Part 9 (1/2)
”Next there went St. Andrew, Then goes St. Philip too; And see, there is an end Of St. Bartholomew.
”St. Simon is in the snuff, But it is a matter of doubt, Whether he or St. Thomas could be said, Soonest to have gone out.
”There are only three remaining, St. Jude and the two Saints James, And great was then Queen Mary's hope, For the best of all good names.
”Great was then Queen Mary's hope, But greater her fear, I guess, When one of the three went out, And that one was St. James the less.
”They are now within less than quarter inch, The only remaining two.
When there came a thief in St James, And it made a gutter too.
”Up started Queen Mary, Up she sate in her bed, 'I can never call him Judas,'
She clasped her hands and said.
'I never can call him Judas!'
Again did she exclaim.
'Holy Mother, preserve us!
It is not a Christian name.'
”She opened her hands and clasped them again, And the infant in the cradle Set up a cry, a l.u.s.ty cry, As loud as he was able.
”'Holy Mother, preserve us!'
The Queen her prayer renewed, When in came a moth at the window, And fluttered about St. Jude.
”St. James had fallen in the socket, But as yet the flame is not out, And St. Jude hath singed the silly moth, That flutters so idly about.
”And before the flame and the molten wax, That silly moth could kill, It hath beat out St. Jude with its wings, But St. James is burning still.
”Oh, that was a joy for Queen Mary's heart, The babe is christened James, The Prince of Aragon hath got, The best of all good names.
”Glory to Santiago, The mighty one in war, James he is called, and he shall be King James the Conqueror.
”Now shall the Crescent wane, The Cross be set on high, In triumph upon many a mosque, Woe, woe to Mawmetry!”
So Jayme the youth was named, Jayme being the popularly accepted Aragonese form for James, and early in life he entered upon an active career which soon showed him to possess a strong and crafty nature, though he was at the same time brutal, rough, and dissolute. In his various schemes for conquest and national expansion, he stopped at nothing which might ensure the success of his undertakings, and in particular did he attempt by matrimonial ventures of various kinds to increase his already large domain. This rather unusual disregard of the sacredness of the marriage relation, even for that time, may have been induced to some extent by the atmosphere in which he pa.s.sed his youthful days; for his mother, the devout Queen Maria, in spite of all her pious zeal for the Church, was pleasure-loving, and in the excitement of court life it was whispered that she had looked with favor more than once upon some gallant troubadour from Provence who had written verses in her honor. Jayme's first marriage was with Eleanor of Castile, Berenguela's sister, but when he discovered that the young Castilian king, Fernando, was strong and capable and that there was no possibility whatever of an ultimate union of Aragon and Castile, at least within his own time, he promptly divorced Eleanor, and then wedded Yolande, the daughter of King Andrew of Hungary. Yolande's eldest son, Pedro, was married to Constance, daughter of King Manfred of Sicily, for purely political reasons; and when the King of France opposed this alliance as one detrimental to the best interests of the pope, who was being much aided at this time by Gallican support, Jayme cleverly silenced this complaint by marrying his daughter Isabel to Philip, the French dauphin. This daring King of Aragon had dreams of a great Romance Empire which might extend all over the southern part of Europe, with Aragon as its centre, and it was to this end that he bent all his energies. While he was not able to realize this fond hope, he was remarkably successful; and not a little of his success must be attributed to his lack of sentiment and his practical view of the matrimonial question.
