opportunity, and they made the most of it. Alfonso VI., who had united
under his sway the three kingdoms of the Asturias, Leon, and Castile,
understood his part perfectly. He saw that he only had to allow the
various Moslem princes rope enough, and they would proceed to hang
themselves with the utmost expedition. These short-sighted tyrants,
indeed, caring only for their petty individual power, and eagerly aiding
in anything that could weaken their rivals, threw themselves at
Alfonso's feet, and implored his assistance whenever they found
themselves overmastered by a more powerful neighbour. Partly in
consequence of acts of this kind, and partly in terror at the furious
raids which the Castilians made throughout the country, even as far as
the port of Cadiz, the Moslem States were almost all tributaries of the
King of Castile, who took care to annually demand heavier and more heavy
tribute, as the price of his friendship, in order to lay up stores for
the great conquest which he had in mind. The north was poor, and with a
fine irony he trusted to the immense contributions of his vassals among
the Andalusian princes to provide the sinews of the war which should
destroy them. Divided and jealous as were the Mohammedan dynasts, there
was a limit to their patience. When Alfonso had bathed in the ocean by
Hercules' Pillars, rejoicing that at last he had traversed all Spain and
touched the watery border; when he had established a garrison of more
than twelve thousand daring men in the fortress of Aledo, in the very
midst of the Moslem territories, whence they ruthlessly emerged to harry
the whole country and commit every sort of savage outrage; when Rodrigo
Diaz de Bivar, "my Cid the Challenger," had established himself in
Valencia with his Castilians, and laid waste the neighbouring lands;
when it became clear to everyone that Alfonso meant nothing less than
the reconquest of all Spain, and the extermination of all Moslems--then
at last the Mohammedan princes awoke to their danger, and began to take
measures for their defence. Helpless in themselves and, in spite of the
common danger, despairing of any firm collected action among so many and
such hostile factions, they took the only other course possible--they
called in the aid of the foreigner. Some, indeed, foresaw dangers in
such aid; but Mo'temid, the King of Seville, silenced them: "Better be a
camel-driver in African deserts," he said, "than a swineherd in
Castile!" The power they required was not far off. A new Berber
revolution had taken place in North Africa, and a sect of fanatics,
called the marabouts or saints (_Almoravides_, as the Spaniards named
them), had conquered the whole country from Algiers to Senegal. They
were much the same sort of people as T[=a]rik and his followers, and they
were ready enough to cross the water and conquer the fertile provinces
of Spain. They made it a favour, indeed, and evinced supreme
indifference to the attractions of Andalusia; but they came, and it was
easy to see that they meant to stay.
When the Almoravides first came over like a cloud of locusts to devour
the country thus offered to their appetite, they found the way perfectly
open. The mass of the people of Andalusia rejoiced to see once more a
strong arm coming to repress the disorder which had destroyed their
well-being ever since the death of the great Almanzor; the petty
tyrants either had invited them or could not resist them, and were, at
all events, glad to see the Castilians successfully repelled. The
Almoravide king, Y[=u]suf, the son of Teshf[=i]n, after appropriating
Algeciras, as a harbour and necessary basis of operations, marched
unopposed through the provinces, and met Alfonso at Zall[=a]ka, or, as the
Spaniards call it, Sacralias, near Badajoz, October 23, 1086. Alfonso,
as he looked upon his own splendid army, exclaimed, "With men like these
I would fight devils, angels, and ghosts!" Nevertheless he resorted to a
ruse to score a surprise over the joint forces of the Berbers and
Andalusian; but Y[=u]suf was not easily disconcerted. He took the Castilian
army skilfully in front and rear, and, thus placed between two fires, in
spite of the obstinate resistance which the tried warriors of Castile
knew well how to offer, he crushed them utterly. Alfonso barely escaped
with some five hundred horsemen. Many thousands of the best sword-arms
in Castile lay stiff and nerveless on that fatal field.
