the Holy Office in Spain. It was established ten years before he came to
court as Isabella's confessor, and it was only now, in his sixty-first
year that he had control in it. True to his reforming character he set
about changing what abuses had crept in. He fostered the better
religious instruction of the newly converted; and he prosecuted the
inquisitor Lucero, who had been guilty of injustice.
The great Cardinal-Archbishop was over threescore and ten when he
undertook the expedition to Northern Africa. He had long burned to plant
the Church again where it had flourished under St. Cyprian and St.
Augustine. As the pirates of Oran were a terror in the Mediterranean, it
was against that city he set out in the year 1509. His address to the
troops before the battle, encouraging them against an enemy who had
ravaged their coasts, dragged their children into slavery, and insulted
the Christian name, roused the men to an heroic charge up the hill of
Oran with Spain's battle cry _Santiago!_ on their lips. Of the vast
treasure found in the city, Ximenez who had spent a fortune to fit out
the expedition, only reserved the Moslem books for his University of
Alcalá. For it must not be forgotten that in the midst of state
questions, this remarkable man was carrying on the building and endowing
of an University to whose halls the learned minds of Spain and Europe
were invited. He was printing at his own expense the well-known Polyglot
Bible, the first edition in their original texts of the Christian
Scriptures. From his early years a close student of the Bible, he had
learned Chaldaic and Hebrew for its better study; every day on his knees
he read a chapter of the Holy Word. Besides these interests he found
time to build various hospitals, libraries, and churches, to organize
summer retreats for the health of his professors, to print and
distribute free works on agriculture, to give dowries to distressed
women, to visit the sick in person, and to feed daily thirty poor in his
palace.
Ferdinand, a good ruler, but suspicious and ungrateful, never had much
love for the Cardinal. Yet on his deathbed he left him Regent of
Castile, saying that a better leader on account of his virtues and love
of justice could not be found to reëstablish order and morality, and
only wishing he were a little more pliable. Some idea of Ximenez' genius
may be gathered from a hasty review of his Regency, which covered the
last two years of his life. It stands an astonishing feat of noble
activity. He brought order into the finances and paid the crown debts.
He introduced the militia system into the army, proving that men fight
better when they defend their own homes. He strengthened the navy to
help break the Moorish pirate Barbarossa who controlled the sea. He
restored the dockyards of Seville. He crushed a French invasion in
Navarre, and put down local disorders in Málaga and other places, for
the nobles took this opportunity to again assert themselves. He adjusted
troubles with both the ex-queens, Juana la Loca and Germaine de Foix. It
was just four months before his death that the Polyglot Bible was
finished. When the young son of the printer, dressed in his best attire,
ran with the last sheets to the Cardinal, Ximenez exclaimed fervently:
"I thank thee, O most high God, that thou hast brought this work to its
longed-for end!" To-day the more scientific methods of philology have
put the Complutensian Polyglot in the shade, but none deny that for its
period it was a notable work.
Another of Ximenez' reforms, little known, was his advocacy of Las Casas
in the crusade against Indian slavery in the American colonies. As early
as 1511, a Dominican preacher named Montesino gave a sermon in the
Cathedral of Santo Domingo, before the governor Diego Columbus, in which
he thundered against the ill-treatment of the natives. The monks were
threatened with expulsion by the rich settlers unless Montesino
retracted, whereupon on the following Sunday, the brave reformer not
only repeated his previous attack but added fresh proofs. Against fierce
opposition the Dominicans refused the sacraments to every one who owned
an Indian slave. But they could not end the evil, so the passionate Las
Casas, whose whole life may be said to have burned with fury for this
cause, returned to Spain to plead for the Indians.
