported himself by pencilling maps and charts ; a meditative cosmographer perpetually brooding over the sinuous lines of his sea-drawings, and providentially haunted by apparitions of land to the west,— the Fortunate Isles, Plato's Atlantis, the Cartha- ginian Antilla, the bright-tinted Canaries aud Azores, the lovely garden of the Hesperides floating and flash- ing on the curve of the horizon — a poetic maze of truth and error, involving him in feverish disquietude and fed by the family of navigators into which he had married in Portugal. A passion seized Columbus to know everything that had been known or written, by ancients or moderns, on geography, and he drew up a sort of creed by which from various points of view he convinced himseF, and eventually others, that there must be a western passage to the cities of the Indies. His enthusiasm polarized every piece of corroborative testimony, and made it point straight in the direction of his theory. He convinced himself, from the reports of navigators, the authority of learned writers, and the very nature of things, that land — the over-lapping wing of Asia, stretching far to the east, and voluming out like a vast curtain with a Europe-ward curve — lay beyond the Azores. He was a man of singularly beautiful fancy, erudite in a certain sense withal, with a solemn sort of eloquence that inter- ested people who from regarding him as a visionary guilty of a fixed idea, came to look upon him as an inspired sailor and prophet, and at length even tried to surround him with the halo of a saint. The palaces of Cathay, with roofs of burnished plates of gold, cam- phire-illumined ceilings, where the pearly sea-grit was as plentiful as blackberries, and the wealth reported by the great Venetian traveller encrusted every city and highway ; gold dust, ivory, slaves, fantastic minarets, and monstrous idols with blazing jewels for eyes ; ail these things danced before his eyes, and he saw in them the means for the realization of his life-long scheme — the recovery of the Holy Land out of the hands of the Saracen. In 1484 he left Lisbon with his son Diego, exasper- ated at the faithlessness and vacillation of King Joa, and made his way painfully to Spain. Here for seven years (i 485-1 492) he hung around 1 ! . h 364 The Spanish Navigators. the Bohemian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, — a court perpetually flitting from point to point according as the exigencies of the Moorish war demanded, — urging his claims, discussing his project at Cordova, and before the doctors of Salamanca, refuting the Bib- lical and patristic texts with which they assailed him to prove the impossibility of a western continent, following the court like a faithful hound into the very heart of the Moorish dominions ; pointed at by the very children as a madman, ridiculed for his notion of an antipodes where they said men must needs walk heels upward, trees grow into, instead of out of the earth, rain and snow shoot out of the soil skyward, and the ver}^ ro- tunditv of the earth would make a mountain barrier, up which no ship could sail. There were many people, however — not doctors of Salamanca or cavaliers of Cordova — who were struck with the grandeur of Columbus's views ; none more so than Juan Perez, the worthy prior of the convent of La Rabida, and the Pinzons, a family of famous navigators living at Palos on the sea. By their help he ultimately overcame the distrust of the suspicious Ferdinand, gained access to the sover- eigns, wrung from them by his perseverance, the titles of admiral and viceroy over the countries he should discover, and owner of one-tenth of all gains thence accruing, and even inspired the heroic Isabella to de- clare " that she undertook the enterprise for her own crown of Castile, and pledged her jewels to raise the necessary funds." The gracious queen — in marked opposition to the short-sighted king — thus became the patroness of the noblest expedition ever planned ; and it is said the iiAJMvb Ui iiiJti iJ.vxvu<^'- »jxvrL.ii.-vL>A. I • i I m The New World Found. 367 same pen that signed the capitulation of Granada in 1492, virtually signed the agreement of the sovereigns to Columbus's stipulation the same year. The funds for the expedition came temporarily out of the treasury of Aragon, though the glory and aggran- dizement arising from it redound to the memory of the enlightened Isabella of Castile. Columbus was fifty-six — he had been a suppliant for eighteen years — at this triumphant moment of his life, — triumphant, indeed, when we consider with what slight means he was to achieve his enterprise. The Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Nina — quaint, high-pooped, forecastled structures, two of them open- decked and one with lateen sails — glided out of the little port of Palos with the " high-admiral of the Ocean sea " and one hundred and twenty souls aboard, in Au- gust, 1492 ; and cleaving the Gibraltar seas, sped south- westerly toward the Peak of Teneriffe and the Canaries. Martin Alonzo Pinzon and his brothers, Francisco and Vicente Yanez, accompanied him. Land ! Columbus himself had won the ten thousand marave- dis promised to him who should first see land ; for on the night of Friday, October nth, 1492, he had beheld lights glimmering at a great distance, and the next morning the weary navigators threw themselves on their knees with passionate tears of thanksgiving, and called the land San Salvador. Columbus lived and died in the illusion that it was the outspurs of India that he had discovered — whence the name given to the aborigines ; and throughout the varied experience of his four voyages he persisted in the belief. 368 The Spaiiish Navigators, Sensation in Spain. 369 11 His fortunate miscalculation of the circumference of the globe, making him think that it was one-eighth smaller than it really was, drew him on with the hope that he should immediately see land. To keep up the spirits of his crews, he kept two reckonings, one for himself, with the true distances traversed from day to day, and the other altered, and intended to deceive his companions into the belief that they were not so far from their native land as was actually the case. The discovery of Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, the Pearl Islands, the mainland of South America and Central America, rapidly followed, the glory being left to Sebastian Cabot of dis- covering and coasting North America in the year 1497. Hoodwinked with his theories, Columbus wasted precious time and many lives in tracing and retracing his steps through the intricacies of the Caribbean archi- pelago, searching for the continent of Asia, the outlying evidences of Asiatic civilization, and an opportunity to avail himself of the Hebrew and Arabic interpreters whom he had brought with him to communicate with the inhabitants of the New World. To the apprehension of the simple islanders Colum- bus's ships had shot out of the crystal firmament ; the mariners were the children of the sun, beauteous- haired, from the burning East whence salvation was to come ; thunder and lightning flashed out of the rods they held in their hands ; they were luminous intelli- gences, not beardless, naked, tattooed like themselves or living on cassava-bread, yuca root, and fruits, but fair spirits that lavished on them hawk's bells, strings of crystal made in the skies, and cloths colored like the dawn. They ran after the Spaniards and worshipped them as supernatural beings, treated them with gentle benignity, and gave them their ornaments of gold with affecting readiness. The announcement of these discoveries made a pro- found sensation in Spain. Rumors of the golden islands, of the marvellous sun-colored birds, of fish with scales that flashed like precious stones, of thou- sand-tinted dolphins, of forests of spice-woods spark- ling with the winged radiance of the humming-bird, the blood-red flamingo, the sapphire-sharded insect life of the tropics, of regions where the birds and crickets sang all night, and the hurricanes cast ashore multi- tudes of lustrous shells — spread all over Spain, and made Columbus's journey through the country, on his return, a triumphal procession. More precious, however, than any cinnamon, nutmeg, or rhubarb, that they were ever in search of, were the potato-plant, the Indian corn, the sweet pepper, the intoxicating tobacco, the strange fruits of this populous island-studded archipelago. *' The infinity of great and green trees " excited the admiration of the admiral, and he told his royal auditors of how the natives had canoes, made out of the trunk of a single tree, capable of holding one hundred and fifty persons ; of the beauty of the tropical vegetation ; of the perfectly naked women with rings in their noses ; of the easy rule of the Indian caciques ; of the multitudes of fish, turtle, and game, found everywhere ; of the grace and prince- liness of many of the native sovereigns ; of the caress- ing hospitality they met with ; of the mystic mermaiden they had seen on their w^y home ; the fierce Caribs they had encountered ; and their eventual arrival in Portugal, I 4 ,; , .! 370 l^he Spayiish Navigators. I ■ ; Hi after planting the colony of La Navidad in the New- World. The whole of Europe soon rang with these thrilling stories. The germ of the mighty India House of Spain was planted at Seville. Isabella's compassionate heart interested itself in the spiritual welfare of the poor Indians. Columbus was more than confirmed in all his powers and privileges. The difficulties between Spain and Portugal, relative to their mutual rights in the At- lantic, were settled in 1494 on the basis that a line should be drawn from pole to pole, three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape de Verde islands, and that Spain should have a right to all discoveries made west of this line, and Portugal to those made east of it. In 1493 Columbus sailed anew; discovered the beau- tiful semi-circle of the Antilles inhabited by the Caribs ; thoroughly explored Hispaniola, where hardly a trace of the colony left could be found ; gathered specimens of amber, lapis lazuli, jasper, and gold-dust ; heard of the melon, gourd, and cucumber seed which he had planted, bearing fruit within a month ; coasted Cuba carefully (1494), and discovered Jamaica. The air here was filled with the living sparkles of innumerable butterflies ; ponderous clusters of grapes clung to the giant grape vines ; tortoises thronged the low keys and reefs of the milky waters south of Cuba ; cranes stood drawn up in solemn array among the for- ests, and filled the superstitious Spaniards with affright ; the tree clefts were full of honey ; the islands shot forth fragrances to deUght their senses ; and they saw the natives catching fish and tortoises by means of the cucker-lish, which, tied by the tail to a long string, was Hi Oystei's on Trees. 371 said to dart fiercely on its prey and attach itself until forced to relinquish it by being drawn out of the water. Colonization sprang up swiftly in the footsteps of Co- lumbus. He had waved his enchanter's wand, and the gates of a New World seemed to fly open for all the rest- less blood then in Europe to discharge itself through. In 1498 he undertook his third voyage with a squad- ron of six ships and sailed through the gulf of Paria, where he found mangrove trees clustered with oysters, their mouths open, according to the legend, ready to catch the dew, afterward to be transformed into pearls. He encountered the huge volume of fresh water pour- ing forth from the great Oronooco, and speculated in- geniously about it. On his arrival at Hispaniola he found the whole island in confusion. — Everywhere through his voyages he encountered mutinies, rebellion, opposition, threats of assassination, and untold suffer- ings from shipwreck, ill-health, desertion, and shame- less tittle-tattle ; but succored by his brothers, Don Diego and the Adelantado Don Bartholomew, and sus- tained by his own indomitable spirit, he was enabled to endure even the last indignity of being sent home in irons by Bobadilla at the conclusion of his third voyage, to answer charges brought against him by his enemies in Castile. His benefactress always welcomed him kindly, but Ferdinand lent a willing ear to gossip, and humiliated Columbus as he had humiliated the great Gonsalvo. In 1497 Vasco de Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and three years later Pedro Alvarez de Cabral, sailing in the interest of Portugal to Calicut, took pos- session of Brazil, discovered earlier the same year, by :H 372 The Spanhli Xaviijators. il Vicente Yanez Pinzon and Diego Lepe, in the name of Portugal, because the land lay eastward of the line agreed upon by the two powers, as the boundary of their respective discoveries. In this way Brazil came to belong to Portugal. Vi- cente Pinzon was the first European who crossed the western equinoctial line, though Gama in his expedition of 1497, immortalized in the Lusiadas of Camoens, must first have observed the constellation of the South- ern Cross, which became at once the symbol of faith, and the lode-star of the southern hemisphere. Columbus in 1502, departed at the age of sixty-seven, on his fourth voyage, full of infirmities, often racked by pain, broken down in health, but invincibly bent on fur- ther extending the discoveries he had begun. He had nobly vindicated himself from the charges of Bobadilla and now ventured out for the last time, in four barks of from fifty to seventy tons each, in search of a strait through the Isthmus of Darien. He coasted Honduras, the Mosquito coast, Costa Rica, in ships honeycombed by the teredo ; fancied the mines of Veragua to be the Aurea Chersonesus of Josephus ; and was finally stranded on the island of Jamaica, where twelve months of anxiety, hunger, thirst, and disease were spent. In Hispaniola hundreds of thousands of the natives had perished by disease, massacre, or the bloodhound, during the first twelve years of colonization. From visitors from heaven the Spaniards had soon trans- formed themselves into demons from hell. Licentious- ness, torture, extortion, the fatal repartimiento or distri- bution of the natives among the ruffians of the colony, did their work but too effectually, and changed these PJiASANT OF THE ENVIRONS OF GRANADA I «l I V / The Companions of Columbus, 375 lovely islands into dens of lasciviousness and death. From the beginning, a curse lay on the Latin conquests in the New World ; conquests accomplished by perfidy, cruelty, and lust. The old navigator passed away in 1506; Columbus died as he had lived, a devout Catholic, and his ashes, deposited at first in Valladolid, then in Seville, passed over to San Domingo in 1536 whence, in 1796, — as has been lately established by the Spanish Royal Acad- emy of History, — they were transported to Havana. Thus ended the career of the great poet and dis- coverer—perhaps so great a discoverer because so richly endowed with the prophetic instinct, the enthu- siasm, the imaginative vision of the poet. Columbus's companions soon greatly developed and extended his discoveries. It was a time '' fulfilled with fairy ; " the attraction toward unknown lands was irre- sistible. Vicente Pinzon discovered the La Plata river in 1508 ; a year signalized by the importation of negroes into Hayti (Hispaniola) from Guinea. In 15 u, Diego Columbus effected the conquest of Cuba, and in 15 13 Vasco Nunez de Balboa, crossing the Isthmus with dauntless intrepidity, cast eyes for the first time on the enormous sheet of the Pacific ocean. Ponce de Leon, an aged Castilian knight, having heard of a land to the far northwest, where tradition said there was a fountain of perpetual youth, sailed thither- ward, and coming on a beautifully sunny, and flowery coast, dubbed it, after the day (Pascua Florida, Palm Sunday) on which it was discovered, Florida. There seemed to be enterprises, discoveries, con- S76 The Spanish Navigators. The Mexico of the Aztecs, 877 ■ .|f, quests, for everybody in those happy times. The begin- ning of the reign of Charles V. was illustrated by the discovery (151 8) of the coast of Mexico, and some years later of Peru, In 1521, Magellan, sailing under the Spanish flag, circumnavigated South America, and passing from island to island, came upon another archi- pelago of twelve hundred islands, to which the name of Philippine islands, in honor of Philip II., was after- wards given — an archipelago more than thirteen hun- dred miles in length and eight hundred in breadth, a replica of the exquisite picturesqueness and fertility of the Caribbeean group. Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurri- canes, are the scourge of these sunlit latitudes, whose prodigious wealth in tropical fruits, ebony, sandal-wood, spices, dyes, silver, sulphur, and gold, w^hose unrivalled scenery and luxuriance, whose gorgeous coloring, popu- lation of Papuas, Malays, Chinese and Spaniards, and superstitions, have ever since offered so great attractions to the merchant, artist, and ethnologist. The subjugation of the Mexican and Peruvian em- pires was an achievement w^orthy of an heroic age. There is perhaps nothing in fabulous story — in Iliad or in Nibelungenlied — which quite equals the deeds of Hernando Cortes and Francisco Pizarro — the one a student of Salamanca, the other so ignorant that he could neither read nor write his own name. Cortes's commentaries on his campaigns have been likened to Caesar's ; Pizarro's dispatches read like a romance. Cortes's achievement was the more remark- able of the two, since it was original with himself and occurred against odds so overwhelming. Pizarro mod- elled himself distinctly after Cortes, even to the very stratagem by which the empire of the Incas at one blow sank in ruins. Here the parallelism ceases, for Cortes was a man of genius, reconstructing what he had de- stroyed, legislating serenely and successfully amid intense excitement, renovating, consolidating, laying the foundations of a great empire again, and command- ing admiration for the many elements of nobility, hero- ism, unselfishness, and administrative skill displayed in his character. Pizarro though a man of marked ability, was essentially a ruffian by birth, a foundling from an obscure village in Estremadura, who died by the hand of the assassin in the great country he had conquered. The timid, caste-ridden, enervated Peruvians, too, were very different from the implacable Aztecs, the san- guinary Tlascalans, and the acute Tezcucans, who hurled their thousands against Cortes's little band, and struggled impotently to cast them back into the sea. The Mexico of the Aztecs was said to have covered an area of nearly fifty thousand square miles, though the part with which we are immediately concerned the lake district — filled an area of only about sixteen hundred square miles, the size of Rhode Island. Whether the inhabitants of the Western continent were aboriginal; whether they came by Behring's straits from the Asiatic coast, or crossed hundreds of leagues of sea as they journeyed from island to island of the Pacific, and finally landed in the American country, or whether an ''Atlantis," now submerged, really existed in the Atlantic, whence they made their way from Eu- rope laboriously thitherwards, in prehistoric times, are at present subjects for ingenious though fruitless spec- ulation. . w 878 Thp- Spanish Navigators. i I •J ii' i.ii The country of Mexico, like Spain itself, is a system of gigantic terraces, rising from the gulf to an exten- sive tableland from five thousand to eight thousand feet above the sea, and culminating in the cones of Orizaba and Popocatepetl, which almost cast their shadows over the city of Mexico. Beneath these mighty volcanoes — which tower more than three miles above the sea — lay a system of lakes about which had gathered a population of some two hundred and fifty thousand souls, cultivated to a point that recalls much of what we know of ancient Egypt and Assyria. (Cor- tes frequently gives what he saw, the palm of superiority over what was then to be seen in contemporary Europe.) The naked islanders of the archipelago were here re- placed by a well-organized confederacy of races com- posed of the descendants of seven tribes from the north, and as far as is known, without communication with the other great sovereignty of the south. They possessed a considerable degree of culture when Cor- tes, commanding the Armada dispatched by Velasquez, governor of Cuba, arrived in the country in 15 19. Dwelling high above the fever-smitten swamps of the Warm Land, as the Atlantic coast was called, they were a race bold, hardy, and persevering; a hive of na- tions — Toltecs, Chichimecs, Aztecs or Mexicans, and Acolhuans — succeeding or conquering one another, variously gifted, and busy with the arts of an almost civilized community. It will be impossible to enter into their feuds, tradi- tions and coalitions before the conquest, therefore only a condensed sketch of characteristic customs and pecu- liarities will be attempted. BALCONIES AT GRANADA. nis TliP Spa)iisli Navigators. 1 The country of Mexico, like Spain itself, is a system of gigantic terraces, rising from the gulf to an exten- sive tableland from five thousand to eight thousand feet above the sea, and culminating in the cones of Orizaba and Popocatepetl, which almost cast their shadows over the city of Mexico. Beneath these mighty volcanoes — which tower more than three miles above the sea — lay a system of lakes about which had gathered a population of some two hundred and fifty thousand souls, cultivated to a point that recalls much of what we know of ancient Egypt and Assyria. (Cor- tes frequently gives what he saw, the palm of superiority over what was then to be seen in contemporary Europe.) The naked islanders of the archipelago were here re- placed by a well-organized confederacy of races com- posed of the descendants of seven tribes from the north, and as far as is known, without communication with the other great sovereignty of the south. They possessed a considerable degree of culture when Cor- tes, commanding the Armada dispatched by Velasquez, governor of Cuba, arrived in the countr}- in 15 19. Dwelling high above the fever-smitten swamps of the Warm Land, as the Atlantic coast was called, they were a race bold, hardy, and persevering; a hive of na- tions — Toltecs, Chichimecs, Aztecs or Mexicans, and Acolhuans — succeeding or conquering one another, variously gifted, and busy with the arts of an almost civilized community. It will be impossible to enter into their feuds, tradi- tions and coalitions before the conquest, therefore only a condensed sketch of characteristic customs and pecu- liarities will be attempted. •'■'K- ;.,*^^a« :: ,mmmm^. BALCONIES AT GRANADA. «WtH»-,jrV^»i^^3G.riief« ^-^{ISSaSKS^K^.^S^^MisW-I .3 Nl r., m The Aztec Community. 381 Entirely false notions have hitherto prevailed with regard to the Aztec community, now fortunately almost entirely removed by the valuable researches of Morgan* and Bandelier.t These researches have shown incon- trovertibly that in a European sense there was neither a state, a nation, nor a political society of any kind in aboriginal Mexico. The Spaniards found there a varied population, divided into tribes speaking various languages, each tribe autonomous in matters of govern- ment, and occasionally forming confederacies for pur- poses of self-defence and conquest. The ancient Mexicans as typical of this aboriginal constitution, have been shown to be an organic body, composed of twenty consanguine groups or kins, voluntarily associated for purposes of mutual protection and sub- sistence. This social organization, so far from exhibit- ing the complex conditions of a feudal state, as it appeared to the excited Spaniards, and as it is de- scribed in the current histories, was a democratic body; each of the kins was governed by its own strictly elective officers subject to removal at the pleas- ure of their constituents ; the associated kins, for their mutual benefit, had delegated their powers to transact business without to a council of the tribe, in which each consanguine group or kin was represented by one mem- ber; the execution of the decrees of this council was left to elective officers, whose powers were limited to military command, and whom the tribe might depose at ♦Ancient Society, pp. 186-214. t Social Organization and Mode of Government, Art of Warfare and Mode of Warfare, and Distribution and Tenure of lands of the Ancient Mexicans ; three extremely important treatises published in 1877, '78 and '79 by the American Archaeological Association. • n^-ir-sBa (ftsas--*^:^ 382 The Spanish Navigator^, Ahorigmal Life in Mexico, 383 .. ,. Ilr •s ■ : W^ \V' pleasure; these officers with the exception of certain inferior positions, could not appoint others to office, not even their assistants of high rank ; the dignity of chief, such as Montezuma held, so far from being the prerogative of hereditary nobility, was simply a reward of merit, carrying with it no other privileges than per- sonal consideration and a more or less distinctive cos- tume ; and the final result of the last scrutiny into Mexican " civilization " is, that it was the result of a social organization based upon a military democracy, itself originally based upon community of living, and consanguineous relationship. Such conclusions, of course, entirely overthrow the fictitious "elective monarchy" of the English and Spanish historians; the terminology of feudal Europe was unhappily applied to the misunderstood League of the Lake ; and a so-called " Kingdom of Mexico " and " Empire of the Aztecs " was the result. Cortes found in the valley of Mexico the famous Nahuatl confederacy, composed of the three tribes called Aztecs or Mexicans, Tezcucans, and Tlacopans. The Aztecs were one of seven kindred tribes from the north that had settled in and near the valley of Mexico. These seven tribes were, i. the Sochimilcas, or Nation of the Seeds of Flowers; 2. the Chalcas, or People of Mouths ; 3. the Tepanecans, or People of the Bridge ; 4. the Culhuas, or Crooked People; 5. the Tlatluicans, or Men of the Sierra ; 6. the Tlascalans, or Men of Bread ; and 7. the Aztecs, who came last and occupied the site of the present city of Mexico. They founded the celebrated pueblo of Mexico about a. d. 1325, which is supposed to have contained about thirty thou- sand inhabitants at the time of the arrival of Cortes. A In 1426 the Aztec confederacy, composed of the Aztecs and the overthrown Tezcucans and Tlacopans, was formed ; a league or confederacy of offence and defence, with the Aztecs at the head. Several points of great interest have been settled as to certain features of aboriginal life in ancient Mexico. It is now known that the ancient Mexicans, and presum- ably their tribal kindred, had no notion of abstract ownership of the soil either by a nation, or state, the head of the government or by individuals. As each tribe had as its unit of organization, the consanguine groups or kins before- mentioned, so' pos- sessory rights were vested in them as a community, with no conception of sale, barter, conveyance or alienation of any kind. Individuals had only the right to use certain definite lots for their maintenance, a right hered- itary in the male line, yet limited to the conditions of residence within the area held by the kin, and of culti- vation either by or in the name of him to whom these lots were assigned. Neither Montezuma nor any of his chieftains or officers had property rights individually, except as he belonged to a certain kin, when he had the use of a certain lot which could be rented or farmed for his benefit. There were certain lots set aside as official lands, out of which public hospitality, the require- ments of tribal business, the governmental features of the kin, and the official households were supplied and sustained ; but both the lands and their products were independent of the persons or families of the chiefs themselves. Again, the conquest of a neighboring tribe by the Mexicans, was not followed by territorial annexation or 384 The Spanish Navigators, Mexicaji Religion. 385 1 \ ■i by distribution of its lands among the conquerors. The Mexicans simply exacted tribute, which was paid from the produce of special lands set aside for that purpose. And finally neither a military despotism nor the principle and institution of feudality existed among the aboriginal Mexicans. The pueblo of Mexico was divided into four wards, constituted out of four groups of related people, each autonomous and each with its own chief and its own communal organization. Montezuma was simply the elective war-chief of the four wards, his election was sanctioned by the confederated tribes, and he had asso- ciated with him a dignitary called the " Snake woman," or supreme advisor of the tribe. The Mexicans had neither invented nor developed monarchical institutions. Montezuma's title was Teuctli, or war chief ; in the council of chiefs, elected by bodies of kindred to advise with him, he was sometimes called Tlatoani, or speaker. In other words, he was neither king nor emperor, but simply general. The office held by him was hereditary in a gens, was given by the gens to the worthiest brother or nephew of a dead chief, was ratified by the four di- visions or phratries of the Aztecs, and then by the Tez- cucans and Tlacopans acting through their representa- tives. The magniloquence of the Spaniards made of him an absolute potentate. A judicial system existed ; murder, adultery, bribery, stealing, drunkenness, and extravagance were punisha ble with death. Polygamy and slavery flourished. Taxes were laid on all objects of luxury. Granaries and warehouses for the reception of the tributes dotted the country. Couriers, trained to travel with great swiftness, carried hieroglyphical letters from one end of the country to the other. Montezuma, it is said, though he lived two hundred miles from the coast, had fish from the gulf on his table, twenty-four hours after they were caught. The wars of the aborigines were largely religious j they had insignia of honor for those who dis- tinguished themselves; they used feather armor; cuir- asses of gold or silver ; and gorgeous tribal standards embroidered in gold and feather-work ; and their military organization though complicated, was free. The religion of the Mexicans required human sacri- fices eighteen times a year, attended by cannibalism ; deities in profusion formed their hierarchy, with a fan- tastic and sanguinary monster, Huitzilopotchli, Hum- ming-bird-on-the-left-foot, the God of war, at the head. Quetzalcoatl, a beneficent God, who taught them metal- work, agriculture, and the science of government, and who typified the Anahuac golden age, counter-balanced this bloody deity. The people had mystical expecta- tions connected with the east, out of which their benev- olent deity was to come again and bring back the " Saturnia regna " of ancient times. Everlasting dark- ness, eternal light, and a neutral limbo of negative contentment for those who had died of certain diseases, formed a cluster of beliefs connected with their notions of immortality curiously recalling the system of Ma- homet. The sun was the luminary around which the spirits of the blest danced; then clouds and bright- plumaged singing birds received them in a perpetual intoxication of sense. At the naming of children, a ceremony resembling baptism took place. Their relig- ious observances were imposing; numbers of priests »>'«e»° ft»> .L- '>i»»»-* . i!'.'ia M » i>i»i $i ■i ■ 386 The Spanish Navigators. Aztec Customs, 38" 1 1 ministered at the fire-crowned temples, which, rising in pyramidal terraces, approached the Egyptian pyramids in form and magnitude. The temples were great schools where the youth were educated ; the priests could marry, though they had to practise great austerity at certain seasons. Rites resembling confession and absolution formed a part of their ritual. Large tracts of land supported the church establishment. Singing and dancing alternated in their ceremonial with horrible mutilation of hecatombs of human victims, whose hearts were torn out, and in some cases, it is said, were cast in thousands smoking on the altars of sacrifice. Along with this went a singular refinement in their love of flowers. The Aztec system of hieroglyphics — the key to which is now unfortunately lost — showed considerable ingenuity and culture. With some of these hieroglyph- ics were associated phonetic signs, though their em- ployers seem to have laid most stress on actual pictorial representation of the object described. Laws, tribute- rolls, calendars, rituals, political annals, chronological systems, were claimed to be stored up in these hiero- glyphics, which were swiftly and skilfully painted on cotton cloth, skins, aloe-paper or a composition of silk and gum. Spanish superstition and abhorrence of necromancy caused the destruction of the greater part of these invaluable records — for they associated dev- ilish arts and demoniacal devices with the characters in which these "manuscripts" were written. Thus, prob- ably, have hopelessly perished nearly all the traces of the literature of these nations, if thev had one. They excelled in jugglery and physical sleight ; but their attainments in mathematics give them a claim to recognition as rivals, in a certain sense, of the Europeans. They seem to have had methods of indicating square and cube roots, fractions, and integers, little inferior to those used by the great mathematicians of antiquity before the Arabic ciphers were introduced. Their astronomical system was exact, and it was found on the arrival of the Spaniards that their method of comput- ing time was eleven days nearer the true time tlian that of their conquerors. Their year consisted of eigh'teen months, of twenty days each, with five intercalary days to make up the three hundred and sixty-five, and at intervals of fifty- two years they added twelve days and a half to account for the annual excess of nearly six hours in the calen- dar. It is said that they came within an inappreciable fraction of the exact length of the tropical year as established by the most accurate observations. They were acquainted with the cause of eclipses and with the use of the sun-dial ; adjusted their festivals by the movements of the heavenly bodies ; and kindled their sacred fires anew every fifty-two years by the friction of sticks placed on the wounded breast of sacrificial victims. The Aztec husbandry evinced much intelligence, for it alternated years in the crops, irrigated, cherished for- estry, and stored up harvests in granaries. The banana, the chocolate-plant, and the maize were cultivated. They made sugar out of the Indian-corn stalks, intoxi- cating drinks out of grain and the aloe-plant, and main- tained semblances of zoological and botanical gardens. Their curious and fantastically carved emeralds and amethysts; their metal-work in gold and silver, their tmmm im i »*" i i i<^ 388 The Spanish Navlyators. knives, razors, and sword-blades of obsidian ; their sculptured images, bas-reliefs, and calendar-stone ; their painted cups and vases, mineral and vegetable dye- stuffs, and brilliant-colored woven tissues of cotton, rabbit-hair, and feather-work, all showed much knowl- edge of the mechanical arts. They had great market-places where trade and traffic, by barter and by a sort of currency, were carried on with strict justice. Transparent quills of gold-dust ; T- shaped bits of tin, and grains of cacao in bags consti- tuted their money. Ot iron they had no knowledge. The cities were divided among the various trade-guilds ; the life of the merchant-spy w^as esteemed highly honor- able ; and slave-dealing had no disgrace attached to it. The domestic manners of the Aztecs were rather re- fined. The official classes were said to dine in com- munal halls among odoriferous herbs (performing their ablutions before and after meals). Perfumed tobacco, smoked in tortoise-shell or silver tubes, was esteemed a great after-dinner luxury ; and their tables were loaded with rude gold and silver vases and dishes, in which a variety of barbaric spiced viands, *' pastry " and " con- fectionery " was served. (Morgan,* however, in his dis- cussion of " Montezuma's Dinner," has sufficiently shown that we must not place too implicit confidence in the swelling descriptions of Spanish adventurers on this point.) Dancing, singing of plaintive legendary ballads, and instrumental music closed their entertain- ments. Such is a silhouette of the so-called empire of Mon- tezuma. * North American Review, April, 1S77. '>-'' AX A^ A ■* J.^ A^ A4 V \J% 388 The Spanish Xavlyatnn<. t ■< knives, razors, and sword-blades of obsidian ; their sculptured images, bas-reliefs, and calendar-stone ; their painted cups and vases, mineral and vegetable d3^e- stuffs, and brilliant-colored woven tissues of cotton, rabbit-hair, and feather-work, all showed much knowl- edge of the mechanical arts. They had great market-places where trade and traffic, by barter and by a sort of currency, were carried on with strict justice. Transparent quills of gold-dust ; T- shaped bits of tin, and grains of cacao in bags consti- tuted their money. Ol iron they had no knowledge. The cities were divided among the various trade-guilds ; the life of the merchant-spy \vas esteemed highly honor- able ; and slave-dealing had no disgrace attached to it. The domestic manners of the Aztecs were rather re- fined. The official classes were said to dine in com- munal halls among odoriferous herbs (performing their ablutions before and after meals). Perfumed tobacco, smoked in tortoise-shell or silver tubes, was esteemed a great after-dinner luxury ; and their tables were loaded with rude gold and silver vases and dishes, in which a variety of barbaric spiced viands, " pastry " and '• con- fectionerv " was served. (Morofan.* however, in his dis- cussion of "Montezuma's Dinner," has sufficiently shown that we must not place too implicit confidence in the swelling descriptions of Spanish adventurers on this point.) Dancing, singing of plaintive legendary ballads, and instrumental music closed their entertain- ments. Such is a silhouette of the so-called empire of Mon- tezuma. * North American Review, April, 1877. ^itiJhiNlb Oi.i\i:-.>^il^l*\U. »-^?gv va •■ ^•ir-3-_"~'as?^-?"^r»jsr"! CorUs in Mexico. 391 Cortes, had he not burnt his ships, allied himself with the fierce republic of Tlascala, which was the deadly foe of Montezuma, and taken advantage of the discords then rending this powerful democracy, would never have succeeded in his perilous undertaking. His two masterstrokes — the conciliation of the Tlascalans and the seizure of Montezuma — aided by his horses and fire- arms, which inspired dread ; by accomplished sub- alterns like Sandoval and Alvarado ; and by his own cheerful and dauntless pluck — enabled him with a few hundred Spaniards and many thousand Tlascalans to overrun the country in about two years (15 19-152 1). This is no place to enter into the details of the hor- rors accompanying the conquest, the gloom of the Noche Triste so famous for its disaster to the Spaniards, when they were driven out of the city, the siege of Mexico, and the beautiful and touching episode of Montezuma's captivity and death. Every outrage that could be com- mitted was committed by the conquerors despite the enlightened policy of their commander, which was to conciliate rather than to irritate. Perhaps there is no siege recorded in history more unparalleled than the siege of the city of Mexico ; and certainly, few charac- ters more heroic than that of the unfortunate Guate- mozin. Cortes extended his reputation afterward by the dis- covery of the gulf of California in 1537. The conquest of the empire of the Incas in 1531, in little more than a year, was an achievement second only to the conquest of Mexico, in glory and in far- reaching results. Balboa's great discovery — swiftly followed as it was by his tragical death — remained / 392 The Spanish Navigators. The Land of the Incas, 393 unutilized nearly twenty years. In 15 19 the city of Panama was founded on the Pacific side of the isthmus, and from that time, rumors of a mighty empire to the south filled the air and roused the Spanish imagination, already exalted by the wonderful events in Mexico, to realize its dreams in further explorations. But it was not until 1526 that the celebrated contract for the conquest of Peru was signed by the two adven- turers, Pizarro and Almagro, and the ecclesiastic De Luque, by whom chiefly, with little aid from the Span- ish government, this memorable enterprise was eifected. Several preliminary expeditions, pregnant with disaster, suffering, and final success, were undertaken by these men, who rambled with their soldiers through impene- trable forests, encountered starvation, tempest, and death by sea and by land, and at length, sailing into serener latitudes, came suddenly upon the fair)^-land of the brilliant Incas, and stood, as it were, enthralled before an opulence and culture hitherto unimagined. Another problematic civilization sprang up before them, remote from all association, hedged in by boundless for- ests on the one side, and by boundless seas on the other, characterized by a refinement, splendor, and orderliness, superior in many respects to the Aztec. The immediate wealth flowing from this conquest was much greater than that produced by the conquest of Mexico ; and from this time on the mines of Peru began to pour that silver tor- rent into the coffers of Spain which seemed inexhaustible. This great empire extended north and south through thirty-nine degrees of latitude, embracing probably the states which are now known as Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chili. The country is traversed by the enormous backbone of the Cordilleras. It was covered with towns and villages ; Hamas innumerable — the sheep of the coun- try — wandered over its heights ; gardens, settlements, farms, nestled among the terraces and precipices of the stupendous volcanoes. The natives were found to be under the rule of Incas or lords, who traced their de- scent from the sun. Cuzco was the royal residence ; a city situated in a beautiful valley, filled with solid struc- tures of every description, squares, public places, above all, the noble temple of the sun blazing with gold and jewels. Powerful fortresses were scattered through the country, built of enormous stones adjusted with skill. The succession in this empire was hereditary, and the queen was at once sister and wife to the Inca. Military schools were maintained, where the youth were carefully educated in all warlike and manly exercises. The " Children of the Sun " among them, were dis- tinguished by huge pendants of gold hung from the ear, which stretched the lobe to such an extent that it became a frightful disfigurement. The ceremonies by which members of the royal family were, as it were, authenticated and recognized as belonging to the Inca race, closely resembled those attending the initiation of Christian knights in the feudal ages. The government was despotic ; the Inca wore a dress radiant with gold and precious stones, a wreathed tur- ban of many-colored folds, and plumes. Blazing with emeralds and ornaments he was borne in his solemn progresses through the kingdom in a litter, on the shoulders of men. There were magnificent roads ex- tending from one end of the kingdom to the other, along which inns were established for halting-places. 394 The Spanish Navigators. ii Immense palaces at various points jj? his dominions, received the monarch in his many journeys — structures of stone, with roofs of wood or rushes, gorgeously dec- orated within with images of animals and plants wrought in gold and silver, utensils of the same, and hangings of exquisite texture and color, made of the delicate Peruvian wool. We are told of subterranean channels of silver bear- ing water into basins of gold for the baths of the Incas ; groves and gardens filled with countless plants and flowers ; parterres of vegetable products skilfully imi- tated in the precious metals ; palaces in the cool Sierras recalling all that we have read in Ariosto or Spenser. At the death of the Inca, palaces, furniture, apparel, treasures, all were left to decay in strange ruin. Human blood flowed in torrents on his tomb ; his disembowelled remains were embalmed, and, arrayed in splendid attire, were placed in a golden chair and deposited in the great temple of the sun at Cuzco. The nobility had a distinguishing dress, dialect, and prerogative. The priests and generals came from their order. They were nearly all more or less related to the Inca blood, and hence gave to the royal family great strength and stability by their support. The nation called itself "the four quarters of the world," the name Peru or " river " having been given by the Spaniards, it is said, through a mistake. Hence the capital and the kingdom were in the same manner divided into four parts. A complicated social organization existed, suggestive of a peculiar and original people. The provisions for justice were as elaborate as among the Mexicans. Se- „-^^!^<-. ^t- \ e-v^ X^-ni ah TOMB OF FERDINANi -='"-'^r-^--:- >iil.LA IN THE CA'l wF iiKAiNAi>A. ^ The Times of the Incas. 397 u ^Wm-s i , i -I vere laws, repressed crime. The Sun, the Inca, and the people divided the territory equally among them. The multitudinous priesthood and the costly ceremonial of the religious establishment, absorbed much both of land and treasure. The household, kindred, and govern- ment of the Inca likewise involved great expenditure. The soil put aside for the people was annually re-dis- tributed in certain allotments, on the basis of an in- creased or diminished family, so that every man had a portion of the soil and became virtually its proprietor for life. The Sun lands and the Inca's lands were first cultivated by the people ; then the lands belonging to the infirm and the widows ; then their own lands. Agricul- ture was diligently attended to, and the numerous flocks of llamas were nurtured with sagacity. The spinning and weaving were all done by the families, who received due portions of wool to be wrought up for themselves and for the Incas. Registers of births and deaths were kept ; the census was taken ; surveys of the lands with their mineral and agricultural resources made; and different prov- inces were assigned to different industries — mining, metal-working, and the like. Huge magazines of stone received and stored up the surplus products — maize, coca, wool, cotton, copper, silver, and gold. Mendi- cancy was forbidden ; public charity was generously shown the sick and unfortunate ; and idleness was a crime. Poverty and wealth seemed equally banished from this remarkable realm, whose guiding principle was passive obedience to the sway of the divinely-de- scended ruler. The country abounded in great public works — aque- ■ I ' A iiiS'/u ip w 398 The Spanish Navigators. lu ^- I ducts, roads, fortresses, temples, palaces, and terraces — whose ruins to-day excite admiration for their gran- deur and massiveness. Suspension-bridges were thrown across the rivers and vast engineering difficulties sur- mounted in the construction of the great road which was said to be over fifteen hundred miles long, from twelve to twenty feet wide, flagged with freestone, and supported on solid masonry, where masonry was necessary. An- other road traversed the region between the ocean and the Andes, which was parapeted, lined by shade-trees, crossed causeways, threw light suspension-bridges woven of cables of aloe-fibre over rivers and streams, and was bordered every twelve miles by inns. Hum- boldt was justified in saying that the ruins of this great road might for beauty be compared with the finest he had seen in Italy, France, or Spain, and was one of the most useful as well as stupendous works ever con- structed by the hand of man. Posts for communication with various parts of the empire existed, at intervals of five miles, along the great roads, and dispatches forwarded by couriers dressed in livery, could be sent a distance of a hundred and fifty miles a day. Connected with this was a package-post for game, fruit, fish, and the necessaries and luxuries of life, chiefly for the benefit of the nobles. Hence the ease with which news could be brought, insurrectionary movements crushed, and troops concentrated in any part of the empire, on short notice. A force of two hundred thousand men, armed with bows and arrows, slings, lances, darts, short-swords and battle-axes, dressed in the costumes peculiar to each province, headed by the brilliant-plumed, sparkling- f Religion under the Incas, 399 casqued Inca generals, and overshadowed by the reful- gent device of the rainbow, could be readily brought into the field — more closely resembling a resplendent procession winding among the defiles of the Andes, than an army terrible with banners. Clemency was characteristic of the Inca conquerors; religious toleration was recognized among them — pro- vided that their great luminary-god were acknowledged as supreme ; the conquered princes were removed to the capital and their people admitted into a sort of cit- izenship ; they were compelled to learn the Quiclma language, which was the language of the court and capital ; and in cases of doubtful loyalty the inhabitants of conquered provinces were removed in thousands to other parts of the empire, and their place supplied by loyal citizens. Residence could not be changed without license ; and in the case of compulsory removal, a con- genial climate was selected for the emigrants. History presents few examples of a nation so consol- idated and systematized, so controlled from the germ by a sagacious and harmonious principle, so logically developed by the policy of successive Incas. A com- mon religion, a common language, and a common gov- ernment thus resulted in no jangling confederation of jarring nationalities, but in a powerful, homogeneous, and civilized community habituated to obedience and attached to its own institutions. Religion was never more pompously enshrined than in the Peruvian " Houses of the Sun," especially in the renowned temple of Cuzco. A massive, sunlike, golden plate of enormous dimensions was said to catch the morning sun before the eastern portal, and scat- ...