HISTORICAL COMPOSITION.--ZURITA, MORALES, RIBADENEYRA, SIGUENZA,
MARIANA, SANDOVAL, HERRERA, ARGENSOLA, THE INCA GARCILASSO, MENDOZA,
MONCADA, COLOMA, MELO, SAAVEDRA, SOLÍS.--GENERAL REMARKS ON THE SPANISH
HISTORIANS.
The fathers of Spanish history, as distinguished from Spanish
chronicling, are Zurita and Morales, both of whom, educated in the
reign of Charles the Fifth, show that they were not insensible to the
influences of that great period in the annals of their country, and
both of whom, after its close, prepared and published their works under
the happiest auspices.
Zurita was born in Saragossa in 1512, and died there in 1580; so that
he had the happiness to live while the political privileges of his
native kingdom were yet little impaired, and to die just before they
were effectually broken down. His father was a favored physician of
Ferdinand the Catholic, and accompanied that monarch to Naples in
1506. The son, who showed from early youth a great facility in the
acquisition of knowledge, was educated at the University of Alcalá,
where it was his good fortune to have, for his chief instructor,
Fernan Nuñez, who was commonly called the Greek Commander, from the
circumstance, that, while his position in the state as a member of the
great family of the Guzmans made him Knight Commander of the Order of
Santiago, his personal acquisitions and talents rendered him the first
Greek scholar of his age and country.
As the elder Zurita continued to be much trusted by Charles the
Fifth, and as his son’s connections were chiefly with persons of
great consideration, the progress of the future historian was, at
first, rather in the direction of public affairs. But in 1548,
under circumstances peculiarly honorable to him, he was appointed
historiographer of Aragon; being elected unanimously by the free Cortes
of the kingdom to the office, which they had just established, and as a
candidate for which he had to encounter the most powerful and learned
competitors. The election seems to have satisfied his ambition, and to
have given a new direction to his life. At any rate, he immediately
procured a royal warrant to examine and use all documents needful for
his purpose that could be found in any part of the empire. Under this
broad authority he went over much of Spain, consulting and arranging
the great national records at Simancas, and then visited Sicily and
Naples, from whose monasteries and public archives he obtained further
ample and learned spoils.
The result was, that between 1562 and 1580 he published, in six folio
volumes, “The Annals of Aragon,” from the invasion of the country by
the Arabs to 1516, the last third of his labor being entirely given to
the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic, for which the recollections of his
father’s life at the court of that monarch probably afforded some of
the more interesting materials. The whole work is more important for
Spanish history than any that had preceded it. It has hardly any thing
of the monkish credulity of the old chronicles, for Zurita was a man of
the world, and always concerned in the stirring interests of his time;
first, from having been intrusted with the municipal affairs of one of
the principal cities of the kingdom; next, from being charged with the
general correspondence of the Inquisition; and finally, from his duties
as one of the secretaries of Philip the Second, which kept him much at
court and about the king’s person. It shows, too, not unfrequently, a
love for the ancient privileges of Aragon, and a generosity of opinion
on political subjects, remarkable in one who was aware that whatever
he wrote would not only be submitted before its publication to the
censorship of jealous rivals, but read by the wary and severe monarch
on whom all his fortunes depended. Its faults are its great length and
a carelessness of style, scarcely regarded as faults at the time when
it was written.[202]
[202] The best notice of Gerónimo de Zurita is the one at the end
of Part II. Chap. I. of Prescott’s “Ferdinand and Isabella”;--the
most ample is the folio volume of Diego Josef Dormer, entitled
“Progresos de la Historia en Aragon” (Zaragoza, 1680, folio);
really a life of Zurita, published in his honor by the Cortes of
his native kingdom. There are several editions of his Annals;
and Latassa (Bib. Nueva, Tom. I. pp. 358-373) gives a list of
above forty of his works, nearly all unpublished, and none of
them, probably, of much value, except his History, to which, in
fact, they are generally subsidiary. He held several offices
under Philip II., and there is a letter to him from the king in
Dormer, (p. 109,) which shows that he enjoyed much of the royal
consideration; though, as I have intimated, and as may be fully
seen in Dormer, (Lib. II. c. 2, 3, 4,) he was much teased, at one
time, by the censors of his History. The first edition of the
“Anales de la Corona de Aragon” was published in different years,
at Saragossa, between 1562 and 1580, to which a volume of Indices
was added in 1604, making seven volumes, folio, in all. The third
edition (Zaragoza, 1610-21, 7 tom. folio) is the one that is
preferred.
Another volume was added to the Annals of Zurita (Zaragoza,
1630, fol.) by Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, the poet, who
brought them down to 1520, and whose style is better than that in
Zurita’s portion; but not much of it is the work of Argensola, so
heavy is it with documents.
I have said that Zurita was employed as secretary of Philip
II., from time to time; and such was the fact. But this title
often implied little except the right of the person who bore
it to receive a moderate salary from the public treasury;--a
circumstance which I mention because I have occasion frequently
to notice authors who were royal secretaries, from the time
of Baena, the Jew, in the days of John II., down to the
disappearance of the Austrian family. Thus Gonzalo Perez and his
son Antonio were royal secretaries; so were the two Quevedos, and
many more. In 1605, Philip III. had twenty-nine such secretaries.
Clemencin, note to Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 47.
Morales, who was an admirer of Zurita, and defended him from one of
his assailants in a tract published at the end of the last volume of
the “Annals of Aragon,” was born in 1513, a year after his friend, and
died in 1591, having survived him by eleven years. He was educated
at Salamanca, and, besides early obtaining Church preferments and
distinctions, rose subsequently to eminence as a Professor in
the University of Alcalá. But from 1570, when he was appointed
historiographer to the crown of Castile, he devoted himself to the
completion of the History begun on so vast a scale by Ocampo, whose
work he seems to have taken up in some degree out of regard for the
memory of its author.
He began his task, however, too late. He was already sixty-seven years
old, and when he died, eleven years afterwards, he had been able to
bring it down no further than to the union of the crowns of Castile
and Leon, in 1037,--a point from which it was afterwards carried,
by Sandoval, to the death of Alfonso the Seventh, in 1097, where it
finally stops. Imperfect, however, as is the portion compiled in his
old age by Morales, we can hardly fail to regard it, not, indeed, as
so wise and well-weighed an historical composition as that of Zurita,
but as one marked with much more general ability, and showing a much
more enlightened spirit, than the work of Ocampo, to which it serves
as a continuation. Its style, unhappily, is wanting in correctness;--a
circumstance the more to be noticed, since Morales valued himself on
his pure Castilian, both as the son of a gentleman of high caste, and
as the nephew of Fernan de Oliva, by whom he was educated, and whose
works he had published because they had done so much to advance prose
composition in Spain.[203]
[203] The History of Ambrosio de Morales was first published in
three folios, Alcalá, 1574-77; but the best edition is that of
Madrid, 1791, in six small quartos, to which are commonly added
two volumes, dated 1792, on Spanish Antiquities, and three more,
dated 1793, of his miscellaneous works;--the whole being preceded
by the work of Ocampo, in two volumes, already noticed, and
followed by the continuation of Sandoval, in one volume, a work
of about equal merit with that of Morales, and first printed at
Pamplona, in 1615, folio. The three authors, Ocampo, Morales, and
Sandoval, taken together, are thus made to fill twelve volumes,
as if they belonged to one work, to which is given the unsuitable
title of “Corónica General de España.”