The Regent took up the question with interest, and the commission which
he organized and sent out to the Colonies is a model of reforming
government worthy of study. Just as it was about to start, fourteen
pious Franciscans came down to Spain to offer themselves for the good
work. Among them was a brother of the King of Scotland,--a rather
delightful episode of the cosmopolitanism of religion. Ximenez also
issued a proclamation forbidding the importation of negro slaves, for
the colonists had already learned that one negro did the work of four
Indians. Should not this act of farseeing wisdom, be set against his
stern treatment of the Moors?
Ximenez ruled as Regent of Castile from the time of Ferdinand's death to
the coming of Charles V to his distant possessions. The
Cardinal-Archbishop, alert in mind and body though over eighty, was on
his way to meet the young Emperor on his landing in the north, when he
died suddenly at Roa, in the province of Burgos. He was buried in his
loved Alcalá, and his tomb still rests in the dismantled town whose
University has been removed to Madrid. Just thirty years after the
Cardinal's death, one of the world's supreme geniuses was born under the
shadow of his University, as if a compensating Providence would reward
the Franciscan friar's unresting love of letters. Ximenez has received
scant justice, but if the atmosphere of culture which he created at
Alcalá, had aught to do with making Cervantes what he was, the stern
educator did not live in vain.
In Toledo it takes no effort of the imagination to people the streets
with the figures of the past; it is every-day life that drops away, and
the surprise is that one does not meet some intellectual-faced cardinal,
some hidalgo in velvet cloak or chased armor. The stone effigies on the
tombs of Spanish churches make it easy to picture a certain very
splendid presence that once walked, in youth's proud livery, these
silent streets. Garcilaso de la Vega is a pure type of the grandee,
Spain's Philip Sidney, a courtier, a soldier, a poet whose gift of song
made him the idol of the nation, he is one of the alluring figures of
history. By writing in Virgilian classic verse, he changed the rhythm of
Spanish poetry from that of the "Cid," of Juan de Mena and Manrique. "In
our Spain, Garcilaso stands first beyond compare," wrote a contemporary
poet, a judgment held later by Cervantes and Lope de Vega.
This lovable hero was born in Toledo while Ximenez was still its active
if aged Archbishop. He came of distinguished stock, the first Garcia
Laso de la Vega was the favorite of Alfonso XI in 1328. This later
namesake had for father a knight of Santiago, lord of many towns,
ambassador to Rome, and one of Isabella and Ferdinand's councilors of
state; on his mother's side his lineage was still more illustrious, she
was a Guzmán, another of Spain's families whose prominence continued for
centuries.
Garcilaso, who early showed his love for the liberal arts, received a
finished education. At fifteen he became guardsman to Charles V, and his
qualities of heart and brain soon won him the affectionate admiration of
the court. "Comely in action, noble in speech, gentle in sentiment,
vehement in friendship, nature had made his body a fitting temple for
his soul." And Spain can show this harmony in many of her sons. Some
untranslatable words describe Garcilaso, _hermosamente varonil_, the
superb manhood of beauty. During the Emperor's wars in Italy he fought
bravely, and at the Battle of Pavia, where Pescara's lions of Spain
carried all before them, he won distinction. He was not merely a soldier
in Italy, his richly-endowed nature avidly seized on her art and
learning. Cardinal Bembo calls him "best loved and most welcome of all
the Spaniards that ever come to us." Like Sir Philip Sidney, the young
poet was not destined to reach middle age; a short thirty-three years is
his record. At a siege near Fréjus, in the south of France, he fell
wounded into the arms of his dearest friend, the Marquis de Lombay, and
in spite of Charles V sending his skilled physician and coming in
person to visit the wounded knight, he died. He was buried among his
ancestors in the church of San Pedro Mártir, in Toledo, "where every
stone in the city is his monument," wrote the euphuistic Góngora.