^^riSB^ I 1 »'' V: \' 400 The Spanish Navigators, ter it in innumerable rays before the temple. The interior of the temple was one effulgence of gold and precious stones — golden friezes, cornices, walls, and ceilings. A chapel dedicated to the moon, lustrous with the pearly radiance of burnished silver, contrasted in its silvery spirituality with the golden glory prodigally claimed by the sun. An island in Lake Titicaca contained the most vener- ated of these sun-temples ; for hence proceeded, said tradition, the founders of the Peruvian line, and here the ancient monuments of their civilization are still to be seen in part. The sun, moon, and stars, the thunder, lightning, and rainbow, were the peculiar objects of adoration. We are told that the great vases of Indian corn, the perfume-censers, the ewers and pipes connected with the great temple were of gold, while the gardens spar- kled with flowers and golden-fleeced llamas of the same costly material. The festivals and national solemnities were conducted with barbaric pomp. Cannibalism was suppressed and human sacrifices lessened in numbers by the Incas. They used concave mirrors for kindling their sacred lire, which was then cherished by the Virgins of the Sun, an institution analogous to that of the Roman Catholic nuns or the Vestals of antiquity. These vir- gins lived in nunneries, and were destined not to eter- nal celibacy, but, as brides of the sun, became concu- bines of the Inca. Schools existed ; language, laws, religious rites, and rudimentary science were taught; and records were kept in the peculiar hieroglyphic system, called quipu. ^< I Peruvian Literature, 403 Cords of many-colored threads twisted together, with pendant fringes of white, yellow, red, and vari-tinted threads, knotted in an arbitrary manner, constituted the fundamental basis of this system, the chief value of which was for arithmetical purposes, for calculating revenues, keeping registers, and recording annals ; each knot, as has been said, suggesting to the skilled, a train of associations similar to that suggested by the number attached to the commandments of the dec- alogue. The Peruvians had legendary poetry, ballads, and a sort of theatrical exhibitions more or less dramatic. They were geographers to some extent, constructed maps, divided the year into twelve lunar months, took azimuths by measuring the shadows of cylindrical col- umns, and determined the equinoxes by a pillar set in the centre of a circle within the great temple, divided by a line drawn from east to west. Altar-fires blazed to the planet Venus; diviners dabbled in astrology; eclipses were viewed with affright. Tunnels, canals for irrigating purposes, and the abun- dant use of ^uano in their field culture, showed their skill and foresight in overcoming the obstacles of na- ture. As in Mexico, the greatest variety of climate and products existed, from the sun^bathed plains swimming in the incandescent atmosphere of the sea-level, through the mellowing humidity of the middle regions, up to those irradiated cones which, armored in adaman- tine ice, tower into dazzling altitudes and shoot flame and sunlight from their volcanic sides. The banana, the maize-plant, the aloe, the tobacco, the narcotic coca for chewing, a sort of rice, and many 404 TJip. Spanish Navigators. shrubs and medicinal herbs, were known to them. They were probably the only American race that em- ployed domestic animals, chiefly the llamas and the alpacas. Shawls, robes, hangings, of admirable delicacy and durability, showed their aptitude in working up the hair of animals. Bracelets, collars, and vases of gold and silver, elaborately wrought, evinced unusual metal- lurgical knowledge ; mirrors of polished stone or bur- nished silver ; utensils of fine clay and copper ; delicate cutting and setting of emeralds without knowledge of iron ; sculptured porphyry and granite ; extraction of the precious metals without knowledge of quicksilver ; ore-smelting, architectural monuments of great extent and magnificence, all give testimony of their superiority in the various arts. A refined, innocent, orderly people, they stand in the greatest contrast to the ferocious Aztecs. They guarded carefully against famine, invasion, and rebellion; they worshipped the light ; they abounded in institutions re- garded even by the Spaniards as exerting a favorable influence on the people, and though their system was an inexorable mechanism, all the parts were harmoni- ously related, and every detail was defined with pre- cision.* Such was the nation against which the foundling, the pilot, and the missionary directed their romantic expe- dition. The story of their dropping down into those silent latitudes — their meeting with the wandering Indians on the passage, their landing at Tumbez, their reception as the children of the Sun by the simple natives, ♦Vid. G. Bruhl, "Die Culturvolker Alt-Amerikas," 1877-78-79. A Social Fabric Dissolved, 405 their return to Panama, their final overthrow of this immense sovereignty with about one thousand men in little more than twelve months — is a story which would be characterized as pure fiction, did not undoubted evidence of the undertaking exist in the utmost fulness. Pizarro's march over the Andes is equal to the most celebrated of Cortes's marches. His seizure and exe- cution of Atahuallpa, the powerful Inca o£ Peru, in the face of a countless army, is paralleled only by what happened in the case of Montezuma. The whole Peru- vian organization seemed to dissolve like a breath before the SjDanish arms ; a handful of hungry cavaliers seemed to brush away instantaneously the whole fabric. The principal actors in the great drama perished by violent deaths. Almagro and his son, Gonzalo Pizarro and his brother Francisco, Carbajal, Hernando de Soto, Blasco Nunez the viceroy, Garcia de Alvarado, and the wretched Incas Manco and Atahuallpa, were either executed, murdered, or drowned ; and Hernando Pizarro languished in a Castilian prison for twenty years. Four years after the conquest of Peru, Jacques Cartier, a Frenchman, discovered the gulf of St. Law- rence, and Mendoza overran Buenos Ayres as far as Potosi, famous for the silver mines found there nine years later. In 1541 Chili was conquered ; Orellana sailed down the Amazon, and Hernando de Soto (like Cortes and the Pizarros, an Estremaduran) discovered the Mississippi, and found a grave in its waters. The great navigators, Drake, Davis, and Frobisher added, by their discoveries, new lustre to the English name, while the Dutch navigators, Van Linschoten, Barendz, 406 The Spanish Navigatoi^s, Heemskerk, De Veer, Ryp, Dirk Gerrits, and the Hout- manns, in their search for a passage to Cathay, dis- covered Spitzbergen, doubled the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, and opened the way for the mighty Dutch East India company, which attached to the Netherlands, by the slender filaments of trade, a series of dependencies that encircled the globe. Thus had the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans become " Spanish Lakes;" the possessions of Spain in the New World swept the poles, and a gigantic colonial systeip was built up which lasted down to our day. Mexico, Peru, La Plata, and New Granada became opulent vice- royalties ; Yucatan, Guatemala, Chili, Venezuela, and Cuba remained captain-generalcies. The advent of Joseph Bonaparte in Spain, and the dethronement of Ferdinand VH., produced (we may say in anticipation) revolutions in Spanish America, which resulted in the independence of all the great colonies except Cuba and Porto Rico. The land of the Incas became fully independent in 1824-26 ; New Granada and Venezuela finally in 1823 ; Mexico in 1829 ; and Guatemala in 1823.* The Portuguese colony of Brazil was finally established into an independent empire in the year 1822, with Dom Pedro as emperor. The royal family, fearing to fall into the hands of Napoleon, had abandoned the country, and arrived in Brazil in January, 1808. In 18 15 Brazil, though still subject to Portugal, was declared an inde- pendent kingdom, entitled to its own laws and adminis- tration. Its marvellous progress in the last fifty years A Magnificent Empire. 407 has justified the expectations formed of its splendid future. The Spanish navigators had thus, in less than fifty years, made Spain the most magnificent empire on earth. It is no wonder that Charles V. and Philip H. were looked upon as little less than gods, were held in affectionate remembrance as the greatest kings that have ever sat on the throne of Spain, and were re- garded as the incarnation of Spanish greatness and dignity. The results flowing from the munificence of Isabella the Catholic had been incalculable. Nobody could have foreseen them, except perhaps the far-sighted queen herself, who united to moral grandeur and states- manship, a faith, hope, and charity, seldom blended in so eloquent a degree in any human character. * Vid. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition. I* $? CHAPTER XVII. REGENCY OF XIMENES. — REIGN OF CHARLES V. AND JUANA. A BRIEF interregnum in Spanish affairs now en- sued. Ximenes, holding the regency by the doubtful sanction of a prince who at the time of his death had no jurisdiction whatever over Castilian affairs, vio-orously asserted himself, though opposed by Charles's ambassador, Adrian, Dean of Louvain. Letters from Charles soon came confirming the Cardinal's authority. Despite the repeated remonstrances of Xime'nes and the council, Charles, though it was an indignity to his mother, and contrary to established usage, insisted on being proclaimed king. The cardinal at length yielded, and Charles's wish was carried out in Madrid and the provinces, though Aragon sturdily refused till he had made oath personally to respect the laws and liberties of the realm. Courage, vigor, strong physical force, strict economic arrangements, and bold schemes of reform, character- ized Xime'nes' administration. " These are my creden- tials," said he, pointing to a park of artillery, when the discontented aristocracy came to him in a body, and demanded by what powers he held the government so 408 ^4 Death of Ximenes. 411 absolutely. He organized the burgesses into regular military companies for police purposes and self-protec- tion, retrenched excessive salaries, took ample precau- tions for the preservation of the foreign conquests of Spain, extended the inquisition to the New World, and, by his assumption of sole authority in 15 17, intimidated the powerful grandees of Castile. The landing of Charles in the Asturias in September, 1517, fortunately got the octogenarian prelate out of a host of difficulties engendered by the extortion of the Flemings, the wide and general discontent at the ab- sence of the king, and the murmurs of the aristocracy. By a piece of matchless ingratitude, excusable perhaps on the score of youth (he was but seventeen) and evil counsel, Charles addressed a letter to Xime'nes, telling him, after various complimentary preliminaries, that he might retire to his diocese. Ill as he was at the mo- ment, anxiety, disease, and emotion, added to this un- grateful announcement, were too much for his proud spirit ; Ximenes became mortally ill ; and full of devo- tion, contrition, and prayer, died (November 8, 15 17), saying, "■ In thee. Lord, have I trusted." The character of Ximenes excites awe rather than admiration. Cloister-bred, gloomy, and passionate, he governed despotically, he believed fanatically, he was reckless of difficulties, and fearless of all temporal sovereignties. Of great versatility of talent, deep dis- interestedness, a despiser rather than fearer of the squibs and lampoons poured pitilessly on him, irre- proachable in morals, full of a sort of lofty humility, avaricious of time to a degree, short of speech, addicted to theological arguments as his only amusement, people P^M 412 Reign of Charles V, Rival Claimants, 413 saw in his vivid dark eyes, precise enunciation, rare mental endowments, and commanding though emaciated personality, a spirit born to rule, and to rule sovereignly. A few years of universal calm succeeded the peace of Troyon in 15 16, which occasioned an alliance be- tween Charles and Francis I. of France, and brought the bloody and tedious wars evoked by the league of Cambray to an end. A pompous entry into Valladolid in 15 18, followed by his proclamation as king by the Cortes — despite its respect for ancient forms and aversion to innovation — distinguished the beginning of the reign. Enveloped in a cloud of Netherlanders, Charles hardly had a chance to learn his own language, as Philip II., for opposite reasons, never completely acquired the Neth- erlandish. Leaving Castile disgusted with the venality of his followers and the nomination of William de Croy, nephew of the unpopular favorite Chievres, to the primacy of Spain, Charles made haste to hold the Cortes of Aragon. The Aragonese proved more intract- able than the Castilians ; he met violent opposition from them, though they at length conferred on him the title of king in conjunction with his mother. And here Charles began those requests for " donations " which soon became a regular part of his policy— money, money, he asked for everlastingly, and at all times, so that it came to be said that he visited Spain solely to gather ducats. On the i2th of January, 1519, died Maximilian em- peror of Germany, Charles's grandfather — a sudden explosion amid the profound peace then reigning in Europe, an irritant to the mortal rivalries of the young kings Francis and Charles, and a spark that kindled into a mighty conflagration all the combustible elements and crude ambitions at that time dormant through the continent. Maximilian had endeavored before his death to se- cure the imperial crown to his grandson, though obsti- nately opposed by the German princes — emperor "elect," only, as he himself was considered from his never having been crowned by the pope,— an indispen- sable ceremony. Almost at the very death-bed of Maximilian, the passions of Europe began to break forth. Two splendid rivals sprang forth to dispute the empire — both illustrious in youth, strength, brilliant aspiration, and unrivalled expectations. Charles looked upon his own elevation to the imperial throne, with sanguine hopes as grandson of Maximilian, as a prince of German nationality, and as a king able to repel with what, in the event of his election, would be irresistible force, the encroachments of the Turkish power under Selim II., then menacing Christendom with the whole of his power. Francis, on the other hand, had high hopes of con- vincing the diet of the expediency of now snubbing the princes of the house of Austria j of showing the need of an able and mature sovereign in the present religious and political emergency ; of limiting the ambitious and comprehensive designs of a prince who, once elected emperor of Germany, would aspire to universal sover- eignty ; and of engaging a great mass of disciplined and valiant troops capable of coping with the invincible Selim. The diet of Frankfort, June, 15 19, after offering the 414 Ueign of Charles V. imperial crown to Frederic of Saxony, — a crown which had no charms for a prince of such pure magnanimity and disinterestedness, — conferred it unanimously, when Frederic had declined, on Charies. Discovering, how- ever, great jealousy of his extraordinary powers, the electoral college presented to Charles a " capitulation," or bill of rights, in which he was requested to sign a solemn recognition of the privileges and immunities of the electors, the princes of the empire, the cities and the whole Germanic confederation; which, signed by his representatives, was afterwards confirmed at his coronation by himself. At once vast projects of ambition began to dawn upon the newly elected emperor. Centuries seem to have gone by since the narrow times of Ferdinand and Isabella. The huge arena of European politics, sud- denly opening like an immeasurable amphitheatre before us, discloses the youthful emperor with lofty de- signs and great enterprises vividly at work before his expanding imagination. Spain at once took a step, from the confined limits of a petty Catholic power entangled in infinite self-conflict, out into the boundless area of a wider diplomacy, leaped to the forefront of the continental powers, and for four-score years exercised an astounding ascendency over them all. Charles's Spanish subjects, however, viewed his ele- vation very differently. They saw in it continual absence from home, government by proxy, waste of blood and treasure in the endless German and Italian wars, and perni- cious taxation to keep up all this foreign splendor. A civil war broke out in Valencia between nobles and people, a mutinous spirit showed itself in Castile, and the ^■^'^^^^Iftt^^^^SiMWL The Field of the Cloth of Gold, 415 whole kingdom was more or less agitated. Leaving Adrian, now a cardinal, regent of Castile, Don Juan Launza, viceroy of Aragon, and Mendoza, count of Melito, viceroy of Valencia, Charies sailed from Coruna for the Low Countries, May 22, 1520. He was com- pelled to this move by the impatience of the imperial electors at the long interregnum between Maximilian's death and his own coronation, by the intestine commo- tions in his hereditary dominions of the Netherlands, by the rapid and alarming progress of Protestantism in Germany, and by the speed and vigor of the prepara- tions of the French king, who was now ready with his usual impetuosity to dispute any and everything in which Charles took interest, or to which he had a claim, — Naples, Milan, Charies's patrimonial domain of Bur- gundy, wrested from his ancestors by Louis XL, or the conquered kingdom of Navarre, — no matter what. The famous meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, between Henry VI 1 1, and Francis, took place in an open plain between Guisnes and Ardres, in 1520, — a meeting, which though resulting in personal impressions favorable to the chivalrous accomplishments and de- lightful manners of the French king, was soon counter- acted in influence by Charles's ally, Wolsey, and by a less gorgeous but practically more advantageous meet- ing with Charies himself, at Gravelines, a month after- wards. In the presence of a splendid and numerous assem- blage gathered at Aix-la-Chapelle, the young king was crowned with the crown of Charlemagne, emperor of Germany, October 23, 1520 — an event almost contem- porary with the accession of Solyman the Magnificent, to the sultanate of Turkey. 416 Reign of Charles V, Never perhaps had Europe beheld such a group of brilliant sovereigns as at that moment riveted its atten- tion. Charles, Francis I., Leo X., Henry VIII., and Solyman, made an illustrious band — each endowed with special and splendid gifts, whether as diplomat, preux chevalier^ connoisseur in art, possessor of deter- mined personal force, or lover of eastern magnificence. The diet of Worms, so celebrated for its discussions of Lutheranism, was called by Charles for January 6, 152 1, — the first act of his eventful administration. When Charles arrived in Germany no change in es- tablished forms of worship had been introduced, no prince had as yet embraced Lutheranism; the contro- versy as yet was a controversy of pamphlets and pas- sions, and no encroachments had been made upon the possessions or jurisdiction of the clergy. A profound impression of the beauty, truth, and sincerity of Luther's teachings, however, agitated Germany and impregnated the minds of the people with the liveliest apprehensions of approaching change. Since 15 17 the new movement to reform religion had been publicly propagated by Luther and his followers. Leo X.'s hapless love of splendor led him to that sale of indulgences which, under Tetzel, in Saxony, and other agencies in the rest of the empire, introduced enormous abuses, attracted the attention of the purer clergy as a bold and novel mode of replenishing church coffers, and brought them to consider it a practice equally sub- versive of faith and morals. The poor peasant of Eisleben, fed on the niceties and distinctions of a scho- lastic theology, by which men tried to refine themselves into heaven, found providentially a copy of the Bible -.^i^^^Mto^.^ Martin Luther, 417 in his monastery library. He devoured its contents, and soon gained such reputation for sanctity and learning, that Frederic of Saxony called him to the chair of phil- osophy, in his newly founded university of Wittemberg, and then to the chair of theology in the same institu- tion. — But it will be useless to pursue the thousand-told tale of the reformation. Luther published ninety-five theses against indulgences; he was supported by the Augustinian friars of his own monastic order, he was secretly encouraged by the elector of Saxony, he was regarded at first with condescending contempt and tol- eration by the court of Rome, then he was summoned in 1518 to appear at Rome before Prierias, the inquisitor- general. In default of this, the papal legate, Cajetan, was empowered to try him for heresy in Germany, at Augsburg. His memorable intrepidity during that ex- amination, his flight from Augsburg, his appeal from the absolutism of Cajetan, who insisted inflexibly on a re- cantation, Luther's perilous situation, his appeal to a general council, the perpetual negotiations flying hither and thither between the parties to the controversy, and the manner in which Luther, by the obstinacy and false- hood of its ministers, came from implicit confidence to absolute disbelief in the divine origin of the papal au- thority — all this need not be harped on. At last in 1520, a bull of excommunication was pub- lished against him ; anathemas thundered and adversa- ries exulted ; but literally to no purpose. As well fling pins against a wall of adamant, as bulls, summonses, pen- alties, against this Teutonic impersonation of strength. Luther mercilessly pointed out the impiousness of the canon law; he made bonfires of the bulls; and far 418 Reign of Charles V, from becoming the victim of abject ecclesiastical bigotry, laughed at, and despised it from his stronghold in the hearts of the people. The glorious light of justifica- tion by faith transfigured him ; he saw the uselessness of penances and pilgrimages, auricular confessions and purgatory, of saintly intercessions, celibacy, and the de- cisions of the schoolmen ; and not only he, but his contemporaries ; so that the ground in which Waldus, Wiclif, and Huss, had sown was now covered with a white har\'est ready for the reaper. Luther then can only be regarded as the effective mouthpiece of the general European world, uttering with incomparable force, quaintness, and eloquence, what multitudes had at heart and cherished in the secret chambers of the soul. When a deacon guilty of murder might get ofi for twenty crowns, an abbot assassinate for three hun- dred livres, and the voluptuous lives of ecclesiastics ap- proach the bestialities of Petronius and the Lexicon Venereum, it was high time that a purifying blast should come and blow such scandals to the winds. The bene- fices of Germany lay at the mercy of joint-stock com- panies, who openly purchased and retailed them to the highest bidder. Reuchlin, Hutten. Erasmus, and Mel- ancthon, with the united force of wdt, raillery, eloquence, and erudition, — men who had revived learning and men who had not, — gathered their strength at earlier or later moments of this splendid liberation of Christianity, and whether in speculative accord with it or not, directly or incidentally aided in its accomplishment. Charles, from motives of policy, perhaps, more than on the merits of the case, resolved to treat Luther with signal severity ; he was summoned to appear at Worms, ■■~4*" • THE PUERTA DEL SOL (GATE OF liii. ..UA,. TOLEDO 'mmmm^ The Diet of Worms, 421 N in March, 1521. He did appear under imperial safe- conduct, saying, " that he should do so though as many devils as there are tiles on the houses, were there com- bined against him ; " but as an obstinate and excommu- nicated criminal, he was deprived by edict, when neither threats nor prayers could prevail on him to re- tract his opinions, of his rights as a citizen, and even the personal protection of favorably disposed princes. He suddenly disappeared, and lay concealed at Wart- burg for nine months, under the protection of the elec- tor of Saxony. , In 152 1, hostilities broke out in Navarre between the French and Spanish, but the former were defeated and driven out. A league was formed between Henry and Charles against Francis ; hostilities broke out in the Netherlands and Italy; the pope declared against France, and a grand spectacular scene of war, tourna- ment, and negotiation ensued, further complicated by Leo's death in 1522, and the election of Adrian of Utrecht, Charles's old tutor, to the pontifical dignity. Solyman the Magnificent, made his famous descent on Rhodes in 1522, the seat of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem; and pitting two hundred thousand against five or six thousand soldiers and knights, com- manded by the heroic Villers de I'Isle Adam, brought it to an honorable capitulation after a siege of six months. The knights then received from the emperor as reparation the island of Malta, so celebrated after- wards for its resistance to the same enemy in Philip's time. By the victory of the nobles over the " comunidades," of Castile, at Villalar, April 23, 1522, — an event iSfi^r '• -.*», iiJ ilji-ft'^#ilittl^.^ 422 Reign of Charles V. Pavia Besieged. 423 which crushed for ages the communal liberties of Spain, — an unsuccessful insurrection was quelled and a new confirmation and extension of the powers of the crown resulted. The Castilians were acknowledged to have better un- derstood the principles of liberty than any other people in Europe ; to have acquired more liberal ideas of govern- ment and the rights and privileges of individuals ; and to have exhibited a political knowledge not attained even by the English till a century later. And yet by this fatal revolution, headed by Juan de Padilla, and suppressed as suddenly, all was risked and all was lost. The people and cortes subsided into that lethargy from which they were never roused except when the cortes abandoning the ancient and cautious form of examining and redressing grievances before they proceeded to grant supplies, was called upon for money and began to grant it without remonstrance. And from this fatal victory the privileges of the cities date their circum- scription and abolition, commerce begins to decline, the cortes ceased to be a genuine deliberative body, and, in the next reign, was almost entirely superseded by a sys- tem of councils established and multiplied by the poli- tic Philip. From Villalar, therefore, — from this great, popular insurrrection, protesting against tyranny and breathing through its " Holy Junta " such liberty as could hardly be expected from the haughtiest confed- eracy in the most enlightened times, — dates the extinct- tion of Spanish liberty. Disaffection followed in Valencia, Aragon, and Ma- jorca, and Charles's peninsula dominions for a moment — owing to the national antipathy, rivalries, and hostil- 9 ity, existing from time immemorial between the different kingdoms comprising Spain — seemed on the point of dissolution. By prudent and generous behavior towards the malecontents, however, — by punishing capitally scarcely twenty persons in Castile, after his arrival in Spain, by humoring with tact their national prejudices, by gentleness and conciliation, he easily pacified them ; and as they idolized the memory of Isabella, and loved and pitied the Lady Jane, so they began to twine their impressionable affections round him and to serve him with that love and loyalty seen, perhaps, nowhere in the world more profoundly and pathetically than in the peninsula. Charles, elated with recent successes in Italy, made his disastrous invasion of Provence (1524) and was re- pelled by the military skill, resources, and wisdom, of Francis. Delivered from this invasion Francis, — who seemed to be in a perpetual dance and exhilaration of happy animal spirits, — assisted by one of the most powerful and best-appointed armies ever raised in France, resolved upon the re-invasion of Milan, and, appointing Louise of Savoy, his mother, regent during his absence, he passed the Alps at Mont Cenis, spread consternation and disorder before him, embarrassed the imperialists by his brisk movements, and — fatal error for him — turned aside to lay siege to Pavia, (October 1524), a town of great importance, but strong in forti- fications. Detained by the gallant defence of Pavia, and yet pursuing his design of taking it with a rashness and obstinacy hard to explain, sacrificing everything to his boast that he would take the city, and keenly alive to '-fmmmnimmf 424 Reign of Charles V, and Juana. the ignominy of abandoning the enterprise unaccom- plished, he was shut in between the forces of Leyva, com- mandant at Pavia, and the forces of the imperial generals ; a battle took place, universal rout ensued, ten thousand men fell, and Francis himself, together with the king of Navarre, was taken prisoner. Perhaps the most memorable dispatch in history is that which Francis sent to his mother after the battle : " Madam, all is lost except our honor ! " His kingdom was saved by the address and foresight of Louise of Savoy. Instead of treating Francis with the magnanimity due a great prince, — instead of making one concentrated cam- paign against France and Italy before they had recovered from their speechless demoralization, Charles, as usual, took refuge in prolix negotiations, proposed offensive measures to Francis — restoration of Burgundy, sur- render of Dauphine and Provence, satisfaction of Hen- ry's claims on France, and renunciation of all French pretensions to Naples and Milan, — and sent the knightly Francis into ignoble captivity in the alcazar of Madrid, under the lynx eyes of Alarcon. After a rigorous imprisonment of more than a year, Francis was finally released from captivity by the treaty of Madrid, January 14, 1526. He left his eldest son, the dauphin, and his second son, the Due d' Orleans, as hostages for the performance of the stipulations of the treaty. It is to Charles's disgrace that he was driven to this treaty by urgent necessity; by Francis's threatening to resign his crown to the dauphin rather than be tor- tured into concessions unworthy of a king, and by his A League against Charles, 425 own dread that if he refined his torment too far, and wrung and stung Francis's spirit by still more humili- ating conditions, he might outwit himself, and lose the magnificent ransom which he hoped to get from the French king. In March, 1526, Charles's union with Isabella, of Portugal, a beautiful and accomplished princess, nearly related to the royal house of Spain, was solemnized with picturesque gayety and glory at Seville, — the loveliest of the Andalusian cities ; an event nearly con- temporaneous with the time when Francis, leaping into Lautrec's boat at Hendaya, crossed the river, sprang delightedly on the soil of France, and crying, " I am yet a king," galloped full speed to Bayonne. Disquietude reigned in Germany during this interval; an insurrection of the peasants in Suabia broke out, followed by another in Thuringia led by Muncer, one of Luther's disciples, a communist and revolutionary of the worst and wildest type. The death of Muncer, who was condemned and executed as his crimes de- served, ended the war, but did not quench the smoul- dering religious enthusiasm upon which it was built, afterwards to flash up anew in a dangerous and san- guinary form. Luther's translation of the Bible, suc- ceeded by what was called his " incestuous marriage " with a noble nun, Catherine k Boria, created great scandal in the ecclesiastical world, somewhat extenuated, to be sure, by his prudence and moderation during this peas- ant outbreak. Absolved by the pope from his oath not to take up arms against Charles, Francis made haste, on his de- liverance, to form a league with Henry, the Pope, Milan, and Venice against the swelling ambition of the empe- 426 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. ror. Being required to perform what he had stipulated — especially the restoration of Burgundy — he replied by publishing his league with the other powers, thus rousing the bitterest indignation of Charles. In 1527 took place the sacking of Rome by the im- perialists, under the Constable de Bourbon — an event infamous to the last degree, disclaimed, though secretly rejoiced in, by Charles, and giving to the Catholic world a cruel shock. To avenge Pope Clement's double-deal- ing, Charles's general, Bourbon, set out with a muti- nous and savage crew of twenty-five thousand men of every nationality, with the intention of invading the papal territories. Immense booty allured the soldiers, rendered furious by lack of pay and by suffering; Clement, fluctuating, finally made a treaty with Lannoy, viceroy of Naples, disbanded his troops, and relied on providence and the other party to the treaty for a carry- ing out of its articles. Bourbon refused to recognize the new treaty, marched on and assaulted Rome, de- fended only by such troops as Clement could hurriedly gather, was slain himself in the assault, and his men, animated by frenzy, stormed, burned, ravaged, and vio- lated, in a way that roused indignation throughout Chris- tendom. Clement fled to the castle of St. Angelo, and Charles laughed in his sleeve. Starved out of his stronghold, the wretched Medici had to surrender, while the horror of Europe at the sacrilege of the Holy City in flames was assuaged by the devout spectacle of Charles appointing prayers and processions throughout all Spain for the recovery of the pope's liberty, putting himself and his court in mourning, and commanding the rejoicings over the birth of his son Philip, inauspicious in this moment of universal desolation (!), to cease. CHAPTER XVIII. REIGN OF CHARLES V. AND JUANA. [continued.] THE next eight years (15 2 7-1 535) were crowded with events, some of minor, some of immense importance. The large extent of Charles's dominions compelled frequent absences from Spain. His life was one of incessant travel from point to point and from diet to diet ; and the wonder is not that he should have abdicated in the prime of life, but that he should have held his tumultuous territories as long as he did. Pope followed pope ; treaty followed treaty ; war, negotiation, and reconciliation followed war, negotiation, and recon- ciliation ; and still the emperor, with matchless calm and persistency, gout-tormented as he was, exposed as he was to the infinite fatigues of horse-back travel over vast distances, held on, and with impassivity continued to weave the woof of his designs. The period under view embraced the formation of the confederacy be- tween Henry and Francis against Charles ; the recov- ery of their liberty by the Florentines, with the re-es- tablishment of their ancient popular form of govern- ment ; the invasion of Italy by the French and Vene- tians for the liberation of the pope and the Italian states j the liberation of Clement in 1527 on payment 429 430 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. of an enormous ransom ; the romantic cartel of defi- ance from Francis giving the emperor the lie in form for saying that he was a base violator of public faith and a stranger to the honor of a gentleman (the chal- lenge was accepted by Charles, though the duel did not take place) ; the retreat of the imperialists from Rome in 1528, the revolt of the great Andrew Doria from France, with the recover}' of her liberty by Genoa the same year, and the peace of Cambray, Aug. 5, 1529, between Charles and Francis, with terms advantageous to the emperor. Francis, impatient to release his sons from captivity in Spain, sacrificed by this treaty the fruits of nine successive campaigns, left Charles arbiter of the fate of Italy, removed a stigma from the Netherlands by abandoning his claims to the sovereignty of Flanders and Artois, and showed the fertility, caution, and sagacity of Charles in favorable contrast with his own heedlessness and impetuosity. Henry, anxious to ob- tain a divorce from Catharine of Aragon, owing to newly discovered scruples as to the legitimacy of his marriage with his brother's widow, and equally desirous to gain Clement's consent to it, acquiesced in the treaty. Then the emperor, landing at Genoa, appeared in Italy with the pomp and power of a conqueror, winning all by his courtesy and affability. He re-established the authority of the Medici at Florence, appointed the diet of Speyerfor March 15, 1529, and enjoined those states of the empire which had hitherto obeyed the decree issued against Luther at Worms in 1524 to persevere in the observation of it, while prohibiting further religious innovations. The name Protestant was said first to have been given to the band of illustrious princes and i , I The Augsburg Confession. 431 cities that entered a protest against this decree passed by a majority of voices at the diet — Elector of Saxony, Marquis of Brandenburg, Landgrave of Hesse, Duke of Lunenburg, Prince of Anhalt, and deputies from fourteen imperial cities. On March 22, 1530, a diet of the empire was held at Augsburg, during which Melancthon, the ethereal- minded scholar, drew up the famous Augsburg Confes- sion of Faith, expressing with moderation and soberness the precise tenets of the Protestant party. A severe decree, condemning most of the heretical opinions of this confession, was fulminated by the popish party ; a severity which compelled the Protestant states, alarmed at the prospect of rigorous persecution, and convinced of their destruction having been determined upon, to enter into a league of mutual defence against all aggressors, at Smalkalde, December 22, 1530. By firmness in adhering to their opinions, by the unanimity with which they pushed all their pretensions, and by their wisdom in seizing a happy conjuncture when the emperor was embarrassed on one side by the precarious peace with France, and on the other by the hostile movements of Solyman, they managed to extort from Charles at Nuremberg (1531), terms which virtu- ally amounted to toleration of Protestantism. Solyman was compelled to retreat from Hungary. Charles thus released, set out to re-visit Spain by way of Italy, and arrived in Barcelona in 1533. The famous enterprise of the Spaniards against the pirates of Barbary, in 1535, aroused universal attention, spread Charles's fame as the chief prince in Christen- dom everywhere, and with the defeat of the corsair 432 Rei(/n of Charles V. and Juana. Barbarossa's army and the surrender of Tunis momen- tarily extinguished the system of piracy with which the Mediterranean was afflicted. In 1 S38 at Nice, was concluded a truce of ten years between Charles and Francis - a result accomplished by the zeal and ingenuity of the venerable pontiff Paul and doubtless pleasing to Charles, after his second luckless invasion of Provence in 1536. An interview took place between the rivals, spiced with piquant rec- ollections, perhaps, considering the terms on which they had been for twenty years. They had mutually given and taken the lie; Charles had denounced Frahcis as destitute of honor, Francis had accused Charles of bein- accessory to the recent death of the dauphin and injuries without number reciprocally inflicted or endured were in the" memory of each. And yet they romanti- cally rushed into each other's arms like two school-boy.s and showed the warmest demonstrations of esteem and affection on both sides. In i:;39 on the accession of Henry to the electorate of Saxony - a prince devotedly attached to Protestant- ism — that religion became established in every part of Saxony. , , . The expenses of Charles's military undertakings now caused Spain to groan under a taxation unknown in its history He dismissed the Cortes of Castile at Toledo in 1^4 with great acrimony because it ventured to ex- postulate with his continual entanglement in European ^airs, the burdens entailed upon the people in conse- auence and the threatened ruin of public credit and ^ resources. Henceforth nobles and pre^ate^ were not called to the Cortes, under pretence that those 432 Beiro gland fid^h — their wealth, their special trading facilities with foreign countries, granted by the court of Rome, their possessions in every country — sometimes with sovereign sway — and their character- istic and pernicious attachment to the order first and the order last— showed, before the end of the sixteenth century, that mighty progress which, though illustrated by eminence in literature, art, and education, was soon seen to be the fertile source of innumerable calamities to civil and political society. Occult ambition, reckless selfishness, insatiable intrigue, caused their ruin; and though they did not exercise any considerable influence in Charles's time, the order began their career at that epoch, and experienced a check from his sagacious and far-seeing spirit. Another expedition to Africa against Algiers, m 1541, going down in an eclipse of disaster, as the first had been full of glory, now called Charles away. The emperor's great qualities came out conspicuously in his reverses ; self-denial, greatness of soul in defeat, constancy, humanity, showed that he was not wholly mastered by selfishness and self-interest. The immense pageant of Charles's reign was now increased by the presence of Maurice of Saxony, who, in 1 541, succeeded his father Henry in that part of Saxony which belonged to the Albertine branch of the Saxon family; a knightly figure; brilliant, graceful, daring ; a zealous Protestant, a great general, a paladm of romance for costly and insinuating accomplishments ; and all this at twenty. Francis, tired of the truce, re- newed hostilities in 1542 with five fine armies, but made peace at Crespy in 1544. Death of Martm Luther. 437 The council of Trent was summoned to meet in 1545, soon after the peace of Crespy, but the Protestants, with the exception of Maurice, who courted favor with the emperor, would have nothing to do with it. An inflammation of the stomach carried off the great Luther in 1541. The reformer left behind a reputation for dauntless intrepidity, zeal for truth, purity and austerity of man- ners, humor, passionate temper, and prejudice, not min- gled in equal degree in the character of any of his contemporaries. Indelicacy, culpable acrimony of statement, irascibility, and vanity, cast a shade on one side of the picture, and tell us that Luther was human. But a rugged grandeur of soul, an infinitely subtle spirit of mirth, the warbling of a melodious gift for poetry, a Homeric sense of the ridiculous, a generous toleration for human fraility, and a pleasant garrulousness as of some rough old man talking to his children, show us in him glimpses of a lovableness and simplicity allied to the sweetest tendencies of our nature. The next two years, saw the commencement of hos- tilities against the Protestants. Charles concluded a truce with Solyman, gained over Maurice and other princes in Germany, formed a treaty with the pope to check the growth of Henry, and while endeavoring to conceal his intentions from the Protestants, so alarmed them that, after gigantic efforts, they were enabled to take the field with forces superior to his own, and even to overawe the emperor. The elector of Saxony, the landgrave of Hesse, the duke of Wurtemberg, the princes of Anhalt, and the cities of Augsburg, Ulm, and Strass- burg, were the principal contributors to this great ar- 438 Reign of Charles V, and Juana. mament of seventy thousand foot and fifteen thousand horse. But the host fell asunder at the critical moment ; one part of it after another submitted ; and, finally, by the battle of Miihlberg, in 1547, Charles defeated and took prisoner the elector of Saxony. He forced him with ungenerous rigor to surrender the electorate and remain a perpetual prisoner; Maurice was put in pos- session of his dominions as his reward for deserting the Protestant cause; and the landgrave of Hesse, Maurice's father-in-law, being made the victim of an infamous piece of perfidy on Charles's part, was de- tained a prisoner under a Spanish guard. The emperor's indecent treatment of two of the greatest princes of Germany provoked murmurs long and loud. But assuming the arrogant and inflexible tone of a conqueror, he began to dictate despotically and greatly to alarm a people habituated during centu- ries to consider the imperial authority as neither exten- sive nor formidable. Charles could act all the more confidently, as Francis, his antagonist during twenty- eight years, — the gay, the spiritual, the captivating, the accomplished, — was now no more. The sparkling volatility of Francis, his absolute au- thority within his own compact dominions, his enthu- siastic and adventurous temperament, his easily-kindled affections, his love of poetry and painting, were a direct counterbalance to Charles's length of deliberation, his bull-dog-like obstinacy, his sway over a large and loose confederation, perpetually angry, perpetually in fermen- tation, and his cautious utilization of his conquests. We may admire Charles, but Francis we cannot help loving. An irrepressible boyishness, a dash, a gal- INTERIOR OF SAN JUAN DF roQ ■ ULEDO. A Bad Impression. 441 lantry, unknown to his sober rival, endear him to us and make us forgive or forget his numerous faults. Charles now journeyed into the Low Countries to re- ceive and have his son Philip, now twenty-one, recog- nized as heir-apparent of the Netherlands. Philip, though welcomed and entertained with the ancient splendor of Brabant, did not make a good impression. His youth seemed to have no bloom, no brilliance, no benignity, already his haughty reserve and solemn frown overcast the sunshiny disposition of the Nether- landers, and overawed their frank and joyous temper- ament, and horoscopes most unfavorable to his future in the Low Countries were already cast by the impres- sionable imaginations of the Flemings. Prince Maurice of Saxony, who had all along been profoundly double-dealing with the emperor, suddenly, after the capitulation of the hitherto unreduced Magde- burg, in 155 1, threw off the mask, and revealed to ''the astounded despot his own vast schemes of ambition. In his manifesto of 1552, justifying his conduct, he ex- poses his reasons for now taking up arms against the emperor, who had hitherto regarded him as one of his strongest allies,— that he might assure the Protestants in the practice of their religion, maintain the laws and constitution of the empire, save Germany from a despotism, and deliver the landgrave of Hesse from the miseries of a long and unjust imprisonment. Being powerfully aided by Henry IL, of France, he advanced with eagle swiftness upon the imperialist forces at Innsbruck, compelled the emperor to fly in confusion from the place, broke up the council, which had again returned to Trent from Bologna, in wildest consternation, and by the vigor and alertness of his 442 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. operations forced the distressed and embarrassed mon- arch to the celebrated Peace of Religion at Passau, August 2, 1552. This peace overthrew with a breath the monstrous fabric of Charles's ambition, annulled all his regulations concerning religion, scattered to the winds his darling scheme of procuring the election of Philip as his suc- cessor on the imperial throne, and triumphantly vindi- cated and established Protestantism. Maurice's pro- found dissimulation was glorified and transfigured into providential foresight ; and the historian's concluding reflection on the subject is, " that wonderfully doth the wisdom of God superintend and regulate the caprice of human passions, and render them subservient towards the accomplishment of his own purpose ! " Little remains to be said of the three concluding years of Charles's long and stormy reign, unless we would repeat the perpetual story of hostility against France — now his favorite passion ; tumults in various parts of his widely-extended territories, and never-ending diffi- culties with Italy. The landgrave of Hesse recovered his freedom and was reinstated in his dominions, and the degraded elector of Saxony was set at liberty by the emperor. War was again renewed with France for the" recover)^ of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, lately won by the French; but the deluges of rain and snow, bitter winter weather, starvation, and the gallant Duke of Guise brought about the utter ruin of the imperial army with the loss of thirty thousand men. This disastrous year (1552), was further signalized by unfortunate occurrences in Italy, the revolt of Sien- na, and the descent of the Turks on the kingdom of An Extraordinarif G-enius, 448 Naples, where they cast anchor in tJie very harbor of the metropolis, and diffused terror through Italy. The turbulence of Albert of Brandenburg, who kindled a new war in Germany, and united the most powerful princes in the land (headed by Maurice) against himself, threw the vast confederation into a tremor. In the bat- tle of Sieverhausen, in Lunenburg, he was attacked and routed ; but the Germanic league experienced an irrepar- able loss in the death of Maurice, who fell in this bat- tle, aged thirty-two. An extraordinary genius; ambitious, grossly unjust in stealing his kinsman's dominions, full of prudence and vigor when his youth suggested immaturity and recklessness, wonderfully alert and forgiving where his own interests were concerned, a profound intriguer, an intricate schemer, a sturdy Protestant , the most para- doxical elements combined in Prince Maurice's character and made him at once universally admired and univer- sally feared. The decline of the '' Star of Austria " was observ- able also in Hungary, where the emperor's brother Ferdinand was compelled to abandon Transylvania to Isabella, late queen of Hungary, and the Turks. To counteract apparently the decay of his prestige, a mar- riage was projected between Charles's son Philip, now a widower, and Mary of England, — a marriage origi- nally arranged for Charles himself It seemed, however, Philip's fate to marry princesses originally destined for somebody else ; for no less than three out of his four wives were thus selected, one for his father and two for his son, Don Carlos. The marriage treaty v/as signed m 1554 and gave to 444 Reign of Charles V, and Juana. Philip the empty title of king of England. Discontent and apprehension were general in England at so close a connection with the most Catholic of European coun- tries ; justified to a great extent, for, after the stately wedding ceremonies in 1554, Mary took advantage of Wyatt's insurrection to effect measures for the extirpa- tion of Protestantism in her kingdom. Fitful campaigns in Picardy against Henry of France, and in Piedmont under the duke of Alva, were carried on with varying event. 'I he conspiracy to deliver Metz into the hands of the imperialists signally miscarried. Languid negotiations for peace between the potentates were labored upon with piety and humanity by Cardi- nal Pole ; but as neither would relinquish his extrava- gant demands, they proved abortive. The "recess of Augsburg," in 1555, a scheme of pacification between the Papists and Protestants of Germany, gave the foundation to the subsequent reli- gious peace and toleration in that country— a scheme essential to their mutual safety and tranquillity. Curi- ously enough, Calvin's and Zwingle's followers were excluded from this arrangement ; only those adhering to the Confession of Augsburg receiving the benefit of it • and not till the treaty of Westphalia did they ac- quire legal authorization to enjoy equal privileges with the Lutherans. , , j .u An event long conceived, long fore-shadowed, — the surrender of his hereditary dominions to Philip, and his own retirement from the brilliant but agitated arena of political life, — was now put into execution by Charles. Elected to the imperial crown in 1519, when Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella had become consolidated, Abdication of Charles V. 445 and had taken its place in the hierarchy of the great European commonwealth — the real sovereign of Mexico, of Peru, of far-distant dependencies in the New World and the Old, of Franche-Comte, Spain, and the Nether- lands, of Naples and Sicily — his life had been one of ceaseless activity, vicissitude, and success. He had crushed the liberties of the Spanish people at Villalar in the war of the communities. He had witnessed and vigorously co-operated — on the wrong side — in the great battle for religious liberty and Protestantism. He had rolled back the tide of Turkish conquest in his early life. He had been the champion of Christianity in Tunis and Algiers. He had traversed Italy, Spain, Flanders, France, England, and Germany, forty times, bent on expeditions of war or peace. He had carried on a prolonged and sanguinary conflict with his brother- in-law, Francis I. He had waged determined war on the Lutheran princes of Germany. He had struggled in vain against Maurice and had seen his projects anni- hilated by the peace of Passau. And now, prema- turely exhausted at fifty-six, racked since his thirtieth year by excruciating gout, disabled so that he had to be carried about in a litter and could not or would not sign letters or papers for months ; overshadowed by consti- tutional melancholy and in deep mourning for the re- cent death of his mother Juana ; listening to supersti- tious voices calling him away, and seeing a fit successor in his thoroughly trained son Philip, now twenty- nine, Charles hastened to make arrangements by which he could fittingly and impressively withdraw into the monastery of Yuste and leave forever the tumultuous drama of the w^orld. r 446 Reign of Charles V, and Juana, I- The closing scene of his sovereignty at Brussels, October 25, 1555, when in the sumptuous chateau of the capital, and surrounded by the gorgeous ceremonial of the antique Burgundian court, he ceded to his son the realm of Flanders, forms a transcendent picture wor- thy of the commemorative pencil of Paul Veronese. Breathless attention reigned throughout the assembly ; deep emotion was evoked by the pathos and lofty self- abnegation of the emperor's tone ; Charles spoke with a simplicity and eloquence that touched all hearts ; and his parting admonition, delivered in broken accents to his son, who stood by in an attitude of deep respect, brought them to tears. " Fear God, live justly, respect the laws ; above all, cherish the interests of religion." On the 1 6th of January, 1556, he formally ceded to Philip the sovereignty of Castile, Aragon, and their dependencies, having, the October previous, thrown about his neck the sparkling jewel of the grandmaster- ship of the Golden Fleece. The emperor now passed into Spain accompanied by the queens of Hungary and France, his sisters, and one hundred and fifty of his household as special es- cort ; and after a few months' sojourn in various parts of the realm, where he was affectionately welcomed, he journeyed on like a pilgrim, to the city of his rest, toward the Hieronymite monastery which he had chosen for his hermitage. There he settled into a life of med- itation, austerity, penitence, and prayer ; mingling his monkish practices, however, with characteristic amuse- ments, sensual indulgences, and comprehensive corre- spondence with his agents abroad. He could not give up the world entirely, but kept up unfailing interest in its affairs. ' . ■\\V\X^'^^ ^^ /^ ^M^0m ^ \>fe\«'' '^lO.AVffli^^rx^^^^^^^ PEASANT OF ALCOY. n Charles V, at Yuste. 