Part 13
"Pero Bermudez could not bear this, but holding the banner in his hand, he cried, God help you, Cid Campeador; I shall put your banner in the middle of that main body; and you who are bound to stand by it--I shall see how you will succour it. And he began to prick forward. And the Campeador called unto him to stop as he loved him, but Pero Bermudez replied he would stop for nothing, and away he spurred and carried his banner into the middle of the great body of the Moors. And the Moors fell upon him that they might win the banner, and beset him on all sides, giving him many and great blows to beat him down; nevertheless, his arms were proof, and they could not pierce them, neither could they beat him down, nor force the banner from him, for he was a right brave man and a strong and a good horseman, and of great heart. And when the Cid saw him thus beset, he called to his people to move on and help him. Then placed they their shields before their hearts, and lowered their lances with the streamers thereon, and, bending forward, rode on. Three hundred lances were they, each with its pendant, and every man at the first charge slew his Moor. Smite them, knights, for the love of charity! cried the Campeador. I am Ruydiez, the Cid of Bivar! Many a shield was pierced that day, and many a false corselet was broken, and many a white streamer dyed with blood, and many a horse left without a rider. The misbelievers called on Mahomet, and the Christians on Santiago, and the noise of the tambours and of the trumpets was so great that none could hear his neighbour. And my Cid and his company succoured Pero Bermudez, and they rode through the host of the Moors, slaying as they went, and they rode back again in like manner; thirteen hundred did they kill in this guise. If you would know who they were, who were the good men of that day, it behoves me to tell you, for though they are departed, it is not fitting that the names of those who have done well should die, nor would they who have done well themselves, or who hope so to do, think it right; for good men would not be so bound to do well if their good feats should be kept silent. There was my Cid, the good man in battle, who fought well upon his gilt saddle; and Alvar Fanez Minaya, and Martin Antolinez the Burgalese of prowess, and Muno Gustios, and Martin Munoz who held Montemayor, and Alvar Alvarez, and Alvar Salvadores, and Galin Garcia the good one of Aragon, and Felez Munoz the nephew of the Campeador. Wherever my Cid went, the Moors made a path before him, for he smote them down without mercy. And while the battle still continued, the Moors killed the horse of Alvar Fanez, and his lance was broken, and he fought bravely with his sword afoot. And my Cid, seeing him, came up to an Alguazil, who rode upon a good horse, and smote him with his sword under the right arm, so that he cut him through and through, and he gave the horse to Alvar Fanez, saying, Mount Minaya, for you are my right hand."
The great feat of the Cid's career was the conquest of Valencia. By force of political troubles he came to occupy the position of protector of the Moorish King of Valencia in the name of the King of Zaragoza. His first entry was peaceful and unopposed:
"Then the Cid went to Valencia, and King Yahya received him full honourably, and made a covenant with him to give him weekly four thousand maravedis of silver, and he on his part was to reduce the castles to his obedience, so that they should pay the same rents unto him as had been paid unto the former kings of Valencia; and that the Cid should protect him against all men, Moors or Christians, and should have his home in Valencia, and bring all his booty there to be sold, and that he should have his granaries there. This covenant was confirmed in writing, so that they were secure on one side and on the other. And my Cid sent to all those who held the castles, commanding them to pay their rents to the King of Valencia as they had done aforetime, and they all obeyed his command, every one striving to have his love."
From the vantage post of Valencia the Cid carried his triumphant arms against the neighbouring kingdoms. He "warred against Denia and against Xativa, and abode there all the winter, doing great hurt, insomuch that there did not remain a wall standing from Orihuela to Xativa, for he laid everything waste, and all his booty and his prisoners he sold in Valencia." On one of these expeditions, however, he lost his capital for a while. Alfonso, in 1089, has received him back to favour, given him castles, and decreed that all the Cid's conquests should be his own property. In other words, he recognized the Cid as an almost independent prince. Almost immediately, however, the king became again suspicious of his powerful vassal, and seized the opportunity of the Cid's absence in the north to besiege his peculiar possession, the city of Valencia. When the Campeador heard this he was very wroth, and, by way of retaliation, carried fire and sword through Alfonso's districts of Najera and Calahorra, razed Logrono to the ground, and, in the words of the old Latin _Gesta_, "with terrible and impious despoilment he wasted and harried the land, and stripped it bare of its riches and seized them for himself." Alfonso hastily abandoned the siege of Valencia, and returned to defend his own country. But the Cid, having effected his purpose, came back another way, and found the gates of Valencia closed against him.
