_The Gothic Kings of Toledo_
Here may be said to begin the real history of Toledo, from this until
the fatal battle of Guadalete, the capital of Spain, since it was the
heart of Gothic rule. The backward pages of its story are blurred and
insignificant, judged by their traces, though we may imagine, if it were
possible to build up the effaced picture of Toledo under Roman power, we
should find a very superior civilisation. Instead of a flourishing Roman
colony, Atanagildo's choice of this "strong place" was merely the
establishment of a rough barbaric camp. It is doubtful if, until Wamba's
time, the Goths had the art of profiting by such heritage as the
decadent vanquished had left them. As a race they inspire even less
interest than their brethren east and north.
Family love was no strong element in the development of the Royal House,
as the quaintly heartless story of San Hermengildo proves. Leovigildo
was reigning then, and he, an Arian, committed the imprudence of
marrying his eldest son, Hermengildo, to a French Goth, Ingundus, the
niece of Saint Leander of Seville. With such powerful interests on the
side of Rome, it is not surprising that the Arian prince speedily
abjured his heresy, to the anger and dismay of his father.
Unfortunately, his conversion did not imply the practice of any of the
Christian virtues. Religion accomplishes the very thing we should have
thought its mission to forbid: it arms the son against his father. The
two sects, oddly enough representing the doctrine of peace and goodwill
on earth, meet outside the walls of Seville in armed encounter. Hitherto
the spectacle had been war and persecution and their attendant horrors
on the side of Pagan against the noble and martyred Christian. From this
we were to learn that Christian _versus_ Christian could show quite as
pretty a figure in atrocities as ever the persecuting worshipper of the
gods. Here we have an infuriated father and a rebellious son ready to
cut one another's throat, and of the two it can hardly be said that the
Catholic saint shows to better advantage. Indeed, in their
correspondence both reason and dignity are on the side of Leovigildo,
who writes to his son: "I associated you with my power from earliest
years, not that you should arm strangers against me. Thou dost blunt thy
conscience, and cover thyself with the veil of religion," he acutely
adds, while Hermengildo's reply is an inflated and pragmatical attack on
the baseness of his father's creed and the superiority of his own.[3]
Hermengildo is beaten, his forces scattered, and thanks to the
intercession of his brother, Recaredo, instead of the expected death
sentence, his father sentences him to exile at Valencia. As a Christian,
a martyr, and a canonised saint, Hermengildo presents an original
figure. Even the harsh wisdom of Moses condemns him, and the worst Pagan
would hardly condone his unprovoked assault on his father, by way of
converting him to a belief in Christ's divinity; while instead of
quietly enduring the consequences of his abortive rebellion and his
inappropriate expression of faith, he went about the coast, begging the
assistance of the Greeks in another attempt to proselytise by the sword,
and seize his father's throne by the same stroke. The Spanish
historians, to whom this method of conversion is particularly
sympathetic and of unquestionable logic, disregard the side question of
revolt, and delight in weighing upon Hermengildo's lofty efforts in
behalf of truth. His object they accept as the laudable extirpation of
error. Indifferent to his natural relations to the king he desired to
dethrone, Gamero says: "Perhaps, like Alaric, within his breast, a
secret voice had commanded him to go forth and destroy the power of
Arianism in Spain; to establish upon the ruins of paganism and false
sects the immortal throne where the god of Sabahot is worshipped, and on
which shines with eternal splendour the immaculate purity of Mary." And
so he complacently follows the unfilial prince on his bellicose mission
through Estremadura, now occupying Merida, again attempting to take
Seville and his former court, seeking support in France with the hope of
arming his brother-in-law, Sigeric, against his father. All Gamero
laments is his unsuccess. The Arian father did precisely what
Hermengildo would have done in his place; he seized his son, flung him
into a dungeon, first at Toledo, then at Tarragona, where he was
beheaded after stoutly refusing to accept communion from the hands of an
Arian bishop. His form of refusal is proudly recorded by St Gregory of
Tours as an admirable one: "As a minister of the devil, only to hell
couldst thou guide me. Away and go, coward, to the punishment prepared
for thee, and which thou deservest." We hardly detect the influence of
Christian mildness and sweetness in this address. However, all saints
cannot resemble St Francis of Assisi, and even St Fernando of Castille
boiled his enemies alive in great pots of water over huge fires. This is
Gamero's admiring epitaph: "Thus on the 13th April, 584, ended with
glorious martyrdom the life of this hero of the Spanish Church, whose
blood effaced any faults as a man he may have committed, and was a
perennial source of happiness and fortune to our country."
Morality is, after all, like criticism, only a matter of existing
convention and national temperament. Believe the right thing, and one's
vices are a matter of small account. In the mediæval times, with a
proper amount of faith, one might with impunity, boil one's enemies or
roast them before a fire, and be duly canonised and offered to posterity
as a saint and a just man. But be as virtuous and as austere as Marcus
Aurelius, believing the wrong thing, and the orthodox historian will
manage to be blind to your virtues, and offer you for public contumely.
So we have a legend of sanctity centred round this extremely unedifying
prince, who took up arms against a father not convicted of any
particular injustice or enormity, plotted with France to dethrone him,
and after an unnatural career, died furious and unresigned, breathing
curses upon his enemies. Behold him one of the glories of that curious
medley of Pagan qualities and unchristian vices, Mediæval Catholicism.
The historians will not even permit the poor father to grieve and regret
his own harshness in peace. His sorrow and remorse are not accepted as
the natural sentiments of a man whom a just anger had carried beyond the
endurance of nature. We are forced to regard them as the tardy
recognition of his own iniquity and error. We are told in triumph that
the monarch died weeping and repentant in the arms of St Leander of
Seville, the friend and uncle by marriage of his exiled son. Could
anything be more natural than this touching and piteous picture of an
old man, doubtful of himself, turning in his grief to the one great
friend of his son? The action in its simple humanity is worth all the
grandiloquent insolence of the saint and martyr Leovigildo mourned, in
whose story virtue and sanctity are equally unevident.
Recaredo, his son and successor, solemnly abjured Arianism before the
third Toledan Council, as the inscription on his statue outside the
Alcázar records. We may imagine this unhappy son and brother weary for
the moment of bloodshed and strife, and anxious to put an end to
dissension in his kingdom. It would suffice to explain the wise and
eloquent speech he addressed to his subjects, exhorting all to be of one
faith, to enter the bosom of the Church, and accept its dogmas as he had
done. His speech must have been miraculously persuasive, and his
influence over his people almost magnetic, since nearly all to a man
yielded to the earnest prayer of a tired and suffering heart, and
consented to make his religion theirs. And thus it might be hoped, after
the terrible domestic tragedy Recaredo had been obliged to witness,
powerless to prevent it, the reign of violence, persecution, and discord
was over, and the religious power of Toledo permanently established upon
tolerant lines. But this was to count without the spirit of the times.
