^%c< THE NATIONS' HISTORIES SPAIN o •d i THE NATIONS' HISTORIES SPAIN BY DAVID HANNAY LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK, LIMITED NEW YORK : FREDERICK A. STOKES CO. 1917 LJ I o HISTORY I Printed in Great Britain oy Turnbull &= Spears, Edinburgh CONTENTS PAGE Introductory ......... i CHAPTER I THE EARLY CENTURIES ........ 6 CHAPTER II THE MOSLEM CONQUEST (7II-IO31) ..... 2/ CHAPTER III THE RECONQUEST ........ . 5I CHAPTER IV MEDIEVAL SPAIN ......... 75 CHAPTER V THE CATHOLIC SOVEREIGNS ....... I09 CHAPTER VI THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN . . . . . . . 14! CHAPTER VII SPAIN IN AMERICA . . . . . . . I7I CHAPTER VIII PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK . , . . . . . I99 CHAPTER IX THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS ...... 23I vi SPAIN CHAPTER X SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ^53 CHAPTER XI SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION . . • • • ^77 Conclusion ..■••••• ^^ Bibliography 3^5 Appendix ..••••••• ^ ^ Index ...••••■•• ^^^ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Toledo ...... Roman Aqueduct, Tarragona Roman Wall of Tarragona Interior of Great Mosque, Cordoba The Tower of Giralda, Seville Alcazar, Hall of Ambassadors, Seville The Puerta del Sol, Toledo Prayer Shrine, Cordova . The Walls of Avila .... Cathedral and Town of Salamanca . Cloisters of San Juan de los Reyes, Toledo Stucco Decoration of El Transito, Synagogue, Toledo Choir Stalls, Toledo Cathedral Heraldic Frieze, Church of S. Juan, Toledo The Castle of Medina del Campo Detail of Altar, Tarragona Cathedral Toledo Cathedral .... The Belfry, Tarragona Cathedral . Nave of Saragossa Cathedral . Town and Monastery of the Escorial The Royal Palace, Madrid The Lantern of Burgos Cathedral . PAGE Frontispiece Vlll SPAIN The Cathedral, Burgos Granada ..... Capital in Tarragona Cathedral San Esteban, Segovia Tower of Barcelona Cathedral Tarragona — the Belfry of the Cathedral Map of Spain ...... PAGE 224 232 256 256 272 272 x-xi Bartholomew, tdinT SPAIN INTRODUCTORY The people, or peoples, of Spain have been limited, or helped, by the nature of their land. Before making our survey of their fortunes we must realize, at least in its main features, what is the character of the Iberian Peninsula. The political distinction between Spain and Portugal can be ignored for the present. It dates from the twelfth century of the Christian era, and therefore began at a comparatively recent period. Nor has it been constantly maintained. A Spanish historian, the Count of Toreno, has said that Spain is '' the last land in Europe." Physically it is the last because it is a promontory stretching out to the south-west, and foi that very reason it has been at all times likely to be the last affected by all great European movements, whether they were the migrations of peoples or the spread of ideas and faiths. It is not everywhere equally difficult of access, but where it is most easily reached it tends to be least European. On the north it is attached to the continent by an isthmus of 260 miles long. But that space is barred by a genuine natural frontier, a real wall of mountains, the Pyrenees. They can be crossed with ease at their eastern and western ex- tremities, and are not impassable in the centre. But between the two ends the gates lie far up, are blocked for months by snow, and open on to rugged hills to the south. It is a simpler A X 2 ■ SPAIN matter to cnv.cr oversea irom the east, while the Strait divid- ing the land from Africa on the south presents a lesser obstacle than some rivers — ^the Amazon, for instance, or the Indus. Nor is the road to the inner land equally open to influences which have actually made their entry on the north, the east, or the south. The Iberian Peninsula consists of a tableland and of slopes to the sea. The tableland begins at mountains on the north and north-west. It stretches to the sea on the south and south-east, and is scored from east to west by another mountain wall. It is battlemented on all sides by other moun- tains, and broken, rugged ground. The six chief rivers— the Ebro, which alone falls into the Mediterranean, the Minho, the Duero, the Tagus, the Guadiana, and the Guadalquivir, which fall into the ocean — rise in high hills, have worn their beds deep, and are therefore too broken by rapids to be of value for navigation. They are so difficult to tap tjiat they are largely useless for irrigation. On the north, where the mountains leave the continent of Europe, and stretch to the west along the sea-shore, there is but a narrow strip of coast. On the east the land is accessible along the Ebro valley to the feet of the central plateau. The coast strip is wider, and on the south is the Guadalquivir valley, the only part of the peninsula in which there is any considerable space of less than 400 feet above the sea level. Tablelands and mountains to- gether make up more than half the whole. The tablelands lie at from 1600 to 3000 feet high. A space equal to the whole of Ireland rises more than 3300 feet. The average height of the whole land is 2300 feet, and is greater than that of the Balkan Peninsula. Here, then, is a land all barred and broken, fenced off even from its own sea-coast — a land of dif&cult communica- tions. Agriculture it may have in valleys and slopes to the sea. Pastures it will naturally have on tablelands and moun- INTRODUCTORY 3 tain sides. It has mines. Its sources of wealth may not be few, but in has httle means of transporting its produce. Though it has coasts on two seas, and is not lacking in good harbours, it will not be naturally a maritime country. Where the ground rises in the centre the climate is not tempered by sea breezes, and the rainfall is small. The summer is hot, and in winter, when the snow is lying on the mountains, the cold is bitter. When the snow melts the rivers become raging floods. The foresight, the labour, and the ingenuity of man must be taxed to tame such a land. And there is one deduction we are fully entitled to draw from these physical facts. It is that in the main, and in the end, the dominating power will go with the possession of the tableland. Whoever holds it can, in the well-known military phrase, operate on interior lines from the centre to the circumference. He will act from above to below, and that is no small advantage. Before an advantage of position can be used, there must be a state and people to avail themselves of it. That state and people were formed late in Spanish history — ^in the tenth century, and in the kingdom of Castile. There have been, and there are, other forces and other men in the Iberian Peninsula. But the dominating element has come from the high inner land and its mountains. During a period of perhaps two thousand years, beginning at a date we cannot fix, and ending while England was ruled by WiUiam of Normandy and his sons, the Iberian Peninsula was invaded and worked upon by a long succession of foreign influences — ^by Phoenicians from the Syrian coast and from Carthage in Africa, Greek colonists, Romans, Barbarians of the time of the great *' Wandering of the Peoples/' and then by Moslem intruders who came in successive swarms, between the eighth and the eleventh centuries since Christ. One among them dug so deep and built so strongly, that the work of all the others has been negligible in comparison. From 4 SPAIN Rome and mainly from the Empire, the Spaniards have re- ceived their language, their faith, their essential poHtical and social principles. From the others they have received some arts and some usages, a part of their vocabulary, and much of their pronunciation. But they could have dispensed with all this. Without what the Roman taught and left behind him, the Spaniards can neither speak, nor pray, nor think. Though the continuity of Spanish history is as unbroken in all that pertains to the inward and spiritual life of the people as is the history of any other land, it can be divided into periods which are more than merely convenient for the arrangement of the narrative. From times of which no memory remains, till the beginning of the eighth century of the Christian era, Spain was visited by the Phoenician ; exploited by the Carthaginian ; partially civilized and Christianized by the Roman ; and then roughly governed by Roman institutions as administered by the Visigoths (? 711 A.D.). From the beginning of the eighth century till the middle of the thirteenth it was first flooded by Moslem invaders, and then recovered from their hands (711 to 1248). From the niiddle of the thirteenth century till the end of the fifteenth the land was given up to conflicts and often to anarchy (1248 to 1479). By the end of the fifteenth century it attained to such a measure of political unity as allowed of a wonderful expan- sion of energy, which reached to the New World across the Atlantic, and lasted for rather more than a hundred years (1479 to 1598). For two .centuries more Spain decayed, till i^ reached exhaustion and fell wholly under French influence (1598 to 1808). In the year 1808 it was seized upon by the spirit of revolu- INTRODUCTORY 5 tion and dragged into a turmoil in which it was stripped and reshaped (1808 to 1874). That interval of agitation may be said to have come to an end when Alfonso XII. was called to the throne in 1874, and the country entered on the contemporary phase of its history. CHAPTER I THE EARLY CENTURIES It is the function of the ethnologist and the student of pre- historical remains to endeavour to find an answer to the question — Who were the first inhabitants of Spain ? The peninsula and the neighbouring Balearic islands are rich in examples of human handiwork, ornaments, instruments of industry, chase, and war, in flint, bronze and iron, megalithic monuments, and painted caves. Much has been discovered, and it is at least highly probable that more remains to be found. All are very similar to, or are indeed identical in char- acter with, other survivals of the art- and industries of remote ages in widelj/ -separated regions of the world. The paintings on the caves of Altamira in the province of Santander may be paralleled by the art of the Hottentots, The stone circle of Dilar near Granada is manifestly akin to our own Stonehenge. Instruments of chipped flint are to be found in Spain and all the world over. But does similarity of work prove identity of race, or only that when the material and the purpose are the same, the products cannot differ ? ^ The traveller whose curiosity goes beyond looking at the collections contained in museums can find what he seeks in ^ Those who wish to pursue the study of this subject, which many find fascinating, may be referred to the "Ages prehistoriques de I'Espagne et du Portugal" of Cartailhac; the " Essai sur I'Art et L' Industrie de I'Espagne Primitive" of M. Pierre Paris; the "L'Arqueologia de Espana," by Herr E. Hiibner, pubUshed in Spanish and at Barcelona in 1888, and the Catalogue of the Museo Arqueologico of Madrid. 6 THE EARLY CENTURIES 7 the cave of Altamira, above Santellana del Mar in Santander, and as far south as Gibraltar ; at La Lobrega near Torrecella de Cameros in the province of Logrofio ; at La Solana in Segovia ; at Serinya in Gerona (Catalonia) ; at La Cueva de Fuencaliente, in the province of Ciudad Real (La Mancha) ; at La Carchena, near Baena, in the province of Cordoba ; at the cave of La Menga, near Antequera, in the province of Malaga, to name only a few. Even when we leave behind us the ages anterior to all written history we by no means escape from doubt and ob- scurity: The first civilized men who observed Spain and recorded their discoveries were Greek navigators, who can have seen only the coast. Even if their wordb were not lost, and we were not reduced to rely on the compilations and ab- breviations of later writers, it is highly doubtful whether they would have anything to tell us. Even the compilers and abbreviators are known only in fragments. The field is open to speculators, and they have occupied it boldly. Large theories have been founded on mere similarities of names. We cannot afford to Hnger in that attractive, but withal somewhat inane, region. We are, however, on sohd ground when we note that geographical fact and physical similarity point to the occupation of Spain by races akin to the brown peoples, Libyans or Berbers, of Northern Africa. Nor is there any reason to doubt that a part of the great Celtic migration crossed the Pyrenees. The name Iberian, given to the non-Celtic inhabitants of Spain, is of Greek origin, was first used of the people of the Ebro valley, and was extended to the whole country by mere use and wont. We know what the Roman found there, and all the rest is guesswork or romance. What the Roman found which was native to Spain was a thin and widely-scattered population organized in tribes. They were warlike, and they showed an utter incapacity to 8 , SPAIN combine for any common purpose. From the constant mention of cities and of sieges it appears that the Spaniards of the first times hved as their descendants very generally do to this day, not scattered in separate steadings as the Teutonic peoples lived, but collected in towns or large villages. They cultivated the land about these townships, going, as they also do to this day, long distances to their work, and they had flocks and herds pastured by a rude race of nomadic shepherds whose status was servile. All would resist the in- vader who intruded on their territory, be his origin what it might, but they would not combine against a common enemy, and they were ever ready to turn their arms against one another. Such a population, placed in a country full of mountain ranges and strong positions, could make the task of a conqueror long and troublesome. Whatever elements have gone to its formation, the Spanish people has always shown the same character in war. Caesar and Froissart pass almost identical judgments on their conduct in the field. They were fierce in coming on, eager to follow up a success, and swift to retreat and scatter when their onset was broken, but always ready to unite and try again. They were ob- stinate in defence of their '' cities,'' and amazingly patient of suffering, whether by hunger and thirst or any other form of pain. The plausible supposition that the Basques of the north, of whom a remnant still speak an ancient language of unknown, or at least of extremely doubtful, affinities, in the mountains of Biscay, Guipuzcoa, and Alava, and a part of Navarre, represent the ancient population of all Spain, is untenable. A number of Iberian inscriptions of great antiquity are still legible. They are written in an alphabet adapted from Greeks and Phoenicians, and therefore the words can be read. If the Iberians were Basques, the modern speech (the Vascuence) would supply a clue to their meaning, but it does not. We really do not know whether the Roman classi- THE EARLY CENTURIES 9 fi cation of the Spaniards into Iberians on the north and east, Celts in the west, and Celtiberians between the two, was made after correct observation and comparison. What we do know by the testimony of centuries is that by whatever name they were called, the inhabitants of Spain have displayed a most persistent character. The first Spaniard whose face we can see, the Lusitanian Viriatus, was manifestly even such a man as the Guerrillero chiefs of the Peninsular war were, and a long line of champions connect the two. We can see the same valour, a similar chivalrous magnanimity, an identical passionate local patriotism, an ever-present individualism, the love of self-assertion and display, an unteachable tendency to pass from action to sloth, and an incurable incapacity to shape and work institutions. With these qualities and these defects the Spaniard could sell his freedom dear, but he was doomed to be overcome by organized, consistent attack. But also, and because of the indomitable personality of his type, he has always recast and made his own all those foreign things which he has been forced to accept. The Phoenician who came first established trading coasts at Malaka (Malaga), at Gades (Agadir), the modern Cadiz, at Hispalis (Seville), and a few other spots. He worked mines, for, as Gibbon has said with his unfailing capacity for stating the fact with finality and precision, Spain was the Mexico and Peru of the ancient world. In the valley of the Betis (the Guadalquivir) he found an open country — ^rich soil, a less warlike people than elsewhere, and easy access to the mines of the Sierra Morena (the Marianus Mons of the Romans). His influence started what has been somewhat ambitiously called an Iberian civilization. He taught the Turdetanians to w^ork metals, strike coins, weave, and build. A sarcophagus, with lid carved into a portrait, which was found a few years ago at Cadiz, is the chief, if not the only, undeniable piece of Phoenician handiw^ork which has survived. He had to meet 10 SPAIN the competition of the Greek who colonized on the east coast at Rosas (Rhodon), Ampurias (Emporium), and at Denia. The real function of both on the side of politics and civilization was to prepare the way for the Roman. The Greek inscrip- tions which have been found in Spain belong to the time of the Roman Empire. When the Phoenician of the Syrian coast began to decline, his place in Spain was taken by his African colony, Carthage. The Carthaginian first maintained the Punic trading and mining stations in Spain, and then when the Roman had beaten him out of Sicily, he exploited the country as a com- pensation, and as the means of obtaining his revenge. He knew that he could draw bullion from the mines, and he knew equally well that he could recruit mercenary soldiers. He founded New Carthage, the Carthagena of to-day, and he made an army. The history of Carthage in Spain, which is properly the history of the house of Barca, is part of the war with Rome. For Spanish history, the real significance of the war is that the Roman remained a conqueror, as present master of part, and future master of all, to teach and to train. What he did is living now in the peninsula, and from Cali- fornia to the Tierra del Fuego, from Peru to Pernambuco in America. Obvious considerations of space prohibit the attempt to give a detailed account of the progressive conquest of Spain. The process began with the close of the Second Punic War, 206 B.C., and lasted till far into the principate of Augustus, that is to say, till the eve of the Christian era. It included a long list of marches and battles, of which, in the great majority of cases, nothing more is known than that they took place. While the struggle with Carthage lasted, the tribes sided sometimes with one, and sometimes with the other combatant. The war rolled to and fro. The Romans divided the seat of war into two military regions, the Hither (Citerior) THE EARLY CENTURIES ii and the Further (Ulterior). The first included the east coast and the valley of the Ebro. The second was the valley of the Betis (Guadalquivir). When Carthage had been vanquished, the native tribes found they had a new master, and they re- belled against him. The Romans still held only the east and south, but they soon found that they had to repel the raids of the tribes of the centre, and to guard against their renewal by conquest. The conditions which partly forced and partly tempted the East India Company to conquer Hindustan and the Deccan were operative in Spain. The Roman had really no choice. The military spheres became the Hither and Further Provinces. Under a long series of Proconsuls and Pretors, the elder Cato and Tiberius Gracchus being two of them, and in the first half of the second century B.C. the Romans worked up from the coasts of the east and south to the central tableland. If the conquest had been carried on consistently and in pursuit of a definite policy it would have been completed in lOO B.C. But the advance of Rome was delayed by the growing corrup- tions of the Republic, which had their inevitable effect in the relaxations of discipline in the legions, and the misconduct of governors. A province was the reward of political service in Rome, and was, in the decline of the Republic, commonly treated as booty by which the governor recouped himself for lavish bribery at home. The middle years of the century saw the nearest approach to a national resistance. It was provoked by the extortions and falsities of the Roman governors. The leader was the Lusitanian Viriatus, a man of the people, not a born chief. It has been supposed that he represented not only a national resistance to Rome, but also a popular movement against the tribal aristocracies. After many alternations of success and defeat he died, assassinated by his own countrymen— in pursuit, it may be, of some social or tribal feud. To the same period belongs the heroic struggle 12 SPAIN of Numantia, a city near the modern Soria in Old Castile. The unsuccessful siege of 151 B.C., and the final destruction by the younger Scipio in 134 or 132 B.C., are the noblest episodes in the resistance to Rome. But it is to be noted that the heroic " city '* was left to fight and to perish alone. After the death of Viriatus and the fall of Numantia, all Spain, except the west and north-west, was in the hands of the Romans. There was fighting on the borders with the unsubdued tribes. Revolts within the borders were provoked and suppressed. In 123 B.C. the Balearic Isles, which were homes of piracy, were annexed. But the hold of Rome was so strong that it stood two tests of the most severe order. Between 112 and 100 B.C. Spain was invaded by a part of the great Cimbric and Teuton horde which shook the Roman RepubHc to its foundations. The Spaniards found that there were worse invaders than the Roman. Under his leadership and by his side they fought successfully to repel the attack. Between 80 and 72 B.C. Sertorius made himself master in the north, and endeavoured to use the country as it had been used by Hannibal as a recruiting ground for a force to be led into Italy, this time in pursuit of a civil war. Sertorius died by the hands of his own countrymen. For two generations more Spain was part of the battle-ground of Roman factions, till Augustus gave it peace, and carried the Roman arms to the seas of the north and west. Mommsen has noted that Spain was the only region in which the Republic made a serious attempt to romanize its conquered subjects. The work was begun by Scipio Africanus himself, when he settled a body of veterans in Italica, near Hispahs (Seville), and planted a settlement of the children of Roman soldiers and Spanish mothers at Carteia (Bay of Algeciras). Italica, which was the home of Trajan and of the Antonines, was erected into a colony by the Emperor Hadrian. The rule of the RepubHc was harsh, apart from the brutalities THE EARLY CENTURIES 13 of particular governors. It appears to have aimed deliber- ately at breaking up the old tribal organizations. The Spaniards were not divided by cantons representing the terri- tories of the tribes, but into smaller districts (civitates). But the statesmen of the Republic had some excuse if they did divide in order that they might rule, and the divisions they made were accepted and maintained by the Spaniards. The '' pueblo," which in medieval times received charters from the King, or noble, or bishop, was the '' ci vitas *' of the Romans — a town with its dependent " comarca " or district, in which there might be other townships. All were not treated alike. Some which remained loyal, or made terms for them- selves, retained a considerable measure of self-government. Many of them — native towns and Roman colonies — ^retained the right of coining money down to the reign of Caligula. The military colony at Merida (Augusta Emerita) was one, and others were scattered over the peninsula from Evora (Ebura) in Lusitania to Osuna (Immunis Julia Gentiva Urbanorum) in Boetica. With few exceptions — of which Valencia (Colonia Valentia, founded by Decimus Junius Brutus) was the most notable — they were founded byjuhus Csesar and the emperors. The great settlement and organization of Spain was the work of Augustus. He made the division into three provinces. The Tarraconensis, began at the moath of the Duero. The border followed the course of the river to a point north- east of the present Salamanca, then ran south to MedelHn (Colonia Metellensis) , and thence to the south-east to the modern Bay of Almeria. The modern Andalusia corresponds to the ancient province of Boetica. The rest of the country belonged to Lusitania — that is to say, modern Portugal south of the Douro, or Duero, and part of Spanish Estremadura. The Tarraconensis and Lusitania were imperial provinces, governed by '' Legates.'* Boetica was Senatorial. The division was disproportionate, for the Tarraconensis included 14 SPAIN more than half the peninsula. Caracalla made a fourth province by dividing the north-west— Gallaecia — from the Tarraconensis. The division between Imperial and Senatorial provinces then disappeared. In the reorganization of the Empire by Diocletian a fifth province was formed — Cartha- gena and the Balearic Isles, also taken from the Tarraconensis. In the new order all Spain became a '' Diocese '* in the Prefecture of the Gauls. The unity of Roman rule was compatible with much diver- sity in the application. The '' cities '* of Spain were not all on the same footing. They were divided into colonies, municipahties, free, allied and tributary, with varying rights of self-government. The romanization of the people was not everywhere equally thorough. Whereas in the south not a single inscription has been found which might not equally have been set up in Italy, the centre and north-west contain many which show non-Roman worships and names — as a rule '* Iberian.*' The dedication to '* the mothers " at Cluniae (Carre(5n de los Condes in Old Castile) is nearly the only trace of Celtic worship, but the Iberian gods in " icus " and *' oecus " are commonly met with. The Roman Empire drew freely on Spain for soldiers. The conquest was largely completed with the help of natives. The pacification allowed the garrison to be reduced from seven to three, and then to one legion (the Vllth Gemina, which had its headquarters in and gave its name to Leon). The Vllth Gemina was a Spanish legion. Records of Spanish cohorts have been found in other parts of the Empire, and one Spanish Legion — the Nona Hispana — took part in the conquest of Britain. Local militias always existed. The municipal laws of Osuna, preserved on the well-known bronze plates now in the Museo Arqueologico in Madrid, provide that when it shall be necessary to raise a local force for the defence of the colony, the Duumvirs shall be authorized to appoint a THE EARLY CENTURIES 15 '' tribunus '' who shall have all the authority of a '* tribunus Populi Romani/' Spain repaid the Empire for its civilizing work, not only by contributing hardy and enduring infantry to the legions, and " wings " of light horse, but by the produce of its mines, the wool of its flocks, the corn of Boetica and of Orihuela in Murcia (still the finest grown), and the wine of Gades.^ From Spain came many of the great men of the silver age of Latin literature — the Senecas, Lucan, Quintillian, Martial, and lesser names. Italica was the original home of Trajan and the Antonines. In the decline of the Empire she sent forth the last sole emperor — the great Theodosius, and the first great Christian poet Prudentius, and of these two it can be said that they were thorough Spaniards. In the interval which separates them from the writers of the silver age and the good emperors, Rome had spread over Spain the last, but withal the most powerful, of her influences. Christianity had come to complete the formation of the Spanish character. When and how the tradition that the first evangelizer was the Apostle Saint James arose, are questions for future notice. The belief that Saint Paul did actually fulfil the promise he made in the Epistle to the Romans (chap. xxiv. 19) was ancient and general. In his case at least it cannot be shown that he did not preach '* Christ Crucified " to the western limit of the Roman world. But his mission, and the labours of the " Seven Apostolic Men " whom he and Saint Peter, according to the pious and ancient belief of the Spaniards, sent from Rome to Carthagena, belong to tradition only. ^ Whether the wine of Gades (Cadiz) was either sherry, or the pre- decessor of sherry, is a question. So is the origin of the name. The suppositions that Jerez, formerly spelt Xeres and pronounced Sheres, is Shiraz, and that the name was given by Persians among the Moslem conquerors, has been advanced and rejected. But it is not sure that Jerez was " Municipium Caesaris," and that sherry is really named after JuUus Caesar. i6 SPAIN It was natural and inevitable that Christianity should reach Spain from Rome. The intercourse between them was con- stant and rapid — four days' sail to Carthagena or Tarraco (Tarragona), and eleven to Gades. The eastern religions which spread in the western half of the Empire came easily to Spain. There are not a few traces of Mithraism in the country. The existence of Jewish colonies which, whether they existed before the Crucifixion or not, were numerous under the early emperors, promoted the spread of Christianity. The general obscurity of the history of Spain during the peaceful years of the Empire conceals the beginnings of Christianity. The first event which stands out in the history of the Spanish Church is the meeting of the Council of Iliberris (Elvira, on or near the site of Granada) at some much disputed date just before or after the persecution of Dio- cletian (303-311 A.D.). It was attended by nineteen bishops. The list of names shows that there were bishoprics spread over Spain as far to the north-west as Asturica (Astorga), and the sixty canons drawn up by them show that Spain was already Spain. Some of them display the char- acteristic national hatred of the Jew. But they prove also that municipal magistrates were to be found among the Christians. They are allowed to act as pagan '' flamens," provided that they do not actually offer blood sacrifices, or attend gladiatorial games — and do not claim to take the com- munion during their year in office. The canon which pro- hibits the placing of statues in the churches expressly allows the pamting of figures and symbols on the walls. It was probably directed against the use of pagan figures. One of the canons gives no favourable impression of the influence which Christianity had exercised on the humanity of the faithful. It provides that the Christian mistress who shall have flogged a female slave so severely that the woman dies within three days shall be excluded from the communion for seven years THE EARLY CENTURIES 17 if it appears that she meant to cause death, and for five if she had not that intention. If the death occurred after three days, no penalty was imposed. From another canon we learn that the penalty for slandering a bishop was exclusion from the communion even in the article of death. We see which was counted the more heinous offence. The canons are much concerned with sexual immorality. Taken as a whole they give the impression that the Spanish Church of the fourth century was quite as eager to enforce orthodoxy of behef, and to augment the power of the clergy, as to improve the morality of the faithful. The Council was certainly not, for this reason, the less truly prophetic of what the Spanish Church was to be. Perhaps, too, the canons help us to understand why the triumph of Christianity did so little to prepare the people to meet the great storms of the fifth century. The Roman rule had pacified Spain and had given material prosperity. It had given a conception of law, the Church organization which was in the coming centuries to hold the people together, and the Latin language. But it had emascu- lated its subjects. The municipal freedom of the first genera- tions had disappeared as the Emperor interfered to redress the complaints of the citizens, and so took over the whole administration. The general causes which depressed the middle class, extended slavery, and concentrated the land in the possession of a few landlords, frequently absentees, in all parts of the Empire, were at work in Spain. There also the people had been taught generation after generation to look on passively while the Empire w^as transferred from one adventurer to another by mutinous soldiers who were largely of barbarian origin. The Spaniards lost the power to act or even to wish to act for themselves. They lost in every kind of energy. If it is true, as writers of the time afiirm, that the ruins made by the invaders of the reign of Gallienus (253-268 A.D.) had not been made good a hundred and fifty years later, B i8 SPAIN it is manifest that the community must have been in a state of decHne even as to population. An energetic people would have removed every trace of mere destruction within twenty years* It was in 409 a.d. that the barbarians forced their way across the Pyrenees, and entered Spain, never to return. The first-comers were the Suevi, the Alans, and the Vandals. When we hear of the immense and irreparable damage they did, we naturally think of vast multitudes of invaders. Yet when the Vandals passed over to Africa in 420 a.d., under their King Geiseric, they were numbered and were found to amount to 80,000 men, women and children, of whom some were run- away slaves who had joined them, and only 15 ,000 were warriors. In the interval they had been recruited by the remains of the Alans, who had been shattered in battle with the Visigoths. There is no reason to suppose that the Suevi were more numer- ous than their associates. Thirty thousand is probably a large estimate of the total fighting force of the three. It was a number quite inadequate to the work of dominating a country of a quarter of a million square miles, if it had met with any serious resistance. The supposition that they " occupied " the land is absurd for physical reasons. When Napoleon was employing over 300,000 men to dominate Spain he could not occupy the whole of it, and his generals were often unable to concentrate a substantial force at im- portant points. But the Spain of 409 was a different country from the Spain of 1808-1814. The great landowners were mere rich men who were excluded from real power by the jealousy of the emperors, and who feared to act. It is a sig- nificant fact that the only members of this, the Senatorial class, who tried to play a manful part, were four brothers of the Theodosian family, who took up arms not to fight the bar- barians, but to resist the '' tyrant " Maximus, who had pro- claimed himself Emperor in Gaul, and claimed to govern Spain also. They were crushed by '' Roman " troops — i.e. THE EARLY CENTURIES 19 barbarian mercenaries in the service of the '' tyrant/' The free barbarians roamed about without meeting effective opposition from the depressed remnant of the middle class of landowners, and still less from the slaves who were far more disposed to join them, or to revolt and fight for their own land as '* Bagaudae/' i.e. rebellious slaves, who took to the hills, just as in future times the insurgent blacks of Spanish colonies were to become Cimarrones = Maroons. The in- vaders, disorganized, cut the communications, plundered, and levied blackmail. Considerable parts of the country escaped their outrages. It was in 411 a.d. that Spain was first visited by that barbarian people whose name was to be pecaliarly connected with Spanish history. The Visigoths, driven from Southern Gaul by the arms of the Roman general and future Emperor Constantius, and by hunger, crossed the eastern Pyrenees. The whole multitude is said to have amounted to 300,000 persons, of whom 50,000 were warriors. But these were not the Visigoths who were to found the Visigothic kingdom of Spain. Their leader, Ataulf, whose life had been passed fai from Spain, was soon murdered while watching private theatricals — or rather a pantomime — in a village near Barce- lona. His immediate successor was murdered in a few days, and then Walha was chosen king. WalHa made peace with the Empire — crushed the Alans, drove the Vandals and Suevi away to the north-west, and then with all his horde passed into Gaul to settle as an ally (faederatus) in the territory ceded to him by the Emperor in Southern Gaul. It was as the supporters of an Emperor, Avitus, set up by themselves, that the Visigoths came back to Spain, and then only to invade, burn and go out again. Before noting the time and circumstances of the transfer of their monarchy from Gaul to Spain, it is very necessary to see in what spirit and with what purpose they acted. 20 SPAIN Mr Freeman, in his lectures on the history of the fifth century, has said that we cannot read a short passage near the close of the seventh and last book of Orosius^s history, " Adversus Paganos," too often, nor reflect on them too much. In this constantly quoted part of his book the Spanish writer tells how when he was on a mission to St Jerome at Bethlehem he met a certain religious, prudent, and serious Narbonnese, who had been distinguished in the armies of Theodosius. This old officer said that he had been very familiar with Ataulf , and had often heard him declare that he had first hoped to destroy the Roman Empire and to put the Gothic in its place. But in time experience had taught him that the '' unbridled barbarity " of his countrymen rendered them incapable of obedience, and had shown him how unwise it was to destroy laws without which no state can exist. Therefore he had decided to use the force of the Goths for the restoration of Rome. Now it really matters very little whether the Narbon- nese veteran reported Ataulf correctly, nor even whether he was more than a literary artifice, akin to those long speeches which historians have put into the mouths of princes and generals. We need not even ask whether this supposed scheme of Ataulf's to revive an institution so rotten as the Roman Empire then was, by the help of unbridled barbarians, was any proof of his wisdom. What is of real consequence is that the Gothic rulers, whether they were East Goths in Italy, or West Goths in Spain, did act in the spirit of the words attributed to Ataulf. They may well have been awed by the stately apparatus of government created by Diocletian. The very fact that they were barbarians would make them the more susceptible to the grandiosity of the thing. And as they were unquestionably astute men, they were perfectly capable of seeing how much they stood to gain if only they could add the absolute authority of a Roman Emperor to the restricted power of a war chief who had been raised THE EARLY CENTURIES 21 on the shield by free warriors. That this is what they tried to do rests on far better evidence than the word of Orosius. The connection of the Visigoths with Spain was divided into three phases. For a period of nearly one hundred years, from the reign of Ataulf (410-415) till the end of the reign of Alaric II. (485-507), these^ kings were established in Southern Gaul. They intervened in Spain, and dominated the feeble Hispano-Romans. But the Suevi held their ground in the north-west. Roman officers, or Hispano-Roman senators, governed in places. Native communities lived more or less freely in the mountains. One of these communities existed in a ocnsiderable tract of country between the modern New Castile and Valencia — the Orospodans. In 507 the Visigoth kings fled across the Pyrenees before the Franks. From 507 to the reign of Leovigild (567-586) successive Visigoth kings encamped in a part of Spain. When the series of Roman emperors of the west was suspended in 465, the Empire was not thought to have ceased, but it became still more vague and ineffective than it had been, and the barbarian kings grew consciously more independent. Justinian restored the rule of the Empire in the south of Spain, but only there. Leovigild, by virtue of his personal qualities, made himself master in the whole peninsula, very much as a capable Spanish American tyrant — a Rosas, a Guzman Blanco, or a Porfirio Diaz — dominates his '' Republic." The southern coast still remained in the power of the Byzantines. So far the Goths had been Arians, and their heresy had divided them from their Catholic subjects. But the pressure of the far more numerous Catholic Spaniards told on them. Intermarriage with the Catholic Merovingians in Gaul had some influence. Hermengild, the son of Leovigild, was led into conversion and rebelhon which ended in his own defeat and death by his Frankish wife, and the persuasion of Leander, the Catholic Bishop of Seville. Reccared (586-601), Leovigild's other son, saw that conversion %2 SPAIN might confirm his power. His father had destroyed the Suevic kingdom, and had beaten the independent Orospodans. If he could reconcile the mass of the Spaniards he seemed to have a chance of estabhshing a solid kingdom. On that conviction he acted, and Catholicism became the religion of the State. The second phase of Visigothic Spanish history ended with the conversion of Reccared. The third lasted from 6oi to 711, that is, till the invasion of the Arabs. It is full of the utter failure of Reccared' s hopes — or at least of the hopes which may plausibly be attri- buted to him. The conversion of the Visigoths did not cure their barbarism. It had no effect whatever on their prefer- ence for an elective to a hereditary monarchy. If it had, the result would probably have been the same. The Merovin- gians held strongly to the hereditary principle, but their kings became '' sluggards " and anarchy was not avoided. The barbarians barbarized the Church itself. And it needed no stimulus to be ferocious. The savage persecutions of the Jews, who were numerous in Spain, were instigated by Churchmen. Palace revolutions, regicides, tumultuous elections were the rule. The Visigoth kingdom in Spain was the forerunner of the kingdom of Poland. It was an elective monarchy, with a factious nobility, for whom '* freedom '' meant exemp- tion from the control of the law, a population almost wholly enslaved, a Church which in the seventh century tended to become as factious and as barbarous as the nobles, while a depressed and brutally ill-treated minority of Jews represented the whole trading and wealth-producing middle class. The mere events of Spanish Visigothic history are extremely obscure. It is even not easy to realize what was meant, in so far as race was in question, by the name Visigoth. They themselves did not forbid intermarriage with Gallo- or Hispano- Romans. One of their kings. Theudis, who was himself an Ostrogoth and an officer of Theoderich's, married a THE EARLY CENTURIES 23 Hispano-Roman lady. Another of their later kings, Egica, was the son of a Byzantine father of Persian descent who married a Visigoth princess. It is impossible to believe that barbarian warriors encamped by force in the Empire would be restrained from satisfying their desires, or forwarding their interests by mere respect for a Theodosian law which fore- bade intermarriage between Romans and barbarians. Ataulf himself had set the example. Their kings both in Gaul and Spain were surrounded by '* Roman *' bishops, lawyers, dukes, and counts. They were great lawgivers, and their codes were based on the Roman Law. The Visigothic code in Spain, the Forum Judicum, was shaped during the last century of the kingdom in the Councils of Toledo, in which the bishops, who were thoroughly Latin in training and sympathy, dominated. That the Visigothic '' faederati '' of the Empire were the military and political chiefs of the countries they coerced is no doubt true, and because they were it was every man's interest to be counted one of them if he could. Visi- goth became the name of a governing class in which there was an element J how great we do not and cannot know, of Visigoth blood. The process was easy and natural. It would have been contrary to all physical and moral probability that the " Visigoths '' should have remained a separate race. If we ask what institutions the Visigoths brought to Spain, the answer must be that they contributed very little, and that in essentials their work was to hand on as much of the principles of the Roman Empire as could survive in ages of anarchy. In theory the King was a despot. In practice he was weak, because his nobles were armed and factious, and the mass of the people was servile in status, and looked on revolts and palace revolutions just as the Romans of the Empire had looked on while the legionaries made or unmade emperors. It must be allowed that Reccared made a national monarchy possible in the future when he renounced the Arian heresy. 24 SPAIN The Visigoth code gave the Spaniards a body of laws which Hved all through the Middle Ages. It was fundamentally Roman. In their last phase they ceased to be even mihtary. By 711 A.D. they had brought the country to a state which could no longer endure. Half of the elections to the throne of the King of the Goths were brought about by murders or compulsory abdications. And it is significant that the last stages of the kingdom's history are the most obscure. We do not even know how Roderick, the last king of the Goths of all Spain, came to be chosen.. It is possible that the commonly accepted lists are mainly official and drawn up at Toledo, which from the time of Athanagild and the occupation of Andalusia by the troops of Justinian was the Visigoth capital. Coins have been found which bear the names of other kings who presumably ruled only in a part of Spain. NOTES The Spaniards give the name **obra de los Romanos/' a work of the Romans, to all buildings of great size and solidit^^ They have been taught to adopt that standard by the great monuments which remain among them, mostly from the second century of the Christian era. Their own era is taken from the settlement of Spain by Augustus, and is thirty-eight years older than the Christian. It begins on the ist January 38 B.C., or 716 a.u.c. Though the Spaniards have taken it to themselves, and continued to use it till the sixteenth century, it was in fact the era of the Caesars, and was employed both in Africa and Gaul. The aqueduct of Segovia is the largest and the most complete of the Roman remains in Spain. The date is uncertain, but the construction of this most impressive work is attributed to the reign of Trajan. It begins in the Sierra Fonfria, a part of the Guadarrama, and is some ten miles long. The aqueduct is not wholly the work of the Romans. In 107 1 a.d. thirty-five of the three hundred and twenty arches were broken down by the Moors of Toledo. But it was restored in 1483, by Juan Escovedo, a Roman Aqueduct, Tarragona Photos. Exclusive News Agency Roman Wall of Tarragona THE EARLY CENTURIES 25 monk of the Parral, who was appointed " Maestro de las Obras " by Isabel the Catholic. Escovedo imitated the Roman work very closely. Later repairs have not deserved the same praise. It is sad to reflect that Escovedo's own convent of the Parral (i.e. of the unpruned vine) is now a deplorable semi-ruin. The bridge of Alcantara near the Portuguese frontier on the Tagus has excited the admiration of all who have seen it. The length is some 670 feet, and it consists of six arches. The central two have spans of 1 10 feet. The height is 210 feet. It lies north-west of the frontier town of Alcantara. Alcantara means The Bridge in Arabic (Al-Kantarah). Like so many other fine things in Spain it can be seen only by those who do not shrink from very rough travelling, and still rougher eating. Merida on the Guadiana can at least be reached by the railway, from Salamanca to Huelva. It contains more Roman remains than any other city in Spain — a bridge, built under Trajan, 2672 feet long, of 81 arches, 26 feet wide, and 33 feet above the river, much repaired from the seventh century downwards ; the remnants of a Roman castle, added to by the Moors ; the ruins of an aqueduct ; of an amphitheatre in very bad condition ; and of a well-preserved theatre, and the undoubtedly partly Roman Church of St Eulalia. Segovia, Alcantara, and Merida are the three great Roman antiquities in Spain. The remains of circuses and amphitheatres near Seville (Italica) and Toledo, the Roman " House of Pilate," the Roman work on the walls, the aqueduct and the triumphal arch called " The Tomb of the Scipios " at Tarragona, are more accessible than Merida or Alcantara. The remains of the work of the Visigoths are few and doubtful. A time of barbarism — and of tamely imitative barbarism — could not be rich in buildings. The work which is attributed to them is much subject to suspicion. Don Vicente Lamperez, in his monumental " Historia de la Arquitectura Cristiana Espafiola en la Edad Media" (Madrid, 1908), has stated all the reasons for believing that the Church of San Juan de Bafios, in the Province of Palencia, is Visigothic, and that the horseshoe arches which are to be seen in it are Visigothic. It is not disputed that the church was founded by a Visigothic king, Reccesvinth, nor that the ground plan and part of the masonry belong to the original building. San Juan was built in a T, with three square apses. But it has been much restored and altered in the course of its history. The question is whether the arches do not come 36 SPAIN from a restoration in the twelfth century, when Mozarabic — that is to say. Christian workmen living under Arabic masters, and much influenced by them, were active in Leon. Doubts of the same kind must rest on all the remains which Senor Lamperez, who is more cautious than some other Spanish authorities, con- siders authentic — namely, the Latin basilica at Cabeza de Griego, or Segobriga, in the province of Cuenca ; the Byzantine basilica at Santa Combe de Bande (Orense), and various fragmentary remains of baptistries at Tarrasa (Barcelona), San Antolin (Palencia), Capilla de Elche (Alicante), and the crypt of the Cathedral of Palencia. All these buildings and remains of buildings are very small, and some are in remote spots of difficult access. It is very doubtful whether the rudely carved figures found at the Cerro de los Santos, near Almansa ( Albacete) , belong to the Visigoth age or an earlier time. They may be seen in the Museo Arqueologico in Madrid, but the forger has been very busy. The very attractive bust known as the Lady of Elche, because it was found there, which now belongs to the Louvre, is visibly oriental in inspiration. It may be Byzantine or still earlier, but nobody really knows. Jewellery would naturally be the chief art of this age. The glow of gold and the blaze of gems are peculiarly attractive to barbarians, and then precious metals and precious stones are portable property. The votive crowns discovered at Guarrazar, near Toledo, in 1858, bear the names of known kings, and are no doubt the survivals of much goldsmith's work. Some of them — carefully restored — belong to the Louvre. One, which has been left as it was found, can be seen in the Armoury at Madrid. The coins of the Visigoths are numerous, and supply some knowledge of their history. The earliest are struck in the name of the Emperor. But from the reign of Leovigild, the King of the Goths struck them in his own name, and put his own image (of a highly conventional character) on them, wearing the Imperial insignia. He takes the Imperial name Flavins. CHAPTER II THE MOSLEM CONQUEST (7II-IO31) The Visigoth kingdom was ripe for destruction when Moslem conquerors from Northern Africa broke in, and shattered it at a blow. A legend of Httle poetic merit, and of no historical value, accounts for the invasion by a romantic commonplace. Roderick, it says, violated the daughter of Count Julian, governor of Ceuta, and the father revenged his family honour by helping the invaders to cross the straits. Nothing is known concerning the antecedent circumstances of the inroad. The desire to extend the dominion of their faith was motive enough for the Mahometans. The Visigoths were torn by factions, and the family of Roderick's predecessor, Witika, were, we can well beheve, as ready to make use of Moslem help as were the Hindu rulers on the eastern border of Islam. One fact stands out from the darkness of the time. On the nth July 711 a small raiding force of invaders, led by Tarik, the cHent and lieutenant of Musa, the governor of Northern Africa, defeated ** the last King of the Goths,'* at the battle commonly called, of Guadalete. The real scene of the action was on the banks of the Barbate, called by the Arabs the Guadalbeca, near the lagoon of La Janda, between Medina Sidonia and Veger de la Frontera. Whether Roderick died in the battle, or survived only to be slain two years later (13th September 713), at Segoyuela, in Estremadura, is doubtful. That his kingdom was shattered is beyond question. Nor need we refuse to believe that Tarik, who had landed only 27 28 SPAIN to make a raid and a reconnaissance in force, was helped to his victory by the treasonable aid of the Witika faction, and was then led to undertake the conquest of the whole country b}- his discovery of the weakness and anarchical divisions of the Visigoths. He was unquestionably helped by the persecuted Jews. In a short time he was joined by Musa, and by the end of 714 the two had overrun the country as far as the cold and wet mountains of the north. It might be plausibly argued that the most important event which happened in Spain in the year 718 was the elec- tion of Pelayo (Pelagius) as " King of the Goths,'' in the mountains of Asturias. To contemporaries this choice of a leader by a handful of refugees was either unknown, or if known was regarded as a small matter. For the next three centuries " Spain '' was the country held by the Mahometans. The future belonged to their enemies, the hillmen of the north. For the present these champions of Christianity were but raiders on the '' upper frontiers.'' The fortunes of the Moslem masters of the bulk of the country make the main stream of Spanish history. I have preferred to say Moslem and not Arab in order to avoid a very possible confusion. The success at La Janda was an Arab victory in a sense, just as the battle of Patna was a British victory, though the very great majority of the soldiers who won it were native Sepoys. Though Tarik himself was a Berber, and his soldiers were mainly native Africans, he fought for the Arab caliph at Damascus. When we speak of the " Arab " conquest of Spain we ought to use the name with an ever-present understanding of the fact that the majority of the Moslems in Spain were at no time Arabians, either by birth or by descent. The history of Mahometan rule in Spain lies between 711 and 1492. In the course of that period of nearly eight hundred years there were great changes. From 711 till the fall of the THE MOSLEM CONQUEST 29 Caliphate of Cordova in 103 1 Spain, with the exception of the hill country held by the struggHng Christian princes of the north, was ruled by men of Arab race. From 1031 to 1248 the Moslem powers were African and Berber, not Arabian, save in the case of isolated famihes here and there. By the year 1248 and the conquest of Se\ille by the King of Castile and Leon Fernando IIL the Mahometans had been driven into Granada. From that year till the final conquest by the Catholic sovereigns in 1492 a crowded population of Mahometans survived there in precarious independence with the help of occasional support from Africa. When the Spaniards of the age of the Reconquest and later looked back on the great overthrow of the eighth century, they saw it as a dreadful disaster, and as the defilement of a Christian community by black unbelievers. They could not conceive of it as meaning anything but suffering. Obscure as the time is, there is no doubt that the change from Visigoth and Christian to Arab and Mahometan rule did not appear in this light to large elements of the conquered people. On the contrary it brought no change for the worse to some, while to others it brought relief. In many cases the opulent landowners, Visigoth Seniores and Hispano-Roman Senatores, made terms for themselves. So did some of the cities. In Murcia the local Visigoth Duke, Theodomir, submitted, paid tribute, and was no worse off than before. Toledo made a capitulation. So did Braga in modern Portugal. Both secured freedom of worship, and at least as large a measure of self- government as they had enjoyed before 711. But the chief gainers were the peasantry. The Visigoth rulers had en- deavoured to maintain the Roman fiscal system, by which the whole burden of taxation fell on the small men, and they were individually bound to make good any deficiency in the taxes of their district. In order that they might be at hand to answer to the demand of the fisc, they were tied to the soil, 30 SPAIN where they were exposed to the exactions of tax collectors and lords. The Arab was content with his Koranic taxes, and the '* Karadj " or head-money tribute paid by the Christians, which was not levied on women or children, cripples, old men or the very poor. He planted his people on the domains of the fisc, or the lands of refugees, and took a part of the produce from the actual cultivator. The individual peasant was free to sell or to go as he chose. A vigorous development of agricul- ture followed the Arab conquest. In the towns the Christian communities were bound to pay the tribute, but they were left free to practise their own religion and settle their affairs among themselves by the Visigoth code — the Forum Judicum. The chief difference for them was, that whereas they had been governed by a Visigoth count, they were now judged by their bishop. In material prosperity they lost nothing, and it is highly probable that they gained in security for life and property. The best proof that the Moslem conquest was not felt as a cruel disaster is the number of free conversions which followed it. There is good reason to beheve that Christianity had not spread far beyond the cities. The country population was pagan in so far as it had any religion. For these men it was promotion to become Mahometans, and the door was open to them. The Caliph Wahd had decided that Mahomet came to teach Islam, and not circumcision. Submission to this rite was not demanded from adults. The serf or slave who wished for freedom from a Christian master had but to pronounce the formula of the faith, '' Allah alone is God, and Mahomet is His Prophet," to become a free man. Even if he changed only to become the slave of a Mahometan he gained. He now had the protection of one of the governing class, and the brotherhood of Islam is the strongest, the most equaHzing of bonds. This process of assimilation was helped in another way. The invaders did not come as a wandering people THE MOSLEM CONQUEST 31 with wives and children, but as soldiers. They took to them- selves wives of the daughters of the people, and all the more easily because they did not insist on the conversion of these women. In the second generation Moslem Spain was full of " Muladi^s/' i,e, half-breeds. The Arab, though he pro- duced Mahomet anism, has been on the whole the least fanatical of Mahometans. His natural tendency is to scepticism. The new rulers did not scruple to declare that they preferred the Kharadj of the Christian to his conversion. Yet there was a temptation to join the governing element. Not a few Chris- tians who did not belong to the unfree classes passed over to Islam. The family of Theodomir of Murcia were Mahometans in the third generation. In the Ebro valley a certain Count Fortunatus was converted with all his people, and he founded a dynasty which reigned at Saragossa — the Beni- Lope or Beni-Casi. From the first, and for centuries, intef- marriages between the creeds were common. Christians fought in the Moslem armies. Discontented Moslems aUied themselves with Christian princes. Arabic was naturally the language of government, of literature, and of the rehgion of the ruHng element. But the pure Arabic was never the language of the people. A '' lingua franca " or " aljamia " made up of Arabic, with Berber and Latin elements, was the speech of the house and the market-place. The pure Arabic became what Latin was among the Romance and even Teutonic peoples, the idiom of government, law, literature, and rehgion, used by the highly educated alone. The Arab alphabet was used even by independent Christians when writing Latin, or the language which was ceasing to be Latin, but had not yet become Romance. Through the Muzarabes — ^that is, the Christians living under Moslem rule — ^Arabic affected the vocabulary and pronunciation of the Spanish form of Romance. The Spanish guttural '* ]" and " g" came from the Arab with many names of domestic use, of agriculture, and of plants. 32 SPAIN When a Spaniard says *' Would to God," " ojala/* he invokes Allah. If Mahometanism were capable of growth and of adapta- tion, if the Arab were not incurg^bly anarchical, there might well have been a complete assimilation of races and civiHza- tions in Spain. But where Islam takes possession of the soul of man it tolerates no partner, and it atrophies every moral quality, every intellectual capacity, which it does not need. The anarchy of the Arab is incurable. He never bows for long to any obhgation save his tribal loyalty. He is a post, a knight, a champion, and in every one of these forms of his native virtue, a rebel to authority and an assertor of himself. It was the considered opinion of one of them, Ibn Khaldoun, that the Arabs will ruin any country which they govern.^ And yet the Arab period of Spanish Mahometan history passes, not unjustly, for a time of glory, splendour, and pros- perity. The contradiction is susceptible of a satisfactory solution. Within half a century of the battle at La Janda there came to Spain an Arab of the purest race, more fierce, more astute, more ruthlessly self-assertive than any other, and he founded a dynasty fertile in able men of his own type. They cowed the anarchy of their fellow Arabs by fraud and the scimitar, and they ruled largely through servants of native and Jewish origin, and by the use of armies of professional soldiers drawn from Africa or from Christian peoples. Musa and Tarik had barely overrun Spain in 714 when 1 See, in the publications of the " Bibhoheque Nationale," the trans- lation by Baron M'Guckin de Slane of the "Prolegomena" of Ibn Khaldoun, vols 19, 20, and 21. This extraordinary man, the descend- ant of an Arab family settled in Seville, which emigrated to Africa when the city was taken by Fernando III., and who saw Peter the Cruel and Tamerlane, was a writer on politics worthy to rank with Montesquieu or Burke. He is an authority of the first importance for the history of the Mahometan states of the Middle Ages — and indeed of all time. THE MOSLEM CONQUEST 33 they were recalled to Damascus by the Caliph to answer charges of maladministration brought by their enemies. Musa left his son Abdul Aziz in command. Abdul Aziz took to himself the widow of Roderick, and showed a leaning to make himself independent by the help of the Christians. Perhaps he was unjustly suspected of treasonable aims. But the Cahph at Damascus had cause to distrust governors of distant conquests. Abdul Aziz was murdered by orders from his sovereign. His head was sent to the Caliph, and the widow of Roderick was carried into the harem. His successor as governor in Spain went on with the settlement of the country. Then the Arab rulers passed the Pyrenees with their motley army, and spread their power till they broke against the solid infantry of the Franks at Poitiers (732). Though they were not at once expelled from Southern Gaul, they were thrown back on themselves. Conflicts and confusion broke out at once. The aristocratic insolence and strong racial arrogance of the Arab element among the conquerors showed themselves in injustice to the Berbers. The Arabs kept the rich and warm south to themselves, and planted the Berbers on the cold and barren plateau of the north. The two races fought, and numbers of the Berbers deserted their poor share of the conquered soil, and returned to Africa. A fresh Arab element came in from Syria. Tribal and race rivalry raged uncon- trolled. Battles were fought in which thousands of Christians served under Moslem chiefs and beside Moslem warriors. In the east the caliphs at Damascus, of the Ommayad dynasty, were being undermined and destroyed by the Abbasides, who took Bagdad as their capital. Islam was checked in Europe, and was drawing back from its Syrian outpost towards the centre of Asia, in the east. If now no new force had intervened in Spain, the country would have been parcelled out among petty principahties, and Mahometanism in that case would have been utterly unable o 34 SPAIN to resist the onset of the Franks led by the Carlovingians. For good or for evil it was saved from that fate by a single man. Abdur-Rahman, son of the tenth Ommayad Caliph, had escaped to the west from the massacre of his family. Through many perils and adventures he found his way to Africa. From thence he made himself known to clients of his house among the Arabs settled in Spain. Tribal loyalty, the bond between chent and lord, counted for something, and rivalries of factions counted for more. Abdur-Rahman was promised support if he would strike for a throne in Spain, and he came. For thirty years (756-788) he played the part of '' the man of blood '* who prepares the way for the Solomon of oriental dynasties. He had neither faith nor pity, and he had to deal with endless treason. From his capital at Cordoba he watched sleeplessly. He forestalled treason, undermined plots, and struck with ferocity. He suffered most from his own kith and kin, and spared them least. At the end of his life he poured out the bitterness of. his heart in a confession which may stand beside the *' omnia fui et nil expedit '' of the Emperor Severus. He had fought and laboured to save the house of Moawiya from extinction, and they hated him because he had made himself greater than any of them. But, unlike Severus, he at least founded a lasting dynasty. Let us take a Hst of the Ommayad rulers of Spain of whom it can be said that they were more than mere names : — A.D. Abdur-Rahman I. . 756-788 Hisham I . 788-796 Hakam I . 796-822 Abdur-Rahman H, . 822-852 Mohammad I. . 852-886 Mundhir • . . . . 886-888 THE MOSLEM CONQUEST 35 A.D. Abdallah 888-912 Abdur-Rahman III. Hakam 11. . Hisham II. . 912-961 961-976 976-1009 Between 1009 and 103 1 fourteen caliphs were proclaimed at C6rdoba. Some of them appear twice, because they were restored after being deposed, but all were the puppets of palace conspiracy and pretorian revolt. They simply serve to ticket the final decay of the Ommayads. The progress of every oriental ruHng house is the same — from David to Solomon and from Solomon to Rehaboam. The greatest of them produce more Davids and Solomons than one, and sometimes the agony is long drawn out. The Spanish Ommayads rank with the best, the Sassanids and the house of Othman. For two centuries they produced a high proportion of strong rulers. Though they are all commonly spoken of as caliphs of Cordoba, the state was first actually used by Abdur-Rahman III. (912-961), who proclaimed himself " Al KhaHfa al Nasir.