449 Yuste was a lovely spot ; high, pure-aired, wrapped in lemon and myrtle gardens, lifted into an atmosphere serene and sweet above the teeming plains that washed its base like a sea ; and there, amid its tranquil luxuri- ance, sunny groves, and sacred employments, the tired emperor found space for yet a few years of peaceful existence. Here, amid the hills of Estremadura, he was enabled to carry out his plans of devoting himself to the salvation of his soul — a plan which his consort, the Empress Isabella, had likewise conceived, but which she died too early to execute. Expiating the crimes, mistakes, and misunderstand- ings of a reign of forty years unparalleled for great issues and protracted struggles, required, however, more than mere self-consecration to prayer and holy medita- tion. Let us seize the opportunity offered by the lull to attempt a concise portrayal, hitherto impossible, of Charles's personal traits, habits, and surroundings. The monastery had been fitted up with some archi- tectural elegance, richly but simply furnished, and guarded against the damps so fatal to his gouty consti- tution. Here he displayed in full force his passion for watches, clocks, and mechanical contrivances of all sorts ; he was served on silver and surrounded by luxu- rious tapestries ; eider-down and ermine lined his six- teen robes of silk and velvet, and curiously constructed arm-chairs supported his tormented limbs. The "Gloria" of Titian hung in one of his rooms, accompanied by a small but exquisite group of masterpieces from the same inimitable fingers. He was as fond of horticul- ture as Diocletian, and he loved to sit and meditate under his walnuts and chestnuts. Though renowned 450 Reign of Charles V. and Juana, for horsemanship and all manly exercises in his prime, he could not bestride now even an Andalusian jennet. Some fifty persons, mostly Flemish gentlemen, whose language and nationality he devotedly loved, surrounded him as his retinue. Though a recluse at Yuste, he re- mained emperor for over a year after his arrival there, formally resigning the empire into the hands of the diet of Frankfort early in 1558. He spent his surplus time in mass-going, carving wood (of which he was very fond), arguing at length on scientific questions with the scholar Van Male, gen- tleman of the bed-chamber, listening to the eloquent harangues of the Hieronymite brethren, discussing the- ology after dinner with them ; and in severe Lenten fasts and self-flagellations. A musical voice was another of Charles's gifts, and a false note from any of the less fastidiously trained monks would make him swear as in his old campaigning days. He was an ingenious mechanician, and his con- trivances kept the simple monks in an astonishment that made them dread him as a necromancer. Being unable to make any of his numerous time-pieces keep exactly the same time, it is said that he exclaimed on the folly of attempting to make people think alike in religious matters. He admitted visitors ; the queens of Hungary and France came to see him ; he had the con- solation of retaining in his neighborhood, though given out as the son of his major-domo Quixada, his own nat- ural son, the spirited Don Juan of Austria ] he con- ferred with military men and strangers from abroad ; and he was in perpetual communication with Philip. He lamented the loss of Calais and rejoiced over the Charles V, Declines. 451 '^ victory of St. Quentin ; he took deep interest in Philip's financial regulations, and varied his conventual life in a manner at first most beneficial to his health. His sisters he loved tenderly, and the death of Eleanor, queen dowager of France and Portugal, in 1558, gave him a deep shock. He thundered from his mountain retreat against heresy, and zealously encouraged the Charles V. inquisition in its development. Monastic life intensified his bigotry, while it could not check his appetites or his relish for eel-pie and capons. His health, however, declined ; he is said to have gone through the singular ceremony of having funeral obsequies performed over himself in the chapel, which was hung with black and Ilti 452 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. blazed with innumerable wax-lights ; and he developed a fantastic inclination for dismal rites and the lugubrious and dramatic side of church spectacles. In August, alarming symptoms showed themselves ; he began to pass much time in rapt contemplation before the beau- tiful features of his dead wife, and before Titian's Agony in the garden ; and he executed a codicil to his will, in which he conjured Philip to exterminate every heretic in his dominions and to cherish the Inquisition. With the holy taper clasped in one hand and the cru- cifix in the other, fixing his dying eyes on the sacred symbol, while the archbishop of Toledo repeated the De Profiindis, he expired on the 21st of September, 1558, in the fifty-ninth very of his age. Thus the empire of the Caesars, more vast in extent, and more absolutely held than since the days of Charlemagne, was left desolate. OURBONS. i d Two Sicilies, Portug-al. of England. '. of France, nilian II. C3) 2. Isabella = Al ob. s. p. 1633. Sovereigns of a =f Einp. Ferdinand III I rgaret Theresa =f(i) En tivariayMaria Antonia. eph Ferdinand*, [)b. s. p. 1699. I. of Frederick , of Saxony. Ma; (Emp. Francis I.) 1 ' 1 _ >eopold II. Caroline — I 3. FRANCIS I, Maria: 1S25-1S30. Theresa. u (Pet« iJhristina. c. Theresa=Pet of Br Mary, of = F; Bavaria. / / THE HABSBURGS AND BOURBONS. Including Bourbon Princes in Parma ani Two Sicilies. 1 PHILIP U, (i) = Maria, dau. of John III of Portugal. 1556-1598. (3) = Mary, dau. of Henry Vlliof England. (3) = Elizabtth.dau.ofHenry II of France. (4) = Anne, dau. of Emp. MaxiiOilian II. (0 (4) (3) (3) » Recognized heir of Charles II of Spain until his death. *> Rival claimants of Spain after Charles II, the elder brother of each re. signing his pretensions. c Deposed by Napoleon, 1S07 ; restored to Parma on death of Maria Louisa, Napoleon's widow, in 1S47. d Ferdinand VII was proclaimed on his father's resignation, but was set aside by Napoleon, and replaced by Joseph Buonaparte till 1S14. I. Don Carlos, ob. s. p. 156S. 4. PHILIP III, y Margaret, sister of 159S-1631. Emp. Ferdinand II. 3. Catharine = Charles Emanuel I, of Savoy. 2. Isabella = Albert, son of Emp. ob. s. p. 1633. Maximilian II. Sovereigns of the Netherlands. I.vOuis XIII of — Anne. France. I..ouis X PHILIP IV, (0 = Elizabeth, dau. of Henry IV, of France. 16^1-1655. Maria T Emp. Ferdinand III. (0 (3) — Maria. (3) V =■ 1 7 Maria Theresa. Louis. — I 3. CHARLES II, (0 Maria Louisa, of Orleans. 1655-1700, ob. s. p. (2) =-; Maria Anna, of Neuburg. a. Mafg 'garet Theresa == (0 Emp. Leopold I, (3) T Eleanor, of Neuburg. I I ob. 1705 IvOuis, D. of Burgundy. (0 PHILIP Vb, res. 1734 ;(i) = Maria Louisa, dau. of Victor Airadeus II, resumed crown, 1725; of Savoy. ob. 1746. (2) ^ Isabella Farnese, ultimately heiress of Parma (0 I (^) Max Emanuel, of B^variayMaria Antonia. Joseph I, ob. 1711. jofteph Ferdinand", ^. s. p. 1699. (2) Charles VI**. Parma. Louisa, dau. of := LOUIS, 1724-1725, Regent Orleans. ob. s. p. FERDINAND VI, = Magdalen, dau. of 1746-1759, ob. s. p. John V, of Portugal. CHARLES m.l^Maria Amelia, dail- of Frederick 1759-17S8. Augustus lib of Saxony. Maria Anna = Joseph, of Portugal. Louisa Maria, = 3. CHARLES IV, 17SS-1S0S, res. of Parma. 1 — ^ 4. Gabriel. + PHILIP, ob. 1765. —Maria Louisa, dau. of I Louis XV, of France. ., 1 -t (Emp. Francis I.) Two Sicilies. 1 j- -t Charles IV, of — Louisa Maria. Spain. FERDINAND, ob. 1S03. , 1 , -r I. Charlotte =f John VI of Portugal. 1 1 -r Louis, = 2. Maria K. of Louisa. , , Etruria. 4. Charles, = Francesca. Isabella,=(2) 3. FERDINAND VIP,(i)=Maria Antonia, dau. of . _r »r_i.-__ Maria=(3) 1S14-1S33. Ferdinand I, of Two Sicilies Josepha, 1 of Saxony. (4) — Christina 5. Maria — Francis I, of Two Sicilies. C. of Molina, ob. 1S55. I. Maria Louisa -= Emp. tfeopold II. Caroline — 3. FERDINAND 1, 1759-1S25. I r- Charles, C. of Montemolin, ob. s. p. 1S61. John = Mary Beatrix, dau, of Francis IV, (4) (4) 1 Charles Margaret, dau. of Charies III, of Parma. of Modena. 2. Louisa =: Antoine, D. of 1. ISABELLA II, =r Francis Montpensier. 1S33-1S6S, dep |-(i) I i I. Maria ^^ (0 Clementina. Louisa y 6. Francis Maria, dau. of =^ (3) I de Paula. Charles IV I of Spain. -J (2) r- (Emp. Leopold II.) » I ' 1 iriT — f 3- FRANCIS I, Maria = Emp. Ferdinand I1I,= 2. Louisa 4. Maria =r Louis 1S25-1S30. Theresa. Francis II. of Tuscany. Amelia. Amelia. Philippe, J I of France. Maria Louisa -p LOUIS, K. of Caroline = Maximilian, j Etruria, ob. 1S03. of Saxony. — -r- + -I L 5. Maria = (i) Ferdinand VII, Antonia. of Spain. 1 (Victor Emanuel I, of Sardinia.) Alfonso. Caroline = Ciiarles, D. of (Charles IV, of Spain.) r ^— 1 (Peter I, of Brazil.) 1 ' 1 Daughters. ALFONSO XII, proclaimed King, Jan. 1S75. Berri. 2. Louisa^Franc s Ferdinand=3. ^'h"stina. 5. Theresa=Peter 11, Jan- -r 6 Louis, de Paula. VII. of Brazil, uaria. I C. of (O CHARLES LOUISS res. 1S49. 4. FERDINAND II, (i) = Christina. Theresa 1S30-1S59. (2) -j- Theresa, of Austria. CHARLES III. =Louisa, dau. Aquila. I ob. 1S54. of Charles, (3) (3) D. of Berri. Mary, of : Bavaria. FRANCIS II, dep. 1S60. Pia= ROBERT, dep. 1S60. P. Charles, = Margaret, of Spain J CHAPTER XIX. SPAIN UNDER PHILIP 11. PHILIP, as we have seen, was already twenty-nine when the helm of government passed into his hands. He was born at Valladolid, May 21, 1527. In 1528 the royal baby had bonfires and illuminations lighted for him, bull-fights and tournaments of reeds fou2:ht in his honor, and chivalrous and romantic cere- monies performed, all in celebration of his recognition by the Castilian cortes, as rightful heir to this unrivalled empire. Two functionaries were entrusted with his education — the complaisant Juan Martinez Siliceo, an humble but scholastically-trained doctor of Salamanca, and Don Juan de Zuniga. Ancient languages, French, Italian, mathematics, architecture, painting, and sculp- ture, for some of which Philip showed peculiar aptitude, were taught him by Siliceo. A knowledge of tilting and tourneying, fencing, riding, and other invigorating accomplishments, together with the duties belonging to his royal station, was imparted by the grandee Zuniga. Twelve years after her marriage with Charles, Isa- bella died ; and thus Philip was bereft of his mother's high and generous teachings. Surrounded as he was from the beginning, however, by statesmen of wisdom 455 456 Spain under Philip II. m and experience, he soon became familiar with govern- ment and its workings, and what buoyancy he may have had was crushed out of him by the serious and respon- sible nature of the position which he occupied. The emperor being almost continually absent, and visiting Spain only when his exchequer needed replenishing, Philip was thrust forward into great prominence ; was intrusted with the regency under a council consisting of Alva, Cardinal Tavera, and Cobos, and almost from the beginning w'as bidden by his father to depend on nobody but himself, to avoid being governed by the grandees, and in his perplexities lean exclusively on his Maker. Philip's character thus ripened early into a firm, granite-hard, cautious, and calculating texture, which afforded his father untold satisfaction, and gave him hopes that the empire would lose nothing in force when it had to be transmitted to his son. His only child by his first wife, Maria of Portugal, married in 1543, and dead in less than two years, was Don Carlos, of evil and pathetic memor}^ In the autumn of 1548 Philip, having by his father's command temporarily surrendered the regency into the hands of Maximilian, son of his uncle Ferdinand, and his sister Maria, Maximilian's wife, set out with a bril- liant retinue for Flanders, on a visit to his father. His household, very different from the stately yet simple customs of his ancestors, was now thronged with cere- monious figures, gathered from the usages and traditions of Burgundy. Even his bed-chamber and his table were served by men of rank ; there were splendid state dinners in public ; minstrels, musicians, grandees of the purest water as chamberlains, captain of the body-guard Philip inarries Mary. 457 and major-domo. Everything moved to a resplendent ceremonial, in cadence as it were, accompanied by an elegant hospitality and profusion. Philip traversed Genoa, the battle-field of Pavia, laden for him with glorious souvenirs of Spanish valor ; Milan, where we see him dancing, with light and agile figure ; Tyrol, Heidelberg, and Flanders ; receiving with gracious condescension the civilities everywhere heaped upon him, especially, we may imagine, the goblets of golden ducats with which many cities accompanied their complimentary addresses. His personality — blue eyes, yellow hair and beard, slight, symmetric figure, Austrian lip, and ceremonious demeanor — was not unpleasing or unintellectual. His tastes were too re- served and quiet, however, to recommend him to the boisterous Netherlanders. After presenting himself in the Low Countries, taking long and careful lessons in public affairs and the art of government in the cabinet of his father, accompanying Charles to the diet of Augsburg in 1550, where his effort to procure Philip's election as king of the Romans proved abortive, Philip withdrew from the importunate festivi- ties of the Flemings, their masques, dances, and uproar- ious mirth, and stole like a sombre shadow out of all this sunshine back to Barcelona in 155 1. Here at least he felt himself at home among a people, as has been said, with the exception of the Jews, more distinguished than any other for their intense spirit of nationality. Philip's union with Mary of England in 1554 has already been incidentally spoken of. Betrothed origi- nally to the emperor, Mary was now courted by him for his son. After some coquetry hardly natural in a wo- 458 Spain under Philip TL man of thirty six, Mary yielded ; and it was said of her marriage treaty, that it looked more like a defence against an enemy than a marriage compact, so cau- tiously guarded were its stipulations. England, under the reign of this happy pair, was restored to the communion of the Roman Catholic Church — a consummation accompanied by abundant clouds of incense from Smithfield market-place. In the course of time Mary, imagining herself near her con- finement, was saluted with Te Deums, bell-ringings, and bonfires; "but," quaintly remarks Holinshed, " in the end appeared neither young maister nor young mistress that any man to this day can hear of ! " Charles's proposed abdication in 1555 necessitated Philip's absence from England; so, accompanied by a bright troop of English and Castilian grandees, he went over to the Flemish capital in great state, arriving in September. We have described, in faint outlines the thrilling scene of Charles's abdication in Brussels — leaving to Philip such an empire as the Caesars had never dreamed of. Family alliances, inheritance, and the Spanish nav- igators had all but compassed the globe to bestow their richest gifts prodigally on this only son of a great king ; a knight whose lady was Catholicism, for Philip was temporally the mightiest of Catholic potentates, and it was his highest ambition to devote himself Christianly and humbly to the service of his church. The truce of Vaucelles, made between Charles and Henry II., in 1556, was now violated by Henry, who was absolved from his oath by Paul IV., the bitter enemy of Philip. The complaisant theologians of Salamanca, Siege of St. Quentin, 459 Alcala, and Valladolid, justified Philip in taking up arms against the pope ; accordingly he sent word to his lieutenant, the Duke of Alva, to take measures for the protection of Naples, menaced by his holiness. The first three years of Philip's reign were distin- guished by remarkable successes. Italy proved the " grave of France." The Duke of Guise, who commanded the French, retired with his soldiers, scattered and crestfallen, across the Alps. Paul, who had called in the aid of the French, said thaT f/iey might easily be dislodged, but that " the Spaniards were like dog-grass, which is sure to strike root wherever it is cast." . Emanuel Philibert of Savoy, a tried general, com- manded Philip's forces in France, which, exclusive of the English, amounted to thirty-five thousand foot, twelve thousand horse, and a line train of artillery. The most brilliant action of the war w^as the siege of St. Quentin, an ancient town on the frontier of Picardy, held by Gaspard de Coligny, the Protestant martyr of St. Bartholomew. Pure, austere, intrepid, and full of resource, Coligny was just the man to command a des- perate position like that of this dilapidated, river-gir- dled city. Though Montmorency hastened to his help with the chivalry of France, the lilies of France were no match for the combined battalions of Spain, Flan- ders, and England. Philip, who visited the place the day of the great bat- tle of St. Quentin, in 1557, did not follow up his victory and march on Paris, preferring to push the siege of the town by means of battering-trains, mines, and starva- tion. 460 Spain under Philip II. After nearly a month's siege, during which it had maintained itself against the most powerful monarch in Europe, the city surrendered. This campaign was especially distinguished from others of this reign by its being the only campaign at which Philip was personally present. Negotiations for peace were soon opened. Cardinal Granvelle (son of Charles V.'s celebrated chancellor), William of Orange, and the Duke of Alva, — all per- sonages of supreme importance in the after history of the Netherlands, — were the agents selected by Philip to represent his interests, while Montmorency, Marshal St. Andre, and the Cardinal of Lorraine, represented the French. The treaty of Cateau-Cambresis was arranged in 1559, England, France, and Spain, being the contract- ing parties. The difficulty of bringing the English to relinquish Calais — " When I die," said Mary, "Calais will be found wTitten on my heart," — had protracted the negotiations to the April of this year ; but the whole resulted greatly to the glory of Spain and the discredit of France. Philip received two hundred towns in Italy and the Netherlands for the five he held in Picardy. Rome humbled, France virtually van- quished, Naples and Picardy illustrated by honorable successes, Philip may well be said to have wiped out, in the beginning of his reign, the legacy of failures be- queathed him at the close of his father's. The union between the enemies was further cemented by a mar- riage. Mary's brief and painful reign had ended with her death in 1558. A71 Ominous Marriage. 461 Hardly a month after her decease Philip had the au- dacity to propose, though without success, to her sister Elizabeth, who had now^ ascended the throne. An offer so purely political could not keenly concern Philip's heart ; he solaced himself for this and for the loss of England with contracting in 1559 a third alliance, this time with Isabella of France, daughter of Henry II., intended at one time as the future bride of the young Don Carlos. An ominous marriage, mournfully celebrated by the death of Henry in a tournament with the Scotch Count of Montgomery, during the nuptial festivities, and the cloud that hangs over Don Carlos. The Huguenots may have rejoiced in the death of Henry, the would-be exterminator of the Protestant heresy in France; but in the clutch of Catharine de Medici and her descend- ants, who succeeded him, they soon had occasion to repent of their ill-considered joy. As Philip's difficulties with the Netherlands — that transcendent episode of his reign — soon begin, it will be well to cast a glance over the condition of things in that country at this time. The provinces, countries, duchies, and lordships con- stituting the seventeen states of the Netherlands, were anciently distinct and independent states, each gov- erned by its own petty sovereign. Infinite toil and per- tinacity, intrepid voyages, extensive commerce, the con- cession of important political privileges on the part of their princes, the rapid growth of communities, and the remarkably free institutions of the Netherlanders soon conspired to produce a degree of wealth and civiliza- tion there that rivalled that of the Adriatic and Medi- 462 Spain u7iofer Philip IL terranean states. Sturdily independent, and sharply individualized, however; speaking different languages and belonging to different races ; full of feuds and ani- mosities towards one another, and repugnant to a consol- idation into one monarchy ; they preferred their sepa- rate existence, cultivated the arts of peace, prospered commercially, and formed a sort of republic tributary to the House of Austria. There was a supreme court of appeals at Mechlin and a general legislative assembly (states-general) com- posed of deputies from the provinces, the clergy, and the nobility ; but the power of the states-general was at once loose and circumscribed, and its movements so cumbrous that it could do nothing, not even impose taxes, without the sanction of each provincial legis- lature. Charles's Flemish birth made him popular among the Netherlanders, and enabled him to gain a personal as- cendency over the higher nobles, which ended in a subtle and unperceived undermining of their ancient prerogatives. He gave them the highest posts in Spain, opened to the people an unlimited trading area in his immense possessions, sagaciously cherished the material interests — manufactures, husbandry, fertiliza- tion by canals, agriculture — of his favorite people, and administered to the growth of large cities like Ghent (seventy thousand inhabitants), Brussels, (seventy-five thousand), and Antwerp, (one hundred thousand), — in every possible way. A busy, laborious, ingenious population thus swarmed through the Netherlands; their fleets navigated every sea; their great fairs gave a vivid pictorial meeting- f '■■ ■*!»■,*- fet ALCAZAR OF TOLEDO. The Netherlands, 465 > point for intercourse between the varied nationalities ; liberal municipal rights attracted foreigners , capitalists from every clime filled the Dutch banking-houses ; noble exchanges and cathedrals were erected ; illiteracy was rare, and a school of painting, characterized by exquisite humor, genius for landscape and portrait- painting, and a matchless reproduction of homely bur- gher life, grew up in the opulent cities, hand in hand with the luxurious habits, dress, and style of living of the higher population. The introduction of Protestantism soon resulted from the intercourse between Germany and the Netherlands. The reformation spread among the Flemish provinces, nobility, and people. Catholicism, with its kindled imagination, poetic sensibilities, and pageant-like acces- sories, lost its sway over these simple, practical, reason- loving people : and freedom of speculative inquiry — an innovation dreaded by Charles — established itself among all classes. From 1520 to 1550 the emperor fulminated edict after edict against the heretical Neth- erlanders, menacing them with " fire, pit, and sword " if they did not return to their ancient church. Indigna- tion, terror, flight, were the effects of these edicts — a system based on the tribunal of the inquisition and having as its enginery, imprisonment, torture, confisca- tion, banishment, death. A slight security was in 1546 afforded the people of the Netherlands, by their own regular courts of justice, since no sentence whatever could be pronounced by an inquisitor without the sanction of some member of the provincial council. The free and independent charac- ter of the population, however, prevented the complete vis0atSmm0iit 466 Spain under Philip IL establishment of the Holy Office in all its rigor. They execrated the iniquities of the institution as personified in the tragical Spanish auto de fi (act of faith), and would not, as they hinted, let the Day of Judgment be forestalled on earth and supplanted by the utterances of a grand inquisitor. Still there were victims enough ; and the crackle of its fires, the thunder of its edicts, and the cries of its victims, tell us that for thirty years the workings of the Inquisition were not altogether unsatisfactory here. Charles, however, had too much need of money to make his religious sensibilities con- spicuous ; the Netherlands were his purse ; and he had to confess at last, with bitterness, that circumstances had compelled him to permit the growth of heresy there. In 1559, Philip returned to Spain, never again to visit the Low Countries. He had left behind, Egmont, as governor of Flanders and Artois, and the Prince of Orange as governor of Holland, Zealand, Utrecht, and West Friesland ; while two battalions of Spanish sol- diers, now thoroughly detested by the people, were left with them. Granvelle, a suave, polished, but ambitious ecclesiastic, recommended by Charles to Philip , Count Barlaitnont, and the erudite jurist Viglius, composed the advisory body to be consulted by the lady-regent, Margaret of Parma, natural daughter of Charles V. Philip repelled the Netherlanders by his icy reserve, his lack of enthusiasm, his religious melancholy, and his ungenial austerity. They contrasted his partiality for the Spaniards, the etiquette and ceremonial he kept up, and the gloom of his surroundings with Charles's love of their people, his easy manners, and approachability. Philip's growing unpopularity took an almost tragical Martyr-Fires of Protestantism, 467 turn, moreover when he attempted to enforce certain religious edicts, which created fourteen new bishop- rics and three archbishoprics as a salutary exchange for the three existing enormous bishoprics of Arras, Tournay, and Utrecht. Margaret, duchess of Parma, received her appoint- ment in 1559, to rule in Philip's absence ; and as she was of Flemish birth her appointment seemed auspi- But she fully endorsed her half brother's famous cious. saying, " Better not reign at all than reign over here- tics," — a principle that enslaved him to an inexorable superstition. The next six years are of great significance in the history of Spain and the Netherlands. The reformed doctrines, crushed out of Spain by the Inquisition and the ai^fo de fi, as the Jewish and Mahometan heresies had been, now developed in the xVetherlands into a sort of sacred patriotism and passionate representative to them of whatever was most precious in matters of civil and religious liberty. Spain might be lurid with the martyr-fires of Protestantism ; Granada, Barcelona, Toledo, and Seville might be wrapped in the smoke of the torment of Lutherans ; church holidays, Sundays, and public squares might be made cheerful with the agonies of multitudes dragged from the dungeons of the Inquisition ; and one by one the gentle lights of Chris- tianity be extinguished by the fingers of the priests : in the Netherlands the love of toleration had rooted itself, and no power on earth — not even Philip's, not even the cardinal-archbishop of Seville's, grand Inquisitor and what not — could trample it out. 468 Spain under Philip TL So, while nobles and gentlewomen, bishops and dig- nitaries, writhed at the stake, did humiliating penance, or were ''reconciled," and the fires, for lack of material,' gradually slackened, till by 1570 they gleaned only a solitary Lutheran here and there for the delectation of the spectacle-loving grandees ; while speculative, physi- cal, and practical science, literature, and culture, were mute, or merged in a theology with which innovation was a crime ; the very principle thus destructive to Spain struck ineradicable roots in Holland, and gave- birth not only to liberty, but to an intense intellectual activity in due proportion to the efforts made to extinguish it. Denmark, Sweden, England, and France were deeply agitated by the same questions falling from the lips of Knox, Calvin, and their compeers. Even a king of Navarre had declared himself a Protestant. And per- haps it would have fared ill with Catholicism, had not Philip, tolerant of no other religion, " offered a coun- terpoise to the Protestant cause, which prevented it from making itself master of Europe." Unphilosoph- ical, bigoted, making the maintenance of Catholicism a point of honor, he erred capitally in giving so much authority to foreigners in the Netherlands— particularly to the unscrupulous Granvelle — and excluding the princes to whom he owed St. Quentin and Gravelines. He did not take proper measures to employ or satisfy the hordes of inferior aristocracy and disbanded sol- diery vagabondizing through the land and producing crying discontent. He did not fulfil his promise of removing the hated Spanish troops until 1561, more than a year after he had stipulated to do so. Orange and Egmont. 469 While the great nobles affected devotion to the estab- lished religion, some of them were far from feeling it. Troubles arose in which the Lad\ Margaret accused Orange and Egmont of fomenting discord between the people and the crown. Granvelle's usurpation, zeal, and arrogance provoked open war with the nobles, who refused to have anything to do with him. Philip, pas- sionately urged by the regent to come personally to the Netherlands to arrange matters, to suggest a way out of difficulties, delayed and delayed, doing so with an indif- ference that soon became characteristic of all his move- ments. A league was formed against Granvelle. Even Margaret, who had formerly enthusiastically upheld her minister, gave way before the storm of opposition, and prayed for his dismissal. Philip deliberated, dilly- dallied, temporized. .Finally, in 1564, he discharged Granvelle — intelligence of which was received with frantic joy ; and the minister soon quitted Brussels never to return. Philip in his policy with the Netherlands, haunted by superstitious shadows, fancied himself continually treading in the footsteps of his father. But the people had changed. Calvinists, Lutherans, Jews, swarmed among them. He himself was heartily disliked as a Spaniard. He had made deplorable missteps ; he had retraced them ; but with an obstinacy inflexible as steel he now joined issue with the people themselves in a struggle of life and death. Philip declared he would rather lose a hundred thou- sand lives, if he had so many, than allow a single change in matters of religion. 470 Spain under Philip IL ^ 1 At length, dragged out of his mask of deceit, delay, and perfidy, and losing his temper over the persistent cry from the Netherlands for reform, he flashed out of his silence in the letter from the Wood of Segovia, in Octo- ber 1565, and at once destroyed all hopes of religious toleration, virtually established the inquisition in the Flemish towns, and called forth the '* Compromise." CATTLE MERCHANT OF CORDOVA. CHAPTER XX. THE STRUGGLE IN THE NETHERLANDS. THE " Compromise " was a document proceeding from a body of twenty young cavaliers, who met in Count Culemborg's palace at Brussels, for the pur- pose of talking over the evils of the country. In this document they bound themselves by a solemn oath to resist the Inquisition ; and protect one another in it with their lives and fortunes. Copies of the " Compromise " were soon circulated, and enormous numbers, Catholics and Protestants equally, signed their names to it at once. Orange's young brother, Louis, Count of Nassau, Philip de Marnix, Henry of Brederode, and other prominent nobles were ring-leaders in the league. The greatest of the great lords, however, as yet held aloof. A panic spread through the land and thousands sought refuge in England from the impending calamities. William of Orange, habitually cautious, temperate, and quiet, acted with extreme prudence, and had not yet identified himself with the movement; while Egmont, impulsive, knightly-tempered, a devout Catholic and eloquently loyal at this great crisis, could not desert the distressed 4T3 474 Spain under Philip IL and perplexed regent but continued to stand by her at this critical moment like the noble knight and gentle- man that he was. But as the contest proceeded, the figure of William of Orange, came out clearer and clearer. At first shadowy, undecided, reserved, we see him supporting the bent form of Charles V., on the striking occasion of his ab- dication. Lord of Breda, Chalons, and Orange (a principality in the heart of France), he had been bred a Catholic in the family of the emperor's sister, the Queen of Hungary, formerly regent. Early manifesting extra- ordinary qualities, which he showed on the battle-field and in diplomatic missions, he was selected by Charles for the honorable office of bearing the imperial crown to Ferdinand. One of the hostages detained in France for the proper execution of the treaty of Cateau Cam- bresis, he became acquainted, at the Court of Henry H., with his and Philip's designs against Protestantism, con- ceived a deep disgust for the Spaniards, and resolved to expel them from the Netherlands. Despite the em- peror's recommendation he could not win the regard or confidence of the suspicious Philip. Convivial, fond of hunting and hawking, an adept in gallantry, famous for his gastronomic tastes, entertaining magnificently, ca- pable of being wrought up out of his reserve into rare eloquence, he appeared to be indifferent to religion or to regard it as a politic invention ; loved and exercised a benignant tolerance in affairs of conscience, and showed his German parentage by upholding freedom of speculation as a right inalienable of the human race. Born two hundred years before Washington, William the Silent has often been compared with the great re- " Vivent les G-ueux^ 475 publican; and if self-abnegation, magnanimity, and suf- fering for the loftiest of earthly causes can cast a trans- figuration over human character, his deserves the double glory of exalted patriotism and martyrbom. In 1566, two hundred of the confederates entered Brussels, and, headed by Viscount Brederode and Louis of Nassau, presented a petition to Margaret, praying the instant abolition of the inquisition and the edicts. Margaret regarding with alarm the numbers and mar- tial array of the confederates, as they presented them- selves before her at the palace, was quieted by Count Barlaimont who told her " they were nothing but a crowd of beggars." From this arose the celebrated watch-word of *' Vivent les Gueux " (beggars) which, soon further heightened by a beggar's wallet and a wooden bowl, became the symbol of the uprisen, Protes- tant Netherlands. Brought to bay by the insurrectionary movements in the north, and by the representations of Baron de Montigny, who had now been sent by the regent to urge his acquiescence in the reforms demanded by the league, Philip appeared to relent and to make concessions, made pretence of abolishing the inquisition in favor of the inquisitorial powers vested in the bishops, and de- clared a pretended general pardon to whomsoever the regent wished, the already condemned excepted. But the whole was a tissue of perfidy on his part, for he men- tally reserved to himself the right to revoke whatever terms had been made with the reformers, and his maxim with regard to them was, " No faith to be kept with heretics." Don Carlos, contemptuously referring to his father'? 476 Spai7i under Philip 11. repeated but unfulfilled promises to visit the Nether- lands m person, scribbled on his blank-book one day The Great and Admirable Voyages of King Philip " and wuhm as contents, "From Madrid to the Par- do, from the Pardo to the Escorial, from the Escorial to Aranjuez," etc. The same year the beautifulcathedralof Antwerp was sacrilegiously devastated by a mob, who, dragging the the statue of Christ to the ground with a rope about its neck, left the two thieves "as if to preside over the work of rapine below." Iconoclastic fury seized the rabble in various provinces : four hundred churches in Flanders alone furnished fuel to this band of saint- haters and unage-breakers, and that in less than a fort- night. Alarm pervaded Brussels : Margaret determined on flight, but was induced to relinquish her scheme of departure. Churches were conceded for the reformed worship, and for the moment tranquillity seemed re-estab- hshed. Ph.Iip, on learning of the disorders, burst into frantic passion, and swore by the soul of his father that they should cost the perpetrators dear. His bitter sus- picions instantly fixed upon the great nobles as at the bottom of the troubles in Flanders, particularly upon Orange Egmont, and Van Hoorne. Love and patriot- ism -his wife and the sufferings of his fatheriand- had now made William of Orange a Calvinist, ' and roused from indifference, he stood forth as the cham- pion of the Reformation, ready to risk all in the strug- The famous test-oath of loyalty brought forward by Margaret to try the obedience of the knights of the Gol den Fleece, the great nobles, and the high civil and 476 Spain under Philip IL I ( repeated but unfulfilled promises to visit the x\ether- lands m person, scribbled on his blank-book one day The Great and Admirable Voyages of King Philip" and withni as contents, "From Madrid to the Par do, from the Pardo to the Escorial, fro.n the Escorial to Aranjuez," etc. The same year the beautiful cathedral of Antwerp was sacrilegiously devastated by a mob, who, dragging the the statue of Christ to the ground with a rope about its neck, left the two thieves "as if to preside over the work of rapine below." Iconoclastic fury seized the rabble in various provinces : four hundred churches in Flanders alone furnished fuel to this band of saint- haters and image-breakers, and that in less than a fort- night. Alarm pervaded Brussels : Margaret determined on flight, but was induced to relinquish her scheme of departure. Churches were conceded for the reformed vyorship, and for the moment tranquillity seemed re-estab- lished. Philip, on learning of the disorders, burst into frantic passion, and swore by the soul of his father that they should cost the perpetrators dear. His bitter sus- picions instantly fi.xed upon the great nobles as at the bottom of the troubles in Flanders, particularly upon Orange tgmont, and Van Hoorne. Love and patriot- .sni- his wife and the sufferings of his fatherland - had now made William of Orange a Calvinist, ' and roused from indifference, he stood forth as the cham- pion of the Reformation, ready to risk all in the strug- The famous test-oath of loyalty brought forward by Margaret to try the obedience of the knights of the Gol den Fleece, the great nobles, and the high civil and i|.f,i .1"' The Dvkt of Alva, 479 military officers, to the crown, drove Orange from the Netherlands to Germany, while Counts Hoorne, Hoogs- traten, and Brederode, also refused to swear to it, and retired to their estates. Egmont subscribed. A tide of emigration again set in which threatened to empty the country into the lap of England, France, and Germany. Urged by the anguish of Pius V., at the dissemination of heresy in the Low Country, Philip the Slow at length sent the Duke of Alva in 1567 to Brussels. With ten thousand picked men he made his admirable march from Genoa, through countries of every shade of un- friendliness, to the Netherlands without accident, op- position, or trespass of any kind. He arrived in Brussels August 22, 1567. His powers were practically unlimited, while to Margaret, as a recompense for all her faithfulness, anxiety, and labor, w^as still left for a short time the meaningless title of "regent." He had supreme control in civil and military affairs and was a king in all but the name. He was to levy war on the rebellious people, and inquire into and punish the origi- nators of the recent troubles. He garrisoned the great towns, erected fortresses, let loose his licentious sol- diery on the unprotected population, and under pretence of holding a council of state, summoned Egmont and Hoorne to Culemborg House in Brussels, where they were arrested and confined. *' This sword has done the king service more than once," said Egmont, delivering up the. weapon rendered immortal by the blood-stains of St. Quentin and Grave- lines. Granvelle, learning that the duke "had not drawn into his net the Silent One," (William the Silent), said, " If he has not caught him, he has caught nothing." 480 Spain under Philip II. The establishment of the Council of Blood was but a natural sequence of these enormities. Its twelve judges— mostly men of ancient and honorable family, with the exception of the infamous Del Rio and the criminal Juan de Vargas — had cognizance of all civil and criminal cases that had grown out of the late dis- orders, and superseded the great court of Mechlin and every other provincial or municipal tribunal in the coun- try. Its establishment was a burning outrage on the constitutional rights of the nation. In February, 1568, a royal edict literally swept the whole nation with the penalties of treason, death, and confiscation. Innumerable arrests, trials, and execu- tions followed, without distinction of sex, age, or char- acter, but met with a heroism as pathetic as it was in- domitable. Worn out with signing death-warrants, it is said that Vargas would fall asleep in his chair, and, being sud- denly roused, would exclaim, half-awake, " To the gal- lows! to the gallows!" Confiscation and perpetual banishment were promul- gated against the Orange princes. Though powerful efforts were made to save the unfortunate Egmont and Hoorne, they were in vain. They were charged with sedition, encouragement of sectaries, and treason, ex- amined, and sentenced to death. This blood bore rich fruit to the cause of reform. It is now time to glance at events in the South. The defence of Malta in 1565 under La Valette against Solyman II., is a bright spot in the annals of this reign — a siege which gave a tremendous shock to ^ Events in the South, 481 the Moslem power in the Mediterranean, cost Solyman more than thirty thousands men, and brought the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, who conducted the defence, to the highest point of glory. Charles V., after their expulsion from Rhodes by the Turks, had ceded Malta to this noble military order on payment of a falcon annually, in token of his feudal supremacy; they had become immensely wealthy, had elaborated a far-reaching scheme for the government of the order, had developed a navy which swept the Turkish seas ; eventually they had roused the vengeance of Solyman. After a fierce siege the Turks were overpowered ; Dro- gut, one of their commanders, was killed ; and the white flag of St. John floated once more triumphantly over the crags and promontories of Malta, — " City of Refuge." Its capital, Valetta, commemorates the reverence and admiration in which their great commander was held by the knights, and its cathedral holds his ashes. Malta lies like a jewel cast upon these sparkling Medi- terranean seas ; and the desire of the eyes no less than vengeance may have made the Turks flock in tens of thousands about its cliffs in this memorable undertak- ing. What a picture ! the sheer morning seas infinitely blue and still ; the rock itself bristling with unfinished fortification, ravelin and counterscarp ; the sturdy little community of knights, battling for God and soul's sal- vation ; Mustapha with his myriads howling about the impregnable haven, and the sea white with the innumer- able moons of Islam. Then flash of cannonade, thun- der of artillery, tumultuous onslaught, and the mighty tragedy has begun. 482 Spain under Philip IL The Netherlands and Malta were not the only spots illumined by dismal or heroic tragedy at this time. In Spain, in Philip's own family, within the sumptuous boudoirs of the palace itself, almost in the very bed- chamber of the king, had been slowly gathering the clouds of a mysterious crime as yet unfathomed by his- torian or chronicler. This was the conspiracy, confine- ment and death of Dor. Carlos, at this time Philip's only son. Don Carlos was now but twenty-three — wayward, dissipated, discontented ; and the eccentricity of his conduct — carefully educated in all manly and intellect- ual exercises as he had been — can only be accounted for on the ground of hereditary insanity. A fearless, generous, sarcastic disposition, he was fierce, cruel, and diseased, both in mind and body. Upon such a char- acter the spectacle of his father carrying off the beauti- ful Isabella of France, who had been intended for him, is supposed to have produced a profound impression. Brought up with his uncle, Don Juan of Austria, and his cousin, Alexander Farnese, son of Margaret of Parma, both afterward to be so celebrated in their con- nection with the Netherlands, he imbibed all the lawless habits of the time, carrying pistols, assaulting people on the street with swords, insulting women, and acting with the utmost violence towards his tutor, his chamber- lain, and Cardinal Espinosa, threatening to poniard the latter for banishing a player from the palace. Such reckless defiance of decency brought upon him the deep displeasure of his father. He was distrusted, excluded from military and political offices, surrounded by spies, and tormented in the petty and ignominious ways which m-i ("V/ I / will hill You,"*' 485 Philip knew so well how to practice. Drawing his dag- ger on the Duke of Alva previous to his departure for Flanders, Carlos, who had regarded himself as the proper person to be entrusted with the mission, fiercely exclaimed, " You shall not go ; if you do, I will kill you." Hemmed in on all sides, the wretched prince of the Asturias conceived the idea of flight to a foreign land. Before attempting to put his plan into execution, and dogged as by some insane hallucination, he kept repeating before his gentleman of the bed-chamber that **he desired to kill a man with whom he had a quarrel." He made the same avowal to his confessor at the Christmas anniversary of 1567 ; whereupon he was re- fused absolution. Being entreated to tell who the per- son was, he said "his father was the person, and he wished to have his life." Carlos, who habitually slept with a sword, dagger, and loaded musket within reach, was surprised in sleep and imprisoned in his apartment. He threatened to kill himself, declared that he was not mad, and that the king's treatment of him was driving him to despair. " The king's dagger followed close on his smile," said Cabrera. A long process was begun; perpetual imprison- ment was determined upon; and though pretending anguish at the conduct of his son, Philip subjected him to the most rigorous incarceration. To his design on his father's life was now added the suspicion that Carios was either a Lutheran or an infidel. Philip even neglected the magnificent pile of the Escorial, now rising in all its commemorative glory of granite on a spur of the Guadarramas, to keep intense watch 486 Spain under Philip IL over the sullen and frenzied prisoner of the palace. Tortured by mental excitement and physical debility, Don Carlos indulged in the wildest excesses, alter- nately freezing, starving, and then gorging himself; vomiting, dysentery set in ; his strength swiftly passed away, till on the Vigil of St. James, in 1568, after con- fessing, and adoring the crucifix grasped in his poor, trembling, diseased hands, he fell back and expired without a groan. Philip the same night had stolen in on tip-toe, like a conscience-stricken spectre, and made over his dying son the shadowy benediction of the cross. But Isa- bella, whom Carlos loved and revered, had been kept away. The belief was rife that the prince had been con- demned to death by casuists and inquisitors, and that his sentence was slow poisoning, lasting four months. Philip was proclaimed by William of Orange the mur- derer of his son, as he afterwards became of the Prince of Orange ; and it was remembered of Philip that he had said to a heretic, '' Were my son such a wretch as thou art, I would myself carry the fagots to burn him." Responsibility if not guilt rested upon the unhappy father, and we may agree with the historian that if he did not directly employ the hand of the assassin to take the life of his son, yet by his rigorous treatment he drove him to such desperation that it ended in death. Thus this poor young life was wasted away by prema- ture disease, exasperation, and excess. Its brilliant dawn ; its heirship to the noblest throne in Christendom ; its boundless gifts of ancestry, inheritance, and fortune, were as nothing before its own passions and the rigor of an inexorable father. A Moorish Invasion, 487 Isabella of France, after a brief reign of eight years as Philip's wife, died at twenty-three, the same year as Don Carlos. " She passed away," says old Brantome, " in the sweet and pleasant April of her age, when her beauty was such that it seemed as if it might almost defy the assaults of time." And in less than eighteen months the inconsolable widower had married his fourth wife — this time Anne of Austria. She was the daughter of Maximilian of Germany, and his own niece. As for the so-called amours of Carlos and Isabella, there seems as yet no historical foundation for them. They loved each other as step-mother and step-son should, and as a step-son, tormented and treated as Don Carlos was, would naturally love a beautiful, kindly-tempered woman, who had interested herself in his fate. There is no trace of criminal passion to fleck this story of a noble and pathetic relationship. Between 1566 and 1572 Spain was again agitated by a Moorish rebellion. Under Charles, the Moors, though subject to the constant terror of the Inquisition, lived in comparative ease and quietude, contributing and con- forming, outwardly at least, to the established faith. They rapidly multiplied ; their hamlets and farms cov- ered the Sierras ; among the mountains they preserved their wild and independent spirit, and in the plains and vegas, their ingenuity and patient toil had converted the country into a paradise. Granada had been special- ly favored in the treaty with the Moors, and its lovely environs showed an almost boundless fertility under the culture of the inhabitants. But Philip fretted that these infidels did not renounce ! li 488 Spain under Philip II. their immemorial religion and usages wholesale, abjure their ancient memories, and come at once within the pale of the Catholic church. The unfortunate Moriscoes, however, escaped legislation for some years after Philip's accession, and it was not till 1560 and 1563 that laws were published interdicting them the use of African slaves and prohibiting them from possessing unlicensed arms ; both of which were impolitic edicts and exasper- ated this already long-suffering people. Soon Guerrero, archbishop of Granada, drew the attention of the govern- ment to the manifold backslidings of the New Chris- tians, — as the converted Moors were called, — their washing off the traces of baptism from their newly- sprinkled children, their practice of circumcision, their solemnization of marriage with their own national sports and dances, and their alleged kidnapping and circum- cising of Christian children. Hence a law unparalleled for cruelty was drawn up, and signed by Philip in 1566, outraging the most sacred feelings of the Moors, tearing asunder the strongest ties of kindred and countr}', vio- lating private life in the profanest manner, and evoking agonies of grief from the outraged nationality. This law interdicted them the employment of Arabic either in speaking or writing, compelled them to change Arabic for Spanish family names, declared void all legal instruments not written in Castilian, allowed three years for the entire nation to learn an absolutely different speech, wholly irreconcilable with their own, and re- quired the substitution of Spanish costumes for their own graceful and flowing Oriental dress. The veils — a necessity to the pure Mahometan — were torn from the faces of the women. Their weddings were to be ^^^^^ A\ AGICD AI£NDICAW1 aWD UIS GRANDCHILD M Legal Cruelty. 