After the victory, Y[=u]suf the Almoravide returned to Africa, leaving
three thousand of his Berbers to help the Andalusians. He had promised
to make no annexations, and, except in retaining the harbour of
Algeciras, he had so far kept his word. The Andalusians were delighted
with him; they praised his valour and exulted over the saving of the
land; they admired his simple piety, which let him do nothing without
the advice of his priests, and which had induced him to abolish all
taxes in Spain except those few authorized by the Khalif Omar in the
earliest days of Islam. The upper classes, indeed, ridiculed his
ignorance and rough manners; he could speak but little Arabic, and when
the poets recited their charming verses in his honour he generally
missed the point of the compliment--no slight offence to the polished
and elegant Andalusians, who never forgot their poetry even when they
were up to their knees in blood. Y[=u]suf was to them a mere barbarian. But
their contempt for his education did not greatly matter; they could not
do without his sword, and the vast mass of the people, thinking rather
of comfort than culture, were ready to receive him joyfully as sovereign
of Andalusia. In 1090 the King of Seville again prayed the Almoravide to
come over and help him against the Christians, who were as bold as ever,
and carried on a perpetual guerilla warfare from their stronghold of
Aledo. He acceded, with assumed unwillingness, and this time he directed
his attacks quite as much against the Andalusian princes as against the
Christians of Castile. These foolish tyrants dinned into his ears
innumerable complaints against each other, and mutually betrayed
themselves to such an extent, that Y[=u]suf very soon had grounds for
distrusting the whole body of them. He had on his side the people, and,
above all, the priests. These soon absolved him from his promise not to
annex Andalusia, and even went so far as to urge him that it was his
duty, in God's name, to restore peace and happiness to the distracted
land. Always under the influence of his spiritual advisers, and
sufficiently prompted by his own ambition without any such external
impetus, Y[=u]suf readily fell in with this view, and before the year 1090
was out he had begun the subjugation of Spain. He entered Granada in
November, and distributed its wonderful treasures--its diamonds, pearls,
rubies, and other precious jewels, its splendid ornaments of gold and
silver, its crystal cups, and gorgeous carpets, its unheard-of riches of
every sort--among his officers, who had never in their lives seen
anything approaching such magnificence. Tar[=i]fa fell in December, and the
next year saw the capture of Seville and many of the chief cities of
Andalusia. An army sent by Alfonso, under the famous captain, Alvar
Fanez, was defeated, and all the south lay at the feet of the
Almoravides--save only Valencia, which no assault could carry so long as
the Cid lived to direct the defence. In 1102, after the hero's death,
Valencia succumbed, and now the whole of Mohammedan Spain, with the
exception of Toledo, had become a province of the great African empire
of the Almoravides.
The mass of the people had reason to be satisfied, for a time, with the
result of their appeal to the foreigner. A minority, consisting of all
the men of position and of education, were not so well pleased with the
experiment. The reign of the Puritans had come, and without a Milton to
soften its austerity. The poets and men of letters, who had thriven at
the numerous little courts, where the most bloodthirsty despot had
always a hearty and appreciative welcome for a man of genius, and would
generally cap his verses with impromptu lines, were disgusted with the
savage Berbers, who could not understand their refinements, and who,
when they sometimes attempted to form themselves upon the model of the
cultivated tyrants who had preceded them, made so poor an imitation that
it was impossible to help laughing. The free-thinkers and men of broad
views saw nothing very encouraging in the accession to power of the
fanatical priests who formed the Almoravides' advisers, and who were not
only rabidly opposed to anything that savoured of philosophy, but read
their Koran exclusively through the spectacles of a single commentator.
The Jews and Christians soon discovered what the tolerance of the
Almoravides was: they were cruelly persecuted, massacred, or else
transported. The old noble families, the few that remained, and the
remnants of the petty princes, were in despair when they saw the
stranger, whom they had bidden to their aid, taking up his permanent
station in their dominions, and recalled with terror the doings of
similar hordes of Berbers in the latter days of the Cordovan Khalifate.
But the mass of the people were glad enough to see the Almoravides
staying in the land; their lives and goods were at last safe, which had
never been the case when the country was cut up into a number of
separate principalities, few of which were strong enough to protect
their subjects outside the castle gates; the roads were free from the
brigands who had made travelling impossible for many years, and the
Christians, instead of pouncing upon unsuspecting villages and harrying
the land, were driven back to their own territory, where a wholesome
dread of the Berbers, and a long strife among themselves, kept them at a
safe distance. Order and tranquillity reigned for the moment; the law
was respected, and the people once more dreamed of wealth and happiness.
The dream was a delusion. There was no prosperity in store for the
subjects of the Almoravides. What had happened to the Romans and the
Goths now happened to the Berbers. They came to Spain hardy rough
warriors, unused to ease or luxuries, delighting in feats of strength
and prowess, filled with a fierce but simple zeal for their religion.
