THE MOSLEMS IN SPAIN
It is curious to note the different modes of government which
prevailed in the different States of Italy in the fifteenth century.
There was, nearly halfway down the long peninsula, this Papal State
or State of the Church, firmly established by 1450. In the extreme
south was the kingdom, that is to say a State governed by a monarchy,
of Naples, with which the island of Sicily was at one time included,
while at another time the kingdom was separated from it. In the
extreme north there was Milan, of which the Duke was the head.
Another of the five great States by which all Italy at that time was
held was Florence, under a republican government, and there was the
powerful naval State of Venice, also in name a republic, though its
mode of government differed from the mode of Florence. In Italy more
than in any other country, although conditions everywhere were
constantly changing, we find what we may call experiments in ways of
government being attempted. I do not think that there is any form of
government, or even of anarchy--which is absence of all
government--under which mankind ever has tried to live that was not
put upon its trial in Italy during these years. Yet, through all the
shifting scene, so unsettled that even the Pope himself had to fly
from the Holy City, the power of the Church still increased and
increased. And one of the means of its {172} increase we have to
recognise in the Crusades. Although the later Crusades lost much of
the high spiritual motives which had inspired the first Crusades,
even the worst of them was waged with the underlying idea in the
minds of the warriors that they were fighting in the sacred cause of
religion.
The earlier Crusades had been fired with the project, which for a
while had been achieved, of rescuing the Holy Places of Palestine
from the infidel. The first Crusaders of all had been invited
thither by the Emperor at Constantinople. The fourth Crusaders had
attacked and taken Constantinople itself and had put one of their
leaders, Baldwin, the Norman, on the imperial throne. But there were
other so-called Crusades that never went eastward at all. Only a few
years later than the date, 1204, of the expedition which captured the
imperial capital of the East, that so-called Crusade against the
Albigenses swept over the beautiful country of the troubadours. The
people of this part of France had been disposed, for many years, to
adopt a view of the nature of God which had been brought from the
east of Europe and was opposed to the doctrine of the Church of Rome.
Moreover, these heretics, as the Church deemed them, set their faces
firmly against some of the evil practices of the clergy.
It is not only in the south of France, but it is in whatever part of
Christendom we look at this time, that we find these evil practices.
Doubtless there were very many good and zealous priests and monks,
but the records leave no doubt that there were very many who were
idle, and worse than idle. From the Pope himself came parchments on
which were written pardons for sins committed, and these pardons
could be bought, for money, from the clergy. Also there were other
parchments on which were written "indulgences," as they were
called--that is to say leave to {173} commit sins, up to a certain
date, without penalty. These too were sold, for the benefit of the
clergy and the Church.
It was against such bad doings as these that the Albigensian heretics
protested, and probably it was this protesting, quite as much as
their heretical belief, which led the Church to incite an active war
against them. They were under the protection of the lords of the
castles in which, as we have seen, the troubadours were welcomed and
entertained, for these lords themselves appear to have been inclined
to their doctrine. One of these lords was excommunicated by the
Pope's legate who had been sent to try to suppress the heresy. In
the uproar which this caused the legate was killed, and the result of
his murder was that the Pope incited the lords of the north of France
to take up arms against the south and sweep the Albigensian heretics
off the face of the earth.
[Illustration: STATUE OF KNIGHT IN CHAIN ARMOUR.]
It was a sweeping which was not perfectly accomplished at the first
passage of the broom. The heresy continued to linger on in secret
places until the Church, by the use of that most cruel institution
called the Inquisition, finally destroyed it. But it was an
immediate result of the Crusade that the independence of the lords of
the south of France was lost. Their demesnes were gathered in under
the sovereignty of {174} the King of France, and all that graceful
and picturesque and highly cultivated life in which the troubadours
had taken so very large a part came to an end. Their music was
silenced: their poems were composed no more.
You may read in your history books that the "era of the Crusades"
comes to an end in 1270. You will also find the Crusades divided up
into first, second, third, and so on. But, as we have seen, there
was a continual going to and from Palestine. There was, too, one
European country in which we may say that a perpetual Crusade, or war
for the Cross against the Crescent, went on without ceasing for close
on 800 years. That country is Spain, from its first invasion by the
Moslems, which was early in the eighth century, until their final
expulsion at the end of the fifteenth.
