The people did not look very healthy as to build or color, and there was
a sound of coughing everywhere. To be sure, it was now the season of
the first colds, which would no doubt wear off with the coming of next
spring; and there was at any rate not nearly so much begging as at
Toledo, because there could not be anywhere. I am sorry I can contribute
no statistics as to the moral or intellectual condition of Cordova;
perhaps they will not be expected or desired of me; I can only say that
the general intelligence is such that no one will own he does not know
anything you ask him even when he does not; but this is a national
rather than a local trait, which causes the stranger to go in many wrong
directions all over the peninsula. I should not say that there was any
noticeable decay of character from the north to the south such as the
attributive pride of the old Castilian in the Sheridan Knowlesian drama
would teach; the Cordovese looked no more shiftless than the haughtiest
citizens of Burgos.
They had decidedly prettier _patios_ and more of them, and they had many
public carriages against none whatever in that ancient capital. Rubber
tires I did not expect in Cordova and certainly did not get in a city
where a single course over the pavements of 850 would have worn them to
tatters: but there seems a good deal of public spirit if one may judge
from the fact that it is the municipality which keeps Abderrahman’s
mosque in repair. There are public gardens, far pleasanter than those of
Valladolid, which we visited in an interval of the afternoon, and there
is a very personable bull-ring to which we drove in the vain hope of
seeing the people come out in a typical multitude. But there had been no
feast of bulls; and we had to make what we could out of the walking
and driving in the Paseo del Gran Capitan toward evening. In its long,
discouraging course there were some good houses, but not many, and the
promenaders of any social quality were almost as few. Some ladies in
private carriages were driving out, and a great many more in public
ones as well dressed as the others, but with no pretense of state in
the horses or drivers. The women of the people all wore flowers in their
hair, a dahlia or a marigold, whether their hair was black or gray. No
ladies were walking in the Paseo, except one pretty mother, with her
nice-looking children about her, who totaled the sum of her class; but
men of every class rather swarmed. High or low, they all wore the kind
of hat which abounds everywhere in Andalusia and is called a Cordovese:
flat, stiff, squat in crown and wide in brim, and of every shade of
gray, brown, and black.
I ought to have had my associations with the great Captain Gonsalvo in
the promenade which the city has named after him, but I am not sure that
I had, though his life was one of the Spanish books which I won my
way through in the middle years of my pathless teens. A comprehensive
ignorance of the countries and histories which formed the setting of his
most dramatic career was not the best preparation for knowledge of
the man, but it was the best I had, and now I can only look back at my
struggle with him and wonder that I came off alive. It is the hard fate
of the self-taught that their learning must cost them twice as much
labor as it would if they were taught by others; the very books they
study are grudging friends if not insidious foes. Long afterward when I
came to Italy, and began to make the past part of my present, I began to
untangle a little the web that the French and the Aragonese wove in
the conquest and reconquest of the wretched Sicilies; but how was I
to imagine in the Connecticut Western Reserve the scene of Gonsalvo’s
victories in Calabria? Even loath Ferdinand the Catholic said they
brought greater glory to his crown than his own conquest of Granada; I
dare say I took some unintelligent pride in his being Viceroy of Naples,
and I may have been indignant at his recall and then his retirement from
court by the jealous king. But my present knowledge of these facts, and
of his helping put down the Moorish insurrection in 1500, as well as his
exploits as commander of a Spanish armada against the Turks is a
recent debt I owe to the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ and not to my boyish
researches. Of like actuality is my debt to Mr. Calvert’s _Southern
Spain,_ where he quotes the accounting which the Great Captain gave
on the greedy king’s demand for a statement of his expenses in the
Sicilies.
“Two hundred thousand seven hundred and thirty-six ducats and 9 reals
paid to the clergy and the poor who prayed for the victory of the army
of Spain.
“One hundred millions in pikes, bullets, and intrenching tools; 10,000
ducats in scented gloves, to preserve the troops from the odor of the
enemies’ dead left on the battle-field; 100,000 ducats, spent in the
repair of the bells completely worn out by every-day announcing fresh
victories gained over our enemies; 50,000 ducats in ‘aguardiente’
for the troops on the eve of battle. A million and a half for the
safeguarding prisoners and wounded.
“One million for Masses of Thanksgiving; 700,494 ducats for secret
service, etc.
“And one hundred millions for the patience with which I have listened to
the king, who demands an account from the man who has presented him with
a Kingdom.”
It seems that Gonsalvo was one of the greatest humorists, as well as
captains of his age, and the king may very well have liked his fun no
better than his fame. Now that he has been dead nearly four hundred
years, Ferdinand would, if he were living, no doubt join Cordova in
honoring Gonzalo Hernandez de Aguila y de Cordova. After all he was not
born in Cordova (as I had supposed till an hour ago), but in the little
city of Montilla, five stations away on the railroad to the Malaga, and
now more noted for its surpassing sherry than for the greatest soldier
of his time. To have given its name to Amontillado is glory enough for
Montilla, and it must be owned that Gonzalo Hernandez de Aguila y de
Montilla would not sound so well as the title we know the hero by, when
we know him at all. There may be some who will say that Cordova merits
remembrance less because of him than because of Columbus, who first
came to the Catholic kings there to offer them not a mere kingdom, but
a whole hemisphere. Cordova was then the Spanish headquarters for the
operations against Granada, and one reads of the fact with a luminous
sense which one cannot have till one has seen Cordova.