They had not been long in the enjoyment of the fruits of their victory
when all the demoralization which the soft luxuries of Capua brought
upon the soldiers of Hannibal came also upon them. They lost their
martial habits, their love of deeds of daring, their pleasure in
enduring hardships in the brave way of war--they lost all their
manliness with inconceivable rapidity. In twenty years there was no
Berber army that could be trusted to repel the attacks of the
Castilians; in its place was a disorganized crowd of sodden debauchees,
miserable poltroons, who had drunk and fooled away their manhood's
vigour and become slaves to all the appetites that make men cowards.
Instead of preserving order, they had now become the disturbers of
order; brigands, when they could pluck up courage to attack a peaceful
traveller; thieves on all promising opportunities. The country was worse
off than ever it had been, even under the petty tyrants. The enfeebled
Berbers were at the beck and call of bad women and ambitious priests,
and they would counterorder one day what they had commanded the day
before. Such rulers do not rule for long. A great revolution was sapping
the power of the Almoravides in Africa, and the Castilians under
Alfonso the Battler resumed their raids into Andalusia. In 1125 they
harried the south for a whole year. In 1133 they burnt the very suburbs
of Cordova, Seville, and Carmona, and sacked Xeres and set it in a
blaze. The Christian forays now extended from Leon to the Straits of
Gibraltar, yet the besotted government did nothing to meet the danger.
Exasperated at its feebleness, the people finally rose in their wrath
and drove their impotent rulers from the land.
"At last," says the Arab historian, "when the people of Andalus saw that
the empire of the Almoravides was falling to pieces, they waited no
longer, but, casting away the mask of dissimulation, broke out into open
rebellion. Every petty governor, chief, or man of influence, who could
command a few followers and had a castle to retire to in case of need,
styled himself Sultan, and assumed the other insignia of royalty; and
Andalus had as many kings as there were towns in it. Ibn-Hamd[=i]n rose at
Cordova, Ibn-Maym[=u]n at Cadiz, Ibn-K[=a]sy and Ibn-Wez[=i]r Seddaray held the
west, Lamt[=u]ny Granada, Ibn-Mardan[=i]sh, Valencia; some Andalusians, others
Berbers. All, however, shortly disappeared before the banners of
Abd-el-Mumin, who deprived every one of them of their dominions, and
subjected the whole of Andalus to his rule." Abd-el-Mumin was the leader
of the Almohades, who succeeded to the Almoravide power in Africa and
Spain.
[Illustration]
XI.
MY CID THE CHALLENGER.
It is time to glance at the opponents of the Moors in the North. We have
seen how Pelayo gathered together the remnant of the Goths in the
inaccessible caves and fastnesses of the Asturian mountains; how this
remnant soon advanced beyond its early boundaries, and, taking courage
from the indifference or the disunion of the Berber tribes who were
quartered on the frontiers of the Mohammedan dominions, gradually
recovered most of the territory north of the Sierra de Guadarrama, and
there established the kingdom of Leon and the county of Castile; while
the separate kingdom of Navarre arose further east, beneath the
Pyrenees. We have also seen how these Christian kingdoms were in a state
of almost constant war with their Moorish neighbours, and might have
been seriously dangerous but for the no less constant divisions which
neutralized the various Christian States. So long as the kingdom of
Cordova remained strong and undivided, while the Christians of Leon,
Castile, and Navarre wasted their vigour in civil wars, the Moors were
fully equal to the task of preserving their dominions. But when the
kingdom of Cordova fell, and Andalusia became a prey to petty
dynasties, each of which thought first of its own interests, and then
perhaps of the interests of the Mohammedan power at large, the
Christians became more venturesome, and were enabled to wring from the
Moors a considerable accession of territory. During the confusion of the
eleventh century, when almost every city in Andalusia formed a State by
itself, we have seen that the Christians scoured the land of the Moslems
with their victorious armies, and exacted tribute from many of the most
important Moorish princes. At this time Fernando the First had united
the greater part of the north under his own sceptre. He had combined the
conflicting provinces of Leon and Castile, and incorporated the Asturias
and Galicia in his dominions. Fernando was undoubtedly the most powerful
monarch in all Spain at this time; he had annexed Lormego, Viseu, and
Coimbra in Portugal, and took tribute from the kings of Zaragoza,
Toledo, Badajoz, and Seville; and though his imprudent division of his
dominions among his three sons and two daughters involved the north in a
series of civil wars after his death, Alfonso VI. "the Valiant"
eventually succeeded in cementing the scattered fragments together
again, and henceforward the progress of the Christian power in Spain was
inevitable. It was only the immense bribes of the Mohammedan princes
(who paid blackmail to a fabulous amount to buy off the Christians), and
the armies of the Almoravides in the background, that prevented the
entire reconquest of Andalusia by the Christians at this period of
Moorish weakness. As it was, the Moors were in no sense their own
masters; they were harassed between the dread of Alfonso and the
scarcely less alarming supremacy of their Almoravide ally; and in the
end they had to succumb to the latter. At this time we find the
Christians interfering in most of the political affairs of the
Mohammedan states; Christian armies overrunning their territories and
demanding heavy tribute for their goodwill; and so complicated became
the alliances between the two parties that many Christian mercenaries
were to be found in the armies of the Moors, vigorously assisting in
campaigns of devastation and sacrilege through Christian provinces,
while Moors were ready to join the Castilians against their
fellow-Moslems. It was, in short, a time of adventurers, of paid
mercenaries, of men who fought for personal interest and profit, instead
of for king and country.
