noble domain was given her for a home in the town of Asola, up among the
northern mountains. Here, in a massive castle, she held her court. It
was a bright and happy company, the home of poetry and music, the arts,
and all the culture and refinement of that age, when learning belonged
to the few and the people were sunk in densest ignorance.
Here Titian, the great artist, painted the portrait of the exiled queen
that has come down to us. Here she lived for years, sad in her memories
of the past, but happy in her helpfulness of others until, on her way
to visit her brother Giorgio in Venice, she was stricken with a sudden
fever, and died in the palace in which she had played as a child.
With pomp and display, as was the wont of the Great Republic, with a
city hung with emblems of mourning, and with the solemn strains of
dirge and mass filling the air, out from the great hall of the Palazzo
Cornaro, on, across the heavily draped bridge that spanned the Grand
Canal from the water-gate of the palace, along the broad piazza crowded
with a silent throng, and into the Church of the Holy Apostles, the
funeral procession slowly passed. The service closed, and in the great
Cornaro tomb in the family chapel, at last was laid to rest the body
of one who had enjoyed much but suffered more--the sorrowful Queen of
Cyprus, the once bright and beautiful Daughter of the Republic.
Venice to-day is mouldy and wasting. The palace in which Catarina
Cornaro spent her girlhood is now a pawnbroker’s shop. The last living
representative of the haughty house of Lusignan--Kings, in their day, of
Cyprus, of Jerusalem, and of Armenia--is said to be a waiter in a French
cafe. So royalty withers and power fades. There is no title to nobility
save character, and no family pride so unfading as a spotless name. But,
though palace and family have both decayed, the beautiful girl who was
once the glory of Venice and whom great artists loved to paint, sends us
across the ages, in a flash of regal splendor, a lesson of loyalty and
helpfulness. This, indeed, will outlive all their queenly titles, and
shows her to us as the bright-hearted girl who, in spite of sorrow, of
trouble, and of loss, developed into the strong and self-reliant woman.
THERESA OF AVILA: THE GIRL OF THE SPANISH SIERRAS.
(Afterward known as St. Theresa of Avila.) A.D. 1525.
It is a stern and gray old city that the sun looks down upon, when
once he does show his jolly face above the saw-like ridges of the grim
Guadarrama Mountains in Central Spain; a stern and gray old city as well
it may be, for it is one of the very old towns of Western Europe--Avila,
said by some to have been built by Albula, the mother of Hercules nearly
four thousand years ago.
Whether or not it was the place in which that baby gymnast strangled
the serpents who sought to kill him in his cradle, it is indeed ancient
enough to suit any boy or girl who likes to dig among the relics of
the past. For more than eight centuries the same granite walls that
now surround it have lifted their gray ramparts out of the vast and
granite-covered plains that make the country so wild and lonesome, while
its eighty-six towers and gateways, still unbroken and complete, tell
of its strength and importance in those far-off days, when the Cross
was battling with the Crescent, and Christian Spain, step by step, was
forcing Mohammedan Spain back to the blue Mediterranean and the arid
wastes of Africa, from which, centuries before, the followers of the
Arabian Prophet had come.
At the time of our story, in the year 1525, this forcing process was
about over. Under the relentless measures of Ferdinand and Isabella,
with whose story all American children, at least, should be familiar,
the last Moorish stronghold had fallen, in the very year in which
Columbus discovered America, and Spain, from the Pyrenees to the Straits
of Gibraltar, acknowledged the mastership of its Christian sovereigns.
But the centuries of warfare that had made the Spaniards a fierce and
warlike race, had also filled Spain with frowning castles and embattled
towns. And such an embattled town was this same city of Avila, in which,
in 1525, lived the stern and pious old grandee, Don Alphonso Sanchez de
Cepeda, his sentimental and romance-loving wife, the Donna Beatrix, and
their twelve sturdy and healthy children.
Religious warfare, as it is the most bitter and relentless of strifes,
is also the most brutal. It turns the natures of men and women into
quite a different channel from the one in which the truths they are
fighting for would seek to lead them; and of all relentless and brutal
religious wars, few have been more bitter than the one that for fully
five hundred years had wasted the land of Spain.