With his conquests and the corresponding prosperity which is to be seen in Castile at the same general period, Christian Spain slowly became the most civilized and enlightened country in all Europe. Spain was rich, there was much culture and refinement, and her artistic manufactures excited the wonder of the world. With the knights who were coming in ever increasing numbers to do battle against the Moors, now that the time of the Crusades had pa.s.sed, there came a goodly number of the troubadours and minstrels who had recently been driven from Provence by the cruel Simon de Montfort at the time of the Albigensian ma.s.sacres, and the whole condition of Spanish society was such that the stern simplicity of the early Spaniards quickly disappeared. So great was the craze for poetry and for glittering entertainments and a lavish display of wealth, that Don Jayme felt called upon to take some restraining measures. Aragon, as well as Castile, was filled with the wealth of captured Moorish cities, there was a new sense of national security with each successive Christian victory, luxuries of all kinds were being brought within the reach of the people as the result of a newly aroused spirit of commercialism, and, all in all, to a warlike king, the situation was fraught with danger. Accordingly, Jayme determined to take matters into his own hands, and he proceeded to issue a number of sumptuary laws which were far from mild. Food was regulated, minstrels were not allowed to sit at the same table with ladies and gentlemen, most rigid rules were formulated against the abuse of gold, silver, and tinsel tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs on the dresses of the women, and of the men as well, and the use of ermine and of all fine and Costly furs was carefully restricted. In Castile the same movement was taking place, and Alfonso X., who followed Fernando, issued similar laws, wherein women were forbidden to wear any bright colors, to adorn their girdles with pearls, or to border their skirts with either gold or silver thread. As in Italy at about the same time, and notably in Florence, extravagant wedding feasts were condemned, no presents of garments were permitted, and the whole cost of a bride's trousseau could not exceed sixty maravedis, a maravedi being a gold coin containing about sixty grains of the yellow metal.
It was in the midst of this brilliant period of national well-being that Spain was called upon to celebrate a wedding festival which far surpa.s.sed in magnificence anything that had ever before been seen among the Christians of the peninsula. The sister of King Alfonso X. of Castile, Eleanor, was given in marriage to Edward Plantagenet, the attractive young heir to the English throne, and it was in honor of this event that all Burgos was in gala dress in the month of October, 1254.
All were on tiptoe with excitement, crowds thronged into the old cathedral city, and the windows and housetops were black with people, on that eventful day when the stalwart prince rode in through the great gate, with a glittering train of n.o.bles at his back, to claim his bride.
Prince Edward was a magnificent specimen of physical manhood, towering almost head and shoulders above his fellows, and the gorgeous entertainments which were prepared for him and his followers gave good opportunity for all to witness his courtly grace and his distinguished bearing. The chronicles of the time are full of the most superlative descriptions of this whole affair, and often they seem lost in wonderment, lacking words with which to describe the scene properly.
Before the wedding, in accord with mediaeval custom, Edward received knighthood at the hands of King Alfonso. In that same old monastery at Las Huelgas where the youth Fernando had kept his lonely vigil before he had been knighted by his n.o.ble mother, Queen Berenguela, the English prince now kept his watch; and when the morning came and he stood, tall and fair, clothed in a robe of white, ready to receive the accolade, before a company of chosen knights and ladies, the scene must have been wonderfully impressive. The bride, Eleanor, had been a great favorite with all her people, of both high and low degree, and all were glad to see that the future seemed to smile upon her.
A worthy companion to the wise Berenguela is found in the person of Maria de Molina, the wife of Sancho IV., called the Ferocious, King of Castile. His reign, which had extended over a period of eleven years, came to a close with his death in the year 1295, and in all that time there had been nothing but discord and confusion, warfare and a.s.sa.s.sination, as Sancho's claim to the throne had been disputed by several pretenders, and they lost no occasion to hara.s.s him by plot and revolution. It may well be imagined, then, that when he died, leaving his throne to his son Fernando, a child of nine, the situation was most perplexing for the queen-mother, who had been made regent, by the terms of her husband's will, until Fernando should become of age. A further matter which tended to complicate the situation was the fact that the marriage between Sancho and Maria had never been sanctioned by the pope, as the two were within the forbidden limits of consanguinity, and he had refused to grant his special dispensation. With this doubt as to her son's legitimacy, Maria was placed in a position which was doubly hard, and if she had not been a woman of keen diplomacy and great wisdom, she would never have been able to steer her s.h.i.+p of state in safety amid so many threatening dangers. Her first care was to induce the pope to grant, after much persuasion, the long-deferred dispensation which legalized her marriage; and this matter settled, she was ready to enter the conflict and endeavor to maintain her rights. The first to attempt her overthrow was the Infante Juan, the young king's uncle, who made an alliance with the Moorish king of Granada and a.s.sumed a threatening att.i.tude. Maria sent against him her greatest n.o.bles, Haro, and the Lords of Lara; but she had been deceived in the loyalty of these followers, as they promptly deserted the regent's cause and, with all their men, went over to the insurgents and helped to make more powerful the coalition which was forming against the infant king. For a brief moment Maria was in despair and felt almost ready to yield in the face of the opposition, as the hostile combination now included Portugal, Aragon, Navarre, France, and Granada, and it was their intent to separate the kingdoms of Leon and Castile if possible and undo all that Berenguela had labored so hard and with such success to accomplish.
