T[=a]rik's conquest proceeded apace. Archidona was occupied without a
struggle: the inhabitants had all fled to the hills. Malaga surrendered,
and Elvira (near where Granada now stands) was stormed. The mountain
passes of Murcia were defended by Theodemir for some time with great
valour and prudence; but at last, being over-persuaded into offering a
pitched battle on the plain, the Christian army was cut to pieces, and
Theodemir escaped with a single page to the city of Orihuela. There he
practised an ingenious deception upon his pursuers. Having hardly any
men left in the city, for the youth of Murcia had fallen in the field,
he made the women put on male attire, arm themselves with helmets and
long rods like lances, and bring their hair over their chins as though
they wore beards. Then he lined the ramparts with this strange garrison,
and when the enemy approached in the shades of evening, they were
disheartened to see the walls so well defended. Theodemir then took a
flag of truce in his hand, and put a herald's tabard on his page, and
they two sallied forth to capitulate, and were graciously received by
the Moslem general, who did not recognize the prince. "I come," said
Theodemir, "on behalf of the commander of this city to treat for terms
worthy of your magnanimity and of his dignity. You perceive that the
city is capable of withstanding a long siege; but he is desirous of
sparing the lives of his soldiers. Promise that the inhabitants shall be
at liberty to depart unmolested with their property, and the city will
be delivered up to you to-morrow morning without a blow; otherwise we
are prepared to fight until not a man be left." The articles of
capitulation were then drawn out; and when the Moor had affixed his
seal, Theodemir took the pen and wrote his signature. "Behold in me,"
said he, "the governor of the city!" At the dawn of day the gates were
thrown open, and the Moslems looked to see a great force issuing forth,
but beheld merely Theodemir and his page, in battered armour, followed
by a multitude of old men, women, and children. "Where are the
soldiers," asked the Moor, "that I saw lining the walls last evening?"
"Soldiers have I none," answered Theodemir. "As to my garrison, behold
it before you. With these women did I man my walls; and this page is my
herald, guard, and retinue!" So struck was the Moorish general with the
boldness and ingenuity of the trick which had been played upon him, that
he made Theodemir governor of the province of Murcia, which was ever
afterwards known in Arabic as "Theodemir's land." Even in these early
days the Moors knew and practised the principles of true chivalry. They
had already won that title to knightliness which many centuries later
compelled the victorious Spaniards to address them as "Knights of
Granada, Gentlemen, albeit Moors:"
Caballeros Granadinos
Aunque Moros hijos d'algo.
[Illustration: PUERTO DEL SOL, TOLEDO.]
Meanwhile T[=a]rik had pressed on to Toledo, the capital of the Goths. He
was seeking for the Gothic nobles. At Cordova he had looked to meet
them, but they had fled: at Toledo, which the Jews delivered into his
hands, the nobles were not to be found; they had fled further, and taken
refuge in the mountains of the Asturias. Traitors, like the family of
Witiza and Count Julian, alone remained, and these were rewarded with
posts of government. The rest of the nobility had disappeared; the
country was abandoned to the Moors. Spain had become, in fact, a
province of the vast empire of the Arab Khalifs, who held their court at
Damascus and swayed an empire that stretched from the mountains of India
to the pillars of Hercules. What remained to be done towards the
pacification of Spain was effected by M[=u]sa, who, when he heard of
T[=a]rik's continued career of success, sailed in all haste across the
Straits, followed by his Arabs, to take his full share of the glory. He
crossed in the summer of 712 with eighteen thousand men, and, after
reducing Carmona, Seville, and Merida, joined T[=a]rik at Toledo. The
meeting between the conqueror and his superior officer was not friendly.
T[=a]rik went forth to receive the governor of the West with all honour,
but M[=u]sa struck him with a whip, overwhelmed him with reprimands for
exceeding his instructions, and, declaring that it was impossible to
entrust the safety of the Moslems to such rash and impetuous leading,
threw him into prison. When this act of jealous tyranny came to the ears
of the Khalif Wel[=i]d he summoned M[=u]sa to Damascus, and restored T[=a]rik to
his command in Spain.
