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