[Illustration: BOTICA DE LOS TEMPLARIOS, TOLEDO.]
We should make a great mistake if we regarded the warriors of Leon and
Castile as anything approaching an ideal of knightly honour and
chivalry, and a still greater error would be to imagine them polished,
cultivated gentlemen. The Christians of the north formed the most
striking possible contrast to their Moorish rivals. The Arabs, rough
tribesmen as they had been at their first arrival, had softened, by
contact with the Andalusians and by their own natural disposition to
enjoyment and luxury, into a highly civilized people, delighting in
poetry and elegant literature, devoted to the pursuit of learning, and,
above all, determined to enjoy life to the utmost. Their intellectual
tastes were unusually fine and delicate; they were moved by emotions
which could only be felt by men of taste and _savoir vivre_. They were
romantic, imaginative, poetical, speculative, and would bestow on a
well-turned epigram what would have sufficed to pay a regiment of
soldiers. The most tyrannical and bloodthirsty among their despots was
held in some contempt if he were not also something of a poet, or at
least instinctively appreciative of polished wit and courtly eloquence.
Music, oratory, as well as the severer pursuits of science, seemed to
come naturally to this brilliant people; and they possessed in a high
degree that quality of critical perception and delicate appreciation of
the finer shades of expression which in the present day we associate
with the French nation.
The Christians of the north were as unlike this as can well be
conceived. Though descended from an older kingdom, the northern states
had most of the qualities of new nations. They were rude and
uncultivated; few of their princes possessed the elements of what could
be called education, and they were too poor to indulge in the refined
luxuries of the Moorish sovereigns. The Christians were simply rough
warriors, as fond of fighting as even their Moslem antagonists, but even
better prepared by their hard and necessarily self-denying lives for the
endurance of long campaigns and the performance of desperate deeds of
valour. They had no idea of the high standard of chivalrous conduct
which poets afterwards infused into their histories; they were men of
the sword, and little besides. Their poverty made them any man's
servants; they sold their valour to him who paid them best; they fought
to get a livelihood. We have seen how the great minister Almanzor won
his victories against Leon and took Santiago with the aid of a large
contingent of the Leonese themselves, who perceived clearly enough on
which side their fortunes were to be made. The history of the eleventh
century in Spain is full of such examples of the employment of Christian
_chevaliers d'industrie_ by Moorish princes; but of these none has ever
attained such celebrity as the Cid, the national hero of Spain.
The Cid's proper name was Rodrigo Diaz of Bivar, and he was called the
_Cid_ because that was the title which his Moorish followers naturally
gave him. A Mohammedan gentleman is still addressed in Egypt and
elsewhere by the title _S[=i]d_, which is a corruption of the word
_Seyyid_, meaning "master." The Cid, or "master," was also styled
_Campeador_, which signifies "champion," or, more accurately,
"challenger," because his exceeding prowess made him the natural
challenger in those single combats which in Spanish wars commonly
preceded a general engagement between two armies. A famous warrior would
advance before the ranks, as Goliath of Gath stood forth before the
armies of Israel, and challenge the opposing forces to send him out a
champion; and none was more renowned for his triumphs in this manner of
warfare than Rodrigo Diaz, "myo Cid el Campeador," as the old chronicler
affectionately calls him. It is not easy to decide how much of the
splendid history which has gathered round the exploits of the Cid is
true. The Christian chroniclers stopped at nothing when they began to
describe their national hero; and the enthusiasm that did not shrink
from relating how the King of Leon seized Paris, and conquered the
French, Germans, Italians, and even the Persians, can be trusted still
less when it sounds the glories of the beloved Cid. The Spanish ballads
surround their hero with a saintly aureole of all the virtues, and
forget that many of these virtues would not have been understood or
appreciated by the Cid himself or his contemporaries in Castile. The
Arabic writers are generally more trustworthy, but their judgment can
hardly have been unbiassed when they spoke of a Christian who worked
such misery to the Moslems of Valencia as did the famous Campeador. Yet
even they call him a "miracle of God."