Before returning to Syria, M[=u]sa had stood upon the Pyrenees and seen a
vision of European conquest. His recall interrupted his further advance;
but others soon pushed forward. An Arab governor, as early as 719,
occupied the southern part of Gaul, called Septimania, with the cities
of Carcasonne and Narbonne, and from these centres he began to make
raids upon Burgundy and Aquitania. Eudes, Duke of Aquitania,
administered a total defeat to the Saracens under the walls of Toulouse
in 721, but this only diverted their course more to the west. They
sacked Beaune, exacted tribute from Sens, seized Avignon in 730, and
made numerous raids upon the neighbouring districts. The new governor of
Narbonne, Abd-er-Rahm[=a]n, resolved upon the conquest of all Gaul. He had
already checked the operations of Eudes, who presumed, after his victory
at Toulouse, to carry the war into the Saracens' country; and now he
attacked the Tarraconaise, and boldly invaded Aquitaine, defeated Eudes
on the banks of the Garonne, captured Bordeaux by assault, and in 732
marched on in triumph towards Tours, where he had heard of the treasures
of the Abbey of St. Martin. Between Poictiers and Tours he was met by
Charles, the son of Pepin the Heristal, then virtual King of France, for
the feeble Merovingian sovereign, Lothair, had no voice to oppose the
will of his powerful Mayor of the Palace. The Saracens went joyfully to
the fight. They expected a second field of the Guadalete, and looked to
see fair France their prey from Calais to Marseilles. An issue momentous
for Europe was to be decided, and the conflict that ensued has rightly
been numbered among the fifteen decisive battles of the world. The
question to be judged by force of arms was whether Europe was to be
Christian or Mohammedan--whether the future Notre Dame was to be a
church or a mosque--perhaps even whether St. Paul's, when it came to be
built, should echo the chant of the Agnus Dei or the muttered prayers of
Islam. Had not the Saracens been checked at Tours there is no reason to
suppose that they would have stopped at the English Channel. But, as
fate decreed, the tide of Mohammedan invasion had reached its limit, and
the ebb was about to set in. Charles and his Franks were no emasculate
race like the Romanized Spaniards and Goths. They were at least as hardy
and valorous as the Moors themselves, and their magnificent stature gave
them an advantage which could not fail to tell. Six days were spent in
partial engagements, and then on the seventh came a general medley.
Charles cut through the ranks of the Moslems with irresistible might,
dealing right and left such ponderous blows that from that day he was
called Charles Martel, "Karl of the Hammer." His Frankish followers,
inspired by their leader's prowess, bore down upon the Saracens with
crushing force; and the whole array of the Moslems broke and fled in
utter rout. The spot was long and shudderingly known in Andalusia by the
name of the "Pavement of Martyrs."
The danger to Western Europe was averted. So crushing was the disaster
that the Moors of Spain never again, during all the centuries that they
ruled in the south, attempted to invade France. They retained, indeed,
their hold of Narbonne and the districts bordering the northern slopes
of the Pyrenees for some time longer (until 797), and even ventured upon
foraying raids into Provence. But here their ambition ceased. The battle
of Tours had once for all vindicated the independence of France, and set
a bound to the Moslem conquests. Like the swelling tide of the sea, the
Saracen hordes had poured over the land; and now, through the Hammerer
of the Franks, a voice had spoken: "Hitherto shalt thou come and no
further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed."
[Illustration: ARCH IN THE ALJAFERIA OF ZARAGOZA.]
On the other hand, the kings of France were so deeply impressed with the
courage of their Moslem neighbours, that, though they too delighted in
occasional forays, once only did they attempt the subjugation of Spain.