To battle for the Cross, to gain renown in fights against the
Infidels--as the Moors were then called,--to “obtain martyrdom” among
the followers of Mohammed--these were reckoned by the Christians of
crusading days as the highest honor that life could bring or death
bestow. It is no wonder, therefore, that in a family, the father of
which had been himself a fighter of Infidels, and the mother a reader
and dreamer of all the romantic stories that such conflicts create, the
children also should be full of that spirit of hatred toward a conquered
foe that came from so bitter and long-continuing a warfare.
Don Alphonso’s religion had little in it of cheerfulness and love.
It was of the stern and pitiless kind that called for sacrifice and
penance, and all those uncomfortable and unnecessary forms by which too
many good people, even in this more enlightened day, think to ease their
troubled consciences, or to satisfy the fancied demands of the Good
Father, who really requires none of these foolish and most unpleasant
self-punishments.
But such a belief was the rule in Don Alphonso’s day, and when it could
lay so strong a hold upon grown men and women, it would, of course,
be likely to work in peculiar ways with thoughtful and conscientious
children, who, understanding little of the real meaning of sacrifice and
penance, felt it their duty to do something as proof of their belief.
So it came about that little ten-year-old Theresa, one of the numerous
girls of the Cepeda family, thought as deeply of these things as her
small mind was capable. She was of a peculiarly sympathetic, romantic,
and conscientious nature, and she felt it her duty to do something
to show her devotion to the faith for which her father had fought so
valiantly, and which the nuns and priests, who were her teachers, so
vigorously impressed upon her.
She had been taught that alike the punishment or the glory that must
follow her life on earth were to last forever. Forever! this was a word
that even a thoughtful little maiden like Theresa could not comprehend.
So she sought her mother.
“Forever? how long is forever, mother mine?” she asked.
But the Donna Beatrix was just then too deeply interested in the tragic
story of the two lovers, Calixto and Melibea, in the Senor Fernando de
Rojas’ tear-compelling story, to be able to enter into the discussion of
so deep a question.
“Forever,” she said, looking up from the thick and crabbed black-letter
pages, “why forever is forever, child--always. Pray do not trouble
me with such questions; just as I am in the midst of this beautiful
death-scene too.”
The little girl found she could gain no knowledge from this source, and
she feared to question her stern and bigoted old father. So she sought
her favorite brother Pedro--a bright little fellow of seven, who adored
and thoroughly believed in his sister Theresa.
To Pedro, then, Theresa confided her belief that, if forever was so long
a time as “always,” it would be most unpleasant to suffer “always,” if
by any chance they should do any thing wrong. It would be far better,
so argued this little logician, to die now and end the problem, than to
live and run so great a risk. She told him, too, that, as they knew from
their mother’s tales, the most beautiful, the most glorious way to die
was as a martyr among the infidel Moors. So she proposed to Pedro that
she and he should not say a word to any one, but just start off at once
as crusaders on their own accounts, and lose their lives but save their
souls as martyrs among the Moors.
The suggestion had all the effect of novelty to the little Pedro, and
while he did not altogether relish the idea of losing his life among the
Moors, still the possibility of a change presented itself with all the
attractions that the thought of trying something new always has for
children. Besides, he had great respect for his sister’s judgment.
“Well, let us be crusaders,” he said, “and perhaps we need not be
martyrs, sister. I don’t think that would be so very pleasant, do
you? Who knows; perhaps we may be victorious crusaders and conquer the
Infidels just as did Ruy Diaz the Cid.(1) See here, Theresa; I have my
sword and you can take your cross, and we can have such a nice crusade,
and may be the infidel Moors will run away from us just as they did from
the Cid and leave us their cities and their gold and treasure? Don’t you
remember what mother read us, how the Cid won Castelon, with its silver
and its gold?”
(1) The Cid was the great hero of Spanish romance. The stories of his
valor have been the joy of Spaniards, old and young, for centuries. Cid
is a corruption of the Moorish word seyd or said, and means master.
And the little fellow spouted most valiantly this portion of the famous
poem of the exploits of the Cid (the Poema del Cid), with the martial
spirit of which stirring rhyme his romantic mother had filled her
children:
“Smite, smite, my knights, for mercy’s sake--on boldly to the
war;
I am Ruy Diaz of Bivar, the Cid Campeador!