Morales, in his youth, cruelly mutilated his person, in order
to insure his priestly purity of life, and wellnigh died of the
consequences.
I might have mentioned here the “Comentario de la Guerra de
Alemaña de Luis de Avila y Zuñiga,” a small volume, (Anvers,
1550, 12mo,) first printed in 1548, and frequently afterwards,
both in Latin and French, as well as in Spanish. It is an account
of the campaigns of Charles V. in Germany, in 1546 and 1547,
prepared, probably, from information furnished by the Emperor
himself, (Navarra, Diálogos, 1567, f. 13,) and written in a
natural, but by no means polished, Castilian style. Parts of
it bear internal evidence of having been composed at the very
time of the events they record, and the whole is evidently the
work of one of the few personal friends Charles V. ever had;
one, however, who does not appear to much advantage in the
private letters of Guillaume van Male, printed by the Belgian
Bibliophiles, in 1843. See, _ante_, Vol. I. p. 499, n.
Contemporary with both Zurita and Morales, but far in advance of
both of them as a writer of history, was the old statesman, Diego de
Mendoza, whose fresh and vigorous account of the rebellion of the Moors
in 1568 we have already considered, noticing it rather at the period
when it was written than at the beginning of the seventeenth century,
when it was first given to the world, and when Siguenza, Ribadeneyra,
Mariana, Sandoval, and Herrera had already appeared, and determined
the character which should be finally impressed on this department of
Spanish literature.
Of this group, the first two, who devoted themselves to ecclesiastical
history, and entered into the religious discussions of their time,
were, perhaps, originally the most prominent. Ribadeneyra, one of the
early and efficient members of the Society of Jesuits, distinguished
himself by his “History of the Schism in the English Church,” in the
time of Henry the Eighth, and by his “Lives of the Saints.” Siguenza,
who was a disciple of Saint Jerome, was no less faithful to the
brotherhood by whom he was adopted and honored, as his life of their
founder and his history of their Order abundantly prove. Both were
men of uncommon gifts, and wrote with a manly and noble eloquence;
the first with more richness and fervor, the last with a more simple
dignity, but each with the earnest and trusting spirit of his peculiar
faith.[204]
[204] Pedro de Ribadeneyra, who died, aged 84, in 1611, and for
whom a beautiful epitaph was composed by Mariana, wrote several
works in honor of his company, and several ascetic works, besides
his “Cisma de Inglaterra,” (Valencia, 1588,) and his “Flos
Sanctorum,” Madrid, 1599-1601, 2 tom. folio.
José de Siguenza, who was born in 1545, and died in 1606, as
Prior of the Escurial,--whose construction he witnessed and
described,--published his “Vida de San Gerónimo,” in Madrid,
1595, 4to, and his “Historia de la Orden de San Gerónimo,”
in Madrid, 1600, 4to. He was persecuted by the Inquisition.
Llorente, Hist. de l’Inquisition, Tom. II., 1817, p. 474.
It would be easy to add to these two writers on ecclesiastical
history the names of many more. Hardly a convent or a saint
of any note in Spain, during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, failed of especial commemoration; and each of the
religious orders and great cathedrals had at least one historian,
and most of them several. The number of books on Spanish
ecclesiastical history to be found in the list at the end of
the second volume of Antonio’s Bibliotheca Nova is, therefore,
one that may well be called enormous. Some of them, too, like
the history of the order of St. Benedict, by Yepes, and several
of the histories of those orders that were both knightly and
religious, are of no little importance for the facts and
documents with which they are crowded. But nearly all of them are
heavy, monkish annals, and not one, I believe, has literary merit
enough to attract our attention.
From the nature of their subjects, however, neither of them rose to be
the great historian of his country;--an honor which belongs to Juan
de Mariana, a foundling, who was born at Talavera in 1536, and whose
extraordinary talents attracted the attention of the Jesuits, then
fast advancing into notice as a religious power. Having gone through
a severe course of studies at Alcalá, he was selected, at the age of
twenty-four, to fill the most important place in the great college
which the members of his society were then establishing at Rome,
and which they regarded as one of their principal institutions for
consolidating and extending their influence. After five years, he was
removed to Sicily, to introduce similar studies into that island; and,
a little later, he was transferred to Paris, where he was received with
honor, and taught for several years, lecturing chiefly on the works and
opinions of Thomas Aquinas, to crowded audiences. But the climate of
France was unfriendly to his health, and in 1574, having spent thirteen
years in foreign countries, as a public instructor, he returned to
Spain, and established himself in the house of his order at Toledo,
which he hardly left during the forty-nine remaining years of his life.
This long period, which he devoted to literary labor, was not,
however, permitted to be as peaceful as his merits should have
made it. The Polyglot Bible published by Arias Montano at Antwerp,
in 1569-72,--which was at first received with great favor, but
afterwards, by the intrigues of the Jesuits, was denounced to the
Inquisition,--excited so bitter a quarrel, that it was deemed necessary
to inquire into the truth of the charges brought against it. By the
management of the Jesuits, Mariana was the principal person employed to
make the investigation; and, through his learning and influence, they
felt sure of a triumph. But though he was a faithful Jesuit, he was
not a subservient one. His decision was in favor of Montano; and this,
together with the circumstance that he did not follow the intimations
given to him when he was employed in arranging the Index Expurgatorius
of 1584, brought upon him the displeasure of his superiors in a way
that caused him much trouble.[205]
[205] Llorente, Tom. I. p. 479, Tom. II. p. 457, Tom. III. pp.
75-82. Carvajal, the author of the “Elógio Historico” of Montano,
in the seventh volume of the Memoirs of the Academy of History,
(1832, 4to, p. 84,) does not think the course of Mariana, in this
investigation, was so frank as it should have been. Perhaps it
was not; but he came to the right conclusion at last, and it was
a bold and honest thing to do so.
In 1599, he published a Latin treatise on the Institution of Royalty,
and dedicated it to Philip the Third;--a work liberal in its general
political tone, and even intimating that there are cases in which it
may be lawful to put a monarch to death. At home, it caused little
remark. It was regularly approved by the censors of the press, and
is even said to have been favored by the policy of the government,
which, in the time of Philip the Second, had sent assassins to cut off
Elizabeth of England and the Prince of Orange. But in France, where
Henry the Third had been thus put to death a few years before, and
where Henry the Fourth suffered a similar fate a few years afterwards,
it excited a great sensation. Indeed, the sixth chapter of the first
book directly mentions, and by implication countenances, the murder of
the former of these monarchs, and was claimed, though contrary to the
truth of fact, to have been among the causes that stimulated Ravaillac
to the assassination of the latter. It was, therefore, both attacked
and defended with extraordinary acrimony; and at last the Parliament
of Paris ordered it to be burned by the hands of the common hangman.