Charlemagne, the second Alexander, could not contemplate with
composure the immunity of the Moslem power on the other side of the
Pyrenees. As a good Christian he was pledged to extirpate the infidel;
and, as an imperial conqueror, the existence of the independent kingdom
of Andalusia was hateful to his pride. His opportunity came at
last--when the accession of the first Spanish prince of the Omeyyad
stock roused the hostility of some of the factions which were always
prone to revolt in Spain. Charlemagne was invited to interfere and drive
out the usurper. The Spanish chroniclers make Alfonso, King of the
Asturias and heir of Pelagius,[6] summon the Frankish emperor to his
aid; but there is more reason to believe that the invitation came from
certain disappointed Moslem chiefs, who could not brook the authority of
Abd-er-Rahm[=a]n the Omeyyad, and who were ready to submit even to the
sworn enemy of Islam, rather than recognize the new ruler. The moment of
their appeal was propitious; Charlemagne had just completed, as he
thought, the subjugation of the Saxons; their chief Wittekind had been
banished, and thousands of his followers were coming to Paderborn to be
baptized. The conqueror's hands were thus free to turn to other schemes
of victory. It was arranged that he should invade Spain, while the
factious Moslem chiefs should make diversions in his favour at three
different points. Fortunately for the newly-founded dynasty of Cordova,
this formidable coalition came to naught. The allies in Spain
miscalculated their time, and fell to blows with one another; and when
Charlemagne crossed the Pyrenees in 777, he found himself unsupported.
He began the siege of Zaragoza, when news was brought him that Wittekind
had returned and raised the Saxons, who were again in arms, and had
advanced as far as Cologne. There was nothing for it but to hurry back
and defend his dominions. He rapidly retraced his steps, and the main
part of his army had already crossed the mountains when disaster
overtook the rear in the Pass of Roncesvalles. The Basques, who
nourished an eternal hatred against the Franks, had laid a skilful
ambuscade among the rocky defiles of the Pyrenees, and, allowing the
advanced part of the army to march through, waited till the rear-guard,
encumbered with baggage, began slowly to thread its way through the
pass. Then they fell upon it hip and thigh, so that scarcely a Frank
escaped. The Christian chroniclers tell terrible tales of the slaughter
done that day. According to them it was the Saracens, side by side with
the knights of Leon, who wrought this havoc upon King Charles. We read
in the old Spanish ballad how the legendary hero Bernardo del Carpio led
the chivalry of Leon to the massacre of the Frankish host:
With three thousand men of Leon from the city Bernard goes,
To protect the soil Hispanian from the spear of Frankish foes;
From the city which is planted in the midst between the seas,
To preserve the name and glory of old Pelayo's victories.
Free were we born, 'tis thus they cry, though to our king we owe
The homage and the fealty behind his crest to go:
By God's behest our aid he shares, but God did ne'er command
That we should leave our children heirs of an enslaved land.
Our breasts are not so timorous, nor are our arms so weak,
Nor are our veins so bloodless, that we our vow should break,
To sell our freedom for the fear of prince or paladin:
At least we'll sell our birthright dear--no bloodless prize they'll win.
At least King Charles, if God decrees he must be Lord of Spain,
Shall witness that the Leonese were not aroused in vain:
He shall bear witness that we died as lived our sires of old--
Nor only of Numantium's pride shall minstrels' tale be told.
The LION that hath bathed his paws in seas of Lybian gore;
Shall he not battle for the laws and liberties of yore?
Anointed cravens may give gold to whom it likes them well,
But steadfast heart and spirit, Alfonso ne'er shall quell.
Side by side with the doughty warriors of Leon, who thus refused to join
the Prince of the Asturias in his homage to Charlemagne, were (according
to the romances) a host of valiant Saracens, who joined in the onset
upon the retiring Franks. Pseudo-Turpin's legendary history of Charles
and Orlando tells of a "fresh body of thirty thousand Saracens, who now
poured furiously down upon the Christians, already faint and exhausted
with fighting so long, and smote them from high to low, so that scarcely
one escaped. Some were transpierced with lances, some killed with clubs,
others beheaded, burnt, flayed alive, or suspended on trees." The
massacre was horrible, and the memory of that day has never faded from
the imagination of the peasantry of the district. When the English army
pursued Napoleon's marshals through the pass of Roncesvalles, the
soldiers heard the people singing the old ballad of the fatal field; and
Spanish minstrels have recorded many incidents, true or false, of the
fight. One of the most famous is the ballad of Admiral Guarinos, which
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza heard sung at Toboso, according to the
veracious history of Cervantes:
The day of Roncesvalles was a dismal day for you,
Ye men of France, for there the lance of King Charles was broke in two:
Ye well may curse that rueful field, for many a noble peer
In fray or fight the dust did bite beneath Bernardo's spear.