Three hundred lances then were couched, with pennons
streaming gay;
Three hundred shields were pierced through--no steel the
shock might stay;--
Three hundred hauberks were torn off in that encounter sore;
Three hundred snow-white pennons were crimson-dyed in
gore;
Three hundred chargers wandered loose--their lords were
overthrown;
The Christians cry ‘St. James for Spain!’ the Moormen
cry ‘Mahoun!’”
Theresa applauded her little brother’s eloquent recitation, and thought
him a very smart boy; but she said rather sadly: “I fear me it will not
be that way, my Pedro; for martyrdom means, as mother has told us, the
giving up of our life rather than bow to the false faith of the Infidel,
and thus to save our souls and have a crown of glory.”
“The crown would be very nice, I suppose, sister,” said practical young
Pedro, “especially if it was all so fine as the one they say the
young King Carlos(1) wears--Emperor, too, now, is he not? Could we be
emperors, too, sister, if we were martyrs, and had each a crown? But we
must be crusaders first, I suppose. Come, let us go at once.”
(1) King Charles the Fifth was at this time King of Spain, and had just
been elected Emperor of Germany.
The road from granite-walled Avila to the south is across a wild and
desolate waste, frowned down upon on either hand by the savage crests
of the grim sierras of the Guadarrama. It winds along gorges and ravines
and rocky river-beds, and has always been, even in the days of Spanish
power and glory, about as untamed and savagely picturesque a road as one
could well imagine.
Along this hard and desolate road, only a few days after their
determination had been reached, to start upon a crusade the brother and
sister plodded. Theresa carried her crucifix, and Pedro his toy sword,
while in a little wallet at his side were a few bits of food taken from
the home larder. This stock of food had, of course, been taken without
the knowledge of the mother, who knew nothing of their crusade, and
this, therefore, furnished for Theresa another sin, for which she must
do penance, and another reason for the desired martyrdom.
They had really only proceeded a few miles into the mountains beyond
Avila, but already their sturdy little legs were tired, and their stout
little backs were sore. Pedro thought crusading not such very great fun
after all; he was always hungry and thirsty, and Theresa would only let
him take a bite once in a while.
“Don’t you suppose there is a Moorish castle somewhere around here that
we could capture, and so get plenty to eat?” he inquired of his sister.
“That is what the Cid was always finding. Don’t you remember how nicely
he got into Alcacer and slew eleven Infidel knights, and found ever so
much gold and things to eat? This is what he said, you know:
“‘On, on, my knights, and smite the foe!
And falter not, I pray;
For by the grace of God, I trow,
The town is ours this day!’”
“O Pedro, dear, why will you think so much of things to eat,” groaned
Theresa. “Do you not know that to be hungry is one way to be a martyr.
And besides, it is, I doubt not, our just punishment for having taken
any thing to eat without letting mother know. We must suffer and be
strong, little brother.”
“That’s just like a girl,” cried Pedro, a trifle scornfully. “How can we
be strong if we suffer? I can’t, I know.”
But before Theresa could enter upon an explanation of this most
difficult problem--one that has troubled many older heads than little
Pedro’s,--both the children started in surprise, and then involuntarily
shrunk closer to the dark gray rock in whose shadow they were resting.
For there, not a hundred yards distant, coming around a turn in the
road, was one of the very Infidels they had come out to meet and
conquer, or be martyred by.
He was a rather imposing-looking but not a formidable old man. His cloak
or mantle of brown stuff was worn and ragged, his turban was quite
as dingy, but the long white beard that fell upon his breast made his
swarthy face look even fiercer than it really was, and the stout staff,
with which he helped himself over the uneven road, seemed to the little
crusaders some terrible weapon of torture and of martyrdom.
But Pedro was a valiant little fellow after all. The fighting spirit of
his father the Don burned within him, and few little folks of seven know
what caution is. He whispered to his sister, whose hand he had at first
clutched in terror, a word of assurance.
“Be not afraid, sister mine,” he said. “Yonder comes the Infidel we have
gone forth to find. Do you suppose he has a whole great army following
him? Hold up your crucifix, and I will strike him with my sword. The
castle can’t be far away, and perhaps we can conquer this old Infidel
and find a good dinner in his castle. That ‘s just what the Cid would
have done. You know what he said:
“‘Far from our land, far from Castile
We here are banished;
If with the Moors we battle not,
I wot we get no bread.’
Let us battle with him at once.”
And before his sister with restraining hand, could hold him back the
plucky young crusader flourished his sword furiously and charged down
upon the old Moor, who now in turn started in surprise and drew aside
from the path of the determined little warrior.