After the first shock of misery and bereavement had passed, the
turbulent sense of revolt on one side, and determination to crush it on
the other, broke out in all its malignant force. The Arian bishops,
goaded on by Leovigildo's widow, hurled their vote of resistance to the
establishment of Roman influence. Here we have another instance of the
charming inconsistency of the prolix Spanish historians. Leovigildo was
nothing less than a monster, because he punished conspiracy and
rebellion, and his Catholic son, condemned justly by the laws of the day
to death, was a haloed martyr. Recaredo remains a just and magnanimous
sovereign when he cuts off the heads and hands of the Arian
conspirators; and the premature death of the queen dowager, Gosvintha,
is deeply lamented, because her step-son was thus deprived of the duty
of cutting off her rebellious head. Why was she less of a saint, one
asks, than Hermengildo? She, too, rebelled on behalf of principle, and
surely a step-son is a more natural antagonist in the field than a
father! But for the historian conspiracy against a legitimate heretical
sovereign may be an article of faith and duty, whereas the heretic who
conspires against the monarch of the right faith is a fiend. It is this
hopeless lack of logic and sense that renders so dreary and unillumined
a task the reading of Spanish history. The humorists, alas! wrote dramas
and novels, and history was left to the terrible Mariana, the credulous
Masdeu, and the one-sided Gamero.
At the next Toledan Council, Recaredo presided in all pomp, accompanied
by his queen, Baddo. The sovereigns first, then all the converted
Arians, bishops, priests, deacons, and lords and leaders, read aloud
this act of allegiance to Rome. Recaredo was the first to swear: "I,
Recaredo, King, maintaining with my heart, and affirming with my word,
this true and holy confession, which alone the Catholic Church professes
all over the globe, have subscribed with my right hand, God protecting
me." Baddo, his wife, then swore: "I, Baddo, glorious queen, have
subscribed with my hand and all my heart to that faith I believe in and
have admitted." Followed the oath of each bishop and priest; and then
came the turn of the nobles. Imagination readily enough evokes the scene
from such dry details, and pictures one of exceptional solemnity, with a
touch of barbarism, beginning to borrow undreamed of luxury from a
departed civilisation, without taste or tact to render that luxury
beautiful. We have only to visit the Musée de Cluny to form some notion
of Gothic gold-work by inspection of the Gothic votive crowns discovered
in Toledo, and it is easy to picture this rough humanity, from monarch
to knight, in their flowing cloaks, grave, impressed, all in deadly
earnest, and the mitred and mighty prelates forming an inner circle, in
gold and silvered embroideries, bejewelled, and full of glory and
contentment. The importance of the nobles we gather from a list of
Gothic dignitaries. First came the dukes, counts, palatines of the royal
house. Then came the first count, the count of the drinking-cup,
_Escansias_; the chamberlain, Count _Cubiculario_; the chief groom,
Count _Estabulario_; then the major domos, counts of the patrimony, the
counters-in-chief, Count _Numerario_, the count of the viands, Count
_Silonario_; knight of the youths, Count of the _Espartarios_, captain
of the guard; Count of the _Sagrarios_, keeper of sacred things; Count
of the _Sargentarios_, keeper of the treasure. The grandees or _ricos
hombres_ were governors of the territories and kingdoms.
St Isidor has painted Recaredo as a model of all the Christian virtues,
which is decidedly excessive praise in the face of such accentuated
vices against the mild sublimity of that scarce practised creed as an
inflexible spirit of vengeance and cruelty, and a bigotry in his new
religion as hard and determined as that of his Arian fathers, once the
early lesson in adversity had been learnt and forgotten. However, in
spite of defects rather belonging to his barbarous times, few natures
being able to resist the forces of environment and general feeling, than
to the man himself perhaps, he remains unquestionably one of the wisest
and strongest of Gothic kings, and his personality is all the more
marked by contrast with that of his feeble son, Luiva II., who was
dethroned by Viterico, a senseless usurper, shortly afterwards
assassinated at table by his own servants and cast into the street,
where the infuriated populace seized the corpse and dragged it up and
down the hilly streets and lanes of Toledo, eventually flinging it into
a filthy hole as unfit for decent burial.
Gundmar's short reign furnished no reason to doubt his well-meaning
intentions. He quelled a rising among the Vasco Navarrese and the
Imperial troops, and convened a council at Toledo to decide in the
town's favour against the sacerdotal pretensions of Carthagena. But his
successor is a figure worth noting, and in his reign takes place the
first of those unfortunate outbreaks against the Jews, for which
dismantled and impoverished Spain still pays so heavy a price. Before
the Moors came, Toledo's source of prosperity and wealth sprang from her
Hebrew colony, and the anti-Semitic movement, started by Sisebuth, had
probably no other object than the barbarians' desire to appropriate
Jewish gold. Sisebuth himself is spoken of in history as the father of
the poor, and is extolled for his compassionate heart and his
liberality. His horror of suffering and blood was so great that he sent
his own doctors to tend the stricken enemy when he was compelled to go
to war, and paid out of his own purse to his soldiers the ransom of
their captives. Servitude and blood-shedding were equally abhorrent to
him. The annalist Frêdégaire tells of him, as an example of exquisite
sensibility in those rude times, which would be no less rare in our own,
that in the thick of battle with the Imperial army, seeing the Greek
soldiers fall in numbers under the savage blow of his men, he rushed
into their midst, shouting: "Woe to me whose reign should see the
flowing of so much human blood," and frantically drove away his soldiers
from the wounded Byzantines. The pity was such excellent sentiments were
not cultivated on behalf of the Jews. Having twice defeated the
Byzantine army, Cesario only procured a treaty of peace on condition the
Jews were expelled from Spain. And in 616, Sisebuth published his famous
edict against the children of Israel, offering them the harsh
alternative, within the year, of professing the Christian faith, and
accepting baptism, or being publicly flogged a hundred whip-strokes,
shaven and shorn, robbed of their goods, and expelled from the kingdom.
One hardly understands why the shaving and flogging should have been
ordered, since appropriation and expulsion ought to have sufficed. Even
the Fathers of the Church had the grace to protest against the needless
inhumanity of this edict, though the Toledan bishops in a council upheld
it. Yet history accepts him as a mild and upright judge, a magnificent
prince, a valiant and humane captain, the friend of the poor, the
protector of letters. He himself dabbled in literature, wrote in the
swollen and exaggerated Gothic manner, composed several earnest and
dogmatic letters in refutation of Arianism, which he addressed to the
King and Queen of Lombardy, severely reprimanded Bishop Eusebius for the
disorders of his existence, and commanded Bishop Caecilius to return to
his diocese, which he had forsaken for the monastery. Clearly a monarch
not to be trifled with even by the bishops, whom he kept in check, and
whose public and private life he insisted on regulating. He conquered
the Asturians and the Vascons, and overthrew the Byzantine power in
Spain, seizing most of the Imperial towns and weakening the Imperial
forces at Cadiz. At home he built the church of St Leocadia.