Then began that memorable siege of nine months, during which the people of Valencia suffered agonies of hunger and thirst, while the Cid maintained his remorseless leaguer round the walls. The besieged were reduced to the agonies of starvation, and those who rushed out, or were thrust forth as useless burdens by the townspeople, were massacred or sold into slavery by the Cid's soldiers. It is even said by the Moorish historians that the Cid had many of them burnt alive. The _Chronicle_ pathetically records: "Now there was no food to be bought in the city, and the people were in the waves of death; and men were seen to drop and die in the streets." Thus wrote a poet of the devoted city:
"Valencia! Valencia! trouble is come upon thee, and thou art in the hour of death; and if peradventure thou shouldst escape, it will be a wonder to all that shall behold thee.
"But if ever God hath shown mercy to any place, let Him be pleased to show mercy unto thee; for thy name was joy, and all Moors delighted in thee and took their pleasure in thee.
"And if it should please God utterly to destroy thee now, it will be for thy great sins, and for the great presumption which thou hadst in thy pride.
"The four corner stones whereon thou art founded would meet together and lament for thee, if they could!
"Thy strong wall which is founded upon these four stones trembles, and is about to fall, and hath lost all its strength.
"Thy lofty and fair towers which were seen from far, and rejoiced the hearts of the people, ... little by little they are falling.
"Thy white battlements which glittered afar off, have lost their truth with which they shone like the sunbeams.
"Thy noble river Guadalaviar, with all the other waters with which thou hast been served so well, have left their channel, and now they run where they should not.
"Thy water-courses, which were so clear and of such great profit to so many, for lack of cleansing are choked with mud.
"Thy pleasant gardens which were round about thee; ... the ravenous wolf hath gnawn at the roots, and the trees can yield thee no fruit.
"Thy goodly fields, with so many and such fair flowers, wherein thy people were wont to take their pastime, are all dried up.
"Thy noble harbour, which was so great honour to thee, is deprived of all the nobleness which was wont to come into it for thy sake.
"The fire hath laid waste the lands of which thou wert called Mistress, and the great smoke thereof reacheth thee.
"There is no medicine for thy sore infirmity, and the physicians despair of healing thee.
"Valencia! Valencia! from a broken heart have I uttered all these things which I have said of thee.
"And this grief would I keep unto myself that none should know it, if it were not needful that it should be known to all."