What was more unfortunate for its author, the whole discussion having
brought much popular odium on the Jesuits, who were held responsible
for a book which was written by one of their order, and could not
have been published without permission of its heads, Mariana himself
became more than ever unwelcome to the great body of his religious
associates.[206]
[206] The account of this book, and of the discussions it
occasioned, is given amply by Bayle, in the notes to his article
_Mariana_; but, as is usual with him, in a manner that shows
his dislike of the Jesuits. I know the treatise “De Rege et
Regis Institutione” only in the edition “Typis Wechelianis,”
1611, 12mo; but I believe that edition is not at all expurgated.
Certainly, the passage Lib. I. c. 6 is quite strong enough, in
extenuation of the atrocious crime of Jaques Clemens, to be
open to severe animadversion. (Sismondi, Hist. des Français,
Paris, 8vo, Tom. XXII., 1839, p. 191.) From the very remarkable
letters of Loaysa, the confessor of Charles V., it appears that
the great Emperor himself was as little scrupulous as his son in
such matters. This renders the passage in Mariana more easy of
explanation. See Briefe an Kaiser Karl V., etc., von D. G. Heine,
Berlin, 1848, 8vo, p. 130, and note.
At last, an occasion was found where he could be assailed without
assigning the reasons for the attack. In 1609, he published, not in
Spain, but at Cologne, seven Latin treatises on various subjects of
theology and criticism, such as the state of the Spanish theatre, the
Arab computation of time, and the year and day of the Saviour’s birth.
Most of them were of a nature that could provoke no animadversion; but
one, “On Mortality and Immortality,” was seized upon for theological
censure, and another, “On the Coinage of the Realm,” was assailed on
political grounds, because it showed how unwise and scandalous had been
the practices of the reigning favorite, the Duke of Lerma, in tampering
with the currency and debasing it. The Inquisition took cognizance
of both; and their author, though then seventy-three years old, was
subjected first to confinement, and afterwards to penance, for his
offences. Both works were placed at once on the Index Expurgatorius;
and Philip the Third gave orders to collect and destroy as many copies
as possible of the volume in which they were contained. As Lope de Vega
said, “His country did not pardon the most learned Mariana when he
erred.”
His treatment on this occasion was undoubtedly the more severe, because
among his papers was found a treatise “On the Errors in the Government
of the Society of Jesuits,” which was not printed till after its
author’s death, and then with no friendly views to the order.[207] But
the firm spirit of Mariana was not broken by his persecutions. He
went forward with his literary labors to the last; and when he died,
in 1623, it was of the infirmities which his extreme age had naturally
brought with it. He was eighty-seven years old.
[207] “Joh. Mariana, e Soc. Jesu, Tractatus VII., nunc primum
in Lucem editi,” Colon. Agrip., 1609, fol.; my copy of which is
mutilated according to the minute directions given in the Index
Expurgatorius, 1667, p. 719. It should be noted that the treatise
“De Ponderibus et Mensuris,” which contains the obnoxious
discussions about the coin, had been previously published at
Toledo, in a neat quarto volume, in 1599, a copy of which I have,
with all needful authority and privileges. (Santander, Catalogue,
1792, 8vo, Tom. IV. pp. 152, 153, article _Proceso del Padre
Mariana_, MS. Lope de Vega, Obras Sueltas, Tom. I. p. 295.) The
“Discursus de Erroribus qui in Formâ Gubernationis Societatis
Jesu occurrunt,” written in Mariana’s beautiful flowing style,
was first printed at Bordeaux, 1625, 8vo, and then again on
the suppression of the order by Charles III.; but in the Index
Expurgatorius, (1667, p. 735,) where it is strictly prohibited,
it is craftily treated as if it were still in manuscript, and as
if its author were not certainly known. In the Index of 1790, he
is still censured with great severity. A considerable number of
his unpublished manuscripts is said to have been long preserved
in the Jesuits’ Library at Toledo.
The main occupation of the last thirty or forty years of his life was
his great History. In the foreign countries where he had long lived,
the earlier annals of Spain were so little known to the learned men
with whom he had been associated, that, as a Spaniard, he had felt
mortified by an ignorance which seemed disrespectful to his country. He
determined, therefore, to do something that should show the world by
what manly steps Spain had come into the larger interests of Europe,
and to prove by her history that she deserved the consideration she
had, from the time of Charles the Fifth, everywhere enjoyed. He began
his work, therefore, in Latin, that all Christendom might be able to
read it, and in 1592 published, in that language, twenty out of thirty
of the books, of which it consists.
But, even before he had printed the other ten books, which appeared
in 1609, he was fortunately induced, like Cardinal Bembo, to become
his own translator, and to give his work to his countrymen in the pure
Castilian of Toledo. In doing this, he enjoyed a great advantage.
He might use a freedom in his version that could be claimed by no
one else; for he had not only a right to change the phraseology and
arrangement, but, whenever he saw fit, he might modify the opinions
of a book which was as much his own in the one language as in the
other. His “Historia de España,” therefore, the first part of which
appeared in 1601, has all the air and merit of an original work; and
in the successive editions published under his own direction, and
especially in the fourth, which appeared the very year of his death, it
was gradually enlarged, enriched, and in every way improved, until it
became, what it has remained ever since, the proudest monument erected
to the history of his country.[208]
[208] The most carefully printed and beautiful edition of
Mariana’s History is the fourteenth, published at Madrid, by
Ibarra, (two vols. fol. 1780,) under the direction of the
Superintendents of the Royal Library;--a book whose mechanical
execution would do honor to any press in Europe. It is remarkable
how much Mariana amended his History in the successive editions
during his lifetime; the additions between 1608 and 1623 being
equal, as stated by the editors of that of 1780, to a moderate
volume.
It begins with the supposed peopling of Spain by Tubal, the son of
Japhet, and comes down to the death of Ferdinand the Catholic and the
accession of Charles the Fifth; to all which Mariana himself afterwards
added a compressed abstract of the course of events to 1621, when
Philip the Fourth ascended the throne. It was a bold undertaking,
and in some respects is marked with the peculiar spirit of its age.
In weighing the value of authorities, for instance, he has been less
careful than became the high office he had assumed. He follows Ocampo,
and especially Garibay,--credulous compilers of old fables, who were
his own contemporaries,--confessing freely that he thought it safest
and best to take the received traditions of the country, unless obvious
reasons called upon him to reject them. His manner, too, is, in a few
particulars, open to remark. In the beautiful dedication of the Spanish
version of his History to Philip the Third, he admits that antiquated
words occasionally adhere to his style, from his familiar study of the
old writers; and Saavedra, who was pleased to find fault with him,
says, that, as other people dye their beards to make themselves look
young, Mariana dyed his to make himself look old.[209]
[209] Mariana, Hist., Lib. I. c. 13. Saavedra, República
Literaria, Madrid, 1759, 4to, p. 44. Mariana admits the want of
critical exactness in some parts of his history, when, replying
to a letter of Lupercio de Argensola, who had noticed his mistake
in calling Prudentius a Spaniard, he says: “I never undertook
to make a history of Spain, in which I should verify every
particular fact; for if I had, I should never have finished it;
but I undertook to arrange in a becoming style, and in the Latin
language, what others had collected as materials for the fabric
I desired to raise. To look up authorities for every thing would
have left Spain, for another series of centuries, without a Latin
History that could show itself in the world.” J. A. Pellicer,
Ensayo de una Biblioteca de Traductores, p. 59.