But of the growth of the town we learn little. Literature in those days
was more moral than descriptive, and the Gothic kings of Toledo, when
not fighting the Byzantines and Vascons, seem chiefly to have been
engaged in discovering elegant flowers of speech, and cultivating the
very finest obscurity of expression. Suinthila, looking from the seven
rocky hills of his martial town, could tell himself that the kings of
Toledo ruled from Cadiz to the Pyrenees, from Atlantic to Mediterranean
shores, while Chindasvinthe, in his semi-Roman palace, looked peacefully
across the vega and along those foliaged banks of the quiet Tagus that
had beguiled Pyrrhus and his mate from the East, and recreated himself
with the art of letters. St Eugenius and St Braulion of Zaragoza were
the honoured recipients of his royal epistles, in which he writes of "an
eloquence adorned with the most flowery words and girdled with all the
harmonies of fine language," and plunging further into unlucid
intricacies hymns an "eloquence suggesting a royal clemency, an
observation wherein shines the zeal displayed in the travail of literary
composition." When he led his troops to battle, it is to be hoped that
his military addresses to them revealed less fearfully the travail of
literary composition. Surely the harmonies of fine language so admired
by him were never more inappropriately "girdled" against the
encroachments of ordinary sense. He speaks of someone "who will not
succumb from a need of understanding" and "who is not meagre through
poverty of spirit." His successor, Recesvinthus, displayed the same
Gothic tendencies and rhymed in the highest obscurity, in proof of the
"fatness" of his wisdom, which verses he dedicated to the grateful
Fathers of the VIIth Council, who being Gothic, probably understood and
relished them. But Recesvinthus deserves the recognition of
bibliophiles, for he had a passion for collecting old manuscripts, and
was extremely particular about their authenticity and corrections. He
too persecuted the Jews, and his morals were doubtful.
The most famous archbishop of Toledo under Gothic rule was San
Ildephonso. His parents, Stephen and Lucy, were noble Goths of almost
royal blood, distantly related to the King Atanagildo. Ildephonso was
educated by his uncle, St Eugenius III. At an early age he developed a
passion for learning, and was sent to Seville to the care of the famous
Doctor St Isidor. It would be astonishing if breathing so much
sanctified air the young Ildephonso did not become himself a saint, or
the reverse. His saintly master grew so attached to his pupil that when
Ildephonso expressed a wish to return to his parents at Toledo, St
Isidor locked him up. After a considerable while he yielded to his
disciple's prayer, and allowed him to depart. The youth, after a short
stay at his father's house, left it for the monastery of Agalia outside
Toledo. Stephen flew into a violent rage upon the discovery, and
attacked the monastery with armed followers. The monks hid the lad,
while Stephen and his band searched the building from roof to cellars,
and departed swearing profusely. His mother was more reasonable, and
besought St Eugenius to intervene and obtain her son's permission to
follow his vocation. Shortly before his death, St Eladio consecrated him
and gave him holy orders (632). He was first abbot of the monastery of
St Cosmos and St Damian, and on the death of Adeodato, became abbot of
the monastery of Agalia where he had received orders. Inheriting from
his parents, he devoted the inheritance to the foundation of a convent
for nuns, and on his uncle's death, 659, he was raised to the vacant
archbishopric of Toledo. Heretics began to discuss the perpetual
virginity of Our Lady, and Ildephonso wrote his first notable book, _De
Virginitate perpetua Sanctae Mariae adversus tres infideles_, the three
infidels being Elvidio, Theudio, and Eladio, natives of Narbonne. The
saint's triumph in polemics was immediate, and the infidels were
pronounced as completely crushed. The whole court followed the King and
the Archbishop to the church of Saint Leocadia to give loud thanks.
Kneeling at the saint's tomb, suddenly a group of angels appeared
through clouds and sweet scents; the clouds fainting, the young martyr
was revealed in the midst of the group, and smiling graciously upon
Ildephonso, said, _Ildephonse per te vivit domina mea_. The astounded
archbishop, rapidly recovering his bewilderment, held out his hand to
grasp the saint's veil, and the King Recesvinthus, kneeling beside him,
passed him his knife, with which Ildephonso cut off a piece of the veil,
which, together with the knife, is now kept among the Cathedral
treasures. The mass of St Leocadia, composed by the archbishop, was then
solemnly sung, and this was the first inauguration of a feast since
adopted by the Church of Rome, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
Thanks from heaven did not rest with Mary's messenger, St Leocadia. Nine
days after entering the church to recite matins, the archbishop saw a
strange flame upon the wall. Approaching, he discovered the queen of
heaven seated on his own marble chair enveloped in heavenly radiance,
who thus addressed him: _Propera, serva dei charissime, in occursum, et
accipe munusculum de manu mea, quod de thesausus filii sevi attuli_. The
present she brought him from heaven was a splendid chasuble wrought by
angels, in which the Virgin with her own hands vested him, while the
celestial choir chanted around him. The vision faded in a faint smoke,
and only the perfumes and the vague echo of remote music remained, while
St Ildephonso lay prostrate in ecstasy, kissing the spot the Virgin's
feet had touched, _ubi steterum pedes ejus_. He was found in this
attitude by the clergy and multitudes, and his fame, owing to this
second miracle, spread far and wide, till Rome dispatched two legates to
inquire into the legend. Thus it was that the Pope and the King of Spain
came to be canons of the Cathedral of Toledo, which took precedence of
all others in the land. In a few weeks St Ildephonso returned the
Virgin's visit in heaven, and he was buried in all pomp beside the
patron of the city, St Leocadia.
But of all these Gothic sovereigns, the most important for Toledo was
Wamba, the only one now gloriously remembered. Wamba it was who built
the great walls, traces of which to-day remain. Most of the Gothic
inscriptions were in honour of Wamba, though these have nearly all
disappeared. His defaced statue it is that greets you welcome to his
ancient citadel and capital. One of these vanished inscriptions is
preserved in the _Chronique rimée des rois de Tolède_ by the anonymous
writers of Cordova.[4] It was traced on Wamba's famous walls: _Erexit
factore Deo rex inclitus urbem, Wamba suæ celebrem protendedens, gentis
honorem. Vos sancti domini, quorum hic præsentia fulget. Hunc urbem et
golebem solito salvate favore._
For the Toledans, Wamba remains a personage of fabulous virtue and
merit. We first meet him at the funeral of Recesvinthus, when by general
election he was proclaimed king. He was an old warrior, neither
ambitious nor over-confident, it would appear, and he humbly declined an
honour he did not feel fitted to accept. So frantic was the sense of
disappointment that a duke walked up to him angrily and threatened to
kill him on the spot if he persisted in his refusal, and confronted with
a crown and a formidable Toledan blade, the humblest sage that ever drew
breath would naturally choose the crown. Wamba bowed to spontaneous
choice, and made his triumphal entry into the capital, Sep. 20, 672,
nineteen days after his compulsory acceptance of the throne. It was no
easy seat, and all his prowess, his undoubted genius and his popularity
could not keep him thereon unmolested, though Bishop Quiricus had
anointed him amid universal rejoicings. Lope de Vega assumes that this
really remarkable man was of peasant origin, but later historians agree
that he was of good blood, a much more likely fact, as the barbarous
Goths were sticklers for aristocratic prestige, and the law kept very
distinct the _nobiles_ and the _vilidies_. However virtuous the man of
obscure origin might be, it is doubtful if a fierce Gothic duke would
have threatened to murder him if he declined so stupendous an honour as
the right of ruling that duke and his fellow-nobles.