*' His predecessors were content to be emirs or sultans. Yt as they held aloof from the Caliph at Bagdad, we may pardon- ably follow the common custom. Without attempting to take them reign by reign, we can best learn what these rulers were, and what their rule meant for Spain by taking them in their relation to their own people, whether Arab or Berber, to their Christian subjects, and to their Christian neighbours. Little need be said of their work as purely oriental rulers. By whatever name men know him, the head of an eastern poUty is a pure despot, in whose person resides the whole authority of the State, who is Hmited by no institution, and who is master of every man's life and fortune. That he 36 SPAIN always is in theory, and while the vigour of a dynasty lasts he is so in fact. But if he has not to take account of a great organized ecclesiastical legal or political institution, there are often forces which he must control under penalty of destruc- tion. He holds wolves of fanaticism, or of anarchy, by the ears, and must not let them go. If he destroys one of them his very victory may be won by creating another danger. Now the wolf which the caliphs of Cordoba held by the ears and did subdue by creating a force which in the end turned on themselves, was the Arab nobility. These descendants of the heroes of the desert had won what they held by the sword. They hated every master, and in the Vega of Granada , in the valley of the Guadalquivir, or the tableland of the centre, they pursued the old implacable blood feuds of their clans. The Sultan, Emir, or Caliph, who had to form an army by calling them together, was at their mercy. The greatest of the Ommayad dynasty in Spain, Abdur-Rahman III., was deserted in the midit of a campaign by his Arab nobles. It was impossible to govern with an instrument which might break at any moment. Therefore from the founder of the dynasty downwards every Ommayad aimed at forming a professional army of soldiers who should be slaves of the King. Many came from Morocco. Many were imported from the centre and north of Europe by the Jew slave merchants. It may well be that not a few of those English slaves who were exported from Bristol spent their lives fighting for the Caliph of Cordoba. This force of well-trained men — the forerunners of the Janissaries — was irresistible to the Arab nobles and the Christian levies of the north. And the Caliph could hire the native Christians, and did. The Ommayads were not fanatical. They cared little that bands of mercenaries from the mountains of the north prayed to Christ and wore the cross, so long as they followed the Ommayad banner — ^the green turban unrolled and knotted round the head of a lance> THE MOSLEM CONQUEST 37 which Abdur-Rahman I. improvised before the first battle he fought for his throne. The prince who employs foreign mercenaries may spread his feathers for a time, says Bacon, but he will soon moult them. The slaves of the Caliph became his masters. The pretorians dictated to the sovereign who depended on them, and the last stage of the Ommayad dynasty was one of military mutiny and anarchy. The Ommayads were intelHgent and could understand that the prosperity of the subject is the wealth of the King. They protected the peasant, the herdsman, the artisan, the trader. It may be that the regrets of later times did more than justice to the felicity of their rule. Yet the home and the foundation of their power, Spain south of the Sierra Morena and along the Mediterranean, was unquestionably rich and industrious indeed when compared to the rest of Western Europe. Cor- doba became a great city, the ports were busy. The Caliphs built their great mosque at Cordoba, the noblest monument of Arab art, for Allah, and lordly palaces for themselves. Yet it must be borne in mind that this splendour came late, and was transitory. All depended on the quahty of the ruler, and all the predecessors of Abdur-Rahman III., the Solomon of the dynasty, were not capable. The immediate successors of Abdur-Rahman I. were not able to prevent murderous strife between the Arab element and the native converts. Numbers of these " Muladies " were driven into exile from Seville and Granada in the reign of Abdallah (888-912). Toledo had revolted under Hakam I. (796-822), and the revolt was suppressed by his successor, Abdur-Rahman 11. Large parts of the territory of the Amirs were withdrawn from their rule for long periods. In the Ebro valley the Beni-Lope, or Beni-Casi, made themselves independent, and ruled as kings of the " Upper Frontier, *' or as '* Third Kings in Spain." At Merida a certain Ben Meruan ruled for himself, and en- 38 SPAIN deavoured to frame a new religion by combining Islam and Christianity. Under the immediate predecessors of Abdur- Rahman III., a Mahometan of Christian ancestry, Omar Ben Hafsun made a principaHty for himself in the Sierra de Ronda, and carried war to the very gates of Cordoba. His power was not broken till he reverted to the religion of his fathers and his Moslem followers, who, be it noted, were native Spaniards, left him. Yet he died unsubdued in his castle of Bobastro, and Abdur-Rahman III. had to fight hard to subdue his heirs. The Ommayads were good masters to their Jewish and Christian subjects. The first flourished in trade. The second were left free to worship and work in peace, save for occasional bursts of fanaticism on the part of the ** fakirs,'' with whom the caliphs had small patience. The one serious '' perse- cution " to which they were subject was provoked by some of themselves. The '* martyrs of Cordoba,'' who drove their reluctant Mahometan masters to put them to death in the reign of Abdur-Rahman II., were animated by a furious zeal for martyrdom. They satisfied it by outrageous insults to the religion of their masters, and though their chiefs, men and women, Eulogius and Alvarus, Flora and Maria, were canonized later on by the Church, they were at the time discouraged by the regular clergy. The bishops of the Muz- arabic Christians required the consent of the Caliph before they could occupy their sees. He even presided over their councils, and they stood to him on the same footing as the Greek patriarch at Constantinople did to the Sultan of Turkey. In their isolation from Rome they enjoyed practical independ- ence, and some of them wandered into heresies. The limits of the Caliph's power — ^we may even say his essential weakness — become very visible when we turn from his internal government to his relations with external Christian enemies. When the Caliphate was at its height between 912 and 1009, it failed completely to subdue the independent THE MOSLEM CONQUEST 39 Christians of the north. Before the accession of Abdur- Rahman III. the Ommayads were too busy enforcing their own authority when they were capable men, and when they were not they were too weak to complete the conquest of Spain. They had, it is true, Httle to fear from the Christians beyond the Pyrenees. The inroad of Charlemagne in 788 is famous in poetic legend, but in history it is insignificant. The Frankish sovereign crossed the mountains not to make a reconquest of the country for Christianity, but as the associate of rebels against the Emir, Abdur-Rahman I. He advanced to Saragossa, but his aUies failed to keep touch. He heard of a rising of the Saxons on his eastern borders and marched back by the western passes. His rearguard was cut to pieces, and the baggage of his army was captured by the Basques in the Pass of Roncesvalles. It was an incident of no consequence . in the wars of the time. Yet this instance of Basque guerrillero warfare and greed for plunder is not without a certain meaning. While he was in Spain Charlemagne, by destroying the walls of Pamplona, did more harm to the Christians than he did to the Mahometans. To the Basques he was simply a Frankish conqueror, and they were no more disposed to be dominated by a Frank than by an Arab. They had, in fact, less natural hostility to the Mahometans of the Ebro valley, who were largely of native descent, than they had to a Teutonic intruder from the north. When we first hear of historical Christian sovereigns in Navarre they are seen to be more concerned in resisting Frankish counts than in fighting the unbeliever. The Basques of the Western Pyrenees, with their spontaneous hatred of all intruders, were, in fact, more a protection than a menace to the cahphs. On the eastern Pyrenees the case was different. The south- eastern corner of Gaul, Narbonne and the Septimania, had been attached to the Visigoth monarchy to the end. They, and at least the northern part of Catalonia, were together 40 SPAIN known as Gothia. It was comparatively easy for the Carlo- vingians to establish their authority in this region. Here, then, was formed the Spanish March — Marca Hispanica — governed by Prankish counts or wardens of the marches, who had a share in the reconquest of Spain. That share was, however, essentially subordinate. It was amply proved in the Peninsula War, when the transport of armies was far easier than in the Middle Ages, that military operations in Catalonia have very little influence on the course of events in other parts of Spain. It is cut off from the interior by mountains and lies apart. And then the speedy decline of the Carlovingian power was followed by the development of Feudalism, which broke all Gaul into fragments of lordships, big and little, engaged in endless wars with one another. The real danger to the Caliphate lay to the west of the Pyrenees, in the mountains of Asturias and Galicia. Pelayo had been elected in Asturias, in the Picos de Europa, in 718. Hi'^ history and that of his successors for several generations is of the last degree of obscurity. We need not doubt his existence, nor even that he won some success over a body of Berbers at Covadonga. There were Christian kings whose relationships and dates are often doubtful, and whose names, Favila, Alfonso I., Fruela, Aurelio, Silo, Mauregato Bermudo I., have little or nothing to tell us, in the north-west. They considered themselves very rightly as the true successors of the Visigoth kings. They were first known as kings of the Goths, and their country as Gothia. When that title ceased to have a meaning, they were spoken of as kings at Cangas de Onis (in Asturias), at Oviedo, or at Leon, or in GaHcia. The Arabs called them the Beni Alfons, or kings of Galicia. The internal history of their kingdom was a prolongation of that of the Visigoths. There was the same king who was for ever struggling to make the crown hereditary, the same nobles who strove to keep it elective. The mass of the population was THE MOSLEM CONQUEST 41 either fully enslaved, or at least bound to the soil and to labour on the domain of the lord. Local rivalries were rife between different parts of the reduced kindgom. Every son of a king wished to be a king, and there was a constant tendency to divide the dominions of a sovereign at his death. The state (if the word can be fairly applied to so confused, so fissiparous a community, or combination of communities) could not have resisted continuous and consistent attack by the Moslem. It survived because it was not resolutely attacked. While the Ommayad princes were busy in the south, while the centre of Spain was neglected and largely depopulated, when the Berbers had deserted the north, and the Mahometans of the Ebro Valley were thinking of themselves only, and were at all times ready to ally themselves with the Christians, the kings in the north-west were able to shape, very loosely, a realm which stretched from the Cantabrian Mountains to the Duero. Christians took refuge among them, or they raided over the border, and brought back men of their own religion to people their lands. We must conceive of the Christian kings of that epoch as holding the maritime provinces firmly. Over against them lay the Moslem power, whose frontier ran from Coimbra in modern Portugal, by Coria, Talavera, Toledo, Guadalajara, up to Pamplona. Between them lay a no man's land, which was mainly deserted This kingdom of the north-west, this successor of the Visi- goth realm, and parent of the great Spanish monarchy, begins to appear as a solid reality in the long reign of Alfonso II. • El Casto (791-842). We are told, and no doubt truly — for what else should he do ? — ^that he laboured to people his land, and to abate anarchy, by enforcing the Visigoth laws — that is, the Forum Judicum. He was known to Charlemagne and to all Christianity as a king beyond the mountains who was the natural enemy of the unbeliever. One event of extreme importance in the history of Spain, and of some consequence 42 SPAIN to Europe, makes his reign highly notable. It was the *' inven- tion *' in the ecclesiastical sense, i,e. the discovery, of the Tomb of St James, the Apostle at Iria, in Galicia. Lights were seen in a wood and angels descending and ascending. The cause was investigated, and in a marble sarcophagus was found the body of the Apostle. Who was prepared to doubt in that age ? and who will stop now to ask what were the respective shares of childish mendacity, or childish creduHty in this wonder ? The tomb, for there no doubt was a tomb, became the shrine of Compostella (Campus Stellae or Campus Apostoli). Round it grew the noble cathedral of later times, and a city, Santiago de Galicia, rose round the cathedral. Europe, outside of Italy, had no more famous goal for pilgrims. The pilgrim road which crossed the western Pyrenees, and ran along the feet of the Cantabrian Mountains, became a channel through which the influence, the trade, and the literature of Europe worked on Spain. St James became the warrior patron saint of the Castilians, who expected to see him, and therefore did see him, leading the charge against the Moslem. *' Santiago y cierra Espaiia '' was the Christian answer to the *' Allah il Allah '' of the Mahometans.^ From the death of Alfonso II. till the accession of Alfonso v., in 994, there is the same tale to tell. A succession of kings, Ramiros, Ordofios, Bermudos, pass vague and colour- less. Fratricidal wars, anarchy of the nobles, complicated by revolts of the serfs, local rivalries of Galician and Leonese, ^ " Cerrar con el enemigo/' to close with the enemy, was to charge. " Santiago y cierra Espana " belong rather to poetry than fact. The Castilians of the Middle Ages appear to have shouted " Haro " (pro- nounced aro) as their slogan, and " Haro " seems to be simply the " ar6/' " get on," of the Mulateers. The Aragonese Saint was St George, not St James, and their war-cry was " Aragon." Out of "Allah il Allah " the CastiUans made " Lelilie," with which compare the British soldiers' interpretation of " Hassan Hussein " into " Hobson Jobson " in India. THE MOSLEM CONQUEST 43 kept the kingdom weak. The northmen raided on the coast, but made no great settlement. The caliphs made no effectual attack, and therefore the kingdom of the Beni Alfons subsisted. Yet all this strife represented the growing pains of a real state. In the midst of their disorders the Christians of the north-west extended themselves eastward. The ancient " Bardulia " of the Romans began to be studded by the peels, the rude castles of the advancing Christians, and the foundations of the future kingdom of Castille were laid. In Navarre a king at Pamplona began to make a kingdom out of the Basque hillmen. The early history of the kingdom of Navarre is obscured not by honest legend, but by audacious lying, the sin of monkish writers of a later age. At the eastern end of the Pyrenees, the Spanish March of the Carlovingians gave birth to the county of Barcelona. The counts of Barcelona, of the house of the Frank, Wifred or Gifred (? Jofre or Geoffrey), The Hairy (Lo Velu), acknow- ledged themselves to be vassals of the King of the Franks. But they were already independent in fact, and the day was not very far off when they would be sovereign princes by law. Wifred was called The Hairy, not because he was covered with hair, even to the palms of his hands. That was the wild etymology of a later age which had forgotten the real meaning of his nickname — the Comes pilosus — that is to say, the count of the scrub or bush, which covered his uncleared territory. When Abdur-Rahman III. had subdued his enemies in the south, he was free to bring the upper frontier to obedience, and to provide against danger from Africa, by taking hold on northern Morocco. He did both, and his State, ruled with despotic authority, enforcing its will by means of a slave army, looked a mighty power over against the turmoil of the Christian north. But it was a mechanism, and they were living organ- isms. Abdur-Rahman was a great oriental ruler, a Haroun al 44 SPAIN Rashid or an Akbar, who kept the mechanism in working order so long as he Hved. Yet he gained no ground against the Christians of the north. He did, it is true, gain victories, and would burn and destroy on Christian territory. Even this much he did not do without check, for he was heavily defeated by the Christians of the north-west and Navarre, at Alhandega. His disaster was produced by the treason of his Arab nobles, and henceforward he took the field no more, but governed from Cordoba, and neutralized the Christians by making use of their own factions. There were family feuds among the Christian kings, whose capital was at Leon, and the Castilian borderers were intent on winning independence. When Ramiro II., a great leader of raids, and the conqueror of the Caliph himself at Alhandega (939), died in 956, his sons, the half brothers Ordono and Sancho, fought. Sancho was the son of Ramiro by his second marriage with the daughter of Tot a (Theuda), the Queen Mother of Navarre, and regent of the kingdom, a medieval, great lady, who hunted and fought like a man. After years of confusion Sancho was expelled. He and Theuda appealed to Abdur-Rahman. Sancho was crippled by his immense obesity, from whence came his name The Fat. He and his grandmother prostrated themselves before the throne of the Caliph, and Abdur-Rahman first provided Sancho with a doctor, who reduced his overgrown flesh, and then, in retarn for profuse promises of future tribute and obedience, restored him to his throne. The Christian king would not, and perhaps could not, keep his engagements. In the end he was poisoned, and then began another period of furious strife, in which rival kings and the Count of Castile, Fernan Gonsalez, forgot everything except the satisfaction of their greed and rage— in the regular early medieval way. Abdur-Rahman might well think that they were no danger to him. Yet if the moral tale which represents him as confessing THE MOSLEM CONQUEST 45 that he had enjoyed only twenty days of happiness in all his long reign is true, he may have known how unstable his empire w^as. Its hoUowness was shown within a very few years of his death. His son and successor, Hakam 11. , was a conscientious ruler, bat withal a man of weak physique, a lover and collector of books. A Sultan, says Ibn Khaldoun, is but one weak man on whom a heavy burden is laid. He must rule through the vizirs he chooses, who will mislead him for their own ends if they can. While the dynasty is founding its power, the Sultan must lead his armies and rule from his saddle. When the victory is gained, then the Sultan is sorely tempted to enjoy, and to let the burden fall on an '* alter ego.*' Hakam yielded to the temptation. It was natural that he should trust to those who were nearest him. Now no one was so close to the heart of Hakam as the only wife who bore him a son, and that when he was no longer young. Sobh — the Daybreak — a Christian from the Basques of the north, whose native name was perhaps Aurora, gained complete influence over her lord. In the feudal Christian world of that age Sobh might have held councils and led armies. In the Mahometan world she was a '' dweller behind the curtain,'* and had need of a man to speak for her, and he must be one whose place was in the palace. To quote Ibn Khaldoun once more — When an oriental dynasty has reached the stage when it can enjoy its grandeur, the Lord High Chamberlain, the Hagib, becomes the most important person in the Sultan's service, for he stands between sovereign and people, and no one can approach the throne except by his leave. Sobh looked about for a Hagib who should be her man, and found him in Mahomet ben Abdallah, ascribe of an old Arab family settled at Algeciras. She made him Hagib to manage for her, and he, when once well seated in office, made himself master of her and of the Cahphate. If Mahomet ben Abdallah had been a- less astute man than 46 SPAIN he was, it would still have been easy for him to see that the official who was trusted in the palace could soon get the nomination of the vizirs, and the hiring of the mercenaries. It was not long before he had filled all offices with his agents, and had recruited mercenaries mostly from Africa who took pay and orders from him. When Hakam died in 976, and was succeeded by his own son, Hisham II. (976-1009) . a boy of twelve, the Hagib promptly relegated Sobh to the zenana, and the boy to the nursery. If Hisham had threatened to develop an}" vigour of character it is highly probable that he would not have lived very long. But he was feeble, addicted to pious practices, and perfectly docile. He existed in the recesses of the palace, and the Hagib reigned in his name. Mahomet ben Abdallah first got rid of his only possible competitor. El Ghalib (the Victorious) , governor of the African dependency of the Caliphate, and his own father-in-law, by fraud and murder. Then he applied himself to earning the name by which he is best known — Almansur Billah — the conqueror by the favour of Allah. Until he died, in 1002, Almansur warred unceasingly against the Christians of the north. Fifty times he carried the Holy War into their territory, wasting their country with fire and sword. He marched to Santiago de Galicia on the north- west, and drove the Count of Barcelona back to the Pyrenees on the east. He was a portent and a terror to Christianity, who left desolated towns and ruined churches wherever he marched. To the Mahometans he was a warrior saint who carried his coffin always with him, and shook into it the dust of march and battle, so that when he came to die he might be buried in the evidence of his labours for Islam. The hatred and fear of the Christians pursued his memory with idle tales of a final defeat at Calatafiaxor, which had revenged them. Almansur died undefeated, having achieved — ^precisely nothing. His fifty victorious campaigns were punitive THE MOSLEM CONQUEST 47 expeditions which left the Christians hardened and chastised, but unbroken. He had carried off the gates and bells of the first Christian cathedral of Santiago, but he had not de- stroyed the men who survived to bring them back. A very few years gave time enough to show that what he had really done was to lead a convulsive effort to hold the ground already occupied by Islam. Such success as he achieved was purely personal. Frankish mayors of the palace and Japanese shoguns founded hereditary dynasties of second kings who governed in the name of secluded sovereigns, but then they were themselves chiefs of clans. Almansur was an official who was great because he abused his office, and had a better faculty than any of his contemporaries. In seven years his sons had quarrelled, failed, and disappeared in a storm of popular revolt and mihtary sedition. Between 1009 and 1031 the Ommayad house went headlong through the agony of a dying oriental dynasty. It is recorded of one of them that he said to his associates in an intrigue : ''If you make me Caliph to-day, you may kill me to-morrow." The saying, whether true or invented, is equally good evidence for the spirit of the time. Twenty adventurers, some of them Berbers, some Arabs by descent, divided the inheritance among them. For a space of about seventy years Moslem Spain was torn to frag- ments. It was the time of the Kings of the Bands, '' Reyes de Taifas,*' who seized, and for a brief space held, pieces of the Empire of Abdur-Rahman III. There may not have been exactly twenty at any one time, for some endured but for a few months, and all strove to eat others with insatiable appetite. Reinhart Dozy, the Dutch historian of Mahometan Spain, who tells their story with approved learning and admirable spirit, has treated them very kindly. And his partiality is not surprising, for all these princes, even the rudest Berber soldier of fortune among them, thought it 48 SPAIN becoming ta favour art and literature. There is a striking similarity between them and the Italian princes of the Re- naissance — ^the Visconti, the Sforza, the Baghoni. They all patronized the artist and the poet. Some were themselves no mean performers. Some chose their vizirs among poets, and their affairs flourished accordingly. Treason, intrigue, cruelty, the practice of murder with zest, were common to them all. Al Mutadid of Seville used the heads of his slaughtered enemies as flower-pots. To gain the means for maintaining their splendour and paying the mercenary soldiers, they fleeced their subjects unmercifully. Their religion was quite on a par with the Catholicism of Caesar Borgia. In such hands the fortunes of Mahometan Spain went to swift ruin, and if they had been its only defenders all would have been regained for Christianity by the begin- ning of the thirteenth century. While they were ravening like wild beasts, or dawdling in the zenana, the whole Christian line advanced. NOTES The Pilgrim Road to Santiago de Galicia is not the least, nor the least interesting of the antiquities of the early Middle Ages in Spain. It may be said to be a Y with a long stem carried to the west. The left-hand prong started from the Pass of Ronces- valles, and crossed Navarre by Pamplona to Puente de la Reina (Queen's Bridge), on the Arga, to the south of the city. The bridge was built by Dona Mayor, wife of Sancho of Navarre, for the use of the pilgrims. It is no longer in existence. Puente de la Reina was the junction of the western with the eastern prong, which began in the Pyrenees at Aspe (Canfranc), and then turned westward. From the junction the now single road ran by *Estella, Logroiio, *Najera, * Santo Domingo de la Calzada (St Dominic of the Causeway, not the founder of the order), Montes de Oca, "^Burgos, Castrojeriz, *Fr6mista (where there are remains of the old causeway of fiat stones), *Sahagun, *Ponferradaj * Villafranca del Bierzo, Puertomarin, Campoleboreiro, *Castanedaj CHAPTER III THE RECONQUEST The difference between the two types of polity which in the eleventh century contended for the possession of Spain can be best illustrated by a simple comparison. While the Moslem world was given up to a scuffle of kites and crows, Alfonso Vth held at Leon, and in 1020, the great council in which he and his queen, Geloria (Elvira), granted the '' Fuero " or franchises of their kingdom. At the other end of the Christian line Ramon Berenger L, the Old {1035-1076) Count of Barcelona, in another great council recognized and confirmed the good customs (Usatges) of Catalonia. On the one side was the Koran, which alters not, the despot, and the scimitar. On the other was a growing world of law, of institutions, and of free men. Much remained to be done, but not a little had been gained. The kingship had ceased to be elective and fluid. It had become hereditary and stable. But the conception of the state as an indivisible entity had not yet been reached. The position of king was still looked upon as a personal status which all sons inherited. It was not only in Spain nor in these early centuries that a division of dominions among a king's sons seemed natural. We know how William the Conqueror divided his dominions at his death. Until the end of the fifteenth century Spanish sovereigns held themselves free to dispose of whatever they might have conquered as they pleased, even if they could not divide what they had inherited. 51 32 SPAIN The apportioning out of a king's dominions by a wiU, and the subdivision of fiefs, or the attempt to hold them in common, were much the practices of the time. The Spanish kings are hardly to be blamed for feeling and thinking as their contem- poraries did. But it is not to be denied that they injured the Christian cause and delayed the reconquest by acting in what to them, their familes and vassals, appeared the fair way. The eleventh century saw several such divisions in Spain. When it began the Christian belt on the north was divided between the kingdom of Leon on the west, the county of Castile, the small corner *' harto pequefio rincon,*' formed by Burgos and its hills, to the east of Leon ; then the kingdom of Navarre ; and at the eastern extremity the county of Barcelona. In the middle century the leadership in the re- conquest was taken by Navarre, which was to play a very minor part in later Spanish history. Sancho, surnamed El Mayor, the Great, grandson of the virago Tota, freed him self from all dictation on the part of potentates north of the Pyrenees, and then turned to extend his kingdom in Spain. He conquered to east and south. On the side of Castile he strengthened himself by marriage with a sister of the last Count Garcia. When Garcia was murdered by the sons of Vela, or Bela, Count of Alava, whom he had dispossessed, Sancho enforced his wife's right of inheritance. Castile was still bound by a vague vassalage to Leon. Bermudo, son of Alfonso v., claimed the county, but a compromise was made. Fernando, Sancho's younger son, married a sister of Bermudo, and was recognized as king in Castile. It was not long before the brothers-in-law came to blows, and Bermudo was driven from Leon. Fernando now became King of Leon and Castile. Leon as the more ancient kingdom was the more dignified. When Sancho died in 1035 he left Navarre and the Basque provinces to his eldest son, Garcia, and divided his conquests THE RECONQUEST 53 to the east between other sons. Ramiro received Aragon (then only the upper waters of the river of that name, a tributary of the Ebro) while Sobrarbe, with Ribagorza, on the southern slope of the Pyrenees, went to Gonzalo. On the speedy death of Gonzalo his share fell to Ramiro Sanchez.^ The two monarchies which were to divide Spain for centuries, and then to join to form the national unity, were now founded. The great reconquest begins with Fernando, the first King of Castile, and Ramiro, the first King of Aragon. But Fernando had to secure his own power. Bermudo could not rest con- tent with his defeat and in 1037 ^^ made an effort to regain Leon. His overthrow and death at Tamaron on the banks of the Arlanzon, a tributary of the Duero, in 1037 S^^e GaUcia to the King of Castile. There was a moment when it was perhaps in Fernando' s power to include Navarre in his dominions. If the division of territories among the sons of a king was a practice of the time, so were the greed and brutality with which the inheritors of parts strove to possess themselves of the whole. In 1054 Garcia of Navarre assailed his brother and perished in battle against him at Atapuerca. But Fernando made no attempt to annex Navarre. He left it to Gracia s son. During all the thirty years of his reign (1035-1065) Fernando, " El Magno,'' The Great, was a model king and warrior of the eleventh century. In 1050, at the Great Council of Coyanza (the modern Valencia de Don Juan), he confirmed the " fueros " granted thirty years before by Alfonso Vth. With his reign the long secluded Christian kingdom of north-west Spain began to enter the brotherhood of European states. The pilgrim road to Santiago ran through his kingdoms, Castile, ^ The reader who does not know Spanish may be told that the termination " ez " is the Latin genitive "is." Ramiro Sanchez is Sancho's Remiro, or Remiro Sancho's son. Patronymics were as unknown in Spain as elsewhere. 54 SPAIN Leon, Galicia. Along it came pilgrims, lay and ecclesiastical, who sought the shrine of the apostle for the good of their souls alone ; the trader who combined piety with profit, and the knight and squire errant, who rode armed first to pray at the tomb of St James and then to carve out fortunes for them- selves from the land of the unbelievers. The eleventh century was an age of much wandering. The sons of the- Norman Tancred of Hautevitle, who won kingdoms in Southern Italy, were only the most gloriously successful of a swarm of champions, the successors of the Vikings and the forerunners of the Crusaders. The castles and manors of France swarmed with sons trained to arms and nothing else : all could not be provided for by being devoted to God in monasteries — into which for the rest they carried their martial habits and incurable pugnacity. Many preferred adventure with lance and sword. Spain received and assimilated an ample share of these soldiers of fortune of the time who took a pair of '' strong arms and legs conform '' to the wars. The Norman knight, who was to be found wherever fighting went along with profit, was not unknown in Spain. But for the most part her recruits were Burgundians. The road was shown by the monks of Cluny, endowed in 910 by William of Acquitaine. They carried their missionary activity over the Pyrenees, and the part they were to play there was great. Their influence reached its height in the reign of Fernando 's son, Alfonso VI., but they were already active when Fernando, having brought his kingdoms to order, and having no farther occasion to fear Navarre, turned heartily to the task of beat- ing down the Moslem. The last ten years of his reign were full of triumphant compaigns — as compaigns were understood in the eleventh century. That is to say, they were not coherent military operations, conducted on a plan to achieve a definite object. They were what the Arabs called " aceifas " or '' acefas/' THE RECONQUEST 55 a word taken from them by the mediaeval Spaniards, which survived in Portuguese. Aceifas were raids undertaken in summer for the purpose of destroying the enemies' crops and extorting ransom or booty. Towns and castles might be taken incidentally, and held if possible. Neither regular armies, nor the resources to maintain them, existed, or could exist. It was possible to retain a captured town or castle only when the conqueror could '' people " his conquest. This process of '' peopling " was a great matter in the history of Christian Spain. A garrison was not a body of professional soldiers, but of soldiers who were to be paid not out of a poor or even non-existent treasury, but by grants of land so given as to tempt them to stay, and this implied that with the grant of land went the grant of the franchise. Serfs and burghers were in revolt against the arbitrary exactions of lords in and out of Spain. In it they were peculiarly fortunate, for so long as land was to be won from the Mahometans, kings, nobles and the Church had every reason to reward all who would settle on their conquered territory by giving them freedom and rights, " fueros.'* They were not only allowed, they were required to possess arms and wear them always. The man who could provide his own horse, hauberk, lance and sword, was free to live '' knightly." The mounted warrior was a '' miles,*' and a miles was a '' caballero," and a caballero was a gentleman. He was not " noble,'' but he lived nobly. These non-noble — or non- " hidalgo "-r-" caballeros," were said to be " de fuero," or were '' caballeros pardos," *' homespun knights." The free carriage, the sense of personal dignity, which have been noted, very rightly, in the genuine Castilian, are inherited from the '' caballeros pardos " or " de fuero." That predial slavery disappeared early in Castille was due to this necessity for paying the men who would adventure to hold the frontier by personal freedom. I have dwelt on the character of these wars of Fernando 56 SPAIN el Magno, and even somewhat forestalled later development, because they show what was the character of the reconquest down to the thirteenth century. For the last ten years of his Hfe he gained ground in Portugal and towards Aragon," desolated the Mahometan kingdom of Toledo, raided far into Andalusia, extorting from the King of Seville tribute and the body of Saint Isidore. The religion of the eleventh century was made up of practices which were held to have a magic efficacy, of a fetichism which adored reliques, and of a dread of hell fire which was to be averted by penance and gifts to the Church. Men sinned violently, submitted to the peni- tential scourge of the Church, to the actual lash, without sense of degradation — and kept the fruits of their crimes with a pacified conscience. Fernando did as his time did. He harried and extorted blackmail, but he let the King of Seville off more or less lightly in consideration of the surrender of St Isidore. Al Motadid, a most cynical ruffian, gave him a body, with outward professions of regret at being forced to part with the glory of his kingdom, and no doubt with inward jeers at the credulous '' polytheist.'* Fernando was worn out in a final '* aceifa " to Valencia, and came back to Leon to die, stripped of his royal robes and stretched on a bed of ashes before the altar of the Church of St Isidore. Being the king of the eleventh century he was Fernando had no conception of the unity of the State. He left Castile, his patrimonial kingdom, to Sancho, his eldest son, his con- quests, Leon and Galicia, to Alfonso and to Garcia respectively. To his daughter Urraca (Maria) he left the town of Zamora and to Elvira Toro. Sancho also was a man of his time. While his mother lived she kept peace among the brothers, but when she died in 1067 Sancho fell upon his brother, Alfonso of Leon, defeated him at Llantada and Volpejar, and imprisoned him. Then he drove Garcia to exile at Seville. He robbed Elvira of Toro, and strove to take Zamora from THE RECONQUEST 57 Urraca. Her knights and burghers fought for her, and one of them, to whom the poets of another generation gave the name of Bellido Dolfos, slew Sancho by treason. Alfonso had escaped to the protection of Cadir, the King of Toledo. He came back when he knew of his brother's death, and as the hereditary character of the monarchy was now well established he was accepted as king. Alfonso was as resolute as Sancho to hold whatever their father had had. When Garcia came back to claim his kingdom of Galicia he threw him into prison and kept him there till he died. When Alfonso had settled his authority at home he took up his hereditary task. Spain was now fairly the land of the perpetual crusade. The popes were stimulating the barons of France to regain it for the Church. At the close of Fernando's reign the Norman William of Montreuil had crossed the Pyrenees, had taken Barbastro in Aragon, and after sacking it ferociously had gone off with his booty. Gregory VII., Hildebrand (1072-1083) , was zealous in promoting these pious wars — on the distinct understanding that what- ever was conquered was to be held of the see of St Peter, for he thought it better that the '' unbelievers should continue to possess it than that Christians should have it to the detri- ment of their souls.'' Such crusades as these would probably have banded the native Christians with the Mahometans. The abbots of Cluny found a better way. By their efforts Alfonso VI. was married to a daughter of Robert, the first Capetian Duke of Burgundy. The King of Leon and Castile had little help to hope for from his father-in-law, for Robert was a poor lord, who lived largely by fleecing the Church, or robbing on the highway. But he had much to gain from the aid of Burgundian chivalry, and the support of the great Cluniac order. The romance writers, who told of knights winning the daughters of the Admiral of Babylon, or becoming- sons-in-law of the Emperor of Trebizond, were but giving a 58 SPAIN poetic version of reality. Henry of Burgundy, brother of the Queen Constance, had just such a fortune. Alfonso married him to his natural daughter Teresa, and made him Count of Porto. He led a Burgundian following to that frontier and there founded the first dynasty of kings of Portugal. Another such champion was that Raymond of Besan9on, from the county of Burgundy (the Freigrafschaft, La Franche Comte), who married Urraca, the daughter of Alfonso and Constance, and became the father of a line of Castilian kings. The monks of Cluny did more than recruit fighting men for the King of Castile. They brought the Spanish Church, which had lived in isolation and still used the ritual of St Isidore (the so-called Mozarabic ritual), into harmony with the universal Church of the west. It was not without a struggle that the monks of Cluny won their way. The Moz- arabic ritual was reluctantly given up. Their war against simony and the laxity of monastries was as arduous in Spain as it was elsewhere. And in Spain they met a particular difficulty. They tried to introduce the whole rigour of French feudalism into a country where it was unknown, and pro- voked violent opposition. But these fruits of their labour came later. Under the first stimulus of their zeal the perpetual crusade of Spain went on apace. The method did not alter. The campaigns were still raids in search of tribute extorted by fire and sword. In 1082 Alfonso stormed across Andalusia as far as Tarifa, then rode his horse into the sea, hurled a javelin in front of him, and took possession, saying, *' This is the last land of Spain, and it is mine.** Raids might produce booty and blackmail, but in 1084 Alfonso made a great permanent conquest. He starved Toledo, a natural fortress on a piece of '' crag and tail '* in a bend of the Tagus, into surrender. Now Toledo had a great fame as having been the capital of the Goths. It was the *' shield of Andalusia/' the advanced post which in the hands THE RECONQUE^T 59 of a friend could cover, or in those of an enemy would menace, the passes through the Sierra Morena. It was a great head- quarters of the Jews. Rumours travel fast among the Mahometan peoples, and the fall of Toledo resounded through- out Islam. The subjects of the kings of the Taifas saw the end close at hand if help did not come from somewhere. The favour their masters showed philosophers offended their orthodoxy. They groaned under exactions which went to support princely profusion or pay tribute to Christian raiders. They began to look across the Straits to Africa where Jusuf ibn Techfin was ruling the kingdom of the Almoravides. The princes looked there, too, longing for his help, but dreading his ambition. Al Motamid of Seville, son and successor of Al Motadid, a prince of literary tastes, and spendthrift habits, had most reason to fear him as being the nearest. Yet he at last decided to call for aid from the new champion of the faith. When he announced his decision in Durbar, his son Al Raschid said, '' Will not Jusuf take our kingdom ? " " Per- haps he will," said Al Motamid, '' but I will not be cursed throughout Islam for betraying the faith, and if the worst is to come I would rather lead camels in Africa than keep pigs in Castile.'' The Almoravides were the leaders of a great revival of Mahometanism, which was then at its full development in Northern Africa, among the Berbers and the Touareg peoples of the desert. It corresponded to the reform of monastici"im and the reformation of the Church under papal guidance, which were then preparing Europe for the Crusades. A colhsion between them was inevitable, and nothing was more natural than that it should begin in Spain. The sovereign of the Almoravides (i.e. the Morabatin or Marabouts, the fight- ing priests of African Islam) heard the call of Al Motamid. After extorting a " basis of operations " at Algeciras he crossed the Straits with an army. Both sides drew their 6o SPAIN forces together in the full assurance that a great, perhaps a decisive, trial of strength was before them. The two hosts met in October 1086 at Zalaca (the ancient Sacralias) near Badajoz. The Christians advanced in the regular manner of French and Spanish chivalry — in one line behind the banners of the king, lords and knights. But they had to deal with a general. Jusuf marshalled the Andalusians under the direct command of Al Motamid, with a '' stiffening " of Africans, in his first line, and he held in hand a strong reserve of his own clansmen and his negro guard, picked men and disciplined soldiers. While the Christians were driving back his first line he swung his reserve across their flank, and rolled them up. The overthrow was utter and the slaughter great. The rout of Zalaca was, in the opinion of the shocked Christian world, more than an answer to the conquest of Toledo. In reahty it was one of those battles which are but " in- cidents in a campaign.'' Jusuf heard of the death of the son whom he had left as governor in Africa, and returned to sup- press consequent troubles. His victory stopped Christian raids and demands for tribute in Andalusia. But these results were negative, and no Moslem advance followed. Soon the Christians rallied and took the offensive. Fresh appeals went to Jusuf. He returned, but it was to stay. The fears of Al Raschid were justified, and in the course of 1090-91 he made himself master of all Moslem Spain except Saragossa. After his death in 1106 even that submitted to his successor AH. With the Almoravides the Arab ceased to be the dominating element in Spanish Mahometanism altogether, and the time of the Moors began. The Berber Prince of the Faithful, the Emir al Mumenin, whose title was hispaniolized as Miramamolin, took the place of the Caliph. Alfonso VI. fought on until his death in 1109, ^^^ ^^ ^^^ essential point he was successful. He held on to Toledo. Even another defeat at Ucles in 1108 did not shake his hold. THE RECONQUEST 6i It embittered his old age, for it cost him the life of his only son, the boy Sancho. The history of the lad is too character- istic of the time to be wholly passed over. His mother, Zaida, who is said to have been a daughter of El Motamid, had been one of the King's concubines. The religion of Alfonso, though no doubt as sincere as his father's, was wholly that of his age. He founded churches and favoured the monks of Cluny, but his household was polygamous. None of his successive wives, nor his numerous " mancebas " (con- cubines), except Zaida, bore him a son, though he had many daughters. After the death of Constance of Burgundy, he caused Zaida to be baptized by the name of Isabel, and made her his Queen. The boy (he was hardly ten) was sent to the host to represent his father, and was slain in the battle, to- gether with his foster father. The King's only legitimate successor was his daughter by Constance of Burgundy, now the widow of Raymond of Besan9on, or as the Spaniards said of Lorraine. A son had been born of their marriage, the future Alfonso VII., but he was a child in arms. The nobles insisted that Urraca should take a husband to lead the army. They chose for her her cousin, Alfonso of Aragon. Since the time of Ramiro Sanchez the kingdom of Aragon had grown. Ramiro fell in battle with the Mahometans of the Ebro valley in 1063. His son, Sancho Ramirez, carried on the war with success. A f atricidal struggle in Navarre between the sons of Garcia, enabled him to annex that kingdom. His son, Pedro I., went on with increased power, and when he died in 1104 he was succeeded by his son, Alfonso I. It will be seen that the marriage was uncanonical for they were cousins within the prohibited degrees. That would have mattered little if husband and wife could have lived in peace. But as the Spanish historian, Sandoval, candidly states the case, Urraca was defamed for her light Hfe, and her husband endeavoured to make her mend her ways, which bred mortal 62 SPAIN enmity between them. The quarrels of the two plunged Castile into a witch's sabbath of very obscure disorder. The case was complicated by the existence of the boy Alfonso Raimundez, the son of Urraca's first marriage. The story is so little known that it is aseless to try to tell it. But there were two fixed points in the ever-shifting confusions of the struggle. Alfonso of Aragon went on with the conquest of the Ebro valley. In p8« he took Saragossa, and in 1120 con- firmed his conquest by a brilliant victory at Cutanda. It was the most fruitful of the nineteen battles of Alfonso, '' El Batallador," the Battler. Meanwhile the boy Alfonso Raim- undez was growing up in Galicia, under the care of one of the most notable Spaniards of the age, the Bishop, afterwards the first Archbishop, of Santiago, Diego Gelmirez. Across trans- actions which are not intelligible — a perpetual shifting of alliances between mother, son,- and stepfather (if the name can be used in face of the fact that the unhappy marriage of Urraca and El Batallador was pronounced uncanonical by the Pope), battles, flights, truces and breach of the truce, — Alfonso Raimundez fought his way to the front. He outlived his mother, who died in 1126, and the King of Aragon, who fell in battle, or died just after a defeat in 1134. The obscurity of this age of Castilian history is particularly unfortunate for the reign of Alfonso VII.^ From his actions he can be judged to have been a sovereign who followed a political ideal — a somewhat fantastic one in the circumstances, and a selfish one in the sense that if success would have been for the good of Spain it would also have brought a great access of power to him. It is to be observed that he loved to call ^ The reader should be warned that there is a certain confusion in the numbering of these many Alfonsos. El Batallador is sometimes counted among the kings of Castile, because of his marriage and the homage paid him by the nobles. In this case he appears as Alfonso VII., and Alfonso Raimundez was the Vlllth. But the other custom has prevailed. THE RECONQUEST 63 himself '' The King of the men of the Two Religions." He resumed the raids of his grandfather and great grandfather, but he showed a tendency to put vassal Mahometan princes in possession, and to call them to his great councils on the same footing as other nobles. We may let his raids pass, for they are monotonous and had no permanent results. The most fruitful of them all, the taking of Almeria in alliance with the Italian trading repubhcs, did not prove a permanent gain. The Moors, as we must now call them, had been driven back. They had lost the ''upper frontier" when Saragossa fell to the King of Aragon, and were now confined to the east coast beginning at Valencia and to the xountry south of the Sierra Morena. Even there Alfonso VIII. was for a time in posses- sion of Cordoba. He gave it to a vassal Moorish prince who soon lost it. The real interest of his reign lies rather in what might fairly be called his domestic pohcy. To judge by his acts he strove to unite the whole peninsula under himself as Emperor. In 1 135 he was actually crowned Emperor at Leon in the presence of princes and nobles of Southern France and of Spain, and of some of his Moorish vassals. The Emperor of *' The Holy Roman Empire " and Pope protested. But Alfonso had no universal empire in his mind, only the overlordship of the whole Iberian peninsula. It was a fantastic scheme, for the country was very far from ripe for union. In Portugal Alfonso Enriquez — the son of Teresa and Henry (Henrique in Spanish) of Burgundy — ^was in fact busy preparing the com- plete separation of his fief from the crown of Castile. So far, however, he was but weak. Elsewhere the appearances were favourable to '' the Emperor." The " Batallador " had left no children. His unhappy marriage with Urraca had seem- ingly turned him into a woman hater. By his will he left his kingdom to the Knights of the Temple and of St John. The Navarrese then broke away from Aragon. The Aragonese 64 SPAIN put the will aside (though they afterwards gave an indemnity to the Templars) and proclaimed Alfonso's brother the Monk Ramiro, as King. Ramiro accepted the crown, married, and when a daughter, Petronilla, was born to him, returned to the cloister, 1137. His subjects were left with a new-born baby, and that a girl. Though it was not a matter of positive law, the belief of the Aragonese was that the throne could not be ' held by a woman. The position was one of no small difficulty, but Ramiro had betrothed his daughter to Berenger IV., Count of Barcelona. The Aragonese, who have generally more poli- tical good sense than most Spaniards, accepted the doctrine that though a woman could not reign she could transmit the right to a husband. Berenger was accepted as King. His marriage with Petronilla took place in 1150, at which date she was fourteen years of age. Their son, Ramon (Raymond), changed his name to Alfonso when he succeeded his father in 1162, and in him the Hues of Sancho el Mayor and of Wifred Lo Velu were united. The kingdom of Aragon was now fully formed. During the infancy of Petronilla there had been weakness and division in Aragon and Navarre. Alfonso of Castile had been tempted to impose his power on both, and as a matter of fact the King, chosen in Navarre on the death of the Batallador, Garcia Ramon, a descendant of the old hne, and Ramon Berenger in Aragon, '' commended '' themselves to him, and he could fairly claim to be overlord of all Spain. Such a settlement was certain to be temporary, and indeed Alfonso VII. undid his own work when he left Castile to his eldest son, Sancho, and Leon to Fernando, the second son. The reader may well grow weary of the perpetual return of the same events with the same consequences. We will hurry over the wars immediately following the death of Alfonso VII. Of course the brothers fought, but Sancho died too soon to have time to conquer Leon, and Castile, which had now spread over the Guadarrama to the Sierra Morena, that is into New Castile, %, zz"' 1^H||[^HH| ■"^ lyU^lf^^^'^l^^ ilss^SBtmimmk^KK Bi^^^^^^^H K-^ ^ ^^m^^JBP M HKraH^HIHL^i^^l 1 liSv^'^ 1 ■P S^ -.£sSiS«iiCf >i:^'5. ...- r" J^^H ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^K't 1 .^B^H THE RECONQUEST 65 was too strong to be mastered. The minority of Sancho's little son was a medieval minority in the most ample extent — that is to say, a time of anarchy, of conflicts of nobles, who strove to get possession of the King and make use of his name for their own ends. In spite of it all the people grew. The townsmen of Toledo kept their frontier. To the west of them two churchmen, Raimundo, a Frenchman, and Abbot of Fitero, and the monk Diego Velazquez, did a considerable work. They took the menaced frontier town of Calatrava in charge, preached a crusade, and collected a following which they shaped into an order on the model of the Templars — the Knights of Calatrava. In 1166, while he was still a mere boy, Alfonso VIII. was declared of age at Toledo. By 1180 the realm had again been brought to order. Alfonso, who bears the name of '' The Noble," is an attractive figure among the kings of Castile. He showed a moderation unknown to his more imaginative father. He did his best to live in peace with his turbulent uncle, Fernando of Leon, and with Fernando's son Alfonso, who bore the unpleasant name of '' El Baboso,'' the Slobberer. The unfortunate man was apparently an epileptic, who was subject to fits which caused him to foam at the mouth. The history of the time is distracted by the name Alfonso. There was Alfonso of Castile, Alfonso of Aragon, Alfonso of Leon, and Alfonso Enriquez in Portugal. He of Castile dominated them all. By his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine he became son-in-law of our Henry II. Their daughter, Blanca, became the mother of St Louis of France. He subdued the " broken men '* of his anarchical minority, the " foragidos " or outlaws^ who swarmed in the mountains, and from the best of them he formed the order ^ " Foragido," one who is driven out ; " fuera," the Latin " foris " ; c/. the Italian " fuoniscite." They were not necessarily common criminals. Dante w^ " fuoruscitx)," 66 SPAIN of St James of the Sword. He founded the first Spanish university, the " studium generale '' of Palencia, and he took up the sacred task of the reconquest. In 1177, in alHance with Aragon, he conquered Cuenca and spread New Castile to the west. The Archbishop of Toledo with his vassals, and the knights of Calatrava raided far and wide in Andalusia. This destructive inroad provoked the last fierce struggle on equal terms between Moslem and Christian. The Almoravides had declined soon and thoroughly. In Africa they were assailed by a new religious movement — the revolt of the Unitarians or '' Almohades,'' who fought to demonstrate that he who speaks or thinks of Allah as possess- ing attributes insults the unity of the divinity. In Spain their power fell to pieces and a new crop of Reyes de Taifas arose. The Almohades pushed their attack on the Almora- vides in Spain. The Miramamolin Abu Yusuf Yakub Mansur raised an army, and Christianity was threatened. The King of Castile endeavoured to form a league of the peninsula's sovereigns to meet him. Promises were given and broken, and Alfonso was left to fight and to be overpowered at Alarcos. Once more, and for the last time, the Moors had won a great victory, which had but negative results. The Almohade host did swarm over the Sierra Morena, and advance as far as Cuenca and Madrid. The Christians were divided, for Alfonso VIII. had been angered by the breach of faith of the other kings, and there was war all round his border. But little by little he won his way. He made truce with the Moors, . pacified Alfonso of Leon and married him to his daughter Berengaria. He gained the Basque country from Navarre, and made a treaty with Alfonso of Aragon by which they defined their '' spheres of influence " in the peninsula. When his house was again in order and his hands were free Alfonso organized a great crusade. It was favoured by the Pope, and it brought a swarm of adventurers to Spain. But THE RECONQUEST 67 the crusades had been degraded in the war against the Albi- genses. The crusaders who joined Alfonso in 1212 were largely mere ruffians who came for plunder. When their hopes were disappointed, and they felt the heat of a Spanish summer, they went back committing outrages. It was with a native army of his own subjects, of Aragonese led by their king, Pedro II., of Templars from Portugal, and of Navarrese, that Alfonso, on the i6th July 1212, won the '' crowning mercy '* at Las Navas de Tolosa, at the southern entry to the Pass of Despeiiaperros through the Sierra Morena. The Moors had fortified the pass, but it can be turned at several points. A shepherd acted as guide, and the Christian host reached the plain. The battle appears to have been a hammer and tongs affair without manoeuvring, and the Christians drove the Moors before them. The Miramamolin Mahomet Nasir fled to Africa, and the superiority passed finally to the Christian side.^ Yet the fruits of victory were not to be reaped for years. Another period of confusion paralysed the Christian king- doms. Alfonso VIII. died in 1214, leaving as his successor his younger and only surviving son, Henry. The guardianship was entrusted to his elder daughter Berengaria. We must now turn back for a moment to Leon. Alfonso IX., son of Fernando, had been first married to Teresa of Portugal. They were close cousins, and the marriage was declared uncanonical by the Pope. For years Alfonso paid no attention to papal exhortations. At last he yielded and separated from Teresa, by whom he had two daughters. Then he proved the sincerity of his repentance by marrying Beren- garia. The union was, of course, arranged for political reasons, and the httle attention all the parties paid to the well-known ^ A " nava " is a flat valley surrounded by abrupt hills. Las Navas de Tolosa lie not far from the scene of the defeat of Dupont's army in 1808. 68 SPAIN laws of the Church was characteristic of the age. Again the Pope thundered and interdicted, and again Alfonso paid no attention until it suited him so to do. It should be added that Leonese bishops were found to marry him, and to baptize Fernando, the son of this marriage, in spite of the Pope. The Head of the Church was far off and his weapons were spiritual. The King was at hand, and his wrath was to be feared. After some years Alfonso once more came to see the error of his ways, and there are indications that Berengaria was heartily tired of him. They separated, and the Pope was pacified. He recognized the legitimacy of their son Fernando. The end of the story is not the least characteristic part of it. No sooner had the King of Leon withdrawn from his uncanonical union with Berengaria than he returned to his equally un- canonical spouse Teresa. Berengaria was not allowed to exercise her powers as Regent in peace. When the King was a child anarchy raised its head. Disorderly nobles, headed by the ever-turbulent house of Lara, took up arms, and they were aided by the King of Leon, who claimed the Regency for himself. The anarchy might have lasted for years, but the little King Henry was killed by the fall of a tile from the roof, while he was playing with his pages in the court of his palace at Valladohd. Berengaria, who had many admirers and supporters, was at once proclaimed Queen in her own right [reina proprietaria). She had sum- moned her son to join her, and, with abnegation and good sense, she resigned the crown to him. She had need of a man to lead the host, and she could rely on the love and respect of her son, which never failed so long as she lived. His son, Alfonso X., El Sabio (the Learned), in his history of Spain has left a truly dehghtful picture of his father. In Fernando the line of the kings of the Reconquest culminated. He was a true King of Chivalry in the high sense of a much- abused word — a knight on the throne, vaHant, kindly, hospit- THE RECONQUEST 69 able, open-handed, and a lover of music. Withal he was emphatically the son of his mother, a statesman and a ruler. He had to begin by driving his intolerable father out of Castile and compelling him to renew the homage due from him for Leon. With a becoming air of the respect due from a son, but with all the firmness befitting a king asserting his rights, the son of Berengaria brought his father to a sense of his position. Then he crushed the Laras. Always he had behind him the devotion to his true interests, and the wisdom of Berengaria. By her diplomacy he was married to Beatrice, daughter of Philip of Swabia, the Hohenstaufen. Their son was Alfonso X. After the death of Beatrice, Fernando married Joan of Aumale, of the house of France. Their daughter was the Eleanor of Castile who married our Edward I. When his feet were firm in the stirrups Fernando took up the work of the Reconquest. He advanced by successive campaigns, each of which left a permanent gain. In 1226 the death of his father suspended his advance for a space. Alfonso IX. had attempted his final piece of mischief in his last years. He tried to leave Leon to his daughters by Teresa of Portugal. But it was an age of sensible women. Teresa and Berengaria united to defeat the spiteful manoeuvre of their common husband. The daughters obediently resigned their claims in return for handsome pensions. Fernando was received as King. Leon and Castile were reunited never to separate again, and now it was no longer the united kingdom of Leon and Castile, but of Castile and Leon. With the united powers of the central tableland at his command, Fernando conquered Andalusia. Cordoba fell in 1236 and Sevilla in 1248. It was a proof of the growth of the now fully pre- dominant Christian kingdom that a fleet raised on the Can- tabrian coast had a large share in the capture of the city. Fernando was helped by the anarchy of the Moorish states. The Almohades were in dechne, attacked by the Beni Marin 70 SPAIN in Africa, and unable to control the new kings of Taifas who arose in Andalusia. Some of them served Fernando and did him homage. Among them was Al Hamar, founder of the Nasride dynasty of Granada, which lingered on till 1492. He was also aided from another quarter, but to explain this inter- vention we must again go back. Mention has already been made of the marriage of Ramon Berenguer of Barcelona to Petronilla, which united the county of Barcelona to the kingdom of Aragon. The house of Barcelona, originally one of several counts of the Spanish march, had partly, by fortunate marriages, or the falhng in of the appanages of younger sons, but mainly by a prevailing miHtary and poHtical capacity of its own, formed a substantial power to the north as well as to the south of the eastern Pyrenees. Alfonso II., son of Raman Berenger and Petron- illa, gained ground in both directions. His family had already become free of all vassalage to the King of the French. Alfonso himself was freed of all obhgation to pay homage or render service to the crown of Castile, by his cousin, Alfonso VIII., in return for the help he gave at the taking of Cuenca. There was a time when it was no mere dream of foolish ambition that the house of Aragon — the inclyt casa d'Arago — might gain the sovereignty of all France south of the Loire. Alfonso's son, Peter II., a crusader in Spain, a raider on the land of the Moors, one of the conquerors of Las Navas de Tolosa, must have cherished some such hopes. It was probably to strengthen his position that he did homage for his kingdom of Aragon to the Pope. The measure looks strange, but the case was com- pHcated for him by the Albigensian crusades. He wa^. bound to resist the northern crusaders, and yet he could not wish to incur the reproach of favouring the heretics. To hold of the Pope was a way of freeing himself to oppose Simon of Montfort. But Peter, a king of Troubadours and a man of outrageously immoral life, was no match for Simon. He fell THE RECONQUEST 71 at Muret in 1213, leaving his kingdom to his son James, a boy of three. The minority of James passed in the inevitable disorders of feudalism when the King was a child. But he grew to be the glory of his house. He was a hard fighter and fitted for the work. Even as a lad his physical strength was great. His mummy, which is preserved in the cathedral of Tarragona, shows that he was nearly seven feet high. And he was em- phatically not only a knight, as his father had been, but a king. The ambitions which he cherished in France came to nothing, for the day was passed when the House of Aragon could hope to rule up to the Loire ; but he increased his king- dom to the east and south by his conquests of the Balearic Islands, 1228, and of Valencia, 1238. He lived on good terms with the King of Castile, and at the end of his life, in pursu- ance of a treaty between them, he helped to conquer Murcia, not for himself, but for the CastiHan sovereign. With the death of Fernando of Castile in 1252, and of James the Conqueror in 1276, the two great Spanish kingdoms, Castile and Leon and Aragon, were finally constituted. Portugal had thrown off all subordination to the crown of Castile, having been notably helped by the unfortunate division of the dominions of the '' Emperor " Alfonso VH. Navarre was shut in, and tended to follow France rather than Spain. It was of so little consequence that it can for the present be left aside. The crown of Castile and Leon, and what the Castilians named the coronet of Aragon, divided Spain between them. Granada was an enclave of Africa which existed in subordination to the greater Christian kingdom. There was a wide difference between these two states, in geographical character and in their internal organization. Aragon may be described as forming a rough triangle with its apex far up the Ebro, its basis on the Mediterranean, stretching from Narbonne to Murcia, and with an outpost in the Balearic 72 SPAIN Islands. Castile stretched from the Cantabrian coast to the Straits of Gibraltar, over all the central tableland. Obviously the first was a maritime state, or at least had the power to be one, with its outlook to the east. The second was a con- tinental state, with windows to the sea north and south. There was every probability that the fortunes of the two would be radically different. Aragon, under which name were included Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands in Spain, with the trans-Pyrenean possessions of its princes, would move eastward. The natural line of advance for Castile was across the straits into Africa. And if their outward fortunes were like to differ, they were also divided profoundly in all respects. The language of Aragon was a form of the Southern French, the Provengal, or so-called Limosi. Castile had developed its own modifica- tion of Latin. Aragon was feudal. No part of medieval Europe was more thoroughly feudalized than Catalonia. It became feudal under French influence. Valencia and the Balearic Islands were organized feudally at the conquest. But though there was feudalism in Castile, it was not, properly speaking, a feudal kingdom. It was the essential character of feudalism that jurisdiction went with the possession of land, and that men were bound, not by a common subjection to the State, but by benefaction and loyalty. The lord granted a benefice (or fief), the vassal received. The lord demanded service in return for his grant, and the vassal looked to be pro- tected by the lord whom he served. It is an organization of society which has had, and probably always will have, its admirers. Nor is their admiration wholly misplaced. The feudal relation, when it coincided with a fortunate moral quahty in the men, did help to develop the noble sentiment of loyalty to a very high degree.^ The weakness of feudahsm ^ The reader who wishes t6 see, not a poetical picture, which is always subject to suspicion, but the direct testimony of a credible witness. THE RECONQUEST 73 was just that it exacted for its smooth working a higher level of virtue than can reasonably be expected from average human nature. Its evils are copiously illustrated by the history of the crown of Aragon. If the possession of excessive power by great nobles, if grants of land, privileges, jurisdictions and exemptions by the King, if the common use ofThe words Lord and Vassal are enough to constitute feudalism, then the kingdom of Castile and Leon was feudal. But they are not. The essential principles of feudalism, that jurisdiction went with an estate in the land, and that the vassal's obedience was due only as return for a benefice, and to the man from whom he held, and to the King through that man alone, were never recognized in Castile and Leon. Through the Leonese royalty, which was the direct representative of the kingdom of the Goths, the medieval royalty of Castile inherited the principles of the Roman law as embodied in the Visigoth code, the Forum Judicum, the Fuero Juzgo. In theory the sovereignty re- sided in the person of the King. In long minorities, and under weak kings, the power to enforce his right was lacking, but the right itself was always there in the laws. When the King granted '' fueros " to the cities or to rural communities, he weakened his power but not his right. When the crown was should read the chronicle of Ramon de Muntaner. This Valencian gentleman, of Catalan descent, and vassal of the " inclyt casa d'Arago," was a knight pure and simple. He tells his own life, and by what he takes for granted, by what he implies, far more than by what he says, he shows in plain, soldierly narrative, how manly, how noble a type of man could be shaped under the inspiration of the sentiment of feudal loyalty. His chronicle, written in his native Valencian dialect, is pubUshed by the Literarische Verein, in Stuttgart (1844). There is a French translation by Buchon, 1827, and a Spanish translation by Bofarrul, i860. This is a convenient place to note that the title Don (Dominus) is Castilian. The Aragonese equivalent was " En," the last s^dlable of Mossen = mi Seiior, or Senyor = Monseigneur En Ramon, not Don Ramon, is the correct form for Aragon. 