Inasmuch as this was, above all else, a quarrel which concerned the n.o.bility, a contention which had its rise in the jealousy and mutual distrust of several powerful houses, Maria, with a keen knowledge of the situation, and with a sagacity which was rather surprising in a woman untrained in politics or government, decided to win to her side the great ma.s.s of the common people, with whom she had always lived in peace and harmony. Her first act was to call a meeting of the Cortes in Valladolid, which was the only city upon which she could depend in this crisis. The Cortes speedily acknowledged Fernando IV. as king, and with this encouragement Maria de Molina set bravely about her arduous task of organization and defence. Few of the n.o.bles rallied to her support, but she soon won over the chartered towns by the liberal treatment she accorded them in matters of taxation and by her protection of the various civic brotherhoods which had been organized by the people that they might defend themselves from the injustice of the n.o.bility, which was now showing itself in countless tyrannical and petty acts. She labored early and late, conducted her government in a most businesslike manner, convoked the Cortes in regular session every year, and by the sheer force of her integrity and her moral strength she finally quelled all internal disturbances and brought back the government to its former strength and solidity. In the year 1300 Fernando was declared king in his own right, at the age of fourteen, and then, for a short time, it looked as if all that the regent had sought to accomplish might suddenly be nullified. The king, inclined to be arrogant, and with his head somewhat turned as the result of his sudden accession to power, was prevailed upon to listen to evil counsellors, who tried in every way to make him believe that Maria had administered her regency with an eye to her own interests, and that much of the revenue which legally belonged to him had been diverted to her own private uses. Fernando, in spite of all his mother's goodness, was simple enough to believe these idle tales, and, in most unfilial and suspecting fas.h.i.+on, he sternly ordered Maria to render up a detailed account of her stewards.h.i.+p during his minority. Maria was much affected by this thoughtless and inconsiderate act, but before she had had time to reply or attempt her own defence in any way, a storm of indignation broke forth from the free towns, and Fernando was informed that he would not be allowed to enter the town of Medina del Campo, where the Leonese Cortes was to be held, unless he restored his mother to favor and brought her with him to the a.s.sembly.
Fernando knew enough to fear the veiled threat which this communication contained, and the queen-regent appeared with him at the opening of the session. The scene which followed is pathetic in the extreme, and shows the magnanimity and unselfishness of Maria in a most striking manner.
She spoke to the members of the Cortes, recalled their former struggles against the encroachments of the n.o.bles, and urged them to prudent action, that there might be no further occasion for domestic strife.
Loyalty to country and to king were the keynotes of her speech, and before she had finished, those who had a.s.sembled in anger, ready to renounce their allegiance on account of Fernando's shameful treatment of his mother, were now willing to forgive and pardon for that same mother's sake. This point once established and a loyal following secured, Maria proceeded to give in detail that account of her stewards.h.i.+p which had been called for, and she had no trouble in showing that her administration had been above reproach. Then it was that Fernando made public acknowledgment of the fact that he had been led astray by evil-minded advisers; and the Cortes adjourned, faithful to the king and more than ever devoted to his mother. At Fernando's death in 1312, Maria de Molina was again called to the regency, so great was her reputation for wisdom and fair play; and when she ended her public career, in 1324, all hastened to do honor to her memory, and she was called Maria the Great, a t.i.tle which has never been bestowed upon any other queen-regent in Spain. Her reputation for goodness was unchanged by the lapse of time, her goodness stands approved to-day, and two dramatists, Tirso de Molina and Roca de Togores, have depicted her as a heroine in their plays.