“Now yield thee, yield thee, pagan prince.
Or die in crimson gore;
I am Ruy Diaz of Bivar,
The Cid Campeador!”
shouted the little crusader, charging against his pagan enemy at a
furious rate.
“O spare him, spare my brother, noble emir. Let me die in his stead,”
cried the terrified Theresa, not quite so confident now as to the
pleasure of martyrdom.
The old man stretched out his staff and stopped the headlong dash of
the boy. Then laying a hand lightly on his assailant’s head he looked
smilingly toward Theresa.
“Neither prince nor emir am I, Christian maiden,” he said, “but the poor
Morisco Abd-el-’Aman of Cordova, seeking my son Ali, who, men say, is
servant to a family in Valladolid. Pray you if you have aught to eat
give some to me, for I am famishing.”
This was not exactly martyrdom; it was, in fact, quite the opposite,
and the little Theresa was puzzled as to her duty in the matter. Pedro,
however, was not at all undecided.
“Give our bread and cake to a nasty old Moor?” he cried; “I should say
we will not, will we, sister? We need it for ourselves. Besides, what
dreadful thing is it that the Holy Inquisition does to people who succor
the infidel Moors?”
Theresa shuddered. She knew too well all the stories of the horrible
punishments that the Holy Office, known as the Inquisition of Spain,
visited upon those who harbored Jews or aided the now degraded Moors.
For so complete had been the conquest of the once proud possessors of
Southern Spain, that they were usually known only by the contemptuous
title of “Moriscoes,” and were despised and hated by their “chivalrous”
Christian conquerors.
But little Theresa de Cepeda was of so loving and generous a nature that
even the plea of an outcast and despised Morisco moved her to pity. From
her earliest childhood she had delighted in helpful and generous deeds.
She repeatedly gave away, so we are told, all her pocket-money in
charity, and any sign of trouble or distress found her ready and anxious
to extend relief. There was really a good deal of the angelic in little
Theresa, and even the risk of arousing the wrath of the Inquisition,
the walls of whose gloomy dungeon in Avila she had, so often looked upon
with awe, could not withhold her from wishing to help this poor old man
who was hunting for his lost son.
“Nay, brother,” she said to little Pedro, “it can be not so very great a
crime to give food to a starving man”; and much to Pedro’s disgust, she
opened the wallet and emptied their little store of provisions into the
old beggar’s hand.
“And wither are ye bound, little ones?” asked this “tramp” of the long
ago, as the children watched their precious dinner disappear behind his
snowy beard.
“We are on a crusade, don Infidel,” replied Pedro, boldly. “A crusade
against your armies and castles, perhaps to capture them, and thus gain
the crown of martyrdom.”
The old Moor looked at them sadly. “There is scarce need for that, my
children,” he said. “My people are but slaves; their armies and their
castles are lost; their beautiful cities are ruined, and there is
neither conquest nor martyrdom for Christian youths and maidens to gain
among them. Go home, my little ones, and pray to Allah that you and
yours may never know so much of sorrow and of trouble as do the poor
Moriscoes of Spain this day.”
This was news to Theresa. No martyrdom to be obtained among the Moors?
Where then was all the truth of her mother’s romances,--where was all
the wisdom of her father’s savage faith? She had always supposed that
the Moors were monsters and djins, waiting with great fires and racks
and sharpest cimeters to put to horrible death all young Christians who
came amongst them, and now here was one who begged for bread and pleaded
for pity like any common beggar of Avila. Evidently something was wrong
in the home stories.
As for little Pedro, he waxed more valiant as the danger lessened. He
whetted his toy sword against the granite rocks and looked savagely at
the old man.
“You have eaten all my bread, don Infidel,” he said, “and now you would
lie about your people and your castles. You are no beggar; you are the
King of Cordova come here in this disguise to spy out the Christian’s
land. I know all about you from my mother’s stories. So you must die. I
shall send your head to our Emperor by my sister here, and when he shall
ask her who has done this noble deed she will say, just as did Alvar
Fanez to King Alfonso:
‘My Cid Campeador, O king, it was who girded brand:
The Paynim king he hath o’ercome, the mightiest in the land
Plenteous and sovereign is the spoil he from the Moor hath
won;
This portion, honored king and lord, he sendeth to your
throne.’