491 Christianized and solemnized in public. It was penal to wear silk. Their national songs and dances were made crimes. And it became a heinous offence to in- dulge in warm baths. The most frightful penalties — confiscation, the galleys, hundreds of lashes, — enforced this edict. The publication of the act in the great square of Granada, in 1567, — still to-day carpeted with poetic memories of the Arabians, and penetrated by long lines of noble limes, — called forth such shame, sorrow, and hatred, as have rung on piteously even down into our time. Remonstrances, supplications, menaces, were in vain. Philip was like a rock, and quailed not at the spectacle of an agonized people lying heart-broken at his feet. The edict was mercilessly proclaimed in every part of the kingdom of Granada. At once the Moors sprang to arms, under Aben Hu- meya, a descendant of the Omaiyades. But for a moment our attention is arrested at this point by a knightly and courteous figure, withdrawing us from the enormities of the war, and concentrating our gaze upon its own fresh youth, gayety, and brilliancy. Don Juan of Austria (born about 1545), — Philip's bastard brother, said to be the son of Charles V. and a beautiful young German girl of Ratisbon, — came to take charge of the war. A perfect chevalier in all noble exercises, of singular beauty and nobility of countenance, generous, fiery, and full of heroic aspira- tion, Don Juan rose as by enchantment from an ob- scure and ambiguous position as Luis Quixada's ward to that of an illustrious prince, acknowledged in 1559 by Philip as his brother. He comes before us, out of ir-f: 492 Spain under Philip 11. the mists of this dark reign, like a dazzling personifica- tion of the last dying spirit of chivalry, — an echo from the romantic land of the Gerusalemme Liberata, — a prince and paladin of legendary story, full of tenderness for his adopted mother Dona Magdalena Quixada, romantically popular among the people who idolized him, discreet yet impetuous, revealing in his sunny hair, frank blue eyes, and fair complexion, traces of his German blood, and altogether the most gorgeous and winning person- ality on the stage of Spanish affairs since the times of the great Gonsalvo. In 1569, he entered the gates of Granada, surrounded by a throng of supplicating humanity — black-stoled Moorish women, with tears streaming from their eyes, who besought protection for their wretched relatives. The splendid pageant passed on like a gleam of sunlight amid this dark-shrouded multitude, and help for a mo- ment seemed to lie in the grace and sympathy of the brilliant commander-in-chief. But these hopes were of brief duration. A stern de- cree came removing the Moriscoes from their beloved Granada, city of delights, of palaces, of fountains, and myrtle-gardens. Consternation, grief, expulsion, eter- nal farewell to their ancient city so tenderly intertwined with sweet and holy recollections, distribution of their children throughout Spain, ruin to Granada, — a single swift decree, like a flash from Dante's Hell, condensed and concentrated the miseries of this dismal picture. In brief space the rebellion was crushed, Aben-Aboo, " the little king of the Alpujarras," who had succeeded Aben Humeya, was treacherously murdered in 157 1 by one of his officers. His body was brought to Granada - A Savage Edict, 493 and his head put in a cage ; and the war sank in a mist of blood, execution, and exile. Don Juan had by his own request been relieved of the command in 1570. The fitting close to this episode was one of those sav- age edicts which were the only mode of literary com- position in which Philip excelled. The Moriscoes were all expelled from the kingdom of Granada ; the country was districted and placed under scrupulous military superintendence, and the people were thrust into chilling exile among the distant provinces of the peninsula. As they had lisped in Arabic, so now they learned to sing in Spanish. As they had danced the voluptuous Andalusian dances, so now their feet learned the intri- cate measures of the fandango and the bolero. Lan- guageless, countryless, barbarously bereft of national existence, denuded even of their immemorial costume, they clothed their nakedness in Spanish jackets, learned the suave melodies of the Castilian, and, impelled by necessity to profound dissimulation, slipped readily into the embrace of another faith and another fatherland. But a hate blacker than night and deeper than hell slumbered beneath the ripple of their exiled laughter ; and though they might dance, and sing, and jest in Spanish, in their heart of hearts they were more fiercely Arabic than ever. CHAPTER XXI. PHILIP'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. IT was a national characteristic of the Spaniard to be perpetually engaged in a crusade. All his wars were religious wars, whether he scoured the infidel Levant, campaigned against the Moors, or grappled with the heretic Netherlanders. William of Orange and Selim II., were equally enemies of the faith, and both were treated by the bigot of the Escorial with equally intense hatred. Philip had more tolerance for outright infidelity than for lapsed Catholicism. It was his fate, or rather his glory to be perpetually harassed by the Turks. Malta had become a spot of renown in his struggle with Solyman the Magnificent (1566); and now the Adriatic, sprinkled with innumerable is- lands as with fragments of a disrupted continent, was to shed even greater lustre on Spanish annals. Selim II., resolving on the acquisition of Cyprus, at- tempted to snatch this precious gem from the crown of Venice. Venice appealed to Pius V., who in his turn pleaded the cause of the forlorn republic in an ear that never turned away from such an appeal. Philip, the great champion of the faith, listened with benignity to the proposition of the league to be formed against the 494 i'r. j 1 i, 1 i The Holy League. 497 Eastern despot, and being in especially good humor, it would seem, by his recent marriage with Anne of Aus- tria, dismissed the papal legate with assurances of im- mediate succor to Venice. The Holy League was ratified in 157 1 between the pope and the ambassadors of Spain and Venice. Fifty thousand foot, four thousand five hundred horse, two hundred galleys, and one hundred transports, with ar- tillery and munitions, were the forces pledged by the allied powers. Naples, Sicily, the Balearic Isles, and the seaports of the Peninsula, soon rang with the hammers of the swarm- ing artisans making preparations for the splendid naval armament. The Castilian sensibilities kindled into a fire, and lords and cavaliers thronged about the chival- rous presence of Don Juan, the captain-general. With a magnificent retinue he passed over to Italy and dropped anchor in the bay of Naples. To the Italians he seemed like a young demi-god of twenty-four, with his snow-white plumes, golden curls, dress of white vel- vet and cloth of gold, and dauntless bearing ; and his dancing, fencing, tennis-playing, his open physiognomy and courteous manners, intoxicated the volatile Neapoli- tans, and made them dream of some antique mirror of chivalry. He was presented with the consecrated stan- dard, sailed over the glancing Sicilian waters to Messina, and was welcomed with cannon-thunder, fire-works, and multitudinous acclaim. The allied fleet was a floating city of eighty thousand men, twenty-nine thousand of whom were soldiers, nineteen thousand being the Span- ish quota. They all to a man fasted three days, con- fessed, communed, were absolved from their sins, and 498 Spain under Philip IL indulged by the pope as if they were crusading for the deHverance of Jerusalem ; and thus equipped, they set forth from Messina, coasted Calabria, and steered for Corfu, where they learned that the Ottoman fleet, after rava^in^^ the Venetian territories, lay with a powerful armament in the Gulf of Lepanto. There were many memorable persons present in this famous battle— Don Juan, Veniero (the Venetian cap- tain-general), Colonna (the papal captain-general), the Grand Commander Requesens, and Alexander Farnese, Cervantes. both of whom attained such sad celebrity in the Neth- erland wars; Cardona, general of the Sicilian fleet, Andria Doria, and last but not least, Cervantes, the im- mortal author of Don Quixote, serving as a common soldier. It was resolved to give immediate battle. Certainly no more striking and beautiful spot, no spot more sprinkled with undying souvenirs, no spot A Striking Spot, 499 more dazzlingly becircled with blue seas, amethystine peaks, and islets magically scattered on pellucid water, could have been chosen for the greatest naval battle of modern times. It was ground, all of which had been immortalized by ancient poet, philosopher, or politician. Actium was near ; Ithaca was near ; Corfu, where the first naval battle recorded in history took place, was Don Juan's first stopping-place ; Leucadia, the Isle of Sappho; Paxo, famous for the legend of Pan which Milton and Mrs. Browning have embalmed ; the ancient Scheria of Homer, where Odysseus was cast away and rescued by Nausikaa ; fields which had felt the foot- steps of TibuUus; temples of Jupiter before which Nero had danced; convents where crusaders stopped on their pilgrimages to the Holy Land; estates once owned by Cicero, and spots where Cicero himself had meditated ; the gardens of Alkinous ; cliffs rising thou- sands of feet in the crystalline atmosphere ; crags con- secrated by the musings of Nicostratos, Deucalion, Ar- temisia ; islands memorable for the marriage of Antony and Octavia, for the landing of St. Helena going to Palestine to look for the true cross, for the temporary abode of Augustus, of Diocletian, of Cato, and the blind Belisarius ; islands all tasselled with early Athen- ian and Peloponnesian memories ; Olympian Elis down the coast, and pregnant and eloquent suggestiveness in everything on which the eye fell ; surely an unrivalled spot for so transcendent a passage-at-arms. The Sabbath-like stillness of an exquisite October morning, — more exquisite, perhaps, in these opalescent Ionian seas than any where else in the world — was soon rent by the passionate thunders of Ali Pasha's 500 Spain under Philip IL and Don Juan's mighty fleets. In four hours the Mos- lems were ahnost annihilated. Ruin met the blazing and sinking galleys of Algiers and Constantinople. Forty out of two hundred and fifty galleys escaped, while one hundred and thirty were captured. The all- engulfing seas swallowed the rest. Ali Pasha was slain ; twenty-five thousand Turks were killed : five thousand were taken prisoner ; twelve thousand Chris- tian slaves, chained to the oar, liberated ; gold, jewels, brocade, ore hundred and seventy thousand gold The Battle of Lepanto. sequins, and multitudes of valuable articles, formed part of the booty. Cervantes lost the use of his left hand from a wound received in this battle. The allies lost eight thousand men. Ottoman decline dates from this defeat. In 1574, Don Juan with twenty thousand men, took Tunis, together with prodigious booty, which was soon retaken by the Moslems. Domestic Administration. 501 Thus passed away the vision of African sovereignty, — of a kingdom to the south of the Mediterranean, — which had flickered restlessly, "a sightless substance," before the mind of the ambitious young prince. Other visions began to flicker ere long before the same rest- less imagination — union with Elizabeth, chivalrous maintenance of the cause of Mary of Scotland, mar- riage with the Scotch queen — all possible and impos- sible ambitions haunted the yellow-haired son of impe- rial Charles. And while he dreamed of Elizabeth as a wife, Philip ended by trying to poison her. Meanwhile, the domestic administration of Spain under Philip must be briefly sketched, and its salient points noted before returning to the Eighty Years' War of the Netherlands, — a war which did not absolutely become a struggle for national independence until it had continued for twenty-five years, and which did not end till the peace of Westphalia in 1648. For it must be remembered that the Netherlanders were resisting unjust taxation, usurpations of the rights of their own constitutional assemblies, and, above all, the establish- ment of the Inquisition ; nor had they an idea at first of severing their connection with the Spanish crown. But the edict of 1568, dooming to death three millions of people, followed by the butchery of eighteen thou- sand during Alva's administration alone, was gradually bringing these rugged, hirsute, tolerance-loving Dutch- men to the belief that they could not possibly live with Philip on any terms ■ — a belief which ripened into vir- tual independence in 1581 and was forever signed and sealed by the martyr-blood of William of Orange, in 1584. 502 Spain under Philip lf» The despotism built upon the ruins of constitutional liberty by the Emperor Charles, and transmitted by him to Philip, found an able perpetuator in that mon- arch. Philip's Spanish birth enabled him to get a more subtle control over his people than his father had had, to aggrandize himself at the expense of his subjects, to gain such ascendency that everything he said and did was regarded with reverence. He dreaded the calling in of cortes for any important step ; hence he extended the three councils of state, left him by Ferdinand and Isabella and by Charles, to sixteen, composed mainly of eminent ecclesiastics and jurists, a plan which enabled him, in large measure, to dispense with the constitu- tional legislative body. Indefatigable scribe that he was, Philip delighted in long-written reports sent in by these councils, to which he added endless commentaries in his own hand-writing. Mountains of autograph — the production of himself and his unhappy secretaries — remain to attest his mar- vellous industry. Despatch-writing was his bread of life, varied occasionally by gunning or cross-bow shoot- ing in his palace-grounds. Travel he detested, and there were many parts of his own peninsular dominions which his gout, his emaciated frame, or his constitu- tional sluggishness never permitted him to visit. He became almost as difficult of access as a Japanese Mikado, wrapped up in the recesses of his huge palace- monastery of the Escorial, moving about in close car- riages, after dark, or in the woods. His acquired knowledge of Spain — by actual observation he knew little — was immense and exact, and was gathered from maps, surveys, and statistics compiled for him ; while Philip^ s Private Life, 503 countless spies, flitting about continental and insular courts, kept him curiously informed of everything that was going on in distant countries. He seems to have lived in almost absolute isolation, and to have trusted nobody, for he kept spies on his spies, and writhed in everlasting and uneasy suspicion of his most confidential advisors. No martyr could excel him in a sort of patience which approached as nearly to a virtue as any quality he possessed. The splendor of his early munificence soon narrowed into a pinching economy, called for by his many schemes, for which sixteen millions of annual revenue were insufficient. The man himself always comes before us clad in black velvet or satin, — black velvet shoes, plumed Spanish cap, — lighted up now and then about the neck with the gorgeous circlet of the Golden Fleece. The most mischievous of his qualities as an adminis- trator was his procrastination, — a vice which heaped up business and involved him in those myriads of de- tails, ever}^ one of which he desired to arrange himself ; thus accomplishing but little in months. The wealthy aristocracy — the wealthiest in Europe, perhaps — imitated Philip's lavish expenditure in the beginning, and revelled in equipages, liveries, retainers, banquetings, dice-playing, and frivolous amusements. Their ancestral castles were filled with serving hidalgos and cavaliers, body-guards, elegant plate, sumptuous chattels, kneeling vassals, and regal pomp. And though they might be viceroys of Naples, Sicily, or Milan, and captains-general of the Netherlands, Philip studiously kept them apart at home and turned them into a body F-Ss*s:a(i aii. ■■eatSfet«{SSA»a^ 604 Spain under Philip IL of country gentlemen, without political power, living idly on their estates. The Castilian commons had been equally plucked of their feathers, and they cringed in the dust, an abject spectre of what they had been in the proud days of the Catholic sovereigns. They might remonstrate against the enormous expenses of the king's household, against the Burgundian ceremonial, against the alienation of crown lands, against taxes unsanctioned by the ancient laws of the cortes, against the king's neglect of the codification of the Castilian laws, against the tyranny of the crown in seizing for its own use all the bullion privately imported by the Seville merchants from the New World. Philip replied serenely and with a sweet- ness of temper that left nothing to be desired. The love of costly and ostentatious dress was sought to be checked by sumptuary laws. The cortes tried to keep all the gold and silver in the country by repressive measures; for lack of graver things, meddled with table expenses, courses of viands, the scandalous in- crease of coaches; and stimulated bull-baiting by advising the erection of new amphitheatres, breeding better horses, and the like. Minute impertinences like these — brought forward by a body but a shadow of its former venerable self, and destitute of all real power — were occasionally varied by consolatory rec- ommendations of one sort and another, — appointment of guardians for destitute young persons, sanitary recom- mendations, accommodations of travellers at inns, be- havior of servants, stigmatizing of romances of chiv- alry, and educational schemes. Education at home was made fashionable by Philip tii- The Eseorial, 507 } # — a fashion still further popularized by threats of for- feiture of estates, banishment, and confiscation in case of disobedience. He did not hesitate to reject peti- tions peremptorily when it suited his purposes ; and as for co-operation between him and the cortes — that belonged to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Am- biguity, circumlocution, delay, were his delight; he never expressed himself with directness ; he wound and twisted in labyrinthine phraseology which might or might not mean something ; and he was master of Machiavellian dissimulation. The Spaniards were characteristically flattered, how- ever, by being called together at all — even to vote supplies ; and they fancied themselves a free people in spite of the maintenance of a hitherto unknown stand- ing army, the germs of which were sown during the forty-three years of this reign. A body of thirty thousand militia, a corps of sixteen hundred horsemen patrolling Andalusia, garrisons and fortresses at frequent intervals, twenty companies of men-at-arms, and five thousand light cavalry, the "guards of Castile," furnished a force whose ready mobilization was a constant menace to the dozen kingdoms of which the peninsula consisted. Philip had but to lift his long finger, and any province could be throttled in an instant. The greatest architectural monument of this reign is an outgrowth of the king's religious enthusiasm. The Escorial — from scoria^ the dross of iron-mines found in the neighborhood — is said to be Saint Lorenzo's grid- iron in granite, and arose in consequence of a vow to that saint in commemoration of the victory of St. Quentin, I- I lit. 508 Spain under Philip TL in 1557. Philip had moved his capital in 1563-64 to Madrid, the vicinity of which to this structure, its pure air, and its central locality offered to his mind incomparable advantages over hoar)' Toledo or spacious Valladolid. A mausoleum, a monastery, a palace, a church, a museum, a marvellous reliquary, where the bones and limbs of hundreds of saints were devoutly accumulated ; a city of corridors, doors, windows, and apartments ; a great library, a gigantic picture-gallery, a net-work of tanks and towers, a confession-stool for princely humil- ity, a village of Hieronymite monks, a town clinging to the sides of the mountain-wilderness of the Guadar- ramas, a swarming cloister, an austere hermitage, a for- tress, — what was not this wonderful edifice, begun by Juan Bautista de Toledo in 1563, and occupying thirty years of Philip's life before it was finished ? Aranjuez, Segovia, Madrid, Valladolid, all attest that union of mag- nificence with simplicity which distinguished Philip's architectural taste. And through his spy-glass he watched the Escorial as it rose in sober grandeur with an interest more intense perhaps than he bestowed upon anything else. Delicate marbles of many hues, damasks and velvets of Granada, bronze and iron of Toledo, exquisite work in steel, gold, and precious stones from Milan, gorgeous tapestries from Flanders, rare embroideries from the thronging monasteries of Spain, cedar, ebony, marvellously tinted woods from beyond the seas, masterpieces of Titian and the Italian artists — all that money, consummate taste, and bound- less dominion could summon, hung, or glistened, or blazed with magical brilliancy within these walls. The year 1593 saw the completion of the monastery, finished The Buy of Alva. 509 by Herrera, a pupil of Toledo, after the master's death. But no jewels or precious loom-work, or costly frescoes could give the immense, cold, gray mass a gleam of brightness or grace. It cost six million ducats ; it occu- pied three-fifths of a square mile ; it had more than a thousand pounds of keys, twelve thousand doors and windows, sixty-eight fountains, and a dome three hun- dred and fifteen feet high ; it swarmed with inestimable treasures, gems, saints' bones, oriental manuscripts, shrines, paintings, sculptures; Philip dwelt with his niece-wife there, and an arctic radiance seemed to shed itself over the icy Leviathan. But it stood on its mountain-side, solitary and cheerless, the " eighth won- der of the world," indeed, as the Castilians love to call it, but a majestic impersonation of freezing gloom, in- capable of ever being sympathetically regarded. Philip's fourth queen, Anne of Austria, died four years before it was finished, leaving besides other chil- dren, as a monument of the dangers of consanguine- ous marriages, the imbecile bigot Philip III., who suc- ceeded his father. The year 1573 saw the end of Alva's six years' administration in the Netherlands. So accomplished a military chieftain, however, could not be utterly dispensed with, and the duke afterwards proved an efficient instrument in the conquest of Port- ugal, and its union with the crown of Spain. Of great military excellence, with skilful and daring qualities as a general, a consummate tactician, a formid- able antagonist in field and cabinet, of faultless judg- ment in his military combinations, keenly and wholly foreseeing and calculating upon precisely the points 510 Spain under Philip II. where his opponent, Louis of Nassau, would fail, im- movable amid the blazing and starving nation around him, a commanding figure of cruelty, serene amid immi- nent peril, a potent chieftain everywhere except against the unconquerable Batavians, — Alva's audacity^ invent- iveness, and desperate courage rang through Christen- dom. His love of tyranny, however, counteracted his profound strategy, for the desperation it evoked mad- dened millions into furious resistance. His political economy was laughed at, for he tried to make a perma- nent revenue out of confiscations. A prosperous com- monwealth under him became a gaunt mob of rebellious oligarchies. Murder, robbery, the death warrant ; an appalling apparatus of despotism ; statutes and popu- lar constitutions made highways for his feet of iron ; indiscriminate massacre, slaughtering in the dark, six years of grinding torment, torture, and conflagration; forests of gibbets, with bodies dead and alive swinging to them brutally in the pestilential air ; dissolution of marriages ; gibbeting of corpses that their estates might be confiscated ; insolence, grotesque barbarity, and fiendish spectacles of market-places turned into roaring amphitheatres of lust, fire, and execution: what light is there to this black and disordered picture of the guilty duke, who, swimming for a life-time in blood, was at length, in his blighted old age, brought to keep himself alive by milk, which he drew from a woman's breast? "The Spanish Inquisition, without intermission — The Spanish Inquisition has drunk our blood The Spanish Inquisition ! may God's malediction Blast the Spanish Inquisition and all her brood ! p) iK%i ' The Inquisition. 613 " Long live the Beggars ! Wilt thou Christ's word cherish- Long live the Beggars 1 be bold of heart and hand ; Long live the Beggars ! God will not see them perish ; Long live the Beggars I oh, noble Christian band ! " So sang the Netherlanders, "guilty of the crimes of Protestantism and opulence " ; and back thundered the " Our Father of Ghent " : " Our Father, in heaven which art, Grant that this hellish devil may soon depart — And with him his Council false and bloody, Who make murder and rapine their daily study — And all his savage war-dogs of Spain, Oh, send them back to the Devil, their father, again. Amen." The administration of Requesens (Alva's successor) lasted from 1573 to 1576, and pretended to be moderate and conciliatory, though it labored under enormous difficulties arising from the ruin and bankruptcy in which the country had been left by Alva. In 1575, Holland and Zealand, from which the Span- iards had been almost completely expelled, wereninited under William of Orange, as absolute sovereign, during the war. The death of Requesens — a mediocre bigot, possessing hardly a tithe of Alva's ability — occurred a year later ; but nearly ever}' considerable city in the Netherlands — Antwerp, Valenciennes, Ghent, Utrecht, Culemborg, Viane, Alost — had been left by him chained hand and foot beneath the feet of the Spaniard. On the 8th of November, 1576, was concluded the memorable ** Pacification of Ghent," — a union wrought out by the eloquence of Orange between the Protestant 614 Spain under Philip II. v-*% i provinces of Holland and Zealand and the fifteen Cath- olic provinces. It was a league which established mu- tual religious toleration among the hitherto inharmonious provinces, abolished the Inquisition from all alike, and combined the whole nation into a determined unit for the expulsion of the Spaniards. V *1 CHAPTER XXII. END OF THE REIGN OF PHILIP II. Don Juan of Austria, now thirty-two, succeeded Requesens as captain-general, — stealing, as history tells us, through Spain and France in disguise as a Moorish slave, that he might elude observation. His career in the Netherlands was inglorious, its mid- dle year being characterized by the so-called " Perpet- ual Edict," a compromise which the provinces wrung from him with the bitterness of death. It ratified the Ghent arrangement, promised removal of soldiery as soon as possible, maintenance of the privileges, char- ters, and constitutions of the Netherlands ; required an oath to uphold the Catholic religion, and recognized Don Juan as governor-general. In December, 1577, dis- covering that this arrangement was insincere, designed as a mere blind to carry out the schemes of Philip, the states-general deposed Don Juan, and war, after a brief respite, blazed forth afresh. A treaty with Queen Elizabeth — the beginning of a long and famous connection — was concluded by the States in January, 1578, to the boundless pique of the imperial bastard. He thundered forth war in French, German, and Flemish, dreaming of victory, as well he 515 516 Spain under Philip IL |l 4 might : a superb soldier himself, the lode-star of twenty thousand picked veterans, and begirt by the most re- markable military geniuses in Europe — Alexander Far- nese, Mansfeld, Mendoza, and Mondragon. But both sides being abjectly poor, the war dragged wearily on ; and Don Juan — thwarted by Philip's silence and eternal delays, out of money, surrounded by innu- merable enemies, suspected by the king himself, the pestilence making dreadful ravages ,in his little army, disgraced and abandoned, as he said, by the king, in ter- tor of the insidious practices of the French (who had now entered the country), filled with gnawing melan- choly, consumed by fever, tossing on his bed in fantastic visions of battles and victories, utterly wrecked in health by care, chagrin, and despondency, — breathed forth his heroic soul in that very month rendered immortal by the battle of Lepanto. Philip was suspected of having poisoned him. His body was transported to Spain to the king's presence, a disembowelled spectre blazing with jewels, balsams, and brocades, in perfumed gloves and sparkling insignia of the Golden Fleece ; but historians do not tell us that Philip was overwhelmed with grief. Wonder and compassion will strike all who contem- plate this singular career. A fine military commander, famous in the Moorish wars, matchless in his Turkish successes, accomplished in many languages, fascinating in manners, singularly handsome, fluent, and high- spirited, a visionary dreaming of impossible sovereign- ties, embodying the most enviable gifts of the crusader and the wandering knight, Barbara Blomberg's son died at thirty-three, baffled, disappointed, broken-hearted. VALENCIAN LABORER. The Netherland Butchery. 519 I And over the Pyrenees sat the uxorious Philip spinning his innumerable wiles, gathering his complicated spider- web of intrigue and death about whomsoever approached him, benignly doing the work of half a dozen men in his silent cabinet, grasping in his hands chords that could wring harmonies or torments from dominions wide as the world ; passively gazing upon this noble, dying Lion-hearted, so beautiful, so daring, so unfortunate. Margaret of Parma's son, Alexander Farnese, a nephew of Philip, — a gifted, dangerous, and impas- sioned soldier, — sprang into the breach caused by the death of his uncle, Don Juan of Austria, and exer- cised his great military talents there in a way which transcended even the glories of Alva's reign. The House of Austria, after producing four princes of great ability, — Charles, Philip, Don Juan, and the Prince of Parma, — princes whose wonderful careers filled the cen- tury from 1500 to 1598, — lapsed into a state of imbe- cility and went out in the semi-idiocy and melancholy of Philip III. and IV. and Charles II. (1700). Alexander Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III. — edu- cated at Alcala with Don Carlos and Don Juan ; a capi- tal huntsman, tourneyer, gladiator; husband of the spotless Maria of Portugal ; a midnight brawler in his father's capital ; a hero of Lepanto, where he grappled and captured the treasure-ship of the Moslems ; a dark- eyed, side-glancing, sinister-looking, handsome man, sumptuously apparelled, princely-mannered, desperate, and audacious, — smote the Netherlanders hip and thigh ; hung, butchered, drowned, and burned like a true Ro- man Catholic of that age, expiated his sins by torch- f» 520 Spain under Philip 11. light mass, but found his match in the serene, silent- working Prince of Orange. Holland, Zealand, Gelderland, Ghent, Friesland, Utrecht, Overyssel, and Groningen, concluded in Janu- ary, 1579, the Union of Utrecht, which was the basis of the Dutch Republic and the foundation-stone of two hundred years of glory and splendor. It ratified the " Ghent Pacification," which still acknowledged Philip, yet contracted to expel the foreigner ; carefully abstained from religious intolerance ; retained all the ancient con- stitutions, charters, and forms ; left upon their ancient foundations and with their ancient peculiarities a mass of historic sovereignties mutually independent and yet unified ; accepted existing civil and political institu- tions, and wrought an iron league which, without pre- meditation, developed into the Republic of the United Netherlands and left the Walloon sovereignties alien- ated, down to our time, from their heroic brethren of the North. This league, by slow and stealthy degrees, grew into a solemn declaration of independence and renunciation of allegiance to -Philip in July, 1581. The Prince of Orange accepted the supreme power in Holland and Zealand for the term of the war, but in 1582 without limitation. The "Act of Abjuration," as this declaration was called, deposed Philip without establishing formally any Republic, maintained a system of hereditary sover- eignty mingled with popular institutions to which the burghers were attached, devised no special constitution,^ rid the country of a mischievous tyranny, and put an end " to the first and true cause of all our miseries," — William of Orange, 521 the Inquisition. That all seventeen provinces did not join in this magnetic circle was owing to the ambition of certain grandees anxious to uphold the independence of their individual states, to religious intolerance, to the genius of Farnese whose management prevented a con- federation, and to the self-abnegation of William the Silent, who refused to become the chief of the United States. Henry, the Cardinal King of Portugal, having died in 1580, the Spaniards under Alva overran the country in two months, and Philip received homage as king of Portugal at Lisbon, in 1581. Italians, Lorrainers, Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Spaniards, had long been trying to murder Orange, — five attempts were made in two years — and at length a small, spindle-shanked, wonderfully courageous Bur- gundian, Francis Guion, alias Balthazar Gerard, suc- ceeded on a Tuesday morning in July, 1584, in ancient, linden-avenued Delft. " O, my God, have mercy upon my soul ! O, my God, have mercy upon this poor people ! " were William's last words as he fell riddled with Gerard's poisoned slugs. William died in his fifty-second year, leaving eleven children by his four marriages (with Anne of Egmont, Anna of Saxony — a coarse maniac — Charlotte of Bour- bon, and Louisa de Coligny). Two of his sons — Prince Maurice of Nassau and the Stadtholder of the Repub- lic, Frederic Henry — maintained the undying fame of the race. Piery, fortitude, serene enthusiasm, perfect disinter- estedness, munificence that plunged him into debt, were iti 522 Spain under Philip TL prominent characteristics of the great prince. An inimi- table captain, a political genius of the first order, of commanding and suggestive eloquence, of an industry paralleled by that of Philip alone ; a thorough linguist ; a subtle and profound intriguer, who had won over Philip's very secretary to transmit to him for ten years copies of all his dispatches; a patriot and self-abnegator illumined by a divine mission ; an athlete, a philosopher, and a Christian, the Prince of Orange was undoubtedly the greatest man of his age. All the Netherlands hung affectionately about the tomb of '* Father William," and beo-irdled it with the living immortelles of their tears and memories. The duke of Anjou, elected by the united Provinces in 1583 duke of Brabant and sovereign of the whole country, proved a traitor, and fortunately died in 1584. The provinces then, after applying to Henry III. of France, turned to " the glorious virgin who then ruled England," and pressed the sovereignty upon her. While declining the proposed honor, Elizabeth threw down the gauntlet to Spain, by the publication of her famous manifesto and solemn treaty of alliance with the Netherlands, in 1585. Philip, who hated the Prot- estant princess with all the venom of a rejected suitor, forthwith took measures for operations against England. Because Holland was the very threshold of England; because the two countries were so intimately associated by position, nationality, religion, and commerce; be- cause the conquest of England had been determined upon by Philip after he had conquered Holland ; and because England and Protestantism might be annihi- lated if Philip once got control of the immense wealth, The Earl of Leicester. 523 spacious ports, and numerous fleet of Holland ; such were the reasons that moved the great but eccentric queen to help the Dutch. The earl of Leicester— famous in romance, intrigue, and love ; the most picturesque chieftain of the age \ the man of infinite crimes according to his enemies' and of matchless virtues according to Elizabeth ; " a rare artist in poison ; " the grandee-favorite of ' the queen, whose calumnies, murders, accomplishments, widow-marrying, wife-killing, jexvelled apparel, gem- pierced ears, magnificence in dress, overgrown figure, and subtle blandishments to an infatuated mistress, have come down to us vividly depictured in contemporary prose — was made lieutenant general of the five thou- sand English sent over to the aid of the Dutch. Side by side with him stood his nephew, — - the very genius of poetry and chivalry, an effulgent impersonation of chiv- alrous culture, a beautiful apparition with " amber-col- ored hair," blue eyes, high-born features, and the soul of all knight-errantry in him, the dreamer of Arcadia, the friend of Melancthon and William the Silent, the star of Astrophel, and son-in-law of Walsingham', the pearl-embroidered Adonis in blue gilded armor, 'who flashes on us like a Knight of the Holy Grail, the scholar, poet, statesman, — Sir Philip Sidney. The skirmish of Zutphen, in 1586, was rendered for- ever '* to our posterity famous," as Leicester said it would be, by the death of Sidney. " Thy necessity is even greater than mine," said he, handing the cup of water to the wounded soldier. His dying words to Robert Sidney were "Love my memory, cherish my friends. Above all, govern your will and affections by 624 Spai7i under Philip 11. the will and word of your Creator ; in me beholding the end of the world with all her vanities." Thus beautifully he died, talking of Plato and the immortality of the soul, listening to sweet music, and remembering all his friends with gifts and rings. The blazing bonfires in Cadiz and Lisbon harbors, caused by Sir Francis Drake's scuttling and burning two hundred and fifty Spanish galleys and transports, gave the Spaniards in 1587 a foretaste of the Great Armada disaster of the next year, as well as of the pluck of English mariners. Leicester's governor-generalship in the Netherlands, owing to his unpopularity, the queen's double-dealing, and Farnese's tactics, had proved a failure, and in January, 1588, he had resigned. In 1588, Philip tried to carry out his insolent scheme against England. The invincible Armada — an assem- blage of one hundred and forty ships in ten squadrons, with thirty thousand men on board, commanded by the "golden" duke of Medina-Sidonia — set sail from Coruria toward the last of May, 1588, with Calais harbor as its destination. Galley-slaves, grandees, mendicant friars, soldiers, inquisitors, bands of music, great cas- tellated galeasses, mighty galleons, gilded saints, heavy cannon, thousands of sailors, servants, and adventurers, store-ships, caravels, familiars of the Inquisition, huge monster vessels, driven by three hundred slaves a-piece such were the incongruous elements of the armament that floated out amid the tempests of the Bay of Biscay that May of 1588. A girdle of beacon lights shone along the coast of England and flashed the news that the Spaniards were coming. Drake, Frobisher, Howard, %nd Hawkins, The Spanish Armada. 627 with their sixty-seven light and swift ships, — as won- derfully alert on the sea as the Moors were with their flash-and-go horse in the plains of Andalusia, — hovered about, sunk, cannonaded, boarded, destroyed, utterly discomfited the huge, indolent-sailing Spanish ocean- palaces, and brought to utter grief the vast half-moon of the Spanish Armada. The English darted to and fro like infuriated hornets, and grappled the galleons with a grim determination to sink them or be sunk. Their decks were thronged with patricians eager to immortalize themselves — Raleigh, Willoughby, William Hatton, Cecil, Oxford, Brooke, Noel, Northumberland, Cumberland; and added to these came enormous "float- ing volcanoes " at night, dazzling the pitchy darkness with unutterable light and fire, and shattering the Span- ish hulks to flinders. Howard " plucked their feathers little by little," as he said, between July 31st and August 9. The Armada, utterly routed, crippled, and thunder- riven by the English broadsides, swept panic-stricken through the North sea into the icy and inhospitable waters of Scotland and Norway. A series of tempests providentially aided the English, who had to abandon the chase ; and perhaps ten thousand alone, out of the thirty thousand men who had sailed forth, ever drank Spanish wine or heard a Spanish mass again. The sea was full of Spanish grandees and Spanish ducats. Eighty-one out of one hundred and forty vessels per- ished or were captured, while the feeling in Spain may be argued from the fact that a Lisbon merchant, who ven- tured to laugh at the wreck of the Armada,was gibbetted. 'i'he murder of the Guises, the assassination of Henry 528 Spain under Philip IL III. of France, last of the Valois, and the claims of Henry of Navarre to the throne, — tiery Gascon Hugue- not that he was, — had plunged France into an ocean of anarchy, league, and counter-league. Philip hniiself claimed the throne through the Infanta, his daughter, grand-daughter of Henry II., and the horrible rumor circulated, " that if the Salic law could not be set aside in her favor, he meant to get a dispensation and marry her himself," thus confirming his right to the crown, in virtue of his wife. The death of the Prince of Parma, in 1592, pursued as he was by the malice, ingratitude, and suspicions of his roval uncle, gave a severe blow to the Spanish dause in the Low Countries, hardly bettered by his suc- cessor, the Archduke Ernest, brother of the Emperor Rudolph. The hard-faced, antique-looking Count Fuentes, — a grizzled and leathern-skinned reminiscence of Alva, one of those alert, sagacious, saffron-colored, sinister- eved apparitions, in Brussels point and Milan armor, that look out of the corners of their eyes at us from Velasquez's portraits - succeeded the archduke m '^Another of the Habsburgtrs— the Archduke Cardi- nal Albert, of Toledo— arrived in the Netherlands in- 1596, as governor-general in Fuentes' stead. About this time, a combined expedition of Dutch and English forces attacked the Spanish war-ships at Cadiz, and planted the flag of the republic on the fortress of Cadiz itself, succeeded by the capitulation and sackmg of the citv. Philip's second armada, fitted out for the conquest of Treaty of VervinH. 529 Ireland, went to the bottom in 1596-7, by aid of the same succoring tempests that had shattered the armada of 1588, and with it 5,000 men. Mexico was literally transmuted into golden ducats, wafted to Spain by vast Indiamen for the Danae-tub of Philip's Fountain of Perpetual Schemes. No difficulty, no defeat baffled his purpose. His gigantic villainy in repudiating his enor- mous debts under the guise of religion, in 1596, beg- gared the archduke governor-general, and produced "a general howl of indignation and despair upon every exchange, in every counting-room, in every palace, in every cottage in Christendom.'' The treaty of peace between France and Spain, — war had been proclaimed by Henry in 1595, — signed at Vervins in May, 1598, almost contemporaneously with the famous Edict of Nantes in favor of the Prot- estant subjects of Henry IV., was as disgraceful to Philip as the opening treaty of his long reign at Cateau Cambresis, in 1559, had been humbling to France. Philip conceded nearly everything that Henry de- manded. The same spring he transferred the Nether- lands to his daughter Isabella and her intended hus- band, the cardinal archduke Albert, as tranquilly as if the whole matter were an ordinary business transaction. The Infante Philip, his only son, married Margaret of Austria by proxy at the same time, — another specimen of that frequent intermarriage of relations so popular between Spain and Austria, and which everywhere spun threads of madness, idiocy, depravity, and melancholy through the whole connection. Philip himself, now seventy-one and in the forty-third year of his reign, was this year smitten with the loath- /■ 530 Spain under FhlUp IL Philip^s Character. 631 ti some disease by which he was soon to expiate physi- cally the enormities of his life. He lingered from June to September in horrible agony, — devoured alive by in- numerable vermin which had developed in myriads out of his gouty and corrupted joints, and in exquisite ma- lignity surpassed every deviltry ever invented by the Inquisition. Seeing his end approaching, extreme unc- tion and the Lord's Supper were administered to him repeatedly, at his own request; he rubbed his sores with the knee-bones of saints ; he discoursed with edi- fication on sacred subjects ; he provided thirty thousand masses to be said for his soul ; and made minute mil- liner-like directions about his funeral obsequies. His last words were, " I die like a good Catholic, in faith and obedience to the Holy Roman Church" Then a paroxysm passed over the bedful of crowned misery, and Philip was no more. Thus ended the absolute despotism of Philip H., — a despotism fountained and centred in him, with absolute power to nominate and remove every judge, magistrate, military or civil officer, every archbishop, bishop, and ecclesiastic of whatever sort ; a reign consumed " in accomplishing infinite nothing ; " in extinguishing free institutions and venerable municipal privileges ; in nul- lifying legislative and deliberative bodies; in "eluding justice and constitutional right of every sort; in in- famous self-indulgence, criminality, and assassination ; in kindling everlasting war in neighboring countries ; in corrupting, bribing, and espionaging half of contem- porary Europe ; in murdering thousands of human beings ; in generating the noisome and gigantic pesti- lence of an omnipresent Inquisition ; and in organized terrorism, hostility of class to class, and extermination of the popular will. The most valuable part of the population of this world-empire was " accursed " and excommunicated. Philip himself was the kingdom concentrated in one all-powerful personality. Dependencies girdling the globe hung by a thread of iron to a middle-sized, yel- low-haired fanatic, who with horrible monotony of evil poisoned the world for seventy-one years, and died leaving a memory compounded of every evil-smelling thing under the sun. He lived and breathed murder, as we know by his attempted killing of Elizabeth, Henry of Navarre, and John of Olden-Barneveld, the great burgher; by his assassination of Egmont, Hoorne, and William the Si- lent ; by his suspected assassination of his own and, at that time, only son, Don Carlos, and his nephew, Don Juan of Austria ; by his condemning millions to death in the Netherlands by one edict ; by the grinning skull of the chief-justice of Aragon fixed for years in a Span- ish market-place ; and by the assassination of his sec- retary, Escovedo. Countless families were reduced by him to beggary; and confiscations, extortions, black- mail had become commonplaces. It is also difficult to conceive how a man could be so false, so utterly hypocritical, mendacious, and faithless as Philip was, — serene incarnation of passionless evil as history shows him to be. Illiterate, petty-minded, and full of cant, he could not spell, tell the truth, or be sincere, if it had cost him his life ; nor did he scruple for his own nefarious purposes to take twenty-five per 532 Spain under Philip II. I !i cent of the $12,000,000 of precious metals annually dug out of the mines of Mexico. He governed a colossal realm composed of the most heterogeneous elements, and separated in every possible way, — in language, locality, color, institutions. With Peru, Mex- ico, Brazil, and the Antilles, from Cape Horn to Labra- dor ; the seventeen Netherland provinces ; the twelve kingdoms of Spain and Portugal ; the two Sicilies ; Milan ; portions of Tuscany ; Barbary ; Guinea ; the African coast southwards, and the Indian peninsulas and archipelagos ; the Philippine and Molucca Islands ; with the grand-duchy of Florence, and the republic of Genoa as virtual vassals, titular king of England, Wales, and Ireland, and claiming the kingdom of France through his daughter, Philip was a universal monarch indeed. His swarming armies, his perpetual levies, and con- tributions, his habitual violation of good faith in repud- iating his debts, his twelve millions of Spaniards and Portuguese embraced in the united peninsula, the in- dustrial and scientific civilization exhibited by his " accursed " troops of Jews, Moors, and Dutch, his holy office spread over two hemispheres, his indom- itable soldiers, his hierarchy of archbishops (11) and bishops (62) with their hold on one-third of the entire income of Spain and Portugal, — all his marriages, in- heritances, gifts, and cruelties : all this and much more proved of no avail ; he could not conquer the Nether- lands ; he never did succeed fully and permanently in anything ; he never had one moment's freedom from suspicion; he was hated, dreaded, despised; he was PEASANTS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF MADRID. Death of Philip 11. 535 utterly outgeneralled by Henry of Navarre and the vir- gin queen ; his great fleets were scattered like feathers; his armies mutinied; and he died a wreck of disap- pointed and ignoble ambition, a striking monument of a life lived almost utterly in vain. | _L ll iHlJ i .J. I JL | L J" «' .g 1 tfM CHAPTER XXIII. FROM THE DEATH OF PHILIP H., TO THE ACCES- SION OF THE BOURBONS. REIGNS OF PHILIP HL, PHILIP IV., AND CHARLES H. WE have devoted a more extended attention to the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles v., and Philip II., because they form a cluster of reigns the most important within the cycle of Spanish his- tory. Spain became united and consolidated under the Catholic kings ; it became a cosmopolitan empire un- der Charles ; and in Philip, austere, bigoted, and com- manding, its height of glory was reached. Thenceforth the Austrian supremacy in the peninsula — the star of the House of Habsburg — declined, until a whiff of diplomacy was sufficient to extinguish its lights in the person of the childless and imbecile Charles^II. Three reigns — Philip IH. (1598-1621), Philip IV. (1621-1665), and Charles H. (1665-1 700) — fill this century of national decline, full as it is of crowned idiocy, hypochondria, and madness, the result of inces- tuous marriages, or natural weakness. The splendid and prosperous Spanish empire under the emperor and his son — its vast conquests, discoveries, and foreign wars, — becomes transformed into a bauble for the caprice of favorites, under their successors. 536 A Retrospect. 