74 SPAIN weak the chartered communities grasped at what did not by law belong to them. They falsified charters and advanced ungrounded claims, which they made good by disorderly force. Castile suffered from repeated and prolonged minorities. In fact it was as disorderly as ever was any feudal state. But this was pure anarchy, due to the fact that the absolute monarchy depended, in ages when the State was poor and a standing army did not exist, on the energy and capacity of the King. The disorders of a feudal state were the natural fruits of feudalism. The_essential difference between the two is copiously illustrated by the fortunes of the kingdoms of Castile and of Aragon during the two and a half centuries or so which separate the close of the epoch of the great reconquest from \the estabhshment of the '' absolute " monarchy of the Cathohc sovereigns. NOTES Though the end of the great reconquest makes a division in the political history of Spain, it does not correspond to any division in its artistic life. Therefore notes on the buildings of later medieval times can be left to the close of the following chapter. I take this opportunity to say that if I have told the history of the reign of Alfonso VI. without naming the Cid, the omission is deliberate. The Cid Campeador is a creature of literature. That he had an original is true. Ruy Diaz de Bivar, El Mio Cid, lived, fell out with the King, married Ximena, fought for his own hand on the frontier, among the Moors and against Chris- tians, a banished man, and made himself master of Valencia, which his widow was compelled to leave, and which was re- occupied by the Almoravides. He was astute, faithless, ferocious, and a champion of great valour. But if he had never lived, the course of the reconquest would have been the same. I can see no more reason for telling his history in a short history of Spain, than for telhng the deeds of Muno Affonso, who also was a real man, a champion, and a hero of romance. But he and not a few others we know of lacked a sacred bard. CHAPTER IV MEDIEVAL SPAIN The epoch of the reconquest had been fruitful in great achievements which had lasting results. From the middle of the thirteenth century until the close of the fifteenth the history of Spain was not wholly, but was very largely, one of barren confusion, of a scuffling of kites and crows, wherein courtiers and nobles played much the same parts as we have seen performed by the poHticians and barrack-yard con- spirators who have made '' pronunciamientos/' The mere events of such a time may be passed over rapidly. Of the two polities which now divided much the greater part of the peninsula between them, Aragon was the more pros- perous and the better governed. But Castile, the larger of the two, provides the main stream of Spanish history. It was the singular misfortune of Castile that there were four long minorities in the ten reigns which cover the period between the death of Fernando " El Santo '' and the accession of the Catholic sovereigns. This of itself was a disaster in a State where so much depended on the capacity of the King. But it was an even greater evil that one only of these ten kings showed a respectable faculty fo/'^government — Alfonso XL — and that he died in early middle life. Alfonso X., El Sabio (1252-1284), of whom better things are to be said in other connections, was incapable in practical affairs. His descent through his mother from the house of Swabia tempted him to compete for the Empire when the 75 76 SPAIN Hohenstaufen line came to the ruinous end of its struggle with the Papacy. On that delusion he wasted time and treasure. He endeavoured to raise money by debasing the coinage, to the injury and wrath of his subjects. But his worst fault was, that though he claimed to be, above all else, a law-giver, he set the bad example of ridding himself of disobedient subjects by pure murder. The death of his eldest son, Fernando, nicknamed of the Wart (de la Cerda), from a big one he was born with, took place in the King's life-time, leaving two sons by his wife, a lady of the house of France. Alfonso's second son, Sancho, then advanced a claim which was not inconsistent with medieval opinion. He said that as the eldest surviving son, he was the nearest representative of the King, and therefore entitled to succeed in preference to the grandsons, the children of Fernando de la Cerda. The doctrine was disputable and generally rejected, but it served as a sufficient excuse to the discontented nobles and cities. Sancho was recognized as heir by an assembly which he summoned and professed to consider as a national parlia- ment. The old King died, deserted and broken-hearted, at Seville. Sancho, called " El Bravo " [1284-1295), which we may most accurately translate by The Fierce, spent his reign in one continual ravening fight with his nobles and brothers. He died, and left his kingdom to a child, Fernando IV. {1295- 1312). Now followed a long minority, an interval of anarchy in which the kingdom was torn by the intrigues and violence of the King's uncles, of nobles, and the partisans of the sons of Fernando de la Cerda. The brutal scene, in which no question of principle was at stake, is relieved only by the noble figure of the boy king's mother, Maria de MoHna. She could not avert civil war, but she did save her son, and the unity of the kingdom. Fernando lived long enough to prove ungrateful to his mother, then died, leaving an infant son MEDIEVAL SPAIN 77 and another minority. Maria de Molina used her wisdom and her just influence on behalf of her grandson, Alfonso XI. (1312-1350). Alfonso, variously known as the " Implacable " or as *' He of the Rio Salado/' was, as his chronicler says of him, " a very great king." When he grew up he played his part manfully, rooting out robber barons and knights who descended from castles perched on the '' Sierras " to plunder and extort blackmail. He spent half his life in the saddle, and ruled '* from the stirrup." And he discharged the main international function of a King of Castile, which was to shield Europe from the invasion of African and Moslem barbarism. The Almohades had given place to the Beni Marin in Morocco. In 1340 they led a host into Spain, and were utterly defeated by Alfonso at the Rio Salado, near Tarifa. By the capture of Algeciras he deprived them of their basis of operations in Andalusia, and by the organization of a good fleet he shut the straits. His death at the siege of Gibraltar in 1350 was a disaster to his kingdom. Yet Alfonso XI. was a king of the degraded chivalry of the fourteenth century. He neglected his wife, a Portuguese princess, and her son, and he lived openly with a paramour, Leonor de Guzman, who bore him several sons. In his early years he had rid himself of his turbulent great-uncle, Don Juan El Tuerto (in the strict sense the Squint-Eyed, but by extension the Evil-Disposed), by inviting him to the palace and murdering him. The father ate the sour grapes, the children's teeth were set on edge. The Queen came into possession of power embittered and hungry for revenge. While she ruled in the name of her son Peter (1350-1369) she murdered Leonor de Guzman. Her son followed her example. Attempts have been made at various times to relieve Peter of the epithet of ** The Cruel " which his con- temporaries gave him. That many of his nobles were false and anarchical is true, and his father, grandfather, and great- 78 SPAIN grandfather had set him the example of enforcing authority by murder. But that was the only part of their conduct which he followed. No other king of Castile made such an abuse of his power as ''Rey Neto y absoluto.'* His reign is one long story of butcheries of men, women, and children, and church- men. He treated his wife, Blanche of Bourbon, with brutahty, and if he did not positively order her murder, he drove her to death. He lived with his concubine, Maria de Padilla, as openly as his father had hved with Leonor de Guzman, and he was not true to her. His bastard brother, Henry of Trasta- mara, and his nobles were driven to invent the story that he was himself a bastard, and to rise in arms against him. How they called in the swarm of mercenaries left unemployed by the peace of Bretigny ; how Peter fled before them, and Henry was proclaimed king ; how Peter took refuge with the Black Prince at Bordeaux ; how his daughters by Maria de Padilla were married to the sons of Edward HI., Edmund of Langley, and John of Gaunt ^ ; how he was replaced on the throne by the Black Prince ; and how he repaid his ally, are stories which belong to our history as much as to that of Castile. When the Black Prince had retired, sick at heart with disgust at the beastly ferocity of his ally, and ruined in health by the malarial fever he caught in the marshes of Valladolid, Henry of Trastamara returned with a following of exiles and French mercenaries. Peter was defeated, and murdered by the hand of his bastard brother, Henry de Trastamara, in the tent of Bertrand de Gueschn, at Montiel in La Mancha. With Peter ended the '' old kings." The hne of Henry of Trastamara (1369-1379) was in some sort in the same position as the House of Lancaster in England. They were ^ Through the marriage of Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, to Isabel of Castile, the ro5^al family of Great Britain descends from Maria de Padilla and Peter the Cruel. MEDIEVAL SPAIN 79 not fully legitimate, and as they depended largely on voluntary support, they could not venture to exercise authority with the same ferocity as their predecessors. They were insignifi- cant kings. Henry helped the French against England, and did something to pacify his kingdom. His son John was defeated in an attempt to enforce his hereditary right to the crown of Portugal, where the legitimate line had ended. French soldiers fought for Castile and Enghsh for Portugal. The marriage of John's successor, H^nry III., to a daughter of John of Gaunt and of Constance of Castile, was the Spanish equivalent for the marriage of our Henry VII. to Ehzabeth of York. It united competing claims to the crown. Henry III. (1388-1406) gave good promise, but he, too, died young. He figures among Castilian kings as ''El Doliente,'' The Sufferer. Again Castile endured a minority — less disturbed than some others, because the King's uncle, Fernando of Antequera, kept order, till he was chosen (how, we shall see) to be king in Aragon, and then the confusion was never quite so bad as it had sometimes been. Henry's son, John IL (1406-1453), reigned long and never ruled at all. At the best times of his reign he was only the cloak of his able favourite, Alvaro de Luna, The Constable. Space forbids any attempt to record the events of a whirl of rebellion and intrigue. Alvaro was deserted by his master and died on the scaffold. Henry IV. (1453-1474), called among CastiHan kings ''El Impotente," The Impotent, was a pitiable figure ; but what has to be said of him will find its place in the life of his sister \Isabeli " The Catholic," with whom a new day came for Spain. "While the energies of Castile were wasted on civil strife, the kingdom of Aragon was playing a conspicuous part in the hfe of the Mediterranean world. When James the Conqueror died in 1274 he had formed a strong kingdom. It is true that he followed the habitual course of Spanish kings, who held it to be their right to treat their conquests as 8o SPAIN private estates. He left the Balearic Islands to his younger son James, to be held as a kingdom, and as ''an honour " (i.e, a fief for which no service was due, sine ullo servicio) of the crown of Aragon. But though this division bred fratri- cidal strife, it was not so disastrous as the successive separa- tions of Castile and Leon. The Balearic kingdom had been a brief existence, and its fortunes may best be told at once to leave the field free for Aragon. Between 1262, when the Conqueror erected Mallorca (Majorca) into a kingdom, and 1344, there were three kings : James II., Sancho I., James III. They were too feeble to possess real independence. They were menaced by their cousins of Aragon, and as they also possessed the county of Montpelier, they were exposed to the hostihtj; of the kings of France. They were driven from the islands after a disgusting story of chicane and murder by Pedro IV. in 1344. A phantom king of Majorca, James IV., lingered for a time a mere pawn in the politics of Aragon and France With Pedro III. (1274-1285) Aragon came into the politics of Italy. He began his reign by renewing his father^s refusa to recognize the suzerainty of the Pope. His marriage witli Constance, daughter of Manfred of Beneventum, gave him s claim to intervene in Sicily and Naples. His theoretical rights would have been a feeble resource against the authority of the Pope and the military power of Charles of Anjou, the papal champion in southern Italy. The first years of his reign were spent in subduing his rebellious nobles, who made a pretext of a disputed succession in the Pyrenean county of Urgel to rise in arms against him. The bulk of his subjects were loyal, and Peter made the nobles understand that his hand could be as heavy as his father's, and enforced his clairr to the homage of his brother James, the King of Majorca When he was master in his own house, he entered resolutely into the great conspiracy against Charles of Anjou, organized by the Sicihan, John of Procida, and the Greek emperors in MEDIEVAL SPAIN 8i the East. The author of a short history of Spain must exercise a certain virtue when he finds himself at the threshold of the wars of Anjou and Aragon for the possession of Naples and Sicily. The story is full of passion, of events, and of great characters. But it would lead us far, and our task is to see what it meant for Spain. We must not forget that in the eyes of contemporaries there was as complete a distinction between Spaniards, the subjects of the Crown of Castile and Leon, and the Aragonese as between Englishmen and Scots. But while Aragon was fighting for its own hand it was preparing the way for the Spanish intervention in Italy in the sixteenth century. King Peter inherited from his father a protectorate over the Berber kingdom of _Tunis. Fratricidal wars among the Tunisian princes gave him a plausible excuse for intervention, whether to promote the commercial interests of his subjects or to strike in when the opportunity should come in Naples. He was on the Tunisian coast with his fleet when the '' Sicilian Vespers " (31st March 1282) broke out in premature fury, and the massacre of the Angevine soldiery. He landed at once and with the hearty good will of the people took the crown of Sicily. From 1282 till the signing of the peace of Calatabellota in 1302, the House of Aragon was in permanent strife with the House of Anjou. This rivalry brought with it a quarrel with the Pope. A crusade was declared against Aragon, and in 1285 Philip III., King of France, invaded Catalonia in alliance with the King of Majorca. The invasion was repelled, partly through the desperate defence made in Gerona, but mainly because the French fleet, on which the army relied for supplies, was destroyed in a campaign of extraordinary skill and vigour by the Admiral of Aragon, the Sicilian Norman Roger de Lauria.^ The French were ^ This is the Spanish form of his name ; Ruggiero di Luria, or deU' Oria, is the Italian. 82 SPAIN terribly mauled in the Pass of Pannisars during their retreat. Yet Aragon was overtasked, and when Peter died in November 1285 the was resigned to restoring Sicily to the Pope. But his sons were not, nor were the Sicilians. Alfonso III. (1285- 1291), who inherited Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, and James, who received Sicily, went on with the fight. Alfonso had too much to do at home to intervene effectually in Italy — the task of subduing his cousins of Majorca and Roussillon, and the rebellious nobles of Aragon. The nobles extorted from him in 1287 the famous privilege called of the Union, which gave them a chartered right to rebel. He, too, would have resigned Sicily, but his brother James would not. James , however, was heir, for Alfonso was childless. When he succeeded to the throne, the same situation was repeated, for while he would have given up Sicily, his son Fadrique, backed up by the people, resisted. The end was that Fadrique remained in possession of Sicily with the title of King of Trinacria. James turned to the ever-renewed task of suppressing aristocratic anarchy at home, and he also succeeded in making himself master of Sardinia at the cost of a war with the Pisans. He had contests and wars with Castile over frontier questions. Alfonso J V., known as the Benign, who succeeded inli327, reigned till 1337,) in compara- tive peace, but did his best to prepare another civil war for his kingdom by cutting a new state out of it for the benefit of his children by a second marriage. The scheme was defeated by the son of his first marriage, Peter, diversely known as '* The Ceremonious " and as '' Lord Peter of the Dagger " (En Per del Punyalet) . Peter IV. (1337-1387) was such a ruler as Machiavelli imagined in his prince, a wholly political being, who worked for political ends without pity or scruple, in the use of those cruel 01 crafty methods which seemed to be profitable to the State. We will not dwell on the dreary story of his wars MEDIEVAL SPAIN 83 with his namesake Peter the Cruel of Castile. He aided Alfonso. XL to defeat the Benimarin at the battle of the Rio Salado. He annexed the Balearic Islands finally. He fought and negotiated to right and to left. But the capital achievement of his long reign was the subjection of the nobles. The struggle of King and Aristocracy had to be fought out. He was checked, and more than once compelled to draw back for a time, but his perseverance was never wearied, and after routing the nobles of Aragon at Epila (1348) he remained the real master of his kingdom. Peter's revenge on persons was ferocious, but his use of his victory was statesmanlike. He forced the beaten nobles to surrender the charter of the Union and cut it to pieces with his dagger so eagerly that he wounded his own arm — ^whence his title " En Per del Puny- alet.'' But while he thought his blood well shed in destroying an instrument of anarchy, he respected the institutions of his kingdom. The essence of his policy was that his subjects should obey the King, but that they should be governed by law. His methods were barbarous, but his purpose was beneficent, and if he died old, hated, abandoned by wife and child, he had turned Aragon from a conglomerate of states, within a state held together by a bond of loyalty, which each part claimed to interpret for itself, into a real state. The effect of his work, was seen in 1410. His immediate successors, John I. {1387-1397) and Martin I. (1397-1410), need not detain us. The only event of their reigns which was of real importance was the incorporation of Sicily in the kingdom of Aragon. Martin I. died childless, and the kingdom was threatened by a disputed succession. The claimants were many, but some were fantastic. The two chief were Fernando, Infante of Castile and Regent of the kingdom in the minority of John II., and James, Count of Urgel. The first claimed as the son of Leonora, sister of Martin L The second as male representa- 84 SPAIN tive of the House of Aragon. He was a cousin of Martin I., and grandnephew of Peter IV. Though the Aragonese states did not recognize the rights of women to occupy the throne, they did, as was shown in the case of Petronilla, consider that a king might inherit the kingdom from his mother. By this rule the heir was John of Castile, who was the son of Leonora's elder son. But the Aragonese were not prepared for a union with Castile. The alternative would appear to have been to adhere to the rule of descent through heirs male. In that case the crown would have come to the Count of Urgel. / But the Count was not acceptable to the majority of the nobles, to the burghers, the Church, or the lawyers. *1 Some nobles did support him, but the bulk of his followers were peasants or artizans. Here were all the elements of a civil war, and it is certain that in similar circumstances Castile would have been plunged into anarchy. But the Aragonese dominions had attained, partly as a result of the severe course of discipHne they had undergone at the hands of Peter IV., to a degree of political unity, and to a capacity for orderly combined action unknown to the Castihans. It is true that they did not wholly escape local conflicts, but it is also the fact that violence was kept within bounds by the great political institutions of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. The Cortes of each of these met and decided on combined action. They excluded the Trans-Pyrenean possessions of the House of Aragon and Sicily from participa- tion, and they appointed a committee of nine persons, five ecclesiastics and four lawyers, to act as a court for the trial of the suit. A tribunal composed of these elements was sure to decide in favour of the heirs of Leonora, all the more because one of its members was the Valencian Friar and Saint Vicente Ferrer, who was a strong partisan of Fernando. It sat at Caspe, and on the 25th June 1412 gave its decision by which he was chosen king. The_-compromise of Ca§2£»_ MEDIEVAL SPAIN 85 as it is usually called, marked a step forward towards the political union of all Spain. The same family now reigned in Castile and in Aragon, though the antipathy of Aragonese (in the wide sense) for CastiHans was so strong as to forbid the arbitrators to carry out their doctrine of the descent of sovereign rights by the female hne to the full, and to name King John of Castile as the heir of King Martin. The settle- ment made was illogical enough, but it was to the honour of Aragon that the dispute was decided without a prolonged and ruinous civil war. Fernando's reign was short. He had but time to suppress the Count of Urgel, who refused to accept the compromise of Caspe, before he died in 1416. The reign of his son Alfonso V. (1416-1458) belongs to Italy. He claimed Naples by the will of Joanna II., and spent his life first in enforcing his claim through alternations of defeat and success, and then amid the politics of the Italian states. Alfonso the '' Learned " or the " Magnanimous '' was a conspicuous figure in the early Renaissance, but his part in Spanish history was trifling. During his absence his place was taken by his Lieutenant- General and brother John. From the Spanish point of view Alfonso is chiefly of interest because he was the last king who acted on the rule that he was entitled to dispose of his conquests. He left Naples to his natural son Fernando (Itahan Ferrante). His hereditary dominions, including Sicily, went to his brother John. Though John II. of Aragon was by no means an insignificant figure, he goes properly with his son Fernando, the husband of Isabel of Castile. Beside the main history of Aragon, and in very loose con- nection with it, a curious manifestation of the energy of her people ran its course between 1302 and 1388. The Aragonese princes had, even before their intervention in the wars of Italy, made use of a force of paid regular soldiers known as almugavares. The name is Arabic and has been variously 86 SPAIN interpreted. It was apparently understood to mean frontier- men, scouts, or raiders. By race they were Aragonese, Catalans, Navarrese, Basques. They were foot soldiers, and, whether, by tradition or by independent development, used the armament of the Roman legionaries — the javelin — the pilum known to them as the azagaya, or assegay (another Arabic word), the stabbing broadsword and the shield. They wore no armour, and displayed a perfect contempt for the man-at-arms who was hampered by his iron shell. They were savages, but, as the Angevine knights discovered, were formid- able soldiers. When the peace of Calatabellota in 1302 left Fadrique of Aragon in possession of Sicily the almugavares became a burden and a danger to his little kingdom. He was very ready to consent when they were hired by the Eastern Emperor Andronicus to fight against the Turks. The almu- gavares, 4000 foot, and with them 1500 Aragonese light horse, sailed to the Levant in 1303 under the command of a man of partly Italian, partly German descent, Roger Blum or de Flor. Their leader was named Megaduca by the Emperor and married to a daughter of the King of Bulgaria. The almugavares fought one wonderfully successful campaign against the Turks. But their boundless scorn for the Greeks, and their brutal arrogance rendered them intolerable. The Emperor, too, had promised more than he was disposed to fulfil, or perhaps was able to perform. He tried to cheat them by paying bad money, and to disarm them by the treacherous murder of their leader. The almugavares seized GallipoH and took a hideous revenge. \Vhen they had exhausted the country about Gallipoli they went off to the south, and there entered into relations with one of the Latin princes who had arisen out of the Crusades, the French Duke of Athens of the house of Brienne. They soon, as was natural, came to a quarrel with him, and a battle. The almugavares, who were not knights, but were soldiers, had entrenched a position near MEDIEVAL SPAIN 87 Thebes. They turned a small stream, and made an artificial marsh in front. The French knights behaved as they always did from Courtrai to Nicopolis. They rushed on headlong, were entrapped in the marsh, and very coolly butchered. The almugavares then marched on Athens and divided the property, widows and daughters, of the slaughtered knights, among them. They established themselves in the city and offered the Duchy to the. princes of Aragon. The offer was accepted and the Aragonese duchy of Athens ran the usual course of the Latin principalities in the Levant — a short period of energy and a swift decline into sloth and cowardice. The expedition of the Catalans and Aragonese to the Levant is a passage in their history of which they have always been proud. It did one good thing. It led to the writing of the chronicle of En Ramon de Muntaner, which contains as much of the mihtary soul of the Middle Ages as any book of the literature of the time. In sober truth the renowned expedi- tion was simply a huge enterprise of brigandage which could neither do, nor come to, any good. The almugavares showed the road to those Catalan pirates who helped to infest the Levant, and to prepare the way for the Turkish conquest by convincing the Greeks that any strong authority was better than the brutality and disorder of the '' Latins." Catalonia appeared more to its advantage as a competitor in the trade of the Mediterranean, the great scene of medieval commerce, the rival of Genoa, and the ally of Venice. The kings of Aragon used their military power to forward the interests of their trading subjects. Majorca had a rather brief career of commercial prosperity under them. The municipal life of '* the Principality '' was active before the counts became kings, and it must be clearly understood that the King of Aragon was never king in Catalonia. He was Count of Barcelona. The Catalans were touchy on that point. Charles V., who had much tact in these matters, pleased them 88 SPAIN greatly by giving directions that he was to be received as Count, and not as Emperor, when he came among them. The municipal life of Catalonia had been vigorous before the union with Aragon. The most distinguished, though not the earliest, of the Catalan municipalities was naturally the Count's own city of Barcelona, which may stand as the repre- sentative of them all. Its history is long, and has been exceptional. No other Mediterranean port was a leader in both the Levant trade with the East in the Middle Ages, and in the American trade of the eighteenth century. There was, indeed, an interval between its two periods of prosperity. Barcelona suffered, together with Venice and Genoa, by the alteration in the route of the trade of the East after the Portuguese discoveries, and for so long as the trade to the '' Spanish West Indies,'' that is to say America, was confined to Seville and the territories belonging to the crown of Castile. But when the restriction was removed by the Bourbon sovereigns after 1714 it rapidly revived. The latter stage was not, however, as the first. The flourish- ing time of Barcelona was in the ages before the voyage of Vasco da Gama. Like the other Catalan towns it asked and r ceived the protection ('* emparanza ") of the Count against the exactions of his feudal vassals. The counts of Barcelona favoured the towns which gave them money and obeyed them much better than the barons and knights. No ruler of that time followed its policy more consistently than James I. Barcelona was a favourite with him. In 1274 he gave it a large extension of its franchises and the con^^titution, which it enjoyed with changes in detail till 1714, when they were confiscated by Philip V. to punish the city for its obstinate support of the Hapsburg claimant. By the establishment of James I. Barcelona was governed by a provost (Veguer — the Viguier of Provence and Languedoc) and a Bayle (bailiff), with judicial and administrative functions. f Photos. Exclusive News Agency The Walls of Avila Photos. Exclusive News Agency MEDIEVAL SPAIN 89 Five members of Council (concellers) chosen by the lawful men of the town (probi-homines) sat every Tuesday and Saturday with the Veguer and Bayle to transact the affairs of the town. The small council named the members of the Council of a Hundred. Both councils held office for a year. The municipality had the right to coin money, could name the governors of its trading factories in the Levant (consuls) and its commercial judges (consules de mar). Barcelona has claimed, and on confessedly good grounds, to have drawn up the code of maritime law called the '' Consulado,*' which was very generally accepted as an authority, or a model in Europe. So long as the old Hne of Wifred lo Velu lasted, the city and its count lived in much harmony. The franchises granted by James I. were extended by his successors. It was not until the choice of Fernando of Antequera brought the absolutist theories of Castile into Catalonia that the old good feehng was destroyed. We shall see to what a pitch of hostility the Catalans came in the course of their quarrel with Fernando 's son John. Like all the municipalities of the Middle Ages Barcelona had its internal troubles of a social kind. These were versions of the universal rivalries between the greater and the lesser guilds and arts. They never came to quite the same height as they did in Italian, Flemish, and German cities, perhaps because the Count was a very real authority. The tendency was towards a more democratic organization. « In earlier times the councillors of both councils were chosen from the '* honourable citizens '* (honrats), owners of land and houses, doctors of medicine or law. But in time the merchants and manufacturers who constituted the ** Middle Hand " (ma mitjana) forced their way in, and behind them came the " ma menor,'' the " Little Hand," made up of shopkeepers, handi- craftsmen, and day labourers. In the fifteenth century it became the rule that the Council of Five should be composed 90 SPAIN of two '' honrats," one merchant, one handicraftsman, and one workman. Representatives of the md mitjana and the ma menor were added to the Council of a Hundred, whict contained 177 members in 1454. The number was afterwards reduced to 128, but the general character of the municipalit} was not altered. It was a vigorous organization whict named its officers and spread its influence far beyond th( town walls. The vices of the Barcelonese constitution were those whicl in the end ruined the municipal freedom of all Spain. It! representation, as we see, was one of classes. A man wa; honrat, ma mitjana, or ma menor rather than simply '* free man of the city." Even though they lived in fair harmon;^ they never were fully welded into a commonwealth. Anc then the city had a constant tendency to extend its powe: over other towns. It had a means of bringing them int( subordination. By granting the right of '' carreratge '' i could favour one neighbouring town against another. \Vhei a town was given the right of " carreratge " it was considerec as forming one street in the city which in this way admittec it to its freedom. As Barcelona was the money market anc great port of trade, the difference for a smaller township such as Tarrasa, or Sabadell, or Castellvi de Rosanes, betweei possessing or lacking the privilege of '* carreratge '' wa vital. It could always be coerced by the threat to withdra\ its privilege. And Barcelona spread its influence in this wa; outside of Catalonia, and into the dominions of the crown c Castile. A power of this kind was sure to excite the jealous; of the rival municipalities. And the time came when thi medieval organization, great and valuable in its day, becam an obstacle to the unity of the nation. The Barcelonese hk not only most Spaniards, but most Italians, Frenchmer Flemings, and Germans, would not adapt themselves to changing world, and then the victory of the royal authorit MEDIEVAL SPAIN 91 became the alternative to the permanent division of the country into a patchwork of conflicting sovereignties — that is to say, it became the one security for the formation of a state and a people. Barcelona was the most eminent, but it was very far from being a rare example of a vigorous municipal life in Spain. It would be paralleled in point of intensity far and wide in the kingdom of Castile and Leon, which, be it noted once more, stretched from the Bay of Biscay to the Straits of Gibraltar. Nothing is easier to understand than the rise of the Castilian towns to importance, except, unhappily, their ultimate decline and fall. The conditions of the Reconquest which have been already mentioned, made it certain that the cities would have an intense life. They, their walls, their trainbands led by the " Alferez " they named, formed a very large part of the military force of the kingdom. These " caballeros pardos '* fought gallantly under the banner of Alfonso VIII. at Alarcos when his brother Spanish kings left him in the lurch. They took an active share in the defeat of the Almohade Mirama- mohn at the Navas de Tolosa, and they helped to rout the Benimarin at the Rio Salado. Men who were indispensable for the deliverance and defence of the country, would expect, and could insist on, their rights. We would expect to find among them pride in their city, a strong sense of the importance of the common cause as against the Moorish enemy, a corpor- ate sense of their own dignity which would find expression in the construction of great churches — the outward and visible sign of the victory of the faith. They would not be lacking in determination to obtain confirmation of their rights from the King, nor yet in disposition to defend them against aggressions of the nobles — even when the great man they had to deal with was a bishop. In these cases they would see and stand for the common cause. Towns would form leagues, Hermandades (brotherhoods), to control the 92 SPAIN barons and nobles, and to support the King against them. All this was good and the cause of much vigour of life and character. But there was an excess of the good which might easily become a great evil. There would inevitably be a tendency to confine patriotism to the little mother-country — to the city, or if not to confine it, still to place their town higher in their affections than the great mother-country. There was always the risk that townsmen, who for generations stood on guard against the nobles, or marched against them in the field, would look upon them as natural enemies, and not as brother Spaniards with whom it was possible to act in a common cause. And this did happen, and because it happened the cities were unable to bring themselves to join with the nobles in the great crisis of the reign of Charles V. They went further. They forced the nobles to draw the sword against them in self-defence. In another way the strong municipal s entiment of Castile, and of Aragon also, worked^J onjeyil. The old sense of the unity of the State and the Law which the Visigoths had transmitted to the early kings in Asturias and Leon, with the tradition of the Roman Empire and the Fuero Juzgo, was frittered away in the epoch of the great reconquest. Spain became a perfect Jacob's coat of particular laws. The Fuero Juzgo lost all authority when it was supposed to be in conflict with the charter of a city. And the townsmen did not rest content with insisting on what had really been granted them by the King. They claimed arbitrary extensions, justified them by forgeries and interpolations, and grasped at them by force. They did not and could not stand alone. Classes did what the cities were doing. Churchmen always claimed to have their particular law, and so did the nobles — ihe i Hidalgos. Both insisted on their class *' fuero," and forged '' fueros " to support their claims. The struggle made by MEDIEVAL SPAIN 93 Alfonso X., El Sabio, to unify the law ended in defeat. The code which is attributed to him — the Siete Partidas — ^was not promulgated till the reign of his great grandson Alfonso XL, and even then was allowed to have no authority when it came in contact with a particular law. Alfonso X.'s Espejo (mirror), his Fuero Real (Royal Code), and the Partidas, represent rather what the King would like to have done than what he did do. This splitting up of the law was accompanied by a corre- sponding break ing in t o pieces of the judica ture. If Castile was not a feudal country in which the jurisdiction went with the land, the evil came in another way. The King granted jurisdictions or sold them. The right of the higher and the lower justice, which was simply the right to impose and pocket money compositions for offences, was a great favour when it was received for nothing, and a source of profit for which it was worth while to pay. It was also a form of plunder at which it was advisable to grab in dis- orderly minorities and weak reigns. Every king of Castile who succeeded a weak predecessor or had to outgrow a minority, was driven to begin his effective reign by forcing the holders of these illegitimate jurisdictions to disgorge. The King's revenue was sold or seized piecemeal. It was by reassuming lost rights of jurisdiction, and lost dues that the Catholic sovereigns provided themselves with a revenue, much of which Ferdinand afterwards frittered away to find money for his wars in Italy. All this confusion of jurisdictions, particular laws, and so forth, went with a profusion of racial distinctions unknown out of Spain. It was not merely a question of noble and non-noble which Spain shared with other countries, nor of towns and classes with franchises and others without, for that was universal in Europe. It was a question of division between Christians, Mozarabic Christians, Mudejares, and 94 SPAIN Jews. The Christian from the north of Spain itself was subtly distinguished from the Christian whose family had lived, happily enough, under Mahometan rule. The fall of the Caliphate, and the rise of the fanatical Almordvides, produced a flight of these Mozarabes to the north. Their numbers increased as the Christians advanced. From the date of the conquest of Toledo by Alfonso VI. in 1084 the Mozarabes became a very important element in the kingdom of Castile. To them we may add the many foreigners who in the eleventh or twelfth centuries came into Spain as crusaders or by the Pilgrim Road, and who did not return to their native lands. There is frequent mention of Burgundians, French- men, Italians, Germans in the documents of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Even Enghshmen are named as established at Sahagun. They all appear as separate classes and wards among the citizens. Christians — Mozarabic or not — and foreigners would com- bine quickly and easily to form one people. Not so the Mudejares and the Jews. A Mudejar (one who is left behind or is subject) was a Mahometan who remained in the lands reconquered by the Christians. They were numerous, and what is not easy to account for is that they were to be found in the extreme north, where Moslem rule had never been estabhshed. Until the close of the fourteenth century the Spaniards were in practice singularly tolerant. Mudejar communities were numerous in the towns, where they inhabited wards of their own '' Morerias,'' and still more numerous in the country districts. The great lands given to the military orders were mainly tilled by them. These bodies, which existed for the purpose of driving Mahometanism from Spain, depended for their revenue on the labour of Moslem tenants or serfs. Many of the Mudejares were personally free, and some grew rich. Whether the Moreria was urban or rural it had its mosque, its school, and its own Cadi, who judged MEDIEVAL SPAIN 95 between its members. Moors could in some cases form part of the municipality. The moreria was balanced by the Juderia, the ghetto. The history of the Jews in Spain is long and varied. They became numerous in the second century, and in all probability their settlements forwarded the spread of Christianity. Persecuted by the Visigoths they were protected by the Caliphate, then persecuted by Almordvide and Almohade, but protected by Christian kings. There was no country population of Jews, but in the towns they were numerous. Toledo was largely a Jewish city. They, too, had their synagogues, their schools, their princes. The part they played in Spanish industry was great, and in thought and literature was not inconsiderable. All this toleration has been counted as righteousness to the medieval Spaniard by modern writers. It laid him open to the scoff of foreigners, and the reproaches of popes while it lasted. How far the favour shown to Mudejares and Jews arose from toleration of their opinions is a question not easy to answer. When Alfonso VII. could call himself the King of the men of the two religions (he might well have said three) it is to be supposed that he did not think he would shock his subjects by putting them on what looks like a footing of equality. Yet it is as certain as anything in his history that the Spaniard never doubted the essential inferiority of Mahometanism or Judaism to his own creed, nor the conse- quent inferiority of the Mussulman and Jew to himself. The thinness of the population, the necessity for not increasing the number of his enemies, had probably more influence on the Christian Spaniard than any sentiment of toleration. Neither is it at all certain that this indifference of his was in the end very good for him. The mere fact that agriculture and industry were in the hands of unbelievers whose position at the best was one of inferiority discredited them, and pro- 96 SPAIN moted the Spaniard's natural disposition to despise honest industry as unworthy of a caballero whose proper business was war. They were *' vile '' and therefore repugnant to a self-respecting man. The Spaniard might not have been industrious in any case. He was the lazier because hard Work was the badge of the enemies of God. However that may be the good days of toleration in Spain began to draw to an end after the conquest of Andalusia. They did not end at once nor by a single step, nor wholly because of a revival of religious fanaticism among the Spaniards. The Jews were odious as collectors and farmers of the taxes. The Mudejares supplied the guards who executed the vengeance of Peter the Cruel, and the bands of ruffians who served turbulent nobles and sometimes bishops. The influence of the Pope was used to promote persecution. But the Spaniards responded promptly enough. All through the fourteenth century there was a tendency to limit and then to suppress the freedom of the Mudejares. Their privi- leges were withdrawn, their mosques closed, their schools suppressed. Large numbers were converted and sank into the Christian population — from which their ancestors had been largely drawn in earlier centuries. The remnant lost the name of Mudcjar and became known as Moriscos, little Moors. The history of the Jews ran parallel with that of the Mudejares. First came hostihty of sentiment and restriction, then at the close of the fourteenth century a murderous explosion of hate and envy, provoked by fanatical preachers in Castile and Aragon alike. Multitudes of Jews were driven into Christianity by terror. They strove to placate the persecuting Christians, partly by marrying their daughters with large dowries to men of influence, and partly by an affectation of rehgious zeal which too often took the form oi the renegade's spite against the loyal Jews who had adhered MEDIEVAL SPAIN 97 to their faith — by whom they knew they were cursed and despised. These were the " Conversos," converts, Cristianos nuevos — ^new Christians — ol Spanish history. The Morisco and the Converso were the predestined victims of the Inquisition. It would appear at first sight that the existence of repre- sentative institutions in the form of the Cortes would have tended to counteract the se paratist ten dency of the Spaniards. Perhaps it did to some extent, but not greatly or in any way effectually. The fact that in the twelfth century the kings began to add representatives of the third estate to the great councils of bishops and nobles (proceres) they had always held, is quite sufficiently explained by the fact that the sovereign had need of money. It was for this reason no doubt that John and his successors in England summoned knights of the shire and burgess to ParHament. But the results were very different. When the King of Leon during the separation from Castile, after the death of Alfonso VI I. , summoned representatives of the towns to Cortes in 1188 he forestalled the similar action of other sovereigns. But what did he summon ? and why ? and with what consequences ? He summoned delegates, attornies (personeros) of such town councils as he chose. They came to vote money. And they never advanced beyond the state of being voters of money and petitioners. There were times when only four towns (uni- versidades, i.e, communes) were summoned to the Cortes of Aragon. In Castile the summonses were in early times numerous, but the towns protested against the trouble and expense. With their good will the right of representation was Hmited to the privileged towns Burgos, Leon, Avila, Segovia, Zamora, Toro, Salamanca, Soria, Murcia, Cuenca, Toledo, Seville, Cordoba, Jaen, Valladolid, Madrid, Guada- lajara. And these towns begged the'^King to bear the expenses of their delegates. He willingly agreed, for the receipt of Q 98 SPAIN pay from him put them at his service. At no time did the Cortes insist on having a necessary share in legislation. The legislative power belonged to the King alone. The Cortes could petition, but the King made the law which he *' promulgated in Cortes.'* When the King was weak, as was the case after the murder of Peter the Cruel, the Cortes could no doubt exact some attention to its petitions. But the utter incapacity of the towns and the nobles to combine, the fact that when the Cortes was summoned only to vote money the nobles did not attend, and the very limited char- acter of the representation, combined to render the power oi the third estate an affair rather of show than of reality. And the men who came were just Spaniards of their time. In Castilethe_administration of justice was divided and incoherent. In Aragon the great authority of jth^Jiisticia May or,jthe- Lord Chief Justice, gave a dignity and independ- ence^to the courts which they did not possess in other parts of Spain: — not even in Catalonia or Valencia. The positior of the Justicia Mayor was not essentially different from thai of the English Lord Chief Justice. He was named by th( King and could be removed by him. There were cases o dismissal, and that for gross misconduct. But the Aragones( were jealous of all royal interference with their great judge His power of '' manifesting,'* that is to taking any case int( his own court, and the fact that he would decide whethe the choice of a particular person for the post of Lieutenant General in the King's absence was consistent with the con stitution, gave him a very exceptional authority. NOTE The great epoch of Spanish architecture coincides closely wit the generations lying between the middle of the eleventh an^ the first half of the sixteenth century. It would perhaps b more accurate to say architecture in Spain than Spanish arch: MEDIEVAL SPAIN 99 lecture. The second phrase implies that Spain developed a native school. But though the Spaniards modified what they received from abroad, and adapted it, they never went on to provide a school of their own in the sense that England, Normandy, and France did. Don Vicente Lamperez is of opinion that they failed because they never had the time given them. So soon as they were in a fair way to achieve full originality, some new foreign influence broke in. The most exotic, and because exotic, the most interesting of these influences to the traveller is the Arabic — so-called — though the Arabs appear to have had but small share in creating it. We are naturally attracted by what is newest. The traveller has seen much akin to the Cathedral of Toledo, but nothing like the Santa Maria la Blanca or the cloister of Guadalupe. But because they are more remote are they more beautiful ? When we reject all illegitimate considerations and endeavour to judge the work on its merits, the wonders of architecture in Spain ought to be classed — first the Romanesque, then the Gothic, then the Classic, that is the building done in the sixteenth century, and later under mainly Italian renaissance influence, and then the " Arabic, '* Mudejar or Mozarabic. There is an insuperable difficulty in the way of giving any approach to an account of the architectural wealth of Spain here. The amount is immense, and then much of it Hes in places which can be reached only by those who are prepared for a rough adventure, bad quarters, and worse than indifferent food. Even places which lie on a rail- way cannot always be seen easily by the traveller who consults his comfort. Take for instance the most interesting and beautiful Cathedral of Siguenza. It can be reached easily enough by taking the morning train from Madrid to Saragossa, stopping at Siguenza, and going on by the night train. It is easy enough to see the cathedral, but the traveller must either " attend to the pro vend " before he leaves Madrid, or prepare to eat a dinner much more curious than palatable, or even digestible. And yet , Siguenza is a market town, a not unprosperous place, and contains much only less worth seeing than the cathedral. When the railway fine is left the obstacles are only to be overcome by those who have health, a capacity for roughing it, unlimited time, and a tolerable command of money. It would be idle to expect the great majority of visitors to Spain to see the Romanesque church and hill fort of Loarre above Huesca, the Romanesque church 100 SPAIN with Gothic touches which fills the whole keep of the Castle of Tur6gano, in the Province of Segovia, or San Martin de Fr6mista on the Pilgrim Road, or Santa Maria de Sasamon. This last church is an extraordinary instance of the architectural wealth of Spain. Sasamon is a small town or large village lying some twenty miles to the west of Burgos. It has never been of any consequence. Until the eleventh century it was the see of a bishopric— so obscure that the names of two only of its bishops are known with certainty. The see was incorporated with Burgos by Alfonso VII. A hundred years after the bishopric had been suppressed, a great church, worthy to be the cathedral of a great diocese, was built in this obscure town. It was greatly damaged in the War of Independence, but is still used as a parish church. We must assume that the traveller will enter Spain by one of three ways — ^by Galicia, and then by Leon to the junction with the railway to France at Venta de Baiios ; by Irun, and thence by Burgos, Miranda de Ebro, Valladolid, Segovia, the Escurial, Madrid ; or by the Eastern Pyrenees, Barcelona, Lerida, Sara- gossa, Siguenza, Guadalajara to Madrid. From Madrid he will go south to Cordova and Seville, making the obligatory visit to Granada. And he can work up the coast by Malaga, Valencia, Tarragona to Barcelona again. There are points at which he can stop to look to right and left — at Palencia, for instance, and at Salamanca. When he has done all this, he has only to take Don Vicente Lamperez, '* Architectura Cristiana," and he will see how much he misses. Moreover, Don Vicente acknowledges that his two great volumes, with their hundreds of illustrations, are not exhaustive, and he touches on very little which is not church architecture. Now an adequate account of what is to be seen on these routes alone would fill several volumes the size of this. Let us begin at Santiago de Compostela, which some think the noblest church in Spain. It was the goal, and may be said to be the product of the pilgrimage to the shrine of St James. It stands over the remains of the earlier cathedral destroyed by Almansur. Though the Spaniards have every right to be proud of it, it is a standing proof of the immense influence of France. The plan was taken from St Serrion at Toulouse. The builders were French, and it arose when Galicia was a centre of French influence, ecclesiastical, literary, military, and political. The *' Portico de la Gloria," the western entrance is a known " glory " of medieval MEDIEVAL SPAIN loi art — a thing of pure beauty, and free" from any toiich of the grotesque. The reader must needs be referred to Mr Street's " Gothic Architecture in Spain '* for the full account which the church deserves. The cathedral is not a Gothic church at all, but Romanesque. If the traveller works round by the line from Corunna, he will find another Romanesque church, founded by Raymond of Bezan^on, the husband of Queen Urraca, in 1 129, at Lugo, where there are the city walls to see also. Sir John Moore's army halted at Lugo on the retreat to Corunna. The cathedral has been severely modernized outside and in, but nave of nine bays and the aisles (which may be of earlier date) are free from modern additions. The church has the privilege of exposing the host day and night. From Lugo the way is by MonfortC: — a place to be noted as typical of a country where towns were placed where they could be defended, on a hill, or on crag and tail, with a stream for defence and water supply. The next step is Villafranca del Bierzo, another defensible place in an '* Entrambasaguas " which has just the same meaning as Florence, the meeting place of streams (Burbia and Valcarce). The Bierzo is the Switzerland of Spain, and was the refuge of Christian hermits and monks even before the Arab conquest. San Fructuoso made a Thebais of it in the seventh century. The Church of Penalva is one of the disputed proofs that the Spanish builders gave the horseshoe arch to the Arabs, and did not take it from them. At Leon is the Romanesque Church of San Isidor, founded or ordered to be founded by Fernando el Magno, who bought the saint's body from Al Motamid of Seville, but built by his son Alfonso VI. The great Jesuit convent San Marcos de Leon is of later date, of the sixteenth century (1514-49), and was built by Juan de Badajoz. The Jesuits hold it now, but were for a time compelled to cede it to their old rivals the Escolapios— the Aragonese order of San Joseph of Calasanz. It is " plateresque work,*' was never quite completed, and has suffered some " restoration." The glory of Leon is its cathedral — a thoroughly French church, belonging to the thirteenth century. The place of Leon among Spanish cathedrals is neatly defined in the Latin lines Dives Toletana, sancta Ovitensis, Pulchra Leonina, fortis Salamantina. 102 SPAIN Toledo the ncn, Ovi^do the lioJy, Leon the beautiful, and Sala- manca (the old one), the strong. It is a Gothic church, light and elegant. The next step is Palencia, with its Gothic cathedral, begun in 1321, and not finished till the sixteenth century, the Convent of St Pablo, the parish church of San Miguel. Both Leon and Palencia contain ancient private houses. Sahagun, lying between the two, has a fine Romanesque church of no small historic interest. It was begun by Alfonso VI., who designed it as the burial place of himself and his five wives. At Palencia, or rather at the junction of Venta de Banos, close at hand, the line falls into the route from Irun. On that route lie, to name only the chief points, Vitoria, the Basque city, where the traveller may make his first acquaintance with the Spanish custom of placing the choir in the centre of, or towards the west end of the nave, in the collegiate Church of San Maria, now the cathedral of a newly created see. Burgos follows, with its great cathedral founded by Fernando el Santo, to record his marriage with Beatrice of Swabia. The first stone was laid on the 20th July 122 1 by the King. The bishop, who began the building, was an Englishman, Maurice, who came to Spain with Beatrice. A parallel case may be found at Cuenca, far away to the east of Madrid. It was conquered from the Moors by Alfonso VIII. , and its first bishop was one of the chaplains of the Queen Eleanor, daughter of Henry 11. No doubt that is why the cathedral is Anglo-Norman in character. Cuenca, a hill fortress, one of many in Spain, was the birthplace of many famous Spaniards, including that Gil Carillo de Albornoz, the Archbishop of Toledo, who helped to win the battle of the Rio Salado, and was Pope's Legate in the Romagna. The Cathedral of Burgos is German in character and belongs mainly to later times. John of Cologne made the great spires, which distinguish Burgos among Spanish cathedrals. Of Burgos itself we can afiirm that nothing in Spain is more Spanish, as a town and in sentiment. The narrow streets, massive houses, and dark, too often now neglected churches may have foreign origins, but the Spaniards made them their own. In the Church of Santa Agueda (Gadea), the Cid Campeador forced Alfonso VI. to purge himself by oath of the guilt of the murder of his brother Sancho. The historic Ruy Diaz de Bivar most assuredly did no such thing. The champion's own convent, San Pedro de Cardeiia, lies near the city, but has been so overlaid with insipid modern MEDIEVAL SPAIN 103 additions that it is not worth a visit. The Carthusian house of Miraflores is again German work of the Cologne family, too luscious for some tastes. At the Convent of Las Huelgas (the pleasure grounds) the male visitor is confined to looking from the transept into the nave through a grating. It is a house of nuns who are preached at through the opening. The church is pure and early Gothic of the late thirteenth century. Historically the hospital is interesting. It was established by Alfonso VIII. for the use of the pilgrims, but the building is late and is not interesting. At half a mile from the junction at Venta de Baiios, at Baiios de Cerrato, is the debated Visigothic church already mentioned. Valladolid, a little way ahead, has as much of the history of Spain in it as any city in the Peninsula. It came near being established as the " Court " by Charles V., and was actually the residence of Phihp III. for a few years, till the cold, the wet, the mud drove him and his courtiers back to Madrid. The marshes in the neigh- bourhood ruined the health of the Black Prince. Philip II. was born there. The famous Gondomar, whom the English hated so soundly in the reign of James I., had his house there. Valla- dolid was horribly pillaged by the French in the War of Inde- pendence. The constable Alvaro de Luna was executed by his ungrateful master at Valladolid. Architecturally, however, the town belongs to a later period than ours. At Medina del Campo is the massive brick fortress where Isabel the Catholic lived and Caesar Borgia was imprisoned. The mighty " homage tower," from which he dropped, soars into the air. From Medina del Campo you can go on to Madrid by Avila or by Segovia, or turn to Salamanca eastward and come back. All three are rich in great work of the great time. Salamanca, like Saragossa, has two cathedrals — the old " fortis Salamantina," and the sixteenth- century church begun in 15 13, and built by Juan Gil de Ontafion, the last of a line of architects. The fortis Salamantina has the air of having been built when a cathedral had need to be also a fortress, and so it had, for it was begun when the Almordvides were in full swing, 1102, and is in fact a French Romanesque fortress church. The younger hardly belongs to our time. It is late and some say florid Gothic. Avila belongs, as. the Spanish phrase has it, to the Kidney of Castile, with its walls, in which the apse of the cathedral plays the part of tower, and the cathedral itself. There is a somewhat 104 SPAIN similar arrangement at Siguenza, where the apse of the cathedral projects to the edge of a precipitous river bank, and looks like a fortification. In the Spain of the Middle Ages, a church, without being exactly encased in a keep as at Turegano, had need to be defensible — at first against the Moors, and then in endless civil wars. The Church of San Vicente, outside the walls, is perhaps the finest building in Avila — a beautiful Romanesque church, more consistent than the cathedral, which was built at different \^ periods. The apse of the cathedral, which makes a tower in the city walls, is considered by Senor Lamperez as the most beautiful example of the church-castle in Spain, " and perhaps in Europe." Segovia contains one professing monument of the Middle Ages, against which the reader must be warned — the castle or tower. This building has nothing really in common with the tower connected with the name of Alfonso el Sabio, of Isabel the Catholic, and of Gil Bias. That was burnt to the ground in 1862, having been deliberately set on fire by the cadets of the Artillery School, who resented being lodged in its cold walls. To-day it is a mere restoration. The cathedral is rather later in date of foundation than its sister church at Salamanca — both being the work of the Ontanon family. The old cathedral was destroyed by those ill-praised sons of freedom the Comuneros. This fact, by the way, should be borne in mind by those who suppose that the destruction of churches was a sin peculiar to Protestant Reformers. But Segovia is rich in churches with Romanesque remains. Raw ruin and squalid neglect has defaced many of them. Of Madrid there is here nothing to be said. Whoever reaches the capital of Spain from the eastern Pyrenees (and it is a very good way of approach), can soon begin to meet monuments of the great ages of Spanish building. Santa Maria de RipoU and San Juan de las Abadesas, ancient Roman- esque churches and cloisters, lie near the Pyrenees, and Gerona is on the way. Its single nave, with a span of 73 feet, is a triumph in its way. The history of the Council of '* maestros de obras," summoned by the Dean and Chapter, to advise on the best way of completing the existing apse with its chapel, is a date in the history of architecture. The chapter had the courage to accept the opinion of the minority, who supported the bold scheme of the *' Maestro " Beffiy. Barcelona is full of buildings worth seeing. The cathedral is dark, for there are no windows in the side chapels, and not much light from above. But it is often the best policy MEDIEVAL SPAIN 105 of the visitor to begin by sitting down in a Spanish church and waiting till his eye is accustomed to the gloom. And there is something very grand in the high spring of the pillars from the dark below, even if they do cramp the clerestory. The Church of Montesion, which has been bodily transferred from the centre to the suburbs of the town, is light enough in every sense. It holds the banner of Don John of Austria carried at Lepanto. There are great spans of roof in Santa Maria del Mar and Santa Maria del Pino, and Romanesque work in San Pedro de las Puellas. By fetching a small compass, the traveller can see Tarragona. There he will be in the middle of records of antiquity, which go back to a time when there were possibly not even Phoenicians in Spain. It is a hill fort on a large scale overlooking the sea from a height of 750 feet. Its walls are Cyclopean, Roman, medieval, and modern. The tomb of the Scipios (erroneously so called) and the remains of the great aqueduct, the Devil's Bridge, speak of Rome. The cathedral is sad and weather- beaten enough outside, but is all glorious within, free from tawdry modern ornaments, light, simple, yet massive. It was built between 1059 and 1131, and is an example of Romanesque work tending to become Gothic. The cloister is a joy for any one who will study the capitals of its pillars, with their virgins and saints of Mexican ugliness and queer groups of rats hugging eggs, and being pulled along by the tail by other rats. From Tarragona the way is clear by Caspe to Lerida. At L6rida, in the hill fortress, there is a building which was a Romanesque cathedral, but is a military accoutrement store, inaccessible, and disgustingly defiled. The outside can be well seen from the railway station. At Monzon there is an impressive thing, the great rock of the Castle of the Templars, where James I. passed some years of his boyhood. Saragossa has its two cathedrals, the Seo, which is worth careful visiting for its beauty and its history, and the Pilar, which is also worth seeing in order to appreciate the passion of seventeenth and eighteenth century " classics " for white and blank spaces. Centuries of history are built into the Seo. It was a mosque turned into a church by Alfonso the Battler, and the pattern on part of the outer walls is supposed to be a trace of its Mahometan days. It was rebuilt and added to by kings and town guilds, and by the Antipope Benedict XIII., Rodrigo de Luna, an Aragonese in all senses, including the obstinacy for which they are io6 SPAIN famous. It is a basilica with three apses, divided into five aisles by four rows of beaiatiful Gothic pillars. The old Moorish castle, the Aljaferia, was the residence of Moorish and Aragonese kings. Little remains of the Arab work except the small octagonal mosque, and indeed it has all been degraded to vile purposes, and then restored in the reign of Alfonso XII. — restored in good taste — but a restoration is not an original building. Siguenza, we have seen ; Guadalajara contains the Mudejar palace of the Dukes of Infantado, and the fortress of San Francisco, originally a castle of the Templars, is a military station and difficult to see. As you go to the south there is Toledo to begin with, the old rival of Burgos for primacy among Spanish cities. A Spanish wit once declared that Toledo should be put under a glass case and preserved from the touch of time. Let no fool persuade you that a day is enough for Toledo. It cannot be tasted in sips. There is too much history in Toledo for such treatment. It lacks the visible antiquity of Tarragona. Its Roman and Gothic histories have left no trace — or only disputable bits of stone. But medieval Spain — ^Moorish, Christian, Mozarabic, and Mudejar — is on wellnigh every square foot of it. The cathedral is considered by Spanish judges as the most Spanish of all their churches. They have good cause to be proud that it is, for nothing can be more noble than this mighty cathedral. As is so commonly the case in Spain, the outside is inferior to the in, and is indeed so built up to that it is difiicult to see. It was built when the line of the old kings was at its height — at least it was begun by Fernando el Santo in 1226 — to replace the consecrated mosque which had stood there before. It was not finished till 1492, on the design of the first *' maestro de obras/' Pedro Perez. The length is 404 feet and the width 204 feet, and there are 84 piers. The woodwork of the choir, the work of the Maestro Rodrigo, is a history of the conquest of Granada. But there is also much work of Vigorny and Berruguete. It is not only because it is small and the cathedral is very large, that the Mudejar synagogue, known as Maria la Blanca, seems to emphasize the enormous V superiority of Christian and European architecture. What could be done with those horseshoe arches and blank walls ? You see all there is to see at a glance. A Gothic artist would have made a chapel of the same size which would show a new beauty every time you looked at it. Of the Alcazar — the castle — there is little to be said except that it is a restoration of a restora- MEDIEVAL SPAIN 107 tion, an imposing mass standing on the cliff over the Tagus, and no more. The Church of San Juan de los Reyes, St John of the Kings, with its imposing heraldic friezes, is a noble thing too, but there is too much restoration in and about it. The Puerta del Sol is Mudejar of a much better kind than the Blanca or the kindred (and very tiny) Cristo de la Luz. Its warm colour and the fine balance of its Moorish arches combine to impress the eye, as it stands out at the entry to the city. The mosque at Cordoba is confessedly the triumph of Arab art in Spain, and it is doubtless all that could be done with a rectangular building low, as compared to Christian churches, divided into many aisles by pillars and horseshoe arches, with open courts of approach. It was begun by the first of the Omda- yads, completed according to the first design in 796, enlarged between 961-967, and adorned by the Mihrab or shrine on the south side. The Christian choir cut out of the middle, belongs to the sixteenth century. Charles V. is said to have told the townsmen that they were barbarians for destroying what was unique, in order to build what they could equally well have put up else- where. And yet there is something appropriate in this rising of the Christian Church through and over the Moslem mosque. It is the history of Spain in stone. Seville is known to all — the best known of all places in Spain, except Granada. Has it not the Giralda built by the Almohade Abu Yusuf Yakub in 1196, to be the Muezzin tower of the great mosque, and crowned by the belfrey of Fernando Ruiz in 1568 ? The total height is 350 feet. As the belfrey of Ruiz rose over the Giralda, so the cathedral covers the ground once occupied by the mosque — a great oblong church, cruciform inside, but rectangular without, 414 feet by 271 feet, with double aisles and lateral chapels. It is characteristic that the old mosque was removed in 1401, not out of fanaticism, but because it was flimsily built and would not last. Seville is a Gothic church, and as its builders meant it to be, is grand. The Alcazar of Seville is Spanish, exactly as is the mosque of Cordoba — that is to say, it is Christian imposing itself on Moslem. It was a castle- palace of Moorish kings, was altered by Peter the Cruel, who employed Moorish workmen, by Charles V., by Philip II., by Phihp III., by Philip V., and Ferdinand VI. The Alhambra story might be told almost in the same words, save that it has suffered much degradation because it was not used io8 SPAIN as a palace by Christian kings. It was the work of the last Moorish dynasty in Spain, the Nasrides. The place was properly speaking not a palace, but a Government city, including barracks, officers, and parade ground. The beauty of it is not one of archi- tecture (not even of masonry), but of ornament. The site is of the finest, on a hill overlooking a plain and looking to mountains. But it is not a great building, and withal it has been terribly cut about. It will not stand being seen on a cloudy or rainy day. Beyond the Alhambra there is nothing belonging to one period. The cathedral of Granada is classic, and the cathedrals of Malaga and Valencia are either that or they are naught. The Spain of great architecture is the Spain of the north, from Galicia to Catalonia, and of the centre. CHAPTER V THE CATHOLIC SOVEREIGNS In order to understand how the pohtical union of Castile and Aragon was brought about it is necessary to bear the relationship of the two royal families well in mind. A brief pedigree will save words : Castile. John I. of Castile. Aragon. Henry III. = Constance of Lancaster. Fernando, chosen at Caspe. i Maria of Aragon = John II. =- Isabel of Alfonso. I Portugal. Henry IV. = Joan of Blanche of = John II. I Portugal. Joan La Beltraneja. Navarre. I Charles, Blanche, Leonora. «= Maria Henriquez. Alfonso. Isabel, the Cathohc = Fernando, the Catholic. The families, as we see, were very close kin. The Aragonese branch retained its appanages in Castile, which gave its members a sufficient excuse for intervening in all the troubles of that kingdom during the reign of John II. The busiest of these turbulent Infantes de Aragon was John, the younger son of Fernando, called of Antequera. John, who acted as Lieutenant-General of Aragon, while his elder brother Alfonso was warring and conquering in Italy, had an independent 109 no SPAIN power of his own by right of his marriage with Blanche o Navarre. This httle Pyrenean kingdom had played s< small a part in Spanish history for centuries that it has beei possible to omit all notice of it. In 1285 it was carried b] marriage into the House of France. When the elder line o the French kings ended by the death of Charles IV. in 1328 without male offspring, and the French crown passed to th branch of Valois, Navarre was separated. The SaHc la\; was not accepted by the Navarrese and Joan, the niece Charles IV., became their Queen. She was married to PhiHj of Evreux. Two Charleses succeeded thera, and the crow] went to the distaff with the daughter of the second of them Blanche, who was the wife, first of Martin of Sicily and thei of John of Aragon — a prince after the heart of Machiavelli By Blanche of Navarre he had three children, Charles, calle( Prince of Viana, Blanche, and Leonora, who married the Coun of Foix. When his wife died in 1441, John married Mari; Enriquez, daughter of the hereditary Admiral of Castile, th head of an illegitimate branch of the Royal House, by descen from a natural son of Henry of Trastamara. Their soi Fernando was therefore cousin by his father and his mother t the princes of Castile. If we turn to that family we see tha John II. married his cousin Maria, daughter of Fernando c Antequera and sister of John of Aragon. Henry IV. c Castile was the son of that marriage. By his second marriag with Isabel of Portugal John had two children, Alfonso an Isabel, the future Catholic Queen. It would be difficult indeed to say whether the reign c Henry in Castille or of John of Navarre and Aragon was th more turbulent, but it is certain that there was more shame i: Castile. Henry who had emasculated himself in debaucher; in the loose court of his father, would not make war an could not keep peace. A small inroad into Granada dis gusted him with warfare. His first marriage was dissolve( THE CATHOLIC SOVEREIGNS iii on the shameless pretext of '' respective impotence," but he married again, and after six years his wife bore a daughter. As the King had no issue by his first marriage nor by any of his many mistresses, the nobles, always ready to avail them- selves of any pretext for rebellion, alleged that the Queen's daughter was the child of the King's favourite Beltran de la Cueva — whence came her insulting nickname La Beltraneja. The rebels deposed the King at a solemn ceremony at Avila, and proclaimed his brother Alfonso King. But Alfonso died very soon. The nobles would then have proclaimed his sister Isabel Queen. She, however, refused to accept their offer, but asserted her disbelief in the legitimacy of his supposed daughter, and asserted her own right to succeed on his death. By the treaty of Guisando (near Avila) the King accepted this compromise. Then he broke his word and threw the kingdom into another turmoil by attempting to force his sister into a marriage, first with the elderly King of Portugal, whom she rejected, and then with Pedro Giron, Grand Master of Calatrava, who died very opportunely for her. Then Isabel, with the advice and support of the Archbishop of Toledo and many of the nobles, married her cousin Fernando of Aragon, at Valladolid, on the 19th of October 1469. Fernando came from one scene of family dissension to another. Maria Enriquez was cruelly wrongd by her con- temporaries, if she was not the unjust stepmother as drawn in romance. But for her influence it is hard to see why her husband John should have persecuted his son by his first marriage the Prince of Viana. He did, and there went on for years between him and his son, an amiable but weak man, an abominable story of falsity and oppression. Navarre, to which the Prince had an immediate claim as the son of Blanche, Aragon, and Catalonia were all involved. Catalonia revolted on behalf of the Prince. The King, driven to the wall, appealed for help to Louis XL, and a bargain was made by which 112 SPAIN John gave Roussillon in pawn for a loan of money. Neither party intended to carry out the bargain. Louis did not mean to return the pledge nor John to repay the loan — ^which indeed he received only in part. The death of the Prince of Viana did not end the revolt. The Barcelonese called in other foreign princes, Peter of Portugal and Rene of Anjou, but both died opportunely for the old King, who finally recovered his states but only after promising to observe all franchises. The struggle was still raging when Ferdinand rode in disguise to Valladohd to marry Isabel. John died in 1479 leaving Navarre to his daughter Leonora, who is plausibly believed to have murdered her sister Blanche. His last years were spent in an unsuccessful effort to recover Roussillon out of the hands of Louis XL, without repaying him for the money lent. In Castile the death of Henry IV. in 1474 was followed by a short civil war. Some of the nobles and towns adhered to Joan La Beltraneja. Among them were churchmen and , nobles who had been partisans of Isabel, but who changed sides for merely selfish reasons with the usual frivohty of their type. They were helped by the King of Portugal. But these opponents of Isabel and her husband showed neither resolution nor sense. One battle of some note was fought at Toro (in February 1476) between the Castilians and Portu- guese, in which the latter were defeated. The opposition io the young sovereigns collapsed by its own weakness. La Beltraneja fled to Portugal, where she entered a religious house, and died in 1530. Isabel was now Queen in her own right (Reina Proprietaria) and Fernando King as her husband. He had tried in a characteristic underhand way to secure his own recognition as representative of the male line of the family, but was effectually resisted by the Castilians. On the death of his father in 1479 the two kingdoms were joined to this extent that their respective sovereigns were wife Choir Stalls, Toledo Cathedral , The Castle of Medina del Campo Detail of Altar, Tarragrona Cathedral THE CATHOLIC SOVEREIGNS 137 wish that her husband should hold the regency till Joan's eldest son was of age. But the Castilians — and more particu- larly the nobles — disliked Fernando. They forced him to stand aside in favour of the young Queen's husband, PhiHp the Handsome. Joan, it must not be forgotten, was Queen in Castile by her own right, and her name appeared on all public acts so long as she lived. Her father withdrew and took the opportunity to visit his newly-acquired kingdom of Naples. His motive was not only to establish his govern- ment but to watch and remove Gonsalvo de Cordoba, who had conquered it for him, and who in that age of ambitious treason, when a successful falsity passed for a proof of virtue, was suspected by him and others of scheming to take Naples for himself. Gonsalvo had certainly distributed the booty among his captains and was the idol of the '' martial men.'