Truly that age was past rivalry in the appealingly noble characters it
produced, fine spirits of heroism, fit inheritors of Isabella's period
that had prepared the soil for such a flowering. A Garcilaso de la Vega
is the bosom friend of a Francis Borgia, a Francis Borgia communes with
a Teresa de Jesús with the intense pleasure of feeling souls akin, an
Ignatius Loyola serves as guide to a Francis Xavier, and so on, these
noted lives touch and overlap. What an array the first fifty years of
the sixteenth century can show! 1503 Garcilaso was born, also Diego
Hurtado de Mendoza, the noted diplomat and patron of letters; 1504 Luis
de Granada, the religious writer; 1506 St. Francis Xavier of Navarre,
who died the great missionary of the East; 1510 St. Francis Borgia; 1515
St. Teresa, "fair sister of the seraphim"; 1529 Luis de León, Spain's
best lyric poet; 1534 Fernando de Herrera, another poet; 1542, St. John
of the Cross, that mystic flame of Divine love; 1545, the dashing hero
of Lepanto, Don John of Austria; and final glory of this half century,
and of all centuries, 1547, Miguel de Cervantes. The opening of the
next century was fecund in men of creative genius: 1599, Velasquez;
1616, Calderón; 1617, Murillo, but to one who loves _España la heróica_,
the earlier age is dearer.
The gray city on the Tagus is worthy of such citizens, "fit compeer for
such high company." So many are her associations that one turns aside in
irresistible digressions. In a palace near Santo Tomé, Isabella of
Portugal, Charles V's wife, died: to those who know Titian's portrait of
her in the Prado, she is a beautiful, living presence. Francis Borgia
who in early youth had married one of her ladies in waiting, was the
equerry appointed to escort her dead body to Granada, where it was to be
laid in the Chapel Royal. When the coffin was opened to verify the
Empress, she who had been all loveliness so short a time before was
changed to so horrible a sight that the Marquis de Lombay is said to
have exclaimed, "Never more will I serve a master who can die!" The
Hound of Heaven was in pursuit of grand quarry here. A few years before,
the death of Garcilaso his friend had sobered Francis. Now came the loss
of his cherished wife, with whom he had lived in truly holy wedlock: in
Catalonia where he was the Emperor's viceroy, a lady asked the Marquesa
one day why she of such high standing and beauty dressed so plainly,
and she answered how could she do otherwise when her husband wore a
hair-shirt beneath his velvet. Lombay succeeded to his father's estates
and the title of Duke of Gandía, his children--who eventually rose to
distinction--were a natural temptation to stifle the higher call of
which he was conscious:
"For, though I knew His love who followed,
Yet was I sore adread
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside."
It was a tremendous decision to make, completely to relinquish a future
of international influence; relentlessly the heavenly Feet pursued:
"I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurried chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed,
Majestic instancy,
They beat--and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet--
'All things betray thee who betrayest Me.'"[26]
The compelling Voice won. Having settled his children, the Duke of
Gandía gave up titles and estates to enter the Company of Jesus, of
which he has been called the second founder, so fruitful were the years
of his generalship.
The death of Isabella of Portugal is connected with another foremost
member of the _Compañía_. The Pope sent Cardinal Farnese to carry his
condolences to the Emperor, and the papal suite lodged in a house of
Toledo near that of a widow named Ribadeneyra. Her willful,
high-spirited and captivating boy Pedro attached himself voluntarily to
the embassy, and so won the notice of the Cardinal that he was taken
back to Rome, where, by another hap-hazard in his life, he fell under
the influence of St. Ignatius Loyola, became his loved pupil and future
biographer. The books of this delightful Pedro, telling the early
history of the Jesuit Order make as solidly interesting a bout of
reading as can while away a month. He was not only the confidant of the
first General, but of his two successors, Lainez and Borgia, he helped
St. Charles Borromeo in his reforms at Milan, and lived long enough to
rejoice on the day of his great master's beatification, 1609.
In Toledo many a time Cervantes strolled, here he has set several of the
interesting "Novelas Exemplares"; St. Teresa founded one of her houses
here, described in her "Libro de las Fundaciones," a companion book to
the "Novelas"; that prodigy of improvization, Lope de Vega, also placed
some dramas in these dark winding streets; and in the Jesuit house the
historian Mariana, a friend of Ribadeneyra, browsed over his work,
called by Ticknor "the most remarkable union of picturesque chronicling
with sober fact that the world has ever seen."
