It is always a question how much or little we had better know about
the history of a strange country when seeing it. If the great mass of
travelers voted according to their ignorance, the majority in favor of
knowing next to nothing would be overwhelming, and I do not say they
would be altogether unwise. History itself is often of two minds about
the facts, or the truth from them, and when you have stored away
its diverse conclusions, and you begin to apply them to the actual
conditions, you are constantly embarrassed by the misfits. What did it
avail me to believe that when the Goths overran the north of Spain the
Vandals overran the south, and when they swept on into Africa and melted
away in the hot sun there as a distinctive race, they left nothing but
the name Vandalusia, a letter less, behind them? If the Vandals
were what they are reported to have been, the name does not at all
characterize the liveliest province of Spain. Besides, the very next
history told me that they took even their name with them, and forbade me
the simple and apt etymology which I had pinned my indolent faith to.
I
Before I left Seville I convinced a principal bookseller, much against
his opinions, that there must be some such brief local history of the
city as I was fond of finding in Italian towns, and I took it from
his own reluctant shelf. It was a very intelligent little guide, this
_Seville in the Hand,_ as it calls itself, but I got it too late for
use in exploring the city, and now I can turn to it only for those
directions which will keep the reader from losing his way in the devious
past. The author rejects the fable which the chroniclers delight in,
and holds with historians who accept the Phoenicians as the sufficiently
remote founders of Seville. This does not put out of commission those
Biblical “ships of Tarshish” which Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in
his graphic sketch of Spanish history, has sailing to and from the
neighboring coasts. Very likely they came up the Guadalquivir, and lay
in the stream where a few thousand years later I saw those cheerful
tramp-steamers lying. At any rate, the Phoenicians greatly flourished
there, and gave their colony the name of Hispalis, which it remained
content with till the Romans came and called the town Julia Romula,
and Julius Caesar fenced it with the strong walls which the Moorish
conquerors, after the Goths, reinforced and have left plain to be seen
at this day. The most casual of wayfaring men must have read as he ran
that the Moorish power fell before the sword of San Fernando as the
Gothic fell before their own, and the Roman before the Gothic. But it
is more difficult to realize that earlier than the Gothic, somewhere in
between the Vandals and the Romans, had been the Carthaginians, whose
great general Hamilcar fancied turning all Spain into a Carthaginian
province. They were a branch of the Phoenicians as even the older,
unadvertised edition of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ will tell, and the
Phoenicians were a sort of Hebrews. Whether they remained to flourish
with the other Jews under the Moors, my _Sevilla en la Mano_ does not
say; and I am not sure whether they survived to share the universal
exile into which Islam and Israel were finally driven. What is certain
is, that the old Phoenician name of Hispalis outlived the Roman name of
Julia Romula and reappeared in the Arabic as Ishbiliya (I know it from
my Baedeker) and is now permanently established as Seville.
Under the Moors the city was subordinate to Cordova, though I can hardly
bear to think so in my far greater love of Seville. But it was the seat
of schools of science, art, and agriculture, and after the Christians
had got it back, Alfonso the Learned founded other schools there for the
study of Latin and Arabic. But her greatest prosperity and glory came
to Seville with the discovery of America. Not Columbus only, but all his
most famous contemporaries, sailed from the ports of her coasts; she was
the capital of the commerce with the new world, ruling and regulating it
by the oldest mercantile tribunal in the world, and becoming the richest
city of Spain. Then riches flowered in the letters and arts, especially
the arts, and Herrera, Pacheco, Velasquez, Murillo, and Zurburan
were born and flourished in Seville. In modern times she has taken a
prominent part in political events. She led in the patriotic war to
drive out the armies of Napoleon, and she seems to have been on both
sides in the struggle for liberal and absolutist principles, the
establishment of the brief republic of 1868, and the restoration of the
present monarchy.
Through all the many changes from better to Worse, from richer to
poorer, Seville continued faithful to the ideal of religious unity which
the wise Isabel and the shrewd Ferdinand divined was the only means of
consolidating the intensely provincial kingdoms of Spain into one nation
of Spaniards. Andalusia not being Gothic had never been Aryan, and
it was one of her kings who carried his orthodoxy to Castile and
established it inexpugnably at Toledo after he succeeded his heretical
father there. When four or five hundred years later it became a
political necessity of the Catholic Kings to expel their Jewish and
Moorish subjects and convert their wealth to pious and patriotic uses,
Andalusia was one of the most zealous provinces in the cause. When
presently the inquisitions of the Holy Office began, some five hundred
heretics were burned alive at Seville before the year was out; many
others, who were dead and buried, paid the penalty of their heresy
in effigy; in all more than two thousand suffered in the region round
about. Before he was in Valladolid, Torquemada was in Seville, and there
he drew up the rules that governed the procedure of the Inquisition
throughout Spain. A magnificent _quemadero,_ or crematory, second only
to that of Madrid, was built: a square stone platform where almost every
day the smoke of human sacrifice ascended. This crematory for the living
was in the meadow of San Sebastian, now a part of the city park system
which we left on the right that first evening when we drove to the
Delicias. I do not know why I should now regret not having visited the
place of this dreadful altar and offered my unavailing pity there to
the memory of those scores of thousands of hapless martyrs who suffered
there to no end, not even to the end of confirming Spain in the faith
one and indivisible, for there are now, after so many generations of
torment, two Protestant churches in Seville. For one thing I did not
know where the place of the _quemadero_ was; and I do not yet know where
those Protestant churches are.