There captured was Guarinos, King Charles's Admiral:
Seven Moorish kings surrounded him, and seized him for their thrall.
And the ballad goes on to tell the tale of Guarinos' captivity, and of
his revenge at the tourney, when he slew his captor, and rode free for
France.
Among the slain that day was Roland, the redoubtable Paladin, commander
of the frontier of Brittany. He is the Sir Launcelot of the Charlemagne
romance, and many are the doughty deeds recorded of him. He had fought
all day in the thickest of the fray, dealing deadly blows with his good
sword Durenda; but all his prowess could not save the day. So, wounded
to death, and surrounded by the bodies of his friends, he stretched
himself on the ground, and prepared to yield up his soul. But first he
drew his faithful sword, than which he would sooner have spared the arm
that wielded it, and saying, "O sword of unparalleled brightness,
excellent dimensions, admirable temper, and hilt of the whitest ivory,
decorated with a splendid cross of gold, topped by a berylline apple,
engraved with the sacred name of God, endued with keenness and every
other virtue, who now shall wield thee in battle, who shall call thee
master? He that possessed thee was never conquered, never daunted by the
foe; phantoms never appalled him. Aided by the Almighty, with thee did
he destroy the Saracen, exalt the faith of Christ, and win consummate
glory. O happy sword, keenest of the keen, never was one like thee; he
that made thee, made not thy fellow! Not one escaped with life from thy
stroke." And lest Durenda should fall into the hands of a craven or an
infidel, Roland smote it upon a block of stone and brake it in twain.
Then he blew his horn, which was so resonant that all other horns were
split by its sound; and now he blew it with all his might, till the
veins of his neck burst. And the
blast of that dread horn,
On Fontarabian echoes borne,
reached even to King Charles's ear as he lay encamped and ignorant of
the disaster that had befallen the rear-guard eight miles away. The king
would have hastened to answer the forlorn blast, that seemed to tell of
a tragedy; but a traitor told him that Roland was gone a-hunting, and
Charlemagne was persuaded not to answer the summons of his faithful
paladin; who, after prayer and confession, gave up the ghost. Then
Baldwin, another of the peers of France, came running to the king and
told him of what had befallen the rear of his army, and the death of
Roland and Oliver. Whereupon the king and all his army turned and
marched back to Roncesvalles, where the ground was strewn with dead, and
Charles himself was the first to descry the body of the hero, lying in
the form of a cross, with his horn and broken sword beside him. Then did
Great Charles lament over him with bitter sighs and sobs, wringing his
hands and tearing his beard, and crying, "O right arm of thy Sovereign's
body, honour of the Franks, sword of justice, inflexible spear,
inviolable breastplate, shield of safety, noble defender of the
Christians, scourge of the Saracens, a wall to the clergy, the widow's
and orphan's friend, just and faithful in judgment! Renowned Count of
the Franks, valiant captain of our armies, why did I leave thee here to
perish? How can I behold thee dead, and not die with thee? Why hast thou
left me sorrowful and alone, a poor miserable king? But thou art exalted
to the kingdom of heaven, and dost enjoy the company of angels and
martyrs!" Thus did Charles mourn for Roland to the last day of his life.
On the spot where he died the army rested, and the body was embalmed
with balsam, aloes, and myrrh. The whole army of the Franks watched by
it that night, honouring the corse with hymns and songs, and lighting
fires on the mountains round about. Then they took him with them, and
buried him right royally. Thus ended the fatal day--
When Roland brave and Oliver,
And every paladin and peer,
On Roncesvalles died.
No action of so small importance has ever been made the theme of so many
heroic legends and songs. It is the Thermopylae of the Pyrenees, with
none of the glory or the significance, but all the glamour, of its
prototype.
[Illustration]
III.
THE PEOPLE OF ANDALUSIA.