But there is another side to all this. His willing belief in the old
chronicles, tempered, as it necessarily is, by his great learning,
gives an air of true-heartedness and good faith to his accounts, and
a picturesqueness to his details, which are singularly attractive;
while, at the same time, his occasional antiquated words and phrases,
so well suited to such views of his subject, add to the idiomatic
richness, in which, among Spanish prose compositions, the style of
Mariana is all but unrivalled. His narratives--the most important part
of an historical work of this class--are peculiarly flowing, free, and
impressive. The accounts of the wars of Hannibal, in the second book;
those of the irruption of the Northern nations, with which the fifth
opens; the conspiracy of John de Procida, in the fourteenth; the last
scenes in the troubled life of Peter the Cruel, in the seventeenth;
and most of the descriptions of the leading events in the reign of
Ferdinand and Isabella, towards the conclusion of the work, give
abundant proof of this peculiar historical talent. They seem instinct
with life and movement.
His formal speeches, in which he made Livy his model, are, generally,
less fortunate. Most of them want individuality and appropriateness.
But the one which in the fifth book he has given to Ruy Lope Davalos,
when that nobleman offers the crown of Castile to the Infante Don
Ferdinand, is remarkable for the courageous spirit in which it
discusses the foundations of all political government, and leaves the
rights of kings to rest on the assent of their subjects;--a boldness,
it should be added, which is apparent in many other parts of his
history, as it was in much of his life.
The characters he has drawn of the prominent personages that, from
time to time, come to the front of the stage, are almost always short,
sketched with a few touches, and struck off with the hand of a master.
Such are those of Alvaro de Luna, Alfonso the Wise, and the unhappy
Prince of Viana, in which so few words could hardly be made to express
more.
As a general remark, a certain nobleness of air and carriage, not,
perhaps, without something of the old Castilian sturdiness, but
never without its dignity, is the characteristic that most prevails
throughout the whole work; and this, with its admirably idiomatic
style,--so full, yet so unencumbered, so pure and yet so rich,--renders
it, if not the most trustworthy of annals, at least the most remarkable
union of picturesque chronicling with sober history, that the world has
ever seen.[210]
[210] The first attack on Mariana was made by a Spaniard in
Italy, who called himself Pedro Mantuano, and who printed his
“Advertencias” at Milan in 1611. Thomas Tamayo de Vargas wrote
a vituperative reply to it (Toledo, 1616, 4to). But Mariana
wisely refused to read either. The Marquis of Mondejar, a
most respectable authority, renewed the discussion, and his
“Advertencias” were published, (Valencia, 1746, folio,) with a
preface by Mayans y Siscar, somewhat mitigating their force.
Still, neither these, which are the principal criticisms that
have appeared on Mariana, nor any others, have, in the estimation
of Spaniards, seriously interfered with his claims to be regarded
as the great historian of his country.
Sandoval, who was one of the salaried chroniclers of the monarchy, and
who, in that capacity, prepared the continuation of Morales, already
noticed, seems to have been willing to constitute himself the successor
of Mariana, and prosecute the general history of Spain where that
eloquent Jesuit was likely to leave it, rather than from the point
where he had himself officially taken it up. At least he began there,
and wrote an elaborate life of Charles the Fifth. But it is too long.
It fills as many pages as the entire work of Mariana, and, though
written with simplicity, is not attractive in its style. His prejudices
are strong and obvious. Not only the monk,--for he was a Benedictine,
and enjoyed successively two very rich bishoprics,--but the courtier
of Philip the Third, is constantly apparent. He lays the whole crime
of the assault and capture of Rome upon the Constable de Bourbon; and,
besides tracing the Austrian family distinctly to Adam, he connects
its honors genealogically with those of Hercules and Dardanus. Still,
the History of Sandoval is a documentary work of authority much relied
on by Robertson, and one that, on the whole, by its ample and minute
details, gives a more satisfactory account of the reign of Charles the
Fifth than any other single history extant. It was first published in
1604-6, and its author died at the end of 1620 or the beginning of
1621.[211]
[211] Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. II. p. 255. La Mothe le Vayer,
in a discourse addressed to Cardinal Mazarin, (Œuvres, Paris,
1662, folio, Tom. I. pp. 225, etc.,) assails Sandoval furiously,
and sometimes successfully, for his credulity, superstition,
flattery, etc., not forgetting his style. It was a part of the
warfare of France against Spain.
After this, no important and connected work on the history of Spain,
that falls within the domain of elegant literature, appeared for a long
period.[212] Portions of Spanish history, and portions of the history
of Spanish discovery and conquest in the East and the West, were indeed
published from time to time, but the official chroniclers of the crowns
of Castile and Aragon no longer felt themselves bound to go on with
the great works of their predecessors, and the decaying spirit of the
monarchy made no earnest demands on others to tread in their steps.
Some, however, of these historians of the outposts of an empire which
now extended round the globe, and some of the accounts of isolated
events in its annals at home, should be noticed.
[212] During this period, embracing a large part of the
seventeenth century, two remarkable controversies took place
in Spain, which, by introducing a more critical caution into
historical composition, were not without their effect on Mariana,
and may have tended to diminish the number of his successors, by
subjecting history, in all its forms, to more rigorous rules. The
discussions referred to arose in consequence of two extraordinary
forgeries, which, for a time, created a great sensation
throughout the country, and deluded not a few intelligent men and
honest scholars.
The first related to certain metallic plates, sometimes called
“The Leaden Books,” which, having been prepared and buried for
the purpose several years before, were disinterred near Granada
between 1588 and 1595, and, when deciphered, seemed to offer
materials for defending the favorite doctrine of the Spanish
Church on the Immaculate Conception, and for establishing the
great corner-stone of Spanish ecclesiastical history, the coming
to Spain of the Apostle James, the patron saint of the country.
This gross forgery was received for authentic history by Philip
II., Philip III., and Philip IV., each of whom, in a council of
state, consisting of the principal personages of the kingdom,
solemnly adjudged it to be true; so that, at one period of the
discussion, some persons believed the “Leaden Books” would
be admitted into the Canon of the Scriptures. The question,
however, was in time settled at Rome, and they were decided, by
the highest tribunal of the Church, to be false and forged; a
decision in which Spain soon acquiesced.