The start of Wamba's brief but glorious reign was marked by treachery
and revolt. His general, of Greek origin, Count Paul, in conspiracy with
the Count of Nîmes and the Bishop of Maguelonne, rose against him in
Narbonese Gaul. Wamba was then fighting the eternal Vascon, the
hereditary enemy of the Kings of Toledo, but he left the Basque country
and marched into Gaul, capturing the Pyrenean fortresses, attacking
Narbonne by land and sea, and seizing Béziers, Agde, Maguelonne, and
then he fell upon Nîmes. Never were French prisoners treated with
greater courtesy and consideration. Not only did he free them but sent
them off with splendid gifts. For Count Paul alone was he adamantine. He
condemned the rebel to walk barefooted between two dukes on horseback,
who led him in leash by the hair of his Greek head through the Gothic
ranks at Nîmes. Then Wamba on horseback coldly surveyed the ignoble
procession, while poor Paul was forced to prostrate himself before his
outraged master. In public the King rebuked him, and then we are sorry
to record of so great a man, publicly kicked him and ordered his head to
be shaved. The shaving and the kick might fittingly have been suppressed
with dignity added to the picture of stern Wamba on horseback. To see
his enemy grovelling at his feet ought to have contented even a Goth.
But no. When Wamba made his triumphal entry into Toledo, the unfortunate
Paul and his accomplices walked behind--shaven, forlorn, barefooted,
robed in camel's hair, and instead of graceful, superfluous locks, Paul
wore a mock crown of laurel. He was not without a certain grim humour
King Wamba, you perceive, and one would like to have seen his Gothic
visage as his glance fell upon the laurel crown. Not benignant of a
surety, possibly sardonic.
But it is not in connection with Count Paul that Wamba's name reaches us
to-day and like that of the fatal Rodrigo, is permanently attached to
Toledo. Forgotten the long list of Gothic sovereigns, forgotten the
councils they presided over, the battles they lost and won, their
achievements, follies and virtues, their epistolary flowers of speech
and decrees. Only Wamba and Rodrigo remain, one a historic fact, the
other vaguely and unveraciously defined through legend and romance. As I
have said, coming up from the station, the traveller is greeted upon the
dusty curving road by the noseless statue of King Wamba, who built upon
the Roman remains a magnificent wall round the city, raised ramparts,
towers, and chapels, and for eight years was the untiring benefactor of
the city and the people, till treachery rewarded his splendid services
by deposition in the hour of illness and condemned him to claustral
reclusion.
In his days, the Bridge of Alcántara still existed with its marvellous
Roman arch, one of the most finished and graceful Roman monuments of
Spain. For the Goths had the virtue not to destroy any of the Roman
remains, though they were incapable of profiting by what they found.
They it was who, at Wamba's orders, built the walls and palaces of
Toledo, and gave
[Illustration: PUENTE DE ALCANTARA.]
the city its definite note of architecture, a note the Moors were
careful not to efface, all in adding their own ineffaceable stamp, for
the Moors were great artists and had the secret of utilising what they
influenced. If the Spanish Goths began by modelling their architecture
on the Roman remains in their capacity of imitators and not inventors,
the Moors, inventors and assimilators, forced the Goths to modify their
style by the famous mudejar order. Violence must be a rudimentary
instinct of humanity, since the milder and less florid mudejar remains a
single feature in Spanish architecture, while the rough Goths have the
secret of impressing their individuality on all the entire Peninsula,
and so with their flowers of speech, vapid, empty, and void of sincerity
which to this day have entered the language of the country, unaltered by
the march of centuries, ornate and unintelligent, untouched by modern
civilisation, of which the Spaniards take no heed. The ruins of this
dead Gothic art are best studied at Toledo. Here you have it purest, the
fourth century style with its coarse and pointed leafage, its laboured
workmanship, its ornamentation, symbols, and figurative caprices, then
so new and bold, and which are never repeated in the Arabic or Byzantine
architecture later.
Fragments of this art of Wamba's days may be seen in the ruined church
of San Genes, in the bath of the Cava, never a bath, where never the
legendary Florinda bathed, and in the wall of a house in the _calle
Lechuga_, as well as in the façade of the Bridge of Alcántara. In the
beginning of Gothic rule it was chiefly architecture that flourished,
but Wamba's immediate predecessors, we have seen, preferred literature
and libraries, cultivated poetry, the epistolary art, and such research
as the obscure times afforded, which they called science, and founded
colleges. Their costume was half Roman, since they borrowed what they
knew of civilisation from the Romans. They wore silk embroidered cloaks,
let their hair grow long, like their Merovingian brethren, to mark their
superiority to the short-cropped Celt-Iberians they had conquered; the
women wore costly habits and splendid jewels, and all the nobles drank
from golden cups and washed in silver basins. The value and beauty of
their goldsmiths' work are abundantly testified by the nine great votive
crowns in the Musée de Cluny, where the famous treasure of Guarrazar is
preserved. These magnificent gold crowns of the seventh century were
discovered near Toledo in 1858 by a French officer who owned the
property _La Fuente de Guarrazar_ where these historic crowns were
buried. They were probably buried at the time of Tarik's invasion, and
remained nearly eight centuries underground. The most important, as well
as the largest and most beautiful, is the crown which bears the
inscription in letters of gold cloisonné and incrusted, RECCESVINTHUS
REX OFFERET. To show the value of the workmanship of this crown, I
cannot do better than quote here in full its official description in the
catalogue of the Musée Cluny by M. du Sommerard: "King Recesvinthus'
crown is composed of a large and massive golden band. It opens with a
double hinge, and is richly framed by two borders of gold cloisonné, and
incrusted with red Carian stones, those which Anastasius calls _gemmis
alabandinsis_, and in relief has thirty Oriental sapphires of the
greatest beauty set in golden borders, mostly of considerable dimension.
Thirty-five pearls of a no less notable size alternate with the
sapphires on a golden ground incrusted with the same stones, and
twenty-four little gold chains, starting from the lower circle of the
crown, suspend large letters in gold cloisonné and incrusted, whose
disposition form the words:
RECCESVINTHUS REX OFFERET.
Each of these letters ends with a pendant of gold and fine pearls
holding a pear of rose sapphire. The king's crown is suspended by a
quadruple chain of beautiful workmanship which attaches it to a double
gem of massive gold enriched with twelve pendants in sapphire, and this
gem, whose branches are open, is surmounted by a capital in
rock-crystal, finely wrought; then comes a ball of the same material,
and then a golden stem which forms the starting point of the suspension.
The cross which occupies the centre of the crown and is attached to the
gem by a long golden chain, is not less remarkable for its elegance of
form and richness of material. It is in massive gold relieved by six
lovely sapphires and eight big fine pearls, each jewel is set in relief
in open claws, and behind is still the fibula that hooked it to the
royal mantle.