537 From the boundless confusion, degradation, and dis- solution of the very forms of government which took place at the death of Enrique IV., in 1474, Spain had, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, passed to a point where it towered far above all the kingdoms of Europe in definite aims and in thorough consolidation of the elements of power. The union of Castile and Aragon, and the conquest of the Mahometans, had made the land one. A nation, the most highly individ- ualized and tumultuous of the middle ages, rent by the controversies of an ambitious nobility, an uncontrolled clergy, and the innumerable communities which formed petty republics in themselves within its borders, sud- denly abandons its strifes, and follows the path of law and order as developed in a wise administration, a care- ful police, a vigorous system of justice, and educational establishments of sufficient range. The crown became the commanding power in the land. The battle-fields of Italy, the immense fields of western exploration, became the theatres of a restless energy hitherto de- voted to civil war. The marriage of Juana with Philip the Handsome, brought Spain in the sixteenth century into intimate contact with the house of Habsburg; and thus it entered into the vast aggregate of European states. Its isolated position — a huge promontory of south-western Europe, severed by the Pyrenees from its neighbors, — no longer worked against it. Its blood, seething with Phenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Ger- manic, and Asiatic influences, mingled many of the best elements of the north, east, and west, and prepared it for a career of unexampled scope under the emperor. Its contact with the Netherlandish, Italian, and Ger- 538 Reign of Philip TIL > man dominions of Charles V., might have been of infi- nite benefit, had not the Reformation placed it in an attitude of rigid hostility to the great European federa- tion into which it had just entered. Thereafter, as in the times of the Moors, its wars all became religious wars, — the narrowest and most soul-sterilizing of all, — whether against the union of Smalkalde, the rebellious Netherlands, Elizabeth of England, the Grand Turk, the African Beys, or the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Araucanians of Chili. This attitude towards the rest of the world was due to the bigotry of the Habsburg- ers, and in this attitude of cr)^stallized hostility, of un- impressionable fanaticism, of non-progression, and un- enlightenment, Spain has ever since remained. The seven centuries of conflict with Islam were succeeded by nearly as many with Luther and Calvin. Both Charles's and Philip's highest ambition ran in the double line of giving Spain the dominant place in the European hierarchy, and maintaining victoriously the unity of the Catholic faith. They did not struggle in vain. For two generations Spain was the first power in the world, and it is due to its influence that the Reformation w^as discredited and expelled from France, Italy, Bavaria, Austria, Poland, and the Southern Neth- erlands. '' And yet what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul .? " Amid its im- measurable wealth, Spain was bankrupt. The gold, and silver, and precious stones of the West, emptied them- selves into a land the poorest and most debt-laden in Europe, the most spiritually ignorant despite the count- less churches, the most notorious for its dissolute nobil- it}% its worthless officials, its ignoble family relations, Eet7 'ogression. 541 its horrible moral aberrations pervading all grades of the population; and all in vain. The mighty fancy, the enthusiastic loyalty, the fervid faith of the richly endowed Spaniard were not counterbalanced by hum- bler but more practical virtues, — love of industry, of agriculture, of manufactures. The Castilians hated the doings of citizens and peasants ; the taint of the Arab and the Jew was on the profession of money-getting. Thousands left their ploughs and went to the Indies, found places in the police, or bought themselves titles of nobility, which forthwith rendered all work dishonor- able. The land grew into a literal infatuation with miracles, relics, cloisters, fraternities, pious foundations of every description. The church was omnipotent. Nobody cultivated the soil. Hundreds of thousands lived in the convents. Begging soup at the monastery gates,— such is a type of the famishing Spain of the seventeenth century. In economic, political, physical, moral, and intellectual aspects, a decay pervaded the peninsula under the later Habsburgers, such as no civil- ized nation has ever undergone. The population de- clined from ten millions under Charles V. (Charles I. of Spain) to six millions under Charles II. The people had vanished from hundreds of places in New Castile, Old Castile, Toledo, Estremadura, and Andalusia, 'one might travel miles in the lovely regions of the South, without seeing a solitary cultivated field or dwelling! Seville was almost depopulated. Pecuniary distress at the end of the seventeenth century reached an unexam- pled height ; the soldiers wandered through the cities begging ; nearly all the great fortresses from Barcelona to Cadiz were ruinous; the king's servants ran away 642 Reign of Philip IIL because they were neither paid nor fed ; more than once there was no money to supply the royal table ; the ministers were besieged by high officials and officers seeking to extort their pay long due ; couriers charged with communications of the highest importance lin- gered on the road for lack of means to continue their journey. Finance was reduced to tricks of low deceit and robbery. Moneys sent to private individuals from America were seized and appropriated; the value of the government paper fell twenty-five per cent.; coin was debased in a frightful manner; the people were forced to deliver up good securities in exchange for worthless certificates; churches and monasteries were plundered in spite of the rooted bigotry, and taxes increased so fearfully that a bushel of salt rose once from thirty or forty reals, to three hundred and twenty- one reals. The idiocy of the system of taxation was unpar- alleled. Even in 1594 the cortes complained that the merchant, out of every one thousand ducats capital, had to pay three hundred ducats in taxes ; that no ten- ant-farmer could maintain himself, however low his rent might be ; and that the taxes exceeded the income of numerous estates. Bad as the system was under Philip II., it became worse under his Austrian successors. The tax upon the sale of food, for instance, increased from ten to fourteen per cent. Looms were most pro- ductive when they were absolutely silent. Almost the entire household arrangements of a Spanish family were the products of foreign industries. In the begin- ning of the seventeenth century, five-sixths of the do- mestic and nine-tenths of the foreign trade were in the A Rampant Church, 54^ o hands of aliens. In Castile, alone, there were one hun- dred and sixty thousand foreigners^ who had gained complete possession of the industrial and manufactur- ing interests. " We cannot clothe ourselves without them, for we have neither linen nor cloth ; we cannot write without them, for we have no paper," complains a Spaniard. Hence, the enormous masses of gold and silver annually transmitted from the colonies passed through Spain into French, English, Italian, and Dutch pockets. Not a real, it is said, of the thirty-five mil- lions of ducats which Spain received from the colonies in 1595, was found in Castile the following year. In this indescribable retrogression, but one interest in any way prospered — the church. The more agri- culture, industry, trade declined, the more exclusively did the Catholic clergy monopolize all economic and intellectual life. Innumerable families lived on the gifts of their numerous clerical members. One son at least, out of every burgher and peasant family, had to be immolated to the church, that the others might not actually starve ; at least one daughter was doomed to the veil, to justify her relatives in asking a crust at the convent refectory ; and the father himself, gladly united with one of the brotherhoods for his self-preservation. Another part of the population wandered around as servants, among the palaces of the grandees, them- selves living on the glories of an irrecoverable past and the favor of the government. In many provinces there were more cut-purses, smugglers, and beggars, than arti- sans. And the keener the distress, the more the people shrank from exerting themselves, and the more power- ful became the tendencies to superstition and idleness. 544 Beign of Philip III. Singularly enough, along with this crushing humilia- tion of the material interests of Spain, went the most brilliant intellectual development. The age of Philip II., of Philip III., and Philip IV., from 1550 to 1665, saw an astounding multitude of poets, historians, dram- atists, artists, spring up as if by magic, out of the con- quest of Granada, the Italian campaigns, and the mar- vellous deeds of the conquerors of the New World. Garcilasso de la Vega (1503-36), and Hurtado de Men- doza (1503-75), — the one a charming ecloguist, the other an elegant historian and reputed founder of the gtistfl picaresco in Spain, — illustrated the reign of Charles V. Then followed, in the early part of his reign and in the next, a series of the most delightful chroniclers— Cortes, Gomara, the charming old sol- dier Bernal Diaz, Oviedo, Las Casas — telling the won- ders of Mexico, Peru, and the Indian islands, fit con- tinuers of the glowing narratives of Columbus. More than twent}' poets, many of distinguished eminence, surrounded Philip II. Here find a place the eloquent religious poet, Fray Luis de Leon (1528-1591), who spent many years of his life in the cells of the Inquisi- tion ; the immortal Castilian Cervantes (1547-1616), author of Don Quixote, Lope de Vega (1562-1635), the author of eighteen hundred plays and four hundred autos, which were so popular that one of them found its way to the seraglio of Constantinople; and the eminent, religious, and didactic prose-writer Quevedo (i 580-1 645), the victim of the cruelties of the infamous Count Duke Olivares. Between 1588 and 1682 lived and labored the cele- brated Spanish painters Ribera, Velazquez, and Murillo. A Literary Age. 545 The effect of removing the capital to Madrid from 1563, stimulated dramatic art especially, caused the con- struction of theatres, and gave wide scope to the pecu- liar religious representations and sacred dramas in which the Spanish poets delighted. Calderon de la Barca (i 600-1 681) was the last of the great poets, and like Lope entered the church. The reign of Philip IV., who was himself a poet, like Jayme of Aragon, was the most fruitful age of Spanish dramatic literature. It would require pages LOPK I)K VK(4A. even to enumerate the lyric, satirical, elegiac, pastoral, epigrammatic, didactic, and descriptive poets of the Austrian era ; the graceful ballad-writers, with the uni- versal love of ballads ; the composers of romantic fic- tion — chivalrous, pastoral, humorous, historical, and serious ; the cultivators of forensic eloquence, and cor- respondence ; the great historians (Zurita, Morales, 546 Reign of Philip 11. and IIL Mariana, Sandoval, Herrera, Argensola, Solis) ; the di- dactic prose writers, and the dramatists. In one hundred and fifty years, however, all this radi- ance had come and gone. The overthrow of institu- tions in the war of the communeros under Charles V., the virtual slavery of the one hundred millions of people whom Philip II. ground under the iron heel of the Inquisition, the stifling incubus of Jesuit rule, the expulsion of the six hundred thousand Moriscoes, the most valuable part of the population, under Philip III., the seizure of Jamaica by the English, the cession of Roussillon to France, and the independence of Portugal in 1640, the repudiation of much of the public debt, the long and disastrous minority of Charles II., with the deplorable ruin and dilapidation ensuing ; each of these things was a step downward of that once magnifi- cent House of Austria. The disgraceful credulity of the Dark Ages was revived in the spectacle of the last member of this house being exorcised for witchcraft. Insignificant Portugal triumphantly maintaining her- self against, nay, actually invading, the universal empire of Spain ; Catalonia in successful revolt for thirteen year-s ; milliards of reals spent on the subjugation of the Netherlands, and yet Spain, compelled by the peace of Westphalia, in 1648, to recognize their independence and the equal rights of heretics in Germany ; how deep a degradation is here ! England under Cromwell, France under Louis XIV., were meanwhile contemporaneously expanding, grow- ing in power ; advancing on all sides, by land and by sea, at the expense of Spain. Franche-Comte fell to JAR MERCHANT, MADRID. Decadence. 549 France in a fortnight ; the strongest fortresses in Cata- lonia capitulated in a few days. The most warlike of nations had in one hundred and fifty years transformed itself into the feeblest, the most indifferent to glory and honor. The northern provinces under Charles II., were defenceless against the French, and the South trembled at the thought of a second barbarian conquest from Africa. Raw boys and gray-haired weaklings formed the majority in the Spanish regiments. Even under Philip II. the naval power had gone to naught. Instead of developing uninterruptedly, hand in hand with the huge colonial system, it at last sank to thir- teen galleys, seven of which were hired from Genoa ; the art of ship-building was lost ; the magazines, arse- nals, and workshops at the sea-ports, stood empty ; and Italy, France, and England, furnished the hired ships, to bring the very tobacco from Havana. A kingdom to whose very existence a navy was indispensable, — whose Netherlandish, Italian, and colonial possessions could not be communicated with without ships, — shamelessly neglected the very art most essential to its safety. Its trade with America fell into the hands of foreigners. Pirates from Barbary were the terror of the Spanish seas; the country became uninhabitable for miles inland along the Mediterranean ; filibusters ravaged the transatlantic colonies ; under Charles II., Cuba, St. Domingo, Nicaragua, and New Granada, year in year out, were plundered by them ; the great city of Carthagena was subdued, and Vera Cruz surprised and burned. This brief sketch may serve to show how profoundly Spain had sunk in the two centuries of Habsburg rule. 550 Reign of Philip IL and II L It lay a corpse, over which hovered the vulture of the House of Austria — not an emblem of victory, but a symbol of death. The reign of Philip III. is pitiably deficient in inter- est. His accession to power was at once signalized by the transference of the reins of government to the hands of the favorite, the Duke of Lerma, in terror of whom and his formidable wife, Philip and his queen lived for many years. Philip was so weak, that when look- ing over the portraits of all the daughters of the Arch- duke Charles, that he might select his future wife from among them, he alleged, that the princess who should meet with his father's approbation, would be the most beautiful in his eyes— a filial excellence altogether admirable, had it shown anything but the most abject dread in which he lived towards the terrible Philip II. The death of Elizabeth of England in 1603, deprived the Netherlands of their mightiest ally, and left them at the tender mercies of James I., who abhorred support- ing revolted subjects against their sovereign under any circumstances. The United Provinces, however, were now acknowledged as independent by all countries except Spain. In 1602 they had established the first East India Company ; their resources were inexhaust- ible, and the Dutch fleets filled the treasury with the spoils of the Spanish treasure-ships. The treaty of Antwerp, in 1609, secured the acknowledgment of the admission of the United Provinces into the European commonwealth. Gentle and humane as Philip was, his bigotry got the better of him in his expulsion of the Moriscoes — bap- tized though recreant infidels — from their native land The Moriscoes, 551 to Africa. Two archbishops urged their complete ex- tirpation from the soil of Spain. They had settled in Valencia in thousands, and were much the most desir- able part of the population, being skilled artisans, agri- cultural laborers, miners, and manufacturers. As a last insult to them, it was proposed that six families in every hundred should be detained temporarily by the lords to whom they were vassals, in order that they might teach the Christian inhabitants the management of the drains, aqueducts, irrigating canals, rice planta- tions, and sugar works, which had been almost exclu- sively in the hands of these descendants of the Moors. From six hundred thousand to one million of the most industrious and ingenious subjects of Spain were cru- elly torn from their homes, and transported to Africa, where thousands of them, as in the earlier case of the Jews of the fifteenth century, were plundered or perished. One hundred thousand are reputed to have perished within a few months of their expulsion from Valencia. Lerma enormously increased the tax on the necessa- ries of life ; the internal prosperity of the country re- ceived its death-blow by this emigration ; the mal-ad- ministration of the favorite exasperated the people ; a prime minister had been so long unknown in Spain, that whatever he did was regarded with suspicion ; and his elevation of Rodrigo de Calderon, a menial in his household, to the position of favorite's favorite, put the climax to the discontent. Spain and Austria were rescued, in 16 10, from the impending danger of a confederation organized against them on the part of Henry IV., by the dagger of Ravail- lac. The illustrious kins: fell a victim to assassination. 552 Reig7i of Philip III. In 1613, Philip became involved in the eternal dis putes and hostilities of the Italian princes of Mantua and Savoy. His interests there were represented by Villa Franca, governor of Milan, Bedmar, ambassador to Venice, and the duke of Ossuna, viceroy of Naples. Bedmar's indignation with Venice, resulted in the con- spiracy immortalized in Otway's "Venice Preserved." Ossuna won himself a fantastic celebrity under Philip .^■^'''■^ Philip III. IL, by so extravagantly executing the king's order to send corn from Naples to Spain that he "produced plenty in Spain and famine in the kingdom of Naples." Suspected of the desire to convert Naples into an inde- pendent principality for himself, he was recalled and disgraced. Philip's affection for his all-powerful minister gradu- A Bigot and Voluptuary, 553 ally chilled, more especially when by one of the theat- rical incongruities of the Spanish church system, Ler- ma succeeded in donning a cardinal's hat, and Philip came to regard him with reverential awe and dread. The cardinal-duke vigorously opposed being degraded, but was forced to retire to a country-seat in 1618, whilst his arrogant favorite was arrested. The last years of Philip's life resound with echoes from Ger- many, where the Thirty Years' War had broken out. He is said to have died broken-hearted over the discovery of the unfortunate condition into which Spain had fallen, and his own helplessness to aid her. A pro- found melancholy preyed upon him, and though Spain still retained possession of^the Duchy of Milan, the kingdoms of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and the for- tresses on the African coast, her state seemed to him hopeless, and he died (1621) "a curse to the nation he governed." One of his daugjiters had married the king of France, another became queen of Hungary. Of his three sons, Philip, Carlos, and Ferdinand, cardinal arch- bishop of Toledo, the first succeeded him as Philip IV., (1621-1665). The life of Philip IV., lasted sixty years, forty-four of which were passed in the cares and responsibilities of royalty. Almost uninterrupted war kept his long reign in a ripple of excitement from its beginning to its close. A bigot and a voluptuary, " Philip the Great," as Spanish adulation dubbed him, soon left the duties of a sovereign to the favorite Olivares, the count-duke of the great family of the Guzmans. Olivares began by fining Lerma for malversation, executing Calderon for 554 Reign of Philip I V. a murder of which he was believed innocent, and throw- ing Ossuna into prison, where he died of disease. He renewed war with the United Provinces, sought the alli- ance of the emperor, and prevented England from inter- fering in behalf of the Palatinate by his project of a marriage between the prince of Wales and the Infanta. Both in the Indian and American seas, however, the fleets of the Netherlands rode triumphant, plundering treasure-ships, subduing the greater part of the Portu- guese empire in India and Brazil, sacking Lima in Peru, taking possession of several of the West Indian island, and presenting the spectacle of a handful of half-sub- merged amphibii baffling the once boundless resources of the united Spanish empire.^ The romantic visit of Charles, prince of Wales, sec- onded by the brilliant and volatile duke of Bucking- ham, charmed the stately Spaniards by its gallantry : but a quarrel between Buckingham and Olivares, and the undisguised licentiousness of Ch^les's companion, brought the negotiation to an end, and Charles ended by marrying Henrietta of Orleans, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and leaving the Infanta to be wedded later to the emperor's eldest son, afterwards Ferdinand HI. The count-duke first meddled in the affairs of the Milanese, then in an Italian war originating in the dis- puted succession of the duchy of Mantua, then in the Dutch and German wars, assisting the emperor against Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. In his Dutch intrigues he was no match for the accomplished and subtle Rich- elieu, prime minister of France, whom the reduction of the Huguenots, in 1635, left ample leisure to prepare .:; U.fS^uMJft. WANDERING MUSICIANS. An Ins U7' red 1071. 557 for and declare war against Spain on account of an at- tack by a Spanish army on the archbishop of Treves. Spain was signally successful in expelling the united in- vading armies of France and Holland from the Nether- lands : on the Pyreneean frontier mutual invasions took place, with varying success. A fierce insurrection of the Catalans, due to the infraction of one of their im- Olivares. memorial privileges, in 1640, kept the whole of the Spanish forces at bay for thirteen years, — an insurrec- tion occasioned by the tyranny of Olivares. Catalonia proclaimed itself a republic and claimed the protection of France; but the rebellion was subdued in 1652 by Don Juan, the king's natural son, after a fifteen months' ^iA*.ja^S15ii5»irtS?Sa®&&'S^-S'K ;^^.^,-'.i»^.ft-^^«SS^S«^3S 658 Reign of Philip 1 V. m- siege of Barcelona. The privileges of Catalonia — almost the last relics of Spanish liberty,— were ruth- lessly destroyed, and a monarchy as absolute as that of Turkey rose upon their foundations. In 1640-64 Por- tugal threw off the yoke and proclaimed king the duke of Braganza as Joa IV., the legitimate descendant and fepresentative of her ancient sovereigns. The abject impotence of Olivares and his minions was never more emphatically displayed than in this memorable transac- tion, the result of which he jocularly communicated to the king as follows : " The duke of Braganza has run stark mad ; he has proclaimed himself king of Portu- gal. This folly will bring your majesty twelve millions in confiscations ! " France meanwhile had overrun the Netherlands; Prince Maurice took Breda; the. superb military genius of Gustavus Adolphus brought Ferdinand to the brink of ruin in Germany, and was thwarted only by the ex- traordinary talents of Wallenstein, whom Schiller has immortalized; Gustavus, however, fell heroically at Lutzen, and Wallenstein was basely murdered at the instigation of Ferdinand. Cardinal Richelieu's turbulent career closed in 1642, but his Machiavellian slippers were an exact fit for his successor, Mazarin. The great Conde was at the head of the French armies during the regency of Anne of Austria, and carried off the glorious victory of Rocroi over the Spaniards and Walloons, — a victory of mournful augury for the Spanish sovereignty in the Netherlands. Though Olivares had accomplished some good by re- voking the profuse grants of previous sovereigns, intro- ducing sumptuary regulations, turning out " two-thirds m Netherland Independence, 659 of the locusts in office," and increasing the revenues of the crown, his principle was self-adoration and personal aggrandizement. Agriculture, commerce, mechanical arts, declined pitiably under the profligate extravagan- ces of the court. A conspiracy of weaklings and women, headed by the queen and the duchess of Mantua, wrought his ruin ; and Olivares was exiled. In 1646 Massaniello's outburst at Naples came near costing Spain the loss of her Neapolitan dominions. He was a fisherman whose wife had been insulted, and who, in- citing a rebellion, overpowered the viceroy and for ten days ruled despotically over Naples. The final peace with the Netherlands in 1648 secured' to this long-suffering land the blessings of independence, — acknowledged even by Spain, — and the retention of its conquests at home and in the West Indies. Dun- kirk was taken with England's aid, then under the pow- erful administration of Cromwell; and the English wrested Jamaica from Spain as a further drop in the bitter cup of humiliation. But the difficulties between France and Spain were aided by Anne's affection for her brother, smoothed away by the celebrated treaty of the Pyrenees, in 1659, and a marriage : Louis XI V^ was united with Philip's daughter, Maria Theresa, who renounced her rights to the Spanish crown as the eld- est daughter of Philip's first wife. By the treaty Spain ceded Roussillon and Artois to France, — a further dis- memberment, — and France evacuated all her conquests in Catalonia and elsewhere. The English war ceased with the restoration of Charles II. The Portuguese war alone dragged interminably along, till the effective battle of Villaviciosa, lost by the Spaniards; after which ^ ,,iLi'U™^*.jaiSfe&w^^^**6S« i,^&^^iM^iS^^SI^i^ 560 Reicjn of Charles 12. there is the dramatic scene of Philip's receiving the tidings of the defeat, ejaculating, "It is the will of God !. " and swooning away. This defeat was his finishing blow, for he died shortly afterwards (1665), leaving the morbid hypochondriac Charles II., as a three-year-old legacy to the nation. His queen, assisted by a j'lmfa, was named regent. Of Philip it has been aptly said that his reign was, next to that of Roderic, the most disastrous in the annals of Spain. His life was a series of monumental failures on which were inscribed in characters of wormwood and flame : Catalonia, Roussillon, Jamaica, the Nether- lands, Portugal. He had several mistresses and numerous descendants by them, but of the children of his two lawful wives, the queen of France, Margaret of Hungary, and Don Carlos (Charles II.), alone survived him. The next reign was inaugurated by a weak and jeal- ous queen-dowager, who was wholly governed by a German Jesuit. This man was the inquisitor-general Nitard, who was hated by the nobles as an interloper, and more especially by the high-born and spirited Don Juan. Hence the beginning of a long period of in- trigue and orgy which harassed the whole of Charles's reign. Louis XIV. began to develop his passion for conquest at the expense of his infant brother-in-law by attempting, contrary to all justice, to overrun the Neth- erlands. His dream of universal empire was, however, brief, for the Triple Alliance between England, the Unit- ed Provinces, and Sweden, stayed his ambitious aspira- tions. He restored to Spain, by the treaty of Aix-la- Chapelle in 1668, most of his recent acquisitions. Don ''"^:^. ^k ^cAar^'re>??^r»'^R!rf?^»5K ■;SE>!SBa5*^^!S^-S m.^£m«iii£»^fi^^ 570 Spam under Philip Fl A Stimulating Reign, 671 army, and in the council-chamber. The abolition of the special privileges of Aragon, already so rudely shaken under Philip II., and the ensuing partial equali- zation through the provinces, of contributions for the maintenance of the government, threw down the wall which for ages had separated and antagonized Castile and Aragon. The absolute dominion of the king over the whole land, was felt not only in levying and increas- ing taxes, and in reforming the laws, but in stimulating scientific research ; which had hitherto been unknown to Spaniards. " There was nothing in Newton that could make one a better logician or metaphysician, and the teachings of Aristotle were more in conformity with revealed truth than those of Gassendi/' was a boast of one of their savants. Europe saw with amazement, Spain — benumbed, motionless, dead — giving evidence of a life and per- sistency, a patience and inflexibility, under exhausting trial, which, even though accompanied by the loss of her Dutch and Italian possessions through the peace of Utrecht (17 13), showed her in a light more favorable than for many years before. A conflict with the church — that incarnation of bound- less idleness, stupendous superstition, and monstrous ignorance that in the midst of the ruin of the nation possessed enormous wealth, meddled with the palace, the university, and the school alike, and ate out the very vitals of the country — began, and was so success- ful that the pretensions of the Roman See were clipped, the Spanish church even largely emancipated from Rome, and the very Inquisition menaced. Unfortu- nately Philip fell under the influence of an Italian wife — Isabella Farnese ; he lapsed into the usual stupor and indifference of Spanish kings ; and all the pictur- esque stir and movement of the War of the Succession seemed to go out of his gloom-smitten life, leaving the Inquisition and the ancient abuses for the time trium- phant. Injurious interference with Italian politics en- sued as soon as the king^ felt himself strons" enoupfh ; Naples and Parma were reconquered, but at an extraor- dinary sacrifice of men and means. A few figures will be pregnant interpreters of the Spanish art of governing. An annual income before the Italian wars, of two hundred and thirty-five million reals, sank to two hundred and eleven millions, against an annual expenditure of three hundred and thirty-six millions, payments on the public debt being excluded. The government was carried on at an expense of seven- teen and one-half millions, while the court swallowed thirty-seven millions, and the fleet and army, two hundred and thirty-five millions. A theatrical Italian campaign — an imposing court full of spangled grandees — were the main amusement of the controlling classes ; justice, security, culture, material welfare, were contemptible secondary considerations. Still, Philip's reign of forty-six years gave a very varied stimulus to the Spanish people. If the old and immemorial was not absolutely laid aside, it was undermined ; innovation became practicable ; inquiry was made whether this state of permanent crusade, of general beggary and vagabondage, of callous supersti- tion, of idolatrous reverence for the church, was really leading to anything; whether the fashion of the uni- verse, or the fashion of Spain, was the more likely to utiCirKKwutmiiimfem 572 Spain under Philip V, be correct. A gleam of doubt as to the infallibility of Spanish methods and Spanish traditions timidly pene- trated the chinks of the Pyrenees. Contempt for what was foreign, absolute exclusion from the outside world, had been hitherto the mainspring of political life. The misery and humiliation of Charles II.'s reign had failed to rouse the inquiry whether Spain could profit by the lessons of other lands ; it was left to a stranger to mount the throne and make foreign example beneficial to this benighted people. Of course such a revolution of ancient modes of thought went on with painful slowness, as it must do in descending from the upper to the lower classes. The church still fattened ; the cloisters grew ; ecclesi- astical authority was profoundly reverenced ; the most important of Philip's ministers, Patino, had been a Jesuit; and the state was still a secondary affair. But Philip kept up his intimacy with the enlightened Macanaz, who had fled abroad from the clutches of the Inquisition ; he founded the great academy which has done so much for Spanish literature and lexicography ; and he encouraged foreign artists, scholars, and manu- facturers to settle in Spain, while sending some of his own subjects abroad to study. Spanish science no longer remained a contradiction in terms. Imaginative tendencies like those embodied in the multitudinous fancies of Lope and Calderon, now exhaled in the cold, clear light of eighteenth century criticism : the frost of innumerable Boileaus lay on that century. Realities emerged out of that confused and complex state in which, hitherto, feeling, passion, subjectivity, declama- tion had given the tone to Spanish art and poetry ; and 572 Spain under Fhilip V, liii'^. be correct. A gleam of doubt as to the infallibility of Spanish methods and Spanish traditions timidly pene- trated the chinks of the Pyrenees. Contempt for what was foreign, absolute exclusion from the outside world, had been hitherto the mainspring of political life. The misery and humiliation of Charles II.'s reign had failed to rouse the inquiry whether Spain could profit by the lessons of other lands ; it was left to a stranger to mount the throne and make foreign example beneficial to this benighted people. Of course such a revolution of ancient modes of thought went on with painful slowness, as it must do in descending from the upper to the lower classes. The church still fattened ; the cloisters grew ; ecclesi- astical authority was profoundly reverenced ; the most important of Philip's ministers, Patino, had been a Jesuit; and the state was still a secondary affair. But Philip kept up his intimacy with the enlightened Macanaz, who had fled abroad from the clutches of the Inquisition; he founded the great academy which has done so much for Spanish literature and lexicography ; and he encouraged foreign artists, scholars, and manu- facturers to settle in Spain, while sending some of his own subjects abroad to study. Spanish science no longer remained a contradiction in terms. Imaginative tendencies like those embodied in the multitudinous fancies of Lope and Calderon, now exhaled in the cold, clear light of eighteenth century criticism : the frost of innumerable Boileaus lay on that century. Realities emerged out of that confused and complex state in which, hitherto, feeling, passion, subjectivity, declama- tion had given the tone to Spanish art and poetry ; and A liL,l^-^l ^^.i. J-AfL^^, Seeds of Reform. 575 Spain seemed gradually to recover her consciousness of the world of fact. Scientific criticism, economic research, comparison between European and peninsular condi- tions resulted from the new life brought into the nation. The Benedictine monk, Feyjoo, fought nobly in be- half of his country's enlightenment, ridiculed the prev- Philip V. alent notions about comets and matters of science, made the universities, where the texts had not changed since the days of Ximenes, smart for their maintenance of the obsolete scholastic philosophy ; and scourged the pride, mendicancy, and conservatism of the provinces, with caustic yet kindly severity. Thus, under Philip v., seeds of reform and regeneration were cautiously 576 Ferdinand VI. Public Security. 577 though surely scattered, waiting only for propitious cir^ cumstances to germinate. The old order, without being revolutionized, received a gentle but powerful shock, which roused men out of the lethargic apathy of the Habsburger times, and made them at least curiously forebode new things. Thus prepared, Spain came, in 1746, under the guid- ance of Ferdinand VI. — a small, anxious-minded, weakly, hypochondriacal man, of whom nobody ex- pected anything for the advancement of the country. But the people were mistaken. His pacific and benev- olent disposition gave the country thirteen years of quiet and happiness. In this brooding period, for the first time, the germs sown in the previous reign put forth into life; unfinished enterprise was carried fur- ther ; the system of taxation transformed ; the interests of the population, of industrial and productive under- takings, furthered; .roads built; harbors restored; intercourse with America regulated ; the purification of the law courts, the interest in science and education, stimulated. For the first time since Isabella of Castile, the government had money, which was employed for the good of the commonwealth. The clever minis- ters, Ensenada and C-arvajal, introduced a noteworthy activity into all branches of the public service. The destructive farming of the revenues was abolished; the burden of the Alcavala, or tax on food, and of indirect taxation, lightened; the customs system re- formed, for the benefit of the agricultural and indus- trial classes ; regularity in providing for the interest on the national debt, and in the payment of salaries intro- duced ; internal communication rendered practicable by the construction of highways and the establishment of a certain public security ; shipbuilding, increase of the marine service, and foreign trade encouraged. Be- tween 1737 and 1760, the revenues had increased from two hundred and eleven millions (reals) to three hundred and fifty-two millions, despite the lightening of the taxes, and apart from the immense sums, often amounting to five hundred millions, accruing from American sources. Instead of a deficit of one hundred and twenty-five mil- lions in the expenditures, there was a surplus of eighty- five millions. In 1737, the army had cost one hundred and eighty-eight millions; in 1760, ninety millions suf- ficed. The navy now consisted of forty-four ships of the line, fifteen frigates, and twenty-two other ships, costing sixty millions instead of fifty-one millions. The whole government expenses in 1737 had been eked out with the miserable sum of seventeen and one-half mil- lions, whereas now, almost that sum was employed in the department of justice alone, and the whole expense of running the government ran up to seventy-eight millions. Of a thorough-going reform of ecclesiastical abuses, however, under Ferdinand as under Philip, there was but little talk. In 1749, the statistics show one hundred and eighty thousand persons belonging to the clerical class, among whom one hundred and twelve thousand belonged to orders. The same numbers held good at the begin- ning of the seventeenth century, so that at least the clergy had not increased in proportion to the rest of the population, which had grown a million and a half. The extent of the domain of the church was, however, stilt prodigious. It enjoyed a revenue of three hundred and fifty-nine millions — a sum equal to the entire reve- nue of the state. Ensenada told the king that " the >^.-;»^.!0^<:^i^&i^«'*m^'miSt-^^''^^f«^ ^tmrwmf^^^^^^^^'^^^^ 578 Charles TIL A Bourbon Alliance, 579 11 monstrous number of monks and clerics was highly inju- rious to the state, that the councils, and even the popes, had declared that the only method of obtaining virtuous monks and nuns was, to permit but a small number of each." But opinions were of little avail. The bishops and chiefs of orders went on as before, giving the finish- ing touch in affairs of state, and even declaring, m junta assembled, that the state was not obligated to pay the debts incurred in the previous reign. However, the famous concordat of 1753 was an important victory for Spain over Rome. By this agreement the ancient Spanish privilege, that the crown must supervise church appointments, was re-established, and^ the nominations from Rome reduced from twelve thousand to fifty-two. The one thousand victims of Inquisitorial torment in the previous reign were reduced to ten only under Ferdinand. The Jesuits burned with indignation at the satire of '* Brother Gerund," a remarkable work by Father Isla, condemned, indeed, by the Inquisition, but universally read and appreciated for its truth and wit. A band of clever scholars appeared ; natural science was cautiously cultivated; and everywhere progress was visible. The accession of Charles III. to the throne, in 1759, after having already gained invaluable experience in his five-and-twenty years' reign as king of Naples, gave admirable fruition to all these dimly-working agencies. Well-educated in history and mathematics, and full of the spirit of French and Italian literature, full of inter- est, also, for scientific questions though fervently ortho- dox in his religious beliefs, he had gained insight into the principles and policy of government, and saw that church and state must be divorced if either was to thrive. He resented the illegalities of the inquisitor- general, who looked upon his office as co-equal with the crown. In 1762 he compelled all papal promulgations Charles III. with regard to Spain to be first submitted to the crown for its sanction. His unhappy hatred of England and his ambition, however, entangled him in the family alli- \ 580 Charles III. ance of the Bourbons, and caused him in the first years of his government to suffer a humiliating defeat. But an era in which Pombal was working so powerfully against the Jesuits of Portugal, and Frederic the Great was so gloriously upholding the cause of enlightenment in Germany, could not but affect Spain sympathetically. The Italian ministers of the king, Squilaci and Grim- aldi, ruthlessly combated the old system ; in the minis- tries and higher offices the reformers multiplied ; bigotry and sloth in the upper classes became less intense; and in the struggle between complete reform and com- plete and irrecoverable reaction, Charles happily chose the former. The Jesuits were expelled from Spain, and dieir order abolished by Clement XIV., in 1773, a victory largely due to the shrewd energy of the Spanish ambassador, Monino, afterwards Count Floridablanca. Incalculable results followed from this great step ; eccle- siastical interference in secular affairs was stemmed ; the beggary and licentiousness of the countless brother- hoods restrained ; the church monopoly in educational matters, its right to submit all literary productions to a manifold censorship, the astounding impertinence of Roman pretensions to jurisdiction over the Spanish church, checked. The chief agents in these memorable reforms were the Counts Aranda, Floridablanca, and Campomanes. They represent the essential elements and tendencies which then impelled the peninsula forward. Aranda, a grandee of Aragon and a military man of high position, was thoroughly conversant with French politics and cul- ture, a personal friend of Voltaire, a nucleus for the Spanish type of French radicalism, and a passionate '^ 580 Charles III. ance of the Bourbons, and caused hinn in the first years of his government to suffer a humiliating defeat. But an era in which Pombal was working so powerfully against the Jesuits of Portugal, and Frederic the Great w^as so gloriously upholding the cause of enlightenment in Germany, could not but affect Spain sympathetically. The Italian ministers of the king, Squilaci and Grim- aldi, ruthlessly combated the old system ; in the minis- tries and higher offices the reformers multiplied ; bigotry and sloth in the upper classes became less intense; and in the struggle between complete reform and com- plete and irrecoverable reaction, Charles happily chose the former. The Jesuits were expelled from Spain, and their order abolished by Clement XIV., in 1773, a victory largely due to the shrewd energy of the Spanish ambassador, Monino, afterwards Count Floridablanca. Incalculable results followed from this great step ; eccle- siastical interference in secular affairs was stemmed ; the beggary and licentiousness of the countless brother- hoods restrained ; the church monopoly in educational matters, its right to submit all literary productions to a manifold censorship, the astounding impertinence of Roman pretensions to jurisdiction over the Spanish church, checked. The chief agents in these memorable refomis were the Counts Aranda, Floridablanca, and Campomanes. Thev represent the essential elements and tendencies which then impelled the peninsula forward. Aranda, a grandee of Aragon and a military man of high position, was thoroughly conversant with French politics and cul- ture, a personal friend of Voltaire, a nucleus for the Spanish type of French radicalism, and a passionate m Political Reformers, 583 champion of the French alliance. He was the terror of the reactionists, the high-priest of reform, the aven- ger of the injured majesty of the king, the castigator of unbridled license, and the enemy of the Jesuits, whom he drove out of Spain in one day. His distin- guished birth and military position, too, gave his reforms an aspect of bon ton duly appreciated by the proudest nation in Europe. Yet his frivolity and irreligious taint at length displeased the conservative-tempered king and his people, and Aranda was pushed aside for Campomanes, an Asturian villager, the exact opposite of the grandee of Aragon. With a spirit of universal intelligence, a character marked by the purest unselfishness and consistency, a heart full of love for his people and patriotism for his native land, Campomanes was more familiar with European culture than even Aranda, while he did not overvalue it. Profoundly imbued with the historic sense, and with an intimate acquaintance with the past career of his country, he knew that every people, how- ever richly it may learn from foreign lands, has to fol- low the laws of its own peculiar development, condi- tioned as they are by manifold circumstances. A friend of national and local independence and self govern- ment, he appealed to public opinion and enlightened patriots. His literary activity was wonderful, and it was chiefly directed to eradicating the distorted views of life, the beggarly arrogance, the unctuous idleness, the contempt for labor and utility prevalent in Spain. As author and as president of the council of Castile, as president of the academy of history and as financier, his attention covered the whole ground of public polity, 584 Charles III. purifying and reforming. The immoderate possessions of the clergy arising from mortmain, the extension of cloister-building, the protection given by the church to privileged, immemorial beggary, the harmful preroga- tives of the great cattle and sheep companies, the guilds, and the havens, the degradation of the univer- sities, and the absurd neglect of mathematical, econom- ical, and scientific studies, were bitterly opposed by him. But his sagacious mind told him that he must not revo- lutionize — that he must first gain public opinion to- his side — that he must tranquillize and illuminate, not outrage it. Hence, in its century of most absolute absolutism, Spain became covered with patriotic socie- ties, which placed at the free disposal of the govern- ment, the help of the educated : intelligent insight, useful, practical knowledge were disseminated, and the country, emerging from the murk and wreck of the Habsburgers, began to work its way cheerfully toward the light. In 1777 Floridablanca, a highly-endowed and widely- cultured man, succeeded Campomanes in the cares of prime-minister. He differed from both of his remarkable predecessors. Though free from bigotry, he was at the same time opposed to the radicalism of the French School. Though he combated the church with his sharpest weapons when he considered its encroachments dangerous to the state, he made common cause with it so soon as the church submitted to his conceptions of a benignant absolutism. The yeasty fermentation of Aranda's principles was as repugnant to him as Cam- pomanes' subtle but perilous education of the masses in self-government, civilization, and learning. He was a Progress Retardecl. 585 great policeman and bureaucrat rather than a great statesman, — an incarnation of the eighteenth century's passion for material interests, development of the powers of the state, cabal, commanding below and obeying above, autocratic selfishness. Both king and minister had in view an unconditional maintenance of the authority of the crown ; and both admired strict orthodoxy. Such reforms as had been in preparation for two generations met great difficulties in the tough and un- changing middle class. The heads of departments were able men, but detail work, application of principles to practice, shattered against the colossal reefs of indo- lence, ignorance, and official corruption. The higher nobility were hardly to be moved out of their attach- ment to empty external pomp ; they could hardly be induced to take an interest in educating either them- selves or the masses. The thousands of pompous pre- bendaries, the tens of thousands of superstitious, unemployed, and careless monks, clung to the old order of things, which was their very existence. And the only immediate result of so much anxious prepara- tion seemed to be that Spaniards were less fanatical, less prcud of imagined excellences, more ready to fol- low a new order of things than a hundred years ago. The attempts to manufacture the products of the coun- try, to start the mines again, to revive business by the building of canals and turnpikes, to repress mendicancy by the establishment of houses of correction, swallowed huge sums without immediate beneficial consequences. The magnificent saltpetre works at Madrid, for in- stance, lost something like three reals on every pound of material. 