* The atmosphere of the age reeked of treason and suspicion of treason. Philip of Hapsburg came to Spain to govern in the name of his wife, but soon died (1507). Fernando resumed the regency and held it till his death in 15 16. He suffered the Archbishop of Toledo, Jimenez de Cisneros, to conduct the internal government of Castile — as far at least as it was possible for him to trust any man. The archbishop looked vigilantly to the maintenance of order and pushed on the conquest of the African coast with all the resources he could command. It was the true policy of a wise ruler of Spain and the right defence of the country against Moslem piracy in the Western Mediterranean. But it was the policy of the archbishop and not of the King, who waded deeper and deeper into the great Italian and general European imbroglio — ^joining in the League of Cambray against Venice, quarrelling with his brother Leaguers, warring and preparing wars. But he did one real service to Spain. In 1512 he annexed as much of Navarre (that is the bulk of the kingdom) 138 SPAIN as lay to the south of the Pyrenees. The heiress of Beam carried the claim of her family into the House of Albret, from which it passed in due time with Henry IV. to the Bourbons. But the main part of Navarre went, as by geo- graphical and political necessity it ought to have gone, to Spain. Only the transpyrenean strip followed its natural destiny and fell to France. The Catholic sovereigns had made it possible for Spain to play the part of a great power. They created a vigorous administration. They favoured the efforts of the best church- men to bring order into the lives of the secular clergy, and to reform the laxity of the monastic houses. The Archbishop Mendoza and his successor Jimenez de Cisneros — the first by the foundation of his college at Valladolid, and the second by his endowment of the university of Alcala de Henares — strove with some effect to raise the level of education in the country and particularly in the Church. Spanish industry enjoyed a golden age. When we look at these reigns from a distance they appear as a time of glory and prosperity. A closer examination reveals a less agreeable spectacle. The order was largely superficial. Fernando's confession to Guicciardini that his subjects were anarchical was well justified by the facts. In his own personal dominion there were fierce revolts of the serfs against their lords in Aragon, and rebellions of the peasantry in Catalonia. The Aragonese jacqueries were suppressed, and the King aided the nobles to enforce their most atrocious pretensions. The Catalans, who acted better together* and who had the advantage of possessing a difficult hill-country to defend, succeeded in extorting valuable concessions confirmed by the King in the Convenio (convention) de Guadalupe — the name of the religious house in Estremadura at which he was then resident. In Castile the peasantry were as always quiescent. Good adminis- tration depended wholly on the personal character and THE CATHOLIC SOVEREIGNS 139 hard work of the sovereign, who went into the most minute details. The material prosperity of the country was very relative. All travellers noted the thin population, the great tracts of uncultivated land, the wide distances between villages, the treelessness of the country, the rarity of towns, the squalid meanness of the houses apart from the palaces of nobles, or great monastic buildings, the all but universal poverty of the life. They noted, too, that the clergy as a rule were extremely ignorant. The Spanish Church could no doubt boast of some learned men — enough to enable it to appear with honour in general councils. But the learning was in a few hands, and was, so to speak, adventitious and external. The people knew nothing of it. The Church was represented to them by the Parish Priests and the Begging Friars, who exercised a vast influence, and who were grossly ignorant. x\ll travellers, too, noted the repugnance of the " Old Christian" Spaniards of all ranks for industry. It was associated in their minds with the converted Jews and the Moriscos. Industry laid a man open to suspicion of unclean blood and doubtful orthodoxy. The Spaniards were very far from being indifferent to money. They loved wealth, but it must be wealth which was rapidly acquired by gambling or by force, and was to be enjoyed in idleness. Pure sloth was even encouraged in act, though not, we must beheve, in deliber- ate intention, by the Church. A holy poverty, a holy men- dicity, a holy personal dirt, were signs of Christian humility, trust in God and sanctity. The Church held up as an example to be admired the figure of Isidore of Madrid (a very different Isidore from him of Seville), the pious ploughman who spent his time praying, and was rewarded by seeing the angels plough his field for him. The Spaniard envied the prosperity of the hard-working Jews and Moors. He thought that what they gained was robbed from him, and he was ever eager to 140 SPAIN despoil them. The soul of the race was turned to evil. It was not, and it could not come to, good. At the very dawn of its brief, external, and largely accidental greatness, Spain was on the road leading to the torpor and beggary of the seventeenth century. CHAPTER VI THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN For a period of some eighty years, counting from the death of Fernando to the Peace of Vervins in 1598, which marked the beginning of the swift dechne, Spain was the foremost power in Europe. Even a summary of all that was done in part, or in whole, by the co-operation of Spanish soldiers and diplomatists during that time would require wide ranging excursions into the history of Italy, Germany, Poland, France, Flanders, and the British Isles. While we were wandering far afield on the track of wars and diplomacies, we would lose sight of the Spaniard of Spain, who is really of moment to us, for he was the ancestor of, and his fortunes explain, the Spaniard of to-day. I will therefore be but brief in such survey as must be made of the great horizon line from Naples to Ireland, during such time as a few Spaniards were active at every point of it. They were busy in all these regions less by any power of expansion of their own than because marriage and death had made them the servants of the august, the illustrious. House of Austria. Let us look at the illustrious house. Carlyle has written of the " tough " struggle of the Hapsburgs, and that is the .word. Pertinacity, perseverance, determination never to submit nor yield have been their qualities, and this indomitable character of the race has been united with an average level of capacity — never reaching 141 142 SPAIN actual greatness perhaps in any of them, but often good, such as no other royal race has maintained for an equal length of time. Whether as Hapsburg pure and simple or as Hapsburg-Lorraine, they have never quite failed to pro- duce men and women who could live through disaster and follow up success. This manhood, and this capability, have been at the service of an '' unconquerable hope '' and an " inviolable shade.*' The first of them who saw greatness well within reach, meditated on the mystic significance of the vowels A E I U, which, if you speak Latin, stand for Austrice est imperium orbis universi, and if you use German A lies erdreich ist Oesterreich unterthan. They have often been dreamers and astrologers, but they have looked to the stars for encouragement, not for miracles. They have sought to hold the inviolable shade, and forward the unconquerable hope, by means which are of the earth earthly. In their hearts has been the belief that all of right belongs to *' Austria,'' that *' Austria " is the illustrious House of Hapsburg, that men and women, thinkers, fighters, and peoples exist to be used in fulfiUing the high destinies of the sacred race. The whole may be, and in an imperfect world as a matter of fact is, beyond reach at any given moment. But whatever is gained marks a step in the fulfilment of a divinely fixed destiny, and whatever is taken to that high end is taken justly. Behind them at the close of the fifteenth century lay the shining image of the medieval Holy Roman Empire. Before them lay the prospect of making it once more, and far more than it had ever been for Saxon or Thuringian, or Swabian emperors, a living reality. If that hope was deferred, the Hapsburgs toiled on, not with a sick heart, but with an indignant sense of the world's injustice, and with the in- vincible determination to secure as much of the inheritance kept from them by the perversity of mankind, as could be attained to by force and by craft. The spirit rules the fleshy THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 143 and this was the spirit of the men and women who were to control the destiny of Spain for two centuries. It came to Spain in the person of Charles V. The armour he wore at the battle of Miihlberg, and the chair he was carried in when gout had crippled him, may be seen to-day at Madrid. They show that he must have been a slender man of about five feet two inches high. But in that small body dwelt an overweening spirit, and a colossal egotism. There was that much in common between him and his subjects but at the beginning there was nothing else — not even language. Charles had been bred up in Flanders amid the opulent Flemish part of the great Burgundian inheritance which his grandfather the romantic Maximilian had won by his marriage to Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold. His younger brother Ferdinand had been bred in Spain. His grandfather of Aragon had loved him, and had thought of leaving him a great independent power in Spain. But the poHtical instincts of this true King were victorious, and all went to Charles. Ferdinand of Austria, perhaps the abler, and beyond doubt the more sane man of the two, who was popular in Spain, was left at his brother's mercy. The first act of Charles was to send Ferdinand to represent him in the Hapsburg possessions in Southern Germany. With the accession of Charles I. in Castile, but soon to be Vth among Germanic-Roman emperors, Spain became part of an inter- national or confederated power, known for short as " the House of Austria." Its fortunes were tied to those of Southern Germany, the Danube, and the Netherlands. What did it mean for Spain ? First, it meant that Charles came to Spain still little more than a boy, with no knowledge of it, no affection for it, surrounded by Flemish advisers, and with no other purpose than to draw on his Spanish inherit- ance for means to secure his election to the Empire on the death of his grandfather Maximilian. That purpose he 144 SPAIN carried out with all the pertinacity of his race and character. It was a decisive crisis in the history of Spain. Had there been a Spanish people, and had that people acted on a sound political principle, he would have been met with an emphatic refusal. But there was, in the sense of a political entity, a genuine commonwealth, no Spanish people. There were Castilians, Aragonese, Catalans, Valencians, Andalusians, subjects of the same prince, who did not look upon them- selves as fellow-countrymen. Each of these parts was again divided and subdivided into classes, noble and non-noble, lay and clerical, town and country. The common crown alone represented the national unity. It was the tragedy of Spain's destiny that the land was driven to its misfortunes by a necessity which was in part of its own creation. If the Spaniards could have acted together it would have been easy for them to compel Charles to choose between Spain and the Empire. But they could not act together, nor does it appear that this wholesome division presented itself as a possibiHty to any of them. They had their grievances against the Crown, but also against one another. If they attempted to enforce attention to the first by arms there was every probability that the second would flare up into civil and social war. The choice before them lay between securing a minimum of unity and internal order by allowing the real interests of the country to be sacrificed to the family ambitions of a foreign dynasty, or attempting to avert that misfortune by replunging the country into the divisions and anarchy of the Middle Ages. It may happen to nations as well as to parties to find themselves in a position where nothing they can do will fail to work evil. During the three years 15 17-15 20 that Charles remained in Spain he aroused much ill-feeling by his lavish distribution of offices and benefices to his Flernish servants, The nobles THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 145 I sulked, and the Cortes protested. Charles went his way disregarding the nobles, and coercing or bribing the repre- sentatives of the commons in Cortes. The money he extorted he spent in securing the favour of the German electoral princes. When at last he sailed for Flanders, pursued by the expostulations of his subjects, he left the elements of disorder behind him, and it broke out in the rising of the Comuneros in Castile, and of the Germania in Valencia. They have been called the last struggle of Spanish freedom, and they ought to be called the last effort of the anarchy of the Middle Ages to raise its head once more. The King had forced the Cortes to follow him to Santiago in Gahcia, for he intended to go to Flanders by sea. As it met for the purpose of voting money, it consisted only of the delegates or attorneys (personeros) of the towns having voice and vote. These men were paid by him while the session lasted, and were much at his mercy. Charles put pressure on them and bribed them, and by virtue of his royal authority he released them from all the engagements they had entered into with their constituents, the town councils. The grant was made and he sailed. When the cities learnt what had happened a storm of rage broke out in Castile. The anger of the townsmen was justified, for the story of the Cortes which met at Santiago was enough to prove that the King was both willing and able to reduce the constitutional right of the commons to vote the taxes they were to pay to a pure formahty. The means he had used were deliberately insulting. But if their wrath was excusable, the way in which it was shown deprives the rising of the Comuneros of all claim to respect. At Zamora the townsmen hunted for the " Procuradores '' who had betrayed them. The two offenders were saved from massacre by the local influence of the Count of Alba de Liste, who enabled them to escape. When the townsmen rushed 146 SPAIN to burn their houses, the Countess faced the mob, and induced it to abstain from the outrage. Personal influence accounted for much in this case, and so did the fact that a Count of Alba de Liste could command *the service of an armed follow- ing. At Segovia there was nobody to play the same part. The townsmen who had collected in the cathedral to elect municipal officers broke into a paroxysm of murderous fury. They murdered two royal judicial officers, by hanging them by the heels. The Procurador Tordesillas, who, though warned of his danger, came manfully forward to defend his action in the Cortes, was butchered. In Burgos the rage of the towns- men was directed against a certain Garcia Jofre, a man of French birth, married and settled in the town, who had long served the Catholic sovereigns, and was in the service of their grandson. J of re's offence was that the King had made him a grant of a castle which Burgos looked upon as belonging to itself. He was not in the town when the mob broke out, but he was hunted down, seized in a village church in which he had taken refuge, dragged from the *' horns of the altar '' and taken to Burgos. The mob beat him to death and hung his corpse from the gallows. These are only a few examples of crimes which were imitated everywhere so long as the rising of the Comuneros lasted. When Charles is blamed for the severity of the punishments he inflicted when the royal authority triumphed, it must not be forgotten that his hand fell on men who had been guilty of mere crimes. Private grudges were satiated everywhere under cover of zeal for the cause of the communes. It has often been said that the liberties of Castile were crushed by the standing army of the Crown. But Charles left no army behind him when he sailed for Flanders. The ill-chosen regent he named to conduct the government — his tutor Adrian of Utrecht (afterwards Pope Hadrian VI.) — could command the service of only a handful of guards. He did THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 147 send the Alcalde Ronquillo (the Judge Jeffreys of Spanish history) with a thousand Hght horse to take possession of Segovia, but the citizens defied him and he had to retreat. An attempt made by him and Don Antonio de Fonseca to suppress the Comuneros of Medina del Campo, the centre of the Spanish wool trade, and the scene of a great annual fair, succeeded only in setting the town on fire. Their army dissolved and many of their soldiers passed over to the Comuneros. The destruction they caused was increased by the vengeance of the popular party, which burnt a thousand houses belonging to supporters of the royal authority. Medina del Campo was utterly ruined, and never rallied from the disaster. It is absolutely necessary to bear these operations of blind rage and private spite acting under pretence of a public cause, and also the utter weakness of the royal authority, well in mind if we wish to understand why and how the revolt of the Comuneros ended, and by its very nature was doomed to end, in failure. For the moment and in the summer of 1520 they appeared to be the masters of Castile, and they had promises of co-operation from the coast districts. Dele- gates from the cities which had voice and vote met at Avila, and formed a '* Pacto de Hermandad '' (a Bond of Brother- hood). Their chief leaders were certain gentlemen — Garci Laso de la Vega and Juan de Padilla, of Toledo, and Juan Bravo of Salamanca. Other leaders there were — Don Pedro Giron, for instance, a member of the ducal house of Osuna, and Acufia, the Bishop of Zamora. The first was simply a specimen of the Cataline type, the necessitous or disappointed noble who does not scruple to make use of a popular riot, subject to a perfect readiness to betray his plebeian dupes, if the dispensers of patronage will buy him off. The bishop was a brutal, hot-headed man, who appears to have been on the verge of insanity — if not on the wrong side of it altogether. 148 SPAIN Don Pedro played the double traitor, and we may as well dismiss the bishop at once. When the Comuneros were put down he was taken prisoner, and confined in the castle of Logrofio. His confinement kept him in a state of brooding fury though he was treated with the respect due to his cloth. In a mood of cunning savagery he put a heavy stone in the velvet bag in which he usually carried his prayer-book. Then he appHed for an interview with the governor of the castle. The governor came, and as he made his bow, the bishop smote him on the back of the head with his weighted bag, felling him. For this achievement he was hanged from the battlements in his clerical robes. A cause led by such chiefs as these could come to no good. Nor did the more honourable men Padilla or Bravo (Laso betrayed his cause) give any proof of political faculty. The statement of grievances drawn up by the Comuneros is a list of complaints, not a claim of rights. It asks the King not to appoint foreigners to office, to summon the Cortes once in every three years, and to remove certain exactions in the collection of taxes. If Charles had consented to all of them, the authority of the Crown would not have been diminished. The Comuneros went to Tordesillas where the mad Queen Joan lived and released her. They treated her with respect and the poor lady spoke kindly. But they made no political use of her name. They wandered to and fro fighting but little, for so far there was nobody to meet them. The Regent was helpless. Charles sent messages promising concessions to certain towns in order, of course, to divide the insurgents. A more effectual and also more kingly act of his was to join Don Inigo de Velasco, Count of Haro, and Constable of Castile, in the Regency with the Cardinal Adrian. Don liiigo was an honourable and able man, who showed great moderation and who openly sym- pathized with the just grievances of the insurgents. He THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 149 tried to make peace, but the Comuneros were too unstable, too fond of displacing and replacing leaders, to allow of an arrangement with them. Two things became daily more visible, one was that the rising was a purely Castihan move- ment, and the other was that it was developing into an attack on the nobles. The north-west formed a separate '* Pacto '* of royahst tendency. Andalusia stood apart. There was, it is true, disorder in Seville, but the nature of the events which happened in that region were decisive evidence that the war of the Comuneros was simply reviving the anarchy of the reigns of John II. and Henry IV. Don Juan de Figueroa,^ brother of Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, Duke of Arcos, a very turbulent gentleman, saw an oppor- tunity, when to all appearances there was no king in Israel, to revive the good old standing feud of his house with the Guzmans. The opportunity looked the more promising because the then Duke was insane, and his brother, who acted as " tutor '' of his estates, was ill. Don Juan soon collected a disorderly following, and with the help of his partizans among the townsmen made himself master of Seville. But he had overlooked the Duchess Dofia Ana de Aragon, who Was a '' virago '' in the honourable sense of the word as used at that time — a woman of energy and high spirit. She stepped into the place left empty by the madness of her husband and the illness of her brother-in-law. She rallied the vassals of the Duchy and gave the immediate command of them to a gentleman, Valencia de Benavides, who had ^ The reader may be surprised to meet a gentleman of the name of Figueroa, who was brother of another gentleman whose name was Ponce de Leon. But the Spaniards of the noble class used a great freedom in the choice of family names, " apelUdos." If they inherited property brought into the family by a lady, they would take her name, or if they married an heiress they did the same thing. Sometimes, as in the case of the poet Gongora, a man would bear his mother's name in preference to his father's, because it was the more ancient and noble. 150 SPAIN married the Duke's bastard half-sister. Under his leadership, and by her orders, the Guzmans fell upon Don Juan de Figueroa and his followers, who had seized the Alcazar — the Royal Palace. The Palace was stormed and Don Juan taken prisoner. The licence of the times permitted other revivals of family feuds. Andalusia, which was the headquarters of the now rising trade with the '' Indies,*' the new world across the Atlantic, found them intolerable, and rallied to the royal authority as a protection. In Castile the Comuneros came to open strife with the nobles. Don liiigo de Velasco made a patient effort to quiet the disorders by negotiation. If the cities would have acted with him there was a possibility that the King would have found himself compelled to come to terms with a national resistance. But the nobles had separated themselves from the commons by their obstinacy in refusing to pay personal taxes. The Comuneros aimed at saving themselves from taxation by confiscating the lands of the nobles for the benefit of the Crown, a measure which, if it had been carried out, would have rendered the King independent of them also. They declared war on the nobles as a body. The natural consequence was that the nobles united in self-defence, and they with their armed followings routed the ill-organized and confusedly-led army of the Comuneros at Villalar, near Torrelobaton, on the 23rd April 1521. A single charge of their cavalry was enough to scatter the Comuneros. The chiefs died on the scaffold, and though Dofia Maria de Pacheco, wife of Juan de Padilla, another of the '' viragos " of the age, resisted for a time in Toledo, she was compelled to flee into Portugal ; and the war of the Comuneros was at an end. The Constable and the other nobles made a very moderate use of their victory. But when Charles, now Emperor, returned to Spain in July 1522 he brought with him a force of four thousand German Lanzknechts, which made him inde- THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 151 pendent of their help now that only police work was required, though so small a force would have been utterly unequal to the task of coercing a united kingdom of Castile. But he had nothing to fear, for the nobles had broken the Comuneros, effectually for the benefit of the Crown. He took a savage vengeance on the chiefs of the rising. Centuries were to pass before there was another revolt against royal authority in Spain. The Germanias of Valencia and Mallorca had run their course alongside, but not in co-operation with, the war of the Comuneros. These two movements were revolts of artisans in the towns, the Ma Menor, and country labourers against the burghers and the nobles. The signal was given in Valencia, a seaport and manufacturing town notorious for its dissolute morals, and with a large foreign element in its population. There were Frenchmen and ItaHans, and at least one Englishman among the leaders of the '' Agermina- dos.'' The necessity for defending the coast against the Barbary pirates had induced the viceroy to allow the '' Ma Menor '' to form companies of militia. The possession of arms and the absence of any force of royal troops tempted them to compel attention to their greivances. The actual disorders began as in Castile by mere murder. The victims were two men who were being tried for sodomy. The mob broke into the court, dragged the prisoners out, and burnt them in the market place. The movement turned at once to an attack on the nobles, who were accused, to some extent justly, of immorality and insolence to the poor, but who were peculiarly offensive because their wealth was based on the high rents paid by their Mahometan Morisco tenants. These poor people would pay enormous rents for the protection of the nobles, but their industry, sobriety, and thrift enabled them to accumulate more money than the Christian workmen could earn. The Christians of the working classes hated 152 SPAIN them for the very reasons which make the white workmen of South Africa, or of America, hostile to Asiatic labour. They undersold their rivals and kept wages down. The Ager- minados massacred many of them and forcibly baptized many more. There will be occasion to return to this ugly business of the forcible baptisms. The Germania was from the first a social revolt of the " have nots '' against the *' haves.*' It was after many delays suppressed in the country by the nobles who armed their Morisco tenants. The Agerminados were finally cut to pieces at Orihuela. In Valencia the burghers of the ''ma mayor " seized the opportunity when the insurgents were weakened and discouraged to suppress the '' Germania '' of the Ma Menor in the city. The Mallorquin rising ran the same course, lasted longer, was marked by hideous outrages and ferocious retaliations. It was put down by troops sent from the mainland, and left a state of crime and disorder behind. Taken together, the war of the Comuneros in Castile and of the Germanias of Valencia and Majorca, must be held to prove that if the government of the absolute king was fatal to Spain, no other was possible. The alternative was anarchy, which would have produced instant ruin. If the monarchy exhausted the country in pursuit of selfish dynastic ends, it at least preserved the national unity for better days, and gave the Spaniards that passing period of national greatness of which they have never ceased to be proud. It was the lesser of the two evils between which, by fortune, and their own limitations, the Spaniards were called upon to choose. Though '* Carlos Quint o " has been adopted by Spanish tradition as a national hero, he chose his most trusted servants from other nationalities. His chief ministers, Chievres and Mercurio della Gattinara in his early years, Nicholas Perrenot de Granvella in his later, were Flemish or Italian. Of his generals, only the Duke of Alba was a Spaniard. And it THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 153 is to be observed that the Emperor never entrusted Alba with an important command away from his own direct control. Perhaps he distrusted his character rather than his abilities. In his letter of advice given to his son Philip he warned him against Alba, saying that the Duke would try to influence his master for his own ends. His two chief lieutenants were Frederick Davalos, the Marquis of Pescara, whose family was indeed of Spanish origin, but long settled in Southern Italy, and Charles Lannoy, who was a Burgundian. The Emperor had indeed many Spaniards among his officers, Alarcon, Alonso de Leiva, Avila, Quijada, but they were " executive officers " not generals. His admiral was the Genoese, Andrew Doria. Charles appears to have liked the character of the best type of Spaniard, the sense of honour, the personal valour, the '* proud humility " which mingled a self-respecting manhood with their deference. But it is plain that he did not think highly of the intellect of any of them. The climate of their country suited him. The security of his position when once the royal authority was finally established made him prefer Spain as a refuge and a headquarters in the intervals of his campaigns. But the greater part of his life was spent on the high road or on the sea. He came back to Spain to die. In his active life he drew on it for money and soldiers. The briefest history of Spain must stop for a moment to deal with the Seiior Soldado, the gentleman soldier of the great epoch. The soldier and the priest or friar, were the two main Spanish types. From the early days when the Spaniards were the pith of Hannibars army, through the legions of the Roman Empire, the Almugaveres of the wars of Anjou and Aragon, and the *' mesnaderos '' (mesnadieri) of medieval Italian tyrants, and the '* Ecorcheurs " of the Hundred Years War in France, the race had produced good fighting men. Yet, paradoxical 154 SPAIN as it may seem, the Spaniard has rarely been a good soldier. Left to himself he is a partisan, a guerrillero, a champion, not a disciplined soldier. Some directing intellect from without has always been required to make him a useful member of an organized force. Yet from the end of the fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, Spain produced a soldier who, by general consent, was second to none. When Defoe's '' Cavaher '' recorded that the fighting of the Spanish '' tercios " at the battle of Nordlingen was the best he had seen he was repeating a general judgment. The " tercios,*' the '' Old Bands '' of the great epoch, are still the miHtary glory of Spain. When Gonsalvo de Cordaba landed in Calabria in 1497 the men he brought with him from Spain were the veterans of the conquest of Granada — light-horse (ginetes) and infantry. The Spanish cavalry, though it has been good, never ranked with the best infantry. The foot soldier of the first times was a cross-bowman or arquebusier, or a sword and buckler man — light, sinewy, extremely expert in the use of his weapon, of wonderful endurance in hunger and fatigue, tenacious in defence, and withal capable of adventure in the surprise of posts, and of sudden terrible onsets when the moment for the line to advance had come. On broken ground and in partisan warfare he showed himself more than a match for Swiss pikemen or French men-at-arms. But he had much to learn before he could be trusted on a stricken field, and where men had to act in masses. The Spanish intellect was still alert and acquisitive. It did learn and rapidly. The pike was adopted from the Swiss, and with it all the use of that weapon implied — the close formation and the constant practice which made it possible for men drawn up eight lines deep to stand firm in a mutually supporting mass, and to charge so well together that their whole combined weight told at once. But when the Spaniard took the pike he did THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 155 not neglect the sword nor the '* shot.'* The pikes to form the '* battle/* the centre, the shot in the '' wings " to flank and disorder the enemy, were the two elements of the Spanish formation ; only rigid discipline animated by intelligence could allow of the effective combination of the two. And the discipline of the Spaniards was universally allowed to be of the best. Our Elizabethan ancestors, who professed a somewhat swaggering contempt for the individual Spaniard, confessed that his discipHne made him a formidable soldier. Now that discipline was above all else moral. To those who remember that the Spaniards were the most avaricious, the most ruthless of the host of mercenaries who sacked Rome, and who have heard of the '' Fury of Antwerp," the word moral may sound much out of place when applied to them. But I mean the code of morals which teaches a man to '' play the game '* as a soldier and in action — to obey orders, to aid a comrade even when he is a personal enemy, to keep his place unshaken, to step into the place of a dead fellow soldier, to stand firm and to charge home. This morality, which is no base one, was never more in honour than it was in the '' old Spanish bands.'' The Spanish soldier began as a *' bisofio,'' a '' recruit,'' who was supposed to know nothing and must serve his apprenticeship. At the end of three years he was a *' Sefior Soldado," a gentleman soldier, from whom the honour of a cavalier was to be expected. The tercio became his home. He could marry. His wife and children were rationed. The women who were " on the strength " were organized in companies hke the men and were officered by the wives of the officers. A tercio was, in fact, a tribe living for war and for nothing else. The word '' tercio " is of rather dubious origin. It means a '* third part." but was applied to a body of varying numbers of pikemen, arquebusiers and musketeers, who formed a corps divided into companies and commanded by a Maese de Campo, 156 SPAIN a camp-master. It might sink to a few hundred men in peace, or be recruited up to two thousand five hundred or even three thousand in war. A whole tercio might be dis- solved. When that was done, those of its officers and men who could find a place would enter one of the tercios kept on foot. They were known as reformed, " reformados.'* There were occasions when the number of '* reformados " in a tercio was sufficient to replace all the officers if need were twice over. Whatever changes the financial necessities of the government might compel it to make, some of the tercios were always kept on foot, and when new were raised the '* cadres " were drawn from the permanent corps. These bands were not stationed in Spain. They were the '' fijos " or fixed bodies which garrisoned Palermo, or Naples, or Milan. Like another famous infantry of which we have often heard, the Spanish infantry, if it was the best in the world of its day, was not numerous. It was a common saying that nobody ever saw more than eight thousand Spaniards on a field of battle. Eight thousand was a large proportion of armies of twenty-five or thirty thousand. Marlborough had a lesser proportion of British soldiers. But the point is that no army of Charles Vth or his successors was ever purely Spanish. The Spaniards were used hke Napoleon's old guard, for the decisive blow on the battle-field. When Leiva was appointed to take command of the town of Pavia he asked for a Spanish garrison. The Emperor's lieutenant, the Marquis of Pescara, refused his request. He allowed him five hundred to stiffen his other soldiers, but declared that he must keep the Old Bands in hand to win the battle which he meant to fight with Francis I. If we turn to general morality, it must be allowed that the Spaniards were not above the level of their age. . They do appear to have been less addicted to massacring prisoners than some others of the time. We ourselves had a very bad THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 157 reputation on that side. But that the Spaniards could plunder, and could torture the civil populations to force revelations of hidden property, is not to be denied. When their pay was long in arrears, which frequently happened, they would mutiny with ferocity. Gonsalvo de Cordoba once declared that a general had better be in the middle of ten thousand devils broken loose than, amidst Spanish mutineers. Even in mutiny the " pundonor," which was the real code of morals of the Spaniard, was not forgotten. They did not, like the Germans and Swiss, mutiny before a battle and refuse to fight. They would listen to an appeal to honour, return to duty, fight, and mutiny again after victory. There is one respect in which the Seiior Soldado was much better than the reputation which his enemies made for him. He passed for being a braggart and very arrogant. Yet in the great mass of the memoirs, reports, reminiscences of Spanish soldiers which remain, the tone is not generally boastful. The Spaniards, as a matter of fact, bragged a great deal less than the Elizabethan English. Some of our raiders in the West Indies made a far more blatant swagger over the plunder of small unarmed settlements, than the Spaniards did over their hottest fighting. There is a notable incHnation among them to insist on the value of discipline, and good management, and to say little or nothing of their valour. A fine but far from exceptional example is the account of the campaign of Muhlberg written by Don Luis de Avila y Zufiiga, who accompanied the Emperor throughout. He criticized friend and enemy freely and with good sense. He praises his own countrymen, but it is for the admirable steadi- ness of the arquebusiers, who reserved their fire till the German cavalry was two pikes' length from them, and fired so well together and with such steady aim that they shattered their assailants. His tone to foes and fellow soldiers of other races is generous. He is proud of his countrymen, but because 158 SPAIN of their good discipline. The opinion of the Duke of Alba was pretty generally shared by other Spaniards. He claimed that the '' Old Bands " were the best of the Emperor's soldiers, but he added that the Spaniards were trustworthy only when they were veterans. It required an intensive training, and a process of natural selection which weeded out the weaker to make the Seiior Soldado. The German was a useful soldier so soon as he was drilled. The Emperor may, without the least exaggeration, be said to have made use of these men twice, and only twice, in the interest of Spain — in his victorious expedition to Tunis in 1535 and his unsuccessful effort to conquer Algiers in 1541. The history of Spanish poHcy in Northern Africa supplies such a complete illustration of the disastrous consequences of the '' Imperial position *' it won by the poHcy of the Catholic sovereigns and the succession of Charles V., that it is for our purpose far more worth telling than many better remembered transactions. In order to make a survey of it we must go back to years before the reign of the Emperor and go on for some years after his death. But it makes a story by itself and can best be treated apart. As far back as 1402 a Norman adventurer, Jean de Bethen- court, in partnership with a Spaniard, Rubin de Bracamonte, had made a settlement in the Canaries. They did homage to the then King of Castile (Henry III.), and promised to hold the islands from him. The fief passed in one way and another through different hands, and in 1477 it was ceded by the then possessor Diego Garcia Herrera and his wife Dofia Ana, to Isabel the CathoHc. The Queen took measures to complete the conquest in 1594, and took hold of the opposite coast of Africa, Santa Cruz de Mar Pequefia. Andalusian seamen and mer- chants were active in trade and armed adventure on the coast, and in rivalry with the Portuguese who had conquered Ceuta and the land near it. To the east of the Straits the Spaniards THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 159 were following their example. An expedition raised mainly by the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and commanded by his captain Diego de Estopinar, had occupied Melilla (then called Mellosa) . The policy of extension into Africa was dictated by the reasons which had induced the Romans to establish the Tingitana province as a protection to Boetica, and the great Caliph Abdurrahman III. to conquer Morocco. Africa was always the home of piracy, from which Spain was obviously the first to suffer. After the fall of Granada in 1592 piracy grew in intensity. The more spirited of the Moors passed over to Africa and sought revenge by plundering the Spanish trade and coast, which their local knowledge qualified them to do with great effect. It was in pure self-defence that the wisest rulers of Spain sought to master the ports from which these irreconcilable enemies sailed. The wars of Ferdinand in Italy drew the resources of Spain away from their proper work. Yet during his second regency (1507-15 16) he allowed if he did not help Jimenez de Cisneros to do something for the common good. The resources used by the Cardinal were largely drawn from the immense revenue of his archbishopric of Toledo. His lieutenant was the Count Pedro Navarro, a Basque of obscure origin, and varied fortunes. He had run away to sea when a mere boy, had been a pirate in the Mediterranean, and a mercenary soldier in the service of Florence. In that age of strenuous intellectual activity he had found a way to educate himself. He was one of the many-sided men of the Renaissance, seaman, soldier, mathematician, military engineer and shipbuilder. Navarro resented the interference of the archbishop in military matters, but served him with vigour. Pefion de Velez, Pefion de la Gomera, Oran, Bugia (Bougie), Tripoh, were occupied (1508- 1510). The native African (Berber or so-called Arab) princes of Tunis, Algiers, Tlemcen were forced to '' commend '' themselves. But Fernando was now entering into the i6o SPAIN League of Cambrai against Venice. It was more to him that the Venetians held towns on the iEgean coast of his kingdom of Naples than that Spain should be protected on the side of Africa. His imperial policy crushed the real interest of his native country. It was a small matter that an expedition to the island of Gelves (Djerba on the coast of Tunis) failed by bad management in 1510. But it was fatal that every man and every maravedi at the command of Spain was thrown into the most ruthless and the most wickedly destructive of the wars of Italy. For now an infinitely more terrible enemy intervened in Africa. The Turkish Sultan Sehm and his son SoHman, the Magnani mous (or Magnificent), had respectively prepared the way for and had created the naval power of the Turks. In 1520 Soliman was allowed to drive the Knights of St John from Rhodes, and a priceless bulwark was lost to Christianity in the Mediterranean. Religion and his own interest combined to make Soliman the protector of the Mahometans of the Western Mediterranean. The way was shown him by two of his subjects, Moslem Albanians, sons of an artisan gf the island of Mitylene, Arudj and Kairredin, surnamed Barbarossa.^ They began as mean sea robbers, but prospered. Arudj, the elder and the first '' Turcus Ahenobarbus,'' entered the service of the native King of Algiers, and in the natural course of things murdered his employer and seized the kingdom. He then began to extend his kingdom in Africa and to raid far and wide in the Western Mediterranean, plundering and slave hunting. Arudj was defeated and killed by a com- bined force of Spaniards and native Africans at Tlemcen. Algiers was lost for a time, and Kairredin Barbarossa fled to Constantinople, where he offered his services to Soliman, ^ It has been said that Barbarossa did not mean Redbeard but Babu Arudj = Father Arudj. Yet he is called Ahenobarbus by writers in Latin at the time. THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN i6i and was by him made Capitan Pasha. The great Barbarossa, who was till his end the terror of the shores of the Mediter- ranean, was Kairredin, not Arudj. His expeditions were a maritime version of the slave-hunting raids of '* Arab *' slave-hunters in Africa. While the Christian sovereigns were ravening over the duchies and frontier towns, Barbarossa was desolating the shores of Sicily, Naples, and Spain. He intervened in the brutal conflicts of Tunisian princes and made himself master of the city and its port. In 1535 the Emperor had a moment of leisure in his endless wars with Francis and his schemes for the suppression of Protestantism in Germany. He utilized it to carry out what, if it had been followed up, would have been a truly profitable enterprise, and what was at least a brilliant achieve- ment. He sailed from Barcelona, ralHed all his forces in Southern Italy, and fell upon Tunis with an overwhelming naval force, and an army of 30,000 men, among whom were mustered the flower of the '' Old Bands '' and the best of his captains. The Goletta, the fortress port of Tunis, was taken by storm, and the majority of Barbarossa's galleys were captured. He strove to stand on his defence in the city, but two Spanish renegades in his service saw that the time was come to take care of themselves. They released and armed the thousands of Christian captives in the citadel. The ground was cut beneath his feet, and Barbarossa fled to Bona, where he had a small reserve squadron, and from thence escaped to Constantinople. Charles placed an African prince in possession of Tunis, and returned to Spain. '' Well begun is half done.'' But half done is not done at all. And Charles went no further. His Imperial interests called him off to Italy, to France, to Germany. Barbarossa came back with the countenance of Francis I. of France, who sought the help of the Turk. Algiers became his head- quarters, and the southern French ports his bases of opera- i62 SPAIN tions. A nightmare of misery descended on the western Mediterranean. In 1541, in another pause of the European struggle, Charles struck at Algiers. He sailed too late in thf- year. His fleet was shattered by a storm. His army, deprive of its stores, could make no impression on the town. He re-embarked beaten, with huge loss. For the rest of his hfe he was entangled in his unsuccessful strife with German Protestantism — and with France for the recovery of Metz. Dragut succeeded Barbarossa at Algiers, and the Turkisli Beglerbegs fixed their grip on Northern Africa. The futile story was repeated when Charles had abdicated, and his son Philip had succeeded. If Charles was jealoir of his authority, he at least led his armies and was on tli< spot to decide. Philip hid himself in the heart of CastiL and would direct everything from his desk. Delay was the natural result, and his generals were cowed out of all capacity to act for themselves. The expeditions he sent to Afric! were nearly all disastrous. Garcia de Toledo, his viceroy in Naples, did indeed relieve Malta when it was besieged by Dragut in 1565. Six years later, when the Turks had attacked th( Venetian possessions in Cyprus, Philip joined the Holy League organized by the Pope. His bastard brother, John of Austriji , was appointed captain-general of a great fleet, mainly com- posed of Venetian and other Italian galleys, but carrying a strong contingent of Spanish troops. He won the really splendid victory of Lepanto (7th October 1571). l^ut once more the work was half done. Venice retired from th( League. Don John did take Tunis, which was again in tlj( hands of the Turks. But Philip, who was now fairly entangled in the troubles of the Low Countries, left the Spanish garrison to be overpowered and massacred. From that tini(' forward a few trumpery local raids of no lasting value was all S])ain did to protect herself against Africa. While Philip was endeavouring to manage all the world, the Barbary THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 163 sea captains ravaged his coast till the people fled from their villages, and took refuge in the hills, and his trade was de- stroyed. The blood and the life of Spain ebbed away in contumacious folly in Flanders. '' The eyes of the fool are in the ends of the earth.** Within the country itself Charles set up an ideal of kingship. The King of Castile had always been in theory a strong ruler of great legal power. If he was not so in fact, the explanation I of his weakness was to be found in his age or his character. But he was with that a man born of woman, to be opposed and even punished when he would not discharge or would abuse his office. Under Charles the king became a kind of demi-god above criticism, one who was to be obeyed because his office was divine. A story which may not be literally true (few of the stories conuiionly told could be proved ** to the satisfaction of a jury "), but which would not have been told at all if it had not had at least an air of plausibility, has been recorded of one of his successors. It puts the whole theory of kingshij) as held by the Spaniards with I'' precision, and at any rate " mythical truth." It runs that Philip v., first ruler of the Bourbon dynasty, asked one of his ministers whether, in his opinion, a king was ever justified in disregarding the opinion of all his council. The minister, who is not represented as having been silly or a sycophant, replied that as by God kings have rule, they are pecuHarly His servants, and it must be supposed that He gives them His help and inspiration. Therefore a divinely directed king will naturally have a better wisdom than the merely human wisdom of his ministers. This sanctification of the King, this return to the Roman view of the Prince as " divus," that is ihimself a god, was assuredly not peculiar to Spain. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries all Europe was turning to belief in the necessity for a strongly constituted central authority. Tl;ie state was, in Burke's phrase, consecrated, i64 SPAIN and it was inevitable that the actual man born of woman who occupied the throne should come to be accepted as the personification of the abstract state. The longing of whole populations for a strong authority to protect them against the anarchy, the exactions, the brutal selfishness of feudalism, when the poetry had died out of it, and nothing remained but a huge machinery of oppression, the sentiment of loyalty to the '' lords anointed,'' combined, with the teaching of lawyers soaked in the principles of the Roman Law, to make the king a god. Learned men, discoursing of law and political theories might draw a distinction between the abstract Prince who is pure authority, and the fallible, perhaps the vicious, or semi-insane human being who sits on the throne. So the theologian knows that the statue of the Virgin Mother which stands on the altar is itself naught, save only as being a symbol, a means of edification. But the worshipper does not, let the apologist of the adoration of images say what he pleases. The subjects of Spanish kings drew no distinction betw^een the abstract Prince and Charles or Philip of Hapsburg or of Bourbon. They adored him even when he was an imbecile. Again, we must remember that it was not the thing, but the degree and the persistence of the thing, which marked the Spaniard. There were Englishmen who could use the language of adoration to their '' gracious king who represents the King of Heaven '' as profanely and as sincerely as any Spaniard. The point is, that they did not mean it as the Spaniard did. Saint Simon, who knew by long experience what an absolute king was, declared that no king in Europe was so unchecked as the sovereign of Spain. He was right, and the people would have it so. Spaniards were the first people of Western Europe to erect altars and offer sacrifices to Augustus. There was in them, and is in them now, a tendency to look for a ruler, a '' Ramiro of the Rod of Justice/' who makes the law, and is above his own handiwork, who THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 165 does justice by giving favours and smiting all offenders. At times within the memory of our grandfathers they were looking for such a divine figure in Ferdinand VII. Charles V. fulfilled their ideal. When the Hermandad of the Comuneros and Germanias of Valencia and Majorca had rolled off like the smoke of straw, '' a humo de pajas/' they were resigned in the hand of the King as utterly as ever was mystic in the hand of God. They met his incessant demands for money with murmurs and obedience. When in 1538 he proposed to tax the nobles as if they were mere plebeians those gentlemen did indeed recalcitrate. By the mouth of the Constable liiigo de Velasco they pleaded their exemptions, and they hinted at united action with the commons. The King drew back. Common sense must have shown him that it was his interest to keep nobles and commons divided. As the nobles would not pay, and as he called on the Cortes for no other purpose than to vote money, the commons, the delegates of the eighteen towns, were summoned alone. What pressure could not get from them, or could obtain only at the cost of some trouble, was secured by bribery. It was no great matter to buy the votes of a majority of thirty-six *' procuradores " who had no longer to fear the fate of Tordesillas at Segovia. Observe that it was Castile which bore the brunt. Aragon and Catalonia were more stiff- necked and were on the Pyrenean frontier and might be thrown into the arms of France. They paid, but not so much. From Castile subsidy and aid (servicios) were exacted again and again. The old alcabala was not enough. The tax of " the millions " dates from the year 1538, when the nobles eluded payment of direct taxes, and the last faint chance that a national resistance to royal exactions would be possible in Castile vanished for ever. This impost, called of the millions, because it was calculated not in maravedises but in millions of ducats, was a tax on the necessaries of Hfe. It began with 166 SPAIN meat, wine, oil, and vinegar, and went on extending to all necessaries. Powder, lead, sulphur, almager, vermilion, sealing-wax, and cards were taxed, the so-called '' rentillas,'* little rents of the Crown. The bullion which began to pour in at the end of the reign from America depreciated the precious metals. More had to be demanded to make good the deficiency. A tax and a tax collector stood at every stage of industry. Before Charles died the promising industry of the time of the Catholic sovereigns was mortally stricken. Nor was all the money wrung from the growing poverty of Castile spent on fleets and armies. Charles V. brought to Spain all the pomp and ceremony of the Burgundian Court. The medieval Spaniards had loved magnificence well enough, but the household of the Catholic sovereigns was modest in comparison with the court of Charles V. The Cortes pleaded that he would reduce his estabhshment to the standard of Castile, to which he paid no attention. A change which was significant of much began in this reign. Spain had never possessed a capital. The Catholic sovereigns moved from town to town, carrying their government with them, drawing their purveyance from one place and another. With Charles the court tended to settle in one spot — Madrid. The rule that '' Madrid only is court '' was not fixed in his time. The process by which Madrid became the centre of the Spanish monarchy is a characteristic part of the country's history. The town, for Madrid never was, properly speaking, a city, had not been so unimportant in the Middle Ages as it has been said to have been. It was to begin with a fortress, standing, as do Toledo, Segovia, and many other Spanish towns, on " crag and tail." The famihar comparison of Madrid to a cut-off hand, laid palm down with out-stretched fingers on a table, is largely accurate. The wrist end is the bluff overlooking the dribble of water in the sandy bed of the THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 167 Manzanares. The back of the hand is the tail — the slope which falls away from the crag, dividing as it sinks with dips between thumb and forefinger, and lesser dips between the fingers. It faces the passes leading through the Guadarrama. By virtue of its local formation and its bearings to the moun- tains, it was of value as a fortress — whether as an outpost to Toledo, or as an advanced post for the masters of the passes. The Moorish kings of Toledo put a castle, an alcazar, on the bluff, and on the slope behind it a walled town grew up. The country around is dry, sandy, full of flint, but not barren when it can be watered. It was ill-supplied with water till the canal which taps the Lozoya to the north was made in the middle of the nineteenth century. Still there were wells in the town, and such water as they suppHed was very pure. It is not accurate to say that Madrid is a mere point in the geography of Spain. Geographically it has the same, or nearly the same, value as Segovia, another crag and tail fortress which watches the passes to the north. Therefore it was never quite neglected by the medieval kings of Castile. From time to time they held their court, and summoned the Cortes within its walls. It had voice and vote with Burgos or Toledo. Henry III. married the daughter of John of Gaunt at Madrid, and built the church of St Jerome for his wedding. Still, though not wholly of no importance, Madrid could not rank with Segovia or Toledo or ValladoHd or Burgos or Seville. The fact that it is almost the exact centre of Spain was of consequence. The King's orders could be most speedily despatched from the centre. Yet Segovia and Toledo are close by. Why then did the Haps- burg kings prefer the Moorish alcazar of Madrid to the noble alcazar of Segovia or to the other palace fortress of Toledo, the capital of their predecessors the Visigothic kings, and the shield of Andalusia ? That it lay near their hunting grounds of Balsain on the Guadarrama was not much, for i68 SPAIN Segovia lies nearer still. Perhaps because the keen dry air suited them, and perhaps because there was no archbishop, as at Toledo, no bishop, as at Segovia, no vigorous tradi- tion of municipal life. Madrid was '' hechura sua '' their creature. For these reasons, or even without very definite intention, Charles V., though he resided sometimes at other towns, gave a growing preference to Madrid. He assigned it as residence to his prisoner Francis I. He added largely to the old alcazar, and his son added more. Except for a brief interval in the reign of Philip HI. Madrid became '' the only court/' the acknowledged seat of government and capital. The alcazar of Charles V. and Philip II. possessed only one merit. It was ugly, inconvenient, and built in bits. But it was very large. The fire of 1734 gutted it and the ruins were swept away to make room for the Palace of to-day. Nothing remains of the house of Charles V. and his dynasty. But while it lasted it was a very notable place. , We must not think of the alcazar as having been only a palace such as Buckingham Palace. It was a vast ''government buildings,'' of which the King's own quarters form a part. His chief secretaries had quarters in it and their clerks worked on the ground floor — the '' covachuelas." The model was rather the Alhambra, which is a royal town, than the palace of a European king. It has been customary to draw a wide distinction between Charles Vth and his son Philip II. There is obviously one palpable difference between them. The father was a soldier. It was said of him that fate, which made him King, had wasted a fine cavalry general. He lived on the march, and, till gout crippled him, in the saddle. He ruling from the stirrup. The son was as far as a man could be from being a soldier. On the only occasion on which he was near a field of battle at St Quentin, he was content to spend the time at a safe -«# Si d* THE GREATNESS OF SPAIN 169 distance in a chapel and in prayer. The father had exposed himself recklessly. During the fighting in front of Tunis he had ridden in the vanguard. When his general the Marquis de Guasto asked him for his orders, the Emperor replied, '' Oh, you are general of the day. You can carry on." Guasto answered, '' Then my first order will be to your majesty to retire to the rear, for you are risking the whole fortune of the Empire where you are.'' Charles laughed good- humouredly and obeyed, but as he went he said — '* Emperors are never killed in battle. How should I be ? " He forgot Decius and Valens, and Julian the Apostate, together with a few others. His boundless confidence in his divine quality made him indifferent to peril, but it takes a brave man to feel that confidence. Because he lived among them, frank, affable, ready to lay the formality of the court aside and to jest under fire with knight or pikeman, a man among men on the field of battle, they loved him as they never loved his quill-driving successor, hidden in his '' despacho." But take from Charles the capacity of the general and the instinct of the fighter, and the father was even as the son. Their views of their rights were identical, and their bigotry was the same. Charles could be peremptory with .the Pope, but so could Philip. They were equally disposed to control the Papacy which they protected, and their Spanish clergy, which was more royalist (regalista) than papal, was ready to support them. When in his last days he learnt that the Lutheran heresy had pene- trated into Spain he urged on the Inquisition as eagerly as ever did Philip. He sacrificed the interests of his subjects to his ambitions without scruple ; all the son did the father began. But the Spaniards came to identify themselves with his grandeur. They thought of his empire as theirs, though they were but a sacrificed part of a foreign dominion. The way in which he left the throne is a part of European history. It is characteristic of the towering pride of the 170 SPAIN man, that he left the world before the world could leave him. He was crippled by gout the result of his gluttony, for he was an enormous eater. He had been baffled by the Lutheran German princes, and had failed before Metz. He would not linger on. He would have secured the election to the Empire for Philip if he could even at the expense of resigning Spain and the Indies to Maximilian, the son of his brother Ferdinand. The German princes would not hear of Philip, nor of any more emperors from Spain. They had already constrained Charles to endow Ferdinand with the Southern German possessions of his house. They were resolved to make the younger brother emperor. After hesitations and doubts he ended by trans- ferring all the Netherlands, La Franche Comte, Milan, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and the Indies to Philip, and retired to the house which he had prepared for himself, close to the Jeronomite monastery of Yuste, near Caceres, in Estre- madura. He did not cease to direct the Government in his retirement. He directed affairs from his retreat, using his old despotic power in the old way, as when he seized the silver belonging to the merchants in the home-coming convoy from America, and applied it to the use of the army. He died on the 2ist September 1558. CHAPTER VII SPAIN IN AMERICA While Fernando of Aragon and Charles of Hapsburg were using the Spaniards as tools in a work of dynastic ambition, their subjects were making an empire for themselves in America. The ambitions of the two sovereigns have gone the road of all enterprises which are founded on a perverse determination to force the nature of things to go against necessity. But the Spaniards have left their language, and have made human societies from Mexico to the Tierra del Fuego. We are not called upon to judge those societies here. To have made them was an achievement which will go on producing its consequences so long as the human race shall last. The conquest of America is the undeniable testi- mony to the magnificent energy and faculty of the Spaniard of the sixteenth century. How the Genoese Christopher Columbus persuaded the Catholic sovereigns to give him ships, and promise him rewards for the feat he undertook to perform, is matter for his biography. When he sailed from Palos de Moguer, 3rd August 1492, it was to prove that men could reach Cathay and Cipango by saihng directly West, and when he made his landfall at Guanahani (Wateling Island to all seeming) on the 12th October, he thought that he had done it — that he had reached the neighbourhood of the rich Pagan kingdoms of which he had read in the travels of Marco Polo. So all men then beheved, and in that faith he died. If he had never hved 171 172 SPAIN the land he discovered would equally have been found in 1500 when the Portuguese Pedro Alvarez Cabral, on his way to the East Indies, held too far over to the west and was carried by the current to within sight of the coast of Brazil, which he called the land of the Holy Cross, from the one fine constellation which blazes in the southern hemisphere with a reputation much beyond its real merits. But Columbus was first, and because of the time at which, and the way in which the feat was performed, the Spanish Empire in America started as it did. We cannot linger over perhaps the most often told of all tales. The first voyage (1492-93) revealed Cuba and Hispaniola. The second (1493-94) added Dominica, Guadalupe, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, to the map. In the third (1498-99) the mainland was reached at the mouth of the Orinoco. In 1499 the followers began with Alonso de Hojeda, Alonso Nino, Diego de Lepe. The fourth voyage came in 1502-4, and in 1506 Columbus died, having erred, and hav- ing sounded the depths of the ingratitude of kings and peoples. Between 1500 and 15 16 Vicente Yanez Pinzon, Rodrigo Bastidas, Cristobal and Luis Guerra, Ponce de Leon, Nicuesa and Hojeda, Vasco Nufiez de Balboa and Diaz de Solis had explored north to Yucatan, and south to the La Plata estuary. Balboa in 1513 had crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and had waded into the South Sea, and had taken possession of it for Castile and for Leon. The first epoch had ended and the foundations were laid. The Catholic sovereigns knew what had not been won for them, but not quite what had. It was plain that the mighty and civilized kingdoms described by Marco Polo had not been found. What Columbus had discovered were lands which might be settled, and might become a power too strong for them to control. They might have been ready to reward the Genoese, but they were not prepared to make him, or let him make himself, a great feudatory. They treated him SPAIN IN AMERICA 173 with ingratitude, and when the poHtical interests of their kingdom were at stake, they would have been unable to attach any rational meaning to the word grMitude to a subject. What had been found for Castile and Leon must be taken and held by them — i.e, by the sovereign who personified them — alone. In all Spanish colonial history, and more particularly in the first generations, we have to bear in mind the constant fear of the sovereign at home lest his representative on the spot should make himself independent. Leaving the question of colonial government aside for the present, let us go to the second epoch of the conquest. It began in 15 19 when Hernan {i.e. Fernando) Cortes sailed from Cuba with 400 Spaniards, 200 Indian carriers, 32 horses, 14 small field guns, in 11 ships. He knew that there was before him a coast inhabited by peoples who possessed gold, and had attained to some measure of skill in the mechanical arts. The Spaniards had made land- ings on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, had suffered repulse, and had heard of a great empire rich in the precious metals which occupied the inner land. Neither Cortes nor any man of that time can have known what that empire, as they called it, really was. There are good reasons for beheving that they never did come to understand its true character. Though the intellect and the education of Cortes was above the level of the Spanish conquerors (Conquistadores), he thought and spoke in terms of his age and country. His companions were still more bound by human limitations than he was, since they were more ignorant. Nor must we forget that they came from a country in which the vast majority of houses were still but one story high, and built of sun-dried mud, as many private dwelling-places in Spain and Spanish America, even in Buenos Ayres, still are. The buildings of the advanced village (pueblo) Indians which they found on the mainland were about equal to what they had left at 174 SPAIN home. They cannot justly be accused of falsity when they say that some Indian town was equal to Seville, or compare some '' big house '' of a tribe of Pueblo Indians to the Alhambra. The beauty of the Alhambra is wholly one of situation and internal ornament. Its masonry is poor and it has no great architectural merit. They exaggerated the material civilization they found, but they did not invent. That they should have failed to understand the political and rehgious organization of the Indians was inevitable. The *' head man " naturrlly appeared to them to be just such a ruler as a King at Granada or at Fez, if not exactly a brother sovereign to the King of Castile and Leon. That the so-called empire of Mexico or of the Aztecs was essentially a feeble thing detracts in no way from the fair claim of Cortes to be counted a daring conqueror. He knew that the people of the coast had shown themselves capable of repelling Spanish attack and that there were many more behind them, and he made a consummately skilful use of the essential weakness of the Aztecs. The little he can have learnt through the captive Indian woman, Marina, whom he took with him as a con- cubine, might have been shown to many of his contemporaries in vain. With the insight of a statesman he detected the dominating fact that the rule of the Aztecs rested on the oppression of many tribes by one. The combination of hard hitting where force must be used, with astute diplomacy, by which he organized the confederacy he led against Mexico, puts him in the first rank of conquerors and founders of empires. The story of that conquest from the first encounter at Tabasco till the fall of the city of Mexico (15 19-21) must be read at length to be appreciated. From the point on the coast at which he finally landed. La Vera Cruz, Cortes advanced by Jalapa and Cholula, conquering and binding to himself the Tlascalans on his wsq/, till he reached Mexico (8th November 15 19). The genius of the Aztecs was rebuked SPAIN IN AMERICA 175 before him. Their '' Emperor " Mortuzuma dreaded him as supernatural, irresistible. The most wonderful part of his conquest was not so much his defeat of the Aztecs, as the exercise of the towering personal superiority by which he cowed Panfilo de Narvaez, who had been sent to displace him, with a superior force, and drew it to his own banner. Wlien he returned to Mexico to find that the brutality of his lieutenant Alvarado had roused a fearful peril, when he not only survived the expulsion of his little force from Mexico, but kept his hold on his native allies so firmly that he could return to take Mexico after a long siege (21st August 152 1), he did a greater thing than was ever achieved by Charles Vth, and he did his work by statesmanship more than by hard fighting, though of that there was much. , He had won the recognition of his place of Lieutenant- General for the King in New Spain. For five years he pro- moted exploration far and wide till he sailed for Spain in 1527. He had done too much not to have aroused the distrust of his King. As only ruler in '' New Spain '' he would be a danger. Therefore care must be taken that if he went back he should go checked, watched, half disarmed. Compli- ments were not spared, fine words, '' court holy water, *' were lavished, titles. Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca and so forth, were conferred. But when he went back to Mexico he went with limited powers, and royal officials were sent to watch him. From 1530 to 1540 he remained exploring and spending his fortune, till he returned to Spain, with claims which were disregarded, to die in 1547. Under his direction, or contemporaneously with his ventures, explorers had filled up the gap between the Valley of Mexico and the older Spanish settlements in Central America, or had reached the Mississippi Valley (the Espiritu Santo of the Spaniards), or had penetrated to CaHfornia with Coronado (1539-43). They went in search of other lake cities and other 176 SPAIN hoards of gold. Quivira was for long the El Dorado of the north. The vision had its birth there and not in the southern continent. The year after Cortes sailed for the last time to Spain, his only possible equal among the Conquistadores, Francisco Pizarro, died in the city he had founded at Lima, by the hands of his fellow Spaniards. The history of the conquest of Peru is so much a repetition of the winning of Mexico that nothing more need be said of the nature of the thing. Between 1524 and 1530 Pizarro and his partner Almagro, sailing from Central America, reconnoitred the coast to the south, and heard of the rich empire of the Incas. Pizarro went to Spain and returned with authority from the Emperor to conquer. Between 1531 and 1535 the conquest was completed, to the advantage mainly of Francisco himself and the curiously composed family of half brothers, legitimate and illegitimate, who acted with him. Almagro, defrauded of his expected share, and disappointed in his hopes of finding another Peru in ChiH, turned against his old comrade and was put to death by him. Pizarro died at the hands of the younger Almagro, and the " men of Chili," butchered in his house at Lima. Years of conflict among the conquista- dores, or between them and the governors, churchmen, and lawyers sent out from Spain to enforce the royal authority followed. Between 1540 and 1553 Pedro de Valdivia took possession of as much of ChiH as he could wring from the hands of the indomitable Araucans. He died, slain by them, and left a heritage of long wars. In 1436 and thereabouts Jimenez de Quesada, coming up the Magdalena, exterminated the Chibchas on the plain of Bolivia, and Spaniards or Germans acting with the Emperor's authority joined him from Hojeda's settle- ment on the west of Venezuela. On the east coast other Conquistadores had entered the estuary of La Plata in search SPAIN IN AMERICA 177 of easy access to the " country of silver." In 1534 Pedro de Mendoza founded a town, as towns went in those early days, on the southern bank of the estuary, and dedicated it to the Virgin Patroness of the seaman's guild of Seville, Our Lady of Fair Winds, Nuestra Sefiora de los Buenos Ayres. His successor, Nuiiez Cabeza de Vaca, renowned for a wonderful march he made almost alone from the Mississippi valley overland to Mexico, and his successor Irala explored the Paraguay, 1541 to 1557. While Cortes was on his way to Mexico, the Portuguese Magalhaens (Magellan) had persuaded the Spanish Govern- ment to provide him with the means to discover the passage which it was beheved must exist between the Atlantic and the South Seas. Before his death in the PhiHppine Islands in 1520 he had performed the most wonderful of all voyages of maritime discovery. At the head of a mutinous squadron, kept to its work by his iron will and fierce decision, and cowed by his quelling of a mutiny in St Juhan's Bay, where Drake was to put Doughty to death, he had passed the straits named from him and had crossed the Pacific. One of his captains, the Basque Sebastian de Elcano, brought the only surviving ship of the squadron to San Lacar de Barrameda in September 1522. He first circumnavigated the world. The veil was torn aside. It was seen that Columbus had not reached the kingdoms described by Marco Polo, but a new world. The decision of the German geographer Waldseemiiller, to name a supposed island discovered by the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci after the discoverer, fixed America as its name. To the Spaniards the New World was always *' The Indies." By the middle of the sixteenth century the colonial empire of Spain was founded and marked out. What remained to do was to fill up and to connect. It was a wonderful feat done by men who, with the exception of Cortes, would in normal times have been seamen and soldiers, brave and active M 178 SPAIN men, no doubt, but nowise exceptional. The occasion fitted the virtue and they won empires for the crown of Castile and Leon. The whole world which they had doubled, was full of their renown, and they deserved it, not for defeating the naked Indians with their weapons of flint or obsidian or wood, but for the unconquerable energy they showed in overcoming distance, heat, cold, hunger, solitude, the un- known, the forest and the swamp. The foundation of the British colonial empire in North America is but tame and colourless in comparison — an affair of tobacco planting and farming, of a slow advance, prolonged through generations, made with the plough, and the packhorse of the pedlar trading for furs. But the future and civiHzation were with the farmers and the traders of New England. The Spanish conquest carried the seeds of destruction in it from the first. It was too rapid and too extensive to be solid, and it spread itself over lands which could not be the home of a healthy European race. In a period of less than three-quarters of a century (1492-1550) the Spaniards had spread themselves from the Antilles to the shores of the Pacific, and from Cali- fornia to Chili. It followed inevitably that though they could dominate they could not occupy. What their numbers in the Indies were about the year 1550 is a question which cannot be answered with confidence. The official historian, Antonio de Herrera, a sane and careful writer, a contem- porary and a royal historiographer who had access to good sources of information, estimates the total at 15,000. Other writers put it much higher, but he and they were only guessing more or less plausibly. Whatever the exact figure was, it is certain that the Spanish colonists were but small handfuUs scattered over distances measured by thousands of miles. Late in the reign of Philip II. a royal officer sent to report on the defences of the Indies gave two thousand as the SPAIN IN AMERICA 179 number of the Spaniard in the city of Mexico, the largest by far of all the settlements. In 1585 Alvaro de Bazan, who was well placed to know the truth, declared that there were only 500 Spaniards at Lima. If the climate had been favour- able to white labour, and the Spaniards had been disposed to work, they must have been lost in these vast spaces. But the chmates demanded native or negro labour, and the Spaniards looked to command, and to live by the toil of others. The native races were broken to submission by Aztec tyranny, or Inca state socialism. When they failed negroes could be imported. The Spaniards inevitably became a small ruling caste of white planters, mine owners, cattle breeders, who for safety's sake, for companionship, and because of habits of town hving formed at home, collected in settlements. The character of this population, the conditions in which it lived dictated the character of the third epoch of Spanish colonial conquest. The settlements made by 1550 or 1560 began to throw out new adventurers who went in search of some equivalent for Mexico, Peru, and the Kingdom of the Chibchas, where hordes of gold were to be found. Many of these undertakings were wild marches through swamp, forest, or waterless desert in search of the imaginary gold and jewels of Quivira in the northern continent, or the no less fabulous riches of the Empire of Omoa and its gilded king " El Dorado '' in the southern. The energy and heroism displayed was not seldom great, but they were doomed to failure in so far as the purpose for which they were made was concerned. Geo- graphical knowledge was gained. It was proved that no great inland sea existed in the northern parts of South America, that no strait answering to Magellan's crossed the northern continent. In the meantime less picturesque but more useful ventures promoted trade and settlement. Miguel de Legaspi and Andres de Urdaneta followed the beginning made i8o SPAIN by Magellan, and opened the ocean trade route from the Pacific coast of Mexico to the Philippines (1564-1565). It went by the westerly current to the south of the equator. Urdaneta formed the scientific hypothesis that, a trade wind blowing from the west, corresponding to the prevaihng wind of the North Atlantic, was to be found in the North Pacific. He put his hypothesis to the test, and proved it sound. The route for saiHng ships trading between Mexico and the Philippines, out by the equatorial current and back by the trade wind, was fixed. Legaspi founded Manila in 1570. In the last third of the century Fernandez de Quiros and others began the exploration of the South Pacific. Mean- while newcomers from Europe, but in larger numbers, seekers for fresh conquests and new treasures coming across the Andes from Peru and Chili, explored the courses of the Paraguay, the Uruguay, and the Parana, and founded " cities '* at Mendoza, Tucaman, Salta. When Philip II. died in 1598, one hundred and six years after the first voyage of Columbus the huge colonial empire of Spain had reached the limits of its growth. It was a giant who had shot in mere boyhood to a towering height at the fatal cost of outgrowing its strength. The history of Spain and of her relations with her neighbours is intimately bound with the history of her colonies. What were they in themselves ? how were they governed ? how were they affected from without ? are the questions which must be answered. What was essential to be known of their quality has been already noted. From Cuba to Luzon in the Philippines, from the north of Mexico to the south of Chili, a Spanish colony was a tropical or sub-tropical territory of greater or of less extent, inhabited by subject peoples of the coloured races, who were dominated by small bodies of Spaniards. More will have to be said of the constitution of those bodies, SPAIN IN AMERICA i8i but the governing condition was always the rule, the exploita- tion, which too often implied the sheer oppression, of the many by the few. So much has been said of the cruelties of the Spaniards that the theme has become a commonplace. They were cruel — as cruel as the Dutch could show themselves to the natives of islands in the Indian Ocean, as English puritans in New England to the Red men, or British colonists in Australia to the Black Fellows. The feebler island races died before them, as the Black Fellows of Tasmania perished from contact with ourselves. Which of the European races is free from sin in this matter ? None of the Spaniards showed more brutality than some of the Germans to whom Charles Vth rented Venezuela. The white man goes to fertile hot lands that he may grow rich as speedily as he can. His natural instinct has ever been to make *' the beggars work,*' by terror and by the lash. If the Spaniards have differed from others it has not been in themselves, but by the extent of their opportunities. And let it be remembered that if we know of their cruelties, we have learnt from themselves, and could equal their crimes from the first. It was long before any EngHsh voice was heard pleading for humanity so passion- ately sincere, so eloquent as the voice of Bartolome de las Casas. When English eyes first looked on the scene of the cruelties of the Spaniards, they were the eyes of John Hawkins and his companions, armed smugglers of negro slaves, collected by brutal violence to be sold in Spanish America. It did not lie in the mouth of that cut-throat kidnapper and liat, nor yet in the mouth of the country which knighted him, made him a high official in its admiralty, and a national hero, and gave him a '' demi Moor bound ** for his crest to prate about the cruelty of the Spaniards. It was long before British legislators began to produce anything approaching the humane provisions of the " Laws of the Indies.'' The EngHsh traveller Gage, who saw Mexico in the first part of the seventeenth i82 SPAIN century, found the Spanish planters complaining that their Government restricted their freedom to '' make the beggars work/' Cruelty there was in Spanish America, and it was as bad as the cruelty of that slave trade which the British Government fostered with tender care for generations. But when we have said that we have said enough. Bad as this inhumanity was it was not the worst feature of the Spanish rule. The native civiHzations, so called, had beaten down opposition by force, but they had probably improved the conquered tribes. The Spaniards degraded the peoples they had subdued by shattering all they had done for themselves, and reducing them to serfdom under alien rule. They rendered a service to humanity when they suppressed the blood sacrifices of the Aztecs and other sanguin- ary rites. If we can trust the figures given, or even if we discount them as exaggerated, we must still believe that the native rulers of Mexico offered more Indian lives in sacrifice to their deities during a few years than were taken by the Spaniards in battle or by massacre, in the whole course of their conquests. Their sin was that they reduced their subjects to serfdom to an alien race, and that the religion they put in the place of the religions they destroyed was itself a pure affair of ceremonies, which either meant nothing to the Indian, or were adored by him in fear, because they were '' the great medicines,' ' the magic spells of the powerful white men. And then the first Spaniards fixed upon their ''Indies*'* a curse from which they suffer to this day — the sexual immorality which degrades all family life. The Catholic sovereigns endeavoured to found real colonies, and some of the Conquist adores — notably Cortes — followed their example. But both fell into the mistake made by the Portuguese at Goa. They endeavoured to form a " Spanish " population by favouring marriage with the native women. The intention was good, and the error was pardonable in the SPAIN IN AMERICA 183 absence of experiences of its consequences. A mixed race was formed, and for long it remained loyal to its Spanish kin. A few of the " Mestizos " seemed to justify the pohcy. The '' Inca " Garcilaso de la Vega, whose mother was " a virgin of the sun/' was a not contemptible writer and a pathetically attractive person. Yet on the whole the Arab proverb, which has it that Allah made the white man and the black, but that Satan made the half-breed, is founded on a just observation. The " Mestizos '' imitated the contempt of their white fathers for honest industry. They, too, hoped to be exploiters and to live by the toil of the mere Indian. Some of them were the eager agents of the worst cruelty of the white man, and even when marriage had rendered the connection lawful and honourable, social prejudice could not be suppressed by the law. The Spaniard of the pure blood looked down on the man who was of the mixed race. He was bred in his own country to be proud of his '* limpieza de sangre,'' the cleanness of his blood, free from admixture of Jew, Moor, or native of the Canaries (Guanche). He carried his hereditary sentiment to the Indies. The Spaniard who came fresh from old Spain, the '* Peninsular," held himself superior to the Creole, whose blood was very rarely free from some mixture of Indian .^ Then the overwhelming majority of unions between Spaniards and native women were not regulated by marriage. The Conquistadores became the masters of multitudes of ^ The word " crioUo " is sometimes misunderstood. It means " created," and was in the strict sense appUcable only to the human beings, animals, or plants, sprung from Spanish originals and bred in the Indies. The now native South American horse is " crioUo," not because his owner is a Creole, but because he himself is Creole. The native American horse, which once existed, had died out long before the Spaniard came to the New World. Whoever had a mixture of Indian blood, however small, was properly speaking a " Mestizo," or half breed. In practice all who were more white than Indian claimed to be " Creole." i84 SPAIN Indian women. Some of them are known to have been the fathers of scores, the grandfathers and great-grandtathers of hundreds of '' Mestizos/' In an astonishingly short time the Spanish colonies possessed a triple population of Creoles who counted themselves white, Mestizos who founded pre- tensions on their descent from white men, and mere Indians, who in the eyes of the first and second element alike, were hewers of wood and drawers of water. All three were counted inferior by the Spaniard from old Spain the " Peninsular.*' Ill feeling was bred between Peninsulares and Criollos. In the reign of Philip II. a revolt known as of '' The Seven '' took place in Peru. It was a rising of the Criollos, who held that the land should belong to them for they were born there. It was suppressed and had no immediate consequence. But the seeds of the revolt of Spanish America were sown early and they never died. The nature of the governments established and maintained by Spain was such as to foster the causes of its final destruc- tion. When we put aside the details, the separable accidents, that government had three essentials. It was composed of '' single persons '' who came and went, and of corporate bodies which were permanent, and it had for its main object the consistent subjection of the colonies to the interests of Old Spain, as they were understood by the " Peninsulares." So long as we keep to mere names as much might be said of the British colonies where also there were governors, colonial assemblies, and the Navigation Laws which subordinated trade to the interests of the mother country. But the things were different, and so were the consequendes they produced. The Spanish colonies differed in dignity and so as a matter of course did the rank of the '' single person." Some were kingdoms, others only provinces. Mexico and Peru were kingdoms — New Kingdom of Spain and New Kingdom of Castile — and were governed by viceroys. There was a viceroy SPAIN IN AMERICA 185 in the Philippines. The New Kingdom of Granada (Colombia and Venezuela), the New Kingdom of Toledo (Chih), Guatemala were governed by '* Governors and Captains-Generals/' The provinces, Cuba for instance, and the territories on the south- east. La Plata and Paraguay, and some others, had only governors, presidents, or alcaldes. Changes were often made. The first conqueror was allowed to exercise more or less authority for a time, but Mexico became a Viceroyalty in 1534 and Peru in 1544. New Granada was separated from Peru in 1563 and Quito in 1564. Chili continued for long ,to be subordinate to Peru. But whatever alterations there might be, the position of the high official at the head remained the same. He was the representative of the King — El Rey neto y absoluto — who was not a '' King in Council " but the embodiment of the sovereignty of the State. In that capacity he exercised great power. He was the head of the Adminis- tration, he commanded the armed forces, he could exile any man, make or mar the fortunes of individuals official or un- official. He was by far the most conspicuous figure in the Spanish colonial system, and to foreigners he seemed to control his province with unlimited authority. This seemingly unbounded power was more in show than reality, for he was checked by the corporate body which his master in Spain established, largely for that very purpose — the Audiencia. Nothing less like the legislative body of an English colony could well be imagined. The Audiencia of a Spanish Viceroyalty or other colony was one form of those innumerable Councils or Boards through which the Princes of the House of Austria conducted their " polysynodic '' government in all their dominions. It consisted of lawyers (Letrados), and its functions were partly administrative and partly judicial. As an administrative body it worked under the presidency or chairmanship of the Viceroy, or governor. But when it acted in its judicial capacity, it worked under i86 SPAIN its own '' Presidente/' and the governor, be his title what it might, had neither voice nor vote. The " single person " could not work without the Audiencia, but there was one great field in which it was independent of him, and there came a day when he was directly subject to its jurisdiction. At all times any case arising out of an administrative act of the governors would be judged by the Audiencia sitting as a law court, which could therefore check him. But it was the rule that when his term of service (six years was the normal period) was ended the governor had to submit to what was technically known as '' residence.'' He was compelled to stay in the colony without authority, and to pass his accounts. The inspecting body was the Audiencia. He could, while in office, take note of acts of misconduct on the part of members of the Audiencia (Oidores), but he had no control over the corporate body. The two were meant to watch one another, so that no single authority should make itself independent of the Crown. If power to last is a proof of the excellence of an organiza- tion, the Spanish colonial system could have stood the test confidently. It endured from the first half of the sixteenth century to the first quarter of the nineteenth, and during all that time in spite of the decadence of the mother country, and the attacks of powerful enemies, it preserved her colonial empire for Spain. If the test is the capacity to give good government, then the verdict must be far less favourable. The elaborate system of checks was eluded by men who found it their interest to connive at one another's excesses. Viceroys, governors, and captains-general on the one part, and Audiencias on the other, did indeed quarrel hotly enough, but generally on personal matters not tending to the good administration of the colonies. As a rule they came to an understanding. The Viceroy overlooked the corruption of the Audiencias^ which in turn passed his accounts. SPAIN IN AMERICA 187 If the Audiencias had been recruited in the colonies they might have become, powerful organs of colonial opinion. But like the governors themselves, and, indeed, the whole official body, they were composed of men sent out from Spain who came to make their fortunes. They were always dishked by the Creoles. The first generations of conquista- dores detested the '' letradillos " {i.e. the pettifoggers), who robbed them of the just rewards of their toils. In later ages they were dishked as being corrupt and oppressive, and hated because they showed all the familiar arrogance of the Peninsular to the Creole. Yet if words on pieces of paper had any virtue, the Creoles were not without institutions which appeared to give them a useful measure of self-government. The Spaniards brought to America both the town council (Ayuntamiento, Cabildo) of their native land, and the Cortes. Unfortunately they brought not the vigorous institutions of the Middle Ages, but their attenuated successors which had been reduced to insignificance at home. The town council in the Indies was a nominated body, or one which elected itself. When the year of office was at an end the outgoing councillors named their successors, who, when their time was up, repaid the service. A town council could indeed summon a '* cabildo abierto,'' an open council, of all notable citizens, and such meetings did meet, but only for the purpose of making complimentary addresses or presents, to the King or his representative. A Cortes, or as it was commonly called a Congreso, met as early as 15 18 in the island of Hispaniola. It was composed of " procuradores '* from the town councils on the model of the Cortes at home. Many instances of Congresses can be quoted, but what they did remains obscure — and if their action had not been in- significant there would have been no obscurity. The colonists could carry their complaints to the foot of the throne, and they did. But when they got there they had to deal not with i88 SPAIN the King, but with the colonial government at home which was in hearty sympathy with the administration in the colonies, and very jealous of any show of independence on the part of the Creoles. Two corporate bodies in Spain superintended the government of the colonies — the Casa de Contratacion (Board of Trade) at Seville, and the Council of the Indies. They were two, just as the Admiralty Board and the Navy Board, which governed the British Navy, were two. But they completed one another, and between them they constituted the whole administration. The Casa de Contratacion was the senior body. It was constituted by the Cathohc sovereign in January 1503. It was organized on the model of a medieval Hanse, or Mahona, or Merchant Guild. Its jurisdiction included not only the newly-discovered islands in the west, but the coast of Barbary and the Canaries. A treasurer, comptroller (Contador), and a factor or merchant, formed the Board. It possessed bonded warehouses (Almacenes) through which all goods going or coming had to pass, where dues were levied, and certificates of quality were given. In 1505 its powers were increased. From the first it had employed examiners of seamen and map-makers. Juan de la Cosa, author of one of the most famous and beautiful of early maps, was an official of the Casa de Contratacion. In 1508 it was endowed with the same powers as the English Trinity House. It issued certificates to masters and mates (pilotos), signed by the Grand Pilot (Piloto Mayor). It included an hydro- grapher's department, which did much good work. Like all the other councils of the Spanish Crown it was judicial as well as administrative. It exercised Admiralty jurisdiction and after 1511 it was a court with judges of its own for all suits arising out of the trade to the Indies. It had its officials, who went with the trading convoys and exercised their functions in America. SPAIN IN AMERICA 189 The Council of the Indies was founded by Ferdinand the Catholic in 15 11 to advise him on Indian affairs, but it was developed under Charles V. When full grown the Council consisted of a president, a grand chancellor and his lieutenant, eight councillors, an attorney-general (Fiscal), two secretaries, and a httle army of subordinate officials, recorders (relatores), scriveners, comptrollers, a chronicler, and a cosmographer. It issued commissions, gave instructions, named officials, and in fact covered the whole ground of colonial administra- tion. Of course it, too, was judicial as well as administrative. It was the Supreme Court of Appeal for the Indies — the equivalent for our own judicial committee of the Privy Council, and also a Court of Exchequer to try all suits in which the Indian revenue was concerned. By these two bodies the trade to the Indies was fostered with that kind of protection which puts men in blinkers lest they should wander from the straight path, ties their elbows behind their backs lest they should do themselves or others an injury, and hobbles them lest they should go too fast. To say that they killed the trade to the Indies would be too much. Other causes were at work. But the Consejo and the Casa between them helped the other enemies of Spanish trade, by regulating, inspecting, interfering, exacting fees, and compeUing it to work under the burden of a swarm of officials, all ill-paid, eager to magnify their office and hungry for bribes. They acted in the spirit of the government which created them. Charles no doubt intended to promote the trade to the Indies for the good of his subjects, but he acted as if his chief purpose had been to force it to go where it should be directly under his thumb, and the more easily fleeced. The measure of freedom it had possessed at the beginning was soon restricted, and the whole trade of the Indies was confined to Seville, so that the King's dues might be the igo SPAIN more easily collected, and those dues were always increasing. The Imperial policy of Charles and his son was horribly costly. Money was to be found to maintain armies and support allies. Export duties were laid on thicker and ever thicker. And the Imperial policy, which bled Spain at every pore, brought a destructive evil on the Indian trade. After the middle of the sixteenth century assailants began to swarm on the route to the Indies. French Huguenots, English sea-rovers and armed smugglers, and then Dutch enemies. The trade was compelled to sail in " fiotas,'' convoys of which two left Seville in the later months of every year — one for the Tierra Firme — i.e. the northern mainland of South America, the Spanish Main — the other for New Spain, Mexico. On the return voyage they met at Havannah and came home together. A special squadron governed by the Casa de Contratacion was formed to protect them, the Armada de Galeones, and was paid for by a tax — the '' hab arias '' — • levied on the trade itself. When now it is remembered that all Spanish industry became decadent under Charles V. and went headlong to ruin under Philip II., it becomes easy to understand why the Spanish trade to the Indies was killed. That ruin was a great fact in the politics of two centuries. Spain tried to reserve the trade of the Indies to herself, but she could not supply the goods needed by the growing popula- tion of her colonies. Her merchants were forced to look abroad for goods. But the Government, partly in order to '' protect native industry,'* partly because its dire need for money compelled it to tax everything visible and invisible, imposed such duties, import and export, on those goods as they passed through Spain and in the Indies also, that they could not be sold at a profit except at prohibitive prices. What could be the result except the rise of a huge contraband trade ? It was not wholly foreign. Spaniards joined in it. Merchants deserted the '' flotas '' and did a smuggHng trade SPAIN IN AMERICA 191 in unlicensed ports. Before the end of the sixteenth century the Creoles and Spaniards settled in the Indies were in organized communication with French, English, and Dutch '* contrabandistas." Human necessities will be served. Human nature, barred and fenced off from legitimate access to what it needs, will fihd indirect hidden ways. While the lawful trade was struggling in chains, tied to leave Seville and return to it, forced to confine itself to Cartagena of the Indies and the fair of Portobello, where goods from Europe were landed, and the produce of Peru brought on mules across the Isthmus was shipped, or to La Vera Cruz — the contraband trade was slipping in at unlicensed ports. And because this indispensable smuggling trade was indirect and hidden it corrupted and was corrupted. It worked by bribery or by force. The smuggler soon became a pirate. Honest trade was strangled by the Government. The West Indies became the most lawless region on the earth. Lawlessness in fact became the character of all Spanish America. The laws of the Indies as framed under the Catholic sovereigns, Charles and Philip, were generally wise and humane. But though they had some effect, as our countryman Gage noted, they were largely mere words on paper in practice. They aimed at saving the native from slavery, and in theory the Indians were never slaves unless they were captured members of wild and cannibal tribes. The wild Indians — or *' Indianos Bravos " — of South America were mostly cannibals. But the evil practices of granting " repartimientos '' never ceased. A repartimiento was a division, not of Indian territory, which was always counted to belong to the King, but of the command of the labour of the Indians living in a certain district, to a Spanish " encomendero,'' i.e. commendator. These men sent their serfs in droves to labour in the mines of Mexico and Peru. The practice was properly speaking illegal. But if the Spanish administration denied the Creole all share in the government of 192 SPAIN his native land, it did not dare to drive him to revolt by a fully effective protection of the Indians. It denied him fair treat- ment and kept him quiet by tolerating his vices. The Inquisi- tion, which in the Indies dates from about 1560, was another cause of corruption as it was at home. It multiplied spectacles of cruelty. Brazil had never tolerated the Inquisition. It became the refuge of the '' New Christians," descendants of converted Jews. During the union of Spain and Portugal (1580-1640) they overflowed into Spanish America, and they provided the Inquisition with a great harvest of victims. The people were taught to rejoice over Autos de Fe. If Spanish America is libidinous, corrupt, and cruel, as unhappily it is, the sources of its vices flow from the days of the old colonial government. It would be unjust to omit to say that the Church, and in par- ticular certain orders, of which the Jesuits were the most success- ful, did strive to secure humane treatment for the Indians. They did it in the face of the angry, often the murderous, opposition of Peninsulars and Creoles. Their best successes were achieved in unsettled regions and among wild tribes. In the Jesuit " Missions '' in Paraguay an Indian population was brought to peaceful industry, taught arts which its descend- ants have not forgotten, and protected against exploitation by lay tyrants. Yet that population was deliberately kept in childish submission, and even if the exploitation was gentle, it was none the less exploited for the benefit of the Jesuits. The Spanish colonial government stands condemned by its fruits. That it lasted so long is a fact which can be ac- counted for without crediting it with poHtical or administra- tive virtues. After the first generations of conquest and adventure the Spanish colonies sank into a state of torpor. The very intelHgent French engineer officer, Frezier, who saw Chih and Peru in the eighteenth century (1711-14), describes them as living in thoughtless sloth. They might have been SPAIN IN AMERICA 193 roused by a foreign influence which would have helped to remove their grievances, and was not repugnant to them. But the foreign influences with which they came most in con- tact were the English and the Dutch — and both were heretical. The Catholicism of Spanish America was even less enlightened than that of Old Spain. The Creoles could rarely have given an intelhgent account of their own creed, but they were attached to its practices, its rites, and they were awed by mystery, miracle, and magic. They did not know what the heresies of Enghshmen and Dutchmen were, but they hated heresy. Therefore, if the choice seemed to lie between the rule of the Catholic King and government by the heretic, they preferred the first and would fight for him. But it is a very probable opinion that the best explanation of their long ac- quiescence is to be found in that very contraband trade which Spaniards at home looked upon as the main cause of the little good their colonies did them. If the Home Government could really have excluded the smuggler, the colonists might very well have been driven to revolt by the pressure of their needs. But it could not. It could force lawful trade to plod on a beaten path and to a few licensed ports. It could not control the smuggler, who eluded or defied it, with the aid of the Creoles and the connivance of corrupt officials. Therefore the colonists did in fact obtain what they required, and did find an outlet for their own produce. A modus vivendi was reached which, if not good, was at least tolerable. Nor do we tell the whole truth if we speak only of the re- strictions which Spain put on the trade of her colonies. A very appreciable part of the '' wealth of the Indies '' was but the return of what had been imported into them by the Spaniards — horses, cattle, sheep, poultry, plants. On the River Plate, from which no bulHon came to Spain, except in transit and in time of war, when the regular route by Panama was interrupted, there grew up an active trade in hides. A similar industry 194 SPAIN arose in Hispaniola, which at an early date was swarming with cattle. The mother country made comparatively little profit out of the products introduced by herself. She tried to re- strict this trade also to Spanish hands. Buenos Ayres was supposed to be hmited to such output of its produce as was provided by the licensed ships, '' avisos/' or '' Buenos Ayres frigates/' which sailed from Spain, apart from the main convoys sent to the Tierra Firme. But here again the interests of the Creoles, and the inability of Spanish officials to control the whole community, or to resist the temptation of bribes, baffled the restrictive Spanish law of trade. The bulk of the hides exported from the River Plate was carried direct to Dutch or English ports. Sometimes the Home Government tried in vain to undo its own work. The vine had been carried early to South America, and it flourished. A wine making industry arose. As it competed with the wine trade of Spain attempts were made to destroy the Creole vineyards. But they were defended by the passive resistance, the tacit threat of rebellion, and the private transactions of local vineyard owners with officials. The restrictive policy of Spain towards its colonial trade did not differ in principle from the policies of England, Holland, and France. It was different in fact for two reasons. The first is that Spain, not being herself an industrial country, could not offer a sufficient market for the produce of its immense pos- sessions, nor provide the manufactured goods in exchange for them in adequate quantities. The essential injustice of the mercantile system was therefore, in her case acutely felt, and but for the relief given by the contraband trade would have been insufferable. Yet just because Spain was not a manufacturing country, her policy was in some ways less restrictive than the English. Local manufacturing industries were allowed to rise unhampered because there was no home producer with whom they competed. There were weaving industries in Mexico SPAIN IN AMERICA 195 and in South America, and in parts of what is now the Argentine Repubhc there was an active production of metal and par- ticularly of silver work. When the trade of South America was at last thrown open to all the world these industries were swamped by the cheap products of British steam mills. South America gained in the end, but the immediate effect was to cause a good deal of suffering and to aggravate the social and political disorders of the insurgent colonies. The nature of the most generally desired of the products of Spanish America was the second and the chief reason for the peculiarly injurious working of the mercantile system in her case. Hides, cocoa, timber, the world wouH have, but what it particularly desired was the bulHon and chiefly the silver of the Mexican mines (Guanajuato) and the Peruvian Potosi. It was needed most especially for the trade with the East Indies, which from ancient times had been largely founded on the export of silver. Now the Spaniards were just as firmly convinced as the rest of the world that the precious metals are wealth. They were very willing to re-export the hides, timber, and so forth, but it was their cherished wish to prevent what- ever silver came to them from '* the Indies " from going out of Spain. Of course they could not succeed. The very Govern- ment set the example of breaking its own laws. It had need of silver to pay the expenses of its imperial policy. The share of the Crown in the produce of the mines — at first a fifth, and afterwards a tenth of the whole, was sent out to pay for armies in Flanders and Italy — generally in the shape of repay- ments to Genoese bankers for advances made at high interest. Private persons followed the example. They smuggled their silver out. In their own country they could not have found a market for Spain had been flooded by silver to the wholesale depreciation of its currency, and_ until toilette tables, bed- room crockery, and stools were made of the precious metal, often because it was really cheaper than fine wood or porcelain. 196 SPAIN If the Spanish Government would have allowed the silver to be re-exported from home ports, even subject to a reason- able export duty (if an export can ever be truly reasonable), the traders of England, Holland, France, the Hanse towns, would have traded for it willingly. But the mercantile system, the dogged conviction of mankind that the standard of value is itself wealth, would not allow of such a supposed injury to the interest of Spain, of such a drain of its true riches. So the silver trade was compelled by the wisdom of the age to be contraband or not to exist. If the smuggling could have been stopped the mines must have been shut down. There would have been no advantage in working them. But it could not be prevented. Silver was re-exported from Spain, transferred to foreign ships, at sea, or their boats on the beach. Bags of bullion were, by an arrangement which everybody knew of, thrown over the sea wall of Cadiz and picked up by the foreign smuggler. The bulk of the contraband was done in '' the Indies," in quiet creeks, or in unlicensed ports by connivance of the officials. Manufactured goods were given in exchange — or negro slaves. The restrictions placed on Indian slavery, aided by the greater value of the negro as a labourer, combined to promote an African slave trade. This also Government endeavoured to regulate by making contracts (asientos) with native traders, but generally with Portuguese or Genoese capitalists. But here again the smuggler served the Creole more rapidly, and '' better cheap '' than the lawful trader, hampered as he was by government inspection, and compelled to pay for his privilege. The contraband trade of the Spanish Indies became a great interest in international pohtics. The foreigner, beckoned to and welcomed by the Creole, came in by fraud and force. Foreign governments in the days of Spain's weakness com- pelled her to admit them to privileges. France set the ex- SPAIN IN AMERICA 197 ample, and when she was defeated in the great war of the Spanish Succession then Great Britain made use of her strength to extort an ignominious prize — the exclusive right to kidnap negroes for the service of the Spanish Indies. No more shameful act smirches the honour of any nation — but Great Britain did not set the example, and others would. have done as she did if they could. The negro was on the whole better treated in the Spanish Indies than elsewhere. The law favoured manumission and gave the slave a right to purchase his freedom by instalments by days at a time, and in the '* old colonial days " the Spanish planter was a less strenuous man than English, French, or Dutchman, and did not drive his slaves so hard. Cruel he could be by fits and starts, but he did not extort the day's work, day after day, so fiercely. When we think of the relations of Spain to her neighbours in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries, we have alw^ays to bear in mind that in as far as lay in her power she stood on guard on '* the Line.'* That famous line was first drawn by Pope Alexander VI. (Rodrigo Borgia) to define the " spheres of influence " of Spain and Portugal in '' the Indies." The old joke that the Pope gave the new world, which did not belong to him, to Spain, is a monument of " rejoicing and facetious ignorance." Neither he nor the Spanish and Portuguese governments which applied to him as arbitrator, were aware that any new world was in existence. On the 4th May 1493, he marked a Hne to be drawn between north and south one hundred leagues to the west of the Azores and Cape de Verd islands, as the boundary of the regions within which Spain and Portugal were free to explore and settle. It did not suit the Portuguese because it confined them too closely to the shore of Africa. The two governments came to an understanding at the conference of Tordesillas (June 1494) and agreed to carry the line three hundred and sixty leagues to the west of the Azores. It was never expressly marked, but 198 SPAIN may be taken to be roughly the 50th degree of longitude west of Greenwich, which strikes the continent of South America at the mouth of the Amazon and leaves it below the mountains of Sta Catarina. The Spanish government claimed to have the exclusive right to trade and settle to the west of that line. Its efforts to enforce that claim, and the persistent refusal of other peoples to respect its supposed right, make no small part of European and American history. If the question what Spain and her government gained by the produce of the mines means — what good, the answer is easy. None whatever, but on the contrary much evil. Reliance on the precious metals, won as they were by the forced labour of the Indians, fostered a mistaken conception of the nature of wealth, and the already far too strong dis- position of the people to despise industry. The futile struggle to confine the precious metal to Spanish hands, bred infinite fraud and much crime. But if the question means how much silver passed through Spanish hands, ofiicial and un- official, then the answer is very difficult to give, or cannot be given at all. Estimates have no doubt been made, but they are only guesses. No record was, by the very nature of the thing, kept of the smugghng trade, and the facts of the lawful trade were not published. Of one thing only we can be sure — ^it is, that when Raleigh said that the King of Spain did not draw the treasures with which he disturbed all Europe from the trade in Seville oranges, he showed less than his best judgment. On the contrary, it was by the murderous taxation of the " Seville oranges,'' which we will take to mean such industry as poor Spain had, that the King found the means of supporting his political adventures. His Indian mines were of comparatively small value. CHAPTER VIII PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK When Charles V. retired to Yuste he left his son entangled in a war with France, but what was incomparably more serious was that he left him committed to a political position which no wisdom on Phihp's part could have made other than disastrous to Spain. The war ended in a triumphant peace (Cateau-Cambresis, 3rd April 1559), and yet the new King's position was not permanently improved. His marriage with Mary Tudor had been designed to secure the support of an ally against France. It was a barren union, and ended at the death of the Queen in November 1588. And it left a bitter feeling of hostility to Spain in England. The war with France had been triumphant for Philip, but it cost England the loss of Calais, and if this was an injury rather to the pride than to the interests of the country, it was none the less grievous. There was no possibility that the new King could reconcile his position as absolute sovereign of Spain and the Indies, with his limited rights as sovereign by different titles of various parts of the Netherlands, and if he could not they must needs be nothing but a cause of danger and difficulty to him. The character of Philip II. is a great fact in the history of Spain, and it is one which has been the subject of infinite rhetoric. He was denounced in his own time as a monster of wickedness, and accused of endless improbable crimes. Mr Motley, through whom he is perhaps best known to Enghsh 199 200 SPAIN readers, was driven by the study of his acts into positive screams of hysterical hatred. Yet he has found apologists, and some modern Spanish writers have endeavoured to show that he was the kindest, the most beneficent of men. They can quote chapter and verse for their opinion. If you are con- tent to judge Philip by the letters which he wrote from Portugal to his daughters, then he appears in a very pleasant hght. We see the King snatching half an hour out of a day so busy that he does not know when he will be able to take his supper, to write a letter to the two young girls he left at Aranju^z or the Escorial. They are excellent letters, simple, kindly, free from condescension and pedantry. He does not talk over the heads of Isabel and Catahna, good, intelligent girls who were to grow into good, intelligent women. But neither does he affect to come a long way down to put himself on a level with jtheir young minds. We sympathize when he tells how he enjoyed a refreshing nap in the midst of a cruelly long-winded sermon. The girls were no doubt interested to hear of the dinner he ate, under the awning of the poop of his galley, on the Tagus. We are pleased to see that he was a patient master of somewhat peevish old family servants. We are touched when he notes that the wild strawberries of the Guadarrama are now at their best, and that he cannot get any at Lisbon. He becomes slightly sentimental as he thinks of the flowers now in full beauty in his gardens, and there is a soft touch of poetic feeling in his wish that he were back with his dear, good girls and could again sit at the window and hear the nightingales singing in the trees of his park. Is this the gloomy tyrant of the Escorial, the bigot who drenched Flanders in blood, the despot who drove his miserable Morisco subjects to hopeless revolt, the cold-blooded villain who ordered the murder of Escovedo, and paid the assassin of WiUiam the Silent ? The answer is that he undoubtedly was, and that there is PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 201 nothing in human nature to make it improbable that he was.' There have been innumerable decent persons, male and female, strict gentlemen and gentlewomen, with a great xieal of proper pride, who have shown all the faults of PhiHp II. in their small world, and who lacked only power and oppor- tunity to have rivalled his " crimes." Philip II. was the perfection of the man who '' knows he is right " and who will have his rights, who can be quite kind to those who behave as they ought to do, but who feels it his duty to correct perverse persons of bad principles, who bring their sufferings on themselves by misconduct. He never had to think for a moment before deciding what con- stituted good behaviour, bad principles, or perversity. His code political, moral, and rehgious came to him complete from his father, and was accepted by him as a thing not to be questioned except by the perverse who by the mere act of questioning rendered themselves fit objects for punishment. God had put him over his people, or rather peoples, to be their shepherd, the sole judge of right and wrong, the only source of authority, under God, in this world. It was for him to decide and for them to obey. As shepherd of the people it was peculiarly his duty to see to it that there should be no breach in the beautiful, the indispensable unity of the faith which was the sure basis of all order. It was his duty to punish those servants of the devil and enemies of all good men, who sought to introduce disorder in the beneficent harmony of the state and church. With these principles of conduct to guide him, it was certain that Philip would come into contact with his Flemish subjects, and through them with England. The way in which the collision would take place might be largely influenced by his character and the extent of his capacity, but the conflict was inevitable. If we compare Philip on the moral side with contemporary sovereigns, he stands the test very well. He was a better 202 SPAIN man than the sulky Henry II. of France, and incomparably superior to such a degenerate creature as Henry HI. He was less false than Elizabeth and not more cruel. His policy in Flanders was not more ferocious than hers in Ireland. He never showed more spite than she did in the persecution of the Puritan Stubbs. Nothing he did was meaner than her whole conduct to Mary Queen of Scots. He rivalled Eliza- beth in devotion to the StatvU and showed a capacity for self-sacrifice of which she was incapable. He had a high sense of duty, and he toiled terribly at his business as king. Where the element of religious difference was absent he showed no preference for harsh measures. When he enforced his undoubted claim to the throne of Portugal he acted with the utmost moderation and an even excessive deference, not only to the rights but to the susceptibilities of his new sub- jects. Only when the question of religious difference did enter into a political question, and rare were the occasions in that age in which it did not, was Philip roused to a passion of hate, justified in his own eyes by the fact that he was striking at those whom he judged to be servants of the Devil, the enemies of God, and of all that is good for man. If we turn from the moral aspects of his character, and try to estimate him as a ruler and administrator, he cannot escape condemnation. The ways in which he tried to carry out his policy are eloquent of a certain fussy small-minded- ness, a clerkly passion for pottering over details, a nervous jealousy of his own authority, which led him to insist upon doing everything himself. He could not choose his man and trust him, but must be peddling and interfering at every turn. He was puzzle-headed, a specimen of the incurable mis- manager who combines obstinacy of purpose with infirmity of will. He tried to govern his widespread and varied pos- sessions as Frederick the Great of Prussia did actually govern his small and simple dominions, and he lacked the Prussian PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 203 King's piercing insight, rapidity of decision, and above all, the admirable sense which distinguished at a glance the advan- tageous and attainable, from the desirable but unattainable. And because he was what he was, Philip is a dominating fact in the history of modern Spain. He not only did nothing to extricate the country from its false position, but he aggravated the evil, and he rivet ted on his successors a method of doing business which paralysed the execution of work. Philip was the ruler who perfected and fixed on Spain the lumbering system of administration by Boards.^ The king was always the ultimate authority, and he had secretaries who worked immediately under his eye, and were lodged in his Palace. Below them were the councils — the Royal Council, the Council of Castile, of Aragon, of the Millions (the tax so-called), of the Indies, of war, and others which varied in number from time to time. These bodies were com- posed of " Letrados,'' lawyers drawn from the middle classes. They were judicial as well as administrative, and their decisions required the confirmation of the king. Their first merit in the eyes of the king was that they took all real power out of the hands of the nobles whom the Austrian dynasty distrusted, and their second was that they transacted all business by minutes which could be referred to the king. In his opinion it was no demerit that they were always coming in contact with one another on questions of jurisdiction which had to be referred to his decision. The more they differed among themselves the less were they likely to unite against him. It was Philip's constant policy to foster rivalries among his servants, for is not " divide et impera " a wise maxim ? ^ This system, to which the Abbe Saint Pierre gave the name of " polysynodic," was Hapslnirg, and not only Spanish Hapsburg. The reader who wishes to understand the essential nature of the thing, should take the fourth volume of the Bohn edition of Coxe's " House of Austria," and read the translation given in the appendix of " The Genesis of the March Revolution of 1849." 