In this critical age we are frequently obliged to abandon with regret
the most charming traditions of our childhood's histories; and the Cid
has not been spared. A special book has been written by an eminent
Orientalist to prove that the redoubtable Challenger was by no means the
hero he was supposed to be; that he was treacherous and cruel, a
violator of altars, and a breaker of his own good faith. Professor Dozy
maintains that the romantic history of the Cid is a tissue of
inventions, and he has written an account of "the real Cid" to
counteract these misleading narratives. He founds his criticisms mainly
on the Arabic historians, in whom, despite their national and religious
bias, he places as blind a reliance as less learned people have placed
in the _Chronicle of the Cid_. Yet it is surprising how trifling are the
differences that can be detected between his "real Cid" and that
romantic _Chronicle of the Cid_, the substance of which was compiled by
Alfonso the Learned only half a century after the Cid's death, and which
Robert Southey translated into English in 1805 with such skill and charm
of style that his version has ever since been almost as much a classic
as the original. Every one can separate for himself the obviously
legendary incidents in the delightful old _Chronicle_ without any
assistance from the Arabic historians, who deal chiefly with one period
alone of the Cid's career; and the best popular account of the hero, in
discriminating hands and with due allowances, is still Southey's
fascinating _Chronicle_. The Cid of the _Chronicle_ is not at all the
same as the Cid of the Romances; and while we cheerfully abandon the
latter immaculate personage, we may still believe in the former. Of
course our Cid had his faults, and was guilty of not a few thoroughly
indefensible acts. He was no very orthodox champion of the faith, for he
fought as well for the Moors as for the Christians, and would as
dispassionately rob a church as a mosque. But all this is clear enough
to any one who reads the _Chronicle_, and it does not make the Cid
anything but what he always was--a hero of the rude days of yore. If we
are to limit our definition of heroism to characters that display all
Christian virtues, long-suffering, gentleness, and pity, we shall have
to dismiss most of our old friends. Achilles was not very gentle or
compassionate when he dragged the body of Hector round the walls of
Troy: but Achilles is the hero of the Iliad. Nine out of ten of the
heroes of antiquity committed a host of acts which we moderns, with our
superfine sensibilities, call cruel, ungenerous, even dastardly. It is
a pure perversion of history to apply latter-day codes of morality to
the heroes of bygone ages. Let us admit that they are not all gold; and
then let us delight in their great deeds, the mighty swing of their
sword-arm, the crushing shock of their onset, their tall stature and
flashing eyes as they ride to meet their foes. We do not expect them to
be philosophers or strict advocates of the theories of political
economy. We are quite satisfied with them as they are: heroes,--brave,
gallant leaders of men.
The Cid was a real hero to the Spaniards: first, because he fought so
magnificently, and that used once to be title enough to reverence;
secondly, because, like the mythical Bernardo del Carpio and the real
Fernando Gonzalez, he was the champion of Castile, and had bearded the
King of Leon, and thus represented the immemorial jealousy which the
Castilians entertained for the powerful neighbours who absorbed their
province; and thirdly, because the minstrels forgot his long alliance
with the Moors, or contrived to give it a disinterested aspect, and
remembered him only as the great champion of the Christian people
against the infidels. But the very cause which specially commended him
to the Castilians, his insubordination to King Alfonso, made him a less
perfect hero to the writer of the _Cronica General_, from which the
_Chronicle of the Cid_ was extracted. That writer or compiler, Alfonso
the Learned, King of Leon and Castile, could not approve the haughty
independence of the Cid towards his own forerunner the sixth Alfonso.
Hence in Southey's version of the _Chronicle_ (which is enriched with
many extracts from the _Poem of the Cid_ and other sources) we have a
check upon the excessive adulation of the ballads and romances. There is
no lack of details in the work which are anything but creditable to the
Cid; but, nevertheless, the true heroic character, with all its faults
and limitations, is well sustained, and the record forms a wonderfully
interesting picture of a stirring time and the greatest figure among the
Spanish chevaliers.