The diadem is of plain gold within, but the exterior, which the
sapphires and fine pearls set in relief ornament, has another particular
decoration, which consists in a set of palm leaves in open cutting whose
leaves are filled with blades of the same red material which looks like
cornelian stone at first sight, of which we have already spoken.
The sapphires which decorate the band, and whose setting is largely
treated, are, we have said, thirty, all of the finest water, and many of
them show traces of a natural crystallisation by facets; the two
principal ones, which are placed in the centre of each face, are not in
diameter less than thirty millimetres. The pearls are also of an
exceptional size, and only a few have been affected by time. The
suspension chains are composed each of five fine gems cut in open work,
and the stem that supports the whole is of massive gold.
The number of sapphires that ornament this crown, the cross and the gem
are not less than seventy, of which thirty are of matchless size, the
pearls the same. The pendants which terminate the letters of the diadem
are, as well, decorated with enamel enchased in golden borders.
So much to prove that the charge of luxury against the Toledan Goths is
not unfounded. A people so enamoured of gold and jewels and embroidered
silks as they at this time were, would naturally be disposed to forget
the rude lessons of war and camp. Wamba had improved their town and made
it a fair and comfortable place to dwell in, and the barbarians without
the gates were quieted now by frequent defeat. And so, the wise and
virtuous Wamba once deposed by trickery and smuggled off the throne in a
cataleptic fit, garbed in the monk's gown of renouncement, the period of
Gothic decadence set in. Its day of triumph and ordered rule had been a
brief if brilliant one, and it had by patient effort evolved its own
rude and unstable civilisation out of rough-shod conquest. From Ataulfo
and his horde of barbarians, pouring, famished and athirst, across the
Pyrenees, to lettered Recesvinthus and austere Wamba, who would make an
effective figure even in our own times, the range in humanity is long,
the dividing sea is wide and deep. But if swift had been the triumph,
swifter still and more inexplicable was the decline. A more unhappy and
reckless descent to oblivion history does not record. Towards the end of
the seventh century, the glory of Toledo had so sensibly diminished that
a haze lies upon its subsequent history to the lurid fame of the doomed
day of Guadalete. We hear dimly of deplorable vices, of a demoralised
clergy, of effaced and degraded sovereigns, of a people given up to
every shameful pleasure and wrapped in effeminacy and indolence.
The private story of King Egica is a curious and an unedifying one, told
at length by Lozana in his _Reyes Nuevos_ and by the Conde de Mora in
his History of Toledo. Egica fell violently in love with his niece, Doña
Luz, who, on her side, loved more passionately than wisely her other
uncle, Don Favila. Favila seems a disreputable enough fellow, since he
took the last advantage of his niece's passion, and left her to face the
most atrocious troubles that might have ceased by manly behaviour on his
part. It is one of those complicated and incomprehensible episodes in
history that leave us aghast. Favila is elsewhere supposed to have
murdered his brother by a blow on the head for the sake of that
brother's wife. At any-rate he pursued Doña Luz and, as Lozana naïvely
asserts, with her permission entered her bedroom one night, and there
kneeling before the statue of the Virgin (exquisite absence of all sense
of the ludicrous revealed even in modern Spanish plays where the same
sort of thing happens), they proclaim themselves man and wife with the
usual results. In a little while the watchful and suspicious king
perceives that his niece, Doña Luz, is _enceinte_. The lady understands
her own and the coming infant's danger, so she has an ark made, and
after a secret delivery, places the infant in it like another Moses,
with quantities of linen, jewellery and money, and her women float it
down the Tagus, where, by a miracle, it is found by her uncle, Grafeses,
who lives at Alcántara. Not knowing whose is the child, Grafeses takes
it home. At Toledo the king suspects what has happened, but can find out
nothing definite, so, still true to biblical tradition, he decides to
tackle the new-born infants. He sends for a list of all the children
born in and without Toledo during the past three months, with the name
of each father, hoping thus to discover an unfathered babe with which to
charge Doña Luz. The number of babies born during the three months in
the city of Toledo reached 10,428, and in the suburbs surpassed 25,000.
What a different story from that of to-day! One wonders where there was
room for the immense population of olden times. Alas for the vindictive
king! All the babies had authentic fathers and mothers, and there was no
reaching Doña Luz by this device. There remained another and less
primitive vengeance. He ordered one of his gentlemen, Melias, to attack
her publicly as "a lost woman." Because she refused to become _his_
mistress, and became somebody else's (his brother's), he decided she
should be burnt for impurity. Excellent logic of man! On Doña Luz's
first appearance at Court Melias charged her with impropriety, and the
king fiercely ordered her to reply to the accusation. "My Lord," said
Luz, with much dignity, "how would you have me reply to such a charge?
God knows, and you, my lord, see that I cannot give him the reply he
merits, since he is a cavalier and yet accuses me, a woman, of evil."
The king, base churl, not touched by this admirable reply, mockingly
assures her that he is uncertain whether to address her as dame or maid,
and defies her to find a defender, having previously forbidden his
courtiers to take up her cause. At all times the picture of a
disappointed lover vindictively pursuing the woman who has refused to
listen to him is particularly hideous, but never more than here, where
the insulted lady is so noble and patient and he such a ruffian. Without
a defender, he adds, she is destined to burn for her lack of chastity.
She asks for a delay, and this is surlily granted. Just as the fire is
being prepared for the unfortunate Doña Luz, Don Favila arrives from the
Asturias. It is not made clear to us why he did not remain and provoke a
duel with Melias at once, but the historians unctuously assure us that
he kissed his wife (in the eyes of God) wept over her, told her to hold
her soul in patience, and returned to the Asturias in search of money.
The delay must have been unendurably long, and one wonders at Egica's
unnatural command of temper, when even now, as I, alas! too well know,
it takes a long time, even with the aid of steam, to get from Toledo to
the Asturias. In hot haste, however, Don Favila returned to Toledo,
challenged Melias, and all the court assembled in the Vega beneath the
archbishop's palace, to watch the fight. Doña Luz remained in her
chamber, full of sorrow and fear for Favila. The king ordered the Duke
of Cabra and Count of Merida with three hundred cavaliers to guard the
Vega, and, under pain of death, prevent anyone from assisting the
combatants. His fierce desire, not even concealed, was that Favila
should be killed, and Doña Luz thus placed more utterly at his mercy.