“So, King of Cordova, bend down and let me cut off your head.”
The “King of Cordova” made no movement of compliance to this gentle
invitation, and the head-strong Pedro, springing toward him, would have
caught him by the beard, had not his gentle sister restrained him.
“I do believe he is no king, my Pedro,” she said, “but only, as he says,
a poor Morisco beggar. Let us rather try to help him. He hath no castles
I am sure, and as for his armies----”
“His armies! there they come; look, sister!” cried little Pedro,
breaking into his sister’s words; “now will you believe me?” and
following his gaze, Theresa herself started as she saw dashing down the
mountain highway what looked to her unpractised eye like a whole band of
Moorish cavalry with glimmering lances and streaming pennons.
Pedro faced the charge with drawn sword. Theresa knelt on the ground
with silver crucifix upraised, expecting instant martyrdom, while the
old Moorish tramp, Abd-el-’Aman, believing discretion to be the better
part of valor, quietly dropped down by the side of the rocky roadway,
for well he understood who were these latest comers.
The Moorish cavalry, which proved to be three Spaniards on horseback,
drew up before the young crusaders.
“So, runaways, we have found you,” cried one of them, as he recognized
the children. “Come, Theresa, what means this folly? Whither are you and
Pedro bound?”
“We were even starting for a crusade against the Moor, Brother Jago,”
said Theresa, timidly, “but our Infidel friend here--why, where hath he
gone?--says that there are neither Infidel castles nor Moorish armies
now, and that therefore we may not be crusaders.”
“But I know that he doth lie, Brother Jago,” cried little Pedro, more
valiant still when he saw to what his Moorish cavalry was reduced. “He
is the King of Cordova, come here to spy out the land, and I was about
to cut off his head when you did disturb us.”
Big brother Jago de Cepeda and the two servants of his father’s house
laughed long and loudly.
“Crusaders and kings,” he cried; “why, we shall have the Cid himself
here, if we do but wait long enough.”
“Hush, brother,” said young Pedro, confidentially, “say it not so
loudly. I did tell the Infidel that I was Ruy Diaz of Bivar, the Cid
Campeador--and he did believe me.”
And then the cavalry laughed louder than ever, and swooping down
captured the young crusaders and set the truants before them on their
uncomfortable Cordova saddles. Then, turning around, they rode swiftly
back to Avila with the runaways, while the old Moor, glad to have
escaped rough handling from the Christian riders, grasped his staff and
plodded on toward Avila and Valladolid.
So the expedition for martyrdom and crusade came to an ignominious
end. But the pious desires of little Theresa did not. For, finding
that martyrdom was out of the question, she proposed to her ever-ready
brother that they should become hermits, and for days the two children
worked away trying to build a hermitage near their father’s house.
But the rough and heavy pieces of granite with which they sought to
build their hermitage proved more than they could handle, and their
knowledge of mason-work was about as imperfect as had been their
familiarity with crusading and the country of the Moors. “The stones
that we piled one upon another,” wrote Theresa herself in later years,
“immediately fell down, and so it came to pass that we found no means of
accomplishing our wish.”
The pluck and piety, however, that set this conscientious and
sympathetic little girl to such impossible tasks were certain to blossom
into something equally hard and unselfish when she grew to womanhood.
And so it proved. Her much-loved but romance-reading mother died when
she was twelve years old, and Theresa felt her loss keenly.
She was a very clever and ambitious girl, and with a mother’s guiding
hand removed she became impatient under the restraints which her
stern old father, Don Alphonso, placed upon her. At sixteen she was an
impetuous, worldly-minded, and very vain though very dignified young
lady. Then her father, fearful as to her future, sent her to a convent,
with orders that she should be kept in strict seclusion.
Such a punishment awoke all the feelings of conscientiousness and
self-conviction that had so influenced her when she was a little girl,
and Theresa, left to her own thoughts, first grew morbid, and then fell
sick.
During her sickness she resolved to become a nun, persuaded her
ever-faithful brother, Pedro, to become a friar, and when Don Alphonso,
their father, refused his consent, the brother and sister, repeating the
folly of their childhood, again ran away from home.
Then their father, seeing the uselessness of resistance, consented, and
Theresa, at the age of twenty, entered a convent in Avila, and became a
nun in what was known as the Order of the Carmelites.