1'he great spinning establishment erected 686 Charles III. War of the Succession, 587 by the archbishop of Toledo for the employment of the poor, ended in disaster. Hundreds of millions were spent on roads which were left unfinished. Num- berless speculators spread their mazy nets over the land. The census of 1787 showed indeed a consider- able decrease in the clergy, and the convents were re- duced one-third in number as compared with the seven- teenth century ; but the ninety-five thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine persons who lived in three thousand one hundred and eighty-nine convents, were a frightful burden to bear. Among the seventy thousand secular clergy, there were only twenty-two thousand priests. The elementary schools were visited by only one-tenth of the youth. Though the population had nearly doubled (10,268,150) in one hundred years, yet sixteen hundred and eleven once inhabited places now lay waste, and out of every thirteen houses, one was, even according to Spanish ideas, uninhabitable. The thirty years of reform had in 1787 increased the reve- nues only to four hundred millions reals, and expenses ran beyond income by more than one hundred millions. The two foolish wars with England compelled the issue of the vales reales, a paper currency bearing interest at four per cent., four hundred and fifty millions of which, with interest amounting to eighteen millions, circulated down to 1783. Instead of providing for the payment of these obligations in the succeeding years of peace, they were increased to meet the expenses of roads and canals. A later calculation showed the national debt bequeathed by Charles III. to be two milliards of reals. Deficit hence- forth became a regular part of each administration, though trade with America increased wonderfully after all the Spanish ports — hitherto it had been confined to Cadiz — were permitted to compete for it. Still, great things had happened in Spain since the reactionary revolt of 1766. The state had emancipated itself from the church, and was striving to counteract the church's injurious influence on the masses. The people uninterruptedly pressed forward. The measures of the government, the performances of literature, the watchfulness of public opinion showed continually a welcome growth. The nation had wound its way out of the labyrinths of Habsburger politics, and found itself abreast of many of its European compeers. The death of Charles III. in December 1788, closed the period of reform in Spain. The reign of his suc- cessor, Charles IV., was a twenty years' preparation for revolution. So much for the general considerations growing out of a survey of these three important reigns. A more precise, though brief enumeration of dates and facts will be necessary to make our sketch intelligible. The War of the Succession between Philip of Anjou, the testamentary heir of Charles II., and the Archduke Charles, second son of the Emperor Leopold of Ger- many, who also claimed the succession, is the first great event that meets us at the threshold of Philip V.'s reign. In it Charles, assisted by the Portuguese and English, more than once drove Philip from his cap- ital and seemed on the point of establishing himself as king. But Philip was deeply rooted in the affections of his adopted people ; they fought nobly for him, and the obstinate struggle was only ended by the election of the archduke as successor to his brother, Prince 1: 588 Philip K Eusene's brilliant successes in Italy over the French, at the beginning of the war, had much to do with the for- mation of the anti-Gallican Grand Alliance in 1701, be- tween England, Holland, and Austria, for the purpose of preventing the union of the two crowns of France and Spain on one head. Louis's great antagonist, William III. of England, however, died in 1702, leav- ing the country to Anne. Assisted by the counsels of Godolphin and Marlborough, the queen became formi- dable to Louis; Cadiz was plundered by an English armament, and the "plate fleet" from America de- stroyed during Philip's absence in the Italian cam- paign ; Charles III., as the archduke called himself, landed at Lisbon with eight thousand men ; and Philip's cause looked gloomy, . Marshal Berwick, a natural son of James II. by Marlborough's sister, commanded Louis's auxiliaries in Spain, and the duke of Vendome began to check the victorious career of Prince Eugene in Italy. In 1704, Sir George Rooke executed the memorable capture of Gibraltar, which has ever since remained in the hands of the English. But the great battles to which the War of the Succession owes its celebrity, were fought in Germany and the Netherlands, where Marlborough commanded with sixty thousand troops. The batde of Blenheim in 1704 relieved the emperor from impending ruin, immortalized Marlbor- ough and Prince Eugene, and menaced the French with annihilation. The fantastic Peterborough, with his bold, able, and skilful tactics in Spain, greatly aided the cause of the archduke. Barcelona fell by a daring stratagem of Lord Peterborough's, and almost the whole of Murcia, Valencia, and eastern Spain acknowl- 588 Philip r. Eugene's brilliant successes in Italy over the French, at the beginning of the war, had much to do with the for- mation of the anti-Gallican Grand Alliance in 1701, be- tween England, Holland, and Austria, for the purpose of preventing the union of the two crowns of France and Spain on one head. Louis's great antagonist, William III. of England, however, died in 1702, leav- ing the country to Anne. Assisted by the counsels of Godolphin and Marlborough, the queen became formi- dable to Louis; Cadiz was plundered by an English armament, and the ''plate fleet" from America de- stroyed during Philip's absence in the Italian cam- paign ; Charles III., as the archduke called himself, landed at Lisbon with eight thousand men ; and Philip's cause looked gloomy. Marshal Berwick, a natural son of James II. by Marlborough's sister, commanded Louis's auxiliaries in Spain, and the duke of Vendome began to check the victorious career of Prince Eugene in Italy. In 1704, Sir George Rooke executed the memorable capture of Gibraltar, which has ever since remained in the hands of the English. But the great battles to which the War of the Succession owes its celebrity, were fought in Germany and the Netherlands, where Marlborough commanded with sixty thousand troops. The batde of Blenheim in 1704 relieved the emperor from impending ruin, immortalized Marlbor- ou"-h and Prince Eugene, and menaced the French with annihilation. The fantastic Peterborough, with his bold, able, and skilful tactics in Spain, greatly aided the cause of the archduke. Barcelona fell by a daring stratagem of Lord Peterborough's, and almost the whole of Murcia, Valencia, and eastern Spain acknowl- Peace of Utrecht. 591 edged Charles. Barcelona was again besieged by Philip, reduced to the last extremity, but relieved at the critical moment by an English fleet. Saragossa and Madrid fell under Peterborough's eccentric and dashing manoeuvres ; the splendid and decisive battle of Ramilies in the Netherlands, in 1706, crowned Marl- borough's arms with glory. In the panoramic shiftings of the war, Philip soon re- turned to Madrid, Charles was soon driven into Cata- lonia; Louis positively rejected all demands of the Grand Alliance that he should compel his grandson to abdicate, declaring that if he must make war, it should not be against his own children ; though the sanguinary battle of Malplaquet, in 1709, won by Marlborough and Prince Eugene over marshal Villars and the French, caused him to repent. The Czar Peter of Russia, and Charles XII. of Sweden, were meanwhile in the north, waging their terrible wars, and threatening to involve one or another of the German states in their disputes. In the south, Philip had again (17 10) fled from Madrid. But the death of the emperor, Joseph I., left his throne vacant to his brother Charles ; and as the Grand Al- liance had never contemplated the union of all the hereditary dominions of the house of Austria, Spanish and German, under one crown, the peaceful solution of the question was now accomplished. By the peace of Utrecht, in 17 13, Philip was acknowledged king of Spain and the Indies ; Naples, Milan, Sardinia, and the Netherlands were assigned to the emperor ; Sicily fell to the Duke of Savoy ; England retained her con- quests of Gibraltar, Minorca, Newfoundland, and Hud- 592 Philip V. son's Bay ; and the emperor was obliged to recall his troops from Catalonia. Scrofula carried off the king's first wife, Maria Louisa, in 1714. Philip abandoned himself to squalor and de- spair, and could only be roused by the Princess Orsini, the favorite of his wife, who proposed another match (Isabella Farnese). A woman of unrivalled conversa- tional powers, tact, and eloquence, Orsini had exercised undisturbed ascendency over the queen, and as Louis's tool influenced Spanish politics at all points. Her savage treatment by the new queen, and expulsion to France in the depths of winter, is one of the common- places of Spanish history. Louis's death in 1715 brought Isabella's truly Italian genius for intrigue into luxuri- ant play. In 1724, Philip abdicated in favor of his son Luis^ _! it is supposed with the hope of acquiring the sovereignty of France on the expected death of Louis XV. The French king, however, recovered ; Don Luis was carried off by the small-pox after a reign of eight months ; and Philip, who had taken a solemn and irrev- ocable vow never to resume the crown, found it conve- nient to forget. His morbid melancholy so increased between 1730 and 1734, that he would lie in bed for months, and, like Juana, refuse to attend to any sort of business. In the Italian campaign of 1 733-5 Naples and Sicily were reconquered by the young duke of Parma, Philip's eldest son. Spain concurred in the Pragmatic Sanction of 1738-9, by which the Archduchess Maria Theresa was guaranteed the right of succession to the Austrian dominions of her father, Charles VI. War with England broke out in 1739, owing to commercial disputes growing out of the treaty of Utrecht. The Death of Philip V, 593 death of Charles VI. in 1740 was the signal for a gen- eral explosion around the heroic figure of Maria The- resa, who, empress-queen in consequence of her hus- band's election as emperor in 1746, worsted both France and Spain in their efforts to support the Bourbon claim to the imperial throne. Maria Louisa. A sudden fit of apoplexy carried off Philip in 1746, before he could obtain help either from medicine or confessor. Though Alberoni and Ripperdk — the latter one of the most extraordinary adventurers of which history gives any account — were not specially able or 694 Ferdinand VI. honest ministers, they improved the country, rehabili- tated to some extent the army and navy, and assisted Philip in his undeniable desire to govern well. The king spent enormous sums in building a Spanish Versailles in the clouds— San Ildefonso, or La Granja, whose magnificent fountains and gardens still hang, four thousand feet above the sea, on the acclivities of the Guadarramas. It is a fairy palace about which sparkle the purest mountain waters : great avenues of pine ; silver and purple peaks ; an immeasurable plain out- spread in front; an ancient chateau filled with the quaint tapestries, clocks, and furniture of the time of Louis XV. ; long garden-vistas, down which gleam bril- liant masses of sculptured marble in frolicking w^ater ; — such are San Ildefonso and its surroundings. At thirty-eight, when he succeeded to the throne, Ferdinand VI. did not give promise of so long and stirring a reign as his father. Nor, in fact, did his irresolute, indolent, amiable life last beyond thirteen years after his accession. He was fortunate in possess- ing an excellent wife — Barbara of Portugal — whose sense compensated for her homeliness. The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, closed the war in which Maria Theresa, France, England, and Spain had been so long engaged. Henceforth Ferdinand lived in peace, de- voted his attention to improving the agriculture, trade, and manufactures of Spain, opposing an enlightened op- position — though Bourbon to the bone — to the Inqui- sition, and building up the resources of his exhausted countr)'. He was tolerably fortunate, too, in the selec- tion of his ministers. The Marquis de la Ensenada, a peasant, banking-clerk, and financier, rose to be minister The Lisbon Earthquake, 595 of marine, war, and finance. Attached to France, he was a friend of the avaricious queen, and by her influence and that of the celebrated singer, Farinelli, was retained in office. It was to the enchantment of Farinelli's music that Philip had owed his recovery from an almost hopeless attack of hypochondria. The singer's exqui- site voice had charmed the king out of his filthy couch, where he had lain for months neglected and half raving with gloom. Ferdinand and his queen were both music-worshippers ; they retained Farinelli, and his influence was unbounded, though "I am a musician, not a politician," said he, when one tried to bribe him. Don Jose de Carvajal, Ferdinand's other minister, was a man of solid judgment and sound sense, pure, just, and incorruptible. His opposition to French in- fluence counterbalanced Ensenada's inclination in that direction. The revolt and reduction of the seven Jesuit settle- ments in Paraguay, in 1750, attracted attention to the power of that immense Catholic organization in the New World. These settlements had been founded with great toil, expense, and judgment by Jesuit missionaries seht out to convert the Indians, bring them under civil- ized institutions, and teach them the elements of knowl- edge. The proposed cession of the settlements to Portugal in exchange for Nova Colonia — a remote colony — caused the revolt. The horrible earthquake of Lisbon, in 1755, preceded Ferdinand's death by four years, and caused the whole population of the city to live in tents or huts throughout the winter. The disgrace of Ensenada ensued on the discovery that he had sent out secret orders to the West 596 Charles IIL Indies to attack the English logwood settlements on the Musquito coast. Spain kept aloof from the general European war of 1756, in which England and Prussia ranged themselves against the empire, France, Russia, Sweden, and Poland. William Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham, rose to eminence at this period, and courted the alliance of Spain so earnestly that he even offered Ferdinand Gibraltar if he would deviate from his neu- trality and join England. The death of Queen Barbara in 1758 threw the king into agonies of grief, from which he never recovered. His death in 1759, childless, opened the way for his brother, Don Carlos (Charles III.), king of the Two Sicilies. Perhaps Charles did not find this loss so irreparable when he discovered that his brother's econ- omy had left fifteen millions of dollars in the treasury. The abolition of papal patronage had also relieved his subjects from an unendurable evil. In 1759 the Jesuits, who were supposed to have been implicated in the plot to murder King Jose of Portugal, were proscribed and banished by the weakest and most bigoted court in Europe. Charles III.'s long reign was crowded with important events. His eldest son was an epileptic idiot who could not succeed to the Italian dominions, which were there- fore settled upon his third son, Ferdinand, proclaimed king of the Sicilies. Charles banished Farinelli, in- stalled his Neapolitan favorite. Marquis Squilaci, made provision for the payment of the national debt, which had been neglected by the economical Ferdinand, and after the death of his gentle queen, Amelia of Saxony, in 1760, plunged into the first of his disastrous wars THE LEANING TOWER OF 6AKAGOSSA. ^11 The Bourhon Compact. 599 against England. England under Pitt had nearly oblit- erated the Spanish navy and conquered the colonies of her enemy in nearly every part of the globe. Charles, urged by the Duke de Choiseul, joined France in the Bourbon alliance called the Family Compact, by which the different sovereigns of the Bourbon blood bound themselves to support one another against all the world. War was formally declared, after long negcftiations be- tween the courts of Madrid and St. James, in 1762. Havana, with a booty of three millions sterling, fell into the hands of the British ; Trinidad, in the West Indies, and Manilla, capital of the Philippines, followed; and the famous Acapulco galleon, with its cargo worth three million dollars, became the spoil of the Union Jack. In 1763 a treaty of peace was signed between Eng- land, France, and Spain, in which France ceded to England Canada, the adjacent islands, '' Louisiana '» lying east of the Mississippi, Dominica, St. Vincent, Tobago, Senegal, and many parts of the Coromandel coast. Spain bought back Havana, Trinidad, and Ma- nilla by the cession to England of the Floridas and the right granted to the English to cut logwood in the Bay of Honduras. Spain recovered the rest of " Louis- iana " lying west of the Mississippi. General Wall, a foreigner, who had been one of Fer- dinand's trusted ministers, was now succeeded by Mar- quis Grimaldi, a Genoese, whose lively conversation, comely person, and real abilities had brought him to the notice of Charles. Wall, however, soon wearying of the cares of political life, is said to have rubbed his eyes with ointment so as to give them the aspect of 600 Charles IIL inflammation, and feigned inability to carry on the gov- ernment any longer. Grimaldi tightened the links be- tween France and Spain and the other royal families of Europe, by forging new and more complicated matri- monial chains. The favorite Squilaci's career ended with the famous Sombrero-and-Manta revolution of 1766. He ha(f tried to quell the incessant assassinations occurring in the capital, by bringing about the abolition of the huge sombreros and voluminous mantas which the dangerous classes affected, and by means of which they could either effectually disguise themselves or carry concealed weapons with impunity. A storm of indig- nation ensued, intensified by his efforts to clean the disgusting filth of the capital, regulate the price of food, and light the city. Both king and favorite fled the town ; the intended abolition was not carried out ; and the mob triumphed. The Count de Aranda suc- ceeded Grimaldi. From the zealous protector of the Jesuits, Charies became their implacable enemy, after his mind had been artfully poisoned by insinuations that they were the prime agents in the Madrid insurrec- tion. They were cruelly expelled at midnight, in March 1767, and departed in thousands to Italy and Corsica. Charles's course was followed by the duke of Parma and the king of the Sicilies. To the universal prayer that they might be permitted to return, Charles was inflexible, and the Order of Jesus was formally sup- pressed by Clement XIV., in 1773. Aranda introduced many reforms in army and navy, and adopted the system of tactics mvented by Frederic the Great. His efforts to liberalize Spanish ideas were War with England. 601 unremitting: he limited the monstrous privileges of sanctuary, by which almost any criminal could flee for safety to almost any one of the innumerable churches in the kingdom ; he opposed an audacious front to the Inquisition; he rooted out haunts of robbers and ban- ditti, and established a colony of intelligent Germans, Swiss, and Italians in the Sierra Morena. His revolu- tionary tendencies, however, were so marked that they caused his removal, and many of his best reforms were brought to naught. Louis XVI., husband of the fascinating Marie An- toinette, had now succeeded to the throne of France. In Spain, Don Jose Monifio, afterwards created count Floridablanca (1775), had become prime minister. The never-ending disputes with Portugal over the Brazil- ian colonies were accommodated by the cesssion of Nova Colonia to Spain, and the securing of an offen- sive and defensive alliance between the hitherto bitter enemies. The outbreak of the American War of Inde- pendence had its reverberations all over the globe. France joined the United States (1778); Spain kept aloof for a while, but in 1779 frivolously declared war against England. A rebellion in the wealthy trans- atlantic provinces of Spain, which had been so tranquil under Philip V. and Ferdinand VI., however, kept the government inactive. An alarming insurrection, pro- voked by the exactions of the corregidores, and headed by the so-called Inca, Tupac-Amaru, broke out in Peru, but was crushed in 178 1-2. The Spaniards took the Bahama Islands in 1782 ; but Gibraltar, which had now been blockaded three years, proved impregnable. The capture of this mighty rock was Charles's passionate I. \ ] 602 Charles III. wish. "Is Gibraltar taken?'' was his first question every morning. The American war was drawing to a close (1782). Spain, realizing that her navy had been nearly annihilated and that twenty millions sterling had been added to her debt, signed the preliminaries of peace in 1783. In Jmie, 1786, ended the millennium of war in which she had been engaged with the Ma- hometans, by which a peace was brought about between Algiers and the peninsula, piratical incursions from Barbary put an end to, and thousands of Spaniards, who had been pining in hopeless slavery, liberated. Internal regulations and foreign negotiations ; efforts to recover Gibraltar ; to meddle in German politics at the death of Frederic the Great, in 1786; disapproba- tion of the projected quadruple alliance of Russia, Austria, France, and Spain ; relaxation of the irksome intimacy between the two Bourbon courts ; and nervous horror of French republicanism, now frightfully on the increase by the success of America ; the financial em- barrassments of the French government, and the as- sembling of the long-discontinued states-general, filled up the remaining years of Charles's life. Spain, how- ever, had gradually become saturated with French ideas and French philosophy. Literature, the new school of statesmanship, the relaxation of the censorship of the press, the starving of the Inquisition, hitherto so abun- dantly fed with Jews and Protestants, all showed prog- ress. Roads and canals, employment of cultivated aliens in the ministries, the establishment of a public bank, the introduction of an effective police, the util- ization of the clergy in providing for the poor, — such Death of Charles III, 603 were some of the enduring monuments of Florida- blanca's beneficent rule. Charles died in 1788, seventy-three years of age, within a month of his favorite son, Don Gabriel, who fell a victim to the prejudice against inoculation. n CHAPTER XXV.. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. — REIGNS OF CHARLES IV. AND FERDINAND VIL THE twenty years between the death of Charles ni. and the abdication of his ignoble son, in 1808, form one of the most dismal episodes of Spanish his- tory. The brilliant eminence to which Spain had gradu- ally attained under Campomanes, Aranda, and Florida- blanca suffered disastrous^ eclipse ; the slowl)'-healing wounds of a nation rent by uncontrolled passions, by a long course of wretched despotism, by moral evils without name or number, were torn open again ; favor- itism reigned supreme ; an imbecile sat on the throne ; and a weak, passionate, and criminal Italian queen scandalized Europe by the open profligacy of her morals. Charles IV. was already forty years of age at his accession (1788), and physically was a singularly hand- some and stately specimen of kingship. His good- nature and absolute ignorance permitted the reins of government to glide imperceptibly into the hands of Maria Louisa, princess of Parma, his wife, — a clever, inventive, ambitious, and voluptuous Machiavelli in petticoats, who made of tlie palace a den of vice, and ruled the country with a rod of iron. Ploridablanca 604 ^ -tS?' 4^ * Sift i- *• '.ifpn « ;• (h i' A; I'h IN THE CHURCH Ui .» .-..»-• .^j,.. I ii.Arv, .-i.^K.ALiUSi.V. CHAPTER XXV., THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. — REIGNS OF CHARLES IV. AND FERDINAND VIL THE twenty years between the death of Charles HI. and the abdication of his ignoble son, in 1808, form one of the most dismal episodes of Spanish his- tory. The brilliant eminence to which Spain had gradu- ally attained under Campomanes, Aranda, and Florida- blanca suffered disastrous eclipse ; the slowly-healing wounds of a nation rent by uncontrolled passions, by a long course of wretched despotism, by moral evils without name or number, were torn open again ; favor- itism reigned supreme ; an imbecile sat on the throne ; and a weak, passionate, and criminal Italian queen scandalized Europe by the open profligacy of her morals. Charles IV. was already forty years of age at his accession (1788), and physically was a singularly hand- some and stately specimen of kingship. His good- nature and absolute ignorance permitted the reins of government to glide imperceptibly into the hands of Maria Louisa, princess of Parma, his wife, — a clever, inventive, ambitious, and voluptuous Machiavelli in petticoats, who made of the palace a den of vice, and ruled the country with a rod of iron. Floridablanca 604 lA lilt <_111K<.U Ut ULK LAl;V DEL I'lLAK, SAKAGUSbA. m Decency Lost. 607 and his companions soon retreated into the back- ground; in 1790 the great minister found himself com- pelled to give up the portfolio of justice ; Count Cabarrus, a zealous and successful promoter of re- forms, was arrested; and Don Caspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the noblest patriot, profoundest thinker, and most eminent writer that Spain had produced in the eighteenth century, was removed from his influen- tial position at Madrid and banished to the Asturias. Campomanes fell in 1791, and was succeeded by a feeble creature of the court. Thus the influence of the queen had extinguished every spark of decency and respectability that still illumined this tempestuous court. The government became the sport of chaotic caprice. Decrees promul- gated to-day were revoked to-morrow. Lawlessness, arbitrary power, intrigue reigned in the palace and throughout the kingdom. The mighty murmurs of the revolution over the Pyrenees were unheeded, or mis- understood, with idiotic obtuseness or complacency. Spain and her vast colonial empire lay exposed to the ravages of France and England. The monstrous mis- government so transformed the land, that in a few years the prosperous Spain of Ferdinand VI. and Charles III. w^as hard to recognize. Thousands of greedy fingers hunted in the treasury. Whole towns and provinces — as in Galicia in 1790 — were in rebel- lion for months, without any one being able to bring them to order. Even Floridablanca had his head turned by the " French madness,'* — the horror of in- novation, hatred of foreigners, and revolution, — and became a dark reactionist and progress-hater. The 608 Reign of Charles IV, foreign policy of Spain was a mass of ridiculous errors and inconsistencies. Recalled to power in 1792, it seemed as if Floridablanca, deep as his dread of French radicalism had made him sink in the slums of reaction, would reorganize and restore the country, and govern with the power and intelligence he had shown under Charles III. But he was removed the same year, a victim of the furious accusations of the queen. His rival, Aranda, the representative of the Aragonese party of progress, peace, and French ideas, took his place, and was intended by the queen to pave the way for her frivolous favorite, Manuel Godoy, — a young officer whom she adored, made a "grandee of the first class," and, to the scandal of the aristocracy, visited in his own palace. "The grandees grumbled, and — crept to the feet of the favorite." Aranda was graciously dismissed at the end of the year, and Godoy, now duke of Alcudia, took the control of the ministrv as secre- tary of state for foreign affairs. It was fortunate for the French revolution that, at the period when it broke out, a set of kings sat on the various thrones of Europe about as effective as a chorus of Aristophanic frogs. In this the revolution found its justification. Frederic the Great had been followed by Frederic William II. ; Leopold II. by Kaiser Franz; Charles III. of Spain by Charles IV.; and George III. of England was to be revealed to the world by the glowing pen of Miss Burney. How dif- ferently might the course of the revolution have fash- ioned itself, had it found opponents of the greatness of Frederic II., the wisdom of Leopold, and the quiet dignity of Charles III ! In Spain, rooted as she was Confusio7i and Despotism, 609 in century-old adoration of her reforming Bourbon kings, four years— 1 788-1 792 — sufficed to extinguish the last recollection of the beneficent works of three generations; and with the shadow of Aranda whole- some progress, the enlightenment of the people, the revival of agriculture and industry, the purification of legislation, the protection of lawful freedom, the con- trol of officials, and the establishment of the authority of the government, passed away, and left behind only confusion, despotic power, unmitigated license, a throng of hateful lickspittles, and the depraved spectacle of an obscene queen and her lover. So low did Spain sink, that the revolutionary convention paid no atten- tion to her pressing desire for the mitigation of the fate of Louis XVI. The murder of the most Christian king by a godless mob produced an extraordinary sensation in Spain, and the land rang with cries of vengeance, from Cadiz to Bar- celona. The queen gave way to tears; the king swore; Godoy spoke like a hero ; Catalonia, Andalusia, Valen- cia, Galicia stormed the throne with their impassioned petitions for war against the regicides, — and nothing was done. Spain, with intense loyalty and love of the dynasty, rose as one man, with an enthusiasm really sublime, — grandees, beggars, clergy, bankers, corpora- tions, — and demanded vengeance on the Bourbon massacrers. What an incomparable opportunity for the young duke and the queen to atone for the past, satisfy the great claims of the present, secure a worthy future for themselves and the faithful nation who, with such touching and unreserved confidence, thronged round the throne and supplicated their even stili be- 11^. 610 Reign of Charles IV. loved rulers to lead them against the hosts of French terrorism ! But nothing was done either towards a restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in France or an extension of the Spanish possessions. Held in check by the united powers of Austria, England, Prussia, and Spain, in 1793, the revolutionary armies remained for a while stationary; and Godoy let the priceless opportunity slip, at the cost of eight hundred and sixty millions of reals in the first six months of the war, while exposing the boasted Spanish prowess to the ridicule of Europe. The foaming excitement of the people died away, and was succeeded by a deep depression at the prospect of an endless war which would complete the financial ruin of the land. The French inundated Guipuzcoa and Navarre ; several all-important frontier fortresses capit- ulated ; the valleys of Upper Catalonia were thick with enemies. Incompetent generals, ruined finances, a worthless soldier}^ plunged the loyal and credulous nation into despair. A conspiracy was discovered in June, 1794, whose object was the downfall of the cor- rupt Godoy, to whose criminal ambition, incapacity, and baleful influence on the queen the humiliation and demoralization of Spain were attributed. The royal residence soon swarmed with symptoms of revolu- tionary smypathies, due to the eloquence of the royal immorality, the French pamphlets and proclamations,' and to the hopeless bewilderment caused by rumors of a hostile march on Madrid. The flight of the king's family from Madrid to Seville was spoken of in 1794. Between 1795 and 1802 Spain became virtually a vassal of her powerful neighbor. The queen, at first an enthu- d^ «X A. * AA.V^«kA^A.> 610 Reign of Charles IV. loved rulers to lead them against the hosts of French terrorism ! But nothing was done either towards a restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in France or an extension of the Spanish possessions. Held in check by the united powers of Austria, England, Prussia, and Spain, in 1793, the revolutionary armies remained for a while stationary; and Godoy let the priceless opportunity slip, at the cost of eight hundred and sixty millions of rea/s in the first six months of the war, while exposing the boasted Spanish prowess to the ridicule of Europe. The foaming excitement of the people died away, and was succeeded by a deep depression at the prospect of an endless war which would complete the financial ruin of the land. The French inundated Guipuzcoa and Navarre ; several all-im])ortant frontier fortresses capit- ulated; the valleys of Upper Catalonia were thick with enemies. Incompetent generals, ruined finances, a worthless soldiery, plunged the loyal and credulous nation into despair. A conspiracy was discovered in June, 1794, whose object was the downfall of the cor- rupt Godoy, to whose criminal ambition, incapacity, and baleful influence on the queen the humiliation and demoralization of Spain were attributed. The royal residence soon swarmed with symptoms of revolu- tionary smypathies, due to the eloquence of the royal immorality, the French pamphlets and proclamations,' and to the hopeless bewilderment caused by rumors of a hostile march on Madrid. The flight of the king's family from Madrid to Seville was spoken of in 1794. Between 1795 and 1802 Spain became virtually a vassal of her powerful neighbor. The queen, at first an enthu- Jl^AVA^.^ a^. A A \_«< » G-odoy Overthroiv7i. 613 siastic adherent of the war-party, was in a few months transformed, by the defeat of the Spanish arms, into as enthusiastic an adherent of peace. Godoy resolved to seek relations with the republic ; too late, however, to avoid exposing to France and England the disintegra- tion going on in the provinces, and the powerlessness of the omnipotent favorite. One shameful overthrow after another annihilated Godoy's forces in Catalonia, while he buried himself in a whirl of giddy dissipations and extravagance. The conclusion of peace at Basel in July, 1795, — signed by Godoy a year after, — ac- companied by favorable conditions (evacuation of th^ territory by the French, intimate alliance with the republic, and the cession to France of the Spanish side of San Domingo), gave universal content. Godoy bore off triumphantly the title of " Prince of Peace," sup- ported by gifts of the richest state domains; while Aranda, Floridablanca, Cabarrus, and Jovellanos, who had been languishing in exile or prison, were recalled or released. The peace of Basel, so far as Spain was concerned, was a bit of sublime farce. What it really established was not the glory, but the absolute dependence of the peninsula on the republic. In this it was happily aided by the inimitable frivolity of the Prince of Peace ; and its consequences were the gradual annihilation of the naval power of the country, the undermining of its im- mense colonial network, and the complete wreck of the finances. What compatibility could there be between their Catholic majesties — the most absolute type of Bourbons — and the revolutionary French republic, at the very moment red with the gore of the Bourbons 614 Charles IV. themselves?. The treaty of San Ildefonso, as the Spaniards call it, was both a literal repetition of the Family Compact of 1761, and in many not unessential points — being both offensive and defensive — went beyond that celebrated defensive alliance. The battle of Cape St. Vincent, in February, 1797, between the English and Spanish fleets off the south point of Portugal, resulted, in spite of the immense superiority of the Spaniards in ships and artillery, in the defeat of their fleet, and contributed more than any- thing else to the ruin of the Spanish marine. The English swept the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Carib- bean. The colonies, which had thriven so wonderfully under the tranquil despotism of the corregidores and Jesuits began to ignite from the revolutionary sparks thrown off by the mighty volcano in France. English intriefue sealed the doom of the colonies, and sowed seed of discord and discontent, soon to bear abundant fruit. The vicious and despotic administration of Godoy crowned the anarchy of the Indies and Sierras. Between 1793 and 1796, the total income was twenty- four hundred and forty-five millions of reals ; the total expenses, thirty-seven hundred and fourteen millions, leaving a debt of over twelve hundred millions. Paper money to the amount of nineteen hundred and eighty millions was already in circulation. The deficit in one year amounted to eight hundred millions of reals. A galling satire which rang like a clarion through the country after the battles of San Vincent and Trin- idad, depicts the matchless confusion of the times. It stated that Spain had generals enough to command the armies of the world, innumerable regiments and ships, li' A Satiric Picture. 615 but no soldiers or sailors. There were more churches than houses, more priests than burghers, more altars than kitchens in the capital. Even in the filthiest nooks and darkest holes of vice, saints, waxen figures, censers and lamps abounded. At every step one ran against a pious fraternity, a procession, or a gang of penitents telling their beads. The wealth of decrees and declarations was inexhaustible, but justice was no- where to be found. Laws flew out of the Castilian man- ufactory before you could say amen. The affirmation of an ancient statute cost a lawsuit of a century. The judges hung twenty citizens in one day, and disputed twenty years before they would take a mule from a wagon. Every spot had its municipal code, its local taxes, its own statutes. It was bliss indeed, to arrive saturated and chilled, at a Spanish inn, and then be obliged to seek one's meal among the grotesque multi- tude of shopkeepers alone authorized to sell, the one wine, the second oil, a third meat, a fourth salt. A skin of must or a bushel of oats could not be obtained without laborious search for the individuals alone privi- leged by the municipality to deal in these things. Mis- chievous superstition, incurable vice, universal laziness, monumental pride — such are the chords which thrill harshly through the work of the clever and pitiless author, whose intimacy with all the details of public and private life was undoubted. The ungovernable passion of his countrymen for bull-fighting is stigmatized. If Rome was content with bread and amphitheatres, Mad- rid was content with bread and bulls. The mean Eng- lishman, the unbelieving Gaul, spoil day and night with their dangerous political controversies; the precious 616 Charles IV, Spaniard lives in sweet ease, and — delightful fasting. T/iey quarrel a month until they get a law passed ; we have thousands of laws ready in a trice without the trace of a contradiction. T/ieir gums are too fastidious for cream; we swallow thistles with rapture. T/iey sting like bees when they are being robbed of their honey ; 7ve are sheared and slaughtered as patiently as sheep. They, insatiable of riches and happiness, live like slaves of trade and industry ; we are content and proud in poverty and beggary. 77iej^ deify freedom and consider a single link of the slave-chain an intoler- able burden ; we carry a whole chain in ignorance of what freedom is. Heroes with them are rare ; heroes with us shoot up like leeks and onions. Such is the essence of this famous but faithful dia- tribe attributed to the historian Vargas Ponce, and giv- ing an all too conscientious revelation of this cancer- eaten society. The liberal tendencies which began to be shown by the government culminated, in 1797, in the temporary banishment of the inquisitor-general and the arch- bishops of Toledo and Seville, on the discovery of a plot to overthrow the favorite, and transfer him to the dungeons of the clerical party. Jovellanos was re- called to the department of justice in 1797. The plundering of Rome in 1798 by the French, and the proclamation of a republic instead of the papal tyr- anny, plunged the country into profound apprehension, and rendered Godoy, who had now espoused a daughter of the Infante Don Luis, more abject a dependent of the all-overshadowing republic than ever. To crown the scandal, the republic demanded his dis- 616 Charles IK Spaniard lives in sweet ease, and — delightful fasting. T/iey quarrel a month until they get a law passed ; we have thousands of laws ready in a trice without the trace of a contradiction. JV/c/r gums are too fastidious for cream ; we swallow thistles with rapture. T/iey sting like bees when they are being robbed of their honey ; 7ife are sheared and slaughtered as patiently as sheep. T/iey, insatiable of riches and happiness, live like slaves of trade and industry ; we are content and proud in poverty and beggary. IViey deify freedom and consider a single link of the slave-chain an intoler- able burden ; we carry a whole chain in ignorance of what freedom is. Heroes with them are rare ; heroes with us shoot up like leeks and onions. Such is the essence of this famous but faithful dia- tribe attributed to the historian Vargas Ponce, and giv- ing an all too conscientious revelation of this cancer- eaten society. The liberal tendencies which began to be shown by the government culminated, in 1797, in the temporary banishment of the inquisitor-general and the arch- bishops of Toledo and Seville, on the discovery of a plot to overthrow the favorite, and transfer him to the dungeons of the clerical party. Jovellanos was re- called to the department of justice in 1797. The plundering of Rome in 1798 by the French, and the proclamation of a republic instead of the papal tyr- anny, plunged the country into profound apprehension, and rendered Godoy, who had now espoused a daughter of the Infante Don Luis, more abject a dependent of the all-overshadowing republic than ever. To crown the scandal, the republic demanded his dis- wn Tufn"> Mi *«ir Hi G-odoy and Napoleon. 619 missal as prime-minister in the same year. The humors of the queen, flickering hither and thither Uke a wind- blown light, systematically bewildered and humiliated the government in its whole attitude towards France. One minister succeeded another as in the beginning of the reign ; the cabinet became a miserable compound of irreconcilable elements. The infamous avarice, illiberality, and fanaticism of Don Jose Caballero in the ministry of justice, were found side by side with the passionate, anti-clerical radicalism of Urquijo in the foreign office and finances. The relative independence of the Madrid cabinet at this period was ended by the successful return of Bo- naparte from Egypt, the ruin of the Directory, and the elevation of the first consul. Godoy was formally re- stored to power as a tool of Napoleon, and a treaty between the two countries was signed in 1801, by which Napoleon's fervent desire to grapple with England by means of the Spanish fleet was gratified. In January, the same year, Lucien Bonaparte and the Spanish suc- cessor of Urquijo, Cevallos, signed a treaty whose basis was a common operation against Portugal. But the Spanish court obstinately refused to take part in the invasion and spoliation of its neighbor, more par- ticularly as the queen's favorite daughter. Dona Carlota, was the wife of Don Joa, Prince-Regent of Portugal ; and the queen, refusing to aggrandize Spanish Amer- ica at the expense of Portugal and its possessions, was indefatigable in working for peace. This attitude was maintained until Bonaparte assumed the supremacy. War then broke out ; Portugal was overwhelmed by fifteen thousand French, and sixty thousand Spanish 620 Charles IV, soldiers with Godoy as generalissimo, and the little kingdom was partially dismembered. After this " war of oranges " Godoy, swelling with heroic pride, exulted in being compared with Frederic the Great. After ten frightful years of war, Europe by the peace negotiations of Amiens in 1802, enjoyed a brief spell of tranquillity. Spain was fortunate enough to enjoy nearly three years of neutrality, though nothing was essentially advanced by it. The land, both in peace and war, was the slave of Napoleon and Talleyrand. The sums which the military operations had not swal- lowed up were squandered by the extravagance of the court or by the uncurbed greed of the minions with whom Godoy peopled every branch of the administra- tion. The six years between 1802 and 1808 were years of infamy, of profound criminality on the part of the Prince of Peace, perpetually coquetting with Napoleon and dreaming of an independent sovereignty in Portu- gal, and of shameless squabbles in the royal family. The mere mention of an honest meeting of expenses created a paroxysm of disgust, terror, and indignation in the palace. Three years before (1799), the paper money had fallen forty per cent, in value, and the appalling news circulated that a new emission, to the amount of ten hundred and sixty million reals, was to be made in April of the same year. Of the eighteen hun- dred and twenty-three millions expended in 1799, the palace swallowed one hundred and five millions, justice seven (!), war nine hundred thirty-five, finance four hundred and twenty-eight, foreign affairs forty-six, the navy three hundred. In October, 1802, on the occasion of the marriage of the prince of the Asturias, fifty-seven Louisiana Sold. 621 field marshals, twenty-six lieutenants general, and hun- dreds of colonels were named. The navy, which counted only fifteen seaworthy ships of the line and frigates, swarmed with honorary officials on enormous salaries. Godoy's annual revenues ran up to one mil- lion r^^/j— more than all the judges of the kingdom. The pestilence, failure of harvests, famine, and earth- quake, added to the gloomy horrors of this epoch of distraction (1800). The immorality of the governing authorities gave an infinity of details to the general misery. The peace with England, after the treaty of Amiens, left behind its remembrance, in a debt of four thousand millions. By the treaty of 1800, Spain had ceded Louisiana to France, on condition that France would agree not to cede it thereafter to any other power than Spain. Bon- aparte, however, falling into financial straits, impudently sold it to the United States for eighty million francs, . without even informing Spain. The miserable dallying of Godoy with France and England, now again at war, resulted in a threat on Bonaparte's side, of planting eighty thousand Frenchmen in the heart of Spain. Hence the ignominious treaty of 1803 with France which rendered war with England unavoidable, cast a mountain of responsibility on the peninsula, yoked the Spanish exchequer to a dismal monthly contribution of six million francs, and exceeded infinitely the stipula tions of 1796. The year 1805 buried the relics of the once glorious Spanish fleet in the seas of Cape Finisterre (July 22), and Trafalgar (October 20). The emperor simply sent his orders to Madrid and the Spanish ports. Disobe- 622 Charles IV. dience was a crime. The art of paying salaries had for thirty-three months been forgotten in Spain. And yet, this noble people still glanced with idolatrous de- votion up at the illumined and divinely-appointed being whom it recognized as its king. The word " majesty " still thrilled through the Spaniard with the holiest shud- der of his loyal heart. Add to this, *' Catholic," the miraculous touch of the healing and universal church, and the foundations of Spanish patriotism were even yet intact in the reverence of the masses. French diplomacy began in 1801 to enhance and utilize the natural indignation of the young prince of the Asturias against the favoritism of the palace. Fer- dinand's dark and resolute character had already, in 1 79 1, created the fear that the heir of the Indies might eventually turn out another Philip II. His mother hated, Godoy dreaded, him ; and the audacious thought had even entered Godoy's mind to push aside the hereditar}' prince, and, in the eventuality of Charles's death, get himself and the queen appointed regents of the realm. The queen-mother was even accused of twice frustrating the hopes of her pregnant daughter-in-law, and in 1806, of poisoning her. The same year found Europe covered with vassal kings of Napoleon ; Italy, Germany, Holland, were presented to his brothers or his brothers-in-law, or his allies. Spain and Portugal remained ; and when Godoy found that Prince Ferdi- nand's character put an impassable obstacle in the way of his ambition in Spain, he turned his attention to Portugal, actually feeling the crown on his head when the French troops received orders to march on Portugal Treaty of Fontainebleau. 623 — a crown of thorns to be obtained from the hands of the great emperor who hated and despised him. The capture of Buenos Ayres by the English -- a city which dominated the South American domains as far as the Cordilleras — threatened to revolutionize America. Godoy, infinitely tickled by being called Man Cousin by Napoleon, felt himself ready to do anything for the almighty Olympian who now thundered his commands from distant Warsaw. Junot's columns crossed the Spanish frontier in 1806, and the treaty of Fontaine- bleau, signed by Duroc on the part of the French, and by Izquierdo on the part of Spain, completed the con- spiracy against Portugal. This treaty dismembered that kingdom and made three states of it, one of which was to be Godoy's. The factions of the Escorial broke out anew in dis- graceful scenes. Ferdinand, now a widower, reduced to despair, sought help of Napoleon, and begged the honor of allying himself with an imperial princess. For years, it was said, no post of importance had been given at the palace, unless the wife or the daughter or the sister of the applicant, was handed over to the prime-minister. Ferdinand knew this; and yet his helplessness made his position still more difficult. He was suddenly arrested, deprived of his sword, and shut up in his room under a charge of treason ; but his con- fession and profound penitence secured his pardon. In November, Junot overran much of Portugal and the royal family fled to Brazil. Dupont and Moncey followed him, the first with twenty-four thousand, the second with twenty-five thousand Frenchmen; who f i j; 624 Charles IV. entered Spain without giving the least notice to the authorities. Ferdinand's popularity, meanwhile, had risen in 1807 in -the same proportion as the hatred of the populace against the queen and Godoy. The reorganization of the universities by the Prince of Peace, in 1807, had undeniable merits ; but with these admirable reforms, he infuriated the clergy and the hidalgos by proposing 'fl'i/-^ Godoy. to utilize some of the enormous possessions of both ; and it was said that, while the people were starving, he had stolen five or six hundred millions of reals out of the treasury and the pockets of his subordinates. Monks and preachers painted his godlessness in the foulest colors, and circulated the most hideous narratives concerning their majesties : the queen, who in the palace had a Napoleon's Popularity, 627 seraglio arranged like the Turks' and Moors', wanted to marry Godoy and poison the king; the king was in love with Pepita Tudo, Godoy's "double wife;" and Godoy compensated himself by Pepita's younger sister. The wondrous popularity of Napoleon had even pen- etrated the Pyrenees, and was identifying itself in Spain with the cause of Ferdinand and liberation. Consider- ing the European relations since 1805, it seemed an almost inexplicable anomaly that Spain should have been treated by Napoleon with such indulgence. Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Prussia, Russia had felt his powerful hand and been forced into new paths : Spain alone for twenty years had seemed hardly to perceive the universal tempest. The French troops had stood on the Ebro in 1795, with Castile fully de- fenseless before them, and they had evacuated the country without the cession of a village. In 1801 Godoy had roused the utmost fury of Bonaparte ; 1802 and 1803, conspired with England and Naples in the most insulting manner; and in 1806, believing in the invincible spirit of the Prussian army, had issued a warlike proclamation against the distant emperor; and he had always succeeded in supplicating pardon from the most contemptuous despot in Europe. But none of the states subject to the Corsican had done so little, none might have done so much, for Napoleon ; and now that the whole Napoleonic policy was concentrated in the intense desire to humiliate England, and the solution of this paramount problem wholly depended on the possession of a suitable fleet, he began to turn his eyes slowly in the direction of the peninsula, and slowly to evolve his mighty plans of conquest. 628 Chaides IV. But the unconquerable difficulties arising froni the peculiarity of the Spanish monarchy, its composition, the stubborn and haughty character of the people, the nature of the country, and the singular confusion be- tween religion and patriotism always existing in the Spanish mind, and lashing it to fury on the least insult from a stranger, had hardly escaped the transcendent clairvoyance of his glance. From 1801 he had busied himself more than once with Spanish things. The immense successes of the year 1807, leaving him free to avenge the insults he had suffered from Godoy ; his knowledge of the discords in the royal household ; the prayers and protestations of father, son, and favorite ; and the absolute necessity of bendmg England, ■—: all- urged him to the marshalling of his myriads on the Spanish frontier. Hence the order to General Dupont to assemble an army of twenty-five thousand mert for the expedition into Spain. The two corps of Dupont and Moncey seemed to him, in 1808, sufficient for the coup intended against the centre of Spain ; other divisions were gathered from Italy and Germany, and planted at the foot of the Pyrenees to cover these. The enigmatical designs of the emperor filled Charles IV. with anguish and anx- iety ; but they were plain to anybody from November, 1807 : he wanted to be lord of Spain as he had become lord of Italy. The passion of the conqueror blinded him : Charles was a fool, a coward, a hen-pecked, con- temptible bigot ; Ferdinand was a hypocrite, an igno- ramus, a lazy and faithless wire-puller; everybody knew Godoy was a scoundrel, the queen a hag: would it not be easy to descend with irresistible might on • G-overnment Paralyzed. 