The knights met with a terrible shock of steel, so that both were
unhorsed and nearly killed. This report reached Doña Luz and prostrated
her. She hurried out to see for herself; and Favila, recovered from his
faint, looked up and gave her a glance of reassurance and love. He was
only dizzy as was proved by his alert spring to his feet and quick rush
upon his lady's enemy, through whose slanderous mouth he thrust his
sword inflicting thus a death wound. He coolly drew out his sword, wiped
it, and advancing to the royal seat, he bowed before the king and queen,
and haughtily hoped that Doña Luz's reputation now was cleared. Not
satisfied, Egica sent another knight, Bristes, (what unutterable cads
those Gothic knights were!), to challenge the lady's innocence, and
Bristes went gaily forth on his base sovereign's behalf to meet Favila
to whom he shouted: "I will kill you and have Doña Luz burnt." Favila
wisely replied: "deeds not words weigh" and ran his sword through the
braggart's body. Much to his grief and disappointment Egica was forced
to admit the lady's vindication, but demanded her lover's sword, which
provoked a fresh onslaught. Grafeses stayed the clash of steel by coming
to court to learn the meaning of all these wild doings, and, on passing
through his niece's room, on his way to the queen's chamber, recognised
a handkerchief which resembled those folded round the infant of the ark
he had picked up on the banks of the Tagus at Alcantara. Questioning his
niece, he discovered the nature of her relations with Favila, and
instantly insisted on their marriage. The king was still bent on another
duel, and sent Longaris to fight Favila about the sword, when a hermit
comes to court and, in the name of heaven, stops the duel by revealing,
as a divine message from above, the secret loves of Doña Luz and Don
Favila. Both the cavaliers were wounded, and Doña Luz flung herself on
her knees before the king and begged for mercy for her lover. After long
hesitation, impelled by the hermit's command from heaven to accept the
inevitable, Egica gives in, signals the end of the third duel against
Doña Luz's happiness, and permits, gracelessly of course, after Favila's
recovery, his public marriage with the thrice unfortunate Doña Luz. He
and the queen were witnesses, and Grafeses, a kind of _deus ex machina_,
proclaimed the infante Childe Pelayo, the future hero and victor of
Covadonga. Egica's other feat was to persecute anew the Jews for an
imaginary conspiracy to convert Spain into a Hebrew kingdom. He
pronounced them slaves, took their children from them, and forebade them
to intermarry.
Two figures stand out in this prolonged and monotonous legend in
exaggerated, it may even be said, in false relief. Witiza and Rodrigo
are charged with the ruin of the Toledan kingdom. No less than four
archbishops, in no moderate language, have recorded the tale of Witiza's
iniquities, Sebastian of Salamanca, Isidor Pacense, Lucas of Tuy, and
Rodrigo of Toledo. None of these writers were contemporaries of Witiza,
and they wrote in days when research was nigh impossible, and when we
may doubt if a premium was put upon accuracy. How much even of our own
history is a matter of hearsay? and does there exist a man so fortressed
by virtue as to live without the range of slander if he be so
unfortunate as to excite enmity or jealousy; above all, if he tread on
the susceptible toes of prejudice? This is what Witiza precisely did.
And the prejudice he wounded was ecclesiastical, and ecclesiastical
rancour we know at all times has proved the bitterest man can provoke.
But we also find the notable figure of the Archbishop of Toledo, Julian,
a fluent and accomplished writer, and a saint. The anonymous chronicler
of Cordova tells us that his origin was Jewish, a fact suppressed by the
anti-semitical Spanish historians. He succeeded Quiricus and wrote the
history of Wamba's reign, all in proving himself a model pastor. His
accomplishments were varied. He was a historian, an orator, theologian,
polemist, poet, and musician. So much genius and sanctity in a Goth was
little short of an impertinence. The list of his writings is vast, but
only a few remain. Some are in Greek, most are in Latin, and their
matter is hardly of general interest. He wrote the _Apology of Real
Faith_ in reply to the heresies of Apollinarius, and sent it to Pope Leo
II. It reached Rome after the pope's death. The succeeding pope,
Benedict, replied to it, and two years later the reply reached the
Archbishop of Toledo. It provoked a learned treatise to prove that the
writer was in accord with Isidor of Seville, Fulgence, Ambrose,
Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria. Three ecclesiastics were dispatched
with the precious document, and it took them fourteen months to reach
Rome. Meanwhile three other popes had succeeded Benedict, and the fourth
called a council to consider the matter. All Spain hung on the decision;
the king was worried and alarmed, not knowing if he should regard his
erudite archbishop as a heretic or one of the faithful. At last the
messengers from Rome arrived, bringing praise and admiration from a pope
to whom the document had not been addressed, while between him and Leo,
the original disputer of Julian's orthodoxy, four popes placidly lay in
their tombs. Julian died three years after this triumph, having ruled
during ten brilliant years of primacy, 690, and was buried with St
Ildefonso in the church of St Leocadia.
This is the incongruous legend of Witiza. During his father's life-time,
he ruled at Tuy in Galicia, and proved himself pious, mild, just and
generous. His morals were unimpeachable, and while humane to all, he was
indulgent to his personal enemies, and freely granted pardon and favours
to malcontents. Such a man seems a fitter subject for canonisation than
San Hermengildo. Then this excellent monarch, in middle life, with
character and habits formed, comes down to Toledo, and without rhyme or
reason, we hear of him suddenly as a blind and bloody-minded scoundrel.
From sage and saint he turns into an historic ogre, not content with
libertinage in himself but constraining his subjects to follow his
example, and for sheer viciousness' sake, commanding an austere and
chaste clergy to marry. No villany, no crime seems too base and
preposterous for the archbishops to lay to his account. For the
benevolence of Tuy we have rank injustice, for the mildness envenomed
cruelty, and every anterior virtue is replaced by its pendant vice. Yet
Witiza's power at Tuy was no less than his power at Toledo. He had his
court and his throne in both towns, and there was no reason on earth why
he should act the wise man in the north, and the unreasoning reprobate
in the south. We suspect his first act of clemency on reaching Toledo,
in annulling Sisebuth's edict against the Jews, had much to do with the
joint vituperation of the archbishops and the subsequent historians. Not
only did he recall them, but, misplaced generosity in mediæval eyes, he
restored to the unfortunates their appropriated property and wealth, and
permitted them to live and earn unmolested in his kingdom.
Witiza's defence has been ingeniously undertaken by the Père Tailhan in
his interesting notes to the rhyming chronicler of Cordova, a
contemporary of Witiza. Here we meet the clement Prince of Tuy, whose
mildness, in spite of a natural impetuosity held in check, was his
greatest crime in the eyes of immediate posterity, unswervingly kind to
all who approached and addressed him, described by his enemies, the
Moors, as the most just and pious of all the Christian kings of his
time, and a man of blameless life. Count Fernando Gonzalez refers to him
as "a powerful king, of indomitable courage and of noble heart." The
anonymous writer of Cordova, who was in a position to judge, writes of
his reign as one of peace and prosperity and universal happiness. Was
the devil incarnate the invention of the four respectable archbishops?
