Leon, Burgos and Salamanca: a historical and descriptive account

by Albert Frederick Calvert

On the abdication of Ramiro in 950, González was reinstated in his fiefs, and henceforward played the part of king-maker in northern Spain, changing sides more than once, establishing every day more firmly his own authority, and warring unceasingly against the Moor. His policy often met with severe rebuffs, and he sustained not a few disastrous reverses; but his death in 970 was felt as a deadly blow to Christian Spain and to the Castilians in particular, whose national aspirations undoubtedly coincided with his own ambitions.

He had succeeded so far as to establish a dynasty; and his son Garcia Fernández became the next count of Castile as of right. The defects of the hereditary system became at once apparent, for while inheriting his father’s rank, Garcia inherited little of his ability. Unluckily for him, he was the contemporary of the terrible Al Mansûr, the greatest and most formidable of the Moorish race. Castile was ravaged from the Sierra Guadarrama to the sea. Don Sancho, supported by the Moors, revolted against his father, who died from wounds received in battle on the banks of the Douro, in May 995. The unfilial Sancho was at once acknowledged sovereign Count of Castile, but was compelled to pay an annual tribute to the Khalifa of Cordoba. But we find Al Mansûr waging war against him seven years later. It was the great Mohammedan’s last campaign, and Sancho profited by the dismay into which their leader’s mortal sickness plunged the Moslems to expel them from his dominions.

Two or three years later we find the envoys of rival Moorish monarchs soliciting the aid of the count of Castile; and in 1009 Sancho paid off old scores by taking and sacking the proud city of the Khalifas. Never had so much richness been seen in barren Castile, when her armies returned laden with booty. ‘He of the good laws,’ as Sancho was styled by his subjects, died in 1021, and was buried in the church of the monastery of San Salvador de Oña, which he had founded.

The sisters of his youthful son and successor, Garcia II., were married to the kings of Leon and Navarre; and Garcia went to Leon to seek the hand of King Bermudo’s daughter, and to demand recognition of his title as king of Castile. The poniards of the three sons of the Count de Vela left him a bleeding corpse at the door of the church of San Isidoro, on the 13th May 1029, and put an end to the male line of the house of Fernan González. His destined bride became the wife of Fernando, son of the king of Navarre, who was proclaimed count of Castile, though he enjoyed nothing more than the semblance of sovereignty till his father’s death in 1035. Bermudo of Leon died two years later, and Fernando thus became king of united Leon and Castile—the former in right of his wife, the latter in right of his mother.

The newly crowned king was immediately assailed by his elder brother, Garcia of Navarre, who invaded Castile with an army largely composed of Mussulmans, and threatened Burgos. After some days passed in fruitless negotiations between the fraternal enemies, the Navarrese king was defeated and slain. Eleven years later—in 1065—Fernando I. followed his brother to the grave. Deeming his dominions too vast to be administered by one man he divided them, allotting Castile to his first-born son Sancho, from which it may be inferred that he considered that province the fairest of his possessions. Not contented with the lion’s share of the spoils, the king of Castile wrested the kingdom of Leon from his brother Alfonso, whom he imprisoned in the castle of Burgos. Sancho next endeavoured to deprive his sister Urraca of her little principality of Zamora. Before the walls of that town he fell a victim to the sword of Bellido Dolfos, and to the kingdoms which he had by dint of violence and treachery reunited, succeeded Alfonso, but lately a guest of the kindly Moorish Amir of Toledo.

So far the history of Burgos and of Castile generally has been an involved and tedious record of dynastic arrangements, civil strife, and desultory warfare with the Moor. The dullness of the panorama is now relieved by the picturesque and crudely romantic personality of the Cid—‘he that in a good hour was born’—Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar.

‘Rodrigo is Burgos, Rodrigo is Castile, Rodrigo is Spain,’ says Don Rodrigo Amador de los Rios. ‘His prowess, his glory, his trials, his renown, are the renown, the trials, the glory, and the prowess of the fatherland. His form, which touches the confines of the supernatural, and stands forth vigorous and powerful in the interesting picture of the Middle Ages, is the spontaneous creation of a people—is the people itself—whose marvellous instinct has given it from its own being, heat and life. His honour is the honour of Castile and Spain; there is nothing in his personality which does not represent and symbolise with transcendental expression the national character; he is the splendid synthesis in which a nation is resumed, the idol of the ages, the pattern of all perfection, the permanent example of all the virtues, the true mirror of the Middle Ages, with all that they had of noble and generous, rude and loyal, warrior and devotee, tradition and history, legend and fact, petty and great; the manifestation, in short, of the essential and permanent in the Spanish nationality, which does not vary, and is transmitted unimpaired from generation to generation, through the centuries; the spirit which informs and sustains the peoples, in all the epochs of history.’

I quote in extenso an eminent Spaniard’s appreciation of the national hero. But accepting even the Cid of the ballads and legends, it does not seem that a high compliment is paid to Spain by recognising in him her absolute personification and embodiment. The traditions of less cultured races have conceived purer heroes. But in Burgos, almost his native place, we must not approach the memory of the doughty Campeador in any cold or captious mood. You may visit (though you will derive neither pleasure nor profit from the journey) the miserable hamlet of Vivar, five or six miles from Burgos, where he first saw the light somewhere about the year 1040. For ancestors, tradition credits him with the famous judges, Lain Calvo and Nuño Rasura, two worthies whose existence is at least problematical. But that Rodrigo (or Ruy) Diaz was a good Burgolese, there can be no question. Here he passed his youth at the court of Fernando I., rising to the high rank of Alferez or standard-bearer in the service of King Sancho. He was among the champions selected by his sovereign to decide the fate of the two kingdoms in a personal conflict with a similar number of Leonese knights. But whatever luck may have attended Rodrigo individually on this occasion, the Castilians got the worst of the encounter; whereupon Sancho refused to stand by his bargain, and by more military and less chivalrous methods secured his brother’s realms.

When Alfonso ascended the throne of Castile, it was the Cid who exacted from him, at the gate of the church of Santa Gadea, the humiliating oath that he had had no share in his brother’s murder—an indignity which Alfonso did not quietly forget. He dissimulated his resentment, however, and gave his sister Jimena in marriage to the valiant Campeador. Soon after the threatened quarrel broke out, and the haughty vassal abandoned all his estates in Castile, and entered the service of the Moorish Amir of Zaragoza. The chronicles tell how on his visiting Burgos the knight found, by order of the king, every door shut against him. Only a little girl nine years of age ventured to address him. From their windows the citizens beheld him and wept, crying, ‘How good a vassal, if he had only a good lord!’ Very sadly the Cid passed the night with his followers without the walls. He visited his wife and daughters at the monastery of Cardeña, and turned his face from Castile. He was at shifts for money—a precedent Don Quixote appears to have forgotten—and bethought him of an ingenious expedient. Filling an enormous coffer with stones and sand, he offered it, as being laden with gold and treasure, as security to a Jew, on the understanding that it should not be opened till the money was repaid. The confiding usurer readily advanced six hundred marks of gold and silver, and the coffer remains to this day to attest the simplicity of the Jewish character and the eminently commercial aptitudes of the Castilian national hero.

With Rodrigo’s wonderful exploits in other parts of Spain we are not here concerned. When he died at Valencia at a ripe age, he was brought back to his native place, seated upright on his famous steed Babieca, and laid to rest beside his wife at Cardeña. There he was suffered to remain till the year 1842, when his ashes were transported to the town hall of Burgos. A brave soldier, but one of the sorriest of the nation’s heroes!