629 such a mass of incompetency, scatter it to the four winds, and install some scion of the Napoleons on the throne of St. Ferdinand ? Junot had already solemnly, by imperial decree, deposed the house of Braganza at Lisbon, and laid upon the land a contribution of one hun- dred million francs. The French troops of the north began to advance from Burgos and Valladolid toward Segovia and Aranda, in the very heart of Spain. The conscription of 1809 was about to raise his giant army to nine hundred thousand men. The Spanish govern- ment, too, as if paralyzed or indifferent, made no sharp protest, nor took any measures whatever for the military security of the country, either of which might have given the eagle-eyed emperor precisely what he wanted, — an excuse for a fierce and downright proclamation of war. Murat, therefore, was sent off in all haste to Bay- onne, that he might betake himself thence to Madrid at the head of the advancing columns ; the Spanish government all the time fancying, or pretending to fancy, that Napoleon's object was simply to strengthen the Mediterranean and other ports threatened by the English! French troops poured into Spain through the Basque Provinces, the Pass of Roncesvalles, on Pampelona, and into Catalonia, where General Du- hesme installed himself, at Barcelona, in February. The fortresses commanding the north were soon en- tirely in the hands of the French. CHAPTER XXVI. REIGN OF FERDINAND VII. AS if by a flash of lightning, an intimation of Na- poleon's intentions seemed to be at last con- veyed to these obtuse Bourbon consciousnesses. The royal family prepared for flight. Immense agitation shook the peninsula at the deeds of violence perpe- trated by the invaders in Navarre and Catalonia. The whole responsibility was shifted on the hated govern- ment ; for either, as it was said, its accursed ambiguity of action had forced the former ally to his evil meas- ures, or it was voluntarily surrendering the very bul- warks of Spanish independence to the cunning enemy. The French, meanwhile, were moving on Madrid, — with peaceful intentions all the while ! Godoy and the queen resolved to fly from the royal residence of Aran- juez, — a sort of Spanish Fontainebleau, filled with exquisite gardens, fountains, and palaces ; when the people, hearing of it, broke out into frenzy, threw them- selves on Godoy's hotel, ruined the luxurious furniture, dashed the windows to pieces, threatened to kill him, and compelled the king to dismiss the odious minister. Charles IV., in a paroxysm of terror, abdicated on the 19th of March, 1808, and on the plea of "ill-health," and to the boundless enthusiasm of the populace, an- 630 Murat at Madrid, 631 nounced Ferdinand VII. as his successor. An era of universal happiness seemed about to dawn, for was not the martyr Ferdinand king t was not Godoy deposed and about to be executed ? and the imbecile kins: and the termagant queen forever relegated to private life ? And the two thousand millions of Godoy's stolen prop- erty would largely pay the national debt ! Murat, even when a few miles from Madrid, knew no more of Napoleon's intentions than one of his own subordinate generals; and he had hitherto begged un- availingly for enlightenment. His own passionate am- bition was to be made king of this beautiful and wealthy realm ; would it be fulfilled } The queen meanwhile had bitterly rued the prema- ture abdication of her easily intimidated and easily governed husband. She now began a series of in- trigues with Murat, crying for help against her " rebel- lious " son. Murat surprised Ferdinand by recognizing only Charles IV. as king, of Spain, though the lovely spring day on which the new monarch made his tri- umphal entry into Madrid showed Murat the population in a state of indescribable joy and unanimity over his accession, while the nation almost to a man hailed him as a deliverer. Forty thousand French, now in the metropolis, began to maintain a menacing attitude, under shelter of whom Charles recalled his " forced " abdication, and the queen and her daughter described their son and brother to the foreign general as the blackest ingrate and schemer. Now came the opportunity for Napoleon. He suc- ceeded in alluring first Ferdinand, then, a few days after, his father, mother, and their faithful " Manuel " 632 Reign of Ferdinand VII. (Godoy), to Bayonne, holding out to them the prospect of a vague settlement, the necessity of an interview, consuhations over what was to be done for Spain, etc. With incredible complacency both parties — now mortal rivals — fell into the net. A government so long con- sisting simply of the prime minister could not be hard to frighten. Difficult indeed, however, was the manipu- lation of this haughty people, who felt themselves out- raged, degraded, scandalized to the core by the un- seemly haste of the unhasting Spanish majesties to throw themselves into the arms of the magnificent up- start. Ferdinand was expostulated with. It was of no avail : he rushed on his fate like a true Bourbon, and, once across the frontier, was treated by Napoleon with one indignity after another. He was forced — some say under fear of death — to abdicate; Charles IV. was reinstated, but refused obstinately to return to Spain ; and for the pitiable mess of pottage of a French palace and a sum of money,, surrendered his birthright of the immemorial crown of Hispania to the truculent invader. By this time the 2d of May — date ever memorable in the annals of the peninsula — had dawned on the people of Madrid, where 2i junta composed of grandees and dignitaries represented the Spanish government, so shamefully abandoned by its kings. The effort to en- tice the remaining members of the royal family to Bay- onne filled the huge masses of peasantry, who had flocked to the capital to witness the Sunday parade of the imperial guard, with deep-murmuring indignation. A collision ensued: then a frightful massacre of the innocent spectators ; then for a week all the corpora- i)i\oviL/i;< Oiii^xixi-xtij, 1 xww V J-.'* wx. \j& .ai^a.VA. 632 Reign of Ferdincmd Vll. (Godoy), to Bayonne, holding out to them the prospect of a vague settlement, the necessity of an interview, consultations over what was to be done for Spain, etc. With incredible complacency both parties — now mortal rivals — fell into the net. A government so long con- sisting simply of the prime minister could not be hard to frighten. Difficult indeed, however, was the manipu- lation of this haughty people, w^ho felt themselves out- raged, degraded, scandalized to the core by the un- seemly haste of the unhasting Spanish majesties to throw themselves into the arms of the magnificent up- start. Ferdinand was expostulated with. It was of no avail : he rushed on his fate like a true Bourbon, and, once across the frontier, was treated by Napoleon with one indignity after another. He was forced — some say under fear of death — to abdicate; Charles IV. was reinstated, but refused obstinately to return to Spain ; and for the pitiable mess of pottage of a French palace and a sum of money, .surrendered his birthright of the immemorial crown of Hispania to the truculent invader. By this time the 2d of May — date ever memorable in the annals of the peninsula — had dawned on the people of Madrid, where Tnjufita composed of grandees and dignitaries represented the Spanish government, so shamefully abandoned by its kings. The effort to en- tice the remaining members of the royal family to Bay- onne filled the huge masses of peasantry, who had flocked to the capital to witness the Sunday parade of the imperial guard, with deep-murmuring indignation. A collision ensued : then a frightful massacre of the innocent spectators ; then for a week all the corpora- iiAbyoij SAiiji.'jjii:.xviy, L iwj \ L^\,tLA \ji: ^i r AVA. •1 ■A Depression, 685 tions of the overawed city did homage to Murat as governor-general of the empire. Spain was being prop- erly reduced to order! Did not Charles IV., with his newly obtained civil list of thirty millions of reals, — "with the integrity of his empire maintained," " the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion alone tolerated in Spain," " the prince whom the emperor shall place on the vacant throne independ- ent," — shiver in his imperial palace of Compiegne as he watched these things? And Ferdinand? who, for his pretty behavior in so gracefully abdicating, had pocketed an income of 1,100,000 francs, and was to be entertained by the Talleyrands at Chateau Valen^ay, with theatre, comedians, the possibility of an intrigue with some joliefiUe^ attached. The powerful fleet — 76 ships of the line and 51 frigates — of the time of Charles III. had been suf- fered to fall to pieces ; the absolutely worthless govern- ment had, during Charles IV.'s twenty years' reign, added but 5 ships of the line and 12 frigates to the fleet, in 1808 ! And of these many were unseaworthy. The condition of the arsenals and navy-yards was deplor- able. The army, nominally 120,000 strong, really amounted to only 60,000 with which to oppose Napo- leon ; and there were under the generalissimo 5 cap- tains-general, 87 lieutenants-general, 127 field-marshals, 252 brigadier-generals, and 2,000 colonels! As for finances, there were none. The state debt amounted at this period to more than seven milliards of reals, but one-third of which was due to earlier gov- ernments. And the Castiles had lost one-third of their population by epidemics and famines. 636 Reigji of Ferdinand Vll, Such was the gift which the "grand pioneer of new forms of life, the consummator of God's revolutionary judgments on ancient Europe," was about to make to his eldest brother, Joseph, then king of Naples, with the pretended sanction of the representative bodies of Spain. It is undeniable, however, that the ripest and most honest conviction of many of the most distinguished Spaniards inclined to the emperor, nauseated as they were with the paternal charivari of the Bourbons, now as loathsome as the dynasty of Habsburgers. The mighty mass of the people, however, — that deep, slumbering, loyal, long-sulTering mob, — shrieked at the brutal despotism of the emperor, at last awake to the enormous responsibilities of the hour. Not since the Arabian invasion had flooded the land from Cadiz to the Asturias, under Taric, had such an invasion im- pended. The noblest men of the eighteenth century, like Campomanes and Jovellanos, were Asturians ; and out of the Asturias, for the second time, the tide of resistance was to flood, before which the hitherto resist- less conqueror was to bend. The Asturians, piercing the impenetrable veil that hung over the emperor's projects, sprang to arms in May, 1808, and declared solemn war on Napoleon. A single week sufficed to transform the whole of Spain, from the Cantabrian Sea to the Bay of Cadiz, and from the Ocean to the Medi- terranean, into a sea of flame. Of the hundred and fifty deputies called by Napoleon to Bayonne, to give national sanction to Joseph's pre- tensions and draw up a constitution, only ninety-one ap- peared. The gentle and accomplished Joseph loathed Joseph Bonaparte. 637 the idea of forcing himself on a gallant people ; but, overwhelmed by the prayers and reproaches of his broth- er, he yielded, and hoped to win the hearts of his new- subjects by kindness, intelligence, and good government. In July he set off from Bayonne with his new constitiition in his pocket, — doubtless a great improvement on pre- existing ones. Engagements with the insurgents took place almost simultaneously. Saragossa underwent its first brilliant siege with sublime heroism, and was fired to the loftiest pitch of exaltation by the valor of the two- and-twenty-year-old Maid of Saragossa ; and its success- ful resistance worked indescribably on the rest of Spain. The defeat of the Spaniards at Rio Seco greatly de- lighted Napoleon. Joseph, who had now entered Madrid, found his posi- tion every day becoming more desperate, amid a popu- lation absolutely untamable. A French army under Marshal Moncey was beaten back from Valencia; an- other under Uupont and Reding, plunging too deeply into Andalusia in its efforts to protect the French squadron lying at Cadiz, capitulated to Castanos, at Baylen, July 2 1, 1808, to the number of more than seven- teen thousand men. Joseph fled instantly from his cap- ital of a week, followed by not a soul of his two thou- sand domestics. At Burgos he took breath, while the news made the emperor writhe with fury. "I'll send you Ney and one hundred thousand men, and in the autumn Spain shall be ours ! " But it took six tempestuous and irretrievable years before not Spain, but Bonaparte, was conquered ! How bitterly Joseph repented exchanging " les doux loisirs du trone de Naples," for that Madrid where, even 638 Spain under Joseph Bonaparte, as king, it was said that his dreaded brother reigned a hundred times more than he did ! And nine-tenths of his kingdom was in rebellion, while the French generals who had captured Barcelona, Burgos, and Vittoria, were virtually the prisoners of their conquest. . In Portugal, the arrival of Sir Arthur Wellesley, in July, 1808, at the head of ten thousand English, gave a nucleus about which the insurrection could gather, — a movement due to the luminous foresight of Canning, who saw that Spain must be England's battle-ground in this struggle of giants. Reinforcements from England soon raised his troops to thirty thousand. The over- throw of the French af Vimeiro, August, 1808, com- pelled Junot to sign the convention of Cintra, by which the French army was compelled to evacuate Lisbon and Portugal, though with all the honors of war. The invinci- ble legions were defeated ; the beginning of the end was at hand ; the colossal pride of Napoleon was humbled. He resolved himself to come to Spain and superin- tend the vast military operations he was about to inau- gurate against the twelve or fifteen local and even mu- tually hostile governments then existing in that country. The supreme y//;//<^ sat at Aranjuez under the presidency of Floridablanca. Sir John Moore was now the com- mander-in-chief of the English forces in Portugal. The Spaniards had a foretaste of Napoleon in the bonfires of Burgos, — fed by the furniture and musical instru- ments of the city ; while the emperor himself crossed the Guadarramas and descended on Madrid, where he arrived on the anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, December 2, 1808. By several successive decrees he abolished the Inquisition, suppressed the lines of cus- Napoleon in Spain. 689 tom-houses that separated the provinces, and formed the great obstade to the unity of the peninsula, and with a stroke of his pen annihilated the feudal rights which were the basis of the power of the grandees. Joseph had returned to Madrid among other impedhnenta, and imagined himself now firmly seated on his throne, more especially as Blake had been defeated in the North. Sir John Moore was defeated and slain in 1809, by Soult, at the battle of Coruna, and the Spanish armies fled right and left before the serried masses of the French. In January, 1809, the emperor, impelled by the arma- ments of Austria and the apprehension of a continental war, quitted Spain, leaving the incapable Joseph "camp- ing rather than reigning at Madrid." The wondrous second siege of Saragossa in 1809, conducted for the Spanish by the heroic Palafox, and for the French by Lannes, a siege lasting fifty days, during which one- third of a garrison of forty thousand were placed hors de combat and the twelve thousand that surrendered pre- ferred prison to the service of Joseph — gave the gentle- hearted king another taste of that bitter disillusion which he had all along been poignantly expressing to his mother. And Palafox, dragged half dead to the dungeon of Vincennes, symbolized the unbending spirit of the people. The same year (1809) saw Soult's unsuccessful expe- dition to Portugal, — a disaster due largely to the un- changeable plans of the emperor, who, five hundred leagues from the scene of action, insisted that his plans of campaign should be executed ; and to disobey was worse than to be defeated. More fatal than all, dazzled by the hope of planting 640 Spain under Joseph Bonaparte. his victorious eagles in Lisbon, he had left Spain, after his brief and triumphant campaign, in the hands of eight or nine ambitious and irreconcilable generals ; Soult in Portugal, Victor at Merida, Jourdanat Madrid, Mortier and Suchet in Aragon, Saint Cyr at Barcelona, Keller- mann at Valladolid, Bonnet in Biscay, and Lapisse at Salamanca, — between whom bitter rivalries existed ; who each, perhaps, hankered after independent principalities ; and who could with difficulty, if at all, be brought to act together on a concerted plan. Strangest of all, the emperor was in profound error as to the disposition of the inhabitants, who, he curiously enough thought, would *'aid the French in suppressing the insurrection." Wellesley now commanded in Portugal; Carvajal, La Cuesta, and La Romana commanded the three Spanish armies of the centre, west and north, while there were innumerable groups of insurgents without commanders. The gross vanity, incapacity, and carelessness of Soult were no match for the clear vision and cold manoeuvering of Wellesley. Portugal was miserably lost for France, and a fatal blow dealt by the check to the morale and discipline of its armies. The second Andalusian expedition of 1809-10 was more mischiev- ous in consequences than the first. Soult, lately so dis- honorably driven by the English from Oporto, was named generalissimo of the three armies of Galicia, Portugal, and old Castile, and became, in the absence of the emperor, the real king of Spain. In the great battle of Talavera (July, 1809), the advantage ultimately remained on the side of the allied armies. In the Andalusian movements, though Cordova, Seville, and Granada fell into the hands of the French, they were LA FUENTE DEL CISNE (FOUNTAIN OF THE SWAN), MADRID. Wellington at Lisbon, 648 open, indefensible cities, while Cadiz, the key of Anda- lusia in a military and political sense, escaped. From hence, as once from the remote corners of Galicia and Asturias, the regeneration of Spain was to come. The third French expedition to Portugal, under Mas- sena, shattered against Wellington's impregnable lines of Torres Vedras — one of the most gigantic works ever executed, covering five hundred English square miles of surface, and consisting of a triple series of enormous fortifications, defended by six hundred can- non, the object of which was to protect the approaches to Lisbon. This was the third time that Wellington had purged Portugal of the presence of French soldiers. The assembling of the national cortes in September, 1810, at Cadiz, was of supreme importance, and its installation terminated the mission of the regency pre- viously in office as the highest tribunal of the country. General Blake, Admiral Ciscar, and Captain Agar, were named the successors of the former five regents. Though the yellow fever raged in the city, the cortes refused to abandon it, and in 18 12 effected its capital work, the "Constitution of 1812." This constitution inaugurated representative govern- ment in Spain, abolished torture, the Inquisition, and most of the convents, founded the liberty of the citizen and the press, and improved the judiciary. The seign- orial rights attached to thirteen thousand three hundred and nine out of the twenty-five thousand three hundred and twenty villages of the peninsula were abolished, and though the nine thousand men's convents of 1626 had fallen to two thousand and fifty in 1808, these were considerably reduced. But unfortunately this brilliant : » it' 644 Spain under Joseph Bonaparte, constitution died even before it was born, and was suc- ceeded by an absolute monarchy which utterly crushed The military operations of the years 1810-12, con- ducted by Soult against Badajoz, Victor and Marmont against Cadiz, and Saint Cyr and Suchet in Catalonia and Valencia, employed a force of four hundred thousand P>ench, and might have resulted in the entire conquest of Spain, had not Napoleon, now (1812) intent on his cel- ebrated Russian campaign, withdrawn many troops from Spain, and thereby hopelessly weakened his prospects in that countrv. Under such circumstances beating Wellington and a nation almost immeasurably endowed with patience, enthusiasm, and power of resistance, — a nation that had fought the Moors for a thousand years and were fully equal to fighting Napoleon and his marshals for six, — was impossible. Wellington's genius triumphed brilliantly in the great battle of Salamanca, July, 1812 : Joseph evacuated Madrid in haste and retired to Valen- cia ; the treacherous Soult withdrew from Andalusia (August, 1812); and the two and a half years' siege of Cadiz was raised. Though Joseph returned for a brief space to Madrid, the year 18 13 saw the evacuation of Spain by the enemy. Wellington, now generalissimo of the Spanish armies, won the famous battle of Vittoria in June, 1813, over King Joseph, and ended almost at a blow the dis- mal tragedy which, really begun in 1807 by ihe inva- sion of Portugal, was rendered utterly abortive by this last disaster in 18 13. Annexation of the Ebro provinces, as the Spanish frontier of France, was a Bourbons Restored, 645 dream no longer to be realized. The French were in full retreat, flowing torrent-fashion through that Pass of Roncesvalles, which in Charlemagne's time had proved so fatal to their countrymen. Eighty thousand men remained of the four hundred thousand that had been poured into this bottomless pit of blood. Returning to Paris in 1813, the emperor began nego- tiations with the prisoner of Valengay, with whom a treaty was signed December 11, 1813. Joseph was deposed; Ferdinand was reinstated. In 18 14 a double restor- ation took place, in France and in Spain, of the ancient Bourbon dynasty — a dynasty whose characteristic it was, never to understand the necessities of the times nor the instincts of the countries it had to rule. Louis XVIII. in France, and Ferdinand VII. in the peninsula, represented ignobly enough the principle of divine right and passive obedience. The allies entered Paris in March, 18 14, and the emperor, caught in an inextri- cable net, was a prisoner on the island of Elba. On his arrival in his dominions in March, 18 14, three suggestions were made to Ferdinand, relative to the constitution of 1812 : to swear to it, not to swear, or to swear with mental reservations. His perfidious charac- ter prompted to the last. The South American colonies meanwhile had not es- caped the tremendous political agitations then revolu- tionizing Europe. The impulse towards entire emanci- pation from the mother-country started in 180S, and was consummated in the independence of Mexico in 1829. It was gloriously shown that " Christopher Co- lumbus had not conquered the New World to feed the muleteers of La Mancha and the cobblers of Castile," 646 Ferdinand Vll. The revolt broke out at Caraccas, in Venezuela (1810). Then came the turn of Buenos Ayres, at the other extremity of the continent; New Granada, Paraguay, Chili, Mexico, with varying success. Bolivar and Sucre assured the independence of Peru in 1824-26. And all that kept that " dust of republics, incessantly swept by the wind of revolution," from unifying into one huge South American federal organization, was the im- mense and compact monarchy of Brazil, flourishing anew under the House of Braganza. In May, 1814, — the year of the great congress of Vienna — the last smothered cry of the national cortes was suppressed. The deputies were arrested; the memorial stone of the Constitution, erected in the pub- lic squares of the cities, overturned ; and no trace* of protest either from people or army was heard. At last there was a king again. The day which saw the liberation of the country from the yoke of the stranger, saw it almost hopelessly sink beneath the yoke of its well-beloved king, the incarnation of cruel, base, " tricky " absolutism, a vile debauchee, " beginning and ending in blood and mud." The three periods of Ferdinand's reign embrace the six years, from his return to Madrid in 18 14 to the revo- lution of 1820, and the resurrection of the cortes and Constitution of 1812 ; the second extends from 1820 to the capture of Cadiz, and the fall of constitutional government in 1823; and the last, from 1823 to Ferdi- nand's death in 1833. The period between 1808 and 18 1 4 was interrupted by exile and the usurpation of Joseph Bonaparte. The first period saw the recall of the Jesuits; the S'^-C^ BASQUE PEASANT. li^ asm,. A Neiv Despotism. 649 ^lite of Spain, such as Arguelles, Martinez de la Rosa, and Herreros, condemned to the galleys; the liberal constitutional party proscribed ; the free-masons extend- ing their vast hidden system over the land as a perma- nent conspiracy against the encroachments of crown and clergy ; monarchical, terrorism organized, and the noble outburst in Andalusia (1820) headed by Riego, whose name, given to the national hymn' has become famous as the synonyme of constitutionalism in Spain. In March, 1820, Ferdinand was compelled by the popular clamor to convoke the cortes ; to confide the principal portfolios to liberals drawn from the galleys (Herreros, Perez de Castro, and the two Arguelles) ; to abolish the Inquisition forever ; to free the press, and to re-establish the national militia. Civil war broke out in May, 1822, and with it came misery, famine, and ruin. The Holy Alliance, led by France, intervened ; the Due d'AngouIeme, at the head of one hundred and fifty thousand men, entered the peninsula in 1823, to crush the insurgents, restore a "scion of Henry IV. to the throne," and hand over the devoted land to ten years more of proscription and torture with the restoration of Ferdinand who, tempora- rily set aside, had been carried off a prisoner by his subjects to Cadiz. Ferdinand owed his second deliverance (1823) to France, as he had owed his first to England. The fall of Cadiz — the liberation of the king — endowed Spain with a new despotism mere concentrated than ever. At Saragossa, in the course of a few days, fifteen hundred persons were cast into prison; death was decreed against the three constitutional regents who had been 650 Ferdinand VII. appointed to govern the country in his place ; a secret police sowed terror and dissension .everywhere. The frightful atrocities perpetrated by the king's order, on the rebels of Catalonia, were memorable even in this reign of rosaries, blood, and voluptuousness. '4' Ferdinand VII. In 1829, the last of the Ferdinands married as his fourth wife — he was without heir — his niece, Maria Christina, daughter of the king of Naples and sister of the Duchess de Berrv. The finances of the kingdom were hopelessly out of order; an annual expense of seven hundred million reals could hardly be met by an annual revenue of four hun- dred millions. The revolution of 1830 in France, with the expulsion of the Bourbons, caused the intensely ex- A Question of Succession. 651 cited Spaniards to desire their revolution of July and their citizen king, while Ferdinand, absolutely rotting on his thronfc with gout, debauchery, superstition, and ferocity, seemed but little capable of resisting, in his enfeebled health, the stress and storm of the times. The question of the succession now began to occupy Maria Christina. the dying king. The well known decree of Philip V. in 1 7 13, transformed by cortes into the fundamental law of the kingdom, had decided that women could succeed only in default of male heirs, not only in the direct, but in the collateral branches. The cortes of 1789 abolished the Salic law, and was confirmed in 652 Ferdinand VIL Eternal Civil War, 653 its course by the cortes of 1812, keeping in mind the ever-glorious reign of Isabella the Catholic. In 1830, Ferdinand had this law, — already half a century old, — formally promulgated, in anticipation of the pos- sible birth of a daughter, and that he might exclude his brother Don Carlos and his heirs from the succes- sion. The birth of Maria Isabella II., October 18, 1830, justified these precautions, though Don Carlos, born one year before the Pragmatic Sanction of 1789, had an absolute right to the throne in default of heirs male to his brother. A conspiracy headed by Don Carlos and his " Apos- tolical " party, wrenched from the half unconscious monarch, the annulling of the Pragmatic Sanction, to the intense indignation of the country, which was almost unanimously for Christina. Ferdinand fortu- nately returned to himself and, urged by his energetic sister-in-law, Charlotte, revoked the consent, to the horror of the court party, the reactionary clergy, most of the captains-general, and the fanatical northern provinces. The young queen, made regent, became immensely popular by her first decrees, which pro- claimed a general amnesty and re-opened the universi- ties — "the reaction having found no other means of preventing the revolution of July from crossing the Pyrenees than by dedicating Spain to ignorance." A period of so-called "enlightened despotism," under the adm.inistration of Zea Bermudez, set in. The cortes reassembled in Madrid in 1833 and swore obe- dience to the queen-regent and to the infant queen. War from that moment was declared between the Chris- tinos and Carlists — a war which has lasted intermittently to our times. In September, 1833, Spain was deliv- ered from the most odious and fatal ruler that ever op- pressed and crushed a noble people ; and the legacy he left, was an eternal civil war. The conspirator of the Escorial ; the rebel of Aran- juez; the robber of his father's crown; the worm squirming at the feet of his enemy at Bayonne ; the captive of Valengay, begging bits of colored ribbon from Napoleon while his people were pouring out their blood and gold to give him back his crown ; the jailer of the illustrious statesmen to whom he owed the res- toration of that crown ; the perjured villain, who spon- taneously engaged to be true to the constitution of 18 12, and then conspired to overthrow it the day after he had sworn ; the promoter of anarchy during the three years of constitutional government ; the invoker of the Holy Alliance and the intervention of France ; the author of innumerable proscriptions ; the coarse voluptuary : Ferdinand leaves no memory but that of a man worthy of our profoundest scorn. \ CHAPTER XXVII. THE REGENCY. -ISABELLA IL- AMADEUS.-THE REPUBLIC — ALFONSO XIL THE flocking of the liberals round the popular queen-regent seemed auspicious of happy conse- quences for Spain. But even before the king's death, indefatigable Carlist intriguers were working for Don Carlos' Was Don Carlos or Isabella to succeed ? As the kin- up to his last moment, had. done absolutely nothing'to secure the future of his wife and infant daughter from the horrors of an unending dispute, speculation was rife as to the sovereign to come Hardly was the breath out of the body of Ferdinand, who, for seven years had been subject to choking fits wheii everybody rushed to " hear his will . Ova War J Almost simultaneously the Carlists rose in V.zcaya and Alava ; the insurrection sprang up neariy everywhere over Spain. A council of regency, which represented the liberal opposition against Zea, was formed, whose object it was to assist the queen, carry on the govern- men and quell the insurrection. The Carlists, headed ZL celebrated parson qf^Villoviado, Don Geronimo Merino, -originally a goat-herd, of inimitable audacity, activitv, and a cruelty that shrank from no excess, -- gather'ed in great force in old Castile ; but were de- feated, and driven over the border to Don Carios. A oo4 The Basques, Q6^ momentary lull set in, which it will be well to employ by a slight characterization of the Basques and their history, the proper pivot and nucleus of this intermin- able rebellion. The Basques occupy an isolated position both in ori- gin and language among the nations of Europe. Not only have they preserved their hitherto unclassified tongue with strange obstinacy from the earliest times, but the popular life, the customs, the independence of the people, surviving Romans, Goths, and Arabs, live on in undisturbed vigor at the present day. In the great Habsburg wars with France, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Basques became the natural guardians of the important western frontier on the Spanish side. When the Catalans, at the eastern ex- tremity of the Pyrenees, yielded to Richelieu's allure- ments, and threw off the yoke of the Castilians, it is well known that this event contributed to the over- throw of the general supremacy of Spain. Had the Basques in the west acted similarly, the results might have been beyond calculation. But as they remained loyal, it appeared of little importance whether the few hundred thousand mountaineers paid more or fewer taxes, and the Castilians came readily to grant the poor mountain folk a privileged position in consideration of the great services they were capable of rendering. Among their privileges was the famous " nobility of blood," according to which all Basques were of noble birth, and enjoyed, both at home and elsewhere in Spain, all the prerogatives of nobility — a privilege fully established in their favor in 1582, and unconditionally reaffirmed by Philip III. in 1608, to the pique of the 656 Basque Provmces. Castilian hidalgos. Far from being satisfied, however, with their large measure of local independence, they gradually came to decline their part of the burdens of the government, formed with their three provinces and the allied kingdom of Navarre a sort of sovereign state within the state, were freed from the taxes exacted from the other provinces, gave the monarch only voluntary gifts, and were exempted from the customs system of the realm, from regular recruiting for the army, and from calling out their troops except in vivid emergen- cies. The king was not permitted to keep troops in their land except in certain towns; and the administra- tive and judicial organization of the rest of the realm was foreign to them. Thus sundered from the rest of Spain, these four provinces w^ere no less so among themselves ; and all that held them together at all, was the moral bond of their essentially similar fueros. Every spot watched with lynx eyes over its own independence ; feuds raged between the various villages, valleys, and fraternities ; and everything moved within the circle of a sharply de- fined indh^iduality which formed the delight of Jean- Jacques Rousseau. The constitution of Alava, Guipuz- coa, and Navarre, however, harmonized essentially with that of Vizcaya ; a glance at the latter will be tolerably applicable to the remainder of the Pyreneean sister- hood. The fueros of Vizcaya were comprehensively revised in 1452, 1526, and 1527, and recognized the reigning monarch not as kuig but as lord. The government was conducted by a deputation, two out of whose three members were chosen by the popular assembly, the Basque Prosperity, 657 third — called corregidor—h^mg appointed by the king from among the natives of the country. The Jutita General v^zs> the real organ of the sovereignty of Vizcaya, at which the deputies of each place met annually once, under the venerable oak of of Guernica. The compe- tent house-owners of pure Biscayan blood had the right to choose the representative of the town or village, and to instruct him for the sitting. Common interests were discussed and decided as the deputies sat on the bench under the great oak, and listened to the reports of the deputation. The delegates, dividing into two parts, drew by lot three electors, who then named several per- sons among whom lots again decided as to which should form the two deputies and the six corregidores, the latter being a committee of the classes, consisting of six cor- regidores chosen by the popular assembly as an adjunct to the deputation. The Basques had remained, fortunately, free from the influence of the evil tendencies to which the monarchy since Charles V. had gradually given way. The mis- chievous system of taxing food, and the provincial reve- nues, the suicidal customs scheme existing between the various principalities, and the monstrous corruption of officials and judges, remained far from these mountains. Hence, agriculture flourished in a fashion unknown to Castile ; the harbors were full of ships ; industrial en- terprise, mining, iron-founding, went on vigorously. The valleys were, owing to the vicinity of the Pyrenees and the rich abundance of water, Edens of verdure, though the mode of cultivation and the agricultural im- plements were of the most primitive description. But the rudest two-wheeled Basque wagon, the most antedi- 3 658 Basque Provinces, luvian laya^ were preferable to the hopeless indolence of the Castilian. Beggary, monastery soup, the idle filth of central Spain, were unknown. The loveliness of the country, the industry, genial prosperity, and noble patriotism of the people, and the comfortable appear- ance of the towns and villages, roused the admira- tion of Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1799. According to the census of 1797, only fourteen hamlets had become despoblado or abandoned, in the Basque provinces, — a feature so characteristic of Spain — while there were more than nine hundred of them elsewhere. Manorial taxes did not exist among the Basques. The home of Loyola could not of course be free from monastic estab- lishments ; but the regidar clerg}^ counterbalanced the monks, and schools flourished more than monasteries. While Absolutism made but rare and unsuccessful at- tempts to subject the Basques to its uniform order, Liberalism, in the radical form it assumed elsewhere in Spain, was distasteful to them, especially as it failed to tolerate these exasperating privileges. Hence, the Basques were prepared to fight to the death against the Constitution of 18 12, in support of the independence of their ancient fueros. The restoration of 1823 had restored their privileges, momentarily threatened in 1820. The whole Basque land stood with unanimity on the "servile" side as opposed to liberalism. They had never suffered from the absolute king ; their clergy were dear to them ; the liberals seemed to them violent tyrants, against whom their immemorial rights must be protected, as lately against the French. The liberal party therefore had nowhere fewer adherents than in these remote mountains. I •'•1,1 , r~ t '-•"•. -1 ■ V* ■ ■ M,^-::af!.;\ b!:;^'^fv "3 \vi":. -\ TWO LADIES. SKETCH MADE AT ALICANTE. Don Carlos, 661 Hence, the great influence which Don Carlos exerted in the Basque provinces, when it was skilfully sprinkled among the simple-minded, liberty-loving bigots that Don Carlos had always protected their cause against the arbitrary abolition tendencies of the liberals, that to him alone was due the salvation of their fueros. A curious paradox was the result : the freest and most active-spirited provinces of Spain, which reminded Hum- boldt irresistibly, in situation, constitution, and vivacity, of the small free states of Greece, became the chief prop and mainstay of the powers of darkness, intoler- ance, and servitude, that swarmed under the banner of Don Carlos ! And the first commanding personality that Spain had produced in forty years, — Tomas Zumalacarregui, — was, by force of circumstances, to throw his genius into the Carlist cause and prolong the death-struggle of Old Spain seven bloody and destructive years. Originally an officer in the royal army, Zumala- carregui had been forced by the bitter injustice of his superiors to proclaim boldly that his sympathies were with Don Carlos. He became commanding general of Navarre, Guipuzcoa, and Vizcaya, beat and baffled the Christinos in numberless conflicts, and developed the guerrilla warfare into a brilliant science which men- aced the very foundations of the established govern- ment. It would be fruitless to linger over the myriad coali- tions and ministries, the attacks of the opposition, the intrigues of diplomacy, the irresolution of the govern- ment wherever and whenever tact and vigor were neces- sary to the very existence of the state, the excitement 662 Christina. roused by the scandalous indecorum of the queen-re- gent, the admonitions of foreign cabinets, the dismis- sal of ministers, all through the ten years from the death of Ferdinand to the flight of Espartero. The one bright spot in the early part of Christina's regency was the comprehensive system of organization put forth by the great Spanish statesman, Burgos. Burgos was an accomplished student of the policy of Campomanes and Jovellanos ; his brain teemed with an infinite wealth of knowledge and ideas; his memorable "instruction," sent out to the magistrates, embraced in great and yet practicable outlines the most important regulations con- cerning agriculture, industry, trade, mining, popular representation, general police, public instruction, eco- nomic associations, irrigation, forestry-, weights and measures, bull-fights, sanitary and prison reform, roads, canals, public libraries, museums, theatres, and places of popular amusement. And yet, for the moment, the state possessed not a real for the accomplishment of his enlightened measures, the universities having been closed for years ; whereas, schools for bull-figTiters had been founded at considerable expense ! Many of these reforms, however, went gradually into effect. Burgos succeeded in abolishing the system of guilds by which the handworkers were oppressed, the wretched restrictions under which the once so flourish- ing sheep, cattle, and wine culture was languishing, and the senseless prescriptions that hampered the free sale of provisions; rendered all the professions and handicrafts honorable by opening to all of them the public offices of the communities, and even the doors of the nobility, previously closed by the laws of Charles HEROES OF THE CARLIST WAR. Imprisonment. 665 III. ; censured and restrained the passion for bull- baiting ; protected the theatre ; and at a stroke, by his decree reorganizing the whole prison system, lifted his land out of the utmost savagery in this regard to a level with modern civilization. The painful suspense in which the country had been kept for many decades past, vacillating as it had been between the most dismal absolutism and the extremest liberalism, and not as yet arrived at any intelligent or intelligible freedom, seemed about to be closed by the well-known Esiatuto Real^ or Royal Statute^ of April lo, 1834. Though not by any means lavish of rights and liberties, this statute worked a great progress in com- parison with the state of things that had existed for three hundred years. It excelled in very essential points, in real and permanent advantages, the declama- tory and much-vaunted Constitution of 18 12. It dis- tributed the powers in such a manner between crown, clergy, nobility, and popular interests, that each seemed content and had better guarantees than the Constitu- tion of 181 2 had offered. The cortes was to be sum- moned ; and it was to consist of two bodies, Proceres and Prociir adores. The Proceres ^^x^ constituted of the higher clergy, the grandees, prominent dignitaries such as ministers, ambassadors, generals, judges, and wealthy manufacturers, or owners of real estate with an income of three thousand dollars. They held office for life, from the age of twenty-five. The president and vice- president were chosen by the king at each meeting of the cortes. The other house consisted of deputies with an income of at least six hundred dollars, and its presi- dent and vice-president were likewise chosen by the 6(j6 Christina. kin- from a group of five selected by the deputies themselves. They were elected for three years, were re-eli"ible, and must be natives or inhabitants, for at least "two years previous, of the province from which they came. The king could summon, suspend, or dis- solve cortes, and had to swear to uphold the constitu- tion and laws. The right of petition was recognized. The execution of the laws was subject to the sanction of the king and the two houses. All taxes were voted by the cortes, -which was called together whenever deemed necessary by the king, -on the proposal of the king, and cmld be imposed for not more than two years Reports from the various ministries were re- quired. Dissolution of cortes was followed by the re-assembling of the new one within a year. Members of both houses were inviolable so far as concerned the votes and opinions given in the discharge of their duty. . ^ r.i The staiu/e was thus seen to contain most of the requi- sites of constitutional government; its defects lay more in externals, in tone, than in essence ; and it based itself happily on the ancient fundamental laws of the kingdom. The chief difficulty in its way lay in the abnormal condition of society, the irreconcilable con- trasts of religious and secular opinion, gready aggra- vated as they had been by the restoration and revolu- tion and the curious antagonism between the class which clung passionately to the moral and religious tra- ditions of the past, and the class steeped in the fash- ionable French radicalism and emancipation from every moral and religious bond. Nowhere is this abnormal state of things,- are the innumerable wounds under Cholera at Madrid, 667 which Spanish society was then suffering, — more graphically dragged to the light than in the caustic and incisive pages of the great contemporary satirist, Larra. The Quadruple Alliance of the same year, between Spain, Portugal, England and France, strengthened the foreign relations of Spain, and united, loosely enough to be sure, the four powers in their plan of expelling Don Carlos from Spain, and the Portuguese pretender, Don Miguel, from Portugal. Don Miguel laid down his arms, and Don Carlos, then in Portugal, escaped to England in an English (!) ship, whence he speedily set out in disguise for Spain. His arrival in Navarre ex- cited immense enthusiasm among his adherents. The ravages of the cholera in Madrid, 1833-4, mali- ciously attributed to the poisoning of the wells by the monks, led to frightful massacres of these innocent per- sons, and showed the almost insane condition of public opinion; for the most intensely orthodox of Catholic nations had, in a paroxysm of terror and fury, turned upon the priests it had so long worshipped, and threat- ened to root out their very existence. The opening of the cortes gave rise to most unwelcome revelations as to the almost hopeless financial difficulties of the nation, — enormous debts incurred, hundreds of millions de- ficit; the marine in pitiable plight; public instruction neglected ; the great highways between Saragossa and Barcelona, Seville and Madrid, and Madrid and Irun, bridgeless and incomplete ; and the government, with its one hundred and nineteen thousand soldiers, utterly unable to grapple with the Carlist rebellion. Wherever the eye glanced — dissolution of the force.*? of govern- ment, moral and financial bankruptcy, incapacity or 668 Chrntina. in^possibility of advancing a step;-fanaUasm b.gowy egoism rampant ; eternal opposition by grandees and deputies to wliatever saving measures might be pro- posed ; and a whirl of giddy ministries, one succeeding and blinding the other with more and more desperate exhibitions of witlessness and weakness. The moral and tactical superiority of Zumalacarregut over Rodil, Mina, and the other Spanish generals was strikingly shown in the rapid successes of the Carl.sts. A handful of soldiers breaking out '^-^^ -^''""f''^ the heart of the capital of Spa.n and the Indies plunged the peninsula into a state bordenng on chaos The complete demoralization of the royal army the constant defeats of the Cnristinos and the constant victories of Zumalacarregui, caused the government to call in the intervention of the allies ; but ^o.MV9^ declined to interfere. A momentary pause m the pan c, caused by Zumalacarregui's intended --ch °n Madr d was produced by the wounding and death of the great '' Angular personality; a stature of middle size; a head of the finest symmetry, surmounting a neck wor- thy of a Roman gladiator ; a profile that seemed snatched 1 some antfque bas-relief, whose Gre^c harmony was, however, ruffled by something peculiarly aggres live in the chin and nose; a gray eye, working with ncredible intensity under thick, overhanging brows ; a cllr, passionate, and powerful energy imprisoned within an a'uLre, monosyllabic, --j>-s nature ; inflexibly iust unselfish, inhuman ; his dazzling valor and the Ldnating might of his personality wove a spell over i 668 ChriMina. impossibility of advancing a step;-fa..atic.sm b.go y egoism rampant ; eternal opposition by sranclees and deputies to whatever saving measures might be pro- posed ; and a whirl of giddy ministries, one succeedn,g Zd blinding the other with more and more desperate exhibitions of witlessness and weakness. The moral and tactical superiority of Zumalacarregut over Rodil, Mina, and the other Sp-ish generals was strikhiglv shown in the rapid successes of theCarlists. A handful of soldiers breaking out into an . W. -n the heart of the capital of Spam and the Inches plunged the peninsula into a state bordering on chaos The complete demoralization of the royal army the constant defeats of the CMs^^nos and the consta U victories of Zumalacarregui, caused the government to call in the intervention of the allies ; but L-- P'^^'Pf; declined to interfere. A momentary pause m the pan c, caused by Zumalacarregui's intended '--'^ ""^ fj^^;^; was produced by the wounding and death of the great ''a Igular personality ; a stature of middle size ; a head of the finest symmetrj-, surmountn.g a neck wo- tirof a Roman gladiator ; a profile that seemed snatched from some antfque bas-relief, whose Greek harmony as however, raffled by something pecuharly aggr s- 2- in the chin and nose; a gray eye, -rkmg juh incredible intensity under thick, o-rhangmg bn> , a dear, passionate, and powerful energy mipnsoned with n an a'uLre, monosyllabic, "--"--"'"IVfnr'S iust unselfish, inhuman ; his dazzling valor and the Enating might of his personality wove a spell over Down with the Monks ! 671 all who approached him ; and from his death dates the slow but sure decomposition of the Carlist party. General Maroto, a dark intriguer, whom Don Carlos called in to supply his place, proved the ruin of that party. " Down with the monks ! " became the almost uni- versal cry in 1835, ^^^ led to sanguinary excesses in Catalonia and Navarre, — a flame ignited by incendiary pamphlets and consuming the land with anarchy. An- dalusia rose and demanded the constitution of 1812 ; Juntas established themselves everywhere, since the gov- ernment was powerless to govern ; again France, called in, declined to intervene in the affairs of the unhappy peninsula; and England, as a last resource from abso- lute ruin, at length proposed the formation of a minis- try under the great banker, Don Juan Alvarez y Men- dizabal. v Beginning with a captivating programme for the finan- cial regeneration of the nation, Mendizabal's impracti- cable dreams could not be realized ; his enigmatical financial projects for a moment fired the nation with enthusiastic faith in his wonder-working power, but soon brought him into discredit ; and the conflicts aris- ing between the central government and the numerous self-constituted juntas of the provinces increased the despair springing from a lost faith in the all-powerful minister. A new levy of one hundred thousand men, without a real to pay them, was made to check the dan- gerous monotony of Carlist successes in Aragon, Cata- lonia, and Vizcaya, as the new Carlist chiefs, Cabrera and Eguia, bade fair to make telling substitutes for Zumalacarregui against Espartero and General Cordoba. 6T2 Christinti. ., r,.h=,rs decree, confiscating, with few exceptions, f 1nt£ nLs o7 cclesiastical property, opened or the entire ™^^^ ° ^^.^ „f boundless resources for ; : Te'r s of' trbanUrupt state. But a nation so ^e^ttd by insecurity of ^-^^Z':^ZoZ rf fce'l l\TroX::Crop:n robber, in- LSon^^is^-t. found - ^se ^e^^^^ .ble church coffers >nffi^^^^ ^^^^^^ ,„ ,,, Paris, Madrid and Cadu. ^^i^i^.^on by the The general ^'^^'y '^~' . ,312 in Andalusia ^-/rr tte*s:ier rri.^ ^- -^ ^ :neS;""e:;y everywhere, a^^^^ San lldefonso, the ----.-^'t^f^t! palace, terri- angry mob, breaking at -^-gh' ^ ° the P ^^.^ ^^^ ,ed Christina into 2" J j-fthe na'tion should constitution of 18.2 tint ^ ^^g^. be clearly known in cones^ThJl^ ^, Naples, ^'^r^""' rfleet he ountry and saving herself bi, .ith ^tx::^^^^ -'''''"' '^'" utter stupidity, fanaticism, ^^.