At last, in June, 1094, Valencia surrendered, and the Cid stood once more upon her towers and ramparts. He made hard conditions with the people, many of whom he sent away to the suburbs to make room for his Castilians. But if he was harsh and not quite honest in his dealings with the vanquished, his triumph was stained by no wholesale butchery. The people were sometimes ruined; but their lives, except their leader's, were safe. The Cid had now attained the summit of his power. He sent for his wife and daughters from the abbey, and established himself permanently as King of Valencia and suzerain of the country round about. The King of Aragon besought his alliance. He exacted heavy tribute from his neighbours; his revenue included 120,000 pieces of gold yearly from Valencia, 10,000 from the lord of Albarracin, 10,000 from the heir of Alpuente, 6,000 from the Master of Murviedro, and so forth. He dreamed of reconquering all Andalusia. "One Roderick," he said, "lost Spain; another shall recover it." When the Almoravides came against him, he put them to rout. The _Chronicle_ tells the story:
"Day is gone, and night is come. At cock-crow they all assembled together in the Church of St. Pedro, and the Bishop Don Hieronymo sang mass, and they were shriven and assoyled and howselled. Great was the absolution which the bishop gave them: He who shall die, said he, fighting face forward, I will take his sins, and God shall have his soul. Then said he, A boon, Cid Don Rodrigo; I have sung mass to you this morning: let me have the giving the first wounds in this battle and the Cid granted him this boon in the name of God. Then, being all ready, they went out through the gate which is called the Gate of the Snake, for the greatest power of the Moors was on that side, leaving good men to guard the gates. Alvar Fanez and his company were already gone forth, and had laid their ambush. Four thousand, lacking thirty, were they who went out with my Cid, with a good will, to attack fifty thousand. They went through all the narrow places and bad passes, and, leaving the ambush on the left, struck to the right hand, so as to get the Moors between them and the town. And the Cid put his battles in good array, and bade Pero Bermudez bear his banner. When the Moors saw this they were greatly amazed; and they harnessed themselves in great haste, and came out of their tents. Then the Cid bade his banner move on, and the Bishop Don Hieronymo pricked forward with his company, and laid on with such guise, that the hosts were soon mingled together. Then might you have seen many a horse running about the field with the saddle under his belly, and many a horseman in evil plight upon the ground. Great was the smiting and slaying in short time; but by reason that the Moors were so great a number, they bore hard upon the Christians, and were in the hour of overcoming them. And the Cid began to encourage them with a loud voice, shouting God and Santiago! And Alvar Fanez at this time issued out from ambush, and fell upon them, on the side which was nearest the sea; and the Moors thought that a great power had arrived to the Cid's succour, and they were dismayed, and began to fly. And the Cid and his people pursued, punishing them in a bad way. If we should wish to tell you how every one behaved himself in this battle, it is a thing which could not be done, for all did so well that no man can relate their feats. And the Cid Ruydiez did so well, and made such mortality among the Moors, that the blood ran from his wrist to his elbow! Great pleasure had he in his horse Bavieca that day, to find himself so well mounted. And in the pursuit he came up to King Yusuf, and smote him three times; but the king escaped from under the sword, for the horse of the Cid passed on in his course, and when he turned, the king being on a fleet horse, was far off, so that he might not be overtaken; and he got into a castle called Guyera, for so far did the Christians pursue them, smiting and slaying, and giving them no respite, so that hardly fifteen thousand escaped of fifty that they were."
But the fortune of war is fickle. The troops of the Cid were defeated at last by the invaders; and the Campeador died of grief in July, 1099. They took his body and embalmed it, and kept vigil by its side; then, in the legend of the poets, they did as the Cid had bidden them: they set him upon his good horse Bavieca, and fastened the saddle well, so that he sat erect, with his countenance unchanged, his eyes bright and fair, and his beard flowing down his breast, and his trusty sword Tizona in his hand. No one would have known that he was dead. And they led Bavieca out of the city: Pero Bermudez in front with the banner of the Cid and five hundred knights to guard it, and Dona Ximena behind with her company and escort. Slowly they cut a path through the besiegers, and took the road to Castile, leaving the Moors in sore amazement at their strange departure: for they did not know that the Cid was dead. But the body of the hero was set in an ivory chair beside the great altar of San Pedro de Cardena, under a canopy whereon were blazoned the arms of Castile and Leon, Navarre and Aragon, and of the Cid Campeador. Ten years the Cid sat upright beside the altar, his face still noble and comely, when the signs of death at last began to appear; so they buried him before the altar, where Dona Ximena already lay; and they left him in the vault, still upright in the ivory chair, still in his princely robes with the sword Tizona in his hand,--still the great Campeador whose dinted shield and banner of victory hung desolate over his tomb.
XII.
THE KINGDOM OF GRANADA.