[Sidenote: The Moorish "conquest"]
The Mahommedans, you may remember, even pressed on over the Pyrenees,
those mountains dividing France from Spain, after they had helped in
breaking up the kingdom of the Visigoths in Spain itself; but they
were defeated and driven, back as soon as they came up against a
strong opposition. They were able to overrun Spain just because
there was no strong opposition there. But these Moslems themselves
did not form any durable government in Spain. They had none of the
ability for governing and organising that the Romans had shown. They
had no sooner swept over the Spanish peninsula, as they did, than a
Christian kingdom independent of them was proclaimed in that region
of Spain which you may still see marked on the map as Asturias. But
it extended much beyond the bounds of the present province so-called,
reaching from the Pyrenees away to the western extremity of the
peninsula.
The story of Spain all this while was cut off and separated from the
whole great story and did not enter {175} intimately into its making,
rather as that peninsula itself is cut off from the rest by the
Pyrenees. It is a story, however, which we cannot afford to neglect
because there came a time, a little later, that is to say in the
sixteenth century, when Spain was very masterful all over the world
and played the leading role in the story. But during all these eight
centuries of her crusade with the Moslem she took but little part.
We have observed that the Pyrenees, beside being a formidable
obstacle and boundary in themselves, were the home of a very
independent and unconquered people called the Basques. They are
there still, still a people rather apart. Probably they are
survivors of one or the other of those early Celtic invasions which
swept over Europe and of which there survive also remnants in
Brittany and in Wales. They still speak a language unrelated to that
of the French on the one side or the Spanish on the other.
And what was the story of this Spanish peninsula, thus separated from
the rest? We have in the first place to try to understand what the
"Moorish conquest," as it is called, meant. It is said that the
Moors "swept over" the country. It is a good phrase to express what
happened if we take it in the right sense. They "swept over" the
country, but that does not at all imply that they swept all the
former inhabitants, who probably were chiefly of the Visigothic race,
before them. Spain is a country of many mountain ranges. To bear
that fact in mind will help us to understand what happened.
These mountain ranges provided refuges into which the inhabitants
could resort in time of invasion, and whence they could come forth
again and take up their lives much as before when the sweeping of the
invasion had passed over. Spain was far too large a country for the
Moslems who came in to settle and to govern, and it was too much cut
up by the mountains. The {176} invaders had not any very settled
government or organisation among themselves. They were a mixed
company of soldiers, Arabs, Syrians, and Africans. They had no
settled purpose in their invasion. They seem not to have known what
to do with it when they had achieved it.
They achieved it easily, because there was no real resistance, as we
have seen, until they crossed into France. But though the Christians
of Spain could not combine to resist them, the Christians had some
settled interests in common, to hold them together. They had the
Church, and they had the combination of their own Gothic laws with
the Roman law which they found in Spain when they came there. They
had, therefore, some influences to bring them together into that
unity which gives strength, and as their numbers grew they became
powerful.
We should bear in mind that they had not long been converted to
Christianity when the Moslems came upon them. The religion of Christ
had no very strong hold over them. The consequence was that, when
they found that their conquerors would let them live far more
comfortably in the country if they adopted the religion of Mahomet,
there were many who were quite willing to do so. The conquerors do
not seem to have used their power cruelly, and it is likely that the
people in general were in quite as good a position and quite as happy
under the new rule as under the old. The Jews, particularly, of
which nation there were very many in Spain, were almost certainly
happier, for the Christian government had persecuted and oppressed
them and the Moslems were far more tolerant. The Moslems, indeed,
whether in Spain or Asia, or even in Africa, were probably quite as
advanced in general culture as the Christians. Europe was indebted
to them for a better knowledge of medicine than the Western world had
acquired before. The game of chess was given us {177} by them, and
when we say "check-mate" we are really saying "Sheik mat"=the sheik,
or king, is dead. By the tenth century the Christian power from the
north was beginning to press heavily upon the Mahommedans in the
south, and this pressure southward led to the foundation of the
Kingdom of Castile, in the centre of Spain. Another kingdom which
had been independent, that of Leon, was absorbed by Castile. This
name of Castile is said to be derived from _castillas_, or castles,
because the Christians, as they spread southwards, made forts or
castles, as they went, which they held as outposts against the
Mahommedans. All through the next, the eleventh century, in the
course of which William the Conqueror came to Britain, the war
between Christian and Moslem went on, a continual Crusade, in Spain.