Our days in Toledo sped all too fast. For me it is one of those few
fascinating cities of the world that rouses a recurrent longing to
return. The impressive, solitary walk above the Tagus gorge at the hour
of sunset is an unforgettable memory. Another walk leads to San
Cristo-in-the-fields, the legend of whose crucifix, with one arm hanging
pendant, has been told by Bécquer; beyond this church, across the
_vega_, where the Tagus spreads out in relief from the confining gorge
behind, is the _Fábrica de Armas_, where good Toledan blades are made,
so elastic that they are packed in boxes curled up like the mainspring
of a watch. Within the town the rambles are endless, now down the
step-cut hill, past the Plateresque façade of Santa Cruz hospital,
founded by Cardinal Mendoza; now out by the one sloping side of the city
to another hospital, where the sculptor Berruguete died, and lies buried
near his last work, the marble tomb of the founder, Cardinal Tavera. One
day in the narrow street, hearing the sound of singing, I entered a
monastery church, to listen for an enchanted hour to a choir of male
voices admirably trained.[27] There is about this town an atmosphere
that makes you sure that real peace and holiness lie within the looming
convent walls under which you pass. The wise Chinese statesman, Kang Yu
Wei, who has toured the world studying its religions, said he found in a
monastery of Toledo an impressive spirit of devout silence.
[Illustration: TOMB OF BISHOP SAN SEGUNDO, BY BERRUGUETE, AVILA]
We carried away a beautiful last picture of the "Crown of Spain," as her
loyal son Padilla called her. We were to catch the night train to
Andalusia, at Castillejo on the express route. It was a night with an
early moon. So white and romantic lay the city streets that we sent the
luggage by the diligence and went on foot to the distant station. When
we crossed the Alcántara bridge, we turned to look back at the climbing
mass of houses and churches. With a feeling of sadness we gazed at the
old mediæval city, so far from the fret of modern life. This was to be,
we thought, our last impression of the Castiles. Andalusia, enticing,
warm in the sun, facile, impudent, lay ahead. Farewell to the grave,
courteous Castilian! Farewell to the valorous stoic-heart of Spain!
CORDOVA AND GRANADA
"The art of the Alhambra is eminently decorative, light, and
smiling; it expresses the well being, the repose, the riches of
life; its grace lay almost entirely in its youth. Not having the
severe lines that rest the eye, these works paled when their first
freshness faded. Theirs was a delicate beauty that has suffered
more than others from the deterioration of its details."
RENÉ BAZIN.
In his "Terre d' Espagne," M. René Bazin speaks of the faded city of
Cordova, and the term is singularly exact. It is a tranquil, faded
ghost, not a nightmare ghost, but an aloof, melancholy specter. I have
been haunted by it often since the day and night spent there. Dull and
unimportant as it now is, hard to be imagined as the Athens of the West
with almost a million inhabitants and an enlightened dynasty of Caliphs,
yet, like a true ghost, vague in feature, Cordova succeeds in making
itself unforgettable. The past covers it like a mist. It gave me more
the sensation of the Moslem than any other spot in Spain: Allah, not
Christ, is its brooding spirit.
We strolled hither and thither through its preternaturally quiet streets
which are lined with two-storied white or pinkish houses. Every few
minutes we stopped with exclamations of delight to gaze through the iron
grilles at the tiled and marble patios, here seen for the first time. "A
patio! How shall I describe a patio!" exclaimed De Amicis, when he first
came into Andalusia. "It is not a garden, it is not a room, it is not a
courtyard, it is the three in one,--small, graceful, and mysterious."