204 SPAIN The result was a frightful development of red tape, or to use a better French word " paperasserie/' a multipHcation of minutes, a profusion of references to and fro, an endless dis- cussing and wrangling. The machine became blocked by its own products. Nothing could be brought to a decision without endless delays, and unless there was at the head of all, a man who would work fourteen hours a day, and act instantly. Philip, who believed his own capacity for work to be unlimited, found a system which kept his servants con- stantly engaged in checking one another, and made his per- sonal intervention at every step indispensable, altogether excellent. And he worked incessantly. But even if he had not thought that delay and hesitation were prudent, he would have been unable to overtake the colossal masses of mere secretarial labour which he imposed upon himself. His government was nearly always behindhand. Under his successors, who neither could nor would work as he did, this '' polysynodic government '' led first to the nomination of favourites (privados) who did the King's work for him, and then to the utter paralysis of an administration which was smothered in the weight and complications of its own apparatus. And this slow King and creaking machinery were called upon to deal with world-wide interests which called, above all, for quick decision and prompt execution. The exhausting struggle into which Spain was led by its King, had for cause the profound religious division among the European peoples and for cradle the Netherlands. The Spaniards, who believed themselves to be above all else " Christians,'' were very ready to support their King, and he came back from Flanders in 1559 already committed to the struggle. He had learnt in Germany and during his passing visits to his unloved wife Queen Mary, that he was regarded with extreme personal dislike by those who were either the PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 205 enemies of the Church, or its tepid friends. The Netherlands had given him to understand very plainly that they did not allow him to possess any authority among them in his quality of Spanish King, and that in his quality of Duke, Count and so forth of Burgundy, Flanders, Brabant, or Holland, they held that his authority was limited by the rights and fran- chises of his vassals. They had insisted firmly on the with- drawal of his Spanish troops. This assumption, as he was by his nature and his education bound to think it, of rights in- dependent of his royal will was the more exasperating to Philip, because he well knew that at the back of it lay a growth of Lutheran and Calvinist heresies which had been filtering into the Netherlands all through his father's reign. Rebellion against the faith was in fact going hand in hand with resistance to his divinely-given authority. The news which met him in Spain was of a nature to ex- acerbate his irritation. Dr Carranza, who had been his father's confessor and his own, and had by his favour been appointed Archbishop of Toledo, was accused of holding heretical opinions on subtle points connected with the value of the sacrament. The accusation was promoted by the spite of the Inquisitor-general Valdes, who hoped to be named archbishop. Valdes had been effectually helped by Melchor Cano, censor (calificador) of the Inquisition, a keen theologian who hated the man and knew the subject. Competent judges have been of opinion that Carranza, a confused -headed, emotional creature had dropped into heresies without knowing what he was doing, and that his efforts to justify himself only made his case worse. However that may be, the fact remained that the Primate of all Spain, a man favoured by himself, was openly accused of unsoundness in the faith. The Pope, who had always reserved the right to try bishops, summoned the case to Rome, where Carranza died years afterwards, neither condemned nor frankly 2o6 SPAIN acquitted, and broken-hearted. An element of sour pleasantry is introduced into the story by the fact that Melchor Cano, who was rewarded for his services against Carranza by the Bishgpric of the Canaries^ had been denounced by the Pope as '^ a son of perdition '' for his enmity to the Jesuits. PhiHp, we may be sure, saw no pleasantry in the story. It was shocking to him that heresy, or even the mere suspicion of it, should appear in his own Spanish Church. The case was all the worse because nests of Spanish '' Protestants '' had been detected in Spain at the close of his father's reign, and the heresy hunt was in full cry when he returned to the country from Flanders. There appears to be an insuperable difficulty in discovering what were the opinions for which these unhappy people suffered torture and death. There can be no doubt on one point, and that is, the hearty approval given to the persecution by the overwhelming mass of Spaniards. They crowded in thousands to witness the auto de fe at which Philip presided. When they were told that he had answered one of the victims who appealed to him by saying that he would carry a faggot to burn any child of his own who was a heretic, they applauded with all their hearts. They thought the King was very much in the right when he took measures to prevent his subjects from being contaminated by heresy. Lest they should be, they were forbidden to go abroad for education, rigid measures were taken to exclude all foreign thought which was not a repetition of old proved orthodoxies, all teachers were compelled to confine themselves to certified text-books, which subjected every man in Spain who used his intelligence and opened his mouth to speak on matters of thought, to the risk of secret denunciation to the Holy Office. Spain escaped the evil of wars of rehgion (of which there was no great danger) but she was saved from the training given to a people by every manful struggle for principles. The process begun by the PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 207 Catholic Sovereigns, carried on by Charles V., and perfected by Philip II., atrophied the inteUigence of Spain. Within half a century of his death it had become a country of incapables, of grown men with childish minds. All educa- tion was reduced to a repetition of words by rote, all thought degraded to a legerdemain with the terms of the scholastic philosophy in its dotage, and all religion to gestures which had become habits by repetition through generations. The work of purification could not be complete while Flanders was a possible source of infection. It might well be one, for the commercial intercourse between the Netherlands and Spain was active. Therefore they must be purified. I propose to say nothing of the politics and wars of the Low Countries save that they were the '' cancer which destroyed Spain.'' They caused the constant drain which sapped its already diminishing strength. Into that bottomless pit went innumerable lives of Spanish men, and whatever could be wrung from Spanish tax-payers. '' Flanders " was in itself a running sore, and it aggravated every other evil. Because Flanders must be saved from heresy Spain must be hostile to all from whom heresy might come, to England first, and then to France so long as there was any danger that it would be ruled by a Huguenot king. My task is to stand in the middle of Spain and see how she faced it all, and what its consequences were to her. No greater mistake can be made than to suppose that " rehgion " was not the causing cause of whatever befell her in those years. If Philip would have consented to tolerate heresy in the Netherlands the troubles would never have arisen. Until the Northern States declared themselves independent, there never was a time when they would not have returned to obedience if Phihp would have submitted to such a compromise as his father made by the Peace of Passau in Germany (1552). But he would not, and the 2o8 SPAIN mental dishonesty of the man is shown by his dogged refusal to grant the one thing needful even when he was reduced by the failure of his armies and the emptiness of his treasury to attempt conciliation. And his subjects supported him. They raised pitiful clamours over the burden of taxation and the progressive impoverishment of the land. But they never asked him to remove the cause of all their misery. They never told him resolutely that they would no longer be sacri- ficed in a contumacious struggle to cleanse the lands he had inherited from his great-grandmother from heresy. Their ruin went on, and they were proud of its cause. Beggary, starvation, rags, increased. The great open pastures (dehesas), the deserted agricultural districts (despoblados), and the mountains (sierras) swarmed with growing bands of nomads who were called gipsies, but as a matter of fact were mainly Spaniards. Sheer poverty helped to recruit them, and the spirit of adventure, which had once filled the bands of the con- quistadores, sank to a love of criminal vagabondage. Troops of highway robbers marched and camped as they pleased far and wide. In 1590 Philip IL, who was trying to impose his daughter Isabel on the French as their queen, was com- pelled to make a capitulation with Pedro Machaca, captain of a band of three hundred brigands who had long been master of the country round Jerez — that is to say at the very gates of Seville, the staple of the trade of the Indies. The pest of brigand vagabondage was fixed on Spain for generations. Long after Philip's time the king's government was to be found deciding that young gentlemen (hidalgos) who were caught Hving as '' picaros " (rogues) in these bands should be sent to serve as soldiers with a higher rate of pay (distinguidos) because of their gentihty. The Tale of Roguery (Novela de Picaros) became the most popular of all forms of literature except plays. The common personage of these stories — the beggarly hidalgo who starves at home, and swaggers idly in I PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 209 the streets, became the very type of Spain. Arrogance and pretension abroad, conceaHng poverty and decay at home, was the definition of the Spanish monarchy, till the poverty reached the point where the pretension could no longer be kept up. Then the monarchy was maintained in a state of life in death by the mutual jealousies of its neighbours. One act of Philip's stands out as characteristic of the man and the time. When his reign began at home he burst into a wail of fear and anxiety over the emptiness of his treasury and the utter disorder of his finances. No improvement ever took place. He was always in distress for money ; he was compelled to confess himself bankrupt in 1574. After this, when he was again forced to have recourse to the Genoese bankers for advances, they naturally charged enormous rates of interest. Yet this sovereign who could not pay his way, spent a vast sum on building the huge Escorial on a slope of the Guadarrama, in a healthy spot indeed, but where the water supply is bad. His model was, or might have been, one of the two palace monasteries of the kings of Aragon, Poblet or Santas Creus, Cistercian houses in Catalonia. It is a royal burial place and lodging, in a monastery dedicated to St Lawrence, on whose day the battle of St Quentin had been won in 1557 (loth August). Architecturally it has a stark energy which is impressive, and it by no means deserves its reputation for gloom. But we cannot well forget that the means to build it must have been taken from the increasing poverty of his people, and diverted from the service of his '* holy war *' to the mere glorification of his illustrious house and himself. Mutiny was paralysing his armies in the field. His schemes were failing one after the other. One enterprise half-completed was deserted because another had been taken in hand. The lack of money was drawing cries of desperation from his servants and crushing himself with anxiety. Yet he built this huge pile at a cost which would 210 SPAIN have maintained whole fleets and armies, in order that he might repose in death amid more grandeur than any other king. The cult of the '' royal person " was carried to its utmost limit, and this also was arrogance and pretension covering poverty and defeat. This extravagant adoration of his own family, his own person, which was a manifestation of " the slow stalking contentious hissing vanity of the gander," brought upon Philip the accusation that he had committed a most odious and useless crime — the murder of his eldest son Don Carlos. The silly would-be romance which has been woven around this only child of Philip's first marriage to Maria of Portugal belongs to the history of political pamphleteering and of German poetry. He was born with the unstable mind of his great-grandmother Joan the Mad, and unlike her he was misshapen and unhealthy in body. If he had been the son of a private person he would have been early put under restraint. But Phihp shrank from confessing that his only son was crazy ;, and persisted in refusing to recognize the truth till Carlos had rendered himself intolerable by a long course of imbecile plots and insane violence. Philip confined him in the palace, and there he died (1568). The circumstances of his death were concealed out of false shame, but there is no real reason to suppose that it was not natural. The sentences in which the King explained his action to Catherine of Medici, mother of his second wife Isabel of Valois, whom he married at the peace of Cateau Cambresis, has been quoted against him. " It " (the imprisonment) ''was not a punishment, for had it been one, it would have had an end. But I had lost all hope of seeing my son with a healthy mind. In this case, I have decided to sacrifice my own flesh and blood to God, as preferring his service and the general good to all human considerations." On the face of them these words seem to us to imply that Philip caused his son to be put to death. But PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 211 we think so only because we have ceased to use the terms of the pious dialect of the King's own time and country. '' Hacer sacrificio/' to offer as sacrifice, was in the language of Philip, and his subjects, simply to submit to pain, humiliation, or loss, either when self-imposed as acts of devotion, or when they were inflicted by God. It was the equivalent of our '' to bear your cross.'' He did not commit a needless murder, for all the evidence goes to show that Carlos could not have lived long. His fault was that he thought it beneath his dignity to act as a right-minded private person would have done — to take the opinion of the doctors and confess openly that his son was insane. Because he was governed by false shame he incurred suspicion of odious cruelty. And this, again, is part of the immense web of *' vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would," which the Spaniards, King and people, wrapped round themselves. As they would move in the world as if it were shaped by their own dreams, they stumbled against one hard fact after the other. We have seen that Philip had made some attempt to defend his coasts against the piratical Barbary states. After the relief of Malta in 1565, his attention was drawn off by the rising troubles in the Low Countries. In 1567 the Duke of Alba was sent with his army, and an attempt to cleanse the land by a paroxysm of brutal rage began. Just as Spain was committed to an eighty years' struggle ending in humiliat- ing defeat, the bigotry of the Spaniards and the greed of many of them, combined to drive the Moriscos of Granada into revolt. They were unaccustomed to war, by disposition peaceful, and they were unarmed, unorganized. A flash of illuminating hght is thrown on the internal state of Spain by the fact that it was found impossible to suppress these feeble insurgents, until Alba sent three thousand soldiers from the Low Countries to help in the work. During the reign of 212 SPAIN Fernando, the Florentine Guicciardini had calculated that the establishment of internal peace would weaken the martial spirit of the Spaniards. The process was in operation in 1570, and was to go much further. If Sehm the Drunkard, who became Sultan in 1566, had sent an army to invade Spain, as he well might have done, the country would have been not much better able to defend itself at home than it was in 711. No effectual help was sent, and in 1571 the rising was suppressed. The Moriscos of other parts of Spain did not move. Those of Granada — all of them who escaped massacre or did not flee to Africa — were driven from their homes and scattered over Spain. A gaping breach of empty land was left at the south-east of the Peninsula. Then Philip joined the Holy League and sent his bastard half brother, John of Austria, who had served in Granada, to win the sea- fight in Lepanto (October 1571). The ferocity of Alba had meantime borne its fruit in the Low Countries. Catholics and Protestants were driven to combine. There was universal revolt. Englishmen and Flemish exiles in England intervened — English armed smugglers began to invade the West Indies. Roman Catholic plots (of which, as things then were with him, Philip did not approve) were undertaken in the Netherlands against Elizabeth. The Queen and her ministers, who were thoroughly acquainted with the embarrassments of Philip, treated him with insolence and defiance. He bore it all for his hands were full, and a new task was thrown on him. King Sebastian of Portugal was killed at the battle of Alcazar-el-Kebir in Morocco (4th August 1578). His heir was his uncle, Cardinal Henry, an old man. Phihp's right to the succession through his mother Isabel of Portugal was good.^ The Portuguese of the burgher and ^ The lovely portrait of this lady by Titian is one of the gems of the Museo at Madrid. But we must remember that he never saw her. The portrait was painted after another portrait, the work of Sanchez PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 213 peasant classes hated the Castilians. The Jesuits, too, who were powerful in Portugal were no friends at that time to Philip. Though founded by a Spaniard, Ignatius Loyola, they were far more papal and Italian than Spanish. The orthodox King, as he considered himself, was very peremp- tory in asserting the rights of his crown against the Pope, and his own clergy were ready to support him. The Pope could do very Httle in Spain without the Royal Permission (Pase regio). The Dominicans, who were powerful through the Inquisition, were openly hostile to the Jesuits. But this obstacle was overcome by diplomacy. The nobles were persuaded and bribed. On the death of Henry (31st January 1580) Philip enforced his claim against the favourite of the lower orders, Antonio, Prior of Crato, in the mihtary order of Christ. Antonio's followers were scattered and he fled abroad. With the help of foreign adventurers, French and English, he made an attempt to hold his ground in the islands. He was defeated by the Spanish fleet under Alvaro de Bazan in July 1582. In April 1581 Philip had been recognized as King by the Portuguese Cortes at Thomar. The union might have been to the good of the whole Peninsular. But Philip secured only the support or the acquiescence of the Church. He bribed the nobles by allowing them a dangerous amount of power. The union was forced, and depended in reality on the power of Spain. If that failed it was sure to be broken. Now Phihp was at last free to clear accounts with EHzabeth. We know how he set to work and how his plans ended with the failure of the Invincible Armada. The Spaniards called it the most happy (Felicisima), which after all implies '' in- Ccello, Isabel's Portuguese artist. Sanchez Coello was an excellent portrait painter. It is said that his original exists in possession of a French collector. If so, it no doubt shows what she was really like, and how far the loveliness of the picture in the Museo was put in by the great Venetian. 214 SPAIN vincible/' and the one epithet is as inaccurate as the other. We look now upon the failure of the Armada as the end of all possibiHty of Spanish aggression on England. EngHsh- men of the time were not so sure. The utter failure of their counter attack on Spain in 1589 was a warning. Whoever surveys the whole field must see that England reaped the whole harvest of her victory because Philip turned his atten- tion to France. The murder of Henry III. on the 3rd August 1589 opened the way to the throne of France to Henry of Navarre — the Huguenot. Now the accession of a Huguenot King in France and the predominance of a Huguenot party would have been a terrible blow to Philip. He at once, and to the neglect of everything else, threw all his resources into an attempt to make his own daughter Isabel (who was also granddaughter of Henry II. of France through her mother Elizabeth of Valois) Queen, with the help of the Catholic League. He was defeated by the arms and the well-timed conversion of Henry of Navarre. The adventure lasted from 1589 to 1598, and while money and troops were employed in it England was safe, and the Protestant *' United Provinces '' consolidated their polity and founded their naval power. One passage in the history of Philip's last years might have brought some good for Spain, though its cause was evil. In 1575 the King had ordered the execution (as he would think it) of Escovedo, the Secretary of Don John of Austria, then governor in the Low Countries. The master and the secretary had been concerned in intrigues and schemes for the conquest of England which were in disobedience to the King's orders, and dangerous to him. Escovedo was sent to Spain to for- ward these wild plans. In the use of his royal authority, and acting, as he held he was entitled to do, " legibus solutus," Philip authorized his secretary, Antonio Perez, to cause Escovedo to be killed. Perez, an unscrupulous scoundrel PHILIP 11. AND HIS WORK 215 of some showy cleverness, hired bravos to kill the unfortun- ate man on the 31st March 1578. It was a vile act on his part for Escovedo was his friend, and both had been among the followers of the King's early favourite, Ruy Gomez, Prince of Eboli. On Philip's part the act was no less vile, even if we allow for the opinions as to his own rights in which he had been brought up. It was a cowardly action, and the King's whole conduct was cowardly. He shrank from boldly avowing his orders, and allowed the family of Escovedo to pursue Perez before the courts. After a time, and for reasons which remain obscure, he turned on Perez, caused him to be im- prisoned, and put to the torture. In February 1590 Perez escaped to Saragossa, where he sought the protection of the Justiza Mayor. He was by origin an Aragonese, but his life had been spent in Castile. The Justiza had really no juris- diction. But the populace of Saragossa, and some of the more foohsh of the gentry, took up the cause of Perez, and protected him against the King and the Inquisition, which icted for the King. The ofhce of Justiza had become lereditary in the Lanuza family. The tenant of the office at the crises was a Don Juan de Lanuza, a besotted young man. Philip raised troops to subdue resistance. Perez fled across the Pyrenees to live the life of an adventurer and die in miser- able poverty in Paris. No general rising took place in Aragon. Don Juan de Lanuza was beheaded by PhiHp's order without :rial, and a number of executions by administrative order LoUowed. They were all murders in the same sense as the kilHng of Escovedo. The office of Justiza was reduced to an ordinary judgeship and Aragon lost some of its franchises. The punishment might have been for the good of Spain, for it "orwarded the unity of the country, and the freedoms of .\ragon were medieval institutions which had outlived their time and had become excuses for anarchy. Unhappily for Spain, or as the just result of the errors of its peoples, the 2i6 SPAIN result of Philip's success was only to strengthen a government which continued to grow continually more incapable. After the conversion of Henry IV. in March 1593, Philip began to recognize that he must withdraw from the French adventure. There was no excuse for it when a Cathohc was on the French throne. Age and infirmities, horrible forms of gout, were coming on him. He began to wish to put his affairs in order before he died. He saw that his only surviving son, Philip, was incapable. There is something which has been judged pathetic in the spectacle of the old King, now con- fined wholly to the Escorial, overburdened with work and torn by pain, toiling to hquidate the bankruptcy of his dearest ambitions. But sentimental pity for the old man, who had caused so much misery to others, is frozen when we see that to the very end his surrenders, his repentances, his attempts to provide for the future, were not honest. He delayed to make his peace with France. The Peace of Vervins was not signed till May 1598. The measure which was to have relieved Spain of the Flemish incubus was a fraud. The King made a pretence of surrendering the sovereignty of the Low Countries to his daughter Isabel and her husband the Archduke Albert. If the surrender had been honest it would have been a boon to Spain. But to be honest it must be preceded, or at any rate accompanied, by a frank recognition of the independence of the Seven United Provinces of the Protestant north, and a genuine transfer of the sovereignty over the Catholic Pro- vinces of the south. But Philip would not recognize the independence of the north, and the transfer of sovereignty to Isabel and her husband was a sham, deprived of all sub- stance by secret treaties providing for its return to the crown of Spain, and for the retention of Spanish garrisons in Flemish cities. It was a proof of the incurable pedantry of the man that he really appears to have thought that a few changes in names would abolish the fact of the case in the Low Countries. PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 217 He seems to have imagined that the Dutchmen who now knew their own strength, and the weakness of Spain, would surrender their rehgious and pohtical freedom, if only they were not asked to give them up to a sovereign officially named " King of Spain/' He died on the 13th September 1598, having endured horrible tortures with unfaihng patience, and praying that his sufferings in this world might be allowed to mitigate the punishment of his sins in the next, and sub- mitting meekly to know that his son had already begun to act as King. When it is said that a frank surrender of the Low Countries would have been a boon to Spain, the statement must not be understood as meaning that this or any merely political measure could have averted the now inevitable decadence of the country. The cessation of a costly lawsuit will not cure a diseased man. And Spain was diseased in body and in mind — anaemic and given up to '* strong delusions and to believe in lies.'' The folly of Philip II. appeared to the Spaniards to be grandeur. They were quite ready to see his son Philip III. and grandson Philip IV. keep on the path he had chosen. They forgot that they had been inherited by the sovereign of the Low Countries, and looked upon them as their own inheritance. When Phihp III. (1598-1621) con- tinued with dull obstinacy to strive for the submission of the Dutch they applauded him. They did not blame his futile attempts to aid EHzabeth's " Irish rebels." They welcomed the peace with her successor James I. in 1603, because it left them free to suppress the Dutch heretics. Those heretics were now swarming in every Spanish and Portuguese sea, and proved unconquerable at home. In 1609 sheer poverty forced Spain to make a truce of twelve years with the United Pro- vinces and to treat with them as independent powers. But the Spanish government showed a Chinese determination to '' save its face." It would not recognize the independence of 2i8 SPAIN the Republic explicitly. The practical Dutch, who secured the substance of what they were fighting for, made a skilful use of the refusal of the form. They insisted that since Spain would not allow them to be a foreign power she must permit their trade with the Indies. Again the Royal government saved its face by refusing a formal permission, but it allowed the thing. In the Royal Council there were protests against the indignity of the treaty, but when the critics were asked how they proposed to carry on the war they had no answer to make. They had saved their face by pure words, and must submit to the fact. Philip III. was himself a nonentity, who allowed his privado the Duke of Lerma to govern in his name. Lerma, for his part, was simply a corrupt courtier who encouraged the ex- travagance of the Court and filled his own pocket. He held his place till he was upset by an intrigue headed by his own son. Under his protection the nobles regained power, not to use it as statesmen or soldiers, but to pillage the treasury. The greatest king, or the greatest minister, would have been taxed beyond his power to rescue the country from the consequences of Philip II.'s policy. The royal figurehead of the monarchy, and the worthless favourites he trusted, aggravated the evil. They consented, not without reluctance, but under the pressure of pubhc opinion, to expel the Moriscos from all parts of Spain. This act of stupid brutality was the one really popular thing they did. The Church distrusted the sincerity of the forced conversions of these descendants of Mahometans — and not without reason. The people hated them for the relative prosperity they owed to their industry. It feared that in case of an invasion, either from Africa or by Henry IV. of France, they would aid the invader. The suspicion was not unfounded. If a foreign power had invaded Spain it was in the nature of things that the persecuted Moriscos would act as did the Jews in 711. The greatest of PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 219 Spanish men of letters, Cervantes, shared and expressed the feelings of his countrymen. (See " El Coloquio de los Dos Perros," i.e., the Talk of the Two Dogs.) The expulsion was planned and carried out in 1609-1614 without opposition, save a murmur of protest from some landlords who lost their best tenants. It was executed with a display of force which, properly directed, would have been equal to the conquest of Algiers. A few desperate Moriscos became bandits in the mountains of Valencia. It is difficult, indeed in the absence of properly taken statistics it is impossible, to know exactly what this poHcy of bigotry, greed, and fear cost Spain in the way of material loss, and in population. The estimates of the number actually expelled vary enor- mously. The most careful calculation puts the figure at 500,000, but it has no solid foundations. Here as in whatever the Spaniards did at that time, there is a wide interval between pretence and reality. A few Moriscos were allowed to remain to teach the Spaniards who were invited from other parts of the country to replace the expelled tenants, how to work the irrigation canals of Valencia. Some — including large numbers of children — remained as domestic slaves. It is' certain that many contrived to find their way back. They were rejected by France and ill-received in the Barbary States. Whatever the figures may have been there can be no doubt that the expulsion did diminish the population of the country. And there is reason to believe that the popula- tion was sinking for other reasons. Here also we lack accurate figures, and must, as the lively Spanish phrase has it, go '' a tienta parades," feeling the wall like the blind man. The government of Philip II. did begin a topographical and statistical survey of Spain, but like so many other hopeful undertakings it fell through from lack of money. As far as it went it tended to show that the population was sinking. The complaints of town councils 220 SPAIN and of the Cortes are often rhetorical, and made in general terms. But they all agree that there was a fall-off. There is one piece of evidence which speaks for itself. In parts of Spain — and notably in Estremadura — there are the remains of large numbers of houses which once held an agricultural population, but have mouldered down uninhabited, since the sixteenth century. Their churches still stand, the so- called Iglesias frias (cold churches), and mass is performed in them once a year by a priest sent for the purpose. The fact that Cortes and Pizarro were " Estremefios," and recruited among their countrymen, helps to account for the emigration of men for this region. There certainly was a time when Estremaduran villages were full of women, and the priest was almost the only grown male. An epidemic of hysteria, which took the form of reHgious mania and witchcraft, gave the Inquisition much to do. Yet the main cause of this ruin of agriculture was unquestion- ably the '' Mesta." This corporation of sheep and cattle owners reached its fullest power in the seventeenth century. The wandering herds which it controlled, roamed from the summer pastures in Santander and the Meseta de Cuenca, to the winter pastures of Estremadura and the Sierra Morena. Its priviliges authorized it to insist on the sale of forage at fixed prices, good year or bad, and to prevent the enclosure of land. Its strong organization into quarters with a general council, its rights of jurisdiction, and its treasury gave it enormous power. The number of its sheep is uncertain, but whether it amounted to two or eight miUions there can be no doubt that the passage of its devouring flocks was ruinous to agriculture. Whole districts were depopulated before them. But the Mesta could lend the King money, and there was no one to check it. By the second half of the seventeenth century Spain, which was capable of producing far more wheat than it needed for its consumption, was largely PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 221 dependent on imported breadstuffs. Vagabondage and sloth, stimulated by vanity and the patronage of pious mendicancy by the Church, but also the result of the sheer despair of men who were not allowed to profit by their labour, had reached such a pitch that whatever harvests were taken in were largely reaped by labourers from France, who took their earn- ings out with them. The hospitals founded for the service of the pilgrims going to Galicia found that they had to entertain during the regulation three days hundreds of incomers. But they saw nobody going out. The pilgrims never reached Santiago de Galicia. They turned from the road to seek work at the harvest, and went away by the passes of the Pyrenees. By the action of the King's government, but (we cannot insist upon the fact too often) with the acquiescence or approval of the people, Spain, which, as her neighbours judged, was more impoverished in peace than other nations in war, consummated her ruin after 1618. The Flemish cancer again became active. The murder of Henry IV. of France in 1610 had averted a great danger. Matrimonial alliances — the marriage of the Infanta Ana to Louis XIII., and of his sister Elizabeth to the heir of Philip III., seemed to establish good relations with France. But on the approach of the Thirty Years War in Germany the Austrian branch of the house of Hapsburg asked help from their Spanish cousins, and it was given. Indeed refusal was not possible. So long as Spain retained Flanders she must send troops to defend it. But the naval power of the Dutch, and the jealousy of England, rendered the sea route dangerous. Therefore her soldiers must go by the land route, from Northern Italy, through the passes of the Alps and along the " Bishop's Road," the ecclesiastical states of the Rhine Valley. But if the Protestants gained the upper hand those states would be securalized for the benefit of Lutheran or Calvinist princes, and the road would be cut. Therefore Spain must support the Catholic i 222 SPAIN cause in Germany. So she went into the Valley of Destruction convinced thai: it was her part to rule the world. Philip III. died in 1621. His successor Philip IV., a lad of sixteen, embodied the feeble good intentions, the incapacity to give them effect, the family pride, and the slavery to delu- sions which made up the Spaniard of the time. He wished to be a good King. He actually studied a part of the history of Italy of Guicciardini, " a meritorious servant of our house," in order to qualify himself to understand public affairs. If things could be done by wishing them done, Philip would have been an effectual King. But when these velleities were to be put into action he shrank from the effort. There is a mythical truth, at any rate, in the story that when he made a feeble show of applying himself to government, his favourite, the famous Count-Duke of Olivares, put a speedy end to his good intentions by presenting himself with an armful of documents for his Majesty to read and decide upon. Philip IV. was frightened at the prospect. He was just an average sensual man of some intelligence, but no force of mind. His business in life was amusement — and that of the most elementary character. His true ambition was to be counted the best horseman in his dominions, and impartial witnesses allow that he rode well. Whether he was ever permitted to mount a dangerous horse we do not know. A moderate measure of accomplishment goes a long way with princes. We know Philip from the portraits of Velasquez, and can read a serene foolishness on his face. He loved toys and things to look at, and gained that reputation for a love of art which is easily given to princes who pay for pictures, and he is credited with literary tastes, which he showed by going to see plays. He was punctual in performing his religious duties, and kept his many amours under decent cover. His outward carriage was stately, and he was only twice seen to compromise his dignity by laughing in public — PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 223 once when a practical joker let loose a cage of mice in the women's gallery of a theatre — once when he heard that his second wife really believed that her legs would be cut off when she reached Spain. Her major-domo had rejected a present of woven stockings offered by the artisans of an Italian town she passed through on her way from Vienna to Madrid, saying, '' the Queen of Spain has no legs/' He thought the present too familiar. Beneath the grave airs put on for the public, lay a mere animal vulgarity. His stately palace was a brothel. His eldest son, the open-faced pleasant boy Baltasar Carlos, whom we know through Velasquez, was deliberately led into the juvenile debauchery which killed him, by the gentlemen of many and sonorous names, to whom his education was entrusted. He left the government of his dominions to his '' valido '' or *' privado,'' the favourite Olivares. Gaspar de Guzman, by inheritance Count of Olivares, and by favour of Philip IV. Duke of San Lucar, who preferred to be known as the Count-Duke, ruled from 1621 to 1643. During those years he presided over the fall of Spain from the appearance of power to the confessed reality of impotence. He is the scapegoat of Spanish history. Yet a fair judge can hardly say more against him than that he was not wise enough and strong enough to force the royal master by whose favour he lived, and the people by whose support alone it was possible for him to resist the King, to renounce hopes, pretensions, delusions, which had become bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. To some extent the man is condemned out of his own mouth. After his fall he reproached his King for having forced him to follow the course which led to ruin. If Gaspar de Guzman beHeved that he was called upon to do what would be injurious to his country, it was in his power to *' make sacrifice '* of his personal ambition and endure the royal anger. The worst that could happen to him would have 224 SPAIN been an order to leave the court and retire to his estates. He was not hero enough to endure that martyrdom, and it is highly probable that in 1643 he credited himself with having held opinions in 162 1 which were in fact far from him at that date. The faults of the man were glaring and they were of the kind which incur animosity. He was, to use a Spanish word, '' mandon.'* The dictionary in its decent way trans- lates by ''imperious/' ''haughty." Jack-in-ofhce conveys the sense better. The " mandon *' is the man who is not content with exercising power, but must flourish his authority in the face of all the world. The more he was " mandon " the more was he a Spaniard. The Spaniard, as Napier justly says in his " War in the Peninsula,'' is peremptory in the exercise of official authority. But he at least worked very hard, showed considerable executive faculty, and con- trived to keep the over- weighted machine working after a fashion. Like all the ministers of his time he was Httle scrupulous in accumulating the fruits of office. His yearly gains have been put at 440,000 ducats, say £80,000. Yet it does not appear that he died rich. He at least did not neglect the public service as Lerma had done. With all his faults he has one distinction. He is the last great personality we meet in Spanish history. He closes the long Hst of strong, capable, haughty men which includes the Cid, Jimenez, Gonsalvo de Cordoba, Cortes, the Duke of Alba, and that Gil Carrillo de Albornoz, the lieutenant of the Popes at Avignon, who reconquered the Romagna and has been called the second founder of the Papacy. He failed, but it was as Laocoon failed, in the grip of the executioners of the wrath of the gods. The reader must go to the histories of Italy, Germany, Holland, Flanders, France, and England for the details of all that Olivares (for we may leave the King at his diversions) was called upon to direct, or to pretend to direct. His policy belongs to Spain which first endured it, and then endured PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 225 the results. It began by the refusal to renew the twelve years truce with the United Provinces in 162 1. Posterity has called the act a folly and some contemporary Spaniards did not think it wise. But even they were not prepared to accept the alternative, which was the recognition of the inde- pendence of the Dutch. The Portuguese had suffered acutely from the attacks of the Dutch East India Company on their possessions in the Indian Ocean. They thought war would bring them relief. It did bring them the formation of the West India Company and the invasion of Brazil. The first of the Company's enterprises, the capture of Bahia, was a failure. A combined Spanish naval and mihtary expedition, commanded by Fadrique (Frederick) de Toledo, drove them out in 1624. ^^"t Spain could not maintain the constant protection which was needed. We know the deplorable story of the Spanish marriage from our own side, and how James I., who also was given up to strong delusions, and to believe in lies, thought to put a hook in the nose of Leviathan, and use the monster in the interest of the Protestant Palatinate. His son came to Madrid with the Duke of Buckingham to carry out the scheme, and prospered as he was bound to do. The Spanish govern- ment had no intention of marrying the Infanta to a heretic prince. Charles went back and war followed. It contained one episode, the wretchedly prepared and conducted Enghsh attacks on Cadiz in 1625. I't was a shameful failure. The English fleet retired with the shame and the odd hits, and the Spanish convoy came in with the treasure from the Indies. It was sorely needed for King Philip's government was penni- less. The Spaniards rejoiced over their victory and turned to operations which were more important to them than the prosecution of the war with England. The English discovered that the Spanish Leviathan was in reahty '' a skeleton held to- ^^ether by wire." The phrase was a later, and not an Enghsh, 226 SPAIN invention. The old hatred born of fear of the aggressive Catholic power began to die out. The other matters the Spaniards had to attend were the wars in Flanders and Gerniany. There they gained a success — the taking of Breda by the Genoese, Ambrose Spinola, who was their general, and was also the last of the condottiere. He had contracted to carry on the war in Flanders in the reign of PhiHp III. and was a great taker of cities. Bahia, Cadiz, Breda, were three successes which came together. The Spaniards saw a mirage — a restoration of grandeur which was founded on vapours and made of sunbeams. They called Philip '^ the Great." In a few years they were saying that he was great in the sense that a pit is — the more you take from it the bigger it grows. The humour which has created the proverbs of Spain and animated innumerable shrewd " humor- adas " (epigrams) from MartiaFs to the newspaper wits of to-day, had ample employment in the rest of his reign, and in the reign of his son. Until 1635 Spain fought on without apparently losing ground. Then, when Richelieu had broken the political independence of the Huguenots, France intervened as a principal in the Thirty Years War in Germany. The result of her intervention was to cut the '' Bishops' Road.'' Spain was compelled to reinforce her army in Flanders by sea. In 1639 a fleet sent for that purpose was destroyed by Tromp in the Downs and it became impossible for Spain to " put a pike in Flanders " by her own resources. She was losing ground in Italy and was attacked on her own Pyrenean frontier, and she was breaking to pieces within it. In 1640 came the revolt of the Catalans, who were exasperated by the disorders of the royal troops, mostly Italian and Irish mercenaries ; and the separation of Portugal, which fell away almost without the need for a struggle. Catalonia offered itself to the French. It was recovered after much bloodshed, less by the force of PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 227 Spain, than because the Catalans were driven to reconcile themselves with their king by the outrages of the French. But their navy was developing and it began to defeat the Spaniards both in the Mediterranean, and on the ocean. They conquered Rousillon in 1642. The death of Richelieu (December 1642), and of Lewis XIIL (14th May 1643) left the Spanish Queen Anne as Regent and brought some relief to Spain, yet only five days after Lewis died, the Prince of Conde broke the prestige of the famous Spanish infantry at Rocroi on the Flemish frontier. They were held too long in reserve, the other troops were routed, then the whole army of Conde fell upon them. They fought magnificently and sold their defeat dear, closing their ranks as their numbers diminished. The remnant surrendered with honour. The disorders of the Fronde in France prevented the loss of Flanders. And then fears of French power brought the Dutch to look upon the Spanish dominion in the southern Nether- lands as a protection to themselves. In 1648 by the peace of Westphalia Spain recognized the independence of the Dutch. Her Flemish possessions were now kept for her by the jealousy of the rivals of France, who preferred to see them in the dead hand of the '' skeleton held together by wire." The revolt called of Masaniello in Naples (1467) fell by its own disorders. The war with France dragged on till the Peace of the Pyrenees, November 1659. England had joined France, had taken Jamaica and plundered the treasure ships. Cromwell, who would have joined Spain, asked as a con- dition that she would allow freedom of worship to English residents and open the trade to America. He was told that the Inquisition and the monopoly of the Indies were the two eyes of the King, and that he wanted them both. From the date of the Peace of the Pyrenees till the year 1700, Spain was in Western Europe what Turkey has been in the East — the sick man whose inheritance was fought over 228 SPAIN by greedy heirs collected round his deathbed. Its external history is made up of the rivalries of others. Its internal history is summed up in the word decay. Philip IV. after dismissing Olivares, not of his own free will but driven by public clamour in 1643, made a timid effort to govern for himself, and then subsided into docile submission to another privado the Count of Haro, nephew of the discarded minister. His last energies were spent in an effort to subdue Portugal. It failed largely because his Spanish subjects seemed to have lost all power and will to *fight. He died in 1665 broken hearted. Of the thirty-five years which the Austrian dynasty had to live in Spain, only one thing can be said. They show as no other passage in European history does to what a depth of degradation absolute monarchy can fall. The King, Charles II., the son of Philip's second marriage to his own niece Maria Ana of Austria, was an unhappy being of whom it is painful to think. His hfe was one long senile decay. His subjects had been so broken in to obedience that they could not save themselves. They could complain, write satiric verse, make bread riots, but they could not unite for any definite purpose. A few noble intriguers had laid schemes in Philip's reign for making themselves kings in parts of Spain^ but none had gone beyond loose talking. There was manhood and worth in the mass of the population, but it was passive. There was wisdom in some members of the council, but it was the melancholy wisdom of an oriental resignation to fate. We can hear it speaking by the mouth of the Marquis of Mancera. '' Sire. The inevitable decay (caducidad, liter- ally dotage or senile decay) of this monarchy, whether it is to be conquered by France or inherited by the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, is neither hidden from your Majesty, nor is it remote. Its universal influence is visible to all eyes in all parts and members (of the State) in the lack of leaders, in the PHILIP II. AND HIS WORK 229 failure of inhabitants, in the poverty of pubHc and private treasuries, in the utter privation of arms, ammunition, equip- ment, artillery and transport, and what is more, of military disciphne on land or sea ; in the universal faint-heartedness, gloom, and shameful fear to which, for our sins, this nation, forgetful of its native valour and generosity, is reduced/' To this awful indictment there was no answer. To this the monarchy of Charles Vth and Philip II. had come. The wisest of its subjects could only wait for the end in the resigna- tion of despair. NOTES The whole period which goes from the reign of the Catholic sovereigns to the end of the Austrian dynasty, has a common character. It is the period in which ** classic " influences came to Spain, rapidly conquered and reigned with absolute authority. " Renaissance " may be preferred to " classic," and the second word is perhaps best kept for the later influences of the eighteenth century. The distinction is a fair one, and it is convenient to have some handy way of distinguishing the influence which pro- duced the cathedral of Granada from that which led to such an atrocity as the plastering over and the white-washing of the interior of the Cathedral of Vich in the eighteenth century, in order that its " Gothic " barbarism might be reduced to a trim regularity. The Renaissance influence was felt first in the form of the " plateresque." It began by being an addition to, or an over- laying of, Gothic foundations with ornament akin to bas reliefs or silver work, hence the name, " platero" being a silversmith in Spanish. The tower of the church of Santa Maria del Campo at Burgos is an example of this style easily seen, and there is much of it in Spain. But the influence was not likely to stop there. It bore fruit in the so-called " Graeco- Roman " cathedrals of Granada, Malaga, Jaen, and in Guadix. They were the countries last conquered from the Moors, and the new school had a fair field. The next step was the development of a Spanish variety of the " classic " influence. It came in the form of the work and school of Herrera, the builder of the Escorial. It is perhaps best 230 SPAIN seen there where it is in perfect harmony with the background and the character of the building. The rectangular, the balanced, the dry, but none the less dignified and stately chapel, of the Escorial is the triumph of Herrera. It is talked of as cold, and compared to a heathen temple. But heathen temples are places in which men have prayed, and if a man cannot pray in the chapel of the Escorial, the fault does not lie in Herrera's archi- tecture. The Cathedral of Valladolid which he began, was never finished. The school of Herrera was too " high and dry " to last. It gave way to the churrigueresque, that is the style of Churriguera, who practised it. The churrigueresque came from Italy, like the other Renaissance influences. The essential feature of it was that it consisted in a profusion of ornament, visibly nailed, so to speak, to the building, and usually tawdry. The churrigueresque produced its inevitable reaction in the new classic of the later eighteenth century, of which the two chief models are the Cathedral of the Pilar at Saragossa and the Cathedral of Cadiz. CHAPTER IX THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS During the whole generation preceding the death of the Hapsburg King, France was laying her hand more and more firmly on Spain. The aggressions of Lewis XIV. in Flanders and La Franche Compte were comparatively a small matter. The vital point was that Spain was herself, and at home, falling into subordination to France. Nothing need be said here of the painful diplomatic arrangements made by the European wise men in view of the coming question of the Spanish succession. None of their schemes took effect. Part of the story is purely disgusting. Charles was born in a state of senile decay and his existence was a death in life. Two women were sent to be Queens of Spain — Marie Louise of Orleans and Mariana of Neuburg — not that they might be mothers, but that they might help the House of Bourbon or the House of Austria to annex the whole Spanish inheritance. The King was surrounded by intrigue and at the end tormented by Froilan Diaz, his confessor, a mahgnant fool, who caused him to be exorcised to drive out the devils who possessed him. Monarchy is deeply rooted in the affection of the Spaniards. It survived this shameful spectacle, and they only pitied Carlos el Hechizado (Charles the Bewitched) . But they grew sick of the illustrious House of Hapsburg, and turned to Lewis XIV. as the one man who could save the integrity of the Monarchy. Under the pressure of his subjects Charles II. left his kingdom to a grandson of the French King. 231 232 SPAIN If the transmission of a monarchy could be arranged like the passing of a private estate, the claims of the House of Bourbon were unanswerable. Lewis XIV. had married the daughter of Phihp IV., Maria Teresa, and her descendants were the rightful heirs. It is true that she had renounced her rights of succession in Spain, but the renunciation was contingent on the payment of her dowry, which was never paid and therefore it was of no effect. As a kingdom is not a private estate, as the other European powers were not likely to tolerate the union of the whole Spanish monarchy to France, and as the Spaniards themselves were not willing to become the subjects of the French King, an alternative was found. Charles II. was persuaded to, or rather was bullied by the Archbishop of Toledo, Portocarrero, into leaving his kingdom to the Duke of Anjou, the younger son of the first Dauphin of Lewis XIV. On this occasion the Spaniards acted as the Aragonese had done at the time of the compromise of Caspe. They took the heir next to the rightful heir. The War of the Spanish Succession was a great European struggle in which, as far as other nations were concerned, the question at issue was whether or no they would submit to the predominance of France. But there was another question at issue for the Spaniards, namely, whether or no they would allow a king to be forced on them by the enemies of Lewis XIV. Early in 1701 Philip, Duke of Anjou, a blue- eyed handsome boy of fifteen, came to Spain as King. He was accepted by the Spaniards because, for them, he repre- sented the preservation of the monarchy. The Emperor Joseph refused to acknowledge him, and took up arms to enforce what he called the rights and what were the desires of the House of Hapsburg. But the mercantile classes in England and Holland did not desire another war with France. Philip was recognized by them as King. If the French King had behaved with moderation it is possible that no great THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS 233 European war would have followed. But the passion of Lewis XIV. would have everything at once. He began a series of acts of aggression. One of them was an attempt to seize the whole trade of Spain with the Indies for the benefit of France. By this and by other exhibitions of crazy arro- gance, such as his occupation of the Spanish Netherlands and his recognition of the son of the exiled James II. as King of England, he drove England and Holland to declare war It was inevitable that the allies should wish to drive Philip ^^TIl ^tJ°"' °^ ^^^^- ^^^y "^^^^ked their recognition bribed the King of Portugal to join them, accepted Charles of Hapsburg as King of Spain, and sent forces to put him on the throne. They found friends in the country-a few Austrian partizans in all parts, and in Catalonia the bulk of the population. The actual military operations need not be told with any attempt at detail. M. Sorel, in his history of Europe and the French Revolution," has called the desperate resistance of Spain to Napoleon "anonymous." If the adjective sounds odd it is none the less accurate. In both the great struggles of 1702-1712, and of 1808-1814, there was a plentiful lack in Spain of those statesmen and generals who embody the qualities of a nation and decide, or plausibly !r''. !° .?'?' ''' ^"'^- ^ ^^^ honourable men who adhered to the Bourbon King among the nobles and officials some gallant officers, and several capable guerriUero chiefs are known. But the hero of Spain in the war was named by Saint Simon-the good, the noble people of Castile. The administration was incoherent, smothered in " paperasserie " corrupt, blocked by its endless formalities, and overmanned by councils and clerks. Spain could do little in the way of orderly war. The people were ignorant, indifferent to what happened outside the comarcas of their widely scattered towns and villages. But there were in them a fund of man- hood, and an instinct of patriotism which came into play when 234 SPAIN the issue was stated in terms they could understand, and it was so stated when they saw Enghsh heretics, French Hugue- nots in Enghsh pay, Portuguese enemies,. German soldiers, and Catalan insurgents marching into the heart of their country to impose a king upon them. When discipHned and well led they made good soldiers. On the battle-field of Almansa, and when General Stanhope and his English regiments were forced to surrender at Brihuega, and Starhemberg was stopped at Villaviciosa, the Spaniards took their honourable share in the fighting. But on these battle-fields the direction, the intellectual part, belonged to foreigners — to the Duke of Berwick, the natural son of James II. and nephew of Marl- borough, the '* long dry devil of an Enghshman who went straight ahead," or to the French Duke of Vendome, a mass of lust, spite, and mihtary capacity. Their own part was to create an atmosphere of deadly hostility around the invaders. While the allied forces remained united they could beat the undisciplined Spaniards in a set battle, but they starved. If they spread in search of food they were cut off in detail. It would have required a constantly reinforced army of a hundred thousand men at least to occupy Spain — and the allies could not provide such a force. When the death of the Emperor Joseph and the succession of his brother, the nominal King of Spain, threatened Europe with a restoration of the Empire of Charles Vth, England and Holland were glad enough to with- draw from the adventure. Externally and in Europe the war left Spain relieved of her useless and dangerous possessions in Flanders and Italy, but intact and still sovereign of the Indies. Its internal consequences were as advantageous as tl^Hl feeble intelligence of her rulers allowed them to be. Catalonil^ had adopted the Hapsburg cause, not quite unanimously, for there were Catalonian partisans of the Bourbons, b as a political whole. Aragon, Valencia, and Majorca wei 1 THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS 235 Hapsburg in sympathy. The old division of Spain into Castile and Aragon appeared for the last time in this war. The victory of Philip was the victory of Castile. It was accompanied, inevitably, by the suppression of Aragonese, Catalan, Valencian, and Majorcan franchises. The Catalans held out fiercely, and Barcelona was not stormed till after a siege in 1714, two years after the general war had ended in 1712. The Catalans had just ground to reproach the bad faith of England which, after promising to secure their franchises, deserted them cynically. It has been a common- place to lament the loss of these ancient freedoms. Yet they were but belated survivals of medieval realities. If Spain w^as to become a true nation it must cease to consist of separate polities united by the Crown only. The better way would have been such a union as was made in 1707 between England and Scotland. That was not possible in Spain, and the alternative — the bad best — was the unification of th^ country by the centralized monarchy of the House of Bourbon. Philip V. (1700-1746), Ferdinand VI. (1746-1759), Charles III. (1759-1788), and Charles IV. (1788-1808), the four kings who reigned while the royal authority was the great political power in Spain, had ample opportunity to do good. Unhappily the best that can be claimed for them is that they allowed some good to be done. Nor can it be said that their subjects tried to force them to do better. Having vindicated their independence they fell back into the old routine. Their very patriotism did them harm. They were not prepared to see the lumbering apparatus of government which had grown up under the Hapsburg dynasty swept away. It was national, and they wished that at least the show of the old order might be kept. But here as elsewhere show and reality did not correspond in Spain. The old system was much modified in fact, and if a decent respect had been shown for names, the Bourbon kings might have 236 SPAIN given Spain a simple, and rational administration, by dividing the legislative, administrative, and judicial functions of their innumerable councils, confining the first to the Council of State, the second to the Council of Ministers, and the third to the Council of Castile. The result of the war had cleared the ground, partly by the loss of Flanders and Italy, partly by the suppression of the separate government of Aragon. In fact, and in the midst of suppressions, rearrangements, restora- tions and fresh suppressions, the kings did take a great deal into the hands of their secretaries. But far too much of the old confused debating and referring to and fro went on to the end — that is to say, till the French revolution came and the old order was not transformed and usefully adapted as it might have been, but brutally swept away to be replaced by a slavish imitation of the mere administrative machinery of the French Empire. The swarming official world was, of course, opposed to all change in ancient habits, and the people would not force them to reform. The Spaniards could express their discontent forcibly enough when they under- stood what they wanted, but good government is a thing they have longed for without ever quite understanding what they meant by the term, and still less realising that good governments do not come floating to a people in clouds of glory, without effort of its own. Spanish kings had sold jurisdictions and pawned revenues for money in hand. There was a strong wish that these concessions should be revoked. But they could not be taken back till the purchasers or repre- sentatives had been repaid — and the kings never had the necessary money. That they had not was mainly due to their own extravagance and bad politics. Philip V. was perhaps the worst sinner of them all. He at any rate had the best opportunity, and he threw it away. When he had subdued Barcelona and could look about him, he was in a better position than most other kings THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS 237 in Europe. The loss of Flanders and Italy had freed Spain of a ruinous burden. She kept the Indies. The loyalty of his subjects of the crown of Castile, and of not a few of those of the crown of Aragon, protected him against danger at home. The credit of his immediate predecessors, and his own in early times, was so bad that few had trusted the Spanish treasury, and it therefore owed comparatively little. It is true that England had insisted on retaining Minorca and Gibraltar. But she would hold them only so long as Spain remained poor and ill-armed. The England of 1712 was comparatively rich, but she was far from being what she became in the age of steam. There were several periods in the eighteenth century when Spain, which did actually recover Minorca, could have recovered Gibraltar also. She had been compelled to give England the monopoly for thirty years of the supply of negroes to the Indies — and trading rights which the English meant to abuse and did abuse. But the '' asiento '' was only for thirty years, and in the meantime by keeping England to the letter of the bond, and by giving more freedom to his subjects in the trade of the Indies, the King could have nullified at least very largely any harm it could do him. With peace abroad he could have brought his finances into order, and he had servants — the Italian Alberoni for one, and the Spaniard Jose Patiiio — who would have executed the work well. A beginning had been made by the French agent of Lewis XIV., Orry, who let some common sense into the jungle of Spanish finance during the war. With good finance it would have been possible to have a good fleet and a good army. In short, what the interests of his kingdom required was that Phihp V. should have acted on the principles of Frederick William of Prussia, but with the civilized manner of the Archduke Leopold, who made the administration of his Grand Duchy of Tuscany a model to Europe. I 238 SPAIN Philip V. was as incapable of imitating the good sense of Frederick William as of enjoying the '' Tobacco Parliament/' When it is said that he, who never had money enough for the current business of his government, spent no less a sum than ;^3,ooo,ooo on building himself a summer palace — a little Versailles at La Gran j a on the northern slope of the- Guadarrama, above Segovia — it will be seen at once that he was not the man to do what was needed. He never would allow his personal expenses to be separated from the general revenue of the kingdom. Money set aside for the public purposes was taken by him or his wife from the minister and spent on bricks and mortar, jewels, and tapestry, and yet he plunged into political and military adventures of a costly kind. Spain in fact had got rid of the illustrious house of Austria, only to give herself to the other illustrious house of Bourbon. The housing, hunting, and personal adornment of royalty, the provision of little kingdoms all for themselves for the younger sons of the august family, continued to be the great aims of Spanish government. Philip's first wife, Maria Louisa Gabriella of Savoy, a spirited lovable woman, who did much to make him popular, died in 1714, leaving him two sons, Lewis and Ferdinand. Then he married Elizabeth Farnese, daughter of the Duke of Parma, a coarse robust woman of strong will, who bore him several children, three sons, Charles, Philip, Lewis, and daughters besides. The King's passions were strong, his capacity for self-restraint was nil, and his Jesuist confessors had taught him to fear hell flames. They did not tell him to avoid them by self-restraint and devoting himself to the good of his people, but only not to indulge himself outside the lawful bounds of matrimony. His pride was of a kind which is exacting in matters of form, but ready to bow where his personal comfort was concerned, and to those who managed him. His inteUigence was hardly above THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS 239 imbecility at its best, and there were times when he was in the Hteral sense of the word insane. A robust, crafty woman, who would humour his whims, submit to his exactions, and put up (as Elizabeth Farnese was prepared to do) with blows when he was violent, could with patience lead him as she chose. The couple were among the most grotesque figures of the royalty of the eighteenth century. Elizabeth, the Termagant of Spain, had claims to succeed her father in the Duchy of Parma. They were disputed by the Emperor Charles VI., the unsuccessful candidate for the Spanish throne, who maintained that it was a male fief and ought to return to the Empire on the death of the Duke. EHzabeth wanted it for her own son Charles. She had other claims in Italy, and wanted positions for her other sons. Spain was dragged into adven- tures no more rational than the charge of Don Quixote on the windmills. The reviving resources of the country collected by the energy of Philip's Italian minister, Alberoni, a Parmesan, who had arranged the marriage with Elizabeth, were madly wasted in an attempt to drive the Emperor from Naples and Sicily which were secured to him by the peace of Utrecht. A Spanish fleet, scraped together by hook and by crook, was destroyed by the British squadron of Admiral Byng off Cape Passaro (1718). Spanish troops landed in Sicily were forced to capitulate to the Austrians. Philip, acting through Alberoni, plunged into intrigues against the Duke of Orleans, who was Regent in France since the death of Lewis XIV., and brought upon Spain the invasion of a French army led by the Duke of Berwick, and the destruction of its shipping on the north coast by a British squadron. After a severe lesson, Philip surrendered, sent Alberoni away, and accepted the peace dictated to him. As he began so he went on ; his reign, which was the reign of his passionate wife, was one long story of fussy diplomacy and silly outbreaks with England, which were not disastrous 240 SPAIN to Spain simply because Sir Robert Walpole would not fight if he could help it, or no longer than he must. Parma was secured for Charles in 1729 by the help of England, which was ready to buy peace, and in 1733, in the so-called Polish War, he was helped by France and the Pope to make himself King in Naples and Sicily. Spanish money and Spanish troops were wasted in Italy on these schemes. Even in 1739, when the British Parliament and people forced a war on Spain, the main resources of the poor country were squandered on campaigns in Italy which had no other purpose than to get estates and more estates for the children of Elizabeth Farnese. It ought to be noted that in 1724 Philip, acting on motives which have remained obscure, perhaps because they were the vague impulses of a man shaking on the border of insanity, resigned his crown to his eldest son Lewis. But Lewis died of smallpox at the end of seven months, and Philip resumed the throne. The war of 1739 — known to us as the Spanish War, or War of Jenkins' Ear — was serious politics. It stood for all that was not dynastic self-seeking in the foreign politics of Spain throughout the century till the French Revolution began. The Asiento Treaty, which has been mentioned in the chapter on Spain in America, bore its natural faults. The British vessels which carried the slaves, also carried goods to smuggle. The agents of the South Sea Company to which Queen Anne had ceded the monopoly were the managers of the trade. The Nave de permiso (or treaty ship) authorized to accompany the Spanish convoys was made a mere cover for wholesale contraband. The Spanish colonies were flooded with British goods, and the lawful trader was repeatedly compelled to bring his cargo back unsold. It was very natural that the Spanish government should be restive under these provocations. But its excusable anger was not shown ivith dignity or good sense. Instead of maintaining a com- THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS 24] petent naval force in the West Indies and keeping the South Sea Company to the letter of the bond, it com missioned privateers to act as revenue cutters (guarda costas) and allowed them to make prize of British vessels accused of smuggHng. The semi-piratical population o: Jamaica, and the Spanish guardacostas carried on a bruta' warfare. The check put on the smuggHng trade aroused great irrita- tion both in Great Britain and in the West Indies. There was a growing reaction against the peace policy of Walpole In 1739, after much wrangling between the British and Spanish governments, war broke out. It was an absurd war. A British squadron took the practically undefended Spanish trading station of Portobello. But other attacks on Spanish possessions, and notably a great combined attack on Cartha- gena in South America, failed lamentably. The war of the Austrian Succession began. As Great Britain was more concerned to maintain the Balance of Power, and Spain tc promote the fortunes of young princes in Italy, than either was to make a real settlement of the colonial dispute, this question was neglected. Philip V. died in 1746 suddenly. His son and successor, Ferdinand VI., is commonly spoken of with kindness by Spanish historians. He certainly loved peace and for a time he allowed his minister the Marquis of Ensenada to do some good to the country. But Ferdinand was as feeble in mind as his father, and he was not less uxorious. His Portuguese wife Barbara persuaded him to make a treaty with Portugal for the regulation of their respective frontiers in South America. It was much in favour of Portugal. Ensenada, who could not oppose the making of the treaty openly, betrayed its provisions to the King's half-brother and heir presumptive, Charles, King of Naples, who protested. The treaty fell through and Ensenada was sent into exile. For the rest of his Q 242 SPAIN reign Ferdinand kept the peace. For fourteen years Spain had no occasion to fight. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 had not settled the Colonial question, but the Spanish government freed itself from the asiento by paying the South Sea Company an indemnity for the surrender of the last years of its monopoly. There was a comparatively consider- able revival of prosperity in Spain. Yet the King ruined the credit of his government by refusing to pay his father's debts. He was encouraged to commit this act of dishonesty by the Church. He accumulated a treasure by not paying his way, and wasted large sums on building for his own use. Queen Barbara amassed a private treasure out of the public revenue. She however died before the King. After her death he fell into a state almost as miserable as that of Charles II. At the end he was positively insane and the whole business of govern- ment was at a standstill. When he died in the summer of 1759, the treasury, the army, and the navy of Spain were in hopeless confusion. During the last three years of his reign the possibility that Spain might have played a great part in Europe was fully demonstrated. On the approach of the Seven Years War the French government appealed to Ferdinand for help. When it surprised Minorca in 1756 it offered to hand the island over at once to Spain in return for an alliance. On the other hand, the elder Pitt (the Earl of Chatham of later days) offered to restore Gibraltar if Ferdinand would help to the recovery of Minorca. Had the Spanish government been in a position to act with effect it might have made its own terms. Charles III., who became King m 1759, is a great figure in Spanish and even in European history. But he does not owe his reputation to the wisdom of his foreign policy. A dis- tinction must be drawn between his policy, and the means he took to enforce it. He has been accused of having led his country into two needless wars with Great Britain for no more THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS 243 rational purpose than to support the grandeur of the House of Bourbon. But in truth he was perfectly justified in his belief that he would be guilty of extreme folly if he allowed the French naval power to be destroyed by Great Britain. He would leave himself without a possible ally at sea. Frederick the Great would have acted on the same principle as Charles III., but he would have taken care to be able to act with effect. Charles HI. did not. He did nothing to make a fleet except build ships, and in order to have the more money to build ships, he spent nothing on training his officers and men in peace. His navy was a sham. He intervened late in the Seven Years War when the French navy was already broken, and so brought the temporary loss of Havannah in the West Indies, and of Manila in the East Indies, on his kingdom. Havannah was recovered, but only by the surrender of Florida, at the peace in 1763. In this case he was hampered by the disorders left him by his brother. But when he all but provoked a war with Great Britain over the Falkland Islands in 1771^ Vhen he intervened late and ineffectually in the War 6T"AJmerican Independence, he showed practical incapacity. It is true that he recovered Minorca by the help of the French, and Florida, which was reconquered for him by his general Benito Galvez. But he failed to re- cover Gibraltar, because his clumsy fleet was not able to prevent Rodney, Hardy, and Howe from revictualling the fortress. He left his finances in confusion. The emptiness of the treasury and the wretched state of the armaments of Spain were due to him and to his predecessors. They were also the immediate cause of the utter feebleness of Spain in presence of the French Revolution. The reign of his successor, Charles IV., coincides with the Revolution. When Charles III. died in 1788 (14th December) the Bourbon monarchy had done nearly all the good it was to do in Spain for wellnigh a century. The work it had done 244 SPAIN can be praised only with many reservations, and yet was considerable. The mere fact that Philip V. and his successors were French princes and never forgot that they were, was on the whole an advantage for Spain. Spanish writers have been much in the habit of lamenting the prevalence of French in- fluence in their country. They make a great use of the word " castizo '' (from the Latin '' castus "), and insist that whatever came from France was of the nature of a corruption of their pure, chaste, undefiled native institutions and ways. There is much fatuity in all this. The civiHzation of Europe has been created by the exchange of influences between its various peoples. Spain had already received much from France and from Italy. In the later seventeenth century and for long afterwards the influence of France was at work, from Great Britain to Russia and from Scandinavia to Naples. Spain was no exception — or if it was an exception in so far that the French influence was there stronger, and, if men choose to say so, more destructive than elsewhere, the ex- planation is simple. At the close of the seventeenth century Spain was on the verge of falling into the condition of those oriental peoples who have become fossihzed — the Thibetans or the Koreans. Clarendon, who visited Madrid as agent for the exiled Charles Stewart, made an observation which is instructive. He noted the superiority of those Spaniards who had served in Flanders or Germany, in knowledge and in capacity for business, over those who had spent their hves at home. The arrogance, the ignorance, the torpor of these latter, were the despair of all who had to deal with them. History contains no better example of the truth of Bacon's saying that " a froward retention of customs '* is the worst of innovations. Because Spain had endeavoured to go on living in the outgrown mould of the Middle Ages, she was on the verge of killing her power to learn and to grow. There THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS 245 could be no greater innovation than the destruction of the capacity to Hve. A new influence must come into Spain if the country was to be saved, and while Italy was quiescent, Germany was exhausted by the Thirty Years War, England was remote, ahen and heretic, it could come only from France. It would have come in any case, and it came the more because the dynasty was French. Then again the character of the dynasty worked on the whole for good. Its high conception of the royal authority, its passion for administrative centralization, were vices when carried to the point of pedantry, as they often were. But the natural tendencies of Spain were separatist and even anarchical. The strong monarchy afforded the only guarantee that the general interests of the country would be consulted, as to some extent they were. To begin with, the Bourbon kings, simply because they were jealous of their authority, began to make it possible for laymen to think for themselves. They were very orthodox princes. Charles III., who passed for a '' philosophic '' prince, was superstitious. But they were all more or less disinclined to allow themselves to be dictated to by the Inquisition. Under their protection was formed the so-called '* Regahsta '' party. The Regahsta was com- monly a lawyer. He was always a man who wished to see the " regalities,'' the superior rights of the Crown — the lay state — vigorously used to repress the encroachments of the Church. When Charles III. was provoked by talk about the superiority of the spiritual power into telHng the Pope in the most trenchant style, that his authority was not only quite as divine in origin as His Holiness's, but was anterior and superior, he showed himself '' regahsta." He also stated the much misquoted doctrine of the divine right of kings. These regahstas were not heterodox men. Macanaz, the father of them all, in the reign of Philip V. was as ready as any man to support the Inquisition as an institution for the suppression of 246 SPAIN heresy. But from the fact that they were on the side of the lay state as against clerical tyranny they worked for freedom of the intellect. They grew bolder as time went on. It is true that the Spanish kings of the House of Bourbon never came to an open breach with the Church. Philip V., finding that Macanaz had deeply offended the Inquisition, sent him abroad. But he corresponded with him, and employed him in diplomacy. The tide broke in here and there. By the middle of the century a lay public opinion was formed which first enabled the government of Ferdinand VI. to make a concordat with the Pope, very favourable to the royal authority and then supported Charles III. in his destructive attack on the Jesuits. Whether the King did well when he expelled that one of the religious Orders, which was the best educated and the least fanatical, is perhaps a question. It is to be remembered that he had the support not only of some laymen, but of a large part of the Church, regular and secular. The Dominicans and Franciscans detested the Jesuits, and most of the bishops were their enemies because of their success in monopolizing the education of the moneyed classes and their passion for dominating in Church and State. Clerical senti- ment was united in this case with the ill-feehng of the com- mercial classes, who had been offended by the trading opera- tions of the company, and I fear we must add its occasional dishonesty. Both were aided by the equally violent jealousy of the Crown and the official world of the independent power the Jesuits had built up in their Paraguayan missions. The expulsion was carried out in 1767 with great brutality, and the Order was suppressed by the Pope mainly by the efforts of the Spanish King (1773). The mere fact that a great Order could be treated in this harsh style by the King of Spain, with the acquiescence of the bulk of his subjects and the very zealous help of many of them, shows how vast a change had taken place in the feelings of Spaniards. The THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS 247 Church was brought into complete subjection to the lay state, and the Inquisition with it. As was so often the case in Spain, the appearance and the reality of the power of the Inquisition were very different things. All through the century the Inquisition was '' in- quiring " into the orthodoxy of every man who was known to hold regalista opinions and suspected of reading dangerous foreign books. But there are only a few cases in which it was allowed to go beyond inquiring. When the Inquisitor- General made a show of opposition to the King in the matter of the Jesuits he was summarily ordered out of Madrid. He was thoroughly scared by the King's anger, and grovelled in submission. The Supreme Council of the Holy House prostrated itself before His Majesty. Charles III. pardoned the offender but told the Inquisition that he expected to receive its absolute obedience in future. The lay courts were empowered to check abuses of its jurisdiction. By the second half of the eighteenth century the Inquisition had been reduced to the state of Giant Pope in the *' Pilgrim's Progress." It could sit at the door of its cave, could snarl and threaten, but it could no longer bite except when the King gave it leave, which he was not ready to do when the person threatened was a servant of his own. It became a byword that nothing secured the popularity of a book so much as its inclusion in the index of the Inquisition. So long as a decent appearance of conformity was maintained men were free to study and think as they pleased. Blanco White, who began his strange career as a canon of Seville, says that not a few even of the clergy were freethinkers and could possess works of the French philosophers so long as they did not make a display of them. When the questions, how far did this emancipation go ? and what effect did the spread of foreign influence and the desire for reform produce ? are asked, no very satisfactory answers 248 SPAIN can be given. There was a revival of independent criticism in historical study and some progress on the part of individuals in science. Certain of the Royal ministers, Jose Patifio, Francisco Campillo, and Zenon de Somadevila, who were suc- cessively prime ministers of Philip V., the Count of Aranda, Campomanes, Jose Mofiino, created Count of Floridablanca, and G. M. de Jovellanos, the ministers of Charles III. were enhghtened men. All of them were believers in beneficent despotism and looked upon representative institutions and public discussion with repugnance or even terror. A small society of men who could study and think was formed about the Court. Their teaching and example was beginning to have effect. If Spain could have enjoyed another generation of peace and well-meaning government a real public opinion might have been formed. But the great mass of the nation was untouched. Only the favour of Charles III. enabled the reformers to do anything. If the Crown itself became reactionary, or if popular passions were excited, the reformers would be sure to be swept away. Nor were they able to do very much while they lasted. The Bourbon kings of the eighteenth century may be said to have been what Catherine of Russia claimed to be, '' setters in movement." But they followed nothing to completion. The outrageous system of taxation inherited from former times was somewhat bettered, but it was not reformed. The kings had the excuse that they met with but little support, and with much opposition, passive and even active. The numerous officials who profited by the old familiar abuses were naturally hostile. They met every proposal for reform by endless discussions and references, and by acting in the spirit of the old formula that His Majesty's instructions should be ** obeyed but not carried out '' (obedecidas y no cumplidas). An absolute king who could send any man to the penal settle- ment at Ceuta could have brought his officials to order. But THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS 249 a much more dangerous form of opposition than theirs was to be feared. The mass of the Spaniards hated the system of taxation. But they bore it, and by long practice had arrived at a wonderful pitch of skill in the art of concealments of taxable property. The poorest class of all, naturally, suffered most from the taxes on necessaries, which supplied the main part of the revenue. But they were hopelessly ignorant and very torpid. They did not understand, and they had no shame in begging. All alike, well-to-do or very poor, had such a profound distrust of the government in the matter of taxation, that they were moved to hostility by any proposal for change. They concluded that it could have no other purpose than to take still more from them. In Aragon and Catalonia, Philip V., who disposed of them as a conqueror, had established a simple system of direct taxation. But it is highly probable that if the King had tried seriously to . extend this more rational system to Castile he would have provoked a general rising headed by his own officials. In every part of Spanish government was to be seen the same readiness to begin, the same inability to complete. Great schemes for supplying the country with roads and bridges found only a fragmentary execution. To-day the Spaniard is ready enough to tell the traveller that '* In this country. Sir, nothing is ever finished '' (En este pais, Seiior, no se acaba nunca nada). And if that is true to-day it was much more true in the eighteenth century. If we take a survey of the internal history of Spain under Charles III. we can see that the reforms of his government hardly went below the surface. He came from Naples in 1759 when he was a man of over forty. In Naples he had been the patron of the famous Tanucci, who ranks among the reformers of the eighteenth century. He had a wider knowledge of the world and had received a better education than either his brother Ferdinand VI. or his father Philip V. 250 SPAIN He found everything at a standstill and in disorder Ferdinand, during his last years could do nothing himself nor let anything be done. There was money in the treasury but only because King Philip's debts were unpaid and salariei were in arrears. The first duty of the new King was to intro duce some order into the management of affairs and to restore public credit b}' paying an instalment of his father's debts His very natural, and in principle quite sensible, wish to aic France against England in the Seven Years War led him t( form the Family Compact. It brought on him a brief wa with England of a disastrous kind, which of course interruptec the work of reform. The King's money was needed for th< war. Yet this interruption was not ruinous. What wa disastrous was that when he turned to internal reform h( was blocked by the open or tacit opposition of his subjects The reorganization of the taxes was the most necessary o all reforms. A commission was appointed, sat, inquired reported, and minuted. But no progress was made. Tb King grew tired of an unending conflict with obstruction anc intrigue. The reform of the taxes which was to have replacec endless indirect imports by "an only tax," that is to say direct taxation on the Aragonese model, was dropped. In the meantime the Italian minister Squillacci, called b] the Spaniards Esquilache, whom the King had brought witl him from Naples, was engaged in the kind of reform whicl emphatically did not matter. He ordered the people o Madrid to give up wearing broad brimmed hats and lon| cloaks, the national '' capa," because they were what Spense called the Irish saffron mantle, '' cover for a thief." Thi interference with their clothes did what mal-administratio] and the sacrifice of national interests to dynastic ambition had not done. The Spaniards broke into rebellious riot ii Madrid and other towns. A wind of disorder blew over al Spain. There was probably an element of reaction agains THE WORK OF THE BOURBONS 251 the employment of foreign ministers in it all. The King, who played a rather sorry part during the riot, sent Esquilache away, and called in the Count of Aranda to restore order. He made him President of the Council of Castile and left him a free hand. The Count was the most marked character of all the Spanish ministers of the eighteenth century. The others were as a rule plebeians or very small gentlemen. They were mere officials and were commonly known as " golillas,'* the name for the flat starched collar invented in the reign of Phihp IV. Our tape and sealing-wax, and the French *' rond-de-cuir," convej the exact meaning. Aranda was a noble with an estate of £16,000 a year. His family Abarca de Bolea, was ancient in Aragon. He was a great baron — a " ricohombre," a fact which he never forgot himself nor allowed others to forget. His personal character was a curious mixture of real capacity and shrewd wit, with absurdities in manner. He did the work the King expected from him remarkably well, partly by abstaining from fretful interference with the habits of the people, partly by striking with ruthless severity at elements of real disorder, and partly by providing Madrid with a decent administration. The town, which had been one of the filthiest places in Europe, was cleansed. But the reform was wholly superficial. Nothing was done to remedy the great defect of Madrid — the lack of a good supply of water. Aranda recommended himself to the King by his bitter hatred of the Jesuits. He had a main share in directmg the expulsion of the Order. But when he quieted Madrid, and had driven out the Jesuits, he soon became intolerable to the King. His " ricohombreria," his nobleman pride, rendered him incapable of controlling his naturally sharp tongue, or of even trying to suppress his fiery contempt for the *' gohllas '' ; Charles got rid of him by sending him as ambassador to Paris, and leaving him there. 252 SPAIN Aranda's mere washing of the outside of Madrid was only too typical of all the reforming work of the reign of King Charles ; education, commerce, industry, agriculture, policy, the administration of the law, were touched. Something was done in the way of removing restrictions of the most fooHsh kind, and of setting up better models. After a dismal failure in an attempt to subdue Algiers in 1775 an arrange- ment was with the Barbary States which relieved the southern coasts of Spain from piratical raids. In 1783, when the measure came too late to produce much effect, the trade to America was thrown open. The good intentions of the government were not wholly ineffectual. When the reign of Charles III. is compared to the torpor which went before, and the anarchy which was to follow, it was a golden age of prosperity and reform. But the improvement was mainly on the surface. The chief results of the efforts of the King and his ministers was to form a small class of Spaniards who were disposed to demand reforms of a far more drastic character than the monarchy was likely to make, and to plant here and there in a very rocky soil, seeds which struck root, and were to bear fruit in the future. CHAPTER X SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The prospect of sober and profitable development for the reforms begun by Charles III. was ruined partly by the character of his successor, but to a far greater extent by the course of events in France between 1789 and 1792. King Charles IV. was not quite a nonentity, nor was he a malignant or vicious man. He had a high, almost a besotted, conception of his dignity as King. Where that was concerned he could give orders and could say "No." His personal character was decent. He was loyal to a wife who did not deserve his respect, where he gave his affection he never took it back, and he sincerely desired the good of his people. But his intelligence was mean. He had inherited through his mother, a Princess of Saxony, the huge body of Augustus the Strong. Continued mental exertion, or even prolonged sitting at a desk, were impossible for him. He was not a man of vulgar tastes. He loved music and is said to have made himself a passable amateur vioHnist. If it had been his good fortune to be born to be a navvy or a stevedore he would have been a very useful workman. It was his misfortune to be born to be King in a trying time. Even so he might have passed through the world with credit if he had had the happiness to be married to a sensible woman, who could think for him while he was keeping himself in health by hunting in his park or coursing over the slopes of the Guadarrama. But his wife and cousin Maria Luisa — daughter of his uncle Philip 253 254 SPAIN of Parma — was neither a good woman nor a woman of sense. We can leave the scandals of her life untold, except in so far as they must be mentioned. Out of them came the worst of all her actions — the support she gave to the favourite Manuel Godoy. The modern craze for white-wash, and the tendency of some Spaniards to insist on pretending to believe what they think is most to the credit of their country, have produced apologists for Godoy. It would be unjust to say, as some have done, that the man was a mere fribble. Lord Holland, who had known Fox and Pitt, Lord Grey and Lord Palmerston, who had seen Godoy in his greatness and his fall, thought him a notable man, and praised his command of the grand manner of the eigtheenth century court world. In his memoirs he writes of his royal master and mistress like a gentleman. He would have done good to Spain if he had been able. Some good he did, or allowed to be done — for instance the abolition of the injurious privileges of the Mesta. But he was called upon by the favour of the Queen and the King to govern Spain in a time of crisis, and he did nothing to save it from disaster and shame. The downfall of the French monarchy could not but be painful to Charles IV. He showed no disposition to play the part of champion of royalty, and he positively disliked the emigres. He knew the poverty of his treasury and the weakness of his kingdom. The French forced war on him in 1793-1795. So long as there were no organized armies on the French side the Spaniards gained some successes. When the Terrorists had made armies the Spaniards were beaten east and west on the Pyrenean frontier. It was a necessity for Spain to make peace at Bale in 1795. In the confusion and distress of these years the King emancipated himself from the ministers left by his father — Aranda and Floridablanca. Aranda soon died. Godoy, who was already SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 255 a court favourite, and created Duke of Alcudia and Captain- General in the army, though his only qualification was that he had been a private gentleman of the Life Guard, was made '* Privado.*' From 1796 to 1808 Spain was simply at the orders of the masters of France. She was dragged into war with England, in which her navy was routed at the battle of Cape St Vincent, 14th February 1797. Her interests were disregarded at the Peace of Amiens. When the war was renewed Napoleon forced her to contribute money, and when Great Britain naturally treated these contributions as hostile acts she was forced into war again. The remains of her navy disappeared at Trafalgar. Her trade was destroyed, her colonies were open to attack. She lost Trinidad in the first war, and it became a depot for British smuggled trade. In the second war, her colonies on the River Plate were invaded. It is true that the British attacks on Buenos Ayres failed, but they none the less set going the movement which was to end in the revolt of the Indies. In the meantime the French dictated every act of the Spanish government. Godoy was driven from office by one French influence in 1797 and restored by another. Napoleon treated the country as if it had been a sponge, fooling the King by offers of Httle kingdoms for members of his family in Italy, or simply giving orders which Godoy and his masters could only try to evade but did not dare to disobey. The tyranny of the Emperor was so galling that when the war with Prussia broke out in 1806, the Spanish government made a half-hearted show of independence. It was nothing more than the issue of a foolish proclamation. But it was enough to convince Napoleon that he must take Spain in hand. The battle of Jena cowed the Spanish government and it grovelled, but Napoleon held his hand only till the Peace of Tilsit left him free. The time was come when the French Revolution was to burn into Spain with destructive force. 256 SPAIN The diplomatic history of 1807 and 1808 is full of th( cynical tricks played by Napoleon on the credulity and the terrors of the Spanish Court. They included a plot for the partition of Portugal and the creation of a kingdom in the Algarves for Godoy. It is a revolting story of insolence on one side and credulity, mixed with cowardice, on the other, and withal it is a tale of httle meaning. The sub- stantial facts were that Napoleon had made up his minH to take all Spain, that the lies he told to keep the Spanis court quiet till he was ready to act cost him nothii and that he did not in the very least foresee what was i. happen. It must be allowed that the royal family and court of Spain did all they could to convince the Emperor that they were entitled to no consideration. There was, as a matter oi course, a palace party hostile to Godoy. The leader, as was also a matter of course, was the heir-apparent, Ferdinand. The favourite had indeed come to a point where he must either go further, or stand in peril of uttei ruin. Ferdinand, who was — and that again was a matter of course in his family — kept at a distance from all affairs, hated him, and found courtiers to join in an intrigue for the ruin of the upstart. During October 1807 a plot was being carried on. The object was apparently to obtain the help of Napoleon. Ferdinand, who was a widower after a brief marriage with a cousin of the Neapolitan family, desired to marry a relation of Napoleon*s. The plot was discovered, and the Prince arrested on the 17th October. He behaved in an abject manner, but his papers revealed the fact that he was appealing to the Emperor. At the sight of the mere name the Court was seized with terror and nothing serious was done either to the Prince or his associates. It was exactly a month after the arrest at the Escorial that Napoleon signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which was formally intended to produce a SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 257 partition of Portugal, but really meant to facilitate the occupation of the Peninsula. For a time, and for as long as the royal family could issue orders, all went well for the Emperor's plans. On the 15th November Junot crossed the Spanish frontier with an army corps. By the 30th a headlong march, which nearly destroyed his army, had carried him to Lisbon just in time to see the Portuguese royal family sail for Brazil in a British squadron. In January 1808 the corps of Dupont and Moncey crossed the frontier, and set about surprising the northern fortresses of Spain. At last Godoy and his master began to suspect the truth. When they heard from their own ambassador that Napoleon proposed to insist on the surrender of all Spain north of the Ebro, they saw where they stood. No thought of a manly resolution could shape itself in their minds. They had but one resource, to flee to Andalucia and escape from Cadiz to America. The Court moved from the Escorial to Aranjuez. Doubts and fears began to spread among the people. If the King had appealed honestly to his subjects we know from their behaviour three months later what their response would have been. But all Charles could do was to publish a mendacious proclamation assuring his people that the French were friendly. The preparations for flight went on. The measure was at last full. On the i6th March a riot broke out at Aranjuez. The people, assured by Ferdinand's agents that Godoy had sold the country to the French, broke into his house and pillaged it. They respected his wife, a lady of a morganatic branch of the royal family, but him they would have butchered if they could have laid hands on him. He hid in a roll of matting in a garret. The troops " frater- nized " with the mob. The old King was plainly told by the officers of his own guard that only the Prince of Asturias could control the people. He named his son Lieutenant- 258 SPAIN General of the kingdom. Soon he went a step further. Or the 19th Godoy, driven from his hiding place in the garret b} hunger and thirst, crept downstairs. He was recognizee and arrested. To save the Hfe of his favourite, whom th< mob tried to massacre, the King abdicated. Meanwhile Murat, whom the Emperor had named Com mander-in-Chief in Spain, had advanced on Madrid fron Burgos by Aranda del Duero. He occupied the capita on the 23rd March. And now followed a series of scene; which justified the immeasurable scorn of Napoleon for th( Spanish royal house. All its members, the father, th< mother, the son, and the rest, ran to deliver themselves int( his hands. Ferdinand reached Bayonne on the 20tl April. His father and mother came on the 30th. Godoy released from prison by the orders of the French, joined th( party. Between the 5th and loth of May the Spanisl Bourbons surrendered all their rights to Napoleon. Oi the 2nd of the month the people of Madrid had revoltec against the removal from the palace of the only remainini members of the family left in Spain — King Charles's imbecil brother Antonio and his youngest son Lewis. The risini in which a few soldiers led by two artillery officers, Daoiz an( Velarde, joined the people, was suppressed by a massacre The history of modern Spain may fairly be said to begi] with the *' 2 de Mayo.'' To us the date may be said to stan( for the beginning of the Peninsular War. But the campaign of the Duke of Wellington, glorious to him and to us, an( important to Spain as they were, were yet the least vita part of the history of the country between 1808 and 1814. The British historian of that war inevitably, and from hi point of view very rightly, dwells on the movements of th troops and the fields of battle. The Spanish government i to him an administration to be judged and generally con demned by the way in which it discharged its administrativ SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 259 work. It is not his function to show how wonderful it was that Spain was able to provide itself with any kind of govern- ment, nor to explain the stupendous difficulties which had to be overcome before the task could be even badly performed. In the month of May 1808 Spain was somewhat in the same case as Peru when Pizarro seized the Inca. The whole machinery of government depended on the King, and the King w^as in the hands of the enemy. Nor was that all. King Charles was a voluntary prisoner, and so was Ferdina,nd. They had put themselves in Napoleon's hands, and had transferred all their authority to him. The head of the committee Ferdinand left behind him at Madrid was also a prisoner by his own free will. The country was called upon to make a revolution in order to preserve an abdicating government, and to disobey the King in order to prove its loyalty. And who was to speak for the nation ? Foreign contemporaries talked Hghtly of summoning the Cortes, and their example has been followed very generally. But before the unhappy country could collect a Cortes it had to make one. The ancient Cortes of Castile and Leon, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, and Majorca were gone. Philip V. had formed a general Cortes by adding representatives from the kingdom of Aragon to the Castilians and Leonese. But this body had met eight times in a century only to do homage to the King and his heir-apparent, or to confirm his orders as to the succession. It was a shadow of a name. Moreover; when Napoleon conferred the crown of Spain on his brother Joseph, a meeting of Spanish notables was summoned at Bayonne. It consisted largely of nobles and prelates; who were necessary members of a national Cortes. This assembly did homage to Joseph and accepted a constitution from him. The constitution was no doubt meant to be a sham, but it offered the country something more like a real representation than the '* procuradores '* of a few favoured towns which 26o SPAIN was all the historical Cortes had to offer. And the historical Cortes could not meet lawfully except when summoned bj; the King — and the King had abdicated. The new government was to be made while the enemy was encamped in the heart of the country, and of what elements, bj; whom, was it to be made ? The mass of the population was but dimly if at all aware that there was any such problem to be solved. It could think of but one government as possible — the " Rey Neto 3; absoluto." It was accustomed to pay obedience to the persons who represented the King and would obey them now as a matter of course. These persons were officials, nobles, and local gentry. The first had the right to claim obedience, the second and third had no considerable part in the adminis- tration, but they had some share in the municipalities, and they had social prestige. And then there was the most powerful of Spanish institutions — if we ought not to say the only Spanish institution other than the monarchy — the Church. If these natural, these accepted leaders, lay and ecclesiastical, could have acted together a working govern- ment would have been formed at once. But they could not. Putting aside those of them who, having possessions, were chiefly concerned not to lose them (and they are many at all times and in all countries) the leading classes, lay and clerical, were divided and subdivided. There were the '* afrancesados,'* that is to say those who were prepared to accept the King to be chosen for them by Napoleon, not only as the respectable people who had possessions and were nervous about them did, for their safety's sake, but because they despaired of the future of their country under Bourbon rule, and hoped to see. it '* regenerated " by the help of Napoleon. This class included a very large proportion of the most experienced men in the public service, and of the '' enlightened '* Spaniards among writers, artists, and of SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 261 those who thought. When the war was over the Catalan University of Cervera implored the restored King Ferdinand to believe that it had never fallen into the vice of thinking. It had no suspicion that its words sounded absurd. To think in Spain had really come to mean to have a heterodox opinion. The good Spaniard was not to think, which means to trust his own fallible judgment, which was sure to lead him wrong, but to accept and obey. We misjudge if we suppose that all the " afrancesados '' were mere traitors, office-seekers who had been servile hacks before 1808, and who now went over to what they thought would be the winning side. Such men as the seaman Mazaredo, a capable officer and bold man, Leandro Moratin the dramatist, and Goya the painter, the only Spaniard of that age who was a genius, accepted, for a time at least, the king given them by the Emperor. Nor were the sincere afrancesados all educated and all pupils of the French '' philosophes.'' Thousands of Spaniards served Joseph as soldiers, fought for him, and went into exile for their cause. We must class them with those men of the age of the Reformation for whom religion transcended, or rather included patriotism. The '' afrances- ados " numbered among them not a few of the higher and the well-endowed clergy. Then there were laymen and churchmen, too, who were both patriots and " afrancesados.'' Patriots because they would not accept the foreign king, and ''afrancesados'' because they had imbibed French ideas, and were minded to seize the opportunity offered them by the abject surrender of the Bourbons to Napoleon, and to make use of it to give Spain freedom, and some means of securing good government. We shall see them at work. Finally there was the great mass of the Spaniards — some nobles, a larger proportion of the gentry, the great majority of the townsmen, whether artisans or not, and practically 262 SPAIN all the country population. They were patriotic and were not " afrancesados/' The most powerful influence amon^ them was that of the Church, represented not by prelates opulent Cistercian or Benedictine monasteries, or collegiat< churches possessing rich endowments, but by the Parisl Priests with their miserable stipends of three or six pound; sterling a year, and the Begging Friars. To them it appearec an unanswerable proposition that all the miseries now descend ing upon Spain came from the pestilent innovations o Charles III. and his ministers. Napoleon had decreed th< suppression of the Inquisition, and it was known that h< would secularize the Church lands. While those who enjoyec the Church's wealth were often ready to attempt to sav< something by submission, the Parish Priest and the Begging Friar, who came from the people, and lived with it, who sharec its poverty and its beliefs, were ready to fight and to die fo: what they personally could never hope to enjoy. And wh( shall blame either people, priest, or friar ? The Spaniard: would be an ignoble people if the old order had been endurec for so long by men who neither loved it, nor believed in it nor were ready to fight for it. If we look merely to th( material good of Spain, if we ask whether acceptance o Napoleon's " regeneration " would not have spared then many evils, then we may, or rather we must, answer thai the national resistance was a misfortune. But man doei not live by bread alone. If the Spaniards had accepted th( good things Napoleon offered, as he made his offer, they woulc have forfeited their right to be an independent people. Thej did well to refuse even though their refusal condemned them tc wade towards a better order through infinite blood and dung Unhappily for the country these whole-hearted patriots inherited to the full the defects of the national character— the disposition to treat all who differ as heretics, and al heretics as fit only to be killed, the besotted belief that an SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 263 institution can be reformed or national cause forwarded by murder, the barbarous conviction that hate justifies slaughter. The first form taken by the national resistance was an outburst of assassination. AlcaM Galiano, who could remember these days of his boyhood, records how the in- habitants of a village in Castile said to a traveller, '* The people of such and such a place have killed somebody. We are patriots and we want to kill somebody.'* The objects of this popular hatred were naturally the '* enlightened '* partisans of reform, and thf friends of Godoy — such men as SolanOi who was butchered at Cadiz. Valencia, which has always possessed a particularly bad mob, was terrorized by a rabble headed by a rabid cleric. The French residents were massacred. But the healthy elements of the population raUied promptly, and with the support of some of the land- owners who armed their tenants, were able to suppress the rioters. Indeed the whole country rallied with honourable promptitude. Where official authority failed, social leadership took its place. Asturias, which possessed a local governing board, could act at once. Galicia, where the regular troops were comparatively numerous, and the commercial classes were strong, and Andalucia, where the great landowners and the mer- chants had much influence, set the example. Their first step was to appeal to the nation which was already fighting for its existence against Napoleon, which was bound by its interests to help them and had the power — to Great Britain. There could be but one answer to the appeal. On the 4th July 1808 orders were issued from London to cease all acts of hostility against Spain. The British troops, which were collected to sail on an expedition to the River Plate, were turned to the Peninsula, and Great Britain found the battle-field on which she could meet and defeat the armies of Napoleon. The campaigns of the Peninsular War make a great subject. But in the operations of orderly war the first part was played 264 SPAIN by the British army and its famous chief. The part of Spain was to make those operations possible and to give that chief his opportunity. If the Spaniards had submitted cheerfully to the Emperor he could have thrown the whole of the two hundred and fifty or three hundred thousand men he was able to pour into Spain on the British army at once. With a submissive country to operate in, and before him the prospect of a rapid campaign, Napoleon would probably have come himself. To believe that any army Great Britain could have sent, even though commanded by Wellington, could have held its ground in Portugal against such an attack is to lose all sense of reality. It was because the Spaniards always occupied the great majority of the French troops in Spain that no sufficient force could ever be brought by them to bear on the British army. It was because he was not overwhelmed that Wellington was able first to hold his footing and then to strike back. The war divides itself for Spain into well-marked phases. From May to July 1808 the whole country heaved in furious reaction against attack. Joseph Bonaparte, dragged much against his will from his comfortable quarters at Naples, was declared King at Bayonne in June. His road to Madrid was cleared by Bessieres, who defeated the Spanish forces, a few troops and a crowd of armed peasants, at Rio Seco (Dry River) in Leon on the 14th July. He reached his capital, and French troops were sent under Moncey to occupy Valencia, and under Dupont to occupy Andalucia. Behind him Saragossa had shut its gates and was standing its first siege. Moncey reached Valencia, was repulsed and fell back on the centre of Spain. Catalonia was fighting with the French, who had been allowed by the old government to occupy Barcelona. Dupont crossed the Sierra Morena, descended upon and sacked C6rdoba. But the country was rising on him, directed by the Andalucian committee or SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 265 Junta. His army consisted largely of the young conscripts whom the Emperor was beginning to draw before the lawful age. These immature lads, carrying a weight of sixty pounds, suffered cruelly in the " stewpan of Spain." He had shone as a subordinate officer, but was not equal to independent command. He blundered into a position in which he was forced to surrender at Bailen on the 21st July. The Spanish generals Castanos and the Swiss Reding won rather by good luck than good guidance. But they won and the effect of their victory was incalculable. It gave a staggering blow to the prestige of the Imperial armies, animated all Europe, and swept the French over the Ebro. The panic which seized on Joseph and his advisers in Madrid was as shameful as Dupont's capitulation. It revealed an inward weakness, a terror of possible disaster. Meanwhile the different provinces of Spain had rapidly formed " Juntas," committees of govern- ment. From among them was gathered the Central Junta, first of twenty-four, and then of thirty-six members, which met at Aranjuez on the 24th September. Th-e good advice given to the Spaniards by Canning had some share in the formation of the Central Junta. Spain had a government. Unhappily that government was concerned not only to drive out the French but to expel from Spain all that could be shown to have come from France. Its first president, the aged Count of Floridablanca, once a reforming minister under Charles III., and now in his dotage, panic-stricken by his work, lent himself to reaction. A dreadful fear of the people, '' the many headed beast " which they saw about them, possessed the minds of the Junta, No definite practical action was to be expected from such a body. Nothing effectual was done to meet the storm, which ought to have been foreseen. Men who had been trained to say what was correct and sounded best, were not likely to tell the country the truth, even if they saw it themselves. 266 SPAIN which apparently they did not. The Spaniards had been taught for centuries not to look for truth, but for orthodoxy. They were given up to strong delusions and to believe in lies. In the last months of the year, Napoleon, maddened by the disgrace of Bailen, burst into Spain with a positive spilth of resources, swept the few troops and many armed peasants opposed to him to right and to left, rushed across old Castile, stormed through the ill-occupied pass of the Somosierra, and swooped on Madrid. He had made, as he put it, an example of the canaille, and was as sure, as he continued to be to the end, that with a few more military executions and the shooting of a few score priests and friars, there would be an end of Spanish resistance. Meanwhile the British troops had driven the French from Portugal, and under Sir John Moore they struck at his communications with France. He had lavished resources, and yet a comparative handful of men marching on a vital spot gave lockjaw (to use a phrase of his own) to all his power. He rushed in pursuit of Sir J. Moore, failed to overtake him, and went off to France. Spain did not afford him an opportunity for the coups de thedtre he loved to perform, and Austria was arming. The Junta Central had fled before the Emperor to Seville. There was a pause in the war. The French at Madrid made no further advance. In the north they did not subdue Saragossa till January 1809. On the north-west they occupied Galicia and overran Northern Portugal. The Junta, pre- sided over by the Marquis of Astorga after the death of Floridablanca, strove manfully enough to defend the country. But Napier's saying concerning the amazing General who commanded for them, Don Gregorio de la Cuesta, that as between his country and the invaders Cuesta was honest, but as between his country and his passions he was not honest, applies equally to the Junta. The members were chiefly anxious to retain their own power. Their motive I SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 267 have been commonly said to have been mere ambition and arrogance. Yet it is but fair to remember that these men by their very education and inherited instincts had a pro- found distrust of the Cortes. It had been a maxim among them that whatever the difficulties of the State might be, the Cortes must never be summoned, because, weak as it looked, it would soon be everybody's master, and its action would be incalculable. Then there was the question how was it to be organized ? The Junta played with the proposal to summon the national representation, and postponed a settlement. In the meanwhile they kept on raising raw armies and sending them untrained against the French, by whom they were beaten one after another. If only they could win a signal success they would be masters of the country and be in a position to save it, not only from the French but from a Cortes which would not improbably follow the example of the States General of 1789 in France. So they blundered on, and their folly culminated when they sent their last army under a most incapable general to be shattered at Ocana at the cross-roads of the highways to Andalucia and Murcia, to the south of Madrid (November 1809). At the close of the year the French overflowed the Sierra Morena. Their armies were starving in the barren country round Madrid and it was an absolute necessity for them to obtain access to the food supplies of the maritime provinces. The Junta fled to Cadiz, and resigned its powers into the hands of a Regency. The new governors would have postponed the meeting of a Cortes if they could, but the cry was too loud and at Cadiz the Regency was at the mercy of the mob. The Cortes met on the 24th September 1810. The period from that date until the return of Ferdinand in March 1814, saw the beginnings of all the httle good and very much of the evil in the subsequent history of Spain. The conduct of the great operations of war passed wholly 268 SPAIN to the chief of the British army in Portugal. The share of the Spaniards in the struggle with France was to produce the guerrilleros. These champions and the Cortes made up between them what Spain was doing, and was to go on doing down to times of which the writer of this book was an eyewitness. The guerrilleros were of much consequence in the history of the War of Independence, which we call the Peninsular War, and they are of the first consequence for the history of Spain. Some of them were mere criminals, bandits and armed smugglers who saw a comparatively safe life of pillage in the " partidas.'' " Viva Fernando y vamos robando.*' Long live Ferdinand and let's go a robbing, was the popular formula for their patriotism. They were the pest and terror of their own countrymen. But they were not tolerated. In every part of Spain, from Navarre to Malaga, blackguards of this stamp were seized and shot by the honest men. The guerrilleros, who were really patriots, came from all classes except the greater nobles. There were doctors of law and of medicine, half-pay navy and army officers, old soldiers who had returned to civil life, plain gentlemen and simple peasants. El Marquisito, Jose Palarea El Medico, Chapal- angarra, Francisco Mina, Julian Sanchez, El Empecinado, and the Cura Marino, came from all parts of Spain and all classes of Spaniards. Their history can no more be told than the history of a swarm of mosquitoes. They represented a condition. Their contribution to the defence of their country was a good deal of sharp fighting, cutting off of detachments, capture of posts, and destruction of convoys. The capture of the French convoy by Mina in the Pass of Arlaban was a fine example of their fighting. But they rarely showed themselves capable of standing in the open against a sub- stantial body of French troops. What they did do was to make it necessary for the French to spread themselves SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 269 all over the country in order to obtain supplies, and therefore made it increasingly difficult for them to remain concentrated in effective masses. The French generals were constantly clamouring for more men to clear the roads of these '' brigands " and enable them to collect provisions. The great majority of the three hundred thousand French soldiers sacrificed in the Peninsular War died of disease. The im- mature conscripts whom Napoleon drew before their time and poured into Spain, perished in multitudes of pneumonia; brought on by the deadly combination of blazing hot sun, gentle cold wind by day, and sudden drop of temperature at sunset, or of dysentery or typhoid fever. But of those who died in action as many fell dimly in obscure skirmishes as on the great stricken fields. That is the profitable part of the activity of the guerrilleros. But there is another. These bands accustomed crowds of men to a life of adventure with sudden hauls of prize money. Thereby they intensified the natural incHnation of the Spaniards for vagabondage with its alternatives of spasms of exciting activity and intervals of idleness. What was even more, the guerrillero chief had his " junta;" his com- mittee, which collected voluntary or forced contributions, took care of the wounded and raised recruits. The villages which failed to supply provisions or to give recruits to the bands were fired. A whole apparatus of subterranean, irregular, though patriotic government was spread over Spain. It was simple and easy to work. The memory of it remained, and in times of civil strife it revived at once. The inheritance which the guerrilleros of 1810-1814 ^^^^ to their country was an ever-available army of *' facciosos ** and its latent war office, which could be called into operation with tempting facility when civil war broke out. While the guerrilleros, fighting honestly for their country, were forming the army of domestic strife, the Cortes at Cadiz 270 SPAIN was providing the cause. The Spaniards have a melancholy proverb which says that we grow wise too late, '* Tarde Uega el desengafio/' ^ They have frequently shown its truth. They did so in 1810. Because the Junta Central had hesitated before calHng the Cortes, this body was less truly representa- tive of the Spanish people than it might have been, and it met in the one place where a mob was at hand to support radical measures. The merely artificial Cortes created by Philip V. had never possessed real vitality, and such as it was it could be fully formed only by including the nobles and prelates who had done homage to Joseph Bonaparte. A real representation must be made. The Junta Central had played with schemes for a Cortes of two houses, and had done nothing effectual. The Cortes which actually met was shaped in a hurry. It consisted of one House com- posed of representatives of the towns which had had votes in Cortes, of delegates of the provincial Juntas, of repre- sentatives of every 50,000 inhabitants, and of the colonies. It was based on a species of ten-pound householder franchise. The '' vecinos '* (householders) of each parish elected an elector, the electors of a district elected other electors for the province, and that body chose the deputy to Cortes. As a matter of fact and as the French were occupying or overrunning the whole country the election was made from hand to mouth, and in some districts not at all, while the colonies were too far off. Their distance was not the only reason why they could have but small share in the Cortes. When the news of the rout at Ocafia, and the invasion of Andalucia reached America, the Creoles began to think that there was no reason why they should remain dependent on a ^ Desengano is not an easy word to translate. Disillusionment, besides being a lumbering word, does not give the full force of the Spanish. El desengaiio includes the " conviction of sin," and implies more than the loss of mere illusions, or the attainment of merely worldly wisdom. SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 271 country which was itself in process of being conquered. 1810 saw the first rising in the Indies. In some cases the members were chosen at Cadiz by refugees from the occupied provinces. Yet on the whole the Cortes was as good a body as could well have been collected at that time in Spain. There were able and honest men in it, and as a rule the members would probably have been elected in any case. The great defects of the Cortes were inevitable. It consisted, and was bound to consist of very inexperienced men, and they were Spaniards who had a very difficult task to perform. To suppose that they could agree to meet, confine themselves to setting up a regency and voting taxes, would be to '' fish for cakes in the bay.'' That they were there was no more certain than that they would endeavour to set up some defence against the return of the ignominious conditions which had culmi- nated in the prostration of the whole royal family at the feet of Napoleon. They would have been less than men if they had not made the attempt, and they would have been more than men if they had succeeded. Nothing is easier, or less worth doing, than to show the absurdities of the constitution finally made by the Cortes. When the members decided that none of them should hold office they made it certain that the administration would be in the hands of men alien in sympathy to them, and also that the administrators would fret under the control of a body which would not take direct responsibility. When they made the rule that no member of the Cortes could be re-elected they condemned the next house to be without experience. These were just the kind of mistakes which well-meaning men, painfully anxious for the '' purity of parliament " and resolved to show themselves disinterested, would be Hkely to make. The serious part of the whole business was that these really well-meaning men were un- avoidably engaged in a fantastic attempt to put a hook in 272 SPAIN the nose of Leviathan. If Spain was not to be subject to another Charles IV., and another Godoy, there must be some power entitled to control such persons. England had achieved the feat when it forced James II. to '* abdicate " and gave itself a king with a parliamentary title. France was to do the same thing when Charles X. was sent on his travels in 1830. But this remedy was the impossible of all impossibles for Spain. The country was heart and soul devoted to '' Ferdinand the Desired " and would hear of no other King. What remained therefore but to make a '* con- stitution " and put the King in leading-strings ? So the Cortes included in the constitution articles making it com- pulsory on the King to summon one every year, to allow it to sit for three months, giving it the sole power to vote taxes, establishing ministerial responsibility, and giving to the King only a suspensory veto. There was very little in the constitution which in substance at least must not be found in every parhamentary government. The thing was a sham, not because it was a bad constitution, but because the country was not prepared for parhamen- tary government at all. The Cortes had offended many interests, and in particular had revolted the Church by declaring the Inquisition abolished, and by secularizing Church lands. It was as certain as anything well could be that the King would not accept the constitution, and that he would be supported by soldiers and civilians alike in sweeping it away. And that is precisely what happened when he returned to Spain in March 1814 on the first fall of Napoleon. The members of the Cortes showed all the faith of the Spaniards in mere words. They had taken the title of majesty for themselves, as the outward and visible sign of their right to represent the sovereignty of the State. They seem to have thought that if they only recorded this doctrine in sonorous words on a paper called a constitution ; SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 273 if they compelled all men in office to swear to maintain their handiwork ; if they declared that the King was not to be accepted unless he too swore ; if they asserted it to be the law that the King's unlawful orders were not to be obeyed, they would enforce obedience though they could command neither popular nor military support. In short they were pedants who imagined that words were realities. They soon found what a mistake they had made when Ferdinand issued his proclamation in Valencia declaring the constitution abolished, and asserting that the sovereignty resided in his royal person and only there. It was abolished amid general rejoicing, and the Liberals who had made it were swept into prison by the thousand. Ferdinand asserted that if he had not imprisoned them, they would have been torn to pieces by the mob. There is very good reason to believe that for once at any rate he spoke the truth. None the less the Cortes had done a great work and a lasting one. It had §hown that thousands of Spaniards, including most of the least benighted part of the population, were resolved to make an end of the '* Key Neto y absoluto/* and to give the country a voice in the management of its affairs. That at least was a solid fact which was not to be abolished by the King's declaration that everything should be restored to the state it was in before 1808. He and his advisers were just as besotted by words as the members of the Cortes. They thought that if they put back the hand of the clock they could also make the shadow go back on the sundial. Several of the restored monarchs of 1814 were of the same way of thinking, but no one of them strove to do the impos- sible with quite so much brainless violence as Ferdinand VI I. A. wise and honest man would have been taxed to deal with the ruin and confusion he found on his restoration. The naterial damage done by the war was enormous. Three lundred thousand houses were lying in ruins. Trade was 274 SPAIN disorganized, agriculture and industry were in an equally bad condition. The revolt of the colonies had completed the injury inflicted by the invasion. An enormous debt, £70,000,000, had been contracted. The moral and intellectual damage suffered by the unhappy people was worse than the material. It was the function of Ferdinand to aggravate all the prevailing evils, and to demonstrate to the world that the monarchy he represented was rotten to the core — not only imbecile but vicious. He had promised his subjects that though he was absolute King he would not rule as a '' despot." The distinction was not an absurd one. The absolute King rules by law and through institutions. The despot rules by whim and passion, and intervenes personally in the adminis- tration of the law. But if Ferdinand was not absurd he was mendacious. He did rule as a despot, and, moreover, he behaved Hke a spiteful school bully. Thirty ministers held office, and were summarily dismissed in twenty months. It was the King's amusement to appoint a minister, treat him with favour for a few days or weeks, and then order his arrest and imprisonment in a fortress. His real advisers were a small '' camarilla " of buffoons and panders with whom he spent his nights. The frivolity and cruelty of the man disgusted his fellow-sovereigns, who were indeed resolved to be absolute, but who at least were grown up and looked upon government as a serious business. They refused to treat him as an equal or allow him a voice in the settle- ment of Europe. When he waited till after Waterloo to act against Napoleon, the ragged soldiers he sent into the South of France were, almost in the literal sense of the word, kicked out by the Royahsts with the universal approval of Europe. He insulted his brother kings by presenting the world with a sordid caricature of their principles and their governments. SPAIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 275 Meanwhile the facts which Ferdinand endeavoured to abohsh with his mouth were steadily working. The financial chaos forced even this degradation of monarchy to allow a remedy to be attempted. Martin de Garay, a hearty royalist, a man who might have been the useful minister of a beneficent despotism, was entrusted with the organization of the finances. It was a mere matter of course that this Royalist, who was also a man of business, was compelled to adopt the principles of the Cortes — that is to say; to impose uniform taxes and propose to secularize the Church lands for the relief of the State. The necessity for doing some- thing compelled even Ferdinand to allow Garay eighteen months in which to make his experiment. It failed, for neither nobles nor Church were capable of learning from experience, and the mass of the population hated all innova- tions. Garay went as prisoner to a fortress. The chaos went on. The very soldiers were left to starve in rags. It is an astonishing proof of the strength of monarchy that for five years these men remained loyal. In each year some " liberal " malcontent endeavoured to head a revolt. The leaders were guerrillero chiefs or army officers, Porlier, Mina, or Lacy. They all failed. The throne seemed firmly estab- lished on the loyalty of a people who would endure every- thing. The elder Marquis de Villars, who came to Spain as ambassador for Lewis XIV., said that the Spaniards might be brave soldiers in Flanders, but at home they endured what no courageous people would put up with. But the " Zeitgeist " was at work even in Spain. The French garrisons had spread some French ideas. They had founded political societies under the name of Freemasons' Lodges. These bodies did not dissolve when the French retired. They only acted in secret. Then, too, the Spaniards had never yet been subjected to the caprices of a vicious boy with the out- ward appearance of a man and the power of an absolute 276 SPAIN king. The ground under Ferdinand's feet, which looked so firm, was being undermined. Only accident, or the loss of courage of leaders, postponed the inevitable outbreak. It came at last in 1820, and from a cause which was itself the result of old Spanish obstinacies and follies, combined with the new revolutionary spirit. The dogged attempt of the Spanish government to subdue " the Indies '' with utterly insufficient means was the im- mediate cause of the revolution at home. Troops unpaid, half naked, and ill-fed were collected at Cadiz. They were kept waiting for transports. No political idea was at work among the men. They were only conscripts who reluctantly obeyed the order to embark for the bottomless gulf of the Indian wars, from which they knew they had small chance of returning. But there were men who had ideas — not their own indeed, but ideas imbibed during imprisonment as prisoners of war in France, or from French soldiers in Spain, or simply because they were in the air. They were poor creatures, but what they had in front of them was torpor or putridity. At the instigation of such leaders, part of the army collected near Cadiz broke into mutiny at the Cabezas de San Juan on New Year's Day 1820. The third step had been taken. The first was the riot at Aranjuez in March 1808, a mere attempt to force a change of persons on the throne. The second was the making of the Constitu- tion of 1812, an attempt to alter the nature of the govern- ment. The third was the '' pronunciamiento " of 1820, which plunged Spain into half a century of revolutionary turmoil, and at the same time decided that the greatest political influence in the country should be the army. CHAPTER XI SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION From the day that a few discontented soldiers led by so feather-headed a person as the Colonel Riego, pronounced at Cabezas de San Juan, down to 24th December 1874, when Martinez Campos carried out the pronunctamiento which restored Don Alfonso XII., Spain was going through her own revolution. The story has a peculiar interest, and stands quite alone in the contemporary history of revolutionary Europe. The difference was not due to any originaHty of thought on the part of the Spaniards. On the contrary, the combatants for whichever side they fought borrowed their ideas, their arguments, their very language. The revolutionary parties had nothing to say which they had not heard said before in France. The defenders of the old order when they went beyond mere threats and assertions, plagiarized Joseph de Maistre. The Spanish intellect has never been strong on the side of thought and speculation. If it had been it would have burst the bonds of the Inquisition, as a growing tree will split a flagstone. It had been so long cramped that in the nineteenth century it was wellnigh atrophied. We must not look to it for what it could not give. Neither need we seek great characters in the Spanish revolution. Of this movement also it has to be said that it was " anonymous." There would, to be sure, be no difficulty in filling a volume larger than this with the names of attorneys who '' pronounced " in villages, 277 278 SPAIN or barrack-yard conspirators who '' pronounced '* in camps, of ministers who came and went and returned, of journahsts and courtiers. But there is not one of them of whom we can confidently say that his absence would have altered the history of Spain — no Stein nor Metternich, Lamartine, Guizot, Thiers, or even Louis Blanc, no Mazzini, nor Cavour. Fate, which Mommsen tells us sometimes consoles a nation by sending it a hero to grace its fall, did give old Spain one old Spaniard, the Carlist leader, Tomas Zumalacarregui, who, in happier times, might have stood by the side of Hernan Cortes. He saved the honour of his cause, but not the cause, and rather by his essential manhood than by his intellect. Of what the Spaniards contributed to their internal strife much was pure shame. The court of Ferdinand VII. and his daughter Isabel II. were brothels. The politicians who sought their fortune in it were commonly just such persons as use those places for profit. The shootings and floggings inflicted by both sides were hideous. One constitu- tionalist general of the name of Nogueras shocked the civilized world by shooting the mother of the Carlist leader Cabrera, who, for his part, shot the wives of the constitutionalist oflicers. I mention these things for once and for all. It is not good to dwell on them. But the history of Spain is falsified if we suppress the fact that the men who fought for freedom, and those who fought for " God and King;" were as bloodthirsty as Touareg tribes in the Sahara. If Spain escaped wars of religion in the sixteenth century, it repeated the worst violences of that strife, in the nineteenth century. Such things were done to the very end. A priest who was a leader in the last Carlist war — there are still alive some who knew him — sickened even his own side by bestial acts of ferocity practised for the most part on women. And there were Republican officers who were no better than he. The French invasion, followed by the frivolous SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION 279 cruelty of Ferdinand VII., plunged Spain back into African barbarism. In spite of all these evils, without wise leadership or ideas of their own, the Spaniards have won through to comparative political stability, to relative sanity, to a revival of knowledge, and of civilization. That they have brought through so much, and have learnt so much, is a proof that, below the froth of the surface, there is a great treasure of sound instincts in Spain, and a hope for the future. The interest of two generations of apparently barren anarchy lies in the very fact that, blinded and leaderless as they were, the Spaniards have struggled on to better things by virtue of their innate manhood. Those to whom the old order had become intoler- able in its degradation have destroyed it. Those to whom it was lovely have indeed been defeated, but because they acted on instincts inseparable from their being they have preserved something of the essential good of their cause. The interpenetration of the two has made