We may notice that twice, when the Moslems were hard pressed, they
summoned others of their own creed in Africa to come to their
assistance. On each occasion of the coming of these new forces the
Christians were forced back.
[Sidenote: Waning power of the Moors]
But the energy and the organisation which made the strength of these
counter-attacks seem to have spent themselves quickly. Always there
was more unity among the Christians and a more steady purpose. They
came on again to the attack and found the Moslem force less able to
resist.
A very important gain for the Christians was the taking of Cordova by
Ferdinand III., King of Castile and Leon, in 1236. Cordova was the
chief city of Mahommedan Spain. There was a Caliph, or head of the
Moslem Church, at Cordova, independent of the Caliph at Mecca. It is
rather like the position of the Pope at Rome and the Patriarch at
Constantinople in the Christian Church at that time.
The effect of this capture of Cordova was decisive. Not many years
later another important and strong city of the Mahommedans, Seville,
was also taken from {179} them, and it is a remarkable fact in this
capture of Seville that the Christians had the assistance of ships
belonging to the Moorish King of Granada. The King of Granada had
done homage to Ferdinand for his kingdom. Even before the middle of
the previous century Alphonso VII. had been crowned as "Emperor in
Spain and King of the Men of the Two Religions."
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[Illustration: SEVILLE. The Giralda.]
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It is a singular title. There is not the slightest doubt that it
claimed a great deal more than the possessor of the title could
enforce, but still it shows the direction in which events even then
were moving. They had gone very far when a king of Castile could
have the only remaining Moslem potentate in the land as his vassal,
and could have the help of his Moslem ships in the assault on a
Moslem city.
But still Spain was far from a united kingdom. Portugal was
independent and has retained that independence ever since. There was
the small independent Kingdom of Navarre, up against the Pyrenees,
and in the south-east, with a long stretch of sea-coast on the
Mediterranean, was Aragon, also an independent kingdom.
Aragon entered more into the course of the great story than any other
of the kingdoms in Spain before 1500; because her kings had some
claim to the throne of Naples and Sicily; but it was no very large
part in the story that even Aragon played.
Our England came near to being drawn into the story of Spain herself,
or rather, of Castile--I say rather of Castile, because the name of
Spain, to include the whole country which we now so call, was hardly
in use then. This happened because John of Gaunt, who was son of our
King Edward III., had married, as his second wife, a daughter of
Pedro the Cruel, as he was styled, the King of Castile. Pedro, for
his cruelties, had been hunted off the throne by his own brother,
{180} and our Edward the Black Prince, eldest brother of John of
Gaunt, went down from France into Castile and helped to put Pedro
back.
John of Gaunt's claim was settled by the marriage of the son of John
I., who had succeeded Pedro on the throne of Castile, to John of
Gaunt's daughter. We may think that England was fortunate in thus
escaping all the complications in which this claim might have
involved her.
And now--to conclude the story of Spain, up to the year 1500 or so,
and the story of that long drawn-out crusade of eight centuries of
which she was the scene--it is remarkable that although the Moslems'
power had been restricted to the Kingdom of Granada as early as the
middle of the thirteenth century, it was not until nearly the close
of the fifteenth that their dominion in Spain was brought to an end
by the capture of Granada itself. And by this time the Christian
power in the country had been strengthened by the union of the
Kingdom of Aragon with that of Castile. This was brought about by
the marriage of Ferdinand, King of Aragon with Isabella, Queen of
Castile. Thus, with Granada now included in Christian Spain, we have
the boundaries of the country as they are to-day, except for a small
part of the little Kingdom of Navarre which lay south of the
Pyrenees. That final portion also will be annexed before many years
of the new century have gone.
And now Columbus is just coming back with the news of America. Spain
is about to enter on her conquests in the New World. A new day is
dawning.
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