The other fraud was connected with this one of the “Leaden
Books,” whose authority it was alleged to confirm; but it was
much broader and bolder in its claims and character. It consisted
of a series of fragments of chronicles, circulated earlier in
manuscript, but first printed in 1610, and then represented to
have come, in 1594, from the monastery of Fulda, near Worms, to
Father Higuera, of Toledo, a Jesuit, and a personal acquaintance
of Mariana. They purported, on their face, to have been written
by Flavius Lucius Dexter, Marcus Maximus, Heleca, and other
primitive Christians, and contained important and wholly new
statements touching the early civil and ecclesiastical history
of Spain. They were, no doubt, an imitation of the forgeries of
John of Viterbo, given to the world about a century before as
the works of Berosus and Manetho; but the Spanish forgeries were
prepared with more learning and a nicer ingenuity. Flattering
fictions were fitted to recognized facts, as if both rested
on the same authority; new saints were given to churches that
were not well provided in this department of their hagiology;
a dignified origin was traced for noble families, that had
before been unable to boast of their founders; and a multitude
of Christian conquests and achievements were hinted at or
recorded, that gratified the pride of the whole nation, the more
because they had never till then been heard of. Few doubted
what it was so agreeable to all to believe. Sandoval, Tamayo
de Vargas, Lorenzo Ramirez de Prado, and, for a time, Nicolas
Antonio,--all learned men,--were persuaded that these summaries
of chronicles, or _chronicones_, as they were called, were
authentic; and if Arias Montano, the editor of the Polyglot,
Mariana, the historian, and Antonio Agustin, the cautious and
critical friend of Zurita, held an opposite faith, they did not
think it worth while openly to avow it. The current of opinion,
in fact, ran strongly in favor of the forgeries; and they were
generally regarded as true history till about 1650 or a little
later, and therefore till long after the death of their real
author, Father Higuera, which happened in 1624. The discussion
about them, however, which, it is evident, was going quietly on
during much of this time, was useful. Doubts were multiplied;
the disbelief in their genuineness, which had been expressed to
Higuera himself, as early as 1595, by the modest and learned
Juan Bautista Perez, Bishop of Segorbe, gradually gained ground;
writers of history grew cautious; and at last, in 1652, Nicolas
Antonio began his “Historias _Fabulosas_”; a huge folio, which he
left unfinished at his death, and which was not printed till long
afterwards, but which, with its cumbrous, though clear-sighted
learning, left no doubt as to the nature and extent of the fraud
of Father Higuera, and made his case a teaching to all future
Spanish historians, that does not seem to have been lost on them.
See the Chronicle of Dexter at the end of Antonio’s Bibliotheca
Vetus; the Historias Fabulosas of Antonio, with the Life of its
author prefixed by Mayans y Siscar, (Madrid, 1742, folio,) to
show the grossness of the whole imposture; and the “Chrónica
Universal” of Alonso Maldonado, (Madrid, 1624, folio,) to show
how implicitly it was then believed and followed by learned men.
The man of learning who was the most clear-sighted about “The
Leaden Books” and the _chronicones_, and who behaved with the
most courage in relation to them from the first, was, I suppose,
the Bishop of Segorbe, who is noticed in Villanueva, “Viage
Literario á las Iglesias de España,” (Madrid, 1804, 8vo, Tom.
III. p. 166,) together with the document (pp. 259-278) in which
he exposes the whole fraud, but which was never before published.
Of this class, the first in importance and the most comprehensive
in character is “The General History of the Indies,” by Antonio de
Herrera. It embraces the period from the first discovery of America
to the year 1554; and as Herrera was a practised writer, and, from
his official position as historiographer to the Indies, had access to
every source of information known in his time, his work, which was
printed in 1601, is of great value. But he was the author of other
historical works, for which his qualifications and resources were less
satisfactory and his prejudices more abundant;--such as a “History of
the World during the Reign of Philip the Second,” a History of the
affairs of England and Scotland, during the unhappy times of Mary
Stuart; a History of the League in France; and a History of the affair
of Antonio Perez and the troubles that followed it;--all written under
the influence of contemporary passions, and all published between 1589
and 1612, before any of these passions had been much tranquillized.
It is sufficient to say of them, that, in the case of Antonio Perez,
Herrera suppresses nearly every one of the important facts that tend
to the justification of that remarkable man; and that, by way of a
glorious termination to his Universal History, he gives Philip the
Second, in his death-struggles, miraculous assistance from heaven,
to enable him to end his long and holy life by an act of devotion.
Herrera’s chief reputation, therefore, as an historian, must rest upon
his great work on the Discovery and Conquest of America, in which,
indeed, his style, nowhere rich or powerful, seems better and more
effective than it is in his other attempts at historical composition.
He died in 1625, above seventy-six years old, much valued by Philip the
Fourth, as he had been by that monarch’s father and grandfather.[213]
[213] “Historia General de los Hechos de los Castellanos en las
Islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Océano,” Madrid, 1601-15, 4 vols.
fol.--“Historia General del Mundo del Tiempo del Señor Rey Don
Felipe II., desde 1559, hasta su Muerte,” Madrid, 1601-12,
3 vols. fol.--Five books on the History of Portugal and the
Conquest of the Azores were printed, Madrid, 1591, 4to; the
History of the League, Madrid, 1598, 4to; and the History of
the Troubles in Aragon, in 1612, 4to; the last being only a
tract of 140 pages. A work on the History of Italy, from 1281
to 1559, printed at Madrid in 1624, folio, I have never seen.
The of Historia General del Mundo is on the Index of 1667, for
expurgation.
But the East, as well as the West, was now opened to Spanish adventure.
The conquest of Portugal had brought the Oriental dependencies of that
kingdom under the authority of the Spanish crown; and as the Count
de Lemos, the great patron of letters in his time, and President of
the Council of the Indies, chanced to have his attention particularly
drawn in that direction, he commanded the younger of the Argensolas to
write an account of the Moluccas. The poet obeyed, and published his
work in 1609, dedicating it to Philip the Third. It is one of the most
pleasing of the minor Spanish histories; full of the traditions found
among the natives by the Portuguese, when they first landed, and of the
wild adventures that followed when they had taken possession of the
islands. Parts of it are, indeed, inconsistent with the nature of the
civilization they found there, such as formal and eloquent harangues
attributed to the natives; while other parts, like some of its
love-stories, are romantic enough to be suspected of invention, even
if they are true. But, in general, the work is written in an agreeable
poetical style, such as is not unbefitting an account of the mysterious
isles
“Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants brought
Their spicy drugs,”--
striving, for a long time, to hide from the competition of other
nations the history and resources of the oppressed race whom they
compelled to minister to their love of gain.[214]
[214] “Conquista de las Islas Molucas,” Madrid, 1609, folio.
Pellicer, Bib. de Trad., Tom. I. p. 87. The love-story of
Durante, an ensign, in the third book of the “Conquista,” is
good and probable; and the account of the Patagonian giants, in
the same book, turns out to be almost true, like some of the
long-discredited stories of Marco Polo and Mendez Pinto.
Quite as uncertain in authority and less elegant in style are the
histories of Garcilasso de la Vega,--a gentle and trusting spirit
rather than a wise one; proud of being a captain in the service of
the king of Spain, and allied, as a son of one of the unscrupulous
conquerors of Peru, to the great house of Infantado; but always
betraying the weaker nature of his mother, who was of the blood royal
of the Incas, and never entirely forgetting the glories of his Indian
race, or the cruel injuries they had suffered at the hands of Spain.
He was born at “Cuzco, in Peru, the seat of Atabalipa,” in 1540, and
was educated there, amidst the tumults of the conquest; but, when he
was twenty years old, he was sent to Spain, where, under difficult and
trying circumstances, he maintained an honorable reputation during a
life protracted to the age of seventy-six.
The military part of his personal history, which consisted of service
under Don John of Austria against the Moriscos of Granada, was not of
much consequence, though he seems to have valued himself upon it not a
little. The part he gave to letters was more interesting and important.