They are so spotless a king could eat off their paving-stones. Isolated
from the stir of the world, they breathe that intimate quiet of the
spirit felt in the pictures of the Primitives. To wander for the first
time over a city filled with these oases, gives that exhilaration of
novelty which as a rule the traveler has long since lost with his first
journeys.
I should not say our very vivid impression of Cordova depended on chance
details,--the hour of arrival, a personal mood, the weather. Of course
the strangeness was heightened by our coming from the north, through a
cold night of travel on the train that made the transition from the
central plateau of the Castiles to the semi-tropical coast belt of
Andalusia, an abrupt one. Toledo, the last seen Castilian town, had been
so distinctly Christian in spite of Moorish remains, and our
night-flitting over the level sea of La Mancha was so possessed by that
_español neto_, the adventuresome Don, that suddenly to awake among
palm trees and oranges gave the sensation of another race and climate.
It was this province with its astonishing fertility that had been the
land of Elysium of the ancients.
Having grown familiar with the orderly streets of Cordova by day, it was
quite without fear that we took a night ramble. Not a soul was astir.
What were they doing, these cloistered people? It was as deserted as
Stamboul at night, more lonely even, for here was not a single yellow
cur to bay the moon, nor the iron beat of the watchman's staff; and
though like the Orient in some aspects, these streets were far too
orderly and the houses too spotless. Perhaps there lay the source of the
indefinable fascination; this was neither East nor West, but a place
stranded in time, made by circumstances that never will be repeated. The
Oriental influenced the Spaniard deeply, a psychological as well as a
racial influence. I often felt that the dignified gravity which so
distinguishes a Spaniard from his fellow Latins is a trait acquired
unconsciously from his Arab neighbors: nothing like it is found except
among races whose ancestors dwelt in the desert. Also the excessive
generosity and hospitality of the Spaniard are oriental virtues, just as
the Andalusian procrastination and acceptance of fate are oriental
failings. We too often forget that there were generations when,
religious hatred quieting down, the two peoples lived side by side in
friendly consideration. If the Christian gained from the Moslem, the
Moor in Spain was influenced no less potently by the standards of the
European. He became a very different being from his brother in northern
Africa. He learned to gather libraries, to express himself in buildings
where he translated his nomad carpet into colored stucco; much of his
traditional jealousy was laid aside and Moorish ladies appeared at the
tournaments to applaud their Moorish cavaliers who tilted with the same
rules of romantic chivalry as the Christian knights. Moslem civilization
could even boast some femmes savantes. The stimulus of the two opposing
races gave Spain just the impetus she needed, and the conqueror lost
with his very victory. When all men think the same way without the spur
of competition, inaction and ill-health are sure to follow. Perhaps the
upholders of law and order need not worry too much to-day over the
anarchists and socialists in the commercial districts of Spain: is not
the health of a nation quickened by struggle?
The soul of a Spanish city is always the Cathedral, and Cordova has what
it called one, but it is no more a Christian church than the Caaba at
Mecca. The canons in Charles V's time tore out the center of the Mosque
and built a Plateresque-Gothic _capilla mayor_ and _coro_. It was an
ignorant thing to do, and when the Emperor saw their work he exclaimed
in disgust, "You have built here what anyone might have built elsewhere,
but you have destroyed what was unique in the world!" Nevertheless,
those old canons had some excuse. They felt that they could not pray in
a proper Christian manner under the low, oppressing roof of Islam.
Instead of "Christe Eleison," it was "Allah illal allah, ve Mahommed
recoul" that came to their lips in abominable heresy, so in desperation
they put up the incongruous enclosure and tried to shut Islam out.
A building every one of whose stones has been laid in earnest faith,
seems to have a spirit that will never desert it, let the ritual change
as it may. Santa Sophia is Christian in spite of eight thousand
Mussulmans prostrated there on the 27th of Ramazan: the Gregorian chant
still echoes in Westminster Abbey. So here the canons' efforts were in
vain, the Mezquita makes heretics of us all, we turn to the Mihrab as
the holy of holies, not to the High Altar.