The victory of Charles Martel, in 733, had set a bound to the Saracens'
invasion of Europe; they no longer thought of further conquest, but
turned to the work of consolidating the kingdom they had acquired. After
the brief and disastrous incursion of Charlemagne, they were left in
almost undisturbed possession of their new territory for a period of
three hundred years. It is true the descendants of the expelled Goths
still held out in stubborn independence in the mountainous districts of
the north, and from time to time recovered a portion of their ancient
dominion; but these inroads, while they gave some trouble, did not
materially endanger the domination of the Moors over the greater part of
Spain until the eleventh century. The conquerors accepted the
independence of the northern provinces as an inevitable evil, which
would cost more blood to remove than the feat was worth; and leaving
Galicia, Leon, Castile, and the Biscayan provinces to the Christians,
they contented themselves with the better part of the land: the
Christians might enjoy the dreary wastes and rocky defiles of the north,
provided they did not interfere with the Moors' enjoyment of the warm
and fertile provinces of the south and east. From the end of the eighth
century, when the Moorish boundaries took a tolerably final shape, to
the time of the advance of the Christian kingdoms in the eleventh
century, the division between the Christian north and the Moslem south
may be roughly placed at the great range of mountains called the Sierra
de Guadarrama, which runs in a north-easterly direction from Coimbra in
Portugal to Zaragoza, from whence the Ebro may be taken as a rough
boundary. The Moors thus enjoyed the fertile valleys of the Tagus, the
Guadiana, and the Guadalquivir--the very name of which bears witness to
its Arab owners, for Guadalquivir is a corruption of the Arabic
Wady-l-keb[=i]r, or the "Great River"--besides possessing the famous cities
of Andalusia, the wealth and commerce and climatic advantages of which
had been celebrated from Roman times. The division was a natural one;
the two parts have been distinguished geographically from time
immemorial, on account of their climatic differences. The north is bleak
and exposed to biting winds, subject to heavy rains and intense cold; a
good pasturage country, but in most parts ill to cultivate. The south,
while tormented by the hot winds that blow over from Africa, is genial,
well watered, and capable of high cultivation. A great plateau divides
the two, and though this fell chiefly on the Moorish side, it was to
some extent debatable land and insecurely held. Its chilly heights
rendered it distasteful to lovers of sunshine like the Moors, and they
confided it chiefly to the care of the Berber tribes who had first come
over with T[=a]rik, and who were always held in poor estimation by the
true Arabs who reaped the fruits of the conquest.
[Illustration: ALCANTARA.]
In the two-thirds of the peninsula thus marked off by nature for their
habitation, which the Arabs always called "Andalus," and we shall call
Andalusia, to distinguish it from the entire peninsula, the Moors
organized that wonderful kingdom of Cordova which was the marvel of the
Middle Ages, and which, when all Europe was plunged in barbaric
ignorance and strife, alone held the torch of learning and civilization
bright and shining before the Western world. It must not be supposed
that the Moors, like the barbarian hordes who preceded them, brought
desolation and tyranny in their wake. On the contrary, never was
Andalusia so mildly, justly, and wisely governed as by her Arab
conquerors. Where they got their talent for administration it is hard to
say, for they came almost direct from their Arabian deserts, and the
rapid tide of victories had left them little leisure to acquire the art
of managing foreign nations. Some of their counsellors were Greeks and
Spaniards, but this does not explain the problem; for these same
counsellors were unable to produce similar results elsewhere, and all
the administrative talent of Spain had not sufficed to make the Gothic
domination tolerable to its subjects. Under the Moors, on the other
hand, the people were on the whole contented--as contented as any people
can be whose rulers are of a separate race and creed,--and far better
pleased than they had been when their sovereigns belonged to the same
religion as that which they nominally professed. Religion was, indeed,
the smallest difficulty which the Moors had to contend with at the
outset, though it became troublesome afterwards. The Spaniards were as
much pagan as Christian; the new creed promulgated by Constantine had
made little impression among the general mass of the population, who
were still predominantly Roman. What they wanted was, not a creed, but
the power to live their lives in peace and prosperity. This their
Moorish masters gave them.
[Illustration: THE SIERRA NEVADA.]