This portion he began, in 1590, with a translation of the “Dialogues
on Love,” by Abarbanel, a Platonizing Jew, whose family had been
expelled from Spain in the persecution under Ferdinand and Isabella,
and who in Italy had published this singular work under the name of
“The Hebrew Lion.” The attempt, so far as Garcilasso was concerned,
was not a fortunate one. The Dialogues, which enjoyed considerable
popularity at the time, had been already printed in Spanish,--a fact
evidently unknown to him; and though, as it appears from a subsequent
statement by himself, he had obtained for his translation the favorable
regard of Philip the Second, still there was an odor both of Judaism
and heathen free-thinking about it, that rendered it obnoxious to the
ecclesiastical authorities of the state. Garcilasso’s first work,
therefore, was speedily placed on the Index Expurgatorius, and was
rarely heard of afterwards.
His next attempt was on a subject in which he had a nearer interest. It
was a “History of Florida,” or rather of the first discovery of that
country, and was published in 1605,--a work which, when, twenty years
before, he spoke of writing it, he appropriately called “The Expedition
of Fernando de Soto”; since the adventures of that extraordinary man,
and his strange fate, not only form its most brilliant and attractive
portion, but constitute nearly the whole of its substance. In this
Garcilasso was more successful than he was in his version from the
Italian; and his “History of Florida,” as it is still called, has been
often reprinted since.
But, in his old age, his heart turned more and more to the thoughts
and feelings of his youth, and, gathering together the few materials
he could collect from among his kinsmen on the Pacific, as well as
from the stores of his own memory and the records already accumulated
in Spain, he published, in 1609, the first part of his “Commentaries
on Peru”; the second of which, though licensed for the press in
1613, did not appear till 1617, the year after its author’s death.
It is a garrulous, gossiping book, written in a diffuse style, and
abounding in matters personal to himself. In its very division, he
acknowledges frankly the conflicting claims that he felt were upon
him. The earlier half, he says, relates to the eighteen Incas known
to Peruvian history, and contains an account of the traditions of the
country, its institutions, manners, and general character; all which he
offers as a tribute due to his descent from the Children of the Sun.
The remainder--which, with many episodes and much irrelevant, but not
always unpleasant, discussion, contains the history of the Spanish
conquest, and of the quarrels of the Spaniards with each other growing
out of it--he offers, in like manner, to the glories of the great
Spanish family with which he was connected, and which numbered on its
rolls some of the brightest names in the Castilian annals. In both
parts, his Commentaries are a striking and interesting book, showing
much of the spirit of the old chronicles, and infected with even more
than the common measure of chronicling credulity; since, with a natural
willingness to believe whatever fables were honorable to the land of
his birth, he mingles a constant anxiety to show that he is, above
every thing else, a Catholic Christian, whose faith was much too ample
to reject the most extravagant legends of his Church, and too pure to
tolerate the idolatry of that royal ancestry which he yet cannot help
regarding with reverence and admiration.[215]
[215] “La Traduccion del Indio de los Tres Diálogos de Amor,
de Leon Hebreo, echado de Italiano en Espagnol, por Garcilasso
Inga de la Vega,” Madrid, 1590, 4to. A Spanish translation of
it, which I have seen, had appeared at Venice in 1568, and I
believe there was another at Zaragoza in 1584, of which it seems
strange that Garcilasso knew nothing. (Barbosa, Bib. Lus., Tom.
II. p. 920; Castro, Bib., Tom. I. p. 371; and Antonio, Bib.
Nov., Tom. I. p. 232.) The letter of Garcilasso to Philip II.,
with additional remarks by its author, containing interesting
materials for his own life, is prefixed to the first edition
of the second part of the Commentaries on Peru. “La Florida”
was printed at Lisbon in 1606, 4to; the first part of the Peru
at Lisbon, 1609, folio; and the second part at Córdova, 1617,
folio. Both of the historical works are to be found in several
other editions, and both have been translated into most of the
languages of modern Europe.
Two striking examples may be given of the opposite kinds of that
credulity in Garcilasso which so much impairs the value of his
Commentaries. He believed that the subjection of Peru by the
Spaniards was predicted by the last of the Incas that reigned
before their arrival, (Parte I. Lib. IX. c. 15, and Parte II.
Lib. VIII. c. 18,) and he believed that all the Spaniards in the
army of Peru, who were notorious blasphemers, perished by wounds
in the _mouth_ (Parte II., Lib. IV. c. 21).
The publication, in 1610, of “The War of Granada,” by Mendoza, had--as
might have been anticipated from its attractive subject and style--an
effect on Spanish historical composition; producing, in the course of
the century, several imitations more worthy of notice than any thing
in their class that appeared after the great work of Mariana.
The first of them is by Moncada, a nobleman of the highest rank in the
South of Spain, and connected with several of the principal families,
both in Catalonia and Valencia. His father was, successively, viceroy
of Sardinia and Aragon; he himself was governor of the Low Countries
and commander-in-chief of the armies there; and both of them filled, in
their respective times, the most important of the Spanish embassies.
But the younger Moncada had tastes widely different from the cares
that beset his life. In 1623 he published his “Expedition of the
Catalans against the Turks and Greeks”; and when he died, in 1635,
just after putting to rout two hostile armies, he left several other
works, of less value, one or two of which have since been printed.
The History of the Catalan Expedition, by which alone he has been
known in later times, is on the romantic adventures and achievements
of an extraordinary band of mercenaries, who, under Roger de
Flor,--successively a freebooter, a great admiral, and a Cæsar of the
Eastern Empire,--drove back the Turks, as they approached the Bosphorus
in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and then, after being for
some time no less formidable to their allies than they had been to the
infidel, settled down into a sort of uneasy tranquillity at Athens,
where their historian leaves them.
It is an account, therefore, of a most wild passage in the affairs
rather of the Middle Ages than of the Spanish peninsula,--one that may
be trusted, notwithstanding its air of romance, since its foundations
are laid in the great work of Zurita, and one by no means wanting in
picturesque effect, since its details are often taken from Ramon
Muntaner, the old Catalan, who had himself shared the perils of
this very expedition, and described them in his own Chronicle with
his accustomed spirit and vigor. Parts of it are very striking in
themselves, and strikingly told; especially the rise of Roger de Flor
till he had reached the highest place a subject could hold in the Greek
empire, and then his assassination in the presence and by the command
of the same Emperor who had raised him so high,--his blood soiling the
imperial table, to which, with treacherous hospitality, he had been
invited. The whole is written in a bold and free, rather than in a
careful style; but the coloring is well suited to the dark ground-work
of the picture, and, though less energetic in its tone than Mendoza’s
“War of Granada,” of which, from the first sentence, we see it is an
imitation, it is often more easy, flowing, and natural.[216]
[216] “Expedicion de los Catalanes contra Griegos y Turcos,
por Francisco de Moncada, Conde de Osona,” Barcelona, 1623,
and Madrid, 1772 and 1805, 12mo. There is an edition, also, of
Barcelona, 1842, 8vo, edited by Don Jaime Tió, with a poem at
the end by Calisto Fernandez Campo-redondo, which is on the same
subject with the History, and in 1841 gained a prize at Barcelona
for its success at a festival, that reminds us of the days of the
Floral Games and of the Marquis of Villena.