it, not certain, but possible, that Spain may take an honourable place in the modern world, and yet not cease to be Spain. The revolt at Cabezas de San Juan was the premature outbreak of a plot. The example was not immediately followed by all the troops. Many who joined were only seeking a chance to desert. It seemed at one time possible that the mutineers would simply scatter. But the country was in reality ripe for revolt — that is to say, a strong minority of Spaniards was rebellious, and the others were torpid. Outbreaks took place in the north-west, and spread to Aragon and the Mediterranean coast. Finally; the Count of Bisbal (O'Donnel), who commanded at Ocafia went over to the in- surgents. He had shortly before betrayed a plot into which he had first entered, and was at all times so erratic that it is impossible to argue from his actions to his motives. Ferdinand behaved all through like himself. When the 28o SPAIN danger first arose he promised concessions. When it grew greater he made more promises. When it was plainly about to overwhelm him he promised everything. It is not sure that he lied at one stage of the process more than at any other. From the spring of 1820 till the spring of 1823 Spain saw another version in altered circumstances of the history of the Cortes at Cadiz. The Liberals were endeavouring to establish a constitutional government with little enough training, and in face of an immovable obstacle. They could not succeed except by the help of the King, and his name was perfidy. To remove him was impossible. Nobody in the country then desired a republic. There was no member of the royal family who could be made use of to replace him. Moreover, the Spaniards could not but know that they were watched by the allied European sovereigns. The revolt of 1820 was the last occasion on which the action of the Spanish people had any effect on Europe. Their revolution had set Portugal and Italy on fire. A heave of revolution angered the sovereigns whose memory of the recent years was fresh. Spain must not go too far. In fact, it was in a blind alley. Whether any wisdom could have brought the rising to a good end is doubtful. As a matter of fact no wisdom and very little common sense was displayed. The mob of the towns gained the upper hand. The moneyed classes and the Church were offended by financial folly and threats of spoliation. The country population followed the Church. Confusion became anarchy and anarchy grew worse. At last France undertook to restore order. In April 1823 a hundred thousand French soldiers crossed the frontier and were joined by many Spaniards. The revolutionaries fled to Cadiz, carrying the King with them. They were followed and forced to surrender. He promised whatever he was asked while in their hands, and broke his promises when free. SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION 281 From 1823 to 1833 the government was again despotic, but there was no restoration of the old order of before 1808. In the first place Ferdinand was kept on the throne by French troops who remained in the country for years, and exercised some check on him. He and the Royalist party which preferred to call itself " apostolic " did take a beastly revenge, and thrust Spain one step more down to the African level. But he was not allowed to restore the Inquisition which he had set up, in name at least, in 1814. He had learnt something and the last ten years of his reign saw at least an attempt to carry on a consistent administration. All but a fragment of the Indies — Cuba and Porto Rico — had gone. England retahated for the French invasion of Spain by recognizing the independence of the insurgents in America. That drain was stopped. The country began to breathe again, and there was a certain revival of prosperity. The great difference between the times before and after 1820-1823 was that the old order began to divide against itself. The '' apost61icos " were not satisfied that the restora- tion was sufficiently thorough. The continued suppression of the Inquisition disturbed them. The old clash of lay monarchy and ecclesiastical pretensions revived. The Church would have all, and the King was bound to keep something for him- self. A party formed within the " apost61icos " — namely, the " agraviados/' that is to say, the injured or aggrieved persons. The grievance was that they were not allowed to kill all Liberals, and purge the sacred soil of Spain by the unchecked action of their society, called of the Destroying Angel. And the Royalists, who were so Royalist that they would not allow their King to do anything which they felt was unbecoming his position, began to spread stories that Ferdinand had himself become a Freemason. There were other Royalists who were sickened by clerical dictation. The party split, and Ferdinand drowned the '' agraviados " in their own 282 SPAIN blood by methods worthy of some Mulay Malook in Morocco. The dead barrier of obstinacy which would not move in a moving world was breaking under the pressure. Its final disruption was brought about by one of those combinations of circumstances which in one form or another are sure to come to the ruin of things and parties which will persist in trying to defy necessity. Ferdinand had been three times married without obtaining children. His brother Charles was also married and had children. He, Don Carlos, as all the world has always called him, was heir presumptive, and in the freedom of that position was able to maintain a spotless orthodoxy. He was a man of no brains, but he was loyal to his principles, and would take no action against his brother, the rightful King. As Ferdinand's constitution was broken by debauchery, the time seemed near at hand when he would die and the throne would be occupied by a true son of the Church and of old Spain. But he married a fourth time. His wife was his niece, Maria Cristina; of the Neapolitan branch of the Bourbons, and she bore him two daughters. By the ancient law of Castile a daughter could succeed, and Aragon had recognized the capacity of an heiress to convey the crown to a husband or son. Philip Vth had introduced a modified form of the Salic Law into Spain. He issued a '' Pragmatic '' by which females were excluded from the succession so long as there remained any male representative born in Spain. What one King with the co-operation of a Cortes summoned for the purpose could do, another King and Cortes could undo. Charles IV., who himself had been born in Naples, did undo the Pragmatic of his grandfather, in a Cortes summoned for the purpose. The revocation was not formally pro- mulgated, but it was known to exist. Under the influence of his young wife Ferdinand promulgated the decree. He revoked his promulgation when he was ill, and then SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION 283 revoked his revocation. His daughter, Isabel II., was pro- claimed Queen by her own right when he died on 27th September 1833. The Royahsts were divided finally. All the " apost6Hco " or " agraviado " elements became Carlist. The others adhered to Isabel II. The Carlists had the support of the Basques, who were afraid that their local privileges would be swamped if the new reign made terms with Liberals, and of the hillmen of Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. The Church they had everywhere. But in the towns the Church had lost power, and in open plains of Central Spain Carlist bands could not stand before the troops. The army officers were Royalists of the lay type, or sympathized with the Liberals. The Queen Regent, Maria Cristina, would fain have gone on governing in the old absolute way. But she needed the Liberals, and they, because they were indispensable, made their terms. There followed a war for principles, in which the champions were the hillmen of the north, north-east, and east on the one side, and on the other the coast towns, and towns generally, the machinery of government, and those Spaniards who were carried on by the movement of Europe. It was a hateful war^ a straggling, confused struggle of guerrilleros and soldiers, both Spaniards, who massacred one another as ferociously as ever the French and Patriots had done in the War of Independence. So long as the hill- men were fighting among their mountains against the mostty ill-trained and ill-led soldiers they were on the whole victorious. In the early period of the seven years' struggle, the Carhsts had one considerable leader in Tomas Zumalacarregui, who organized their army in Biscay and Navarre. But even he could do little against towns, and when he was mortally wounded at the first siege of Bilbao, they fell into being mere guerrilleros. At the end the poor, would-be *' Rey Neto y absoluto," became a mere puppet in the hands of his own 284 SPAIN general Maroto. This man first shot all his rivals in the camp of the army of God, the King, and the Faith, and then betrayed the cause. But Biscay was in fact exhausted. On the constitutionalist or Cristino side there was con- fusion, corruption, incapacity in abundance. The help of France and England was begged. The Spanish Legion, so called, was raised in England with the consent of the British government and sent to Spain, where it did no good, or very little. But in a bHnd groping way the Liberal cause had life and the future in it. The acts it performed were often atrocious. , It was horrible, for instance, that when the cholera visited Madrid, the mob should have massacred scores of Jesuits and friars. Bat the friars who had recruited the notorious society of the Destroying Angel, had taught their countrymen to massacre. They preached that the cholera was a punishment sent by God to an impious people. The baser sort of Liberals replied that the friars were partisans of Don Carlos, and had poisoned the wells. The pupils applied the teaching of the convents to their inhabitants. At Barcelona the Franciscans were foully butchered. The curses of the Church came home to roost. The old order was torn away by brutal hands piece by piece. In dire need of money the government of Maria Cristina pillaged the Church, and was itself cheated by its own agents in the process. Never was the truth of Carlyle's saying that those who will not accept the hght will be smitten by the lightning more copiously illustrated. The Queen Regent would not frankly accept constitutional government, and yet she must recruit the aid of the Liberals. With the trumpery cunning of the later Bourbons, and their secret clerical advisers, Maria Cristina tried to give a show of representative institutions, while refusing the reahty. By a concession which ceded the whole principle, but failed to satisfy the Liberals, she consented to set up a Parliament SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION 285 so limited that it could do nothing. In 1837 she was forced by the mutiny of her own guards at La Gran j a to consent to a more democratic constitution than would have satisfied the Liberals four years earher. By persisting in taking back by intrigue what she yielded to pressure, by artfully playing one faction off against another, she so effectually promoted the natural tendency of the Spaniards to division and personal rivalries, that she ruined the influence of the civil pohticians completely. All power fell into the hands of a successful soldier. Baldomero Espartero, a confused- headed man who possessed no mihtary quahty except personal courage, was carried to the top. He settled the war in Biscay by the convention of Vergara with Maroto, and then swept Cabrera out of the east of Spain. When the Carhst hero next appeared in the country it was to declare that the age of despotism, bigotry, and the Inquisition was over. The transformation was typical of the age. After enormous bloodshed, and profuse assertions that the safety of the country was to be found only in absolutism and the dominion of the Church, the CarHsts had to renounce their own principles, and offer to save the country by means of the very things they had sworn to prevent. Maria Cristina was driven from Spain by intrigues morally and intellectually on a level with her own in 1840. Espartero, who rightly enough re- fused to form one of a council of Regency, was named Regent. The change might well have been wholly for the good of Spain. The army was now, in the general disorganization of the country, the only real power, capable of acting together and ready to obey orders. Where the power was, there the responsibility ought to be also. Mihtary government may be a disaster, but no other was possible in Spain, while the majority of the people refnained torpid, and the active minority was split into factions. The misfortune of the country was that the man at the head of the army 286 SPAIN was a political nullity. The barbarism which had covered Spain was shown when two barrack-yard con- spirators made an attempt to kidnap the little Queen in her own palace. It failed because the " alabarderos " — a small palace guard, answering to our Beefeaters — made a fight, and help came in time. Intrigue from within and without, favoured by the French government of Louis Phihppe surrounded Espartero. He met it by spasms of mihtary execution, and long spells of sloth. He was driven out by military mutiny in 1843. Where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together. The diplomacy of France and England descended on Spain. France was intriguing in the interest of the Orleans family. Great Britain was mainly intent on obtain- ing a reduction of the import duties on Lancashire cottons. Both entered into the intrigues of the palace and the Cortes. The culmination of them was the famous Spanish marriage question, which at this distance, and when we know what came of the profound schemes of profound statesmen, looks so ineffably silly. The outcome of the craft and greed of all parties was the marriage of the young Queen to her cousin Francis, Duke of Cadiz, who was chosen by the plotters, one of whom was her own mother, because he was known to be incapable of being a father, and the marriage of her sister to a son of Louis PhiHppe, the Duke of Montpensier. Isabel was the daughter of Ferdinand VII. and she did become a mother. Let us note that much and pass all the rest of the ignominy. Poor Queen Isabel was never more than a child in mind. After years of reign and when she was a mother she was caught putting her tongue out and making a long nose, behind the back of a minister, who had come to report busi- ness to her. Her whole conduct was of a piece with this freak. She neither would nor could abstain from the sins of the flesh, and she sought to atone by serving the pecuniary SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION 287 interests of the Church. Monastic impostors who pretended to be marked by the wounds of Christ, confessors who con- doned adultery in return for assistance in gaining property for the Church, men who were either pimps or prostitutes or both, and pohticians no better than they, swarmed in and round the palace. It was in the years of Isabel's reign that Spaniards who had no behef in the Republic as the sole legitimate form of government, but who saw no hope for the country so long as the palace interfered in affairs, and was itself a sink of intrigue and corruption, became Repubhcans. Two great convulsions came out of the fountain of vice and folly. The first, in 1854, shook the throne roughly. The second, in 1868, swept Isabel over the Pyrenees. The country had moved in the comparative peace of the years following the end of the Carlist war. Trade increased. For practical reasons some ministers did useful work, notably by estabHshing a really effective constabulary. Railways were begun. The palace, its panders and its politicians, settled like a flight of carrion crows on '' concessions." Disgust seized on the more honourable Spaniards. Intriguers not sufficiently favoured by the distributors of booty saw an opening. The army acted as the real representative of the nation. A mutiny of part of the garrison of Madrid set the example of other mutinies. Espartero, who was living in retirement at Logrofio, was called into action. It is highly probable that if he had chosen he might have ante- dated the revolution of 1868 by fourteen years. But he never knew what he would be at. He tried to direct affairs for about two years and then was jockeyed out of office, partly by the Queen, partly by other mihtary intriguers who helped her. After a brief interval of transient ministries another general, O'Donnell, gave Spain a five years' ad- ministration which allowed the country to grow. But it 288 SPAIN did nothing to put the finances in order. It embarrassed them by expenditure on armaments, and by adventures in Africa which pleased the pride of the Spaniards, but brought no advantage. On the contrary, they were forbidden by Great Britain to reap the profits of their campaign, and of their victory over the Moors at Wad Ras (1859). O'Donnell fell. His rival, Narvaez, came and went, and O^Donnell returned. The financial conditions grew worse and worse. Foreign capitalists lefused to grant loans. The scandals of the palace went on as before. In 1868 the army broke away. A convulsion seized Spain, and, in a spasm of reaction against the pests which tormented it, it threw off the Bourbon monarchy. The process which began in March 1808 at Aranjuez was continued by the Coites at Cadiz, was carried further in 1820-1823, and was carried still further in the first CarHst War, was now complete. Spain had tried changes in the persons and restrictions on the royal power. It had found them useless. There was nothing for it but to teach the otherwise unteachable by stripes, the only form of instruction they could really understand. The fact that from 1868 to 1874 Spain was torn by con- fusion, and that in the end the son of Isabel II., Alfonso XII., was called to the throne as being the ruler who would divide the Spaniards the least, does not imply that nothing was done by the Revolution of 1868. The repubhcan leader Castelar was nearer the truth when he said that after what had then been gained there was nothing left for which a wise man would care to fire a shot. It is to be observed that though the Spaniards took her son as King they posi- tively refused to receive her. She had assumed that she was indispensable. She was taught that she was not, and that if she wished her son to reign she must stand aside. In the end she did. The revolution of 1868 did what, SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION 289 according to the elder Boswell of Auchinleck, Cromwell had done in England. It gart kings ken they had a hth in their necks. The restored monarchy was as different from what the old had been as was the monarchy of Charles II. from his father's in England. The restored King might have his own way, but he must get it by per- suasion or corruption. He could no longer think his word was enough. The whole atmosphere, the whole character, was altered even though the names remained. The interval was indeed sufficiently painful. The only leader of the Revolution of 1868 who exercised a genuine personal influence, the Catalan soldier Juan Prim, was, or professed that he was, convinced of the necessity for a monarchy in Spain. If he had told the whole truth he would probably have said that an alien and elected king would be wholly dependent on the party leader who had put him on the throne. Prim as king-maker would have ruled in the name of the royal puppet. There was this to be said for the line Pnm took that the best guarantee for constitutional government in Spain as in other countries would be the presence on the throne of a sovereign who reigned with a parhamentary title, and also that in a country where the mass of the population is passive and the minority is unstable and factious, a royal authority could be a very useful instru- ment of government. It is just possible that if a king could have been quickly found, or if Prim had lived when a candi- date did come forward, the result might have justified his calculation. There is no reason to believe that he possessed political or administrative faculty in a high degree, but he had sense, energy, and was well qualified to play the part of '* man with a stick.'* Unluckily there were difficulties in the way of finding a king. We all know how the Franco-German War of 1870-71 arose, not because of them certainly, but on a pretext they T 290 SPAIN provided for states which had been approaching a struggle on very great issues for some years. It was not till after the fall of the French Empire that Spain at last found an ItaHan prince, Amadeo of Savoy, to accept the Spanish throne. On the very day that Don Amadeo landed at Carthagena Prim died at Madrid of wounds inflicted on him by assassins (30th December 1870). He was vulgar and a braggart. Foreign officers who had means of judging him thought that he was utterly ignorant of the higher parts of the art of war. He was a gambler, and in all ways un- scrupulous. But he was beyond all question the first man in Spain when he was cut off in the Calle del Turco by bullets. The facts were never well cleared, though there can be very little doubt that he was murdered by associates whom he had betrayed — Repubhcans and partisans of the candidature of the Duke of Montpensier. The Duke had contributed money to help the revolution in the hope of winning the throne for himself. The Repubhcans had cherished hopes for themselves. Prim had promised, or had given to be under- stood, that he would make a return for services rendered, and had broken his promises to the hope and probably also to the ear. It was a sad end to all the efforts and sufferings of half a century that the fate of a country with a once glorious history should be the plaything of gangs of military con- spirators and political adventurers. But the very excess of the evil was to bring its (at any rate partial) cure, when the disease had finished running its course. It continued to be acute from January 1871 till December 1874. The reign of Don Amadeo, if the word reign can be used of what was a mere adventure, lasted till February of 1873. During those two years and a few weeks the moral and intellectual anarchy of Spain took material shape. The nominal king was a puppet in the hands of sordid intriguers. The better kind of Spaniards held aloof from him. Religion SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION 291 has little or no influence on the morahty, or even the genuine beliefs, of the so-called upper classes, but it was good form among them to be " papist/' The mere fact that Don Amadeo belonged to the family which had taken Rome from the Pope was enough to make him repugnant to them. Sensible men saw that his monarchy had no foundation. There was a small but very loquacious knot of Republicans, consisting mainly of Professors^ Castelar, Salmeron, Fiqueroa, Pi y Margall, who promised a new heaven and a new earth. The mass of the population neither knew nor cared anything about them. But as it was incapable of any combined action it had no influence. Their promises wrought on the town population, and they began to have some influence on the army, for they had undertaken to abolish the conscription. The Carlists took the field again on all their old scenes of activity. It is not credible that Don Amadeo could have kept his throne for long. The immediate cause of his resignation was the revolt of the artillery officers, who resigned in a body rather than serve with or under a certain Hidalgo, formerly a member of their own corps, who had taken part in a mutiny in which many of his comrades were massacred in 1866. His ministers forced the King to sign a decree dismissing them, and on the 12th February 1873 he resigned his crown. The Republic was proclaimed by the Cortes simply because there was no other candidate to take his place, and although very few of the deputies were avowed Republicans. This passage in the constitutional history of Spain is pecuharly illuminative. The reader must bear in mind that what is known as an election in Great Britain, France, or the United States — and some other nations — has never been held in Spain. None can be held, not because the government of the day prevents the voice of the people from being heard, but because the great majority of the electors, if left entirely free, will not take the trouble to vote. There is a gulf, or 292 SPAIN solution of continuity, between the minority who take an interest in politics, and the majority who care nothing about them. The minority live in the towns. Now the fifty or so principal towns in Spain do not contain more th*an about a tenth of the whole population^ say two millions and a half^ out of some twenty miUions. The eighteen millions or so who remain pay the bulk of the taxes, and contribute the whole of the conscripts who fill the ranks of the army, from which the constabulary (Guardia Civil) is recruited. The central administration which can rely on the obedience of the army and the constabulary, can also take it for granted that the voters outside the chief towns will vote as they are directed. They are not obedient because they are a pusil- lanimous people. The Spaniard can, and always could, fight fiercely on a sufficient occasion. But their interests are limited to their native place, their '' pueblo " or '* lugar," and its neighbourhood (comarca). If they have a wider view it rarely goes beyond a standing dispute with another township over pasture or water rights. These latent hostilities are sometimes enfiamed by purely personal quarrels, and cases do occur in which the Civil Governor of the province has to intervene with half a battalion of infantry and a couple of guns to keep the peace. Unless local passions are aroused by such causes as these, the greater part of the population of Spain is torpid. It may, as some well qualified observers believe, sympathize on the whole with the cause of Don Carlos and the Church. But it never goes beyond producing a few bands of armed partisans recruited from the criminally disposed, or by young men who would rather enjoy the licence of the guerrillero than do their service as soldiers. In normal times it has favours to ask from the government — grants of money for roads and bridges, or the grant of time for the payment of chronic arrears of taxes. Therefore it votes as it is told. While the majority of Spaniards are SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION 293 so easily led, a government which controls the army and constabulary can terrorize the towns or falsify the returns at an election pretty much as it pleases. A large city, Valencia or Barcelona or Saragossa, when it happens to be in earnest, can defy coercion or corruption. When a majority of the people of Spain is in earnest on a political question we may be very sure that there will be neither King nor Rook (ni Rey ni Roque) who will be able to say it nay. But that case has not occurred, and there is no sign that it will. Until it does the government may be unable to coerce the very few cities of more than a hundred thousand in- habitants, but it can have its way in all the others. Therefore an election is always made by the ministry in office for the time being. There have been ministries of the more arrogant order which have allowed only three or four opposition members to be returned. But as a rule the gentlemen in office are more reasonable and allow of the return of a decent proportion of opponents. By going too far they provoke conspiracies. If the question is put — how then is the minister in office ever turned out ? the answer is double and is not difficult. Sometimes they yield to pressure from without applied by the army. And then when members are once safely returned, the minister has httle or no control over them. Persons who will lend themselves to the bargain- ing inseparable from such electioneering ways as these, are not scrupulous. A very recent example has been given. At the 1 913 election some forty candidates secured their return by promising to support the Prime Minister, Sefior Dato, in return for his aid. When once they were safely in place they told him, impudently, that though their mouths said it, their hearts meant another thing. They went bodily over to his chief rival Seiior Maura. In fact, these machine- made majorities of the Spanish Cortes are perfectly untrustworthy. 294 SPAIN It will easily be believed that the peculiar ways of Spanish parhamentary government were worse and not better than usual during the revolutionary troubles. There had been three elections in the brief reign of Don Amadeo. In all of them there had been corruption and the active intervention of what was known as the " partido de la Porra/' the Party of the Cudgel. It consisted of mere ruffians who were used as bullies, and were protected by party leaders. They were particularly active in Andalucia, where their leaders Palma, alias Bando, PuUi, Pitofio, and so on, were allowed to kidnap opponents, and hold them to ransom. The Cortes sitting when Don Amadeo abdicated had been elected in these ways and was rather worse than the average body of the kind. It proclaimed the Republic without conviction, but with a perfect readiness to work the new form of government if it were allowed. It was not tolerated, and a new Cortes was elected by the Republican leaders in very much the old way. The army in the meantime had been corrupted by promises that the conscription — the '' tribute of blood '' — ^was to be abolished. The officers, who knew that this would mean the total ruin of the army, were hostile to the Republic, but for the first time their men would not follow them. When General Gaminde, ' then commanding in Catalonia, collected a large force in Barcelona and tried to make a *' pronunciamiento " in favour of Isabel's son Alfonso^ his soldiers broke away from him. They then acted on their belief that the conscription was no longer to be enforced, and went every man to his own house. The Republic simply produced a break-down of all govern- ment. The Carlists^ who had begun to stir in Don Amadeo's time, were rapidly organized. They formed an army of over seventy thousand men, and one hundred and forty guns. In the south of Spain there was an outbreak of pure anarchy. The so-called cantonalists, who proposed to split SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION 295 all Spain into self-governing cantons, obtained possession of several towns^ including the naval station at Carthagena, and the squadron. The very dissolution of the country seemed at hand. It was not so terrible in fact as it looked on paper. There was more shouting than fighting. Those who lived in even turbulent Spanish towns in that time were able to go about their business or their amusements freely. In many places people who had local influence were able, with the help of the Civil Guard, to keep order. The condition of Spain enabled those who lived in it to understand how our own ancestors of the wars of the Roses and the Civil War, could leave the interested parties to fight their quarrels out, and meanwhile attend to their own affairs. The misadventures of the RepubHcan figureheads^ who succeeded one another rapidly at Madrid, were seen with general indifference. One of them, when told that he was about to be put at the head of the government, Figueras, packed his portmanteau and ran away to France. His successors, Pi y Margall and Salmeron, did something to restore order in the south, but they were so afraid of reviving the power of the army that they would not finish the work. In September 1873 Salmeron was put aside and Don Emilio Castelar was named to succeed him. Castelar had favoured the abolition of the conscription and all the other Republican nostrums. But he saw that the prevailing disorders could not be allowed to go further except at the cost of the ruin of Spain. He threw his principles to the winds, levied a double conscription, made peace with the artillery officers, and created a new army. The docile population obeyed, but it lost all behef in the Republic from which it had expected the abolition of the conscription. When once the army was reconstructed it resumed the control of the country under the direction of its officers. They would have continued to support Castelar, who had 296 SPAIN shown administrative capacity. But when the Cortes which had been prorogued in September met in January 1874, the deputies prepared to turn him out. He decHned to hold his place by favour of the soldiers. Then the captain- general of New Castile^ Pavia, turned the Cortes into the streets. The name of the Republic was preserved, and Serrano, an old favourite of Isabel's, and a product of the epoch of pro- nunciamientos, was put at the head of affairs as '' Protector."' He did something to check the CarHsts and his government lived from hand to mouth. Nobody supposed that it coilld last long. There was a growing belief that the only possible settlement would be the establishment of Isabel's son Alfonso on the throne. His mother had been brought to see that she must abdicate in his favour. Acting by the advice of the Alfonsist leader, Don Antonio Canovas, the prince issued a proclamation promising a general amnesty and an honest constitutional government. Canovas would have preferred to see the Carlist fairly beaten, and a free Parliament elected to offer the throne to Don Alfonso. The army considered that this would be an idle ceremony, and some of them had their fortunes to make. Very soon after the issue of Don Alfonso's proclamation, two battalions stationed at Murviedro " pronounced " for him at the instigation of General Martinez Campos. The example was followed, and Don Alfonso came back as King in December 1874. Before the end of 1876 the Carlists had been first swept out of the east, and then crushed in the north. On a superficial view it may appear that there was no- change in Spain, only a " pronunciamiento " the more, and another person on the throne. And indeed very much remained as before. Elections continued to be *' made "' by the minister of the day. The administration was not less> corrupt and dilatory than it had been. The army remained and remains the most effective power in Spain. The Church. SPAIN AND HER OWN REVOLUTION 297 has gone on trying to regain power by intrigue. Never- theless it is true in a very real sense that Spain had com- pleted her revolution. Evils which had come down through centuries, ingrained habits of old standing, and bad practices which work for the profit of individuals, are not to be cured except slowly. They will riot be amended till the Spanish people understand that good government is not a boon which comes to men in their sleep, but is to be won by their own efforts, and that before it can be conquered they must have a conception in their own minds of what good government means, together with a resolute determination to enforce attention to their wishes. But all this is the task of reform, not of revolution. The Spaniards have the means of carrying out the reformation if they choose to make use of them. The great point is that, though the CarHst party still exists, and though there are Republicans, there is no general disposition to change the form of govern- ment. The constitution framed by Canovas in 1876, which did not differ much from its predecessor of 1845, has now lasted for nearly forty years and has stood two severe strains. The Carhsts have been compelled to renounce all their principles, and to endeavour to obtain confidence by promising to work a constitutional government more honestly than their opponents. Among the Repubhcans several of the leaders who are most listened to declare openly that they are per- fectly prepared to accept the monarchy if only it will give a guarantee of sincerity in applying the constitution. In the face of such facts as these it is surely safe to say that the revolutionary epoch has come to an end. CONCLUSION The period of thirty years which divides us from the settle- ment of Spain under Alfonso XII. belongs to contemporary history, which is notoriously the most difficult of all to tell. Nothing would be gained by attempting to record the many changes of ministry which have taken place during this time. Many of them were the result of obscure intrigues. The truth is not known about most of these crises, and probably never will be known. It is safe to assume that the know- ledge would not be worth having if we were told honestly. But a general survey may lead us to a conclusion which is not without hope for the future of Spain. For over twenty years — till 1898 — two party leaders alter- nated in office — Don Antonio Canovas and Don Mateo Praxides Sagasta. There was no real difference in their methods. The names of Conservative and Liberal which they respectively bore meant little or nothing. By an under- standing between them, and between both and the King, it was agreed that they should rotate in office, and that the loaves and fishes should be fairly divided between their followers. Both worked by corruption, and through the local agents known in the slang of Spanish politics as caciques. Corruption was the tribute which they paid to Parliamentary government, and during this period we hear no more of violent interruptions carried out by palace intrigue or barrack-yard conspiracy. The two leaders took care not to offend the army or to provoke the Church. The country advanced in material prosperity. 298 CONCLUSION 299 Canovas and Sagasta had the credit of having brought Spain through a very trying crisis. The popularity of Alfonso XII. did not last. His first marriage with his cousin Mercedes, daughter of the Duke of Montpensier, healed a family feud. When she died very young he married Maria Cristina of the Imperial Austrian family. His foreign pohcy was unfortunate. He offended the French by accepting the honorary colonelship of a German Uhlan regiment, and then the Germans tried to lay hands on the Caroline Islands in the Indian Ocean, to the great annoyance of the Spaniards. But the unpopularity which he undoubtedly incurred was due to the belief that the bad palace atmosphere of the times of his mother and grandfather was reviving about him. His death on the 25th November 1885 ^^Y very possibly have averted fresh troubles. Yet it left Spain in a difficult position. Daughters but no son had been born of his marriage. The Queen was with child. His mother, who had returned to Spain, and other members of the Bourbon family, aided by the persons generally known as the old palace gang, entered into intrigues against his widow. It was a proof that Spain had advanced that they found neither general nor poHtician to help them. The chiefs of the army combined with Canovas and Sagasta to suppress intrigues and to establish the Queen as Regent. No real settlement of the crown could be made till she was deHvered on the 17th May 1886 of a son, the present King Alfonso XIII. The crisis had been well turned. The dignity of the Queen Regent's life, her rigid abstinence from political intrigue, and her devotion to her son began to restore respect for the royal family. The politicians rotated quietly in office and the prosperity of the country advanced still further. Then came the second crisis. The few remaining frag- ments of Spain's colonial empire were lost entirely it should be 300 SPAIN added by the fault of the Spaniards. All the old vices of their colonial administration were allowed to flourish in Porto Rico and Cuba. In a way they grew worse. In former times the viceroys and their audiencias had at least exercised the real power. But in the last stage and the remains of the colonies the officials were terrorized by immigrants from Spain, who treated the islands as booty, who were organized into so-called volunteers in the towns, and who were the enemies of every proposal for reform. A rebellion had broken out in Cuba in 1868 and had dragged on for ten years. It was settled by Martinez Campos, who made a convention with the insurgent leaders, and gave many promises. They were not fulfilled. A '* small war '' broke out, but the in- surgents were put down. The final revolt began in 1895. It lingered on mainly because of the sloth an^ corruption of the forces sent to restore the island to obedience. Martinez Campos failed to make peace. His successor. General Weyler, tried to subdue the fighting element by collecting the civil element in concentration camps. The policy was not in itself one we can blame. It was adopted by the British govern- ment in South Africa. But the administration of the policy by the Spanish authorities was vile and immense misery was caused. The government of the United States had shown great patience with a pest which lay as near it as Ireland does to Great Britain. It tried to suppress fili- bustering expeditions, but obtained no effective co-operation from the Spaniards. At last the explosion of a mine — or so it is supposed — destroyed the United States warship '^ Maine *' in Havannah harbour. Intervention had become inevitable, but this incident precipitated the action of the States. The war was soon over. Its two chief incidents — the destruction of a wretchedly ill-appointed Spanish squadron at Manila, and of another not much better near Santiago de Cuba, revealed the utter weakness of Spain. The second CONCLUSION 301 squadron was sent out from Europe simply to satisfy public opinion, and though both the government at home and the admiral in command were perfectly well aware that it was quite unable to meet the American naval forces. It slipped into Santiago de Cuba, was blockaded and driven to sea by the clamours of the volunteers. Of course it was instantly destroyed. The American soldiers landed near Santiago and had some fighting. The Spanish troops showed that they could defend positions stoutly. But the contest was hopeless and Spain surrendered. She lost both the Philippines and the West Indian Islands. It has beeh the curious fate of Spain to profit at home by all her losses abroad. When the first pang was over, the Spaniards quickly recognized that the injury done was mostly to their pride. The nation at large was heartily glad to be free of the perpetual drain of men to Cuba. Cdnovas had been murdered by an anarchist in 1897. Sagasta, who now remained without a rival, guided the country through another and a very bad crisis. The Spaniards took up the financial burden thrown on them by the war manfully, and turned for almost the first time in their history to the develop- ment of their own land. They had very much to do. If poHtical conflicts have abated among them, social feuds have begun to take their place. Spain has suffered from anarchist outrages in manufacturing towns, and agrarian revolts in the south. It is not possible to feel sympathy with scoundrels who throw bombs into theatres and commit similar atrocities. But a government which retaliates by permitting the use of torture is not morally superior to the criminals. r When we come nearer our own day than the war of 1898, we pass altogether from history and enter into contemporary pohtics. The last historic events in the history of Spain were the majority of the present King in 1902 and 302 SPAIN his marriage to a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria in 1906. On the first occasion the veteran Sagasta^ now very near his end, drew a comparison between Spain as he had known it in his youth and as it now was. He could say that there had been great progress. The Spanish noveHst Blasco Ibailez has said that his country has been dragged along by Europe, but has in modern times contributed nothing to her own progress. What else could be expected ? When a nation has for generations devoted all the strength of its will to keeping itself in a state of immobihty, it will either become fossilized or be forced along by external influences. The second and the happier alternative has been the case of Spain. It has had to go to school again. When it has learnt it will be in a position to act for itself. The number of Spaniards who go abroad for their education, and the almost total disappearance of the self-conceit which was conspicuous in 1868^ are hopeful signs. The marriage of the King in 1906 to the Princess Victoria of Battenburg was a signal proof of the advance of Spain. It was fortunate that the Princess found it possible to con- form to the Roman CathoHc Church. She could not have become Queen of Spain if she had not. These are personal questions. The national importance of the event lies in the fact that the Spaniards were very glad to see their King seek his wife outside of the Bourbon and Hapsburg connec- tion, and in the royal family of Great Britain. The courage which the King and Queen showed when a brutal attempt was made to murder them with a bomb on the day of their marriage gained them public sympathy. By going through Madrid without an escort on the day following the outrage they touched a sentiment in the Spanish character which never fails to respond to a proper appeal. King Alfonso has come out from the seclusion of the palace in many ways. CONCLUSION 303 The result has been to show that the old monarchical faith is alive in Spain, and that the young King may well do for his country what Queen Victoria did for the somewhat dis- credited and shaken monarchy of Great Britain, as it was left by her uncles. BIBLIOGRAPHY There is no general history of Spain in English which possesses any authority. The nearest approach to one is Ford's *' Hand- book for Travellers." His introductory matter and his '* Gather- ings in Spain " are both excellent. They were both published by Murray and have reached several editions. The later editions are much compressed. Mr Ford was a scholar and he rarely fails to say something to the purpose about the history of the towns he mentions. Unfortunately his book is defaced by a rather snobbish parade of British patriotism, and a perpetual laudation of " Our Great Duke " which becomes very tiresome. Hallam's chapters on Spanish history in his ** History of the Middle Ages " are of course substantial. Durham's ** History of Spain and Portugal," done for the " Cabinet Cyclopaedia," is on the whole the best we have, but it is not complete and it is somewhat out of date. Books on particular parts or periods are not very rare, but they deal rather with Spain's international relations than her internal history. Mr Armstrong's ** Elizabeth Farnese " is an instance. Coxe's " Memoirs of the Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon, 1 706- 1 798," is still an authority quoted by the Spaniards themselves. Spanish is now sufficiently read in England to allow of reference to books in that language for the use of the general reader. One must be recommended. Don Rafael Altamira's " Historia de Espana y de la CiviUzacion Espaiiola." It is in four handy v olume s. The greater part is devoted to constitutionalTTh- dustrial, social, and artistic history, and it includes ninety pages of bibliography. The books are arranged by subject, and in periods. Don Rafael has superseded every other Spanish authority. His history is published by the firm " Herederos de Juan Gil " at Barcelona, 1898, etc., and is easily attainable at a moderate price. It is copiously illustrated by real illustrations and not fancy pictures. u 305 3o6 SPAIN Streets' "Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain*' is allowed by the Spaniards themselves to be an excellent authority as far as it goes. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's " Annals of the Artists of Spain " has never been superseded though it has been much followed. Mr Lea's " Chapters from the Religious History of Spain," *' History of the Spanish Inquisition " at home and in America, and his ** Moriscoes of Spain" were indispensable. But the reader who knows Spanish should not neglect the *' Historia de los Heterodoxos Espanoles " by Don Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, who will show him how the same subjects are dealt with by an orthodox Spaniard. Mr Buller Clarke's " Modern Spain " in the ** Cambridge Historical Series," 1906, is a trustworthy summary of the subject. Since this book was written a very well-informed history of "The Spanish Dependencies in South America" has been pubHshed by Dr Bernard Moses. London, 19 14. APPENDIX [This Statistical Summary has been prepared by Olga Epstein.] Area and Population. — The total area of Spain is 194,744 square miles. This figure includes 85,106 square miles which is the extent of the over-sea possessions, namely : Ceuta, possessions in the Gulf of Guinea, and the Canary Islands. Of the total area 79.6 per cent, is fertile. Spain is divided into 49 provinces, and the following table gives their areas and population according to the last census, 19T0 : — Province. .at si Popu- lation. w Province. si Popu- lation. < & f2^ oo3,259 4,226,629 535.296 600,666 485,407 The total amount of wine exported to the United Kingdom in 1910 was valued at £407,963 and in 191 1 at £344.777- The total number of mines in Spain in 1912 was 1848, with a superficial area of 658,084 acres. The mineral wealth of Spain is very great, coal and iron being found in large quantities. Spain is the richest country in Europe as regards silver. In 1912 she produced 5,153,000 fine ounces of silver. In 191 1 the value of the total mineral production at the APPENDIX 317 pit mouth was 206,764,000 pesetas (^£7,657,926). There were ii7>5^3 workers employed, 5361 of whom were women, 15,821 boys under 18, and 1706 girls under 18. The following are the figures of quantities and values mined in 1911 : — i Minerals. Quantity. Value. Minerals. Quantity. Value. Metric Tons Pesetas. Metric Tons Pesetas. Anthracite' . 209,227 3,321,092 Lead Ore . . 165.843 27,620,683 Argentiferous Lignite . . . 252,051 3,057,237 Lead Ore . 156,569 24,575.689 Quicksilver Ore 19,941 3.527.003 Coal . . . 3.454,394 47,690,363 Salt .... 679,947 4,332,725 Copper . . . 3,284,184 35,654,223 Sulphur . . 40,662 286,520 Iron Ore . . 8.773.691 47.599.172 Zinc Ore . . 162,140 6,742,493 Iron Pyrites . 344,879 2,542,245 The latest statistics in connection with the coal production are for 1912 : — Tons Produced. Value (at pit mouth). Pesetas. Anthracite . Coal .... Coke .... Coal dust in Bricks Lignite 226,663 3,625,666 489,558 465,106 283,980 4,362,266 59,520,601 16,208,479 8,193,292 2,861,422 In 191 1 there were 355 Spanish factories for the treatment of the minerals mined. The total number of hands employed was 23,082 and the total value of the production was 278,083,363 pesetas (£10,299,387). The following are some of the chief substances produced and their value : Patent fuel, 10,160,178 pesetas ; lead, 50,945,622 pesetas ; mercury, 10,295,658 pesetas ; Portland cement, 7,210,944 pesetas ; cascara, 13,673,471 pesetas ; copper blister, 27,442,500 pesetas ; rolled steel and iron, 48,983,470 pesetas ; coke, 3i8 SPAIN 15,605,640 pesetas ; silver, 10,385,679 pesetas ; argentiferous lead, 21,607,519 pesetas. In 1911 there were 180 fatal and 17,039 other accidents in the mining industry in Spain. This figure represents 12 per cent, of the number employed. The following are some of the exports of metals during the year 1912 : Cascara of copper, 12,550 tons^ of a value of 14,432,000 pesetas ; copper ingots, 21,027 tons^ valued at 33,643,000 pesetas ; lead in pigs, 144,798 tons, valued at 55,023,000 pesetas ; argentiferous lead in pigs, 41,491 tons, valued at 19,501,000 pesetas. Export duties are levied on iron ore, copper ore, copper matte, lead ores and argentiferous lead ores. Textile Industries. — Spain manufactures virtually the whole of the cotton goods required by her population. The industry is centralized in Catalonia, where in 1913 there were 1492 factories, with 2,200,000 spindles working in 373 mills and 518,230 looms engaged in cotton weaving. Wool and worsted were spun in 217 mills and woollens and worsted goods were woven on 50,580 looms in 2337 factories. Cotton, tissues to the value of 35 million pesetas were exported in T912. The glass and cork industries are likewise flourishing. In 1912 there were 34 glass factories, which were a combina- tion of 120 separate establishments who had entered into a co-operative agreement in 1911 for a period of ten years. Corks are manufactured in large quantities mainly for exporta- tion. In 1910, 6907 tons of corks and 39,171 tons of cork in other forms of a total value of 44 miUions pesetas were exported. In 1912, 8150 tons of stoppers of a value of 40 million pesetas and 46,843 tons of other cork of a value of 8 million pesetas were exported. Paper factories to the number of 144 are principally em- ployed in manufacturing writing, brown, and cigarette paper. APPENDIX 319 The value of the latter exported in 1912 was 600,000 pesetas. 71,500 fishermen are engaged in the Spanish cod and sardine fishing industry. Owing to the enormous consumption of cod-iish by the mass of the population the value of fish caught annually reaches 60,000,000 pesetas. Trade. — Since 1901 the foreign trade of Spain has greatly expanded, the imports have increased by 12 million pounds sterhng and the exports by 14 million pounds. The following are figures for five years prior to 1912 : — Imports. Exports. General. Special. General. Special. 1908 1909 I9I0 I9II I9I2 ;{;iooo. 42.815 42,000 44.178 42.853 45,626 ;^IOOO. 39.265 38,279 40,001 39,795 42,089 ;^IOOO 38,780 40,770 43.012 44.050 45.840 ;^IOOO. 35.854 37.037 38,821 39.057 41,826 The following are some of the chief imports and exports for 1911 and 1912 : — Imports. \ Exports. Articles. 1911. 1912. Articles. 1911. 1912. Cotton, raw and manu- factured Machinery Timber .... Coal and Coke Chemical Products Animals .... Cod-fish Salted Hides and Skins . Iron and Steel Manu- factures Wheat .... Tobacco . * . Coffee .... ;^IOO0. 127,327 78,552 52,913 64,407 60,880 36,334 38,730 33,756 31,050 29,033 21,691 25,065 ;^IOGO. 130,951 95,092 5^'?33 72,818 55,269 3^647 40,690 39.949 41,793 9,238 28,407 26,094 Wine . Iron Ore Lead in plates Oranges Olive Oil . Cotton Manufactures Cork . Copper . Hides . Almonds Grapes . . Wool, raw . ;ClOOO. 107,334 91,813 70,805 53,029 38,343 52,100 50,918 46,363 19,374 26,199 18,804 15,085 ;ClOOO. 113,867 93,163 74,707 67,566 61,697 54,993 49,746 53.775 21,762 15,884 15,692 15,188 320 SPAIN The total trade between the United Kingdom and Spain is shown as follows for three years :— 1910. 1911. 1 91 2. Imports from Spain to U.K. . Exports to Spain from U.K. . 13,928,000 4,892,000 13,693,000 5,496,000 £> 14,552,000 6,887,000 The Customs receipts for the last four years were : — 1910, £5,329,827; 1911, £5,557>079; 1912, £6,718,333; 1913, £9^334.370. Finance. — ^The main source of revenue in Spain, if taxation be excluded, is the huge amount realized from import duties. The figures for the last four years prior to 1912 are : 1909, 134,308,000 pesetas (£5,372,000) ; 1910, 142,159,000 pesetas (£5,686,000) ; 1911, 150,041,000 pesetas (£6,002,000) ; and 1912, 151,827,000 pesetas (£6,073,000). The following is the budget for 1915 : — Revenue. Expenditure. 1000 Pesetas. icxx) Pesetas. Direct Taxes . 499,248 Civil List 8,328 Indirect Taxes 475,000 Legislative Bodies . 2,486 Monopolies, etc. 319,070 Public Debt . 422,519 State Properties, etc 22,187 Pensions 79,584 Treasury Receipts . 138,656 Presidency of Council Ministry of — 877 State — . . 7«i87 Justice 62,389 War . 163,775 Marine 79,819 Interior 93,756 Public Instruction 74,353 PubHc Works 163,923 Finance 19,419 Taxation 151,068 Spanish Possessions in Gulf of Guinea 1,900 Action in Morocco . Total . 124,679 Total . I.455.961 1.455,961 (j^53,924,333) (;^53,924,333) APPENDIX 321 The four previous budgets balanced as follows (in thousands of pesetas) : — I9II 1912 1913 1914 Revenue . . . 1,187,200 Expenditure . . . 1,183,800 1,172,300 1.155,500 1,165,300 1,142,700 1,202,400 1,139,500 The Public Debt on ist January 1914 was as follows :- 3% and 4% Perpetual External Debt 4% Perpetual Internal Debt 5% Redeemable Internal Debt 4% Various Debts Total Pesetas. 1,034,694,700 6,546,829,848 1,591,525,000 155,325,500 465,090,914 9>793'485>962 In 1838 the first savings bank was opened in Madrid. By the end of the year there were 1081 depositors with 314,245 pesetas to their credit. By 1888, the number of depositors was 124,895 with 74,092,508 pesetas. In 1893 the numbers were 184,470 and 142,390,716 pesetas. On 31st Decembei 1912 there were 709,997 depositors and 477,588,952 pesetas. Money. — The principal coin is the peseta of 100 centimos. The rate of exchange is about 27 pesetas to £1. sterling. Diplomatic Representatives. — The Spanish Ambassador in London is Don Alfonso Merry del Val y Zulueta. The British Ambassador to Spain is the Rt. Hon. Sir Arthur Hardinge, G.C.M.G., K.C.B. There is a Consul-General at Barcelona and Consuls at Bilbao, Cadiz, Coruna, Madrid, Seville, and other places. INDEX Abbasides, the, 33 Abdul Aziz, 33 Abdur Rahman I., 34, 37, 39 Abdur Rahman II., ^y, 38 Abdur Rahman III., 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 47 Abu Abdallah, last King of Granada, 132 Abul Hassan Ali, 130 Aceifas (raids), 54, 55 Adrian of Utrecht, the regent, 146 Agriculture, decay of, 220, 221 Alans, the, 18, 19 Alba, Duke of, 152, 153 , in the Low Countries, 211, 212 Alcantara, bridge of, 25 Alcazar of Charles V. at Madrid, 168 Alfonso II., "El Casto," King of Leon, 41 , death of, 41 , King of Aragon, son of Raman Berenger and Petronilla, 70 Alfonso III., King of Aragon, son of Peter III., 82 Alfonso IV., King of Aragon, " the Benign," son of James II., 82 Alfonso v.. King of Leon, son of Bermudo II., 51 , King of Aragon, son of Fer- nando I. King of Naples and Italy, Alfonso VI. , King of Castile and Leon, son of Fernando el Magno, 54, 56, 57,58 , death of, 60, 61 Alfonso VII., **The Emperor," son of Urraca, 61, 62, 63, 64 Alfonso VIII., King of Castile and Leon, "the Noble," 65, 66, 67, 70 Alfonso IX., King of Leon, son of Fernando II. of Leon, 67, 68, 69 Alfonso X., King of Castile and Leon, El Sabio, 68, 69, 75 Alfonso XL, King of Castile and Leon, 75, 77 Alfonso XII., King of Spain, 296, 298, 299 Alfonso XIII., King of Spain, birth of, 299 , marriage of, 302 Alfonso " El Baboso," King of Leon, 65 Alhama, 132 Almansur, 46, 47 Almoravides, 59, 66 Al Motamid, King of Seville, 59 Almugavares, 85, 86, 87 Al Mutadid, King of Seville, 48 Al Raschid, 59, 60 Altamira, caves of, 6, 7 Alvaro de Luna, 79 Alvarus, 38 Amadeo, Don, reign of, 290, 291 Ampurias (Emporium), 10 Andalusia, 13 Arab architecture, 50 Arabic language, 31 Aragon, description of, 71 Aragon, Duchess Dona Ana de, 149 Aranda, Count of, 248, 251, 254 Aranjuez, riot at, 257 Arbues, Inquisitor, murder of, 129 Architecture in Spain, 98 Armada, the, 213, 214 Army, reconstruction of, 295 Asiento Treaty, 240 Ataulf the Goth, 19, 20, 23 Athens, Duchy of, 87 Audiencias, the, 186 Augustus, work of, 13 323 324 SPAIN Austria, House of, 141, 142 Austrian dynasty in Spain, 228, et seq. Austrian Succession, the war of, 241 Avila, 103, 147 B Balearic islands, 6, 12, 80 Barbara, Queen, 242 Barbarians, the, 18-24 Barbarossa, 161 Barbate, battle on the, 27 Barcelona, 104 , municipal life of, 88-92 , treaty of, 135 Basques, the, 8, 39, 45 Beatrice, wife of Fernando III., 69 Ben Meruan, 37 Beni-Casi, 37 Berbers, the, 33, 35, 41, 47 Berengaria, daughter of Alfonso VIII. , 66, 67, 68, 69 Bermudo, King of Leon, son of Alfonso v., 52, 53 Bethencourt, Jean de, 158 Betis, the valley of the, 9, 1 1 Black Prince, the, j2> Blanca, mother of St Louis of France, 6s Blanche of Bourbon, 78 Blanche of Navarre, no Boabdil, last king of Granada, 132. See Abu Abdallah Bobastro, castle of, 38 Bcetica, 13, 15 Bourbon dynasty, work of the, 231- 252 Bracamonte, Rubin de, 158 Bravo, Juan, 147^ Brigand vagabondage, 208 Burgos, 102 Byzantines in Spain, 21 Cadiz, English attacks on, 225 Calatabellota, peace of, 81 Caliph's power, limits of, 38 Cam bray, League of, 137 Campillo, Francisco, 248 Campomanes, 248 Canaries and Queen Isabel the Catholic, 158. See Isabel the Catholic Canovas's Constitution, 297 Caracalla, 14 Carlist War, 283 Carlos, Don, death of, 210, 211 Carranza, trial of, 205 Carteia (Bay of Algeciras), 12 Carthage, 10, 11 Carthaginians, 10 Catholicism, the religion of the State, 22 Casa de Contratacion, 188 Castile, 65, 72, 74, 78 Castile and Leon, 91, 134 Catalans, the, 138 Catalonia, invasion of, 81 , municipal life of, 88 Caves of La Carchena, La Cueva de Fuencaliente, La Lobrega, La Menga, 7 Charlemagne, 39 Charles I (elected to the Empire as Charles V.), son of Joan (the Mad), 134, 143-165 , court of, 166 , retirement and death of, 169- 170 Charles II., King of Spain, 231, 232 Charles III., King of Spain, 235, 242- 253 , King of Spain, death of, 243 Charles IV., 235, 243, 253, 254 Charles V. See Charles I. Charles VIII., successor of Louis XL , I35> 136 Charles of Anjou, 80 Charter of the Union, 82, 83 Christianity and the formation of the Spanish character, 15 Church in Spain, the, 139 Churches in Spain, early, 49 Churrigueresque influence, 230 Cid Campeador, the, 74 Cimbric invasion, 12 Colonies, Spanish, 177-198 , nature of governments, 184 , trade of, 193-197 Columbus, 132, 134, 171-172 INDEX 325 Compostclla, shrine of, 42 Comimeros, the rising of, 145, 146, 147, 150 Constance, Queen of Aragon, daughter of Manfred of Beneventum, 80 Converses on New Christians, persecu- tion of, 129 Cordoba, Gonsalvo de, 136, 137, 154 Cordoba, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 44, 107 Cortes, the, 173, 174, 175, 176, 294 Cortes at Cadiz, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 280 Cortes of Aragon, 97 Cortes proclaim the Republic, 291 Council of the Indies, 188, 189 Coyanza, Great Council of, 53 Cuban Rebellion, 300 D Davalos, Frederick, Marquis of Pes- cara, 153 Denia, 10 Dilar, stone circle of, 6 Don Juan El Tuerto, 77 Doria, Admiral Andrew, 153 Dragut, 162 E Edward III., sons of, 78 Egica, King, 23 **E1 Condenado por Desconfiado," 120, 121 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 65 Eleanor of Castile, 69 El Ghalib (the Victorious), 46 Elizabeth the Termagant of Spain, 239 Enseneda, Marquis of, 241 Epila, rout of the nobles of Aragon at, 85 Escorial, the, 209 Escovedo, 214 , death of, 215 Espartero, appointed Regent, 285 Esquilache, 250, 251 Eulogius, 38 Evora, in Lusitania, 13 Fadrique, King of Trinacria, 82 Ferdinand VI., King of Spain, son of Philip v., 235, 241, 242 Ferdinand VII., son of Charles IV., 256, 257, 259, 267, 268, 274-282 , death of, 283 Fernando I., "El Magno," first King of Castile, 53, 56 Fernando II., of Leon, son of Alfonso VII., 64, 65 Fernando II., of Aragon, married to Queen Isabel, 112-118, 126, 135, 136 , death of, 137 Fernando III., of Castile and Leon, son of Alfonso IX., 68, 69, 70 , death of, 71 Fernando IV., son of Sancho IV. ("El Bravo"), ^6 Fernando de la Cerda, eldest son of Alfonso X., death of, 76 Fernando Infante of Castile, ^^^ Fernando of Antequera, 89, 109, no Feudalism, character of, 72, 73 P'igueroa, Don Juan de, 149, 150 Florida-blanca, 248 Fonseca, Don Antonio de, 147 Fortunatus, Count, 31 Forum Judicum, 23, 24, 30 Francis I., of France, 161 French influence in Spain, 244, 245 French Revolution and Spain, 253- 276 Gades (Agadir), 9 i Gades (Cadiz), wine of, 15 note Garci Laso, de la Vega, 147 Geiseric, King, 18 Geloria (Elvira) Queen, 51 I Germania, the rising of, 145, 151, 152 Gerona, 81, 104 I Giron, Don Pedro, 147 , Godoy, Manuel, 254, 255, 256 ' Gonsalez, Fernan, 44 Granada, conquest of, 130 , 131, 132 , Moriscoes of, 211 Guerrillcros, the, 268, 269 336 SPAIN Guisando, Treaty of, in Guzman, Gaspar de, Count, Duke of Olivares, 223, 224 , Leonor de, 77 H Hakam, II., 45, 46 Hapsburg, House of, 134, 141, 142 Hawkins, John, 181 Henry I., King of Castile, son of Alfonso VIIL, 67, 6S Henry II., King of Trastaraara, son of Alfonso IX., 78, 79 Henry III., King of Trastamara, son of John I., 79, 167 Henry IV., King of Trastamara, ("El Impotente"), 79, no, 112 Henry of Burgundy, 58 Hermengild, son of Leovigild, 21 Hisham II., 46 Hispalis (Seville), 9 Iberian, name of, 7 , inscriptions, 8 , gods, 14 Indians, American treatment of, 192 Inigo de Velasco, Don, Count of Haro, 148, 250 Inquisition, the, 97, 118, 119, 126- 129, 192 , power curtailed, 247 , victims of, 133 Isabel, Queen married to Fernando of Aragon, the Catholic, 79, 112- 118, 129, 131, 158 , death of, 136 Isabel II., daughter of Ferdinand VII., proclaimed Queen, 283, 286 Italica, 12, 15 Italy and Spain, 135 James I., of Aragon, the Conqueror, 71, 79, 80 James II., of Aragon, 80 James III., of Aragon, 80 James IV., the King of Mallorca, 80 James, Count of Urgel, 83, 84, 85 Jesuits, expulsion of, 246, 251 Jewellery, Gothic, 26 Jews and Moors, prosperity of, 139 Jews in Spain, 22, 95, 96, 129, 130, 132 Jimenez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo, 134, 137 Joan of Aumale, wife of Fernando III., 69 Joan, Queen of Castile, 137 Jofre, Garcia, 146 John I., 82, 109 John II., 79, S3, 85, 109 John of Austria, 162 John of Castile, 84, 85 Jovellanos, Melchor, 248 Julian, Count, 27 Justicia Mayor, in Aragon, 98 Justinian, 21 Jusuf, ben Techfin, 60 K Kairredin. See Barbarossa "' Karadj " or head-money tribute, 30 Knights of the White Sword, Order of, 129 Lannoy, Charles, 153 Las Navas de Telosa, battle of, 67, 70 La Solana, 7 Laws, municipal, of Osuna, 14 Leon, loi Leovigild, King of the Goths, reign of, 21 Lepanto, battle of, 162 Louis XII., 136 Lucan, 15 Lugo, cathedral of, lOi Lusitania, 13 M Macanaz, 245, 246 Madrid, Alcazar at, 168 , occupied by the French, 258 , preference of Charles V. for, 168 INDEX 327 Madrid, reform of, 251 , the Court settles in, 166 Magalhaens (Magellan), 177 Mahometanism, 52, 130 Mahomet ben Abdallah, 45, 46 Malaka (Malaga), 9 Mallorquin rising, 152 Manila, foundation of, 180 Maria Cristina, Queen of Ferdinand VII., 282, 284, 285 Marca Hispanica, 40-43 Maria de Molina, 76, 77 Maria de Padilla, 78 Maria Luisa, wife of Charles IV., 253 Martial, 15 Martin I., 83 " Martyrs of Cordoba," 38 Maximus, 18 Medieval Spain, 75-108 Medina del Campo, 103 , ruin of, 147 Mendoza, Pedro de, 177 "Mestizos," the half-breeds, 183, 184 Merida, 25 , military colony at, 13 Mexico, conquest of, 173-175 Minorca, 242 Monino, Jose. See Count of Florida- blanca Montfort, Simon de, 70 Moorish princes, the, 131 Moriscos, expulsion of, 218, 219. Moslem Conquest, 27-50 Mozarabic ritual, 58, 94 Mudejares, the, 94 Muntaner, En Ramon de, 87 '•Mystic City of God," 123 N Napoleon, his intrigues in Spain, 256 Navarre, 137, 138 , early history of, 43 , separation of, no Navarro, Count Pedro, 159 Numantia, 12 O Omar Ben Hafsun, 38 Ommayad Dynasty, 33, 36, 47 , rulers of Spain (list of), 34-35 Ommayads, the Spanish, 35, 37, 39 Ordoho, 44 Orospodans, 22 Pacheco, Dona Maria de, 150 Padilla, Juan de, 147 Palencia cathedral, 102 Paraguay, 192 Patifio, Jose, 248 Pelayo, 40 , elected King of the Goths, 28 Peninsular War, 258-272 Perez, Antonio, escape to Saragossa, 214, 215 Perrenot, Nicholas, Cardinal Granvela, 153 Peru, conquest of, 176 Peter I., King of Aragon, son of Sancho I., 61 Peter II., King of Aragon, son of Sancho I., 67, 70 Peter III., eldest son of James I. the Conqueror, 80 , death of, 82 Peter IV., "The Ceremonious," 80, 82, 83, 84 Peter the Cruel, of Castile and Leon, n. 78 Petronilla, vi^ife of Ramon Berenger of Barcelona, 70 Philip II., King of Spain, son of Charles V., and his work, 199-230 , last days of, 216, 217 Philip III., 218 , death of, 222 Philip IV., 222, 223 , death of, 228 Philip v., 88, 235-240, 244-246 , death of, 241 Philip the Handsome, 137 Phoenicians, the, 9, 10 Pilgrim Road to Santiago, 53 Pisans, war with the, 82 Pizarro, Francisco, and Peru, 176 338 SPAIN Plate, River, trade on the, 193 Portobello, 241 Portugal, accession of Philip II., 212, 213 Prim, Juan, 289, 290 " Procuradores," 145 Protestants, persecution of, 206, 207 Prudentius, 15 QUINTILLIAN, 15 R Ramiro II., King of Leon, a great leader of raids, 44 Ramiro, first King of Aragon, 53 Ramiro, the Monk, proclaimed King in Aragon, 64, 70 Ramon Berenger I., "the Old," Count of Barcelona, 51 Raymond of Besan9on, 58 Reccared, King of the Goths, 21, 23 , conversion of, 22 Regalistas, the, 245 Renaissance influence, 229 note. Republic proclaimed, 291 Revolution of 1868, 288 Reyes de Taifas, 47 Rio Salado, battle of, ^-i^ Rocroi, battle of, 227 Roderick, King of the Goths, 24, 2*], 33 Roman conquest, 10 rule, 11-17 Ronquillo, the Alcalde, 147 Rosas (Rhodon), 10 Sacromonte, lead plates of, 122 Saint James the Apostle, tomb of, 42 wSalamanca, 103 Sancho I., 80 Sancho, ** El Bravo," King of Castile and Leon, 76 Sancho, son of Fernando el Magno, 56 Sancho of Navarre surnamed " El Mayor," 52 Sancho, King of Leon, ** the Fat," 44 San Juan de Banos, Church of, 25 Santa Hermandad, constabulary of, 116, 132 Santiago de Compostela, Church of, 100 Santiago de Galicia, 42 , Pilgrim road to, 48 Saragossa, 105 ^ Sasamon, Church of, 100 Scipio, Africanus, 12 Scipio, the younger, 12 Segovia, 104, 146 , aqueduct of, 24 Senecas, the, 15 Serinya, 7 Sertorius, 12 Seville, 107 , disorder in, 149 Sextus IV,, 129 ** Sicilian Vespers," 81 Sierra Morena, mine of, 9 Siete Partidas, the, 93 Siguenza, Cathedral of, 99 Sobh, the Daybreak, 45 Soliman, the Magnanimous, Sultan of Turkey, 160 Spain, first inhabitants of, 6 Spanish soldier, the, 155, 156 , Succession, War of, 232-235 , War, 240 Squillacci, minister, 250, 251 Suevi, 18, 21 Tarik, 27 Tarraconensis, 13 Tarragona, 105 Taxation, system of, 249 Taxes, Koranic, 30 , reorganization of, 250 Tax of **the millions," 165 Teresa of Portugal, wife of Alfonso IX. of Leon, 67 Theodosius, 15 Theudis, King of the Goths, 22 Tiberius, Gracchus, ii INDEX 329 Toledo, 58, 59, 106 Toledo, Garcia de, relieves Malta, 162 Tordesillas, conference of, 197 Tordesillas, the Procurador, 146 Toro, battle of, 112 Tota (Theuda), Queen of Navarre, 44 Tunis, attacked, 161 Turdetanians, the, 9 U Urdaneta, Andres de, 179, 180 Valdivia, Pedro de, 176 Valencia, 13 Valladolid, 103 Vandals, 18, 19 Victoria of Battenburg, Princess, Queen of Alfonso XIII., 302 Viriatus, the Lusitanian, 9, il, 12 Visigoth, kingdom destroyed, 27 kings, successors of, 40 Visigoths, 18-23, 24, 28, 29, 30 , coins of, 26 , remains of the, 25 Vitoria, 102 W Walid, the Caliph, 30 Wallia, King, 190 West Indies, contraband trade in, 191 , smuggling in the, 196 Wifred or Gifred, the Hairy, 43 Zahara, 130, 132 Zaida, wife of Alfonso VI., 61 Zalaca, battle of, 60 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. 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