^^^ incapable of utilizing the s— • A^ ^^^^ negotiations were going °-J^^ ^^o^ ^.rlos, so hope- ?:rd:d^:S;re"arMXd seem. Carlist bands A New Constitution. 673 traversed Spain in all directions, and appeared before the gates of Madrid ; and if they had had any supreme commanding spirit, instead of numberless guerrilla leaders acting independently, at discord and dagger's point with each other, with the Virgin Mary as general- issima (!) and the pumpkin-headed " Charles V." telling his eternal beads, it is beyond a doubt that they would have succeeded. In 1837, ^ "revised" — though in reality perfectly new — form of the constitution of 1812 was accepted and sworn to by the cortes. This revision accepted the double chamber (" senate " and " chamber of dep- uties ") ; most of the attributions of the king ; the Catholic apostolic faith, — the abolition of whose exclu- sive claims was the first and last need of a liberal Spain ; election of one deputy, twenty-five years old, for each group of fifty thousand souls ; renewal of one- third of the senate whenever a new election took place ; and summoning, proroguing, and dissolution of cortes by the king. This was the third constitution introduced within twenty-five years, and after nine years of representa- tive government. Despite the brilliant achievements of Cabrera, — the barbarous murder of whose mother by the government, in retaliation for the son's cruelties, had raised a cry of indignation through Europe, — Espartero, since his appointment as commander-in-chief of the Spanish forces, inactive, negligent, and commonplace as he was, had gradually inflicted serious losses on the Carlists. Don Carlos himself, however, grovelling in the gross- est superstition, short-sighted, narrow-minded, and sur- 674 Christina, rounded by a host of darklings and speculators was his own greatest enemy; and the appointment of Gen- eral Maroto to the chief command, to relieve the feeble Guergue, sealed his doom. Bitter antagonisms soon showed themselves between Maroto and the "Apostol- ical " reactionaries that swarmed about Carlos Carlos himself took sides against his commander-in-chief ; but the rebellion of the latter, menacing ruin to the cause, compelled the king to submit to his dictation. Maroto, overcome with disgust at the Carlist tactics, and prob- ably influenced by Kspartero's increasing success, en- tered into negotiations, and concluded wUh Inm the well-known Treaty of Vergara, in 1839, vvhich virtually ended the seven years' war. Don Carlos passed oyer to France with eight thousand of his followers ; many o his troops took service for Isabella II.; and the flight of Cabrera over the border, in July, 1840, with five thousand troops, before the victorious legions of Es- partero, ended the first episode of this fifty years war. The Carlist defeat was followed by the exhaustion, it not annihilation, of the powers which had been con- tending so desperately against the new order of things; a victory due not so much to the vigor of the liberal party, which had been continually ravaged by seW- conflict, as to the dissensions and lawlessness of the *^ Two'of the liberal ^-:^x\:^^s,-Exaltados ^.nAModerados, -not content with fighting to the death the "legitimist absolutism" of Carlos, had, after crushing the third faction, called Progressists, themselves split into various factions ; and first one party and then the other, of the great liberal wing, governed the country by means of The Changes Profitless, 675 ministries without fixed principles and absolutely " stand- ing in the air." A period of repose, after the happily ended civil war, was indispensable, if any vital assimilation of the polit- ical forms recently given to the country was to take place. And yet both constitution and liberal institu- ISABELLA II. tions had remained stmnge to the masses, for nearly all the political changes which the land had undergone since 1834 had been forced on it by revolutionary vio- lence, court intrigue, or the arbitrary will of powerful generals; and all these changes had been sterile for the real weal of the land. The great question agitating 676 Chrutina. the country was, not this or that constitution, but "who has control of the offices and revenues of the state, and how can /and my relations find access to them? Whether Moderados or Progressists ruled, therefore, was a matter of indifference. After the treaty of Vergara, Espartero was the most popular and powerful man in Spain. He allied himself with the Progressist group against the queen-regent and her ministry, and soon had the authority of the state entirely at his beck. A crisis having arisen between Espartero and the regent soon after the opening of cortes in 1840, in consequence of the alleged refusal of the regent to sanction the law relating to the comum- dades, Christina, who was then in Barcelona with her daughters, laid down the regency, went into banish- ment, and left her children in Spain. Espartero, a man of moderate intelligence and no specially clear insight, now (1841) stood at the head of the govern- ment as regent. Dissensions burst forth m 1842; a rumor of a treaty with England disadvantageous to the commerce of Catalonia - the great commercial and manufacturing centre of Spain -roused both power- less republicans and Catholic absolutists against him The order to bombard Barcelona and reduce the rebel- lious city to order, and the prorogation of parliament by him before supplies were voted, consummated the ruin of his popularity; and in July he took refuge on an English ship, rather than face the storm of an angry cortes After Espartero's fall, Lopez, the eloquent president of the congress, was placed at the head of a provisional government, though a few months incum- Christina. 679 bency of office reduced him to hopelessness of ever doing anything for the country in what he called " that mephitic atmosphere in which thought and soul every moment sank in the wretchedness of personal interests, pretensions, and intrigues." Reform made Practicable, tT81 tive policy, soon shattered against the clamors of the conservatives, not only for the limitation, but for the extinction of freedom, and the restoration of clerical power and possessions, — hierarchical pretensions which CHAPTER XXVIII. ISABELLA IL ONLY twice since the death of Charles III. has Spain enjoyed a rule which, in permanency and relative comprehension of the needs of the country, really promoted its welfare. The first, under General Narvaez, the military head of the Moderados, main- tained itself, with various interruptions and changes, from 1844 to 1851; the second, under General O'Don- nell, persisted — something unknown in constitutional Spain — from 1858 to 1863. Though both bore a reac- tionary character, were conducted and supported by successful soldiers, and rested on a violent suppression of revolutionary tendencies, yet both held in check the excessive absolutist hankerings of court and clergy, checked by the revolution of 1854. But both eventu- ally succumbed to the hostility of these double influ- ences. As Don Carlos was no longer in the way, the exiled Christina and her emigrant party began to occupy more and more the position abandoned by him j a posi- tion defended, not with the coarse fanaticism, the stupid thoughtlessness, of 18 14 and 1823, but with elaborate argumentation, through the agency of skilful writers like Cortes and Valmes. Narvaez's brilliant beginning, ready as he was to give strong guarantees of a conserva- 680 Narvaez. found the most zealous support in Christina. Under Narvaez, however, for the first time, some of the reforms instituted by the enlightened Burgos were made prac- ticable : a tolerably regular vote of supplies was ob- 682 Narvaez, n tained ; the means for carrying on the government flowed in through the reformed system of taxation ; the sim- plest elements of human and political order appeared above the horizon ; an intelligent scheme of instruction was organized; the state began to pay soldiers and officials punctually; security of life, means of inter- course and culture were afforded ; the people began to work, learn, and obey the laws ; and though temporarily a-itated, in .846, by the marriage of Don Francisco de Bourbon with Isabella II. (prematurely pronounced of acre in 1843), and by the new scandals attaching to the queen and the queen-mother, the country, thanks to his vigorous and conciliatory policy, passed happily through the crisis of 1848. The reconciliation of par- ties was joyfully concluded by the general amnesty of 1849, and the reform of the tariff completed the eco- nomic legislation of 1845. Passion exhausted itself little by little. Railroads, highways, manufactories began to spring up on all sides; the loss of the col- onies began to be abundantly compensated by encour- agement of home industries. Unfortunately, the vicious court opened the palace doors wide to ecclesiastical influences. Narvaez, in 1851, succumbed to the machi- nations of the growing Catholic absolutist party. 1 hree years' experimenting with dreams of a restoration, of ^ the genuine Habsburg-Bourbon type, interrupting the quiet and thrivir,g work of the Moderado party, and again rousing the ancient strife, resulted in the revolu- tion of 1854. For the first time both the monarchy and Catholicism were openly and directly attacked. The scandalous acts of the court had brought into the LIBRARY OF THE ESCURIAL. I 682 Narvaez. tained ; the means tor caro-i"g on the government flowed in through the reformed system of taxation ; the snii- plest elements of human and political order appeared above the horizon ; an intelligent scheme of instruction was organized; the state began to pay soldiers_ and otBcials punctually; security of life, means of inter- course and culture were afforded ; the people began o work, learn, and obey the laws ; and though temporan y a.^itated, in .S46, by the marriage of Don Francisco de irourbonwith Isabella II. (prematurely pronounced of a-e in 1843'), and by the new scandals attaching to the queen and the queen-mother, the country, thanks to his vio-orous and conciliatory policy, passed happily through the crisis of 1848. The reconciliation of par- ties was ioxfuUy concluded hs the general amnesty of ,849, and ihe reform of the tariff completed the eco- noinic legislation of 1845. l'-'>^sion exhausted itself little bv kittle. Railroads, highways, manufactories beoan \o spring up on all sides ; the loss of the col- onies began to be abundantly compensated by encour- a-^ement of home industries. Unfortunately, the uc.ous court opened the palace doors wide to ecclesiastical influences. Narvaez, in 1851, succumbed to the inachi- nations of the growing Catholic absolutist party. Three years' experimenting with dreams of a restoration, of the genuine Habsburg-nourbon type, interrupting the nuiet and thrivir,g work of the Moderado party, and a^ain rousing the ancient strife, resulted in the revo lu- titn of 1854. For the first time both the monarchy and Catholicism were openly and directly attacked. The scandalous acts of the court had brought into the LIBRARY OF THE ESCURIAL. O'Donnell. 685 Bpen light a consistent, radical, republican, materialistic party, hitherto sneaking in corners. Espartero and O'Donnell humbled the throne in this revolution, and the former, as president of the ministry, showed his political incapacity, in the cortes of 1854-56, as conspicuously as before. The Progressists, now in power, showed the same impractical declamation, pas- sionateness, and bad temper as in 1840-43. Yet these years of commotion show an encouraging progress over those of earlier decades : the deportment of the people was more orderly, civilized, and human. The wild bar- barism of the civil war was almost unheard of, and the masses, once so susceptible to deeds of horror when urged by demagogues or monks, had grown quieter and more law-abiding. Twenty years' freedom from monasticism, and contact, however superficial, with modern culture, showed themselves plainly enough in these two years; and the revolution of 1856, collapsing as it did through its own impotence and the impotence of its leaders, held down by O'Donnell, who had kept Espartero in check as war minister, did not give rise to the hitherto usual acts of fanatical violence. But for the clerical tendencies of the priest-ridden court, O'Donnell might have maintained his intelligent, conciliatory policy directly after the putting down of the revolution. Narvaez's government, in 1856, shat- tered against the general opposition flashing forth at the efforts of the Romish hierarchy. In 1858 the queen again took refuge in O'Donnell, the "rebel chief," who, in the revolution of 1854, had occupied a middle position between the old parties of the Mode- rados and Progressists, and had formed out of the 686 Isabella IL adherents of both the well-known Liberal Union. Th«* object of the Union was to exclude party doctrines and party passions, combine the vigorous liberal powers of -very shade, and place them at the disposal of real progress, order, and law. By means of this organiza- tion O'Donnell commanded the situation nearly five years, an important factor in which was his conduct of the brief but glorious Morocco war of 1859, called forth by Mahometan fanaticism and by unauthorized attacks on the Spanish-African stronghold of Ceuta. The happy effects of this outpouring of fervor on a foreign enemy were seen at once in the silencing of the eternal partisan squabbles, and the inauguration of a period of prosperity unknown hitherto to the exhausted peninsula. For several years it seemed as if at length the conclusion of the perpetual confusion in which Spanish life and progress had been involved had been reached, — as if law and culture had become indispens- able as' if progress in peaceful development and serene intelligence at length had become a fundamental part of peninsular experience. Foreign capital began to flow in railways and manifold industrial enterprises to flourish. Exhaustive statistics began to show the world a really delightful advance in trade and commerce, population, national possessions, agriculture, and edu- cational facilities, the growth of the fleet and modes of communication, and the gradual passing away of the stifling superstition, laziness, and despotism of the past. The beginning of the year i860, as compared with the end of the reign of Ferdinand VII. in 1833, showed immense advances in public and private life. In 1833, the boundless tyranny of an evil-minded prince ; m THE NAVAJA. Beneficent Changes, 689 i860 the evil passions of a frivolous princess curbed and chastised. Then the enormous influence of an infinitely wealthy, uncivilized clergy ; now this influence, emasculated by the sale of the church property, the abolition of nearly all the monasteries, the emancipa- tion of the state and of intellectual life from the church. Then the beneficent activity of the state, crippled despite the best will of the ruling circles by a pitiable organization of the executive and judiciary ; now courts and administration so constituted as to satisfy the needs of the moment wherever a tolerable desire to do justice was present. Then anarchy organized in the bands of so-called "royal volunteers," assisted by a feeble army and a powerless police ; now public authority and order, protected by a good army and an excellent police. Then agriculture, the professions, trade, perfectly pros- trate and destitute of the most necessary foundations ; now agriculture revived by private ownership of the huge property of the church, trade, and industry, by the building of railways, roads, bridges, and the existence of public security. Then all participation of the nation in affairs excluded — no representation, no accounta- bility ; now the people able to make their will felt in Cortes, in provincial and communal representation, and in an educated press. Then Spain almost absolutely shut out from the civilized world ; now Spain touched at a thousand points — by means of travel, electricity, and steam — by the thronging impressions of trans- Pyreneean activity. Then all channels of education stopped up ; no public schools ; caricatures of middle- class schools and universities; no literature; no energy X displayed by literary corporations : now all these chan- 690 Isabella IL The True ^Spaniard, 691 nels overflowingly opened, the former hindrances to art set aside, the country covered with universities, lyceums, elementary schools, academies, libraries, museums. How then did it happen that in spite of all these beneficent changes, the nation still found no satisfac- tion—that O'Donnell could not maintain his policy, adapted on the whole to the circumstances ; that after his retirement in 1863 the ancient chaos of cabinet changes and dissolutions of Cortes, of arbitrary and violent repression and of proniinciamientos burst forth more malignly than ever, and in five years precipitated the land into overthrowing the Bourbon dynasty in a day, and into a destruction of all the arrangements hitherto so painfully arrived at, leaving behind six years of the most ghastly anarchy ? The old Catholic Spain was extinct; all external ob- stacles which might have counteracted a hopeful devel- opment removed ; constitutionalism in form at least ex- isted ; no ministry was able to resist a hostile majority in the cortes ; the press exercised a great influence. And yet the whole constitutional apparatus was hollow and empty. Constitutional monarchy is the most per- fect, but the most difficult of all forms of government. It pre-supposes with princes and citizens, not only judgment, but especially virtue ; is adapted only to a grave carefully educated, morally convinced, healthful and energetic state, and a kingly house schooled in governing conscientiously. Where either is wanting — people or prince — great good fortune alone can render a tolerable issue practicable. Spain lacked both. An industrious, virtuously-trained, serious-minded people did not exist ; and at the palace, a princess whose scan- dalous improprieties rivalled those of Maria Louisa, governed. In such circumstances, constitutional gov- ernment is perhaps the worst of governments. A people like the Spanish, accustomed for centuries alternately to riot and then to starve off the unproductiveness of a gigantic colonial system, overshadowed by a heathen- ized and fantastic church devoid of all sense of duty, were gravely endangered at the opening of a parlia- mentary era. All the conspicuous intelligences of the kingdom rushed eloquently and impetuously to the field of battle, not only to obtain influence and control, but the means of a luxurious existence. The true Spaniard knows little of the sober, modest average of a well-reg- ulated civil life ; he must live and labor as a great lord. Hence his effort to find, in the state, a substitute for the vanished colonies. Governing was to him synony- mous with plundering. The treasury became not only the salary-payer but the never-to-be-exhausted mine of thousands. Hence the pressure of all talent into the career of politics. Whatever in other lands thronged the counters and banking-houses, the fields, workshops, and lecture-rooms, the domains of art and science, rushed wildly here into the narrow vortex of politics, creating a crushing competition, a desperate struggle for existence, a superabundance of blood in the brain, with famished extremities. No politics and no party can satisfy claims so insatiable. Even though one party should possess itself exclusively of all the offices and remunerative positions, a great number of its own party and party leaders remains empty handed. These unfortunates then turn their backs on their ungrateful friends, and go into opposition or wherever else the 692 Isabella II. best prospects are to be found. A Spanish politician of 1865 said, that politics in Spain was a speculation, and the number of speculators was daily increasing. Such a condition of things as this described, spring- ing from social and economic considerations, was ren- dered worse by the national temperament. "The Spaniards act in violent paroxysms, one moment capa- ble of the noblest sacrifices, the most heroic exertions; then lapsing into inconstancy and helplessness ; a peo- ple of soldiers ; a race of heroes, but not a nation of citizens." Of course such a temperament puts the most serious obstacles in the way of self-government. Such a people needs politically the check of a strong, conscientious, respected monarchy; morally it needs the guiding principle of a clearly developed sense of duty. Spain, unhappily, has had to bear through all the storms of this century, the load of a dynasty whose immorality and entire unconsciousness of duty would have brought the healthiest nation into agony. Imagme a century of George the Fourths ! —Spain is more des- titute of the moral foundation than perhaps any other European nation. The real question of her future, therefore, is intimately allied with that of a restora- tion of her moral and intellectual groundwork. The whole soul of the people rested on Catholicism at the outbreak of the revolution; its sinister arch spanned the whole moral horizon and intelligence of the people. At the head of the movement of i8o3, Catholicism soon fell into passionate conflict with that movement ; and that the latter was so savage in its character, so deeply undermining in its effects upon the people, was essentially its fault. The restorations of 18 14 and A Royal Collapse, 693 1823 rendered a reposeful development impossible, — destroyed the faith and trust of the people in its guides. The passions thus developed drove the constitutional beginnings, after the death of Ferdinand, astray. The burning of monasteries and murder of monks, illumin- ated, by a flash from hell, its process of education for the people. Its guidance of Carlist politics showed a mastery in the art of ruining those entrusted to its care. Catholicism, having brought Don Carlos to taste the bitter cup of exile, passed ov^r to the other camp. Essentially due to it were the hindrances which Nar- vaez's intelligent conservative policy, experienced in the "forties ;" the revolution of 1854, again, was due to its blind pressure after a thorough-going Catholic restora- tion. Queen Isabella followed its whisperings when she constantly meddled with O'Donnell's policy, and its advice, when in the last years of her government she put herself in such opposition to the minister that the breach ensuing plunged her and her whole house into instant misery and banishment. Catholicism had wrecked the House of Habsburg ; it consummated its triumph by wrecking the House of Bourbon. When, in September, 1868, the land, almost with unanimity, let the royal house collapse under the measureless mass of its own iniquities, its indignation was less bitter against Isabella than against her spiritual advisers. The world was astounded to see how far the most Catholic of na- tions had loosed itself from its church. Out of hatred to this church the populations of the great cities actu- ally began to look sympathetically on the advent of Protestantism in Spain. Heart and understanding had become equally estranged from the previously accepted 694 Isabella 11. dogmatic faith. Sixty years of uninterrupted, immoral, and illiberal, spiritual tyranny, poisoning the whole period, frustrating all the hopes of the nation, had at last ended in the bursting of a chain which for nearly two thousand years had bound church and people together. But with Catholicism, the firm foundation on which the Catholic nation rested is knocked away. No peo- ple, least of all the profoundly religious Spanish people, can exist without some strong moral basis. So much passion, fancy, extravagance, withdraws the intellectual life of the peninsula from the power of quiet philo- sophic meditation, its moral life from sober, moral guidance. Hence the chaos of the next six years. Unbridled haste, the traces of a nervous, paroxysmal constitution, the play and counterplay of splendid, but immature talent, convulsive heroism, followed closely by wretched depression, brief moments of -great exal- tation, and long years of ensuing enervation, endless propositions resulting in nothing, and impracticable reveries put forth by the scholar and statesman ; all come out luminously and sorrowfully enough in Spanish literature, art, and life. Such is the picture of this richly-gifted people of noble tendencies, whom to know is to love and pitv, whose fate it has been to be incon- ceivably misled and misguided by the very persons who should have guided and helped it. The act which led to the immediate exile of Isabella, ' then enjoying the sea baths of San Sebastian, was the Pronunciamiento of Cadiz, of September 19, 1868, which bares to the quick the unendurable misery and dread of the country ; fundamental laws trampled under foot ; A Provhional Grovernment. 695 the right to vote perverted by intimidation and bribery ; personal security, dependent not on the laws but on the irresponsible will of haphazard magistrates; communal freedom extinct; the executive and the exchequer a prey to vice and brokerage ; public instruction enslaved ; the press mute ; patents of nobility shamelessly lavished on favorites ; universal corruption throughout the ad- ministration. It was a cry which rang from one end of Europe to the other, a frightful awakening to Isa- bella and Father Claret. The signers of the Pronun- ciamiento were, Duke de la Torre, Juan Prim (since the Morocco and Mexican wars the great rival of O'Don- nell). General Dulce, Francisco Serrano Bedoya, Ra- mon Nouvilas, R. Perimo de Rivera, A. Caballero de Rodas, and JuanTopete, — all men of unbounded influ- ence. A provisional government was formed, — after some slight hostilities between the royal and the revo- lutionary troops at Alcolea, — with Serrano, as president of the ministry, Prim, as war minister, Lorenzana, as foreign secretary, Ortiz, minister of justice, Topete, minister of the marine, Figuerola, finance minister, Sagasta, minister of the interior, Zorilla, minister of commerce, and Lopez de Ayala for the colonies. In 1869, the national cortes was convoked for the purpose of establishing a permanent form of govern- ment, the opening of which was saluted by vociferous cries of " Constitutional Monarchy ! " " Democratic Monarchy ! " " The Republic ! " " The Federal Re- public ! " The Bourbon coat of arms was removed from the hall of parliament, and the crucifix vanished from the president's table. Serrano laid down his deputed authority in February, 1869. A committee of fifteen, j»»««,«i.«,a'"»»«SS!M»l»'5'»"* 696 Serrano, Prince Leopold Withdrawn. 697 from whom the republican deputies were excluded, was assigned the work of drawing up a constitution. The restoration of a monarchical form of government, with constitutional guarantees, was a clearly enunciated point of this constitution. It established freedom of con- science, the principle that all sovereignty flowed from MONTPENSIER, SERRANO, TOPETE. the people, monarchy as the form of government (in op- position to two hundred republican journals and five hundred republican committees), a senate and council of state, and many other special determinations. It was signed on the 2d of June : magnificent inkstands, prettily ornamented parchments, pens on silver waiters, and gold and ivory pen-holders set with brilliants, — one of the deputies had proposed eight great eagle-quills ! — were supplied for subscribing to this mosaic work of Democrats, Progressists, and Unionists. The public celebration attending its solemn promulgation was with- out enthusiasm. Marshal Serrano was named regent for the interreg- num, during which the candidacies of the duke of Montpensier, Isabella's brother-in-law, and^ Don Fer- nando, king of Portugal, the unwilling representativ'e of the so-called party of the " Iberian Union," were dis- cussed and rejected, the first for dynastic considera- tions, the other because of Don Fernando's repugnance to attempting union between Spain and Portugal. Prim's candidate. Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, the proximate occasion of the Franco-German war, was bitterly opposed by Napoleon IIL, the empress, and Rouher, president of the ministry, from a dread, it is said, of a re-establishment of the universal monarchy of Charles V. There were rumors, too, that the em- press's antipathy to the Hohenzollern family, originating from their rejecting a certain marriage alliance proposed by her, was one of the causes of the war. It is im- possible her« to enter into Napoleon's criminal obsti- nacy in insisting that the king of Prussia, as the eldest of the Hohenzollern branch, should formally forbid Prince Leopold to persist in his candidacy. King William declined such a concession to French pique. The prince's father, however, in view of possible com- plications and the angry feelings of France, withdrew his name in July, 1870. The friends of Espartero in- If •i^m>im^ j»i!ai-jM.BW 698 A7nadeo. Priin Assassinated. 699 sisted that the crown should be offered to him, the " old hermit of Logrofio ; " but he stubbornly and wisely refused. The duke of Aosta, Don Amadeo, son of Victor Eman- uel, then received (November i6) one hundred and ninety-one out of three hundred and eleven votes of Ruiz Zorrilla, Prim, Sagasta. . the cortes, Montpensier twenty-seven, his duchess one, Espartero eight, Don Alfonso (son of Isabella), two, the Federal Republic sixty, the simple Republic one. The duke of Aosta was declared elected Constitutional King of Spain, under the title of Amadeo I. The assassination of Marshal Prim (December 27-30), just before Amadeo's arrival, filled the country and the high-hearted Savoyard king with gloom. " I am dyino-, but the king is coming. Long live the king ! " were the soldier's last words. Serrano surrendered his powers to the cortes and the king was duly sworn in, January 2, 187 1. On the nth of February, 1873, Amadeo abdicated, and the " Republic succeeded the monarchy as quietly as one sentinel succeeds another." The Italian kino- had found it impossible to govern constitutionally in Spain ; his life had been attempted; the queen was continu- ally insulted by the wives of the grandees ; one disso- lution of parliament, and one change of cabinet after another, had failed to give him elements homogeneous, enlightened, unselfish, and patriotic enough to control a country in which republicanism had now made mon- strous strides. "Spain for the Spaniards! Out with the Savoyard!" resounded through stranger-abhorring Spain. A king in round hat and white pantaloons, simple in manners, intolerant of hand-kiscing and ob- sequiousness ; a queen who dared to give birth to a prince without having the palace illuminated ; an im- passive, unemotional royal couple, promenading almost unattended through the streets of Madrid; matchless courage and simplicity ; the heartiest desire to benefit the country by parliamentary and lawful methods, to heal its incurable wounds, to reconcile its irreconcilable par- ties, — all these things contributed to the departure of the king and queen to Portugal. The Federal Republic was proclaimed by two hun- dred and fifty-eight votes of the cortes against thirty- two. The "fuera los Borbones ! " of 1868, was suc- ceeded by the '' al fin lo hemos logrado ! " (at last we 700 The Republic. Emilia Castelar, 701 have it !) of the Republic of 1873. Two years of dictator- ships now ensued ; a cruel picture over which it is refreshing to draw the veil. The beginning of republi- can institutions was, however, signalized by the negotia- tion of an important loan at twelve per cent., whereas, the monarchy had been forced to pay twenty to twenty- five per cent. The war in Cuba — begun in 1868 by the shameful excesses of the mother country, the tyranny of the irresponsible captains-general, the refusal of the home government to liberate the slaves, and to grant Cuba, after repeated promises lasting from 1820 to 1868, Pi y Margall. representation in the national cortes — still raged furi- ously, and was not to be extinguished till 1878. A new Carlist war also had broken out in the North. On June 11, 1873, Senor Pi y Margall, a respectable archaeologist, jurist, journalist, political economist, and follower of Proudhon, was elected " president of the -\ executive power," but resigned in five weeks, unable to cope with the civil war breaking out all over the penin- sula. Nicolas Salmeron, an adherent of the conserva- tive republican party, called the " brain of the revolu- tion," a popular and accomplished university professor, distinguished for his clear and comprehensive policy as dictator, held power for a few weeks, and was followed by the great orator and parliamentarian, Emilio Castelar, (born at Cadiz in 1831). The Virginius affair, during his administration, — the seizure of an American ship bearing supplies to the Cuban insurgents, and the shoot- ing of many of her crew and officers, — came near in- volving the United States in conflict with Spain ; but was satisfactorily adjusted by concessions on the part of Spain. Castelar's government — powerless likewise to grapple with the increasing anarchy, the deeds of violence everywhere, the Carlist and Cuban wars, the innumerable republics and bits of republics that had proclaimed themselves in the provinces, the financial and foreign difficulties — was ended by a coup diktat early in January, 1874, led by General Pavia and his soldiers, to " prevent the triumph of anarchy." Serrano was again entrusted with the presidency of the execu- tive power, and, a reaction from the chaotic and inco- herent republicanism of a nation totally unfit for it hav- ing taken place, on December 31, 1874, Don Alfonso (born November 28, 1857), eldest son of Isabella II, — a thoroughly educated young prince, brought up far from his ignoble mother, in England, France, and Aus- tria, — was proclaimed king at Madrid. He landed at Barcelona and assumed the government January 9, 1875. He has been^ twice married; (i) to his cousin, Marie de 702 Alfonso XII. las Mercedes, youngest daughter of the duke of Mont- pensier; (2) to Marie Christina, archduchess of Aus- tria. Under him Spain enjoys an hereditary, constitutional monarchy. The king is inviolable ; the executive rests in him, the legislative power in king and cortes. Sen- ate and congress compose the cortes, and their meet- in"-s are annual. Deputies from Cuba were admitted in 1878. The king convokes, suspends, or dissolves cortes, appoints the president and vice-president of the senate from the senate alone, and has responsible min- isters. Local self-government is allowed to the various provinces, districts, and communes, with which neither executive nor cortes can interfere except in cases of ar- bitrary or unconstitutional assumption. The established religion is Catholic, which is maintained by the state, and a limited freedom of worship is allowed to Protes- tants, though it must be private. KINGS OF SPAIN SINCE THE UNION OF CASTILE AND ARAGON HOUSE OF ARAGON. Ferdinand V., The Catholic 1512 HOUSE OF HABSBURG. Charles I. (accession) 1516 Philip H " 1556 Philip IH. . . .... ** 1598 Philip IV " 1621 Charles H " 1665 HOUSE OF BOURBON. Philip V " 1700 Ferdinand VI. " 1746 Charles III " 1759 Charles IV . ** 17S8 Ferdinand VII " 1808 HOUSE OF BONAPARTE. Joseph Bonaparte . 1808 HOUSE OF BOURBON (^Restored). Ferdinand VII 1814 Isabella II. (accession) 1833 701 702 Kings of Spain. REPUBLIC. Provisional Government Regency of Serrano HOUSE OF SAVOY. Amadeo I. REPUBLIC. Dictatorship (i) Pi Y Margall, (2) Salmeron, (3) Castelar, (4) Serrano . 1868 . 1869 1871-73 . 1873 . After couJ> d'etat of 1874 HOUSE OF BOURBON {Restored). Alfonso XII. Jan., 1875 INDEX. PAGE Abdallih, 81 Abdallah-ibn-Toumert, . .188 Abderaman I., the Slav, founder of the Omai- yade dynasty, . . . 69, 71 execrated, 72 Abderaman II L, . . . . 83 Abdication of Charles V., . 444 of Charles IV., .... 630 of Philip v., 592 Abencerrages, family of, . 281 "Abjuration," act of, . . 520 Abul Hacen at Granada, . 277 Adrianople, battle of, . . r8 Agriculture in Aragon, . . 230 in Peru, 403 progress of, 130 Aix-la-Chapelle, treaty of, 560, 594 Alaric the " Balth," . . 21-23 Albert of Brandenburg kin- dles war in Germany, . 443 A leal a, burning of the libra- ry at, 330 Alcala, university of, . . . 349 Alcantara, order of, . . . 267 Alarcos, battle of, . . . .197 Alexander Farnese, . . .519 Alfonso II., .... 148, 149 Alfonso the Catholic, 141, 142 PAGE Alfonso, Don, proclaimed king, 701 Alfonso the Fighter, . . .190 Alfonso X. (the Learned), 206 Alhama, capture of, . «. . 282 Alicante, bombardment of, 564 Almansor, power of, . . . 90 Almohades, the, .... 188 Almoravide conquest, the . 115 dynasty, knell of the, . . 188 Alva, Duke of, character of, 510 sent to the Netherlands, . 479 Granvelle, and William of Orange, 460 rule in the Netherlands ends, 509 Alvaro de Luna . . 235, 253 Amadeo, duke of Aosto, , 698 abdication of, .... 699 Amazon, Orellana on the . 405 America, desires of Isabella concernmg, .... 344 discovered, 367 Amiens, peace of, . . . . 620 Andalusia, loveliness of, . 272 war in, 276 Anne of Austria, queen of Philip II., ^09 Antwerp, the cathedral at- tacked, 476 705 706 Index. PAGE Antilles, discovery of, . . 370 Arabian character, ... 99 Arabian Nights, the, . . . loi Arabic language, laws against its use, .... 4SS, 493 Arabs and Berbers distin- guished 54 Aragon, development of, . 209 feudalism in, 226 institutions of, 244, 245, 248 originally small, . . .164 power of, 24 <5 rise of, 165 Architecture, the, of Spain, 120, 121, 124 Aristocracy, the, of Spain, 503 Armada, the invincible, 524, 527 Astrolabe, the, 358 Asturian kings, last of, . .152 Athanaric fights the Huns, 17 Attila, the Hun, .... 27 Augsburg Confession, the, . 431 Augsburg, Philip II. at, . 457 Recess of, 444 Au'.horship in the Roman period, xl Austria, decline of "star" of, 443 Averroes, Avicenna, and other Aristotelians, . 112 Ayxa the Chaste, . . . . 2G1 Aztec community, the, . . 3C1 hieroglyphics, . . . . 3SJ manners, 388 Eadajoz, siege of, by Soult, 644 Bagdad founded, . . . . ii3 Barbara, queen, death of, . 596 PACK Barbary pirates, enterprise against 431 Barcelona, bombardment of, 676 fall of, 5SS last of the counts of, . .235 province of, 158 Basel, peace of, . . . .613 Basques, the, at war, . . .163 fhe, 655, 657 Battles, great, 185 Layonne, deputies called to, 636 Behem, Martin, inventor of the astrolabe, .... 358 Berber dominion narrowed, 145 Berbers, the, come into power, 52. 54 Bernardo del Carpio, . .146 Berry, Duchess of, becomes wife of Ferdinand VII., 650 es 217 469 218 588 ab- Bertrand du Guesclin, Bigotry of Philip II., Blanche, legend of, Blenheim, battle of, Blood, Council of, lished, . . . Bobadil at Granada, flight of, . . . takes Granada, . Bobadil's mother, . Bolero, the dance, . Bonaparte, Joseph, at Mad- rid, 637, 644 Bonaparte, Napoleon, re- turns from Egypt, . .619 Books collected by Hacem II., 86 Bourbon, collapse of the house of, 693 480 302 2S7 2S8 2S1 493 Index. 707 PAGE Bourbons and Habsburgs, pedigrees of, ... . 453 Bourbons restored to the Spanish throne, . . .645 Buenos Ayres, capture of by England, .... 623 Bull fi-'htinr, bec'innin'T of, 41 Byzantir.c influence in archi- tecture, 122 Byzantines expelled, ... 41 Cabot, Sebastian, .... 363 Cadiz plundered by the English, 5^"^ sr.c'-:cd, 5-^ siege of, raised, .... 644 Caesar and Pompey, . . xxxii Calais relinquished by Eng- land, 4^^ California, discovery of, . 391 Calligraphy among the Ara- bians, 113 Campomancs, . . . 583, 607 Cambray, treaty of, . . . 430 Cape Finistcrre, battle of, . 621 Cape St. Vincent, battle of, 614 Cariist defeat, a, . . . . 674 intrigues 65 ^ successes, .... 663, 671 war, the 652 Carlos, Don, character of, . 673 conspiracy against, . . . 432 conspiracy by, .... 6 j2 death of, 4^*3 his influence among the Basques, 661 Cartier, Jacques, in Buenos Ayres 405 PAGE Castelar, Emilio, .... 701 Castile, administration of, . 261 and Aragon, union of, . 537 characteristics of, . . . 244 feudalism in, . . . 222, 223 originally called Bardulia, 167 rises in greatness, . . . 187 Calatrava, order of, . . . 267 Catalonia and Valencia, in- stitutions of, ... . 251 climate of, xviii its union with Aragon, . 245 people of, 157 rebellion in, 557 C ateau - C ambresis, treaty of, 4^. 474 Catharine of Aragon, birth of, 297 Catholicism adopted, . 36, yj attacked, 632 Cervantes, 544 at the battle of Lepanto, 49S Character of the Spaniards, 240 Charlemagne at Ronces- valles, 146 besieges Saragossa, . . 71 Charles II., of Spain, . . 563 Charles III., of Spain, . . 579 reign of, 596 Charles IV., abdication of, . O30 accession of, .... 604 Charles V., abdication of, . 444 bafiled, 442 birth of, -340 crowned at Aix-la-Cha- pelle, 415 enters Valladolid, . . .412 his activity, 429 708 Index, PAGE Charles V., death of, . . . 452 his ambition, 538 his retirement, . . 444, 446 his reverses, 436 invades Italy, . . . -4-3 marriage of, 425 popular among the Neth- erlanders, 462 sketch of, 445 lands in the Asturias, . 411 Charters, the, of Christian Spain, .... Chili, conquest of. Chivalry, institutions of, Cholera in Madrid, . Christianity in Spain, Christians plundered, . . war against, Church and state united, . Church, prosperity of the, Cid Campeador, the, 174, Cid, song of the, .... Clement, Pope, retires to Castle St. Angelo, . . Clergy, unfaithfulness of, . Clovis, 29 Coligny, Gaspard de, at St. Quentin, 459 Colonial possessions, . xxiii Columbus, death of, . . .372 first voyage of, ... . 356 last voyage of, and death, 345 life of, 362 treaty with, 312 Compass and the astrolabe, 357 " Compromise," the, . 470, 473 Compostella, Santiago de, . 174 shrine at, 149 . 194 . 405 • 133 . 667 XXXV . 91 • m • 43 543 178 426 256 PAGE Complutensian polyglot, the, 349 Commerce in Catalonia, . 230 Constantine's rule in Spain, xxxv Constitution, a new (1837), 673 the, of 181 2, 643 Cordova becomes a second Bagdad, 118 condition of in the time of Abderaman III., . 85 end of the kingdom of, . 97 khalifate of, 138 kingdom of, . . . 69, 137 palace of Zahra at, . .120 pillaged by the Berbers and Castilians, . . . * 94 Cortes, Hernando, . . . 376 Cortes, the first in Castile, 243 Crespy, peace of, . . . . 436 Crusaders capture Jerusa- lem, 186 Cuba, war of, 700 Culture of the Spaniards, . 240 the golden age of, . . .104 Debt, the national, . . De Soto discovers the Mis sissippi, Despotism of Philip II., Drake, Sir Francis, . . Dramatic art stimulated. 586 405 502 524 545 Ecclesiastical influence, . . 244 reform, . . . 577> 57^, 580 Ecclesiastical tribunals, en- croachments of, . . 268 Index. ro9 PAGE Education under Charles III., 586 Egmont accused by Marga- ret of Parma,. . . . 469 against the Inquisition, 473» 475 arrested, 479 Elizabeth of England makes a treaty with the Neth- erlands, -515 England, wars with, . , . 586 Enrique IV., of Castile, 256, 257 Epila, battle of, . . 225, 247 Erwic supersedes Wamba, 48 Escorial, factions in the, . 623 the palace of the, . . . 507 Espartcro, . . . .671, 673 fall of, 6-j6 popularity of, . . 676, 6S5 Euric, brother of Theo- deric, 28 Eusebius rebukes Sisibut for bull-fighting, ... 41 Factions, 674 Fandango, the dance, . . 493 Ferdinand I., king of Leon and Castile, . . . Ferdinand and Isabella, conspiracy against, births of, marriage articles of, . Ferdinand, character of, Ferdinand III., . . . Ferdinand VI., accession of, progress in the reign of, Ferdinand VII., character of 653 172 239 259 251 257 355 200 594 576 PAGE reign of, 630 restored to the throne, . 645 three periods in his reign, 646 death of, 653 Feudal system in Spain, . 222 Field of the Cloth of Gold, t^^^' 415 Finances, condition of, . . 635 Financial troubles, . . , 667 Finisterre, Cape, battle of, . 621 Fontainebleau, treaty of, . 623 Floridablanca, 638 at the head of affairs, . 584 prime minister, .... 6oi Francis I., character of, . . 438 taken prisoner at Pavia, . 424 France vanquished, . . . 460 French revolution, the, . . 608 Fueros (charters),'. . . . 194 the, ........ 656 Galicia, shrine at, . . . . 149 Germany, disquiet in, . . 425 Ghent, insurrection in, . . 435 Gibraltar, capture of, . . 588 Godoy, Manuel, favorite of Maria Louisa, 60S-610, 614, 622, 623 an abject dependent, . .616 as generalissimo, . . . 620 circumvented by Napo- leon, 631 fall of, 631 flies from Madrid, . . . 630 hated, 624 Golden Fleece, knights of the, 476 Gonsalvo de Cordova, 322, 333 710 Index. 4OJ 460 PAG^ Gonzalez, Count Fernan, . iC3 Gothic kin^s, list of, . . . 53 Government of the Oma- iyadcs i33» ^34 Granacla, Abul Ilacen at, .277 architecture of, ... • i-4 civil war in, 2. 7 fail of, 3-9 kingdom of, ---» Moors removed from, 492, 493 sicfie of, 3°4 Grand Alliance, demands of, rejected by Loui.^, . 591 Granveile in the Nether- lands, William of Orange, and Alva, Greece and Spain com- pared, xviii Greek settlements in Spain, XXV ii Grimaldi, Marquis, minister of Charles III., • • • 599 Guadalajara, Cortes of, . . 231 Guadalcte, battle of, . • -139 Guerilla v.arfare, . . • • ^^i Guesclin, Certrand du, . .217 "Gueux," the, a party arnon^ the Trotestants, 47 5 Guilds, system of abolished, 602 Habsburr;ers, decay under the rule of the, . 54 «» 549 IIabsburr;s and Bourbons, pedigrees of, ... • 4ii3 Hacam II. collects books, . 06 Hacam the Voluptuary, . 73 Hamilcar Earca in Spain, xxvil PAGE Hannibal, xxviii Ilasdrubal, xxviii Henry II. of France aids Maurice of Saxony, . 44^ Henry VII., of England, treaty with, . . • • 3'^ Hermandad, reorganization of, 262, 2(35 the, of Castile, .... 243 IlermenigildandRecared, . 33 Hicham, ^9> 95 Ilicro-lyphics, the Aztec, . 3:6 Holland allied to England, 522 Holland and Zealand unit- ed 5^3 Holy League, formation of, 349 the, formed, 497 Huns, the, in Spain, . • 17. 27 Iberian Union, the, . . • Ibn-Ilazin, the poet, . . . Ildefonso, San, outbreak at, palace of, treaty of Incas, conquest of the, . . government of, . . . . Inquisition, the, established in the Netherlands, establishment of, . • . petition for its abolition in the Netherlands, . . the, in the Netherlands, . influence of the, . . . restraining of the, . . . the, restrained, . . 573, the, resisted, . . • the, verses on, . • Italy, civilization of, . . 697 672 594 C:4 391 393 470 270 475 /. /• 4^0 (jZ2 £79 473 5^0 341 Index, 711 PAGE Italy, war for, . . • 317, 323 Italian w^ars, . . 317, 323, 339 Isabella, death of, . . 342, 343 Isabella Farnese, wife of Philip v., . . . 562, 571 Isabella of France, death of, 4S7 Isabella II., . . . . 674, 693 exile of, 694 Islam, defined, 133 Islamism hateful to the Ber- bers, 57 James, St., of Compostella, 149 Jayme 1 200, 202 Jerusalem captured by the Crusaders, i8j Jesuits, establishment of, . 435 expelled from Spain, . . 5S0 expulsion of, by Charles HI. 600 the, recalled, ... . 646 Jews, beginning of the per- secutions of, .... 40 condition of, . . . . . 6r edict against,. . . 312, 313 trouble from, 49 Jovellanos, Caspar Melchor de, 607, d-^C) recalled, 616 Juan, Don, character of, .516 death of, 516 Juan, Don, of Austria, . . 491 captain-general of the Netherlands, . . . .515 Juan the Careless, relaxa- tion of morals under, . 232 Junot, Marshal, in Portugal, 623 PAGE Jurisprudence, the Visigoth- ie system, 265 Khalifate, dissolution of the, 95 Kindaswint the Fiery, . . 44 Koran, the, . . . . 124, 127 Las Navas de Tolosa, bat- tle of, 199 Law among the Visigoths, . 193 Learning, stale of, ... Co Loiccstcr, Earl of, ... 523 Le Raymond of Barcelona, 1 58, 1 59 Recared and Hermenigild, . 33 Recared's reign 3*^ Recess of Augsburg,. • -444 Reformation, the, in Ger- many, 417 Reformed doctrines crushed out of Spain, .... 468 , Reform, seeds of, . . . •575 PAGE Reform under Ferdinand VL and Charles III., 577, 578. 5S0, 584* 5S5 Reforms under Narvaez, . 682 Religion of the Peruvians, . 399 of the Mexicans, . . . 3S5 under the Omaiyades, 127, 129 Religious tyranny, ... 67 Republic proclaimed, . . 699 Retrogression, 604 Revolution in Castile, . .421 the French, 608 Richelieu, death of, . . . 558 Rio Verde, battle of the, . 296 Rivers of Spain, . . . . xx Roderic, tall of 139 Roderic, the "Last of the Goths," 50 Rodrigo of Lara, cruelty of, 190 Roland at Roncesvalles, . 146 Romanism, opposition to, . 694 Romans in Spain, xxxi, xxxii, XXXV, xxxvi Rome humbled, .... 460 sacking of, by Constable de Bourbon, .... 426 Roncesvalles, . . . . , 146 Royal statute, the, of 1834, 665, 656 Ruins in Spain, , . . xxxix Ryswick, peace of, ... 564 Saguntum, siege of, . . xxviii St. James, xxxv St. Quentin, siege of, . . 459 Salamanca, battle of, . . 644 PAGE Salic Law, the, 260 the, abolished, .... 651 San Ildefonso, palace of, . 594 treaty of 614 Santiago, order of, ... 267 Saragossa besieged by Char- lemagne, 71 second siege of, . . . . 639 Satire on Spanish affairs, . 615 Scholarship, advance in, . 578 Science, progress of, 572, 575 Scipio in Spain, . . . xxxi Segovia, proclamation of Ferdinand and Isabella at, 260 Self-government in Castile, 243 Selim II. resolves to ac- quire Cyprus, ... 494 Serrano, 699 lays down his authority, . 695 regent, 697 Sertorious, revolt of, . . xxxii Seville, conquest of, . . . 205 Sheep husbandry, . . . . xx Sidney, Sir Philip, . . . 523 Sienna, revolt of, ... . 442 Sierras, the, xvii Slavs, increasing power of, 94 Smalkalde, League of, . .431 Social condition, . . . 60, 98 Social condition of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, 269 Social order in Mexico, . . 383 Social organization among the Peruvians, , , . 394 Solyman, movements of, . 431 il 716 Index, PAGE Solyman the Magnificent attacks Rhodes, . • .421 Soult, Marshal, his expedi- tion to Portugal, . . 639 South America, revolts in, . 646 Spanish character, . . .240 Spain under Philip II., • • 5°^ Speyer, Diet of, .... 43° Strabo on the primitive in- habitants, .... xxiii Succession, war of the, 261, 587 Suevi, downfall of the, . . 34 Superstition, ^^ Talleyrand, 620 Taric-ibn-Ziyad, .... 62 Taxation, heavy, in Spain, 432 svstem of, 542 Taxes increased, . • • -55^ Templars, order of, dis- solved, 213 Theodosius the Great, . 18, 21 Theology among the Ara- bians, 106 Titicaca, island of, ... 400 Toledo, fall of 84 Toulouse, kingdom of founded, 27 Tours, battle of, . • • • 7° Trafalgar, battle of, . . .621 Trent, Council of, . . • • 437 Trinidad, battle of, . • • 614 Tunis, capture of by Don Juan 500 PAOE Valencia, fall of, ... • 201 Valetta, capital of Malta, . 481 Vargas Ponce, satire by, • 616 Vasco de Gama, . • • -371 " Venice Preserved," the, of Otway, 552 Vergara, treaty of, ... 674 Vervins, treaty of, . . . . 529 Villaviciosa, battle of, . . 559 Vincent, St., battle of, . • 614 " Virginius affair," the, . . 70T Viriates of Lusitania, . xxxi Visigoths in Spain, ... 17 Visigothic system of juris- prudence, 265 Utrecht, peace of, .... 59^ treaty of 570 union of, 52° Wamba's reign, . . • • 45 Wealth, increase of, . . -130 Wellesley, Arthur (after- wards duke of Wel- lington), 638 Wellington in Portugal, . 643 in Spain, 638 William of Orange (the Silent), a Calvinist, . . 47^ accused by Margaret of Parma, 4^9 at Cateau-Cambresis, . . 460 against the Inquisition, 47 3» 474 at the head of affairs, . 520 death of, 521 unites Holland and Zea- land, 513 William of Orange, . . .5^3 deatn of 5^^ Women at the siege of Granada, 281 hidex. 717 PAGE Women, beauty of the An- dalusian, 275 Worms, Diet of, . . . .416 Worship, limited freedom of, 702 Xeres de la Frontera, bat- tle of, 52, 54 Ximenes, Cardinal, ZV^ 333' 346 character of, 411 regent, 4^^ Ximene the Heroic, . . . 179 Yousof, king of Morocco, . 186 PAGE Yuste, described 449 retirement of Charles V. to, ... 446, 449, 450 Zahara, capture of, . • 281 Zahra. palace of, at Cordo- va, 120 Zallaca, battle of, ... . 186 Ziryab becomes a legis- lator, 76 Zumalacarregui, his per- sonal appearance, . . 668 Tomas, joins Don Carlos, 661, 668 Zutphen, battle of, ... 523 » », ' » • J > . ' > 1 J J i » ) 5)3 4 > J J ■> t % « • t ( ( t < i t • t • • • • t c OLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIE s This book is due on the date indicated below, or at the xpiration of a definite period after the date of borrowing, a. provided by the library rules or by special arrangement with the Librarian in charge. 5ATE BORROWED 16 M"4F DATE DUE DATE BORROWED DATE DUE m 18 C28(842)M50 Harrison Spain. /V24«^ ^ I COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY P|!!ipil||ll!!||l|llipii|| in il 'ii^ II