Another military history written by a nobleman connected with the
service of his country, both in its armies and its diplomacy, is to
be found in an account of eleven campaigns in Flanders by Coloma,
Marquis of Espinar, published in 1625. A translation which he made of
the “Annals” of Tacitus has been regarded as the best in the language;
but, in his own work, he shows no tendency to imitate the ancients. On
the contrary, it is, as it were, fresh from the fields of the author’s
glory, and full of the honorable feelings of a soldier, sketching the
adventures of the army when in camp, when in immediate action, and
when in winter-quarters; and adding to his main narrative occasional
glimpses of the negotiations then going on in the Low Countries
respecting Spanish affairs, and of the intrigues of the courtiers at
Madrid round the death-bed of Philip the Second. The style of Coloma is
unequal; but much of what he describes he had seen, and the rest had
passed within the compass of what he deemed sure information; so that
he speaks, not only with authority, but with the natural vivacity which
comes from being so near the events he records, that their color is
imparted to his language.[217]
[217] “Las Guerras de los Estados Baxos, desde Maio, 1588, hasta
el Año 1599,” Amberes, 1625 and 1635, 4to, and Barcelona, 1627.
Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 338. He was ambassador to James I. of England,
viceroy of Majorca, etc., and died in 1637, sixty-four years old.
To the same class with the last belongs the spirited history of a
portion of the Catalan rebellion in the time of Philip the Fourth. It
was written by Melo, a Portuguese gentleman, who remained attached to
the service of Spain till 1640-41, when he joined the standard of the
Braganzas, and fought for the independence of his own country. His
life, which extended from 1611 to 1667, was full of adventure. He was
in the dreadful tempest of 1627, when the whole navy, as it were, of
Portugal suffered shipwreck; and it fell to his lot to bury above two
thousand bodies of those who had perished in the waves, from which
he himself had hardly escaped. He was in the wars of Flanders and of
Catalonia. Twelve years he was in prison in his own country, under an
accusation of murder that was at last proved to be without foundation;
and six years he was an exile in Brazil. But under all circumstances,
and through all his trials, he sought consolation in letters. His
published works, in prose and verse, in Spanish and in Portuguese, some
of which have been already noticed, exceed a hundred volumes, and the
unpublished would materially increase even this vast amount. What is
more remarkable, he is, in both languages, admitted to the honors of a
classic writer.
His “History of the War of Catalonia,” which embraces only the short
period during which he served in it, was written while he was in
prison, and was first published in 1645. Owing to political causes,
he did not give his name to it; and when one of his friends in a
letter expressed surprise at this circumstance, he answered, with a
characteristic turn of phrase, “The book loses nothing for want of my
name, and I shall lose nothing for want of the book.” It was, however,
successful. The accounts of the first outbreak in Barcelona, on the
feast of Corpus Christi, when the city was thronged with the bold
peasantry of the interior; the subsequent strife of the exasperated
factions; the debates in the Junta of Catalonia, and those in the
king’s council, under the leading of the Count Duke Olivares; and the
closing scene of the whole,--the ineffectual storming of the grand
fortress of Mon Juich by the royal forces, and the disastrous retreat
that followed,--are all given with a freshness and power that could
come only from one who had shared in the feelings he describes, and
had witnessed the very movements he sets with such a lifelike spirit
before us. His style, too, is suited to his varying subjects; sometimes
animated and forcible, sometimes quaint and idiomatic, and sometimes in
its dark hints and abrupt turns reminding us of Tacitus. But the work
is short,--not longer than that of Mendoza, which was its model,--and
it covers only the space of about six months at the end of 1640 and the
beginning of 1641.
Whether Melo intended to carry his narrative farther is uncertain.
From his striking conclusion, where he says, “The events that
followed--greater in themselves than those I have related--are perhaps
reserved for a greater historian,” we might infer that he was desirous
to describe only what he had witnessed. But, on the other side, in his
Preface we have the following characteristic address to his readers,
alluding to the concealment of his name as the author of the work he
offers them. “If in any thing I have served you, I ask only that you
would not endeavour to know more of me than it pleases my humor to
tell you. I present to you my faithful opinion of things, just as it
has been my lot to form it;--I do not present myself to you; for a
knowledge of my person is not necessary to enable you to judge either
kindly or harshly of what I have written. If I do not please you, read
me no further;--if I do, I make no claims on your gratitude. I speak
without fear and without vanity. The theatre before us is vast; the
tragedy long. We shall meet again. You will know me by my voice; I
shall know you by your judgment.” But, whatever may have been Melo’s
original intentions, he survived the publication of this interesting
work above twenty years, and yet added nothing to its pages.[218]
[218] “Historia de los Movimientos, Separacion, y Guerra de
Cataluña, por Francisco Manuel de Melo,” Lisboa, 1645, and
several other editions; one by Sanchez, 1808, 12mo, and one
at Paris, 1830. His poetry in Spanish has been mentioned,
_ante_, II. 529. For his life and multitudinous works, see
the “Bibliotheca Lusitana” of Diogo Barbosa Machado, (Lisboa,
1741-59, 4 tom. folio,) which I have often referred to, as to the
great authority on all matters of fact in Portuguese literary
history, though of little or no value for the literary opinions
it expresses. It is one of the amplest and most important works
of literary biography and bibliography ever published; but,
unhappily, it is also one of the rarest, a large part of the
impression of the first three volumes having been destroyed in
the fire that followed the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755.
Its author, who gives some account of himself in his own work,
was born in 1682, and died, I believe, in 1770.
From this period, prose composition, which had been long infected with
the bad taste of the age, suffered a still further and more marked
decline. Saavedra Faxardo, indeed, who lived forty years out of Spain,
employed in diplomatic missions, was educated in a better school, and
formed himself on more worthy models, than he could have found among
his contemporaries at home; but his “History of the Goths in Spain” is
an imperfect work, published in 1646, at Munster, when he was there
as a member of the congress that made the peace of Westphalia, and
was left unfinished at his death, which occurred at Madrid two years
later.[219] The only historian of eminence that remains to be noticed
in this period is, therefore, Solís.
[219] The work of Saavedra was continued, very poorly, by Alonso
Nuñez de Castro, through the reign of Henry II., the labors of
both making seven volumes in the edition of Madrid, 1789-90,
12mo, of which the first two only, coming down to 716, are by
Saavedra.
Of him we have already spoken as a lyrical poet and a dramatist, who in
1667 had retired from the world, and dedicated himself to the separate
service of religion. He was, however, the official historiographer of
the Indies, and thought himself bound to do something in fulfilment
of the duties of an office to which, perhaps, a nominal income was
attached. He chose for his subject “The Conquest of Mexico,” and,
beginning with the condition of Spain when it was undertaken, and the
appointment of Cortés to command the invading force, he brings his
history down to the fall of the city and the capture of Guatimozin.