With such soldiers as the Cid, and such kings as Fernando and Alfonso, the recovery of all Spain by the Christians was only a matter of time. Every nation, it appears, has its time of growth and its period of efflorescence, after which comes the age of decay. As Greece fell, as Rome fell, as every ancient kingdom the world has known has risen, triumphed, and fallen, so fell the Moors in Spain. Their time was now near at hand. They had been divided and undisciplined before the Almoravide annexation: they were not less so when their Berber masters had been expelled. But hardly had the Almoravides disappeared, when a new enemy came on the scene. The Almohades, or fanatical "Unitarians," who had overthrown the power of the Almoravides in Africa, resolved to imitate their vanquished predecessors by including Andalusia in their empire. The dissensions among the princes of the long-shattered kingdom of the Moors made the task an easy one. In 1145 the Almohades took Algeciras; in 1146 they occupied Seville and Malaga, and the next four years saw Cordova and the rest of southern Spain united under their sway. Some princes, indeed, held out for a while, but the hordes of African fanatics were too overpowering for any single chief to make a protracted stand against them.
The Almohades, however, had no thought of making Andalusia the centre of their government. They ruled it from Africa, and the consequence was that their hold upon Spain was weak. The disturbed provinces of Andalusia were not easily to be retained by princes who contented themselves with deputies sent from Morocco, and with an occasional expedition to repel the attacks of the Christians. When they came in force their efforts were generally crowned with success. They won a splendid victory over the Christians in 1195 at Alarcos, near Badajoz, where thousands of the enemy were slain, and immense spoils fell into the hands of the fanatics. But the fortune of war changed when, in 1212, the disastrous field of Las Navas decided the fate of the Almohades. Of 600,000 men, few escaped to tell the tale of slaughter. City after city fell into the hands of the Christians; and family dissensions among the foreigners, and the attacks of rival dynasties in Africa, enabled the chiefs of Andalusia, who had grown impatient of the spasmodic rule of their foreign masters, in 1235, to drive the Almohades out of the peninsula. An Arab chief, Ibn-H[=u]d, then made himself master of most of the south of Spain, and even of Ceuta in Africa; but he died in 1238, and the command of Andalusia now devolved upon the Beny-Nasr of Granada.
The kingdom of Granada was the last bulwark of the Moors in Spain. It was not much that was now left to them. Between 1238 and 1260, Fernando III. of Castile and Jayme I. of Aragon conquered Valencia, Cordova, Seville, and Murcia; and the rule of the Moors was now restricted to the present province of Granada, _i.e._, the country about the Sierra Nevada and the sea coast from Almeria to Gibraltar. Within this limit, however, their kingdom was destined to endure for another two centuries and a half. Though hemmed in on all sides, the Moors were well served by soldiers. The people of the conquered cities, the most valiant warriors of the vanquished Moslem states, came to place their swords at the disposal of the one remaining Mohammedan king. Fifty thousand Moors are recorded to have fled to his protection from Valencia, and three hundred thousand from Seville, Xeres, and Cadiz. Nevertheless, Granada was forced to become tributary to the Castilian crown. The founder of the dynasty of the Beny-Nasr, an Arab named Ibn-el-Ahmar, or the "Red man," because of his fair skin and hair, was a vigorous sovereign, but he could not withstand the power of the Christians, who now held nearly the whole of Spain. He paid homage and tribute to Fernando and his son Alfonso the Learned, not, however, without more than one struggle to free himself from their yoke; and from that time forward Granada with its surrounding territory was generally let alone by the Christian kings, who had enough to do to settle their already vast acquired territory and to do away with local pretenders. From time to time the Moors made war upon their Christian neighbours, but eventually they had to make up their minds to a secondary position. The sum of twelve thousand gold ducats was the tribute paid by Mohammed X., in 1463, as a condition of peace. During these two centuries the Moorish territory had suffered little diminution. Gibraltar had been lost and won and lost again; other places, notably Algeciras, had become part of the Christian dominions; but the general extent of the Moslem realm remained in the third quarter of the fifteenth century much what it had been in the first half of the thirteenth.
