Part 5 (1/2)
The path this _Mahdi_ desired to lead them was first to Morocco, there to subdue the Almoravides in their own land, and thence to Spain. In a short time this entire plan was realized. The Mahdi's successor was Emperor of Morocco, and by the year 1150 included in his dominion was all of Mahommedan Spain! The Spanish Arabs, when they were fighting Alfonso VI. and the ”Cid,” did not antic.i.p.ate this disgraceful downfall from people of their own faith. They abhorred these Mahommedan savages, and drew together still closer for a century more in and about their chosen refuge of Granada.
In the early part of the thirteenth century the Emperor of Morocco made such enormous preparations for the occupation of Spain that a larger design upon Europe became manifest. Once more Christendom was alarmed; not since Charles Martel had the danger appeared so great.
The Pope proclaimed a Crusade, this time not into Palestine, but Spain.
An army of volunteers from the kingdom of Portugal and from southern France re-enforced the great armies of the Kings of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre. The Crusaders, as they called themselves, a.s.sembled at Toledo July 12, 1212, under the command of Alfonso IX., King of Castile. The power of the Alhomades was broken, and they were driven out of Spain. The once great Mahommedan Empire in that country was reduced to the single province of Granada, where the Moors intrenched themselves in their last stronghold. For nearly three centuries the Crescent was yet to wave over the kingdom of Granada; but it was to s.h.i.+ne in only the pale light of a waning crescent, until its final extinction in the full light of a Christian day.
CHAPTER XIV.
A great change had been wrought in Europe. The Crusades had opened a channel through which flowed from the East reviving streams of ancient knowledge and culture over the arid waste of mediaevalism. France and England had awakened from their long mental torpor, Paris was become the center of an intellectual revival. In England, Roger Bacon, in his ”Opus Majus,” was systematizing all existing knowledge and laying a foundation for a more advanced science and philosophy for the people, who had only recently extorted from their wicked King John the great charter of their liberties.
It was just at this period, when the door had suddenly opened ushering Europe into a new life, that the Christian cause in Spain triumphed; and, excepting in the little kingdom of Granada, the Cross waved from the Pyrenees to the sea. After more than four centuries of steadfast devotion to that object, the descendants of the Visigoth Kings had come once more into their inheritance.
They found it enriched, and clothed with a beauty of which their ancestors could never have dreamed. These Spaniards had learned their lesson of valor in the north, and they had learned it well. Now in the land of the Moor, dwelling in the palaces they had built, and gazing upon masterpieces of Arabic art and architecture which they had left, they were to learn the subtle charm of form and color, and the fascination which music and poetry and beauty and knowledge may lend to life. As they drank from these Moorish fountains the rugged warriors found them very sweet; and they discovered that there were other pleasures in life beside fighting the Moors and nursing memories of the Cid and their vanished heroes.
The territory of Fernando III., King of Castile (1230-52), extended now from the Bay of Biscay to the Guadalquivir. The ancient city of Seville was chosen as his capital. It was a far cry from the ”Cave of Covadonga” to the Moorish palace of the ”Alcazar,” where dwelt the pious descendant of Pelayo! The first act of Fernando III. was to convert the Mosque at Seville into a cathedral, which still stands with its Moorish bell-tower, the beautiful ”Giralda.” There may also be seen to-day over one of its portals a stuffed crocodile, which was sent alive to King Ferdinand by the Sultan of Egypt. And within the cathedral, in a silver urn with gla.s.s sides, the traveler may also gaze to-day upon the remains of this ”Saint Ferdinand” clothed in royal robes, and with a crown upon his head.
Spain had begun to lift up her head among the other nations of Europe.
To defeat the Crescent was the highest ideal of that chivalric age.
Spain, longer than any other nation, had fought the Mahommedan. It had been her sole occupation for four centuries, and now she had vanquished him, and driven him into the mountains of one of her smallest provinces, there to hide from the Spaniards as they had once hidden from the Moors in the North. This was a pa.s.sport to the honor and respect of other Christian nations. She was Spain ”the Catholic”--the loved and favorite child of the Church--and great monarchs in England, France, and Germany bestowed their sons and daughters upon her kings and princes. Poor though she was in purse, and somewhat rude yet in manners, she held up her head high in proud consciousness of her aristocratic lineage, and her unmatched champions.h.i.+p of Christianity.
We realize how close had become the tie binding her to other nations when we learn that King Fernando III. was the grandson of Queen Eleanor of England (daughter of Henry II.), and that Louis IX. of France, that other royal saint, was his own cousin; and also that his wife Beatrix, whom he brought with him to Seville, was daughter of Frederick II., Emperor of Germany.
The deep hold which Arabic life and thought had taken upon their conquerors was shown when Alfonso X., son of Ferdinand, came to the throne. So in love was he with learning and science that he let his kingdom fall into utter confusion while he busied himself with a set of astronomical tables upon which his heart was set and in holding up to ridicule the Ptolemaic theory. If he had given less thought to the stars, and more to the humble question as to who was to be his successor, it would have saved much strife and suffering to those who came after him.