The period it embraces is, indeed, short,--less than three years; but
they are years so crowded with brilliant adventures and atrocious
crimes, that hardly any portion of the history of the world is of equal
interest. The subject, too, from this circumstance, is more easily
managed; and Solís, who looked upon it with the eye of an artist, as
well as of an historian, has succeeded in giving his work, to an
extraordinary degree, the air of an historical epic;--so exactly are
all its parts and episodes modelled into an harmonious whole, whose
catastrophe is the fall of the great Mexican empire.
The style of Solís is somewhat peculiar. That he had the Roman
historians, and especially Livy, before him, as he wrote, is apparent
both in the general air of his work and in the structure of its
individual sentences. Yet there are few writers of Spanish prose who
are more absolutely Castilian in their idiom than he is. His language,
if not simple, is rich and beautiful; suited to the romantic subject he
had chosen for his history, and deeply imbued with its poetical spirit.
In boldness of manner he falls below Mendoza, and in dignity is not
equal to Mariana; but for copious and sustained eloquence, he may be
placed by the side of either of them. That his work is as interesting
as either of theirs is proved by the unimpaired popularity it has
enjoyed from its first appearance down to our own times.
The Conquest of Mexico was written in the old age of its author, and
is darkened by the feelings that shut him out from the interests and
cares of the world. He refused to see the fierce and marvellous contest
which he recorded, except from the steps of the altar where he had been
consecrated. The Spaniards, therefore, are in his eyes only Christians;
the Mexicans, only heathen. The battle he witnesses and describes is
wholly between the powers of light and the legions of darkness; and
the unhappy Indians,--whom the Spaniards had no more right to invade,
in order to root out religious abominations, of which they had never
heard till after their landing, than Henry the Eighth or Elizabeth had
to invade Spain, in order to root out the abominations of the Spanish
Inquisition,--the unhappy Indians receive none of the historian’s
sympathy in the extremity of suffering they underwent during their
vain, but heroic, struggle for all that could make existence valuable
in their eyes.
The work of Solís, beautifully written and flattering to the national
vanity, was at once successful. But success was then a word whose
meaning was different from that which it bears now, or had borne in
Spain in the time of Lope de Vega. The publication, which took place
in 1684, by the assistance of a friend who defrayed the charges, found
its author poor and left him so. On this point there are passages in
his correspondence which it is painful to read;--one, for instance,
where he says, “I have many creditors who would stop me in the street,
if they saw I had new shoes on”; and another, where he asks a friend
for a warm garment to protect him from the winter’s cold. Still he was
gratified at the applause with which his work was received, though, at
the end of a year, only two hundred copies had been sold. Two years
afterwards he died, at the age of seventy-six, “leaving,” in the
technical phrase and the technical habit of the time, “his soul to be
the only heir of his body,” or, in other words, giving the remnants of
his poverty to purchase expiatory masses.[220] Diego de Tovar, the same
ecclesiastic who had been confessor to Quevedo and Nicolas Antonio,
stood by the bedside of the dying man, and consoled the last moments of
Solís, as he had consoled theirs.[221]
[220] Mad. d’Aulnoy (Voyage, ed. 1693, Tom. II. pp. 17, 18)
explains this custom, and shows to what an absurd and ridiculous
length it was carried in the time of Solís.
[221] There are many editions of the “Conquista de México,” the
first being that of Madrid, 1654, folio, and the best in two
vols. 4to, Madrid, 1783. The author of the life prefixed to his
poems says: “Solís left materials for a continuation of the
History of Mexico, but they are not now known to exist.” A few of
his letters, with a sketch of his life, by Mayans y Siscar, were
published, as I have already noticed, in 1733. They appear again,
carefully revised, in the “Cartas Morales,” etc., 1773. See,
_ante_, II. 420, 549, III. 136.
Solís was the last of the good writers in the elder school of Spanish
history;--a school which, even during its best days, numbered but few
names, and which, now that the whole literature of the country was
decaying, shared the general fate. Nor could it be otherwise. The
spirit of political tyranny in the government, and of religious tyranny
in the Inquisition,--now closer than ever united,--were more hostile to
bold and faithful inquiry in the department of history than in almost
any other; so that the generous national independence and honesty
announced in the old chronicles were stopped midway in their career,
before half of their power had been put forth.
Still, as we have seen, several of the historians that were produced
even under the overshadowing influence of the Austrian family were
not unworthy of the national character. Mariana shows much manly
firmness, Solís much fervor, Zurita much conscientious diligence, while
Mendoza, Moncada, Coloma, and Melo, who confined themselves to subjects
embracing shorter periods and less wide interests, have given us some
of the most striking sketches to be found in the historical literature
of any country. All of them are rich and dignified, abounding rather in
feeling than philosophy, and written in a tone and style that mark, not
so much, perhaps, the peculiar genius of their respective authors, as
that of the country that gave them birth; so that, though they may not
be entirely classical, they are entirely Spanish; and what they want in
finish and grace, they make up in picturesqueness and originality.[222]
[222] From the times of Charles V. and Philip II., when, in
Aragon and Castile, chroniclers were multiplied as a part of the
pageantry of the court, the rest of the kingdoms that entered
into the united Spanish monarchy began to desire to have their
own separate histories, as we can see in Valencia, where those
of Beuter, Escolano, and Diago were written. Besides this,
a great number of the individual cities obtained their own
separate annals from the hand of at least one author,--sometimes
works of authority, like that on Segovia by Colmenares, and
that on Seville by Avila y Zuñiga. But though more of such
local histories were written in Spain between the middle of the
sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth centuries, than were
written during the same period, I believe, in any other country
in Europe, none of them, so far as I know, has such peculiar
merit as to be noticeable in the literary history of the country.
Still, the spirit that produced them in such great numbers,
and especially the spirit which, during the reign of Philip
II., made, with so much care and cost, the vast collections of
documents yet to be found in the Castle of Simancas and the
convent of the Escurial, should not be overlooked.
When the chapter on the Chronicles of the fifteenth century
(First Period, Chap. IX.) was printed, I had not seen the
Chronicle by the Prince of Viana, “Crónica de los Reyes de
Navarra,”--of which there is only one edition, that of Pamplona,
1843, 4to, by Don José Yanguas y Miranda. It was written in 1454
by the Prince Don Carlos, to whom I have already alluded, (Vol.
I. p. 332, note,) who died, forty years old, in 1461, and whose
translation of Aristotle’s Ethics was printed at Saragossa in
1509. (Mendez, Typographia, 1796, p. 193.) The Chronicle was
carefully prepared for publication from four manuscripts, and it
embraces the history of Navarre from the earliest times to the
accession of Charles III. in 1390, noticing a few events in the
beginning of the next century. Besides the life of the author,
it makes about 200 pages, written in a modest, simple style,
but not so good as that of some of the contemporary Castilian
chronicles. A few of the old traditions concerning the little
mountain kingdom, whose early annals it records, are, however,
well preserved; some of them being told as they are found in the
General Chronicle of Spain, and some with additions or changes.
The portions where I have observed most traces of connection
between the two are in the Chronicle of the Prince of Viana, Book
I. chapters 9-14, as compared with the latter portion of the
General Chronicle, Part III. Sometimes the Prince deviates from
all received accounts, as when he calls Cava the _wife_ of Count
Julian, instead of calling her his _daughter_; but, on the whole,
his Chronicle agrees with the common traditions and histories of
the period to which it relates.