Of course the dull and bigoted Mariana follows in their footsteps. Don
José Godoz Alcantara is of a different opinion:--"Witiza," he writes,
"initiated his reign by the most ample act of generosity. He restored to
the destitute their dignities and wealth, publicly burnt all proofs and
denunciations of conspiracy; wishing to cure a degenerate aristocracy of
the passion of power, and direct their spirit of sedition to the arts of
peace, he knocked down Wamba's famous walls, and according to the
picturesque phrase of the Archbishop Don Rodrigo, 'pretended to turn
arms into spades.'"[5] The only crime the traveller in Spain will find
it difficult to forgive, is this act of vandalism in knocking down
Wamba's walls. He could have exhorted his subjects to practise the arts
of peace, all in leaving these great walls untouched in their monumental
beauty. But this is what the reformers of humanity never will do. They
are never happy until they have sacrificed the picturesque on the altar
of utility. Witiza, we see, was in advance of his age. He was a "modern"
man, a creature of fads and fantasies. This was how he came by his
quaint notion of refining the deplorable morals of Toledo. He could
think of no other way of steming the tide of general sensuality but in
legalising polygamy. So fierce a race fallen into bad habits was hardly
to be sermonised with success. The legal state of polygamy he regarded,
along with Oriental sages, as preferable to indiscriminate and
wide-spread libertinage. It is still a nice question unsolved in
civilised Europe whether several legitimate wives or their unrecognised
substitutes constitute a higher or lower state of morality. Witiza was
only less hypocritical than civilised Europe, that is all. But to
pretend that bigamy is more scandalous than private disorder is absurd.
Witiza's notion of reform may have been primitive and instructive, but
it does not justify the legend of his own evil life. To begin with, if
he had been the degraded sensualist the archbishops and Mariana describe
him, he would not have troubled about reform at all, and he may have had
sound reason for requesting the clergy to marry since historians are
agreed that they had become utterly demoralised.
The same haze of legends blurs for us the figure of his unfortunate
successor, Roderick of the Chronicle. On one side we hear of him as
ascending the throne an octogenarian, on another as the impassioned
lover of the beautiful Florinda, the brilliant president of a brilliant
court; carried to battle in a litter, and riding thither on a legendary
steed, fulgent and valiant; disappearing from the field and
disgracefully hiding in a monastery; fighting like a hero and falling in
the fray. We are told that he was a coward by the pen that depicts him
valorously and recklessly approaching the unknown terrors of the
enchanted palace of Hercules, though Florinda's charming leg is not more
vaporous upon research than the vanished walls of this palace. It
matters little now whether the archbishop Rodrigo's ivory-carven car
drawn by mules carried his unhappy namesake to the fatal field of
Guadalete or the legendary steed flashing its way through mailed ranks.
However he comported himself, he lost his kingdom, and his resting place
is forever unknown.
But the tale of the great tournament with which he started his
disastrous reign, must be told at length as one of the most resplendent
pages of courtly history. Whatever may have been the end of his reign,
he certainly began it in the most sumptuous spirit of hospitality and
generosity yet recorded. Was ever such a tournament given before?
Princes and lords and their followers came in swarms from all parts of
Europe to high Toledo, upon her seven steep hills. Hearken only to the
names, and say if they do not make a page in themselves as delightful
as any of Froissart's. The lords of Gascony, Elmet de Bragas, with a
hundred cavaliers; Guillamme de Comenge, with a hundred and twenty; the
Duke of Viana, with four hundred cavaliers; the Count of the Marches,
with a hundred and fifty; the duke of Orleans, with three hundred
cavaliers; and four other Dukes of France, with four hundred. Then came
the King of Poland, with a luxurious train, and six hundred gentlemen of
Lombardy; two marquises, four captains, with twelve hundred cavaliers.
Rome sent three governors and five captains, with fifteen hundred
cavaliers. The Emperor of Constantinople, his brother, three counts, and
three hundred cavaliers came, as well as an English prince, with great
lords, and fifteen hundred cavaliers. From Turkey, Syria, and other
parts, nobles and princes to the number of five thousand came, without
counting their followers and servitors, and different parts of Spain
alone furnished an influx of fifty thousand cavaliers. What a poor
affair our modern exhibitions and sights, even the Queen's Jubilee, seem
after reading of such a brilliant and stupendous gathering of guests at
King Roderick's court of Toledo.
He was, as I have said, a King to visit, with nothing of Spanish
inhospitality about him. He ordered all the citizens to sleep without
the city walls in the ten thousand tents he had fixed in the wide Vega,
and give up their houses to his foreign guests. Be sure he paid them for
the sacrifice in princely style, for out of Eastern fable never was such
a prince as Don Rodrigo, the last of the Goths. All the expenses of the
foreigners, including their mounts and armour, were his, for they were
not permitted to use their own lances, swords, armour or horses. Never
were guests entertained with such prodigious splendour. He ordered
palaces to be built for them, and laid injunctions on builders,
furnishers and purveyors to spare neither expense nor luxury. The whole
Peninsula was scoured in search of armourers and iron-workers, and over
fifteen hundred master armourers with their apprentices and under-hands
were hastily gathered together in Toledo in more than a thousand[6]
improvised iron-shops, working for six busy months at shields and lances
and exquisitely wrought damascene armour for every lord and knight, the
guest of their king. Each guest on arriving received, as well as house
and board, his horse, full armour, shield and lance. The tourney opened
on a Sunday, and presented such a scene as imagination alone can depict.
We are not told the precise spot, but we may suppose the quaint
three-cornered, the ever irresistible Zocodover. Rasis el Moro records
each guest's formal reply when asked if he desired to fight? "For this
we have come from our lands; firstly, to serve and honour these feasts;
secondly, to see how they are carried out; thirdly, to prove your body,
your strength, and learn what you are worth in arms."
Hearing of these great feasts, the Duchess of Lorraine, persecuted by
her brother-in-law, Lembrot, came to Toledo to implore Rodrigo's
protection. Rodrigo received her with cordiality, and lodged her in the
royal palace, and as official defender charged Sacarus with her cause.
Lembrot was called to Toledo to meet the Duchess's knight, and came with
a great train. He, too, was generously entertained, and pending the
clash of steel which was to decide the quarrel between Lembrot and the
Duchess, the Queen gave a sarao, which was even a more brilliant and
gorgeous spectacle than the tourney. Fifty ladies danced with fifty of
the greatest lords, and never was such a constellation of European
titles joined in a single diversion. The ladies' names are not recorded,
but there were in the first dance the King of Poland, the French prince,
the Emperor of Constantinople, the son of the King of England (simply
called _el hijo del Rey de Inglaterra_), the Spanish infante, the Duke
of Viana, the Duke of Orleans, the Count of the Marshes, the Marquis of
Lombardy, and Count William of Saxony.
This enchanting moment preceded bloodshed, for on the next day the two
uncles of Lembrot were killed by Sacarus, thus proclaiming the innocence
of the Duchess to whom Lorraine was then restored, and, along with other
fallen knights, lay the King of Africa. The dead were buried with great
pomp at the expense of their splendid host, and thus ended a tournament
surely without equal as a spectacle in history. The chronicle of Don
Rodrigo devotes nearly a hundred pages to this picturesque event.