During this period of comparative tranquillity, Granada had taken the place of Cordova as the home of the arts and sciences. Its architects were renowned throughout Europe; they had built the marvellous "Red Palace," _Alhambra_, so called from the colour of the ferruginous soil on which it stands, and they had covered it with the splendid gold ornament and Arabesque mouldings which are still the wonder of artists of all countries.[26] Granada itself, with its two castles, was a pearl of price. It stands on the border of a rich plain, the famous "Vega," lying at the feet of the snowy "mountains of the moon," the Sierra Nevada. From the heights of the city, and still better from the Alhambra, which stands sentinel over the plain like the Acropolis of Athens, the eye ranges over this beautiful Vega, with its streams and vineyards, its orchards and orange groves. No city in Andalusia was more favoured in site or climate; the breezes from the snow mountains made the hottest summer tolerable, and the land was fertile beyond compare.
The site chosen by the Moors for their celebrated Red Palace is a terrace bounded by precipitous ravines, at the foot of which, to the north, flow the waters of the river Darro. Solid walls of stone covered with stucco, and strengthened at frequent intervals by towers, surround the terrace. The enclosed space is somewhat of the form of a lanceolate leaf lying on the table-land, with its greatest length (about half a mile) from east to west.
The visitor finds his way into the enclosure through a massive embattled tower of orange and red pierced by the Gate of Justice under which the khalifs, like the judges of the Hebrews, were wont to sit in judgment. Twenty-eight feet above the pavement, over the horseshoe arch, a cabalistic key and a gigantic hand are carved on two stones. Once inside the walls, the visitor finds himself in a square, on one side of which is an unfinished palace designed by Charles the Fifth. The corridor through which entrance is now gained to the Alhambra crosses an angle of this ruined structure and admits the visitor to the Court of the Myrtles, so called from the profusion of those shrubs which adorn its sides. A narrow passage ushers us into a court one hundred and forty feet long, and half as broad, flooded with sunlight and gay with gold-fish, which disport themselves in a long pond that fills the larger part of the space. Pillars and galleries adorn the sides and ends of the enclosure, and on the north the great square tower of Comares rises against the horizon. The court is a place of peace; the water scarcely makes a ripple as it gently oozes into the ample reservoir, and leaves it without a gurgle; the multitudinous goldfishes gleam and glitter in the profusion of sunshine; no suggestion of the outer world penetrates the stillness.
All is calm, but it is not the dull, cold calm of ruin and death; we can but feel a sense of companionship with the former masters of the palace and the grounds. We walk through the Barca, or boat-shaped antechamber, to the Hall of the Ambassadors, and imagine the khalif of the Omeyyads seated upon his throne at the end; while we gaze up into the lofty dome and allow our eyes to wander about the great apartment as we admire the medallions, the graceful characters of the Arabic inscriptions, the delicate patterns of the plaster-work with which the walls are adorned; the balconies, the white, blue, and gold of the cornice and ceiling; the circles, crowns, and stars moulded to imitate the vault of heaven. We stop before the window looking over the Darro to think how Ayesha once let Boabdil down in a basket from it five centuries ago; how Charles the Fifth said of the unfortunate Moor, "Ill-fated was the man who lost all this!" We bring up before us the discoverer of America, as tradition paints him, pleading in this place with the good Isabella for gracious permission to add another jewel to her crown--the bright gem of a New World. We climb to the terraced roof of the tower, following the narrow windings of the steep stairway once trodden by fair lady and gallant prince as they hastened to the lofty battlement to watch the approach of some army or anxiously to study the progress of a battle on the Vega. Our eyes search the broad expanse for that bridge of Pinos where Moor and Christian more than once fought for the mastery. We remember that it was at that spot that Isabella's messenger overtook the despairing Columbus, as he conveyed to him the queen's recall, when the mariner was plodding towards other realms to carry his bold proposition to other and, as he hoped, more gracious sovereigns. We care not that it is tradition only which fixes the spot; tradition and romance are a portion of the charm of the Alhambra.