While the Moslems were building up their kingdom and making of their capital city a second and even more beautiful Cordova, there was a partial truce with the Moors in Granada. Moors and Christians were enemies still; the hereditary hatreds were only lulled into temporary repose. But Christian knights who were handsome and gallant might love and woo Moorish maidens who were beautiful; and, as a writer has intimated, love became the business and war the pastime of the Spaniard in Andalusia. Spain was unconsciously inbibing the soft, sensuous charm of the civilization she was exterminating; and the peculiar rhythm of Spanish music, and the subtle picturesqueness which makes the Spanish people unique among the other Latin nations of Europe, came, not from her Gothic, nor her Roman, nor her Phenician ancestry, but from the plains of Arabia; and the guitar and the dance and the castanet, and the charm and the coquetry of her women, are echoes from that far-off land of poetry and romance. Not so the bull-fight! Would you trace to its source that pleasant pastime, you must not go to the East; the Oriental was cruel to man, but not to beast. He would have abhorred such a form of amus.e.m.e.nt, for the origin of which we must look to the barbarous Kelt; or perhaps, as is more probable, to the mysterious Iberians, since among the Latin peoples of Europe bull-fighting is found in Spain alone. Well was it for Spain that her rough, untutored ancestors were kept hiding in the mountains for centuries, while that brilliant Oriental race planted their Peninsula thick with the germs of high thinking and beautiful living.
As the spider, after his glistening habitation has been destroyed by some ruthless footstep, goes patiently to work to rebuild it, so the Moor in Granada, with his imperishable instinct for beauty, was making of his little kingdom the most beautiful spot in Europe. The city of Granada was lovelier than Cordova; its Alhambra more enchanting than had been the palaces in the ”City of the Fairest.” This citadel, which is fortress and palace in one, still stands like the Acropolis, looking out upon the plain from its lofty elevation. Volumes have been written about its labyrinthine halls and corridors and courts, and the amazing richness of decoration, which still survives--an inexhaustible mine for artists and a shrine for lovers of the beautiful. But Granada cultivated other things besides the art of beauty. Nowhere in Europe was there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries such advanced thinking, and a knowledge so akin to our own to-day, as within the borders of that Moorish kingdom.
CHAPTER XV.
There were other reasons beside the growing peacefulness of the Spaniards why Granada was left to develop in comparative security for two centuries. It was impossible that adjacent ambitious kingdoms, such as Navarre, Castile, Aragon, Leon, and Portugal, with indefinite and disputed boundaries, and, on account of intermarriages between the kingdoms, with indefinite and disputed successions, should ever be at peace. In the perpetual strife and warfare which prevailed on account of royal European alliances, the fate of foreign princes and princesses were often involved, and hence European states stood ready to take a hand.
Castile and Aragon had gradually absorbed the smaller states, excepting Portugal on the one side and Navarre on the other. The history of Spain at this time is a history of the struggles of these two states for supremacy. The most eventful as well as the most lurid period of this prolonged civil war was while Pedro the Cruel was king of Castile, 1350-69. This Spanish Nero, when sixteen years old, commenced his reign by the murder of his mother. A catalogue of his crimes is impossible. Enough to say that a.s.sa.s.sination was his remedy, and means of escape, from every entanglement in which his treacheries involved him. It was the unhappy fate of Blanche de Bourbon, sister of Charles V., King of France, to marry this King of Castile, and when he refused to live with her and had her removed from his palace the Alcazar to a fortress, and finally poisoned her, the French King determined to avenge the insult to his royal house. He allied himself with the King of Aragon to destroy Pedro, with whom the King of Aragon was of course at war.
Edward, the ”Black Prince,” was then brilliantly invading France and extending the kingdom of his father Edward III. He was the kinsman of Pedro, and when appealed to by his cousin for aid in protecting his kingdom from the King of Aragon and his French allies, Edward gallantly consented to help him; and in the spring of 1367, for the second time, a splendid army advanced through the Pa.s.s at Roncesvalles, and a great battle, worthy of a better cause, was fought and won.
So this most atrocious king--perhaps excepting Richard III. of England, whom he resembled--had for his champion the victor of Cressy and Poictiers. He was restored to his throne, which had been usurped by his brother Enrique (or Henry), but in a personal encounter with Enrique soon after (which was artfully brought about by the famous Breton knight, Bertrand du Guesclin), he met a deserved fate (1369).
Constanza, the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, had been married to John of Gaunt (Duke of Lancester), brother of the Black Prince and son of Edward III. As Constanza was the great-grandmother of Isabella I. of Spain, so in the veins of that revered Queen there flowed the blood of the Plantagenets, as well as that of Pedro the Cruel!
Because of the number of doubtful pretenders always existing in Spain, disputes about the royal succession also always existed. Such a dispute now led to a long war with Portugal, where King Fernando had really the most valid hereditary claim to the throne made vacant by Pedro's death. If his right had been acknowledged, Portugal and Spain would now be united; Isabella would have remained only a poor and devout princess, and would never have had the power to win a continent for the world. So impossible is it to remove one of the links forged by fate, that we dare not regret even so monstrous a reign as that of Pedro the Cruel!
Enrique's right to the vacant throne of his brother had two disputants. Besides the King of Portugal, John of Gaunt, who had married the lady Constanza,--by virtue of her rights as daughter of Pedro,--claimed the crown of Castile. This Plantagenet was actually proclaimed King of Castile and Leon (1386). For twenty-five years he vainly strove to come into his kingdom as sovereign; but finally compromised by giving his young daughter Catherine to the boy ”Prince of Asturias,” the heir to the throne. He was obliged to content himself by thus securing to his child the long-coveted prize. And it was this Catherine, who at fourteen was betrothed to a boy of nine, who was the grandmother of Isabella, Queen of Castile.
When such was the private history of those highest in the land we can only imagine what must have been that of the rest. Feudalism, which was a part of Spain's Gothic inheritance, had always made that country one of its strongholds, and chivalry had nowhere else found so congenial a soil. There was no great artisan cla.s.s, as in France, creating a powerful ”bourgeoisie”; no ”guilds,” or simple ”burghers,”