The most prominent episode in the life of the legendary Rodrigo is his
famous intrigue with Florinda. We are told that Count Julian, Governor
of Ceuta, sent his daughter to be brought up at Court, where she was in
a sense the King's ward. Nothing remains in history to support this
tradition, for it is now asserted it was never the Gothic habit to have
the daughters of absent noblemen brought up at court as the sovereign's
wards. Then we hear of the Cava's baths, where Rodrigo, from his palace
windows, overhanging the river outside the Puenta de San Martin, beheld
her bathing. Inspection proves these ruins to be the old foundation of a
bridge, nothing more. The story of the Cava dates from the fourteenth
century, when an Arabian writer, Aben-en-Noguairi, in a volume called
_El Limita de la prudencia en las reglas de la prudencia_, gives the
legend. The historian Gamero thus defines the word _Cava_ as applied to
Florinda in explanation of her condition of violated maiden. Caba
proceeds from Caat, an Arabian tribe that came to Spain in Wamba's
reign, descended from Heber of Jewish origin. When the Jews at the
seventeenth Council of Toledo, under Egica, were ordered to be
destituted and sold as slaves, while their children were to be taken
from them and forcibly brought up as Christians, the saying was that the
_Caba was violated_, that is, that this entire tribe, forced to become
Christian in preservation of its wealth and property, had prostituted
itself. From the current phrase, the historians applied the word to a
particular woman, and poetically named her Florinda. From Eve downward
all her daughters have had to share her fate in supporting all the blame
of human disasters. Neither war, defeat, nor blunder nor wreckage of
nations or of individuals is accepted by man as properly and adequately
explained, if some woman is not the man's or the nation's evil genius.
Unprompted by woman, man is a serene and prudent animal, and but for
Florinda, who never existed (though the historians gravely reproduce a
touching and eloquent letter of hers to her father recording in fine and
dignified phrases the story of her wrongs, and beseeching her father to
vindicate her outraged honour and punish the unworthy King), the last of
the Toledan sovereigns might have ended his days in his bed, and,
undesirable fate for Spain! the Moors might never have crossed the
narrow strait. As Gamero says: "Ultimately the story of Rodrigo's guilty
love for a lady of the palace was created." A lady's name once
introduced, it followed a fatal and romantic legend should be invented,
and what prettier than conversion of the broken bridge on the enchanting
marge of yellow Tagus into a syren's bath, with Rodrigo, the inflammable
warrior, fresh from his encounter with dethroned gods and their
emissaries in an enchanted palace, looking down on the maiden as she
disported in the water from the windows of his luxurious Gothic palace?
The legend once started, it is inevitable that the traitor should
follow, and hence the elusive and mysterious figure of Count Julian, who
advances into the picture on a mission of paternal vengeance, and
treacherously opens the gates of Spain to the predatory Berbers. The
Turks had entered Spain, and it needed some other explanation than
national pluck, enterprise and determination to account for their almost
unopposed approach towards Toledo; and what so likely an instrument of
misfortune as the mythical father of the fabulous Florinda? So history
was written, in all faith in those naïve days. Don Faustina de Bourbon
remarks that this fable was not heard of before the dominion of the
Asturian monarchs in southern Spain; not until the Cid took Valencia,
and Alonzo basely seized Toledo, the kingdom of his Moorish protector
and host. Such fables accord with the childish, superstitious yearning
and need to associate the land's misfortunes with the personal
iniquities of those who rule it. Roderick may have been no saint, and
small blame to him in those grossly immoral times, but we need not
attach to his shoulders the packet of national sins and disorders.
Because the abuses among the clergy and the nobles had reached a
repulsive depth of infamy, and public morals were in a lamentable state,
is no reason to insist on his violation of Florinda, or refer as the
Viscount Palazuelos does in his modern guide-book of Toledo, in an
excess of unromantic austerity and disdain "to the guilty loves of
Rodrigo and Count Julian's daughter."[7] There is no proof whatever
that Rodrigo was the wretched sensualist the historians delight to
paint. His crime was (and that the Gothic race shares with him) that he
unworthily lost a large kingdom to a small invading force, and his shame
lies in his inexplicable defeat.
But for traitor there was never any need to invent Count Julian (whom
the Père Tailhan insists was a certain Roman Urban who accompanied
Tarik, and whose name was distorted into Julian), nor Florinda.
Treachery existed nearer home in Witiza's family. Rodrigo had deposed
Witiza, and the usurper was repaid by the treachery of Witiza's sons and
his brother, Oppas, foolishly thinking the Berber raid would only prove
a transient panic which would permit them to dispossess the usurper, and
claim Witiza's throne. Instead of a mere raid, the invasion turned out
one of the most astonishing conquests of history.
Rodrigo's army was immense; Tarik's only numbered twelve thousand men.
The battle took place on the banks of the Wadi-becca; it lasted a week,
beginning on July 19th, 711. Two wings of the Spanish army were
commanded by Witiza's worthless sons, chiefly manned by malcontents and
their serfs. So when the commanders ordered their men to give their
backs to the enemy, there was no difficulty on the question of
obedience. The centre, commanded by Rodrigo, stood its ground valiantly,
but unassisted, at length gave way, and the Turks literally hacked the
Christians to pieces. It was an appalling massacre. Rodrigo's fate, as I
have said, remains unknown. Did he fly, was he killed? Did he sink into
the marsh where his embroidered saddle and silken cloak were found? We
hear on one side that Roderick disappeared mysteriously from the
battle-field; on the other, that he fought valiantly and when forced to
retreat, did so, fighting his way step by step, sword in hand, and fell
with his face to the enemy as befits a soldier. He was supposed in this
version to have been buried at Visein, and 160 years later, Alfonso the
Great, in reconstituting that fallen town, discovered the dust of the
defeated monarch with the inscription on a stone--_Hic requiescit
Rudericus (ultimus) rex Gothorem_.[8]
It is idle now to ask what is true in all these conflicting accounts, or
stop to ask which statement is the right one, that Rodrigo was a gallant
prince in the prime of life when he began his short reign of one year,
or, as an Arabian historian has asserted, a sick and feeble old man of
over eighty.
His defection or disappearance completed the catastrophy, the most fatal
and final in the record of any land, and Tarik profited by the
circumstance. Both malcontents and Jews joyfully received him and threw
wide open the gates of Toledo to his advance. Hither he came with fresh
laurels gathered at Ecija, surrounded with the flower of his army, while
he sent around detachments against Cordova, Archidme, and Elvira.
To the Jews he owed his easy conquest of Toledo, and the Goths alone
were to blame for this. It was only natural the unhappy and persecuted
Jews should welcome any foreign invasion that helped to deliver them
and sweep their brutal oppressors into obscurity. Witiza's clemency was
too isolated a fact in Gothic rule to be remembered by them or to
inspire the faintest hope for continued tolerance. The next monarch
might even prove worse than Sisebuth or Egica. It was safer to rely on
the Moor, who would probably remember their good-will, and would hardly
maintain a prejudice against them in favour of the Christians. As for
the nobles and prelates, they lost their heads and flew northward. The
city was speedily emptied of all the Goths who had the means of flight.
Most of the patricians emigrated to Galicià; the archbishop retreated to
Rome, and in payment for their treachery, Witiza's sons claimed land to
the extent of three thousand farms, which Tarik granted them. Oppas,
Witiza's brother, was named governor of Toledo, until Tarik's splendid
victory brought over from Africa Musa, infuriated and jealous. Instead
of thanking his lieutenant, he acknowledged his services by publicly
horsewhipping him when the dismayed victor came submissively to meet him
at the city gates.